Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  He went out one last time and came back with a cardboard box filled with mammoth bones. ‘These any use to you?’ he said and I said they were. ‘There you are then,’ and he set the box down beside the box filled with shells.

  There was a final rush of giving and I received a bit of mammoth tusk, dark brown and shiny, and he explained how you could tell what it was by the texture of it; two belemnites; a lovely piece of pale fossilised wood and a sea urchin that had been partly crushed – maybe trodden on by some heavy beast before it was transformed into a lump of golden-coloured flint. He’d had it for years.

  ‘You don’t mind if I give her this, do you, dear?’

  ‘No, dear, it’s been on the side of the sink long enough.’

  They called each other ‘dear’, very sweetly, with a tenderness floating in the word.

  I said my goodbyes and they accompanied me outside, the dragon and the broken clay pipe in my pocket and all of us carrying everything else in cardboard boxes. There was something odd with my car and we saw that the back wheel was flat. I’d only had it for a couple of months and didn’t even know where the spare tyre was hidden.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ray will do it, won’t you, dear?’ said Gail. And so she read the instruction manual to him while he crouched on the pavement and did the practicalities of removing the wheel and fitting its replacement. I looked on and felt foolish. ‘Me and Ray are a good team,’ said Gail.

  ‘She reads books,’ he said, struggling to undo a nut. ‘All I ever read is Treasure Hunting Magazine.’

  Before I drove off, Ray promised he’d let me know when he next hears from his friend Fred who has lots of worked flints, beautiful ones. He was sure Fred would like to show them to me; we could meet him together.

  When I got home I laid out the shells on a long pale table in my husband’s studio and they looked like music.

  10

  Evidence of some of the oldest human occupation in England was found along a stretch of beach and cliff that lies below that Pontins holiday camp near where Ray and Gail live. The entrance to the camp is opposite a bus stop and when I arrived a young man was doing kick-boxing practice there, while talking to himself in a voice much louder than the passing traffic. Behind the bus stop there was a heavy metal gate leading to a large green mound with metal chimneys sprouting out of it, making it appear like the home of a really big Hobbit. This is a landfill site which has become an important feeding place for herring gulls, although I dread to think what it is they are finding that they want to eat.

  I drove past a big Welcome to Pontins billboard and next to it there was a poster pinned on a tree that showed a photograph of a singer called Travis, described as the nearest you’ll get to Elvis in 1958. It was easy to see why, because at first I thought Travis was Elvis, until I realised that of course he wasn’t. Since I wasn’t booked in for a holiday, I felt I was trespassing and so I kept very carefully to the five miles per hour speed limit. I passed little drifts of people, grey-haired couples mostly, and then a woman who must have had a stroke because like a tragi-comic mask, half of her face was fixed into a look of sadness and dismay, while the other half was quite relaxed. She was carrying a plastic bag which said: MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.

  I parked close to a sign where parking is permitted for the unloading of delivery vehicles and visiting cabaret artists only and set off to explore. Interconnecting concrete paths led me past rows of concrete holiday dwellings with names like Heroes Way which must be to do with winning the last war, and Savannah Land which could have been a reference to Doggerland, although that seemed unlikely. There was a restaurant disguised as an ocean liner, and then a fenced-off compound called Sailing Through the Ages where a collection of brightly painted vessels also made out of concrete were gathered convivially together. The upturned end of the Titanic was poised next to the blancmange shape of the iceberg that caused so much trouble. A yellow submarine the size of a motorbike sat beside a Spanish galleon, but neither of them paid any attention to the Titanic and the crisis it was in. The adjacent compound held a fish pond filled with slow and friendly koi carp mouthing the water’s surface and a warning not to throw coins into the water, because they would poison the fish.

  By now I had reached open and well-cut grassland where there were no paths. The land was unnaturally flat, as if it had been pushed about and bulldozed into shape. I passed a coloured playground to be used by supervised children only and several notices telling me to Beware of the Ditch. When I reached the ditch it was not much more than a dip in the grass, but it had its own The Ditch sign, planted at intervals all along its length; I suppose there was always the danger that someone might fall into it and sue for damages. A Beware of the Cliff sign showed me where the land ended and the coast began and here there were lots of extra warnings about tripping on rabbit holes and molehills. The grey-haired holidaymakers moved about in a daze of slowness or sat on benches in the pale sunshine.

  I reached a path at the land’s edge where a To the sea sign was written on a post. The path was made of sharp white stones which must have been imported from somewhere else. A man was coming up it carrying a paper bag, which probably held his lunch. ‘Going down is easy,’ he said and he stopped to draw breath and to laugh at the joke.

  Once on the beach I set off to the right, keeping close to the steep and sandy cliffs. Lots of people had defied their crumbling verticality by climbing up quite high and carving messages into them: Jesus is Love, said one, Sabo loves Nina, said another.

  In 2001 a cache of worked flints, each one not much bigger than my thumb, was found at Pakefield, embedded in this same stretch of cliff, where the ancient river had met the sea. The depth at which the flints lay, the way they had been made and other factors indicated that around eight hundred thousand years ago a band of human beings was here, thus proving that people had come to these shores two hundred thousand years earlier than had previously been thought. There probably weren’t many of them and who knows how long they stayed or where they went to next, but the important thing was that they were here, however briefly.

  Walking along the beach, my eye was often caught by bits of expanded polystyrene which can look like whitened bone until you get close enough to see what it really is. I did find a small black flint that could have been worked into shape by a human hand and I put it in my pocket. I wondered about my chrysalis from a bit further down the coast and whether it belongs to the same band of time as the little human group and why it never hatched; maybe it was killed off by a cold snap in the early spring.

  A man in a cloth sun hat was slowly heading towards me. The light shimmering on the sand turned it into that scene when Omar Sharif approaches Lawrence of Arabia across the undulating desert of the Empty Quarter. He was looking down as if he was searching for something and so as he passed I ask him very politely if he was interested in the pre-history of Pakefield. He was clearly shocked by the question; it was as if I had propositioned him, or offered the first line of a rude joke. ‘No,’ he said rather gruffly, ‘I am here on holiday.’

  I stopped at the lighthouse. A notice on the door announced that visitors were always welcome and so I opened the door and called out and there was a merry answering call. I went up a thin spiral staircase smelling of damp and found two grey-haired gentlemen in the lookout, gazing out at the sea. The room was mostly made of glass and it was hot and stuffy. The sea lay before us in a wide sludge-coloured expanse. The men were very welcoming. One of them was holding a pair of binoculars and he explained that he was trying to identify the little outline of a trawler on the horizon. He could just make out the letters BL which he thought might stand for Boulogne, but he wasn’t sure. He gave me the binoculars, but I couldn’t even read the two letters.

  The men said they were both pensioners and they do a few four-hour shifts in the lighthouse every week. Today they had seen a kestrel being mobbed by gulls; yesterday they saw a sea
l. There was a notice on the wall about correct dealings with porpoise and dolphin, but they had never seen either. One of them remembered how in the 1960s there were lots of seals along this stretch of the coast, the other remembered when the spit of sand that now stretches out for a quarter of a mile into the sea didn’t exist.

  I asked them about Doggerland and they brightened up with the mention of the name. ‘Oh yes, we’ve heard about Doggerland! It was here, wasn’t it?’ And together we all looked with hopeful eyes towards the distant horizon, pulling the land up out of the water that covered it. One of the two men said they need more volunteers for the lighthouse: ‘You get a pound a day towards your tea and coffee but you have to pay for your own uniform.’ I wondered if he thought I might be a suitable candidate.

  I thanked them and said goodbye and threaded my way back down the stairs and returned to the holiday park. I stopped off at the reception centre desk. A woman with shiny orange make-up had Faith and hope and tattooed on her forearm, but I couldn’t read the last word and so I asked her what it was. ‘Pixie Dust,’ she said proudly and she twisted her arm round so I could see it for myself. I asked her if she had heard anything about the palaeontologists who had been working along this stretch of the coast and the discovery that humans were living here eight hundred thousand years ago. She said no, she’d heard nothing about anything like that, but a young man who was also standing at the desk and whose arms were also alive with tattoos said he’d been told there were some First World War pillboxes somewhere nearby. The pixie dust woman said, ‘Well, I have learnt a lot today, haven’t I?’

  There were double swing doors next to the reception desk and I pushed through them and found myself in a huge hall, lit with dim red lights that glittered on shining surfaces. On a stage at the far end of the hall a solitary man was sitting behind a long table. The rest of the hall was filled with little round tables, some of which were being used by groups of people busy with drinks and snacks. Suddenly the man behind the long table asked, ‘Which president of the United States of America was assassinated in 1963?’ His voice echoed through a loudspeaker and everyone was shocked into silence. I realised that this was a quiz.

  I wandered off into the room next door, which was more brightly lit and noisy with a cacophony of bells and bleeps and electric sounds and little snatches of music, all coming from row upon row of slot machines. It was a nervous space to be in and I left in a hurry, my fingers touching the sharp edge of the flint in my pocket, as if for good luck.

  On my way home I decided to stop at the zoo. I hadn’t been there since my children were little. I asked the man at the ticket desk if he knew anything about Doggerland and he said, yes, he had heard of it, but then he lapsed into silence. I said how odd it was to think that many of the animals in the zoo once lived in this part of the world a long time ago and he grinned and agreed. I am not usually so randomly forthcoming with strangers as I was on this particular day and I suppose some of the people I spoke to might have thought that my mind was wandering, which in a way it was.

  The zoo gave a rather gloomy impression. There was a big paddock in which three white rhinos, two ostriches and a few giraffes nuzzled about on the shorn grass and looked bored. Another paddock was home to a family of aurochs-like cattle. The bull was very much a bull, serious and dewlapped, with a sort of heavy masculinity and dangerous horns spreadeagled on his head. He was lying down and chewing the cud, flanked on either side by his two standing wives. None of them appeared to be bothered by the flies that clustered in a black mass around their eyes and along the bony bridges of their russet-coloured heads.

  I also saw two mangy cheetahs, a family of sleeping lions and something called Lemur Island, with no lemurs visible. ‘So I put the towel on the table which is what I normally do,’ said a woman to her friend as they walked past Lemur Island. A notice on the door in the ladies’ loo informed me that an entire species of animal is made extinct every day and suggested I choose one to adopt, in order to save it.

  When I got home I hunted down the address of Bob Mutch, who lives near Pakefield. I had read about him in a newspaper article in which he was quoted as saying that after the storm in 1994 the beach at Pakefield disappeared and the ground level dropped and that was when he saw that an ancient river channel had been exposed, and it was ‘packed with animal bones’. It was Bob Mutch who found the first of the worked flints that set back the date of a human presence in England by two hundred thousand years and I wanted to meet him.

  Time Song 4

  Footprints need soft sediment

  if they are to hold the memory

  of who passed by.

  They also need minimal erosion

  of the surface

  and its rapid burial

  beneath falling ash,

  slow-moving water,

  that sort of thing.

  Footprints can tell you

  if someone was walking or running;

  their posture and gait,

  their height and age

  and more or less what they were doing.

  Not long ago,

  on the beach at Happisburgh,

  pronounced as if it were a haze,

  an area of silt was exposed

  after severe storms.

  Most of the revealed surface

  was flat

  Or gently undulating,

  marked with ripples

  like the sea on a calm day,

  but one area

  below the tide line

  showed a scattered mass

  of long hollows.

  The weather was bad,

  rain falling,

  waves crashing.

  Over the next two weeks

  the hollows were photographed

  and scanned with lasers,

  before they vanished,

  leaving no trace.

  One hundred and two footprints,

  twelve of them complete,

  indicating five individuals

  of different ages:

  a little human group

  moving in a southerly direction

  across the mudflats

  of a large tidal river,

  between eight hundred and fifty

  and nine hundred and fifty

  thousand

  years ago,

  making a further jump back

  in the history of human habitation

  in this country,

  now called England.

  Based on ‘Hominin Footprints from Early Pleistocene Deposits at Happisburgh, UK’ by Nick Ashton et al., PLOS ONE, Feb. 2014, vol. 9: pp. 888, 329.

  A perfect three-dimensional reproduction of the footsteps on the mud was recently part of an exhibition about migration and belonging which was held at the British Museum. They were there in the centre of a small room off to the right of the main entrance, well lit and the mud brightly white. You could walk on it if you wanted to, putting your feet on top of the feet of this family group of pioneers who had somehow reached the distant shores where Happisburgh now stands. One wall displayed a film made by the poet Édouard Glissant following the journey his ancestors made when they were taken as slaves to the Caribbean; another wall was decorated with drawings of bombs exploding and children running, sent by a child in Syria to his uncle in England.

  11

  As a child Bob Mutch had lived on Bloodmoor Road, which was named after a battle and was close to the sea and to the village of Pakefield where the holiday camp now is. When he was about nine he and his school friends would go fishing for rudd and tench in a pond known as Spring Deep. They’d take corned beef sandwiches and a bottle of that bright red fizzy drink called Corona.

  There was construction work on the main road and the pond disappear
ed under a roundabout, but Bob and his friends heard of another pond, at the base of a sandpit which he thought might have been created during the Second World War when they were building a runway for crippled aircraft at the Ellough Airfield, but it might have been older. The pond was mysterious and difficult to get to. It was surrounded by littered heaps of boulder clay and big loose stones disturbed by the excavations and the boys found belemnites and devil’s toenails in the clay and soon became more interested in fossils than in fish, taking hammers with them to break open the rocks and see what secrets might be hidden there.

  That pond disappeared too when the land was sold to be used as a rubbish dump. It was supposed to be for ordinary industrial waste, but trucks used to come in the middle of the night, carrying all kinds of stuff that needed getting rid of. The growing bulk of discarded rubbish was covered with earth, but sometimes strangely coloured flames would erupt spontaneously from the mound. By now Bob was doing his O-level chemistry and he tried to work out which gases were active: arsenic certainly, but God knows what else. The crops and all other vegetation growing near to the site turned a sickly yellow and nothing flourished.

  Bob was interested in philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Taoism, but there was no money for a university degree and so he ended up working as an assistant manager in a bank. It was a steady job and it suited him. But when he was thirty, he became ill with back problems and a numbness in his legs. An osteopath organised physiotherapy and a lot of stretching exercises for the spine, but his condition deteriorated. Finally a neurologist diagnosed spinal muscular atrophy, but by then the muscle fibres and nerves had been irrevocably damaged and he could only manage to walk in a jerky Donald Duck waddle. He was pensioned off from the bank and for the last three decades he has been on morphine: thirty mil four times a day at present, along with the liquid stuff and other pills as well.