our walk's conclusion, then we creak to our feet. There's a lovely passage towards Glinton spire, a post-enclosure road that wasn't there in the days of Clare's schooling. The old track meandered through the fields towards Etton. Nothing is resolved and not much has been learnt. The four-day walk, pushing us hard, has been one of the best. With luck, Anna will be waiting with the car. Otherwise, we'll have to carry on to Crowland, Boston. The wind at your back, there is nothing to stop you, this side of the North Sea.
Glinton Spire
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 Houseestate, 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
Glinton Spire
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 Houseestate, 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
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