Edge of the Orison (16 page)

And from the memory of place. The circle of landscape in which he had once been anchored. As John Clare, he was unvoiced. One of the invisibles buried on the green perimeter of London. A living corpse. ‘O would it were my lot,’ he said (quoting Byron), ‘To be forgetfull as I am forgot.’

After four years enclosed in the forest, he feels that it is time to escape, to return to Mary. His wife and children, settled in their Northborough cottage, have been erased. The imagined crime of bigamy purged by elective amnesia. A walk into the past is contemplated. (By suffering, he will revise errors of biography. Open an alternate life. Follow a different path.) Essex in Northampton is a collapsing topography. There is nowhere of any consequence between High Beach and Mary Joyce's Glinton. ‘Yon spire that points to heaven… True as the needle to the pole.’

In April 1841, still writing in capitals, Clare describes an Easter Sunday visit to Buckhurst Hill Church:

Stood In The Church Yard – When A Very Interesting Boy Came Out While Organ Was Playing Dressed In A Slop Frock Like A Ploughboy & Seemingly About Nine Years Of Age – He Was Just Like My Son Bill When He Was About The Same Age & As Stout Made – He Had A Serious Interesting Face & Looked As Weary With The Working Days As A Hard Working Man – I Was Sorry I Did Not Give Him The Last Halfpenny I Had & Ask Him A Few Questions As To His Age & Name & Parents But Perhaps I May See Him Again

There was also a young woman, dressed as milkmaid or farm servant. ‘I Did Not Speak To Her But I Now Wish I Had & Cannot Forget Her.’ The instant of composition keeps the memory alive, raw. He will walk forward, with pain and difficulty, into the past and make it cohere. The church spire is a needle to his pole.

Returned home, after his successful flight from Matthew Allen's madhouse, ‘where men close prisoners are & women are ravished’, Clare wrote a premature farewell to a fading landscape. His essay on Autumn:

& there is the beautifull Spire of Glinton Church towering high over the grey willows & dark wallnuts still lingering in the church yard like the remains of a wreck telling where their fellows foundered in the ocean of time – place of green Memorys & gloomy sorrows – even these meadows arches seem to me to be something of the beautifull having been so long a prisoner & shut up in confinement they appear something worthy of notice

The pressure of revised history, a parallel life, was extreme. It countered a shameful present, the forest confinement. The ever-watchful eyes of Matthew Allen's servants. In the territory of the mind, John Clare was no longer a peasant poet. He was a boxer: Jack Randall, Champion of England. Establish a new identity and the old Clare can float free. Other fools will accept his folly.

Jack Randall The Champion Of The Prize Ring Begs Leave To Inform The Sporting World That He Is Ready To Meet Any Customer In The Ring Or On The Stage To Fight For The Sum Of £500 He Is Not Particular As To Weight Colour Or Country

Clare is Lord Byron in reduced circumstances, flaying ‘Docter Bottle imp who deals in urine’. He witnesses deviants abusing prisoners: ‘I have often seen such dirty sights.’ He resurrects Mary Joyce, childhood sweetheart. The schoolroom in Glinton Church. The walks to North Fen.

The flight from High Beach can be seen as a shamanic voyage to a more persuasive reality. This dreaming between two worlds is sensible and practical. Clare never denies the existence of Allen's asylum, it was an obligatory trial. A test of his mettle: imprisonment in the dark forest of the grail quests. He has triumphed. From Northborough, he composes a letter of explanation to his former keeper.

Having left the Forest in a hurry I had not time to take leave of you & your family but I intended to write & that before now but dullness & dissapointment prevented me for I found your words true on my return here having neither friends or home left but as it is called “Poets cottage” I claimed a lodging in it where I now am – one of my fancys I found here with her family & all well

The walk, the frantic pilgrimage, was the last of it: sanity. High Beach, like Patty and the children (who are now hers alone), is a ‘fancy’. A contract has been broken or a contract fulfilled. Clare tried London and was mocked by his success. (The fourth visit is always the killer. Dylan Thomas blustered across America, three tours, and returned to Laugharne with a few dollars and a criminal hangover. Trains and women. The fourth trip did for him.) The portraits and life masks of John Clare confirm an absence. They register a person who is no longer there. Travelling, tramping the Great North Road, he swims in his own shadow. He forgets where the sun rises.

On the cusp of a final exile, abdication of world and family, Clare analyses his own condition, the frail distinction between being forgotten and eradicated. Silenced.

A very good common place counsel is
Self Identity
to bid our own hearts not to forget our own selves & always to keep self in the first place lest all the world who always keeps us behind it should forget us all together – forget not thyself & the world will not forget thee – forget thyself & the world will willingly forget thee till thou art nothing but a living-dead man dwelling among shadows & falsehood

He talks to his old friends, the gypsies, at their forest camp. They offer, for a price, to smuggle him away. He returns, they are gone. He picks up a discarded ‘wide awake’ hat and puts it in his pocket. He plots his escape like a military campaign. There are provisions: notebook, chewing tobacco, hat.

I Led the way & my troops soon followed but being careless in mapping down the rout as the Gipsey told me I missed the lane to Enfield town & was going down Enfield highway till I passed “The Labour in vain” Public house where a person I knew comeing out of the door told me the way

John Clare was launched on one of the great English journeys, three and a half days, 20–24 July 1841. Hungry, hobbled, deluded. An expedition to recover a self he had no use for, a wife he didn't recognise, a cottage he loathed. He would confirm the validity of a double consciousness: London and Helpston, poet and labourer, Patty and Mary. A nest of earthly and spiritual children that had been fathered, mislaid. A text, already composed, to be justified by bitter experience.

High Beach

It's July, but not that July, the time of Clare's walk (1841), or the July (2000) when we tracked him, High Beach to Helpston. It is 2004 and I'm trying to remember the details of that evening, four years ago, when Renchi arrived and we spread competing OS maps on the kitchen table. Anna, as you will remember, lurked significantly, preparing dinner and making pointed remarks about comparative distances between Glinton and Peterborough, Glinton and Stamford. We were trespassing, heavy-footed, on her territory. If her memories were not entirely accurate, it wasn't our business to correct them.

The ‘Journey out of Essex’ as depicted on a map in
John Clare by Himself
(edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell) is admirably straightforward: a vertical line dangled between Northborough and Enfield with a kink snagged on High Beach. Around eighty miles: Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire. Find the Great North Road and the rest is a dumb plod emptying heads of all previous convictions.

Clare slept, head to home, letting the true north of pain and loss act as his guide. He travelled towards the thing that troubled him most: memory. Robinson and Powell's map was arctic white, lacking hills, rivers, woods, farms, churches, airfields, concrete bunkers, Happy Eaters, ibis hotels. (The materials in which we dealt.) Factor in our preliminary stroll from Hackney, detours, digressions, and we should be able to stretch this excursion to the required length of 120 miles. Or: the distance around the M25, London's orbital motorway, drawn out like slack elastic.

It must be the season, old hurts return as I look at my original photographs, read the crabby journal of that walk. The flaw has a name: scoliosis. A lateral deviation of the backbone caused by
congenital or acquired abnormalities of the vertebrae. One leg shorter than the other. With inevitable compensations: muscle strain, skewings of tissue. Enough miles on the clock, over the last half-century, to do real damage. In July 2000,1 was a month beyond my fifty-seventh birthday. Clare, when he marched down the hill towards Enfield, was forty-eight. His life had been harder, much harder. Poor diet, nights sleeping under trees. Chemical imbalances, thin blood. Digestive problems untreated or made worse by quacks. There were physical (as well as geographical) elements in his supposed madness. Call it the Northampton Syndrome: incest, witchcraft, land too recently recovered from the water.

The prospect of repeating Clare's walk alarmed me. Piece by piece, I was wearing out; years of lugging boxes of books, packing a child under each arm, had taken its toll. I only visited doctors for inoculations. Other symptoms, I suspected, would cure themselves; more or less, eventually. Or not. Best advice: keep clear of hospitals, you'll catch something. Hospitals are future development opportunities living on borrowed time. Scandals waiting for available indignation.

Backs, at my age, are a given; bad ones. Our walk should have been sponsored by Mr Venus, the Clerkenwell taxidermist. Everybody on the Helpston excursion had temperamental spines, legs of different lengths, pains in the side. Would we make it? The
London Orbital
tour was easy; a day on the road, home to warm bath. This was more challenging, three and a half days, straight – following Clare's route or chasing rivers and footpaths. We couldn't decide.

I reconnoitred the forest. My sense of direction in London is adequate, even the bits I don't know; the base map is etched in my skull. The serpentine Thames. The pattern of churches. E. O. Gordon's sacred elevations (as described in
Prehistoric London, Its Mounds and Circles
). But Epping Forest, the Peterborough diaspora? I couldn't fix where the sun rose; shifty skies, vague horizons. Time, recycled, borrowed from another man, won't behave. It sticks or it races. Old heart beating like a pigeon trapped in a chimney.

I set out from High Beach in winter, logging contour lines of lager cans, burger cartons, cigarette packets, bits of cars. Cargo-trash getting denser as I approached the roundabout where four roads meet: A121, A104, B172, B1393. I found a silver Christmas watch, pressed into a muddy hoofprint, and left notices in huts and nature reserves. It was never claimed.

With Renchi in tow, I searched for Matthew Allen's three houses. Building work in progress, convenient footpaths and bridges across the Lea, from Enfield Lock to High Beach, were discontinued. Maps are so selective. They have no truck with the former Small Arms Factory or its abrupt translation into Enfield Island Village (‘An Exciting New Village Community’). Rifles, the community pub, knows what kind of customers it wants: ‘Over 21's Smart Dress Only. Travellers Not Welcome.’ Thirsty, we wait for Turpin's Cave on the road to the forest.

Dick Turpin was an Essex boy who drifted north: York. A horse-trader brought to the rope, the triple tree. The custom then was that a felon who agreed to act as hangman, to stretch his fellows, would be set free. There was a price on Turpin's head, for the murder of Thomas Morris, servant to Henry Thompson, one of the Keepers of Epping Forest. Turpin's criminal history was traditional: family of publicans and butchers, membership of a gang raiding farmhouses and isolated properties on the fringes of London. Nothing out of the way. They only harmed their own. Born too soon to take advantage of the M25.

James Sharpe, examining the legend in a recent book,
Dick Turpin, The Myth of the English Highwayman
, traces the famous pantomime ride back to Defoe,
A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
(first published in three volumes, 1824–6). A robbery at Gadshill in Kent, mariners paid off at Chatham. The former royalist officer, Richard Dudley, turns highwayman. He escapes across the Thames into Essex and rides up the Great North Road to York. Turpin's legend evolves from a careless reading of Dudley's career.

Turpin on the run, like Harry Roberts (the 1966 police killer), is supposed to have hidden in a cave in Epping Forest. Roberts,
after a botched robbery in Shepherd's Bush, bought himself some camping kit in King's Cross and took to the forest. He had done his National Service in Malaya. He knew how to set up a number of camps and to keep moving. Despite the manhunt that was inevitable, given his crime, Roberts eluded capture – until he made the mistake of crossing a main road, carrying a blue holdall. ‘No one in the country had a bag like that,’ he said.

Numerous hotels on the Great North Road lay claim to Turpin's ghost. His spectral presence is felt at the George Hotel in Buckden. The Bell Inn at Stilton, according to Sharpe, was another ‘regular haunt’. This phantom self, a creature of myth, travels the length of a route Turpin never took (preferring the back roads, the rivers of Fenland). It is the Great North Road that disappears, displaced by the impatient carriageways of the AI. Between Norman Cross and Alconbury, we will discover abandoned filling stations, tin huts and shacks that once offered all-day breakfasts to travellers and hauliers refused entry at Rifles in Enfield Island Village.

An Enfield publican put Clare straight, pointing out the shortest way. The contemporary version is less certain of local topography. An instruction has gone out from the brewers enforcing a total embargo on courtesy. This was one of those ‘High Beach, John? If I wanted fuckin' High Beach, I wouldn't start from here’ scenarios. All we learn, from another lunchtime casual, one-eyed and three pints in, is: ‘There used to be a road. I think. Once.’

Perhaps the same road that rose out of nowhere to greet Clare's old friend Charles Lamb in his Enfield retirement? John Taylor wrote to Clare, one of those weary lectures about unsold stock, delays in publication, texts to be edited, censored, aborted. ‘Poor Charles Lamb is dead – perhaps you had not heard of it before. He fell down and cut his face against the Gravel on the Turnpike Road, which brought on his Erysipelas, and in a few days carried him off.’