Edge of the Orison (5 page)

Figures silhouetted and seen from behind. Childhood sweethearts. Mother at the cottage door. Father and son. A broad-shouldered, sturdy labouring man and his short, slight son (who would gain weight, bulk, ruddy cheeks in the asylum years). John Clare works at threshing in the winter barn with his child's flail. He works in the fields. Parker Clare, broken down, on parish relief, hobbles out to fill holes in the road. John looks for hedges to hide behind, somewhere in which to breathe without others hearing the sound.

By routine, small joys, a circuit of walks, the horizon is fixed. If a child died, another in the family would inherit its name. The poet's sister, Sophy, married William Kettle, and gave birth to two Johns. Clare's great-grandfather, the Parish Clerk, another John, fathered four sons with the same name. Three dead Johns who failed to reach their fourth birthday, before the last of them lived out a reasonable span of twenty-eight years, and married another Mary. It's not a failure of imagination: think of Helpston as a village
in a wooden box, thatched cottages, church, public house, cows, sheep, and enough figures to dress the set, act out dramas of rural life. Johns and Marys, all of them. The chain stretches back, before enclosure, for centuries, with just enough fresh blood, if you're lucky, to avoid inbreeding and idiocy. Scroll through the census entries for the nineteenth century, somewhere to the east of Peterborough (say, Whittlesey), and check that final column: a deluge of ticks in the space left for the dumb, halt, lame, mad.

Clare's vision, the stages of enlightenment and self-knowledge, opens with journeys on foot (later by coach) that carry him away from his heart-place, the village of Helpston.

Childhood: a day's excursion, ‘out of his knowledge’, to Emmonsales Heath. A missing village lad, before the time of tabloid sex monsters, whipped on his return.

Early adolescence: confused, passions too large for his small frame. ‘Gloves to hide my coarse hands… out grown my coat and almost left the sleeves at the elbows.’ Travelling down the Nene to Wisbech. Failed audition as lawyer's clerk. Overprepared, awkward in kitchens. Wandering free, while he waits for the return trip, in a foreign town: bookshops, faces.

Late adolescence: unconvinced rebel, docile runaway. Escaped gardener. Over the wall at Burghley, hiking to Grantham and Newark-on-Trent. Disorientation: ‘I became so ignorant in this far land that I could not tell what quarter the wind blew from & I even was foolish enough to think the suns course was alterd & that it rose in the west & set in the east.’

Hangdog return, stealing away in the night, ‘ninepence half penny in debt’. A hard trudge back to Stamford, rough sleeping under the trees. ‘The rhyme fell thick in the night & we was coverd as white as a sheet when we got up.’

Young married man: drawn by the gravity of future fame to London. A cure for all ills. Four trips to the city he would never learn to love. Theatres, drink, prostitutes, society. Ghosts, demons. Literary ladies and admirals. Possession by the spirit of Lord Byron.

A final road: High Beach to Northborough. Wiping memory,
putting London in its place: as a remote and cruel abstraction. Tramping instead of riding. The solitary figure on the endless road, sleeping with his head to the north, is a provocation for future walkers. Those who, hearing footsteps, cannot leave them alone. The ones who think that tracing a sleepwalker's journey will show them how to write.

Then it struck me. ‘A poet is born…’, the pious tag on Clare's gravestone, echoed a passage in his work. Trapped in the claustrophobic regime of Epping Forest, in that great year, 1841, before the horror overwhelmed him, he moved from witness to visionary. He affected, and was affected by, place and weather. He registered a violent storm on 15 July, five days before he started walking: ‘Roll on, ye wrath of thunders, peal on peal/ Till worlds are ruins and myself alone.’ The fool becomes Lear. The road, if he can find it, now that those tricksters, the gypsies, have gone, will lead him back to an earlier self. To his wasted paradise. Possessed by Byron, or playing that game, he launched the satire of
Don Juan
. Corrupt politicians, unfaithful wives, addled eggs. ‘I would MP's would spin less yarn.’ Wellington, Melbourne. Hot little Vicky and her German husband. The poem of the world, cooked in the madhouse, begins with a stark declaration.

‘Poets are born’ – and so are whores – the trade is Grown universal: in these canting days

Helpston

The publican's face in Castor, it was just what we expected: ginger eyebrows, broken veins in ruddy cheeks, unsubstantiated grin. He leans over the slatted table, resting his weight on powerful arms, ice-blue shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow. ‘Sorry, gentlemen.’

No food, no kitchen: an eccentric request, in the middle of the day, off-highway in England. Can't be done, but – seeing as how we've walked here from London – we can take a pint, outside, before we move on. So long as it's not – tough luck, Chris – the black stuff. Guinness pump is down.

I like this yard with its limestone discriminations, ancient wall of trapped sunshine, yellow slabs underfoot. Tokenist dressing of wallflowers. I like the publican. You could transpose him, with a dirtier shirt, straight into the Clare story. Seen it, done most of it, heard some tales in his time (he's paid to listen). Want to walk from Epping Forest to Glinton, gents? Fine with me. Swim, against the tide, down the Nene to Wisbech? Takes all sorts. Put your coins on the table, drink up, and don't piss in the terracotta.

A Peterborough face recovered from Clare's walk, from his life. They don't migrate these natives, they've been hanging around the same eight-mile circuit, good rich ground, since the Middle Ages. Sometimes farmer, sometimes butcher, sometimes publican: the expression of the man who slides your money into his pocket never changes. Country fatalism. It's bad, gentlemen, but it could be worse. When Clare, thrown fivepence from the cart of Helpston neighbours, demanded ‘two half pints of ale and twopenn'oth of bread and cheese’, that was perfectly acceptable. His pennies were as good as any other man's. Three and a half days of road dirt, gravel rattling in the shoe, dried sweat, the odour of a runaway; these things can be ignored as long as your equity holds out. The
Castor publican who pocketed our change had a professionally disinterested way of not-listening to a tall tale: strong teeth, weather in his face. A man who has come across from his fields to concede the obligatory show of hospitality. For a consideration.

Without funds, Clare wouldn't approach a public house. He knew from experience what would happen. Crippled foot, darkness falling, ‘very uncomfortable and wretched’. Towards evening, after a long day, he located the Ram, lights in the window, countrymen drinking: ‘I had no money and did not like to go in… so I travelled on.’

Beyond Castor, it's a great road for walking (if the cars don't get you). A classic straight track (on the Roman model), shaded by poplars or solitary hawthorn bushes, diminishing into hazy distance, between yellow fields, clumps of woodland. Warm pinkness in the cambered surface along which we progress, the last men in England. Heat rising from tarmac, drugged flies.

Once you cross the A47 (four lanes, all empty), and acknowledge the torched car in the cornfield, you discover that commonplace traffic, the swinish rush of metal, is happening somewhere else (probably Peterborough). If we don't meet Clare on this stretch, we'll never find him. Shimmering afternoon country, the thirsty pints at Castor, encourages the shamanic sense, it's not an illusion, that Hardy describes in
Tess
; we are flying, hovering a few inches above the road's sticky surface. Being carried forward without physical effort. Tess and her companions, drink taken, return to their chicken farm:

They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other.

Chris deals with the burnt car, patterns of rust and scorch, gaping jaw. He comes as close to contentment as he ever will in this vale
of tears. He has noticed a chain of polished repmobiles, in puddles of cool shadow, spread at regular intervals along the road, between Castor and Helpston. A sleep-therapy zone: men in striped shirts and loosened ties, necks twisted, cheeks against glass, mouths agape. Electric windows buzzed down. Sandwich wraps, burger cartons, cigarette packets. Mobiles switched off. The zizz. The throb of cooling engines. Slurry-eros of liquid shit, wild flowers, honeyed air. An ecstatic escape from Peterborough and its crackskull motorway system. They smile in sleep. Within the pod of the complimentary motor, the boxes of stock, lightweight jackets on hangers, they lay their urgent spiels to rest. A phantom babble of soft sell, unrepeatable offers, like wind in electricity cables.

Petit has located a definitive image of Blair's England. A best-value use of countryside. Every drowsy copse an oasis, every shady space pre-booked. Clare's mistake was in not travelling this road; he laboured through Peterborough, aiming for the Beehive at Werrington. Then rode the last miles in a cart, a Tyburn tumbrel, in the company of a stranger, his wife. A woman who ‘caught fast my hands & wished me to get into the cart but I refused & thought her either drunk or mad’.

Meadowsweet, cow parsley, hairy verges: our road dips and climbs, one of us strides ahead to the brow of the next moderate hill, the point where overreaching branches meet and mesh. The Clare we searched for was the Helpston child, coming towards us, on that mythic expedition to Emmonsales Heath. The heath skirted Castor Hanglands Woods – formerly, Castor Anglings Woods – which we were now passing. We stayed alert for John Clare's first steps in his willed disorientation.

I had imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures & discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I coud look down like looking into a large pit & see into its secrets the same as I believed I coud see heaven by looking into water

Searching for heaven, as Petit had done on the bridge over the Nene, is an initiation of gazing, losing yourself. Flowing water is a magician's hinge, the passage between worlds. John Clare's mother was absolutely right, book-learning is a kind of witchcraft, letters of the alphabet are instruments of intent. Like the coded language Clare noticed in the sky above flat fields. ‘Wild geese scudding along and making all the letters of the Alphabet as they flew.’

The childhood walk to Emmonsales Heath, remembered, re-experienced as one of Clare's ‘Autobiographical Fragments’, was an announcement of difference, separation from the clods and clowns of Helpston.

I was finding new wonders every minute & was walking in a new world often wondering to my self that I had not found the end of the old one the sky still touchd the ground in the distance as usual & my childish wisdoms was puzzld in perplexitys

A sickness vocation: poetry. The poet's response to the privilege of place, the numinous road. To languages he would learn, of birds, snakes, foxes. Snail shells he would collect. Orchids. Difference was expressed as a fit, a throw of light: the way sorcerers feel each stage of their initiation as a physical blow, drowning in air, breathing in water, lifting from the ground. Elective epilepsy: plant-induced or resulting from trauma, a car crash, a street assault. The walker overwhelmed by the walk.

Edward Storey in his Clare biography,
The Right to Song
, describes ‘fainting fits which [Clare] imagined owed their origin to the accident he had seen a few years earlier’. A man called Thomas Drake who ‘fell off a load of hay and broke his neck’.

The accident happened in 1811, at harvest time. Clare was eighteen years old. Looking at something cold and empty, he knew the fear of being possessed by another man's spirit. Witnessing the chill of death. Light gone from the eyes.

The ghastly paleness of death struck such a terror on me that I could not forget for years & my dreams were constantly wanderings in churchyards digging graves seeing spirits in charnel houses etc etc In my fits I swooned away without a struggle… but I was always warned of their coming by a chillness & dithering that seemed to creep from ones toes ends till it got up to ones head when I turned senseless & fell Sparks of fire often flashed from my eyes

As a child, Clare solicited dramas that would bring about the necessary fracture in consciousness; make him a poet by default. He fell from a tree: ‘I lay for a long time and knew nothing.’ He slid into a gravel pit: ‘I felt the water choke me and thunder in my ears.’ A makeshift raft of bulrushes sank beneath his weight: ‘I made shift to struggle to a shallow bush & catching hold of the branches I got out but how I did it I know not.’

Crossroads: Castor 3, Helpston 1¾. Barnack 4, Marholm 2. Puffball blisters cushion my tread, the cheapest form of inflatable trainer. Are we on time? I haven't looked at my watch in days: the pubs are all shut, we start walking as soon as it's light. I said to Anna, when she dropped us in Epping Forest, see you in Glinton at four o'clock on Thursday.

In response to a show he's seen at Tate Britain, a list of names painted on the wall, everyone the artist ever met, Petit amuses us by excavating celebrities of his own. He's fond of lists. And would write, if commissioners went for it, all his books that way. Favourite sounds from films: the whispering leaves of Maryon Park (
Blow-Up
), airport footsteps from
Point Blank
. Memorable meals. Much-loved cars. Coats, hairstyles, shoes, cigars. Recalling his time drifting around the Euro festivals as film critic (or film-maker), adventures as freelance essayist and thriller writer, Chris assembles an impressive (and ironically delivered) troop: the cocktail party from hell. Flesh pressed. Bottles shared.

J. G. Ballard. Warren Beatty. Robbie Coltrane. Richard Condon. Eddie Constantine. James Crumley: ‘Montana man, drinker, very chippy.’ Catherine Deneuve: ‘Shared joke about
Repulsion
.’ Ed