Edge of the Orison (43 page)

George A. Rose, who kept the Wheatsheaf, was William's son. George had two daughters, Mary and Edith; who married, accord
ing to the custom of the place, two brothers, the Turners. Norman Turner, the son of the younger Rose girl, Edith, lived in a bungalow in Doddington, a few miles down the road. The Turners, this woman thought, farmed somewhere this side of Benwick. If we went to Doddington, we were sure to find them; not far from the hospital, a neat property, set back from the main street. A name like – ‘The Hollies’?

Once again we are standing outside a strange house, ringing a bell, waiting for a face we won't recognise; a person whose very existence was unknown twenty minutes ago. We'd managed conversations in driveways and at garden gates, but we had never been let inside. Until now. A blonde lady, of middle height, wearing a plum-coloured jersey, listened attentively to our tale. Then invited us in for tea. ‘We're related, sort of cousins,’ she said; treating Anna, at once, as one of the family. Carol Turner, wife of Norman. Daughter-in-law of the former Edith Rose.

Carol apologised for the state of her immaculate property, as we scuffed Fenland mud into a Welcome mat. Even the home improvements were being improved; everything, by our standards, was new and bright. Deep carpets. Big television. Polished wood. Video shelves. Conservatory. Shaved lawn. Caught on the hop, by unaccredited genealogists from London, Carol whipped up tea and biscuits; before producing family albums, the fruits of her research. She was the other person who had been looking into the Roses in Whittlesey Library: working her way towards Anna. As Anna advanced, by fits and starts, on her.

The history of the Wheatsheaf was soon revealed. Old William Rose, keeper of the Windmill Inn, came out of town on to Glassmoor: Delavals Farm. A sizeable property that was later managed by his oldest son, another William – who married, inevitably, another Anna. Florence, his second daughter, married William Hadman of Glinton: the farmer and forester who launched our journey across the Fens.

Old William's third son, George Rose, developed a fancy for the
Wheatsheaf, when he walked past it on his way to school. He vowed one day to own the property. And in the fashion of the Roses, determined folk, canny with cash, he succeeded. He kept the pub and farmed thirty-five acres. The pub part of the operation was closed down in the Twenties. ‘The Irish,’ Carol thinks. Rivermen were always a rough lot, good drinkers, but when the Irish came it was too much. Better to acquire more fields than to sweep up broken glass and mend windows. The Roses were restless. They bought land, rented it out, bought more, diversified into whatever was going.

George, getting old, retreated into Whittlesey: 13 Bread Street. Michael Turner, son of Mary, first cousin of Carol's husband, Norman, took the Wheatsheaf. He didn't run it as a pub, he kept pigs. Hundreds of them. The barn alongside the house had originally been for the horses who pulled cargo boats: the ‘Horse Water Shed’ it was called.

Norman and Carol bought the Wheatsheaf in 1987. Norman still farmed, but the house and much of the land had been sold. It was the ‘Horse Water Shed’ that caused the problem for the present occupant, Mr Chan. Chan decided to wholesale ducks and other feathered delicacies for the restaurant trade. He packed them into the Wheatsheaf barn. The scoring we had noticed, at ground level, had been caused by rats. Rats gnawed through wood and feasted on food laid out for the ducks. Hence, Mr Chan's suspicion of cameras. There had been an episode, before Christmas, a prosecution by the RSPCA. It made a big stir on local television. Our unannounced arrival would have been seen, by the former duck-breeder, as a fresh intrusion by muck-raking journalists. It was far worse: we wanted the dirt on generation after generation of blameless (and quietly forgotten) working people.

‘Do you recognise anyone?’ Carol handed Anna the album.

‘My grandmother.’

The photograph is dated, 7 June 1937: members of the Rose family at the wedding of Mary Rose and Ernest Turner. Standing on the right of the group (as we look at it) is Florence Hadman: pearls, flowers on hat, fur-trim at cuffs. This is the bespectacled face we
know from the 1938 passport portrait. Hats for the ladies, shoulders drooping under a heft of dead fox. The farmers, silverhaired and trim, have the look of late Charles Chaplin: tight suits, eyes narrowed against the light. Self-confident. Established. On their own turf.

But it is the older photographs, weddings as remote as episodes out of D. H. Lawrence (even Hardy), that justify our quest. Anna can find, in the young girls attending these festivities, her own daughters: the spirit and the features. A rapid dissolve in which bone structure, attitude and temperament undergo minimal shifts and adjustments. They live in us, the old ones, and we have a duty to honour their presence. There are no clean slates. Forgathered, posed, the Roses offer themselves to us in their most public and performed aspect. ‘The wedding of a daughter of William and Mary Rose of Glassmoor,’ says the caption. That is all we know. William had nine children, five daughters. Anna thinks that the young woman in a straw boater, sitting in the front row, a baby in her lap, is Florence Hadman, her grandmother. With her first child, Mary. The aunt with whom she stayed at Balcony House in Glinton. The one whose husband cleaned the tar from her sandals.

‘We think old William had a wooden leg,’ Carol tells us, passing another photograph: ‘William and Mary, with their children, at Glassmoor.’ Here is a patriarch to set beside Robert Hadman of Werrington (when he posed with his daughters, in front of the creepered wall). William Rose is solid, moustached. He has the
now familiar trick: raised eyebrow. The photographer had better know his business. Beyond all the fuss, there is enduring pride in the family as a unit: scrub off the pig shit, show the world what we are worth. Watchchains. Bow ties. Dresses with pinched waists and puffed shoulders. The Roses in their place.

There is also a study of the Wheatsheaf, as it was, before Mr Chan. A brick building square to the road. ‘TAP ROOM’, it says, on the parlour window. Above the door, and beneath the Wheatsheaf plaque, is the licence of George A. Rose. In the window of the tap room, arms on hips like a Greek vase, is a woman, looking straight back at us.

Carol contacted Michael Turner, Norman's cousin; the son of the other Rose sister, Mary. After the Wheatsheaf, Michael moved back into Whittlesey. A spotless bungalow tucked away off New Road: two German motors out front, fountains and statuary in the garden, at the rear. Everything, it appeared, fresh from catalogue. Newly released from its polythene.

Michael's wife, Pat, was a broadband genealogist, with files and photographs to display. These were generous people, offering hospitality to strangers, providing us with anecdotal evidence to flesh out speculative biographies. They brought the particulars of Whittlesey and Glassmoor to life.

Anna talked to Pat. Michael showed me his porcelain cabinet: prizefighters, hounds, figurines that cost thousands of pounds. A splendid collection. The striking photograph Michael produced was of a semicircle of tractors, out on the Fens. His father with new machines and the men who worked them. Like Russian collectivists on the steppes. But what Michael remembers, most sharply, is the fact that his father never accompanied him on his return to boarding school in Norwich; a function left to his uncle.

Whittlesey, through Michael's stories, is repopulated, no longer a town of ghosts and shadows. After the pig farm, he went into catering, a fish and chip shop. He cleared serious money, he told me how much, over the Straw Bear Festival: gallons of deep-fat
cod, buckets of potato wedges, to soak up the beer. Later, he sold the premises as a Chinese restaurant. One of his great pleasures was to cruise the Middle Level in his boat; a short haul in agreeable company, pub lunch and afternoon snooze.

The potentialities of Whittlesey and Werrington – Roses met Hadmans at Peterborough Agricultural Fair – were what Anna's father turned his back on. That life was too inviting. The landscape swallowed you: tiny figures, at the mercy of the weather, labour under immense skies. Getting away, Oxford, Lancashire, private plane, property in Kenya, manor house in Rutland, required an active suspension of memory. ‘My father never talked about his grandparents or any of the Roses,’ Anna said. But Michael Turner knew Geoffrey's brother, Lawrie, very well. ‘Lawrie and Madge? Oh yes. I visited their house in Glinton. Lawrie was a butcher in Whittlesey before he took up farming.’

There was a moment when Michael's family could have acquired the Saunders farm. ‘You met Ted Saunders? Tall, red-faced gentleman? Well George Rose worked his land when Ted was away, the army.’ Arable farming: sugar beet, potatoes. Anna's Glassmoor fantasy might have been realised, for the price of a few thousand pounds; Delavals Farm stretching to Bevill's Leam. £15,000 was the asking price. Half was available, in cash; the rest had been lent to a friend and couldn't be repaid in time. It passed. One branch of the family, socially restless, lost sight of the others, the ones who stayed within the gravitational field of Whittlesey Mere. Escape brought its rewards, but also its penalties: nostalgia, admitted or suppressed, for this melancholy land. The challenge of squeezing a living out of sodden fields and black water.

PRE-REMEMBERED

The road he had travelled had disappeared, and all that remained was the little space on which his feet were standing. He was dreaming and he did not know it.

José Saramago,
The Double

Helpston

Property is on the move everywhere, it's like a madness; villages disappear, survivors are rattled, provoked by real-estate promos masquerading as documentaries. Helpston is not immune, Helpston is off-highway. The only marketable commodity is the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’. Helpston is no longer in Northamptonshire. The only peasants are waxworks in heritage museums: waiting for the Black Death (as seen on television).

The Clare Society (in conjunction with Peterborough City Council) has produced a map of the poet's Helpston; a flattering sketch, based on the William Hilton portrait, decorates its cover. Returned to Stilton, the Bell Hotel, for a final push, we are spending one afternoon in Helpston, walking the John Clare trail. At 16 Woodgate, we re-encounter ‘Clare's Cottage’. It is dazzlingly white, gorgeously thatched, and pegged with yellow-and-red boards provided by estate agents, Dickens Watts & Dade, of Cross Street, Peterborough. ‘Viewing Strictly By Appointment Only.’ £475,000. Tom Raworth's 1971 poem, ‘Helpston £9,850’, has come to fruition (in everything except price). The cottage has endured every indignity, from Bill Brandt's theatrical mists to soft-sell digital portraiture. Now it has been forcibly inducted into the Peterborough conurbation.

The walk, mapped out by the Clare Society, is pleasant; it's like scrolling effortlessly through deposits of memory rescued from numerous Clare biographies. I pose Anna, disguised by dark glasses, outside ‘Bachelor's Hall’, where the poet caroused with the Billings brothers. Pointing has been renewed, window frames freshly painted; there is a burglar alarm in the place where the old fire-insurance plaque would once have been sited.