Holiday footwear: somewhere between flip-flops and hobnails
I’m off on holiday next week. As such, I am looking to my boots.
Holidays for me involve a deal of walking. Physical relaxation makes me antsy. I don’t travel hundreds of miles just to sprawl in comfy seating. I don’t journey to a strange place and then neglect to actually look at it. For those of you who’ve read The World In A Sandbag, the attitude that Nora has to sightseeing in Paris is my own. Move fast, before the municipal authorities decide to shutter or bulldoze the sights. Lingering over lunch I can do at home. Getting the most out my time is what it’s all about, so pay the bill and get in gear. And don’t even mention public transport, especially if it’s of the underground variety. Stay where you can see the skyline. See as much of it as you can. Don’t waste daylight. Don’t slow down.
Photos copyright Imperial War Museum.
For my last three holidays – all city breaks – the pavement-pounding was undertaken in a pair of decent lace-up boots. Toffee-coloured, they were the sort of thing a junior draughtsman might have chosen to get married in roundabout 1910 or so. I got them in a sale. Thirty years ago I wouldn’t have been seen dead in anything that looked remotely like them. Split across both (resoled) soles by the time I limped back through my own front door last March, they were at last consigned to the bin. I’d have done the same with my feet if they hadn’t been my only pair. I strongly felt that I had grown too old for all this hoofing.
The replacement boots are also brown, but less toffee-coloured and more russet. Of course they are: they cost more. So far they’ve been kind to me. Supple leather. Rubber soles. I and they should be able to withstand a few days of hardcore tourism.
But you’ll hardly be surprised to know that I can’t walk any distance without my thoughts turning to August 1914. I think about the reservists who crammed their soft civilian feet into army boots before being marched around the barrack square and on to Belgium and all the way to the Marne. Unyielding leather. Iron-shod soles. Summer heat. I’m not going to cite sources here, and indeed I may well be misremembering, but these fragments made their impression and have stayed with me down the years:
An old French woman remembering the first words of German she’d learned as a little girl, when young soldiers staggered into her father’s barn and painfully shrugged off their packs before falling face down in the hay, muttering over and over in disbelief, ‘fierzig Kilometre’.
A photo from a medical archive of a British soldier’s feet, and the mention that socks had sometimes to be removed under anaesthetic.
The bare notation in the Field Service Pocket Book: ‘Boots, ankle, pairs 1. Approx weight 4lbs.’
The reminder that no army was lavish in its provision of socks.
I wear cotton socks myself. The last time I wore heavy knitted socks on a long walk I suffered for it. The only time I wore boots with steel reinforcement was when I was a robust and heedless lad in my twenties, and I suffered for that too.
Also from the Field Service Pocket Book:
‘Socks when taken off should be stretched, well shaken, and placed on the opposite feet when next worn. Where the socks fit over the tender parts of the feet they should be greased inside.’
I’ll bring enough spare socks with me next week, thank you.
And some sticking plaster just in case.
