Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  We drive to Barnack, to explore the ancient quarries, the ‘Hills and Holes’: a favourite walk of the orchid-hunting Clare. And of Renchi's father, Peter. Memories flood back. As we walk, Renchi recalls those conversations. Butterflies. Thorn bushes. Healed declivities from which stone for Peterborough Cathedral was excavated. Rafts on the Nene. Cambridge colleges lying in wait, already formed, beneath a thin carpet of soil. Miniature hills on which to catch unexpected views.

  After paying our respects to Helpston and Glinton, we strike out, down North Fen, towards Clare's bridge; and away, birds rising affronted from bare fields, to Crowland. Renchi worries that he has left his boots in Barnack: in the church with that curious grave, a stone palm tree lying on the ground. I brood on the dissolution of my quest but decide that it doesn't matter. Touring Northampton, church to church, laid down a pattern that activated a series of overlapping narratives. We must walk them out, empty-headed in an empty landscape. Searching for Anna's Hadman relatives, I found Beckett. Listening for Clare, I heard Lucia's silence. Trudging beside water, under unforgiving skies, we hope that our twinned stories will loop back on themselves; bringing us to that unknown place we must learn to recognise.

  REFORGETTING

  & we often see clouds which we identify by their curling up from the orison in seperate masses as gass clouds which ascend into the middle sky & then join the quiet journey other clouds & are lost in the same colour.

  John Clare (Northborough. October/November 1841)

  Glinton

  Clare: Farewell, dear Mrs Joyce. We shall return with tales to tell. (Pauses)

  One more thing before we depart. You mentioned my travels earlier and spoke of my home with a certain familiarity. I was wondering, do you have family in Glinton or Helpston?

  John Mackintosh, A Song of Summer

  Commentators assert that Samuel Beckett, in Krapp's Last Tape, drew on memories of Peggy Sinclair: ‘a girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform’. The association is presumptuous and unnecessary. I remember, I have the photograph in my hand, the three-quarter-length tweed coat, leather collar, Anna wore when I took her to the ‘Hills and Holes’ at Barnack: hoping that she could give me the names of the wild flowers, the bushes. I saw instead how much returning to this part of the world meant. The animation that came with the road from Stamford to Helpston. The pleasure she derived from walking the mounds. Barnack was a quiet, moneyed village with handsome church and vicarage (traces of Charles Kingsley).

  Coming off the Ai, away from London: the lift in the landscape, before the falling away into flatness, is an exhilaration. We've given ourselves three days to sort out the business of the Hadmans and Glinton. We'll start at the family grave, St Benedict's Church, then work across to the Red House, before making a circuit of the village. What we understand, from the modest heights of Barnack, is the way Glinton functioned: cattle brought down from the hills to feed on rich summer pastures, ground recovered from water. Beds of mint. Hemp from which shoes were made. Dampness and flooded fields the perpetual winter condition. How the young Clare moaned about his sodden feet when he tried working as a gardener at Woodcroft Castle.

  Guided by Glinton historian Val Hetzel – who produced enclosure maps, copies of parish registers – we learnt that the Red House stood alongside a pen for strayed cattle. There were two cottages in Rectory Lane: a policeman occupied one of them, the other was a reading room. The Hadmans owned no fields at the time of the enclosures, neither were they landowners in 1886. Websters were active. They intermarried with Vergettes. James Joyce put together a nice parcel of land, a strip here, a patch there. He lived at the Fen edge, beside the path where Mary Joyce is supposed to have kept company with Clare.

  The village spreads like a stain, out from the church, on its green island. Tenant farmers, satirised by Clare, were the coming men: active, energetic, socially ambitious. There was no sentiment for cottage life, nor any aspect of heritage standing in the way of immediate profit. One of the Webster properties was a Custom House, occupied by the military; decent quarters for officers, dormitory for other ranks. They patrolled the rivers and dykes, to prevent the movement of contraband by water (there were no serviceable roads).

  The Titmans, the most recent of the farming families, so Mrs Hetzel told us, were parish and county councillors. They were sufficiently well informed about Peterborough's coming status as a ‘New Town’, about legislation forbidding the replacement of thatched roofs with Collyweston slate, to buy up and rapidly tear down examples of the picturesque (the Glinton equivalent of Clare's cottage). Bungalow developments and convenience stores prepared the way for Glinton to be absorbed into Peterborough: a desirable satellite accessed by dual carriageway. Farmers become developers. Or they vanish, disperse, lose their nerve.

  We couldn't turn right into Glinton: flooded road. The journey from Helpston, a reprise of my original walk, was fouled up by a system of roundabouts that try to suck everything into Peterborough's gravitational field. Clare's trudge home from the village school has been overwhelmed by superstores, retail parks, exhaust-replacement centres. I prompt Anna, looking out of the car at naked fields, to remember where the Auster landed. She can't. An area known as the ‘Stacks’ was part of the Hadman farm, but she can't place it with certainty. Perhaps the field sliced off by the road? Peppery-brown mud, combed flat, fenced by brutally hacked hedges. The hum of the bypass.

  Denied access to Glinton, we make the long detour by way of Northborough. An opportunity to look for the Clare graves, Patty and her children, in St Andrew's churchyard. Damp morning, no definition in the sky. Church locked, key available from cottage down the street.

  I begin, in the dimmest corner, with slabs that are waiting to be broken up, cut to dress a cottage garden. There are no Clares, but plenty of Catlings. Joseph and Elizabeth. And their children. Brian Catling's biological parents come from Sheerness, the Isle of Sheppey, but his adopted family emerged from these parts, floaters. They kept the stock healthy by getting away; pubs, army, ducking and diving in the Old Kent Road and Rotherhithe. The gene pool in some Northamptonshire villages, according to Alan Moore, is so shallow you're lucky to find partners with eyes on different sides of their noses.

  Catlings face the east window, while Clares face them, and look beyond: to the sewage works, the River Welland. Flat fields. Straight roads. Crowland Abbey. Gravestones are readdressed like misdirected mail. Names added until there is no space left on the grey envelope. Northborough was a family reunion to which John Clare was not invited. Martha (Patty) Clare is present; the ‘wife’ part of her title faded from the inscription, black paint gone. Sons and daughters are lovingly remembered. Children of children. Definitively asleep. Until prodded by biographers, scholars obliged to set the record straight. Patty's association with Helpston is put aside. The family sinks back into the element from which it emerged. John Clare's fret of language is kept at a safe distance, a couple of miles down the road, with his father and mother, in St Botolph's churchyard.

  I take down some of the names. ‘William P. Clare. July 31st, 1887. Aged 57.’ John's third son. He lived with Patty in Northborough. He married Elizabeth Pateman and had three children. The family owned Poet's Cottage until 1920.

  We find no Hadman/Clare intermarriage, before or after the poet. Turner, Morris, Sefton, Stimson, Gorge, Garfet, Woodward, Stapely, Ward, Kettle, Crason, Snow, Preston, Bean, Dove, Bowery, Stallebrass, Humber, Baxter, Hornblow, Pryce, Jones, Griffiths: names to stock a dozen Shakespeare comedies, novels by Dickens. It would be easier, if we had the stomach for it, to find a link to my family. Jack Clare, the poet's second son, worked for the railways as a carpenter. He lived in the Welsh borders with his second wife, fathering six children. My mother had connections in Brecon and Monmouthshire. Then there was the rogue schoolteacher, John Donald Parker, itinerant Scot. Who knows where he came from? Or where he went?

  William Hadman, Anna's grandfather, died a month after she was born. He was churchward
en of St Benedict's at Glinton, from 1921 to 1943. His wife, Florence (maiden name Rose), followed him within seven months. Unlike the Websters, Vergettes, Titmans, Joyces, there was only one Hadman grave to be found. It was multiply occupied with memorial prompts. And tended by surviving family members. Gravel combed, lettering repainted, the Hadman grave stood apart from the chaotic enclosure map into which the Glinton churchyard had been converted by the other notable farmers. A strip here, a mound there. Grandiose monuments, broken slabs buried in long grass. Avenues of relatives, shoulder to shoulder, in neighbourly proximity. The Hadmans stood alone. All on one raft. They had come from nowhere, vanished into nothing. There were no uncles, aunts, cousins. The singular grave lacked the soil for elaborate planting; skimmia, roses, chrysanthemums (from garden centres or garages) brought a splash of colour. The record was clear, but stark. Anna's paternal grandparents. Her father, Geoffrey. Her mother, Joan. Her aunt, Mary. Recorded and remembered on one stone.

  That's as far as we can take it. Gravestone and family album. Two photographs of Florence Hadman with her three children: Florence Mary, Lawrence William (‘Lawrie’) and Geoffrey. (The workforce at ICI called him ‘Skipper’.) Florence Hadman isn't happy about this performance, kids gussied up, hair brushed; in bright sunshine, backed against a bush. In the first photograph,

  Geoffrey is a baby, perched on his mother's knee; bemused, bald, affronted by the impertinent camera. A little old man, dignity ruffled. By the second photo – it must have been an annual agony, same cast, same positions – he is about five or six; the only one of the trio who has not yet perfected the Hadman scowl. A tall, solid, beetle-browed gang. With low tolerance for nonsense of any kind. The five-bar gate places them on Rectory Lane, looking at the apple orchards on the far side.

  Here, at last, is something to work with. We pass the Blue Bell pub (tricked out with antique farm implements), and start down the lane. Anna notices how the redbrick frontage of the family house has been grafted on to the armature of a much older cottage. A metal fire-insurance badge is visible between the upstairs windows. Anna recalls the rectory, now a private house, as a rather gloomy children's home. The fields beyond may have been where the Auster landed, bumped to ground. Leaving her deaf for the walk to the Red House. Unable to hear her own footfalls.

  As we come out of the field, on to the busy road, across from the Community College, Anna realises that she has lost her brooch. A Celtic silver device, zoomorphic, swans (like the Peakirk village sign) entwined – and representing, so the leaflet says, ‘shape-shifting abilities, transformation in the physical and spiritual sense’. A small sacrifice to our quest, another Barnack vanishing (to set alongside Renchi's Beckettian boots). Brooches disappear and are replaced like the children of the rural poor. The clip of silver coins I remembered from Sandymount was stolen, the usual toll, shortly after we moved to Hackney, along with most of Anna's inherited jewellery. A replacement brooch went the day Tate Modern opened on Bankside. Now this: no glint in hedge or gutter, as we retrace our steps. I'm sure the brooch dropped off as we clambered around the ‘Hills and Holes’; to be found, in years to come, by a metal-detecting enthusiast. A nice wink to the culture: limestone molehills revised as New Grange theme park. A pocket of renegade Celts rafting up the Nene. An attraction to rival Flag Fen.

  As tourists offer boots and brooches to unsuspecting fields, so chunks of Barnack stone rise from their long hibernation in Whittlesey mud. Blocks designated for Ramsey and Ely shake free from the peat, to parade their thirteenth-century brands. Peter Ashley, English Heritage researcher, told me that after he'd photographed the Ramsey blocks at Engine Farm he was drawn to search for other Barnack stones, sunk with their rafts or dropped over the side. The Old Plough Inn, between Ely and Prickwillow, so he discovered (from a book by A. K. Astbury, called The Black Fens), was ‘built partly of Barnack stone which never completed its journey by river to the site of Ely Cathedral’. With this reference for a guide, Ashley jumped in his car. ‘I did go out on to the Fens at Prickwillow,’ he said. ‘And found that pub (now a home), with very obvious blocks of medieval masonry built into it. It now sits right out on the Fen away from all roads except a grassy track that was once the Ely to Norwich road.’

  Ashley photographed one more thing: a pond with a little rushy island which contained a great church bell. Another drowned item dragged from the depths: to be rung when a novice entered a convent, bride of Christ. The bell's provenance was surprising. It had escaped from an Iris Murdoch novel (the TV dramatisation). And found its rightful place: a real fake. A relic slowly acquiring mystique by erasing its previous history, sitting mute on a piece of damp ground.

  We settled in the pub with papers and documents we'd scrounged or been given by relatives. Val Hetzel, tracking back through local records, came up with a list of the owners of the Red House and its surrounding land.

  At enclosure claimed by Mrs Elizabeth Webster.

  1825 John Webster of Thorney sold to Walker.

  1841 J. Webster willed it to Mrs Frances Walker and died 1850.

  1861 Under the will was sold, purchased by Ancell Ball who built on to the house Eastward.

  1889 A. Ball died, sold to R. Vergette.

  1899 R. Vergette sold to J. T. Smith – Mr Smith bequeathed it to his cousin, Mrs Fanny Warwick.

  1909 Mrs Warwick died, buried at Glinton. Purchased by Mr Hadman for…

  Amount lost. William Hadman was established, not as a tenant farmer, but as the owner of the property, and the land behind it, running back to the road, and beyond. Our understanding of the farmers and how they operate is becoming clearer; the social gulf that yawned between the Joyces and the Clares (who could aspire, at best, to cottager status). Families with push, Elizabeth Webster as prime example, went for land at the time of the enclosures. If the children of farmers spurned Glinton, the power base was lost.

  Clare's satire in ‘The Parish’ shows what he thought of these shifts:

  That good old fame that farmers earned of yore

  That made as equals not as slaves the poor

  That good old fame did in two sparks expire

  A shooting coxcomb and a hunting Squire

  And their old mansions that was dignified

  With things far better than the pomp of pride

  ...

  These all have vanished like a dream of good

  And the slim things that rises where they stood

  Are built by those whose clownish taste aspires

  To hate their farms and ape the country squires

  So William Hadman owned the Red House. He farmed. His eldest son, Lawrie, took over the property. His daughter Mary had a written contract to cook for the men. Talking to Lawrie's daughter, Judy, who now lived on the west side of the Ai, we discovered that her grandfather had not always been a farmer. He started as a forester. Judy supplied us with copies of William Hadman's obituaries. ‘A Glinton Worthy,’ says one of them. Chairman of the Parish Council, churchwarden, school manager, special constable. Member in good standing of the Peterborough Unionist Club. Stalwart of village bowls. Keeper of a herd of Lincoln Red dairy cattle. A man famed for his hospitality. Nothing he enjoyed more than feeding friends and neighbours, until they couldn't move from the table. His pet name for the Red House was ‘Starvation Cottage’.

  Judy had her grandfather's chair, decorative mirrors from the Glinton house. And, with that chair, presence. Looking over the photographs, in her kitchen, fleshed out the family portrait. We learnt about social ambitions, of the sort John Clare noted, that went with the rise in status. Judy's mother was Madge. That was her name. Geoffrey and Mary Hadman decided it would never do. They rechristened her: Margaret. Aunt Margaret she became. Judy, on the other hand, was born Juliet Mary. Then rebranded to fit with a perceived notion of what she should be. Lawrie, it seems, never wanted to take over the farm. He trained as a butcher.

  Identities can be assigned to figures in the group gathered in the Red House garden. The rather el
egant woman in the back row, beside Geoffrey, was a London friend. Anna thinks she sponsored the publication of the unique copy of her father's lost poems. Judy, as a young girl, admired this woman so much that she wanted to become her: the style, the clothes, the perfume. She took to hiding a stone in her shoe, so that she could imitate the rather sexy limp. Anna, in her turn, was captivated by Judy's kidney-shaped dressing table, with the pink frills; make-up, lipstick, preparations for a party. Her very own mirror.

  Family photographs present a severely edited narrative of the past. As if all life happened against that hedge, in that garden: in sunlight. One by one, the participants disappear. Geoffrey Hadman, blazer, cap crumpled awkwardly in left hand, takes up the pose he has practised from childhood. Shuffle the wilting pack of images in any order, reverse time. Anna, as a baby, with mother and aunt. Cats, dogs, dolls. Open-top cars. The Auster parked in a field. William and Florence Hadman: bespectacled, hatted. Their pipe-smoking son, much taller than his father, rests a hand on the old man's shoulder. Infant Anna, in Churchillian siren suit, braves Rectory Lane with her cousin Judy.

  Anna's brother William told us about the only Hadmans he had discovered. One worked for the railway. His name is published on a wall, between Hackford (S) and Hale (E): the memorial to the war dead in King's Cross Station. (‘To the immortal memory of the men of the Great Northern Railway who gave their lives in the Great War.’) So Hadman (E) escaped from his home country, on at least one occasion, to die in a foreign land.

  Alan Moore disputes the fable about Boadicea being buried under a platform at King's Cross. He thinks she's lying beneath a Northampton mound, returned with honour: like the victorious Margaret Thatcher being landfilled at Grantham. Hadman (E) is no fiction. He is visible to anyone walking between ticket hall and train: black lettering on white marble.