One aspect of the story belongs to Anna Sinclair; her company on the expeditions, her memories. What I have presented in terms of Hadman family history is my version of Anna's telling, the episodes I asked her to recall. In points of detail, these will not be the memories of her brothers and sister. But I thank them for additional facts and other prompts, challenges and provocations. Susa Ellis retrieved her father's privately published poems at the optimum moment. Bill Hadman alerted me to the King's Cross war memorial and the Hadman who sailed on the Titanic. Anna's cousins, Gini Dearden and Juliet (Judy) Brown, provided much useful information. The Rose family connections – Norman and Carol Turner of Doddington, Michael and Pat Turner of Whittlesey – gave time and hospitality to importunate strangers. They treated Anna, at once, as a long-lost relative.
Out on the road, Renchi Bicknell's presence was, as ever, relished: always nudging the Hunter S. Thompson scenario in the direction of John Bunyan (all tracks lead to Bedford). Chris Petit's pertinent eye was valued as much as his measured asides: a necessary counterbalance to overheated rhetoric. In their contrary fashion, these men are true poets of the English landscape: ghost roads, river roads and motorway service stations. Both the paintings and the narrative of Emma Matthews haunted our walk.
The project would have stumbled without injections of blood/ treacle/gunpowder from Brian Catling in Oxford and Alan Moore in Northampton. Moore has pulled off that nice conceit of converting the stubbornly local into the universal: hill town as rock in celestial ocean. Without Catling's narrowboat, memory traces would have vanished for ever into the black depths of Whittlesey Mere.
For guidance and for valuable documentary evidence about Glinton and Werrington, I would like to thank Judith Bunten, Val Hetzel, Veronica Smith, Val Watkinson. Paul Green and Peter Astley gave me the benefit of their knowledge: sidebars on Peterborough, Ramsey, Engine Farm.
B. C. Barker-Benfield of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the staffs of the Northampton Central Library, the Northamptonshire Record Office at Wootton Hall Park, the County Record Office in Huntingdon, the Peterborough Library, were courteous and helpful towards a resolutely unfocused and non-academic project.
Transcripts of Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’ and other relevant materials were made from notebooks, ledgers and microfilm, in Northampton Library. But any invasion of the life and work of the Helpston poet's autobiographical writings must acknowledge the pioneering scholarship of Eric Robinson, the diligent decrypting of close-woven texts. Jonathan Bate's Clare biography is a definitive achievement against which earlier accounts must be checked. John Barrell's meditations on landscape, enclosures and open-field poetics were an inspiration.
For books, deeds, advice I would also like to thank: Vanessa Bicknell, Keggie Carew, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Melinda Gebbie, Mike Goldmark, Rigby Graham, Kevin Jackson, Juliette Mitchell, Peter Moyse (of the John Clare Society), John Richard Parker, Simon Prosser, Tom Raworth, Revd George Rogers, Paul Smith, Paddy Summerfield.
A version of the chapter entitled ‘Ouse’ was published, in a very different form, as a ‘Diary’ piece in the London Review of Books.
The Clare portrait, used as a frontispiece is reproduced by permission of Northampton Libraries & Information Service. The Shelley Memorial photograph is by Paddy Summerfield and is reproduced with his permission. The Straw Bear portrait is taken from the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute. Other photographs are by Iain Sinclair, or borrowed from Hadman and Rose family archives.