Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Do you recognise anyone?’ Carol handed Anna the album.

  ‘My grandmother.’

  The photograph is dated, 7 June 1937: members of the Rose family at the wedding of Mary Rose and Ernest Turner. Standing on the right of the group (as we look at it) is Florence Hadman: pearls, flowers on hat, fur-trim at cuffs. This is the bespectacled face we know from the 1938 passport portrait. Hats for the ladies, shoulders drooping under a heft of dead fox. The farmers, silverhaired and trim, have the look of late Charles Chaplin: tight suits, eyes narrowed against the light. Self-confident. Established. On their own turf.

  But it is the older photographs, weddings as remote as episodes out of D. H. Lawrence (even Hardy), that justify our quest. Anna can find, in the young girls attending these festivities, her own daughters: the spirit and the features. A rapid dissolve in which bone structure, attitude and temperament undergo minimal shifts and adjustments. They live in us, the old ones, and we have a duty to honour their presence. There are no clean slates. Forgathered, posed, the Roses offer themselves to us in their most public and performed aspect. ‘The wedding of a daughter of William and Mary Rose of Glassmoor,’ says the caption. That is all we know. William had nine children, five daughters. Anna thinks that the young woman in a straw boater, sitting in the front row, a baby in her lap, is Florence Hadman, her grandmother. With her first child, Mary. The aunt with whom she stayed at Balcony House in Glinton. The one whose husband cleaned the tar from her sandals.

  ‘We think old William had a wooden leg,’ Carol tells us, passing another photograph: ‘William and Mary, with their children, at Glassmoor.’ Here is a patriarch to set beside Robert Hadman of Werrington (when he posed with his daughters, in front of the creepered wall). William Rose is solid, moustached. He has the now familiar trick: raised eyebrow. The photographer had better know his business. Beyond all the fuss, there is enduring pride in the family as a unit: scrub off the pig shit, show the world what we are worth. Watchchains. Bow ties. Dresses with pinched waists and puffed shoulders. The Roses in their place.

  There is also a study of the Wheatsheaf, as it was, before Mr Chan. A brick building square to the road. ‘TAP ROOM’, it says, on the parlour window. Above the door, and beneath the Wheatsheaf plaque, is the licence of George A. Rose. In the window of the tap room, arms on hips like a Greek vase, is a woman, looking straight back at us.

  Carol contacted Michael Turner, Norman's cousin; the son of the other Rose sister, Mary. After the Wheatsheaf, Michael moved back into Whittlesey. A spotless bungalow tucked away off New Road: two German motors out front, fountains and statuary in the garden, at the rear. Everything, it appeared, fresh from catalogue. Newly released from its polythene.

  Michael's wife, Pat, was a broadband genealogist, with files and photographs to display. These were generous people, offering hospitality to strangers, providing us with anecdotal evidence to flesh out speculative biographies. They brought the particulars of Whittlesey and Glassmoor to life.

  Anna talked to Pat. Michael showed me his porcelain cabinet: prizefighters, hounds, figurines that cost thousands of pounds. A splendid collection. The striking photograph Michael produced was of a semicircle of tractors, out on the Fens. His father with new machines and the men who worked them. Like Russian collectivists on the steppes. But what Michael remembers, most sharply, is the fact that his father never accompanied him on his return to boarding school in Norwich; a function left to his uncle.

  Whittlesey, through Michael's stories, is repopulated, no longer a town of ghosts and shadows. After the pig farm, he went into catering, a fish and chip shop. He cleared serious money, he told me how much, over the Straw Bear Festival: gallons of deep-fat cod, buckets of potato wedges, to soak up the beer. Later, he sold the premises as a Chinese restaurant. One of his great pleasures was to cruise the Middle Level in his boat; a short haul in agreeable company, pub lunch and afternoon snooze.

  The potentialities of Whittlesey and Werrington – Roses met Hadmans at Peterborough Agricultural Fair – were what Anna's father turned his back on. That life was too inviting. The landscape swallowed you: tiny figures, at the mercy of the weather, labour under immense skies. Getting away, Oxford, Lancashire, private plane, property in Kenya, manor house in Rutland, required an active suspension of memory. ‘My father never talked about his grandparents or any of the Roses,’ Anna said. But Michael Turner knew Geoffrey's brother, Lawrie, very well. ‘Lawrie and Madge? Oh yes. I visited their house in Glinton. Lawrie was a butcher in Whittlesey before he took up farming.’

  There was a moment when Michael's family could have acquired the Saunders farm. ‘You met Ted Saunders? Tall, red-faced gentleman? Well George Rose worked his land when Ted was away, the army.’ Arable farming: sugar beet, potatoes. Anna's Glassmoor fantasy might have been realised, for the price of a few thousand pounds; Delavals Farm stretching to Bevill's Leam. £15,000 was the asking price. Half was available, in cash; the rest had been lent to a friend and couldn't be repaid in time. It passed. One branch of the family, socially restless, lost sight of the others, the ones who stayed within the gravitational field of Whittlesey Mere. Escape brought its rewards, but also its penalties: nostalgia, admitted or suppressed, for this melancholy land. The challenge of squeezing a living out of sodden fields and black water.

  PRE-REMEMBERED

  The road he had travelled had disappeared, and all that remained was the little space on which his feet were standing. He was dreaming and he did not know it.

  José Saramago, The Double

  Helpston

  Property is on the move everywhere, it's like a madness; villages disappear, survivors are rattled, provoked by real-estate promos masquerading as documentaries. Helpston is not immune, Helpston is off-highway. The only marketable commodity is the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’. Helpston is no longer in Northamptonshire. The only peasants are waxworks in heritage museums: waiting for the Black Death (as seen on television).

  The Clare Society (in conjunction with Peterborough City Council) has produced a map of the poet's Helpston; a flattering sketch, based on the William Hilton portrait, decorates its cover. Returned to Stilton, the Bell Hotel, for a final push, we are spending one afternoon in Helpston, walking the John Clare trail. At 16 Woodgate, we re-encounter ‘Clare's Cottage’. It is dazzlingly white, gorgeously thatched, and pegged with yellow-and-red boards provided by estate agents, Dickens Watts & Dade, of Cross Street, Peterborough. ‘Viewing Strictly By Appointment Only.’ £475,000. Tom Raworth's 1971 poem, ‘Helpston £9,850’, has come to fruition (in everything except price). The cottage has endured every indignity, from Bill Brandt's theatrical mists to soft-sell digital portraiture. Now it has been forcibly inducted into the Peterborough conurbation.

  The walk, mapped out by the Clare Society, is pleasant; it's like scrolling effortlessly through deposits of memory rescued from numerous Clare biographies. I pose Anna, disguised by dark glasses, outside ‘Bachelor's Hall’, where the poet caroused with the Billings brothers. Pointing has been renewed, window frames freshly painted; there is a burglar alarm in the place where the old fire-insurance plaque would once have been sited.

  We follow the trail into Royce Wood, quilted silence, a sudden eros of woody scents: the illusion of invisibility. The wood is a release from village life (eyes, twitching curtains). One element in Clare's work is much clearer now, the way a walk disperses social noise, drops into private meditation: the rhythm of the country, as it climbs, shifts from limestone today. And is randomly punctuated by roads, divided by rivers.

  We hit Torpel Way at a point that carries us to the right, uphill, in the direction of Ailsworth and Castor Highlands. A fruitful error. I decided, quite arbitrarily, to get away from traffic, to take to the fields (another footpath sign left in a ditch). We made an easy descent, seeing the village, seeing how Helpston sat in its dish; the sweep of the horizon so different from its neighbours, Glinton and Northborough. That short move, to the new cottage, was a banishment
the poet couldn't endure. The wooded hills around Helpston offered Clare the possibility of walking out, as the whim took him, into quite distinct topographies, productive of contrary moods: light and shade, good humour or slow-footed, sodden melancholy. Drowning or flying.

  Anna has to be held by the ankles, before she lifts from the ground: the view across broad fields, divided by ancient oaks, is an instantaneous transfusion. A coming-into-herself. A recognition. Stands of poplars. A path skirting the edge of Oxey Wood. Knowing little of Clare's habits, she searches for orchids. There have been dreams and she tells me about them.

  She is at home, her childhood place in the Blackpool suburbs, the familiar bed. ‘If I opened my eyes, I would be there.’ Her brother William and her younger sister, Susa, safe in their rooms. Robert's room, she worries, is a bathroom. Where will he sleep?

  The babble of a party, it keeps her awake. They are downstairs in the salon (yes, that's what her father called it). They are waiting, out of place, Hadmans and Roses; the troublesome dead of Werrington and Whittlesey. In period costume, the clothes of their time. They have been brought back, diverted from the static cling of sepia photographs by the irritation of our gaze. They mill about this awkward room; people of the Peterborough fringe transported to Lancashire. Like wartime aliens to the Isle of Man. ‘They want to be organised,’ Anna said. ‘It's our fault. They came in a deputation. They asked for coffee.’

  I noticed Anna's horoscope in the paper and wrote it down: ‘If they start to form a semicircle around you – run towards the open end. The horizon calls.’

  From Oxey Wood, it is all horizon. Heavy cloud, shadows of oaks; village and road as a pale mirage among remote thickets and hedges. All our themes, our quests, are being resolved (or discontinued) at one time. A visible demonstration of the boundaries of Clare's early poetry. And of Anna's emotional investment in this landscape. The trail of the oldest Hadman we could trace brought us back to Stilton. Information was coming now, faster than we could cope with it. Two books I had been searching for were suddenly available: the ‘lost’ poems written by Anna's father and the original manuscript notebook of John Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’.

  Thinking perhaps of Sylvia Plath, Anna remembered her father's missing collection as Ariel. Which suited me very well, being the name that Shelley wanted to give to the yacht on which he was drowned, the Don Juan. But memory is fickle. I read Geoffrey Hadman's poems on visits to Anna's mother, in her converted cottage in a Rutland village, near Uppingham. I imagined specific references to Clare's geography. There were none, apart from a short lyric invoking Glinton.

  I faintly hear you,

  Lovely bells of lonely Deeping –

  Softly, softly, far-off pealing,

  Across waste water

  The poems were handwritten, a black serif calligraphy, with red titles and initial letters: clear as print. The collection was called Spirit's Expense. (Shakespeare again, Sonnets. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.’) It was astonishing that the book reappeared just as I was struggling to tie up the loose ends of my narrative. Anna contacted her brothers, her sister, none of them knew where their father's poems had gone. I fell under suspicion, for allowing the handsome volume to be swept away, with the rest of the library, to an Uppingham dealer. I knew this wasn't the case. My memory might be full of holes, but books are never forgotten. The poems sat on the reserved pile, to be removed by the family, before the dealer arrived.

  Spirit's Expense turned up in a box of diaries, papers, rings that had belonged to Anna's mother. Her sister, in Cumbria, had it in her safekeeping. And now Anna could handle this unique folio, read it with fresh eyes. Neat symmetry: thirty-one poems published in 1941, when the author was thirty-one (thirty-second birthday in July). Fine paper with watermark of J. Green & Son. Vellum and calf. Gilt lettering on spine. The production was the gift, as Anna understood it, of her father's glamorous London friend whose limp Judy Hadman had imitated.

  Twenty-Five Poems, by Dylan Thomas, was published in 1936. He was five years younger than Anna's father. David Gascoyne's Man's Life is This Meat also appeared in 1936. He was seven years younger. Auden published The Double Man and New Year Letter in 1941. He was two years older than Geoffrey Hadman and would have been a contemporary at Oxford. Stephen Spender, also at Oxford, was two months younger. Eliot published The Dry Salvages in 1941. Little Gidding appeared the following year. ‘Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always.’

  Geoffrey Hadman's verse, privately published, is not of that order; a casual reader would place the collection well before the First War, with Brooke and the Georgians, or with Housman (who is directly invoked). The language is archaic, ripe with ‘e'en were’ and ‘say nay’. It is a long way from the colloquial vigour and sharp-eyed specifics of Clare. Clare's poetry is his existence. The verse in this extravagantly bound folio is a gentlemanly exercise, the exhibition of technical facility; a manageable neurosis of memory and regret, abdicated love, anticipation of death. But it would be unfair to form a critical judgement of a volume that was never offered to the public.

  One of the surprises is a poem addressed to ‘lovely Annabel’. It was written and published two years before Anna was born. She has no idea who the addressee is, or if she existed as anything beyond an echo of Poe; but here might be the clue to that name which was never quite her own: Mary Annabel Rose. The Mary was understood, her Hadman aunt. The Rose part was found in Whittlesey. The Annabel drifted as seven lines in a book of verse, published in an edition of one. In this poem, if anywhere, was a reflection of Clare: the way he dedicated a ‘moment's rapture’ to the unknown Anna who carried his first daughter's name.

  It was good that the book had been recovered, but I was no nearer to any real connection with Clare. Clare operated, like all great poets, in an active present, in which deep images from the past continued to assault him. Time is plural, form a convenience. Sonnets are bent to suit his purpose. Imitations are exercises, contrived, when times are hard, to turn poetry to cash.

  The poem in which Geoffrey Hadman comes closest to the place where we are walking, from Oxey Wood to Maxham's Green Lane, is called ‘Clouds’. I realise now what the poem actually is: a meditation on flight. The cross-country trip, Blackpool to Glinton, in the Auster. The poet is looking down on the clouds.

  White wisps of spirit

  Fading into space,

  Paling the blue infinity of sky,

  Writhing, twisting, ghostly cirrus!

  Frozen souls of the dead,

  Purified in purgatory.

  English fields are masked by ‘blankets of grey stratus’. The pilot's reverie is convalescent, drifting from ‘morphia to nostalgia’. As cloud cover breaks, ‘shafts of washed, golden light’ pick out ‘pinnacles and spires’ of a cathedral: ‘convolute in pure white’. Peterborough is a cloud castle. The vision, based on experience, does approach Clare; his dream of Helpston Church, the Day of Judgement. At last, in the memory of flight, Geoffrey Hadman's elective relationship with the Helpston peasant, with this landscape, is explored and justified.

  Sidney Keyes, another Oxford man, was killed in action: Tunisia, 1943. His ‘Garland for John Clare’ claims that there is only ever one poet, possessed by different voices, operating under various disguises (Shakespeare, Chatterton, Byron). One poet for each place. ‘But sometimes I remember,’ Keyes writes, ‘the time that I was John Clare, and you unborn.’

  We started early, this final push, driving to Huntingdon, the County Record Office, to trawl for Hadmans. We shared the task, dividing up materials relating to territory we were about to explore, the hills behind Stilton. Very soon, I was at a table with pouches of parchment; waxy, yellow, nibbled by rats. The ink held. Many of those married, christened, buried were lost: Hadman or Hadenham, parish clerks were never sure of the spelling. The givers of information may well have been illiterate. I worked back, magnifying glass to document, as far as 1680. To
no great effect.

  I noted: Elizabeth Jane, daughter of Richard and Sarah Hadman, baptised in 1857. And her brother, William George, baptised in 1859 Richard Hadman is described as a ‘labourer’. Then there was William Hadman, who died in 1887, aged eighty-four. And Mary Ann Hadman, who died in August 1893, aged eighty-nine. At Holme. That caught my eye: the last Hadman recorded in Huntingdon was living in a village on the edge of Whittlesey Mere; the place where we had gone searching for the posts that marked the drop in the land. Holme River was the south-western entrance to the Mere, as Bevill's Leam was the entrance in the north-east.

  All these Hadmans came from one place, Caldecote. Caldecote? Caldecote barely exists, it is less than a village; it's a memory smear on the (2.5 inches to the mile) Pathfinder map. A farm, a wood. A motte and bailey castle. Caldecote is tucked against Washingley, on rising ground beyond Stilton. Washingley, we knew, was where Anna's great-great-grandfather, Robert Hadman (1808–63), later of Werrington, began. Washingley was as far as our trail went: a deleted village, a present farm (with fish ponds and earthworks).

  In Huntingdon, I discovered the Washingley Estate Map from 1833; hand-coloured, precise, financial returns laid out like poems. In 1803 the estate brought in £2,138. In 1824: £2,141. No increase in real terms. A farmhouse with garden produced £12–3s–17 in annual rent. The kennels adjoining the pleasure ground produced £35–os–11. Tenant farmers were named: Jasper Perkins, Robert Peake, William Handbury. As were the more humble cottagers, the keeper of a public house. Not one Hadman. They were beneath the level that produced revenue for the estate. They laboured.