Every week through Lent, a writer has reflected on a personal journey through a time of wilderness to an unexpected grace. In a final story for Easter, a novelist and poet recalls a mysterious encounter that, 50 years ago, turned a desolate hitch-hiker into a pilgrim, ‘ready for atonement’

On Friday 5 May 1972 I hitchhiked from my parents’ house in Corby, Northamptonshire, to the pit ­village of Bickershaw, near Wigan. At 17, I was a seasoned hitch-hiker, wandering the roads with a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in one pocket and a tin of ­marijuana in the other; but on that May ­afternoon, I was en route to a music festival billed as England’s answer to Woodstock, showcasing acts as various as the Kinks, Captain Beefheart and the Grateful Dead.
I had little money, and no gear, other than a bedroll and a change of clothes, but to anyone who saw me then, standing by a slip road with my thumb out, I would have seemed a typical “hippie”: hirsute, vagabond and, to all appearances, irresponsibly carefree.

Now, 50 years on, I wish I could remember something about that weekend, beyond the incessant rain; something, that is, about the acts I was there to see, rather than vague impressions of smoke and noise and ghostly faces sliding by in a psychedelic haze. But the truth is, only two distinct moments persist in my memory. The first is of seeing my gear vanish into the mud when the crowd panicked under a sudden deluge and rushed for shelter, trampling everything in its path; the second comes after the Dead left the stage, and I found myself adrift, damp to the marrow and slowly coming down from the cocktail of “substances” that had carried me thus far.