vertical stroke of St Benedict's spire, straight road to church, and imaginary dotted line darting from my eye to the restored weathercock.
That private family legend, I believe it now. Anna's father, Geoffrey Hadman, a young man of the village, used the weathercock as a target. Even with a sporting rifle, it's a magnificent shot. (As children, Anna and her brothers were put to target shooting, across a valley in the Lake District. ‘Between one-fifty and two hundred yards,’ she thinks. ‘We were taught to line up the sights, be very still, squeeze gently. We were lying down.’) Geoffrey restedhis gun on the sill of an upstairs window at the Red House, the family farm in Rectory Lane, and made the cock spin. A metal bird shifting in the wind. This is a Lee Harvey Oswald moment in the catalogue of poultry assassination.
There is a wintry monochrome postcard of Rectory Lane, featuring the Red House and St Benedict's spire (as if produced to commemorate the sportsman's triumph). I tried to estimate the distance: several hundred yards down the lane, past another house, over the green, the road, across the churchyard – and then the
tower, spire, weathercock on its spike. Give Mr Hadman the prize. Give him James Stewart's 1873 Winchester from the Anthony Mann western. (The shots that missed, I wondered about those. Spent bullets falling from a great height, where did they land?)
In postcard memory, the single bowed window of the Red House is gleaming, bedroom windows too. A solitary figure stands outside, in pinafore, a maid. Her face is gone, a blotch of grey dots. No name. She stands square to the house, facing the camera, persuaded to come out, in order to give scale to the spire – which rises like a periscope of vanity from the squared church tower. Tenant farmers in Clare's day were the coming class. James Joyce, father of Mary, had Manor Farm, a substantial property on the other, Peakirk sideof the green. The buildings that grew up, post-enclosure, around the heart of the old settlements were built, so Clare wrote (in ‘The Parish’), ‘by those whose clownish taste aspires/ To hate their farms and ape the country squires.’
Village pursuits haven't changed. Ronald Blythe, in Talking about John Clare , lists them: ‘Boys stripping off to jump over a cat gallows. The pleasures of schoolboys climbing the leads of the church to cut their names there. The pleasure of pelting at a weather cock.’ John Clare, like Geoffrey Hadman, honoured local custom. The boys of Helpston tried to throw stones over their weathercock. ‘He who pelted o'er/ was reckoned on a mighty man.’
The linked initials – ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’ – that Clare is supposed to have cut into, variously, ‘the school-room wall’, an arch, a pillar, the frame of a door, have faded into oblivion. As moveable as the grave of Mary Joyce, who died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one, and who was buried in St Benedict's churchyard. The grave, pointed out to visitors by well-meaning church folk, is another Mary, daughter of William Joyce, not James. Not Clare's childhood love. Who is close at hand, under a cherry tree. A premature cremation. She died of burns sustained in a domestic accident.
Those Joyces, their daughters: James and Mary, James and Lucia Anna. Fictional projections and real myths. Names haunt me, asserting a presence when memorial slabs are erased and pillars scratched with a lattice of unreadable marks; when vulgar curiosity leaves us fumbling for any trace of the poet's cold touch.
Will we make it? The four-o'clock deadline. I haven't admitted that there is one, but, privately, I'm a time freak. I want to be there, Anna with me, as the hands of the clock take up their position and the clock face freezes in a cinematic insert. So, without making it too obvious, I step it out, stretch my stride. Glinton has some part of Anna that I don't know. She'd like to live in this territory, so she says, drawn back; a modest period house
That private family legend, I believe it now. Anna's father, Geoffrey Hadman, a young man of the village, used the weathercock as a target. Even with a sporting rifle, it's a magnificent shot. (As children, Anna and her brothers were put to target shooting, across a valley in the Lake District. ‘Between one-fifty and two hundred yards,’ she thinks. ‘We were taught to line up the sights, be very still, squeeze gently. We were lying down.’) Geoffrey restedhis gun on the sill of an upstairs window at the Red House, the family farm in Rectory Lane, and made the cock spin. A metal bird shifting in the wind. This is a Lee Harvey Oswald moment in the catalogue of poultry assassination.
There is a wintry monochrome postcard of Rectory Lane, featuring the Red House and St Benedict's spire (as if produced to commemorate the sportsman's triumph). I tried to estimate the distance: several hundred yards down the lane, past another house, over the green, the road, across the churchyard – and then the
tower, spire, weathercock on its spike. Give Mr Hadman the prize. Give him James Stewart's 1873 Winchester from the Anthony Mann western. (The shots that missed, I wondered about those. Spent bullets falling from a great height, where did they land?)
In postcard memory, the single bowed window of the Red House is gleaming, bedroom windows too. A solitary figure stands outside, in pinafore, a maid. Her face is gone, a blotch of grey dots. No name. She stands square to the house, facing the camera, persuaded to come out, in order to give scale to the spire – which rises like a periscope of vanity from the squared church tower. Tenant farmers in Clare's day were the coming class. James Joyce, father of Mary, had Manor Farm, a substantial property on the other, Peakirk sideof the green. The buildings that grew up, post-enclosure, around the heart of the old settlements were built, so Clare wrote (in ‘The Parish’), ‘by those whose clownish taste aspires/ To hate their farms and ape the country squires.’
Village pursuits haven't changed. Ronald Blythe, in Talking about John Clare , lists them: ‘Boys stripping off to jump over a cat gallows. The pleasures of schoolboys climbing the leads of the church to cut their names there. The pleasure of pelting at a weather cock.’ John Clare, like Geoffrey Hadman, honoured local custom. The boys of Helpston tried to throw stones over their weathercock. ‘He who pelted o'er/ was reckoned on a mighty man.’
The linked initials – ‘J.C. 1808 Mary’ – that Clare is supposed to have cut into, variously, ‘the school-room wall’, an arch, a pillar, the frame of a door, have faded into oblivion. As moveable as the grave of Mary Joyce, who died, unmarried, at the age of forty-one, and who was buried in St Benedict's churchyard. The grave, pointed out to visitors by well-meaning church folk, is another Mary, daughter of William Joyce, not James. Not Clare's childhood love. Who is close at hand, under a cherry tree. A premature cremation. She died of burns sustained in a domestic accident.
Those Joyces, their daughters: James and Mary, James and Lucia Anna. Fictional projections and real myths. Names haunt me, asserting a presence when memorial slabs are erased and pillars scratched with a lattice of unreadable marks; when vulgar curiosity leaves us fumbling for any trace of the poet's cold touch.
Will we make it? The four-o'clock deadline. I haven't admitted that there is one, but, privately, I'm a time freak. I want to be there, Anna with me, as the hands of the clock take up their position and the clock face freezes in a cinematic insert. So, without making it too obvious, I step it out, stretch my stride. Glinton has some part of Anna that I don't know. She'd like to live in this territory, so she says, drawn back; a modest period house
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