by Sarah Moss
The Professor appeared after breakfast and started organising people in a way that made me wonder if he thought there were Iron Age professors, or maybe as if he couldn’t imagine that there were circumstances in which qualities other than being posh and having read a lot might put a person in charge of everyone else. My dad, I thought, knew as much as anyone about living wild off the land, foraging and fishing and finding your way. You and you, go look for edible plants in this area, said the Prof. Make sure you’re back by half-three, the basket-weaver’s coming to do a workshop. Bill, come with me for fishing. Alison – he looked perplexed, perhaps suddenly unsure if he was allowed to tell Dad’s wife what to do – could you maybe, well, sort out the camp a bit, if you don’t mind? What about me, I said, what will I do? Go with the foraging party, said Dad, maybe you’ll learn summat, but you’re not to wander off and don’t make a nuisance of yourself, this might be fun and games to you but it’s these folks’ work, their studies, I’ll not have you messing around. It’s not a game to me either, I said, we have to eat, course I’ll go foraging.
They had the OS map and a forager’s handbook. Well, said the Prof, only compensating for the local knowledge Ancient British youth would have had, your education isn’t going to help you much with what they’d have known since childhood. We each took a skin bag and set out along the footpath towards the moor. There were, of course, dry stone walls and fields of cattle and a line of pylons against the sky and indeed a tarmac road on which one red car crawled near the horizon. If the occupants saw us, I thought, first they’d think we were ghosts and then they might wonder if they’d driven back in time. My hands and teeth clenched with the strength of my hope that they would not see us. The day was already hot, sweat prickling on my back and heather floating in mirage above the nearest rise. Underfoot, the path was soft with dust, white roots jutting like birdbones from the dry earth.
So, said Dan, Silvie, what, short for Sylvia? Sulevia, I said. I was about to say, as I had been doing since I first started school, she was an Ancient British goddess, my dad chose it, but they were already exchanging glances. Sulevia’s a local deity, said Dan, Jim was talking about her the other day. Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools, co-opted by the Romans, said Molly. So you come from round here? No, I said, we’re to the west, Burnley way? She shook her head. You’ve heard of Rochdale then, I said, but she hadn’t. Near Manchester then, I said, northwards. Yeah, she said, OK but your dad’s not a historian, right, how did he know about her if you’re not local? I could feel myself turning red. He’s a bus driver, I said, history’s just a hobby, he wanted me to have a proper native British name. I saw glances again. What, I said, people have all sorts of weird names, at least it’s not some random word, River or Rainbow or that. Yeah, said Dan, it’s just interesting, I’ve never met anyone with that kind of name.
Well, I said, you have now. And look, there’s a hawk, I think it’s a sparrowhawk, look at the wings. I squinted into the sun and pointed, tracked its ascent into the darkness at the top of the sky.
Good eyes, said Pete. Right, a proper British name. What’s he mean by that, then? Nothing, I said, he likes British prehistory, he thought it was a shame the old names had gone. Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner. You know it’s not really British, right? I mean, Sulevia, it’s obviously just a version of Sylvia which means – of the woods in Latin, I said, yes, I do know, a Roman corruption of a lost British word. There are actually people who know Latin where I come from, we do have books. I could hear my accent shifting as I spoke to them, talking posh and then getting angry and speaking normally again. My face was going red. Peter, I thought, you know that’s really a biblical name, how does it feel to be called a rock, are your parents really into Christianity then?
A raven called and I squinted into the sun. Right above us, there, the sun glinting white on its black wings. It called again, warning or advice: I’d bugger off now if I was you, mate. So it’s actually more of a Roman name, Dan said, does he know that? I wriggled my shoulders, as if I could shrug away the questions. Yeah, I said, probably, he does actually know quite a lot about Roman Britain. Why, asked Molly, if he’s a bus driver? The pine trees on the ridge bowed and you could see a breath of wind passing over the heather, dying before it reached us. He’s interested, of course, I said, that’s why we’re here. OK, said Pete, fair enough, and we walked in silence for a few minutes. The sun shone. The raven circled low. I ran my hand over my hair to feel the heat it had absorbed. You couldn’t really hear our feet on the path, just the movement of skin and cloth, the sound of your own hair against your ears, a grouse startling at our approach. The raven said something derisive and left us to it.
You planning to do archaeology at university then, asked Dan. I shrugged. Dunno, I said, not really planning to go, I don’t think, I’d rather just get a job, get started. There were still grants then, it would have been a way of escaping Dad’s control, but also, it seemed to me, a way of postponing what I imagined as real life, extending the adolescence I couldn’t wait to leave. I probably won’t get the grades anyway, I said. Stop questioning me, I thought, but I didn’t quite know how to ask anything of my own. How do you leave home, how do you get away, how do you not go back? What’s the best way to Berlin from here? Where are we actually going, I asked, what are we actually looking for? Actually, I thought, stop saying actually, it’s stupid. You heard the man, said Dan, edible plants, and he kept going as if he knew what he was doing and the rest of us kept following him.
The sun strengthened as we reached mid-morning, bathing moor and trees and fields in summer yellow. There was no shade, I remember everything a little flattened as if in one of those over-exposed photos it used to be possible to take. There won’t be any berries or anything on the moor, will there, it’s just heather and peat, isn’t it, no point going up there, said Pete, and I waited and glanced around at the others before I said well, you’ve probably thought about this and I dare say I’m wrong, but would it be worth looking for bilberries, I mean it’s probably the wrong time of year, a bit early, specially up here.
Mid-July. The moors above our town were covered with them by early August. Dad didn’t like to stop on his walks, hadn’t come up here to footle about like an old woman at the market, but he’d slow down while I picked a handful and caught him up, and when we camped in Scotland he’d leave Mum and me half a morning to gather what we could while he went in search of food more exciting to catch.
Oh, you mean blueberries, said Dan, yeah, sure, it’s worth a look, where do they grow? I glanced around again. I didn’t mean blueberries. I’d never eaten blueberries, which as far as I knew were a kind of American oversized bilberry robust enough for the pies people ate in films. Everyone kept walking. Molly had lifted her face to the sun and half-closed her eyes. No, bilberries, I said, south-facing slopes, usually, sheep like them too, best not to eat them unwashed, there’s a parasite in sheep pee. Wow, said Pete, you do know a lot, where’d you learn all this? Dad, I said, my dad taught me.
We followed the green-signposted Public Footpath along a stone wall and over a stile towards the moor. As the hill rose, we could see Roman Dere Street, the road to Hadrian’s Wall drawn across the next rise as if it was made of something different from the rest of the landscape, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler on a photo. Dad and I had walked the Wall’s whole length, Newcastle to Carlisle, at Easter the previous year. I remembered the approach of this road near the best bit, the section where the steep ground and sudden drops made a millennium’s worth of northern farmers not bother themselves to pull down milecastles and miles of dressed stone to build sheep-pens and byres. We had stopped there to eat our sandwiches and I’d half closed my eyes, imagined hearing on the wind the Arabic conversations of the Syrian soldiers who’d dug the ditches and hoisted the stones two thousand years ago. I’d tried to hold the view
in my mind and strip the landscape of pylons and church towers, to see through the eyes of the patrolling legion fresh from the Black Forest. They weren’t even really Roman, Dad had said, they were from all over the show, North Africa and Eastern Europe and Germany, probably a lot of them didn’t even speak proper Latin. There were even Negroes, imagine what the Britons made of that, they’d never have seen the like. We were only two days out from Newcastle, a city that had upset Dad, and I knew better than to challenge him; even the word ‘Negro’ was already some concession to my ideas because he preferred to use a more offensive term and wait, chin raised, for a reaction. The day we arrived he’d taken me not to the Roman cases in the city museum or to the sorry remnants of the Roman castle under the Victorian railway bridge where we would have been out of the weather, but to the docks, idle and strewn with rubbish. Come on, girl, walk, don’t you look away from this. It’s only water, won’t get further nor skin. This is what there was, this is what’s left. The wind from the Siberian steppes sliced across the North Sea to whip us with rain. I had on one of Nan’s knitted hats, the sort of thing I wouldn’t wear if anyone I knew might see me, but still pain started up in my ears as I followed him across the concrete waste. Cranes reared above us like the ceremonial pillars of a lost civilisation, intricate with rust and disintegration. The windflowers and morning glory that are either holding together or pulling apart England’s abandoned buildings and roads and railways flattened under the weather. Look at this, he said, look at it. Used to send ships all over the world from here. Look at it now.
There wasn’t a campsite in the city so we spent the first night in a bed and breakfast where there were cigarette burns in the curtains and stains on the nylon sheets. The corner shop sold fruits and vegetables I’d never seen before and smelt of jasmine and spices, but Dad wouldn’t go in, wouldn’t let me try the milky and pink and green sweets oozing syrup on trays in the window of the Indian takeaway, the twisted orange knots and the silver you were apparently meant to eat. Paki muck, he said, you don’t want to know what they put in those, here, since it’s the first night I’ll treat you to a fish and chips, how about that? With that tartare sauce stuff you like. That’ll set you up properly.
It was still raining the next morning when Dad made me take the bacon and toast I couldn’t eat and hide it in a shiny paper napkin to make my lunch. We set off along streets in some ways deeply familiar, where front doors opened onto the pavement, back gates onto the ginnel and the houses had one rattling sash window upstairs and one down, the architecture of Victorian poverty, but the voices here were different, the words sung to a tune carried over the sea. Dad’s mood lifted through the day as we reached the edge of the city and set out through fields, albeit fields broken by A-roads crossing the landscape on pilings with no way for pedestrians, foot-soldiers, to get across. The Wall was only a ditch, that first day, but at least it was a Roman ditch, a physical manifestation of Ancient British resistance still marked on the land, and you could see Dad drawing strength from it.
We had come up onto the moor tops, where the high ground rolls under a big sky. Walking up there, it feels as if you’re being offered on an open hand to the weather, though when you look down there are plenty of soft little hiding places, between the marsh grass in the boggy dips and in the heather, vibrating with bees, on the slopes. Molly pulled a packet of fruit pastilles out of her sheepskin bag and offered it around. There’s a petrol station on the road to the village, she said, we can always get more, it’s not as if Iron Age foragers wouldn’t have gone to Spar if they could. Do they have ice-cream, asked Pete. That’s a bit crap, Moll, said Dan, they’d also have had hot showers and hiking boots and microwaves if they could, wouldn’t they, I mean people do, when they can. Doubt it, said Molly, chewing, not the hiking boots, anyway, would’ve felt horrible to them.
She was right. You move differently in moccasins, have a different experience of the relationship between feet and land. You go around and not over rocks, feel the texture, the warmth, of different kinds of reed and grass in your muscles and your skin. The edges of the wooden steps over the stile touch your bones, an unseen pebble catches your breath. You can imagine how a person might learn a landscape with her feet. But we hadn’t yet crossed any bog and I was pretty sure it would feel different in winter. They used to stuff their moccasins with hay for insulation. You too, Silvie, said Molly, offering her packet with a red one at the top, have one if you like. Of course I liked.
We found bilberries, growing amongst the heather on a south-facing slope above a stream below some lumps that the map called roman camp (rems of). There, I said, the one with the round shiny leaves turning red, the berries are under the leaves, you don’t see them at first. Don’t be bossy, I told myself, little Miss Know-it-all, but no-one seemed to mind. The leather soles weren’t much protection once we’d left the path, and the heather tickled my ankles. I unlaced the shoes, hung them around my neck and picked my way up the stream, teetering on rocky pebbles and cautious over weed. Good idea, said Dan, though given how shallow the stream and strong the sun, the water was remarkably cold. I wondered if they’d done this, the old people, the Ancient Britons, paddled where there was no path, stepped in and out of the water because, as Dad liked to say, your skin’s a waterproof membrane, that’s what it’s there for, to get wet.
Despite what I’d said about the sheep, I ate the berries and so did everyone else. They were warm from the sun, with a bloom on them like skin. Bruised skin. I liked the prickle of the calyx on my tongue, the way they burst in my mouth, the way you don’t know until then if it’s a bland or a sharp one. Bet you could make good gin with these, said Pete, you know, like with damsons. Did they make alcohol, I asked. Dunno, said Molly, probably, you would, wouldn’t you? It’s easy enough to do by accident if you’re storing fruit and veg. They had rye, I don’t know when ergot poisoning started but I’m sure they had some psychotropic stuff. Yeah, I said, actually, my dad says, there were things they gave the bog people before they were sacrificed, to quiet them like, or maybe blunt the pain. Pete held up a bilberry to the sun, squinted at it. Maybe I’ll do my thesis on it, he said, that would be fun, do you think you’re allowed to do experiential archaeology on drugs if you forage them yourself? Ask Jim, said Molly, he’d like the idea whether you’re actually allowed or not, don’t you think he probably smokes dope with his friends at home, like after a dinner party, and thinks he’s really cool? It’d be pretty good, said Pete, can you imagine, on your CV? CV, I thought, and felt a thrill of fear, the backwash of my desperation to have such a thing, to leave childhood and dependence behind me, to enter the world. There’s some thyme here, I said, look, it would be good in the griddle cakes maybe, or if they do catch any fish.
They had caught fish, of course. It is only fair to observe that both Dad and the Prof did have the off-grid survival skills about which they liked to talk. When we got back, well after any conventional interpretation of ‘lunch time’, sunburnt and blue-fingered, our bags almost as flaccid as they had been that morning, a small school of silver fish had been suffocated, disembowelled, opened out like pages and strung on a wooden frame to dry in the sun. There was a smell. You’re back at last, said Dad, you know they wouldn’t have gone off lazing around, summer was the busy time, they’d have known what would happen in winter if they couldn’t be bothered to fill the stores. Is that really all you could find? And I dare say you’re all expecting to eat regardless? They wouldn’t have had two old men supplying the whole community you know, the young people would have played their part. Had to, I thought, seeing as how nobody actually lived to be old, seeing as how you and Prof Jim would have been dead and buried years ago, infection or appendicitis, parasites, the leg you broke that time you fell on the mountain. Sorry, said Dan, we did look, there just didn’t seem to be much, maybe a different terrain next time, isn’t moorland a man-made landscape anyway, from sheep-farming? The Prof was more relaxed. Never mind, he said, it’s just an experiment, just to get
a sense of the challenges. Here, Alison made flatbreads and there’s lots of fish. Your bilberries should dry in no time, a day like today.
The basket-weaver came. What kind of job is that, said Mum, fancy making your living weaving baskets in this day and age, but it turned out, of course, to be more complicated than that. The baskets weren’t to sell. Louise was a friend of the Prof, a semi-retired lecturer in textile arts who now spent her days making things by hand, the hard way, for the amusement of people bored by safe drinking water, modern medicine and dry feet. Lecturer in Textile Arts; I caught Dad’s eye as he absented himself. She was wearing a sort of kaftan thing not unlike our tunics although probably more comfortable and certainly, even to my eye, more expensive, with lumpy flat shoes made of cut-out red leather flowers and green leaves sewn together. She’d driven her jeep up the track into the wood and then the Prof pushed her wheelchair up the field, a process that looked uncomfortable for both and unsafe for her but seemed to cause them great hilarity. Dan and Pete went to help but were waved away; thank you, she said, but Jim pushed me into Loch Lomond once upon a time, I’ll see if I can trust him now. It was twenty-five years ago, he said. It was memorable, she said. Anyway, you must be Jim’s students?
