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and a bottle of beer all day and he was hungry.

    Still, when the bus got to Hereford he’d find a café and have a good meal and look for a bed

    and breakfast and in the morning set out on his walking tour. The bus didn’t get to

    Hereford. Instead it stopped outside a shabby bungalow on what was clearly a

    distinctly B road and the driver got out. Wilt waited ten minutes for him to return and

    then got out himself and was about to knock on the door when it opened and a large angry man

    looked out.
    ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. In the bungalow a Staffordshire bull terrier growled

    menacingly.
    ‘Well, as a matter of fact I want to go to Hereford,’ said Wilt, keeping a wary eye on

    the dog.
    ‘So what are you doing here? This isn’t bloody Hereford.’
    Wilt produced his ticket.
    ‘I paid my fare for Hereford in Birmingham and that bus’
    ‘Isn’t going nowhere near Hereford. It’s going to the fucking knacker’s yard if I can’t

    flog the fucker first.’
    ‘But it says ‘Hereford’ on the front.’
    ‘My, oh, my,’ said the man sarcastically. ‘You could have fooled me. You sure it don’t

    say ‘New York’? Go and take a dekko and don’t come back and tell me. Just bugger off. You come

    back and I’ll set the dog on you.’
    He went back into the bungalow and slammed the door. Wilt retreated and looked at the

    sign on the bus. It was blank. Wilt stared up and down the road and decided to go to the

    left. It was then he noticed the scrapyard behind the house. It was full of old rusting

    cars and lorries. Wilt walked on. There was bound to be a village somewhere down the road

    and where there was a village there was bound to be a pub. And beer. But after an hour in

    which he passed nothing more accommodating than another awful bungalow with a ‘For

    Sale’ sign outside it, he took his knapsack off and sat down on the grass verge opposite

    and considered his situation. The bungalow with its boarded windows and overgrown

    garden wasn’t a pleasing prospect. Lugging his knapsack Wilt moved a couple of hundred

    yards down the lane and sat down again and wished he’d bought some more sandwiches. But the

    evening sun shone down and the sky to the east was clear so things weren’t all that bad. In

    fact in many ways this was exactly what he had set out to experience. He had no idea where

    he was and no wish to know. Right from the start he had intended to erase the map of England

    he carried in his head. Not that he ever could; he had memorised it since his first

    geography lessons and over the years that internal map had been enlarged as much by his

    reading as by the places he’d visited. Hardy was Dorset or Wessex, and Bovington was

    Egdon Heath in _The Return of the Native_ as well as where Lawrence of Arabia had been

    killed on his motorcycle; _Bleak House_ was Lincolnshire; Arnold Bennett’s _Five Towns_

    were the Potteries in Staffordshire; even Sir Walter Scott had contributed to Wilt’s

    literary cartography with _Woodstock_ and _Ivanhoe._ Graham Greene too. Wilt’s Brighton

    had been defined for ever by Pinkie and the woman waiting on the pier. But if he couldn’t

    erase that map he could at any rate do his best to ignore it by not having a clue where he

    was, by avoiding large towns and even by disregarding place names that might prevent him

    from finding the England he was looking for. It was a romantic, nostalgic England. He

    knew that but he was indulging his romantic streak. He wanted to look at old houses, at

    rivers and streams, at old trees and ancient woods. The houses could be small, mere cottages

    or large houses standing in parkland, once great mansions but now in all probability

    divided up into apartments or turned into nursing homes or schools. None of that

    mattered to Wilt. He just wanted to wash Oakhurst Avenue, the Tech and the

    meaninglessness of his own routine out of his system and see England with new eyes,