Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  Tim said something about the coastline which has never occurred to me before. He said that when you are close to the edge of the sea, you are in a liminal space in which everything is shifting, nothing is fixed, there is no stillness, no silence, no place, just the rasping breath of waves on the shingle, the wind, the accumulating sandbanks, the diminishing sandbanks, falling cliffs and the energy of the current which pulls at the land to reveal new areas and cover up old ones. Once you accept such a state of flux, then it can be very calming. I wondered if that was why I choose to walk so often along the coast and why I have been drawn to the undersea landscape of Doggerland. I must have said something about my husband’s death, because Tim briefly mentioned a tragedy within his own life that happened many years ago. Someone he loved died unexpectedly and for him the immediacy of this loss remains as vivid as it ever was. But then with hardly any transition, the conversation moved on and we got to talking about the people who lived in Doggerland and how on earth I could get a sense of who they were, how they might have been.

  He lent me a book by Asen Balikci called The Netsilik Eskimo, partly based on a study done in the 1930s and also on a later work by a man who had lived with them in the 1960s, before they had moved into the modern world of corrugated-iron housing, Christianity, snowmobiles and guns.

  It can’t have been later than five o’clock when I said goodbye and set off home, but I somehow managed to get completely lost along the narrow roads in an area I should have known well. I drove through the darkness in one direction and then I did a three-point turn and drove through the darkness in another direction and still nothing seemed familiar to me, but I got there in the end.

  Time Song 3

  Everything that lives dies

  and everything that lives

  has three isotopes of carbon.

  I do not pretend to understand

  what an isotope is,

  but I accept that

  with death,

  one of the three decays

  while the other two remain stable

  and from the fact of this simple change,

  a date

  can be measured.

  It means

  if I find a flint

  worked into the shape of a perfect axe

  I can only guess its age,

  but if close by

  I find a tiny bone,

  something from a plant,

  or, best of all,

  a speck of charcoal,

  then I can fix the flint,

  to within one hundred years

  of its making,

  fifty at a pinch.

  At the moment

  the isotopes take me back

  forty thousand years

  but maybe that will become more,

  later.

  The movement of the years

  from one to the next,

  along with changes of the weather

  during those years,

  is measurable

  in the rings of growth

  in the trunks of long-since-dead trees.

  These trees

  can be connected

  in a sequence

  of eleven thousand years.

  I imagine them in a long line,

  dancing.

  The pollen from flowers

  survives for millennia

  after the plant has died.

  Each tiny speck holds its own identity:

  two wing sacks denote a pine,

  granulation and three slits around the edge

  denote an oak.

  A core of sediment taken from the land

  holds the story of what has grown here,

  everything declaring its name

  under the eye of a binocular microscope.

  From that you can also assess

  the weather’s fluctuations

  as one plant family is wiped out

  and another arrives

  and flourishes.

  Beetles have not altered their form

  for more than a million years;

  they die easily

  and without complaint

  if there is a rise

  or fall

  of temperature.

  Thus, a fragment from the glittering carapace

  of a little beetle

  tells you about the nature of the world

  it was once inhabiting.

  Based on After the Ice: A Global Human History by Steven Mithen, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003, pp. 14–15. A single filament from the feather of a bird will tell you what countries that bird has visited and tests are currently being carried out on three centimetres of hair from the body of Tollund Man, who lay within a peat bog in Denmark for more than two thousand years. From that piece of hair it should be possible to know of any journeys he made during the last years of his life.

  8

  In my early twenties I made a pen and ink drawing on a postcard, showing a sun and a sickle moon above a low range of hills. Beneath the hills but following the line of their movement, I wrote, Can a man dream of a country he has never seen? I had no idea what I meant by the words, except that they seemed to say something I found important and mysterious in equal measure.

  I met my husband who died when I was eighteen. He was Dutch and we had four rackety years together with a lot of crossing over from one side of the North Sea to the other. Eventually we went our separate ways, but after an absence of twenty-seven years we started all over again and got married. By then he was teaching at an art school in Amsterdam and I was with my children in Suffolk and so for the first year of our new life we returned to the familiar zigzagging back and forth across the sea that divided us.

  We would try to be together every two weeks and during the absences we mostly communicated by that now antiquated system called a fax machine. After his death I went through all our faxes. The thin sheets of paper were growing fragile and taking on a yellow stain from the sunlight they had been exposed to and so I photocopied some of the drawings and wrote some of the fading words into a notebook. In one of the faxes he had written, Do you realise that from now on, even if we are apart, we will be together? When I first read it, it was a declaration of love; now it has become part of my precarious understanding of the nature of time.

  9

  I was walking along the beach. Sunshine and a cold wind. Nobody and then a couple sitting very still side by side on the upturned concrete bunker close to the water’s edge. Two dogs milling softly around them and I was sure I had seen exactly this scene before, but I couldn’t remember when.

  I had a slight sense of hurry because the tide was coming in and it was possible to get cut off, with the steep cliffs at my back and the waves biting at my toes. Stepping quickly over sand and pebble and the shiny expanses of exposed clay, I sometimes looked out towards the mirage of distance, but mostly I looked down, hoovering the solidity of the surface with my eyes.

  I noticed a man walking towards me from out of the distance. He was also looking down and stopping every so often to pick something up. He was carrying two bright green plastic shopping bags that appeared to be rather heavy. As we passed each other I said, ‘Treasure?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, as if this was not an odd question, ‘lead,’ and he opened one of the bags to reveal a tangle of lead piping. ‘I get fifty quid a week, some weeks,’ he said.

  ‘Ever find fossils, bones?’ I asked.

  ‘ ’Undreds of ’em. Got me garage full. Three years back, under the forest bit of the cliff, it was all bones, scattered on the sand. I got a vertebra as big as a table,’ and he put down both his bags to define the size of the vertebra. ‘Sold it on eBay for two hundred quid. Gave a lot
of stuff away a few weeks back, to a young girl who’s interested in fossils and now she’s studying ’em at college and I reckon she’ll become a palaeowhatsit.’

  I told him I was writing a book about Doggerland and all the lands that came before it and he turned his head vaguely towards the soupy grey of the North Sea as if he was looking at the country I had just referred to.

  I felt bold and said I’d love to see his collection and he said, ‘Come any time, you can ’ave what you want, it’s no use to me.’ I wrote his phone number into my mobile. His name was Ray. He lives in Pakefield, not far from the Pontins Holiday Park.

  I phoned him a couple of days later and his wife answered. ‘Ray! It’s that lady you met!’ And so I arranged a visit.

  They live in a little bungalow in a loop of little bungalows, shoulder to shoulder like biscuits in a tin. The people in the house next door had a life-sized black panther in their garden, sitting upright. I think it must have been made of fibreglass, it was too smooth and shiny to be the painted cement of garden gnomes.

  There was no bell on the front door, so I followed a concrete path round the side. The two of them were in the kitchen, close to the window, and they looked up and waved as if we were old friends. Ray opened the back door with the front doorbell in his hand. ‘It’s broke,’ he said.

  ‘Making a noise all night,’ she said.

  He is not very tall and has a nice quiet manner to him, like an old-fashioned idea of a bank clerk. She is round and jolly, like an old-fashioned idea of a schoolteacher. I had brought them a book and a packet of biscuits. ‘That looks nice. I like reading,’ she said. ‘Ray will eat the biscuits. He’ll eat anything sweet. Me, I eat crisps. Crisps are my downfall.’

  We went into the sun room and Gail brought us mugs of coffee. I sat in a big upholstered armchair with flower patterns on it. A smattering of polite conversation and then Ray pottered off to his garage in the garden and returned with a little pile of plastic ice-cream boxes. He pulled the lids off and lifted out small objects he thought might interest me, each one in its own sealed packet.

  ‘All this lot’s from Covehithe, the beach, the cliff and the private land behind the lake, but I’ve permission to go there from the lady of the house.’ We started with medieval seals and then moved on to Anglo-Saxon buckles. I paused to admire a broken bit of worked metal, some kind of belt clasp, on which the crude outline of a running dragon had been scratched, or maybe etched is a better word. Unmistakably a dragon, and done with a sort of familiarity as if from life. I said how lovely it was.

  ‘Have it,’ said Ray. I was rather taken aback, but I thanked him and put the dragon on the side table next to my mug of coffee.

  Now lots of Roman coins. The faces of emperors, one after the other. Hadrian, with the word Aegyptus on the reverse side and a naked female form which I thought might have been Cleopatra. And then a really tiny coin that would balance comfortably on the tip of my little finger and it was very shiny as if it had just been polished, and holding the perfect image of a round-faced and rather insecure-looking emperor, but I couldn’t find his name.

  Ray gave me a broken clay pipe. ‘There you are,’ he said and I put it next to the dragon.

  He kept going out and coming back with more stuff and saying how much he has given away or sold. ‘There’s a good market for the seals. I gave some seals to the Norwich Museum, but when I went to have a look, they said they’d lost them. Lent them stuff to be identified and now they can’t find that either.’

  His collecting began when he was given a metal detector forty years ago. The first thing he found with it was a gold coin. He brought out the coin from its plastic bag. He keeps it in a box lined with red imitation velvet. It looked as fresh and beautiful as a wild flower still growing in a field, thin and delicate, and it seemed impossible it could have survived undamaged for so long. On one side there was a rather snaky-looking boat riding some rather snaky waves and a king was standing in the middle of it, almost as tall as the central mast. He had a pronged crown upon his head and a kingly or perhaps a saintly expression on his face. I could distinguish the Latin letters that circled the king and his boat, but I couldn’t read them because my Latin was not up to it.

  ‘1362,’ said Gail. ‘Edward III.’ She paused and then she said, ‘You hold it in your hand and you think, it’s not people like us who ever owned something like this. We took it to the coroner but he gave it back. He didn’t want it, so we kept it.’

  I wanted to ask about the nature of finding, the compulsion of it, perhaps, or the quiet that comes from looking without knowing what you are looking for, but Ray wasn’t interested and all he would say was, ‘If conditions aren’t right you still got to go, because you don’t know, do you? When I find something that’s been in the ground all that time, it’s a marvellous feeling. But the thrill for me is in the finding.’

  Ray’s father was one of seventeen children. They all grew up in Covehithe, but Ray moved to Kessingland later, which I think was something to do with his mother dying. It was in Kessingland that he met Gail and became a slaughterman.

  He spoke of Covehithe as if he could see its past history from having found so many traces of what had been and perhaps also because his family had lived there for generations and it was still the place where they all belonged, dead or alive.

  He explained that Covehithe was very wealthy in medieval times: lots of rich people, traders; there was a port there and he had been shown an aerial photo in which you could make out a sort of square shape in the sand. ‘You can see where it was if you know what you’re looking for; you follow the little path past the pigs, through the narrow bit and then there’s that noticeboard and a bent tree and you look across towards the reeds and there’s a sort of dip, almost an outline. Boats came right in at high tide and they’d unload when the tide went out.’

  Ray kept going to the garage and returning with more boxes, more talk, more little gifts for me to add to my heap. He did have a Papal seal from 1100, Pius I he thought it was, but he sold that, and some years ago he found a medieval well, after a storm. ‘A circle as big as that,’ and he held his arms out as if he was embracing the air. ‘Lying there on the sand, just the base of it, and it was made of wood and there were black things all the way round the sides and at first I thought it was a bear trap.’

  That was the day before Christmas and he contacted his friend Paul Durbridge and together they dug out the well. ‘A bell-well it were. Double layer of wood nailed together and made from parts of barrels. The mouth of it was at the top of the cliff, but of course the edge was much further back in those days. The people who made it had dug down fifty feet or so, until they reached the water level and the well ended in a point at the bottom. There were pots in there, some of ’em near perfect, and the wood was as good as new and you must be talking six or seven hundred years. It was a work of art.’ Ray wondered why they’d wanted a well there in the first place, because surely it must have been filled with salty water. There was no answer to that.

  While he went to get more boxes, Gail told me she wasn’t really interested in his treasure hunts, but they keep him happy and anyway she and an old school friend go out quite regularly, to a place called Potters for a girlie weekend. They laugh a lot. So she has her fun too.

  Ray appeared with some worked flints. He said the lake at Covehithe which is known as Benacre Broad was once a stream, and an archaeologist told him the stream was a tributary of the Thames. ‘Archaeologists are a bit like zookeepers,’ he said then, remembering the conversation. ‘They think that because they are paid by the taxpayer and have got stuff, it all belongs to them. They take over. They don’t like it if a member of the public gets in the way and knows more than they do.’

  We were moving back in time; the flints were followed by a cardboard box filled with clam shells, all of them stained in gentle shades of cream and ochre and a sharp yellow like cle
ar honey. Some were filled with a coarse-grained sand, packed in tight. ‘After a really big storm, the sand can go right down and there’s scouring at the base of the cliff and you get about four foot of these shells. You only see them for a while and then they’re gone.’ He said these ones were two million years old and they were soft when he first got them, but he dried them out and now they were hard.

  ‘There was a chap came with sacks and a sack barrow and he’d collect the shells and dry ’em out and go through ’em with a magnifying glass and he found some teeth of a mouse that was unknown and he named it after his wife. He was big in fossils he was, he had a bone that came out from the sea and he thought it were a pelvis but it were the top vertebra from a giant deer.

  ‘D’you want ’em?’ and the box of shells came to sit beside my chair.

  Then he told me that once he was walking at Covehithe and on that day the layer of grey-pink marl that is part of the old river bed was smooth and flat, lovely it was, and he noticed these white markings in the clay and that was an animal, about six foot long and four foot wide, and it was complete, but he couldn’t tell what sort it was. The white markings were the lines of its skeleton, like a beautiful drawing, and he watched as it was erased by the incoming tide.