The lake, which became known as Hockham Mere, was mentioned in the twelfth century, but it was already silting up in Tudor times and by the 1700s it had become a marsh, until the marsh was sucked dry by the spread of alder and willow. Recently the area has been cleared of most of the trees and so it is beginning to revert to its Doggerland days and some of the original birds and wildlife have returned.
It was a curiously anonymous expanse, ringed by lines of pine trees in the far distance, with some of the swamp trees still tangling around in the shallow muddy water, but in spite of its lack of feature or perhaps because of it, there was a vague sense that indeed this place had once been something else. No lake, but an awareness of the absence of a lake and containment that a lake gives.
I saw a movement in the water which could have been an eel. I glimpsed the whiteness of an egret and heard the jangling cry of geese, just two of them flying out from the trees making a huge noise within the silence. Then a flock of teal passed overhead; there were maybe a hundred of them and when they turned in unison their bodies flicked over from the blackness of a silhouette to a grey and luminous shimmer with hardly any substance to it.
In the silence that returned after the geese and the teal I became aware of the soft fizz and chatter of small birds, small sounds you only hear if you disentangle them from the modern noises of a day, the grumble of a military plane, the rumble of traffic on a road somewhere.
In the distance we could see shaggy brown cattle, the old sort from Eastern Europe which don’t mind getting their feet wet in such a soggy land. We were planning to follow a causeway, walking past them and then making a sweep over to the far bank of the lake, which was where Tim had found a lot of worked flints some years ago, but at this point he realised he had not got his mobile phone. He remembered putting it into his rucksack and now the pocket of the rucksack was open and the mobile was not where it should be. It must have jumped out, escaping into the wild while the going was good.
We decided to retrace our steps. We had been walking for maybe an hour and a half, little zigzag progressions and circumnavigations of the sort that might be made by foraging animals.
The first stretch was easy with the soft mark of our own footsteps to show us where we had been, but once the ground became harder the footsteps vanished and everything looked both familiar and new. Tim asked me to phone his mobile, but no sound rang out in the wood, just a disembodied voice telling me to leave a message. We passed lots of pingos but I could not be sure if they were the same pingos I had seen before. A misty rain started to fall and a skittering breeze dislodged the last of the oak leaves and they sounded like a heavier rain. I kept pulling up the hood on my jacket and then lowering it because it was such an enveloping thing. It was a charity-shop jacket with declarations on the label about being breathable and waterproof, but it let the rain in while also making me damp from my own sweat. I noticed a holly tree bitten into the conical shape of an artificial Christmas tree by cattle and that was something I had certainly not seen before.
When we got back to the car, Tim’s mobile was in the boot, oblivious to all the fuss. We drove to the other side of the lost lake, to the area where so many Mesolithic remains had been found, but the ground was covered by a tightly sealed skin of grass and roots and low vegetation and whatever lay beneath it was out of sight. Tim remembered that the Forestry Commission was digging trenches for planting pine trees when he was last here and they must have been bringing up the flints in the digging.
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Tim said we should also have a look at what’s left of the estuary where the River Yare meets the sea at Yars-mouth, later known as Great Yarmouth. Once it was part of the marsh and fertile plains that stretched out into Doggerland, and then in Roman times when the estuary was much wider, longer and deeper it than it is now, it carried big ships for many miles inland and defensive watchtowers were built along its banks from which soldiers could keep guard against the incursions of pirates and raiders.
We arranged to meet by the church in the village of Haddiscoe. I was as always early. The church appeared to be stranded on a mound of higher ground in an area of flatness and the graves in the cemetery were leaning at drunken angles as if they had only just managed to withstand the force of a great flood that had tried to overwhelm them.
The Norman porch had a worn stone carving above the door leading into the church. It showed a figure sitting on a throne with his arms raised, his hands holding what must be two torches, although to my modern eyes they resembled two ice-cream cones. The armrests of the throne had the same spindly energy as his legs and his raised arms, so that he looked like a large insect, poised there on the wall and about to leap down on whoever walked in without permission. Someone had sloshed a layer of whitewash over the solemn stone faces carved into the domed ceiling of the porch and they appeared rather startled by the indignity.
Tim arrived and before setting off we paused on a patch of green grass just outside the gate to the churchyard. Very casually he picked up the tip of a microlith, a worked flint no bigger than my fingernail. I could see the energy of the tapping on the stone which fashioned the sharp edges and the delicately pointed end, made to pierce through skin and into flesh. He said there was a time when he did a lot of running and he would catch sight of such flints almost unconsciously as he ran, stooping to collect them with hardly a pause in his step.
The first stage of our walk got us nowhere much. We started by a rather grand farm, the barns and cowsheds all empty and without function. A lopsided footpath sign directed us into a barricade of tall nettles and then on through muddy grass and under the branches of two fallen willow trees. We emerged among a patchwork of water meadows with clusters of heavy cattle in the distance and a hobby swooping like a swift overhead. A marsh harrier was mewing in the blue sky. My eyesight has become hopeless ever since I changed the prescription on my lenses and so with a sort of optimistic misguidedness I identified a seagull as a peregrine falcon and a roe deer as a hare. But I was good at concentrating on the small details on the ground under my feet, the water in the criss-crossing ditches, lichen on a post, a beetle on a stalk of grass.
The path remained vague but according to Tim’s Ordnance Survey map we needed to climb over a gate and join the cattle. Once they had seen our approach they hurtled towards us, all exhaled breath and trampling feet under the bulk of their bodies, united in the fierce courage of a crowd mentality. My father used to say that if you were in a field of obstreperous bullocks or heifers you must sing hymns to them and that would calm them down: ‘The Church’s One Foundation’ worked especially well. Neither Tim nor I were willing to try and so we prepared to turn back the way we had come, but before we left we sat for a while to gather our dignity. We were next to a ditch filled with a carpet of plants, including bog beans and something called water soldiers which I once had in a pond and the soldiers marched with such determination that they overwhelmed all the opposition. In the clear spaces between the greenness, water beetles were spinning to the surface like pinpoints of light with no body visible and crowds of glinting sticklebacks darted like bigger sparks, their sides flashing. I remembered reading that the people of Doggerland were thought to have mashed up sticklebacks and used them as a sort of oil.
We drove on a bit further and stopped at the Roman estuary fort known as Burgh Castle. Bright sunshine, a buffeting wind and the scent of new-mown hay. The castle is mostly its own outline, the remains of thick external walls so weather-beaten they could be mistaken for geological formations. Knapped flints erupt with a casual energy out of the rough but strong cement that holds them, interrupted by steady lines of red clay tiles which also looked as if they had been laid down by the accretion of time. I kept hoping to see some proof that all this really was the work of men: initials scratched on a stone, perhaps, or a rude drawing dug into the clay before the tile was fired, but there was nothing.
We walked down to t
he edge of the estuary. It’s quite narrow these days, hemmed in and controlled by metal banks and steel nets, and the marsh has mostly been drained although there are still a few whispering reed beds and patches of glossy grasses and unexpectedly bold flowers growing in the salty mud. The high reeds made me feel as if I had ceased to exist, but Tim was tall enough to gaze out across the tops of them.
A land that was water before it became land before it became water, before it became land again. The noise of the reeds in the wind, the wind in the reeds. The wind as much alive as I am. A cormorant bobbing back to the water’s surface, the fish in its beak making a struggling descent down its throat, also part of who I am within the world.
We left the estuary and went back to the higher ground close to the castle. Where the marsh had been drained and turned into meadow land I saw the brown gleam of a hare leaping from cover and racing beyond my line of sight.
A couple of weeks later, I was back in Norfolk, helping my friend Jayne who was moving into a new house with her new husband. We carried boxes upstairs and carried boxes downstairs and teetered on a stepladder while unscrewing a curtain rail and teetered again, trying to dismember a wall cupboard that resisted dismemberment. Jayne wanted to go to a local scrapyard from where she had bought an old table and so we did that.
The scrapyard was one of those chaotic compounds in which human artefacts are collected at random and left to fend for themselves in the rain and the weather. Open-doored fridges that can never again be made to work; a heap of white dinner plates filled with green water and balanced on a car fender; the laminate on a laminated table splitting into all its layers, with moss growing between them.
I picked up a slab of baked clay; it was a bit more than a foot long and maybe an inch and a half thick. It looked old and it had a nice biscuit colour. There was an odd row of marks that must have been made in the clay while it was still soft and there were other marks that appeared to have been scratched after the clay had hardened. I carried the tile over to the scrap-metal man. ‘Three quid. It’s not Roman, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ he said and I paid him.
Jayne emailed a photo of the tile to her husband, Peter, who was out of the country. He replied, My guess is it’s 1,800 years old. Various things are scrawled on it, some of them very probably at much later dates. The clearest graffito is towards the bottom. The first four letters are FIAS, second person singular present subjunctive of FIO…meaning ‘Let it/ him/ her be’…The A in FIAS is written as a Greek alpha, hinting that the writer hails from an eastern province of the Roman empire…The next six letters appear to be SEVERO, the dative or ablative form of Severus and likely to denote the tough and unyielding soldier who became emperor near the end of the second century AD. He paid his soldiers well, which made him popular with them, but as a ruler he was universally hated.
In 208 he sailed to Britain to try to pacify the north which was being ravaged by marauding Picts and he died in York in 211…We can’t quite see what follows but if I am right, the rest of the graffito might mean something like ‘successor’ or ‘victor’. But why Norfolk? There were some Roman structures built in a combination of flint, mortar and brickwork around the 3rd century BC…such as the Saxon shore fort of Burgh Castle.
The clay tile is on the plan chest in my husband’s studio. Now that I know the words are words I can see them at once in all their immediacy and I can see a man drawing them into the soft clay with the tip of his finger, or perhaps he is using the rounded end of a stick.
I have put the tile next to a section from the skull of a whale that I found quite recently, lodged in the lowest layer of the cliff at Covehithe. At first I had no way of guessing what it might be until a friend pointed out the thick flutings of bone that are needed to protect the cavity of the brain of a creature that dives deep into the ocean. Side by side the two objects share the same colour and something of the same rough texture, so that in spite of all their differences it looks as if they are in conversation with each other.
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The drawings that accompany the time songs are by the Spanish painter Enrique Brinkmann. I met him when I was seventeen which means he must have been twenty-seven. We spent four weeks together although it might have been two. I spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English but perhaps it was easier to not have to explain oneself. ‘Habla algo!’ he said. ‘Habla algo!’ I answered like Echo in the story.
I had no doubt that my destiny was now sealed with this almost stranger and although we never again lived together we did keep in contact. Year after year I wrote him letters in my ungrammatical and what he called medieval Spanish and stumbled my way through his replies. It didn’t seem to matter how little information we managed to communicate, there was always a sense of a shared understanding. Sometimes I would send him visual images: a shell known as a Hebrew scroll, a few words written on a sheet of paper printed in Sanskrit, or on the flimsy squares of paper money that in China are given to the dead so they can pay their way in the other world. He replied in the language of his delicate drawings augmented by a few words: one on a very big sheet of tissue paper, another across a legal document already covered in the flourishes and curlicues of eighteenth-century handwriting.
When I was starting this book I wrote to tell him what I was doing and asked if he might make me a series of drawings for the songs. I said they were simple poems dealing with subjects that could otherwise be difficult or even tedious to explain: carbon dating, for instance…and I looked that up in my Spanish dictionary.
He said he would try. He then said he planned to spend a week in an area in northern Spain called the Coast of the Dead which he felt would be a suitable place to do the work. After a while he sent me twenty-five drawings. There were a hundred of them, but he had destroyed the others.
The drawings are as close as I could imagine to what I had imagined they might be; for me they seem to sing beside the songs, as if they are occupying a space in a parallel time.
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I arranged to meet Martin Bell at Goldcliff on the edge of the Severn Estuary, close to the drowned island where people used to live and the vanished river that once meandered through a salt marsh and reed beds; barefoot children pausing to check the woven fish traps, to stare at the hoof marks of deer, frightening the big wading birds: the crane and spoonbill, stork and heron whose black, white and grey feathers conceal them within the watery mirage of their surroundings.
A bright warm day. No wind. Martin has an IKEA bag and a plastic toolbox. I have a little rucksack and we are both wearing wellies and waterproof trousers. We walk up concrete steps to the top of the sea wall from where we look out across the glistening expanse of the estuary at low tide. We clamber down on to scattered boulders coated in bladderwrack, careful not to slip and fall, and off we go, in search of the Mesolithic.
Martin points out the vague hump of mud and shingle to the south, which is what is left of the island. The boulders are replaced by stretches of mud and I follow carefully in the track of his footsteps. ‘Good King Wenceslas’s servant,’ I say, but he doesn’t hear me, striding ahead. He reminds me of myself, bent forward to look down at what might be there and stopping every so often to pick something up. He has been collecting fossils since childhood and at school they called him Quasimodo because of his hunched posture.
He pauses to explain things and I make notes with a pencil in a battered notebook that will soon be smeared with pale mud. ‘Devil’s toenail,’ he says, and turns to give it to me and I am surprised again by how much these stone shells look like the shed toenails of an old and not very pleasant person. He says he has found lots of coprolites here, big ones from a fish, probably an ichthyosaurus, but he can’t be sure; you can see the little bones they have swallowed if you have a good magnifier.
He says he hopes the tide will pull back far enough for us to reach the clay laminates and there with any luck we’ll find a bit of charcoal from a heart
h fire, a bit of worked flint, cooked bone, that sort of thing; possibly footprints as well, human, animal or bird, we’ll see. Our first stop is a big lump of something covered in bright green weed as well as knobbly bladderwrack. There are other similar lumps of its kind close by, half swallowed by the mud, half struggling to clamber out of it. ‘Oak trees from the very end of the Mesolithic,’ says Martin, ‘4100 to 3880 BC. If you go deeper down you get to the earlier forest, 5800 BC. We make maps of the position of the trees and cut bits off for ring dating and sample peat for pollen and beetle studies as well. That way we learn everything we need to know about the date, the climate and the landscape.’
By now we are walking across a patch of pale and glutinous mud and I am very careful to step into the deeper imprints of his feet. There are scatterings of smaller stones where the surface is more solid and the mud that coats them looks like melted milk chocolate. There are also patches where the outgoing tide has washed the little stones clean, revealing their complex palette of umber and grey, black and white. I begin to find fossils: three ammonites, a devil’s toenail and something that Martin tells me must be a coprolite, although I am not convinced.
‘I haven’t seen it this good for ages,’ he says and we are standing in one corner of an area of some twenty by twenty metres where he and his team did a thorough three-year study, starting in 2001. They were looking for evidence of ancient woodland from the Iron Age, but also found the late Mesolithic.
We walk a bit further out towards the receding sea and now the mud is interspersed with raised patches of dove-grey clay, sometimes washed clean and sometimes lightly sprinkled with bright orange sand. We stop by a newly emerging clay ledge, built up in thin layers which I realise must be the laminates. If I want to I can turn this rippled cliff – not more than two feet high – into a huge landscape, a sort of Yosemite Park with me as a tiny person no bigger than an insect, gazing at its grandeur.
Time Song Page 16
