Readers Place

Judith Allnatt interview/review

How I came to write this book.

I was born into a family of poetry lovers and brought up on a farm, so perhaps it’s little wonder that I developed a love of John Clare’s poetry in my teenage years. However, I had hardly any knowledge of John Clare, the man, until I moved to his native county, in later life. Here, an arts project took me into Northampton Library to start researching local literary figures. I was only intending to spend an hour researching but three hours later I was still scrolling through the microfiche, interpreting the elegant but curlicued handwriting of John Clare’s letters. The letters that had caught my attention so thoroughly were those written to his family from the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. Through his own words you could trace his heartbreaking mental decline.

At times his letters are perfectly coherent; he enquires about his children and the flowers in his garden but he often becomes confused, asking after his father or writing to his eldest son, Frederick, forgetting that they have both passed away. At times he is clearly distressed and afraid. Despite being kindly treated and given every comfort at the asylum, he refers to it as a ‘Hell’ and a ‘Bastille’. He speaks of his ‘captivity among the Babylonians’ and warns his sons not to visit him in case they are ‘trapped as prisoners’. Sometimes lucid passages are suddenly interrupted by oddity: a reference to red-haired, dirty children that he has seen near the asylum and assumes are his own, or the sudden interpolation of lists of the names of girls he has known in his youth after which he admonishes himself, ‘Gently John, gently John,’ suggesting that he knows the fragile condition of his mind and is wary of disturbing it. Most touching of all is his continuing desire to return home; he longs to ‘hunt in the woods for yellow hyacinths, Polyanthuses and blue Primroses as usual and go in the Meadows a-fishing.’

His final letter, written in 1860 in reply to a well-wisher, Mr. Jas. Hipkins, reads:

Dear Sir
I am in a Madhouse & quite forget your Name or who you are You must excuse me for I have nothing to communicate or tell of & why I am shut up I don’t know I have nothing to say so I conclude
Yours respectfully
JOHN CLARE

Reading a man’s actual words as he becomes more and more lost and bewildered is a moving experience and I felt that I had made an emotional connection with the person and not just the poet. I decided to find out more about his life and family and how his illness had affected them all.

Rather touchingly, the names and dates of birth of his children are written in the back of John’s prayer book. However, in general, information about John’s family is sparse. Clues about his wife, Patty, must be gleaned from the handful of John’s poems written about her, from letters and from John’s sporadic journal writing. It was while reading his journal, ‘Journey out of Essex,’ that it became apparent that John had absconded and walked the eighty miles home, not to return to his wife and family but to find his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce. I discovered that he had remained obsessed with his early love and believed himself twice married, to both Patty and Mary. What must it be like to be married to a man, have nine children with him, two of whom die in infancy, and then find that you are losing him to his illness and to his delusions about another woman? This was something I just had to write to find out. I set about further research.

My journey took me along field margins and through brambled ways, from Burghley House with its hundred and fifteen rooms to tiny cottages dwarfed by the vastness of a fenland sky. The contrast between the splendour of a building where even the hallway is as big as a barn, and the cramped accommodation of the cottages with their dirt floors and low eaves, was sharp. At one point, eleven of the Clare family were sharing a cottage with only two rooms. Such proximity wasn’t only an inconvenience in terms of privacy; when illness struck it ran rampant through a family forced to share their sleeping quarters. As I stood in the hall at Burghley with its marble and richly painted ceilings, the huge polarity between rich and poor was starkly evident.

The experience of walking the ground where the novel was to be set, gave me ways to describe the social history that I learnt about through reading: rural poverty, the greed of the powerful, the enclosure of the countryside and the passing of a way of life. When I imagined the Clare family at the haymaking in the fields below the Great House, Patty sees it as a citadel and says that it ‘has more windows than she can count to,’ a statement that reflects both the enormity of the building and her limited education. This was a time when power was vested in the hands of a few and the workers in the fields, busy at scything and raking from dawn to dusk, were ‘as small as emmets in a green world’.

I visited most of the settings used in the book, not only to collect the small details and sense impressions that help a writer to bring a place to life for the reader, but because I needed to get as close as possible to my characters. There’s nothing quite like standing where you imagine a character to have stood for allowing you to fully inhabit them and to see with their eyes. Standing at the foot of Mary Joyce’s grave in the churchyard at Glinton, I remember pondering a while upon Patty’s ambivalent feelings about her rival. Placing yourself in the character’s setting and just being quiet and still is one of the best ways I know to listen in, as it were, to their thoughts.

This novel evolved to include many things. It’s about a woman’s attempt to restore her husband to his true self, as his identity begins to fragment. It’s about the struggle to hold a family together and about memory and its power to sustain us through the trials of a difficult present. But most of all it’s a story about married love, widely experienced but written about less often than romantic courtship, a love that is inevitably more difficult when rooted in the reality of everyday life and assailed by losses and misfortunes over time but also deep, knowing and forgiving. In writing the novel I hoped that readers of ‘The Poet’s Wife’ would become as fond of Patty as I was and that her story would move you, just as I was moved when I first read John Clare’s letters home.