Edge of the Orison

Whittlesey

A turn around the cathedral, former burial place of Mary Queen of Scots (dug up and removed to Westminster Abbey), glimpse of the Ramsey Psalter (Fenland illuminated manuscript): and out. Pause to admire the West Front: Lincolnshire limestone from Barnack. Detour around the private quarters of cathedral functionaries, a sequestered zone of gables, lanterns, eccentric roofs, odd windows, arches, weeds, diagonal shadows. And down to the river.

This is the best of Peterborough, sunken gardens, high walls; a view that combines river, town bridge and the triumphalism of the cathedral. A functioning Lido that puts to shame the decommissioned swimming baths and architectural vanities of Hackney (millions wasted on leisure centres too dangerous to use). A riverside theatre. And, at last, we are reunited with the Nene.

Wide, stately, steel-grey, the Nene is serious; you hear the thump and squawk of industry on the south bank, barges are moored. We go up on to the bridge that brings London Road, Clare's weary route, into the city.

when I told my story they clubbed together & threw me fivepence out of the cart I picked it up & called at a small public house near the bridge were I had two half pints of ale & twopenn'orth of bread & cheese when I had done I started quite refreshed only my feet was more crippled then ever & I could scarcely make a walk of it over the stones & being ashamed to sit down in the street I forced to keep on the move & got through Peterborough better then I expected

Everything is grey: sky, river, Anna's raincoat, the stone flag pavement on which you cross the bridge. Anna remembers her brother-in-law, Richard Ellis, saying how he'd taken a minesweeper down the Nene from Peterborough to Wisbech. ‘Ah, Wisbech,’ he mused. ‘Never saw the crew so drunk. And the women…’

Some of the craft seem to have been abandoned; rust, debris, tough grass swallowing rudders. Others are still in business. Shaggy horses crop the verge: the kind that might once have towed passengers and cargoes to King's Lynn or Ely. We are the only walkers on a melancholy avenue of mature willows. Wet grey mud. A frenzy of contradictory directional arrows: the footprints of birds.

There are attractions to consider, possible detours: sewage farm and Flag Fen with its ‘reconstructed roundhouses’. (Flag Fen, the Late Bronze Age Settlement, was an artificial island: rectangular huts, on a timber platform, floating in water. England's earliest prehistoric wheel, alderwood, was found on the site. Precursor of the coming Peterborough loop, motorway hell.) As ever, we are alone; quit the city and you enter a world of your own choosing; the silence of the river is broken by distant trains. It's possible, if you make a conscious effort, to hallucinate Clare's river journey; slow and steady momentum carrying a nervous boy, ill clothed as Werner Herzog's changeling time-traveller, Kaspar Hauser, towards a place of judgement. He moves, by this shift of surface, road to river, out of his element. Out of his country. Land vanishes behind steep banks. The world is sky. It's like being suddenly translated from poetry into a novel written by a stranger: into Kafka's Amerika. Terrible things happen. Told in a particular way, with a particular emphasis, they are comic. Experienced, they are painful. Everybody has a script, a street map of the town, you alone are uninformed: it is always the first day at a new school. Language you don't speak.

When we achieve something called ‘Shanks Millennium Bridge’ we have two choices: blow it up or march across. And since the far bank promises a ‘Fen Causeway’, a ‘Roman Road’ leading into Whittlesey, we cross. Good decision: everything changes. The old causeways, timbers laid over mud, were ladders into the unconscious, dream-tracks between turf islands that might at any moment be withdrawn. A broad sandy path, bordered by mutated thorns and savage bushes, navigates a bleak landscape of back rivers, sluices, thickets of teazel. And in the distance, as a marker, a great black cloud issues from a group of tall, slim chimneys.

This is much more like it, apocalypse, struggling nature asserting its potency in the face of feeble human threat; a major quarrying operation, noxious fumes, fountains of blood-red water pouring from blue-grey cliffs. What we are negotiating on our Roman road is the perimeter fence of the London Brick Company. Or, from another point of view, the streets of London in an as yet unrevealed form: buried in peat like the stone blocks of Ramsey Abbey. Here lies sleeping London: canal-side redevelopments, future estates of Thames Gateway, the Olympian hubris of Stratford East. Here is gouging, excavating, baking in furnaces. A procession of rattling trucks and lorries. Wounded red earth. Nitrous sulphide. A poison cloud of yellow-grey methane drifting over Whittlesey.

Naturally, I have to duck under the fence – TIPPING RUBBISH IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED – to experience the quarry; an epic of ravishment on the scale of the Rainham Marshes landfill site, on which is dumped most of London's waste: to smoulder, fume, shudder, slither towards the Thames. There is ambition in this enterprise, an energy equal to the period when London was torn up for the construction of railways. There is employment for discontinued farm-labourers, citizens of Whittlesey, its outlying bogs and hamlets. Clay pits are another form of heritage, self-supporting, coughing forth Barratt units, dormitories of the new inner-city suburbs, replacement estates (in mustard yellow) for Hackney and Bow.

Whittlesey, friends, is a potential Dickens theme park, Coketown from Hard Times: pick up your brochure at the F. R. Leavis Human History Centre.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but, as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye.

Sounds right, but the Coketown of Dickens isn't here, it's closer to the other side of Anna's family, her Lancashire mother, birthplace in Blackpool, her Preston relatives. The London Brick Company is a surreal intervention in a flat land of rivers and dykes, a land that requires beacons for navigation. Glinton spire, Peterborough Cathedral, Whittlesey chimneys: markers for trainee jet pilots who will be over the Wash in seconds and wheeling away to Scotland in minutes.

Our walk started well, light rain diluting the methane, streaking us with yellow, and it improved with every mile we advanced on Whittlesey. The Roses, Anna's lost relatives, were worth chasing. They had found the perfect antidote to the subdued pastoral of Glinton and Werrington: those villages were drowned by development, Whittlesey had risen a few inches out of the peat. Its inhabitants, I imagined, would be cousins of H. P. Lovecraft's fish folk: part-human, part-animal, all alien.

For years, above my desk, I kept a yellow poster; the print of a poem in holograph by Charles Olson. It was dated from 1965 and designed to mimic the shape of a rose. A sentence twisted round on itself until it reached the centre of the mystery: ‘This is the Rose of the World.’

Whittlesey, on the direct route between the island abbeys of Thorney and Ramsey, on the Fen causeway between Peterborough and March, is another rose; beaten flat, choked by fumes from the London Brick Company.

Something below us, beneath the pylons, catches my eye: a blue-white object trapped in the fork of a sapling. Something wet and grey planted in a naked patch of brown earth: chunks of broken brick as compost. Anna decides to stay on the path, while I slither down the rampart to investigate.

This is no bird, a bear. A winged bear arranged so that it clings to the branch. Two other creatures, part-dog, grey as slush, accompany the shaggy angel; they have been secured by pink ribbons. Two further bears have been strapped, like Calvary thieves, to the trunk. A sprig of holly. A small white cross. A wooden dagger. The single word: REMEMBRANCE. The tree of bears marks the spot where a child has died. But I have never come across such a renegade memorial. There is a bench of undersized bears in East Tilbury, but that is arranged in such a way that walkers on the river path can pause, take in the view, pay their respects. The view here, on this damp morning, is bleak: sodden fields, distant cathedral town, looming chimneys.

The map of Whittlesey suggests a museum, a cemetery, several churches: plenty of opportunity to search for relevant Roses. The funeral service for Anna's great-grandfather, William Rose, took place in February 1910, and was conducted by the vicar of St Mary's.

The town is deserted, abandoned to through traffic (which is held by lights stuck on red). I note the window of the monumental mason: more bears. In granite-look, sculpted conglomerate. With a choice of colours: light grey or dark grey. Two roundhead bears with Wayne Rooney ears hold up blank books. Whittlesey is different and proud of it: Methodism, bear worship and a hopeful identity as an ‘ancient market town’. Timber-framed houses (‘preponderance of mellow buff brick’) cheek by jowl with grease caffs, rag-pickers' dens, empty shops with potato sacks.

Agriculture and blue clay: the economy. Chips, buns, dank pubs: the fuel. Church or chapel: duty. The ‘first and foremost of Whittlesey's sons’ was Sir Harry Smith; also known, after his part in the Sikh Wars, as the ‘Hero of Aliwal’. The town of Ladysmith, the brochure informs us, was named after his Spanish bride, Juana Maria De Los Dolores DeLeon. Sir Harry Smith sounds like the novel Conrad never quite got around to writing.

The brochure, after a section on ‘Where to Eat’ (‘good choice of takeaways from Pizza, Kebabs and Burgers to traditional Fish and Chips’), suggests that researching ‘Family History’ has become the principal Fenland passion (easily done, around here, without leaving the house). Whittlesey Library, in Market Street, keeps parish registers (1654–1960) on microfilm.

We'd better start cranking the handle, jumping the names, addresses, occupations of the dead. Census forms provide a column in which to make a mark if you're infirm, simple-minded or imbecile: discriminations of waterland lunacy. Not the Roses. There are dozens of them, farmers, publicans, go-getters with large families; sons to work the land, daughters to marry property (often a brother of the man with whom their sister went to the altar).

At the time of the 1881 census, William Rose was a farmer who also kept the Windmill Inn. He was thirty-six years old. His wife, Mary, was thirty-five. He had three daughters: Annie (thirteen), Florence (nine), Martha (one). And a son, William (seven). By 1891, the family had moved to 72 Benwick Road. (We check this out. The house is on the southern outskirts, close to Whittlesey Dike. The Roses are creeping closer to open Fens, the opportunity of acquiring land.) There are three more sons: Harry (ten), George (six) and another William (four). And a fourth daughter: Nellie (seven). The older William is described as a ‘labourer’, presumably on his father's farm.

Florence Rose, the second daughter, has left home. She is Anna's grandmother, the one who will marry William Hadman in 1902. Her photograph sits on our Hackney wall: posed in the garden of the Red House with her three children. Once, this was a period piece, sepia sentiment; now the figures are placed. Now Florence looks back at us. We know her as an elderly woman, bespectacled, flower in hat, walking down a street in Lancashire; visiting Geoffrey Hadman in Cleveleys. She keeps step with the much taller Miss Marsh, her younger son's landlady. Miss Marsh carries a wicker basket.

The Roses, according to William's obituary, also had connections in Ramsey. Tributes were displayed from ‘Mere House’. A Florence Emily Rose, born at Ramsey, is listed in Whittlesey's 1901 census; described as a ‘milliner/worker’, boarding at a property kept by Hannah Donnington in Almshouse Street. The other lodger was James Henry Parker, manager of a draper's shop. If this were a fiction, a novel by Thomas Hardy (or middle-period Wells), Parker would be a direct descendant of the mysterious John Donald Parker, Clare's grandfather. And Florence Rose would be the future Florence Hadman (the marriage to William taking place the following year). A boarding-house liaison? Manager and counter girl? Pregnancy, desertion; another drowning in the cattle trough?

I found a Parker grave, Thomas Parker (died 1923), in Werrington. (And more of them in Thorney.) Could we trace the wandering schoolmaster, on the road south – Glinton, Werrington, Whittlesey – scattering his bad seed? John Donald has vanished entirely. The Florence Emily Rose of Almshouse Street is not the future Florence Hadman. Our Catherine Cookson version implodes.

Edward Storey, in a note added to a reproduction of the 1786 map, quotes John Bodger, who produced the survey. The Mere, Bodger asserted, was ‘the most spacious fresh water Lake in the Southern part of Great Britain… Its surface is 1,570 square acres and the depth varies considerably.’ The Mere is a considerable absence, out of which stones and treasures have emerged, including ‘a silver censer and incense ship which were believed to have once been part of the silver of Ramsey Abbey’. Loss of water affects the microclimate of the empty land in the triangle between Whittlesey, March and Ramsey.

In 1851, hundreds of people converged on the Mere, with carts and baskets, to take advantage of the final drainage by the Appold Pump. They slither in mud, fighting over dying fish, all that is left of the original ‘abundance of pike, eels, perch, carp, tench, bream, chubb, roach, dace and gudgeon’.

John Clare, in his journal (November 1824), writes that his friend Henderson, the Scottish head-gardener from Milton Park, sends news from Whittlesey:

discovered a new species of Fern a few days back growing among the bogs on Whittlesea Mere & our talks was of Ferns for the day he tells me there is 24 different species or more natives of England & Scotland one of the finest of the latter is calld the Maiden hair fern growing in rock clefts

But Appold is also a street in Shoreditch, passing into the City of London, and as such is part of my sacred geography. Standing in Bunhill Fields, September 2004, I tried to explain the theory of drift to a San Francisco muralist who had picked up a commission on the corner of Hoxton Square. We were in the enclosure between the graves of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake: the energy lines of England run out from this spot. Bunyan used knowledge gained from his walks around and beyond Bedford to formulate a pedestrian parable. Defoe travelled Britain in the double identity of spy and reporter. Blake turned local geography into universal geography, his own religion forged from the dustiest of particulars. I repudiated the notion of Nicholas Hawksmoor whose grooved obelisk at St Luke's, Old Street, we could see, in its alignment with Defoe's obelisk, and distant Christ Church, Spitalfields – as a member of an occult elite. London is a body kept alive, energised by complex lines and patterns that can be walked, built upon: celebrated or exploited. The reality is democratic, anyone can play. All it requires is open eyes and stout boots. Start moving and the path reveals itself.

In my 1987 novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, two of the characters (Brian Catling and myself, an episode borrowed from life) break into the roofless church of St Luke's; a true temple of the City. A site given over to self-seeded trees and wild shrubs, early light picking out blood-colours in shards of stained glass. We climb into the bell tower, witness sunrise as a form of alchemy, then wander, without premeditation, into the streets.

His spine resting on the buried bell. The bell within the obelisk. The cancelled bell that has been hidden from the world.

A flutter of birds against the window. Bird lime. Stench of old feathers.

We turn away, our prayers are made. Down into the face of the lion: Bunhill, Finsbury, Sun, Appold… the path of old stone.

All writing is made in a kind of trance. The Catling expedition to Ramsey happened at the wrong time. The ‘buried’ bell of St Luke's will reappear in the Fens, on an island: a memory that got ahead of itself. Appold's Pump circulates the blood of the heart. White stones break the surface of a peat sea.

‘Beneath the mud,’ Storey concludes, ‘were also discovered the skulls of a wild boar and a wolf, remnants of a history some several years earlier. Now only the map reminds us of what was; the rest is in the imagination.’

We'd covered enough ground for one day. We would visit Whittlesey Museum, which kept very eccentric opening hours, then make our way back to Peterborough. Glassmoor was too large a step. Let it keep. The immediate challenge, in the cathedral city, is to find a restaurant that doesn't have an ambulance with winking lights waiting for overenthusiastic diners.