Obligatory male scratching and rucksack-shrugging and we move off, stopping every twenty or so paces to wrestle with oversized maps. Once exposed, that's it: the landscape in front of us, a sulkily permissive bridle path, bears no relation to the printed diagram. We lack those clear pouches official hikers sling around their necks. Our maps, torn, smudged, swollen with rainwater, can never be refolded in the right sequence. Petit would rather have his arm amputated at the elbow, without anaesthetic, than appear in public with an unsightly plastic envelope dangling across his breast on coloured string.
Clare was alone. He cheered himself by treating this section of the walk like a military campaign. He was in the grip of a very convincing delusion: Mary Joyce, his waiting muse, would help him roll up the bad miles travelled on that first coach trip to London. His return would be an unwalking, a reforgetting. He would suffer enough to overlay the particulars of the fantastic London adventure. No more poetry, no more fame. The beginning was deceptively smooth: ‘Down the lane gently… and bye and bye on the great York Road where it was all plain sailing.’
We share his difficulty in setting an orientation. There is no York Road for us, not yet; roads are barriers, the commuter blitzkrieg of the A1037, charging up the flank of King George's Reservoir, ignoring hand-painted signs for off-highway produce, Lea Valley fruit and flowers (imported by containerload from Holland). M25. A10. A hyperactive bifurcation of rivers, navigations and railways. You are meant to use these engineering marvels (with or without tickets) and not treat them as an obstacle course. London snorts human meat through metalled tubes. And later exhales the de-energised husks, its wage slaves.
Three men in a broken file, three projects under a single flag of convenience, complicates the first mile of the John Clare memorial tour. Renchi sees this walk as the validation of a shift from cataloguing into unifying vision. Clare's seizures, his mimetic fits, were emblems of integrity. Images derived from the journey, photographs or paintings, must subvert the taint of calculation, the obligation to record. There should be minimal intervention, Renchi announced, between walker and walk. His return to visionary art mirrors the shift in Clare's work, from modest epics of noticing, to troubled gazing, to possession by the unquiet spirits of Lord Byron and Jack Randall. ‘I've stood and looked upon the place for hours,’ he writes of the High Beach pond.
Petit, on the other hand, glances at his miniaturised screen, held out from the body, only to confirm the worst: tumbling cultural stocks, property market in freefall. He disdains raw imagery and requires every frame to look like a quotation, a retake. His task, as he sees it, is to eliminate any trace of human awkwardness, material that might be mistaken for the work of inferior or overpraised rivals. He stands, legs apart, struggling to devise a record of something tangential to the thrust of narrative. Exposure blown, focus twisted: a revenge on cinema. Another step towards relinquishing his iconic status as a film-maker who doesn't film. Movement, he decides, is the only solution: new location, new life. Art without the artist. Unmediated light: as witnessed, by preference, from a car window (the higher the better). River, sea. Desert, distant mountain. Fenland skies. Especially the area around Denver Sluice.
Recall his 1993 novel, Robinson:
I found a road. It was straight and flat, the unchanging landscape an endless grid of drainage canals and black fields. No cars passed. There was a line of trees on the edge of the mist and I counted them as a way of making progress. Sometimes the road disappeared under water, and the surrounding fields became lakes. Then the landscape was gone altogether, leaving me nothing except a feeling of acute physical discomfort. I was wet to the skin and shivering. Blisters grew on my heels.
The keynote for our walk had been established. Petit was reluctant to advance, unwilling to commit anything to tape. Renchi, preparing for the worst, crammed rainsuits into a bulging rucksack. He adjusted his piratical red bandanna: GENUINE / U.S.C.L. AUTHENTIC / (Est.1957). I relished the itch of future blisters. And anticipated a greasy spoon breakfast.
Setting off down the track that runs alongside the forest bungalows, our private methods of remembering where we are soon have us spread out like fastidious stalkers. We manage the first Clare trope: getting ourselves lost. And before we have advanced a mile from the former asylum. The point is that the ground over which we walk has to concur with three very different points of view: the spiritual, the aesthetic – and the fetish for delayed narrative. For digression.
‘This is a world,’ Chris later reported (in a proposal for a triumphantly unmade film), ‘in which meaning is subject to constant reinterpretation, where the conventional boundaries – most noticeably between fact and fiction – are questioned, as is the method, in a process which depends on a series of visual and verbal puns.’
Puns are mercifully few, now that our former photographer, Marc Atkins, has taken himself off to Paris. But we're overstocked in metaphors. And symbols. The owl is one of them. The Owl pub on Lippitts Hill.
The Leicestershire painter Rigby Graham, doing his Clare walk as part of a documentary film, was much taken by this spot: dripping field, cottage with electricity poles and wires. The film's director, Charles Mapleston, announced that the Essex Man boozer was indeed ‘Clare's local’. (Where pubs were concerned, Clare's locals were anywhere he happened to be passing.) Local the Owl undoubtedly is, in terms of proximity to Fairmead; and local in the broader sense of representing the spirit of place. The pub looks out on a booster mast and a secure ‘Metropolitan Police Firearms Training’ area.
WHEN THE ORANGE FLAG IS FLYING THERE IS A POSSIBILITY OF SUDDEN LOUD NOISE FROM THIS CAMP.
Ill-considered obscenery usurps every hectare of ground within a day's walk of Aldgate Pump. The Owl is an excursionist pub with wooden outdoor tables, kids welcome. It has a nominal garden in which squirrels and pigeons compete for burger traces, hopping from perch to perch. There is a play area for which the management accepts no responsibility. A fire-hydrant-red helicopter with Arab-zapping rocket rays. A stainless-steel sculpture like an autopsy tray. Barbecue spits coagulated with thick black fat. The heady stink of yesterday's good times dissipated by cordite and diesel and fresh horse manure.
The obtuseness of Lippitts Hill is absolute; here is the confusion we solicit. As we descend, we catch glimpses of a distant London through breaks in the thinning forest: a rumour best avoided. We ask a woman for Mott Street and, very obligingly, she points us in completely the wrong direction. Our mistake. We need an owl as guide.
Edward North Buxton (‘Verderer’), in his 1905 study of Epping Forest, makes a list of birds he encountered. ‘I saw a pair [of Barn owls] close to Fairmead Lodge in the summer of 1884. A chorus of angry jays attracted me to the tree where they were.’ Tawny owls and Long-eared owls were also recorded. Short-eared owls were ‘shot on several occasions by sportsmen in the turnip fields’.
Rigby Graham chooses the owl as John Clare's totem, a mind in flight. Troublesome avatar. From his perch in the Fleet Street window, Clare watches the traffic of London. He is wrapped in a green coat. Feathers. Claws for hands. Crumpled top hat. Graham's birds are a chorus, tracking the poet as he walks north: owls and herons. Owl for madness. Heron as symbol of place: rivers shadowing roads. The painter catches a heron swooping over the Bishop's Palace at Buckden. The owl that is perched under the telegraph pole in the High Beach cottage is still with Clare at the finish, bloody prey in claws, at Glinton.
Our votive beasts, as we follow Mott Street down to the busy commuter road, are white plaster bulldogs. In matching pairs, fresh painted, they guard wrought-iron gates. The crest of the hill is Nationwide footballer, Russian journeyman, rather than Premier League and Beckhamite. The lethal swimming-pool parties of TV comedians are deeper into the forest, further north. Tall gates soon give way to low gates, temple-sized garages to bungalows and pick-up trucks. Dirtyneck enterprises in the way of roadside horticulture. Plant nurseries: Dotheboys Hall for geraniums, antirrhinums, cineraria. Dusty paddocks, spidery
greenhouses. Crystal Palaces of spun sugar, cuckoo-spit. Oxygen tents for premature cucumbers and forced tomatoes.
We're hammered against Sewardstone Road as the rest of London throws itself at the M25. The brownfield acres of Waltham Abbey, suburbs of suburbs, are very brown; horizon-to-horizon mud, smoking machinery. Growling noise. Bright, yellow-brick, non-negotiable, no-through-road dormitory estates. Four-wheel drives bark as you approach, snarl a warning. Civic signs are traduced by the pseudo destinations of developers, locations become locations only when they have been rechristened.
WELCOME TO MERIDIAN PARK.
Barratt Homes, Bellwinch Homes, Fairclough Homes, Twigden Homes, Wimpey Homes. Zero-longitude future somewheres hungry for identity.
A red-and-yellow hoarding – FREE CHOCOLATE – offers: Free Internet Access, Free Web Space, Free Exclusive Email Address. As physical space shrinks, Web space expands to fill the vacuum. Anywhere conquers somewhere. Blink and the ‘New 48 Acre Industrial Park’ will be old news. Another unsightly blank polyfilled with generic architecture, supercity germ cultures grown in hyperspace. Islamophile minarets cohabit with Islamophobe portraits of chicken-slaughtering Southern crackers with phony Confederate titles. You travel through a projected topography to recover from travelling. Retail therapy consoles you for what you have lost: memory, choice. Mark Kass (in a co-production with Nissan) supplies you with transport. Kass has the edgelands franchise; ranks of gleaming motors cushion Waltham Abbey from motorway slip roads. SMART: the number plate of a black pod. Yours for £7995. Wheels pre-champed.
The bridge over the M25 is a moment worth celebrating, the point where our new walk breaks free from the old one; hanging in space, we bond with the totality of London. Petit strokes his screen. Renchi spatters a chaos of stalled trucks, hurtling repmobiles, blue hoardings, white lines, lighting poles, radio masts, into Kodak-colour vorticism. The next image, in the file he sends me, is a booted foot crunching gravel on the riverside path. We can't do what Clare did and take the road into Enfield. Cross-river options have been suspended. Put right by an acquaintance coming out of the Labour in Vain pub, Clare is directed to the Great North Road. But roads change: Ermine Street, Old North Road, Great North Road, A1, A1(M). You would have to walk from Waltham Abbey to South Mimms (don't try it) to pick up Clare's route. Golf courses. Unilaterally privatised roads. Boarding kennels for traumatised dogs. Garden ‘centres’ (symbols of suburbia). Cancelled asylums decanted on to cambered blacktop.
The Great North Road, London to York, was an English myth, serviced by Dick Turpin and the footsore Clare: an escape. The beginnings of the road are complex, two tributaries coming together as they quit the city. Clare, on his visits to and from London, used them both. I feel a shiver of excitement when I read any account confirming the fact that Hackney connects, by lost toll gates, with the fabulous north. Ermine Street made its escape by way of Kingsland Road, Stoke Newington, Tottenham, Edmonton. It slipped its present route to pass through Theobald's Park and on to Cheshunt, Broxbourne.
Posting stations, watering places for horses and passengers, adapt and survive. Milestones, ground down like ancient molars, can still be found in the long grass. Clare, confused after a detour to the Ram public house, beyond Potton, was further discomforted by the dogmatic bluntness of just such a milestone. Information undid him. It was more than he wanted to know.
at length I came to a place where the road branched off into two turnpikes one to the right about & the other straight forward & on going bye my eye glanced on a mile stone standing under the hedge so I heedlessly turned back to read it to see where the other road led too & on doing so I found it led to London I then suddenly forgot which was North or south & though I narrowly examined both ways I could see no tree or bush or stone heap that I could reccolect I had passed so I went on mile after mile almost convinced I was going the same way I came & these thoughts were so strong upon me that doubt & hopelessness made me turn so feeble that I was scarcely able to walk yet I could not sit down or give up but shuffled along till I saw a lamp shining as bright as the moon which on nearing I found was suspended over a Tollgate
Informed walkers fix their position, the distance from London, by examining plants found under hedges, noticing the wildlife that roams free down central reservations. There is more time to experience doubt – and a higher price to pay if you go wrong – when you walk. The Great North Road having so many earlier identities, cattle track, coach route, carriageway, is dangerously plural. Always ready, under extreme weather conditions, clammy mists, flooded rivers, to revert to some previous state. Wandering ghosts are more visible as solid landscape fades.
Anna, smart-suited for a visit to London, met her father at the Great Northern Hotel, near King's Cross. An interview, something of the sort. She would have been – twenty? She thinks I was hanging about, we weren't married. Her father, still living in Lancashire, had business in town. He'd bought a rather grand house in a village, closer to his roots, for retirement. Isaac Newton, so they said, blinded himself challenging the sun in their summer house. They would drive back together, father and daughter, not a common occurrence, to Rutland. The manor house would subsequently be let out, while the family home remained in Poulton-le-Fylde (aka Blackpool).
I know that road, the Ai: a memory strip with bloody sprockets. Driving is re-driving, pre-driving, overlaying one journey with another. You are always crawling through extruded suburbia: electronics companies, war simulations, underwater missile-guidance systems, Hatfield estates with shaved playing fields and pavilions. Will Self, in How the Dead Live, talks about death as the ‘undeveloping’ of memory. That condition also applies to English roads. Highway fog is glaucoma, clouding specifics of place, offering pod-people a preview of non-existence. Limbo dreams between life and extinction.
The Great Northern Hotel, when I left the Hadmans, was a wet hulk. Belonging to the river, not the railway. London was grey skin, fouled lungs. Hands slipping on clammy rails. Highgate Village, by the time they found it, looked back on a drowned valley. The A1 was a supposition, a blind guess. Road signs were there to be touched, not read. Geoffrey Hadman was familiar with the routine of late meetings, long drives. Staying awake on whisky and sandwiches. Anna had been his passenger, often, but not on this road, not out of London.
By Norman Cross visibility is, what, six feet? Anna is instructed to let down the window and count the turn-offs: out loud. The car edges towards the presumption of a roundabout. She can barely see the kerb. She counts. Gets it wrong. Not much moving, sensible drivers have stayed at home or booked in for the night at the Bell in Stilton.
Out of nowhere, full beams: blinding.
Honks, shouts. They can't go any slower, they are already at walking pace. They hear the lorry apply its brakes. The driver gets out, comes over to them. He says something. The steam from his mouth, a little whiter than the mist, gives away his position.
They are travelling, so it seems, the wrong way, up one of the fiercest roads in England. They are lodged in the fast lane of the A1; heading north, straight into oncoming traffic. They can congratulate themselves, when they stop shaking, on outperforming Clare: navigating to the outskirts of Peterborough without benefit of mileposts and toll gates.
Through Waltham Abbey and on to the River Lee Navigation, a sanctioned footpath through an area of small lakes and meads, heronries of the secret state, we process in numbed abstraction. Gunpowder mills, bunkers, blast-deflecting ziggurats hold no mystery. We have decided to take the water route, by way of Broxbourne and Ware, to Hertford. Then we'll cross unfamiliar territory to meet John Clare (and the Great North Road) at Stevenage.
We enjoyed a modest breakfast in town, but found the church closed (quarter to nine in the morning). We therefore missed the recent damage inflicted by a care-in-the-community berserker from Waltham Cross who ran amok with a small axe, striking off the marble nose of Francis Woolaston (of Shenton in Leicestershire). An otherwise obscure youth who died of smallpox, aged sixtee
n, in 1684. White eye split like an egg. Not one drop of blood.
Our route is dispiriting; too much has been invested by outside parties. Noticeboards offer bubblegum cartoons of local history, ecological advances underwritten by generations of bomb-makers. Twinned narratives press uncomfortably on a path that is squeezed tight between road and railway. A David Starkey presentation about abbeys and kings tries to drown the whispered story of badly paid workers in dirty, dangerous occupations; biographies erased by the Official Secrets Act. ‘Best Value’ futurology contradicts the sorry shuffle of what is actually happening: grunge, entropy, mismanagement. Tame journalists, columnists rescued from a Trotskyite past, can always be found to cry hurrah, to ridicule moaners and whingers. To be loud, as Thatcher discovered, is to be right.
The River Lee Navigation is not much navigated. Nor the path walked. It is jogged, painfully, by red-faced men and determined women with water-hoops around their necks (like liquid fetishes). There are aggressive cyclists too, avoiding roads and regarding pedestrians as foolish obstacles, less-evolved life forms. Leisure, between Enfield Lock and Cheshunt, is a discipline, a quasi-military regime of self-punishment and frowning excess. Miles are ticked off, goals achieved. One cyclist, male, screams at a female sculler as she fails to meet his stopwatch target. The poignancy of the Olympic bid fiasco, excusing all development scams, infects the Lea. There is no excuse for obscurity, no time for strollers, fluvial excursionists.
Djuna Barnes, profiling James Joyce, zoomed in on his ‘spoilt and appropriate’ teeth. And that is this stretch of the Lea, precisely: spoilt and appropriate. Hissing trains. Occasional apologetic herons (all spindle and no heft) tipping out of dead trees like faultily assembled kites. Nothing spectacular, nothing to stop your advance on Broxbourne. ‘Writers,’ Joyce told Barnes, ‘should never write about the extraordinary, that is for the journalist.’ But, already, she was nodding off. ‘He drifts from one subject to the other, making no definite division.’
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