Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

It was reported, in a letter from James Spedding, that Tennyson (who spent a fortnight with Allen) was ‘delighted with the mad people’. They represented, the poet felt, the only civilised company to be had in the forest. William Addison is convinced that Tennyson met one of Allen’s most celebrated patients. This unfortunate had been boarded in High Beach at the expense of his friends. A country lyricist who had been the sensation of the last season. A Fenland yokel lionised by London society: John Clare, Peasant Poet, naturalist. Yesterday’s man.

London drew Clare and hurt him. He remembered the funeral procession of Lord Byron, playhouses with ‘morts of tumbling’. He saw what Cockney fools failed to recognise, the living ghosts of Chancery Lane. He stayed late, and silent, at every function to which he was brought; so that he might delay the solitary walk back to his lodgings. In Northampton Asylum, he would become an emanation of Byron. As Don Juan, he ventriloquised a posthumous voice — by an act of occult possession (as Blake revised the ‘errors’ of Milton).

Clare imagined, so the doctors said, that he was being punished, imprisoned for bigamy — for a first spiritual marriage, unconfirmed by civil ceremony. His phantom bride already buried in Glinton churchyard, Clare did what any sane man would do, he took off on his epic ‘Journey Out of Essex’. Three and a half days walking back to Northborough (in Northants). Gnawing grass torn up from the roadside, chewing tobacco. Without drink. Apart from a pint bought with coins thrown to him by migrant farm labourers. ‘Foot foundered and broken down’, he completed his hallucinatory voyage. Without maps or money, Clare fixed his bearings by sleeping with his head pointing to the north.

We calculated that this journey, which we were determined to repeat, was around 120 miles. Or the distance of the M25 if it were stretched out into a straight line. Fugue as exorcism: Clare’s walk successfully performed the ritual we were toying with. He’d been in the forest long enough to understand the peculiarity of its status as a memorial to a featureless and unreachable past, a living stormbreak at the limit of urban projection.

When Clare, reunited with his corporeal wife, came to write up the journal of his escape, he gave it the correct title: ‘Journey Out of Essex’. An expulsion. A rejection. The last of London and ambition. The last of healing and mending; digging, crow-scaring, rambling. The acceptance of the dream, the multiple world. His prose is excited, incantatory, essential. He has to rewalk that road in a seizure. He has to remember to remember; to call up details before they fade. The pains. The errors. Extra miles tramped on miscalculation. There is no better, no more implicated account of the necessity of walking. Clare’s motivation was so much more powerful than our own. The Great North Road was still a route down which everything and everyone travelled; coaches, gypsies, farmers, the military, masterless workmen. The M25 goes nowhere; it’s self-referential, postmodern, ironic. Modestly corrupt. It won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over. (Like the airfields of Middle England, the dormitory villages, the concrete bunkers in corn fields, the nuclear shelters disguised as farmhouses.)

Clare’s walk was an act of love. But the version he gave the world was already at one remove, a condemned cell confession. A forged diary rapidly assembled to rationalise an ecstatic episode. It went wrong so quickly, his return. Disgruntled wife, too many children. A cold cottage in an alien village. He had seen the enclosures. He had been wandering in the fields when men came to carry out their survey for the railway company. The landscape didn’t know him. He would be removed to spend the rest of his life in Northampton Asylum.

He spurned newspaper ‘blarney’, false obituaries. He had seen his Mary ‘alive and well and as young as ever’. But his walk, undertaken in the spirit of Werner Herzog’s tramp from Munich to Paris (to rescue a friend from cancer), had failed: he confirmed his love’s death, filled her mouth with earth. He brought himself back to reality: ‘homeless at home and half gratified to feel that I can be happy any where’.

The story told in a few scribbled pages. An epitaph. Before they took him away. The diary finishes with quotation marks, opened but unclosed.

‘and how can I forget

No period. Nothing lachrymose. No pokerwork homily over the fireplace. A technical demand. The point of any journey, any life: how can I forget?

‘Foot foundered and broken down.’ Moose Jackson, hobbling and groaning through the outskirts of Waltham Abbey, was paying a very direct homage to Clare. ‘I then entered a town and some of the chamber windows had candle lights shining in them — I felt so weak here that I forced to sit down on the ground to rest myself.’

It didn’t come to that, not quite, but the road was much further than it looked from the hill. The illuminated tower of the abbey church, appearing over the roofs, kept us going. I walked with Kevin. He was almost done; he understood that it would be more painful to stop than to carry on. There was only one stop left in him.

Church and grounds are painted with searchlight beams. Renchi, at long last, pilgrimage completed, finds an unlocked door. We have to witness the astrological ceiling, the wall-painting in the side chapel (a fifteenth-century Doom mural). Unseen, it predicted our journey. In darkness, we set out. And in darkness we returned.

The side chapel belonged to the townspeople, not the monks. The Doom painting, this M25 Day of Judgement, was a premature motorway dream: a traffic-directing God, angels blowing down upraised traffic cones. Heaven and Hell. The godly, the ratepayers, led by a bishop into the church, while a mob of naked revellers plunge into Hell’s mouth (otherwise known as Purfleet). Demons lurk on Rainham Marshes in the form of saw-toothed river creatures who have managed to crawl ashore. The ‘London Orbital’ is a medieval nightmare.

We expected to find Kevin where we left him, hooked over Harold’s stone, sobbing. His hair — which turned grey in the course of the walk from Theydon Bois — was slicked into a dripping caul. He was like something lifted from the Doom painting. The flying jacket, launched with such confidence in Staines, now justified its combat status. A wrinkled body bag. There was a black plinth in the burial ground: NIGHT NIGHT TOM. But Kevin had vanished. Evaporated. Slipped away into the darkness.

We try the pub, the Welsh Harp. Double brandies are lined up on the bar. Better not to look at Kevin’s feet. I pull out the plasters, a needle to pop blisters; Renchi provides the red socks. Lodged at a table, drinks coming at regular intervals, on a nod to the publican, Kevin is returned to life. A story is a story. How long does it take before actuality, blood and pain, is safely registered as memory? Before it is written up.

The Welsh Harp is another hinge. The M25 trance is over, I have to begin a new memory project, a novel set in Wales. Here’s to Walter Savage Landor, David Jones, the Vaughan Twins. It’s very companionable in the old pub. Another round, a cigar. Colour returning to Kevin’s bloodless fingers as they grip the glass.

We leave him where he is. As far as I know, he’s there still. He’s probably taken out membership at the Waltham Abbey library. Signed up for night classes in runic prophecy and Pataphysics. He’ll never make it across the market square to the mini-cab office. And they haven’t got any available cabs. He’s come to the end of the line, a Captain Bones exile in the ‘Admiral Benbow’. (‘This is a handy cove,’ says he, at length; ‘and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?’)