HOCKENDEN REVISITED
There’s a poem that I’ve posted in slightly different forms a couple of times called Mr Moore’s Wall-Clock. It has importance for me or two particular reasons. The lesser priority is that it was an attempt at sustained rhyming. It’s quite a long poem & although the rhyme scheme follows a simple A / A / B / B / C / C pattern, because of the theme & content the composition of the piece was quite challenging.
More importantly, the poem drew on childhood memories of times spent at my maternal grandparents’ cottage in rural Kent in the 1950s & the writing of it involved me in a sustained process of cumulative recollection. The poem took a number of months to write & it required almost archaeological precision & delicacy. As I carefully unpeeled one layer of memory, another would be revealed, indistinct at first but increasingly clear with careful scrutiny.
Specifically, the poem described a lean-to shack near Hockenden Cottages in which lived an old man known to me only as Mr Moore. My grandmother, who was a good Baptist, but a kind & compassionate woman in her own right, used to cook an extra lunch every day & take it over to Mr Moore on a covered plate. I would always accompany her on these short expeditions & on pension pay-out days Mr Moore would slip two fingers & a thumb into his waistcoat pocket & pull out a few pennies for me. From time to time I would wander over on my own to the tiny two-roomed shack & curl up in the huge smoker’s bow chair in front of the fireplace, listening, hypnotised, to the deep metallic ticking of the wall-clock.
Touching now on Wednesday’s post responding to the childhood memory meme, my recollections of Hockenden Cottages comprise a core element of the database to which I refer. They have a deeper, more abiding resonance for me, forming as they do a sort of template for my image of rural England & that which defies the passing of the years & inexorable change.
Another poem – Room, which I re-posted in revised form a month or two ago - deals also with the same confluence of time & place. Above it I placed the picture seen at the top of this post. The house shown is not, in fact, the cottage mentioned in the poem. It’s Hockenden House & it’s situated just beyond the patch of rough ground containing Mr Moore’s cottage. A fine example of Kentish shiplap boarding, in my grandparents’ time the house was owned by the McNair family, who ran the large farm on which my grandfather worked as a motor mechanic. I can remember spending an idyllic summer’s day on the large front lawn at a picnic organised, in appropriately patrician fashion, for the farm workers & their families, by Mr McNair.
When I visited Hockenden Lane a couple of years ago, I was surprised to find that little had altered greatly. The barns were more or less derelict; the apple orchard had gone to cultivation; Mr Moore’s cottage was nothing more than a few spars of blackened wood & a tangle of brambles. But Hockenden House was very much intact & clearly inhabited & I stood for a long time beside the wreckage of Mr Moore’s cottage looking across the lawn towards the house, wondering whether it remained under the ownership of the McNair family.
Wandering past a largely unrestored Victorian cottage in Great Offley with Reuben the other day, I thought again of Hockenden House & my earliest memories of the countryside of South-East England. When we got home that afternoon there was, amongst the stacked-up spam, an email from a Suzie Lovelock. Apparently she had come across the Patteran Pages in the course of a Google search for ‘Hockenden’ & had read Mr Moore’s Wall-Clock & the accompanying contextual information. Her parents were, it seemed, the current owners of Hockenden House & had just bought the plot of land on which had stood Mr Moore’s cottage. They were very anxious to know all I could tell them about its erstwhile owner &, indeed, about any aspect of local life & times when he was alive. Delighted, I wrote back immediately & have received a subsequent email from Suzie Lovelock informing me that during the War a 10-year-old refugee girl from Czechoslovakia, Nora Huppert, was taken in by the McNairs. After the War she moved to Australia where she wrote & had published an autobiography, From Holocaust to Haven, in which she writes much about Hockenden House. And apparently she makes mention of a Mr Moore.
Suzie completes her email by stating that the cottage is now completely overgrown, but that her father “is very keen to send you photos of it in its current state” & that “if you are up this way again, please do not hesitate to call in”. This I shall be very pleased to do & I shall make a final pilgrimage to Hockenden Lane in July or August for a last look at the remnants of the cottage before they make way for whatever developments are planned for the land.
MR MOORE'S WALL-CLOCK
Mr Moore lived in a lean-to shack
(two-roomed and shingle-boarded) at the back
of the barn where Grandad kept his car.
Clad with roofing felt and thick with tar
which bubbled in the sun, it shrunk
into the lee of the outbuildings, sunk
deep in a reef of marigolds and nettles,
like the shipwreck that tilts and settles,
shapeless and unnoticed. In the long days,
we children wound our orbit round pathways
of cinders, followed the beaten circuits through
bluebells and cabbage-patches, flew
back to the cottages like swifts at sunset.
And the world was one green hill, the sky a net
that trawled us through the seasons. Time
was a circle dance, two hands in rhyme,
turning, trapped, around the Roman face
of Mr Moore's Prince Albert watch. Period and place
conspired: early summer, watch chain swinging
in the sun; a crowd of heads inclined to hear the singing
of the wheels. Snapping the brass lid shut,
he muttered, "Tempus fuggit", and withdrew. Cut
free from the web, we reeled away
around the orchard tracks. And then, one day,
one June, I crouched inside his smoker's bow
beside an empty grate. Outside the undertow
of low clouds hissed against the single pane,
damping dust, rattling nettles, a long rain
from the east. Granny plumped his pillows, twitched
the patchwork counterpane his wife had stitched
in the days of the old queen. Now he lay
log-still, dream-bound and seventy years away
along the parabola of Vinson's paddock, chasing
Painted Ladies with his cap. Granny ministered, replacing
flowers unnoticed (willowherb and foxglove), winding up
the lamp-wick, slipping the sill of a china cup
beneath his Kaiser Bill moustache. And I lay coiled
in the cage of the hearthside chair, breathing oiled
darkness, ghost fumes of black tobacco,
calcium tang of lime and plaster, scent-echo
of caves, primeval places. And behind the chanting
of the rain, a tenor voice called time, counting
down the seconds: Mr Moore's old hanging clock, walking
across the wall on one brass leg, soft-talking,
like the messenger whose tale is too important
to be shouted loud. Not this harbinger's way, to rant
about decay, the end of worlds. So, doomed,
I watched and heard the hours unwind, consumed
by the oldest story. Mr Moore slept and I dreamed
for the last time. How brief the story seemed -
the fable of the wheel that turns from light
into shadow, from my midday to Mr Moore's midnight.
11:34:47 PM 
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