PRE-REMEMBERED
The road he had travelled had disappeared, and all that remained was the little space on which his feet were standing. He was dreaming and he did not know it.
José Saramago, The Double
Property is on the move everywhere, it's like a madness; villages disappear, survivors are rattled, provoked by real-estate promos masquerading as documentaries. Helpston is not immune, Helpston is off-highway. The only marketable commodity is the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’. Helpston is no longer in Northamptonshire. The only peasants are waxworks in heritage museums: waiting for the Black Death (as seen on television).
The Clare Society (in conjunction with Peterborough City Council) has produced a map of the poet's Helpston; a flattering sketch, based on the William Hilton portrait, decorates its cover. Returned to Stilton, the Bell Hotel, for a final push, we are spending one afternoon in Helpston, walking the John Clare trail. At 16 Woodgate, we re-encounter ‘Clare's Cottage’. It is dazzlingly white, gorgeously thatched, and pegged with yellow-and-red boards provided by estate agents, Dickens Watts & Dade, of Cross Street, Peterborough. ‘Viewing Strictly By Appointment Only.’ £475,000. Tom Raworth's 1971 poem, ‘Helpston £9,850’, has come to fruition (in everything except price). The cottage has endured every indignity, from Bill Brandt's theatrical mists to soft-sell digital portraiture. Now it has been forcibly inducted into the Peterborough conurbation.
The walk, mapped out by the Clare Society, is pleasant; it's like scrolling effortlessly through deposits of memory rescued from numerous Clare biographies. I pose Anna, disguised by dark glasses, outside ‘Bachelor's Hall’, where the poet caroused with the Billings brothers. Pointing has been renewed, window frames freshly painted; there is a burglar alarm in the place where the old fire-insurance plaque would once have been sited.
We follow the trail into Royce Wood, quilted silence, a sudden eros of woody scents: the illusion of invisibility. The wood is a release from village life (eyes, twitching curtains). One element in Clare's work is much clearer now, the way a walk disperses social noise, drops into private meditation: the rhythm of the country, as it climbs, shifts from limestone today. And is randomly punctuated by roads, divided by rivers.
We hit Torpel Way at a point that carries us to the right, uphill, in the direction of Ailsworth and Castor Highlands. A fruitful error. I decided, quite arbitrarily, to get away from traffic, to take to the fields (another footpath sign left in a ditch). We made an easy descent, seeing the village, seeing how Helpston sat in its dish; the sweep of the horizon so different from its neighbours, Glinton and Northborough. That short move, to the new cottage, was a banishment the poet couldn't endure. The wooded hills around Helpston offered Clare the possibility of walking out, as the whim took him, into quite distinct topographies, productive of contrary moods: light and shade, good humour or slow-footed, sodden melancholy. Drowning or flying.
Anna has to be held by the ankles, before she lifts from the ground: the view across broad fields, divided by ancient oaks, is an instantaneous transfusion. A coming-into-herself. A recognition. Stands of poplars. A path skirting the edge of Oxey Wood. Knowing little of Clare's habits, she searches for orchids. There have been dreams and she tells me about them.
She is at home, her childhood place in the Blackpool suburbs, the familiar bed. ‘If I opened my eyes, I would be there.’ Her brother William and her younger sister, Susa, safe in their rooms. Robert's room, she worries, is a bathroom. Where will he sleep?
The babble of a party, it keeps her awake. They are downstairs in the salon (yes, that's what her father called it). They are waiting, out of place, Hadmans and Roses; the troublesome dead of Werrington and Whittlesey. In period costume, the clothes of their time. They have been brought back, diverted from the static cling of sepia photographs by the irritation of our gaze. They mill about this awkward room; people of the Peterborough fringe transported to Lancashire. Like wartime aliens to the Isle of Man. ‘They want to be organised,’ Anna said. ‘It's our fault. They came in a deputation. They asked for coffee.’
I noticed Anna's horoscope in the paper and wrote it down: ‘If they start to form a semicircle around you – run towards the open end. The horizon calls.’
From Oxey Wood, it is all horizon. Heavy cloud, shadows of oaks; village and road as a pale mirage among remote thickets and hedges. All our themes, our quests, are being resolved (or discontinued) at one time. A visible demonstration of the boundaries of Clare's early poetry. And of Anna's emotional investment in this landscape. The trail of the oldest Hadman we could trace brought us back to Stilton. Information was coming now, faster than we could cope with it. Two books I had been searching for were suddenly available: the ‘lost’ poems written by Anna's father and the original manuscript notebook of John Clare's ‘Journey out of Essex’.
Thinking perhaps of Sylvia Plath, Anna remembered her father's missing collection as Ariel. Which suited me very well, being the name that Shelley wanted to give to the yacht on which he was drowned, the Don Juan. But memory is fickle. I read Geoffrey Hadman's poems on visits to Anna's mother, in her converted cottage in a Rutland village, near Uppingham. I imagined specific references to Clare's geography. There were none, apart from a short lyric invoking Glinton.
I faintly hear you,
Lovely bells of lonely Deeping –
Softly, softly, far-off pealing,
Across waste water
The poems were handwritten, a black serif calligraphy, with red titles and initial letters: clear as print. The collection was called Spirit's Expense. (Shakespeare again, Sonnets. ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action.’) It was astonishing that the book reappeared just as I was struggling to tie up the loose ends of my narrative. Anna contacted her brothers, her sister, none of them knew where their father's poems had gone. I fell under suspicion, for allowing the handsome volume to be swept away, with the rest of the library, to an Uppingham dealer. I knew this wasn't the case. My memory might be full of holes, but books are never forgotten. The poems sat on the reserved pile, to be removed by the family, before the dealer arrived.
Spirit's Expense turned up in a box of diaries, papers, rings that had belonged to Anna's mother. Her sister, in Cumbria, had it in her safekeeping. And now Anna could handle this unique folio, read it with fresh eyes. Neat symmetry: thirty-one poems published in 1941, when the author was thirty-one (thirty-second birthday in July). Fine paper with watermark of J. Green & Son. Vellum and calf. Gilt lettering on spine. The production was the gift, as Anna understood it, of her father's glamorous London friend whose limp Judy Hadman had imitated.
Twenty-Five Poems, by Dylan Thomas, was published in 1936. He was five years younger than Anna's father. David Gascoyne's Man's Life is This Meat also appeared in 1936. He was seven years younger. Auden published The Double Man and New Year Letter in 1941. He was two years older than Geoffrey Hadman and would have been a contemporary at Oxford. Stephen Spender, also at Oxford, was two months younger. Eliot published The Dry Salvages in 1941. Little Gidding appeared the following year. ‘Here, the intersection of the timeless moment/ Is England and nowhere. Never and always.’
Geoffrey Hadman's verse, privately published, is not of that order; a casual reader would place the collection well before the First War, with Brooke and the Georgians, or with Housman (who is directly invoked). The language is archaic, ripe with ‘e'en were’ and ‘say nay’. It is a long way from the colloquial vigour and sharp-eyed specifics of Clare. Clare's poetry is his existence. The verse in this extravagantly bound folio is a gentlemanly exercise, the exhibition of technical facility; a manageable neurosis of memory and regret, abdicated love, anticipation of death. But it would be unfair to form a critical judgement of a volume that was never offered to the public.
One of the surprises is a poem addressed to ‘lovely Annabel’. It was written and published two years before Anna was born. She has no idea who the addressee is, or if she existed as anything beyond an echo of Poe; but here might be the clue to that name which was never quite her own: Mary Annabel Rose. The Mary was understood, her Hadman aunt. The Rose part was found in Whittlesey. The Annabel drifted as seven lines in a book of verse, published in an edition of one. In this poem, if anywhere, was a reflection of Clare: the way he dedicated a ‘moment's rapture’ to the unknown Anna who carried his first daughter's name.
It was good that the book had been recovered, but I was no nearer to any real connection with Clare. Clare operated, like all great poets, in an active present, in which deep images from the past continued to assault him. Time is plural, form a convenience. Sonnets are bent to suit his purpose. Imitations are exercises, contrived, when times are hard, to turn poetry to cash.
The poem in which Geoffrey Hadman comes closest to the place where we are walking, from Oxey Wood to Maxham's Green Lane, is called ‘Clouds’. I realise now what the poem actually is: a meditation on flight. The cross-country trip, Blackpool to Glinton, in the Auster. The poet is looking down on the clouds.
White wisps of spirit
Fading into space,
Paling the blue infinity of sky,
Writhing, twisting, ghostly cirrus!
Frozen souls of the dead,
Purified in purgatory.
English fields are masked by ‘blankets of grey stratus’. The pilot's reverie is convalescent, drifting from ‘morphia to nostalgia’. As cloud cover breaks, ‘shafts of washed, golden light’ pick out ‘pinnacles and spires’ of a cathedral: ‘convolute in pure white’. Peterborough is a cloud castle. The vision, based on experience, does approach Clare; his dream of Helpston Church, the Day of Judgement. At last, in the memory of flight, Geoffrey Hadman's elective relationship with the Helpston peasant, with this landscape, is explored and justified.
Sidney Keyes, another Oxford man, was killed in action: Tunisia, 1943. His ‘Garland for John Clare’ claims that there is only ever one poet, possessed by different voices, operating under various disguises (Shakespeare, Chatterton, Byron). One poet for each place. ‘But sometimes I remember,’ Keyes writes, ‘the time that I was John Clare, and you unborn.’
We started early, this final push, driving to Huntingdon, the County Record Office, to trawl for Hadmans. We shared the task, dividing up materials relating to territory we were about to explore, the hills behind Stilton. Very soon, I was at a table with pouches of parchment; waxy, yellow, nibbled by rats. The ink held. Many of those married, christened, buried were lost: Hadman or Hadenham, parish clerks were never sure of the spelling. The givers of information may well have been illiterate. I worked back, magnifying glass to document, as far as 1680. To no great effect.
I noted: Elizabeth Jane, daughter of Richard and Sarah Hadman, baptised in 1857. And her brother, William George, baptised in 1859 Richard Hadman is described as a ‘labourer’. Then there was William Hadman, who died in 1887, aged eighty-four. And Mary Ann Hadman, who died in August 1893, aged eighty-nine. At Holme. That caught my eye: the last Hadman recorded in Huntingdon was living in a village on the edge of Whittlesey Mere; the place where we had gone searching for the posts that marked the drop in the land. Holme River was the south-western entrance to the Mere, as Bevill's Leam was the entrance in the north-east.
All these Hadmans came from one place, Caldecote. Caldecote? Caldecote barely exists, it is less than a village; it's a memory smear on the (2.5 inches to the mile) Pathfinder map. A farm, a wood. A motte and bailey castle. Caldecote is tucked against Washingley, on rising ground beyond Stilton. Washingley, we knew, was where Anna's great-great-grandfather, Robert Hadman (1808–63), later of Werrington, began. Washingley was as far as our trail went: a deleted village, a present farm (with fish ponds and earthworks).
In Huntingdon, I discovered the Washingley Estate Map from 1833; hand-coloured, precise, financial returns laid out like poems. In 1803 the estate brought in £2,138. In 1824: £2,141. No increase in real terms. A farmhouse with garden produced £12–3s–17 in annual rent. The kennels adjoining the pleasure ground produced £35–os–11. Tenant farmers were named: Jasper Perkins, Robert Peake, William Handbury. As were the more humble cottagers, the keeper of a public house. Not one Hadman. They were beneath the level that produced revenue for the estate. They laboured.
We were no closer to Anna's great-great-grandfather, the Robert Hadman who made the break, eight miles to Werrington. We decided to move on at once to Northampton. Anna would hit the record office in Wootton Hall Park, while I went back to the library to view John Clare's notebook with the ‘Journey out of Essex’. I had the required letter from my publisher, access was promised.
I can't believe the generosity, the trust, of the Clare keepers, but Northampton has that quality: it draws you in, it keeps you. Locals know (even when they're wrong) the history of their town, and they talk about it, with affection but no particular respect. There could be no better place to shelter Clare or his memorials. In Northampton, he was a tolerated presence, adding lustre to the stone. The alcove in All Saints' Church still has a ‘reserved for mad poet’ aspect; loose citizens muse, nurse a can, but soon shuffle off. That seat is too hot. The alcove clamps like a wired helmet offering a vertical blow-dry.
I want to say, ‘Don't do it. Don't risk your precious relic.’ This man has the dealing virus in his blood. I picture the entry in a catalogue: ‘Poet's holograph.’ One of one. The notebook is kept in an archival box: ‘John Clare Poems, 1841’. The driven year at High Beach when he worked on split Byronic narratives, ‘Don Juan’, ‘Child Harold’; on biblical paraphrases. Before the escape. A torrent of words in smudged blocks. His furies demanded that he took to the road: to recover himself, to catch up with his wandering spirit, to shake off Byron's clammy grip. Byron had already been carried north. The club-footed aristocrat liked to put up at the Bell in Stilton, where Clare would come close to losing his nerve: ‘He shams.’
Urgent prose cuts against seizures of poetry: so that ‘I wandered many a weary mile/ Love in my heart was burning’ confronts the entry about the ‘wide awake hat’. Script slants to a wind from the east, ruffling Whittlesey Mere. Paper is precious. Every inch of space is exploited. Clare wrote in Northborough, after the road, unpunctuated paragraphs: the voices caught him. He sweated and trembled, pushing his nib across the page, mapping memory before it was lost.
The last sentence of that journey, as I had seen it reproduced by Eric Robinson in John Clare by Himself, was chilling:
Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary – her and her family are as nothing to me now though she herself was once the dearest of all – 'and how can I forget
Quotation marks opened, never to close. Now, using my magnifying glass, I see that the published transcription is incorrect, quotation marks do seal Clare's challenge to his readers. That we should learn how to forget. To let him go. Leaving poetry as its own legend.
It was raining, the shower caught me as I hurried from the library to my pre-arranged meeting with Alan Moore. We would pay our respects to Lucia Joyce at Kingsthorpe Cemetery. Asking after cabs in Northampton minimarts produced blank astonishment: nothing to be had, ten minutes from the centre, nothing but novelty stores, tabloid newspapers, cigarettes, cut-price CDs, used leather.
When hail bounced from the tarmac, my quest took on a certain urgency. I spotted a cab, parked up, tattooed driver doing his best to look like an unemployed getaway specialist, a redundant blagger. He was, he said, on a job, waiting for a client – but, bugger that, cash is cash, jump in.
‘What do you do then?’
‘Writer.’
‘Thought so. Always tell, I can. Had solicitors. From London. Had writers. Never wrong, me.’
What soon became obvious, on our short run to the cemetery, was that cabbies are messengers. In Northampton, time on their hands, they are also local historians.
‘Clare? I was in the John Clare School. Music now. I went there, that school. It was all right.’
Cabbies are the chorus, hurrying a narrative along. No curiosity about what I write, or about my business with Alan Moore. ‘Know him? Seen his picture, like, in the paper.’ Plenty of curiosity about the town: Romans, Thomas à Becket, Clare, shoes. ‘Good luck then.’ He scratches a nose that is too flat to pick. It looks as if he tried to get out of the cab, in a hurry, forgetting there's a windscreen in the way.
I'm early and have time, in the rain, to locate Lucia Joyce's gravestone, before Alan arrives at the gate. The cemetery is built on a hill, in parkland, an extension of the golf course. It is arranged with the usual avenues and planted with a variety of trees and shrubs. I shelter under a chestnut. There are dozens of Haddons here, but no Hadmans. Haddon is the (old) Northamptonshire village that I walked through, with Renchi and Chris Petit, on the last leg of our journey out of Essex. Haddon is close to Stilton, to Washingley and Caldecote. I'm convinced that this is how the family name emerged, out of place: William (or Robert) of Haddon. Haddon-man, Hadman.
Before I make the turn, up the slope to where Lucia is buried, I find a nice marker, the grave of a certain Finnegan. James Joyce would have enjoyed that. Lucia might be less happy, the pain of her involvement with Work in Progress, before it became Finnegans Wake, is still active; provoking critical theories about incest, actual or metaphorical.
Alan, unprotected against the rain, stick in hand, arrives at the gate. I guide him to the grave. The red Aberdeen granite stone for the daughter of James Joyce, more years in Northampton than Paris, is stark.
LUCIA ANNA JOYCE. Trieste 1907. Northampton 1982.
She was two years older than Anna's father. She is left here, surrounded by Haddons and other Northamptonshire families, without a cluster of relatives; grounded in a far country, part of an alien history.
As we walk back, sodden, to Alan's house, he broaches a relativist's General Theory of Northampton, loosely based on some late pronouncement by Stephen Hawking. The town, it seems, is a black hole from which only ‘mangled information’ can escape. And that, Alan acknowledges, is his lifelong task: to de-mangle (and interpret) Northampton's cuneiform script. Its codex of madness and possession. Old magick is the new physics.
Lucia, aged seventy-three, frail, gaunt, was visited at St Andrew's by Dominique Maroger, a childhood friend. Maroger was shocked by the appearance of a woman she had not seen for fifty years. Lucia, she reported, was ‘a medicated shadow’.
They took tea. Carol Loeb Shloss, in her biography of Lucia Joyce, tells us that the interior spaces of the hospital, its halls, were ‘the portals to the Heart of Darkness’. ‘The guarded doors, the knitting women, the unspoken horrors.’ There was a lift Lucia feared and hated. St Andrew's was the Marienbad of Middle England; well-connected neurasthenics in formal wear playing bridge. The sedated and the forgotten, in their pre-posthumous limbo, obedient to social rituals. And otherwise consigned to silence.
‘I mangle language,’ whispered Lucia, ‘because I never have anyone to talk to.’
At a fork in the road, we come on a monument, a pillar whose particular history Alan cannot recall. He knows about the witches hanged in the park on the other side of the road, but not this: a plinth of cut stone, a cube, a cannon ball. An inscription: V.R.I. The pillar must, I surmised, mark young Queen Victoria's triumphant procession through Northampton, perhaps the point where she left town.
I remembered Clare's 1841 notebook. ‘The man whose daughter is now the queen of England is sitting on a stone heap on the high way to…’ Highway to somewhere. I couldn't make out the destination. Smudged script was too taxing for my increasingly blurred vision.
John Clare, supposed lunatic, peasant poet, and William Wordsworth, ex-radical, Tory laureate, were both in Northampton to witness the royal progress. They never met.
As I step into the road, to photograph Moore, who is always game, ready to strike a mad-eyed stare, another figure invades the frame. Another stick. It's one of those lovely accidents: two men of the town, absorbed in their own affairs, cross paths. Moore, blinking, eyes shut. The native blindman in the bright yellow jacket (wise precaution), his dark glasses out of Chris Marker's La Jetée. Rogue trajectories intersect for the one and only time. Souls jump, make their bloodless exchange; return to shocked bodies. Clare could have done more with the incident, the accidental transmigration. I come away with a snapshot. This must be what Alan means about ‘mangled information’. It is there but we don't see it. Without an adequate key, a tedious volume of explanation, photographs mean nothing.