All levelled like a desert
David Lovibond is filled with sadness as he visits the wrecked landscapes that inspired a poet who loved old England and hated rich developers
Inelosure like a Bonaparte let not a thing remain, It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill And hung the moles for traitors — though the brook is running still, It runs a naked brook, cold and chill.
John Clare (1793-1864) 1\4 ore than any other English poet, John Clare's sense of himself depended on an unchanging countryside and on the familiar cus toms that belonged there. Enclosure, in all its hard-headed re-ordering, disregarded the intimate connection between people and place. It outraged Clare's conservative countryman's instincts and grieved him to the point of madness.
Going back through the flat agribusiness prairies that now surround Clare's home village of Helpston in Northamptonshire, it is hard to see any least thing capable of attracting affection, or whose loss would excite a moment's regret. Here and there scraps of hawthorn quickset survive of the hated enclosure hedges, and superficially the removal of this 19th-century clutter might appear to have reinstated Clare's beloved open fields. But there is no life here: no meadows full of wildflowers, no 'misty green sallows' or 'crimping' ferns, no wild cats in the woods, no hares 'shirtingin the corn or yellow wagtails nesting 'in a quiet nook'. Across the stretching distances church spires still push up through the earth like bodkins. but everywhere between, giant pylons march like mastodons over an empty land. No room here, in the seamless monoculture, for Plough Days or botanising or 'kidding furze on the heath' or games of leapfrog among the `thymey molehills'. In Helpston, the families that Clare knew, who had lived in the village for centuries, have almost all long gone — following the railways for work, or into the factories. Any that survive will typically live in the post-war semis strung out in grey ribbons at the edge of the village. The old heart of Helpston, including the thatched low huts of the farm labourers', is of beautifully pale Barnack ragstone and it has experienced the sort of seriously expensive gentrification that only arrivistes can afford. Clare's cottage was one of a terrace of five, 'the old house stooped
just like a cave'; this is now a single property beyond the wages of 50 farm labourers. Nearby, the once ramshackle Bachelors' Hall, the poet's favoured drinking den, has the scrubbed face of respectable retirement.
Clare's writings (there are about 3,500 poems alone) are full of lamentation for what is lost. Enclosure meant the felling of trees, the stopping-up of streams, the end of villagers' freedoms and commoners' rights, and the infringement of the historic right to roam: 'Each little tyrant with his little sign/ Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine./ On paths to freedom and to childhood dear/ A board sticks up to notice "no road here".' To Clare's mind, the culprits were the 'new men' flush with new money, selfish 'improvers' who cared nothing for social justice or the sufferings of the poor. But Clare was no leveller: however indignant he felt at the tyranny of landlords and the 'accursed wealth' of the spoilers, he was equally distrustful of Captain Swingstyle revolutionary violence and 'self-interested' reformers. He yearned, with William Cobbett, for the golden age of an imagined past when a paternal nobility respected local traditions, and as a patriotic countryman he was that most paradoxical of political animals, the conservative radical.
This apparent contradiction finds a modern echo in the mostly Conservative memberships of bodies such as the National Trust, English Heritage and town preservation societies, who often find themselves in opposition to profoundly capitalist housebuilders and developers. It is a conundrum for me too. Here I am, a nationalist Tory whose convictions arise from a rural England of old associations and local attachment, knowing that the foulest enemies of all that gives the countryside its power and its meaning are also Conservatives. These Brian Aldridges are Tories out of narrow calculation, farmers who regard the countryside merely as a business opportunity to be exploited, who obstruct the footpaths, drain the water meadows and rip out the hedgerows as just so many impediments to their 20-furrow ploughs. Surely these barbarians cannot be true Tories, or, in my nostalgic musings, perhaps I am not? At the risk of hubris. I think Clare shared the same confusion. 'He spoke for the forgotten and the neglected, and saw himself as embattled against those who regarded themselves as exercising their rights in the countryside,' says John Lucas, professor emeritus of English at Nottingham University. 'But he hates the canting word freedom, as he sees it as the freedom to abuse others' rights. Clare was patriotic but bewildered — as many are who wonder where their next political certainty is coming from.'
Despite outselling Keats in the 1820s, Clare had the briefest of heydays and lapsed into obscurity for over 100 years (failing to follow the Romantics into an early grave was clearly not the best career move). He re-emerged with the beginning of the environmental movement in the 1960s, the poetry of 'The Midsummer Cushion' chiming presciently with hardening anger at the depredations and profiteering of modern farming:
Here was commons for their hills, where they seek for freedom still Though every common's gone and though traps are set to kill When I think of old Sneap Green, Puddoek's Nook and Hilly Snow AIL levelled like a desert by the never weary plough All vanished like the sun where that cloud is passing now.
Ramblers endlessly battling over rights of way find a particular resonance in Clare, and it is fitting somehow that even in Helpston, where a degree of diffidence among landowners might be expected, Peter Moyse of the John Clare Society says, 'Local farmers are ploughing up the footpaths that Clare walked, and challenging people who try and use them.'
Distress at the disappearance of fondly remembered places and intractable money worries propelled Clare into a depression that would lead to the lunatic asylum. In the 1830s, in an attempt to ease his difficulties, Clare's patrons provided him with a large cottage and land in Northborough, three miles from Helpston. This is proper fen country, 'treeless fens of many miles', bleak and exposed enough today, but to Clare it was a hostile and alien land full of 'vague unpersonifying things'. Northborough is an unrelievedly dreary dorp straggling along a busy road, and Clare's cow-land has gone for a garden centre and a crop of bungalows. The stone cottage where Clare glowered his way to lunacy has acquired picture windows and a front lawn decorated with giant urns and replica street furniture. In 1837 Clare was taken from his new cottage to a private asylum in Essex. Four years later, disgusted at the 'dirty sights' he witnessed and with nothing to eat but grass, he walked the hundred miles back to the 'homeless at home' that was Northborough. 'It was one of the great treks,' says Peter Moyse, who has retraced Clare's route, 'but 90 per cent of it has gone now, under motorway or concrete.'
John Clare died in 1864, oblivious to a world he could no longer have cared for.
I am — yet what I am none cares or knows. . . I am the self-consumer of my woes.
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