Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  We were no closer to Anna's great-great-grandfather, the Robert Hadman who made the break, eight miles to Werrington. We decided to move on at once to Northampton. Anna would hit the record office in Wootton Hall Park, while I went back to the library to view John Clare's notebook with the ‘Journey out of Essex’. I had the required letter from my publisher, access was promised.

  I can't believe the generosity, the trust, of the Clare keepers, but Northampton has that quality: it draws you in, it keeps you. Locals know (even when they're wrong) the history of their town, and they talk about it, with affection but no particular respect. There could be no better place to shelter Clare or his memorials. In Northampton, he was a tolerated presence, adding lustre to the stone. The alcove in All Saints' Church still has a ‘reserved for mad poet’ aspect; loose citizens muse, nurse a can, but soon shuffle off. That seat is too hot. The alcove clamps like a wired helmet offering a vertical blow-dry.

  I want to say, ‘Don't do it. Don't risk your precious relic.’ This man has the dealing virus in his blood. I picture the entry in a catalogue: ‘Poet's holograph.’ One of one. The notebook is kept in an archival box: ‘John Clare Poems, 1841’. The driven year at High Beach when he worked on split Byronic narratives, ‘Don Juan’, ‘Child Harold’; on biblical paraphrases. Before the escape. A torrent of words in smudged blocks. His furies demanded that he took to the road: to recover himself, to catch up with his wandering spirit, to shake off Byron's clammy grip. Byron had already been carried north. The club-footed aristocrat liked to put up at the Bell in Stilton, where Clare would come close to losing his nerve: ‘He shams.’

  Urgent prose cuts against seizures of poetry: so that ‘I wandered many a weary mile/ Love in my heart was burning’ confronts the entry about the ‘wide awake hat’. Script slants to a wind from the east, ruffling Whittlesey Mere. Paper is precious. Every inch of space is exploited. Clare wrote in Northborough, after the road, unpunctuated paragraphs: the voices caught him. He sweated and trembled, pushing his nib across the page, mapping memory before it was lost.

  The last sentence of that journey, as I had seen it reproduced by Eric Robinson in John Clare by Himself, was chilling:

  Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – 'and how can I forget

  Quotation marks opened, never to close. Now, using my magnifying glass, I see that the published transcription is incorrect, quotation marks do seal Clare's challenge to his readers. That we should learn how to forget. To let him go. Leaving poetry as its own legend.

  It was raining, the shower caught me as I hurried from the library to my pre-arranged meeting with Alan Moore. We would pay our respects to Lucia Joyce at Kingsthorpe Cemetery. Asking after cabs in Northampton minimarts produced blank astonishment: nothing to be had, ten minutes from the centre, nothing but novelty stores, tabloid newspapers, cigarettes, cut-price CDs, used leather.

  When hail bounced from the tarmac, my quest took on a certain urgency. I spotted a cab, parked up, tattooed driver doing his best to look like an unemployed getaway specialist, a redundant blagger. He was, he said, on a job, waiting for a client – but, bugger that, cash is cash, jump in.

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘Writer.’

  ‘Thought so. Always tell, I can. Had solicitors. From London. Had writers. Never wrong, me.’

  What soon became obvious, on our short run to the cemetery, was that cabbies are messengers. In Northampton, time on their hands, they are also local historians.

  ‘Clare? I was in the John Clare School. Music now. I went there, that school. It was all right.’

  Cabbies are the chorus, hurrying a narrative along. No curiosity about what I write, or about my business with Alan Moore. ‘Know him? Seen his picture, like, in the paper.’ Plenty of curiosity about the town: Romans, Thomas à Becket, Clare, shoes. ‘Good luck then.’ He scratches a nose that is too flat to pick. It looks as if he tried to get out of the cab, in a hurry, forgetting there's a windscreen in the way.

  I'm early and have time, in the rain, to locate Lucia Joyce's gravestone, before Alan arrives at the gate. The cemetery is built on a hill, in parkland, an extension of the golf course. It is arranged with the usual avenues and planted with a variety of trees and shrubs. I shelter under a chestnut. There are dozens of Haddons here, but no Hadmans. Haddon is the (old) Northamptonshire village that I walked through, with Renchi and Chris Petit, on the last leg of our journey out of Essex. Haddon is close to Stilton, to Washingley and Caldecote. I'm convinced that this is how the family name emerged, out of place: William (or Robert) of Haddon. Haddon-man, Hadman.

  Before I make the turn, up the slope to where Lucia is buried, I find a nice marker, the grave of a certain Finnegan. James Joyce would have enjoyed that. Lucia might be less happy, the pain of her involvement with Work in Progress, before it became Finnegans Wake, is still active; provoking critical theories about incest, actual or metaphorical.

  Alan, unprotected against the rain, stick in hand, arrives at the gate. I guide him to the grave. The red Aberdeen granite stone for the daughter of James Joyce, more years in Northampton than Paris, is stark.

  LUCIA ANNA JOYCE. Trieste 1907. Northampton 1982.

  She was two years older than Anna's father. She is left here, surrounded by Haddons and other Northamptonshire families, without a cluster of relatives; grounded in a far country, part of an alien history.

  As we walk back, sodden, to Alan's house, he broaches a relativist's General Theory of Northampton, loosely based on some late pronouncement by Stephen Hawking. The town, it seems, is a black hole from which only ‘mangled information’ can escape. And that, Alan acknowledges, is his lifelong task: to de-mangle (and interpret) Northampton's cuneiform script. Its codex of madness and possession. Old magick is the new physics.

  Lucia, aged seventy-three, frail, gaunt, was visited at St Andrew's by Dominique Maroger, a childhood friend. Maroger was shocked by the appearance of a woman she had not seen for fifty years. Lucia, she reported, was ‘a medicated shadow’.

  They took tea. Carol Loeb Shloss, in her biography of Lucia Joyce, tells us that the interior spaces of the hospital, its halls, were ‘the portals to the Heart of Darkness’. ‘The guarded doors, the knitting women, the unspoken horrors.’ There was a lift Lucia feared and hated. St Andrew's was the Marienbad of Middle England; well-connected neurasthenics in formal wear playing bridge. The sedated and the forgotten, in their pre-posthumous limbo, obedient to social rituals. And otherwise consigned to silence.

  ‘I mangle language,’ whispered Lucia, ‘because I never have anyone to talk to.’

  At a fork in the road, we come on a monument, a pillar whose particular history Alan cannot recall. He knows about the witches hanged in the park on the other side of the road, but not this: a plinth of cut stone, a cube, a cannon ball. An inscription: V.R.I. The pillar must, I surmised, mark young Queen Victoria's triumphant procession through Northampton, perhaps the point where she left town.

  I remembered Clare's 1841 notebook. ‘The man whose daughter is now the queen of England is sitting on a stone heap on the high way to…’ Highway to somewhere. I couldn't make out the destination. Smudged script was too taxing for my increasingly blurred vision.

  John Clare, supposed lunatic, peasant poet, and William Wordsworth, ex-radical, Tory laureate, were both in Northampton to witness the royal progress. They never met.

  As I step into the road, to photograph Moore, who is always game, ready to strike a mad-eyed stare, another figure invades the frame. Another stick. It's one of those lovely accidents: two men of the town, absorbed in their own affairs, cross paths. Moore, blinking, eyes shut. The native blindman in the bright yellow jacket (wise precaution), his dark glasses out of Chris Marker's La Jetée. Rogue trajectories intersect for the one and only time. Souls jump, make their bloodless exchange; return to shocked bodies. Clare could have done more with the incident,
the accidental transmigration. I come away with a snapshot. This must be what Alan means about ‘mangled information’. It is there but we don't see it. Without an adequate key, a tedious volume of explanation, photographs mean nothing.

  Stilton

  This is a sleeping country. To the casual eye, it remains unpeopled; but they are following us out of Stilton, close on our heels, the ones Anna has summoned. No spectral presences clamour around the bed at the Bell Inn. They accompany us on our walk to Fotheringhay, tapping our shoulders if we take the wrong path.

  For years, Anna spoke of Fotheringhay as the saddest place in England. There is something about the setting that goes beyond the execution of Mary Stuart: its position on the Nene, a quality of afternoon light. A landscape in mourning. She was always telling me I should go there, but I never did. I remembered her recommendation every time I passed the road sign, but I was in too much of a hurry, books or projects.

  Now, crossing the main street at Stilton, we felt a pressure lifted. The materials for the Clare book were in place, I could start a primitive assembly. Anna spent a fruitful afternoon in the Northamptonshire Record Office and couldn't say enough about the efficiency and friendliness of the staff. And I was beginning to think, with rumours of celebrity genealogical truffle-hunts on TV, that it was time to take up a new hobby: collecting yellow-and-blue murder and assault notices (adverts) in Hackney. When a subject is presented by Bill Oddie or Alan Titchmarsh, it is time to duck out.

  We had carried the Hadmans as far as we could, to a period before the birth of John Clare. Anna discovered that her great-great-grandfather, Robert Hadman, was the youngest of four children. The first of them, Elizabeth, was baptised in 1794 (one year after the birth of Clare). The second son, William, married the Mary Ann who died in the village of Holme: the old lady I had already listed in the Huntingdon County Record Office. Mary Ann was illegitimate. Her father was unrecorded. Her mother, Jane Bunning, had the child baptised in 1809. If a link was to be projected with Clare, here it was: some wandering schoolmaster or fiddler, another John Donald Parker, passing through. His name is not known and can't be known.

  Recorded Hadmans stay close to the Washingley Estate. Caldecote Hadmans, the ones I had found, were descendants of William and Mary Ann. In Anna's direct line, the Robert Hadman who moved from Washingley to Werrington was the son of Richard Hadman (1768–1822). Richard married Elizabeth Hill (1767–1813) in the church at Lutton. Folksworth, Washingley, Caldecote, Lutton, a scatter of farms, within a couple of miles of each other, took care of the entire Hadman lineage. We could visit what was left of these settlements in a morning, then come down off the hills and into Fotheringhay.

  The walk, to Stilton Church, was precisely the one undertaken, four years earlier, with Renchi and Chris Petit. Back then, we got it wrong, giving ourselves many needless miles. At the fork, seduced by an avenue of tall trees, we took the left-hand path and spent a long morning wading through corn, accompanying dogs; with the feeling that we were trespassing, we would be turned off. Now, by contrast, the route to Folksworth is direct, but less inviting. A meadow. A dew pond. No cattle: Anna is nervous of cattle. A view back, across country, across the Ai, to the smoking chimneys of Whittlesey. The Mere, in its pomp, approached within two miles of Stilton. Fields are so wet they look burnt: ash-brown stubble, corrugated mud picked out with flints and stones.

  Folksworth has a village pond, suicide trough, and bright new houses (convenient for Peterborough commuters). Not much to detain us, no churchyard to prospect for stray Hadmans. The path twists, through farms and woods, to the next duck pond. Low jumps for schooling horses. One or two curious beasts, hopeful of apples.

  Everything drains towards Washingley and Caldecote. I repeat those names, under my breath, like a mantra. ‘Medieval Village of Washingley (site of)’, says the map. Because there is nothing left, nothing visible. Earthworks. Fish ponds. Our walk has the smack of an official ramble, it is good for us. There are things to be noticed and appreciated.

  Sheep. Hundreds of them.

  Anna can cope with sheep, their vulgar curiosity, dark brown heads rotating to follow her movements as she clambers over a stile. And down towards Manor Farm, the Washingley ponds. They bleat like the tide. (In Hastings, Anna has been dreaming about an ocean of sheep.)

  Coming off the Folksworth to Lutton road, turning back towards Stilton, we cross the path of that first blundering attempt to pick up John Clare's traces. Cereal crops have survived the weather, bound and compressed wheels of straw look as if they have been assembled for a ritual vehicle of enormous size. The English surrealism of Paul Nash, washed-out colour, military detritus, is deployed, quoted, as the keynote of the Washingley Estate.

  A light so pure that it is unreal: diagonal paths, skull-faced sheep, a building with a central tower like a decommissioned concentration camp. We make for that, after detouring to inspect the ponds and the supposed motte and bailey castle.

  PRIVATE FISHING. SYNDICATE MEMBERS ONLY. KEEP TO MARKED FOOTPATHS. PLEASE LEAVE NO LITTER. THANK YOU.

  The syndicated pond is achieved after a woodland trawl on permitted paths: dark water hidden by close-planted bushes and drooping trees. A wooden bench, from which red paint has peeled, waits for those who feel the need to sit and stare at ruffled water. It has a name, this bench, stamped on a yellow lozenge (like a number plate): CECIL.

  The redbrick building with the sinister clocktower turns out to be a set of stables, the kind used for training racehorses. But there are no horses, the multiple green doors are shut. One animal occupies all this space, pressing itself against the wall, a donkey: a beast like Robert Bresson's ‘Balthazar’, from one of my favourite films, Au Hasard, Balthazar. I try to photograph the animal, but my camera won't do it, too far away. Donkeys gave stoicism a good name. The creature doesn't move, doesn't solicit our attention, or come trotting over like a horse. It's there because it's there, our witnessing of the saintly beast confers no blessing on the walk. (Heresy requires as large a leap of faith as any other doctrine.) Bresson's Balthazar, I recall, dies among a field of sheep, during a smuggling expedition.

  A gravel road, between pollarded trees (no taller than Anna's head), leads down to a farm. To Caldecote. A small church excised from the Ordnance Survey map. Anna spotted, with magnifying glass, the ghost of a cross, on the large-scale Pathfinder: her faith is justified. This is the church where the ur-Hadmans, traced through Huntingdon records, are buried.

  Except that it isn't a church, not now. At one time, Caldecote Church, placed between two manor farms, must have served the Washingley Estate. It is a private house, very much occupied, revamped. Dormer windows cut into the weathered tiles of the roof. Creeper encouraged around the porch. Garden furniture of a playfully rustic kind (wood teased to look like bone). Lots of yellow gravel. Nobody to be seen. The rules of the fairy story have to be obeyed. But humans have stepped out of the frame: a wooden recliner with a backrest that can be set in position, like a deckchair, by a series of notches. And on the grass, beside the recliner, a recently abandoned wrap or bathing suit, as brightly coloured as Professor Catling's Hawaiian shirt.

  Vegetation threatens to overwhelm the church, swallow it up. The garden is under control, cut back; greenery will swamp the drive, climb the walls, leaving no trace of the former building. The graves and monuments have already disappeared. We will never find the burial place of the Washingley Hadmans.

  Before we come away, to follow the path that will skirt Caldecote Wood and bring us to Lutton, I try to get close to the church. I want a photograph from the east end. This manoeuvre involves my forcing a path through a tangled wood, clambering on a strategic stone: a gravestone. All the crosses and memorials of Caldecote have been removed to a thicket of thorn and ivy. There are stones arranged in straight lines and solitary slabs thatched with roots and creepers. Inscriptions are erased. Names sandpapered into obscurity. Centuries of memory have leached away; biographical details dripped into earth. Hadmans are here, but
we can't find them. We were lucky to find the church, the replanted burial plot, hidden in the trees. I'm happy with Caldecote as the resolution of the small part of the story that I have been allowed to tell. Families emerge, thrive, vanish. They take their name from the ground they work and they give it back: blank grey stone, soon to be absorbed by nature.

  Caldecote, struck from the official record, is a significant node; ancient paths branch off, uphill to Washingley, or across the fields to Lutton. Painted on a sliced cross-section of tree, like the cattle baron's ranch in a western, is the name of the property.

  F. FOUNTAIN & SON. MANOR FARM. CALDECOTE. NEAR STILTON.

  The name is familiar. I remember where I have seen it before: Delavals Farm, out on Glassmoor, land that once belonged to Anna's great-grandfather, William Rose. Fountain was the link. He owned the Caldecote farm that stood beside the church where the most distant Hadmans were buried: in the place where they had been recorded as ‘labourers’. And he, or a namesake, also owned the Rose farm on Glassmoor. When we got back to Stilton, to the Bell Inn, I checked my files for the William Rose obituary. And there it was: ‘Amongst friends in the Church and at the grave were noticed: F. Fountain.’ A floral tribute was received, ‘With deepest sympathy’, from Mr & Mrs C. Fountain.

  Whittlesey Mere, as described by John Bodger, stretched from the edge of Glassmoor to Caldecote; below Stilton, keeping out the water, was ‘Caldecote Dike’. The aptly named F. Fountain owned property on both banks, properties that linked the two branches of Anna's tribe, the Roses and the Hadmans. The Mere, in my private reconfiguration of the land on either side of the Great North Road, became a swamp of ghosts: like Paul Nash's Totes Meer. This painting from 1941, the year of Geoffrey Hadman's poems, depicts an inland sea made from crashed aeroplanes. Sea of death. A blue-grey scene that marries flying and drowning.