Free Pilgrim's Road by Bettina Selby Page A

voluntary obligations and keeping a record of passing pilgrims had not been an onerous task fifteen years before, when only a trickle of people were passing through on their way to Santiago. Many of her callers were academics researching the route, so it was all very interesting for Mme Debril. But since the Spanish section — the Camino Francés — has been declared a European Heritage Trail there are too many people knocking at her door. She is reluctant to lay down her role, or to compromise with her execution of it. All the details she collects of the hundreds of pilgrims who do call (and she is perversely annoyed by the fact that there are probably just as many who do not) are later carefully transcribed in copperplate handwriting into special ledgers. She is also vigilant in her questioning of those requiring ‘passports’ in order to determine that they have the right motives. ‘There are not many true pilgrims,’ she told me. ‘Most of them, particularly the Spanish, just want a free holiday. They turn up here with nothing, not even a pack. Proper pilgrims have something to identify them and they look like pilgrims.’ This had been the young Englishman’s mistake apparently; he had left his pack with a shopkeeper at the foot of the hill, and as he had no Confraternity papers or badges she had assumed he was another suspicious character.
    ‘Drug addicts, thieves, layabouts, hippies.’ Mme Debril’s list of those who trod the road to Santiago, attempting to get their hands on the key to free lodgings, was like a page from Chaucer. I listened enthralled as, all unwittingly, she imbued my journey with magic once more. For it was life itself she was describing, full-blooded, whole and robust, and not some esoteric off-shoot of it, divorced from reality. As she was speaking I realised that if something worthwhile was to be achieved on my twentieth-century pilgrimage, it would be rooted in the ordinary, everyday world. The journey was not something outside time and reality, but an opportunity to look at the same realities from a different angle and in a different context. My ideas differed widely from those of Mme Debril, but when we parted, with expressions of cordiality on both sides, I thought the world, as well as the pilgrimage, would be the poorer without this irascible but passionately involved woman.
    Much to my disappointment the rain had not cleared as I prepared to set out from St Jean-Pied-de-Port; it was falling in fact with the sort of dogged persistence that held out little hope of an early end to it. There would be no views as I slogged my way over the pass, and I wondered if I would do better to delay my departure until the next day. But there was no guarantee it would cease even then. Besides, I had found the hotel both noisy and expensive, and had already exhausted the sights of the town in a determined two-hour tour the previous evening. Much better to take the journey as it came, the bad with the good, I decided. Something worthwhile might emerge even from such dismal weather. I called in at the least touristy of the shops to buy some strong plastic bags to keep my shoes dry, having exhausted the stock I had brought with me. When I explained to the shopkeeper why I wanted them, he insisted on providing me with the best he had — no payment for a pelerine! Customers and staff watched with interest as I moulded a bag over each shoe and put a rubber band around each ankle to hold them in place. My spare clothes and other luggage were already wrapped in plastic bags inside the panniers, a precaution I adopt now as a matter of course, for no luggage remains completely waterproof in prolonged rain. The handlebar bag is particularly vulnerable, as I discovered once in India when I was caught in a tropical downpour, and all my money, travellers’ cheques, passport and other documents were reduced to pulp; so a separate bag is kept handy to pull over this at need.
    Duly swathed and muffled in a