Edge of the Orison (19 page)

It is at Broxbourne that Petit makes his excuses: he has an afternoon meeting, a bit of business in Rickmansworth. Property, social or professional, who knows? The station car park is full. A cinema-screen-sized hoarding features, in moody black and white, a polarised sky. Desktop clouds merge with our clouds: high and flighty. The day is getting warmer. We decide, without discussion, to leave the Navigation in favour of the New River. Renchi's chosen T-shirt has the message: GUESS.

The chalets and bungalows of Broxbourne – I'm grateful now I didn't molest them – speak of a different attitude to the city, the liberties of the railway. Neat plots. Individual decoration. Fields behind, river ahead. Narrowboats with pot plants, smoking chimneys, bicycles. On another, more successful Lea Valley walk with Anna, after the Clare excursion was done, we passed a boat with a very pertinent name tag. ‘Last Fling But One’, it said.

To Stevenage

Ragwort, mallow, foxgloves. Chris peeling away changes the walk. Renchi stoops over common (common to him) wayside flowers. I'll need the Ladybird book, purchased from Woolworths in Dalston Junction (1974); along with a kiddy-friendly account of the torments of Vincent van Gogh. ‘Then he had too much sun, quite a lot to drink. He took very long walks. Colours were too loud, crows mobbed yellow fields. He cut off his ear.’

Renchi's ears buttress a scarlet bandanna. Silver halo of cropped hair. Contour-hugging beard. He is alert, benign, but not-quite-here: the Lea is an old story. Coming off this walk, he will adopt a raw-food diet. Weight, never excessive, will melt away. Ashram retreats and a beaker of olive oil will sluice waste from the body; stones, sand, gravel. He hadn't realised, until he witnessed the evacuation, that he was transporting such a diverse geology in his system.

We stride along the nicely tended east bank of the New River: a cool, clear stream shaded by overhanging trees. Sir Hugh Myddelton, realising that drinkable water was a valuable commodity, the Elizabethan oil, engineered a liquid slalom into the city. His New River travelled forty miles to accomplish a direct twenty-mile transit. Hertfordshire springs at Amwell and Chadwell were the source. This manufactured river, less visible than the Lea, is less prone to joyless recreationists and fishing parties. In retirement, free of heritage prompts, it is good company.

DANGER. FISHERY AFFECTED BY OVERHEAD ELECTRICAL POWER LINES.

In Broxbourne, nature provides its own security fence. Willows interrupt our view of riverside development: the glint of swimming pools (blue as chemical toilets). Unloved climbing frames. Burglar-
alarmed white mansions parasitical on a bayou of rubber alligators and barbecue pits.

Through shallows of weaving underwater greenstuff, schools of small fish, I think I've spotted a dumped safe. Crime adjusts to suit locality: a New River entrepreneur shot in his car, brains smeared over leather upholstery, outside a body-toning Hertfordshire gymnasium. There are Spanish aspirations in these arched and balconied villas; acceptable retreats for upwardly mobile faces from Hackney and Tottenham. Easy to imagine: dead dogs in swimming pools, a dark-vizored motorcyclist at the security gate.

It isn't a safe. It's a Macintosh computer. The Performa 460? The twin of my own beloved veteran. Sleeping with the fishes. A nest of eels and embryo fictions. Hemingway talks about Greeks, having to embark on some hellish voyage into exile, breaking the forelegs of their mules and dumping them in shallow water. ‘It was all a pleasant business,’ he growls. No mules in Hoddesdon (apart from retired Stanstead drug couriers), just word processors that have run out of words. And the occasional purple bottle trapped on a floating islet of pondweed.

We are far enough out from London to pick up on the energy surge that comes with breaking free from a weakening gravitational field. I feel the high sun on my unprotected neck. And I remember William Cowper's ballad of John Gilpin. Gilpin was a Cheapside linen-draper who decided to celebrate his wedding anniversary by taking his wife to the Bell in Edmonton. The horse bolts. With farcical consequences (rehearsed in excruciating detail over many pages). Lady Austen told Cowper the story to divert him from a depressive fugue. The ruse worked. On the following morning, the poet hacked out his romping, tumpety-tumpety Lea Valley epic.

When John Clare, in the London coach, passed through Huntingdon, Octavius Gilchrist pointed out the homes of Oliver Cromwell and Cowper. There were books by the troubled evangelical poet in Clare's cottage library. Cowper suffered periods of acute melancholia, during which he contemplated suicide. He retired, for months at a time, to Dr Cotton's Collegium Insanorum at St Albans:
another sanctuary placed at a safe distance from London. Disease, so often, seems to be a condition of residence in the edge-lands. At the heart of the city, mad people are not noticed. They enjoy a general amnesty: indifference.

Clare walked, by Northamptonshire streams, with his childhood friend Thomas Porter. Porter, according to Jonathan Bate, had a ‘poetic’ response to nature. ‘He felt,’ Clare wrote, about his friend's taste for vulgar chapbooks, ‘as happy over these while we wiled away the impatience of a bad fishing day under a green willow or an odd thorn as I did over Thomson and Cowper and Walton.’

Walking, fishing and poeticising are promoted by Walton as compatible activities. Sheltering from summer storms under a suitable tree, dipping into a pocket-edition of Spenser. Before returning, at sunset, to deliver the day's catch to an obliging landlady. Long evenings drinking and yarning by an open fire. Here was the myth of a vanished England spun by Izaac Walton. Clare bought it. We came too late. The fishermen were still around, but much of the Lea lay under a coat of green, post-industrial scum. So thick, birds could wade, bank to bank, without getting their feet wet.

With two companions (Venator and Auceps), encountered on Tottenham Hill, Walton walks towards Hoddesdon and Ware. Ware is the pun: a no-place, bend in the river. The town is a destination on a Lee Valley Park signpost, but nobody goes there by choice; nobody we meet. The classic Waltonian form, three men walking, telling tales, has been denied to us. One of our company (Vidhead) has already detrained for Rickmansworth. With the promise of joining us at Stilton on the evening of the third day.

Walton lived on the north side of Fleet Street. Then Chancery Lane. He was one of the presences Clare sensed from his Fleet Street window. One of the extinguished of London who nudged him in narrow alleys. Walton's idyll of the river bank is not all singing milkmaids and brown trout. It is also a game reserve of interspecies savagery. ‘Look, 'tis a bitch otter, and she has lately whelped,’ cries Venator. ‘Let's go to the place where she was put
down, and not far from it you will find all her young ones, I dare warrant you, and kill them all.’

Our first conversation with a New River native concerned fishy matters. Two men, tethered to the scenery, speak of seeing a pike on the far side of the bridge. I remember that taste, gamey ripeness. Ancient sunlight swallowed in a deep pool. The flavour of a creature who has devoured many lesser creatures. It's the brilliance of the morning, after months of rain, that is unfamiliar. I don't bother with a cap, a shirt with a high collar. I don't employ the anti-burn cream Renchi butters lavishly over nose and cheeks. I will pay later for this bravado.

At Rye Meads, New River and old Lea come together, before running on in companionable parallel. We break off to investigate Rye House. Rye House is in the brochure. Rye House has its own brochure: ‘This delightful 15th century moated building is one of the finest examples of early English brickwork in the country. It is the only surviving part of a manorial home built for Sir Andrew Ogard.’ The fallout from a pair of barley-sugar gateposts, a patch of preserved grass, includes an historic pub and a winter parking site for showfolk, travelling fair personnel.

We're never easy with restoration. You can't restore Rye House without the meads, the river. The people. Restore it for what? The kiosk with a selection of gifts? The display of brick-making? Privileged zones downgrade surrounding territory. They create a class of explainers and apologists, civil servants of heritage. Decay is heritage too; we must learn to appreciate it. Horace Walpole's Gothic fraud, Strawberry Hill: let it collapse. Deal with it as he dealt with Chatterton: brush off, withdrawal of patronage. A plague on edge-land invisibles dragged into the circle of Klieg lights. A plague on tactful interventions. Anywhere ‘rescued’ by born-again comedians (serial careerists).

We intervene at Rye House. By noticing it, inventing a response. The Gatehouse opens on Sundays. One story is told, others are erased. Henry Teale bought the pub in 1857 and ran it, lusty and
loud, for riverside entertainment: a maze, cricket, feasts, boating. Drink, song. London on the razzle. Or: London obliterated as we move, slowly, separately, around the brick-in-grass outline of a demolished building. Twisted chimneys, no fire. The mapping of a phantom: ‘Parlour’, ‘Spiral Staircase’. A fiction of conspiracy, torture, death. An attempt on the king's life. As Charles II and his unpopular Catholic brother return from Newmarket.

Before we reach Ware, the straps of an overloaded rucksack rub my shoulder; I can feel a rough spot cutting through one of my boots. Could Ware rescue me from Hackney? A place which has become (geography aping psychogeography) Will Self's zombie suburb, his outstation for the dead. Self's Dulston (in
How the Dead Live
) is the precise contrary of Clare's Helpston: multicultural, multicuisined, busy with voices. Old Jewish. Old Black. New Russian (with Greek-Cypriot minicab drivers). Dulston has no horizon. Helpston is all horizon. And no strangers, no incomers. Stagnant gene pool. The Helpston villagers are inarticulate, by choice; by the standards of London. Clare had broken a taboo. Despite all his creeping around field margins, hiding in bushes, scribbling in hollow trees, he made himself visible. He published. He couldn't disappear into the mess of the city, Fleet Street, Chancery Lane; he saw too many of the restless dead. He was stuck on a never-ending road, between two incompatible destinations: in pain.

Ware is a river town, houses overlook slow water; it is also a convenient stopover, equidistant between A1(M) and M11. It is close to Stanstead. That's how they can successfully operate a leather-couch wine bar like the Vine. We don't eat there. I don't raid the charity shops. We take our lunch, despite some reservations (‘Smart Dress, Over 21’), in the Saracen's Head. On the riverfront. The standing stones around here are not standing stones. They are interventions. Pallid art works quoting William Blake.

On the long curve, between Ware and Hertford, there are humans, quite friendly: Australians visiting antique shops, fast men on crutches, slow women (in football shirts) lopsided with carrier bags. Local walkers. They are unimpressed by: locks, weirs, the
birth of the New River. By the A10, as it snakes on pillars across indifferent fields, under a tired cloudscape. An elevated highway going nowhere and attracting few motorists.

Hertford is the county town (of a county that has no current brand image). It's on the way to other places, you pass through (as do several rivers: Lea, Rib, Beane). Hertford is the end of the line for railway commuters and excursionists. There are plenty of historical traces lying about, if you insist on finding them: castle, Corn Exchange, house of Sir Henry Chauncy, who conducted one of England's last witchcraft trials (Jane Wenham). The East India Company founded Haileybury College, two miles out of town, to keep the colonies supplied with willing young men.

We ignore all this. Renchi exorcises the black statue of some Puritan in a hat: bible in hand, outstretched finger. ‘Get out of town.’ We asked a bright-eyed couple for directions. And discovered that they had just arrived from Melbourne. In search of their roots. We lent them our map.

It's time to abandon this Dutch landscape of canal and sky, distant town; to go off-map, beyond the ken of my faithful Nicholson, the battered
Greater London Street Atlas
. Hertford is stolidly mercantile, Cromwellian, ready to barbecue heretics. We've had enough of rivers. Clare's was a road trip and the road – now we're getting to it – lies across ten miles of blank country. Let's ditch history and start marching.

There is an undiscovered island between the A602 (east), A414 (south) and A1 (west). The apex of the triangle is Stevenage. Clare's first resting point.

I reached Stevenage where being Night I got over a gate crossed over the corner I forced to stay off a respectable distance to keep from falling into it for my legs were knocked up and began to stagger

We set off towards Bull's Green and Datchworth, expecting woods, busy suburbs. Unlike Clare we were pre-booked at the
Abbington Hotel (no prior knowledge). Our legs were moving nicely, nagging backs eased by the morning's stately progress.

On the outskirts of Hertford we notice catalogue buildings that might be drug companies, animal research, or foundation hospitals. Renchi thinks he visited his father in one of these. The late Peter Bicknell (like Anna's faceless relatives) decides to accompany us on the journey north. The further we pull from London, the more the old ones have to say. Or perhaps it's quieter and we have time to listen. Renchi is prompted by the places we pass – Oundle (father's school), Barnack (expeditions to quarries) – to offer anecdotes that bring Peter Bicknell back to life. (There is a lovely painting of his father and his namesake uncle, aged sixty, doing a sixty-mile walk of their own.) Renchi remembers: Peter, as a young man, ice-skating from Cambridge to Ely. Remembers drives across the Fens to look at buildings the senior Bicknell had designed. Remembers childhood: trying to get the attention of an arthritic parent in a Cambridge garden.

Now the pinkish roads of afternoon are quiet and shadow-pooled, heavy branches meeting overhead. Fields of ripe corn seem to require no visible farmworkers. Insects dance around the drooping heads of marigolds.

In the sudden darkness of a wood, Renchi takes out his compass for the first time: to confirm the fact that we've gone wrong (in terms of heading directly for Stevenage). The track is muddy and little used. Hours are lost. With no comforting sound of distant motorway, we're in the warp. Back roads, when we hit them, are lush anachronisms: hedgeless fields, steepled churches, road signs for places that never made it into maps and guides. We lay out what we've got, Renchi's charts and crystals, on the lids of village tombs, forgotten worthies.