Read Online Edge of the Orison by Iain Sinclair - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Iain Sinclair
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quotation from Shakespeare. Chosen, so we assume, by Geoffrey Hadman, a once-a-year C of E man, dubious of the small print: so get what you can out of this life, every last drop, then invoice for everlasting bliss. A proposition vigorously contradicted by this landscape. Wages in hand, dues paid. No white mansions (like the Brighton seafront), no reserved clouds. Which play?
The golden lads and girls who come to dust. Anna gets it: Cymbeline . An unexpected retrieval. On her journeys to school, an hour's ride across town, Anna was instructed by her father to crunch her way through Shakespeare – which, obediently, even though it gave her a pounding headache and left her queasy, she did: a brown book with minuscule print. This ten-year-old girl, pale, rather grave, travelling across Blackpool, from Poulton-le-Fylde to Lytham St Anne's. (When I went to Blackpool, once, with my parents, it was an outing: the Pleasure Beach, sideshows, candy floss, waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen with their cup-winners' medals.)
Fear no more the heat o'th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Legend has it that when Tennyson died, a copy of Cymbeline dropped from his lifeless hand. There was a spine-tingling moment at the memorial service of a later laureate, Ted Hughes, on 13 May 1999, in Westminster Abbey. A pre-recorded message. ‘Ted's rich, quiet voice,’ as Elaine Feinstein reports, spoke the first lines of the ‘Song’ from Cymbeline . A passage which includes the words on William Hadman's grave, sentiments respected by men who work the land.
The plot of Cymbeline is impossible to summarise: multiple identities, runaway daughters, ‘clownish’ sons, Cambrian caves, the dead returning to life. The Oxford Companion to English Literature has a brave stab at it:
Under the name Fidele Imogen becomes a page to Bellarius and the two lost sons of Cymbeline, Guiderius and Aviragus, living in a cave in Wales. Fidele sickens and is found as dead by the brothers, who speak the dirge ‘Fear no more the heat o'th' sun’. Left alone she revives, only to discover at her side the headless corpse of Cloten which she believes, because of his borrowed garments, to be that of her husband Posthumus. A Roman army invades…
It probably plays better than it reads. Brothers lamenting an apparently dead girl, Welsh weather: waiting on an invading army. Some bright spark will set a revival in Afghanistan (clever use of monitor screens).
Florence Hadman (née Rose) was too ill to attend the funeral. She watched the procession from the bowed window of the Red House, but she never recovered her strength and died within sevenmonths of her husband. There were substantial obituaries for William in several of the local papers, with smaller notices for Florence, commending her for rearing turkeys and taking prizes for her butter at the Peterborough Summer Show.
Anna spent an hour in Glinton before we arrived, enough time to weed the family plot, to plant salvias in the gravel (they failed). There was an additional plaque for her father and mother, though their ashes had been scattered in the north, Thornton (she thought) and Ullswater. With a second plaque for her father's sister, Mary, whose urn – when the stone, with some difficulty, had been taken up – was placed at the foot of the grave. This day, 20 July, was her father's birthday.
Next, Anna tried the pub – in case we had sneaked in while she was labouring. Renchi's wife, Vanessa, was also expected: she had a Glinton aunt. All the bloodlines of our story were converging on this village. The Blue Bell, astonishingly, was open. It was almost four o'clock. Anna walked towards the Helpston road, past the Titmans' butcher shop. (The graveyard was packed with legible Titmans.) Figures were advancing, from the Helpston haze, at a gallop; she recognised
The golden lads and girls who come to dust. Anna gets it: Cymbeline . An unexpected retrieval. On her journeys to school, an hour's ride across town, Anna was instructed by her father to crunch her way through Shakespeare – which, obediently, even though it gave her a pounding headache and left her queasy, she did: a brown book with minuscule print. This ten-year-old girl, pale, rather grave, travelling across Blackpool, from Poulton-le-Fylde to Lytham St Anne's. (When I went to Blackpool, once, with my parents, it was an outing: the Pleasure Beach, sideshows, candy floss, waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen with their cup-winners' medals.)
Fear no more the heat o'th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Legend has it that when Tennyson died, a copy of Cymbeline dropped from his lifeless hand. There was a spine-tingling moment at the memorial service of a later laureate, Ted Hughes, on 13 May 1999, in Westminster Abbey. A pre-recorded message. ‘Ted's rich, quiet voice,’ as Elaine Feinstein reports, spoke the first lines of the ‘Song’ from Cymbeline . A passage which includes the words on William Hadman's grave, sentiments respected by men who work the land.
The plot of Cymbeline is impossible to summarise: multiple identities, runaway daughters, ‘clownish’ sons, Cambrian caves, the dead returning to life. The Oxford Companion to English Literature has a brave stab at it:
Under the name Fidele Imogen becomes a page to Bellarius and the two lost sons of Cymbeline, Guiderius and Aviragus, living in a cave in Wales. Fidele sickens and is found as dead by the brothers, who speak the dirge ‘Fear no more the heat o'th' sun’. Left alone she revives, only to discover at her side the headless corpse of Cloten which she believes, because of his borrowed garments, to be that of her husband Posthumus. A Roman army invades…
It probably plays better than it reads. Brothers lamenting an apparently dead girl, Welsh weather: waiting on an invading army. Some bright spark will set a revival in Afghanistan (clever use of monitor screens).
Florence Hadman (née Rose) was too ill to attend the funeral. She watched the procession from the bowed window of the Red House, but she never recovered her strength and died within sevenmonths of her husband. There were substantial obituaries for William in several of the local papers, with smaller notices for Florence, commending her for rearing turkeys and taking prizes for her butter at the Peterborough Summer Show.
Anna spent an hour in Glinton before we arrived, enough time to weed the family plot, to plant salvias in the gravel (they failed). There was an additional plaque for her father and mother, though their ashes had been scattered in the north, Thornton (she thought) and Ullswater. With a second plaque for her father's sister, Mary, whose urn – when the stone, with some difficulty, had been taken up – was placed at the foot of the grave. This day, 20 July, was her father's birthday.
Next, Anna tried the pub – in case we had sneaked in while she was labouring. Renchi's wife, Vanessa, was also expected: she had a Glinton aunt. All the bloodlines of our story were converging on this village. The Blue Bell, astonishingly, was open. It was almost four o'clock. Anna walked towards the Helpston road, past the Titmans' butcher shop. (The graveyard was packed with legible Titmans.) Figures were advancing, from the Helpston haze, at a gallop; she recognised
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