The Green Road Into the Trees

by Hugh Thomson

  This is the 1957 description of the site by T C Lethbridge, then the keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology. It is much as you might expect from the holder of such a post: a dry, observant, slightly technical account, written in crisp Cambridge prose by the author of several well-received books. Over the previous thirty years, Lethbridge had conducted many excavations of barrows and prehistoric sites in his other capacity as Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

  But what he discovered near by at the Iron Age hill-fort of Wandlebury, my next destination, was to send his distinguished career into a strange tailspin that is still highly controversial. ‘Poor Tom,’ a colleague told me, ‘he went slightly mad towards the end.’

  I began to notice from the faces of other archaeologists that they were seriously disturbed by my interpretations of my excavations.

  (T C Lethbridge, Gogmagog: The Buried Gods)

  Lethbridge had painstakingly tracked down historical accounts of early chalk figures carved onto the banks of Wandlebury hill-fort, much in the manner of the Uffington White Horse or the Cerne Abbas giant. These Wandlebury figures were no longer to be seen; without regular scouring, and in a region of wet fertility like Cambridgeshire, they would soon have grown over. One Elizabethan account forbade Cambridge students to go to Wandlebury for any ‘festivities’, because of its pagan associations. The names Gog and Magog, given to the hills, suggest that it was regarded as a place rich in just such prehistoric and therefore pagan associations. Lethbridge speculated that these festivities might have included the scouring of chalk figures.

  He decided to conduct excavations at Wandlebury to see if they could be traced, spurred on by the account of an old man who had once worked with him at the Archaeology Museum in Cambridge, in the restoration department, and claimed to have heard reports of the figures when he was a small boy in the nineteenth century.

  It was enough to pique a red-blooded archaeologist’s interest. Using a technique he had employed many times before, and similar to that used by farmers when they check their fields for drainage pipes, Lethbridge went probing all over the slope at Wandlebury with a six-foot, stainless-steel pole to see if any of the turf had once been cut away, much, in his words, ‘like using a lead line at sea’ (Lethbridge had written about early maritime traffic and often used nautical terms and methods). He and his small team then marked up any resulting discrepancy with poles.

  His excitement at finding what he thought were the outlines of three chalk figures is understandable. For any archaeologist it would have been the find of a lifetime, let alone one approaching the end of his career: Lethbridge was fifty-three. Yet his account in the forthcoming book, Gogmagog: The Buried Gods, was remarkably calm.

  He described the figure of a horse, with a curious beak-like head that matched the iconography of other Iron Age horses; another figure of a man with a sword; and a final, dramatic image of a large female ‘giantess’. The head of this final figure he excavated and photographed, revealing a quite remarkable face.

  Critics claimed that he had not taken account of the natural dips and depressions that might be formed in chalk by rainwater, or by the coprolite mining practised in this area of Cambridgeshire. Some even hinted that he had engineered the face himself by ‘creative excavation’, or suggested that students might have carved the figures as a prank.

  Lethbridge was already disliked by some of his colleagues. He enjoyed a private income and had an attractive, much younger wife, neither factors which make for academic popularity. He was also prickly at times, as archaeologists can be. In many ways he was very like Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, who similarly managed to make enemies of his colleagues at Yale after marrying a Tiffany heiress.

  I have met many archaeologists over the years. The only other profession that can be remotely as cantankerous are minicab drivers, with whom they have much in common. The minicab driver sits in isolation, waiting long periods for a fare, while hearing on his radio about other drivers being assigned lucrative destinations.

  Archaeologists never quite reach their Robert de Niro Taxi Driver moment, but a simmering, repressed violence is often only a short dig away from their surface. The long periods spent in relative isolation, along with the frustration of digs that may not reveal much (but still have to be written up and published), are not good for the soul.

  In addition, while Lethbridge’s description of the excavation had been straightforward and detailed, his interpretation of the findings was difficult for colleagues to stomach. Lethbridge was ahead of his time in being fascinated by anthropology and folklore. Archaeologists of that era were often suspicious of anthropology. I can remember a distinguished old-school archaeologist telling me, with casual and revealing misogyny, that ‘Anthropologists were like old women: they never stopped talking; and, worse, they paid far too much attention to what everyone else told them.’

  In Peru, I was used to the running battle between archaeologists and anthropologists that was almost the leitmotif of Andeanist studies. Archaeologists resented the short cuts by which anthropologists could simply talk to people rather than spend years digging; unless, that is, they happened to come up with a bit of evidence that corroborated the archaeologist’s own conclusions. Meanwhile anthropologists felt that archaeologists had their heads stuck down holes and couldn’t see the bigger picture.

  Lethbridge speculated widely (his colleagues said wildly) about the possible significance of the figures he had found. Drawing on a compendious knowledge of comparative archaeology, and with reference to Frazier’s The Golden Bough, the same work that had so fascinated T S Eliot, he made analogies right across the prehistoric world. Were the figures of prehistoric Iron Age deities? Did they bear some relation to the names Gog and Magog? Could they be ‘the lost gods of Albion’?

  It was heady stuff. But the doubt cast by colleagues over his findings, which led to a Council of British Archaeology inquiry in 1956, and the aspersions cast on his excavation methods, sent Lethbridge into a spin. He resigned his post at Cambridge – he had always disliked what he called ‘academic trade-unionism’ – and went with his wife to live in Devon. There he started to write books of counter-culture that investigated areas way off left field, on the paranormal, dousing and suchlike, which have recently been acclaimed by Julian Cope and other New Age voyagers.

  These helped relegate his earlier findings at Wandlebury yet more to outer academic darkness. When I went to look at the outlying slope of the hill-fort where he had dug, now called the ‘Hill Figures Field’, the grass had grown back over his fifty-year-old excavations; moreover, the lower part of the slope was now covered with small trees.

  But having seen the photographs of the quite extraordinary head he uncovered, and doubting that it was in the man to have fabricated such a find, I wondered if it was not time for further, more calm analysis of the phenomenon.

  *

  It was a cold day when Cambridge came into sight across the plain, ringed by the motorways and science parks that now surround it; no longer is there that sense of the college towers shimmering up out of nothing.

  My feelings about Cambridge were complicated. I owed it a great deal. But in some ways I also resented it.

  I come from a family of Cambridge scientists. Both my grandfathers won the Nobel Prize for Physics. So did their fathers. This was not good when I was at various schools. Physics teachers would observe me expectantly, as if I was a test tube that must surely start to glow red with successful combustion. Genetically the odds were stacked in my favour. But try as I might, physics remained a mystery as arcane as Babylonian cuneiform.

  I somehow got through exams by rote – and the maths at least I managed – but failed to grasp fully how the simplest concepts of physics like mass and gravity interrelated, let alone the particle physics that my great-grandfather’s discovery of the electron had initiated. I was a disappointment. My parents took me to the Christmas Lectu
res at the Royal Institution; I was bored. The models of DNA at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge made me think of candy on sticks and had an abstract beauty I appreciated, but could not understand.

  The only time my scientific genes looked remotely like bearing fruit – or seed – was when a sperm bank suggested I could supplement my student grant by getting a premium rate for my genetically attractive product.

  I walked into Cambridge along the Trumpington Road, past the small flat that my widowed grandmother had lived in; when a student – of English literature, not science – I had often biked out to visit her. Past the medical-industrial complex of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. And past the new Judge Business School which symbolised Cambridge’s brash new twenty-first-century face, as a centre of excellence and of money, with its post-modern façade that mixed classical elements with colours out of a child’s paintbox.

  There was something about Cambridge that always prompted the same reaction in me, as it had when I was an undergraduate. Not respect for its learning, scholarship or antiquity – although in theory I felt all that – but the need for the warmth of another human body.

  Whether it was the cold wind blowing in from the Urals over the East Anglian plains, or the rigour of its Puritan past, my reaction was always the same; the only other city where I had a similar response was Cusco at 10,000 feet in the Andes, where the nights were also cold.

  The more my teachers tried to instil in me a sense of academic rigour, of reasoning, the more I abreacted by wanting emotion, and the restless abandon and commitment of a love affair. My first term I was taught by an English Fellow who had iced water for blood. We were reading Romeo and Juliet, a case study for the dialectical tension between reason and emotion. At one point I blurted out that I liked one scene because it was ‘so true’.

  The professor pursed his lips. ‘The truth, Mr Thomson, is a very naive critical concept.’ Which of course it was.

  Critical concepts would become far from abstract in the years that I was at Cambridge. The early 1980s saw a heated battle in the English Faculty that at the time both excited and amused the students, and was covered in the national press. Dons threatened to sue their colleagues; many refused to talk to each other; mass protests were held outside Senate House.

  The ostensible cause for all this was the refusal to give tenure to a young academic called Colin MacCabe, an avowed structuralist. But this was just the tipping point. The real argument, which had been building for a decade, was over how English was taught. Should it follow the traditional model, in which, said its critics, an established canon of Great Writers were anointed and dissected like the bodies of Catholic saints? Or should Cambridge English acknowledge the French ideas of what was loosely called structuralism – although that term, like just about everything else, itself came to be deconstructed – in which what mattered was the text, not the author, and in theory (everything being now ‘in theory’) one could do as much critical analysis of a shopping list as of Shakespeare’s Sonnets?

  The two most senior professors disagreed violently. In the blue corner, Christopher Ricks, who was able to riff exquisitely for an hour on the way Cleopatra said ‘Oh’, and had a quicksilver mind suspicious of any dependence on theory; in the red, Frank Kermode, author of the best-titled book of literary criticism ever written, The Sense of an Ending, and open to change. Both bounced around the ring trying to position themselves as the radical contender.

  It was a fight without referee, judge or time limitation and rumbled on in the academic jungle long after a disgruntled Christopher Ricks had departed for Boston and bit players like MacCabe had moved elsewhere.

  But what at the time could be discounted as a literary rattling of cages, and of overexcited academics, seems in retrospect to have presaged a far greater change in the decades to come. The carpet was pulled under our feet. Structuralism encouraged a postmodern approach in every discipline from architecture to museum curatorship, in which the concepts of originality and truth became redundant and everything could be fictive, elusive and playful. Which of course was fun, for a while. Chippendale pediments on New York skyscrapers, Flaubert’s Parrot and the growth of music sampling (no point in recording your own when there was already a James Brown drum break). So pervasive was its influence that the next decade would be summarised by another brilliant book title: Michael Bracewell’s The Nineties: When Surface was Depth.

  Authors became fictional characters in their own narration. Martin Amis began the trend with Money, appearing alongside the fictional John Self. Will Self – not another Martin Amis construct, although many at first assumed so – followed suit, as did J M Coetzee and others. Literature became a hall of mirrors. There had always been writers and artists that way inclined, from Laurence Sterne to the Dadaists; now they took over the Academy.

  In my own chosen profession, television documentary, the consequences were radical. Where once producers had been encouraged to go out and engage with the world, the remix became king. Why go to the bother of filming expensive new material when you could repackage and rewrite old archive? Originality became as outmoded a critical concept as truth had been. Whole evenings of repeats were scheduled – ‘white wine television’, Channel 4 called them. If there was nothing new under the sun, as structuralism suggested, then you might as well just rearrange the furniture. (As if on cue, the BBC scrapped their anthropological series Under the Sun, which had filmed remote and different cultures around the world, and scheduled yet more repeats.)

  Travel documentary was one of the few areas where they still occasionally needed ‘new product’ and so I was able to film in India, Bhutan, South America and elsewhere. And at least if we had to cannibalise the past, I could do a ten-hour history of rock and roll, and go to interview all my old musical heroes in the process, for a series called Dancing in the Street.

  Now, as I walked along King’s Parade with hundreds of other summer tourists, I was struck by how sunny and busy it was. In my mind’s eye, Cambridge had always been an austere, empty place. A dark place as well. I remembered coming back late at night along Garrett Hostel Lane and hearing the slow creaking wheels of the poet J H Prynne’s bicycle as he came lugubriously into sight, looking like a character out of Gormenghast. The University Library had been a bleak monument to the overpowering might of published academia, every book ever published going onto its shelves. If you wanted a pastry, you had to bicycle to Fitzbillies at the other end of town.

  No longer. Trinity Street was prematurely lit up as if for Christmas – a retail Mecca with clothes shops, expensive cafés and boutiques sprinkled along its length. It seemed unfair when most students had little money to spare with the rapid increase in their fees; kids in a candy store with no change.

  Back as a student myself, I had written for Broadsheet, which was not the official University newspaper, the pompous Varsity, but a scurrilous and photostatted arts magazine by young gunslingers who fancied themselves as critics.

  I was the theatre reviewer, among other things. As a critic I was frequently myopic. It was easy to get it wrong. The actors who we all thought would go on to be the Hamlets and Ophelias of our generation, the ones who got the big, serious parts, ended up later as prep-school teachers in Wales, or nurses. The ‘character’ actors we thought of as charming but inconsequential – Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Simon Russell Beale – were the ones who became famous.

  Although there was one exception to this. I can still remember the first night when an actress wearing nothing but long red hair stood in the middle of the stage and revealed herself in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, with a performance of blazing integrity and scarily translucent white skin. I cleared the central pages of Broadsheet for a double-page spread on Tilda Swinton’s debut.

  Some of the other writers on the magazine were exceptionally good, like Tom Lubbock and David Sexton. And the stellar talent was the young don who, by chance, became my own teacher when he moved to Trinity College: Eric Griffiths.

>   He arrived with a trail of rumour and innuendo swirling around him – that he was a loose-living, drug-taking, Machiavellian figure. Eric has always attracted controversy. Years later, the papers claimed that he had discriminated against an applicant from a state school because she knew little Greek. Unlikely, given Eric’s own background as a Welsh scholarship boy. He did, however, discriminate against what he perceived as obdurate stupidity or narrow-mindedness.

  As the most charismatic teacher of his generation – the Guardian described him as the cleverest man in England – he could be frightening to his students, not least because he was so partial; you were either part of his coterie or shunned as an anoraked sad case: ‘Can you believe it, he’s doing his thesis on Tolkien,’ he complained of one of his students, consigning him unfairly to the mines of Moria.

  He deplored my loose habits, heterosexuality and lack of cigarettes, but we became good friends. He was only a few years older than me. My abiding vision of Cambridge was of Eric in his rooms drinking and holding forth at length on Pope or Julie Kristeva and grabbing books from the shelves to prove a point.

  My academic career at Cambridge up to that point had not been good. Awarded an exhibition (a junior scholarship) to go there, I was therefore supposed to work even harder to merit it, but hadn’t. The teacher who had commented on my naive critical concept had not lit my fires. I had lost all my notes on a plane to go partying in Majorca when I was meant to be revising in a windowless room. Just to rub salt in the wound, my beautiful girlfriend Emma worked far more diligently than me, pointed out the fact and could quote Dante in Italian.

  Eric changed that. He was inspirational. He took his mentor Christopher Ricks’s fluency and supercharged it with a younger, protean energy, in which, like Ricks, he could riff and play on a concept until the strings bent. But he was also vulnerable: to doubts about his faith – he became a Catholic while he taught me – and about his own writing, which was less prolific than it might have been, partly because of his heightened self-criticism. His cherished friendships also sometimes led to cherished enmities.