Edge of the Orison Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  EDGE OF THE ORISON

  Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital and Dining on Stones. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances. Iain Sinclair lives in Hackney, East London.

  John Clare

  Edge of the Orison

  In the traces of John Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’

  IAIN SINCLAIR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published by Hamish Hamilton 2005

  Published in Penguin Books 2006

  I

  Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-191101-4

  To Anna

  I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures & discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I could look down like looking into a large pit & see into is secrets the same as I belivd I could see heaven by looking into the water.

  John Clare

  Contents

  Frontispiece: John Clare

  Map: Journeys out of Essex: John Clare (1841), his pursuers (2000)

  EDGE OF THE ORISON

  Flying

  Dreaming

  Walking

  Drowning

  Reforgetting

  Pre-remembered

  Map: Edge of the Orison: Peterborough's gravitational field

  Hadman Family Tree

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Journeys out of Essex: John Clare (1841) his pursuers (2000)

  FLYING

  The bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as thinking.

  Jonathan Swift

  Eighty Miles Out

  It is a sleeping country, unpeopled and overlit. The sky cloudless. Horizon soft as milk in a contact lens. We wade, knuckling irritated eyes, through golden cereal fields, missing the familiar sound of the road. This is the conclusion, so we hope, of a walk from Epping Forest to Glinton (once of Northamptonshire, then Huntingdon, now Peterborough). Fifteen or so miles, a literal last leg, after three days shadowing the A1, the Great North Road, dawn to dusk and beyond: in the traces of the mad poet John Clare. Mad to be out of it, mad to chivvy the story along to a predestined conclusion, the reunion with his phantom wife, burnt Mary. Mad to shrug off the poultice of identity, to be everyone. Borderless as an inland sea.

  You might think a circuit of London, twelve walks, inside and outside the orbital motorway, the M25, would have cured me of this neurosis: the compulsion to be on the hoof, burdened with packs, sketchbooks, cameras. Future memories. There was unfinished business. The gravity of London had to be escaped by a final, unwritten chapter, a shaky attempt to place my boots in John Clare's hobbled footsteps (‘foot foundered and broken down’ by the time he reached Stilton). The pain of Clare's journey ameliorated by the ecstasy of this achieved thing, a letter, never sent, to a dead woman. Mary Joyce of Glinton. Reluctant muse. Mother of invisible children.

  I have written an account of my journey or rather escape from Essex for your amusement & hope it may divert your leisure hours – I would have told you before now that I got here to Northborough last friday night but not being able to see you or to hear where you was I soon began to feel homeless at home & shall bye & bye feel nearly hopeless but not so lonely as I did in Essex – for here I can see Glinton church & feeling that Mary is safe if not happy & I am gratified though my home is no home to me my hopes are not entirely hopeless while even the memory of Mary lives so near me God bless you My dear Mary Give my love to your dear beautifull family & to your Mother

  Renchi Bicknell, my companion on the orbital walks, a painter coming back to his practice after years running a bookshop in a small Hampshire town, had moved further west, to try a bed-and-breakfast place (fine view over the Somerset levels) in Glastonbury. His morning circuits, every day the same route, skirted the Tor, until this landscape, from which so many anxious seekers had squeezed the last drop of meaning, lost its novelty and became a part of him. He walked with his wife, plotting other excursions, the Clare hike, a heightened sense of vision. And then, motorway dust shaken off, an expedition with his son to Nepal.

  Who you walk with alters what you see: the view, the prospect. With Renchi, circumnavigating London, rivers, concrete bridges over streams of blind traffic, we were conscious, above everything else, of doing a job: logging evidence, disturbing secure buildings, churches, bunkers, labouring at a narrative that was being shaped by our progress (the lack of it). Renchi's motorway paintings were obliged to perform as diaries, topographical records of simultaneity, like those pre-Giotto lives of Italian saints, where everything happens at once: temptation, triumph, torture, death. Resurrection. The soul, a golden kite, lifted into heaven by a flock of doves.

  London's fringes, motorway ‘edge lands’, were infected by nightmares in asylums and hospitals, by the pressure of our nervous attention, worrying at the fabric, promoting a thesis: the M25 is more than a road, a misconceived one hundred and twenty miles of tarmac, uncivil engineering. It means. Our walk made something happen, happen to us. Nothing changed out there, in the drift of the motorists and their suspended lives; in my conceit, we were transformed. On a molecular level. Very gradually, and with considerable reluctance (on their part), forgotten ancestors acknowledged our feeble interventions. We re-lived their histories and remade our own. The noise of the motorway changed from nuisance to a chorus of oracular whispers, prompts, mangled information. Which we had volunteered to transcribe and interpret.

  Walking with my wife, with Anna, the accident of our forty-year association having passed in an imploding instant of work, children, meals, holidays, bills, urgent inessentials and accidental epiphanies, was different. Very different. We started on the South Coast, the wind at our backs, a stroll to the pier; then the fishing huts, up the steps to the country park. A steady pace, no problems on the flat. But no detours, no church towers, those were Anna's conditions: no museums, book pits, int
errogations of eccentrics met along the way.

  We ambled, by gentle stages, from Hackney to Hastings, through a benign September; scarlet windfall orchards, the country estates of Russian oligarchs, golf courses where footpath signs had been destroyed and forest exits blocked by burnt-out cars. My perceptions were changed by the person who walked by my side. Some of the ground had been crossed, in the other direction, on the M25 expedition; but even the Darent Valley, Dartford to Shoreham, seemed new, quieter, less eager to pitch a yarn. A drowsy benevolence of climate and landscape. Dried hops were tucked under the straps of my rucksack to promote sleep. I didn't have to fix the details in my mind. I could draw them back, whatever I needed, from Anna. Our walk wasn't strategic. It marked a sea change, a shift in our lives. The slightly dazed second courtship of that time, after the children have left home, when we sleepwalk between what is lost and what we are learning to recover.

  On a long straight road, coming out of Kent, there is a disconcerting incident. A stranger, dressed in the clothes Anna is wearing, a person of the same height, same length of stride, passes her, walking north. I'm slightly ahead, marching uphill towards a road sign, wanting to check if we're in the right place. I lift the camera, catch the moment. Anna split, travelling both ways at once; south towards the coast and back, alone, to London.

  I remembered John Clare and his wife, the church-married one, mother of his children, Martha ‘Patty’ Turner, walking out near her father's cottage at Casterton: ‘We both looked on the self-same thing/ Till both became as one.’

  I imagined that stretching the length of the orbital circuit of the M25 into the English countryside, into somewhere as obscure (to me) as the territory between Peterborough, Market Deeping, Stamford and the A1, would complete that episode, bury it. But that's never how it works. My attempted divorce only confirmed the road as another ring, another shackle. London, better known, less understood, was more London than it had ever been; a monster greedy for expansion, eager to swallow underexploited ground and to bury it in satellite development.

  Writers begin with discovery, discovering their subject matter, marking out their turf. And finish with dissolution. Learning how to suppress conditioned reflexes. Learning to forget. Arranging for their own disappearance. John Clare, hyped ‘peasant poet’, arriving by coach, a rattling, thirteen-hour journey from the George Hotel at Stamford to the Blue Boar in Holborn, saw the metropolis with clear, unskinned eyes: a city of ghosts, a dull river less impressive than Whittlesea Mere. His world had been stood on its head. By night, prostitutes promenaded the town, dressed like ladies. Resurrectionists lurked in the shadows. There were labyrinths beneath every loose paving stone.

  If you are fortunate enough to start from London, the goal of every aspiring economic or cultural migrant, then any outward expedition becomes a flight. Heading up the Great North Road, we were not advancing into a fresh narrative, a novel set of coordinates, we were running away – like all those others who lost their nerve. The infant Pepys taken from the purlieus of St Bride's Church, off Fleet Street, to salubrious Dalston, haunt of milkmaids and agriculturalists. Daniel Defoe, the intelligencer, on the road: government agent, documentarist, contriver of myths and fictions. You can't just walk off, one fine summer morning, hands in pockets, and expect to get away, clear, scot free. You will be pursued: like debtors, subversives, those who adhere to the wrong religion.

  Quit London and you will be trampled in the stampede. Plague-dodgers. Hunted criminals (like the Essex man, Richard Turpin). Property-hungry urbanites prospecting for unconverted cottages. The exhausted, the timid. The burgled, raped, assaulted. Overtaxed. Under-rewarded. Choked on thin air. Allergic to everything. Yearlong hay fever. Summer colds that mutate into winter shivers. The sweaty heat of packed public transport, somebody hacking, coughing, spraying a fine mist down the back of your neck. The city is sick. The city is people. The city is watching you. It doesn't care. You don't register (until you transgress).

  Eyes.

  Lit from both sides. Memory and darkness.

  A visiting poet, a hayseed, following the London mob, witnesses the funeral procession of Lord Byron; heading north, like the dead Princess Diana, away from town. A container of gritty ash in a carriage with an heraldic shield: the aristocrat's heart and brain removed for autopsy.

  When, the walk from Epping Forest completed, John Clare lost himself in the long exile of Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, his eyes were smooth as stones. ‘I have lost the irises,’ he said.

  Stilton

  Clare arrived at Stilton, as we did, on the evening of his third day of walking; lamed, filthy, hallucinating. He starved, tearing handfuls of grass from the side of the road. We breakfasted, full English. He chewed tobacco. I worked moisture into a dry mouth, cleaned out pub lunches, reluctantly ceded, with wads of flavourless gum. He slept in a ‘dyke bottom’, outside town, where we booked ourselves into a decent pub. His memories, forged in a phantom letter (or confession) to his vanished muse, are one of the wonders of English prose. My notes, mere scribbles, are strategic prompts for some unresolved future project; more labour and sweat than anything our circumnavigation of the blight that is Peterborough could offer.

  Major schlep from Alconbury up Ermine Street… old North Road to Stilton: abandoned cafés, petrol stations denuded of pumps… an industrial ice-cream bought from one of the last survivors, a filling station/ motel… you can see the destination signs bridging the parallel stream of the A1 like a set of gallows… Feet bad… hard to contemplate the final day, the day ahead. Bridge over A1 & into long thin stretch of the village of Stilton. Renchi dives into a bush to change his clothes, before the Bell Hotel. Chris Petit has driven up from London & is in the bath. We eat in the courtyard, with attendant Morris dancers. I don't have the haunted room, a small single looking out on the street. Dreamless sleep with no Anna to remember my dreams for me.

  The journey from Epping, re-experienced in his detested Northborough cottage, undid Clare. He lived it through his notebook. He saw himself, once again, on the treadmill of the road: incidents from a fading fiction, the escape from Essex. An uncorroborated account of the last walk he would ever take, through summer countryside, one village to the next. Would he, in those asylum years in Northampton, travel more than five miles from his bedroom? A feared future in dispute with an ebbing past, events that might or might not have happened, makes sensory experience more acute, more painful. Journey as metaphor. Betrayed by the inadequacy of language. Pilgrim's Progress revamped, by the dispirited Clare, as a single, breathless sentence. A scream. The nib of his pen navigating a cluttered journal, before the doctors come for him, Fenwick Skrimshire and William Page. The poet's home-brewed ink, brown as a blood stain, eats through the surface of the precious paper. Word-marks too strong for the page to contain them.

  but I dont reccolect the name of any place untill I came to stilton where I was compleatly foot foundered & broken down when I had got about half way through the town a gravel causeway invited me to rest myself so I lay down & nearly went sleep a young woman (so I guessed by the voice) came out of a house & said “poor creature” & another more elderly said “O he shams” but when I got up the latter said “o no he don't” as I hobbled along very lame

  By the end of that third day, Clare was too tired to distinguish one hamlet from another, to copy names into his notebook. ‘I have but slight recollection of the journey between here and Stilton for I was knocked up and noticed little or nothing.’ The walker, early optimism dispersed, withdraws into himself. He sits under a hedge. He sleeps in a sodden ditch. He hears voices. He talks to strangers as if they were living and he, already, one of the dead.

  Stilton, deprived of females to remark on the authenticity of our collapse, feels much as it did: limestone-golden in the twilight. The Bell is a coaching inn at which coaches no longer stop; it caters to a new clientele of wedding parties, shiny reps. Suits who have business with airfields. Awkward lovers in a black-beamed dining room. Travelle
rs breaking their journey north.

  Our overnight hotel is very much in the book, but the surrounding countryside is ex-directory, its history occulted; no suitable myths have, as yet, been discovered by the local heritage industry. Staying here, on a subsequent occasion, I set out for an evening walk: the village soon gives up the ghost. A sanctioned path rubs against the motorway, before twisting back among fields and ponds, rising gently towards the erased settlements of Caldecote and Washingley. Being allowed, even encouraged, to move in a particular direction kills the desire. Wildlife on its best behaviour. Muted squawks, strategic feather-ruffling. Cuteness as a plea against extinction (by gun, poison or lack of a well-connected pressure group).

  There were no supplementary expeditions this time. Chris Petit was fresh. He'd strolled with us, on the first morning, from Epping Forest to the River Lea, then hopped a train at Broxbourne, pleading an afternoon appointment on the other side of town. Now he was back, with his video camera, personal bottle of Evian, selection of dark glasses: no unsightly rucksack. The camera slipped neatly into the pocket of his not-quite-distressed-but-ever-so-slightly-discommoded denim jacket. Discommoded to be in company with rough walkers, volunteer vagrants. With Renchi in his blue bandanna (adapted T-shirt). His shorts, ankle socks, sturdy calves. A Sherpa-sized pack leaking maps and grubby rags from every orifice. The badge of the sahib, Petit understood, was to carry nothing more than a splash of cologne.

  Begin walking and reality kicks in. Inch by inch, through the heat of the day, this painful realisation: you are where you are. And you will stay there until you summon the energy to put one foot in front of the other. Petit has calculated the look perfectly: writer/director on sabbatical, a location scouting trip that might, though he won't admit as much, turn out to be an entry in his video diary. Ribbed, mid-calf socks of some non-synthetic material, enough tone in them to pick up naturally bleached desert-issue shorts. Tank commander's round, anti-glare lenses clipped over austere spectacles: he is prepared to take on Rommel. (James Mason as directed by Henry Hathaway.) Brown shoes, laced and gleaming, bulled overnight by an invisible batman.