Eighty Miles Out

It is a sleeping country, unpeopled and overlit. The sky cloudless. Horizon soft as milk in a contact lens. We wade, knuckling irritated eyes, through golden cereal fields, missing the familiar sound of the road. This is the conclusion, so we hope, of a walk from Epping Forest to Glinton (once of Northamptonshire, then Huntingdon, now Peterborough). Fifteen or so miles, a literal last leg, after three days shadowing the A1, the Great North Road, dawn to dusk and beyond: in the traces of the mad poet John Clare. Mad to be out of it, mad to chivvy the story along to a predestined conclusion, the reunion with his phantom wife, burnt Mary. Mad to shrug off the poultice of identity, to be everyone. Borderless as an inland sea.

You might think a circuit of London, twelve walks, inside and outside the orbital motorway, the M25, would have cured me of this neurosis: the compulsion to be on the hoof, burdened with packs, sketchbooks, cameras. Future memories. There was unfinished business. The gravity of London had to be escaped by a final, unwritten chapter, a shaky attempt to place my boots in John Clare's hobbled footsteps (‘foot foundered and broken down’ by the time he reached Stilton). The pain of Clare's journey ameliorated by the ecstasy of this achieved thing, a letter, never sent, to a dead woman. Mary Joyce of Glinton. Reluctant muse. Mother of invisible children.

I have written an account of my journey or rather escape from Essex for your amusement & hope it may divert your leisure hours – I would have told you before now that I got here to Northborough last friday night but not being able to see you or to hear where you was I soon began to feel homeless at home & shall bye & bye feel nearly hopeless but not so lonely as I did in Essex – for here I can see Glinton church & feeling that Mary is safe if not happy & I am gratified though my home is no home to me my hopes are not entirely hopeless while even the memory of Mary lives so near me God bless you My dear Mary Give my love to your dear beautifull family & to your Mother

Renchi Bicknell, my companion on the orbital walks, a painter coming back to his practice after years running a bookshop in a small Hampshire town, had moved further west, to try a bed-and-breakfast place (fine view over the Somerset levels) in Glastonbury. His morning circuits, every day the same route, skirted the Tor, until this landscape, from which so many anxious seekers had squeezed the last drop of meaning, lost its novelty and became a part of him. He walked with his wife, plotting other excursions, the Clare hike, a heightened sense of vision. And then, motorway dust shaken off, an expedition with his son to Nepal.

Who you walk with alters what you see: the view, the prospect. With Renchi, circumnavigating London, rivers, concrete bridges over streams of blind traffic, we were conscious, above everything else, of doing a job: logging evidence, disturbing secure buildings, churches, bunkers, labouring at a narrative that was being shaped by our progress (the lack of it). Renchi's motorway paintings were obliged to perform as diaries, topographical records of simultaneity, like those pre-Giotto lives of Italian saints, where everything happens at once: temptation, triumph, torture, death. Resurrection. The soul, a golden kite, lifted into heaven by a flock of doves.

London's fringes, motorway ‘edge lands’, were infected by nightmares in asylums and hospitals, by the pressure of our nervous attention, worrying at the fabric, promoting a thesis: the M25 is more than a road, a misconceived one hundred and twenty miles of tarmac, uncivil engineering. It means. Our walk made something happen, happen to us. Nothing changed out there, in the drift of the motorists and their suspended lives; in my conceit, we were transformed. On a molecular level. Very gradually, and with considerable reluctance (on their part), forgotten ancestors acknowledged our feeble interventions. We re-lived their histories and remade our own. The noise of the motorway changed from nuisance to a chorus of oracular whispers, prompts, mangled information. Which we had volunteered to transcribe and interpret.

Walking with my wife, with Anna, the accident of our forty-year association having passed in an imploding instant of work, children, meals, holidays, bills, urgent inessentials and accidental epiphanies, was different. Very different. We started on the South Coast, the wind at our backs, a stroll to the pier; then the fishing huts, up the steps to the country park. A steady pace, no problems on the flat. But no detours, no church towers, those were Anna's conditions: no museums, book pits, interrogations of eccentrics met along the way.

We ambled, by gentle stages, from Hackney to Hastings, through a benign September; scarlet windfall orchards, the country estates of Russian oligarchs, golf courses where footpath signs had been destroyed and forest exits blocked by burnt-out cars. My perceptions were changed by the person who walked by my side. Some of the ground had been crossed, in the other direction, on the M25 expedition; but even the Darent Valley, Dartford to Shoreham, seemed new, quieter, less eager to pitch a yarn. A drowsy benevolence of climate and landscape. Dried hops were tucked under the straps of my rucksack to promote sleep. I didn't have to fix the details in my mind. I could draw them back, whatever I needed, from Anna. Our walk wasn't strategic. It marked a sea change, a shift in our lives. The slightly dazed second courtship of that time, after the children have left home, when we sleepwalk between what is lost and what we are learning to recover.

On a long straight road, coming out of Kent, there is a disconcerting incident. A stranger, dressed in the clothes Anna is wearing, a person of the same height, same length of stride, passes her, walking north. I'm slightly ahead, marching uphill towards a road sign, wanting to check if we're in the right place. I lift the camera, catch the moment. Anna split, travelling both ways at once; south towards the coast and back, alone, to London.

I remembered John Clare and his wife, the church-married one, mother of his children, Martha ‘Patty’ Turner, walking out near her father's cottage at Casterton: ‘We both looked on the self-same thing/ Till both became as one.’

I imagined that stretching the length of the orbital circuit of the M25 into the English countryside, into somewhere as obscure (to me) as the territory between Peterborough, Market Deeping, Stamford and the A1, would complete that episode, bury it. But that's never how it works. My attempted divorce only confirmed the road as another ring, another shackle. London, better known, less understood, was more London than it had ever been; a monster greedy for expansion, eager to swallow underexploited ground and to bury it in satellite development.

Writers begin with discovery, discovering their subject matter, marking out their turf. And finish with dissolution. Learning how to suppress conditioned reflexes. Learning to forget. Arranging for their own disappearance. John Clare, hyped ‘peasant poet’, arriving by coach, a rattling, thirteen-hour journey from the George Hotel at Stamford to the Blue Boar in Holborn, saw the metropolis with clear, unskinned eyes: a city of ghosts, a dull river less impressive than Whittlesea Mere. His world had been stood on its head. By night, prostitutes promenaded the town, dressed like ladies. Resurrectionists lurked in the shadows. There were labyrinths beneath every loose paving stone.

If you are fortunate enough to start from London, the goal of every aspiring economic or cultural migrant, then any outward expedition becomes a flight. Heading up the Great North Road, we were not advancing into a fresh narrative, a novel set of coordinates, we were running away – like all those others who lost their nerve. The infant Pepys taken from the purlieus of St Bride's Church, off Fleet Street, to salubrious Dalston, haunt of milkmaids and agriculturalists. Daniel Defoe, the intelligencer, on the road: government agent, documentarist, contriver of myths and fictions. You can't just walk off, one fine summer morning, hands in pockets, and expect to get away, clear, scot free. You will be pursued: like debtors, subversives, those who adhere to the wrong religion.

Quit London and you will be trampled in the stampede. Plague-dodgers. Hunted criminals (like the Essex man, Richard Turpin). Property-hungry urbanites prospecting for unconverted cottages. The exhausted, the timid. The burgled, raped, assaulted. Overtaxed. Under-rewarded. Choked on thin air. Allergic to everything. Yearlong hay fever. Summer colds that mutate into winter shivers. The sweaty heat of packed public transport, somebody hacking, coughing, spraying a fine mist down the back of your neck. The city is sick. The city is people. The city is watching you. It doesn't care. You don't register (until you transgress).

Eyes.

Lit from both sides. Memory and darkness.

A visiting poet, a hayseed, following the London mob, witnesses the funeral procession of Lord Byron; heading north, like the dead Princess Diana, away from town. A container of gritty ash in a carriage with an heraldic shield: the aristocrat's heart and brain removed for autopsy.

When, the walk from Epping Forest completed, John Clare lost himself in the long exile of Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, his eyes were smooth as stones. ‘I have lost the irises,’ he said.