Aircraft snub-nosed in Kentish cornfields. Gathered as scrap at the Cowley dump. Bruised silver with meat traces; crushed, wrinkled. Nash approached his painting through a series of photographs. In 1940 he visited Cowley to log wrecked German aircraft against a thinly wooded skyline.
Roger Cardinal, in a Nash monograph, describes Totes Meer as ‘a lifeless metallic sea, a displaced arena of death set amid an otherwise pastoral English setting… a charnel house for winged creatures, a graveyard for birds’. He goes on to quote the writer Lance Sieveking, a trained pilot, who praised Nash: ‘for his genius at evoking the sensations of flight despite never having gone up in a plane’.
The path to Lutton was clear, a solitary oak, then a series of white feedbags hung from branches to mark our way along the edge of the wood. They swayed and flapped in the breeze. There were no problems until we came to the BEWARE OF THE BULL notice. ‘I'm not going into that field,’ Anna said. As I blustered: this was an old trick. A right-of-way sign proved my point. ‘Farmers always try to put you off with the bull thing.’ And, since the alternative led to barbed-wire and unfordable ditches, Anna reluctantly agreed to follow the designated track.
We almost made it. A lane at the end of the field would let us out, a lane that ran south towards Little Gidding. The lane had a name: Bullock Road. And then I saw them, through a gap in the hedge, in a parallel field. A herd of white bullocks. Grazing. Or standing. Mostly standing, ears pricked. It was a large gap, a corridor. Anna had unpleasant childhood memories of bullocks. Perhaps she wouldn't notice them, their malign whiteness.
She froze. The worst had happened. The herd sniffed her panic. No point in retreating. We stepped it out. But the herd had our measure, they galloped in an idiot mob: stampede. Minor revenge before (or after) they were castrated, dehorned, carted off to the deep-freeze. There was another gap, we discovered, at the end of the field nearest to the road. This farmer was a sadist. The bulls swung through the distant gap and thundered straight at us.
I pushed Anna into the hedge and put myself in front of her, pretending I knew what I was doing. The animals were as dumb as they were blind; they charged straight past us, pulled up short and stood, snorting and stamping, denied their fun.
By which time, we were over the fence and in the lane. This must be the place Peter Ashley called ‘Moonshine Gap’: where Washingley drovers brought cattle down from the hills on their way to summer grazing in Glinton. I thought of James Stewart and Walter Brennan driving a herd to the Yukon in The Far Country. Classic American sentiment: the dream of saving money to buy that ranch in Wyoming. Bad things happen. It was Stewart's masochistic postwar period, on location with Anthony Mann, a sequence of savage landscape westerns.
Lutton was in reach, across fields, by a path that was increasingly English, increasingly remote from the A1: pylons on the horizon, oak avenues casting shadows over grey-brown corn. The village was caught in a deeper warp than any of the others (once you walked past the factory farm with the group of Balkans chattering at the gate). Lutton looked and behaved like one of those Salisbury Plain settlements taken over by the military during the Second World War and never returned. A church that can be visited once a year. A fake street laid out for the convenience of tank invasion.
The church is on a grassy mound. And it's open. We move inside: a cool, musty retreat. This is where Richard Hadman, Anna's great-great-great-grandfather, married Elizabeth Hill, on 4 August 1788. Five years before the birth of John Clare. One year before the French Revolution.
For Anna, it was the end of her journey: the precise location where a tangible event had taken place, a marriage. This couple, Richard and Elizabeth, at twenty and twenty-one, were two years younger than we had been when we married, in 1967, a few miles up the Ai, in Market Overton. (Breakfast taken, we headed straight back to London; and, on that afternoon, to Ireland.)
Anna stayed quietly at the back of the church. Later she told me that she had experienced a strong sense of a couple, standing before the altar. A sturdy figure in brown and his much shorter bride, who was wearing a long cream dress: Richard and Elizabeth. Anna witnessed an event that she was directing, the fall of light in a dim church.
I poked about, drawn by the sight of an American flag, the dazzle of the Stars and Stripes making a considerable noise in that drugged space. A coffin-altar had been set up, draped with the Pop Art flag, dressed with two silver bombers, on black plinths, inside bell jars. Two documents – PLEASE DO NOT MOVE – were placed in front of the bell jars: remembrance books for the wartime dead. The wall behind the shrine showed evidence of restoration work, or an erased mural. There was a stone effigy, a sleeper with curls, open eyes and a nose as flat as the Northampton cabbie.
And so we came, over the hills, to Warmington. Hedge sparrows fussed in the dirt. We walked faster, sweated, ran, to reach the only pub before the dreaded two-o'clock cut-off for food. Then wondered why we'd bothered; a heavy swill of battered cod and mushy peas sat on the belly as we bridged the Nene and strolled the last miles to Fotheringhay.
Anna was right, this conical mound (reminiscent of a less bald Beckton Alp) incubated melancholy; from its summit, achieved by a worn path, the Nene ox-bowed and twisted. Pleasure boats moored alongside, but excursionists didn't visit the ruins or the church; they picnicked on the bank. What was left of Mary Stuart's prison was a shadowprint, a freeze in the stone, a crop of giant thistles. (Like Scottish V-signs knitted with frost-bitten, purple fingers.)
One chunk of the original castle is itself imprisoned by black, painted, thistle-crowned bars.
IN MEMORY OF MARY STUART, QUEEN OF SCOTS, BEHEADED IN THE GREAT HALL OF FOTHERINGHAY CASTLE 8TH FEBRUARY 1586/7
Fotheringhay, birthplace of Richard III, is an unlucky place; strategically sited, on a bend in the river, between Northampton and Peterborough (where dead queens are taken to lie in state). Dark clouds press on the mound. Invisible jets play chicken at the edge of the stratosphere. Their screams bounce off the hills, reverberate across the killing ground.
Mary Stuart was kept prisoner for sixteen years, moved from house to house, watched, confined, until she came here. For the black ritual of execution. Judges and witnesses lodged in the village and the surrounding farms. Mary arrived in Fotheringhay, 25 September 1586, accompanied by two gentlemen: Sir Amyas Paulet and Sir Thomas Gorges. Gorges was a name with roots in the area. John Clare's great-grandfather, another John Clare, married Alice Gorge in 1724. Their daughter, yet another Alice, had a child, born out of wedlock, with John Donald Parker. This was Parker Clare, father of the poet.
A cold prison, in the damp season, up against the Nene; Mary suffered badly from rheumatism and lack of exercise. She had to be supported to the block. The climate has not improved. We decided to call a cab to take us back to Stilton and, while we waited, we made a circuit of the church.
It seems that Mary Stuart was another versifier, a stopped poet, whose work at a time of crisis prefigured other writers of this country. ‘In my end is my beginning,’ she wrote, anticipating the Eliot of Little Gidding. ‘What am I, alas, what purpose has my life?’ shares its tone with another poem of confinement, Clare's most frequently anthologised piece, the Northampton elegy: ‘I am – yet what I am, none cares or knows.’
The summoned cab-driver broke our mood. He made it appear as if he had been parked in Fotheringhay for months, waiting impatiently for us to complete our pedantic progress; when, all along, he had the story we needed.
‘Got a metal plate in my leg,’ he announced as he crashed the gears. ‘Had to retire after twenty years in the job.’
And what, I had to ask, was that?
‘London Brick Company, Whittlesey.’
He knew Bow, knew Hackney, all my haunts. He'd driven there with loads of bricks, mile after mile, up and down the Ai; he was intimate with every greasy spoon. He lived in Ramsey Heights.
We had to laugh at this.
That Ramsey, an inch or two out of water, should have such a distri
ct. A traffic island was a considerable protuberance in the town of the Golden Python. Ramsey Heights, when I checked the map, was the depressed area we had come through in the narrowboat.
Not much had been said before the driver announced that he would offer us ‘a bit of a tour, no charge – no hurry, now, to get back to the office’. Hadman business done, we were game. We saw fields that we had walked that morning flash past; he drove as if he knew there would be no other vehicles in the narrow back lanes. And he was right.
After Polebrook, I lost all sense of direction; the light was going and our man wanted to come off-road, into the woods. A private estate. He used to drive up here, so he said, with a cricketer. Nice bloke, unmarried; not a care in the world. The landowner allowed the villagers to play on his delightful pitch. The cabbie got to know the cricketer pretty well, picked him up most weekends; and, on these jaunts to scattered grounds, he learnt about the country too. ‘Only thirty-six, he was,’ the driver said, ‘when he hanged himself. Military-medium bowler. They were quite upset, his mates. Who is going to open from Derek's end now?’
We weren't sorry to emerge on open road. We were ready for a bath and dinner.
‘One more place to see.’
Line of poplars. Lowering sky. The cabbie with the plate in his leg limps around to open Anna's door. In the twilight, looking across a long, bare field to the pink horizon, we recognise a special place. We are standing on a section of antique grey-top; a preserved and maintained runway that stops abruptly at the edge of the grass. Flight aborted. Go close and you notice tyre tracks, the scorch of black rubber. And just where tarmac gives way to agricultural land: three sculpted shapes. Two slabs (stone tables). One glossy black triangle set on a plinth (in which a phantom bomber has been carved: 1943–1945).
I make the connection with the memorial in Lutton Church. The black pyramid, dressed with various symbols, honours THE 351st BOMBARDMENT GROUP (HEAVY). Men who: FLEW COMBAT MISSIONS FROM THIS AIRFIELD OVER OCCUPIED EUROPE.
Witnessing fly-pasts in Victoria Park (Hackney), formations of Second War veterans grumbling towards Buckingham Palace for some forgotten anniversary, Anna would always shed a tear. Even on television, bombers over London, sweeping down the Mall, were worth a sniff. The cabbie had brought us back to the war years, the period of our birth: before memory. A great shaft of light breaking through low cloud, illuminating sheds and barns that once were hangars, made old fears palpable. There was no film left in my camera. The vision, rapid movement of the eye, runway to lift-off, was therefore more intense. It wouldn't be recorded. Without the false corroboration of photographic record, memory is absolute. Outside time.
The second black slab, a catafalque with no corpse, was more provocative than the pyramid. Text in gold letters:
IN MEMORY OF LT. GENERAL JAMES T. STEWART, 1921–1980, USAF COMMANDING OFFICER OF 508th SQ. 351St BOMB GROUP WHO FLEW 60 COMBAT MISSIONS AGAINST THE ENEMY FROM THIS AIRFIELD 1943–1945.
Jimmy Stewart. I'd clocked photographs in the biographies, cap on the slant, hands in pocket, posed outside an English hut. The lopsided look he'd perfected, sun too bright for the eyes. He suffered badly from the English cold, sniffled his way through two long winters. A visit to London was too much effort to contemplate. He preferred to spend time away from the base on a rented boat. The experiences of these years, flights over Germany, put iron into the Anthony Mann westerns. After Audie Murphy, Stewart was the most decorated military man in Hollywood. Clark Gable, so the cabbie told us, was in the next village. He turned up at local hops in a tailored uniform; fingering his thin moustache, flashing false teeth. He danced with the driver's mother.
Flying had been Stewart's passion from his earliest days in California: he took Katharine Hepburn up, just once, before going to work on The Philadelphia Story. He kept a plane on a private airfield. In later life, when he became a housebound recluse, deaf and solitary, his daughters recalled that he never read anything in his life except film scripts and flight magazines. Stewart was a convinced Republican, uneasy with ethnic minorities, a strong supporter of Nixon and Reagan. His last trip before retirement from the Air Force Reserve was to South-east Asia. He accompanied a bombing mission to the Cambodian border. His stepson, Ronald, died on a reconnaissance patrol in the Quang Tri province.
The light is almost gone. But I can make out the contents of the hinged glass box, the strangest element of this wartime memorial. A map pinned to the backboard: Polebrook and the airfield. A posy assembled from Stilton fields, ears of corn reduced to yellow dust. A red cushion, stitched with white flowers, on which sits a blue ‘Visitors Book’ and a comic strip of battle, signed by the flight crew. The comic obscures the thing in the corner, a Whittlesey bear in a scarlet jersey. A flying bear, a mascot, safely returned from its raid on enemy territory.
We had achieved a satisfactory conclusion. Now I could let the story go. Daniel Sinclair of Ramsey, a person with an unknown life, a gravestone, had been absorbed into the invented Daniel Santa-Clara of José Saramago's novel. My obsession with doubles, doubled narratives, was brought at last to ground. Jimmy Stewart, freed from the fixed trajectory of Anthony Mann's westerns, from landscape, was named in gold letters on a black slab; an altar overlooking the yellow, evening fields of Middle England.
But I was wrong. You may have realised, as Michael Moorcock did, when he read an early proof of my book, that I had the wrong James Stewart. The actor had commanded a squadron, flown bombing raids over Germany, but not from here. His base was on the far side of the A1, closer to the sea. Stewart was born in 1908. Lieutenant-General James T. Stewart was fourteen years old when his namesake made his movie debut in The Murder Man. Both flyers, both in England at the same time. Our mysterious taxi driver, bringing us to his favourite shrine, vividly recalled those local legends, Stewart and Clark Gable. Figures who had stepped down from the screen to attend dances and church fêtes. Mike Goldmark, the gallery owner from Uppingham, told me that he once lived in Polebrook Lodge, Stewart's wartime home. We remember what we want to remember and forge our own autobiographies. The Clare I found will not be your John Clare, nor the poet Geoffrey Hadman claimed as a relative. The track we travelled, coming from London, is no longer Clare's Great North Road. Through error, perhaps, we arrive at a richer truth: in the telling is the tale. The trance of writing is the author's only defence against the world. He sleepwalks between assignments, between welcoming ghosts, looking out for the next prompt, the next milestone hidden in the grass.
Edge of the Orison: Peterborough's gravitational field
Hadman Family Tree
Further Reading
John Clare, Poems of John Clare's Madness, ed. by Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1949)
—The Shepherd's Calendar, ed. by Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (London, 1964)
—Selected Poems, ed. by Elaine Feinstein (London, 1968)
—The Letters of John Clare, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble (New York, 1970)
—Selected Poems, ed. by J. W. and Anne Tibble, repr. (London, 1976)
—John Clare, The Oxford Authors, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford, 1984)
—John Clare by Himself, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester, 1996)
—Selected Poems, ed. by Ian Hamilton (London, 1996)
—John Clare: The Living Year, 1841, ed. by Tim Chilcott (Nottingham, 1999)
—A Champion for the Poor (Political Verse and Prose), ed. by P. M. S. Dawson, Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester, 2000)
—John Clare, Selected Poems, ed. by Jonathan Bate (London, 2004)
William Addison, Epping Forest, Its Literary and Historical Associations (London, 1945)
—The Old Roads of England (London, 1980)
Robert Aickman and Elizabeth Jane Howard, We Are for the Dark (London, 1951)
Jean-Philippe Antoine, Gertrud Koch and Luc Lang, Gerhard Richter (Paris, 1995)
John Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)
Peter Ast
ley, Comings and Goings (London, 2002)
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London, 1978)
B. C. Barker-Benfield, Shelley's Guitar (A Bicentenary Exhibition) (Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1992)
John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1730–1840): An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 1972)
Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (London, 2003)
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (London, 1958)
Henry Bett, English Legends (London, 1950)
Renchi Bicknell, Michael and Mary Dreaming (A Walk along the Michael and Mary Lines…) (Alton, n.d. [1998])
Ronald Blythe, Talking about John Clare (Nottingham, 1999)
Edward Bond, The Fool (London, 1976)
Marilyn Brakhage, ‘Stan Brakhage: Last Drawings’, from Square One (No. 2), ed. by Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, et al. (Denver, Colo., 2004)
Bill Brandt, Literary Britain, new edn (London, 1984)
Judith Bunten and Alfred Savage, Werrington through the Ages: A History in Photographs (Werrington, 1987)
Edward North Buxton, Epping Forest, 7th edn rev. (London, 1905)
Roger Cardinal, The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (London, 1989)
Brian Catling, Large Ghost (Cambridge, 2001)
William Cobbett, Rural Rides, new edn with notes by Pitt Cobbett (London, 1885)
Stephen Coote, Byron, The Making of a Myth (London, 1988)
Thomas De Quincey, The Collected Writings, vol. III, ed. by David Masson (Edinburgh, 1890)
Donald Dewey, James Stewart: A Biography (London, 1997)
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