Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  I dipped into William Cobbett, a writer admired by Clare. One of Cobbett's rural rides took him through this country, downriver from Huntingdon.

  Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most beautiful meadows that I ever saw in my life. Here are no reeds, here is no sedge, no unevenness of any sort. Here are bowling-greens of hundreds of acres in extent, with a river windling through them, full to the brink.

  Emma has been looking at Anselm Kiefer's pictures of the Rhine (from 1981). Woodcuts on paper. A giant book on a steel lectern in the Tate Modern power station. ‘Even clean hands leave marks and damage surfaces,’ warns a notice, safeguarding this monumental item.

  Out of such Stygian gloom, Emma recognises the solution to her dilemma: how she can make paintings from the Ouse walk that will respect, without being overwhelmed by, dark memories. For many years, childhood and adolescence, the river tragedy was not discussed; the box of photographs remained at the bottom of the wardrobe. Returning to the river, her eight-year-old self, the drama of that autumn day, will be a difficult thing: Emma carrying her son past the place where it happened.

  A fine, Indian summer morning; we meet at the old posting-house, the Lion at Buckden. They can't offer breakfast, not without prior warning: e-mail, fax, credit card details. We detour to Alconbury, around the American air base; then back to the marina at Offord Cluny, the basin where Emma's father picked up the cruiser. A new riverside development is touting for custom, a bar/bistro provides sustenance for weekend sailors.

  The Ouse Valley Way has gathered its complement of small kids with massive rucksacks, award-seeking juvenile hikers, dog attendants and suspiciously cheery fisherfolk. Progress is slow. Louis Petit, seven months old, sturdy, active, has not previously been confronted with a carrysack. He regards it as a gross invasion of his dignity. He grizzles, mopes, works up to an impressive howl. So he is carried in his mother's arms. Set down beside the river for a liquid lunch, he relents. Bestows a winning smile on his exhausted porters.

  Our signposted path in no way resembles Cobbett's ‘bowling-green’ meadows. Going is soft, faces are lashed by drooping willows. Muddy reeds are woven into treacherous islands. The Ouse is broad, oily, thick skinned. A smear of sunlight shows off the dance of midges and gnats. Currents are powerful, contradictory. Pleasure boats pass with upraised gin glasses, rattle of ice cubes. A yawn from the stretching teenage daughter who is like a cat in the wrong place. A scowl from the son at the wheel. The pattern of wavelets, the wash, stays long after the boats have disappeared. My photographs are gloomier than my memories.

  The tower of Holy Trinity Church at Great Paxton can be seen across the river, coming out of the trees. A landing stage on the far bank provokes Emma and brings out the story. It was her duty, in 1970, two families sharing a small boat, a camping expedition, heading towards St Neots, to remember the heavy key that would operate the lock gate, let the water flood through. She failed. She was preoccupied. She forgot it.

  The second adult, a friend of her father, went ashore, into town, to fetch provisions. The boat turned back towards the marina, the starting point of our walk. Emma and her father were in the small cabin. The children of the other family were on deck. Ruth Matthews, in the prow, watching reflections in the water, slipped over the side. Her father, a strong swimmer, dived in. He caught the child, secured her in the rescue position, and then – as the others, alarmed by these sounds, watched – they disappeared below the surface. To be trapped in the weave of reeds? Held under by strong currents? It is not known. Perhaps Dr Matthews suffered a heart attack, the shock of the dive into cold water. The cruiser was brought to the bank, the landing stage. Emma and her brother were taken into a strange house, comforted. Returned to London, their mother. Years later, travelling north, the church at Great Paxton would be pointed out through the train window.

  The story has been told in the place where it happened. We hear the trains. We hear the traffic on the road. We move on. Carrying arrangements for Louis never quite work, buckles snap. The infant is self-absorbed to an heroic degree. His wriggling actuality overrides any attempt on my part to clarify an episode buried in thirty years of memory.

  RIVER VIEWPOINT: DANGER OF DROWNING. NO SWIMMING. NO SKATING. NO UNAUTHORISED BOATING.

  Our outing dissolves into the usual English preoccupations: finding a pub for lunch, crossing a river, a railway line, visiting a Saxon church. Reading memorials. Taking photographs. Worrying about accidents and delays on the road home.

  The pub is one for the book: food-substitutes fizz like sherbet on the tongue. ‘Chicken’ and ‘Fish’ are courtesy discriminations. Microwaved stuff, ice-pink in the middle, is burnt on the outside. A handsome couple, minimally dressed on this cooling October afternoon, chew one another's faces, between swigs from a shared bottle. She exhales his smoke. His love bites depend into rising tattoo bruises. They have a feral, backwater beauty; eyes unclouded by memory of anything that took place before they walked into that bar.

  The narrow metal trough of the Gents has been filled to its brim with copper coins. They glint beneath steaming, bubbling scum: a treasure only the most desperate soul will be tempted to raid.

  As he advanced on Stilton, too tired to recall how long he had been on the road, Clare's memories became dreams, his dreams memories. Edward Storey, in A Right to Song, described the syndrome: ‘Sometimes the dreams do not even come out of memories of the past but appear to project themselves into events that are yet to come.’

  Influenced by De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which he had been following through extracts published in the London Magazine, Clare recorded dreams that might inspire future poems. He saw himself and his fellow villagers processing into Helpston churchyard to witness the Day of Judgement:

  when we got into the church a light streamed in one corner of the chancel & from that light appeared to come the final decisions of mans actions in life I felt awfully afraid tho not terrified & in a moment my name was called from the north-west corner of the chancel & when my conductress smiled in exstacy & uttered something as prophetic of happiness I knew all was right & she led me again into the open air

  Place sustains light. Walking discovers it. Emma Matthews helps memory to achieve the condition of dream. A necklace of particulars. Illuminated tower blocks on the edge of a city. Wet drives, at dawn, through a dusty Texas town. Nightfishing in the English Channel. Accidents of perception substitute doctored images for an unreliable past, whose only claim on our attention is the fact that it has been captured on film. The paintings, less sharply focused, touched by human warmth, imminent not actual, cannot be forgotten. Or lost.

  To Stilton

  As, on the morning of our third day, the countryside becomes more serene, so my expression, captured in Renchi's photographs, is more agonised: screwed up, creased. Eyes narrow, blooded, under the long brim of a sweat-streaked cap. The walk is getting serious. We'll make it but it's going to hurt. Our task is to resupply the pain hidden by the Cambridgeshire landscape. It really is very pleased with itself, pristine roads and unbroken sunshine (when we have lumbered ourselves with bundles of rainwear). Lilies float on harmless water. A signboard, in painted relief, for Offord Cluny. Like the wooden cover ripped from a new edition of Izaac Walton.

  We pass the marina, cross the mainline railway, wink at a gravel chute; achieve Buckden. With every expectation of a mid-morning break at a timbered hostelry: ‘The Old Lion & Lamb. One of the Oldest Posting Houses.’ More significantly, we rejoin the Great North Road and the spirit of Clare (at his most weary, so much done, so far to go).

  I felt so weak here that I forced to sit down on the ground to rest myself & while I sat here a Coach that seemed to be heavy laden came rattling up & stopt in the hollow below me & I cannot reccolect its ever passing by me I then got up & pushed onward seeing little to notice for the road very often looked as stupid as myself & I was very often half asleep as I went on the thi
rd day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road which seemed to taste something like bread

  Settled into a window seat, coffee and biscuits, we plot the rest of the day's march. As I had carried with me Emma's story of the Ouse drownings, so Renchi felt the need to witness Grafham Water and the submerged villages. He had tales of his own to bring to mind. One of which involved a Native American Sundance ceremony, attended by friends or relatives. A tree tumbled on to a participant, smashing his skull. A dancer, who couldn't deal with this unexpected intervention, took off at high speed in his car. The others, after due consideration, came together to pick up the tree, to carry it away: appeasing hurt by a revised and extended ritual.

  As we left Great Paxton, a figure out of Trollope, very much like the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, leant over his trim hedge to let us know that we were looking at ‘the oldest Saxon church in Cambridgeshire’. Buckden has an alternative ecclesiastical attraction, a redbrick bishop's palace. Rigby Graham's lithograph, from his Clare expedition, pushes a rather pudgy poet (in battered Sam Peckinpah top hat) against the palace wall; while a heron, swooping overhead, points out the road. Head north, young man.

  Studying that hat, I wondered how Clare would work in a western, on horseback. This short, sturdy man crumpled under the weight of transporting memories of the Helpston horizon. He wouldn't register in widescreen. Except as a holy fool: Clint Eastwood's dwarfish sidekick in High Plains Drifter. A half-breed deputed to looking after the animals for The Wild Bunch (credited below L. Q. Jones and Bo Hopkins). A person who is never more than an extension of landscape, attractive but disposable. (Chris Petit's acquaintance, Bo Hopkins, mad as a raft of monkeys, is shot to pieces before the end of the credit sequence.)

  Distressed, road-ragged, we behaved like English gentlemen, not cowboys: coffee and Nice biscuits, a brief tour of the bishop's palace. My photographs play along with the romantic fallacy: Jacobean garden, stone cleric with model of church resting on his hand, a priapic swan nuzzling his privates. The eleventh-century palace housed the Bishops of Lincoln. It was here that Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's set-aside queen, was kept. The Lion & Lamb, it seems, was a guest house for the bishop. They still boast of it. Of surviving. And remembering.

  Blisters tended, socks changed, Renchi is a new man; so much so that he heads rapidly out of town and straight back towards London: wrong choice at roundabout, delirious reconnection with the A1. The crenellations of the high wall of Buckden Palace may have had something to do with it. They throw out a ladder of light, down which Renchi, tipped forward by his massive burden, dances. Today's bandanna is pale blue, matching the watery oval on his T-shirt, which is otherwise as green as smoke.

  Grafham Water is not so much Grafham Water as Grafham underwater: 1,500 acres of drowned farms, hamlets and good agricultural land. Recreation instead of seasonal toil. Water sports, nature trails, instead of nature in its unredeemed state. The Exhibition Centre offers a video presentation (official history) and the shop is stocked with souvenirs of a non-place you are never going to know, mementoes of absence. The Anglian Water brochure (‘Something for Everyone’) puffs walking, cycling, eating, avian voyeurism, reduced rates for senior citizen fishermen, but says absolutely nothing about land piracy, decanted villagers. Another nice example of erased or selective memory.

  When you arrive, as pedestrians, bruised and thirsty for images of water, you sense immediately that something is wrong. Retro-futurist buildings, on the rim of a low grass bank, loom like UFOs: Grafham Water is an airstrip for aliens. Our boys fly out to combat virtual terrorism and rogue regimes in never-ending oil wars, while grape-skinned intelligences from distant galaxies drop in for their summer break, the Grafham Water package. ‘For those wishing to have a different location for a special occasion, we can offer private bookings of the facilities.’

  As we approach Grafham Water, destination of choice on all road signs, we notice an ominous glint, red and silver: meridian sun flashing on a mound of lobsters or shelled prawns? Which later reveals itself as: the largest collection of bicycles outside Cambridge (or East London's Cheshire Street market). All of them scarlet with silver mudguards. It's tempting, very tempting. The roads are empty, straight, hedgeless. We should make Stilton in time for an afternoon nap, a drink before dinner.

  We settle instead for a rest on the beach. It's not a real beach, a token scatter of shells. Like the bottom of a parrot's cage. No tides. Clear water over imported gravel, with bands of yellow in the style of urban swimming pools after the incontinent kiddies' session. Fishermen pose, floppy hats, multipocketed vests, floppy lines, on jetties constructed from broken boulders. Blue lake. Lazy clouds. What could be more delightful? Sucking on plastic water, munching peppermints. Cooling swollen feet in liquid that will soon be gushing through the hosepipes and shower units and kitchen taps of Anglia's customers. This water is fine in photographs, but it smells bad. Dead. Or kept alive on a respirator.

  The Duke of Edinburgh choppered down to Grafham in 1966 to cut the ribbon. The Doddington Brook was dammed and water pumped in from the River Ouse at Offord. Farms disappeared. Farmworkers were dispersed. They were used to it, wartime restrictions had never been repealed. Airfields at Little Staughton, Kim-bolton, Brampton Grange, Molesworth. The American base at Alconbury. An epic geometry of crisscrossing runways, now disused, near the village of Thurleigh. Renchi is on the trail of a vanished family, a story he wants to uncover. Memories of commandeered barns, compulsory labour. Official secrets. He thinks that Grafham Church might offer a clue, more names on deleted tombstones.

  We exit the pleasure zone by way of a raised metal arm, an obliging security barrier. Nothing obvious to protect; water behind us, dazzling cornfields ahead. When white lines appear, we know that we're closing on civilisation, cottages, pubs. The lines are fresh and they are in duplicate. The new painter missed the original mark, went back for a second attempt, and left a drunken road to make its own way to the Montagu Arms. MONDAY: STEAK NITE. 2 × 8 SIRLOIN DINNERS. ONLY £10.

  A water tower. Shadows of overhanging trees. Sections of the road, repaired, floating free between black fissures of melted tar.

  Grafham. Ellington. (We skirt Brampton, where the young Samuel Pepys spent so much of his time with upwardly mobile relatives. A cousin of his mother worked as a bailiff for the local landowner, Montagu. Hence: the Montagu Arms. Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, was Pepys's patron. The sponsor of his career as a naval bureaucrat.)

  Renchi leads me into yet another church, another shaded oasis. He photographs the grave of the Baker family: ‘Frank, Twin Brother of Ernest.’ He talks to a woman who has parked her car at the church door. He makes notes. He pieces together the story of a family scattered when the drowning happened, when land under cultivation was lost to Grafham Water.

  A man of the village was sent to the Thames Estuary, the Isle of Grain, where he became a shepherd. A shepherd working with London delinquents. The legends are as vague as our register of the loss suffered by people who lived and worked this patch for generations. Fading names on weathered stone. The thing that excites Renchi is the accident of meeting the woman with the car, the confirmation of facts he had previously suspected.

  Inside the church, he examines a section in the great black Bible, left open on a lectern: ‘Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.’

  When we walk outside, into bright sunlight, the time on the church clock is twelve thirty-three.

  The relief barman is about to call it a day in the village of Alconbury. His wife's family come from another place entirely, my home country, Port Talbot in South Wales. The only relief barmen need there, in the red smoke of the steel mills, is from the humours of the drinkers; the same faces, day after day, looped patter, residual gloom. The game's up in Alconbury, in Middle England, no field-labourers, no dedicated alcoholics left. Small pubs, once run as a sidelin
e by the wives of ambitious farmers, have to peddle pizzas and welcome kids to roadside play areas. (Proud Montagu's heraldic crest is a pub sign. He gave his name to the sandwich, but none are available here.) John Clare's escape from pressure, family, into the boisterous company of the Blue Bell Inn, the Billings brothers and their associates, poachers and fiddlers in the fellowship of drink, has been discontinued.

  Frederick Martin:

  It was proposed by the brothers Billing, tenants of the Hall, and adopted by a majority of votes, that a stick should be put firmly in the ground, in the middle of the room, and that they should dance around it in a ring till it fell from its erect position. The way in which it fell was to indicate in which direction the two emigrants were to go.

  Swaying inebriates stamp a pattern on the dirt floor, a vortex of footprints. Fate will take the decision for them. Such rituals were denied us in Alconbury. Orange moustaches: two pints of sweet cordial fizzed with lemonade from a hose. It's come to that. Rehy-drated, we take our leave of the barman and his wife, grateful for their conversation. They'll be back on the road soon, a new gig in Sheffield. Now we have nothing except a long haul, shoulder to shoulder with Clare, out ahead of us; up Ermine Street, the Great North Road, to Stilton.

  A decorated stone block beside the Great North Road. Hand pointing south: TO LONDON 64 MILES (through Huntingdon, Royston & Ware). To LONDON 72 MILES (through Cambridge). Here is an object we treat with reverence (the better for being unreadable by motorists). It is faded, masonic; a lost piece in a game of psychogeographical chess. Through his magnifying glass, Renchi watches a snail crawl up one of the grooves, following the vertical stroke of the T in ‘To London’.