The girls were called Coral Platt and Patsy Carlow. There were two other women, but these had come on their own and got themselves collected by Carbridge. I put them down as office girls, possibly minor civil servants. They turned out to be clerks in two different insurance firms. They had been friends from schooldays and always managed to fix their holidays for the same three weeks of the year. I spotted them eyeing the men in the party, particularly Todd, James Minch and myself.
James Minch was a straw-haired lad in, I guessed, his early twenties. It transpired that he had been president of his students’ union and I could well envisage him in the part, for he turned out to have the gift of oratory to an extent which almost reduced the exuberant Carbridge to silence, and during the course of the evening he gave us not only what I thought was a highly coloured and would-be humorous account of his college career, but also a description of his journey that day with his sister from their home town to the youth hostel in which, the prisoners of Carbridge, we were now stuck until the morning.
Jane Minch, the sister, was a redhead and her otherwise unremarkable but pleasant young countenance was completely smothered in freckles. The office girls, Rhoda and Tansy (I did not get their surnames at the time), were a good deal older than any of the other women except Hera. They must have been going on for thirty. They were homely-looking girls, quite unexciting, but probably kind-hearted. I thought that the men would write them off.
‘I hope they have that much going for them, anyway. I mean, kind hearts,’ I said to Hera next morning. ‘They don’t seem to have much else to recommend them.’
‘They’re all right,’ said Hera, who was not always a defender of her sex. ‘Isn’t it about time we set out?’
I had delayed our departure deliberately in order to give the others a good long start. There had been some debate among them about whether to take the public transport to get to Milngavie, where The Way kicked off, or whether to footslog it, but this meant pavement-bashing and also it would add another seven miles or so to the long walk to Fort William. In the end it was decided, for the sake of the girls, that the public transport was to be favoured and, as we were going to use it too, although for a longer distance than theirs, I decided to let them get away first. I hoped we should never see them again. It was no part of our experiment to travel in convoy, even if we had liked the gang. The essence of our arrangement was that Hera and I should be on our own for a fortnight except for contact with hotel staff, hostel wardens and the cottagers who were to lodge us for an occasional night.
Hera had demurred when I insisted upon delaying our start, but I held on firmly and said, ‘We’ve got to let that lot get clear away. Besides, I’d like to see as much as I can of the city before we leave. We’ll have lunch somewhere and get on our way this afternoon. We’re in no hurry. Don’t you want to see the sights while we’re here? We can still clock into the hotel at Drymen in plenty of time for a bath and dinner. How I hope we’ve seen the last of that laughing jackass and his party! My bet is that most of them will jettison him the first chance they get. Tomorrow morning we’ll begin our tramping. We can start out directly after breakfast and take it easy to Balmaha. They will be a long way behind us by then, because we’re getting transport to Drymen and they’re walking all the way from Milngavie.’
There was plenty to see and do in Glasgow and, although we by no means covered everything, we did look around the twelfth-century cathedral, the museums, the art gallery, the shops in Sauchiehall Street, and we had lunch at one of the hotels. Hera was still slightly peevish and said that she could see no reason for my having delayed our start, but added that she had enjoyed her lunch. By mid-afternoon I felt we had had enough of sight-seeing and I could see that Hera was almost exhausted, so I suggested a slight change of plan.
‘We’re staying here for the night,’ I said. ‘We’ll have some tea and then I’ll book us in at the hotel where we had lunch.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Hera. ‘We’re booked in at Drymen and that’s where we’re going to spend the night.’
We had had a toss-up about the late start, so I did not argue. We went to Drymen, just as we had arranged to do, and turned in early. On the following morning we took a look around the little place before going on to Balmaha, where we had booked accommodation in a cottage.
Drymen is built around what, in England, would be called the village green. The hotel was excellent, the welcome cordial and the food good. We had been told that the shops were the best we should find for the next sixty miles, so we took the opportunity next morning to stock up on our rations and buy a couple more batteries for the torches. I also went to the bank, having previously arranged for this. I never like being short of ready cash, particularly on holiday when one never knows what unexpected calls may be made upon one’s pocket.
‘I wish we hadn’t missed the earlier part of The Way,’ said Hera. This, I thought, was rather unreasonable of her. We had agreed from the beginning to set out on our walk from Drymen. I began to wonder whether our relationship was going to stand the strain of a fortnight of pointless argument.
‘If we had set out from Milngavie, we should have had the pleasure of Carbridge’s company,’ I pointed out. ‘Be thankful we made the plans we did.’
‘It’s easy walking from Carbeth. I wasn’t thinking of starting from Milngavie. From Carbeth, The Way goes through farmland and I don’t suppose we shall see much of that further along the route, shall we?’ she said.
I answered impatiently, ‘Well, there is some between here and Balmaha.’
‘We could have followed the old railway track,’ she said. ‘That would have been rather fun. Still, as you say, it’s too late to think about that now, or the woods and the hills and the little river and the plank bridge and all the rest that’s in the brochure.’
‘You’ll have all you want of hills and woods later on,’ I told her.
To reach Balmaha we needed to cover only six and a half miles, so we lunched as early as we could at the hotel in Drymen and then made it an afternoon stroll. We identified Conic Hill and had to use a bit of the main road, but even then the journey was far from dull and we soon struck the countryside again as we turned past a farm. After that it was all farmland and forest and then on to grassland which merged into moorland. Hera was satisfied and there were no more complaints.
Some of The Way was rough, but the Garadhban Forest was worth any amount of rough walking. We climbed through sparse plantations of conifers and, looking back, we saw a great hill appearing over the top of the moorland ridge. We were sheltered to some extent in the forest itself, but when we came out to the moors again the air was fresh and the wind quite keen.
One of the strange things about hills and mountains is that they seem always to be shifting about as one travels. We had already seen Conic Hill when it appeared to be slightly behind us, but now we met it. As the day was fine, we could have taken the easier lower path, but Hera was determined to climb the hill for the sake of the view from the top, so she had her way without any dissent from me. I wanted no more arguments.
The bracken, as we climbed, was already high, but we managed to find the markers which charted The Way and, in any case, I had a map. The views from the top were magnificent, not the least being a panorama of Loch Lomond and its mountains.
Balmaha proved to be a tiny place. It had a shop where food could be bought, but already we had stocked up all we wanted to carry, so we found our cottage and introduced ourselves to our hostess. She had taken it for granted that we were married for I had booked for the two of us only in my own name, but Hera soon straightened matters out and I was despatched to a neighbour’s cottage for the night and saw no more of my strong-minded fiancée until breakfast-time.