Edge of the Orison (32 page)

Reading the Beckett biography, I came to understand how relationships are based on shared topography, not mere accidents of blood. Beckett had preceded us to the asylums of London's orbital fringe. Through his friendship with Geoffrey Thompson, he arranged to visit the Bethlem Royal Hospital at Beckenham (where Thompson worked as a Senior House Physician). This was old Bedlam, twice removed; first from Bishopsgate, then from Lambeth. He penetrated secure wards, viewed ‘melancholics, motionless and brooding, holding their heads or bellies according to
type’. Years later, I walked through those gates with Renchi. The expedition was part of our tour around the M25; a direct line from the Millennium Dome to Clacket Lane Services. Samuel Beckett was ahead of us, every step of the way: his silence, his eagle stare (the poster portrait, in the alcove outside the bathroom, that terrified my children).

Before we left town, we made an attempt on St Peter's Church. Once again, Beckett beat us to it. James Knowlson reports that, after the cricket match against Northampton, Sam took to the streets. ‘Instead of going off whoring or drinking in the local pubs with the others, he went on his own around local churches.’

A key is obtained, without difficulty, through the window of the pub. It's that kind of morning: bright sun, beds of lavender scenting soft air. Malfate in remission. The church, under threat of restoration, is balanced between shafts of light, shadowy recesses: past worshippers, present silence. Romanesque arches. Celtic beasts. This is somewhere in which to sit, while the mind is cleared of its froth and babble.

A memorial bust, all knobble and lump, takes me by surprise. Renchi, in his epic walks across England, gathers up chips of chalk, slate, flint. They are incorporated into his paintings as part of the meaning, the weight of the journey. The presiding spirit, on these jaunts, is visionary engineer and duff poet William Smith. Who was responsible, as Simon Winchester would have it, for the ‘map that changed the world’. The colours of this 1815 chart are those of a living body, after the skin has been stripped to expose rivers of pulsing nerves and fibres.

TO HONOUR THE NAME OF WILLIAM SMITH, L.L.D. THIS MONUMENT IS ERECTED BY HIS FRIENDS AND FELLOW LABOURERS IN THE FIELD OF BRITISH GEOLOGY

William Smith, stalker of the limestone causeway, Bath to Lincoln, died in Northampton. And was memorialised in a locked church, across the road from the hotel ibis. An obituary is carved, in capitals, on a marble tablet. Born: 23 March 1769 (at Churchill in Oxfordshire). Works on collieries, canals. In 1815, he publishes his geological map. The artfully delineated strata come at the period of enclosures. Pinks, greys, greens: England divided like the villages of Helpston and Glinton.

The Jurassic Highway drew Smith, as we had been drawn to investigate the mysteries of the M25. His nephew reported: ‘In the winter of 1819 Mr Smith, having perhaps more than usual leisure, undertook the walk from Lincolnshire into Oxfordshire.’ He intended ‘to pass along a particular line through the counties of Rutland, Northampton, Bedford and Oxford’. He listened to ‘odd stories of supernatural beings and incredible frights which were narrated by the villagers’. And as he walked, like Renchi, he picked up stones at the roadside; even the ‘dull red sandstone found in unexceptional middle-English cities like Northampton’. Pedestrian excursions of ‘fifty miles or so’ were ‘a casual stroll’ for this driven man.

It was the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay who provided a verse tribute at the geologist's anniversary dinner in 1854. ‘To Father Smith we owe our thanks/For the history of a few stones.’

Travelling home from Oxfordshire, Smith's coach stopped in Northampton – where he chose to lodge for a few days with his old friend George Baker. A cold ‘settled on his lungs’. He died, 28 August 1839, and was buried, with due ceremony, in St Peter's Church.

We packed up to move out: a last Clare walk, before Renchi returned to Somerset. We would make a circuit, Glinton to Crow-land Abbey, to Market Deeping, to Northborough, back to Glinton. Alan Moore, reflecting on the evening's talk, rang the ibis, telling us to go to the crossroads of Marefair, Gold Street and Horse Market, and to look downhill. We would see the place where St Gregory located the centre of England. Gregory, it seems, made
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The
Northampton Chronicle
fleshes out the story: ‘Visiting the supposed spot where Christ was crucified he noticed an unusual shaped stone projecting from the ground. Scraping it out he discovered an ancient stone cross just 10 inches long.’ An angel ordered him to plant the cross in Northampton: on the spot where he was subsequently buried. The notion of ‘centre’ is a spiritual conceit, significant for local mystics. The ‘true’ centre of the English landmass, according to geographers, is a little closer to the territory from which Anna's ancestors emerged.

We drive to Barnack, to explore the ancient quarries, the ‘Hills and Holes’: a favourite walk of the orchid-hunting Clare. And of Renchi's father, Peter. Memories flood back. As we walk, Renchi recalls those conversations. Butterflies. Thorn bushes. Healed declivities from which stone for Peterborough Cathedral was excavated. Rafts on the Nene. Cambridge colleges lying in wait, already formed, beneath a thin carpet of soil. Miniature hills on which to catch unexpected views.

After paying our respects to Helpston and Glinton, we strike out, down North Fen, towards Clare's bridge; and away, birds rising affronted from bare fields, to Crowland. Renchi worries that he has left his boots in Barnack: in the church with that curious grave, a stone palm tree lying on the ground. I brood on the dissolution of my quest but decide that it doesn't matter. Touring Northampton, church to church, laid down a pattern that activated a series of overlapping narratives. We must walk them out, empty-headed in an empty landscape. Searching for Anna's Hadman relatives, I found Beckett. Listening for Clare, I heard Lucia's silence. Trudging beside water, under unforgiving skies, we hope that our twinned stories will loop back on themselves; bringing us to that unknown place we must learn to recognise.

REFORGETTING

& we often see clouds which we identify by their curling up from the orison in seperate masses as gass clouds which ascend into the middle sky & then join the quiet journey other clouds & are lost in the same colour.

John Clare (Northborough. October/November 1841)

Glinton

Clare: Farewell, dear Mrs Joyce. We shall return with tales to tell. (
Pauses
)

One more thing before we depart. You mentioned my travels earlier and spoke of my home with a certain familiarity. I was wondering, do you have family in Glinton or Helpston?

John Mackintosh,
A Song of Summer

Commentators assert that Samuel Beckett, in
Krapp's Last Tape
, drew on memories of Peggy Sinclair: ‘a girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform’. The association is presumptuous and unnecessary. I remember, I have the photograph in my hand, the three-quarter-length tweed coat, leather collar, Anna wore when I took her to the ‘Hills and Holes’ at Barnack: hoping that she could give me the names of the wild flowers, the bushes. I saw instead how much returning to this part of the world meant. The animation that came with the road from Stamford to Helpston. The pleasure she derived from walking the mounds. Barnack was a quiet, moneyed village with handsome church and vicarage (traces of Charles Kingsley).

Coming off the Ai, away from London: the lift in the landscape, before the falling away into flatness, is an exhilaration. We've given ourselves three days to sort out the business of the Hadmans and Glinton. We'll start at the family grave, St Benedict's Church, then work across to the Red House, before making a circuit of the village. What we understand, from the modest heights of Barnack, is the way Glinton functioned: cattle brought down from the hills to feed on rich summer pastures, ground recovered from water. Beds of mint. Hemp from which shoes were made. Dampness and flooded fields the perpetual winter condition. How the young Clare
moaned about his sodden feet when he tried working as a gardener at Woodcroft Castle.

Guided by Glinton historian Val Hetzel – who produced enclosure maps, copies of parish registers – we learnt that the Red House stood alongside a pen for strayed cattle. There were two cottages in Rectory Lane: a policeman occupied one of them, the other was a reading room. The Hadmans owned no fields at the time of the enclosures, neither were they landowners in 1886. Websters were active. They intermarried with Vergettes. James Joyce put together a nice parcel of land, a strip here, a patch there. He lived at the Fen edge, beside the path where Mary Joyce is supposed to have kept company with Clare.

The village spreads like a stain, out from the church, on its green island. Tenant farmers, satirised by Clare, were the coming men: active, energetic, socially ambitious. There was no sentiment for cottage life, nor any aspect of heritage standing in the way of immediate profit. One of the Webster properties was a Custom House, occupied by the military; decent quarters for officers, dormitory for other ranks. They patrolled the rivers and dykes, to prevent the movement of contraband by water (there were no serviceable roads).

The Titmans, the most recent of the farming families, so Mrs Hetzel told us, were parish and county councillors. They were sufficiently well informed about Peterborough's coming status as a ‘New Town’, about legislation forbidding the replacement of thatched roofs with Collyweston slate, to buy up and rapidly tear down examples of the picturesque (the Glinton equivalent of Clare's cottage). Bungalow developments and convenience stores prepared the way for Glinton to be absorbed into Peterborough: a desirable satellite accessed by dual carriageway. Farmers become developers. Or they vanish, disperse, lose their nerve.

We couldn't turn right into Glinton: flooded road. The journey from Helpston, a reprise of my original walk, was fouled up by a system of roundabouts that try to suck everything into Peterborough's
gravitational field. Clare's trudge home from the village school has been overwhelmed by superstores, retail parks, exhaust-replacement centres. I prompt Anna, looking out of the car at naked fields, to remember where the Auster landed. She can't. An area known as the ‘Stacks’ was part of the Hadman farm, but she can't place it with certainty. Perhaps the field sliced off by the road? Peppery-brown mud, combed flat, fenced by brutally hacked hedges. The hum of the bypass.

Denied access to Glinton, we make the long detour by way of Northborough. An opportunity to look for the Clare graves, Patty and her children, in St Andrew's churchyard. Damp morning, no definition in the sky. Church locked, key available from cottage down the street.

I begin, in the dimmest corner, with slabs that are waiting to be broken up, cut to dress a cottage garden. There are no Clares, but plenty of Catlings. Joseph and Elizabeth. And their children. Brian Catling's biological parents come from Sheerness, the Isle of Sheppey, but his adopted family emerged from these parts, floaters. They kept the stock healthy by getting away; pubs, army, ducking and diving in the Old Kent Road and Rotherhithe. The gene pool in some Northamptonshire villages, according to Alan Moore, is so shallow you're lucky to find partners with eyes on different sides of their noses.

Catlings face the east window, while Clares face them, and look beyond: to the sewage works, the River Welland. Flat fields. Straight roads. Crowland Abbey. Gravestones are readdressed like misdirected mail. Names added until there is no space left on the grey envelope. Northborough was a family reunion to which John Clare was not invited. Martha (Patty) Clare is present; the ‘wife’ part of her title faded from the inscription, black paint gone. Sons and daughters are lovingly remembered. Children of children. Definitively asleep. Until prodded by biographers, scholars obliged to set the record straight. Patty's association with Helpston is put aside. The family sinks back into the element from which it emerged. John Clare's fret of language is kept at a safe distance, a couple of
miles down the road, with his father and mother, in St Botolph's churchyard.

I take down some of the names. ‘William P. Clare. July 31st, 1887. Aged 57.’ John's third son. He lived with Patty in Northborough. He married Elizabeth Pateman and had three children. The family owned Poet's Cottage until 1920.

We find no Hadman/Clare intermarriage, before or after the poet. Turner, Morris, Sefton, Stimson, Gorge, Garfet, Woodward, Stapely, Ward, Kettle, Crason, Snow, Preston, Bean, Dove, Bowery, Stallebrass, Humber, Baxter, Hornblow, Pryce, Jones, Griffiths: names to stock a dozen Shakespeare comedies, novels by Dickens. It would be easier, if we had the stomach for it, to find a link to my family. Jack Clare, the poet's second son, worked for the railways as a carpenter. He lived in the Welsh borders with his second wife, fathering six children. My mother had connections in Brecon and Monmouthshire. Then there was the rogue schoolteacher, John Donald Parker, itinerant Scot. Who knows where he came from? Or where he went?

William Hadman, Anna's grandfather, died a month after she was born. He was churchwarden of St Benedict's at Glinton, from 1921 to 1943. His wife, Florence (maiden name Rose), followed him within seven months. Unlike the Websters, Vergettes, Titmans, Joyces, there was only one Hadman grave to be found. It was multiply occupied with memorial prompts. And tended by surviving family members. Gravel combed, lettering repainted, the Hadman grave stood apart from the chaotic enclosure map into which the Glinton churchyard had been converted by the other notable farmers. A strip here, a mound there. Grandiose monuments, broken slabs buried in long grass. Avenues of relatives, shoulder to shoulder, in neighbourly proximity. The Hadmans stood alone. All on one raft. They had come from nowhere, vanished into nothing. There were no uncles, aunts, cousins. The singular grave lacked the soil for elaborate planting; skimmia, roses, chrysanthemums (from garden centres or garages) brought a splash of colour. The
record was clear, but stark. Anna's paternal grandparents. Her father, Geoffrey. Her mother, Joan. Her aunt, Mary. Recorded and remembered on one stone.