Edge of the Orison Read online

  After the Clare walk, our night in the Bell, we came back to Glinton. We had to do a last section to Clare's cottage in Northborough, the site of his discomfort, disorientation after the family's removal from Helpston. That short distance, three miles or so, undid the poet: from the circle of land edged by hills to the damp clutch of the Fens. A pull towards Market Deeping, Deeping St James and Crowland, instead of Stamford, with its bookshops, lively pubs, radical newspaper. Its mail coach connection to London. Northborough was a blot on the wrong side of the Maxey Cut. The wrong side of Glinton spire.

  Edward Storey describes Northborough:

  The darker, brooding, lonelier landscape was to be a fitting scene for his darker poems… The soil was different. The air was different. The sun appeared in a different quarter of the sky. It was a world which, deprived of limestone, could not grow many of his favourite wild-flowers, especially the orchis he loved to study. There were fewer trees and fewer birds. The hedges were, he tells us, ‘a deader green’, the sun was like ‘a homeless ranger’. Even the clouds and water lost their poetry, their deceptive innocence.

  Glinton graves are scoured by wind and weather. Mary Joyce can be found, though we don't find her, not that day. But tucked in, sheltered at the west end of the church, is a fenced enclosure, teddy bears and flowers, kept up, dedicated to the memory of a dead child. A loud splash against the local bias towards grey, rain-coloured limestone.

  Village history is summarised on a board: ‘Since 1900 the most prominent farming families in Glinton have been the Hadmans, Holmes, Neaversons, Reeds, Rollings, Sharpes, Titmans, Vergettes and the Websters.’ Vergettes and Titmans are well represented in the graveyard; lichen-licked to the colour and texture of dried mustard. Clustering together, they dominate this ground as, once, they dominated the surrounding fields. Grotesque stone heads rim the church. Overseers or magistrates watching for unseemly behaviour down below.

  The fenced schoolyard brings it all back. After the original excursion, the Auster flight, Anna returned to Glinton, to Balcony House, in 1951. To stay with her father's sister, Mary Sugden. She found a letter to confirm the story that I was inviting her to tell.

  I am havin a lovelly time. In the afternoon Antie Mary lets us take our shoes of. On the road the tar squeezes up. When I had my shoes, we were by the road and hapened to sit on some of the tar. Uncle Hubert got it of with some stuff out of a bottle.

  Last night we had Judy to tea, after tea we all went for a walk with Judy's dog Chuffy. We had a long walk over fields and along the River far towards North Fen brige. We went through a field with very LUMPEY soil. The soil got into our sandals. Robert got left a very long way behind. He got nettle stings. I went back and tried to help him. He wouldnt come back for me but Judy gave him a piggiback. Some cows chased Chuffy and we all ran. Then a lady told us we were not supposed to be in those fields so we came back the way we came. Uncle Hubert met us on the way back and gave Robert a ride on his bike. I heard the clock in the tower strike eight when I got into bed.

  My diary is packed every day.

  Eight years old: Anna's first experience of being taught with other children. Her father had been sent to Mexico by ICI. Some woman was making her presence felt and Joan Hadman was required to fly out immediately. The three older children were dispatched to Glinton, while the youngest girl, Susa, was left for three months with the gardener and his family.

  School involved certain difficulties, such as religious knowledge: shades of St Benedict's vestry, John Clare and Mary Joyce. Mrs Rawsthorne, the school mistress, was tall, thin, grey; feared and respected in the village, lovely to the children. Anna's father, Geoffrey, had been one of her favourites: a person of character from the start (bane of future headmasters, inadequate instructors and minders). Anna had no experience of the Old Testament, unforgiving prophets who set bears on children. Beards who rode to heaven in fiery chariots. She remembers how prayers had to be copied out, with the threat of your books being taken in and inspected. Playtime was a relief: her younger brother, Robert, banished to the infants' enclosure, pressed a round red face against the fence, watching her. Mute and accusing.

  The summer of 1951 is replayed as Anna watches current Glinton children moving around the yard. She had an affection, undeclared, for a boy called Maurice Waghorn. Another classmate, a ‘rough, rangy, village boy’ with red hair, Roy Garrett, pursued her with dogged intensity. The other kids chorused news of this infatuation. ‘Roy Garrett loves you.’ Heady times: the bruising dramas of village life, after fear-inducing lessons at home. Latin grammar, French verbs, lists of rivers in places she had never been.

  Mary Annabel Rose Hadman: ‘Anna’. Three shots at fixing her, all wrong. The Mary part came from the Glinton aunt at whose house she was now staying. The Annabel sounds aspirational: tennis, riding, a Betjeman role that never took and was soon abbreviated. (William Hadman, her brother, named after his Glinton grandfather, would be sent to Marlborough, Betjeman's cordially loathed public school.) Because Mary comes first in the list it's the name on the cheque book; the unknown person asked for when the phone rings with official requests. Anna never understood the late Rose addition. Her father returned from registering the birth to inform his wife that he'd decided, on the spur, to make an adjustment. (‘rose: as you grow i weaken’, wrote Tom Raworth in his Helpston poem.)

  And what of Clare's mysterious poem, ‘A Moment's Rapture While Bearing the Lovely Weight of A.S’?

  Now lovely Anna in her Sunday dress

  In softest pressure sits upon my knee

  This young woman, whoever she was, gives her name to Clare's first child, born in 1820.

  Anna belonged to Glinton in a way that her mother, a Lancastrian, never did. The awkwardness for Joan Hadman, her first visit after marriage, of those farmers' meals, quantities she couldn't manage, green bacon with ruffs of heavy fat. The slithery weight of it, food too close to source, pigs in the orchard; the decorative pattern on the plate buried under layers of freshly killed meat. ‘She's pleasant,’ her mother-in-law reported, ‘but unfinished.’

  We never hear what Mary Joyce, the tenant farmer's daughter, thought of John Clare. It's always his side of the story, the walnut thrown in the schoolyard, the walks to North Fen bridge, yards of poetry (attempts to trap her in a mythic past). There is no written account of Mary's time in that Lady Chapel school, her afterlife, post Clare. Young woman, social being. Spinster living at home. It's a harsh destiny: muse by appointment. Heritage pests paying their respects at the wrong grave.

  Anna locked her cousin Virginia (Gini) in the empty pig sheds and left her there. She remembers where the sheds were, on the far side of the lane. Ground that is built over, new houses. Discovered, she was imprisoned in that concrete box as a suitable punishment.

  On later visits to Glinton, Anna was putting on time, slightly melancholy (as it might appear), but generally content, waiting for something: an operation, entrance to university. Auntie Mary to the rescue. Inflamed appendix. Taken out of school. Three weeks in hospital. Then, as the rest of the family went on holiday, Anna was left behind. The operation would be performed in September, when her parents returned. Meanwhile, a warm, dusty August, forbidden to swim, she hung about with her aunt. She did swim (permission granted by local doctor) in the gravel pits, deep cold, clear water: out at Tallington, beyond Lolham Bridges, where Clare cut his initials into stone, and where he fished.

  Before Dublin, her start at Trinity College (where, at last, our paths cross), Anna was back at Glinton. An August like one of those French novels told in letters, solitary bicycle rides through flat country, heat haze, lazy rivers. Law books piled up, unread, beside a deckchair: seasonal lethargy. She'd been working as a receptionist at a hotel in Blackpool, the big one, the Imperial; catching the eye (tall, dark, dramatic) of businessmen and French waiters, but still living at home. This was a different movie. English rite of passage at the seaside (social surrealism), Blackpool always obliging to location scouts. Her father
walked into the Imperial with a party of colleagues and pretended to flirt. He made her write a poem a day, every day, no nonsense about inspiration, a poetry notebook. The Clare inheritance (with chasers of Rupert Brooke): approved subjects in established forms. Prize-winning sonnets.

  Myron Nutting's 1923 sketch of Lucia Anna Joyce (daughter of notorious Paris-domiciled novelist, James) replicates Anna Had-man's Glinton interlude. Weight of hair, tilted head, eyes closed in concentration, pen in hand: the duty of composition. Winning paternal approval. Task set, with good intentions, by a troubled father: be what you are, my daughter. Demonstrate the gifts I gave you. Geoffrey Hadman made family sketches. He worked in pencil, chalk, crayon; portraits of his children, of the gardener, craggy work folk. Portraits of Anna. Sitting, as ordered, unoccupied; inventing herself, slowly.

  We followed the North Fen path Clare is supposed to have taken with Mary Joyce, out towards the trysting bridge. It was a walk Anna often took with her aunt and the golden Labradors. Balcony House had long since been sold, the garden pebbled and planted in a Jacobean style that played up to the unusual balcony addition. The weather was kind; our path soon escaped the village. But it was not the path Anna remembered. The high, wild hedges were gone, fields were exposed. This landscape, evidently, had come full cycle: the hedges and odd-shaped strips of enclosure returned to the wide horizons of Clare's childhood. William Hadman, before moving to the Red House, had his farm out here: ground once occupied by James Joyce, Mary's father. William rented his property to the eccentric Mrs Benson, who ran it as a home for children, which she later moved to another gloomy property in Rectory Lane.

  Thorny copses offer good cover as we approach the bridge and its heritage prompts. A humped silver car squeezes past and is later discovered, parked on the verge, dos-à-dos to a muddy hatchback. (Number plates blanked to protect the guilty.)

  I notice a bush that has been dressed, country fashion, with a limp crop of grapeskin condoms. Over a mulch of crumpled cigarette packets. Pie wrappings. Discarded tights.

  Beyond Car Dyke and the Welland, the half-hidden Paradise Lane leads straight to Northborough and the poet's cottage; which is now in the keeping, so we discover, of a dealer in teddy bears. Northborough is heavy with absence; of all the cemetery villages encountered on our walk out of Essex, this is the paradigm. Internal exile as a prelude to the Big Sleep.

  We confront the bridge. Three bands of human affection can be felt: the romance of those youthful lovers, John Clare and Mary Joyce, given emphasis by our demand that it should be so, innocence before the fall; then illicit conjugations, off-road couplings authorised by the signboard broadcasting Clare's passion; and, finally, a stolen time with Anna, triggering memories of all our earlier walks. Embraces. Collusion. Private interludes rescued from domestic routine. The knowledge that you may be watched is both exciting and inhibiting: in a landscape shaped for ambiguity. Assignations, close talk in parked cars. A line of furled poplars diminishing into a blue distance.

  I draw from Anna an account of her Glinton holidays, village school, appendix operation, forbidden swim – and, most vividly, that period before we met, before she came to Dublin, the afternoons cycling down these lanes, sitting on the lawn, in her bedroom with the window open: a compulsion, lightly held, to remake the past, mend a fractured narrative.

  Her father had friends in Germany, student years, late Twenties, early Thirties, everybody went there. Auden, Isherwood, Spender. University men, gays. Left and right, all persuasions. Samuel Beckett. The friendship with his cousin, Peggy Sinclair. Geoffrey Hadman, returned from Oxford, poses against a tall hedge in the garden of the Red House. ‘What a handsome man,’ my daughter said. Blazer and flannels, heavy brows, off-centre parting, frowning at the camera: clenched left hand. A moment of consequence. Excellent degree (1932). Newspaper cuttings of his performance in the ‘half-mile handicap’. Scrapbook thick with young women, rivers, parties, snow. Big coats, arrogant hats. The women are laughing. The men are pleased.

  GLINTON SCHOLAR'S SUCCESS

  Mr. Geoffrey Hadman, youngest son of Mr. and Mrs. Had-man, of the Red House, Glinton, has gained first-class honours and his B.Sc. degree at Oxford University.

  Mr. Hadman is an Old Boy of Stamford School, to which he won a scholarship from Glinton School at the age of 10. Whilst at Stamford he became head boy and captain of the Rugby Team. He was also prominent in running and swimming, winning many honours in both…

  After spending a well-earned holiday with his parents, in September Mr. Hadman takes up a post with Imperial Chemical Industries.

  Among Anna's files is a letter from Imperial Chemical Industries to the headmaster of Stamford School.

  Subject to the fulfilment of these conditions, the commencing salary to be not less than £350 per annum. If Hadman should prove satisfactory he would be continued in our employment and would be given an agreement for a period of years, with every prospect of advancement.

  Might I ask you to be good enough to communicate this decision to the boy…

  Anna bribed £10 to cram five hundred words of German vocabulary (never used). That climate of cultural seriousness combined with physical exercise, nude bathing, mountain walks (Leni Riefenstahl): a firm grip on social problems, the mob. Students in college scarves driving buses and ambulances at the time of the General Strike. Now it was spoilt, Germany. Painfully so. Friendships suspended.

  From Oxford, the best of times, into digs in Thornton Cleveleys, north of Blackpool. According to family legend, Geoffrey Hadman

  was the youngest works' manager ever appointed by ICI, that global power. Mercurial, he challenged received notions: premature free marketeer. He was elected as a Conservative (for want of a stronger word) to the local council, but couldn't stick the addlebrained bureaucracy. Lancastrian committee men brokering deals on a nod and a wink. Debate not decision.

  There was to be no advance within the corporate structure. No invitation to join the main board. An early ceiling. Too bright, too singular: too bloody-minded. Team captain, not team player: action in place of consensus politics and spin.

  He brooded on radio news: Germany and England, the breaking of that bond. The splitting of the atom: Anna remembers her father, alone in a darkened room, knowing immediately what the announcement meant. ‘It's the end.’ The children talked in whispers. Her mother stayed out of the way. Anna was the one deputed to sit with him, keeping him company.

  Something happened. Something that is hard to appreciate: a brain tumour, one son says. An episode nobody but a man as driven as Geoffrey Hadman would interpret as a sign of weakness. Anna thinks it was more probably a stroke, requiring weeks, months, in hospital. Out of circulation. ‘We thought you were dead,’ colleagues muttered when he reappeared.

  Geoffrey didn't tell his parents. He wrote letters from his hospital bed without alluding to the drama. He let them think he was still at work. He ignored, as far as was possible, the partial paralysis in his left side, the clawed hand. He couldn't run, but he would walk, shoot, load the children into the Bedford van on cold Lancashire evenings, wind cutting off the Irish Sea, a compulsory dip in the murky waters. Poppa would set out from the house in a towelling robe, driving barefoot, stiff leg on pedal.

  ‘I am a new man,’ John Clare wrote to his Cambridge friend, Chauncy Hare Townsend, ‘and have too many tongues.’ The Helpston boy divorced himself from ‘the old silence of rusticity’. For every social gain, there was private loss. He knew that he was no longer the subject of his own story. Succeed elsewhere and you can't go home again.

  When Anna was flown across England, Blackpool to Glinton, her father had suffered his stroke; loss of sensitivity in the left side, dragging leg. His fingers wouldn't open. In a car, he drove at speed, impatient with socialist regulations. Now, high over fields and roads and reservoirs, atrophied nerves tightened the grip on the joystick. The young girl in the bucket seat was unafraid.

  DREAMING

  Anxiety – ghosts, nothing specific.


  Max Brod (on Kafka)

  Poet in the Park

  He had to learn the difficult thing, in different places we are different people. We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices, lulling them by regular habits, of rising, labouring, eating, taking pleasure and exercise: other selves, in suspension, slumber but remain wakeful. Walking confirms identity. We are never more than an extension of the ground on which we live.

  The birds knew him, knew John Clare, a wanderer in fields and woods; they recognised him and he belonged. They proved his right to common air. He shared their heat. Twenty-three years fixed in Helpston, between limestone outcrop and Fen, flailing, herding, stalking the circle, minor expeditions, runs at the horizon. The child lost among the yellow furze of Emmonsales Heath. The crabbed adolescent on the barge, Peterborough to Wisbech. The hot young man tramping to Newark. The lime-burner landing himself with a wife. On an invisible leash, Clare was drawn back, always, to his ‘hut’, hovel, home.

  Poetry is a form of going away. Of holding landscape, and its overwhelming, simultaneous particulars, in the float of memory. ‘For Clare, as for all poets in the Romantic tradition,’ wrote Jonathan Bate, ‘writing was the place of remembering, of preserving what was lost: childhood, first love, moments of vision, glimpses of ordinary things made extraordinary by virtue of the attention bestowed upon them. Without loss, there would be no reason for the poetry.’