We turned to go back and Clive told me to go ahead on my own. I climbed the three or four wooden steps and stood on the platform. It was the same sort of shock I had experienced in the rock tunnel beneath Jerusalem where Jesus made the miracle of giving sight to the blind man. The sea was molten silver and the brightness of the sun poured in through the cave’s huge mouth and highlighted the silhouette of the squat tower of rock and the stalagmite that stood upon it, tall and powerful and shaped like an erect penis: the guardian or the god of the cave, triumphant and powerful and keeping watch on everything that happened, everyone who came and went.
The yellow autumn sunlight played upon the surfaces of the limestone. White and yellow in all its permutations, with the occasional tracery of bright green where water had seeped in and little mosses had grown. The stone was criss-crossed with striation marks as if it was being stretched and pulled by the process of its own birth. It was pockmarked with patterings and whorls, scoops and cracks that appeared to be breathing with life, talking to me in a whispered language I could not understand.
Clive joined me. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ he said. ‘It is something you will never forget. The sun is in a perfect position today. Sometimes the cave’s mouth frames the image of the full moon and the light of it spills in and it is quite extraordinary. I am shocked again, whenever I see it.’
He said that here, close to the fortress and its guarding figure, the people who came as visitors after the cave’s inhabitants had gone brought offerings. Phoenicians came here in their boats around 800 BC and left lamps and rings, bracelets and bowls, amulets and scarabs, and later the Carthaginians gave their gifts, and these pilgrimages to the god who watched over the cave that stood at the edge of the world went on into the medieval period, but not beyond.
We walked the short distance across the stony beach to Vanguard Cave. It was smaller and less dramatic but still beautiful and for people like Clive it was very important because it had not been much visited over the years and had not been excavated and so it contained more perfect relics of the Neanderthal period. Only this July they had found the canine milk tooth of a Neanderthal and it had been taken away for analysis by someone who specialised in Neanderthal canine teeth. The cave floor was divided into sections and carefully marked where it had been excavated into sealed layers of past time. They had found evidence of several hearths and were hoping to find human footprints in an area that had once been soft mud. We looked at all this from a distance. If we were to go closer we would need to be wearing protective clothing, so as not to contaminate the DNA of the Neanderthals with our own.
Close to the mouth of Vanguard Cave, Clive showed me the remains of another sand dune turned into stone. A group of two or three Neanderthals lit a small fire. They threw a handful of mussels into the flames and you can see the shells that split and shattered. They retouched their stone tools to make them sharper, and the shards were found close to the fire and could be pieced together. They were sitting behind the shelter of the dune which meant they would be in the shade; so maybe they were having their meal in winter with a wind blowing in from the sea, or maybe it was night. They were not here for longer than twenty-four hours and then they were gone.
Time Song 18
Today is the anniversary
of your death,
and if today
I were to write you a letter
that you could read,
even though you are dead and read nothing,
I would say I have been looking for you
and I have not found you
but I have found traces of your absence
alongside the other absences
that rear up before my eyes like startled horses,
a wave breaking on the shore,
the moon shifting into view from behind dark clouds.
I would say I have been comforted
by the crowdedness of it all
and I would say to you who does not listen
that time is both longer and shorter
than I ever imagined:
land becomes sea, sea becomes land,
ice into desert, desert into salt marsh,
salt marsh into birds and fish, animals and people,
everything forgotten and remembered and forgotten again;
bone and stone,
footprint and tree trunk,
beetle wing and speck of pollen,
they rear up before my eyes like startled horses,
a wave breaking on the shore,
the moon shifting into view from behind dark clouds.
Then I would say to you
who does not care
one way or another:
I think it’s all right,
the world will continue
even if we have gone
and that is surely something
to smile about.
45
12 February 2018 and Jayne and I have decided to watch the dusk and the dawn as they play out across the North Sea that covers whatever is left of a country called Doggerland.
We begin at the village of Cley which is on a stretch of coast near where she lives. It’s not yet 4 p.m. but the sun is already going down and the luminous turquoise of the sky is streaked with red and apricot, buttery yellow and candyfloss pink.
We walk along a path that goes through the reeds but runs parallel to the road and so we are accompanied by the strange animal growl of cars. We pass a notice explaining that these freshwater marshes are fed from springs bubbling up through the Late Cretaceous chalk beds. I suppose it must be the same process that created the pingos I saw with Tim. I watch my own long shadow moving beside me. During a brief lull of cars I can hear sparrows being noisy in a bush and a chicken celebrating the laying of an egg.
The path turns sharp right and becomes a raised track that crosses reed beds and swampy meadows and spreading expanses of water. Lots of birds. I recognise oystercatchers and something which must be a whimbrel, a few egrets, pochards with their wonderful chestnut-brown heads and a heron. A man heading back to the village is shouting into his mobile. He says, ‘Would it be helpful if we got hold of some recent analysis not sent by the original company?’ I write his words in my notebook. His two children and a black dog follow silently in his wake.
My eye is caught by a moving flurry of white feathers on the bank that leads down from the track. It’s the body of a tern brought to life by the wind; its head is raised in a sort of defiance and its beak is bright red and very sharp.
We reach the shore. Razor shells, oyster shells, whelks, a crab claw. I pick up a pale flint that contains a little picture: a black shape like the silhouette of the head and shoulders of a man and next to the head is a rounded black bubble that could be his thoughts. It reminds me of the picture on the cover of this book in which a two-thousand-year-old couple whose flattened bodies were found in a bog in Holland seem to be walking convivially side by side and one of them has something like a thought, rising just above his head. They were found by bog cutters in 1904. A policeman was summoned and he rolled them together as you might a carpet and tied them on the back of his bicycle and took them back to town, where they ended up in a glass case in the local museum. Whenever I look at them I seem to be looking at me and my husband walking through a landscape, lost in conversation or in silence, our walk continuing in spite of time and the fact of death.
By now the sun is burning like a circle of flame as it moves closer to the horizon. We watch as a tight mass of grey-white birds with pointed wings swoop by with a rush of sound. Knots, which breed in the Arctic but come south during the winter months. Their many bodies are held in unison like a single body. They turn, and with the magic of their turning they vanish. They turn again and they reappear. They dance out across the rippled surface of th
e sea and they have gone.
The sky’s colours are growing dark and thick and it’s suddenly very cold. We are about to leave but stop when we hear a disembodied heralding cry that seems to erupt from a distant line of trees. The noise mixes with the soughing of the wind and almost could be the wind, but as it draws closer it disentangles itself and becomes a chorus of voices.
The geese fly low, directly above our heads. Wave upon wave of noisy warm-blooded creatures: the heaviness of them, the creak of their wings, the determined stretch of their necks as they make their way towards a place where they can be safe for the night.
* * *
—
On the following morning we get up at three thirty. We bundle ourselves into Jayne’s car and drive for an hour or so until we reach a bird reserve on the edge of the bay of the Wash. It’s still pitch dark and absurdly cold. I am wearing a coat, a jacket, a hat, two scarves, gloves and layer upon layer of T-shirts and jumpers and yet when I step out of the car the air cuts like a knife into my nostrils and fingertips and into a small patch around my middle which signals an untucked gap in one of the layers.
We are quite close to where the River Ouse used to flow into Doggerland. We are standing on one side of what was a sheltered estuary protected by the Dogger Hills. We are looking towards Dogger Island before it vanished.
This whole area has been built up out of the slow accretion of river sediment, so the flat muddy land and the shallow muddy sea merge into each other as if they were one and the same, but in the darkness before the dawn all that I can distinguish of my surroundings is what is revealed by the trickle of light from a little torch.
We find a path and follow it, not quite sure if this is the path we want. It is flanked on both sides by the looming presence of bushes and trees, some of which emit tentative fragments of song from the birds sheltered within them. I turn my torch towards a tree and something black tumbles out of it with a clatter of wings.
The path leads to wooden steps. We go up them and seem to be on some sort of man-made embankment. From this vantage point I can see a pink sliver of moon lying on its side in the dark sky. I can hear the lapping of water, but I have no idea what water it is. I am not even sure how far we are from the sea and how near to the shallows and mudflats of the estuary.
We walk on until we reach a wooden bird-hide and we go inside, glad for the relative warmth. By the light of my torch I read an account of the birds who come here during the winter months. Many of the pink-footed geese will have already migrated north, while the densely packed dawn crowds of knot only appear when the tide is high and so we will probably miss that spectacle. I tell myself it’s better this way; if the conditions were perfect, then there would be the distraction of other people laden with binoculars and scopes and buzzing with talk.
We step outside again. There is a definite lifting of the light and I can hear the startled cries of birds; they sound as if they are surprised by the fact of the approach of a new day. I remember at school being asked to write an essay about how I could be sure the sun would rise in the morning and the question disturbed me because it was the first time I had paused to doubt the world’s certainties.
Now I can distinguish the darkly shimmering surface of water to the east and something that looks like water to the west, but it’s raised up and as bulky as a mattress; these must be the mudflats, exposed by the low tide.
More light and although there is still no orb of the sun, the breathing warmth of shades of pink and fiery orange are spreading out across the sky and clinging to the scatterings of cloud. In the distance, coming in from the land, I can see a smoky procession of white birds, flying just above the mud’s surface. Every so often they explode into a flurry of upward flight so their whiteness is muted by the colours of the dawn and then they subside and return to their ordered lines. They keep on coming, purposeful and sure.
A different sort of movement is taking shape in the west. Again it is like smoke, but this smoke is dark as it rises up from the horizon. The geese have woken from where they were sleeping on the sea’s surface and now they are flying in the direction of the dawn. I cannot hear them because they are too far away, but I watch their spidery lines criss-crossing the sky: sentences in a language I am unable to read.
We begin to make our way to the car. Just before we leave the edge of the estuary we come across a crowd of goldfinches. There are thirty of them at least, feeding on a wintry patch of teazel. The sound they make is like excited laughter.
I suddenly realise I have lost a blue and white spotted handkerchief that belonged to my husband. I wonder about turning back to look for it, but that would be absurd and so I leave it wherever it has fallen and I can see it there, long after I have left this place.
* * *
—
That was four months ago. Summer has come earlier than usual and the succession of days have been relentlessly hot and dry. The sky is milky blue and there are never any clouds to disturb it. The exhausted fields have faded into pale yellows and greys and the leaves on the trees make a rustling sound when a soft wind blows.
Yesterday I went swimming at Covehithe. There were quite a few people scattered along the beach, but once I was in the sea with the low outline of Holland invisible on the other side, it was as if there was no one else in all the world.
The wrinkled surface of the sea was covered with glistening clusters of white light that danced with the jostle of waves. Because I am an insecure swimmer I did not go out of my depth and every so often I stood my feet on the underwater land that lay beneath me. It was beautiful beyond words. I was only there for a little while and then I returned home.
Suffolk, July 2018
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Jayne Ivimey had embarked on a series of paintings about Doggerland early in 2015. She shared the information she had so far gathered and we went on several wonderful research trips together along the Norfolk coast.
From conversations with Hugh Brody I began to pull closer to an understanding of the hunter-gatherer way of life. He very kindly read the book in its early and later stages, offering invaluable comments and advice.
Tim Holt-Wilson, with his knowledge of East Anglian geology and prehistory, arranged a number of walks to areas that still had traces of Doggerland.
Enrique Brinkmann, whose work has been part of my visual thinking for more than fifty years, generously provided the sequence of drawings that accompany the eighteen time songs.
Other friends I would like to thank are Tim Dee, Simon Read, Helena Simon, Simon Frazer and Sandra van Beek.
Among the many people who helped me with their knowledge and experience, I would particularly like to thank Robert Mutch, Ray Allen, Jonathan Stewart, Dawn Watson and Rob Spray.
A number of archaeologists and palaeontologists have accepted my lay-person’s understanding with grace and good humour and have been very kind in sharing their expertise. I would like to thank Professor Bryony Coles; Professor Martin Bell; Dr Jim Leary; Klaas Post; Dick Mol; Clive Finlayson, Director of the Gibraltar Museum; Nick Ashton, Senior Curator of the British Museum Palaeolithic Collections; Wijnand van der Sanden, Curator of Archaeology at Drents Museum; Professor Leendert Louwe Kooijmans, Professor of Prehistory at the University of Leiden until 2008; Pauline Asingh of the Moesgård Museum; Felix Riede of Aarhus University; and Ole Nielson, Director of the Silkeborg Museum.
My agent Victoria Hobbs has been an enthusiastic presence throughout the book’s progress. Dan Frank, my editor at Pantheon Books in America, offered some invaluable advice at various stages of the work, and my friend Dan Franklin, who has been my editor at Jonathan Cape for the last twenty-eight years, understood what I was trying to do before I was sure if I did and followed the book step by patient step.
I have tried to give an accurate account of the huge sweeps of time I have been looking at. Any failures in presenting the info
rmation correctly are entirely my own.
The maps on this page, this page, this page, this page and this page are reproduced by permission of Bryony Coles. Maps devised by B.J. Coles and S.E. Rouillard. Copyright B.J. Coles and S.E. Rouillard.
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Time Song Page 20
