Edge of the Orison (34 page)

We drive. There is nobody at home; deserted Church Street, deserted village green: nowhere to park on either of them. The populace, if it exists, is indoors, keeping its communal head down. Afternoon television in empty rooms. A Northborough farm cart, deranged walker, a bit of a domestic: that would be a headline event in contemporary Werrington. A cat crossing the road would make the front page.

It's early afternoon, never a good time for Anna, she knows how it will be: locked church, knocking on impervious doors, phone numbers of discontinued agencies. Clare's pub, the Beehive, is not to be found (it was never here). Trade directories from the period list the Cock, the Blue Bell and the Wheat Sheaf. The nearest Beehive, according to Eric Robinson, was at Stamford. The Cock and the Blue Bell have survived; in the course of our Werrington labours we tried them both.

We march on the church, our obvious starting point, Anna on one side of the road, myself on the other. I photograph the pub,
the village sign, and a thatched cottage: complete with visible quotation marks. Whenever I notice a whitewashed (mouth-washed, deloused) property, blinking at the twenty-first century, I feel obliged to snap back. Werrington is post-ironic, freeze-dried, brittle with anxiety. Rightly suspicious of intruders, fabricators of false memory. With the disappearance of the Beehive, there is no reason for thesis writers, Clare brokers, to step out of their cars.

The road is the road. It used to go somewhere, now it's a self-referential loop, a circuit that is reluctant to let a potential client (toll-payer) get away. Settlements are unsettling. Rate-payers are busy with this new, electronic hobby: inventing ancestors, shaking the family tree. The great genealogical game show. We suffer from a compulsion to apologise for the present malaise, the mess we've made of things. (Just as they did, our fathers, in their own way.)

I'm ahead of Anna, when I walk through the gate at the west end of the Parish Church of St John the Baptist (with Emmanuel). I see the stone, it had to be there; I wait. Anna should go first. We've crossed an invisible line and made contact with a previously unknown Hadman. Mary Annabel Rose has returned to roots she never knew she had. To Werrington.

On the left, inside the gate, is a large, grey-white stone which has been split in half. The memorial to Anna's great-grandfather, Robert; father of William Hadman of the Red House. The damage to the stone, recent vandalism, runs right through Robert's name. The rubric patches together the family dead, as and when they became available.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF LOUISA MARIA, THE BELOVED WIFE OF ROBERT HADMAN WHO FELL ASLEEP OCTR. 19TH 1907

AGED 68 YEARS
+
SO HE GIVETH HIS BELOVED SLEEP
ALSO OF ROBERT HADMAN DIED SEPTR 21ST 1924 AGED 87 YEARS
–
AT REST

From nowhere, Anna has acquired a great-grandfather with her junior brother's name. The senior brother, William, acknowledges the Glinton farmer. This vandalised Robert opens a new chapter. He must have visited Glinton? His son had been living there for fifteen years when the old man died. Anna's father was born the year that William bought the Red House, 1909. But Anna says he never mentioned Robert, his Werrington grandfather, or any other Peterborough-fringe relatives. The only Glinton event she remembers him talking about was a row with his father, over his reluctance, as an Oxford undergraduate, to help with the harvest. He was pushing socially, she reckons, moving up (in the fashion Clare decries). Geoffrey was the first member of the family to make it to university, to escape. And in some style. (That was her assumption. The farm life, she knew, was a hard one.)

Keeping Robert and Louisa company are more fading Hadmans. Henry who died in 1893. George. Alice Machin (daughter of Robert). Her sister, May Wright. Then, after I try the church door, another Robert. A favoured position beside the path. Anna's great-great-grandfather? Born 1808. Died 1863. Married to Rebecca. A second churchwarden in the family?

The vicar, I notice, has a house at the far end of the village, a safe distance from importunate brass-rubbers and drive-by genealogists. We'll try him. The signs aren't promising. St John the Baptist at Werrington has opted to go with the spirit of John Prescott's M11 corridor: the off-highway city that will stretch from London to
Stansted, Cambridge to Peterborough. Satellite estates. Service stations selling everything you don't need. Car-boot sales twinned with collectors' fairs. Motels that specialise in American breakfasts for jacketless reps. Churches have to find a marketable pitch or shut up shop: peddle historic properties to downsizing urbanites with a taste for the bizarre.

‘The Alpha Course – an opportunity to explore the meaning of life,’ whispers a church notice. ‘Can you Handle the National Marriage Week 10 minute challenge?’

The burial grounds of St John's are composted with ex-Hadmans; Hadmans and Stimsons, side by side, contiguous in death. The family of Anna's father cohabiting with the relatives of John Clare's mother. Anna is beginning to feel weighed down with names, dates, biographies teased from the ground. Werrington has been made into an island, cut off by Peterborough ring roads; a motorway circuit between Fenland and the softer country where Ann Stimson's father looked after the Castor flocks.

The padre, disturbed at his afternoon leisure, can't understand why anyone would want to see inside a church when no performance is taking place. ‘My wife's family,’ I mutter. ‘They come from here. Generations planted in your graveyard.’

He walks with us, down the village street, past the Blue Bell; a Canadian, slightly poached around the edges. We are let in at the side door. Church and office are indistinguishable: carpeted, rigged for video projection. ‘It's a crying shame about these things,’ the vicar remarks (of the Norman pillars with their zigzag patterning). ‘They sure spoil the throw.’ He meant the lightbeam that magnified his preaching self on to an elevated silver screen.

‘The church is not buildings but people,’ he explains (in the parish magazine). ‘Jesus Christ. Here we can come to know him personally.’ The vicar's editorial goes on to regret the fact that Our Lord wasn't able to make a personal appearance this season, due to prior commitments; he reassures parishioners (clients) that the next instalment of Hollywood's Tolkien saga, released in time for Christmas, under the title
The Return of the King
, is a portent. To
the initiated, movie trailers are subliminal prompts. Other items flagged on the magazine's cover include: ‘Coping with Cancer, Energised by the Lord’ and ‘Recycling a Goat and Saving the World’.

We realise, very quickly, that messing about with old bones is ill-advised and probably perverse. The church of St John has been around since the twelfth century. It is inconvenient for present needs (inadequate parking facilities); it might have to be relocated to a custom-built municipal hall. Werrington, one of five manors in the parish of Paston, dates its settlement to 1013, when the manor was held by, and worked for, the benefit of Peterborough Abbey.

The current operation is slick and persuasive: ‘all sermons are recorded and kept in the Parish Office’. But it doesn't come cheap. ‘All members of the church have the privilege and responsibility of enabling the financial costs of the church's work to be met through the giving of money.’ One tenth of income is suggested as ‘a good guide’. By Banker's Order: ‘monthly payments’. Or Stewardship Envelopes: ‘each week in offering basket’.

Other churches in the Peterborough outwash are sullen, silent, ashamed of their neglect, preoccupied with petty arguments over flower arranging. Energetic course leaders (such as our Werrington friend) organise their parishes like pyramid salesmen: worshippers become ‘one of the family’, under the umbrella of a great corporation. Actual families of farmers, butchers and bakers are redundant. The village Clare reached, four miles out of Peterborough, was a thin line of cottages, two or three pubs. The present church serves an ever-expanding network of housing estates; it has adapted accordingly.

We have to look elsewhere for news of Anna's relatives: starting with the Parish Office in Twelvetrees Avenue. Here is new Werrington, wide roads branching into generic estates; a civic block with parking bays and security doors. Local history is on file, on-line. The relevant official, Mrs Val Watkinson, gives us the name of a woman who might be able to help. This lady has made it her business to gather up friable newspapers, parish records, census
listings: to put flesh on the bones of graveyard names. She lives down the lane from the church. A phone call is made. The amateur genealogist, overwhelmed by many such requests, is prepared to see us. The Werrington Hadmans? They are in the files, certainly. If she can dig them out.

Very soon, in an L-shaped bungalow, across a hospitable table, tea and biscuits, we are looking into the eyes of dead Hadmans. The paterfamilias with his coven of daughters, women you would be foolish to cross. The grand lady who wouldn't ride on a butcher's cart. A church choir. A wedding party. The story comes in fits and starts: a farm here, a property there, a pair of sisters marrying brothers. Prosperity for some, ruin for others.

The local historian, Mrs Judith Bunten, heard of a cache of glass negatives, about to be scrapped. She rescued them, had prints made. The archive of a village photographer became the basis for a book:
Werrington through the Ages
. Numerous Hadmans were on record. The family had been embedded here, Werrington and Paston, for centuries. The Robert Hadman (1808–1863) who married Rebecca was indeed the father of the Robert (1835–1924) of the split memorial stone. The one who married Louisa Maria Devonshire (1839–1907). Father of William Hadman of the Red House.

‘I'm hung about with them now,’ Anna said. ‘They're waiting, waiting – watching.’ It was too sudden, this stampede of Werrington ghosts. Lifeless faces pressing against the window. Familiar names worn by unfamiliar people. Great-grandfather Robert's older brother, Henry, what became of him? And Robert's children: Robert Henry, William (who married Florence Rose), Edith Caroline (who married George Tyler) ? And: George, May, Alice, Percy, Alfred?

We'd seen a plaque for George and Caroline Tyler in the church: ‘In Loving Memory of George Henry Tyler. 12 September 1871–14 March 1946, church warden for many years, and Caroline his wife, Dec 1 1874–July 30 1962. The Lord shall give thee rest.’ Anna remembered, as a child, when she was staying in Glinton, talk of this considerable personage, Aunt Car. She'd married well.
The Tylers were prominent butchers. Tyler was in partnership with Twelvetree, the man who became a street in new Werrington.

Photographs are easier than parish records. Photographs are always contemporary, our brazen gaze hazarding a gulf in time and culture. Thinking we can know these lives by noticing stiff poses, arrangements of hair, brave outfits exposed to brass-mounted cameras. We survey lost streets, in the belief that the dead will move again. Here is Tyler's cart; in which Caroline was too ladylike to ride (unlike Patty Clare, who came to Werrington in search of her vagrant husband). Fire engines. Primitive airfields. Those images caught my fancy as I riffled through Mrs Bunten's book. It seems there was a long-established tradition, around Peterborough, in the villages, of flying.

In 1920, Tom Stimson flew from a field near Marholm Wood. Werrington had its own aerodrome, a disused barn. Geoffrey Had-man's exploits in the Auster were true to a custom of freelance flight that ran all the way back to the shamanic schools of Stamford, the gobblers of dream-inducing mushrooms. Old planes looked like agricultural machinery expecting a favourable wind, a gale. Men in caps stood around primitive sheds, waiting for farmland to be converted into parks for premature-retaliation American bombers.

October 1911: an aeroplane, canvas and wire, circled Peterborough for the first time. Early flight is a record of spectacular accidents. Mr Ewen, sportingly avoiding large trees near Werrington, ‘failed to land on skids’ and ploughed into the earth; the heavy engine burying itself like one of the Ramsey stones. Boys of the village inspected the carnage. As did the photographer. Farmers looked for ways to turn land, heavy and wet, into cash: a slaughterhouse, a bakery, a battery farm, an aerodrome. One of the Hadmans, with a strip of useless ground, ‘lying on the side of a good road’, attempted (May 1872) to peddle: ‘Four acres of TARES, an excellent crop.’ Tares are featured in the Old Testament as ‘a noxious weed’, probably darnel. Grass with flat leaves and terminal spikes. Fodder a starving mule wouldn't touch.

In such a field, 25 June 1920, there was a passenger flight from
Werrington. The pilot, Donald Hastings Sadler (twenty-one), said ‘Cheerio’ to his mechanics and saluted a small group of onlookers. At 2,000 feet, ‘wings dropped away from the fuselage’, his machine plummeted. The pilot, who bailed out, smashed into the ground at Cock Inn corner.

Mrs Bunten's archives, her memories, rescue Werrington from its present malaise: sleepwalkers in the trance of motorway England. Robert Hadman and his brother Henry lived in Hall Lane, across the road from the village's grandest property: Werrington Hall, home of the Everards. The brothers were listed on census forms as ‘cottagers’, a kind of rural middle-class between tenant farmers like the Joyces (Websters, Vergettes) and peasants like the Clares. (Patty Clare's father, William Turner, was a cottager. He employed labourers to help with his land.) Cottagers kept a few animals and worked a strip or two of field, acquired at the time of enclosures. Despite outward appearances, village society never stood still: the energetic adapted and thrived, while steady labourers, waiting for seasonal employment, felt the bite of the times. The smarter children moved on, following the railways or the potentialities of industrial towns.

Henry Hadman, between 1860 and 1870, was empowered to keep a ‘sparrow book’. Boys of the village were paid a few pence for every dead sparrow they brought to Henry's door. And he, in neat hand, would enter the details of the kill, the money dispersed, in his ledger.