by Jenni Mills
Hadn’t been in Avebury a month before I knew coming back had been a bad idea. Getting off the bus at night, by the Red Lion in the blackout, I’d hear the fizz of a match under the trees. No matter how fast I turned, I was always too late to see more than a dying gleam of flame out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes, when I walked alone across the high Downs, I’d hear a splash in a puddle behind me, or a stone rolling along the track like somebody’d kicked it.
See, they never come back, but I think they try sometimes. They in’t no more than a set of dreams and yearnings, lifted like ash on the wind, but they follow us, the best they can, hoping someone’ll leave a door open for them to slip through, so one day they can come home.
New Year’s Eve, I went to a dance at Lyneham with the boy who had the tin foot. He was a lovely lad, minded me of Davey in some ways. He got himself drunk, and in the car park outside the mess he told me how much he missed his girl. As 1945 came in, I held his head and stroked his thick dark hair, then gave him a regretful kiss and told him she was lucky to have someone care for her that much. He was posted north the next week, and I never saw him again, never knew whether he went back to his sweetheart, whether he survived the last months of the war or not.
Next day I walked over to Yatesbury to leave flowers by Davey’s headstone. The church door was open. It was a still, icy day, so cold that, kneeling in the front pew, there was mist in the air between me and the altar. I wanted to ask God to help those boys lie quiet, but all I could think of was the emptiness in there, and the chill of the stone floor striking up into my knees. Coming out again, I caught a flicker of movement over by the box tomb. Knew then for definite I’d have to leave, maybe for a few years, maybe for a lifetime, hoping that by the time I came back what was left of them would finally have blown away like fog on the wind.
Hardly more than a couple of weeks after that, the Manor barn caught fire in the night. By morning the stink of burned thatch and charred wood had crept through the whole village, hanging on the frosty air. It was the place Mr Keiller had garaged his cars, where Davey used to polish them to a brilliant gloss, and cover them with tarpaulins to stop the bat droppings spoiling the paintwork.
I left Dad listening to the wireless, where Alvar Liddell was talking about the brave Russians fighting their way inch by inch into Warsaw, and went to see what was left of the barn before I caught the bus to work.
Parts of the building were still smouldering. There were pools of water between the blackened timbers, where they’d tried to put the fire out, but it had sunk its teeth well into the thatch and there wasn’t a hope of saving much. Lucky it hadn’t spread to the other barns.
‘Thank God no one was hurt.’
I hadn’t noticed Mr Keiller come up behind me. He looked exhausted, and his hands trembled as he lit himself a cigarette. He offered me one from his battered old cigarette tin, but I shook my head.
‘I’m terrible sorry about the cars,’ I said. The Mercedes was a blistered shell, pinned under a roof beam.
‘Hang the cars.’ He took a deep pull on his cigarette, but it made him cough; the stink of the fire scratched the back of your throat. ‘Though I do mind about the Caterpillar.’ He pointed to a piece of twisted metal. Couldn’t hardly recognize it as a section of track. ‘Remember the day we picnicked at the Long Barrow? Good times, eh, Heartbreaker?’ When I said nothing, he put an arm round my shoulder and tugged me to him, like he wanted to squeeze a yes out of me.
‘We were storing cases of finds in there as well,’ he went on. ‘All damaged beyond recovery, I imagine. Ironic, isn’t it? The earth protected them for several thousand years, and we can’t keep them safe for more than a decade or so. It’s the Barber Surgeon all over again. Maybe we should’ve let them be.’
‘Might not be as bad as you think,’ I said, and patted his arm, like I did with Dad when he started coming over upset remembering Mam. Or, worse, when he forgot she was dead, and began walking up the street searching for her and the old guesthouse. ‘At least the museum wasn’t touched, nor the boxes stored in the dovecote. Anyway, the flints won’t have burned.’
‘Yes, but the labels will have gone up in smoke. A piece of flint can’t tell you much without a record of where it was found.’ He coughed again. ‘Damn American tobacco. Damn war. None of us has had much luck since it began.’
Mr Young came round the side of the unharmed barn across the yard, followed by a couple of the land girls from Mr Peak-Garland’s farm, carrying rakes. He was curator of the museum now, working for the National Trust.
‘You’d have married the Brushwood Boy, wouldn’t you?’ said Mr Keiller, suddenly. ‘You had your ups and downs, I know, but it would’ve worked out in the end, don’t you think?’ There was summat wistful in his voice, and I wondered if it was for those far-away days when he and Davey rode the motorbike over Windmill Hill.
Barns burn, but hope’s like flint. Might not be able to say exact where you found it, but it comes through the fire. He was right, I should’ve married Davey, but wasn’t Davey I was in love with.
Mr Keiller put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt his breath on the top of my head, lifting my hair. There’s moments, only moments, that you live for, and know they’ll never last, maybe never come again.
And what am I thinking that moment? See, I know that even if I were to stay in Avebury, he won’t be with me for ever. Like Mr Cromley said, I’m only a tobacconist’s daughter, too young for Alec, ill-educated, with no more than a splash of young-girl prettiness to catch his eye, a little bit of talent with my drawing and that fading through lack of practice. One day, sooner or later, could be next year, could be next month, Mrs Keiller will be back, or there’ll be some other woman, a writer or another archaeologist, maybe a sportswoman, athletic, cleverer than me, richer than me, older than me, more beautiful, out of the same social drawer as him, a woman who’s meant to be with him: and he’ll be with her.
But in the meantime, you can’t help who you fall in love with. And who knows, maybe Mr Cromley was right after all, and what you will shall be?
We watched Mr Young and the land girls picking their way through the embers of the ruined barn, looking for what could be saved.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
There are some alternative realities in this novel, so this is for people who like to know what is true, and what is made up. It is also my chance to say thanks to all the people who helped bring the book to print.
Avebury has intrigued me for years. When I commuted between Bristol and London in the 1980s, it was my stopping-off point on the way home. It was always a joy to leave the motorway and drive across the sweep of the chalk downs, turning off the A4 and following the Avenue uphill to the stone circle. But it wasn’t until nearly twenty years later, when I made a television programme about Alexander Keiller at Avebury, Village in the Stones, broadcast on BBC2, that I came across the real life story that underpins this novel.
In 1938 Avebury had been captured on amateur cine film by Percy Lawes. The television company I worked for, Available Light Productions, really did show the restored footage to villagers at the Red Lion, as Overview TV do in the parallel-universe Avebury invented in the novel. It had not occurred to me until I saw Percy Lawes’s film that the stone circle is largely a reconstruction, and that, like an old time squire, Keiller knocked down part of the village to achieve his vision.
For me, the fascination of Keiller is his ambivalence. He was the last of the great amateur archaeologists, funding his own projects, but also one of the first to dig in a scientific manner, his excavations conducted with a scrupulous eye for detail that put many of his contemporaries to shame. For some, as local historian Brian Edwards puts it, he was the serpent entering Eden, destroying their community. Yet he also provided decently paid employment for local men, at a time when agricultural wages were so low that many farm workers could not afford the rents in the council houses built especially for them.
As for his sexual ambivalence, there w
ere indeed four wives and countless mistresses, but some personal glimpses in the letters (those that weren’t destroyed by his executors) suggest that he might have been attracted to men as well as women. Homo-eroticism was fashionable in the 1930s, particularly among men of Keiller’s class who had been to public school, and possibly more than one of the young archaeologists whom Keiller encouraged was homosexual, though not openly so. Keiller writes of being bowled over and bewitched by a young man he met at a dinner in London–Sing Ho! for the Brushwood Boy!–but whether he did anything about it, the letters do not reveal.
This is a novel about what we can’t know, as much as what we can. So what’s indisputably true, and what isn’t? I wanted my story to reflect the ambivalence of Keiller’s relationship with the village, so I chose to base it around an almost biblical story of seduction. Frannie is an invented character, and so are her seducer Donald Cromley and her friend Davey Fergusson. But several of the other people who appear in the 1930s/40s strand of the story really lived, including Mrs Sorel–Taylour, Doris Chapman, W.E.V. Young and Stuart Piggott. My regret is that I have had to exclude so many others from the story, or it would have been hopelessly over-populated.
Keiller was a larger-than-life character, and I have tried to be as realistic as possible in my portrayal of him, so that the events Frannie witnesses at the excavation itself (such as the discovery of the Barber Surgeon) are described with some accuracy, though I have taken a few liberties with dates for dramatic purposes. The Barber Surgeon’s skeleton was indeed believed destroyed in a bombing raid on the Royal College of Surgeons but, amazingly, was rediscovered in a storeroom at the Natural History Museum nearly sixty years later. A ceremony led by Keiller brandishing a chalk phallus did take place in the Manor garden, witnessed by Mrs Sorel-Taylour–though at Hallowe’en, not Imbolc.
The question of Charlie is more delicate. Keiller removed his (or her) actual skull, and replaced it with a cast, which remained with the skeleton until only a few years ago. But what you see in the museum today is the genuine article: head and torso have been reunited. There is a serious debate about how we should treat human remains uncovered by archaeology: should they be reburied, or kept (on display or on storeroom shelves) as a research resource? I wouldn’t presume to have an answer, except to observe that when Keiller dug up Charlie in the 1920s, not even the technique of radiocarbon dating had been invented to release the secrets of organic material. Today ever more sophisticated analysis helps us to understand not only when and perhaps how someone died, but also how and where they lived. Charlie may still have something new to tell us.
Keiller didn’t have any direct descendants that we know of. He was a charming, exasperating, obsessive man, both generous and ruthless, who could fly into a rage over almost nothing. He must have been very difficult to live with, and poor Doris Chapman had a hard time. Their marriage limped on, though both she and Keiller had had affairs, until 1947, when she learnt that he had run off to the South of France with Mrs Gabrielle Styles, a professional golfer and heiress. Gabrielle was eventually to become the fourth Mrs Keiller, and stayed with him until he died in 1955 of lung cancer, aged sixty-five. She donated his collection of cow-creamers–there is some dispute, by the way, over whether they numbered 666 or 667–to a museum in the Potteries.
He certainly had an appetite for sexual experimentation–it was the novelist Antonia White who received the unusual invitation to clamber into a wicker basket. (She dubbed him the Marmalade King in her diaries.) There is also a story, revealed to Keiller’s biographer by the son of one of the other participants, that in the 1930s he was one of a group of men who met to engage in ritualized sex with a lady in a South London flat. It is tantalizing to wonder who else was there, and whether the evening’s entertainment was merely erotic or intended to have some magical purpose, sandwiched between the activities of Aleister Crowley earlier in the century, and the invention of modern witchcraft by Gerald Gardner a few years later.
The last air raid on Swindon took place on the afternoon of 29 August 1942, as described in the book, under cover of a dramatic thunderstorm. Houses in Drove Road were destroyed, and a number of people killed. However, there was no crash on Easton Down that afternoon (as far as I know), although there was a Q-site there. British planes were occasionally fooled by the lights of Q-sites, with tragic results. The Starfish sites at Barbury Castle and Liddington existed, and there are bomb craters in both hillforts.
In the present-day story, I have taken considerable liberties with the National Trust’s organization at Avebury. The job of property administrator, as described in the novel, is not one that exists–the entirely fictional Michael is doing the work of several people. He and Graham are not based on any of those who manage Avebury in the real world, nor will you find Corey working in the caf; though you may spot the curator peering at small fragments of Neolithic pot.
Keiller re-erected just over half the stone circle, but most of the ground within the henge remains unexcavated. Every so often there are rumours that someone is planning to put up another stone, but so far it has not happened. But the night of the 22 June 2006 was one of the rare occasions when noctilucent cloud was visible in Wiltshire. Tolemac has recently been cut down and replanted, so looks very different from the woodland described in the novel, and the Goddess, in the form of the tinsel-wigged shop dummy, had sadly been removed from the Swallowhead springs last time I looked. Nothing ever stays quite the same at Avebury. As for the erratic way in which mobile phones pick up a signal in and around the circle, go and see for yourself. It’s a godsend for a novelist, but a mild irritation if you happen to be staying there.
So many people gave me help with the book that I am bound to forget some, and a few asked me not to mention their names. Thank you to all, and forgive me if I have misunderstood, or over-embellished, anything we discussed: responsibility for any inaccuracies or mistakes lies firmly at my door. Much of the background for this book came out of the research I had already done on the Avebury TV programme, with the help of Nigel Clark. We interviewed people who grew up in Avebury during the 1930s, including Josie Ovens, the Rawlins brothers (whose father ran the local garage and provided electric power to the village), Heather Peak-Garland, and her sister the late Jane Lees. But I would most particularly like to thank Ros Cleal, the curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum, and her colleagues at the National Trust in Avebury. They put up with my many visits to the Keiller Archive there, and generously shared their experiences of working at the World Heritage Site, as well as their chocolate biscuits. I enjoyed many enlightening conversations on such diverse matters as the sexual dimorphism of aurochs, the law pertaining to the excavation of badger setts, and the politics of keeping human skeletons in museums. Again, everything I have right is down to them, whereas everything wrong (sometimes deliberately so) is my fault alone.
They found me volunteer work so that I could experience at first hand bumping along muddy tracks in a National Trust Land Rover with head estate warden Hilary Makins, and clearing about three hundred spent tea-lights and a muddy ground sheet from the West Kennet Long Barrow. (What do people get up to there?) I checked the first-aid kits, sat at the till in the Barn Museum with Chris Penney, and worked behind the counter at the caf, so that I can now make a mean cappuccino. Terry the Druid Keeper of the Stones allowed me to join a ceremony to celebrate Imbolc in the Circle, at which he and Gordon Rimes gave me a glimpse of Druid and Wiccan beliefs. The following year I rose excruciatingly early to drive to Avebury for summer solstice sunrise, only to find there was nowhere within miles of the village to park, and no sun. In the strange way that life has of imitating fiction, I picked up my first Neolithic arrowhead, and saw my first hare in the wild, while walking near the village shortly after I had written both experiences into the novel. I stayed twice at Fishlocks Cottage, and once at Teachers Cottage, in order to soak up the atmosphere of Avebury after hours, when most of the visitors have gone home. It is truly magical to sit with a glass
of wine in the garden at Fishlocks, watching a September sunset and dodging bats on their way to cruise the ditches.
Thanks to the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury for permission to quote from Keiller’s letters. (The only fictional quote is the letter of condolence to Frannie.) For further reading on Keiller, I’d recommend A Zest for Life, Lynda J. Murray’s biography. For the archaeology of Avebury and Neolithic/Bronze Age monuments, Josh Pollard’s Avebury was immensely useful, as well as Mike Pitts’s Hengeworld, and Aubrey Burl’s Prehistoric Avebury. Brian Edwards has written a number of papers on the social history of the village, and Marjorie Rawlins’s memoir, Butcher, Baker, Saddlemaker, provided details of life in Avebury in the early part of the twentieth century. On pagan belief, historian Ronald Hutton is the author of many erudite books, including The Triumph of the Moon. I also found helpful The Way of the Shaman by Michael Harner, and Pagan Paths by Pete Jennings. Andy Worthington’s Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion is a fascinating account of the background to the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s. I did have a few moments myself in the seventies, but for what it was like to be there in the eighties, Bee D avies was very helpful. The autobiographies of two Second World War night-fighter navigators, Lewis Brandon and Jimmy Rawnsley, provided background for Davey’s experiences in the RAF.
My father, Robert Mills, was an RAF navigator, and during the war drove a Baby Austin with a sheet of steel welded to the roof. My mother, Sheila Mills, spent the war years working in the almoner’s office of a large hospital, and, during our last conversations, she provided many details of daily life in the 1930s and 1940s. This book was written during a dark and unhappy period for me, as it was conceived at the time of her long illness and eventual death. I miss her immensely, but hear echoes of her voice sometimes in Frannie’s, different as their backgrounds and experiences were.
