As, on the morning of our third day, the countryside becomes more serene, so my expression, captured in Renchi's photographs, is more agonised: screwed up, creased. Eyes narrow, blooded, under the long brim of a sweat-streaked cap. The walk is getting serious. We'll make it but it's going to hurt. Our task is to resupply the pain hidden by the Cambridgeshire landscape. It really is very pleased with itself, pristine roads and unbroken sunshine (when we have lumbered ourselves with bundles of rainwear). Lilies float on harmless water. A signboard, in painted relief, for Offord Cluny. Like the wooden cover ripped from a new edition of Izaac Walton.
We pass the marina, cross the mainline railway, wink at a gravel chute; achieve Buckden. With every expectation of a mid-morning break at a timbered hostelry: ‘The Old Lion & Lamb. One of the Oldest Posting Houses.’ More significantly, we rejoin the Great North Road and the spirit of Clare (at his most weary, so much done, so far to go).
I felt so weak here that I forced to sit down on the ground to rest myself & while I sat here a Coach that seemed to be heavy laden came rattling up & stopt in the hollow below me & I cannot reccolect its ever passing by me I then got up & pushed onward seeing little to notice for the road very often looked as stupid as myself & I was very often half asleep as I went on the third day I satisfied my hunger by eating the grass by the road which seemed to taste something like bread
Settled into a window seat, coffee and biscuits, we plot the rest of the day's march. As I had carried with me Emma's story of the Ouse drownings, so Renchi felt the need to witness Grafham Water and the submerged villages. He had tales of his own to bring to mind. One of which involved a Native American Sundance ceremony, attended by friends or relatives. A tree tumbled on to a participant, smashing his skull. A dancer, who couldn't deal with this unexpected intervention, took off at high speed in his car. The others, after due consideration, came together to pick up the tree, to carry it away: appeasing hurt by a revised and extended ritual.
As we left Great Paxton, a figure out of Trollope, very much like the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, leant over his trim hedge to let us know that we were looking at ‘the oldest Saxon church in Cambridgeshire’. Buckden has an alternative ecclesiastical attraction, a redbrick bishop's palace. Rigby Graham's lithograph, from his Clare expedition, pushes a rather pudgy poet (in battered Sam Peckinpah top hat) against the palace wall; while a heron, swooping overhead, points out the road. Head north, young man.
Studying that hat, I wondered how Clare would work in a western, on horseback. This short, sturdy man crumpled under the weight of transporting memories of the Helpston horizon. He wouldn't register in widescreen. Except as a holy fool: Clint Eastwood's dwarfish sidekick in High Plains Drifter. A half-breed deputed to looking after the animals for The Wild Bunch (credited below L. Q. Jones and Bo Hopkins). A person who is never more than an extension of landscape, attractive but disposable. (Chris Petit's acquaintance, Bo Hopkins, mad as a raft of monkeys, is shot to pieces before the end of the credit sequence.)
Distressed, road-ragged, we behaved like English gentlemen, not cowboys: coffee and Nice biscuits, a brief tour of the bishop's palace. My photographs play along with the romantic fallacy: Jacobean garden, stone cleric with model of church resting on his hand, a priapic swan nuzzling his privates. The eleventh-century palace housed the Bishops of Lincoln. It was here that Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's set-aside queen, was kept. The Lion & Lamb, it seems, was a guest house for the bishop. They still boast of it. Of surviving. And remembering.
Blisters tended, socks changed, Renchi is a new man; so much so that he heads rapidly out of town and straight back towards London: wrong choice at roundabout, delirious reconnection with the A1. The crenellations of the high wall of Buckden Palace may have had something to do with it. They throw out a ladder of light, down which Renchi, tipped forward by his massive burden, dances. Today's bandanna is pale blue, matching the watery oval on his T-shirt, which is otherwise as green as smoke.
Grafham Water is not so much Grafham Water as Grafham underwater: 1,500 acres of drowned farms, hamlets and good agricultural land. Recreation instead of seasonal toil. Water sports, nature trails, instead of nature in its unredeemed state. The Exhibition Centre offers a video presentation (official history) and the shop is stocked with souvenirs of a non-place you are never going to know, mementoes of absence. The Anglian Water brochure (‘Something for Everyone’) puffs walking, cycling, eating, avian voyeurism, reduced rates for senior citizen fishermen, but says absolutely nothing about land piracy, decanted villagers. Another nice example of erased or selective memory.
When you arrive, as pedestrians, bruised and thirsty for images of water, you sense immediately that something is wrong. Retro-futurist buildings, on the rim of a low grass bank, loom like UFOs: Grafham Water is an airstrip for aliens. Our boys fly out to combat virtual terrorism and rogue regimes in never-ending oil wars, while grape-skinned intelligences from distant galaxies drop in for their summer break, the Grafham Water package. ‘For those wishing to have a different location for a special occasion, we can offer private bookings of the facilities.’
As we approach Grafham Water, destination of choice on all road signs, we notice an ominous glint, red and silver: meridian sun flashing on a mound of lobsters or shelled prawns? Which later reveals itself as: the largest collection of bicycles outside Cambridge (or East London's Cheshire Street market). All of them scarlet with silver mudguards. It's tempting, very tempting. The roads are empty, straight, hedgeless. We should make Stilton in time for an afternoon nap, a drink before dinner.
We settle instead for a rest on the beach. It's not a real beach, a token scatter of shells. Like the bottom of a parrot's cage. No tides. Clear water over imported gravel, with bands of yellow in the style of urban swimming pools after the incontinent kiddies' session. Fishermen pose, floppy hats, multipocketed vests, floppy lines, on jetties constructed from broken boulders. Blue lake. Lazy clouds. What could be more delightful? Sucking on plastic water, munching peppermints. Cooling swollen feet in liquid that will soon be gushing through the hosepipes and shower units and kitchen taps of Anglia's customers. This water is fine in photographs, but it smells bad. Dead. Or kept alive on a respirator.
The Duke of Edinburgh choppered down to Grafham in 1966 to cut the ribbon. The Doddington Brook was dammed and water pumped in from the River Ouse at Offord. Farms disappeared. Farmworkers were dispersed. They were used to it, wartime restrictions had never been repealed. Airfields at Little Staughton, Kim-bolton, Brampton Grange, Molesworth. The American base at Alconbury. An epic geometry of crisscrossing runways, now disused, near the village of Thurleigh. Renchi is on the trail of a vanished family, a story he wants to uncover. Memories of commandeered barns, compulsory labour. Official secrets. He thinks that Grafham Church might offer a clue, more names on deleted tombstones.
We exit the pleasure zone by way of a raised metal arm, an obliging security barrier. Nothing obvious to protect; water behind us, dazzling cornfields ahead. When white lines appear, we know that we're closing on civilisation, cottages, pubs. The lines are fresh and they are in duplicate. The new painter missed the original mark, went back for a second attempt, and left a drunken road to make its own way to the Montagu Arms. MONDAY: STEAK NITE. 2 × 8 SIRLOIN DINNERS. ONLY £10.
A water tower. Shadows of overhanging trees. Sections of the road, repaired, floating free between black fissures of melted tar.
Grafham. Ellington. (We skirt Brampton, where the young Samuel Pepys spent so much of his time with upwardly mobile relatives. A cousin of his mother worked as a bailiff for the local landowner, Montagu. Hence: the Montagu Arms. Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, was Pepys's patron. The sponsor of his career as a naval bureaucrat.)
Renchi leads me into yet another church, another shaded oasis. He photographs the grave of the Baker family: ‘Frank, Twin Brother of Ernest.’ He talks to a woman who has parked her car at the church door. He makes notes. He pieces together the story of a family scattered when the drowning happened, when land under cultivation was lost to Grafham Water.
A man of the village was sent to the Thames Estuary, the Isle of Grain, where he became a shepherd. A shepherd working with London delinquents. The legends are as vague as our register of the loss suffered by people who lived and worked this patch for generations. Fading names on weathered stone. The thing that excites Renchi is the accident of meeting the woman with the car, the confirmation of facts he had previously suspected.
Inside the church, he examines a section in the great black Bible, left open on a lectern: ‘Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.’
When we walk outside, into bright sunlight, the time on the church clock is twelve thirty-three.
The relief barman is about to call it a day in the village of Alconbury. His wife's family come from another place entirely, my home country, Port Talbot in South Wales. The only relief barmen need there, in the red smoke of the steel mills, is from the humours of the drinkers; the same faces, day after day, looped patter, residual gloom. The game's up in Alconbury, in Middle England, no field-labourers, no dedicated alcoholics left. Small pubs, once run as a sideline by the wives of ambitious farmers, have to peddle pizzas and welcome kids to roadside play areas. (Proud Montagu's heraldic crest is a pub sign. He gave his name to the sandwich, but none are available here.) John Clare's escape from pressure, family, into the boisterous company of the Blue Bell Inn, the Billings brothers and their associates, poachers and fiddlers in the fellowship of drink, has been discontinued.
Frederick Martin:
It was proposed by the brothers Billing, tenants of the Hall, and adopted by a majority of votes, that a stick should be put firmly in the ground, in the middle of the room, and that they should dance around it in a ring till it fell from its erect position. The way in which it fell was to indicate in which direction the two emigrants were to go.
Swaying inebriates stamp a pattern on the dirt floor, a vortex of footprints. Fate will take the decision for them. Such rituals were denied us in Alconbury. Orange moustaches: two pints of sweet cordial fizzed with lemonade from a hose. It's come to that. Rehy-drated, we take our leave of the barman and his wife, grateful for their conversation. They'll be back on the road soon, a new gig in Sheffield. Now we have nothing except a long haul, shoulder to shoulder with Clare, out ahead of us; up Ermine Street, the Great North Road, to Stilton.
A decorated stone block beside the Great North Road. Hand pointing south: TO LONDON 64 MILES (through Huntingdon, Royston & Ware). To LONDON 72 MILES (through Cambridge). Here is an object we treat with reverence (the better for being unreadable by motorists). It is faded, masonic; a lost piece in a game of psychogeographical chess. Through his magnifying glass, Renchi watches a snail crawl up one of the grooves, following the vertical stroke of the T in ‘To London’.
Pawns advance one square at a time. As we do, hobbled, reconnected to Clare's exhaustion; he understands, pain has taught him, the quest is futile. There is no wife, no Mary Joyce. No cottage. Nothing behind him and no way back to London. Promised distances are lies. TO STILTON 7 MILES. Seven miles on a road that will exist for a single day.
Stilton was a border marker for Clare; finding the Peterborough road, he would be on familiar ground. Spirits lifted after the collapse of the previous night, the disorientation; feeling stupid, out of his knowledge. After Stilton, he had one task left: to learn to forget.
The promised seven miles were the hardest that we walked; one of my feet was shot, blistered. Shoulders were raw from the chafing of unsecured straps. But it was good to have a road again; a ghost highway little used by motorists, Eddie Stobart's fleet or the refrigerated monsters that service superstores.
Vetch, thistle, tares: the unconsidered bounty of disregarded verges. A diminishing white line, dividing vegetable and mineral zones, hauls us forward on a blindman's rope. The edge is innocent of animal corpses, squashed and splattered vermin.
Ghost roads belong to the vanished. They remind me of Chris Petit: who should, by now, be waiting for us at Stilton. With Petit, I've explored many roads that have abdicated their original identity: the A13, out of Rainham. And others. Traffic stolen by a flashier replacement. Leaving a microclimate of entropy and nostalgia. Off-highway enterprises that have run out of puff.
The B1043 is of that family. Pressed against a busy section of the A1(M), it retains a vagrant charm. You have to walk it to know it. Motorway travellers, heading south, visible over tall grass, don't notice you. You might as well be dead. I think of Petit's first feature, Radio On, made before he was thirty. It was when I heard that scoreline – ‘Norwich, two. Chelsea, nil.’ – as the Rover comes down the ramp into Bristol, that I understood. Another fantasy. A posthumous dream. The traveller, trapped on the road west, is dead from the start. Suicide in the bath. Subjected to morbid monologues (roadkill rockers, Belfast), Petit's driver can never come off the road – until it is time to rebury himself in a quarry. Radio On, shot in classic Ilford monochrome, is impossible to date, outside time. With every viewing, it seems more contemporary, and comes from a place that is further away.
Ermine Street, in late afternoon, is a catalogue of extinguished enterprises. Prefabricated cafés, overtaken by tumbleweed, have chipped paint, cracked windows. Poppies, saxifrage, daisies burst through blackened pots and pans. Filling stations have drained tanks. Gates open into wilderness estates. Stone furniture: acanthus overwhelmed by green creepers. A Petit movie that was never commissioned. His stubborn cameraman, Martin Schafer, brought back from the grave.
We don't talk, we listen. We see bridges over the Ai, direction indicators, speed warnings, as a march of invaders, War of the Worlds tripods, heading for London. We sample ice-cream from the one surviving garage. We walk, in shared reverie, as distance stretches. The motorway is a temporary nuisance, choked into immobility; a conduit for the ‘MII corridor’. A preordained future of estate housing, retail parks and out-of-town shopping cities.
To our right is a country we barely notice: encroaching Fens, rivers, the old island town of Ramsey. Fields and woods where Whittlesey Mere, with its armadas of pleasure boats, once gloried in scale, impregnability, nationwide reputation. The Mere was drained on a whim in 1851: in the perverse way that the area around Grafham was flooded a hundred years later. Holme Fen, which we passed, all unknowing, at the end of the third day's walk, was somewhere to which I would return. By car. With Anna.
The woods of Holme Lode Covert are the strangest in Britain. Draining an expanse of water like Whittlesey Mere throws time into reverse. A notice beside two metal posts boasts that you are standing at the ‘lowest place in England’. So low that you breathe through your gills; you breathe earth, dark fathoms of the vanished lake. Water is a magician's medium, a substance with its own memory: you cannot simply pour it away and ignore the outcome. The post crowned with a small pyramid is a marker, set in 1852, to measure peat shrinkage. A second pillar was erected in 1957. The cast-iron column was apparently taken from the original Crystal Palace (built for the Great Exhibition of 1851), before it was removed to Sydenham. So here, in this obscure wood, favoured by dog walkers, antiquarians, adulterous lovers (two cars kept apart), is a piece of Victorian London, a high rib of Empire. The post is not sinking; it is rising, inch by inch, out of the soft black ground.
We abandon the car. Nothing, nobody. The feeling persists: we are watched. I persuade Anna into the woods, over a gate; our path is soft, springy. Pools of friable earth around the roots of fallen trees: run it through your fingers. Sniff them. Damp sawdust, stagnant water. An eros of decay to overwhelm invaders. Better not to come too close, touch or embrace, the consequences would be irreversible. Whittlesey Mere takes no prisoners.
Peter Ashley, the Oundle-based photographer and writer who alerted me to the Crystal Palace post, also suggested that I investigate Engine Farm. A sinister location protected by a steep metal ramp, locked gates, a sluggish irrigation channel: Holme Lode. The map offers no inducement to carry on. A car out of nowhere pulls up alongside, the driver is mystified by my search. ‘Engine Farm? Nothing there but stones.’
Stones? Stones are good. You cross a bridge, make yourself known to the farmer: ‘Don't want to take no bugger by stealth, boy, not out in the Fens.’ You dodge potato lorries: to discover a group of limestone blocks, thirteenth century, intended for Ramsey Abbey. Moving in, you register masons' marks (arrowheads). Embedded fossils. The blocks, lost in transit, had been shipped down the Nene, in flat-bottomed boats, from the Barnack quarries. They had sunk in Whittlesey Mere, deep sediment, for five hundred years. Then, Mere drained by Victorian engineers, they floated to the surface. Peat levels fell away. In brackish hibernation, the Engine Farm stones outlasted the dissolution of the monasteries, the execution of Charles I. Epochs of revolution and restoration. The sanctified blocks, so ley line enthusiasts assert, emerged from the Mere in perfect alignment with Barnack and Ramsey Abbey.
‘When we first moved up here in 1996,’ Peter Ashley told me in a letter,
we went to a local pub that sits on the banks of the River Nene. It was a crowded Sunday lunchtime and we all sat round a table where a man with wild staring eyes (we've got used to that round here now) quietly supped his beer. I got into conversation with him and he started to recite yards of Clare, the syllables dribbling out with drops of ale into his grey beard. As he got up to go he told me he had been a patient in the same Northamptonshire asylum as Clare, and I watched him slowly cycling away up the street in the rain.
Under a quilt of cloud, we crossed the Ai, by way of a splendid bridge. Evening light picked a thread of gold from fading fields. We walked the length of the village, south, to the Bell Inn. Where Chris Petit was already established, bathed and fresh, ready for the final day's stroll to Glinton.
In the courtyard for the evening meal, we suffer nothing worse than a troop of compulsory Morris Dancers (the sort that turn up in the Rigby Graham film). This side of Ermine Street, away from the Fens, dancers are inoffensive hobbyists working up a thirst. Not like the revenant mob, the drunks and madmen of my Welsh youth; the Mari Llwyd rhymers who pranced, house to house, on New Year's Eve. Excavated horse's head, scarlet-lipped, draped in a white sheet. Bells. Footsteps in the snow. The dead try to gain entrance. To fire, warmth, cakes and ale. Improvised poetry, verse for verse, is the only way of keeping them out. The Stilton bell-jinglers, stick-bangers, are not the Shitwitches or Molly Gangs of the Fens. Wild, black-faced, travestied. Unemployed ploughboys taught to beg, midwinter, brick in the hand, by near starvation. Such creatures, displaced from the drained Whittlesey Mere, roam the back-roads. Waiting their time. At Stilton, spectral riot disturbed the broken Clare: ‘I heard the voices but never looked back to see where they came from.’