LITMIR.BIZ

      Yet no trace of Mrs Girling’s grave remains. It is an absence which is doubly appropriate, for her followers claimed that three days after her interment, their leader rose from the dead.

      Once these fields echoed to one hundred and sixty-four men, women and children speaking in tongues and dancing in ecstatic rites, living celibate, communal lives as they awaited the millennium. Now there is nothing left to show for their utopian aspirations: no buildings, no books, no artefacts; nothing more than this small plastic sign. How could the memory of Mary Ann Girling and her Shakers have vanished so completely? Surely it is no coincidence that just a few fields away, that conspiratorial tower rises over the trees, wreathed in its own dumb mystery. But as I look around me, the bare grass of the quiet Hampshire churchyard gives nothing away.

      The facts of Mary Ann’s early life are equally unrevealing. She was born on 27 April 1827 in a cottage at Little Glemham, a village in rural Suffolk, between Woodbridge and Aldeburgh. It is a faintly threatening landscape of corn fields and black crows, often over-lowered by rain clouds which sweep in from the east, streaking downwards as if to suck water from the sea and unload it over the unsuspecting countryside. Mary Ann’s family, the Cloutings, lived in a cottage on Tinkerbrook Lane, an undulating country road now empty of the slate-roofed cottages which once lined it, long since consumed by the expanding fields of modern farming. But it is still bounded on one side by the estate and substantial brick mansion of Glemham Hall, and on the other by the river Alde, which widens into marshland before it reaches the sea at Aldeburgh. There, on a shingle spit, stands a pillbox-like Martello tower – the northernmost link in a chain to defend against Napoleonic invasion which stretched along the shape-changing Orford Ness and down the English coast as far as Hampshire. In Mary Ann’s time, the houses of the fishing village of Slaughden clustered round the tower; but like its outer defences, they were long ago lost to the grey-brown waters of the German Sea.

      Both Constable and Turner painted this watery landscape, but in the early nineteenth century the lives of Suffolk’s ‘wild amphibious race’ were also recorded by the ‘poet of the poor’, George Crabbe, whose verse discerned the grimness as well as the beauty of this countryside and its people. Crabbe practised as a surgeon in Aldeburgh, and was addicted to opium, but later became a curate and preached in Little Glemham’s parish church, St Andrew’s, its characteristic Suffolk flint-knapped square tower rising over the land and its porch painted in gothic letters, enjoining worshippers, ‘This is the Gate of the Lord’. Inside, a neo-classical chapel and a white marble statue still bear testament to the master of Glemham Hall, Dudley North, Crabbe’s patron. Crabbe made his name in London with the help of friends such as Edmund Burke and Charles Fox; but in 1810 he wrote The Borough, and its tale of ‘an old fisherman of Aldborough, while Mr Crabbe was practising there as a surgeon. He had a succession of apprentices from London, and a certain sum with each. As the boys all disappeared under circumstances of strong suspicion, the man was warned by some of the principal inhabitants, that if another followed in like manner, he should certainly be charged with murder’. The story of Peter Grimes – who, it was implied, violated his charges – would provide Benjamin Britten with his opera. Its author – whom the Cloutings may well have heard preach in St Andrew’s – died in 1832, leaving his son, John, to become vicar of Little Glemham in 1840.