Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  I saw the hawk on the day I first met my great-aunt. She was in her eighties and I had just turned five. She was in the hall to welcome us and I looked up and there it was looking down at me with a quizzical gaze. She noticed this encounter and told me how the bird had died and I must have been a good listener because when her story was finished she said I could have it; I could take it with me when my holiday came to an end. And so I did. The glass case sat next to me like a new friend on the back seat of my parents’ black Ford Popular, all the way from Northumberland to London.

  It has been with me ever since, accompanying me through my life. I’ve transported its fragile bulk from place to place, setting it up in one room or another, the feet grasping tightly on the perch, the head tilted and alert, and as our eyes met I’d feel reassured that we were both much the same as we always had been. It’s here now on top of a bookcase. Time and direct sunlight have caused the delicate brown markings on its feathers to fade into a uniformity of dusty white and mouse grey, just as my hair has faded and lost its colour.

  After the sparrowhawk and still young – a solitary child given to observing rather than talking – I became the owner of the jaw of a fox, the teeth sharp and dangerous and ready to bite; the skull of a ram from whose white forehead the twisting horns erupted with an energy that seemed to me miraculous; a single deer antler, the skin of a marmot, the shell of a tortoise and the desiccated body of a toad given to me with uncharacteristic ceremony by my maternal grandmother. For a while I had a bushbaby as a pet, a gentle creature who perched under the jungle leaves of my hair and held on to my ear as we spent the evenings together. When it died suddenly and unexpectedly, I buried the little body in a metal tin that had held powdered milk and, in a very matter-of-fact manner, I dug it up some months later, the skeleton white and clean, the huge eye sockets staring at me with the recollection of limpid brown eyes.

  Everything speaks of what it has been: the leg bone of a wading bird holds the image of that bird standing on the mud of a shoreline, poised on its own mirror reflection. The almost weightless skull of an owl which I found when I first came here allows me to see one of its kind drifting silently in the dusk, quartering the meadows that surround this garden, and my husband is beside me and we watch it together, even though as I walk away he remains by the gate where we stood on that particular evening.

  * * *

  —

  There was a pale and almost transparent moon in the sky this morning. The air has become very autumnal. It will soon be my husband’s second death year but because of the strange mathematics of absence, his age no longer increases with the passing of time. At night I sometimes stretch out my hand towards him and wait until I am almost convinced that an answering hand is there, even though I cannot feel it. I’m sure this is quite usual. It’s what people do.

  Time Song 1

  I am sixty-seven,

  already quite a long while

  to be here in the world.

  My husband who died

  was eleven years older than me:

  war spreading across Europe

  and as a child he saw people assembled in the square

  near where he lived,

  his best friend taken away

  never to return.

  Both my grandmothers

  were born in the 1880s.

  One gave me a flat, white object,

  a fusion of bone and stone

  which she said was a tiger’s paw,

  but I know it’s a piece of mammoth tooth.

  I have a few photographs of her

  and other stiff-backed family members,

  most of whom I never met;

  they hold still while the camera shutter

  traps their image on sensitive paper.

  My parents are dead.

  I have kept some of their things

  as an aspect of memory.

  I have a vivid recollection of my father

  and if I want to

  I can seem to hear his speaking voice.

  My mother is more absent

  except in dreams.

  My two granddaughters are still young;

  they walk with precarious confidence

  and babble words that are not yet words.

  I look at their faces which hold the secret

  of who they already are

  and who they are becoming.

  I find it strangely reassuring to think

  – if all goes well –

  they will be alive for a long time

  after I am dead.

  According to a little book I have owned for ages,

  the earth was born four thousand five hundred million years ago

  at the start of the Cryptozoic Eon.

  The most ancient rocks can be dated

  at three thousand eight hundred million years,

  but I have no idea what was happening during the interim.

  Algal reefs were defining the oceans

  two thousand million years ago,

  and then came green algae and soft-bodied animals.

  The Palaeozoic began with shellfish,

  five hundred and seventy million years ago.

  Vertebrates, plants and amphibia followed,

  Until the jump-back is two hundred and twenty-five million years

  and the Mesozoic is beginning

  and here are the great reptiles of the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.

  The Cainzoic

  – and I must look up its meaning;

  it would be odd if it relates to the man

  who killed his brother

  with the jawbone of an ass –

  started sixty-five million years ago

  and encompassed the mammals,

  as the Eocene became the Oligocene,

  the Miocene and the Pliocene.

  During the last two million years of the Pleistocene

  which has been and gone

  and the Holocene where we more or less still are,

  humans took shape:

  Homo ergaster, erectus, heidelbergensis

  and sapiens which is us;

  all balancing that big skull,

  eyes set forward,

  dexterous fingers

  good at holding tight

  and making things.

  Based on the diagram in a book called Rocks by David Dineley, published in 1976 as part of the Collins Countryside Series, ‘intended to offer the beginner a modern introduction to British natural history’. I know it’s out of date, but never mind, it tells the gist of the story.

  4

  Ages ago and only for a few months, I was living with a rather drunken American writer called Mason. He was very preoccupied with linear time, which he declared was an artificial construct that hemmed us in and was the cause of much of our impatience and sense of inadequacy. ‘We got to get rid of it!’ he said in his loud New York bark and, eager young thing that I was, I tried to do just that. Sometimes and much to my surprise, it worked for a few fleeting seconds and then it was as if past, present and future no longer existed, leaving me dizzy from the exhilaration that came with the loss.

  I have always kept some sort of record of what was happening in my life. I started with diaries as a teenager and when I found it difficult to put my troubles into words I made drawings instead. Aged twenty-five and living in Amsterdam, I met the man who would be my first husband and to chronicle this new trajectory I stripped an old family photograph album of all my remote, dour ancestors – their cars and houses, their horses and dogs – replacing them with labels from tins of food I’d bought in the Chinese supermarket in the Red Light District. Bean curd from Hong Kong,
salt lettuce from Thailand, salted goose from China and fried fish from I don’t know where, but the smiling fish is swimming in a beautiful blue sea the same colour as itself. Now when I look at the album I read it as a story of romance and adventure, while knowing that each label also represents aspects of the past that I was throwing away.

  Later, pregnant with my second child and living on a farm in Suffolk, I began making a casual inventory of what I was thinking and seeing and dreaming. I had just got hold of a copy of a wonderful nineteenth-century account of the stories and beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen, hunter-gatherers who inhabited a world in which humans lived in a sort of eternal present moment and saw themselves as one animal among many with no sense of dominion. The book impressed me more than anything I had ever read.

  I was in southern Spain in 2001, visiting the house where the painter Goya had stayed just after the illness which left him stone deaf. I found myself watching dung beetles scurrying around the roots of a carob tree with the peculiar self-absorption of their tribe, and there was Goya also watching these same beetles that briefly allowed him to forget the isolating disaster of his deafness.

  5

  It’s seven thirty in the morning and I am sitting in bed with a cup of tea. The autumn light is golden in the garden and I am reading about the Eocene, which lasted from fifty-six to just under thirty-four million years ago. The Greek name means New Dawn, because so many new creatures appeared under its watch as it were, although a lot of the old ones disappeared as well, thanks to an event called La Grande Coupure: The Big Cut or Snip.

  This is all because yesterday I went to East Lane in the village of Bawdsey and I am trying to piece together what it is and what it was; alongside what I saw and what I did not and could not see. I brought back a few bits of fossilised wood, from a mangrove swamp most probably, as well as something which looks as if it might be a seed head, but I have no means of identifying what sort of plant it once belonged to. Like a sombre variation of the transforming touch of King Midas, everything I found that was once organic has been turned into iron, thanks to a combination of iron pyrites in the mud and some chemical process caused by a lack of oxygen. These transmuted objects lie about, scattered in casual drifts in the soft cracks and rivulets of a bed of London Clay which itself is a remnant of the Eocene. As well as being heavy and looking at first glance like shrapnel from a recent war, they – the objects – also look exactly like what they once were: branch and twig, fruit and pod, perfectly true to their original form and yet sinister in their oddness.

  The clay in which they lie was originally grey and brown silt, carried down to what was then a different sea by big sluggish rivers. This was in the middle Eocene and the earth, having got very hot and steamy with little or no ice anywhere, not even at the two poles, was cooling again, thanks in part to something called the Azolla Event; the azolla being a floating aquatic fern which apparently flourished extraordinarily well in the Arctic Ocean and then sank in great rotting heaps to the bottom, where it absorbed the excess production of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus changed the climate.

  A second cup of tea. One of my two chickens was killed by a friend’s friendly dog just a couple of days ago. It was alive when I picked it up after the shock of the attack and then the eyes flickered and the life went out as if a switch had been turned. I kept a couple of the pretty feathers as a memento and buried everything else in the top part of the garden. I can now hear the other chicken, which seems to have hardly noticed the loss; it is standing outside the French windows and making elongated burbling noises, to express a hunger for breakfast. I ignore it and persist with the Eocene for a while. I make lots of pencil notes in my notebook because otherwise I could never hold so much surreal information.

  There I was at Bawdsey, parked just behind a sea wall and next to a curious compound closed off by a high wire fence, behind which stood a collection of diggers and earth movers, looking like creatures in a zoo, or perhaps a natural history museum is more accurate, since they were fixed in lifeless poses. I was with my friend Helena who studied Classics at Cambridge and has a wonderful breathing bellow of a laugh that always surprises me because it doesn’t sound as if it could be made by a human being.

  We walked the narrow path that runs across the top of the sea wall, past a couple of quite prim houses and a Martello tower, built as one of one hundred and three such structures to protect these shores from Napoleon’s invading army which never came. The tower has an incongruous chimney on its roof and a wooden staircase leading up to a high front door, but the staircase looked very unsafe and the people who lived here have clearly gone somewhere else.

  And then we were flanked by a heaped-up display of big square-cut stone boulders imported from Denmark I think it was, or maybe Norway. They are supposed to hold the sea back and keep the land safe, but they seemed a bit nonchalant and not very convincing in their sense of purpose. Beyond them we came to a first sight of the sweep of coastline that was my destination, the focus of my study: a delicate scooped-out, half-moon-shaped bay, backed by a rather tatty cliff, with tiered banks of steep shingle in front of it. Below the line of the shingle lay the wide expanse of muddy clay which is revealed with each low tide and during the summer months is much covered by a bright green weed which I believe is called Mermaid’s Hair, but maybe that was just what I called it when I was a child.

  The clay stretched out, as flat as a football pitch. It was littered with a collection of lopsided boxes which I knew were part of later military defences, erected during the First and Second World Wars to protect these shores from invading Germans and their tanks and weaponry. From a distance they made me think of pieces from an abandoned board game.

  We followed the increasingly narrow path which could have been made by rabbits. Larks flew up in sudden flurries. There were lots of them. Now we were stepping on to the noisy shingle and almost at once, among an accumulation of whelk shells turned chalk white by time and the weather, we were confronted by a beautiful dead gannet, its neck stretched out as if still in flight. The eyes were black and empty and, unlike my chicken’s, they had remained open.

  We went down to the edge of the clay. Helena found it too slippery and kept to the shingle, while I pottered about in the familiar bent-over posture that I adopt whenever I am on a beach or a ploughed field that seems to hold the chance of finding treasure. I picked things up, surprised each time by the metallic weight of them. I discarded some and kept others to rattle in my pocket. I was in that nice abstraction in which nothing exists in all the world beyond the walls of a concentrated gaze. Small thoughts, but not many of them. The skin of my hands began to absorb a metallic stink.

  In the new dawn of the Eocene when these fossils were still vivid with their own life, a warm sea covered much of south-east England. It was up to one hundred metres deep and it was fed by rivers which, as well as the clay sediment, also carried the flotsam and jetsam of plant debris, logs and branches. The climate was sub-tropical and the land flourished with a mass of luxuriant rainforests: monkey puzzles, six varieties of palm, members of the avocado and cinnamon family, mulberry, fig, walnut and pecan, waterlily and fern, as well as Norfolk pine and witchhazel. A barricade of thick mangrove swamps straddled the mud all along the coast. In the bright, cold, autumnal air, I tried to snatch a glimpse of what once was.

  Shark and ray and turtles and all sorts of fish and crustaceans inhabited the salt water, while other turtles and big relatives of the crocodile and the alligator were in the waters where the rivers approached the sea. In the forests you might see the pantodont, which was a sort of elephant, an early variety of horse no bigger than a roe deer and, nesting in the trees, a species of owl, along with parrots and other birds.

  What I found so odd in being there on Bawdsey beach was the merging of the very ancient past with the very recent past and the way they seemed to be caught up in an intimate conversation with each other, their voices
overlapping. The tilting and broken carapaces of pillboxes were like the exoskeletons of enormous crabs or dwellings made by a species of hominid that left only this trace of its passing. The seawater sloshed at their walls, the pyrite fossils nestled at their edges, and limpets were almost indistinguishable from the pebble-dash excrescences of reinforced concrete.

  Further along, there were things known as dragon’s teeth: angled iron stakes, laced with barbed wire and installed to stop men from struggling to land once their boats had brought them close enough, or to tear them to pieces if they couldn’t resist the carrying force of the waves. Such sharp teeth could just as well have been the defensive broken branches from the mangrove swamps guarding the shore of a tropical sea against invasion. Beyond the line of the dragon’s teeth I came across a scattering of anti-tank blocks resembling huge vertebrae, from a crocodylid perhaps, or an alligatoroid.

  Five o’clock and Helena had grown tired and was sitting and staring at the horizon. The air was humid and warm and the sun was beginning to sink. I went on for a couple of hundred yards or so, until I was walking beneath some sort of military installation built on the cliff above, with rather menacing street lights planted close to the edge. I turned back, following the base of the cliff. I found some nice shells, ancient bivalves stained a dark yellow ochre, and again that curious confusion in which old things appeared to be bright and new, while scraps of expanded polystyrene and other modern rubbish were masquerading as survivors from another age.

  And so we returned to the car park and drove away. We followed a different route, along narrow roads flanked by high hedges, and at one stage we were driving through the outskirts of a prison complex and there were several rather mysterious road signs telling us to THINK KEYS. By now the sky was streaked a fierce orange, as if dipped in a bath of molten metal.

  Time Song 2