Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  There are Catlings listed on the census forms at Whittlesey Library, huggers of the river bank: watermen, rooters of vegetables. There were always two sorts of folk on the Middle Level between Nene and Ouse: farmers, jealous of their recently acquired land, and river rats (lightermen, demi-pirates, water gypsies). They fought, bare-knuckled, with sticks and clubs, ferociously. Horses, bred to tow barges and flat-bottomed craft, were no respecters of towpaths. (There were no towpaths until they created them.) The horses were as strong as the men. They learnt to come on and off boats. If necessary, they went into the canals to drag their burdens. They jumped obstructions. When river gangs, hauling corn and malt, arrived at a Fen pub, miles from a village, they drank it dry. It was a famous night for the farmer/publican if they didn't burn the place down. ‘Conspicuous conviviality’ the books call it.

  Whittlesey families, servicing the brickworks, using the Mere as a connection between Nene and Ouse, included the Hemmaways, Boons and Gores. Three of the Gores are recorded as attending the funeral of Anna's great-grandfather, William Rose. Among recorded floral tributes, most sent by relatives, is a wreath from ‘Mrs Gore and family’.

  The Roses, it appears, lived on the hinge of the dispute between riparian interests and watermen. Their land was always bordered by a canal or a river. Sons picked up property, where and when they could, between Ramsey and Whittlesey. The beer they brewed was drunk by watermen as much as by farm-labourers. They emerged as an established family in the golden century of water transport, 1750–1850, before railways took over. It was a self-reliant, low-church (revised pagan) way of life: women ferrying horses, across learns or drains, by punting with long poles known as ‘quants’. Men scuttling lighters to make improvised dams. Boys healing a breach in the dyke with tarpaulin. Stupendous acts of porterage: the dragging of craft across every natural obstacle. Cargoes carried in bundles on the head. The Roses must have been a strong-necked crowd: wide in the shoulder, bowed in the leg.

  Our narrowboat is a forty-six-footer, the Ramsey channel brushes against our ribs. Anna has woken, not surprisingly, with a cracking headache. I can feel the aftermath of the cramp in my calf. But our skipper is jaunty, convinced that we'll find somewhere to moor. And he's right: nobody has attempted it in recent times, but there is an industrial dock, turning space, in a town where industry seems, at best, inactive.

  We come ashore, the ground is none too steady; it is still recovering from the shock of emerging from the black waters. The abbey church, for centuries, was a yellow-grey ghost reached by ladders laid over the mud.

  Near-rain, a mongrel atmosphere of air and water (for the benefit of those who breathe through their gills), has evolved as Ramsey's microclimate: it sluices you in liquefied stonedust. Energy and heat are sucked from mammals, so that only the most determined pilgrims get away.

  To keep up stamina, I buy a loaf in the shape of a wreath; it is so heavy that, used as a life-belt, it would take you straight to the bottom of the river. Catling buys a bottle of whisky, a large one. More corned beef. More everything. Sherry to improve the Bloody Marys. Chops, spring onions. The only way to carry all this stuff to the church, so I decide, is in a bag: a blue plastic laundry bag with very short straps. This, from the Ramsey equivalent of Prada, at £1.99.

  The spirit of the town is located, by Catling, in a shop that specialises in reptiles. He's fond of reptiles and used to spend much of his time sending out stick-insects, locusts packed in cotton wool. Lizards, he's fond of those too. So he is delighted to discover a Golden Python from Burma, the pride of Ramsey, its unacknowledged totem and oracle. The beast slumbers in a vast tank, waiting for supplicants with troublesome requests. Its head, so Catling reports, rests in a dog's water bowl. What happened to the dog he doesn't say.

  We recognise the grass, the wall; the church, the burial ground. It hasn't changed in the years since we arrived here, on the burn, in search of that elusive ‘key’. ‘Ramsey holds the key.’ (And holds it close to the chest.) But this time we have voyaged, unhurried, by water. We have meditated for many slow hours on our destination: desultory conversation, mixing of Bloody Marys, horizon-chasing. Apart from the clinking laundry-bag burden, I'm ready. It's now or never.

  My earlier stupidity, cobwebs over the eyes, was astonishing. All that was required, Anna and Brian holding back, swaying in the porch, not sure if they should return immediately to the boat, was a brisk walk down the north side of the parish church of St Thomas à Becket. A careful reading of stained-glass windows. The answer was so obvious, so literal, we must have been ashamed to recognise it in our hunger for signs and portents. It's not the Ackroydian ‘Resurgam’ on the outside of the south wall of the chancel. Prebendary Robins, who died in 1673, requested that this word/symbol be cut into a stone near his grave. Nor is it the fish-shaped recess above the round-headed lancets on the east wall. Revelation comes with the window in which a yellow-bearded Saxon warrior, out of a superhero comic, is gripping a very large key in his right hand: ‘Gift of the Ailwyn Lodge of Freemasons No. 3535, AD 1912.’ An open book floats between twin Masonic pillars: golden compasses, golden pentacle. The window, dedicated to the memory of James Sanderson Sergeant (20 September 1823-13 April 1882), has been subscribed by a clutch of Masons from St Leonards-on-Sea.

  The golden key dangles like an open-ended rebuke. The warrior's left hand crosses his breast. There are wands and tassels: standard elements of mystical geometry. And rich colours: scarlet, green, midnight blue. The shape of the man, in the jigsaw of glass slivers, makes a vertical map. Lead rivers, islands of sand. Whittlesey Mere as a portion of brilliant red cloth.

  I can see where the key is, the riddling message, but I have no idea what it means (beyond the path the key seems to indicate, across the graveyard, to a bricked-up door in the abbey wall). I am as dull as ever – until I notice the opposite window, the south wall: St Etheldreda. A tall, handsome woman, big haired Pre-Raphaelite, holds another key: silver against a gold background. The teeth of the original Masonic key are closed, they point to the east. Etheldreda points to the west. She has a crown, a crozier; a model of the church rests on her right hand. Her left hand, crossing the breast, steadies the model. The saint is wrapped in a long scarlet cloak. Red flowers decorate the grass at her slippered feet. They should be roses.

  ‘The unbelieving husband shall be saved by the believing wife.’ Announces a banner behind Etheldreda's head. Let that be my key. Anna, on our first expedition, was the missing element. The brandishing of phallic toys, keys too clumsy for any lock, has now been countered by a justified sense of place. By the witnessing of my wife: the lost half I have pursued, so blindly, for so many miles. The quarrel of the road has long since been resolved. The Ramsey window is a coloured mirror. My belief in unbelief is tested afresh. My belief in the potency of Anna's memory is confirmed. All those months ago, walking from Stilton to Glinton, I was drawn to try Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles: a warning against genealogical truffling. Alec D'Urberville, with his faked pedigree, has something to say to Tess: ‘The unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband.’

  Etheldreda is the daughter of the chieftain of the East Angles: King Anna. She is honoured, liturgically, as a twice-married virgin. Her first husband died, marriage unconsummated, after three years. Released from the vows of a second marriage, she took the veil: to live in retirement on the Isle of Ely. But the pious Etheldreda is not the woman in the window: a lush artist's model, smothered in flowers, playing her part in a Golden Dawn ritual. Beneath her, a troop of monks and bishops labour with blocks of masonry: the mislaid Ramsey stones returning from the Mere. Flying and drowning, in the suspension of stained glass, are indistinguishable.

  The church of St Thomas is thought to have been built as a hospital or gatehouse for the Benedictine Abbey. Its buildings were converted to accommodate pilgrims. Abbey lands, after the Dissolution, were sold to Sir Richard Williams, the great-grandfather of Oliver Cromwell Tumble
d stones were used to build or extend Cambridge colleges: Caius, King's, Trinity.

  I spoke the word aloud: ‘Caius’. Keys. The connection with Cambridge, Renchi Bicknell's childhood, is reaffirmed. Trips of my own, poetry initiations. Renchi is devouring, so he explains when I visit Glastonbury, a book about visionary journeys: Dark Figures in the Desired Country: Blake's Illustrations to The Pilgrim's Progress by Gerda S. Norvig. Who demonstrates how Blake converts Bunyan's Interpreter into a ‘key figure’. ‘He literally “holds the key”… to the next room of the dream.’ A real key, or bunch of keys, is the pertinent metaphor. The confirmation, I now realise, that we are on the right track, in the right place.

  We wander across Abbey Green to the Gatehouse, which is late fifteenth century; an accidental fragment from which the rest must be assumed or invented. A sepulchral figure, thought to be Earl Ailwyn (of stained-glass fame), floats in a cage. He has been granted three-dimensional reality, then starved to essence. The effigy is imprisoned within the ribs of an upturned boat. A hatchet-carved intensity of gaze burns off accidental tourists. Here, Catling acknowledges, is a major item of sculpture: beyond representation, beyond pious devotion. Spirit in stone: angry and vital. The setting is as important as the thing itself. A standing figure laid on its back, caught in a man-trap, placed in a tower with a blind set of stairs. Worn steps leading to another bricked-up doorway.

  A circuit of the church grounds, gravestones, memorials, is undertaken, without much conviction, before our return to the river. By now, we appreciate churchyard etiquette, stately pace, soft rain, bare trees; one burial site dissolving into the next. Ramsey is grander than the others, it trades on its association with the church and the walls of the abbey: curtains of trailing willow, well-nourished parasites. Urns with rams' heads, curled horns. Angels with folded arms. Clusters of submerged Roses. Ramsey is the fountainhead of the family. Where one Rose is found, we know, there will be others. We have William, son of Daniel and Ann Rose, who died on 6 October 1842. And another William Rose. We have his wife, Hannah. The Hannah part was botched by the stonemason and had to be recut. Beneath this revision, the earlier attempt is still visible: an obliterated Anna. Beyond the Rose reservation, more obscurely, set against the wall and swallowed in ivy, is a solitary stone. A family connection?

  The Christian name, Daniel, can be read without strain, but the date is almost erased – perhaps 1830? The surname, lichen padding the indents of cut letters, is clear enough. A name we have never come across in this country, SINCLAIR.

  Was he Jewish, or part-Jewish, this Daniel in the den of Roses? I read everything I can find about fetches, doppelgängers, spectral twins: honouring a misplaced Scottish heritage. I had to track down The Double, a novel by the Portuguese author José Saramago. The plot, with winks at Sterne and Dostoevsky, is playful. A history teacher notices a bit-part actor playing a hotel receptionist in a video. The man has his face. The receding hair, the moustache he wore five years ago, when the film was made. By a tedious process of elimination, labouring through all the other tapes from the production company responsible for the first film, he discovers the name of the actor, his double: Daniel Santa-Clara. Daniel Sinclair. Driven to conclude an insane quest, the history man fixes the jobbing actor's real name: Claro. Clare. The literal translation of Saramago's Portuguese title is ‘The Duplicated Man’.

  The Cherry House

  Tomorrow, Sunday, will be Anna's birthday. By the time we come through Ashline Lock in Whittlesey, she is asleep (recovering from Ramsey), so I take Brian ashore to show him the Straw Bear photograph, the ‘Witchcraft Totem’. The museum is closed, the town deserted: apart from kids hanging about on the grass outside the Leisure Centre, putting on time until the next burning.

  We found a pub with a bear sign and tried some peat-black beer, treacly and reviving. Pumped straight from the Mere, Brian reckoned. Whittlesey is a grander place than Ramsey, even where the architecture is heritaged or allowed to devolve into empty squares and traffic islands: ghosts are busy, money made from water and clay. Contiguous memories are of flooding and horse-drawn fire engines.

  The rain relents; we nudge our craft through a leafy area known as the ‘Bower’. Overhanging greenery reminds Catling of the Oxford backwaters. This was where Whittlesey courting couples came. ‘A trysting place,’ says the caption on the postcard. Was it favoured by Anna's relatives, the Roses? There is a photograph, from the late-Victorian era, three men in a boat, facing the camera, while two girls – sisters? – watch from the bank.

  As we pass the brickworks, King's Dyke takes on the romance of Jean Vigo's film, L'Atalante; liminal land. Beasts in wild paddocks between road and canal. Sheds, shacks, caravans. Illegitimate fishermen. Thickets for lurkers and sex pests. Black plastic fronds flapping on razorwire. A monster hoarding: CARPETS 4 LESS. I know what I should do for the birthday: book a table for lunch at the Cherry House Restaurant in Werrington, former home of Anna's great-grandfather, Robert Hadman. But this is no easy matter: first, we have to moor in Peterborough, which means passing through Stanground Lock (‘attended, 24-hour notice required’); and then, a sterner challenge, I have to figure out how to use Anna's mobile, while Brian keeps her busy by asking for a fresh Bloody Mary pitcher.

  It works. I find the number in an old notebook. (We tried to get to the Cherry House when we stayed at the Bull Hotel, booked out for weeks.) I hit buttons, phone icons, until a connection is achieved. We can have a table, as soon as they open, at twelve-thirty. It's going to be tight. We have the lock to negotiate, on our way back; so that we can reach the outskirts of March by nightfall, to return the narrowboat to Fox's Yard first thing on Monday morning.

  There is nowhere to moor, housing estates, broken parks, until we reach the Stanground Lock: a cottage with a steeply terraced garden. Brian and Anna try the cottage while I tie up the boat. They knock, hear nothing. They knock again, are on the point of walking away, when the door opens. An old lady. ‘It was like a fairy story,’ Anna said. The old lady thought the whole thing very amusing, that anyone should want to sail through, at this hour, to Peterborough. It was no simple operation, the lock; a booking would have to be made for nine o'clock the following morning. Meanwhile, we could stay where we were; we could make fast at the dock.

  Catling got to work on the Ramsey chops, the sherry-enhanced Blood Marys (with whisky chasers). We kept the hatches open, to clear the smoke: watching rain fall like grapeshot on oily water.

  The lock-keeper, keen gardener, reluctant custodian of the waterways, pressed a button, cranked away, to let us escape. He resented his wife's generosity, accepting this early booking. ‘You can come through at three o'clock,’ he warned. ‘After that we're closed for the night.’

  The great doors of Stanground Lock open, like Traitor's Gate, to a stunning prospect of the city. Peterborough, achieved by water, is a vision. The limestone cliff of the cathedral rises over reed beds, pylons; it travels with us as we curve into the broad Nene, under a road bridge, to tie up on the town embankment. Ancient liberties

  can be assumed from the presence of rough sleepers in pup tents and on tartan rugs. From craft moored, without charge, against the cathedral meadows.

  It was only when we found ourselves drudging around pedestrian precincts, steel-shuttered shopping malls, that our spirits flagged. The cathedral was roped off, busy with choirs. Anna started to make noises about supermarkets and stocking up for the evening, our final meal. The obvious solution was to suggest coffee and biscuits in the Bull Hotel, knowing that this leisurely process would allow me to book a cab for the ride to Werrington.

  Brushing off crumbs, suggesting another look at the family butcher shop, Anna steps into the street. She points to the direction she thinks we ought to take. A smart taxi screeches to a halt. ‘Sorry,’ Anna says. Believing that her arm movement has summoned a cruising predator, desperate for custom. We are sliding northward through suburbs before she guesses the destination: Werrington. The cabbie gets us there, easy when y
ou know the orbital system, in under ten minutes. He agrees to collect us, in plenty of time to make the return voyage to Stanground Lock: a nervous Indian with eyes full of blood.

  The Cherry House, under the thatch and whitewash, is very good. Coming off water, out of Ramsey, we present a challenge to any respectable establishment. Anna's fine: serviceable blouse (pattern of roses), neat linen jacket. I have to fudge an eccentric fisherman look, distressed grey shirt under multi-pocketed waistcoat. Mud-crusted boots, coming apart, are tucked out of sight beneath my chair. A contortion I sustain while we order glasses of celebratory champagne. Professor Catling's uniform (his children won't be seen in his company when he sports it) is a Hawaiian shirt; worn, loose, outside the trousers. A scarlet-and-black, martial-arts interpretation of William Blake's ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun’. Given his luxuriant silver barnet, back-river tan, dark glasses, trimmed bulk, he looks like a porn star moonlighting as a hitman.

  The other Cherry House punters are soft-spoken, recessive, not quite sure if they should be doing this on a Sunday. The rest of the town and most of the surrounding countryside are in church, singing and shaking: affirming. I wanted, very much, to make a second tour of St John the Baptist, Norman doorway and chancel arch, but it was out of the question. Morning service was massively subscribed, earth-shudderingly popular: it went on for hours. From time to time, people left; they scuttled away for sustenance, while the main event continued. Many returned, reinvigorated, to add volume to the joyful choir.