Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  Up to now, the Peterborough orbital motorway system, I've always enjoyed being in a car with Anna. We've had our disagreements, loaded with children, luggage, cats, it's true: the ‘Do you want to drive?’ moments, door held open, voices raised, minor sulks. But, on our own, cars were generally good times; out of Dublin to the West, empty roads, deserted beaches, lunches with rain beating against the windows, or unplanned expeditions to Wales, Cornwall, the Farne Islands. A chance to talk or share a companionable silence, shifting landscapes and somewhere strange to sleep at the end of the day. Frets dissolving, accidents of touch, unthreatening incidents on the way towards renewed intimacy.

  Peterborough rescinds all that in seconds, human affection. The road system is designed to incubate conflict, induce rage. And it works. Before looking for the Rose farmhouse, on Glassmoor, I decided to make a short visit to Milton Hall. I noticed on the map that it was on the western rim of Peterborough, south of Marholm. It was flagged as a golf course, with lake and house at the centre of the park. After three days, driving and walking, Clare's geography was beginning to make sense: territory divided between Burghley House (Marquess of Exeter) and Milton Hall (Earl Fitzwilliam), with anything left squabbled over by various bishoprics and Cambridge colleges. After the enclosures, tenant farmers accumulated spare strips; they intermarried, thrived. Cottagers moved up or went under: diversification (butchery, pubs, baker shops) or submersion (suicide). Cattle (and farm-workers) drifted down from the hills behind Stilton to summer pastures, the edge of the Fens: the dynamic we find in the Rose family. A new property every five years, a new child every two; more land, more animals. Further and further out from Peterborough, from Whittlesey.

  As with any orbital loop, the easy option is to keep going, round and round Peterborough, into highway reverie: block buildings of a certain height, the same hoardings, blue-and-white traffic signs that come too late. The Werrington turn is always missed. It isn't what it looks like. You have to anticipate the move, suppress logic: they have closed the ramp. So try another circuit.

  Milton Park was tricky, slip roads are exactly like other slip roads. We make several foiled attempts, suburban sprawl; then hit, by accident, a wet lane down which Clare might have walked. It's not much more than three and a half miles from Helpston, the familiar tramp to visit Henderson and Artis: to collect a dole from the toffs. Patronising advice, coins for the pocket. Before handing over newly minted copies of books whose pages will never be cut.

  We abandon the car and go into the fields, soft, featureless, with that sense Clare knew better than anyone: invisible eyes, watchers. Gamekeepers. Green-keepers. Farmers who own and control un-worked paddocks of grey-brown mud. Thistle crops. Spiders' webs.

  The Hall, as seen from the road, remains a prospect, a remote view. Gates are secure. Until, at last, and very wet, we come across something like a permitted footpath into the woods. We know we're on the right track when we find the signpost chopped down and chucked into the bushes. When we emerge, yet again, on a golf course.

  Beware of foresters. We learnt, from the pile of Werrington obituaries, that Anna's grandfather began here. Before he tried farming, acquired land in Glinton, he was employed at Milton Hall. As forester, responsible for these woods, he was of equal status with Clare's friends, Henderson and Artis. Subtle plantings, that now screen us from the golf course, had been supervised by William Hadman.

  It's early, raining hard; the only golfers are young, keen, tolerant of our intrusion on a public path that brushes against expensively tended grass. I carry on until I'm up against a hedge, a ditch, with clear sight of house and lake. A long, grey, limestone barrack with regular windows and the smack of isolation hospital: the usual sinister/benevolent institution you always find in English parkland. Clare's nerve, approaching such a place, must have been strong. The walk through the gates of the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton would have been a homecoming.

  Morbid speculations were soon confirmed. A friend, the artist Keggie Carew, told me that we'd missed her own visit to Milton Hall by a few days. She been taken there on a coach, with her father, who was attending an SOE (Special Operations Executive) reunion: the sixtieth anniversary of their country-house stay. The old boy, one of eighteen rugged and independent survivors, had been based at the Hall in the spring of 1944: pre-invasion of Normandy. Like all spare property, spacious, secluded, out of the public gaze, the Fitzwilliam estate had been requisitioned by the military: code-breaking, interrogation, small-arms training. Never was so much fun had by so few, the time of their lives for brave pipe-smokers and bright young things from good families.

  Milton Hall housed a unit called the Jedburghs, known as the ‘Jeds’, who were parachuted into France before, or immediately after, D-Day: ‘Operation Neptune’. Each group was supposed to feature British, American and French members, who would liaise with the French Resistance (over whom they had no authority). Two gents (officers) and one non-commissioned chappie to operate the radio. Their target was the 2nd SS Panzer Das Reich Division.

  Keggie's father was later occupied in the Middle East and Burma. The Milton House mob were intelligent, driven, often crazy individuals who sat around playing chess, reading Chinese poetry, inventing diversions. And shooting at walls. The chips and splinters I'd put down to Cromwell, and the English Civil War, belonged to Keggie's dad and his mates. Here they stand, lean, prop themselves up: a coloured photograph in The Times. A fine bunch of white-bearded, eye-patched pirates enjoying the sunshine.

  Getting from Milton Hall to Whittlesey should have been a matter of no great consequence; Anna with the map, my eyes fixed on the road. But we were soon undone by identical roundabouts, road signs blocked by high-sided, deep-freeze trucks: paranoia about being suckered again by Peterborough and its ever-shifting centre.

  The turn was missed. I shouted. Anna threw the map out of the window. We rehearsed, in moody silence, old grievances. How could I have spent so many years with this person who told me to take a right (meaning left), two minutes after we'd passed the slip road? Thereby condemning us to crawl into Peterborough and over the Town Bridge. By the time we reached Whittlesey, property, goods, children had been divided (without speech); the Clare project was abandoned and those tare-peddling, sparrow-murdering peasants, the Hadmans, could be left to rot in the obscurity of a Fenland midden from which they should never have been extracted. Our improbable alliance had been wrong from the start. Now it was revoked, done with, abjured. No more drives, no more memories.

  I scribbled down a couple of lines of Orson Welles dialogue from the video of The Third Man. He's on the Big Wheel with Joseph Cotten, contemplating murder. ‘The dead are happier dead,’ he says. ‘They don't miss much here.’ Then the Harry Lime character doodles a name in the condensation on the window: ANNA. Capitalised. A heart. Arrow through it. Absurd gesture, I thought. Women in these romances are always called Anna. Like flatlands daughters. The oldest son of the Glassmoor farmer, William Rose, whose house we were searching for, was another William. He married a woman from the neighbouring village of Doddington, her name was Anna. (The name of John Clare's first child.) In 1901 they were living with William's father at 73 Glassmoor. (‘Anna was; Livia is and Plurabelle's to be.’ James Joyce.)

  The picture, coming off the Ramsey road, is so haunting that our quarrel is suspended. Every move is a shot from the film Chris Petit never made; darker, gloomier, wetter than Radio On. This is the true version of his abortive second feature, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. He took on P. D. James for the setting, sluices, long straight roads with telegraph posts: only to be stuck, overcrewed and impotent, in a riverside studio and a Berkshire gravel pit.

  The top of the windscreen has a bluish filter that applies mascara to a dead sky; road and water (Bevill's Leam) are parallel lines, divided by a narrow strip of grass. Fields are flat with occasional wooded clumps, huts, houses. Telegraph poles lean out. A broken white line vanishes into the sodden distance. Anna is, immediately, at home. Revived b
y the minimalism of the tonal range: green to grey. Mildew, mud, puddled tarmac.

  We get out of the car and walk up the drive towards the property that Anna wants, so badly, to be her ancestral home. ‘Glassmoor House’, it says. ‘C. E. W. Saunders’. This is the house that Anna has fantasised as a retreat from Hackney. Featureless fields. Dark canal: outflow from Whittlesey Mere. A mature and managed garden: fir, laurel, yew, box. Family mansion smothered in creeper: blue door, porch, bay windows. There have been additions and revisions, but this, in essence, is a farmhouse of the period of the Hadman property in Glinton. An oasis of civility and good living made against the indifference of the surrounding agricultural land, with its unavoidable assertions of pig and slurry and steaming vegetable matter.

  Anna hovers at the top of the drive, I march directly to the blue door. I want to confront these Roses, now. I want to move on. Our wanderings have brought us to a place that Anna is prepared to acknowledge as a potential conclusion: ‘I could live here. I have lived here. The Roses thrived. I belong in the landscape which has meant most to me.’

  I ring, I rattle. Nobody at home. Nothing resolved. We return to the car and to London. I can't decide what the next move should be: or if I have written myself into another cul-de-sac. Another set of open-ended parentheses.

  Ramsey

  Two phone calls.

  Anna, exploiting our recent membership of the John Clare Society, made contact with Eric Rose. Mr Rose was married to Dorothy Muriel Stokes, Clare's great-great-granddaughter. Anna's researches among her Rose relatives turned up an Eric, and she became quite excited, thinking that the link her father claimed was about to be proved.

  Mr Rose is elderly and not to be drawn out. He has no knowledge of Whittlesey, Ramsey or Glassmoor. He refuses to surrender an address. He has no interest in adding peripheral members to an already complex family tree. There are too many Roses, and not a few thorns, dressing the ground: Peterborough into Norfolk, into Suffolk, and as far afield as Dorset. The Hadmans, breeding more modestly, never strayed more than a mile or two from the shores of the Mere. It began to look as if Stilton was their frontier; peasant-labourers in the hills to the west, go-getting farmers and butchers in the flatlands to the east. Clare territory, without a doubt, but we could discover no blood relatives. Just endless, frustrating hints: Beryl Clare (born 1938), another great-great-granddaughter of the poet, married Douglas Harrison. Nellie Rose, sister of Florence (Anna's grandmother), also married a Mr Harrison. Roses and Clares both allied themselves with Reads. At such a distance, we are all part of one great family whose only ambition is to put as much mileage as possible between itself and any dubious third and fourth cousins. (Particularly those who make importunate phone calls.)

  A second ring: Professor Catling from Oxford. He has been cruising the Net and come up with a narrowboat, available, if we make an immediate booking, at the weekend. Ship out from March on the Middle Level, down the Nene (Old Course) to Ramsey; and then, if we have sufficient time, and haven't come to grief on a low bridge, round to Whittlesey and Peterborough. By slow and secret backwaters. Sounds good. Do it. Make the call.

  Anna, overhearing this conversation, offers to join the crew: a first. Catling boat trips, after early experiences out of Norwich, are usually avoided. Especially when they head down the Thames, out to sea, with competitively drunk, drugged or deranged skippers: Hunter S. Thompson awaydays. (No insurance, no charts, one life-jacket – childsized – shared between five large adults.) But the thought of going by water into Rose country is a temptation not to be resisted.

  Much food, in Anna's generous fashion (cook in expectation of the entire family, plus friends and lovers, appearing at your table), has been loaded into the car when Catling demands a Tesco's pit stop in Huntingdon. He's working his own interpretation of the Atkins diet and presents a more svelte and compact figure than the Wellesian cigar-chomper of my Oxford visit. This is nothing new, the man has always been a shape-shifter; an ability that stands him

  in good stead as a certified performance artist. One day: fabulously bouffant, silver-minted. And the next? Cropped like Magwitch. One day, full-cargoed, under sail; the next, hunched, shuffling, Sherlock Holmes overplaying the vagrant. The range, by his reckoning, runs from early Charles Laughton to eye-patched John Wayne being winched on to his horse. A preternatural ability to swerve, on the beat, from clubbed pathos to diabolic intensity.

  This is a very forgiving diet: high protein, no carbohydrates (to speak of), exceptions made for five-star restaurants. Essentially, it involves stocking up on yards of Cambridgeshire bacon, fish bits, lamb; no poncing about with green stuff. Skewer the lot, stuff them with garlic, cook slowly. And meanwhile keep the Blood Marys coming by the pitcher. That was Catling's spin on Atkins: no whisky, not the first day out, but steady vodka (the reformed drinker's friend); the day's vegetable intake coming from tomato juice, spiced with tabasco, Lea & Perrins, lime and a fistful of ice-cubes. Tremendous self-discipline; he'd lost half a stone in a couple of weeks and looked nothing like Nigel Lawson (that absence, that empty suit). To keep up his strength, between jugs, Catling padded his loose jacket with cellophane packets of sliced corn beef.

  The March boatyard is a live-and-let-live, take-us-as-you-find-us operation; keys, tour of the craft – fridge, double-bunk, TV, hot shower, Calor gas – and cast off. Boat-builder Harold Fox's son-in-law lets Catling grab the tiller (narrowboats are virtually indestructible, if you don't smoke in bed, or chop up the deck for a barbecue). ‘River cruiser, is it? Out on the Thames?’ says the boatman, as Brian fumbles the gears. But the professor compensates by making an immaculate U-turn, sweeping us back upstream towards the yard.

  ‘Where you heading for then?’

  ‘Ramsey.’

  Silence.

  ‘Ram-sey?’

  ‘Ramsey.’

  ‘Any special reason like?’

  Nobody, in the history of Fox's Yard, has admitted to Ramsey as a voluntary destination.

  ‘Nice pub, Outwell way. Some folk reckon on Cambridge.’

  ‘Ramsey. Family.’

  ‘Ramsey, right then.’

  Anna, instantaneously, is a figurehead at the prow, hand on hat. Catling manages the craft with insouciant command: the first Bloody Mary, first Toscani cigar (black as a camel's toenail). The pace is seductive, a brisk walk. The engine purrs. We lie on the surface of things, fields and farms hidden behind earth banks. We drift, drift downstream towards Ramsey.

  ‘Where are you going?’ shouts a dog-walker.

  ‘Ram-sey.’

  ‘Ramsey. Oh. Good luck then.’

  Promised rain holds off; clouds are pressing, agitated. Pylons and radio masts are our event horizon. Concrete bunkers, overgrown, have a forlorn freight: distressed history. The engine thuds softly. Hours pass without register. Anna's sense of well-being is palpable. I take over the tiller and Brian manoeuvres his way around the outside of the boat to join her in the bows. They are very old friends. He's been coming to our house since his student days. He is our daughter Fame's godfather. Now, in the suspension, the steady rhythm of the narrowboat's progress down the old Nene, there is confirmation that this is the right, the only possible place to be. Mile by mile, river-time unpicks the Clare walk; a ballast of unnecessary facts is quietly offloaded. Being on water is entering the dream; junking futile quests, letting go.

  The Nene thickens, surface slime tangles itself around the blades of the propeller, but doesn't slow our progress; nobody has travelled this way in months. We don't pass another boat. No humans, a mile out of March, walk the river bank. Coming free of green sludge, cloudscapes are reflected in a vitreous carpet. Broken bridges are ruined craft, no farm-worker goes near them. ‘Cock-up bridges,’ they say: humped memorials to the ancient causeway system.

  As pale sun breaks through, the golden hour, we arrive at Benwick; a hamlet backed into a bend of the river, between Rose farmland and Ramsey Mere. We make fast in the local version of a bayou: drooping willows
, creepers, rickety dock, burial ground (everything but the alligators).

  Prismatic shafts splinter heavy foliage. The Benwick church has gone, pulled down, leaving nothing but a brick altar in a field of nettles: ‘Site of the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, 1850–1980.’ Gravestones diminish into an allotment patch, before the open fields begin. Dead Roses are here too: Thomas William Brittan Rose, son of William and Louisa, died 27 January 1909, aged twenty-two years. Henry William Brittan Rose, his brother, died 14 June 1912, aged twenty-three years.

  We moor for the night, a mile or two shy of Ramsey, beside a Waiting for Godot tree; a skeletal black stump on which perch cormorants, pretending to be vultures. Catling cooks a notable feast, skewered fish and bacon, complemented by Anna's chicken. Much wine. Crimson sunset. A crash into dreamless sleep (the voyage is the dream) interrupted by my screams as I wake to spasms of cramp, which hurl me, swearing, to the floor. The twisting and lifting of narrowboat life isn't doing much for my back, but a companionable torment is a small price to pay for the gain in mental space: fresh night air, stars, when I sit out on deck, to watch the cormorants watching us.

  Dawn skies squeeze us closer to the water, which is smooth and ripple-free. Catling, bacon-and-egg breakfast cooked and eaten, nurses a mug of coffee as he pilots the narrowboat through the mean outskirts of Ramsey. And all the time, our channel tightens. There would be no possibility now of another nifty U-turn: passing the marina, we have no choice but to carry on as far as this ditch, the High Lode, will take us. Catling doesn't drive cars, never has (there are women for that), but the slow-moving, go-with-the-drift waterworld of the Middle Level suits him very well. Let it happen, it is inevitable. The narrowboat has the kind of valves, flanges, nozzles and teats that he likes. A firm turn of the key. The engine coughs and obliges.