Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  Agriculture and blue clay: the economy. Chips, buns, dank pubs: the fuel. Church or chapel: duty. The ‘first and foremost of Whittlesey's sons’ was Sir Harry Smith; also known, after his part in the Sikh Wars, as the ‘Hero of Aliwal’. The town of Ladysmith, the brochure informs us, was named after his Spanish bride, Juana Maria De Los Dolores DeLeon. Sir Harry Smith sounds like the novel Conrad never quite got around to writing.

  The brochure, after a section on ‘Where to Eat’ (‘good choice of takeaways from Pizza, Kebabs and Burgers to traditional Fish and Chips’), suggests that researching ‘Family History’ has become the principal Fenland passion (easily done, around here, without leaving the house). Whittlesey Library, in Market Street, keeps parish registers (1654–1960) on microfilm.

  We scoot down Broad Street and into Market Street: the Library is open. This is a proper, walk-in, civic amenity; books, information, rows of grey screens. We have William Rose (4 November 1844-21 February 1910) as our starting point. We have a machine, somebody to show us how to use it, and rolls of microfilm. ‘Roses?’ the librarian says. ‘Funny that, another woman was after them. Only last week.’

  We'd better start cranking the handle, jumping the names, addresses, occupations of the dead. Census forms provide a column in which to make a mark if you're infirm, simple-minded or imbecile: discriminations of waterland lunacy. Not the Roses. There are dozens of them, farmers, publicans, go-getters with large families; sons to work the land, daughters to marry property (often a brother of the man with whom their sister went to the altar).

  At the time of the 1881 census, William Rose was a farmer who also kept the Windmill Inn. He was thirty-six years old. His wife, Mary, was thirty-five. He had three daughters: Annie (thirteen), Florence (nine), Martha (one). And a son, William (seven). By 1891, the family had moved to 72 Benwick Road. (We check this out. The house is on the southern outskirts, close to Whittlesey Dike. The Roses are creeping closer to open Fens, the opportunity of acquiring land.) There are three more sons: Harry (ten), George (six) and another William (four). And a fourth daughter: Nellie (seven). The older William is described as a ‘labourer’, presumably on his father's farm.

  Florence Rose, the second daughter, has left home. She is Anna's grandmother, the one who will marry William Hadman in 1902. Her photograph sits on our Hackney wall: posed in the garden of the Red House with her three children. Once, this was a period piece, sepia sentiment; now the figures are placed. Now Florence looks back at us. We know her as an elderly woman, bespectacled, flower in hat, walking down a street in Lancashire; visiting Geoffrey Hadman in Cleveleys. She keeps step with the much taller Miss Marsh, her younger son's landlady. Miss Marsh carries a wicker basket.

  Piece by piece, a pattern is revealed: empty spaces have been left for Anna and her siblings. People disengage from place, place gets on very well without them. Every one of William Rose's children was born in Whittlesey. What happened to Florence? How did she come to Werrington? There were Roses in the village, we knew that, friends, fellow churchgoers, in the choir with the Hadmans and Stimsons. And there were meetings between farmers, from Werrington and Whittlesey, at Peterborough's Agricultural Fair.

  The Roses, according to William's obituary, also had connections in Ramsey. Tributes were displayed from ‘Mere House’. A Florence Emily Rose, born at Ramsey, is listed in Whittlesey's 1901 census; described as a ‘milliner/worker’, boarding at a property kept by Hannah Donnington in Almshouse Street. The other lodger was James Henry Parker, manager of a draper's shop. If this were a fiction, a novel by Thomas Hardy (or middle-period Wells), Parker would be a direct descendant of the mysterious John Donald Parker, Clare's grandfather. And Florence Rose would be the future Florence Hadman (the marriage to William taking place the following year). A boarding-house liaison? Manager and counter girl? Pregnancy, desertion; another drowning in the cattle trough?

  I found a Parker grave, Thomas Parker (died 1923), in Werrington. (And more of them in Thorney.) Could we trace the wandering schoolmaster, on the road south – Glinton, Werrington, Whittlesey – scattering his bad seed? John Donald has vanished entirely. The Florence Emily Rose of Almshouse Street is not the future Florence Hadman. Our Catherine Cookson version implodes.

  Great-grandfather William continues his push on Ramsey; every few years a new property, more land. He relocates to Glassmoor; now he is really out there, on the Middle Level, a muddy desert of thin, parallel strips. Rich soil recovered from the water. Whittlesey, so they tell us, was once an island surrounded by marshes: Whitel's Ey. Glass Moor is an extension of Whittlesey Mere. Looking at a map from 1786, we discover an inland sea, in the approximate shape of Australia, stretching from Stilton (in the west) to the Roses' future holdings. ‘Bevills River’ emerged from the Mere to run alongside Glassmoor House: the present Bevill's Leam. Coleridge and De Quincey could have saved themselves a lot of shoe-leather, the Mere was as impressive as anything in Cumbria. John Clare was quite right when he made his disparaging comment about the Thames: a puddle, a khaki trickle.

  Edward Storey, in a note added to a reproduction of the 1786 map, quotes John Bodger, who produced the survey. The Mere, Bodger asserted, was ‘the most spacious fresh water Lake in the Southern part of Great Britain… Its surface is 1,570 square acres and the depth varies considerably.’ The Mere is a considerable absence, out of which stones and treasures have emerged, including ‘a silver censer and incense ship which were believed to have once been part of the silver of Ramsey Abbey’. Loss of water affects the microclimate of the empty land in the triangle between Whittlesey, March and Ramsey.

  In 1851, hundreds of people converged on the Mere, with carts and baskets, to take advantage of the final drainage by the Appold Pump. They slither in mud, fighting over dying fish, all that is left of the original ‘abundance of pike, eels, perch, carp, tench, bream, chubb, roach, dace and gudgeon’.

  John Clare, in his journal (November 1824), writes that his friend Henderson, the Scottish head-gardener from Milton Park, sends news from Whittlesey:

  discovered a new species of Fern a few days back growing among the bogs on Whittlesea Mere & our talks was of Ferns for the day he tells me there is 24 different species or more natives of England & Scotland one of the finest of the latter is calld the Maiden hair fern growing in rock clefts

  My walk from Holme Fen, that evening when I left Anna in the car and went looking for the risen Ramsey stones, took on additional significance. The sheds around Engine Farm, and even that name, were worth investigating. Reading Storey's remarks, in the margin of the 1786 map, I understood why. The famous Appold Pump, used for the draining of the Mere (which as early as 1805 was losing its water levels), had been shown at the Great Exhibition. It was brought into use at Johnson's Point, below Bevill's Leam. Or: the area where Engine Farm is now to be found.

  But Appold is also a street in Shoreditch, passing into the City of London, and as such is part of my sacred geography. Standing in Bunhill Fields, September 2004, I tried to explain the theory of drift to a San Francisco muralist who had picked up a commission on the corner of Hoxton Square. We were in the enclosure between the graves of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake: the energy lines of England run out from this spot. Bunyan used knowledge gained from his walks around and beyond Bedford to formulate a pedestrian parable. Defoe travelled Britain in the double identity of spy and reporter. Blake turned local geography into universal geography, his own religion forged from the dustiest of particulars. I repudiated the notion of Nicholas Hawksmoor whose grooved obelisk at St Luke's, Old Street, we could see, in its alignment with Defoe's obelisk, and distant Christ Church, Spitalfields – as a member of an occult elite. London is a body kept alive, energised by complex lines and patterns that can be walked, built upon: celebrated or exploited. The reality is democratic, anyone can play. All it requires is open eyes and stout boots. Start moving and the path reveals itself.

  In my 1987 novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, two of the chara
cters (Brian Catling and myself, an episode borrowed from life) break into the roofless church of St Luke's; a true temple of the City. A site given over to self-seeded trees and wild shrubs, early light picking out blood-colours in shards of stained glass. We climb into the bell tower, witness sunrise as a form of alchemy, then wander, without premeditation, into the streets.

  His spine resting on the buried bell. The bell within the obelisk. The cancelled bell that has been hidden from the world.

  A flutter of birds against the window. Bird lime. Stench of old feathers.

  We turn away, our prayers are made. Down into the face of the lion: Bunhill, Finsbury, Sun, Appold… the path of old stone.

  All writing is made in a kind of trance. The Catling expedition to Ramsey happened at the wrong time. The ‘buried’ bell of St Luke's will reappear in the Fens, on an island: a memory that got ahead of itself. Appold's Pump circulates the blood of the heart. White stones break the surface of a peat sea.

  ‘Beneath the mud,’ Storey concludes, ‘were also discovered the skulls of a wild boar and a wolf, remnants of a history some several years earlier. Now only the map reminds us of what was; the rest is in the imagination.’

  We'd covered enough ground for one day. We would visit Whittlesey Museum, which kept very eccentric opening hours, then make our way back to Peterborough. Glassmoor was too large a step. Let it keep. The immediate challenge, in the cathedral city, is to find a restaurant that doesn't have an ambulance with winking lights waiting for overenthusiastic diners.

  Straw Bear

  Come, give me your great bears paw

  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  Step inside the museum, wait for your eyes to adjust to the dim light, and there it is: the photograph. The confirmation. Of all the weirdness that has attended our passage through this landscape. A man attached by a rope to an ambulant mound of mud and twigs. The man has the authentic heavy-browed Hadman frown, the gravity-obeying moustache. A battered top hat with fungal outgrowth bursting through the lid. Moleskin trousers with much of the mole still evident; greasy, free-standing. Heavy waistcoat and jacket (cut from an army blanket). And in this person's left hand what Catling took to be, when I showed him the postcard in Oxford, a brick. The professor knew nothing of Whittlesey and the brickworks, but he had the climate absolutely right: driver, rope, brick, bear. ‘Pay up or I cut the bond, let the creature loose.’ That's what they call the bear's attendants: keepers or drivers. Bear-walkers come, as I would discover, watching film of the winter ritual, in two types. The old fellow, flounced and feathered, only a little drunk in the morning, who minds the bear as he guides it from public house to public house. And the younger, fiercer man who drives the exhausted beast, with goads and tugs on the rope, as the sweating straw-thing staggers into evening. On the following morning, ash in their mouths, chastened rioters burn the bear, a damp bonfire in a bleak field.

  The brick is a collecting box, a slit in its lid. ‘Give us your pennies.’ The Whittlesey Straw Bear Festival is a harvest ritual at the wrong time, an Eastern European folk revival in the wrong

  place. Bears in this country would be an awesome phenomenon, harbingers of thieves and gypsies, the worst kind of travelling people. A vertical thing, like the chimneys and spires, dominating a flat land. John Clare, knowing and sympathising with medicine-show tricksters and wandering mountebanks (he had their blood in him), identified with the bear. Remember his remark about Stamford? About being ‘dragged into it like a Bear & fidler to a wake’? Clare and his broken father, on the road to Milton Hall, in search of patronage: bear and driver.

  Lucia Joyce, in her Wake, reached out for an untrustworthy paw (Americanised pa). She was haunted by a bear in Zurich Zoo. ‘What sort of a God does that fellow have, do you think?’ she asked Cary Baynes, her paid minder.

  Hard winters, plough boys without employment. They use the bear as their weapon. One of them plays the part; he is tailored into straw. The others dance Whittlesey streets, demanding money to carry them through the winter months; money for drink. Against the threat of riot. Burnings. Straw bear or thatched roof: your choice. The custom settled on the Tuesday following Plough Monday (always the first Monday after Twelfth Night). In dark January, Christmas decorations put aside, gaunt men blacked up: to make sport of their grievances. They were, by tradition, the spirits of the returning dead: looking for warmth.

  A boy with tightly twisted straw bands around his legs, arms, chest. Sticks, fastened to the shoulders, meet at a point over his head: rustic dunce, Klansman. Jon Pertwee as ‘Worzel Gummidge’, Barbara Euphan Todd's scarecrow brought to life, would be the English version; tamed for the juvenile market, toothless prankster. Turnip lantern. The Whittlesey bear was a crueller performance. The boy could see very little. He was pulled this way and that. All around him the noise of dancers and drunks; not morris men clapping sticks, but mudfaced Molly Gangs. Even now, in the film of the 1997 festival, shot by Roy Harrison, the Mollys are in evidence: New Road Molly, Old Hunts Molly, Gog Magog Molly, Old Glory Molly Gang, Seven Champions Molly, Mepal Molly Men, Handsome Molly, Pig Dyke Molly. Norwich Shitwitches. And, from Alan Moore's Northamptonshire, covens like the Kettering Witchmen: ‘Dark and mysterious as their name suggests. With dances such as Wicker Man and Wild Hunt.’ Faces part-white, part-black; feathered top hats, smoked glasses. ‘Performances that are pagan in the extreme.’ The burning recalls the sacrificial bulls of Knossos; Cretan farmers driving cattle through the flames, for purification, a rich harvest. But Whittlesey asserts its difference: scorched souls do not ascend to the Spiral Castle to await rebirth, they drown in black water.

  Swaying drunks, reelers and stumblers in hobnailed boots. Afternoon dancers at the pub door, the Windmill Inn. Circling, crossing, clapping: for themselves, not for the watching crowds. Labourers with women's dresses over fieldwork jackets; bulging cord trousers, boots. Travestied gangs, Uncle Tom faces and white eyes, leaping and stamping over a prone figure with spread legs. The town gives itself up to riot and music-making. The beast, the bear in its pointy, penitent's cowl, is driven from pub to pub. ‘It has become a German Bear custom to hug a lady from the crowd and fall backwards with her on top of the bear – only a kiss will release his grip!’

  Whittlesey, decorous market town, old island, goes mad: urgent and uncomic intent. Some of the Molly Gangs look stern as Belfast Orange Men: hats, sashes, Masonic regalia. Melonhead Prods converted to voodoo, blacked-up, pounding the beat (like the head of a captured Taig): as terrible to imagine as Ian Paisley, drink taken, trying on his wife's frock. Or John Ford Indians capering around a burnt-out wagon, wearing the Sunday dresses of women they have raped and killed.

  ‘Molly dancing,’ so the Festival Programme claims, ‘is by nature august.’ Hobnailed dancers are accompanied through town by mobs of plough boys dressed in white shirts or smocks, cracking whips. ‘It was said that if you did not contribute even one penny, you would find a furrow ploughed across your lawn by morning.’

  The festival of the Straw Bear was halted in 1909, the year that William Hadman bought the Red House in Glinton. It had become too wild, said Whittlesey's police inspector; an excuse for ‘cadging’ and debauchery. Prison sentences were meted out to miscreants. After a ‘breach’ of seventy-one years, the Straw Bear re-emerged from his hide in 1980, in keeping with the spirit of the times: the advance of Molly-Lady, Margaret Thatcher, from neighbouring Grantham to Westminster. A back-country Shitwitch. A man-woman, heels and handbag, at the centre of power.

  Frozen by the museum's bear photograph, I was caught by one of the keepers. But I wasn't finished yet. This monster was nothing like the yellow-gold, capering stook of recent times: this bear was a dredge of mud and slime, straight out of the water. A heap of blue clay rolled into town, picking up nests of twigs and brambles on its way. The Whittlesey bear was a negative, the dark contrary of its keeper; same height, same bulk, same soul. The brains of both were compressed, stored in the brick. The double act was a Fenland transl
ation of Jekyll and Hyde. The bear was a hide, on the move: thing from the black lagoon. Its rope? An umbilical cord. Only Samuel Beckett got the relationship right: Lucky and Pozzo, strangers, arriving from nowhere, to deliver their lines and depart. The mute stack of the Whittlesey bear hoards his unpunctuated monologue, silence is absolute. As Beckett understood. Lucky, like John Clare, speaks in tongues.

  The museum woman, a volunteer, not one of the professional curatorial types, doesn't quiz me; she knows just where my interests lie. Very soon she has me in a dark, interior chamber looking through yellow newspaper cuttings, bear reports. And after that, in an outhouse containing the most fearsome relics of the place: bits and pieces of redundant agricultural machinery, sacks, rags and objects that defy description. Such as? A lump of bone-coral, horned and holed, mounted on a rusty metal spike, which is itself attached to a severed hoof. Speculative title? ‘Fenland Witchcraft Totem’.

  Also to be found are military uniforms (relics of Sir Harry Smith), brick-making displays, faked schoolrooms, a mammoth tusk, a Woolly Rhinoceros leg bone, odd vertebrae donated by bison. A cabinet of mongrel curiosities like that displayed by John Tradescant in his Lambeth ‘Ark’. The past is preserved as a series of fatal and non-fatal accidents: waxworks, blood-stained shirts, nicotine prints of demolished buildings and buried people.

  Among the dim photographs on the carousel, I find William Rose's 1881 home, the Windmill Inn. An illustration from the Brothers Grimm: L-shaped, whitewashed, thatched (random windows peering out like asymmetrical eyes). The building is about to fall in on itself, taking its lost history into a blank white rectangle of photographic paper. There are two boys in the street. One braves the camera; the other, booted, creeps towards the mean slit of the pub's door. The boy is the right age, seven years old, for William (son of William and Mary Rose). His father, the innkeeper, also farmed forty-five acres, employing three men and seven boys. By the time he moved to Glassmoor, Anna's great-grandfather had one hundred and seventy acres and employed three men, one boy and a woman. Tomorrow, before we return to London, we'll try to locate the Glassmoor house, to form a picture of where the Roses lived and worked: unencumbered space to set against busy clusters of Werrington Hadmans with their cherry orchards, brass bands, primitive airfields and books of dead sparrows.