Edge of the Orison (33 page)

That's as far as we can take it. Gravestone and family album. Two photographs of Florence Hadman with her three children: Florence Mary, Lawrence William (‘Lawrie’) and Geoffrey. (The workforce at ICI called him ‘Skipper’.) Florence Hadman isn't happy about this performance, kids gussied up, hair brushed; in bright sunshine, backed against a bush. In the first photograph,

Geoffrey is a baby, perched on his mother's knee; bemused, bald, affronted by the impertinent camera. A little old man, dignity ruffled. By the second photo – it must have been an annual agony, same cast, same positions – he is about five or six; the only one of the trio who has not yet perfected the Hadman scowl. A tall, solid, beetle-browed gang. With low tolerance for nonsense of any kind. The five-bar gate places them on Rectory Lane, looking at the apple orchards on the far side.

Here, at last, is something to work with. We pass the Blue Bell pub (tricked out with antique farm implements), and start down
the lane. Anna notices how the redbrick frontage of the family house has been grafted on to the armature of a much older cottage. A metal fire-insurance badge is visible between the upstairs windows. Anna recalls the rectory, now a private house, as a rather gloomy children's home. The fields beyond may have been where the Auster landed, bumped to ground. Leaving her deaf for the walk to the Red House. Unable to hear her own footfalls.

As we come out of the field, on to the busy road, across from the Community College, Anna realises that she has lost her brooch. A Celtic silver device, zoomorphic, swans (like the Peakirk village sign) entwined – and representing, so the leaflet says, ‘shape-shifting abilities, transformation in the physical and spiritual sense’. A small sacrifice to our quest, another Barnack vanishing (to set alongside Renchi's Beckettian boots). Brooches disappear and are replaced like the children of the rural poor. The clip of silver coins I remembered from Sandymount was stolen, the usual toll, shortly after we moved to Hackney, along with most of Anna's inherited jewellery. A replacement brooch went the day Tate Modern opened on Bankside. Now this: no glint in hedge or gutter, as we retrace our steps. I'm sure the brooch dropped off as we clambered around the ‘Hills and Holes’; to be found, in years to come, by a metal-detecting enthusiast. A nice wink to the culture: limestone molehills revised as New Grange theme park. A pocket of renegade Celts rafting up the Nene. An attraction to rival Flag Fen.

As tourists offer boots and brooches to unsuspecting fields, so chunks of Barnack stone rise from their long hibernation in Whittlesey mud. Blocks designated for Ramsey and Ely shake free from the peat, to parade their thirteenth-century brands. Peter Ashley, English Heritage researcher, told me that after he'd photographed the Ramsey blocks at Engine Farm he was drawn to search for other Barnack stones, sunk with their rafts or dropped over the side. The Old Plough Inn, between Ely and Prickwillow, so he discovered (from a book by A. K. Astbury, called
The Black Fens
), was ‘built partly of Barnack stone which never completed its journey
by river to the site of Ely Cathedral’. With this reference for a guide, Ashley jumped in his car. ‘I did go out on to the Fens at Prickwillow,’ he said. ‘And found that pub (now a home), with very obvious blocks of medieval masonry built into it. It now sits right out on the Fen away from all roads except a grassy track that was once the Ely to Norwich road.’

Ashley photographed one more thing: a pond with a little rushy island which contained a great church bell. Another drowned item dragged from the depths: to be rung when a novice entered a convent, bride of Christ. The bell's provenance was surprising. It had escaped from an Iris Murdoch novel (the TV dramatisation). And found its rightful place: a real fake. A relic slowly acquiring mystique by erasing its previous history, sitting mute on a piece of damp ground.

We settled in the pub with papers and documents we'd scrounged or been given by relatives. Val Hetzel, tracking back through local records, came up with a list of the owners of the Red House and its surrounding land.

At enclosure claimed by Mrs Elizabeth Webster.

1825 John Webster of Thorney sold to Walker.

1841 J. Webster willed it to Mrs Frances Walker and died 1850.

1861 Under the will was sold, purchased by Ancell Ball who built on to the house Eastward.

1889 A. Ball died, sold to R. Vergette.

1899 R. Vergette sold to J. T. Smith – Mr Smith bequeathed it to his cousin, Mrs Fanny Warwick.

1909 Mrs Warwick died, buried at Glinton. Purchased by Mr Hadman for…

Amount lost. William Hadman was established, not as a tenant farmer, but as the owner of the property, and the land behind it, running back to the road, and beyond. Our understanding of the
farmers and how they operate is becoming clearer; the social gulf that yawned between the Joyces and the Clares (who could aspire, at best, to cottager status). Families with push, Elizabeth Webster as prime example, went for land at the time of the enclosures. If the children of farmers spurned Glinton, the power base was lost.

Clare's satire in ‘The Parish’ shows what he thought of these shifts:

That good old fame that farmers earned of yore

That made as equals not as slaves the poor

That good old fame did in two sparks expire

A shooting coxcomb and a hunting Squire

And their old mansions that was dignified

With things far better than the pomp of pride

...

These all have vanished like a dream of good

And the slim things that rises where they stood

Are built by those whose clownish taste aspires

To hate their farms and ape the country squires

So William Hadman owned the Red House. He farmed. His eldest son, Lawrie, took over the property. His daughter Mary had a written contract to cook for the men. Talking to Lawrie's daughter, Judy, who now lived on the west side of the Ai, we discovered that her grandfather had not always been a farmer. He started as a forester. Judy supplied us with copies of William Hadman's obituaries. ‘A Glinton Worthy,’ says one of them. Chairman of the Parish Council, churchwarden, school manager, special constable. Member in good standing of the Peterborough Unionist Club. Stalwart of village bowls. Keeper of a herd of Lincoln Red dairy cattle. A man famed for his hospitality. Nothing he enjoyed more than feeding friends and neighbours, until they couldn't move from the table. His pet name for the Red House was ‘Starvation Cottage’.

Judy had her grandfather's chair, decorative mirrors from the Glinton house. And, with that chair, presence. Looking over the photographs, in her kitchen, fleshed out the family portrait. We
learnt about social ambitions, of the sort John Clare noted, that went with the rise in status. Judy's mother was Madge. That was her name. Geoffrey and Mary Hadman decided it would never do. They rechristened her: Margaret. Aunt Margaret she became. Judy, on the other hand, was born Juliet Mary. Then rebranded to fit with a perceived notion of what she should be. Lawrie, it seems, never wanted to take over the farm. He trained as a butcher.

Identities can be assigned to figures in the group gathered in the Red House garden. The rather elegant woman in the back row, beside Geoffrey, was a London friend. Anna thinks she sponsored the publication of the unique copy of her father's lost poems. Judy, as a young girl, admired this woman so much that she wanted to become her: the style, the clothes, the perfume. She took to hiding a stone in her shoe, so that she could imitate the rather sexy limp. Anna, in her turn, was captivated by Judy's kidney-shaped dressing table, with the pink frills; make-up, lipstick, preparations for a party. Her very own mirror.

Family photographs present a severely edited narrative of the past. As if all life happened against that hedge, in that garden: in sunlight. One by one, the participants disappear. Geoffrey Hadman, blazer, cap crumpled awkwardly in left hand, takes up the pose he has practised from childhood. Shuffle the wilting pack of images in any order, reverse time. Anna, as a baby, with mother and aunt. Cats, dogs, dolls. Open-top cars. The Auster parked in a field. William and Florence Hadman: bespectacled, hatted. Their pipe-smoking son, much taller than his father, rests a hand on the old man's shoulder. Infant Anna, in Churchillian siren suit, braves Rectory Lane with her cousin Judy.

Anna's brother William told us about the only Hadmans he had discovered. One worked for the railway. His name is published on a wall, between Hackford (S) and Hale (E): the memorial to the war dead in King's Cross Station. (‘To the immortal memory of the men of the Great Northern Railway who gave their lives in the Great War.’) So Hadman (E) escaped from his home country, on at least one occasion, to die in a foreign land.

Alan Moore disputes the fable about Boadicea being buried under a platform at King's Cross. He thinks she's lying beneath a Northampton mound, returned with honour: like the victorious Margaret Thatcher being landfilled at Grantham. Hadman (E) is no fiction. He is visible to anyone walking between ticket hall and train: black lettering on white marble.

The second rescued Hadman, Oscar, was ambitious. Determined to stretch his horizons, he booked passage on a liner headed from Southampton to New York, pride of the White Star Line. A new beginning in a new country: courtesy of the
Titanic
. He is listed among the survivors. (Further research disproved my notion of Oscar as a country boy, escaping Fenland inertia. Probably German, he shipped out from Cherbourg, giving his destination as: 414 West First Street, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. One of a minority of Third Class male passengers to find a place in a lifeboat, Oscar was picked up by the
SS Carpathia
on 18 April 1912. At which point, bowing modestly, he slips from our story.)

In June 1938, William and Florence Hadman sat for passport photographs; a strange moment to be contemplating a European holiday. Anna isn't sure, but she thinks they had never been abroad before, and that her father, with his affection for Germany, might have been taking them there. Signatures on the documents are clear and firm. William has the high cheekbones, grey moustache, of his grandson and namesake. Steady stare: straight through photographic paper. Through meddlers troubling his memory.

The last item we examined, that day in the Glinton pub, was a copy of William Hadman's birth certificate. Born: 28 December 1872. Registered: 17 January 1873 at Peterborough. Father: Robert Hadman. Rank or profession: cottager. Mother: Louisa Maria Hadman, formerly Devonshire. Place of birth: Werrington, Northants.

That's it, I thought. Move out. Move on. Werrington. Anna winced, she was beginning to flag. ‘We never did a trip with the kids, heading west, without two earthworks, a cathedral and a germ-warfare facility, before breakfast,’ she moaned. The family
learnt to gang up on me. ‘He's reading the country,’ they chorused: as I plunged into a thicket, across a stream, through head-high nettles. They stayed on tarmac. ‘Can dad fetch the car
now
?’ one of them would ask before we negotiated the first incline.

Werrington was where it would begin to connect, the cottager Hadmans and the peasant Clares. John Clare's mother, Ann Stimson, came from Castor; her father was town shepherd. Castor is separated from Werrington by Milton Park. You could form a triangle between Helpston, Werrington and Castor: improvise the rest of the story from that. Hadmans may well have been in Werrington in July 1841; when John Clare arrived, broken down, at the limits of his endurance:

when I got on the high road I rested on the stone heaps as I passed till I was able to go on afresh & bye & bye I passed Walton & soon reached Werrington & was making for the Beehive as fast as I could when a cart met me with a man & a woman & a boy in it when nearing me the woman jumped out & caught fast hold of my hands & wished me to get into the cart but I refused & thought her either drunk or mad but when I was told it was my second wife Patty I got in & was soon at Northborough but Mary was not there neither could I get any information about her further then the old story of her being dead six years ago which might have been taken from a bran new old Newspaper printed a dozen years ago but I took no notice of the blarney having seen her myself about a twelvemonth ago alive & well & as young as ever – so here I am homeless at home & half gratified to feel that I can be happy anywhere

Werrington

Glinton is free of Peterborough, by a breath, but Werrington has been swallowed, split. There are estates, screened highways on the Milton Keynes model, along with the preserved fossil of the original village: a cluster of pubs, a church, the road that Clare travelled. It generally takes longer to drive to Werrington from Glinton than to walk: make an ill-advised turn and the system is unforgiving. Here is another of England's virtual landscapes, a proposal, a drawing laid down over something drowsy but not quite dead: sculpted earthworks, tactful plantings, traffic-calming measures that induce apoplexy. Movement is method. Trust the road and it will carry you to the next retail park, the next Travelodge. The ever-present but teasingly inaccessible cathedral.