cleaning and restoration, it was found to be short of a few feathers, holed and peppered by some undiscovered assailant. The Peterborough Standard attributed thisoutrage 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, atestosterone 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:
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, atestosterone 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:
Similar Books
