Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  Another Hadman, John, cousin of Robert, illustrates the darker side of the rural economy: thrive or perish. He married well, so it was thought, the daughter of Edward Pitts the wheelwright; he was set up with a bakery. The shop was in the wrong place. Werrington had two superior establishments. John's bakery foundered: stale loaves, dead sparrows on a string. Moles pegged out like leather kites. John played with Robert Hadman and George Pitts in a brass band (Anna's favourite music). It didn't help.

  John published the fact that, like Mr Rawlings of Peterborough, he would supply ‘Members in the Neighbourhood, with Bread at Sixpence Farthing the four pound loaf and Flour at a reduction of 2d per stone’. The advertisement didn't work, villagers patronised the bakers they knew. John took out a licence on a Werrington inn, the Wheat Sheaf. Then offered it for sale.

  By April 1868 he was again put to the expense of inserting a notice in the newspaper: ‘I, John Hadman, will not be answerable for any Debt or Debts my wife, Francis Charlotte Hadman, may contract after this date.’ An unfortunate marriage, expectations dashed: disaster. Mrs Bunten thinks that John fell into a depression and killed himself. Melancholia drifts from the Fens like clammy autumn mists.

  Young Robert Hadman, husband of Louisa Maria, prospered. He moved to the Cherry House Farm on the main road through Werrington: Church Street. The road on which Clare would have come, limping from Peterborough, for his collision with Patty. Perhaps it was the Wheat Sheaf he favoured? Robert would have been six years old at the time; his brother Henry, seven. They might have witnessed the scene, as they roamed the village, looking for sparrows to kill.

  Robert managed cherry orchards. His thatched farm, the one I photographed on our walk to the church, was now a restaurant with a Routier badge. The orchards were on the far side of the road. Old Albert Plant recalled being sent as a boy to drive the cherry crop to Peterborough on his cart. ‘Remember, lad; I've counted them,’ stern Mr Hadman used to say. ‘I'll know if you eat so much as one.’ Peterborough was famous for its cherries.

  It was a rare Hadman, bankruptcies and brass bands aside, who made it into newsprint: the Peterborough Advertiser. But Robert's funeral notice (of 1924) preceded the tributes accorded to his second son, William.

  YESTERDAY

  In the presence of a sympathetic gathering of mourners and friends, the remains of Mr. Robert Hadman, one of the most well-known and respected inhabitants of Werrington, who passed away on Sunday morning, after a short illness, were laid to rest in Werrington Churchyard yesterday (Thursday) afternoon. Deceased, who was 87 years of age, had taken a prominent part in the life of the district and held many public offices, which he relinquished a few years ago owing to failing eyesight.

  He was the second son of the late Mr Robert Hadman, farmer, of Werrington… For many years Mr Hadman was a member of the Werrington Parish Council, and prior to the formation of the Parish Council, acted as Surveyor to the village. For sixty years he was a member of the Werrington Church Choir, and he possessed a very fine tenor voice… He was an original member of the old Greycoats, when he played the euphonium, and had vivid recollections of playing at the wedding of the present Marquis of Huntly to the first Marchioness over 50 years ago. He was in the Corps Band when they went to Bristol and secured a second place in a band contest… He was hon. treasurer of the Werrington Pig Club…

  Highlights of the orchard-keeper's life are taken down by a jobbing hack, along with names of those who attended the service. Eight of his twelve children were present. ‘Of the sons,’ remarks the obituarist, ‘William Hadman is a successful farmer at Glinton.’ Alfred is the schoolmaster at Newborough. Percy has taken over the family farm. Hadmans, Tylers, Machins, Aspittles, Vergettes and Roses are well represented. The coffin is of plain English oak with brass fittings. The funeral arrangements are by Mr A. Stimson. If the Hadmans weren't related to the Stimsons, they were buried by them. And beside them. Generation after generation in the small churchyard of St John the Baptist.

  And here the story seems to end. The older Robert came to Werrington, his sons stayed. Some of them kept pubs. One looked after cherry orchards. One tried to peddle tares. Beyond Anna's

  great-great-grandfather, the thread was lost. The earliest census record places Robert in Washingley, a settlement on the ridge above Stilton, now excised from the map. Only the photographs in Mrs Bunten's book stay alive: unblinking eyes test our nerve. A conduit into a past that we can read, remake, but never experience.

  Standing outside his property at 90 Church Street, Robert Had-man's pride is in being present, in this place. Trim white beard. Euphonium-player's moustache. Striped coat and matching waistcoat. Bow tie. Heavy watchchain. Savagely polished boots. A man of substance. The sleeves of his coat swallow working hands. Behind him, in the darkness of the window, is the faint outline of a watching woman. The white impression of a high collar and an unseen face.

  On the same occasion, Robert's daughters are brought out. Strong-featured, tall: not a smile to muster between them. Women

  who married butchers. Or became feared school-teachers. Anna identifies with the dark Caroline and the redbrick villa she built, on Church Street; its name still visible above the door: Carisville.

  Mrs Bunten, keeper of images, is also a keeper of secrets. A twin. Her mother, so she says, had no idea that a brother was coming. The passion for collecting and collating Werrington family histories begins with her own. A mystery in her parentage, undiscussed until that moment, was revealed when she was told to look closely at the name-plate on her grandfather's coffin. She learnt that, as with the Clares and many other village families, there were children born out of wedlock. The name on the coffin, the blood she shared, was Stimson.

  Peterborough

  Peterborough confounds us, as it confounded Clare. The boy who walked from his Helpston cottage to the Glinton turnpike, the cathedral city; down to the river, for his hopeless excursion to Wisbech. And the troubled poet captured by the wife of a bishop. Peterborough is like a dying star, dragging in debris from the surrounding countryside, swallowing villages and villagers. We make several circuits of the asteroid belt, stop-starting, before we crack it: a way of reaching the car park of the Bull Hotel. (Convenient for library, museum and Queensgate Shopping Centre.)

  Even in my bookdealing days Peterborough was an occasional visit, two low-key shops, modest prices, modest returns. Driffs Guide (sic), as tricky to negotiate as the Peterborough road system, ignores the town completely and, in later editions, dismisses its premier hutch, Old Soke Books, in a sentence: ‘I'm sure the name of this shop is a mistake, he didn't look like an alcoholic to me.’ A fact worth remarking in the provincial trade.

  In more recent times, I received a list of Clare materials from the Peterborough poet and dealer Paul Green. I ordered the 1964 reissue of Frederick Martin's 1865 biography. Martin reports the tale of Clare being taken up by Mrs George Marsh, the German-born wife of the bishop; a lady of irresistible charity who did her best to anchor the poet to a writing desk, while macerating him in the society of the cathedral close. The long-suffering bishop was persuaded at one point to visit Clare's home. ‘It was certainly not a little “Malapropos” that you could not ask your noble visitor to enter your cottage, in consequence of the door being lock'd against you,’ Mrs Marsh chided. They had the misfortune to try Helpston on a day when Patty found her husband unmanageable: drunk as a bookman.

  Walking, Martin suggests, soothed and repaired Clare. He was persuaded to leave the confinement of the Northborough cottage for short excursions, during which the melancholy poet allowed himself to be guided, Lear-like, by his daughters. ‘Daily rambles continued for more than a month, Clare at last seemed almost recovered from his malady.’ Repeated rituals form a circuit in the brain, a mapping confirmed and improved by each new day's stroll: the trivia of village life, the breath of the fields.

  He pushed his circuits wider – heath, woods, road – until he found himself caught in the coils of Peterborough. (As S
tamford was to Helpston, the destination of youth and ambition, so Peterborough was to Clare's Northborough exile: a symbol of alienation, hapless wandering, doctors and bishops.)

  One day, when rambling about on the confines of the cathedral city, he met and was recognised by Mrs. Marsh. The good old lady was delighted to see her poet again, and insisted that he should make up for his former neglect by accompanying her at once, and staying for a few days at the episcopal mansion… To prevent her poet from running away again, [she] kept him constantly in her company. Conversing with him on all subjects, Mrs. Marsh at times thought his remarks rather singular; while his sudden swerving from one topic to another often astonished her not a little. But all this the good lady held to be perfectly natural in a poet and a man of genius.

  Clare endured, until it came to the episode in the theatre. Provincial theatres are large events in small towns, social as much as artistic; a question of being seen, of patronising the culture. Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was brought from his room at the London Hospital, to plays and performances. (Not knowing that he himself was the prime exhibit.) John Clare, the trophy of Mrs Marsh, was carried in triumph to a production of The Merchant of Venice. He stood up in the ‘box reserved for the wife of the Lord Bishop’, and yelled at Shylock: ‘You villain, you murderous villain!’ His final act of sanity: getting himself ejected from the theatre, the claustrophobia of the cathedral close. Returned to wife and family.

  The next morning, Clare went back to Northborough, having received an intimation from Mrs. Marsh that it would be best he should go home at once. He wandered forth from the city in a dreamy mood, and lost his way before he had gone far. Some acquaintances found him sitting in a meadow, near the hamlet of Gunthorpe, and seeing his wild and haggard looks and strange manners, they took him by the arm and led him back to Peterborough.

  Gunthorpe is found between Paston and Werrington, Hadman territory. Clare's collapse was a rehearsal for the fugue of escape from High Beach, the incident with the farm cart. Werrington seems to be a pivotal place, between the pull of Peterborough and seductive memories of Glinton spire and Mary Joyce: meadows of tares, pig sheds, future airfields. Hadmans who are not buried in Werrington are buried in Paston: George Edward and his wife, Emily, H. R. Hadman and Lavinia Hadman, Walter John, Jessie, James, Robert Henry, Robert Henry Ford, Edith Carrie, Edward.

  Paul Green, a poet living on London Road, Peterborough, down which Clare marched, identifies with the myth. I asked him if, having grown up in the area, he knew of any Hadmans, and he replied:

  My identification with Clare is very personal, and nurtured by my living (between the ages of three and seven) in the village of Marholm, some two or three miles from Helpston…

  Early indigence in the Marholm and Helpston localities, then a later exposure to poetry, helped bring me to a very personal appreciation, and identification with Clare. He is not simply the local famous poet (with his name given to a pub and a library theatre), but an outsider symbol, or a figure of marginality that shows to what extent a person's origins can descend, without the need for expressive creativity being expunged…

  When I attended school in Walton, there was a caretaker whose name might have been Hadman. My second sister, born after being rehoused and moved from Marholm, now lives in Whittlesey… One curious point here is that her husband's family owned a bungalow in the Eastfield district of Peterborough, which meant that for many years they were the next-door neighbour to Edward Storey. Before he went into adult education, Storey held a clerical position with Hotpoint, so would have worked in a similar profession, and the same office (probably a large one) as my father. Storey, as you know, turned into a Clare biographer, so there is a somewhat sophisticated and circuitous later connection.

  Contemporary poets reiterate Clare's experience: and in doing so discover themselves. Myth becomes truth. Modernist ‘open field poetics’, as proposed by Charles Olson, defy the system of enclosures imposed on language by formalist reactionaries. Rip out hedges, fences, prohibitions, for a method of reading the world from horizon to horizon. No ceilings in time. No knowledge that may not be accessed and inserted. Such metaphors are wasted on Peterborough, a town without irony. How else could they boast of a John Clare pub, library and – theatre?

  This is not a comfortable town to negotiate. The market element has been overwhelmed by a retail labyrinth, the Queensgate Shopping Centre: ‘John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Argos, Bhs, Boots, Waitrose, Virgin Megastore plus ioo other shops in a relaxed environment.’ An arcade project owing more to Walt Disney than Walter Benjamin. Solitaries and reluctant groups stagger around the notional centre in search of a quorum, enough ciderheads to make up a mob.

  I'd never before witnessed a feeding frenzy of the kind encouraged by an eat-till-you-burst-for-a-fiver Chinese restaurant. Genetically-modified birthday kids (English faces, pale and crumpled, on American bodies) take it in turns to stand under an ice-cream dispenser, mouths agape; visibly inflated on a teat of soft yellow slurry. Saturday-night dudes, cowboy boots and string ties, waddle in from the backwoods, to cruise trays of sticky batter-meats and fish balls. They compete to see how many circuits they can achieve before they are too swollen to get out of the chair. The room disappears into a dense flatus of incense, aftershave, sweet gravy, cola-wind and tobacco: sucked between mouthfuls as an appetite depressant, to make room for the next shovel-load of chemical swill.

  Sated with remorseless good times, we retreat: windblown, rain-pelted, down parodically generous pedestrian precincts that advertise their total absence of content. A chainstore is peddling discounted first editions of J. G. Ballard's Millennium People for a couple of pounds; local scavengers are not agile enough to bend down to check the price ticket. The only sure method of finding your hotel, even when it is fifty yards away, is to call a cab. But that's impossible. Cabbies are too smart to risk picking anything off the streets at the weekend. They run a shuttle service from outlying villages to city-centre clubs, booze barns with a door policy barring customers wearing anything more elaborate than lip-piercings and Elastoplast. There is no transport when you need it, but scratch your ear, lift your knuckles from the paved highway, and a mini-cabber will bundle you into his vehicle with the alacrity of a Beirut kidnapper.

  We had a number of items to check before we left town: the enclosure maps of Glinton in the Peterborough Library, the premises of the photographer who made card portraits of Anna's unknown relatives, the butcher's shop once operated by the family of Anna's first cousin, Judy Brown. But the real attraction, for me, was the ‘small collection of ornamental snuffboxes’ that Jonathan Bate says is ‘still held by Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery Society’. The boxes were among the ‘very few possessions’ left at John Clare's death. Random gifts. Scarcely enough to fill a suitcase.

  The library was no problem. I could have spent hours poring over maps, but I knew by this point that there were no Hadmans in Glinton before the early twentieth century. A short walk through the town demonstrated that the premises of Thomas Blackman, ‘Artist Photographer, Miniature & Portrait Painter of St John Street’, had vanished. The artist photographer (‘portraits coloured to order’) placed himself between the old cattle market and the cathedral, in the expectation of catching farmers. Anna's relative, the old gentleman with the snowy Shaker beard, is undergoing an ordeal, an ordeal of retention. His eyes have black holes at the centre of the irises, holes in a statue. The ‘artistic’ part of the transaction is discovered in a wispy loss of focus around the edges, leaving the rustic patriarch afloat: a very material spirit summoned at a seance. The old lady in her cane chair, caped like a widow, clutches a dead flower. She doesn't look at the camera, at us. She meditates on mortality, the uplifting text that will be cut into her gravestone.

  BROWNS SPECIALITY MEATS are also defunct. The family firm has decamped to Stilton, on-line butchery, quality provisions for the carriage trade. Peterborough no longer sustains a connection between Hadman farmers and Hadman butche
rs, between relatives to north and south of the Nene. The market and the big agricultural shows were once the meeting place: business, gossip, society. Lawrie Hadman, her father's older brother, so Anna discovers, worked as a butcher in Whittlesey before he took up farming in Glinton. He trained in Chelmsford. We saw the photograph: arcades of meat, hooked herds, naked chickens, all-too-human pigs (like headless clients of the Chinese restaurant).

  That leaves the museum and art gallery. Which is closed, while an exhibition is being hung. But I persist; I get somebody on the phone, discover the hour when we'll be allowed in. The grey stone building is forbidding, information is given out with some reluctance. Clare's pathetic goods have been imprisoned here, and can be viewed, if we insist on it, as part of a journey between one gallery and another. ‘Tiny tots are welcome in our award-winning Mini Museum, while adults can get nostalgic in the Period Shop.’

  The reason I'm so keen to view the snuffboxes is that Anna, who is not by temperament a collector or hoarder, makes an exception for small boxes. It began when we travelled together and I insisted on ducking into used-book shops ‘for a few moments’. Which might stretch into hours: back rooms, cellars, circuitous conversations endured in procession towards improbable treasure. Anna hit the junk shops, usually in the same part of town, and trawled for curious boxes. Bone, brass, plastic. Round, square, oval.

  Old Soke Books in Peterborough worked out well; alongside the books were a few curios, tins, figurines. Anna fell for a pair of wooden Chinese puzzle boxes. One had a sliding lid with a river scene: beached boat, four trees, distant snow-capped mountain. The boat was heaped with earth, a shape that duplicated the mountain. Inside the box were fifteen numbered squares; which, exploiting a single free space, could be manoeuvred into a correct sequence. The second, larger box was more interesting. It came from the same source: another river scene, in marquetry, on the lid. Two moored craft, one tree with two branches, one boat under sail, distant snow-capped mountain. The trick was to open the box by sliding various chequered panels.