Edge of the Orison (44 page)

We follow the trail into Royce Wood, quilted silence, a sudden eros of woody scents: the illusion of invisibility. The wood is a
release from village life (eyes, twitching curtains). One element in Clare's work is much clearer now, the way a walk disperses social noise, drops into private meditation: the rhythm of the country, as it climbs, shifts from limestone today. And is randomly punctuated by roads, divided by rivers.

We hit Torpel Way at a point that carries us to the right, uphill, in the direction of Ailsworth and Castor Highlands. A fruitful error. I decided, quite arbitrarily, to get away from traffic, to take to the fields (another footpath sign left in a ditch). We made an easy descent, seeing the village, seeing how Helpston sat in its dish; the sweep of the horizon so different from its neighbours, Glinton and Northborough. That short move, to the new cottage, was a banishment the poet couldn't endure. The wooded hills around Helpston offered Clare the possibility of walking out, as the whim took him, into quite distinct topographies, productive of contrary moods: light and shade, good humour or slow-footed, sodden melancholy. Drowning or flying.

Anna has to be held by the ankles, before she lifts from the ground: the view across broad fields, divided by ancient oaks, is an instantaneous transfusion. A coming-into-herself. A recognition. Stands of poplars. A path skirting the edge of Oxey Wood. Knowing little of Clare's habits, she searches for orchids. There have been dreams and she tells me about them.

She is at home, her childhood place in the Blackpool suburbs, the familiar bed. ‘If I opened my eyes, I would be there.’ Her brother William and her younger sister, Susa, safe in their rooms. Robert's room, she worries, is a bathroom. Where will he sleep?

The babble of a party, it keeps her awake. They are downstairs in the salon (yes, that's what her father called it). They are waiting, out of place, Hadmans and Roses; the troublesome dead of Werrington and Whittlesey. In period costume, the clothes of their time. They have been brought back, diverted from the static cling of sepia photographs by the irritation of our gaze. They mill about this awkward room; people of the Peterborough fringe transported to Lancashire. Like wartime aliens to the Isle of Man. ‘They want
to be organised,’ Anna said. ‘It's our fault. They came in a deputation. They asked for coffee.’

I noticed Anna's horoscope in the paper and wrote it down: ‘If they start to form a semicircle around you – run towards the open end. The horizon calls.’

From Oxey Wood, it is all horizon. Heavy cloud, shadows of oaks; village and road as a pale mirage among remote thickets and hedges. All our themes, our quests, are being resolved (or discontinued) at one time. A visible demonstration of the boundaries of Clare's early poetry. And of Anna's emotional investment in this landscape. The trail of the oldest Hadman we could trace brought us back to Stilton. Information was coming now, faster than we could cope with it. Two books I had been searching for were suddenly available: the ‘lost’ poems written by Anna's father and the original manuscript notebook of John Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’.

Thinking perhaps of Sylvia Plath, Anna remembered her father's missing collection as
Ariel
. Which suited me very well, being the name that Shelley wanted to give to the yacht on which he was drowned, the
Don Juan
. But memory is fickle. I read Geoffrey Hadman's poems on visits to Anna's mother, in her converted cottage in a Rutland village, near Uppingham. I imagined specific references to Clare's geography. There were none, apart from a short lyric invoking Glinton.

I faintly hear you,

Lovely bells of lonely Deeping –

Softly, softly, far-off pealing,

Across waste water

The poems were handwritten, a black serif calligraphy, with red titles and initial letters: clear as print. The collection was called
Spirit's Expense
. (Shakespeare again,
Sonnets
. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.’) It was astonishing that the book reappeared just as I was struggling to tie up the loose ends of my narrative. Anna contacted her brothers, her sister, none of them
knew where their father's poems had gone. I fell under suspicion, for allowing the handsome volume to be swept away, with the rest of the library, to an Uppingham dealer. I knew this wasn't the case. My memory might be full of holes, but books are never forgotten. The poems sat on the reserved pile, to be removed by the family, before the dealer arrived.

Spirit's Expense
turned up in a box of diaries, papers, rings that had belonged to Anna's mother. Her sister, in Cumbria, had it in her safekeeping. And now Anna could handle this unique folio, read it with fresh eyes. Neat symmetry: thirty-one poems published in 1941, when the author was thirty-one (thirty-second birthday in July). Fine paper with watermark of J. Green & Son. Vellum and calf. Gilt lettering on spine. The production was the gift, as Anna understood it, of her father's glamorous London friend whose limp Judy Hadman had imitated.

Twenty-Five Poems
, by Dylan Thomas, was published in 1936. He was five years younger than Anna's father. David Gascoyne's
Man's Life is This Meat
also appeared in 1936. He was seven years younger. Auden published
The Double Man
and
New Year Letter
in 1941. He was two years older than Geoffrey Hadman and would have been a contemporary at Oxford. Stephen Spender, also at Oxford, was two months younger. Eliot published
The Dry Salvages
in 1941.
Little Gidding
appeared the following year. ‘Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always.’

Geoffrey Hadman's verse, privately published, is not of that order; a casual reader would place the collection well before the First War, with Brooke and the Georgians, or with Housman (who is directly invoked). The language is archaic, ripe with ‘e'en were’ and ‘say nay’. It is a long way from the colloquial vigour and sharp-eyed specifics of Clare. Clare's poetry is his existence. The verse in this extravagantly bound folio is a gentlemanly exercise, the exhibition of technical facility; a manageable neurosis of memory and regret, abdicated love, anticipation of death. But it would be unfair to form a critical judgement of a volume that was never offered to the public.

One of the surprises is a poem addressed to ‘lovely Annabel’. It was written and published two years before Anna was born. She has no idea who the addressee is, or if she existed as anything beyond an echo of Poe; but here might be the clue to that name which was never quite her own: Mary Annabel Rose. The Mary was understood, her Hadman aunt. The Rose part was found in Whittlesey. The Annabel drifted as seven lines in a book of verse, published in an edition of one. In this poem, if anywhere, was a reflection of Clare: the way he dedicated a ‘moment's rapture’ to the unknown Anna who carried his first daughter's name.

It was good that the book had been recovered, but I was no nearer to any real connection with Clare. Clare operated, like all great poets, in an active present, in which deep images from the past continued to assault him. Time is plural, form a convenience. Sonnets are bent to suit his purpose. Imitations are exercises, contrived, when times are hard, to turn poetry to cash.

The poem in which Geoffrey Hadman comes closest to the place where we are walking, from Oxey Wood to Maxham's Green Lane, is called ‘Clouds’. I realise now what the poem actually is: a meditation on flight. The cross-country trip, Blackpool to Glinton, in the Auster. The poet is looking down on the clouds.

White wisps of spirit

Fading into space,

Paling the blue infinity of sky,

Writhing, twisting, ghostly cirrus!

Frozen souls of the dead,

Purified in purgatory.

English fields are masked by ‘blankets of grey stratus’. The pilot's reverie is convalescent, drifting from ‘morphia to nostalgia’. As cloud cover breaks, ‘shafts of washed, golden light’ pick out ‘pinnacles and spires’ of a cathedral: ‘convolute in pure white’. Peterborough is a cloud castle. The vision, based on experience, does approach Clare; his dream of Helpston Church, the Day of
Judgement. At last, in the memory of flight, Geoffrey Hadman's elective relationship with the Helpston peasant, with this landscape, is explored and justified.

Sidney Keyes, another Oxford man, was killed in action: Tunisia, 1943. His ‘Garland for John Clare’ claims that there is only ever one poet, possessed by different voices, operating under various disguises (Shakespeare, Chatterton, Byron). One poet for each place. ‘But sometimes I remember,’ Keyes writes, ‘the time that I was John Clare, and you unborn.’

We started early, this final push, driving to Huntingdon, the County Record Office, to trawl for Hadmans. We shared the task, dividing up materials relating to territory we were about to explore, the hills behind Stilton. Very soon, I was at a table with pouches of parchment; waxy, yellow, nibbled by rats. The ink held. Many of those married, christened, buried were lost: Hadman or Hadenham, parish clerks were never sure of the spelling. The givers of information may well have been illiterate. I worked back, magnifying glass to document, as far as 1680. To no great effect.

I noted: Elizabeth Jane, daughter of Richard and Sarah Hadman, baptised in 1857. And her brother, William George, baptised in 1859 Richard Hadman is described as a ‘labourer’. Then there was William Hadman, who died in 1887, aged eighty-four. And Mary Ann Hadman, who died in August 1893, aged eighty-nine. At Holme. That caught my eye: the last Hadman recorded in Huntingdon was living in a village on the edge of Whittlesey Mere; the place where we had gone searching for the posts that marked the drop in the land. Holme River was the south-western entrance to the Mere, as Bevill's Leam was the entrance in the north-east.

All these Hadmans came from one place, Caldecote. Caldecote? Caldecote barely exists, it is less than a village; it's a memory smear on the (2.5 inches to the mile) Pathfinder map. A farm, a wood. A motte and bailey castle. Caldecote is tucked against Washingley, on rising ground beyond Stilton. Washingley, we knew, was where Anna's great-great-grandfather, Robert Hadman (1808–63), later of
Werrington, began. Washingley was as far as our trail went: a deleted village, a present farm (with fish ponds and earthworks).

In Huntingdon, I discovered the Washingley Estate Map from 1833; hand-coloured, precise, financial returns laid out like poems. In 1803 the estate brought in £2,138. In 1824: £2,141. No increase in real terms. A farmhouse with garden produced £12–3s–17 in annual rent. The kennels adjoining the pleasure ground produced £35–os–11. Tenant farmers were named: Jasper Perkins, Robert Peake, William Handbury. As were the more humble cottagers, the keeper of a public house. Not one Hadman. They were beneath the level that produced revenue for the estate. They laboured.

We were no closer to Anna's great-great-grandfather, the Robert Hadman who made the break, eight miles to Werrington. We decided to move on at once to Northampton. Anna would hit the record office in Wootton Hall Park, while I went back to the library to view John Clare's notebook with the ‘Journey out of Essex’. I had the required letter from my publisher, access was promised.

I can't believe the generosity, the trust, of the Clare keepers, but Northampton has that quality: it draws you in, it keeps you. Locals know (even when they're wrong) the history of their town, and they talk about it, with affection but no particular respect. There could be no better place to shelter Clare or his memorials. In Northampton, he was a tolerated presence, adding lustre to the stone. The alcove in All Saints' Church still has a ‘reserved for mad poet’ aspect; loose citizens muse, nurse a can, but soon shuffle off. That seat is too hot. The alcove clamps like a wired helmet offering a vertical blow-dry.

I want to say, ‘Don't do it. Don't risk your precious relic.’ This man has the dealing virus in his blood. I picture the entry in a catalogue: ‘Poet's holograph.’ One of one. The notebook is kept in an archival box: ‘John Clare Poems, 1841’. The driven year at High Beach when he worked on split Byronic narratives, ‘Don Juan’, ‘Child Harold’; on biblical paraphrases. Before the escape. A torrent of words in smudged blocks. His furies demanded that he took to
the road: to recover himself, to catch up with his wandering spirit, to shake off Byron's clammy grip. Byron had already been carried north. The club-footed aristocrat liked to put up at the Bell in Stilton, where Clare would come close to losing his nerve: ‘He shams.’

Urgent prose cuts against seizures of poetry: so that ‘I wandered many a weary mile/ Love in my heart was burning’ confronts the entry about the ‘wide awake hat’. Script slants to a wind from the east, ruffling Whittlesey Mere. Paper is precious. Every inch of space is exploited. Clare wrote in Northborough, after the road, unpunctuated paragraphs: the voices caught him. He sweated and trembled, pushing his nib across the page, mapping memory before it was lost.

The last sentence of that journey, as I had seen it reproduced by Eric Robinson in
John Clare by Himself
, was chilling:

Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – 'and how can I forget

Quotation marks opened, never to close. Now, using my magnifying glass, I see that the published transcription is incorrect, quotation marks
do
seal Clare's challenge to his readers. That we should learn how to forget. To let him go. Leaving poetry as its own legend.

It was raining, the shower caught me as I hurried from the library to my pre-arranged meeting with Alan Moore. We would pay our respects to Lucia Joyce at Kingsthorpe Cemetery. Asking after cabs in Northampton minimarts produced blank astonishment: nothing to be had, ten minutes from the centre, nothing but novelty stores, tabloid newspapers, cigarettes, cut-price CDs, used leather.