Edge of the Orison Read online

  Having left the Forest in a hurry I had not time to take leave of you & your family but I intended to write & that before now but dullness & dissapointment prevented me for I found your words true on my return here having neither friends or home left but as it is called “Poets cottage” I claimed a lodging in it where I now am – one of my fancys I found here with her family & all well

  The walk, the frantic pilgrimage, was the last of it: sanity. High Beach, like Patty and the children (who are now hers alone), is a ‘fancy’. A contract has been broken or a contract fulfilled. Clare tried London and was mocked by his success. (The fourth visit is always the killer. Dylan Thomas blustered across America, three tours, and returned to Laugharne with a few dollars and a criminal hangover. Trains and women. The fourth trip did for him.) The portraits and life masks of John Clare confirm an absence. They register a person who is no longer there. Travelling, tramping the Great North Road, he swims in his own shadow. He forgets where the sun rises.

  On the cusp of a final exile, abdication of world and family, Clare analyses his own condition, the frail distinction between being forgotten and eradicated. Silenced.

  A very good common place counsel is Self Identity to bid our own hearts not to forget our own selves & always to keep self in the first place lest all the world who always keeps us behind it should forget us all together – forget not thyself & the world will not forget thee – forget thyself & the world will willingly forget thee till thou art nothing but a living-dead man dwelling among shadows & falsehood

  He talks to his old friends, the gypsies, at their forest camp. They offer, for a price, to smuggle him away. He returns, they are gone. He picks up a discarded ‘wide awake’ hat and puts it in his pocket. He plots his escape like a military campaign. There are provisions: notebook, chewing tobacco, hat.

  I Led the way & my troops soon followed but being careless in mapping down the rout as the Gipsey told me I missed the lane to Enfield town & was going down Enfield highway till I passed “The Labour in vain” Public house where a person I knew comeing out of the door told me the way

  John Clare was launched on one of the great English journeys, three and a half days, 20–24 July 1841. Hungry, hobbled, deluded. An expedition to recover a self he had no use for, a wife he didn't recognise, a cottage he loathed. He would confirm the validity of a double consciousness: London and Helpston, poet and labourer, Patty and Mary. A nest of earthly and spiritual children that had been fathered, mislaid. A text, already composed, to be justified by bitter experience.

  High Beach

  It's July, but not that July, the time of Clare's walk (1841), or the July (2000) when we tracked him, High Beach to Helpston. It is 2004 and I'm trying to remember the details of that evening, four years ago, when Renchi arrived and we spread competing OS maps on the kitchen table. Anna, as you will remember, lurked significantly, preparing dinner and making pointed remarks about comparative distances between Glinton and Peterborough, Glinton and Stamford. We were trespassing, heavy-footed, on her territory. If her memories were not entirely accurate, it wasn't our business to correct them.

  The ‘Journey out of Essex’ as depicted on a map in John Clare by Himself (edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell) is admirably straightforward: a vertical line dangled between Northborough and Enfield with a kink snagged on High Beach. Around eighty miles: Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire. Find the Great North Road and the rest is a dumb plod emptying heads of all previous convictions.

  Clare slept, head to home, letting the true north of pain and loss act as his guide. He travelled towards the thing that troubled him most: memory. Robinson and Powell's map was arctic white, lacking hills, rivers, woods, farms, churches, airfields, concrete bunkers, Happy Eaters, ibis hotels. (The materials in which we dealt.) Factor in our preliminary stroll from Hackney, detours, digressions, and we should be able to stretch this excursion to the required length of 120 miles. Or: the distance around the M25, London's orbital motorway, drawn out like slack elastic.

  It must be the season, old hurts return as I look at my original photographs, read the crabby journal of that walk. The flaw has a name: scoliosis. A lateral deviation of the backbone caused by congenital or acquired abnormalities of the vertebrae. One leg shorter than the other. With inevitable compensations: muscle strain, skewings of tissue. Enough miles on the clock, over the last half-century, to do real damage. In July 2000,1 was a month beyond my fifty-seventh birthday. Clare, when he marched down the hill towards Enfield, was forty-eight. His life had been harder, much harder. Poor diet, nights sleeping under trees. Chemical imbalances, thin blood. Digestive problems untreated or made worse by quacks. There were physical (as well as geographical) elements in his supposed madness. Call it the Northampton Syndrome: incest, witchcraft, land too recently recovered from the water.

  The prospect of repeating Clare's walk alarmed me. Piece by piece, I was wearing out; years of lugging boxes of books, packing a child under each arm, had taken its toll. I only visited doctors for inoculations. Other symptoms, I suspected, would cure themselves; more or less, eventually. Or not. Best advice: keep clear of hospitals, you'll catch something. Hospitals are future development opportunities living on borrowed time. Scandals waiting for available indignation.

  Backs, at my age, are a given; bad ones. Our walk should have been sponsored by Mr Venus, the Clerkenwell taxidermist. Everybody on the Helpston excursion had temperamental spines, legs of different lengths, pains in the side. Would we make it? The London Orbital tour was easy; a day on the road, home to warm bath. This was more challenging, three and a half days, straight – following Clare's route or chasing rivers and footpaths. We couldn't decide.

  I reconnoitred the forest. My sense of direction in London is adequate, even the bits I don't know; the base map is etched in my skull. The serpentine Thames. The pattern of churches. E. O. Gordon's sacred elevations (as described in Prehistoric London, Its Mounds and Circles). But Epping Forest, the Peterborough diaspora? I couldn't fix where the sun rose; shifty skies, vague horizons. Time, recycled, borrowed from another man, won't behave. It sticks or it races. Old heart beating like a pigeon trapped in a chimney.

  I set out from High Beach in winter, logging contour lines of lager cans, burger cartons, cigarette packets, bits of cars. Cargo-trash getting denser as I approached the roundabout where four roads meet: A121, A104, B172, B1393. I found a silver Christmas watch, pressed into a muddy hoofprint, and left notices in huts and nature reserves. It was never claimed.

  With Renchi in tow, I searched for Matthew Allen's three houses. Building work in progress, convenient footpaths and bridges across the Lea, from Enfield Lock to High Beach, were discontinued. Maps are so selective. They have no truck with the former Small Arms Factory or its abrupt translation into Enfield Island Village (‘An Exciting New Village Community’). Rifles, the community pub, knows what kind of customers it wants: ‘Over 21's Smart Dress Only. Travellers Not Welcome.’ Thirsty, we wait for Turpin's Cave on the road to the forest.

  Dick Turpin was an Essex boy who drifted north: York. A horse-trader brought to the rope, the triple tree. The custom then was that a felon who agreed to act as hangman, to stretch his fellows, would be set free. There was a price on Turpin's head, for the murder of Thomas Morris, servant to Henry Thompson, one of the Keepers of Epping Forest. Turpin's criminal history was traditional: family of publicans and butchers, membership of a gang raiding farmhouses and isolated properties on the fringes of London. Nothing out of the way. They only harmed their own. Born too soon to take advantage of the M25.

  James Sharpe, examining the legend in a recent book, Dick Turpin, The Myth of the English Highwayman, traces the famous pantomime ride back to Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (first published in three volumes, 1824–6). A robbery at Gadshill in Kent, mariners paid off at Chatham. The former royalist officer, Richard Dudley, turns highwayman. He escapes across the Thames into Essex and rides
up the Great North Road to York. Turpin's legend evolves from a careless reading of Dudley's career.

  Turpin on the run, like Harry Roberts (the 1966 police killer), is supposed to have hidden in a cave in Epping Forest. Roberts, after a botched robbery in Shepherd's Bush, bought himself some camping kit in King's Cross and took to the forest. He had done his National Service in Malaya. He knew how to set up a number of camps and to keep moving. Despite the manhunt that was inevitable, given his crime, Roberts eluded capture – until he made the mistake of crossing a main road, carrying a blue holdall. ‘No one in the country had a bag like that,’ he said.

  Numerous hotels on the Great North Road lay claim to Turpin's ghost. His spectral presence is felt at the George Hotel in Buckden. The Bell Inn at Stilton, according to Sharpe, was another ‘regular haunt’. This phantom self, a creature of myth, travels the length of a route Turpin never took (preferring the back roads, the rivers of Fenland). It is the Great North Road that disappears, displaced by the impatient carriageways of the AI. Between Norman Cross and Alconbury, we will discover abandoned filling stations, tin huts and shacks that once offered all-day breakfasts to travellers and hauliers refused entry at Rifles in Enfield Island Village.

  An Enfield publican put Clare straight, pointing out the shortest way. The contemporary version is less certain of local topography. An instruction has gone out from the brewers enforcing a total embargo on courtesy. This was one of those ‘High Beach, John? If I wanted fuckin' High Beach, I wouldn't start from here’ scenarios. All we learn, from another lunchtime casual, one-eyed and three pints in, is: ‘There used to be a road. I think. Once.’

  Perhaps the same road that rose out of nowhere to greet Clare's old friend Charles Lamb in his Enfield retirement? John Taylor wrote to Clare, one of those weary lectures about unsold stock, delays in publication, texts to be edited, censored, aborted. ‘Poor Charles Lamb is dead – perhaps you had not heard of it before. He fell down and cut his face against the Gravel on the Turnpike Road, which brought on his Erysipelas, and in a few days carried him off.’

  Premature road rage. The rage of the Turnpike against Islington travellers who don't know where they are going or why: remedial excursionists. A long-distance walk is a serious affair. You shake up every atom of your being. You arrive, footsore, at your destination: lighter, shorter, hungrier. A stranger to those who stayed at home. Head emptied of old fears. With room made for the new.

  From High Beach, Clare contacted his medical adviser, Doctor Darling. ‘Sounds affect me very much and things evil as well [as] good thoughts are continually rising in my mind. I cannot sleep, for I am asleep, as it were, with my eyes open, and I feel chills come over me and a sort of nightmare awake and I got no rest last night.’

  What sounds oppressed him from under the duvet of the forest? Acoustic footprints of future roads? Chained patients in outhouses? The bells of Waltham Abbey? Sound is torture. Fish speared in the beaks of cormorants, herons. Owls swooping on field mice. Feet tramping gravel. Sound brings back memories. Doctor Skrimshire, in 1832, applying leeches to Clare's temples. Blistering glasses to the nape of his neck. Cold showerbaths, drenches. A cloth they wrapped around his head, its flabby slap. Grey bandages soaked in brandy vinegar and rainwater. Cutting off breath, squeezing the bone-armature of the skull. Something he can't see, but can hear, dripping slowly, so slowly, into a white bowl.

  Swallowed in that verdigris coat, a grub in a cabbage leaf, Clare was the Green Man in London. A pub sign on the move. A drowned thing fished from Whittlesey Mere, mud and straw, limping down Chancery Lane, fending off soot demons. Yellow gash at throat, loose kerchief. At High Beach, he faded. Vanished into the dense foliage of summer trees. He spoke of John Clare as someone quite separate from his present identity. Which was? Unknown. Ahead of him on the road. An empty house waiting for someone to take possession.

  Maps are thoughtfully provided by the developers, Fairview, to tell you where you can't go: PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Padlocked gates across ancient footpaths. Dry flowers woven into mesh fences. Rain-erased memorial labels. Smeared ink of lost names. WALTHAM POINT NEW 48 ACRE INDUSTRIAL PARK. Tolerated edge-land irrigated by a blurred section of orbital motorway. Low hills dressed with cemeteries, Jewish burial grounds. Limestone pebbles on granite lids.

  As we climb, the forest enfolds us. Cars behave like interlopers, hiccupping over speed bumps. Drivers park and disappear. Empty vehicles, huddled together for reassurance, witness supposed beauty spots; sites neutralised by an excess of gazing. HIGH BEACH: (30).

  We have only the feeblest notion of the whereabouts of Matthew Allen's asylums; images in a documentary film, drawings by Rigby Graham. A name on the OS map: Springfield Farm. So we begin at the Royal Oak pub and navigate, blind, from there. Until we achieve: ‘Clare House’. Fancy lettering on a garden gate. A pale blue dish with flowery rim. Clare House is a lodge with mock-Tudor gables. The owner, interrogated, has no knowledge of the poet and seems unsure about the provenance of his home. The lady next door has lived in High Beach ‘for forty-nine years’, we're told, but she's not available. Doesn't answer the door. We try a younger couple, cycling, and get as deep into the forest as a sign for ‘Lippitts Hill’. I'm sure we have the right pond, sluggish, green: Allen's Fair Mead. Or a first hint at the quiddity of the place: muffled sound, vibrations of the city felt through the soles of your feet.

  It takes another excursion, accompanied by Anna, to identify the former asylums with any degree of certainty. We try Buckhurst Hill Church, where Clare noticed the boy in the slop frock, the young woman in ‘Darkish Flowerd Cotton Gown’. ‘Bucket Hill’, Clare called it. ‘A place of furze and clouds.’ Another spire: poor substitute for wind-scoured Glinton. No humans on this damp afternoon. A stone angel with a missing head. Pink roses growing from a cracked grave: ‘No Artificial Flowers Permitted.’ Horned snail silver-scripting wet memorial slab.

  Tracking Clare's ‘brook without a bridge’ back to forest, Fair-mead is revealed in its present disguise: The Suntrap Field Study Centre. Thicket, pool, notice forbidding unauthorised entry. We snoop, we pry. Rainwater drips from the collars of our raincoats: July as October. Nature studies (woodcraft for recidivists and malefactors) have replaced the trade in lunatics (returned to their communities). Clare's fascination with creepy-crawlies, fungi, ferns, is now proposed as therapy for a sick city. Revised asylum properties have a sorry atmosphere, the cures have curdled. Solutions are largely concerned with adequate security and raising funds. Business plans, sponsorship, limited opening hours. Placate bureaucracy. And keep a low profile.

  Anna helps. She comes with less baggage and no obligation to tease out a narrative. She's perfectly happy to lean for a moment on a gate. Rain brings out the grassy sweetness of the forest. Curtains twitch in plasterboard bungalows, assembled from kit in the wrong place. In expectation of future marine invasion.

  Leopards Hill. The Owl pub. Springfield Farm. Anna remembers: stables, a white building. Weatherboards. This was the asylum that housed fifteen females. Springfield, seraglio of forbidden and dangerous women, was a zone of peculiar fascination for Clare:

  Nigh Leopards Hill stand All-ns hells

  The public know the same

  Where lady sods & buggers dwell

  To play the dirty game

  Three off-white enamel troughs, raised on bricks, in a stable yard. ‘Butler's sinks’, Anna calls them. Ripped from a cold pantry and deposited here. Refreshment for horses, returned from their forest rides. The sinks might be remnants of Allen's madhouse, water treatment in open air. To cool the heat of inappropriate lusts. Clare's fevered imagination.

  A man emerges from the stables. He is interested in our interest. Like many who congratulate themselves on being out here, fifteen miles from London, cushioned by greenery, this person has a story to peddle. An incident to validate his tentative mortgage on history. (Thereby enhancing property values.)

  The attic of Springfield Farm, creaking boards, w
arped window frame, is haunted. The women's dormitory, he calculates, of Allen's day. A ‘very old’ book is kept there. He doesn't recall its name. The book is open. It is not a bible, one of those family bibles, but it's just as thick. Although the open pages are secured with four black stones, it doesn't help. Every night, without fail, the pages turn. Every morning a new passage is revealed.

  High Beach to Broxbourne

  A green as dull as pewter: Epping Forest at first light. Stooped over dripping foliage, Renchi Bicknell uses a cheap magnifying glass, held at various experimental distances from the lens, to mess with the mindset of his camera. We're agreed: High Beach is bindweed, nettles, ankle-tangling fronds jewelled with overnight rain. A chill start. Sky like the skin on cold soup. Chris Petit picked us up in his current Mercedes at five-thirty on the morning of 17 July 2000.

  It was decided, and rapidly undecided, to follow Clare as closely as we could, up the Great North Road. Or should we settle for starting with the Lea, then cutting across country, to rejoin the exhausted poet at Stevenage? We would sleep, if we could, in the same places. Our journey would be an approximation, in the spirit of the original 1841 walk, with several fixed points: a private hotel booked at Stevenage, a pub in St Neots, the Bell Inn at Stilton. Anna would be met, under Glinton spire, at four o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth day. No ditch bivouacs, too old for that. No trespassed barns. Renchi had walked, in his youth, from London to Swansea, to the west of Ireland, bedding down where he stopped, woodpiles by the Thames, hostels with vagrants and night-smokers, Welsh mountainsides. Without photographs, and with no companion to confirm a memory stitched from fading highlights, the journey was mythical. Now he discovered our lodgings through the Internet and secured them with credit cards. He was, after all, the co-proprietor of a vegetarian B&B with a panoramic view over the Somerset levels.