Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  When our conversation ended Leendert drove me to the station and we shook hands and kissed each other three times on the cheek, mainland Europe style. After I got back to Suffolk, he sent me a copy of a beautifully illustrated article he had written on Mesolithic barbed points and some eighty pages of his as yet unfinished book.

  Time Song 10

  There was once a lake.

  It had been much bigger,

  but for now

  it was five kilometres long, two wide,

  on the east coast of England

  not far from the sea.

  Sedge, reed and big-masted bullrush

  along the water’s edge,

  willow and aspen further back,

  then birch and clumps of hazel

  on higher ground.

  Roe deer, red deer,

  and the last of the giant deer,

  were here,

  as well as lumbering elk

  who like to browse with big lips

  on underwater plants;

  boar and beaver, otter and fox

  even traces of two domesticated dogs,

  one barely six months old.

  Fish and amphibia including turtle

  in the sweet rich water

  and birds, lots of birds:

  stork and crane patrolling the mud

  and all that it contained;

  divers and swimmers

  testing the depths;

  eagle and sea eagle,

  hawk and falcon,

  buzzard and harrier

  in the sky by day,

  owls by night.

  And people

  living their lives.

  The creatures left nothing but bones

  but the people left

  the remains of sixteen wooden posts

  from a dwelling that once stood in a circle;

  a raised platform, purpose unknown;

  a walkway along the water’s edge;

  part of a wooden paddle

  to propel a boat forward on its quest;

  beads of stone without a string to connect them;

  arrows of stone without shaft or bow.

  They also left:

  bladelets and burins,

  awls and adzes,

  threaders and scrapers and stitchers;

  delicately barbed points fashioned from red deer horn,

  heavy mattock heads from elk antlers;

  rolls of birch bark

  which might have clothed the sides of their boats

  or made tinder for fire

  or glue for fixing things

  one to the other.

  Mysteriously

  they kept several horns of red deer

  attached to a patch of skull:

  two holes bored into bone at the back

  so it could be tied to the head of a man.

  They must have gathered here

  in spring and early summer.

  Meeting with others of their kind

  along the lake’s edge.

  Perhaps they hunted together,

  exchanged goods and weapons,

  wives, daughters and dogs,

  stories, and laughter.

  Perhaps a man danced,

  deer horns sprouting from his head,

  so by the light of the fire

  he seemed both man and beast together.

  Or perhaps men went hunting,

  the deer looking up

  and because of the horns

  they saw only others of their kind

  until death broke the spell.

  After three hundred years,

  the people moved elsewhere

  and the lake diminished

  until it was nothing but a few pools and bogs

  holding fragments

  of a forgotten story.

  Based on Early Humans by Nick Ashton, Collins, 2017. I was going to go to Star Carr and then I decided not to because I was told there is no longer anything there to see, although I suppose I could have gone anyway since trying to see through the fact of absence is what this book is mostly about.

  26

  The island was originally a low hill on a plain close to the Severn River. The plain and the island were covered by a thick oak forest and because no other trees were represented, the oaks grew tall and straight, concentrating on the shared effort of reaching the light of the canopy. Around eight thousand years ago the plain was inundated by the sea; the trees died and stood as ghostly skeletons in the newly formed salt marsh and the hill became an island. For the next thousand years, as the sea levels rose further, the edges of the island were buried by salt-marsh silts and this is where the footsteps were found.

  A group of people are here on the island. They will stay for a few days, weeks maybe, and then they will go somewhere else, but they will probably return, because this is a good place to be. They hunt for otter, deer, wild pig and aurochs and they use heated stones to help with cooking the flesh of larger creatures. They eat a lot of fish, especially eel, and they weave baskets and wattle fences made into V-shaped traps for funnelling and catching the retreating fish. They surely must eat birds, even though nothing has survived to prove it. And plants, of course, along with fruits and nuts, shellfish and whatever else belongs to a particular season. At night they might sleep under the shelter of small tepee-like structures made from branches, but the evidence is vague. For hunting and for butchering, they have tools fashioned from stone, wood and the antlers of deer and they abandon many of these tools when they leave.

  Their children are often out on the estuary. They are barefoot. They step on creeping samphire and clumps of sea lavender, pushing through reeds and rushes and crossing open expanses of sand and the glutinous surface of river mud. Boys and girls. The oldest is perhaps fifteen, while the youngest can’t be much more than three. Mostly they leave no trace of their passing, but sometimes the mud remembers them and holds the imprint of the pressure of toe and heel and instep. The feet tell who they are: their age, their height and weight, as well as the activity they were probably engaged in.

  These children are not all here together as a group; they have run and walked and paused to stare or to make a decision, over a stretch of time that lasts from eight thousand to six thousand seven hundred years ago. Several of them were hunting, checking nets and traps, or gathering edible plants; others might simply have been playing. An older child carries a younger child on one hip; someone else slips on the mud.

  Martin Bell has been involved in finding and interpreting the footprints since 2001. We met in the Waterstones café in Piccadilly; downstairs because the upstairs café was being used for a book launch. I was early – it seems to be part of my nature to be early and then to imagine that the person I am waiting for is late. Martin arrived on time. He brought a file of pictures and articles with him. One of the first things he said is how much he loves this work, which allows him to work in such beautiful and remote places.

  Although I had read about the footprints and had seen photographs of them, I realised I still didn’t understand how something so fragile could manage to survive for so long. Martin explained the process of preservation, illustrating his words with diagrams and photographs: a naked foot makes an impression in the fine clay-silt and then a big tide washes in and covers it with a thin layer of sand. This in turn is followed by more clay-silt, and more sand, until layer upon layer is built up. The fine sand keeps a division between the layers of silt, holding the image safe, and as the depth of sediment increases, so it weighs down on what it lies upon, compressing it and causing the chemical changes that are the initial stages of fossilisation. These layers
of sand and silt are known as laminations. You need to go through eleven metres of sediment to reach the Iron Age and then the Mesolithic lies some way beneath that.

  c. 10,000 BP

  The scattering of footprints are found on the lowermost foreshore of the estuary and are only likely to be exposed during the most favourable spring tides and then for less than two hours over a period of four to five days. As another complication: the sand and sediment are permanently on the move, so the most productive area that Martin and his colleagues were studying between 2001 to 2004 was suddenly engulfed by a sandbank up to three metres deep, which then remained on guard, as it were, for the next ten years. Recently it has been shifting and there is a good chance that work can start again quite soon.

  The footsteps move between several campsites on the island that is now known as Goldcliff. There was a river about 230 metres wide, running to the east of the island, and it would have been a good place for hunting fish and birds and might have also provided an inland communication route by boat. A small amount of worked wood has been found close to the channel’s edge, along with something which might be the remains of a basket used in fishing and part of a split plank and a small worked woodchip. There is evidence that people were here, however briefly, during all four seasons of the year.

  In 2004, Rachel Scales, one of Martin’s students at Reading University, developed a method of working with only the tips of her fingers, peeling back the thin layers of lamination inch by inch to reveal muddled patchworks of steps. After a month and towards the end of the time that was available before the spring tides closed in, a large chunk of mud fell away to reveal the most perfect footprint ever found: a child from seven thousand five hundred years ago, and every detail visible, the arch of the instep, the ball of the heel and the splayed toes with long sharp toenails. Twenty-four tracks of a solitary child, next to the tracks of a small unidentified bird, were found in an area four metres long and one metre wide. A little further on, a large bird, probably a crane, had made thirty-two careful steps over the mud and when Martin showed me a photograph I seemed to see its thin black legs and the peculiar, almost fastidious manner with which it lifts and then places each foot one in front of the next. On a deeper level of lamination and therefore of time, a heavy-bodied aurochs walked by.

  On site H, Person 1 takes sixteen steps, walking from east to west and perhaps returning home to the island. He or she slides in the mud, and then hesitates when confronted with other human tracks. Persons 3, 4 and 5 are walking together and they seem to be moving with a common purpose; they pass the tracks of deer and perhaps they are out hunting. Persons 11 and 12 both struggle with their balance; they are only five or six years old and although they could be collecting fish that have been caught in nets, or gathering plants, they might simply be playing.

  A wolf is patrolling the land, or perhaps it is one of the very early domesticated dogs; it is impossible to tell because only a single paw mark survives. Close by but on another level of time, a deer leaps into the air and when it lands it places its two narrow front hoofs in perfect symmetry, side by side.

  Time Song 11

  If they travel away

  the people push their feet along the ground,

  they place grass near the marks they have made.

  Another man sees the grass and says,

  ‘The people must have travelled to the water pool.’

  And he goes to the water pool

  seeking the people.

  The people reverse branches.

  They place the branch with the green top underneath,

  the stump uppermost,

  they draw their foot along the ground,

  making a mark.

  A man when he returns home

  sees the branch and says,

  ‘The people have reversed a branch

  in the direction of the water hole.

  I will go down to the water,

  I will look for the people’s footprints at the water,

  at the place where they seem to have gone.’

  He goes to the water,

  he sees the people’s footpath,

  he takes it,

  he follows it, follows it,

  he finds them.

  Based on Specimens of Bushman Folklore by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, London, 1911.

  27

  People walking. Their talk erupts like the babble of birds and then they return to the concentration of silence.

  People pausing to look at the tracks of deer in the soft mud. They see the cloven cut of hoof and from that hieroglyph they see the animal in its entirety. They all see the same image.

  They sit down to eat. They share the experience of biting and chewing, tasting and swallowing. They glance at each other and know that they share it.

  They examine an object: the ankle bone from a horse that looks like a human torso; a twisted branch that could be mistaken for a snake; the pattern made by the excavation of beetles under the bark of a tree that seems to be a map of their own footprints when they walked on the mud beside the river. Such things tell them stories about who they are.

  A person is holding something of value. A worked flint, perhaps. The person drops the object into the water, here, at this place, because this thing is important, it has power. The water receives the gift.

  A man is preparing to go out hunting. In order to achieve the death of the animal that is to be hunted, he must become the animal. Inhabiting that other body is the first step towards possessing it. I feel my four sharp feet stepping through the rustle of grass. I feel the weight of horns upon my head. I feel an edge of pain as my heart is pierced by a stone point and I feel my blood running down the back of the man who has killed me, who is also myself, preparing to go out hunting.

  A person dies. The breath has stopped. The body is naked and still. We put it on a heap of stones, or on an island separate from the mainland where we live. We might give it gifts, we might stroke it and say words to it, we might stare at it for a long time. But then we let it go. Days and nights. The weather is warm or cold. There are storms or stillness. The body’s flesh is torn and eaten by animals, inhabited by insects. The bones become clean. They divide into segments. They are broken and scattered. They are part of everything that surrounds us.

  Dreams are more real than the world itself. They take the dreamer to a place that can be entered, a place where I can speak with the dead and with living creatures that do not usually speak. If I want to change something or if I want to understand something that is already changing, then I need a dream to explain what is happening and what I must do, what all of us must do. A dreamer knows how to get to that other side, how to bring back information, so everyone can learn from it.

  Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, I understand this. Sex can do it, when the boundary that separates me from another person is dissolved and I am as much him as I am myself.

  There is the same overlap during pregnancy, when the creature that moves within my body is part of my body, part of who I am.

  There were times with my husband who was dying and who knew he was dying and did not mind the fact of it even though he enjoyed being alive, there were times when he was right at the edge of his own mortality and I felt I was there beside him, seeing what he saw, the two of us filled with something like excitement, even though it meant we would be parted. We did once share a dream. I can’t remember much about it, just that we had both been in exactly the same place and when we told each other it made us laugh like children.

  28

  1991 and I was in Australia, searching for whatever fragmented stories I could find about an Irish woman called Daisy Bates who had lived with the Pitjantjatjara people of the Great Western Desert for the last forty years of her long life. She died in 1954.

  Someone mentioned Archie Barton
to me. He was the leader of the Pitjantjatjara and was based in a town called Ceduna on the edge of the desert. He had met Daisy when he was a child and I was told that if anyone could put me in contact with others who had known her, he was the man. I was given his address and I wrote to him several times before I left England, but he never answered. I tried phoning, but that didn’t work either.

  I was with my first husband and our two young children and we were driving a camper van across the Nullarbor Plain. We stopped for a few days at Head of Bight, where sperm whales come to breed in the deep coastal waters. Every evening dingo dogs drew close to the camper and it seemed as though they would become tame and obedient if only I knew the language in which to call them. By day wallabies hid behind bushes, peeping out to gaze at us, their hunched backs giving the impression of shyness and apology. I found a wombat jawbone, speckled with bright yellow lichen that had still not dimmed its fierce colour, and I found a beautiful spiralling shell on the wide beach where there was no one apart from the solemn presences of three steep islands of rock that looked as if they were caught in the act of striding out into the sea. The rolling sand dunes were covered with sweeping traceries of movement made by the lizards and snakes we never saw. We ate bacon, eggs and beans on slices of white bread and swam naked.