Edge of the Orison (42 page)

Back on the water, after this memorable meal, after the lock-keeper's daughter has waved us through, we're ready to chance the Twenty Foot River with its obstacle course of low and very low bridges. The man in the boatyard at March, in his laid-back fashion, advised against it: ‘If the water's high, you'll stick fast. Your decision, boys. We'll come out and cut you free.’ Our passage, between Whittlesey and Angle Bridge, was like Flanders: banks dressed with poppies, gun-emplacements peeping from a carmine curtain. A memorial to battles that had not yet been fought.

We decided to branch off, before taking the Twenty Foot River, to make a run at Bevill's Leam. The Learn was a conduit to drained Whittlesey Mere. Glassmoor House, Anna's fantasy home, faced the Learn – and was reachable, if we risked being unable to turn the boat, by water. Catling, cocky now, thought he could manage reverse gear. Hubris induced by quality champagne with a corned-beef chaser.

Loud print at both ends of our craft. Catling's Hawaiian flames and dragons at the tiller. Anna's roses (travelling expectantly towards other Roses) at the prow. Dark clouds, darker water. Furled poplars. An overgrown bank: edge emphasised by a stain of river scum. The Leam, a narrow trench when we stood safely on the road outside Glassmoor House, appeared, at water level, broad and deep. Very straight. Carrying the eye to that notch in the horizon where the entrance to Whittlesey Mere would once have been located. This detour, I concede, will give my narrative some sort of closure. The elements are in place: time of day, wind roughing up water, birthday lunch in the old Hadman home.

We pass under a bridge, steep banks cancel fields and solitary houses. The notch in the horizon draws us on. If we reach it, we
will fall off the end of the known world. We will enter ‘Three Miles Up’, a ghost story by Robert Aickman; the one in which a narrowboat sails on and on, to the beginning of the primal lake. Bevill's Leam is the only certain way of accessing Whittlesey Mere. But you have to be dead to do it. Aickman's canal ‘immediately broadened… a sheet, an infinity, of water stretched ahead; oily, silent, and still, as far as the eye could see, with no country edging it, nothing but water to the low grey sky above it’.

We stopped talking and remained in our separate positions on the boat: tiller, prow, roof. ‘Navigable,’ says the Middle Level chart, ‘but not as a through route.’ Beyond Tebbits Bridge, you sail into John Bodger's 1786 description of ‘the Beautiful Fishery of Whittlesea Mere and of Such Navigable Rivers with which it has communication’. Bevill's River enters the north-east corner of the inland sea. Other access points were allocated to powerful local interests. ‘Doomsday Book,’ writes Bodger, ‘mentions that the Abbot of Ramsey had one Boatsgate.’

Sluggish currents of submerged memory float us to another place. I jump on to the bank, drive in the metal spikes, make fast. We have come alongside Glassmoor House: riverborne invaders. From the property, we can't be seen. Sunlight breaks through cloud cover, late-afternoon shadows of box and yew: we march up the drive.

Dog. Dogs. Large and black: alert to our trespass. A woman emerges from the shrubbery.

‘Yes?’

That paper-cutting uppercrust voice. Coveted property under siege from three windblown, over-lunched strangers. Nameless and without family. One of whom, a silver-crusted type in dark glasses, is wearing the kind of shirt that is favoured, in this part of the world, for target practice. Dogs paw the ground.

‘We think my wife's family’ – I should have said people – ‘once lived here. The Roses.’

‘Actually, my husband's
people
, the Saunders, built the house. They've been around for a hundred years or so. I'll fetch him out.’

And, actually, yes; Mrs Saunders is gracious about our intrusion. Mr Saunders, visible through the bay window, manifests to deal with uninvited guests, a possible extension of his private party. He is ruddy, copiously cardigan'd; a seasoned extension of belly.

‘Rose?’ he said. ‘Old George? Good lord, he didn't live
here
. George kept a pub, down by the bridge, the Wheatsheaf. The entire road is Glassmoor, actually. We don't have numbers. George Rose in Glassmoor House? Good lord.’

Anna's illusions were visibly shattered. Catling swayed on his heels. Mr Saunders, recognising a fellow spirit, was all for coming aboard and casting anchor.

‘Arrive by water? Good show. Sun over yardarm? I'm very tempted to come along with you chaps.’

George Rose, it appears, was a farmer; and not quite, in the formal sense, a gentleman. Decent fellow, of course. Goes without saying. Salt of. Worked his land and ran, with the help of his wife, a waterside pub: the Wheatsheaf. ‘You'll spot a plaque on the wall as you sail past.’ The pub was strategically sited at Angle Bridge, catching boats, crews and horses, travelling in all directions; on the dyke between Peterborough, Whittlesey and March, or the Leam which, as it flowed under the bridge, became the Twenty Foot River. There were stables for horses. Home-brewed beer for the men. George Rose also kept pigs.

The property was no longer with the family, Mr Saunders thought. Building work in progress, but we should be able to have a good poke around, undisturbed. So that became the revision of our plan: ivy-covered house lost, publicans and working farmers still to be found: we would drive back, tomorrow, on our way to London. This evening, nothing to lose, we would risk the Twenty Foot River, circle around White Moor, and return to the Nene, a mile or two above March.

This evening passage, under a red sunset, is the most otherworldly of them all. The TV aerial has to be taken down so that we can scrape under the third bridge; if it rains again, and the water level
rises, we're going to find ourselves wedged, stuck fast. We are cruising, quietly, at walking speed, through a sanctuary: bird life is affronted. Herons, with their prehistoric bloodline, are disdainful; badly articulated umbrella-forms wishing us hence. Arctic terns divebomb the pilot, regroup, come again as a second wave. Swans, imperious and sharing a mutual dislike with Professor Catling (‘I hate those bastards’), are troubled by the boat. They hammer and slap, strain to lift off, leaving a trail of watery footprints in their wake. Then they settle, shrugging white coats, until the narrowboat, keeping its distance, comes alongside. The process begins again. One wretched bird, fisherman's hook caught in its mouth, line tangled through its wing, cannot fly; it panics, thrashes water; refuses to allow us to get ahead, get away.

The lowest bridge takes the skin from my knuckles. I have to release the tiller as we chug under it. Eventually, light fading, we make the turn towards the Nene. A sewage farm. An encampment of travellers. Scrap-metal traders in bivouacs made from surplus stock. They watch from salvaged perches, music amplified over the quiet river; they wait patiently for our first mistake.

We tie up between a radio mast and a few scrawny trees: our final feast, the last pitchers of a drink that complements the fiery sky. Polished wood shimmers in virtual flame. The boat hook is striped with colours that precisely match Professor Catling's shirt: red, yellow, black.

Laws of the universe, as they apply to time, space, magnetism, respect for living things, are different here. Fenland rivers undo us, challenging previously held convictions. In 1838, Samuel Birley Rowbotham conducted an experiment on a six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford Level, in order to prove that the earth was flat. He assumed that the world's curvature, if it existed, would be revealed by observations made with a telescope: barges, at a sufficient distance, should become invisible. They would drop over the lip, out of sight. Ignorant of refraction caused by the air, Rowbotham's results satisfied him. Case proven. He was wise in his choice of location. On the Old Bedford Level, the world
is
flat. Barges vanish.
People vanish. Then reappear, centuries later, with stories to tell. Drowned faces, six miles off, are more detailed, easier to remember, than those of the people at the other end of your narrowboat. (When viewed through the wrong end of a tumbler of Catling's tipple.)

Such madness doesn't go away. In 1904, Elizabeth Anne Mould Williams (Lady Blount) took up Rowbotham's cause: pianist philosophy. She led an expedition to the Levels, hiring a photographer (with telephoto lens) who was instructed to capture white sheets hung from distant bridges, two feet above the water. If the bottom of the sheets remained in shot, the world was flat. The prints proved satisfactory. The earth, out here, where we were moored, remains flat. And goes on for ever.

The Wheatsheaf

J. H. Prynne, talking about Charles Olson's
Maximus IV, V, VI
, identified the essential movement of that epic, and by implication all epics, as a ‘homecoming’. The poem was ‘a noble arc’ of light and language; moving, from river to shore to ocean to void, in a curve: ‘which is love’. The quality we must bring to this country, against the void of the drained Mere. And our own drowned memories.

Angle Corner enjoys a strategic position. You can see exactly why the Roses shifted from Whittlesey and settled out here. Reedy canals intersect with back rivers. Obscure farms have names such as ‘Wype Doles’. Transport abandoned, we look around us, trying to identify the curve of love in a territory occupied by flat-earthers. A stone bridge. Green-gold crops beaten down by the rains of a poor summer. Flattened fields offering evidence of alien invasion (by capital, by robotic technologies). The scale and quality of emptiness unsettles Londoners: all the ground between Highbury Corner and the Angel, King's Cross and Primrose Hill, under cultivation. Unpeopled. A few bushes, low trees, on the horizon. Telegraph poles. The forensic glint of water. Scarlet poppies follow the dyke back into Whittlesey: an illuminated flight path.

Road signs are fiction: Burnt House, Turves, Benwick (our riverside burial ground). The compact redbrick house – twin bay windows, narrow door, wheatsheaf symbol – commands a broad prospect: ground rises, a few feet above the bridge, before the road runs away across Glassmoor towards Benwick.

I wouldn't say the red house was abandoned, as Mr Saunders suggested: in limbo. The Wheatsheaf has been re-roofed with tiles, given the replacement-window treatment (fake Mediterranean shutters). It is being prepared for sale, although no builders, that
morning, are in evidence. This moment of hesitation on Angle Bridge is as close as we have come to a living Rose relative, a building with a working history: alongside the house is a large barn with marks or bites along the boards. Anna feels that it is her duty to knock at the door, before we invade house or barn.

I was standing off, to one side, when she took the two or three steps from gate to door. I had lined up a nice shot, in which road and canal would be reflected in the window, when Anna knocked. When she stepped smartly back. There would be nobody at home. The warmth of the Roses, even I knew, had long since dissipated. The Wheatsheaf was an old property waiting for a very new buyer, land speculator.

The Chinese man, undershirt, tracksuit trousers, took us by surprise. As we surprised him. The stance was challenging. He blocked access, swaying on the balls of his bare feet, looking up and down the road: searching for black cars, white vans, blue uniforms. He stared, wild-eyed, as Anna muttered something about George Rose. She was a foot taller than the tightly sprung man with his panic stance: one of the original family returned to demand her inheritance.

I imagined all manner of improbable scenarios, based on Sax Rohmer and the yellow press (the Morecambe drownings were fresh in my mind). Work gangs concealed in the barn? A pipeline for smuggling illegal immigrants? White slavery, dope? But it was the Chinese householder who was being inconvenienced; doorstepped, peered at, interrogated by three large occidentals in shabby clothes. Riffraff with cameras and an incomprehensible tale of lost ancestors. We backed off. With difficulty, I stopped myself from bowing. The door was slammed. The man watched us from the window as we climbed back into the car.

That should have been the end of it. Victory for the flat-earthers, nothing connects with nothing. We'd followed the trail from Glinton to Werrington, Whittlesey to Ramsey. We'd travelled on foot and by water. The Roses had been tracked from faded obituary notices to microfilms in Whittlesey Library, address by address, to
a defunct waterside pub. Which was now in Chinese possession. There was a book to be written. It was time for me to let go. In life, neat resolutions are rarely possible.

We spread out maps to pick a route back to the A1. I felt quite nostalgic about rejoining John Clare's road, following him south to London. Clare begins his ‘Autobiographical Fragments’ by knocking off his antecedents in a single paragraph. His forefathers were part of him, a part best understood by re-remembering his own life. Whatever any man achieves, it will continue, this complex interweaving of place and personality; that which is given and that which is stubbornly reconfigured.

I cannot trace my name to any remote period a century & a half is the utmost & in this I have found no great ancestors to boast in the breed – all I can make out is that they were Gardeners Parish Clerks & fiddlers & from these has sprung a large family of the name still increasing were kindred has forgotten its claims & 2nd & 3rd cousins are worn out

A young woman with a wriggling child in her arms raps on our window. She has come from the farm beside the Wheatsheaf and has witnessed our confrontation with Mr Chan. Even when there is nobody to be seen, eyes are on you: taking your measure. Hands on telephones. Dogs on chains. Shotguns in cupboards.

She gives us that name, Chan, but has no information to offer on the current status of the former inn. She knew the Roses. And the Turners who lived in the Wheatsheaf in more recent times. And how the Roses and the Turners were related. William Rose, Anna's great-grandfather, farmed on Glassmoor. His final property was a short distance down the road, in the direction of Benwick: Delavals Farm. We had not been far from the mark when we tried the Saunders house, the two farms were back to back: one faced Bevill's Leam, and the other faced the road (former track) across the Fens.