Eighteen months or so ago saw me travelling back from the Cairngorms to Birmingham by train. I stopped in Borders in Glasgow to pick a book to accompany me back to New Street. I came out with a copy of a simply wonderful book, “Calum’s Road” by Roger Hutchinson. Calum’s Road was the story of one man’s quest to connect his isolated settlement in the north of Rossay with the road system in the south. But the book was much more than that. It was a fine history of a small island community in the Hebrides covering the islanders battle with absentee landlords and their struggle to eek out a living from this bleak land. I reviewed Calum’s Road here.

Last week I was back in the same branch of borders after another trip to the Cairngorms. I was delighted to find a new book from Hutchinson, “Walking to America”. I snapped it up and finished it in one sitting on the train journey to Birmingham.

“Walking to America” is about Hutchinson’s own family. As a child growing up in the 60’s and 70’s Hutchinson spent time at his grandfather’s cottage in Country Durham. His grandfather had worked all his life down the pit and spent his retirement locked inside the house as if — even in retirement — his battered body could no longer stand the outdoors and natural sunlight. His grandfather and one big thing going for him; he had a television at a time when Hutchinson’s parents did not.

His grandfather was a man of few words, but one day, while watching a cowboy TV programme he jumped up and announced “I used to live there”. And so a young boy became fascinated with the knowledge that his family had travelled to the States but had then returned back to the pits of Durham.

This book tells the story of not only Hutchinson’s family but of many others who made their way from the coalfields to the USA. Today, we are all aware of the many Irish and Scots who emigrated but what is not so well known is that one of the largest groups of immigrants to the US, during the later part of the 1800s, were the English.

This is a fascinating if not ultimately sad story. Almost a whole generation of one extended family made their way over the Atlantic to Pittsburg via. Philadelphia, driven on of course by dreams of a new life and the hope of finding a cure for one of the group’s blindness. Pittsburg at that time was described as the blackest and dirtiest city in the world. But the family did not stop in Pittsburg.

One sister in the group was married to an Irishman who upped sticks and took his family south to join the Irish community in New Orleans. But something happened and before long the family — minus the sister — was back in England. Those that had remained in Pittsburg then travelled south on the hopeless mission of finding out what had happened to their missing sister. While they never found her these Durham miners found themselves in a world of the deep south, amongst the Spanish and latino cultures and the African slaves of the deep south. After abandoning their search the family moved back North. But this was not the end of their travels and before long they were taking the long journey to the promised land of the west.

The family ended up in Arizona trying to make a living from the extraction of minerals from the petrified forest. They made their home in Holbrook which was very much a frontier town with native American communities that had only fought their last battles a year or two beforehand. There are shootouts and other scenes direct from the Westerns. A family tragedy — the death of a young daughter — led to the family giving up their dream and returning to the English coalfields.

“Walking to America” is a fascinating story and one which is much more than just the experience of one family. Hutchinson brings alive the dreams of the immigrants, the harshness of their life and the bravery of their journeys.

Hutchinson writes with the most sympathetic of styles. There is no over cleverness here to over shadow the story. Yet there is plenty of details and historical reference. It is one of Hutchinson’s skills to weave all of this together in a narrative that is fascinating and quite effortless to read.

This is well worth seeking out. Available only in hardback at the moment, but the book itself is a lovely thing and will give real pleasure to those who still like the feel of real paper.