Edge of the Orison (39 page)

The museum woman, a volunteer, not one of the professional curatorial types, doesn't quiz me; she knows just where my interests lie. Very soon she has me in a dark, interior chamber looking through yellow newspaper cuttings, bear reports. And after that, in an outhouse containing the most fearsome relics of the place: bits and pieces of redundant agricultural machinery, sacks, rags and objects that defy description. Such as? A lump of bone-coral, horned and holed, mounted on a rusty metal spike, which is itself attached to a severed hoof. Speculative title? ‘Fenland Witchcraft Totem’.

Also to be found are military uniforms (relics of Sir Harry Smith), brick-making displays, faked schoolrooms, a mammoth tusk, a Woolly Rhinoceros leg bone, odd vertebrae donated by bison. A cabinet of mongrel curiosities like that displayed by John Tradescant in his Lambeth ‘Ark’. The past is preserved as a series of fatal and non-fatal accidents: waxworks, blood-stained shirts, nicotine prints of demolished buildings and buried people.

Among the dim photographs on the carousel, I find William Rose's 1881 home, the Windmill Inn. An illustration from the Brothers Grimm: L-shaped, whitewashed, thatched (random windows peering out like asymmetrical eyes). The building is about to fall in on itself, taking its lost history into a blank white rectangle of photographic paper. There are two boys in the street. One braves the camera; the other, booted, creeps towards the mean slit of the pub's door. The boy is the right age, seven years old, for William (son
of William and Mary Rose). His father, the innkeeper, also farmed forty-five acres, employing three men and seven boys. By the time he moved to Glassmoor, Anna's great-grandfather had one hundred and seventy acres and employed three men, one boy and a woman. Tomorrow, before we return to London, we'll try to locate the Glassmoor house, to form a picture of where the Roses lived and worked: unencumbered space to set against busy clusters of Werrington Hadmans with their cherry orchards, brass bands, primitive airfields and books of dead sparrows.

Up to now, the Peterborough orbital motorway system, I've always enjoyed being in a car with Anna. We've had our disagreements, loaded with children, luggage, cats, it's true: the ‘Do
you
want to drive?’ moments, door held open, voices raised, minor sulks. But, on our own, cars were generally good times; out of Dublin to the West, empty roads, deserted beaches, lunches with rain beating against the windows, or unplanned expeditions to Wales, Cornwall, the Farne Islands. A chance to talk or share a companionable silence, shifting landscapes and somewhere strange to sleep at the end of the day. Frets dissolving, accidents of touch, unthreatening incidents on the way towards renewed intimacy.

Peterborough rescinds all that in seconds, human affection. The road system is designed to incubate conflict, induce rage. And it works. Before looking for the Rose farmhouse, on Glassmoor, I decided to make a short visit to Milton Hall. I noticed on the map that it was on the western rim of Peterborough, south of Marholm. It was flagged as a golf course, with lake and house at the centre of the park. After three days, driving and walking, Clare's geography was beginning to make sense: territory divided between Burghley House (Marquess of Exeter) and Milton Hall (Earl Fitzwilliam), with anything left squabbled over by various bishoprics and Cambridge colleges. After the enclosures, tenant farmers accumulated spare strips; they intermarried, thrived. Cottagers moved up or went under: diversification (butchery, pubs, baker shops) or submersion (suicide). Cattle (and farm-workers) drifted down from the hills
behind Stilton to summer pastures, the edge of the Fens: the dynamic we find in the Rose family. A new property every five years, a new child every two; more land, more animals. Further and further out from Peterborough, from Whittlesey.

As with any orbital loop, the easy option is to keep going, round and round Peterborough, into highway reverie: block buildings of a certain height, the same hoardings, blue-and-white traffic signs that come too late. The Werrington turn is always missed. It isn't what it looks like. You have to anticipate the move, suppress logic: they have closed the ramp. So try another circuit.

Milton Park was tricky, slip roads are exactly like other slip roads. We make several foiled attempts, suburban sprawl; then hit, by accident, a wet lane down which Clare might have walked. It's not much more than three and a half miles from Helpston, the familiar tramp to visit Henderson and Artis: to collect a dole from the toffs. Patronising advice, coins for the pocket. Before handing over newly minted copies of books whose pages will never be cut.

We abandon the car and go into the fields, soft, featureless, with that sense Clare knew better than anyone: invisible eyes, watchers. Gamekeepers. Green-keepers. Farmers who own and control un-worked paddocks of grey-brown mud. Thistle crops. Spiders' webs.

The Hall, as seen from the road, remains a prospect, a remote view. Gates are secure. Until, at last, and very wet, we come across something like a permitted footpath into the woods. We know we're on the right track when we find the signpost chopped down and chucked into the bushes. When we emerge, yet again, on a golf course.

Beware of foresters. We learnt, from the pile of Werrington obituaries, that Anna's grandfather began here. Before he tried farming, acquired land in Glinton, he was employed at Milton Hall. As forester, responsible for these woods, he was of equal status with Clare's friends, Henderson and Artis. Subtle plantings, that now screen us from the golf course, had been supervised by William Hadman.

It's early, raining hard; the only golfers are young, keen, tolerant of our intrusion on a public path that brushes against expensively
tended grass. I carry on until I'm up against a hedge, a ditch, with clear sight of house and lake. A long, grey, limestone barrack with regular windows and the smack of isolation hospital: the usual sinister/benevolent institution you always find in English parkland. Clare's nerve, approaching such a place, must have been strong. The walk through the gates of the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton would have been a homecoming.

Morbid speculations were soon confirmed. A friend, the artist Keggie Carew, told me that we'd missed her own visit to Milton Hall by a few days. She been taken there on a coach, with her father, who was attending an SOE (Special Operations Executive) reunion: the sixtieth anniversary of their country-house stay. The old boy, one of eighteen rugged and independent survivors, had been based at the Hall in the spring of 1944: pre-invasion of Normandy. Like all spare property, spacious, secluded, out of the public gaze, the Fitzwilliam estate had been requisitioned by the military: code-breaking, interrogation, small-arms training. Never was so much fun had by so few, the time of their lives for brave pipe-smokers and bright young things from good families.

Milton Hall housed a unit called the Jedburghs, known as the ‘Jeds’, who were parachuted into France before, or immediately after, D-Day: ‘Operation Neptune’. Each group was supposed to feature British, American and French members, who would liaise with the French Resistance (over whom they had no authority). Two gents (officers) and one non-commissioned chappie to operate the radio. Their target was the 2nd SS Panzer
Das Reich
Division.

Keggie's father was later occupied in the Middle East and Burma. The Milton House mob were intelligent, driven, often crazy individuals who sat around playing chess, reading Chinese poetry, inventing diversions. And shooting at walls. The chips and splinters I'd put down to Cromwell, and the English Civil War, belonged to Keggie's dad and his mates. Here they stand, lean, prop themselves up: a coloured photograph in
The Times
. A fine bunch of white-bearded, eye-patched pirates enjoying the sunshine.

Getting from Milton Hall to Whittlesey should have been a matter of no great consequence; Anna with the map, my eyes fixed on the road. But we were soon undone by identical roundabouts, road signs blocked by high-sided, deep-freeze trucks: paranoia about being suckered again by Peterborough and its ever-shifting centre.

The turn was missed. I shouted. Anna threw the map out of the window. We rehearsed, in moody silence, old grievances. How could I have spent so many years with this person who told me to take a right (meaning left), two minutes
after
we'd passed the slip road? Thereby condemning us to crawl into Peterborough and over the Town Bridge. By the time we reached Whittlesey, property, goods, children had been divided (without speech); the Clare project was abandoned and those tare-peddling, sparrow-murdering peasants, the Hadmans, could be left to rot in the obscurity of a Fenland midden from which they should never have been extracted. Our improbable alliance had been wrong from the start. Now it was revoked, done with, abjured. No more drives, no more memories.

I scribbled down a couple of lines of Orson Welles dialogue from the video of
The Third Man
. He's on the Big Wheel with Joseph Cotten, contemplating murder. ‘The dead are happier dead,’ he says. ‘They don't miss much here.’ Then the Harry Lime character doodles a name in the condensation on the window: ANNA. Capitalised. A heart. Arrow through it. Absurd gesture, I thought. Women in these romances are always called Anna. Like flatlands daughters. The oldest son of the Glassmoor farmer, William Rose, whose house we were searching for, was another William. He married a woman from the neighbouring village of Doddington, her name was Anna. (The name of John Clare's first child.) In 1901 they were living with William's father at 73 Glassmoor. (‘Anna was; Livia is and Plurabelle's to be.’ James Joyce.)

The picture, coming off the Ramsey road, is so haunting that our quarrel is suspended. Every move is a shot from the film Chris Petit never made; darker, gloomier, wetter than
Radio On
. This is the true version of his abortive second feature,
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
. He took on P. D. James for the setting, sluices, long
straight roads with telegraph posts: only to be stuck, overcrewed and impotent, in a riverside studio and a Berkshire gravel pit.

The top of the windscreen has a bluish filter that applies mascara to a dead sky; road and water (Bevill's Leam) are parallel lines, divided by a narrow strip of grass. Fields are flat with occasional wooded clumps, huts, houses. Telegraph poles lean out. A broken white line vanishes into the sodden distance. Anna is, immediately, at home. Revived by the minimalism of the tonal range: green to grey. Mildew, mud, puddled tarmac.

We get out of the car and walk up the drive towards the property that Anna wants, so badly, to be her ancestral home. ‘Glassmoor House’, it says. ‘C. E. W. Saunders’. This is the house that Anna has fantasised as a retreat from Hackney. Featureless fields. Dark canal: outflow from Whittlesey Mere. A mature and managed garden: fir, laurel, yew, box. Family mansion smothered in creeper: blue door, porch, bay windows. There have been additions and revisions, but this, in essence, is a farmhouse of the period of the Hadman property in Glinton. An oasis of civility and good living made against the indifference of the surrounding agricultural land, with its unavoidable assertions of pig and slurry and steaming vegetable matter.

Anna hovers at the top of the drive, I march directly to the blue door. I want to confront these Roses, now. I want to move on. Our wanderings have brought us to a place that Anna is prepared to acknowledge as a potential conclusion: ‘I could live here. I
have
lived here. The Roses thrived. I belong in the landscape which has meant most to me.’

I ring, I rattle. Nobody at home. Nothing resolved. We return to the car and to London. I can't decide what the next move should be: or if I have written myself into another cul-de-sac. Another set of open-ended parentheses.

Ramsey

Two phone calls.

Anna, exploiting our recent membership of the John Clare Society, made contact with Eric Rose. Mr Rose was married to Dorothy Muriel Stokes, Clare's great-great-granddaughter. Anna's researches among her Rose relatives turned up an Eric, and she became quite excited, thinking that the link her father claimed was about to be proved.

Mr Rose is elderly and not to be drawn out. He has no knowledge of Whittlesey, Ramsey or Glassmoor. He refuses to surrender an address. He has no interest in adding peripheral members to an already complex family tree. There are too many Roses, and not a few thorns, dressing the ground: Peterborough into Norfolk, into Suffolk, and as far afield as Dorset. The Hadmans, breeding more modestly, never strayed more than a mile or two from the shores of the Mere. It began to look as if Stilton was their frontier; peasant-labourers in the hills to the west, go-getting farmers and butchers in the flatlands to the east. Clare territory, without a doubt, but we could discover no blood relatives. Just endless, frustrating hints: Beryl Clare (born 1938), another great-great-granddaughter of the poet, married Douglas Harrison. Nellie Rose, sister of Florence (Anna's grandmother), also married a Mr Harrison. Roses and Clares both allied themselves with Reads. At such a distance, we are all part of one great family whose only ambition is to put as much mileage as possible between itself and any dubious third and fourth cousins. (Particularly those who make importunate phone calls.)