Edge of the Orison (17 page)

Premature road rage. The rage of the Turnpike against Islington travellers who don't know where they are going or why: remedial excursionists. A long-distance walk is a serious affair. You shake up
every atom of your being. You arrive, footsore, at your destination: lighter, shorter, hungrier. A stranger to those who stayed at home. Head emptied of old fears. With room made for the new.

From High Beach, Clare contacted his medical adviser, Doctor Darling. ‘Sounds affect me very much and things evil as well [as] good thoughts are continually rising in my mind. I cannot sleep, for I am asleep, as it were, with my eyes open, and I feel chills come over me and a sort of nightmare awake and I got no rest last night.’

What sounds oppressed him from under the duvet of the forest? Acoustic footprints of future roads? Chained patients in outhouses? The bells of Waltham Abbey? Sound is torture. Fish speared in the beaks of cormorants, herons. Owls swooping on field mice. Feet tramping gravel. Sound brings back memories. Doctor Skrimshire, in 1832, applying leeches to Clare's temples. Blistering glasses to the nape of his neck. Cold showerbaths, drenches. A cloth they wrapped around his head, its flabby slap. Grey bandages soaked in brandy vinegar and rainwater. Cutting off breath, squeezing the bone-armature of the skull. Something he can't see, but can hear, dripping slowly, so slowly, into a white bowl.

Swallowed in that verdigris coat, a grub in a cabbage leaf, Clare was the Green Man in London. A pub sign on the move. A drowned thing fished from Whittlesey Mere, mud and straw, limping down Chancery Lane, fending off soot demons. Yellow gash at throat, loose kerchief. At High Beach, he faded. Vanished into the dense foliage of summer trees. He spoke of John Clare as someone quite separate from his present identity. Which was? Unknown. Ahead of him on the road. An empty house waiting for someone to take possession.

Maps are thoughtfully provided by the developers, Fairview, to tell you where you can't go: PRIVATE PROPERTY, NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. Padlocked gates across ancient footpaths. Dry flowers woven into mesh fences. Rain-erased memorial labels. Smeared ink of lost names. WALTHAM POINT NEW 48 ACRE INDUSTRIAL PARK. Tolerated edge-land irrigated by a blurred
section of orbital motorway. Low hills dressed with cemeteries, Jewish burial grounds. Limestone pebbles on granite lids.

As we climb, the forest enfolds us. Cars behave like interlopers, hiccupping over speed bumps. Drivers park and disappear. Empty vehicles, huddled together for reassurance, witness supposed beauty spots; sites neutralised by an excess of gazing. HIGH BEACH: (30).

We have only the feeblest notion of the whereabouts of Matthew Allen's asylums; images in a documentary film, drawings by Rigby Graham. A name on the OS map: Springfield Farm. So we begin at the Royal Oak pub and navigate, blind, from there. Until we achieve: ‘Clare House’. Fancy lettering on a garden gate. A pale blue dish with flowery rim. Clare House is a lodge with mock-Tudor gables. The owner, interrogated, has no knowledge of the poet and seems unsure about the provenance of his home. The lady next door has lived in High Beach ‘for forty-nine years’, we're told, but she's not available. Doesn't answer the door. We try a younger couple, cycling, and get as deep into the forest as a sign for ‘Lippitts Hill’. I'm sure we have the right pond, sluggish, green: Allen's Fair Mead. Or a first hint at the quiddity of the place: muffled sound, vibrations of the city felt through the soles of your feet.

It takes another excursion, accompanied by Anna, to identify the former asylums with any degree of certainty. We try Buckhurst Hill Church, where Clare noticed the boy in the slop frock, the young woman in ‘Darkish Flowerd Cotton Gown’. ‘Bucket Hill’, Clare called it. ‘A place of furze and clouds.’ Another spire: poor substitute for wind-scoured Glinton. No humans on this damp afternoon. A stone angel with a missing head. Pink roses growing from a cracked grave: ‘No Artificial Flowers Permitted.’ Horned snail silver-scripting wet memorial slab.

Tracking Clare's ‘brook without a bridge’ back to forest, Fair-mead is revealed in its present disguise: The Suntrap Field Study Centre. Thicket, pool, notice forbidding unauthorised entry. We snoop, we pry. Rainwater drips from the collars of our raincoats: July as October. Nature studies (woodcraft for recidivists and malefactors) have replaced the trade in lunatics (returned to their
communities). Clare's fascination with creepy-crawlies, fungi, ferns, is now proposed as therapy for a sick city. Revised asylum properties have a sorry atmosphere, the cures have curdled. Solutions are largely concerned with adequate security and raising funds. Business plans, sponsorship, limited opening hours. Placate bureaucracy. And keep a low profile.

Anna helps. She comes with less baggage and no obligation to tease out a narrative. She's perfectly happy to lean for a moment on a gate. Rain brings out the grassy sweetness of the forest. Curtains twitch in plasterboard bungalows, assembled from kit in the wrong place. In expectation of future marine invasion.

Leopards Hill. The Owl pub. Springfield Farm. Anna remembers: stables, a white building. Weatherboards. This was the asylum that housed fifteen females. Springfield, seraglio of forbidden and dangerous women, was a zone of peculiar fascination for Clare:

Nigh Leopards Hill stand All-ns hells

The public know the same

Where lady sods & buggers dwell

To play the dirty game

Three off-white enamel troughs, raised on bricks, in a stable yard. ‘Butler's sinks’, Anna calls them. Ripped from a cold pantry and deposited here. Refreshment for horses, returned from their forest rides. The sinks might be remnants of Allen's madhouse, water treatment in open air. To cool the heat of inappropriate lusts. Clare's fevered imagination.

A man emerges from the stables. He is interested in our interest. Like many who congratulate themselves on being out here, fifteen miles from London, cushioned by greenery, this person has a story to peddle. An incident to validate his tentative mortgage on history. (Thereby enhancing property values.)

The attic of Springfield Farm, creaking boards, warped window frame, is haunted. The women's dormitory, he calculates, of Allen's day. A ‘very old’ book is kept there. He doesn't recall its name. The
book is open. It is not a bible, one of those family bibles, but it's just as thick. Although the open pages are secured with four black stones, it doesn't help. Every night, without fail, the pages turn. Every morning a new passage is revealed.

High Beach to Broxbourne

A green as dull as pewter: Epping Forest at first light. Stooped over dripping foliage, Renchi Bicknell uses a cheap magnifying glass, held at various experimental distances from the lens, to mess with the mindset of his camera. We're agreed: High Beach is bindweed, nettles, ankle-tangling fronds jewelled with overnight rain. A chill start. Sky like the skin on cold soup. Chris Petit picked us up in his current Mercedes at five-thirty on the morning of 17 July 2000.

It was decided, and rapidly undecided, to follow Clare as closely as we could, up the Great North Road. Or should we settle for starting with the Lea, then cutting across country, to rejoin the exhausted poet at Stevenage? We would sleep, if we could, in the same places. Our journey would be an approximation, in the spirit of the original 1841 walk, with several fixed points: a private hotel booked at Stevenage, a pub in St Neots, the Bell Inn at Stilton. Anna would be met, under Glinton spire, at four o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth day. No ditch bivouacs, too old for that. No trespassed barns. Renchi had walked, in his youth, from London to Swansea, to the west of Ireland, bedding down where he stopped, woodpiles by the Thames, hostels with vagrants and night-smokers, Welsh mountainsides. Without photographs, and with no companion to confirm a memory stitched from fading highlights, the journey was mythical. Now he discovered our lodgings through the Internet and secured them with credit cards. He was, after all, the co-proprietor of a vegetarian B&B with a panoramic view over the Somerset levels.

Obligatory male scratching and rucksack-shrugging and we move off, stopping every twenty or so paces to wrestle with oversized maps. Once exposed, that's it: the landscape in front of us, a sulkily permissive bridle path, bears no relation to the printed diagram.
We lack those clear pouches official hikers sling around their necks. Our maps, torn, smudged, swollen with rainwater, can never be refolded in the right sequence. Petit would rather have his arm amputated at the elbow, without anaesthetic, than appear in public with an unsightly plastic envelope dangling across his breast on coloured string.

Clare was alone. He cheered himself by treating this section of the walk like a military campaign. He was in the grip of a very convincing delusion: Mary Joyce, his waiting muse, would help him roll up the bad miles travelled on that first coach trip to London. His return would be an unwalking, a reforgetting. He would suffer enough to overlay the particulars of the fantastic London adventure. No more poetry, no more fame. The beginning was deceptively smooth: ‘Down the lane gently… and bye and bye on the great York Road where it was all plain sailing.’

We share his difficulty in setting an orientation. There is no York Road for us, not yet; roads are barriers, the commuter blitzkrieg of the A1037, charging up the flank of King George's Reservoir, ignoring hand-painted signs for off-highway produce, Lea Valley fruit and flowers (imported by containerload from Holland). M25. A10. A hyperactive bifurcation of rivers, navigations and railways. You are meant to
use
these engineering marvels (with or without tickets) and not treat them as an obstacle course. London snorts human meat through metalled tubes. And later exhales the de-energised husks, its wage slaves.

Three men in a broken file, three projects under a single flag of convenience, complicates the first mile of the John Clare memorial tour. Renchi sees this walk as the validation of a shift from cataloguing into unifying vision. Clare's seizures, his mimetic fits, were emblems of integrity. Images derived from the journey, photographs or paintings, must subvert the taint of calculation, the obligation to record. There should be minimal intervention, Renchi announced, between walker and walk. His return to visionary art mirrors the shift in Clare's work, from modest epics of noticing, to troubled gazing, to possession by the unquiet spirits of Lord Byron
and Jack Randall. ‘I've stood and looked upon the place for hours,’ he writes of the High Beach pond.

Petit, on the other hand, glances at his miniaturised screen, held out from the body, only to confirm the worst: tumbling cultural stocks, property market in freefall. He disdains
raw
imagery and requires every frame to look like a quotation, a retake. His task, as he sees it, is to eliminate any trace of human awkwardness, material that might be mistaken for the work of inferior or overpraised rivals. He stands, legs apart, struggling to devise a record of something tangential to the thrust of narrative. Exposure blown, focus twisted: a revenge on cinema. Another step towards relinquishing his iconic status as a film-maker who doesn't film. Movement, he decides, is the only solution: new location, new life. Art without the artist. Unmediated light: as witnessed, by preference, from a car window (the higher the better). River, sea. Desert, distant mountain. Fenland skies. Especially the area around Denver Sluice.

Recall his 1993 novel,
Robinson
:

I found a road. It was straight and flat, the unchanging landscape an endless grid of drainage canals and black fields. No cars passed. There was a line of trees on the edge of the mist and I counted them as a way of making progress. Sometimes the road disappeared under water, and the surrounding fields became lakes. Then the landscape was gone altogether, leaving me nothing except a feeling of acute physical discomfort. I was wet to the skin and shivering. Blisters grew on my heels.

The keynote for our walk had been established. Petit was reluctant to advance, unwilling to commit anything to tape. Renchi, preparing for the worst, crammed rainsuits into a bulging rucksack. He adjusted his piratical red bandanna: GENUINE / U.S.C.L. AUTHENTIC / (Est.1957). I relished the itch of future blisters. And anticipated a greasy spoon breakfast.

Setting off down the track that runs alongside the forest bungalows, our private methods of remembering where we are soon have us spread out like fastidious stalkers. We manage the first
Clare trope: getting ourselves lost. And before we have advanced a mile from the former asylum. The point is that the ground over which we walk has to concur with three very different points of view: the spiritual, the aesthetic – and the fetish for delayed narrative. For digression.

‘This is a world,’ Chris later reported (in a proposal for a triumphantly unmade film), ‘in which meaning is subject to constant reinterpretation, where the conventional boundaries – most noticeably between fact and fiction – are questioned, as is the method, in a process which depends on a series of visual and verbal puns.’

Puns are mercifully few, now that our former photographer, Marc Atkins, has taken himself off to Paris. But we're overstocked in metaphors. And symbols. The owl is one of them. The Owl pub on Lippitts Hill.

The Leicestershire painter Rigby Graham, doing his Clare walk as part of a documentary film, was much taken by this spot: dripping field, cottage with electricity poles and wires. The film's director, Charles Mapleston, announced that the Essex Man boozer was indeed ‘Clare's local’. (Where pubs were concerned, Clare's locals were anywhere he happened to be passing.) Local the Owl undoubtedly is, in terms of proximity to Fairmead; and local in the broader sense of representing the spirit of place. The pub looks out on a booster mast and a secure ‘Metropolitan Police Firearms Training’ area.

WHEN THE ORANGE FLAG IS FLYING THERE IS A POSSIBILITY OF SUDDEN LOUD NOISE FROM THIS CAMP.

Ill-considered obscenery usurps every hectare of ground within a day's walk of Aldgate Pump. The Owl is an excursionist pub with wooden outdoor tables, kids welcome. It has a nominal garden in which squirrels and pigeons compete for burger traces, hopping from perch to perch. There is a play area for which the management accepts no responsibility. A fire-hydrant-red helicopter with Arab-zapping rocket rays. A stainless-steel sculpture like an autopsy tray. Barbecue spits coagulated with thick black fat. The heady stink of
yesterday's good times dissipated by cordite and diesel and fresh horse manure.