Edge of the Orison (2 page)

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. Travellers 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.

Petit's status is ambiguous, he wasn't a party to the full Clare
walk, but is willing to take a day out of town, as uncredited participant. The material might fit somewhere, a future documentary, part of an expanding catalogue of English landscape footage.

TO LONDON 74, it says, on the arch above the glass door of the Bell Hotel (with its three stars). Much further, the way we did it. With another fifteen miles to the finish. Maps examined, blisters pampered, we're ready to hazard a path across green-gold fields, across the A1 and the River Nene. The major decision is to avoid Peterborough (breaking faith with Clare, the town bridge, his meeting with Helpston neighbours, coins thrown from the cart). Peterborough has spun from its entrails a network of ring roads, roundabouts, underpasses and retail parks designed to confuse motorists (and pedestrians, vagrant folk); keep them, at all costs, away from the prolapsed centre. Cathedral, river meadows, arcaded mall complex. Newspaper headlines, signboarded in outlying villages, warn of a plague of rough sleepers, dispersed from Cambridge, and gifted with rail tickets to somewhere else, to Peterborough.

When we interrogated relevant OS maps, on the kitchen table in Hackney, the night before we set out, Anna argued that Clare's Helpston was closer to Stamford than to Peterborough. She had connections, a generation back, with that part of the world. With Glinton and the Fens. What did I know? One funeral service attended in St Benedict's Church? A couple of family visits? A swim in a gravel pit? No contest. Pan lids banged. Knives sharpened with intent.

She was right and she was wrong. Emotionally, Stamford is much closer. The Lincolnshire market town, a cluster of wool churches with fierce spires, was the destination of choice: grammar school, pubs, shops, narrow alleys, auction house. Peterborough, which threatened to swallow Glinton, as it had already devoured the villages of Easton and Werrington, was an invader, privileged by successive governments. A railway town. The town where Clare's madness was publicly demonstrated during a performance of
The Merchant of Venice
. ‘We never went there.’

The discussion was heated. Enough to confirm my instinct to avoid the place entirely, to skirt its western flank, picking up on a long straight road from Castor to Helpston; a Roman road that marked one of the boundaries of Clare's childhood world. Peterborough suffered from another disability: its outline on the town guide was the twin of Hackney (pretty much England with Scotland bitten off). Hackney cut loose, transported into a planners' wilderness, with no proximate boroughs, no Islington or Bethnal Green, to temper its supernatural malignancy.

After a traditional hearty breakfast, on the morning of 20 July 2000, we crossed the wide Stilton street and headed off in search of a footpath to Folksworth. The idea was to work our way through the fields in the direction of Haddon, then towards the A1 as it pulled to the west. Haddon echoed my wife's maiden name, Hadman. Haddenham, Hadham, Hadun: dictionaries of place names concede that the root is probably manorial. Hadmans, if you find them, come from this part of the world. A relative, conducting a computer search, showed Anna a faded print-out: ‘The German surname Hadman would appear to be a variant of the more numerous Handman and it is occupational in origin.’ Hadmans belong near the base of the medieval social pyramid: ‘Above the serfs were the peasants who worked the land in royal manors.’ Anna's family were on the land, of the land, and in the land. Buried, forgotten.

My wife grew up in Lancashire, a suburb of Blackpool, but her father had a deep attachment to the place where he had lived until he went up to St John's College, Oxford. He bought a manor house in Rutland for his retirement. He wrote verse, in traditional forms, which he published – in an edition of one; a single, handsomely bound copy, now lost. Anna remembers a poem set in Market Deeping, bells heard across the Fens. From his home village? A redbrick house, close to the village green. Geoffrey Hadman was born in Glinton, the younger son of a farmer. He didn't tell her much about his parents, Anna said. And nothing about his other
relatives. But he laid claim to kinship with a neighbouring celebrity, the unfashionable Helpston poet, John Clare. No details of this connection were revealed.