A visit to a poet's grave

I'd put it off for too long. After reading Jonathan Bate's excellent biography of the poet John Clare, I had determined to go to Helpston and see for myself the final resting place of the man they had called the 'Peasant Poet'. One fine spring day, I finally made it.

'A Poet Is Born Not Made' is the inscription on one side of Clare's distinctive gravestone. Sadly for John, when he was born the world was already turning into a place so unsuited to his talents and temperament that it eventually drove him into the confines of a lunatic asylum for most of his adult life.

John Clare was born in 1793 in Helpston (then 'Helpstone') in the county of Northamptonshire. The borders of the shires have altered since that time and the village now nestles just inside Cambridgeshire, a few miles from Stamford. He was born into poverty but lived a happy childhood life with his parents and siblings. His love for nature compelled him to write about it almost obsessively, and eventually his poems were discovered and promoted by an influential Stamford publisher with contacts in London. Clare became famous almost overnight, rather in the way that his great idol Lord Byron had a few years before.

Clare met and mixed briefly with the literary lions of London. But he remained a country lad at heart, and his loyalties and responsibilities to his roots held him back when others might have gone forward. Never a man of robust health, the conflicts and tensions of his situation virtually broke him. Instead of a happy and successful life, John Clare found only physical hardship and mental anguish.

When Clare died in 1864, a thoughtful patron saved the poet from being buried in a pauper's grave in Northampton Asylum. The body was brought back to Helpston, where it was buried in the village churchyard alongside the grave of his parents. The suffering was over.

John Clare and his work is now being appreciated more than at any time in the past. The proprietor of the public house next to the church told me that tourists from all over the world, including Japan, come into his establishment and ask about this ill-fated but much admired genius.

I decided to take lunch in that most hospitable and unpretentious of pubs. The landlord led me into the long room which was now the dining area but was once the very room where John's coffin was laid out on the night previous to his burial. A more restful and peaceful atmosphere I could not have wished to come across. As I visited the church a little while later and read the inscriptions both on Clare's grave and that of his parents, it became clear to me that at least the poet had had one stroke of good fortune, albeit at the end of his life. He had come back home.

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes-

They rise and vanish in oblivion's host

(John Clare, LINES: "I AM")

Statue of an enigma

In the Castle Gardens, Leicester, stands a wonderful statue of Richard III. The commission was carried out by James Butler, RA, and was erected in 1980. Repeatedly vandalised in the early days, it was transferred from its initial site to a less exposed part of the Gardens. This turned out to be an inspired move, for the interference ceased. From the new location, only yards away from Bow Bridge, it now directly overlooks the very route on which Richard led out his army westwards from the city on the morning of August 21, 1485, to locate and do battle the following day with the usurping forces of Henry Tudor.

This striking piece of work encapsulates so much of the drama and desperation associated with Richard III. It depicts the king on the verge of defeat, his clothes torn from his unprotected arms as he stands with his dagger gripped in one hand and his battle crown raised in the other. The face, a picture of searing anguish, searches to the heavens in this final moment of regal defiance.

There is no hint of deformity in this sculpture. Nor is there any evidence of Shakespeare's 'bottled spider'; no 'ugly and unnatural aspect' to furnish it. Those who wish to see such time-honoured peculiarities must look elsewhere. Here is the portrayal of a man with strong, regular features; here stands the warrior king, courageous to the last in his spirited defence of the realm. It might be argued this is how Richard himself would have hoped to have been remembered by the world at large. We know, these many years after his brutal death at Bosworth Field, that such a hope has not been fulfilled.

Shakespeare's play, Richard III, is the riveting masterpiece that brought the poet popular acclaim. Alas for Richard, it almost certainly cast its subject into eternal damnation. Posterity had been served up the epitomical arch-villain and it wasn't going to let it go. The great actors of succeeding generations faithfully rallied to the Shakespearean cause, right through to the 20th century when Laurence Olivier's stupefying interpretation gave the world the definitive article.

It is faintly ironic - some would say fitting - that the Leicester statue not only oversees Richard's path out of the city to battle, but also his awful and ignominious return in death and defeat. Perhaps in the irony we can see a kind of balance of the noble and ignoble aspects of this enigma. Perhaps, if we look hard enough at the statue and have the inclination on the day, we might even sense something of the heart-rending nature of the human condition.

Pic: (c) P Taylor

The Pub Quiz . . . Brains Trust or Battleground?

The game was on. Half a dozen teams of keen keen quiz freaks with eyes down were ready to go. Those who had a pencil chewed on it vigorously; others abused their fingernails instead. Yes, it was going to be serious stuff, and one thing I didn't need was a repetitive urge to go to the toilet.

But there it was: a bad problem to have at the best of times, but during a pub quiz? Dangerous. Yes, I'd sunk a beer beer beforehand, and I was having another one now. But I didn't normally need to keep going to let it all out again. A bug? Nerves? The onset of a terminal disease? No idea . . . but I needed to go. And it was only the third question of Round One. Could I really leave my longsuffering friend and team mate on her own to cope with the early questions? Or any questions, come to that. Our record at such events, admittedly with just the two of us making up a team, was unimpressive. In fact, if we had been allowed to be in a league we would have been relegation material with no hope of applying for re-election. We were the Accrington Stanley of the quiz scene; the Bill and Ben of The Big Night Out.

Standing up to go to the gents, I immediately hit a problem. We were squeezed in a corner and I had to get past the 'spreading for England' legs of a nasty-looking guy from a neighbouring but not neighbourly team. Five in their squad, yet they still felt it necessary to field a hard-man in defence to block the opposition breaking through for a Jimmy Riddle.

He moved his knee and let me through . . .this time. When the urge to empty the blighted bladder struck again six questions later his attitude changed. The knee stayed put, eye contact was avoided. My polite but hesitant 'excuse me' went unheeded, and a different sort of game was on. My need to go forced a sudden surge of courage through the system. I decided to knock his leg out of the way and worry about it on the way back. As I stood at the urinal, with the feedback from the quizmaster's equipment whistling in under the door and in and out of the hand-drier, I seriously considered sacrificing a cosy but faltering relationship with my female friend by making a solo dash for the exit. But no: she had got the car keys.

A deft sidestep and a snake-like wriggle saw me back into my seat unharmed. Had I missed anything? Yes, we both had - for the answer sheet remained blank except for a ludicrous stab in the dark from my pal, which was clearly wrong and misspelled to boot.

It was toilet time again within minutes. And this time the irresistible force was met full on by the immovable object. He wasn't budging. Old ladder-legs of the Awkward Squad was holding fast. I sat back down with the awful truth dawning upon me: he thought I was cheating. Yes, there was no other explanation for me being kept prisoner in my seat. The suspicion had arisen among this team of deadly serious dunderheads that I was going out to get the answers from somewhere by using my mobile phone.

'They think I'm cheating', I whispered.
'I know', she said.
'But I wouldn't do that!' was my angry but hushed reply.
'Pity', came the disappointing but unsurprising response. The pairing, for quiz purposes or indeed any other, had always been a dubious one.

Half-time came and the bolt for the boys' room was not graceful. It looked bad, for sure. The same suspicions would have crossed most quizzers' minds, for one reason if no other: Quiz Nights had become a war zone. Of late, wherever the venue, there always seemed to be a public argument over at least one question per round. Always grunts and groans, always a sad air of edgy competition without the sportsmanship. Backstabbing was becoming a discipline more skilfully applied than that of knowing the answers. And the greater the cash prize, the more childish and begrudging was the attitude.

Sadly, some people do actually go outside during a break to get a bit of help. And for those too idle to shift themselves from the spotlight of shame to carry out the skulduggery, a bit of sneaky texting under the table does the trick. Blatant, deplorable but quite common. No wonder the need to answer the call of nature can be readily misconstrued as the need to go and make a call to a knowledgeable phone-a friend.

The final straw came for me on another, later occasion, when a vicious argument broke out between the female captain of a team and the quizmaster, also a woman. A Coronation Street-style confrontation was upon us. The bone of contention was this: was Penfold of the children's TV programme 'Danger Mouse' a hamster or a gerbil? Blows were nearly exchanged. The disgruntled, red-faced team leader was still insisting as she led her troops out at the end that 'He was a GERBIL'. Oh no he wasn't, missus. Not according to the quizmaster, who quite rightly stood her ground. Shamefully ignorant of the answer myself, I was delighted to learn when I got home and checked out the answer on the computer that the quizmaster was correct. Hooray for hamsters! Hooray for the rule of law!

Pub Quizzes are good, really good, for the trade and the customers when and if they are both run and observed correctly. But time and again they are scrubbed from the 'What's On Tonite' board. The beleaguered quizmasters, destined to be forever subjected to Indoor Entertainment's equivalent of 'The Referee's a Bastard', try their level best and in return get little thanks and much criticism for their efforts. It shouldn't be like that. Is the 'win at all costs' syndrome that has burrowed its way so deep into life going to ruin such a worthwhile pastime? Hopefully not, providing there are still a few pubs left standing in this sceptered isle. But in the end it comes down to Joe Public. Does he care enough to play the game, and in the right spirit? Only he has got the answer to that one.

Market Bosworth Station steams back to life

The Battlefield Line that runs a heritage service between Shakerstone and Shenton gained a middle stop when Market Bosworth Station opened for passengers on Saturday for the first time in 80 years.

Volunteers from the Shakerstone Railway Company have been working valiantly for months to repair and renovate the disused station, which was hit by a vicious arson attack in 2008. Two steam trains from the GWR pulled into the platform on a beautiful Gala Weekend morning to strike a blow for triumph over adversity.

My article on this event will be appearing shortly in Heritage Railway magazine. I got some pretty fair photographs and managed to do it all without tripping over my anorak. Steam on!

Death of a tree

A year ago I strode into Leicester's New Street car park with my camera as I set about researching the possible final resting place of Richard III. The car park is on the old site of the Greyfriars Monastery, the place where the slain king was brought by the friars to be cleaned and interred. I wanted a shot of the only thing that remains of the monastery: a small section of outer wall. As I wandered about looking like a cross between an American tourist and a reject hack from the Daily Star, the car park attendant emerged from his hut and steadily came towards me. Belatedly and sheepishly, I asked for permission to proceed.

This kindly and helpful man not only showed me the piece of wall I was looking for, but was very forthcoming about something else which I had not expected to find: a mighty tree, just a few feet from the wall and even closer to the attendant's hut. What a beast it was. Gloriously imposing yet strangely incongruous amongst the smart cars and busy patrons, its odd shape alone was enough to elicit curiosity.

"It could be 200 years old," he told me. "And I bet the roots spread right beneath the whole area of this car park. I reckon it could be two trees in one." I asked if that was possible; he assured me it certainly was. He even showed me the bend in the trunk where the merger had been effected.

I took photographs of the wall and of the tree. Imagine my surprise and sadness when I walked through New Street two days ago and saw that the mighty hybrid had been chopped down. For me it had become something of a marker; a point of reference to concentrate one's attention to the riveting possibility that somewhere beneath its shadow could lie the remains of England's lost king.

For those who do not believe the old legend that Richard's remains were ripped up during the Reformation when Henry VIII looted the Greyfriars, leaving a local mob to cast the bones into the nearby River Soar, the only feasible place where he could be is the area under the monastery grounds . . . where until recently a big tree had stood for a very long time.

For more about the above topic, please see my article 'Homeless Bones' in April's issue of Fortean Times (FT273), page 58-59.

Pics: 1.Tree in New Street car park. 2.Remains of Greyfriars Monastery wall. (c)

BBC axes top folk music show

'When will they ever learn?' is the famous refrain from the timeless Pete Seeger song, 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone?' We must now ask the question of the BBC, and not for the first time. The Corporation's hapless but dangerous executives have decided to kill off a number of regional music programmes from their radio catalogue. Among them, sadly, is the much esteemed 'Folkwaves', broadly regarded as the best folk music programme available to listeners. It has been brilliantly run by Mick Peat and Lester Simpson for twenty-five years, covering the East Midlands region of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. And now it's got the golden BBC Boot.

How strange that some merchants feel fit to cast away their best goods without paying heed to the wishes of their loyal customers. When will they ever learn?

(Pictured: Pete Seeger)

THE TYRANNICIDE BRIEF (Geoffrey Robertson) Book Review

No doubt the fault lies with me, but I have never found a book about the English Civil War that has managed to hold my interest for very long . . . until now. Geoffrey Robertson's 2005 book, The Tyrannicide Brief, enables the reader to gain an understanding of the causes and complexities of those most turbulent of times. By telling the story of one man's personal and critical involvement in the trial of Charles I, Robertson has provided not only the detailed backdrop of the dramatic conflict between Parliament and King but also a disturbing insight into the darker aspects of human nature.

John Cooke was the lawyer who accepted the brief to prosecute Charles I at his trial in 1649. Cooke took on this huge responsibility when other men of his profession were literally hiding in their chambers in fear of the potential consequences of such an undertaking. Eleven years later, with Cromwell dead and and the members of the 'cause' left rudderless and badly divided, Charles II was put on the throne. England again became a monarchy, and John Cooke was to pay the ultimate price for his efforts. The new king ruthlessly and vindictively set about rounding up all those deemed responsible for the execution of his father. Those who were subsequently brought to their mock trials became known as The Regicides. Their fate was sealed, and the author rightly spares us none of the gruesome details of the manner of their deaths at the hands of the appointed executioner. If England thought it had stepped into a more enlightened age, the hanging, drawing and quartering of the Regicides reminded everyone that plumbing the depths of depravity is not peculiar to any given era.

Times and opinions may change, but much of what makes the world of politics what it is does not. In this book, which deals with events that took place three and a half centuries ago, we find examples of behaviour and attitudes that are common enough today: the lust for power and the abuse of power; dogmatic conviction and calamitous intransigence; machiavellian mendacity and downright brute force. Thanks to the likes of John Cooke, there is also a large chunk of decency and courage.