You will tell me—you who know so much—that of course it is not a place of the dead. It is not a burial ground or barrow but somewhere people lived. I had been thinking too much, preparing for the visit, making the journey, about the buried past, and here I was standing where people had lived, and I had not thought about that at all. The ridges on the side of the earthworks were like benches where folk could sit, and I did. I sat down and began to imagine what might have occurred within the space before me and at once realized I didn’t know. I had been so eager to come, so certain I would be moved by it, I had not taken the trouble to find out any facts. I took off my rucksack and took out the printouts from the internet. It felt altogether wrong to be sitting on such a day in such a place and looking all the while at pieces of paper. I understood, as I had not done before, how my husband, Edward, feels. He will never turn to the written word to find out what he wants to know. He would rather trust in instinct, experience, the texture of the soil, the direction of the wind, the few words of advice from a fellow farmer. Our son Tam, who farms the land with him, reads all the agricultural papers and tries to interest his father in what they have to say, but Edward says:
“Oh, yes, and how many signs did you miss while you had your eyes fixed downward on the writing?”
It was one of the things I learned about him only after marriage, that he saw no sense in reading, and I wondered how we would ever be able to live together, being so different, but now, forty years later, I can understand what he means by that sort of remark. I wanted to be able to look about me and learn from what I saw, not from what I read. But I had no experience, and no friend, to help me read the signs, so I scrabbled about for my reading glasses. The skinny, plain woman came up and stood nearby. I caught her eye, and she commented on the beauty of the day as her friend had done earlier. I abandoned the hunt for my glasses. She looked unhealthy, close up, despite the outdoor gear. Her face was the color and texture and not far off from the shape of a beet dug up from the ground in the middle of winter.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “I read up about it before I came, but now I don’t remember what I read.”
“I know it well,” she said. “I studied archaeology. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll see if I can help.”
So, you see, there was an alternative to a piece of paper. A passing archaeologist, called Marion. She sat on the bank beside me and she told me about the site, and then about herself.
I felt, as she spoke, that the Iron Age and Roman peoples were moving all around me, going about the business of cooking and washing and creating domestic objects as I do. As if it could at once be two thousand years in the past but also two thousand years in the future, when some other pair of strangers meet where I live now and recognize the life I led from the pieces of my best green Denby plates and a rusty but recognizable size-eight knitting needle. Some of the things that were found at Warham Camp, Marion said, were discovered in molehills or when rabbits eroded the bank, and some of them when men arrived to dig with the purpose of finding things. I was taken with this idea, of the earth as a barrel of apples; day by day hands reach in and take out the fruit at the top for immediate use, and refill it for tomorrow, but once in a while a curious hand will delve beneath the top layer, or a rat will creep in through a crack in the planking and disturb the lower levels so the older apples come up into the light, in all their strange and forgotten variety. It makes farming seem much closer to the work you do. It is about picking up and replacing the top layer; yours are the hands that go deeper.
Marion and the other women were not, as I had assumed, lifelong friends with successful careers and whose relaxation was walking together. They had met at sessions arranged for women recovering from breast cancer and had agreed to do something, each month, to help them keep in focus the miracle of being alive. The group, Marion told me, was once larger than it is now. I wished Bella had met these women when she was going through what they have been through. But as soon as I had this thought, I knew Bella would not have been able to join them. She was too snappy, too angry. I do not know how I would react, in the circumstances they are in, but I suspect I would collapse into the arms of their friendship easily enough. I hope I would.
Now I think—having written the paragraph above—did your wife die of this disease? Can you bear to read no further? If you do not write again, I will understand, though just thinking this makes me feel a sense of loss greater than I would have expected.
The others came up, and we took our flasks of coffee from our rucksacks and shared our biscuits, then they set out to walk back to Warham and I carried on down the lanes to Fiddler’s Hill Barrow, which was an earthy mound, as predicted.
Marion had told me the site could have origins dating back to before the Iron Age, and the barrow would have been used to bury the dead, or the ashes of cremated bodies, for centuries after that. I felt as I had expected to feel when I went to Warham Camp, as if I could put my hand on the turf and imagine the bones of other hands piled up far below, but somehow still within reach. Only, it was cold, and I was hungry, and there was almost nothing to see, so I walked briskly back down the lanes to Warham and went to the pub for a bowl of soup.
The woman whose house I was parked beside was serving behind the bar. She asked if I had found the camp and if I had gone on to Fiddler’s Hill. Yes, I said, and yes. She apologized for having sent me to the barrow.
“After you’d gone, I remembered it could hardly be called a pretty spot, in winter. The council has planted an orchard of ancient varieties of apple trees there, but they’re just so many bare branches at this time of year.”
To make up for any disappointment I might have felt about the actual place, she told me the story of how it got its name. Legend has it that a tunnel was found, running from a village called Blakeney to the priory in Binham, the next village to Warham. No one was brave enough to go down it, except for a fiddler, who set off with his dog, playing a tune as he went. The worthies of the district followed aboveground, guided by the sound of the fiddle, until, just where Fiddler’s Hill is today, the music stopped. They assumed that the devil had got him and his dog, and built a mound to mark the spot. Between the wars, the rose-pruning barmaid told me, the barrow was cut away to widen the road, and they found the skeletons of three humans and—she leaned forward and lowered her voice—a dog.
“No sign of a fiddle?” I asked.
“Not that I heard.”
The tunnel, I imagine, would be low, and the fiddler entering it bent to half a normal man’s height, and for this reason, I see the fiddler in my mind as the hunchbacked slaughterman I told you about who came to kill the pigs. He was the kind of man to go fearlessly ahead, with a sort of obstinate stupidity, when other men hung back.
I have no more to tell you about my journey. Next time I will be brisk, and more coherent, because this has been a self-indulgent meander, and I am sorry to have put you to the trouble of reading it (if you do). I am not sorry to have written it, so at least one of us had some enjoyment out of all these words.
All the best,
Tina
Silkeborg
April 13
Dear Mrs. Hopgood,
Reading your letter, I wondered whether I should not visit your country to see for myself the evidence of the Iron Age that remains in the landscape, just as you have wondered about visiting my country to see the remains of an Iron Age man. I was sorry not to have been the passing archaeologist who gave you information, but you are there and I am here, and I do not know what she told you. So I will write my own guide for your next visit. This is very arrogant of me because I am not an expert on the Iceni tribe who lived in the area during the late Iron Age. Also, no one knows the answers to the question I imagine you might have wanted to ask, that is: What was life like for the men, women, and children who lived inside the fortified ditches of the fort? I am used to facts, based on evidence. I will give you what facts I can, and you must imagine, for both of us
, how it must have been.
The people in Warham Hill Fort at the time the Tollund Man was alive near the bog in Bjaeldskovdal would have lived in circular huts with walls formed around upright poles and a roof supported by rafters reaching down to touch the ground. This is very different from the settlement the Tollund Man would have lived in; here in Denmark they built longhouses, big rectangles with space at one end for men, women, and children, and room at the other for beasts. In the round huts built in Britain at the time, a man could stand upright only in the center, and this is where family life would have taken place—cooking, eating, sewing, mending tools, and such other activities as might have been normal in a home at this time. Around the edges of the hut were the sleeping quarters and storage areas, tucked in below and between the rafters.
I do not know how big the community of the fort was, but there would have been several families, maybe thirty huts. These forts existed because there was land enough to support such a body of people, not primarily for defensive purposes, though attacks were always possible. The people in such communities led a settled, agricultural life; you were right to imagine men with scythes and sheep coming over the embankment toward you. In the fields round about they grew cereal in the summer, plowing the ground with the help of oxen, harvesting the corn with scythes and drying it for storing in the winter. They kept cattle for meat, as well as to pull the plow and for leather for clothes and other uses around the farm. We have evidence that beef was commonly eaten. We also have evidence that sheep were kept by inhabitants of settlements like this, but less evidence that mutton was eaten. We can assume they were kept mainly for wool; weaving, alongside the production of pottery, was one of the most common crafts. The animals would have been taken to graze farther off in the summer, but brought back to fertilize and turn over the soil of the fields in winter.
Most of the people living in Warham Hill Fort would have been subject to the authority of an overlord, a wealthy man with his attendant warriors, who was able to lay claim to enough land to produce food for himself and his family and to support the labor needed to make it productive. There was a hierarchy, with the workers—the peasants—at the bottom. They could have been slaves, but even if notionally free, they would have had no alternative way to provide food and shelter for themselves than to labor in the service of the chieftain. He had a bigger hut, with an additional room or porch; he had finer goods and ornaments. Even in death, he was treated differently. He was buried, after cremation, in a grave dug with care, the ashes in an urn or ornate bucket, and items of value or of use in the afterlife buried with him, as if he were going to live all over again. The poor people’s ashes were treated with less dignity, though all but the poorest would have had some items beautiful or useful put in the grave beside them.
The people of the fort obeyed the chief in earthly matters, but their religious guides were the druids, who taught them to believe that there was an afterlife, which is why it was important to have beside you something to help you pass on to whatever the next life might be.
It is hard to find evidence from archaeological artifacts for the life that women led in this society. However, after the Roman invasion, we have written observations. Caesar says, writing of the tribes in the areas the Romans first conquered in Britain, that wives would be shared by groups of ten or twelve men, in a family group, so the brothers, father, or sons of the man who took a woman into his home could also treat her as a wife. Any children she had, however, were counted as her husband’s children, no matter who the father might have been. Husbands, according to Caesar, held a right of life or death over their wives. But then Boudicca was queen of the Iceni tribe, and she led her tribe into battle against the Romans, so the women in Warham Camp may not have been so subject to their husbands’ rule.
I am afraid of wearying you with so much detail that I am not expressing in an interesting way. So I will stop. I have one last thing to say about your trip, though. In Denmark, I do not think the woman who saw you sitting alone on the grassy bank would have come to speak to you. Most Danes, I believe, would have thought you were solitary because you chose to be, and would have respected that. Maybe this lady—Marion—should have respected your privacy, and maybe you hoped she would, but I am pleased she became part of the story; it would have been less of a story—less of an important journey—if you had not met her.
Thank you for sharing it with me.
Anders
Bury St. Edmunds
April 20
Dear Anders,
I wish I had received your letter before I went to Warham Camp. As you say, what I really wanted to feel while I was there was how the people lived, what it would have been like for them to live there. Marion talked about the artifacts they made, but not how they lived, and now you have given me details that allow me to come closer to imagining this. Even if it isn’t possible to describe an individual life lived in that place, I can now imagine what a woman, for example, standing at the entrance to her home, looking out to see if her husband or her children were in sight and safe, might have seen and heard and smelled. I can picture the team of oxen being driven out to the fields, pulling a plow behind them. In my mind I see, through a drifting smoke, mud churned up with the passage of feet, animal and human. I hear the sounds men and cattle make, calling to each other, and the rattle and whir of whatever machinery is used to make the things they need, the cloth and the pots. There would have been children’s voices. You do not mention toys, but there must, surely, have been games the children played, and things they made to play with? I expect the woman was blinking, in the light, after the dark of the hut, and I cannot help but feel she would have been anxious, as she looked and listened, alert for anything out of the ordinary. She would have smelled the smoke and the organic waste of people and animals.
I imagined this woman as I walked out of my own house, the morning after I received your letter. The day was overcast, with clouds banked up behind the barn, and although it was not yet raining, the light was dimmer outside the house than inside it. I came out, as I do every morning, to feed the chickens. Maybe she did, too. You don’t mention poultry—maybe they left no trace, or maybe the strains of bird designed to feed people hadn’t been developed. I’m not sure what my Iron Age woman would have been holding in her hands, but I was carrying the feed in an old plastic bucket that was once full of rat poison. Whatever she held, it would not have been plastic and it would not have had a previous purpose connected with a highly engineered approach to the elimination of rodents. Rodents, I should think, could have been one of the things she saw, as she stood in her hut doorway, and accepted as being inevitable. The yard outside my back door is concrete, and Edward is a careful farmer, so it is clean. I could hear a quad bike—Tam, who lives in a bungalow a couple of hundred meters away from the farmhouse, setting off to check on the sheep. Through the open door behind me, I could hear voices on a radio. Although Tam lives so close, and has two small children, I could not hear children; in this, the Iron Age woman’s life was richer than mine. Although, when I look at my grandchildren, I love to see how each day is an adventure for them, whereas back then, I expect, a mother or grandmother would have seen each day a child lived as a battle won. I could smell the honeysuckle growing over the garden wall and the gases given off by a trailer full of organic waste standing ready to be spread on the fields.
I must have been standing, holding the chicken feed bucket but not moving, for several minutes, because Edward came out and asked me what the matter was.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just having a look round.”
He stood beside me, and we both looked round for a while longer. He pointed out the gutter on a cart shed that needed fixing and a patch of nettle overdue for an application of weed killer.
“It’s a good idea to just stand and look sometimes,” he said.
Edward is much closer to Iron Age man than I am to Iron Age woman. He lives exactly in the moment, as they must have done.
&nb
sp; I still know nothing about your wife.
Best wishes,
Tina
Silkeborg
May 2
Dear Tina,
I went outside my house, the morning after I received your letter, and looked around. I have no chickens to feed, and usually, I do not go outside until it is time to go to work, and then I am thinking only of whether I have forgotten anything and whatever it is I have to do when I arrive. This was new for me, to go outside before breakfast, just to see what was outside.
I have a hedge between my house and the road, which is green now but bronze in winter. I noticed it needed to be trimmed; this is a householder’s thought, and I wanted to look not as a householder, so I walked to the pavement. Even then, I realized, I could see little. Most of my neighbors have hedges. Although I live on a small hill above the lakes of Silkeborg, I could not see them. I found I was noticing that the surface of the road was broken and needed repair, so I looked upward instead. The sky was magnificent. I have always loved the sky and I do not take notice of it often enough.
I could hear almost nothing. The sound a neighbor’s flag made, flapping against the pole. In the distance was a light hum of traffic, but nothing close to me. A bird was singing. I could not have named it from the song. I do not think I would have known what it was if I had been able to see it. I could not hear children. In Denmark today the children go to a nursery, paid for by the state, when they are only one year old or so, and unless I happen to be passing a school or a nursery during break time, in sunny weather when the children are playing outside, I never do hear them. Through my open door I could hear the music I had put on when I came downstairs. Shostakovich. The only thing I could smell was my own coffee, although I find smells hide themselves from me unless I have not smelled them for some time. Then they remind me of themselves.
Meet Me at the Museum Page 3
