Glinton spire serves a double function. It reminds us of Clare and it reminds us that, as a fixed point on a flat plain, it helped him to organise the circuit of memory; a needle in the compass rose of childhood's mapping. The poem he wrote, with that title, ‘Glinton Spire’, came when he felt the need to reconfirm the markers in a threatened landscape. It was written at Northborough, in the suspended months between the escape from Epping Forest and the admission to Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The period when he was ‘tried’ and found wanting by his wife.
I love the slender spire to see,
For there the maid of beauty dwells,
I think she hears the sound with me
And love to listen to Glinton Bells.
I came to St Benedict's Church once: for a funeral service, Mary Sugden, my wife's much-loved aunt, her father's sister. But I remember, before that, meals at Balcony House, prodigiously English, meat that tasted, that offered up the beast's biography as you chewed, platters of vegetables from the kitchen garden, summer puddings: which way to shove the port? How to trowel crusty, green-veined Stilton without destroying the integrity of the sweating brick? Elderflower wine with a lift in it, afterburn of brandy, so that, emerging into the damp afternoon air, the village is on the tilt, nothing anchored.
It's been a long time. My notion of how the road works when you drive here, coming from London, has gone entirely. (Walks are ways of remembering, drives wipe the slate.) Come off the A1 at Stamford – and after that? Stone walls of the Burghley House estate, anonymous hamlets, a railway crossing which is always against you; so crank down the window, listen for the train. Taste a different air. A flatironed land: stippled yellow fields burning out of a grey-blue haze. Tree-blots on a soft horizon and, behind those, Glinton spire.
I remember this point in our drive to Glinton, suit and black tie, scrubbed children, as we wait, on our Clare walk, at the same barrier. Red eyes of warning lights blink on the railway-crossing gate. There's a signal box with the Helpston name but no station, nowhere to offload a coffin. A wide road runs through wheatfields (huts, low barns, hangars); our shadows lead us eastwards. Now, for the first time, traffic sweeps past; frantic for mid-afternoon access to the Peterborough vortex. Clare's field path, his mazy journey to school in Glinton Church vestry, is discontinued.
And when I gained the road where all are free
I fancied every stranger frowned at me
All day, since we walked out of Stilton, we've been invisible (except to dogs); a freak of nature that allows us to move with liberty, naming names, looking without being looked at (the illusion). We experience a certain lightheadedness, the hollow aftermath of the lunch we haven't had, the anticipation of this evening's celebratory food and wine. The road from Helpston to Glinton purifies an overcomplex narrative, carrying us away from the intimate particulars of John Clare's writing. Helpston is family and blood. Glinton is Mary. A thing remembered and a thing that never happened. Wisps of cloud. The spire. A village whose potentialities are unsullied, until we arrive to find them mute, morose. Or not in the mood, that day, to give up their mysteries.
Anna's first cousin, Gini Dearden, a child in the early Fifties, remembers jumping over Glinton weathercock as it lay in the churchyard. Brought down for cleaning and restoration, it was found to be short of a few feathers, holed and peppered by some undiscovered assailant. The Peterborough Standard attributed this outrage to aerial combat: shrapnel, tracer or training stunt. The apparent emptiness of the landscape through which we had walked was an illusion, I knew that; behind perimeter fences, bunkers disguised as unlikely mounds, were active and decommissioned air bases. Fighters screeched across the sky, using cereal fields as virtual deserts. War rehearsals. The East of England Tourist Board peddles an ‘official’ map of USAAF airfields: Alconbury, Molesworth, Polebrook, Glatton, Wittering. Around twenty of them in the area we travelled, Bedford to Stamford. A major cluster of scarlet blisters disclosed between the M1 and the A1. With more ceded, barbed wire and CCTV, in the witch-country around Chelmsford, Bury St Edmunds and Norwich. Secrecy begets secrecy begets conspiracy theories. Whispers of rapes and child killings pinned on some local fall guy, lowlife, instead of the guilty American airman. Spiteful village gossip. It's nonsense, it doesn't stand up, but it shows how covert colonialism, misappropriation of land, affects our morality, our sense of what is just and visible.
The weathercock on the spire of St Benedict's is a true rooster, not a dragon or flying lizard. A cockscombed strutter. This is what makes the cloud-skimming attack personal: the crowing cock (‘Commit thy works to God’) is the totem of the Sinclair clan. Very appropriate, my wife thinks. An early-rising, puffed-up bunch, deficient in modesty. Treating the world as its farmyard. The borrowed Sinclair cock was an obvious target for bored pilots, pipe-chewing Battle of Britain aces.
The spire is taller than the tower of the church; you can't photograph it and fit the full span into your composition, unless you stand back, at a respectful distance, to admire its elegance. At first acquaintance – parish church, well-kept green, Sikh gentleman in charge of general store (branded pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, local newspapers, cellophane packets of crusty things that aren't quite cakes or biscuits) – Glinton is unexceptional. Then you notice the push towards clinical tidiness, competitive flora: the rural psychoses that keep the Miss Marple franchise in business. It's not enough to have church bells, comparing bells is a macho stunt, a testosterone trial. A pissing contest. Northborough and Peakirk have two apiece. Helpston has four. So Glinton has six.
Nothing is quite what it seems. The famous spire, thin as a radio mast, relies on entasis. Architectural trickery. A slight convexity has been given to the structure to correct the evidence of your eyes, the optical illusion that would leave the spire looking like a naked kebab skewer.
As we come on it, over the hump of the pedestrian bridge, over mini-roundabouts like tyres from gigantic tractors, earthed and planted, my faulty memories of the old road, Helpston to Glinton, straight as an arrow, have to be reconfigured. What has happened, in essence, is that an orbital motorway, shaped more like a Grand Prix circuit than the M25 oval, has been engineered around Peterborough. With the village of Glinton, not quite, not yet, inducted as the northerly pit stop. New estates, sports centres, captured hamlets: they are kept within the loop. Leaving industrialised farmland as an ill-defined outer limit, a dressing of countrystuff, fields, ponds, sponsored paths into reclaimed Fens (compulsory leisure). The spiritual desolation of a landscape where Clare, claggy-footed, watched for coded patterns of bird flight, migrations and roostings. A short, slight man, on the leash, in thrall to the gravity of the known, questing for cover. Walking out.
Survive the road system that cuts Glinton off from the old westward drift and everything lines up: spire, our path in – and a distant figure coming slowly towards us. The geometry is simple, a triangle: vertical stroke of St Benedict's spire, straight road to church, and imaginary dotted line darting from my eye to the restored weathercock.
That private family legend, I believe it now. Anna's father, Geoffrey Hadman, a young man of the village, used the weathercock as a target. Even with a sporting rifle, it's a magnificent shot. (As children, Anna and her brothers were put to target shooting, across a valley in the Lake District. ‘Between one-fifty and two hundred yards,’ she thinks. ‘We were taught to line up the sights, be very still, squeeze gently. We were lying down.’) Geoffrey rested his gun on the sill of an upstairs window at the Red House, the family farm in Rectory Lane, and made the cock spin. A metal bird shifting in the wind. This is a Lee Harvey Oswald moment in the catalogue of poultry assassination.
There is a wintry monochrome postcard of Rectory Lane, featuring the Red House and St Benedict's spire (as if produced to commemorate the sportsman's triumph). I tried to estimate the distance: several hundred yards down the lane, past another house, over the green, the road, across the churchyard – and then the
tower, spire, weathercock on its spike. Give Mr Hadman the prize. Give him James Stewart's 1873 Winchester from the Anthony Mann western. (The shots that missed, I wondered about those. Spent bullets falling from a great height, where did they land?)
In postcard memory, the single bowed window of the Red House is gleaming, bedroom windows too. A solitary figure stands outside, in pinafore, a maid. Her face is gone, a blotch of grey dots. No name. She stands square to the house, facing the camera, persuaded to come out, in order to give scale to the spire – which rises like a periscope of vanity from the squared church tower. Tenant farmers in Clare's day were the coming class. James Joyce, father of Mary, had Manor Farm, a substantial property on the other, Peakirk side of the green. The buildings that grew up, post-enclosure, around the heart of the old settlements were built, so Clare wrote (in ‘The Parish’), ‘by those whose clownish taste aspires/ To hate their farms and ape the country squires.’
Village pursuits haven't changed. Ronald Blythe, in Talking about John Clare, lists them: ‘Boys stripping off to jump over a cat gallows. The pleasures of schoolboys climbing the leads of the church to cut their names there. The pleasure of pelting at a weather cock.’ John Clare, like Geoffrey Hadman, honoured local custom. The boys of Helpston tried to throw stones over their weathercock. ‘He who pelted o'er/ was reckoned on a mighty man.’
The linked initials – ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’ – that Clare is supposed to have cut into, variously, ‘the school-room wall’, an arch, a pillar, the frame of a door, have faded into oblivion. As moveable as the grave of Mary Joyce, who died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one, and who was buried in St Benedict's churchyard. The grave, pointed out to visitors by well-meaning church folk, is another Mary, daughter of William Joyce, not James. Not Clare's childhood love. Who is close at hand, under a cherry tree. A premature cremation. She died of burns sustained in a domestic accident.
Those Joyces, their daughters: James and Mary, James and Lucia Anna. Fictional projections and real myths. Names haunt me, asserting a presence when memorial slabs are erased and pillars scratched with a lattice of unreadable marks; when vulgar curiosity leaves us fumbling for any trace of the poet's cold touch.
Will we make it? The four-o'clock deadline. I haven't admitted that there is one, but, privately, I'm a time freak. I want to be there, Anna with me, as the hands of the clock take up their position and the clock face freezes in a cinematic insert. So, without making it too obvious, I step it out, stretch my stride. Glinton has some part of Anna that I don't know. She'd like to live in this territory, so she says, drawn back; a modest period house in Stamford would be ideal. The ones she marks up in the property pages look like variants of the original Hadman home, the Red House, nice proportions,
local stone or brick, Virginia creeper optional. This is desire on a molecular level, an instinct she has allowed to lie in abeyance. Her thirty-six-year captivity in low-lying Hackney, with occasional excursions to the seaside (my ideal), has been stoically endured, if not yet accepted: fate. My guilt at putting her through this exile is tempered by seeing, today, what Lesser Peterborough actually is: ribbon estates, self-regarding display, disputes with the vicar on points of doctrine (happy-clappy, lord-of-the-dance against hoary standards bellowed out by a diminishing congregation of Agatha Christie stereotypes).
Where did the Hadman house get its name? From the bricks, obviously, rosy and warm. I think we can discount William Morris and his National Trust stopover in Bexleyheath, too suburban. Too arty-crafty socialist. But I can't help thinking of A. A. Milne's one and only detective novel, published in 1922, The Red House Mystery. Julian Symons placed this bonbon in the tradition of Ronald Knox, an amusing yarn in which ‘the amateur investigator gets everything wrong’. The dead stage their own disappearances. Raymond Chandler had no truck with Milne's gentility, the flaws in his plotting. The detective's sidekick from The Red House Mystery is given clear warning of his place in the scheme of things, the required level of masochism. He knows what he's signing on for: a narrative with good manners – followed by the temporary immortality of instant reprints and cheap paperbacks with gaudy covers.
The problem for our pedestrian trio (one of the problems) is that there are no sidekicks: or, we're all sidekicks but we won't admit it. Petit, drifting off the pace, hoovering up representations of the empty road, a second Nene, is jogging over the pedestrian bridge as I find (and photograph) a pair of oversized, handpainted roosters with fire-engine cockscombs: symbols of the new Glinton. Renchi's photographs are more like film, in terms of their narrative, than Petit's consoling video-meditations on distance: clouds, soft-focus traffic (moving through, moving on). Flip the pages of Renchi's album and the story of the walk flickers into life: my rear-view baldness, peeling ear-rims (disconcertingly like my father, returned and on the lurch). You can see the white shirt, the scarlet rucksack, the camera in my hand; Anna approaching. Broad grin. Grey top. White sunhat. She might be a villager, trowel at the ready, weeding the grave. Four o'clock. At Glinton. Just as I said.
AV TITMAN, FAMILY BUTCHER.
Anna is alongside the butcher's shop, this butcher of families, when we coincide, manoeuvre, embrace. The others, following discreetly behind, embrace her too. Grateful to come out of my fiction, always unpredictable, and back into something real and earthed and ticking in sunlight: the car.
From the boot, I fetch out sandals, a fresh shirt. And then we return to St Benedict's (church locked, stone effigies in the porch, man and woman, fabulously weathered), and to the Hadman family grave. This is prominently positioned, at the south-east corner, close to the gravel path. The lettering is fresh and black (restored in 1995, when Anna's mother died). Clare's inscription might have faded – NOT MAD – while the gravestones of his wife and children, in Northborough, need to be traced by finger like Braille, but this part of the Hadman story is fresher than newsprint.
TO THE MEMORY OF WILLIAM HADMAN CHURCHWARDEN OF GLINTON CHURCH 1921–1943 WHO DIED JULY 28th 1943 AGED 70 YEARS ALSO OF FLORENCE HIS BELOVED WIFE WHO DIED FEB. 4TH 1944 AGED 71 YEARS. “HOME ART GONE AND TA EN THY WAGES”
Anna's grandfather. A farmer. Occupier of the Red House. Founder of the dynasty. That's as far back as we can go. Old William died a month after Anna was born. To be tagged with a quotation from Shakespeare. Chosen, so we assume, by Geoffrey Hadman, a once-a-year C of E man, dubious of the small print: so get what you can out of this life, every last drop, then invoice for everlasting bliss. A proposition vigorously contradicted by this landscape. Wages in hand, dues paid. No white mansions (like the Brighton seafront), no reserved clouds. Which play?
The golden lads and girls who come to dust. Anna gets it: Cymbeline. An unexpected retrieval. On her journeys to school, an hour's ride across town, Anna was instructed by her father to crunch her way through Shakespeare – which, obediently, even though it gave her a pounding headache and left her queasy, she did: a brown book with minuscule print. This ten-year-old girl, pale, rather grave, travelling across Blackpool, from Poulton-le-Fylde to Lytham St Anne's. (When I went to Blackpool, once, with my parents, it was an outing: the Pleasure Beach, sideshows, candy floss, waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen with their cup-winners' medals.)
Fear no more the heat o'th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Legend has it that when Tennyson died, a copy of Cymbeline dropped from his lifeless hand. There was a spine-tingling moment at the memorial service of a later laureate, Ted Hughes, on 13 May 1999, in Westminster Abbey. A pre-recorded message. ‘Ted's rich, quiet voice,’ as Elaine Feinstein reports, spoke the first lines of the ‘Song’ from Cymbeline. A passage which includes the words on William Hadman's grave, sentiments respected by men who work the land.
The plot of Cymbeline is impossible to summarise: multiple identities, runaway daughters, ‘clownish’ sons, Cambrian caves, the dead returning to life. The Oxford Companion to English Literature has a brave stab at it:
Under the name Fidele Imogen becomes a page to Bellarius and the two lost sons of Cymbeline, Guiderius and Aviragus, living in a cave in Wales. Fidele sickens and is found as dead by the brothers, who speak the dirge ‘Fear no more the heat o'th' sun’. Left alone she revives, only to discover at her side the headless corpse of Cloten which she believes, because of his borrowed garments, to be that of her husband Posthumus. A Roman army invades…
It probably plays better than it reads. Brothers lamenting an apparently dead girl, Welsh weather: waiting on an invading army. Some bright spark will set a revival in Afghanistan (clever use of monitor screens).
Florence Hadman (née Rose) was too ill to attend the funeral. She watched the procession from the bowed window of the Red House, but she never recovered her strength and died within seven months of her husband. There were substantial obituaries for William in several of the local papers, with smaller notices for Florence, commending her for rearing turkeys and taking prizes for her butter at the Peterborough Summer Show.
Anna spent an hour in Glinton before we arrived, enough time to weed the family plot, to plant salvias in the gravel (they failed). There was an additional plaque for her father and mother, though their ashes had been scattered in the north, Thornton (she thought) and Ullswater. With a second plaque for her father's sister, Mary, whose urn – when the stone, with some difficulty, had been taken up – was placed at the foot of the grave. This day, 20 July, was her father's birthday.
Next, Anna tried the pub – in case we had sneaked in while she was labouring. Renchi's wife, Vanessa, was also expected: she had a Glinton aunt. All the bloodlines of our story were converging on this village. The Blue Bell, astonishingly, was open. It was almost four o'clock. Anna walked towards the Helpston road, past the Titmans' butcher shop. (The graveyard was packed with legible Titmans.) Figures were advancing, from the Helpston haze, at a gallop; she recognised them. One in particular.
After a subdued session, sitting outside at green tables, slow pints and no Vanessa, we climbed into the car, leaving Renchi in the pub. Chris, returned to Stilton, left immediately for London. Vanessa, stuck on the road, was delayed – but arrived, with Renchi, in time for another courtyard meal (without Morris men) at the Bell.
At breakfast, next morning, I asked Anna about the haunted room. She said it was nothing like the one in Whitby. That attic, though busy, shapes pressing against her bare legs, was benevolent, ‘filled with children’. As were her dreams: a nursery of spirits, active and warm-breathed. Curious little things. Stilton was very different, the proportions, the weight of the furniture. Nothing floated, it dragged. A sufficiency of brandy took care of sleep, pushed the dreams too deep for retrieval. But they were still there, unappeased. Living faces in an album of cancelled topography. Backgrounds fade, gardens disappear, the eyes of those who have once been photographed continue to search out an audience. The ceiling of the disturbed bedroom was so low, she felt, that the plaster took an imprint of your sleeping face.
