Helpston, 9th July 2004

On the evening before the Festival, Peter Moyse led a small party of ‘Clare’ friends around behind Clare’s cottage along a path, called by Clare Crossberry Way.  Safe at the moment from developers, I did notice two ‘access roads’ from the new housing development to the west of the path; no doubt ‘just in case’ the planners relent and allow the Crossberry Way strip to be entirely despoiled.  I know folk have to live somewhere, but should we not seek to protect the path and its environs from further concrete?  Preventing even more “detached, link-detached and mews-style three and four-bedroomed houses in Twigden Homes’s brand new Cambridge range of house style”.  Mmmmm... few of these on closer inspection later in the weekend, seemed to me to be in keeping with the vernacular architecture of the village.
 
It put me in mind of Clare’s poem Helpstone (sic) Green from 1821, and my oft-repeated thought, “nothing changes”; what was it Clare wrote of politicians? 
 
Helpstone Green

Ye injur'd fields, ye once were gay,
When nature's hand display'd
Long waving rows of willows grey,
And clumps of hawthorn shade;
But now, alas! your hawthorn bowers
All desolate we see,
The spoilers' axe their shade devours,
And cuts down every tree.
 
Not trees alone have own'd their force,
Whole woods beneath them bow'd;
They turn'd the winding rivulet's course,
And all thy pastures plough'd;
To shrub or tree throughout thy fields
They no compassion show;
The uplifted axe no mercy yields,
But strikes a fatal blow.
 
Whene'er I muse along the plain,
And mark where once they grew,
Remembrance wakes her busy train
And brings past scenes to view:
The well-known brook, the favourite tree,
In fancy's eye appear,
And next, that pleasant green I see,
That green for ever dear.

(final part tomorrow)