Dawn came. I heard the swans taking off from the Avon, their long necks streaking like comets into the distance they were making theirs. The river they had left would be gliding at its own sweet pleasure, steadily out of Stratford this morning, as it did every morning, every moment of every day – coolly, maddeningly free.
Like the Queen’s Men, who had left Stratford too – five days ago now, in their cloud of white dust. In that diminishing white dustcloud went gods and men, angels and devils, kings and clowns, courtesans, courtly lovers, ladies dead and lovely knights, flown with the fabulous swans. Another world on four wheels. I pictured the cart trundling and trumpeting across an England whose greenness and growing meant nothing to the players it carried, not this summer nor any other summer. They needed neither oak nor owl to measure their hours, their seasons. They were their own men, the Queen’s Men. They were of no landscape, no age. They belonged to all ages and to the era of dreams. They were the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time.
‘And so the decision was reached.’
I walked out of a Henley Street that was a blizzard of tears and torn hair and rent garments and disbelief. Assuring everyone that there was method in my madness I turned my back on the turning clods and clowns of Warwickshire and headed for Clopton Bridge.
Eighteen great arches that led out of Stratford, proudly providing the only egress south – that was Clopton Bridge. It was built in sumptuous stone, courtesy of adventuring Hugh Clopton who’d left Stratford for London, become its Lord Mayor, and returned in triumph as Sir Hugh to build himself a new house, New Place, and also this bridge, in a spirit of concern for the lives of the local drunks. An old wooden structure used to span the river at this point – and many’s the pisshead whose drowning mouth had closed on the Avon after smashing through its rickety sides in a drunken plunge. I now stood on the last arch to leave the town.
It was a stand I’d taken time and time over as a boy to watch the swirl of the water at that juncture as it flowed under the bridge, hit a particular curve in the bank, and eddied for some seconds before changing direction and flooding back beneath the very same arch from which it had just come. We used to throw in a branch or a handful of hay and watch it sail underneath that eighteenth arch and out of Stratford, only to alter course and be swept back again. A child’s game. And this bridge was the crossing point between youth and everything else that was left to come. I turned round in search of a twig or a clump of moss – and saw the disconsolate group standing at the south end of Bridge Street, watching my exit from their lives: mother, father, brothers, sister, children, wife. When they saw me turn like that, as if to re-cross the bridge, my four-year-old Susanna broke from her mother’s hands, started forward, then stopped. That was it. The big wave came thumping up suddenly from my feet, choking me, blinding me. I opened my mouth to howl and nothing came. I was leaving behind three little sisters, dead in the Stratford earth. How did I know that none of my own three might not join them there, before I’d had a chance to see them again? And Susanna, turned to stone, was a lost girl, Perdita.
I wrenched myself round and hurried away from the bridge without even a last wave. In the child’s game the branch would never fail to return to the arch. No game, this. Cut is the branch. The thing had to be now – or it would never be. To stay on now, to work Warwickshire, to die Warwickshire, to be Warwickshire, to become its fields and weathers – this would be death. Clouds would pile over my head like clods, burying me alive, deeper every day, a slow engrossing death, clouds with a voice in them, speaking to me now. Why in that rawness left you wife and child – those precious motives, those strong knots of love? I threw one terrified glance behind me and could still see Susanna’s tiny white hand fluttering like a handkerchief on the other side of the river. I half stumbled as I turned south again, my face blind and streaming, for London.
21
There were two possible roads to the capital: Oxford to the right, Banbury to the left, and the carriers argued about them with dogged and sometimes drunken dogmatism, swearing by Charles’s Wain over the new chimney at four in the morning, gabbling in their carriers’ code. The Oxford road was the shorter, though either way took you through ruts and gullies, with muddied floods in winter and dust-laden desert tracks in summer. Wars and enclosures had spewed out onto these roads a race of masterless men – angry aggressive beings looking for a rough revenge for their ruined families, their solitary broken lives. No shortage of them – or of the ne’er-do-wells who needed no excuse for crime: common robbers, landraking longstaff sixpenny strikers, cut-throats for a groat, the lice of the land even among roadsters. Or there were the high-reaching highwaymen who robbed with a flourish. They slit your purse and spared your neck, unlike the rough scum who were inclined to go for both. The authorities hanged the ones they could catch. Those were few enough. As for casual players, they travelled these roads at their peril and were liable to fall foul of the authorities themselves even if they survived the attentions of the criminal element. Officially they were criminals and their unliveried backs were stripped and lashed bloodily by the commonweal – to a common weal. A lone traveller like myself would have found it safer to beg a lift from one of the carriers, or to hire a horse, but for my money on that first journey it was impossible. A four-day footslog was the best I could hope to manage, with a penny a bed and sixpence a meal at the inns on the way up.
There was a saying in Stratford that if Adam and Eve had come out of Arden and not Eden, they’d have taken the Banbury road to London, not the Oxford one. Old Granny Arden added that they’d certainly taken one of the roads, from what she’d heard of London, obeying to the full the divine injunction to go forth, be fruitful and multiply. When I reached London and saw the crowds I was inclined to agree with her.
I have a saying of my own, though, that if He’d followed the first couple, to spy on them during one of his constitutionals (and London would have been a mere stroll to him), God would have been dismayed to see them opting for the Oxford road. All the good books were in Oxford and knowledge was as plentiful as blackberries for anyone who took that road. Maybe that was why it was the route I came to prefer over the years. It was the route I chose for that first journey of many.
Travelling directly south all day, I exchanged the Avon for the Stour, passing through Atherstone and Newbold, which gave me my first sight of human beings since leaving Stratford, apart from flashes in far-off fields as the sun hit a scythe-blade or the lark-strung air caught a whistle or a shout.
After Shipston my path took me up again into the Cotswolds, to Long Compton, where I made a glum detour to the west to see my mother’s sister, Aunt Joan, and my Uncle Edmund Lambert, at Barton-on-the-Heath. Among the shrills and sobs in Henley Street that morning were my father’s pitiful – and pitiless – entreaties for me to see his brother-in-law and beg back from him the house and fifty-six acres in Wilmcote, my mother’s house, mortgaged to him all of nine years ago for forty pounds, and to promise that I’d make the forty pounds in London and pay him back. If there hadn’t been this new opportunity and this last hope lying on my London route, the Henley Street crowd would have tied me to a stake rather than let me go. My father had been the only willing one among them.
Aunt Joan gaped at me incredulously when I said I was on my way to London. Edmund Lambert for his part just gaped, his boiled blue eyes boring through me unseeingly – he was a man clearly dying. A hopeful sign. But when I raised the matter of the mortgage and reinforced it with the lie that I was being forced up to London against my will to restore the family fortunes, he pointed a white trembling finger at a shifty youth, little more than a frown in the shadows, and Joan translated snippily that John Lambert, her husband’s son – and heir – would have to see to all of that. After an age of arguing, mostly sullen headshakes on his side, the scowling youth, responding to pursings of his mother’s fat lips and intensifications of his father’s vacant blue stare, agreed to accept a further twenty pounds on top of the ori
ginal mortgage: a promise which the slippery bastard denied in court in front of my father only three months later.
I’d done the talking for all four and would have been out of patience with the dismal trio if it hadn’t been for the arrival of their two transient guests, Lambert’s cousin, a Justice from Pebworth, and his cousin from Gloucestershire, out of whose silent mists he appeared to have not quite emerged. These two piping ancients professed to know everybody in Stratford from the cradle upwards, and so, milking me for information, pursued each subject of their inquiry all the way to the grave. Dead? Jesu, death is certain, as the Psalmist says, and life’s a vapour.
My London-bound irruption into that joyless household rekindled the two cousins’ gleeful recollections of their own youth and its wildness and depravity. To celebrate this further they insisted on seeing me to the next stage of my journey and to the nearest inn. No question of hospitality for me here at the Lamberts. The twosome were on horseback for the sake of their ancient shanks but were happy to double up for a mile or two. I was well content to fall in with them and leave the Lamberts to the smells of avarice and death that co-mingled sickeningly within their four walls.
I came down the next day through Chipping Norton, Enstone, Woodstock, and the Cherwell valley without stopping for breath till I arrived at Oxford, where I slept badly at the Crown Tavern in Cornmarket Street, within spitting distance of the very spot where Latimer had writhed in Bloody Mary’s flames.
I was on the road again even earlier next morning, determined to reach Uxbridge before nightfall. It was a forced march: Headington Hill, Wheatley, Tetsworth, Stokenchurch, over the Chilterns and down into High Wycombe, heading ever more easterly after that, through Beaconsfield and Gerrard’s Cross, reaching Uxbridge in the long midsummer twilight only to fall into the most villainous house for fleas on all the road to London. By morning I was stung like a tench and woke to the stench of old piss festering among the ashes in the fireplace and breeding bugs as busily as a loach. I could see I was now saying goodbye to all pleasant connections with the countryside and when I stepped out to Southall and Acton I saw ahead of me such a pall of smoke that my first thought was that London was burning and would be gone before I ever saw it. A lame soldier I overtook and asked about it laughed acridly and assured me that London burned every day. The smoke I saw was merely the halo of its daily hell.
‘By the time you’re in the city you won’t notice it,’ he told me, ‘you’ll just be adding to it. And you’ll soon lose your country fragrance.’
Then he did me for the price of a drink.
Leaving him far behind I passed Shepherd’s Bush and came at last to terrible Tyburn. I stood and stared at the notorious triple tree. Everywhere, I thought, has its shambles, and this was London’s. Here the blood happened to be human, that was the difference. Animals die expressing sheer terror, absolute agony. There is a terrible purity about it. This place was fouled by the curses of its victims and the obscenities of its audiences. What kind of people came here? To witness the spectacle of human butchery as eagerly as I had once fed on Kenilworth’s carnival.
But the grim gallows gave way to the pleasantest of meadows, over which rooks and cuckoos presided in a sweet dissonance, elegists and lyricists, assuring me all over again of that fine weave made by joy and woe. There was a church and a leper hospital and I saw some chained men sitting on the grass. I was coming into the village of St Giles-in-the-Fields. As I took the road towards Holborn I passed more men in chains, two by two, travelling in the direction I’d just come from.
‘You’re on the wrong road for the play, young sir!’ one of the prisoners shouted. ‘Aren’t you coming to see us turned off?’
‘And then turned inside out,’ his companion grinned at me. ‘Come and give us a last handclap.’
I stared after them. They were bound for Tyburn. They would drink Adam’s ale at St Giles’ Bowl, their last refreshing in this life. Then they’d join their fellow criminals for a final rest in the fields before climbing the gallows. Yet they’d gone west with a not unfriendly quip to a fellow creature, one coming into London just as they passed out of it. And out of life. Facing out fear and death with a jest. I shivered and quickened my step. Hurrying away from their doomed backs and bravado, I came along Holborn Street and across the Fleet River, over Holborn Bridge, then past the churches of St Andrew and St Sepulchre, and so to Newgate.
I had arrived.
22
‘History and whores, my boy, it was all waiting for you, wasn’t it?’
Thirty years ago, yes, everything awaited me in London. And it wasn’t just the city I walked into that summer morning, it was the age, hot with whores and history.
‘You said it, lad.’
In entering London I entered the age incarnate, and the hot hole of the great whore of England.
‘A window into hell.’
And hell, like any other whore’s hole, was busy, a busy world of business and desire, a universe in which you had to bustle in or you’d be left chewing your snot and scratching your balls, your prick and purse strings flapping idly in the breeze that blew through England at that time. The dog looked up from its gutter-fucking and sniffed at something new, an era almost tangible. Jesus, even the worm in the clod looked fatly, twitchingly busy, as if it sensed the shiver of excitement that went through the earth then, a thrill of eagerness, some sort of curiosity, belief.
‘For now sits expectation in the air…’
I felt it in my flesh, sensed myself sudden witness to a great happening, the like of which might never come again, as old as England might grow.
‘That’s youth for you.’
The planet was polished and green as a young apple, able to brush off time and circumstance like straw. A lustrous and ingenuous – what can I call it? – youthfulness hung in the clouds, and even dire events were laced with the moondew of dreams, strung with the drops of endless possibilities – and time off the leash.
And what a time it was! It was the age of production: linens and laces, silken girdles and silken terms precise, taffeta doublets, taffeta phrases, codpieces, characters, three-piled hyperboles, figures pedantical – and minds tossing on the ocean, the argosies pregnant with sail, signiors and rich burghers on the flood.
‘Rich buggers everywhere, eh?’
And poor folk underwater and underfoot, poor folk soonest pissed on by the peers, poor houseless indigents under the yellow drench, paying for their houses too, the rich buggers’ houses. Hung with Tyrian tapestries, ivory coffers stuffed with crowns, and cypress chests of arras counterpoints, their spouses’ chests well worth the unbuttoning, their Turkish cushions bossed with pearls, valance of Venice, the vines of Burgundy and milk of France, gold in needlework, pewter and brass, a hundred milchkine to the pail per burgessman, a brace of bulls to boot, and six-score fat oxen standing in the stalls, shitting the richest crap in Christendom.
Wealth. Wealth on the walls and fatness in the fields.
‘It tickled your balls, my boy.’
I’d no wish to be one of the poor, not in the age of the rich bugger. For the poor you have ever with you, ten a penny. Only the unnumbered poor worked all day long for their solitary shilling, sixpence for some. And in that unlikely span of three score year and ten, would the poor man see a lifetime total of as much as two hundred pounds pass through his hard and horny hands?
‘He’d slip into his grave owning nothing but the skin he’d lived and died in.’
Not even that, Francis, for there were priests that would tear the bedsheet from a dying man, and if they could find nothing else in his four bare walls as tithe, they’d skin him alive, the fuckers, and use his grease as lamp-oil, and there’d be precious little of that on a poor man’s bones, he earned the wrong kind of currency, that’s all, for the age offered only two kinds of coin – there was rich money and there was poor money.
‘And you hadn’t come to London for poor money, had you, Will?’
That’s for
sure – unlike what’s to come. Which is never sure.
What’s to come. But what had I really come for? What did I crave more than money? One thing more than anything – space. Strange to have been surrounded all my days by the broad acres of Warwickshire, and yet to be hemmed in, to feel in that very openness an incarceration of a kind.
‘A dangerous time.’
London was lethal, but in one sense it was safer than Stratford. Here you were a speck surrounded by strangers. Here you could slip the bonds of identity, of a known past. You could become someone else. This was the lure of London, especially of the London stage, where king and clown shared the same space, exchanged the same body sweat, could even be the same person. It was more than levelling, it was life-changing, it was metamorphic, Ovidian.
‘So different from Stratford?’
Stratford. Infinite emptiness, the blue beyond, the quilted fields rumpling as far as the eye could stretch, covering all my dung-turning, dung-turned forebears, and I to follow them before I’d had even an hour of life to myself? No, that was not for me. But to stand that morning on the edge of a crowded London was to feel the palpable play of openness and opportunity. You stuck out your tongue and it tingled like it did when you were a child, catching the rain and the snow in your open upturned mouth. Just to speak in the streets of London was to be free. You heard your words ring out, the syllables clattering off the tongue and chiming like gold coins at your feet. You knew you could pick up a quill and scribble things on the sky, poems, plays, anything in this glorious new amplitude – and each particular syllable would prick heaven like a star. London was a whore all right, but you could woo her with words and make love to her with your tongue, right inside the crack.
Will Page 19
