Clare arrived at Stilton, as we did, on the evening of his third day of walking; lamed, filthy, hallucinating. He starved, tearing handfuls of grass from the side of the road. We breakfasted, full English. He chewed tobacco. I worked moisture into a dry mouth, cleaned out pub lunches, reluctantly ceded, with wads of flavourless gum. He slept in a ‘dyke bottom’, outside town, where we booked ourselves into a decent pub. His memories, forged in a phantom letter (or confession) to his vanished muse, are one of the wonders of English prose. My notes, mere scribbles, are strategic prompts for some unresolved future project; more labour and sweat than anything our circumnavigation of the blight that is Peterborough could offer.
Major schlep from Alconbury up Ermine Street… old North Road to Stilton: abandoned cafés, petrol stations denuded of pumps… an industrial ice-cream bought from one of the last survivors, a filling station/ motel… you can see the destination signs bridging the parallel stream of the A1 like a set of gallows… Feet bad… hard to contemplate the final day, the day ahead. Bridge over A1 & into long thin stretch of the village of Stilton. Renchi dives into a bush to change his clothes, before the Bell Hotel. Chris Petit has driven up from London & is in the bath. We eat in the courtyard, with attendant Morris dancers. I don't have the haunted room, a small single looking out on the street. Dreamless sleep with no Anna to remember my dreams for me.
The journey from Epping, re-experienced in his detested Northborough cottage, undid Clare. He lived it through his notebook. He saw himself, once again, on the treadmill of the road: incidents from a fading fiction, the escape from Essex. An uncorroborated account of the last walk he would ever take, through summer countryside, one village to the next. Would he, in those asylum years in Northampton, travel more than five miles from his bedroom? A feared future in dispute with an ebbing past, events that might or might not have happened, makes sensory experience more acute, more painful. Journey as metaphor. Betrayed by the inadequacy of language. Pilgrim's Progress revamped, by the dispirited Clare, as a single, breathless sentence. A scream. The nib of his pen navigating a cluttered journal, before the doctors come for him, Fenwick Skrimshire and William Page. The poet's home-brewed ink, brown as a blood stain, eats through the surface of the precious paper. Word-marks too strong for the page to contain them.
but I dont reccolect the name of any place untill I came to stilton where I was compleatly foot foundered & broken down when I had got about half way through the town a gravel causeway invited me to rest myself so I lay down & nearly went sleep a young woman (so I guessed by the voice) came out of a house & said “poor creature” & another more elderly said “O he shams” but when I got up the latter said “o no he don't” as I hobbled along very lame
By the end of that third day, Clare was too tired to distinguish one hamlet from another, to copy names into his notebook. ‘I have but slight recollection of the journey between here and Stilton for I was knocked up and noticed little or nothing.’ The walker, early optimism dispersed, withdraws into himself. He sits under a hedge. He sleeps in a sodden ditch. He hears voices. He talks to strangers as if they were living and he, already, one of the dead.
Stilton, deprived of females to remark on the authenticity of our collapse, feels much as it did: limestone-golden in the twilight. The Bell is a coaching inn at which coaches no longer stop; it caters to a new clientele of wedding parties, shiny reps. Suits who have business with airfields. Awkward lovers in a black-beamed dining room. Travellers breaking their journey north.
Our overnight hotel is very much in the book, but the surrounding countryside is ex-directory, its history occulted; no suitable myths have, as yet, been discovered by the local heritage industry. Staying here, on a subsequent occasion, I set out for an evening walk: the village soon gives up the ghost. A sanctioned path rubs against the motorway, before twisting back among fields and ponds, rising gently towards the erased settlements of Caldecote and Washingley. Being allowed, even encouraged, to move in a particular direction kills the desire. Wildlife on its best behaviour. Muted squawks, strategic feather-ruffling. Cuteness as a plea against extinction (by gun, poison or lack of a well-connected pressure group).
There were no supplementary expeditions this time. Chris Petit was fresh. He'd strolled with us, on the first morning, from Epping Forest to the River Lea, then hopped a train at Broxbourne, pleading an afternoon appointment on the other side of town. Now he was back, with his video camera, personal bottle of Evian, selection of dark glasses: no unsightly rucksack. The camera slipped neatly into the pocket of his not-quite-distressed-but-ever-so-slightly-discommoded denim jacket. Discommoded to be in company with rough walkers, volunteer vagrants. With Renchi in his blue bandanna (adapted T-shirt). His shorts, ankle socks, sturdy calves. A Sherpa-sized pack leaking maps and grubby rags from every orifice. The badge of the sahib, Petit understood, was to carry nothing more than a splash of cologne.
Begin walking and reality kicks in. Inch by inch, through the heat of the day, this painful realisation: you are where you are. And you will stay there until you summon the energy to put one foot in front of the other. Petit has calculated the look perfectly: writer/director on sabbatical, a location scouting trip that might, though he won't admit as much, turn out to be an entry in his video diary. Ribbed, mid-calf socks of some non-synthetic material, enough tone in them to pick up naturally bleached desert-issue shorts. Tank commander's round, anti-glare lenses clipped over austere spectacles: he is prepared to take on Rommel. (James Mason as directed by Henry Hathaway.) Brown shoes, laced and gleaming, bulled overnight by an invisible batman.
Petit's status is ambiguous, he wasn't a party to the full Clare walk, but is willing to take a day out of town, as uncredited participant. The material might fit somewhere, a future documentary, part of an expanding catalogue of English landscape footage.
TO LONDON 74, it says, on the arch above the glass door of the Bell Hotel (with its three stars). Much further, the way we did it. With another fifteen miles to the finish. Maps examined, blisters pampered, we're ready to hazard a path across green-gold fields, across the A1 and the River Nene. The major decision is to avoid Peterborough (breaking faith with Clare, the town bridge, his meeting with Helpston neighbours, coins thrown from the cart). Peterborough has spun from its entrails a network of ring roads, roundabouts, underpasses and retail parks designed to confuse motorists (and pedestrians, vagrant folk); keep them, at all costs, away from the prolapsed centre. Cathedral, river meadows, arcaded mall complex. Newspaper headlines, signboarded in outlying villages, warn of a plague of rough sleepers, dispersed from Cambridge, and gifted with rail tickets to somewhere else, to Peterborough.
When we interrogated relevant OS maps, on the kitchen table in Hackney, the night before we set out, Anna argued that Clare's Helpston was closer to Stamford than to Peterborough. She had connections, a generation back, with that part of the world. With Glinton and the Fens. What did I know? One funeral service attended in St Benedict's Church? A couple of family visits? A swim in a gravel pit? No contest. Pan lids banged. Knives sharpened with intent.
She was right and she was wrong. Emotionally, Stamford is much closer. The Lincolnshire market town, a cluster of wool churches with fierce spires, was the destination of choice: grammar school, pubs, shops, narrow alleys, auction house. Peterborough, which threatened to swallow Glinton, as it had already devoured the villages of Easton and Werrington, was an invader, privileged by successive governments. A railway town. The town where Clare's madness was publicly demonstrated during a performance of The Merchant of Venice. ‘We never went there.’
The discussion was heated. Enough to confirm my instinct to avoid the place entirely, to skirt its western flank, picking up on a long straight road from Castor to Helpston; a Roman road that marked one of the boundaries of Clare's childhood world. Peterborough suffered from another disability: its outline on the town guide was the twin of Hackney (pretty much England with Scotland bitten off). Hackney cut loose, transported into a planners' wilderness, with no proximate boroughs, no Islington or Bethnal Green, to temper its supernatural malignancy.
After a traditional hearty breakfast, on the morning of 20 July 2000, we crossed the wide Stilton street and headed off in search of a footpath to Folksworth. The idea was to work our way through the fields in the direction of Haddon, then towards the A1 as it pulled to the west. Haddon echoed my wife's maiden name, Hadman. Haddenham, Hadham, Hadun: dictionaries of place names concede that the root is probably manorial. Hadmans, if you find them, come from this part of the world. A relative, conducting a computer search, showed Anna a faded print-out: ‘The German surname Hadman would appear to be a variant of the more numerous Handman and it is occupational in origin.’ Hadmans belong near the base of the medieval social pyramid: ‘Above the serfs were the peasants who worked the land in royal manors.’ Anna's family were on the land, of the land, and in the land. Buried, forgotten.
My wife grew up in Lancashire, a suburb of Blackpool, but her father had a deep attachment to the place where he had lived until he went up to St John's College, Oxford. He bought a manor house in Rutland for his retirement. He wrote verse, in traditional forms, which he published – in an edition of one; a single, handsomely bound copy, now lost. Anna remembers a poem set in Market Deeping, bells heard across the Fens. From his home village? A redbrick house, close to the village green. Geoffrey Hadman was born in Glinton, the younger son of a farmer. He didn't tell her much about his parents, Anna said. And nothing about his other relatives. But he laid claim to kinship with a neighbouring celebrity, the unfashionable Helpston poet, John Clare. No details of this connection were revealed.
I liked the idea and it stayed with me. Clare's walk, out of Matthew Allen's Epping Forest refuge, High Beach, was one of my obsessions. I'd seen drawings of Clare on the road by the Leicester artist Rigby Graham in the collection of a dealer in Peterborough. Another dealer, Mike Goldmark, had shown me the tape of a television film made by Charles Mapleston, in which Graham (driven, not walking) recreates Clare's drudge up the Great North Road. Graham rather specialises in drudge, Neo-Romanticism with tractors and pylons. And the occasional disgruntled owl. Nothing suits him better than dabbing at a dissolving watercolour in a torrential rainstorm, while he confronts a Little Chef on the busiest section of the A1.
There was one other troubling detail: John Clare, through his rogue of a grandfather, John Donald Parker, the itinerant schoolteacher/fiddler who abandoned his pregnant sweetheart, shared my provisional Scottishness. Highland blood, lost to both of us, affected him most as he slid into a confused plurality of identities in the dreary Northampton years. John Clare was the Anglicised version of the name on my birth certificate. My wife, like Clare's first love, Mary Joyce, attended a village school in Glinton. Anna was descended from tenant farmers who, like the Joyces, acquired land in the aftermath of the enclosures.
I was nervous enough of genealogy to re-read Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This business of manor houses on hills, perhaps connected to my wife's family, struck the wrong note. Beware, I reminded myself, of Hardy's Angel Clare; that character's priggish self-absorption, the furtive relish of his spurned wife's ancient blood.
Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man's.
Was Hardy reading the Northamptonshire poet? Did he adopt the Clare surname by accident, a half-memory of the peasant versifier grafted on to the evangelical parson's son?
Tess speaks:
‘Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.’
Not to remember, that's the key. (Especially when your version of the past never happened.) Let family disappear, as our path through this wide field, parting waves of cereal crops, vanishes without warning. It was too good to be true, a track scythed for the benefit of hikers: hardtrodden, red-brown earth. There are attractions that we don't have time to investigate, earthworks, ponds, the remains of a motte and bailey castle – and then, a couple of miles to the south, Little Gidding. We'd planned, coming to Stilton from St Neots, before we found ourselves on that ghost road, Ermine Street, to detour in the direction of Little Gidding. But it didn't happen.
T. S. Eliot arrived there, the chapel, the site of Nicholas Ferrar's seventeenth-century Anglican community, in May 1937. The community gives its name to the last of his Four Quartets. Eliot sees this visit, unwalked, as a pilgrimage, resolution forced on an unshaped life. Either there is ‘no purpose’ or that purpose is shaped by a journey. ‘Beyond the end you figured… altered in fulfilment.’
In August 1937, Eliot travelled to Somerset, to East Coker: another church, more graves. The desire, as the gravity of life pulls harder towards the earth, to locate and pay homage to his ancestors. To shrug off solitude. To belong. ‘The future is before us.’ He speaks in quotation marks. Concealed memory was always his method, his mask. Now, fearing war and the end of a cycle of civilisation, the mask bit into bone. His ashes would be buried in the parish church of St Michael, East Coker, where the first recorded ‘Elliot’, Katherine, was baptised in July 1563.
We are, this bright morning, pleased with ourselves, having come so far, and pleased with this land – in which nobody moves or stirs, no woodsmoke, no barking dogs. Our beacon is a mast on the horizon, the hill crest, a booster or photovoltaic scanner. Middle England, as we have discovered in the last few days, is stitched together from active or abandoned airfields, unpeopled farms, drowned villages and uncertain tracks that are visible only if you insist on them. You see the empty quarter, hedges cropped, absence of rubbish, middens, burnt-out shells of cars, and you sense: money. The lush chlorophyll of liquidity.
After the Enclosure Acts, Clare felt uncomfortable in newly ordered fields; he was watched, spied on, he had much better find himself a road.
I dread walking where there was no path
And prest with cautious tread the meadow swath
And always turned to look with wary eye
And always feared the farmer coming by
We don't crack along. Because Petit and his camera have a different eye on landscape. Renchi, by this time, had abandoned the detailed logging of the M25 project, snapshots, sketches. He had equipped himself with a cheap plastic prism and a Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass; he was shooting from the hip. The format of his prints was larger, rectangles busy with plant life, surreal close-ups or tilted expressionist skies. There were many versions of his red-faced companion with his Bunyan burden. Wattled neck-folds. Tight eyes. The eternal track. This happened. This is what I saw. I don't need to tell you everything. Spidery curtains, in a hotel bedroom, bunched in lazy folds. Sun splintering the breakfast window. Two walkers, monkishly tonsured, captured mid-stride, as they escape from Stilton, lurching towards furled cypress trees. Vision is also a form of narrative.
John Barrell, in the sharpest book on the subject, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1730–1840): An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare, explains how the system works, this reading of view. There is, as eighteenth-century poets who learnt from the painter Claude understood, a ‘circling landscape’ – which, in obedience to accepted rules, can be projected on to canvas or given structure in verse. First, you require a proper elevation, a hill overlooking the campagna (the model is Roman). Then a soft blue horizon: how gratefully the eye leaps towards it, this hint of the celestial, before tracking back across an arrangement of parallel bands, towers, ruins, trees, peasants at work, groups standing around the entrance to a cave. There is a nice tension, Barrell suggests, between the ‘prospect’ and the properly schooled viewer. Otherwise, landscape is chaos: the busy particulars that overwhelmed John Clare. Everything happening at once and all of it with an equal claim on the observer's attention.
The horizon, according to Barrell, is ‘at once the climax and the starting-point of the composition’. Dutifully, beyond Stilton, we search for it, this ambiguity; we tramp through fields marked off with bushes, thorn clumps, stands of trees. We're not excursionists, pastoral aesthetes; we're stalkers of the middle ground, reading contours, observed and observing. We must reach that radio mast, those pylons, to understand where we are; to appreciate everything we fail to notice when we pass through here, foot down, in our cars.
It's Barrell's fugue of ‘roaming reassessment’ that Petit is struggling to accomplish: where to point the camera, how to subvert the mechanics of exposure and focus. When to switch off. Naturally, this takes time. But Renchi doesn't do pauses. There is a rhythm to these walks that has to be maintained. My photographs show Chris, lagging way behind, gazing without conviction at a splash of Monet flora, poppies among the white, struggling to force nature to conform to the miniaturist proportions of his camera's touchscreen. Duration is truth. The prospect, the ‘circling landscape’, is permanently out of the reach of duty-free technology. A panning shot would be an intolerable vulgarity. Petit pretends that he isn't here; he is an anonymous spy, hell-bent on erasing authorial signature. Tomorrow he'll be back in town, at his desk. That's what it says on the contract. Another thriller overdue, global conspiracies to unravel. ‘The problem with my books,’ he confesses, ‘is that all the characters are dead.’
Two dogs appear. One is black and glossy, a labrador/retriever compromise with a savagely docked tail (which it attempts to wag). The other is, loosely, of the collie, German shepherd, wolf breed: amiable, to excess. They were hanging around, waiting for us, by a sign which said: ‘Trespassers & Exercising of Dogs STRICTLY PROHIBITED’. These animals couldn't function without human company, a role to perform. Failing that, we will serve. At worst, they seemed to know which direction to take. I had the feeling they'd done this before. Walked out in company, returned alone.
Lurid sunshine on a red-grey road. No cars, no delivery vans, no people. Welcome to Middle England. Xanaxshire, in the wake of the Lloyds fiasco, the debt mountain, the Blairite establishment of urban fixers and spinners (no fox-hunting, acres of GM crops), is the home of dolour. State-sponsored clinical depression. Valium villages under the ever-present threat of imported sex criminals and Balkan bandits; human landfill dumped in an off-highway nowhere, an uneconomic airship hangar, a reclaimed bunker. Enclosure, suddenly, is a personal matter: you have been shrink-wrapped in your own skin and you can't get out. That's when the blameless horizon, that wood, those hills, begins to hurt. Immaculate properties from catalogue. New furniture under plastic sheeting. Television sets murmuring softly in empty rooms.
Faux-rustics in monster vehicles are servicing the USAAF base at Alconbury, or starting early for their circumnavigation of Peterborough (it would be quicker and less bothersome to commute to London). Those who are left are invisible, facing up to the consequences of the good life, the glutinous subsoil of somebody-else's labour; rituals of service and of release, drink, madness, suicide. Don't watch property programmes and buy into the conversion lottery for a barn you don't need and can't afford. Because at the end of it, you are misplaced. The heat of you, the immortal soul, is left behind. It looks comfortable, drifting through on a July morning, but living, off-road, in this summer country, is as hard as it gets.
The dogs, more by accident than intent, have put us on the right track, a drovers' path between rough hedges. Old-man's beard (also known as traveller's joy) hangs in a shaggy fringe, masking the pollen varnish of the fields. Bright colour in the abundant verges. Juicy air with a hit of toxic crop sprays. Our canine chums are panting, heavy-tongued, ahead of us, waiting by a gate; moving when we move. The novelty of their guidance has become a nuisance, a responsibility. They don't know anything more about the route than we do. They're faking it, in the hope that we won't turn them off, send them back to the misery of hanging about a farm gate, barking at delivery vans and the shadows of low-flying crows.
In truth, we're too lazy to dig the OS maps out of the rucksack. Petit, with his military background, barrack life, combined cadet force, does the business. We're going wrong, he says, slanting through unnecessary landscape, rippled hills. Country stuff. We must realign ourselves by the one constant, the song of the motorway, the whippy, many-laned A1 (very different from the sullen whine of the M25). Clare navigated, until he strayed out of his knowledge, by bird song. Petit does roads, Eddie Stobart lorries, dirty-white Transits, repmobiles, refrigerated carcasses swinging like a syncopated chorus line.
The fording of the A1 is a big moment. Out of the sleeping country around Stilton and into the Nene Valley, the beginnings of the true John Clare mapping. His circle of memory. Eight-mile walks (from his Helpston cottage) that defined his heart-place and sense of identity. The birds, animals, stones, clods, knew him. They confirmed, on a daily basis, the quick of his existence.
Our dogs crossed the A605, beyond Haddon, but the A1 was a barrier they were forced to acknowledge. They stood together on the verge, surfing diesel fumes, as we dodged traffic, made our suicide runs. Getting over the road was easier than finding a way across the Nene; motorways are democratic, they'll splatter any life form, deranged pedestrian, badger or pecking crow. Water Newton, the village that guards the river crossing, is fastidious and unwelcoming. Museum-quality slate and stone, East German security. We skulk past ‘Private Ground’, skirt properties that back on to this desirable stretch of water.
On a bridge over the Back Dike of the Nene, the morning closes. Meadows threaded by a permitted footpath, the Nene Way. We locate the village of Castor, the unconvinced expectation of a pub lunch. A break before the walk up the road to Helpston and Clare's heritage-plaque, whitewash-and-thatch cottage.
The river pulls us to the east, but it remains our duty, fixed on Clare, to head north. We must respect that diagonal, the lie of the Jurassic, as exposed by another serial pedestrian, William Smith. Renchi, pockets heavy with chalk, limestone chippings, pebbles, brick, is big on geology. The colours of Smith's pioneering 1815 map are fixed in his head. Everything leads out of his West Country base, beyond Bath, to the Wash. Layer upon layer, fold upon fold. (Like my unorthodox vision of London as a conglomerate of pains and memories.) We chase the grain of limestone, slabs quarried and ferried down the Nene to Peterborough, a cathedral teased out of the ground.
We are on the outer rim of an eccentric saucer, the petri dish on which Clare fed, and out of which he was formed. Language predated poet, I have no doubt of that. It comes rough and fast, articulation is painful. Punctuation is superfluous when you transcribe the dictation of a multitude of dumb things. You suffer an atemporal otherness. The half-soul of a twin who got it wrong and survived, the weaker vessel. Bessy Clare was gone. Her womb-partner, poor John, lived. And lived with loss. Shame. Doubled consciousness, doubled guilt.
In the buffer zone, between A1 and A47, float the elements of our story. It's like marching through a theatrical costumier, trying on wigs, hats, boots. So many well-intentioned explainers busk different versions of the tale. ‘Clare country’ is marked by two spheres of influence, two great landlords (sources of patronage): Lord Milton (Whig) in Milton Park, now a golf course, and the Earl of Exeter (Tory) at Burghley, outside Stamford. Anything left over will be swallowed up by land-hungry bishops or Cambridge colleges.
It was Clare's associate, E. T. Artis, steward to Lord Milton, who unearthed the Roman settlement of Durobrivae (featured on our Landranger OS map as: ‘Roman Town’). Artis came over from Milton Park, crossing the Nene, to pursue his hobby: scratching, digging out shards and artefacts. He conjured a Roman city from these bland meadows, a bow in the river. A collection of engraved plates, offered by subscription between 1823 and 1828, was published as The Durobrivae of Antoninus. Artis was made a Fellow of both the Geological Society and the Society of Antiquaries. And ‘Friend Clare’ was kept informed of his progress.
Jonathan Bate (in his Clare biography) explains how Artis took a life mask of the poet. Thereby inducting him into the panoply of Roman gods and champions. He drained colour, blood, to produce a simulacrum of rigidity and death. A mask without expression. Like the stiffened rictus on the face of a suicided farm-labourer fished from the Nene. The antiquarian steward, with his interest in genealogies, categories and subcategories, was attempting to make art from a living spirit. The process was uncomfortable. ‘Clare,’ Bate writes, ‘did not enjoy the experience of having his head covered in plaster, and he opened his eyes before the oil was removed, causing them to smart and go bloodshot… Artis's handiwork fell to pieces after eighteen months.’
It is the river that fixes Petit. Minutes stretch into hours. He found his subject, dark water. He allows the camera to run with Warholite insouciance, until the battery gives out. Underwater clouds. Shrouded sun. Chris has more enthusiasm for rivers seen from a solid structure, such as this bridge, than for shorelines viewed from boats: those are a recurring nightmare, as I discovered on the Thames, when he fell asleep and woke with a start to the horror of Coryton oil refinery smokestacks. The same hellish fires that had been burning when he crashed out; our small craft making no headway against a running tide. This was a man haunted by drownings.
I kept myself busy while I waited. A repainted milestone: TO LONDON 81 STAMFORD 8. A restored millhouse. THIS EQUIPMENT OPERATES AUTOMATICALLY AND WITHOUT WARNING. Water meadow, cows. Renchi lies flat on the river bank, ironed into the turf by his enormous pack. He hangs over the bank to photograph quietly flowing water, lilies as yolky and luscious as orchids. Focus is wilfully blown for a wider prospect, the broad river with its reflected clouds, Ophelia thickets of wavering reeds.
When we return, stomachs rumbling, Petit is still hooked over the rail, watching his camera do its work. Mesmerising abstraction. The Nene, with its arbitrary shifts and patterns, is cinema: as Petit recognises it. An occasion for tense watchfulness. He jabs a thick finger at the touchscreen, smearing any version that is too obvious.
The sun vanishes. We cross the bridge and march into Castor. Another hour or two should bring us to Helpston. To the meeting with Clare that we have been soliciting for three days, but which we have done everything in our power to postpone.