The outskirts of Stevenage are voluminous; clients do come off-road and stay here. A virtual landscape of grassy knolls, business businesses and Glaxo colonies. (Renchi's sister is involved with a lawsuit over dyes injected into her spine with unfortunate consequences.) Spur roads, boulevards, overpasses, mirror-glass towers: but no trace of our guest house. We can't tell if we're in town, or through it, suburb to suburb, without locating an obvious centre.
The Abbington Hotel, we discover, is at the northern limits. Stevenage is a cycle city, lacking cyclists. It's dull to walk, even though every effort has been made to allow for such frivolities. So long as you have a certified destination. So long as you smile for the cameras.
It is seven-thirty in the evening. We've been walking for thirteen hours and have achieved a Clare-like state of hallucinatory exhaustion. We have also achieved, at long last, the ivy-smothered, gravel-accessed Abbington Hotel. A signboard, blocked out with credit cards like the flags of all nations, confirms the fact. Renchi ducks into the privet to drop his shorts and assume respectably crumpled jeans. I pull a clean shirt over a sweaty torso. And we present ourselves at the door.
VACANCIES. VACANCIES. VACANCIES.
‘Sorry,’ says the woman. ‘No trace of your booking. Completely full.’ Bona-fide reps check in by sundown. And don't clutter up vestibules with ugly rucksacks.
I think she reads the dangerous madness in our eyes. I made this reservation, by phone, handing over credit card details. There must be a record. Nothing. Well, fine. One day's walk and my London life is a fiction. She sees that we're going to do a Clare and spread out sleeping-bags in her driveway (remembering to set tired heads to the north).
She's sorry. Truly. So much so that she gets on the phone and makes an alternative booking at the hotel ibis. The ibis is back in town, we passed it thirty minutes ago, on the main boulevard: when we still had skin on the soles of our feet. To be rid of us, before the reps notice how their refuge has plunged downmarket, the Abbington woman offers to drive us to the ibis. At once.
Welcome, Bienvenue. ‘Early-Bird Breakfast’ available from four in the morning. The ibis is the travelling person's oasis of choice. Forty-four hotels in places you'd rather not be (Birmingham New Street Station, Coventry Ringway, London East Barking, Luton Airport). Places where you are comfortably not-at-home, pampered by indifference, courteous apathy. The ibis (same hotel in forty-four different locations) is serviced by unseen automatons.
‘No problem,’ says the ibis desk-robot in a computer-generated voice simulation. Welcome, bienvenue. To construction workers in claggy boots, to truckers. To long-distance walkers. Everything is plain and easy. The lights don't work in the bathroom, it doesn't matter. Soap squirts from a wall-dispenser. There is a big firm bed. And you can open the windows.
We sit in the restaurant, the canteen, with other bemused transients. And feel good about microwaved fish, a carafe of sour yellow wine. We are satisfied with the conclusion of the first day's walk. Clare tossed and turned on trusses of clover, pressing against the phantom body of his ‘first wife’. She lay on his left arm, waking him.
I didn't sleep. I put my head on an unyielding foam pillow, shut my eyes, and opened them a nanosecond later to a lion-sun climbing over a palm-fringed desert. Stevenage: Cairo of the Great North Road. The sacred ibis, a water bird, lends its head to Thoth, god of Hermopolis; scribe of the gods, inventor of writing.
I make illegible notes on a complimentary pad; head off to the canteen, where hissing machines spit out cornflake-dust. Ibis croissants are scimitars of delight (small but perfectly formed).
At the end of the month, when my credit card scroll arrives with the demand for a Southend cheque, I discover that the Abbington Hotel has charged me for a night's stay. So perhaps, after all, the ibis was a dream: a shelf of perfect sleep, lulled by traffic, allowing us through the Roebuck Gate and on towards the lesser initiations of the waiting road.
Over our facsimile breakfast, Renchi tells me that when he sorted out his belongings, before climbing into bed, he found that two items had vanished during our ramble through Stevenage: the compass and the crystal.
To St Neots
A blameless morning: 18 July 2000. We are back outside the Abbington, on the edge of town. Renchi, plunging into the privet, recovers his crystal but not his compass. (He has resumed his blue shorts. Today's T-shirt announces: LEARN SWAHILI.) The mural on the underpass, through which we have come, is the product of local schoolchildren. It depicts a funeral possession: hearse with yellow coffin pulled by three-masted schooner. The mourners, sticky silhouettes, wear short cloaks like gendarmes. The procession features several coaches, of the kind that carried John Clare from Stamford to London.
Parked, square across the pavement, near the ibis, is a white police car: Noddy-sized, a notice taped to its perspex window. THIS FACILITY IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER. When we achieve our first major roundabout, going round a woman in dark glasses (backed a body's length into the privet, reading a thick paperback), we find that the road for London lies straight ahead; we must swing away to the right. A last look at the Abbington, last ever, reveals the book and a pair of white hands sticking out of a hedge.
Traffic into Stevenage stretches back for miles: splintering sunbursts on windscreens, mobiles busy as electric razors. Grooming ceremonies: hair twitching, nose picking, lipstick applying. Mirror auditions. Hungrily abstracted cigarette suckling: smoke breakfasts. Buffers of random music. News without novelty. Child murders, men shot by accident. And on purpose. Exploding vehicles. Stevenage cars are nose-to-rump like cattle. Leaking subtle poisons. An invisible necklace around a fortunate satellite.
Our relief at leaving town, being on the road, is immense. Beneath an avenue of pylons, Stevenage has its own Dome. The hint picked up from Mandelson's Folly on the Greenwich Peninsula: temporary permanence. A money pit with accidental benefits. This Dome is more active than its metropolitan model. It has two major attractions: ‘The Way Forward in Tennis’ and the ‘r3 Clinic’ (viz. McTimoney Chiropractic, Aromatherapy, Reflexology).
32 MILES FROM LONDON.
A distressed milestone: lettering renewed with black paint. Yellow lichen on north-facing flank. Did Clare touch this stone with his faltering hand?
The road, before fumes become unbearable, before snarling commuters and hissing air brakes, is a tarmac idyll. Walking is effortless, miles tick past; we don't talk. Maps are not consulted. We'll make for Baldock by the most direct route, up the B197, which runs alongside the A1.
Anna gets her revenge.
Our journey to Glinton is her vision, this cloudless morning, and I am experiencing it (if I'm not hunkered down at the ibis, snoring on a foam pillow). It used to work, for years, that she took care of my dreaming; she earthed nightmares that would, in due course, be dressed as fiction. ‘You've started a new book.’ ‘Haven't.’ ‘You're thinking about it.’ ‘Well, yes.’
Horrors of London, she endured them on my behalf. Folding houses with soft floors. Rivers flooding subterranean passages. Skull-faced stalkers. One-legged dogs. Bubbles of skin that closed around her, cutting off breath. And, worst of all, a man hammering on the door, wanting to be let in. A man with my face. While this impostor, her other husband, lies beside her in the bed. I wake, untroubled, after eight hours: she twists and turns, sits bolt upright; tense, waiting for first light. A few hours of shallow sleep before the day's tasks begin. Before I stroll, whistling, to my desk.
The young Anna, when I met her in Dublin, was a poet, schooled and approved by her father (supposed descendant of John Clare). A man who successfully escaped Glinton and the farm. And who ran a model chemical plant: no strikes, excellent safety record, wasteground given over to the cultivation of vegetables for the canteen. (She is a poet still, without the fuss. The writing. She operates by momentary abdications of attention that never have to be explained. We trade in such exchanges. I front the business, stick my name on the spine. And wait to be found out.)
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sp; Geoffrey Hadman set his eldest daughter to writing a poem a day, verse forms to be mastered. Sonnets, villanelles. These poems were never made public nor commented on; they were a task, a duty accepted without complaint. So that, when she arrived in Dublin, Anna was primed for the tone set by the university's long-established magazine, Icarus. Her work, at first, was acceptable. Mine was awkwardly modernist and full of itself.
I was in touch with the barbarians, Beat and Black Mountain enthusiasts. I published, to local scandal, a three-column piece, airmailed from Tangier by William S. Burroughs. Two of the founding Beats, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, were at that moment visiting Oxford. Henrietta Moraes trailed along.
Afterwards we went to the nearest pub to warm up. Allen and Gregory had a drink or two and started to undress, screaming passionately, ‘You bloody English mother-fuckers. You kill your poets. All the greatest, you murder them. Keats, Shelley, Byron, John Clare.’
In Dublin, poetry blotted up booze. In McDaid's, Toner's, the Pearl Lounge, green-livered poets incubated spite. They manfully ignored one another, until the opening arrived for that rehearsed quip, delivered over the shoulder as they departed: hunched and mildewed phantoms of the anthologies (talking loud enough to be noticed in America). You could watch them pissing it away, under the cool stare of cellophane-collared curates with Spanish Civil War pedigrees, fresh-faced country boys setting down platters of thickcut ham-and-cheese sandwiches.
At Anna's request, I carried a bundle of my poems, faintly typed, to a party in Rathmines. The bundle stayed in my coat. The coat was forgotten. We left in a Dublin taxi, making it up as we went along. Times fresh enough, the softness of the seats, the driver's helmet of Sweet Afton, to be reinvented, reforgotten. Indulged for their radiant obscurity.
I come abruptly out of my reverie as we notice another peripheral ‘Golf Centre’. We lean into cushions of displaced air: Stevenage reps on the burn, sleek convoys of armour-plated school-delivery vehicles. Relief columns for Baldock. Anna must be waking, now, in Hackney; carrying her breakfast tray back to bed. When I get home, I'll find the evidence: screws of kitchen roll blotted with cherry stones, sheets sandpapered in toast crumbs. I haven't much to report: a faded sign for the A1(M) and a few blood-tipped feathers, claws and mince in a buzzing heap. An empty forecourt with chalet-style petrol station attached. A blue car with the door of a red car rammed through its windscreen. A shattered driving mirror fragmenting sky, road, walker, into Cubist slivers. A very worried man in a crisp royal-blue shirt (frosted Blairite half-moons beneath moist armpits) jabbering into his mobile.
WELCOME TO BALDOCK: Historic Market Town. Twinned with Eisenberg & Sanvignes-Les-Mines.
Baldock, I'm ashamed to say, has never meant more to me than this, a marker on the road north. The town takes its name from Baddac, the Old French term for Baghdad. ‘This name was given to Baldock (Herts),’ concludes The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, ‘by the Knights Templar, who held the manor.’
Middle England infected by news from elsewhere: Baldock/ Baghdad. Grubby invaders, we advance through shady suburbs and broad pavements (innocent of pedestrians). Renchi is charmed to find himself in conversation with a rusting oldie who has been around since Templar times. No mere canine accompanist, the Baldock dame is a willing collaborator. Clear blue eyes. She advises us on tea-rooms and potential cafés.
The town is cruciform, architecturally promiscuous: complacent Georgian properties, rejigged coaching inns and a neo-Egyptian Tesco Extra superstore. It is our intention to track Templar Avenue, to search out the fourteenth-century flint church of St Mary the Virgin.
Baldock's former identity as a market can still be felt, our chosen café (reverse lettering on window, plastic cloths, views of lazy street) respects that tradition. Hours could drift while we fictionalise maps, swill coffee, nibble buns. SAND is projected over the bleached sheet of OS Landranger Map (No. 153). WICHES over nothing very much. Renchi sits, head in hands, trying to get a fix on what lies ahead. What is our project? We've lost Clare and discovered a captured Templar enclave. Our route, after we have settled on the point at which we'll snake across the A1 to the east, should carry us towards Biggleswade and Clare's Potton. But what is actually out there? Where are the significant features? Landranger 153 is not forthcoming. Renchi's feet are hurting, after only five or six miles; fresh blisters cropping on loose flaps of skin.
My feeling is that stories are waiting, but we are not a part of them, not yet. Sheltering from the sun, among the monuments in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Renchi doctors his feet, while I pocket a pine cone. Pineal eye. A small, dry, resinous grenade, which I decide to carry with me, to place on another grave. This is the moment to tell Renchi about the drownings, and how the next part of our walk will be dedicated, not so much to the drowned child or her drowned father (unknown to me), but to the person who recounted the story, and how it haunted her life. And how, in recent times, the placing of a new gravestone, names, dates, in a riverside church, near the Great Ouse, the site of the accident, has begun to diffuse a terrible memory.
Clare's account of his ‘Journey out of Essex’ was transcribed on his return to Northborough; the incidents fresh in his mind, before the blisters had deflated and the bruises healed. The spin of the road, the frenzy, set down without calculation, was a desperate attempt to keep alive a set of imposed meanings. The quest to bring Mary Joyce back to life. To recover his youth, the period before he began to write. Before this compulsion to describe a sweep of ground, horizon to horizon; seasons, moods, shifts, social changes. The autobiographies of slugs and stones. Human creatures who required nothing of the sort and damned him for his arrogance.
My own scribbled notes aren't much help: ‘St Mary the Virgin, Mary Joyce… pine cone, drowning… shadow of church follows us down undistinguished road… we're better fed but just as confused as Clare, the journal.’
I got to a village further on & forgot the name the road on the left hand was quite over shaded by some trees & quite dry so I sat down half an hour & made a good many wishes for breakfast but wishes was no hearty meal so I got up as hungry as I sat down – I forget here the names of the villages I passed through
Plodding down Norton Road towards a stone bridge that turns road into river, canted verges, rippling surface, no cars, my standard preoccupations are suspended: home, family, books, bills. Thirty-two years worrying at the fabric of Hackney. ‘Baldock Cemetery’, says the blue sign (white figure like a striding ghost). Then: NORTON. I'm advancing into abandoned fictions. Andrew Norton is my unreliable twin, alternate world fetch: a stand-in through many books. An awkward creature with a gift for disappearing; then re-emerging, burdened with useless knowledge, more confused than when he started. I'm walking, of my own free will, towards Norton's estate, a cemetery at the edge of a Templar manor.
Elizabeth Clare (as she would have been) died a few weeks after her birth on 13 July 1793. John's sturdier twin, Bessy: a potent absence. A stranger to the world (though better suited to it than the poet: ‘a fine lively bonny wench’). She stays with him. Helpston to London. High Beach to Northborough. Northampton to the grave.
My only sibling, an older sister, stays with me. As she stayed with my mother. A lost infant, named but barely present in the world: spoken of, remembered. Her place stolen by a bemused successor. Guilt at survival cannot be undone, unwalked. In suspension, it is managed.
Norton, the road sign, triggered memories of another map; a chart produced by New Age geographer Chris Street. Street tells us, in Earthstars: The Visionary Landscape, that he ‘has been researching the patterns, alignments and sacred sites of London's Earthstars network for the last eighteen years… The revelations were initiated by a series of dreams, visions and psychic experiences.’
Energy lines produced by men of the suburbs favour the suburbs: Burnt Oak, East Barnet, Croydon. Lines forged by Limehouse labourers highlight Hawksmoor churches, blue-and-yellow murder sites, decommissioned hospitals an
d synagogues. Geography is personalised. A walk is a floating autobiography. Renchi travels in the footprints of Peter Bicknell, bearing his father's library of alpine journals, flower paintings, handcoloured English excursions. Writers improvise and iterate, roads reiterate: they are democratic, crowded, verge to verge – even when, as now, coming away from Baldock, we are in remission, no cars, no tractors, no funeral processions.
One map in Chris Street's book catches my eye: four lines meeting in a cross. From Prittlewell Priory, Southend: down the A13 to London. And on, by way of Silbury Hill, to Brean on the Bristol Channel. A reprise of Chris Petit's 1979 road movie, Radio On. Then: from Rottingdean (in the south), up through London, to the section we are now walking. At which point, Street's alignment becomes the plan of our once and future journeys: Stevenage, Norton Church, Buckden Palace, Alconbury, Glinton. Sacred signifiers: ‘Lines of spirit’.
Alconbury is a favourite of mine, a truckers' all-day-breakfast stop: rapid service, modest prices and as much coffee as you can drink. A hill between the A1 and the A14 link. I used to spread research papers on the Formica and plot future books. I bought all my clothes in the Alconbury shop; shirts, jeans, boots. Tapes, maps. True Crime shockers. You could take a shower, have a shave. Get a bed for the night. Alconbury, in its pomp, offered roadside hospitality of the kind once available at Buckden Palace. A Travelodge for Templars following England's psychic highways.
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