Edge of the Orison (35 page)

Further down Hall Lane was a cattle trough and a pond. One night, so Mrs Bunten told us, drawing on a story she'd heard from Albert Plant (who, at a hundred and one, was the oldest man in the village), there had been the sound of a car, a very unusual thing. Albert, a lad in his nightshirt, crept to the window, to witness the sweeping lights of the vehicle. Two passengers: a gentleman and a young woman. Next morning, the woman was found dead, drowned, a supposed suicide, in the cattle trough. Why, Mrs Bunten wanted to know, had this girl, who had been in service and was making her way home, not thrown herself into the pond, which she must have passed?

Another Hadman, John, cousin of Robert, illustrates the darker side of the rural economy: thrive or perish. He married well, so it was thought, the daughter of Edward Pitts the wheelwright; he was set up with a bakery. The shop was in the wrong place. Werrington had two superior establishments. John's bakery foundered: stale loaves, dead sparrows on a string. Moles pegged out like leather kites. John played with Robert Hadman and George Pitts in a brass band (Anna's favourite music). It didn't help.

John published the fact that, like Mr Rawlings of Peterborough, he would supply ‘Members in the Neighbourhood, with Bread at
Sixpence Farthing
the four pound loaf and Flour at a reduction of 2d per stone’. The advertisement didn't work, villagers patronised the bakers they knew. John took out a licence on a Werrington inn, the Wheat Sheaf. Then offered it for sale.

By April 1868 he was again put to the expense of inserting a notice in the newspaper: ‘I, John Hadman, will not be answerable for any Debt or Debts my wife, Francis Charlotte Hadman, may contract after this date.’ An unfortunate marriage, expectations dashed: disaster. Mrs Bunten thinks that John fell into a depression and killed himself. Melancholia drifts from the Fens like clammy autumn mists.

Young Robert Hadman, husband of Louisa Maria, prospered. He moved to the Cherry House Farm on the main road through Werrington: Church Street. The road on which Clare would have come, limping from Peterborough, for his collision with Patty. Perhaps it was the Wheat Sheaf he favoured? Robert would have been six years old at the time; his brother Henry, seven. They might have witnessed the scene, as they roamed the village, looking for sparrows to kill.

Robert managed cherry orchards. His thatched farm, the one I photographed on our walk to the church, was now a restaurant with a Routier badge. The orchards were on the far side of the road. Old Albert Plant recalled being sent as a boy to drive the cherry crop to Peterborough on his cart. ‘Remember, lad; I've counted them,’ stern Mr Hadman used to say. ‘I'll know if you eat so much as one.’ Peterborough was famous for its cherries.

It was a rare Hadman, bankruptcies and brass bands aside, who made it into newsprint: the
Peterborough Advertiser
. But Robert's funeral notice (of 1924) preceded the tributes accorded to his second son, William.

YESTERDAY

In the presence of a sympathetic gathering of mourners and friends, the remains of Mr. Robert Hadman, one of the most well-known and respected inhabitants of Werrington, who passed away on Sunday morning, after a short illness, were laid to rest in Werrington Churchyard yesterday (Thursday) afternoon. Deceased, who was 87 years of age, had taken a prominent part in the life of the district and held many public offices, which he relinquished a few years ago owing to failing eyesight.

He was the second son of the late Mr Robert Hadman, farmer, of Werrington… For many years Mr Hadman was a member of the Werrington Parish Council, and prior to the formation of the Parish Council, acted as Surveyor to the village. For sixty years he was a member of the Werrington Church Choir, and he possessed a very fine tenor voice… He was an original member of the old Greycoats, when he played the euphonium, and had vivid recollections of playing at the wedding of the present Marquis of Huntly to the first Marchioness over 50 years ago. He was in the Corps Band when they went to Bristol and secured a second place in a band contest… He was hon. treasurer of the Werrington Pig Club…

Highlights of the orchard-keeper's life are taken down by a jobbing hack, along with names of those who attended the service. Eight of his twelve children were present. ‘Of the sons,’ remarks the obituarist, ‘William Hadman is a successful farmer at Glinton.’ Alfred is the schoolmaster at Newborough. Percy has taken over
the family farm. Hadmans, Tylers, Machins, Aspittles, Vergettes and Roses are well represented. The coffin is of plain English oak with brass fittings. The funeral arrangements are by Mr A. Stimson. If the Hadmans weren't related to the Stimsons, they were buried by them. And beside them. Generation after generation in the small churchyard of St John the Baptist.

And here the story seems to end. The older Robert came to Werrington, his sons stayed. Some of them kept pubs. One looked after cherry orchards. One tried to peddle tares. Beyond Anna's

great-great-grandfather, the thread was lost. The earliest census record places Robert in Washingley, a settlement on the ridge above Stilton, now excised from the map. Only the photographs in Mrs Bunten's book stay alive: unblinking eyes test our nerve. A conduit into a past that we can read, remake, but never experience.

Standing outside his property at 90 Church Street, Robert Had-man's pride is in being present, in this place. Trim white beard. Euphonium-player's moustache. Striped coat and matching waistcoat. Bow tie. Heavy watchchain. Savagely polished boots. A man of substance. The sleeves of his coat swallow working hands. Behind him, in the darkness of the window, is the faint outline of a watching woman. The white impression of a high collar and an unseen face.

On the same occasion, Robert's daughters are brought out. Strong-featured, tall: not a smile to muster between them. Women

who married butchers. Or became feared school-teachers. Anna identifies with the dark Caroline and the redbrick villa she built, on Church Street; its name still visible above the door: Carisville.

Mrs Bunten, keeper of images, is also a keeper of secrets. A twin. Her mother, so she says, had no idea that a brother was coming. The passion for collecting and collating Werrington family histories
begins with her own. A mystery in her parentage, undiscussed until that moment, was revealed when she was told to look closely at the name-plate on her grandfather's coffin. She learnt that, as with the Clares and many other village families, there were children born out of wedlock. The name on the coffin, the blood she shared, was Stimson.

Peterborough

Peterborough confounds us, as it confounded Clare. The boy who walked from his Helpston cottage to the Glinton turnpike, the cathedral city; down to the river, for his hopeless excursion to Wisbech. And the troubled poet captured by the wife of a bishop. Peterborough is like a dying star, dragging in debris from the surrounding countryside, swallowing villages and villagers. We make several circuits of the asteroid belt, stop-starting, before we crack it: a way of reaching the car park of the Bull Hotel. (Convenient for library, museum and Queensgate Shopping Centre.)

Even in my bookdealing days Peterborough was an occasional visit, two low-key shops, modest prices, modest returns.
Driffs Guide (sic)
, as tricky to negotiate as the Peterborough road system, ignores the town completely and, in later editions, dismisses its premier hutch, Old Soke Books, in a sentence: ‘I'm sure the name of this shop is a mistake, he didn't look like an alcoholic to me.’ A fact worth remarking in the provincial trade.

In more recent times, I received a list of Clare materials from the Peterborough poet and dealer Paul Green. I ordered the 1964 reissue of Frederick Martin's 1865 biography. Martin reports the tale of Clare being taken up by Mrs George Marsh, the German-born wife of the bishop; a lady of irresistible charity who did her best to anchor the poet to a writing desk, while macerating him in the society of the cathedral close. The long-suffering bishop was persuaded at one point to visit Clare's home. ‘It was certainly not a little “Malapropos” that you could not ask your noble visitor to enter your cottage, in consequence of the door being lock'd against you,’ Mrs Marsh chided. They had the misfortune to try Helpston on a day when Patty found her husband unmanageable: drunk as a bookman.

Walking, Martin suggests, soothed and repaired Clare. He was
persuaded to leave the confinement of the Northborough cottage for short excursions, during which the melancholy poet allowed himself to be guided, Lear-like, by his daughters. ‘Daily rambles continued for more than a month, Clare at last seemed almost recovered from his malady.’ Repeated rituals form a circuit in the brain, a mapping confirmed and improved by each new day's stroll: the trivia of village life, the breath of the fields.

He pushed his circuits wider – heath, woods, road – until he found himself caught in the coils of Peterborough. (As Stamford was to Helpston, the destination of youth and ambition, so Peterborough was to Clare's Northborough exile: a symbol of alienation, hapless wandering, doctors and bishops.)

One day, when rambling about on the confines of the cathedral city, he met and was recognised by Mrs. Marsh. The good old lady was delighted to see her poet again, and insisted that he should make up for his former neglect by accompanying her at once, and staying for a few days at the episcopal mansion… To prevent her poet from running away again, [she] kept him constantly in her company. Conversing with him on all subjects, Mrs. Marsh at times thought his remarks rather singular; while his sudden swerving from one topic to another often astonished her not a little. But all this the good lady held to be perfectly natural in a poet and a man of genius.

Clare endured, until it came to the episode in the theatre. Provincial theatres are large events in small towns, social as much as artistic; a question of being seen, of patronising the culture. Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was brought from his room at the London Hospital, to plays and performances. (Not knowing that he himself was the prime exhibit.) John Clare, the trophy of Mrs Marsh, was carried in triumph to a production of
The Merchant of Venice
. He stood up in the ‘box reserved for the wife of the Lord Bishop’, and yelled at Shylock: ‘You villain, you murderous villain!’ His final act of sanity: getting himself ejected from the theatre, the claustrophobia of the cathedral close. Returned to wife and family.

The next morning, Clare went back to Northborough, having received an intimation from Mrs. Marsh that it would be best he should go home at once. He wandered forth from the city in a dreamy mood, and lost his way before he had gone far. Some acquaintances found him sitting in a meadow, near the hamlet of Gunthorpe, and seeing his wild and haggard looks and strange manners, they took him by the arm and led him back to Peterborough.

Gunthorpe is found between Paston and Werrington, Hadman territory. Clare's collapse was a rehearsal for the fugue of escape from High Beach, the incident with the farm cart. Werrington seems to be a pivotal place, between the pull of Peterborough and seductive memories of Glinton spire and Mary Joyce: meadows of tares, pig sheds, future airfields. Hadmans who are not buried in Werrington are buried in Paston: George Edward and his wife, Emily, H. R. Hadman and Lavinia Hadman, Walter John, Jessie, James, Robert Henry, Robert Henry Ford, Edith Carrie, Edward.

Paul Green, a poet living on London Road, Peterborough, down which Clare marched, identifies with the myth. I asked him if, having grown up in the area, he knew of any Hadmans, and he replied:

My identification with Clare is very personal, and nurtured by my living (between the ages of three and seven) in the village of Marholm, some two or three miles from Helpston…

Early indigence in the Marholm and Helpston localities, then a later exposure to poetry, helped bring me to a very personal appreciation, and identification with Clare. He is not simply the local famous poet (with his name given to a pub and a library theatre), but an outsider symbol, or a figure of marginality that shows to what extent a person's origins can descend, without the need for expressive creativity being expunged…