It was the farthest from the home patch we’d ever travelled together. On a whim back in the 1980s, Ronnie and I had decided to take a trip down to Cornwall for the May Day Obby Oss ceremonials in Padstow. I drove, and Ronnie did his ever-luminous trick of improvising a commentary – on the locations of Hardy novels, the mysteries of Bodmin Moor, and the diminutive hedged church of St Edenoc in Rock where John Betjeman is buried .
On May Day morning we walked into Padstow, amazed at a village cleansed of cars, decked up with oak branches and cowslips, and with most of the citizens dressed in white. For the rest of the day we jigged and sang in the procession, ensnared by the hypnotic rhythms of the “Morning Song” and words that seemed like a remnant of some lost May fertility chant. Ale was drunk and Ronnie proved to be an adept communicant, whirling in slow motion like a very English dervish. He was deep in a pagan rite hundreds of miles from home, but never for a moment seeming to be “out of his knowledge”.
A few years previously he’d written his seminal essay, An Inherited Perspective, about the complex ways place and landscape mould personality. He’d been on train journey to Lincoln, had passed unexpectedly through Helpston and seen in the distance the churchyard where John Clare is buried. “It was all over in seconds, the glimpse of the confined prospect of a great poet, but not before I had been reminded that he had thrived for only as long as he had been contained within those village boundaries.” He talks of how Clare’s “extraordinary ability to see furthest when the view was strictly limited” meant he was able to present the “indigenous eye at its purest and most naturally disciplined…(his) feeling for nature and the landscape of man deepens when it remains hedged about by familiar considerations.” Ronnie considered the development of his own landscape consciousness. He saw it as a constant interplay between an instinctive, unlettered, sensuous response, and the scientific, aesthetic and religious sensibilities developed later as a kind of overlay.
It’s tempting, if a tad facile, to see similarities between Ronnie and Clare, the poet he did so much to champion. Both men were born into the poor rural families. Both achieved monumental feats of self-education. Clare read Thompson’s poetry curled up in the fields; Ronnie was decoding to Gainsborough’s and Constable’s paintings when he was barely a teenager. Both produced their most majestic work from the lineaments of landscape and culture contained within a few square miles of their homes. And I sense an affinity between their restless, inquisitive engagements with the world. I always think of Ronnie when I read the opening stanzas of Clare’s elegiac ‘Remembrances’
When jumping time away on old crossberry way
& eating awes sugar plumbs ere they had lost the may
& skipping like a leveret before the peep of day
Walking with Ronnie was just like this, though we progressed more like tortoises than young hares. Everything had to be pondered – the views (“the Suffolk Highlands, dear boy!”), the inscriptions on gravestones, the intimate interiors of local artists’ houses. I could match him on botany (he diligently filled in his Wild Flower Society checklist every year) but just listened, starstruck, to his masterly storytelling about local history. Deeply engrossed, we missed closing times in pubs, and sat on field-banks nibbling peanuts instead. He would spin extravagant tales like the Worm of Wormingford, about the village where he lived in John Nash’s old house. I remember especially one autumn day in Polstead, just a few miles from his home. The narrative moved in parallel with our walk, from the village’s celebrated cherry trees to the crumbling stump of a Gospel Oak, under which St Cedd had reputedly preached. On the way he told, in gory detail, the full story of the village’s great historical scandal, the Red Barn Murder. In 1827 a village girl, Maria Marten, was shot dead by her lover in a Polstead barn. The hunt and trial of her killer became a national sensation. He was hanged in Bury St Edmunds before a crowd estimated at 20,000, and his flayed skin used to bind a book about the murder. How apt, Ronnie added as a footnote, that his friend the distinguished crime writer, Ruth Rendell, now lived in the village….
This is how Ronnie’s storytelling and writing flows. It’s discursive, conversational, sometimes almost gossipy. It has the look of free association, but is more like following the pathways on a detailed map, guided by an intense understanding of history and contexts. Feeding into this is a remarkable bank of memory, both personal and learned. He had the gift of what I’ve called “historical empathy”, able to momentarily exist in two different time zones – or two different consciousnesses. On a night-walk he sees the distant charcoal stump of a church “just as it was in the summer nights that followed the Conquest.” Thoughts about the apostle Mark meld unselfconsciously into concerns over a fish-pie.
This for me, is where Ronnie diverges from Clare. Somewhere on the journey between Suffolk farm-boy and doyen of Aldeburgh’s cultural salons, he acquired a social ease, an ability to move comfortably among all classes and situations. He was never regarded as an out-of-place oddity by his neighbours, as the “peasant poet” was. He could talk as easily to (and about) Wormingford combine drivers as Scottish poets. No manor house owners shunned him because he wrote “the rural idyll slips in blood”. The extent to which he was loved and respected in turn is shown by the immense network of willing villagers and friends who looked after hm in his last years. Since his death I’ve wondered whether his beautiful speaking voice helped his social integration. What must have been in his boyhood a distinct Suffolk accent eventually dissolved, I guess by osmosis, as his circle of friendship widened. I was at the ceremony in Westminster Abbey in 1987 when a plaque to John Clare was installed in Poets’ Corner. Ted Hughes read Clare’s ‘The Nightingales Nest” in his peaty Yorkshire growl, and Ronnie gave the Address in a voice half Cambridge don, half angel.
This was perhaps one occasion when the lettered man took precedence over the indigenous eye. But mostly it was the tension between these two modes of perception that generated the genius in his writing, as it often did with Clare. And no more so that in the writings for which they are both best loved, on nature and the countryside. Both regarded the citizens of the natural world as fellow commoners, a sentiment which was both visceral and philosophical. Both saw a moral virtue in the cultivation of the soil, but decried the enclosures and abuses of modernising agriculture. In what has echoes of Clare’s “Remembrances” a moment of pastoral nostalgia from Ronnie is a perfect example of the interplay between his two forms of landscape consciousness: “Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers, clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet. Or into the light, says someone else.”

ends