Edge of the Orison (37 page)

Whittlesey, Glassmoor: attractive names. I looked at the map, Whittlesey was a spider trapped between rivers, surrounded by Fens and dykes and ditches. A landscape in which, as Iris Murdoch wrote, ‘it was a marvel to see at last something upright, to see a man’.

Whittlesey

A turn around the cathedral, former burial place of Mary Queen of Scots (dug up and removed to Westminster Abbey), glimpse of the Ramsey Psalter (Fenland illuminated manuscript): and out. Pause to admire the West Front: Lincolnshire limestone from Barnack. Detour around the private quarters of cathedral functionaries, a sequestered zone of gables, lanterns, eccentric roofs, odd windows, arches, weeds, diagonal shadows. And down to the river.

This is the best of Peterborough, sunken gardens, high walls; a view that combines river, town bridge and the triumphalism of the cathedral. A functioning Lido that puts to shame the decommissioned swimming baths and architectural vanities of Hackney (millions wasted on leisure centres too dangerous to use). A riverside theatre. And, at last, we are reunited with the Nene.

Wide, stately, steel-grey, the Nene is serious; you hear the thump and squawk of industry on the south bank, barges are moored. We go up on to the bridge that brings London Road, Clare's weary route, into the city.

when I told my story they clubbed together & threw me fivepence out of the cart I picked it up & called at a small public house near the bridge were I had two half pints of ale & twopenn'orth of bread & cheese when I had done I started quite refreshed only my feet was more crippled then ever & I could scarcely make a walk of it over the stones & being ashamed to sit down in the street I forced to keep on the move & got through Peterborough better then I expected

From the bridge, Clare could have looked down on the place where, as a youth, he took the boat to Wisbech. Craft are still tied up, alongside a sign: KEY FERRY RIVER TRIPS. But it is out of
season and pleasure boats now head upstream, in the direction of Wansford and Fotheringhay. Names have been scratched on the grey parapet, above still water in which bare trees are reflected: MARV + HANA 4 EVER.

Everything is grey: sky, river, Anna's raincoat, the stone flag pavement on which you cross the bridge. Anna remembers her brother-in-law, Richard Ellis, saying how he'd taken a minesweeper down the Nene from Peterborough to Wisbech. ‘Ah, Wisbech,’ he mused. ‘Never saw the crew so drunk. And the women…’

Some of the craft seem to have been abandoned; rust, debris, tough grass swallowing rudders. Others are still in business. Shaggy horses crop the verge: the kind that might once have towed passengers and cargoes to King's Lynn or Ely. We are the only walkers on a melancholy avenue of mature willows. Wet grey mud. A frenzy of contradictory directional arrows: the footprints of birds.

There are attractions to consider, possible detours: sewage farm and Flag Fen with its ‘reconstructed roundhouses’. (Flag Fen, the Late Bronze Age Settlement, was an artificial island: rectangular huts, on a timber platform, floating in water. England's earliest prehistoric wheel, alderwood, was found on the site. Precursor of the coming Peterborough loop, motorway hell.) As ever, we are alone; quit the city and you enter a world of your own choosing; the silence of the river is broken by distant trains. It's possible, if you make a conscious effort, to hallucinate Clare's river journey; slow and steady momentum carrying a nervous boy, ill clothed as Werner Herzog's changeling time-traveller, Kaspar Hauser, towards a place of judgement. He moves, by this shift of surface, road to river, out of his element. Out of his country. Land vanishes behind steep banks. The world is sky. It's like being suddenly translated from poetry into a novel written by a stranger: into Kafka's
Amerika
. Terrible things happen. Told in a particular way, with a particular emphasis, they are comic. Experienced, they are painful. Everybody has a script, a street map of the town, you alone are uninformed: it is always the first day at a new school. Language you don't speak.

When we achieve something called ‘Shanks Millennium Bridge’ we have two choices: blow it up or march across. And since the far bank promises a ‘Fen Causeway’, a ‘Roman Road’ leading into Whittlesey, we cross. Good decision: everything changes. The old causeways, timbers laid over mud, were ladders into the unconscious, dream-tracks between turf islands that might at any moment be withdrawn. A broad sandy path, bordered by mutated thorns and savage bushes, navigates a bleak landscape of back rivers, sluices, thickets of teazel. And in the distance, as a marker, a great black cloud issues from a group of tall, slim chimneys.

This is much more like it, apocalypse, struggling nature asserting its potency in the face of feeble human threat; a major quarrying operation, noxious fumes, fountains of blood-red water pouring from blue-grey cliffs. What we are negotiating on our Roman road is the perimeter fence of the London Brick Company. Or, from another point of view, the streets of London in an as yet unrevealed form: buried in peat like the stone blocks of Ramsey Abbey. Here lies sleeping London: canal-side redevelopments, future estates of Thames Gateway, the Olympian hubris of Stratford East. Here is gouging, excavating, baking in furnaces. A procession of rattling trucks and lorries. Wounded red earth. Nitrous sulphide. A poison cloud of yellow-grey methane drifting over Whittlesey.

Naturally, I have to duck under the fence – TIPPING RUBBISH IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED – to experience the quarry; an epic of ravishment on the scale of the Rainham Marshes landfill site, on which is dumped most of London's waste: to smoulder, fume, shudder, slither towards the Thames. There is ambition in this enterprise, an energy equal to the period when London was torn up for the construction of railways. There is employment for discontinued farm-labourers, citizens of Whittlesey, its outlying bogs and hamlets. Clay pits are another form of heritage, self-supporting, coughing forth Barratt units, dormitories of the new inner-city suburbs, replacement estates (in mustard yellow) for Hackney and Bow.

I have to pick up one of the bricks from a pile of slag. Nice
philtrum, lovely shape: Tate quality but damaged, chipped. Rose red. Spotted with moss. The clincher is that word cut into the skin: LONDON. A relic worth stuffing into my rucksack. London is where I'll carry it, chinking against my spine at every step; a constant reminder of its origin.

Whittlesey, friends, is a potential Dickens theme park, Coketown from
Hard Times
: pick up your brochure at the F. R. Leavis Human History Centre.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye.

Sounds right, but the Coketown of Dickens isn't here, it's closer to the other side of Anna's family, her Lancashire mother, birthplace in Blackpool, her Preston relatives. The London Brick Company is a surreal intervention in a flat land of rivers and dykes, a land that requires beacons for navigation. Glinton spire, Peterborough Cathedral, Whittlesey chimneys: markers for trainee jet pilots who will be over the Wash in seconds and wheeling away to Scotland in minutes.

Our walk started well, light rain diluting the methane, streaking us with yellow, and it improved with every mile we advanced on Whittlesey. The Roses, Anna's lost relatives, were worth chasing. They had found the perfect antidote to the subdued pastoral of Glinton and Werrington: those villages were drowned by development, Whittlesey had risen a few inches out of the peat. Its inhabitants, I imagined, would be cousins of H. P. Lovecraft's fish folk: part-human, part-animal, all alien.

‘The Rose Of The World Was Dear Mary To Me’: John Clare's Epping Forest lament. Mary Annabel Rose Hadman now understood that the Rose part of her name was no decorative addition,
but a mark of family loyalty. The walk was a homecoming and she stepped out briskly, relishing immodest skies; unfenced, untidy, amphibian horizons.

For years, above my desk, I kept a yellow poster; the print of a poem in holograph by Charles Olson. It was dated from 1965 and designed to mimic the shape of a rose. A sentence twisted round on itself until it reached the centre of the mystery: ‘This is the Rose of the World.’

Whittlesey, on the direct route between the island abbeys of Thorney and Ramsey, on the Fen causeway between Peterborough and March, is another rose; beaten flat, choked by fumes from the London Brick Company.

Something below us, beneath the pylons, catches my eye: a blue-white object trapped in the fork of a sapling. Something wet and grey planted in a naked patch of brown earth: chunks of broken brick as compost. Anna decides to stay on the path, while I slither down the rampart to investigate.

This is no bird, a bear. A winged bear arranged so that it clings to the branch. Two other creatures, part-dog, grey as slush, accompany the shaggy angel; they have been secured by pink ribbons. Two further bears have been strapped, like Calvary thieves, to the trunk. A sprig of holly. A small white cross. A wooden dagger. The single word: REMEMBRANCE. The tree of bears marks the spot where a child has died. But I have never come across such a renegade memorial. There is a bench of undersized bears in East Tilbury, but that is arranged in such a way that walkers on the river path can pause, take in the view, pay their respects. The view here, on this damp morning, is bleak: sodden fields, distant cathedral town, looming chimneys.

The map of Whittlesey suggests a museum, a cemetery, several churches: plenty of opportunity to search for relevant Roses. The funeral service for Anna's great-grandfather, William Rose, took place in February 1910, and was conducted by the vicar of St Mary's.

The road into town, long and straight, is austere and low level.
Whittlesey is like somewhere achieved, late in the day, in the middle of Ireland: breeze-block bungalows from catalogue, random houses with varieties of extravagant transport parked between front door and road. Clay pits give place to vegetable patches, narrow garden strips. Nobody is walking, nobody is out in the car. It's not actually raining, not much, but tarmac shines in a plaid of greys and grey-blues. Telegraph poles run all the way towards the centre, wherever that is. Out of nowhere, another of those Viking horses appears; a girl leading and a red-haired child in pink rubber boots perched on its back. ‘North Dublin,’ I said. ‘Horses kept in the front room.’

The town is deserted, abandoned to through traffic (which is held by lights stuck on red). I note the window of the monumental mason: more bears. In granite-look, sculpted conglomerate. With a choice of colours: light grey or dark grey. Two roundhead bears with Wayne Rooney ears hold up blank books. Whittlesey is different and proud of it: Methodism, bear worship and a hopeful identity as an ‘ancient market town’. Timber-framed houses (‘preponderance of mellow buff brick’) cheek by jowl with grease caffs, rag-pickers' dens, empty shops with potato sacks.

Agriculture and blue clay: the economy. Chips, buns, dank pubs: the fuel. Church or chapel: duty. The ‘first and foremost of Whittlesey's sons’ was Sir Harry Smith; also known, after his part in the Sikh Wars, as the ‘Hero of Aliwal’. The town of Ladysmith, the brochure informs us, was named after his Spanish bride, Juana Maria De Los Dolores DeLeon. Sir Harry Smith sounds like the novel Conrad never quite got around to writing.

The brochure, after a section on ‘Where to Eat’ (‘good choice of takeaways from Pizza, Kebabs and Burgers to traditional Fish and Chips’), suggests that researching ‘Family History’ has become the principal Fenland passion (easily done, around here, without leaving the house). Whittlesey Library, in Market Street, keeps parish registers (1654–1960) on microfilm.

We scoot down Broad Street and into Market Street: the Library is open. This is a proper, walk-in, civic amenity; books, information,
rows of grey screens. We have William Rose (4 November 1844-21 February 1910) as our starting point. We have a machine, somebody to show us how to use it, and rolls of microfilm. ‘Roses?’ the librarian says. ‘Funny that, another woman was after them. Only last week.’

We'd better start cranking the handle, jumping the names, addresses, occupations of the dead. Census forms provide a column in which to make a mark if you're infirm, simple-minded or imbecile: discriminations of waterland lunacy. Not the Roses. There are dozens of them, farmers, publicans, go-getters with large families; sons to work the land, daughters to marry property (often a brother of the man with whom their sister went to the altar).

At the time of the 1881 census, William Rose was a farmer who also kept the Windmill Inn. He was thirty-six years old. His wife, Mary, was thirty-five. He had three daughters: Annie (thirteen), Florence (nine), Martha (one). And a son, William (seven). By 1891, the family had moved to 72 Benwick Road. (We check this out. The house is on the southern outskirts, close to Whittlesey Dike. The Roses are creeping closer to open Fens, the opportunity of acquiring land.) There are three more sons: Harry (ten), George (six) and another William (four). And a fourth daughter: Nellie (seven). The older William is described as a ‘labourer’, presumably on his father's farm.

Florence Rose, the second daughter, has left home. She is Anna's grandmother, the one who will marry William Hadman in 1902. Her photograph sits on our Hackney wall: posed in the garden of the Red House with her three children. Once, this was a period piece, sepia sentiment; now the figures are placed. Now Florence looks back at us. We know her as an elderly woman, bespectacled, flower in hat, walking down a street in Lancashire; visiting Geoffrey Hadman in Cleveleys. She keeps step with the much taller Miss Marsh, her younger son's landlady. Miss Marsh carries a wicker basket.

Piece by piece, a pattern is revealed: empty spaces have been left for Anna and her siblings. People disengage from place, place gets
on very well without them. Every one of William Rose's children was born in Whittlesey. What happened to Florence? How did she come to Werrington? There were Roses in the village, we knew that, friends, fellow churchgoers, in the choir with the Hadmans and Stimsons. And there were meetings between farmers, from Werrington and Whittlesey, at Peterborough's Agricultural Fair.