I can distinctly remember being in the back seat of the family car on a long journey (to Devon probably – that drive felt interminable), looking at all the other cars full of people and thinking, “Where on earth are they all going and why?” As my eyes went funny trying to keep up with the traffic flicking past, it blew my mind to imagine everyone as the main character in the dramas of their own lives, with a busy morning behind them and a plan for the afternoon ahead. It’s a thought which has never really left me. As a middle-aged woman, one of my ideas of top entertainment is to people-watch. You’ll find me at it in cafés, bars, on trains. I’m completely contented when I’m losing myself in the passing tide of main characters, imagining the scenes of their lives unfurling around them. The only thing that can beat it is to take the extra step and strike up a conversation. Not the drinks party kind with all that, “Did you come on the B359 or via Porchester?” The conversation with strangers I like is the bigger sort, with feelings and explanations of passions, maybe with a bit of childhood thrown in.
Early on in my career as a radio reporter, this preference for the personal over the professional was obvious. I didn’t make the greatest of newshounds, as I was often completely diverted by the lives which surrounded the headline. On one occasion, I was sent to interview an elderly couple on the outskirts of Peterborough. I remember their welcoming bungalow with ornaments carefully arranged on a mantel and a calendar of cat photos hanging in the kitchen. After switching off the recorder, instead of hurrying back to file my piece, I ended up chatting some more and the conversation meandered around to how the couple first met… It is a story I have never forgotten.
During the war, the man explained, he was a prisoner of war at a camp somewhere in East Anglia. His now wife was working as a land girl nearby. Somehow the pair noticed each other, made friends and fell in love. It was a relationship entirely conducted from either side of a prison fence. The description I still remember is of her secretly posting carrots and other vegetables through the wire mesh for him. He told me that as a frightened young man, these offerings sustained him: somebody cared.
Fast forward 20 years or so and I am in Colchester on a hot September lunchtime, talking to a man I have never met before and didn’t plan to interview. He’s on the way to Superdrug and he tells me he’s been married four times and is currently waiting for a hip replacement. He uses a stick to walk, but has a twinkle – and wrists full of leather bracelets. He plays in a band that performs all over Essex. He then tells me how his Italian father met his English mother: he was a PoW and she was a land girl. His father would never talk to him about the war or being imprisoned, but he knew his parents’ marriage was a happy one and the story was precious to him. He told me about his trips to Tuscany and how the older generation there have died and the younger ones have moved away. His connection to that idea of home was fraying, but he was holding on tightly to the bits that are left. Afterwards, in the car on my way home, I found myself reflecting that I’d somehow come full circle and that I could not be happier.
I’d gone to Colchester to record for my podcast, Where Are You Going? The concept is simple: I potter around a location talking to strangers and asking them that one simple question. The answers are always interesting. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes surprising, tragic or shocking. Occasionally they take your breath away. Often they stay with you for years, just like that love story from Peterborough.
In his fascinating book Hello, Stranger, William Buckingham writes that there is “something freeing about strangers, about the possibilities they bring. Strangers are unentangled in our worlds and lives and this lack can lighten our own burden. This is why strangers can unexpectedly become confidants.” He quotes the sociologist Georg Simmel, who found in his research that strangers trade “the most surprising revelations and confidences, at times reminiscent of a confessional”.
On that same sunny day in Essex, I recorded interviews with an artist in a fluffy orange cardigan, a pair of retired special needs teachers on their way to buy ice-creams, and a trio of Iranian refugees. One of those three young men described escaping his homeland disguised as a woman, before crossing the Channel in a small boat full of terrified and screaming children. As the weather worsened, he told me he bailed out water and donated his lifejacket to someone younger than him. He cannot swim.
At the beginning, I assumed lots of people would tell me to sod off or be baffled by the whole idea of me asking: “Where are you going?” But the vast majority do not and aren’t. People seem to want to talk and very often about really important things. A psychotherapist friend of mine was less surprised that people opened up in this way. In her experience, people in therapy often blurt out the most vulnerable and important thing just as the hour’s session is ending. She explained that it’s a safe window of time, after which they leave the room and there is no comeback. The few minutes I spend with people I talk to are perhaps a cross between the confessional described by Simmel and the last few ticks of the clock in the therapy room. Interviewees are always anonymous and – after we chat – we go our separate ways. Even though the conversation can become intimate very quickly, it is also only a brief moment shared, which then sort of closes up behind us.
I have laughed and laughed at some of the stories I have been told, and felt my heart crack listening to others.
The first time I asked, “Where are you going?” was – funnily enough – in Peterborough. This time, I was in the train station. I spoke to a woman who told me she was on the way to pick up her car from the garage. I commented on her eyebrows and she told me she was a beautician. I asked her how long she’d done that for. She swung her big handbag from in front of her legs and said ever since she had been medically discharged from the army “after being blown up by an IED in Iraq”. Once the bag had moved, I could see where the explosion had ripped the flesh and muscle off her legs and buttocks.
What I value so much about gathering stories like this is the freshness of every exchange. I had no idea what trauma that incredible woman had endured. Nor did I know anything about the determination that enabled her to learn to walk again, just in time to make it down the aisle at her wedding.
This September, the podcast won an award at the British Podcast Awards and listeners tell us they have found a blueprint for creating connections of their own, realising it can be quite possible to talk to people you don’t know and share a little of each other’s lives.
In the time since I started asking strangers where they are going, the world has changed, politics has become more divisive and spaces to talk openly feel rarer. A lot of interactions take place online and – as we all know – can become angry pretty quickly. So I’m always expecting the people I approach to reflect that – and to be hostile to the idea of talking to a stranger about things that really matter to them. But instead, I keep finding the opposite. People are as open as ever and – post pandemic – even more keen for connection.
“However assiduously we weave and reweave a sense of home in concentric circles of belonging,” writes Buckingham in Hello, Stranger, “these circles soon blur off into the bewildering mass of humanity who are unknown to us. How can we even make sense of all this dizzying strangeness, all this unknowability, all these multitudes?” He argues that we can and should acknowledge our fear of strangers (xenophobia) but be careful to balance it with the tradition of “philoxenia”, the desire to connect with strangers. “Do not be forgetful of philoxenia for through this some of us have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2). I don’t wish to stray into pulpit territory but I do believe that little chats about catching carp, riding a bike, falling in love or losing a friend really do make that “bewildering mass of humanity” in “all its dizzying strangeness” seem a tiny little bit more knowable.
Listen to the podcast, produced by Loftus Media, at whereareyougoing.co.uk
