Edge of the Orison Read online

  Brandt's vision of literary England is: absence. Classical statuary in sombrous gardens, rocks in operatic slap, lowering clouds, effigies – scarcely a human figure in the entire collection. A water-reflected stickman represents Parson Crabbe. (Clare mistrusted parsons. Crabbe, he reckoned, wrote about the peasantry ‘as much like the Magistrate as the poet’.) England as a park from which poets have been permanently banished, leaving behind some very nasty weather and enough architectural salvage to fill a Hoxton builder's yard.

  Morning mist over warming ground is typical of Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Northampton: wretched conditions for airfields and motorways, a boon to photographers with a preordained vision. Brandt's suggestion is that the poet has just this moment stepped out. Clare, the peasant verse-maker, is never allowed to move beyond the Helpston perspective. The cottage looks on to a village green. The village is an island in a system of open fields, bordered on one side by low, wooded hills, the quarries of Barnack – and, on the other, by dark Fens, from which invaders, hobgoblins and Molly Gangs, will come.

  In the afterburn of the Sixties, Clare's cottage was noticed by mid-Atlantic modernists: its potential as real estate was exposed. The poet Tom Raworth, acknowledged by his peers for his speed and sharpness of eye, had been packaged with the Clare lookalike, Lee Harwood. One of those three-poets-for-the-price-of-one Penguins. We all had the book, Liberal Studies would have collapsed without this convenient prompt. Harwood had contacts with the New York school (Ashbery, Koch) and Raworth was perpetually touring the States or signing in at some writers' punishment colony. Now, in the way of these things, the freelance life, he was at Essex University, outside Colchester. A friend and colleague of John Barrell, who published his Clare study, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, in 1972.

  Raworth remembers Barrell investigating original Clare manuscripts, pouring over enclosure maps for Helpston. The poet Donald Davie's influence was still felt in Colchester (an active Essex/Cambridge nexus): Thomas Hardy, Pound, the landscape-architecture of poetry. Primary research was back in favour: examination of documents, land registers, meditations on painters and paintings. Along with, in the case of the modernist poets, scavenging of cultural ephemera: Hollywood clips, vintage postcards, kids' crayon drawings, French dialogue overheard and misreported. The dominant theory, adopted from a reading of the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, promoted ‘open field’ poetics. A system which sat nicely alongside Barrell's work on Helpston and enclosures. ‘The eye, snatched to the horizon, roams,’ Barrell said. Clare's work belonged in the closed system of traditional forms. When the circle of Helpston landscape, once open and common to all, was hedged and divided into a complex jigsaw, John Clare was one of the hedgers. He needed the work. The rest of his life would be a series of personal enclosures, from London drawing rooms to Epping Forest, to the imposed restrictions of the Northampton years.

  Moving, Raworth's 1971 publication, opens with a quote from Clare (placed against a page of coloured Camel cigarette packets by Joe Brainard). Icons of mass production find themselves in the company of lines from a famously grim asylum poem by John Clare: ‘I am’.

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;

  Even the dearest that I love the best

  Are strange – nay, rather – stranger than the rest.

  I'm not sure how many readers, at that time, picked up on Raworth's choice of epigraph; Jonathan Bate in his chapter on Clare as ‘The Poet's Poet’ doesn't find room for it. He traces an orthodox anthology of influence: Norman Gale, Arthur Symons, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Geoffrey Grigson, Robert Graves, Sidney Keyes, John Ashbery, Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Paulin, R. S. Thomas. Poets needing compensatory values in time of war, damaged rhymers and soil worshippers, thick in the tongue.

  Raworth's ‘HELPSTON £9,850. STONE BUILT RESIDENCE’ takes an oblique, ‘open field’ approach. Snippet from newspaper. John Barrell's eighteenth-century notion of ‘view’ acknowledged but found to be out of service: ‘the view is again unapproachable’. The Helpston cottage has become an illustration in an estate agent's window. Clare's father trying to make the rent from the sale of apples, years of debt, fear of eviction, has now been translated into an aspirational lifestyle. Brandt's Gothic shipwreck, submerged in fog (but solid, rooted in melancholy), becomes a colour print, a development opportunity. A Victorian terraced house in Hackney, at the time of Raworth's quoted price, would sell for around £4,000. Large properties in squares approved by John Betjeman could be found for £7,000. And Helpston's once-spurned peasant cottage, with ‘unapproachable’ views, commands almost £10,000.

  ‘The surface mysticism of the rich,’ Raworth writes, ‘which has eaten our country boys.’ The functioning village, dependent on the benevolence of landowners, the patronage of parsons, the social ambitions of tenant farmers, has dissolved. Expensive properties and nobody at home. ‘You change constantly/ a dog: a clown,’ Raworth continues. ‘Clown’ being one of Clare's favourite ways of describing his neighbours, or indeed himself (when he ventured into polite company, mud of the fields on his boots). The clowns have ambled off into Fenland murk. The village is deserted. And betrayed. Clare is nostalgic about nostalgia, the old wound, the site from which he has been expelled – but where he still lives. Lost muse (two miles down the road in Glinton). Lost childhood (always present but out of reach). A cliff at the end of the world. The pit beyond the horizon out of which all evil things come.

  Our weary trio, the latest cultural pirates, attempting to force meaning from the standing monuments of a future suburb, abandon the cottage and move away down the village street, Woodgate, past the Blue Bell (where young Clare worked and later drank), towards St Botolph's Church. We are conscious of trespassing in a heritage zone: the Clare memorial with its dates and anodyne verse, the Market Cross, the road out.

  We try a little unconvinced sitting around on a bench under the trees, celebrating the fact of our walk's conclusion, then we creak to our feet. There's a lovely passage towards Glinton spire, a post-enclosure road that wasn't there in the days of Clare's schooling. The old track meandered through the fields towards Etton. Nothing is resolved and not much has been learnt. The four-day walk, pushing us hard, has been one of the best. With luck, Anna will be waiting with the car. Otherwise, we'll have to carry on to Crowland, Boston. The wind at your back, there is nothing to stop you, this side of the North Sea.

  Glinton Spire

  Glinton spire serves a double function. It reminds us of Clare and it reminds us that, as a fixed point on a flat plain, it helped him to organise the circuit of memory; a needle in the compass rose of childhood's mapping. The poem he wrote, with that title, ‘Glinton Spire’, came when he felt the need to reconfirm the markers in a threatened landscape. It was written at Northborough, in the suspended months between the escape from Epping Forest and the admission to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The period when he was ‘tried’ and found wanting by his wife.

  I love the slender spire to see,

  For there the maid of beauty dwells,

  I think she hears the sound with me

  And love to listen to Glinton Bells.

  I came to St Benedict's Church once: for a funeral service, Mary Sugden, my wife's much-loved aunt, her father's sister. But I remember, before that, meals at Balcony House, prodigiously English, meat that tasted, that offered up the beast's biography as you chewed, platters of vegetables from the kitchen garden, summer puddings: which way to shove the port? How to trowel crusty, green-veined Stilton without destroying the integrity of the sweating brick? Elderflower wine with a lift in it, afterburn of brandy, so that, emerging into the damp afternoon air, the village is on the tilt, nothing anchored.

  It's been a long time. My notion of how the road works when you drive here, coming from London, has gone entirely. (W
alks are ways of remembering, drives wipe the slate.) Come off the A1 at Stamford – and after that? Stone walls of the Burghley House estate, anonymous hamlets, a railway crossing which is always against you; so crank down the window, listen for the train. Taste a different air. A flatironed land: stippled yellow fields burning out of a grey-blue haze. Tree-blots on a soft horizon and, behind those, Glinton spire.

  I remember this point in our drive to Glinton, suit and black tie, scrubbed children, as we wait, on our Clare walk, at the same barrier. Red eyes of warning lights blink on the railway-crossing gate. There's a signal box with the Helpston name but no station, nowhere to offload a coffin. A wide road runs through wheatfields (huts, low barns, hangars); our shadows lead us eastwards. Now, for the first time, traffic sweeps past; frantic for mid-afternoon access to the Peterborough vortex. Clare's field path, his mazy journey to school in Glinton Church vestry, is discontinued.

  And when I gained the road where all are free

  I fancied every stranger frowned at me

  All day, since we walked out of Stilton, we've been invisible (except to dogs); a freak of nature that allows us to move with liberty, naming names, looking without being looked at (the illusion). We experience a certain lightheadedness, the hollow aftermath of the lunch we haven't had, the anticipation of this evening's celebratory food and wine. The road from Helpston to Glinton purifies an overcomplex narrative, carrying us away from the intimate particulars of John Clare's writing. Helpston is family and blood. Glinton is Mary. A thing remembered and a thing that never happened. Wisps of cloud. The spire. A village whose potentialities are unsullied, until we arrive to find them mute, morose. Or not in the mood, that day, to give up their mysteries.

  Anna's first cousin, Gini Dearden, a child in the early Fifties, remembers jumping over Glinton weathercock as it lay in the churchyard. Brought down for cleaning and restoration, it was found to be short of a few feathers, holed and peppered by some undiscovered assailant. The Peterborough Standard attributed this outrage to aerial combat: shrapnel, tracer or training stunt. The apparent emptiness of the landscape through which we had walked was an illusion, I knew that; behind perimeter fences, bunkers disguised as unlikely mounds, were active and decommissioned air bases. Fighters screeched across the sky, using cereal fields as virtual deserts. War rehearsals. The East of England Tourist Board peddles an ‘official’ map of USAAF airfields: Alconbury, Molesworth, Polebrook, Glatton, Wittering. Around twenty of them in the area we travelled, Bedford to Stamford. A major cluster of scarlet blisters disclosed between the M1 and the A1. With more ceded, barbed wire and CCTV, in the witch-country around Chelmsford, Bury St Edmunds and Norwich. Secrecy begets secrecy begets conspiracy theories. Whispers of rapes and child killings pinned on some local fall guy, lowlife, instead of the guilty American airman. Spiteful village gossip. It's nonsense, it doesn't stand up, but it shows how covert colonialism, misappropriation of land, affects our morality, our sense of what is just and visible.

  The weathercock on the spire of St Benedict's is a true rooster, not a dragon or flying lizard. A cockscombed strutter. This is what makes the cloud-skimming attack personal: the crowing cock (‘Commit thy works to God’) is the totem of the Sinclair clan. Very appropriate, my wife thinks. An early-rising, puffed-up bunch, deficient in modesty. Treating the world as its farmyard. The borrowed Sinclair cock was an obvious target for bored pilots, pipe-chewing Battle of Britain aces.

  The spire is taller than the tower of the church; you can't photograph it and fit the full span into your composition, unless you stand back, at a respectful distance, to admire its elegance. At first acquaintance – parish church, well-kept green, Sikh gentleman in charge of general store (branded pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, local newspapers, cellophane packets of crusty things that aren't quite cakes or biscuits) – Glinton is unexceptional. Then you notice the push towards clinical tidiness, competitive flora: the rural psychoses that keep the Miss Marple franchise in business. It's not enough to have church bells, comparing bells is a macho stunt, a testosterone trial. A pissing contest. Northborough and Peakirk have two apiece. Helpston has four. So Glinton has six.

  Nothing is quite what it seems. The famous spire, thin as a radio mast, relies on entasis. Architectural trickery. A slight convexity has been given to the structure to correct the evidence of your eyes, the optical illusion that would leave the spire looking like a naked kebab skewer.

  As we come on it, over the hump of the pedestrian bridge, over mini-roundabouts like tyres from gigantic tractors, earthed and planted, my faulty memories of the old road, Helpston to Glinton, straight as an arrow, have to be reconfigured. What has happened, in essence, is that an orbital motorway, shaped more like a Grand Prix circuit than the M25 oval, has been engineered around Peterborough. With the village of Glinton, not quite, not yet, inducted as the northerly pit stop. New estates, sports centres, captured hamlets: they are kept within the loop. Leaving industrialised farmland as an ill-defined outer limit, a dressing of countrystuff, fields, ponds, sponsored paths into reclaimed Fens (compulsory leisure). The spiritual desolation of a landscape where Clare, claggy-footed, watched for coded patterns of bird flight, migrations and roostings. A short, slight man, on the leash, in thrall to the gravity of the known, questing for cover. Walking out.

  Survive the road system that cuts Glinton off from the old westward drift and everything lines up: spire, our path in – and a distant figure coming slowly towards us. The geometry is simple, a triangle: vertical stroke of St Benedict's spire, straight road to church, and imaginary dotted line darting from my eye to the restored weathercock.

  That private family legend, I believe it now. Anna's father, Geoffrey Hadman, a young man of the village, used the weathercock as a target. Even with a sporting rifle, it's a magnificent shot. (As children, Anna and her brothers were put to target shooting, across a valley in the Lake District. ‘Between one-fifty and two hundred yards,’ she thinks. ‘We were taught to line up the sights, be very still, squeeze gently. We were lying down.’) Geoffrey rested his gun on the sill of an upstairs window at the Red House, the family farm in Rectory Lane, and made the cock spin. A metal bird shifting in the wind. This is a Lee Harvey Oswald moment in the catalogue of poultry assassination.

  There is a wintry monochrome postcard of Rectory Lane, featuring the Red House and St Benedict's spire (as if produced to commemorate the sportsman's triumph). I tried to estimate the distance: several hundred yards down the lane, past another house, over the green, the road, across the churchyard – and then the

  tower, spire, weathercock on its spike. Give Mr Hadman the prize. Give him James Stewart's 1873 Winchester from the Anthony Mann western. (The shots that missed, I wondered about those. Spent bullets falling from a great height, where did they land?)

  In postcard memory, the single bowed window of the Red House is gleaming, bedroom windows too. A solitary figure stands outside, in pinafore, a maid. Her face is gone, a blotch of grey dots. No name. She stands square to the house, facing the camera, persuaded to come out, in order to give scale to the spire – which rises like a periscope of vanity from the squared church tower. Tenant farmers in Clare's day were the coming class. James Joyce, father of Mary, had Manor Farm, a substantial property on the other, Peakirk side of the green. The buildings that grew up, post-enclosure, around the heart of the old settlements were built, so Clare wrote (in ‘The Parish’), ‘by those whose clownish taste aspires/ To hate their farms and ape the country squires.’

  Village pursuits haven't changed. Ronald Blythe, in Talking about John Clare, lists them: ‘Boys stripping off to jump over a cat gallows. The pleasures of schoolboys climbing the leads of the church to cut their names there. The pleasure of pelting at a weather cock.’ John Clare, like Geoffrey Hadman, honoured local custom. The boys of Helpston tried to throw stones over their weathercock. ‘He who pelted o'er/ was reckoned on a mighty man.’

  The linked initials – ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’ – that Clare is su
pposed to have cut into, variously, ‘the school-room wall’, an arch, a pillar, the frame of a door, have faded into oblivion. As moveable as the grave of Mary Joyce, who died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one, and who was buried in St Benedict's churchyard. The grave, pointed out to visitors by well-meaning church folk, is another Mary, daughter of William Joyce, not James. Not Clare's childhood love. Who is close at hand, under a cherry tree. A premature cremation. She died of burns sustained in a domestic accident.

  Those Joyces, their daughters: James and Mary, James and Lucia Anna. Fictional projections and real myths. Names haunt me, asserting a presence when memorial slabs are erased and pillars scratched with a lattice of unreadable marks; when vulgar curiosity leaves us fumbling for any trace of the poet's cold touch.

  Will we make it? The four-o'clock deadline. I haven't admitted that there is one, but, privately, I'm a time freak. I want to be there, Anna with me, as the hands of the clock take up their position and the clock face freezes in a cinematic insert. So, without making it too obvious, I step it out, stretch my stride. Glinton has some part of Anna that I don't know. She'd like to live in this territory, so she says, drawn back; a modest period house in Stamford would be ideal. The ones she marks up in the property pages look like variants of the original Hadman home, the Red House, nice proportions,

  local stone or brick, Virginia creeper optional. This is desire on a molecular level, an instinct she has allowed to lie in abeyance. Her thirty-six-year captivity in low-lying Hackney, with occasional excursions to the seaside (my ideal), has been stoically endured, if not yet accepted: fate. My guilt at putting her through this exile is tempered by seeing, today, what Lesser Peterborough actually is: ribbon estates, self-regarding display, disputes with the vicar on points of doctrine (happy-clappy, lord-of-the-dance against hoary standards bellowed out by a diminishing congregation of Agatha Christie stereotypes).