Edge of the Orison

by Iain Sinclair

  Anna couldn't crack it. The bookman watched her struggle, then revealed the secret. A blindman had solved the mystery. I didn't ask why a blind person would be visiting a bookshop that didn't run to items in Braille. By touch, the puzzle was solved. Inside the box was another puzzle: a board divided into complex shapes that had to be fitted together.

  Under some pressure, Anna lent the puzzle to a relative, who wanted to try it on a wealthy patron, a collector of such things: private press fine editions, games, watches, pens. The man died. The collection was dispersed. Anna's puzzle vanished. That is the fate of such objects. All puzzles are metaphors. Moves must be made blind, like the clicking of prayer beads, hand gestures, mudras: the purpose is to stretch time. Solutions are meaningless. Unthinking motions of the fingers are everything.

  Clare's snuffboxes would offer a remote trace of the man's heat; hands rubbing against wood or brass. In Northampton, I had seen the books. This was more intimate: touch without premeditation, reflex gestures when the mind is elsewhere. Personal objects exposed for public exhibition, trophies of a city's self-satisfied display.

  The term ‘snuffbox’ has a double meaning: Thanatos and Eros. Death and love. Wooden casket. Pudendum. Sniffing and snuffing. Clare relished such word play. In High Beach, stirred by prurient fantasies, taking on the Byronic rags of Don Juan, he pictured Lord Melbourne violating the ‘snuffbox’ of little Victoria, the new queen. He imagined himself, in Oedipal pride, as the queen's father: Ubu in madness. An asylum clown polishing the box which is both a receptacle for his own ashes and the gamey delta of his daughter's sexuality. (The daughter who has replaced him on the throne of England.)

  When Lucia Joyce was treated by Jung, the Swiss analyst employed a woman called Cary Baynes, who had trained at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, to act as her companion. Lucia didn't respond to Jung. She found his insistence on remembering dreams a nuisance. Lucia preferred Baynes: who talked about leucocytes by their proper name. The beginning of transference occurred, so the companion decided, when Lucia presented her with a small hand-painted box.

  Blood again. It was discovered that Lucia suffered from what Joyce called ‘a superabundance of white corpostles’. ‘Hers is not a disease at all,’ he wrote to Giorgio, ‘but a symptom.’ Misdiagnosis and failure to attend to the obvious set Lucia on the path to Northampton. Undisclosed dreams. Dreams from which there was no escape.

  Anna, when I first knew her, husbanded her energies; ‘pale and interesting’ was her number. That was what she had been told, amid the din of family life, and she went with it: rests after lunch, pints of stout to counter a supposed iron deficiency. Periods of Keatsian languor were justified by vague (and hopeless) medical opinion. All too soon, she would be running a classroom of cadet Hackney gangstas, a house, three children of her own; an improbable regime beginning at six in the morning with housework and concluding with a full family meal. There were, there had to be, periods of ‘collapse’. Blood was tested and found to be deficient in red corpuscles. Platelets were counted at regular intervals. Pills prescribed. Then, much later, came a frightening episode, nightmarish, unexplained: darkness pressing too hard, difficulty in stepping outside. Fortunately, Anna's sister recognised the symptoms: thyroid. More pills, calm restored, condition managed. But it is very easy to see how the mechanics of blood, misread, lay a person, often a woman, open to barbaric treatment and physical abuse.

  Tim Chilcott, introducing John Clare: The Living Year, 1841, speaks of ‘tortured clutches at a sense of dissolving identity… counter-pointed against perceptions of complete clarity and ordinariness’. In these unpredictable shifts of perception lies the terror: visionary instants, unbidden voices. Dictation the scribe struggles to clarify.

  ‘Cun-ys’ and snuffboxes occupy Clare's High Beach satires: ‘The snuff went here and the snuff went there.’ Men are prisoners and women are ravished: ‘All that map of childhood is overcast.’ The spire of the forest church points straight to heaven. Clare sits in a clearing, waiting for gypsies, taking a pinch of snuff.

  Prince Albert goes to Germany & must he

  Leave the queens snuff box where all fools are strumming

  From addled eggs no chicken can be coming

  I wrote to Peterborough Museum's ‘Access Officer: Curator-Human History’ enquiring after Clare's collection. ‘Thank you for your letter,’ she replied.

  I'm afraid we have only the one snuffbox, which is on display. Also, I cannot find anything in our index that refers to Clare's walk from Epping Forest to Northborough… Public access to the manuscripts is tightly controlled and usually only academic researchers are able to utilise them in a useful way. We would require a reference from your academic affiliation for access to manuscripts. Two weeks' notice is also required for appointments.

  Two weeks we don't have. I settle for Clare's rather sad display case. The solitary box sits alongside an open copy of The Village Minstrel. The ends have been rounded: it's a wooden book. ‘Snuffbox which belonged to John Clare and was later owned by his relative John Clare Billing, and then passed to L. Tebbutt of Stamford,’ says a typed card.

  The wood is dark and highly polished. The lid slides open by way of an indentation in the shape of a human fingernail.

  We retreat for the night to the Bull Hotel. What do we have to show for our Peterborough researches? Anna's sense of being draped with Werrington relatives: shrunken heads on her shoulders, fox masks. Names and dates from mildewed tombs. A family tree for John Clare supplied by Peter Moyse of the Clare Society. Six rolls of exposed film. And my instinct to move out, start walking: we must try to follow Clare's voyage down the Nene, from the town bridge to Wisbech.

  Among the papers, spread across the executive-style desk, is the photocopy of a newspaper in smudged type. An obituary notice, for ‘The Late Mr. William Rose of Glassmoor’, published under the heading: ‘Whittlesey Farmer's Funeral’. A note has been written in the margin: ‘Father of Grandmother Hadman.’

  Checking Clare's family tree, I made a potential discovery. On the line descended from the poet's daughter, Eliza Louisa, by way of another John Clare (Sefton), came a Rose. Dorothy Muriel, born 1926 and still alive, married a certain Eric Rose. Could Geoffrey Hadman's vaunted connection be made through his Glinton grandmother, Florence Rose?

  The Roses, so the obituary made clear, lived to the south of the Nene, on the fringes of land recovered from Whittlesey Mere. We would investigate the district tomorrow as part of our river walk. William Rose, Anna's great-grandfather, was another farmer, another churchwarden (at the Angle Bridge Mission). Two hundred people attended his funeral: Roses, Hadmans, Robinsons, Reads, Rowells, Fountains. The coffin, of ‘plain oak with brass furniture’, was contracted to Messrs Rose and Son.

  Whittlesey, Glassmoor: attractive names. I looked at the map, Whittlesey was a spider trapped between rivers, surrounded by Fens and dykes and ditches. A landscape in which, as Iris Murdoch wrote, ‘it was a marvel to see at last something upright, to see a man’.

  Whittlesey

  A turn around the cathedral, former burial place of Mary Queen of Scots (dug up and removed to Westminster Abbey), glimpse of the Ramsey Psalter (Fenland illuminated manuscript): and out. Pause to admire the West Front: Lincolnshire limestone from Barnack. Detour around the private quarters of cathedral functionaries, a sequestered zone of gables, lanterns, eccentric roofs, odd windows, arches, weeds, diagonal shadows. And down to the river.

  This is the best of Peterborough, sunken gardens, high walls; a view that combines river, town bridge and the triumphalism of the cathedral. A functioning Lido that puts to shame the decommissioned swimming baths and architectural vanities of Hackney (millions wasted on leisure centres too dangerous to use). A riverside theatre. And, at last, we are reunited with the Nene.

  Wide, stately, steel-grey, the Nene is serious; you hear the thump and squawk of industry on the south bank, barges are moored. We go up on to the bridge that brings London Road, Clare's weary route, into
the city.

  when I told my story they clubbed together & threw me fivepence out of the cart I picked it up & called at a small public house near the bridge were I had two half pints of ale & twopenn'orth of bread & cheese when I had done I started quite refreshed only my feet was more crippled then ever & I could scarcely make a walk of it over the stones & being ashamed to sit down in the street I forced to keep on the move & got through Peterborough better then I expected

  From the bridge, Clare could have looked down on the place where, as a youth, he took the boat to Wisbech. Craft are still tied up, alongside a sign: KEY FERRY RIVER TRIPS. But it is out of season and pleasure boats now head upstream, in the direction of Wansford and Fotheringhay. Names have been scratched on the grey parapet, above still water in which bare trees are reflected: MARV + HANA 4 EVER.

  Everything is grey: sky, river, Anna's raincoat, the stone flag pavement on which you cross the bridge. Anna remembers her brother-in-law, Richard Ellis, saying how he'd taken a minesweeper down the Nene from Peterborough to Wisbech. ‘Ah, Wisbech,’ he mused. ‘Never saw the crew so drunk. And the women…’

  Some of the craft seem to have been abandoned; rust, debris, tough grass swallowing rudders. Others are still in business. Shaggy horses crop the verge: the kind that might once have towed passengers and cargoes to King's Lynn or Ely. We are the only walkers on a melancholy avenue of mature willows. Wet grey mud. A frenzy of contradictory directional arrows: the footprints of birds.

  There are attractions to consider, possible detours: sewage farm and Flag Fen with its ‘reconstructed roundhouses’. (Flag Fen, the Late Bronze Age Settlement, was an artificial island: rectangular huts, on a timber platform, floating in water. England's earliest prehistoric wheel, alderwood, was found on the site. Precursor of the coming Peterborough loop, motorway hell.) As ever, we are alone; quit the city and you enter a world of your own choosing; the silence of the river is broken by distant trains. It's possible, if you make a conscious effort, to hallucinate Clare's river journey; slow and steady momentum carrying a nervous boy, ill clothed as Werner Herzog's changeling time-traveller, Kaspar Hauser, towards a place of judgement. He moves, by this shift of surface, road to river, out of his element. Out of his country. Land vanishes behind steep banks. The world is sky. It's like being suddenly translated from poetry into a novel written by a stranger: into Kafka's Amerika. Terrible things happen. Told in a particular way, with a particular emphasis, they are comic. Experienced, they are painful. Everybody has a script, a street map of the town, you alone are uninformed: it is always the first day at a new school. Language you don't speak.

  When we achieve something called ‘Shanks Millennium Bridge’ we have two choices: blow it up or march across. And since the far bank promises a ‘Fen Causeway’, a ‘Roman Road’ leading into Whittlesey, we cross. Good decision: everything changes. The old causeways, timbers laid over mud, were ladders into the unconscious, dream-tracks between turf islands that might at any moment be withdrawn. A broad sandy path, bordered by mutated thorns and savage bushes, navigates a bleak landscape of back rivers, sluices, thickets of teazel. And in the distance, as a marker, a great black cloud issues from a group of tall, slim chimneys.

  This is much more like it, apocalypse, struggling nature asserting its potency in the face of feeble human threat; a major quarrying operation, noxious fumes, fountains of blood-red water pouring from blue-grey cliffs. What we are negotiating on our Roman road is the perimeter fence of the London Brick Company. Or, from another point of view, the streets of London in an as yet unrevealed form: buried in peat like the stone blocks of Ramsey Abbey. Here lies sleeping London: canal-side redevelopments, future estates of Thames Gateway, the Olympian hubris of Stratford East. Here is gouging, excavating, baking in furnaces. A procession of rattling trucks and lorries. Wounded red earth. Nitrous sulphide. A poison cloud of yellow-grey methane drifting over Whittlesey.

  Naturally, I have to duck under the fence – TIPPING RUBBISH IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED – to experience the quarry; an epic of ravishment on the scale of the Rainham Marshes landfill site, on which is dumped most of London's waste: to smoulder, fume, shudder, slither towards the Thames. There is ambition in this enterprise, an energy equal to the period when London was torn up for the construction of railways. There is employment for discontinued farm-labourers, citizens of Whittlesey, its outlying bogs and hamlets. Clay pits are another form of heritage, self-supporting, coughing forth Barratt units, dormitories of the new inner-city suburbs, replacement estates (in mustard yellow) for Hackney and Bow.

  I have to pick up one of the bricks from a pile of slag. Nice philtrum, lovely shape: Tate quality but damaged, chipped. Rose red. Spotted with moss. The clincher is that word cut into the skin: LONDON. A relic worth stuffing into my rucksack. London is where I'll carry it, chinking against my spine at every step; a constant reminder of its origin.

  Whittlesey, friends, is a potential Dickens theme park, Coketown from Hard Times: pick up your brochure at the F. R. Leavis Human History Centre.

  It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye.

  Sounds right, but the Coketown of Dickens isn't here, it's closer to the other side of Anna's family, her Lancashire mother, birthplace in Blackpool, her Preston relatives. The London Brick Company is a surreal intervention in a flat land of rivers and dykes, a land that requires beacons for navigation. Glinton spire, Peterborough Cathedral, Whittlesey chimneys: markers for trainee jet pilots who will be over the Wash in seconds and wheeling away to Scotland in minutes.

  Our walk started well, light rain diluting the methane, streaking us with yellow, and it improved with every mile we advanced on Whittlesey. The Roses, Anna's lost relatives, were worth chasing. They had found the perfect antidote to the subdued pastoral of Glinton and Werrington: those villages were drowned by development, Whittlesey had risen a few inches out of the peat. Its inhabitants, I imagined, would be cousins of H. P. Lovecraft's fish folk: part-human, part-animal, all alien.

  ‘The Rose Of The World Was Dear Mary To Me’: John Clare's Epping Forest lament. Mary Annabel Rose Hadman now understood that the Rose part of her name was no decorative addition, but a mark of family loyalty. The walk was a homecoming and she stepped out briskly, relishing immodest skies; unfenced, untidy, amphibian horizons.

  For years, above my desk, I kept a yellow poster; the print of a poem in holograph by Charles Olson. It was dated from 1965 and designed to mimic the shape of a rose. A sentence twisted round on itself until it reached the centre of the mystery: ‘This is the Rose of the World.’

  Whittlesey, on the direct route between the island abbeys of Thorney and Ramsey, on the Fen causeway between Peterborough and March, is another rose; beaten flat, choked by fumes from the London Brick Company.

  Something below us, beneath the pylons, catches my eye: a blue-white object trapped in the fork of a sapling. Something wet and grey planted in a naked patch of brown earth: chunks of broken brick as compost. Anna decides to stay on the path, while I slither down the rampart to investigate.

  This is no bird, a bear. A winged bear arranged so that it clings to the branch. Two other creatures, part-dog, grey as slush, accompany the shaggy angel; they have been secured by pink ribbons. Two further bears have been strapped, like Calvary thieves, to the trunk. A sprig of holly. A small white cross. A wooden dagger. The single word: REMEMBRANCE. The tree of bears marks the spot where a child has died. But I have never come across such a renegade memorial. There is a bench of undersized bears in East Tilbury, but that is arranged in such a way that walkers on the river path can pause, take in the view, pay their respects. The view here, on this damp m
orning, is bleak: sodden fields, distant cathedral town, looming chimneys.

  The map of Whittlesey suggests a museum, a cemetery, several churches: plenty of opportunity to search for relevant Roses. The funeral service for Anna's great-grandfather, William Rose, took place in February 1910, and was conducted by the vicar of St Mary's.

  The road into town, long and straight, is austere and low level. Whittlesey is like somewhere achieved, late in the day, in the middle of Ireland: breeze-block bungalows from catalogue, random houses with varieties of extravagant transport parked between front door and road. Clay pits give place to vegetable patches, narrow garden strips. Nobody is walking, nobody is out in the car. It's not actually raining, not much, but tarmac shines in a plaid of greys and grey-blues. Telegraph poles run all the way towards the centre, wherever that is. Out of nowhere, another of those Viking horses appears; a girl leading and a red-haired child in pink rubber boots perched on its back. ‘North Dublin,’ I said. ‘Horses kept in the front room.’

  The town is deserted, abandoned to through traffic (which is held by lights stuck on red). I note the window of the monumental mason: more bears. In granite-look, sculpted conglomerate. With a choice of colours: light grey or dark grey. Two roundhead bears with Wayne Rooney ears hold up blank books. Whittlesey is different and proud of it: Methodism, bear worship and a hopeful identity as an ‘ancient market town’. Timber-framed houses (‘preponderance of mellow buff brick’) cheek by jowl with grease caffs, rag-pickers' dens, empty shops with potato sacks.