Edge of the Orison (36 page)

When I attended school in Walton, there was a caretaker whose name might have been Hadman. My second sister, born after being rehoused and moved from Marholm, now lives in Whittlesey… One curious point here is that her husband's family owned a bungalow in the Eastfield district of Peterborough, which meant that for many years they were the next-door neighbour to Edward Storey. Before he went into adult education, Storey held a clerical position with Hotpoint, so would have worked in a similar profession, and the same office (probably a large one) as my father. Storey, as you know, turned into a Clare biographer, so there is a somewhat sophisticated and circuitous later connection.

Contemporary poets reiterate Clare's experience: and in doing so discover themselves. Myth becomes truth. Modernist ‘open field poetics’, as proposed by Charles Olson, defy the system of enclosures imposed on language by formalist reactionaries. Rip out hedges, fences, prohibitions, for a method of reading the world from horizon to horizon. No ceilings in time. No knowledge that may not be accessed and inserted. Such metaphors are wasted on Peterborough, a town without irony. How else could they boast of a John Clare pub, library and – theatre?

This is not a comfortable town to negotiate. The market element has been overwhelmed by a retail labyrinth, the Queensgate Shopping Centre: ‘John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Argos, Bhs, Boots, Waitrose, Virgin Megastore plus ioo other shops in a relaxed environment.’ An arcade project owing more to Walt Disney than Walter Benjamin. Solitaries and reluctant groups stagger around the notional centre in search of a quorum, enough ciderheads to make up a mob.

I'd never before witnessed a feeding frenzy of the kind encouraged by an eat-till-you-burst-for-a-fiver Chinese restaurant. Genetically-modified birthday kids (English faces, pale and crumpled, on American bodies) take it in turns to stand under an ice-cream dispenser, mouths agape; visibly inflated on a teat of soft yellow slurry. Saturday-night dudes, cowboy boots and string ties, waddle in from the backwoods, to cruise trays of sticky batter-meats and fish balls. They compete to see how many circuits they can achieve before they are too swollen to get out of the chair. The room disappears into a dense flatus of incense, aftershave, sweet gravy,
cola-wind and tobacco: sucked between mouthfuls as an appetite depressant, to make room for the next shovel-load of chemical swill.

Sated with remorseless good times, we retreat: windblown, rain-pelted, down parodically generous pedestrian precincts that advertise their total absence of content. A chainstore is peddling discounted first editions of J. G. Ballard's
Millennium People
for a couple of pounds; local scavengers are not agile enough to bend down to check the price ticket. The only sure method of finding your hotel, even when it is fifty yards away, is to call a cab. But that's impossible. Cabbies are too smart to risk picking anything off the streets at the weekend. They run a shuttle service from outlying villages to city-centre clubs, booze barns with a door policy barring customers wearing anything more elaborate than lip-piercings and Elastoplast. There is no transport when you need it, but scratch your ear, lift your knuckles from the paved highway, and a mini-cabber will bundle you into his vehicle with the alacrity of a Beirut kidnapper.

We had a number of items to check before we left town: the enclosure maps of Glinton in the Peterborough Library, the premises of the photographer who made card portraits of Anna's unknown relatives, the butcher's shop once operated by the family of Anna's first cousin, Judy Brown. But the real attraction, for me, was the ‘small collection of ornamental snuffboxes’ that Jonathan Bate says is ‘still held by Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery Society’. The boxes were among the ‘very few possessions’ left at John Clare's death. Random gifts. Scarcely enough to fill a suitcase.

The library was no problem. I could have spent hours poring over maps, but I knew by this point that there were no Hadmans in Glinton before the early twentieth century. A short walk through the town demonstrated that the premises of Thomas Blackman, ‘Artist Photographer, Miniature & Portrait Painter of St John Street’, had vanished. The artist photographer (‘portraits coloured to order’) placed himself between the old cattle market and the cathedral, in the expectation of catching farmers. Anna's relative, the old
gentleman with the snowy Shaker beard, is undergoing an ordeal, an ordeal of retention. His eyes have black holes at the centre of the irises, holes in a statue. The ‘artistic’ part of the transaction is discovered in a wispy loss of focus around the edges, leaving the rustic patriarch afloat: a very material spirit summoned at a seance. The old lady in her cane chair, caped like a widow, clutches a dead flower. She doesn't look at the camera, at us. She meditates on mortality, the uplifting text that will be cut into her gravestone.

BROWNS SPECIALITY MEATS are also defunct. The family firm has decamped to Stilton, on-line butchery, quality provisions for the carriage trade. Peterborough no longer sustains a connection between Hadman farmers and Hadman butchers, between relatives to north and south of the Nene. The market and the big agricultural shows were once the meeting place: business, gossip, society. Lawrie Hadman, her father's older brother, so Anna discovers, worked as a butcher in Whittlesey before he took up farming in Glinton. He trained in Chelmsford. We saw the photograph: arcades of meat, hooked herds, naked chickens, all-too-human pigs (like headless clients of the Chinese restaurant).

That leaves the museum and art gallery. Which is closed, while an exhibition is being hung. But I persist; I get somebody on the phone, discover the hour when we'll be allowed in. The grey stone building is forbidding, information is given out with some reluctance. Clare's pathetic goods have been imprisoned here, and can be viewed, if we insist on it, as part of a journey between one gallery and another. ‘Tiny tots are welcome in our award-winning
Mini Museum
, while adults can get nostalgic in the
Period Shop
.’

The reason I'm so keen to view the snuffboxes is that Anna, who is not by temperament a collector or hoarder, makes an exception for small boxes. It began when we travelled together and I insisted on ducking into used-book shops ‘for a few moments’. Which might stretch into hours: back rooms, cellars, circuitous conversations endured in procession towards improbable treasure. Anna hit the junk shops, usually in the same part of town, and trawled for curious boxes. Bone, brass, plastic. Round, square, oval.

Old Soke Books in Peterborough worked out well; alongside the books were a few curios, tins, figurines. Anna fell for a pair of wooden Chinese puzzle boxes. One had a sliding lid with a river scene: beached boat, four trees, distant snow-capped mountain. The boat was heaped with earth, a shape that duplicated the mountain. Inside the box were fifteen numbered squares; which, exploiting a single free space, could be manoeuvred into a correct sequence. The second, larger box was more interesting. It came from the same source: another river scene, in marquetry, on the lid. Two moored craft, one tree with two branches, one boat under sail, distant snow-capped mountain. The trick was to open the box by sliding various chequered panels.

Anna couldn't crack it. The bookman watched her struggle, then revealed the secret. A blindman had solved the mystery. I didn't ask why a blind person would be visiting a bookshop that didn't run to items in Braille. By touch, the puzzle was solved. Inside the box was another puzzle: a board divided into complex shapes that had to be fitted together.

Under some pressure, Anna lent the puzzle to a relative, who wanted to try it on a wealthy patron, a collector of such things: private press fine editions, games, watches, pens. The man died. The collection was dispersed. Anna's puzzle vanished. That is the fate of such objects. All puzzles are metaphors. Moves must be made blind, like the clicking of prayer beads, hand gestures, mudras: the purpose is to stretch time. Solutions are meaningless. Unthinking motions of the fingers are everything.

Clare's snuffboxes would offer a remote trace of the man's heat; hands rubbing against wood or brass. In Northampton, I had seen the books. This was more intimate: touch without premeditation, reflex gestures when the mind is elsewhere. Personal objects exposed for public exhibition, trophies of a city's self-satisfied display.

The term ‘snuffbox’ has a double meaning: Thanatos and Eros. Death and love. Wooden casket. Pudendum. Sniffing and snuffing. Clare relished such word play. In High Beach, stirred by prurient
fantasies, taking on the Byronic rags of
Don Juan
, he pictured Lord Melbourne violating the ‘snuffbox’ of little Victoria, the new queen. He imagined himself, in Oedipal pride, as the queen's father: Ubu in madness. An asylum clown polishing the box which is both a receptacle for his own ashes and the gamey delta of his daughter's sexuality. (The daughter who has replaced him on the throne of England.)

When Lucia Joyce was treated by Jung, the Swiss analyst employed a woman called Cary Baynes, who had trained at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, to act as her companion. Lucia didn't respond to Jung. She found his insistence on remembering dreams a nuisance. Lucia preferred Baynes: who talked about leucocytes by their proper name. The beginning of transference occurred, so the companion decided, when Lucia presented her with a small hand-painted box.

Blood again. It was discovered that Lucia suffered from what Joyce called ‘a superabundance of white corpostles’. ‘Hers is not a disease at all,’ he wrote to Giorgio, ‘but a symptom.’ Misdiagnosis and failure to attend to the obvious set Lucia on the path to Northampton. Undisclosed dreams. Dreams from which there was no escape.

Anna, when I first knew her, husbanded her energies; ‘pale and interesting’ was her number. That was what she had been told, amid the din of family life, and she went with it: rests after lunch, pints of stout to counter a supposed iron deficiency. Periods of Keatsian languor were justified by vague (and hopeless) medical opinion. All too soon, she would be running a classroom of cadet Hackney gangstas, a house, three children of her own; an improbable regime beginning at six in the morning with housework and concluding with a full family meal. There were, there had to be, periods of ‘collapse’. Blood was tested and found to be deficient in red corpuscles. Platelets were counted at regular intervals. Pills prescribed. Then, much later, came a frightening episode, nightmarish, unexplained: darkness pressing too hard, difficulty in stepping outside. Fortunately, Anna's sister recognised the symptoms: thyroid. More pills, calm restored, condition managed. But it is
very easy to see how the mechanics of blood, misread, lay a person, often a woman, open to barbaric treatment and physical abuse.

Tim Chilcott, introducing
John Clare: The Living Year, 1841
, speaks of ‘tortured clutches at a sense of dissolving identity… counter-pointed against perceptions of complete clarity and ordinariness’. In these unpredictable shifts of perception lies the terror: visionary instants, unbidden voices. Dictation the scribe struggles to clarify.

‘Cun-ys’ and snuffboxes occupy Clare's High Beach satires: ‘The snuff went here and the snuff went there.’ Men are prisoners and women are ravished: ‘All that map of childhood is overcast.’ The spire of the forest church points straight to heaven. Clare sits in a clearing, waiting for gypsies, taking a pinch of snuff.

Prince Albert goes to Germany & must he

Leave the queens snuff box where all fools are strumming

From addled eggs no chicken can be coming

I wrote to Peterborough Museum's ‘Access Officer: Curator-Human History’ enquiring after Clare's collection. ‘Thank you for your letter,’ she replied.

I'm afraid we have only the one snuffbox, which is on display. Also, I cannot find anything in our index that refers to Clare's walk from Epping Forest to Northborough… Public access to the manuscripts is tightly controlled and usually only academic researchers are able to utilise them in a useful way. We would require a reference from your academic affiliation for access to manuscripts. Two weeks' notice is also required for appointments.

Two weeks we don't have. I settle for Clare's rather sad display case. The solitary box sits alongside an open copy of
The Village Minstrel
. The ends have been rounded: it's a wooden book. ‘Snuffbox which belonged to John Clare and was later owned by his relative John Clare Billing, and then passed to L. Tebbutt of Stamford,’ says a typed card.

The wood is dark and highly polished. The lid slides open by way of an indentation in the shape of a human fingernail.

We retreat for the night to the Bull Hotel. What do we have to show for our Peterborough researches? Anna's sense of being draped with Werrington relatives: shrunken heads on her shoulders, fox masks. Names and dates from mildewed tombs. A family tree for John Clare supplied by Peter Moyse of the Clare Society. Six rolls of exposed film. And my instinct to move out, start walking: we must try to follow Clare's voyage down the Nene, from the town bridge to Wisbech.

Among the papers, spread across the executive-style desk, is the photocopy of a newspaper in smudged type. An obituary notice, for ‘The Late Mr. William Rose of Glassmoor’, published under the heading: ‘Whittlesey Farmer's Funeral’. A note has been written in the margin: ‘Father of Grandmother Hadman.’

Checking Clare's family tree, I made a potential discovery. On the line descended from the poet's daughter, Eliza Louisa, by way of another John Clare (Sefton), came a Rose. Dorothy Muriel, born 1926 and still alive, married a certain Eric Rose. Could Geoffrey Hadman's vaunted connection be made through his Glinton grandmother, Florence Rose?

The Roses, so the obituary made clear, lived to the south of the Nene, on the fringes of land recovered from Whittlesey Mere. We would investigate the district tomorrow as part of our river walk. William Rose, Anna's great-grandfather, was another farmer, another churchwarden (at the Angle Bridge Mission). Two hundred people attended his funeral: Roses, Hadmans, Robinsons, Reads, Rowells, Fountains. The coffin, of ‘plain oak with brass furniture’, was contracted to Messrs Rose and Son.