by Sarah Moss
The Prof parked Louise’s chair in the shade of the big oak and then went back with Pete to get her boxes of supplies from the car. Mum brought her a birchbark cup of water, offered tea she had no practical means of supplying. Don’t worry, said Louise, the water is perfect and if I want tea later I have a tap and a perfectly good kettle at home. Oh, are you going? Do join us if you like, make a basket. Mum paused. Try it, said Louise, you can stop if it’s not fun. It was the wrong word, Mum didn’t believe in fun. I’ve a mort to do, she said, I’ll be getting on, thank you. More water before I do?
The oak rustled, its shadows pattering over Louise’s clothes and hair. I stood there, had nothing to say. Molly came through the sunlight, introduced herself and knelt at Louise’s side, sitting on her flexed ankles in an elegant Japanese posture that I couldn’t have managed. It’s not easy to sit on the ground in a knee-length tunic. Either Ancient Britons worried a lot less about flashing their knickers than we do or the hunter-gatherer life made them very bendy. Not that they had knickers, probably. And this is Silvie, Molly said, Jim probably mentioned, Bill’s daughter? Short for Sulevia. Hi, I said, feeling myself redden for no particular reason. Molly smiled at me, flicked a plait over her shoulder and started asking questions: don’t you have to destroy an artefact to find out how it was made? Do you use replica tools to make replica objects, and if so do you use replica tools to make the replica tools, how far back does it go? Since the textiles themselves don’t survive, how far are ideas about what people wore in prehistory just guess-work, these tunics, for example? I stood at the edge of the tree’s shelter, leaves moving in my hair, wondering if she’d prepared these questions in advance, worrying that her rapid fire was rude. You don’t talk to people like that, I thought, just come out and ask them stuff, but Molly did and Louise didn’t seem to mind. Well, she said, a lot of archaeology is about taking things apart to see how they work, isn’t it, and we often don’t put them back when we’ve finished, but one of the reasons for making replicas is that you can test them to destruction if you need to. Sometimes I do use replica tools, I have quite a collection of bone needles at home, but you know sometimes you can use the real thing, there are enough medieval loom-weights and spindles around that we can put the real things in handling collections. Really, said Molly, you can spin using the very thing that someone, some woman, used before the Civil War? Doesn’t it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she’s been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not any more, anyway, I’m always trying to do what dead people tell me. And specially when I’m making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I’m kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn’t it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind’s doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.
It’s a shame I couldn’t bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.
I turned out to have natural talent as a basket-weaver. Silvie’s doing very well, said Louise, look at that, have you done this before, do you do a lot of making? Making what, I thought, but whatever she had in mind the answer was no. Great, I said to Moll, my future is settled, I’ll weave baskets. Maybe not full time, Molly said, you must want to do something, there must be something you like, a starting point. I like reading, I said, but not what we do in English lessons. Um, going for walks? Nothing anyone’d pay me for. She pushed woven reeds down onto their willow frame. Mountain guiding, she said. Working in a youth hostel. Forestry and conservation. What about all the outdoor stuff, foraging, you know more about it than we do. Just the bilberries, I said, and only because of Dad, it wasn’t as if there was any way I could not know that stuff, anyway I don’t think it’s a job.
Aviate, navigate, communicate, Dad always said, and don’t expect that anyone will come and get you when it all goes wrong. I was pretty sure he’d never flown, nor even sat in a light aircraft; the aviation was metaphorical and what he meant by ‘communicate’ was ‘don’t ask for help’. I started to tuck the sticking-out ends into the weave of my basket. It was actually quite good, even and stable.
What about you, I said, you’re going to be an archaeologist? Molly’s plaits had come back to the front. There were green apples on them today. Maybe, she said, don’t think I want to spend my life digging though, I like walls and a roof and a bathroom. I might go into museums and galleries, maybe do teacher training first so I can work with kids and families, I’ve always loved museums.
Museums. My father regarded them as temples, the bone-houses of our ancestral past. There wasn’t much locally, just small-town collections going from the less exciting flint tools to patched hoop-skirts from someone’s granny’s attic, but my father was one of the few people who liked to go and look at them, and therefore to take me too. He had taken me once, years ago, to the Manchester Museum, told me I didn’t need to go to school that day, we had better things to do, he and I. He’d told Mum to put up sandwiches for us, sent me back upstairs to take off my uniform and put on ‘summat decent’, and then sent me back to change again when I, matching his one suit with the wide legs, came down in my party dress. Come on, he said, we don’t want to miss the train. I had never been on the train. We held hands and I trotted, as always, to keep up with him, past the butcher where the pork and lamb and beef in the window were divided from each other like the animals on the toy farm at school by plastic grass, past the Post Office where I went with Mum every Thursday straight after school to pick up the Child Benefit and we queued on the dusty lino floor around the metal barriers, because Thursday was also the day you collected your pension so there were old ladies with sweets in their handbags for little girls who knew how to be winsome, which I didn’t, mostly. Dad strode up the cobbled lane to the station, bought tickets, told me to stay behind the yellow line on the platform and not to act daft. It was only on the train that he started to explain where we were going, as I pressed my nose to the grimy window and took in the marine tartan of British Rail, poked my fingers into what turned out to be ash-trays in the arm of each seat. Stop that, he said, listen now. I knew about the peat bogs up on the moor, yes, the ones where the cotton flags grew, where we had to jump from tussock to tussock not to fall in the mire? Even then, when I must have slowed him down enough to be annoying, he took me walking up there every Sunday, whatever the weather; yes, I knew. Right, well those bogs have always been special places for folk round here, right back in ancient times, people saw the marshlights, probably, thought it was spirits or summat like, and probably they were frightened to fall in just like us because I knew, didn’t I, that the bog could hold you down and suck you in, he’d told me, hadn’t he, how hard it could be to get out. Aye, I said, yes. We were crossing the moor by then, the wires swooping along the tracks, and it was a clear enough grey day but I couldn’t see any bog, just heather and sheep and below us terraced houses like our own creeping up the hillside. Well, he said, folk used sometimes to give their precious things to the bog, like if you were to give it your Owl. In my mind I clasped Owl tightly, sent a thought to him left
undefended in my bed, tried not to imagine his fur darkening as he sank, the bog swallowing his yellow felt feet. Or if you gave it your digging books, I said. There was a bookshelf for Dad’s digging books, by the gas fire in the front room. Mum couldn’t watch TV unless Dad was working a night shift because he liked to read them there in the evenings, in silence, and although I wasn’t allowed to touch them he’d sometimes show me the pictures when I came down to say goodnight. These are Bronze Age necklaces, Silvie, can you imagine how heavy to wear? That’s a sword, look at that inlay, think of the work in that. And on this rock, look, they carved a magic pattern, someone did that by hand three thousand years since. That’s where you come from, those folk, that’s how it used to be. I looked round and saw him tense at the thought of throwing his big shiny books in a bog. Ripped pages, spreading water. Aye, I suppose, he said, but you know you’re not to touch them mind. Anyroad, there’s been all sorts found in the bogs, the peat and the water preserve stuff that rots away everywhere else and of course there’s always been digging for peats so things get found. And Silvie, out Cheshire way they found a person, a man. From the really old days, the Iron Age. A man, I said, what, dead? Of course dead, you lummock, didn’t I just say Iron Age, when was the Iron Age? I knew that one. Two thousand years, I said, before the Romans came. Well, there you go then, he’s not going to be alive, is he. We were coming to the next station. The people who wanted to get off had to push the windows all the way down and lean out to use the handle on the outside of the door. Did he fall in then, I asked, get sucked down? Pushed in, more like, said Dad, and a rope round his neck and all. You’re going to see him, Silvie, today. They’ve got him all laid out in a case at the museum. A real man from the Iron Age, himself. But dead, I said again, unable to imagine it.
My dad likes museums, I said to Molly. He likes dead things. She pulled a strand out of her basket and started winding it around the spokes again. I’d like to make things be alive again, she said, like Louise does, let visitors see that people’s tools and jewellery and games are still here even when the people aren’t. And I wish I was better at this, I like the idea of making things the way people used to. Practice, I said, I bet the baskets in museums weren’t anyone’s first attempt.
Though some of the bog bodies must have been someone’s first attempt. It would have been a skill to learn like any other, the art of taking someone into the flickering moment between life and death and holding them there, gone and yet speaking, moving still, for as long as you liked.
There were cold bannocks for the meal we called tea and the Prof called dinner, with greens Dad had found while we were weaving baskets and more of the fish, which were lasting well partly because they were so small and bony that only Dad had the patience for more than one. Half a bannock left lumpen on my plate, I watched him use his fingers to work flakes of pale flesh from skin and bone and then suck on the heads, shrunken eyes open to his tongue and teeth. What, he said, picking his teeth with a fingernail, summat bothering you, not enough refinement round here for you? No, I said, nothing. Good, he said, they wouldn’t have wasted food you know, wouldn’t have left what could be eaten. And nor will you, eat the bannock your mother made now. I saw him looking at Molly’s plate; she’d refused fish and only tasted the greens. You don’t go wasting what people have worked for, he said, but into the air between me and her. No Dad, I said, and afterwards, when the others went off up the hill to see the sunset, he made me stay and help Mum, wipe weird bowls and rough wooden spoons with bunches of reeds he’d told her to gather earlier, then rinse them in the stream. Bits of fish caught in the reeds. He wouldn’t have a dishwasher at home, said they wasted water and it was good for folk to clean up after themselves with their own two hands, but there was a washing-up ritual that he supervised for months before he trusted me alone: scrape into the compost bucket, hot water rinse, soap scrub, second rinse, dry with a fresh cloth, put away. Can’t abide to see dishes left all heaped, how can you clean the sink if it’s like that. Even when we went camping, we had tin plates and after I’d rinsed them in the stream they got a proper wash in water heated over a driftwood fire. Won’t we get sick, I said, why don’t we just eat off leaves and then throw them away? I suppose they didn’t get sick, Mum said, the whojamacallits. Ancient Britons. We’d have to wash the leaves first, anyroad, and I can’t think of big ones that aren’t poisonous. They might well have got food poisoning, I said, something was keeping life expectancy down, the Professor said in most cases they didn’t even live long enough to die of cancer. Oh well, she said. There was a new bruise on her arm. Here, she said, put these back in the hut and then maybe we can sit down a bit before bedtime. Mum often spoke of sitting down as a goal, a prize she might win by hard work, but so rarely achieved that the appeal remained unclear to me. She worked as a cashier for the local supermarket, a job mostly conducted from a seat but apparently not meeting whatever need was meant by ‘sitting down’. You go now, I said, you go sit down, I’ll sort these last bits. I carried the bowls and spoons down to the stream, plopped them into a pool where the water eddied smooth and deep and left them to rinse a bit. I meandered in the evening light, feeling heather and stones under my feet, breathing the smell of leaves and dew. I slapped at midges, picked a few clover leaves and watched them shimmy away on the stream into the dimming evening, dipped my fingers and admired the way the water distorted their lines. A few dark fish ghosted the pool. I saw a bog myrtle bush leaning over the water downstream, pewter leaved, and picked my way towards it, rubbed a leaf between my fingers and inhaled the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood. I squatted for a little while on the bank and listened to the sounds of the night, no birds now but the stream hurrying over stones it had worn to roundness, small lives rustling somewhere within reach, a distant owl and a nearer response. I didn’t leave until it occurred to me that I was going to have trouble carrying everything back to the camp in the dark, although I found I could see well enough until I came within sight of the fire. Light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.
The students were still not back, although by any measure sunset was gone. Dad and the Prof were talking about fighting, the way men do when they’re really fighting about talking. It would just have been intertribal squabbles up here, the Prof was saying, until the Romans came, no training at all for taking on the imperial army, they’d never have seen the like. At least part of their defence was magic, did you know that? War trumpets, scary noises coming at you over the marsh. Aye, said Dad, maybe so, you’re thinking of the carnyxes, but they had their horses and swords as well, didn’t they, put up quite a fight and after all sent them packing in the end, there weren’t dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there? Carnyces, said the Prof, in the plural, and hang on, we don’t—And anyway, I said, don’t the Americans use magic and scary noises to this day, don’t they paint pictures on their bombs and play heavy metal outside their enemies’ compounds? Dad looked at the Prof as if I were his second-in-command, as if I’d just backed him up as planned. Yes, said the Prof, they do, and you’re right, it’s probably very much the same thing; one of the things you learn in my line of work is that there’s no steady increase in rationalism over the centuries, it’s a mistake to think that they had primitive minds and we don’t. The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said, they wouldn’t have bothered with that, would they, if the British hadn’t put the wind up them. Well, said the Prof, they weren’t exactly British, as I said before, they wouldn’t have seen themselves that way, as far as we can tell their identities were tribal. Celts, we tend to call them these days though they wouldn’t have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the West. Dad didn’t like this line. Celts, I suppose, sounded Irish, and even though Jesus had only recently died at the time in question Dad didn’t like the Irish, tended to see Catholicism in much the same light as the earlier form of Roman imperialism. Foreigners coming ov
er here, telling us what to think. He wanted his own ancestry, wanted a lineage, a claim on something. Not people from Ireland or Rome or Germania or Syria but some tribe sprung from English soil like mushrooms in the night. What about Boadicea, Dad said, she routed them an’ all, didn’t she. Boudicca, said the Prof, we call her Boudicca these days, it seems to be a more accurate rendition. For a while, yes, but she led the Iceni in the south, there’s not much evidence that the people round here caused the Romans any major alarm, the Wall was much more of a symbol than a military necessity.
Mum, sitting on a rock a little behind him, was gazing at her own hands. I guessed this didn’t count as sitting down, that she wanted her brown velvet armchair and the telly instead of woodsmoke and talk about the Iron Age.
But – said Dad. You can see, said the Prof, think about the stretch along Whin Sill, you’ve already got a bloody great escarpment running for miles, no possible need to stick a wall on top, doesn’t make it any harder to cross or any easier to police, it’s just a very impressive way of saying Rome Was Here. Yeah, said Dad, OK, but what about – Mum tensed. Her glance flickered towards him and away. It’s a marker, said Prof Slade, the edge of empire, it’s not to keep the barbarians out so much as to show where they are. It was never the Berlin Wall, Bill, no raked earth or watchtowers. Dad didn’t say anything. He lifted his chin, locked eyes with the fire. Mum hunched on her rock, touched her arm where I’d seen the bruise earlier.
Dad was already up and gone by the time I woke up the next morning. Mum was outside stirring gruel again; Dan and Pete had managed to set up a kind of stone trivet for her so she was standing at the fireside and there was steam rising from the pot. Her cheeks were flushed. Those stones’ll explode, I said, if they heat unevenly, and they will because one side’s obviously going to get hotter than the other. Happen, she said. But Mum, I said, if it does happen you’ll get hurt. She shrugged. Aye. Mum, I said, it’s not safe. She stirred her pot. Folk have been building stone fireplaces a long time, Silvie, I daresay they know what they were about. Yeah, I said, but that doesn’t mean those lads know what they’re about, does it? Give over, she said. All right, but why don’t you let someone else do some cooking, have a break, I could manage, or Molly. Oh, she said, I don’t mind, I’d rather eat my own cooking than whatever those students might come up with, and you know I’m not one for rambling, never was. I wondered again what my parents had ever had in common. OK, I said, if you’re happy, it just doesn’t seem very fair, that’s all. Life isn’t, she said, which was what she always said. Mustn’t grumble, can’t be helped, nothing to be gained by making a fuss, well, you wouldn’t want to make trouble, would you?
