Experiences of Eton — and the success it rewards

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was racially abused by another passenger. Besides using several words too offensive to quote, the man spat that Sethi should go back to where she came from. And so she did. Sethi comes from Manchester. Her first reaction to the experience was to speak out, to alert a member of staff and to ensure her abuser faced justice; her second was to start planning a trek across northern England, the landscape that was hers and where she belonged.

Following old existing tracks and forging new ones of her own, she travelled to Malham Cove and Hull Pot and Whin Sill, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, calling along the way at places with brilliantly on-the-nose names such as Hope and The Angel and Settle. At one point, a foot injury prompts an enforced pause, which Sethi spends in Manchester, drawing inspiration from the Pankhursts. She learns about Hadrian’s Wall and looks at the sea; she asks important questions about who actually has access to nature, and who owns the land, and how walking can be a radical act of protest. She digs into history as she goes, and makes neat connections: human bodies to the body of the country, its green skin, its Pennine backbone; tree roots to the routes of our personal histories; mental scars to topographical ones.

I Belong Here is about that northern, Pennine landscape, and Sethi’s writing is full of earnest enthusiasm for what she sees there: the birds and the moss and the extraordinary geological formations. She celebrates a close appreciation of nature, both because we ought to protect it and also because of the benefits this appreciation can bring us (she investigates nature as a healing force for tackling trauma and PTSD).