The Way, the Truth and the Dead

by Francis Pryor

  As he walked back, this time taking the direct route across the disturbed surface left by the removal of the cellular paving grid, he was in time to see Davey’s small van arrive. By now the two other members of the film crew had got out of their rather larger vans and were preparing their equipment. Speed Talbot was frowning as he wrestled with the settings of the HD camera he had had to hire for the shoot. His sound recordist and long-time sidekick was Dave Edwards, known to everyone in the business as ‘Grump’. In fact, Grump and Speed had become something of a legend, a few younger people even referring to them as ‘G and S’. When Alan first heard this, he assumed it was a pun on Gilbert and Sullivan. But it wasn’t.

  Alan stood by his Fourtrak and watched. He liked to see how directors handled their subjects and crews; it told you so much about them. He’d seen Frank having a few words with Speed as he was walking back from his Portakabin, but now he was nowhere to be seen. That was odd. Then he noticed that Speed had stopped fiddling with his camera settings and was filming, while sitting on the tailboard of his van. His camera was pointing at Davey who was pulling on his boots. He continued to film as Davey extracted two heavy jerricans of diesel from the back of the van and carried them the few paces to his digger. He was still filming as Davey collected a third can, plus a large yellow plastic funnel and began to fill up. He only stopped when Frank, who had appeared from nowhere, tapped him lightly on the shoulder. Alan was very surprised. This was the first time he’d worked on a shoot where the subject didn’t know he was being filmed. He decided to have a word with Frank, as he was blowed if anyone was going to treat him like that; but then he paused. Would that be entirely wise? No, he reminded himself, he was here for the long haul. Best put up with it for now.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the digger engine starting up. This time Alan noticed that Speed had the camera on a tripod and Grump was recording on a boom. Alan had to confess it looked quite spectacular with the machine against the clear sky and the abbey ruins looming in the background. As Davey pushed on the throttle the smoke from the exhaust briefly turned dark and they could all smell the diesel, but soon the engine warmed up and the fumes ceased. Alan walked over to the cab, this time wearing hi-vis and a hard hat. He pointed towards a rather battered red-and-white range pole where he wanted Davey to start stripping. Slowly the great machine began to move off, then it slewed hard right. By now Speed was on his knees, the camera focused on the single turning track as it churned its way through the sticky clay.

  The crew and Alan walked rapidly towards the range pole, in time to film the digger arrive and stop. Slowly Davey extended the boom and dipper, then it froze: the bucket about an inch off the ground. He looked towards Alan, who beckoned him forward. Then he raised a hand and the digger again stopped more abruptly this time, rocking slightly under the weight of the long-reach digging arm. Again Davey looked towards Alan, who was aware that Speed was now pointing the camera directly at him. He held one hand about six inches above the other, a signal that Davey immediately understood. The bucket was about two-and-a-half metres wide and had a sharp, toothless cutting edge, which bit into the ground, then pulled back gently to remove a smooth slice of clay, almost exactly six inches thick. Alan was impressed. Jake had been right: Davey was a superb driver. Alan was a useful digger driver himself, but he recognised Davey was in a different class. The machine vibrated as Davey shook the bucket to get the sticky clay to detach. Then he was back.

  Normally Alan would have taken a whole area down one spit at a time, but as this was the first trench of the day he decided to go right through the clay to the surface beneath, to see what was there and how deep they’d have to go. He jumped as Frank tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Can you get the digger to do that again, to one side. Speed needs another shot of the first scoop. It’s always better from several angles.’

  Alan shook his head. ‘Sorry, that’ll have to wait. We need to go down now.’

  ‘But the light may have changed!’ Frank shouted against the digger’s engine. Davey had boosted the revs.

  Alan pretended not to hear. It was important to establish who was boss, and he also knew that they’d have many more opportunities to film close-ups of buckets cutting into virgin ground. What mattered now was to establish the depth of clay to be removed. Again he signed six inches with his hands. And Davey repeated the manoeuvre. They did this five times before Alan held up his arm. Instantly the digger stopped. Alan jumped into the trench, pulling his trowel from his back pocket. He scraped down and started to feel a slight grittiness. That was what he wanted. He stood back, this time indicating two inches.

  Most drivers would have slackened off the revs to do something delicate, but Davey was more experienced; the higher revs gave him greater control – it was just a matter of working the hydraulic levers with immense finesse. And that took skill. Slowly he drew the bucket back and lifted it out of the slot. This time he didn’t slew round to the spoil heap, but gently lowered the curled bucket to the ground. Alan went over to it. He was very impressed indeed; Davey had lightly tickled the buried land surface, but no more. He went over to the cab and asked Davey to empty this bucket on the nearside of the spoil heap. Davey did as he was bid, lightly spreading the loose earth at the same time. This would make it easier for Alan or the metal detectorists to search later.

  Meanwhile Alan was back in the trench. Should he go down any further to get colours to define better, or should he stay at this level, right at the top? Generally speaking, he liked to go down to where everything was a bit clearer, but that was also the way to scrape off original floors and surfaces. The best way to decide was to get down on his hands and knees and have a good trowel-scrape. He signalled to Davey to cut his engine, then walked over to the cab and told him to take a break for five minutes. At this point the PA Trudy appeared with a tray of tea and biscuits. He grabbed one and had jumped back into the trench, when again Frank stopped him. This time he was being more circumspect.

  ‘Alan, I don’t suppose you could get back in the trench again. Speed missed it. And what are you doing now?’

  ‘I need five minutes to have a close look at the surface that’s just been exposed and then I’ll be able to decide if we go down further, or else we go sideways at this level and open up a wider area.’

  ‘OK, Alan, that’s fine.’ He looked towards Speed who made a churning motion with his free hand to show the camera was turning over. ‘And action …’

  Alan jumped back into the trench, crouched down and began trowelling the surface. Speed and Grump recorded this from every conceivable angle and were about to return to their cups of tea when Alan instinctively gave a little ‘Hmm’ and leant back into the daylight, holding something in his hand. As an old pro he tilted his hand towards the camera which zoomed in on something resembling a large broad bean. Alan put it by his teacup at the side of the trench and then resumed trowelling. After a few scrapes, he came up with another piece, this time a bit larger than the first.

  Davey wasn’t in the cab, but for Speed’s benefit Alan looked towards it and shouted, ‘Davey, I think we’ve got something interesting here!’

  Out of the corner of his eye Alan had noticed that Frank was back with the others supping tea. As he shouted to the non-existent Davey in the cab, he caught a glimpse of Frank’s reaction. He sprayed tea everywhere. Wonderful.

  A few moments later Frank hurried across to rejoin them.

  ‘OK, everyone, we’ll go from Davey’s reaction in the cab, to Alan in the trench.’ Frank looked at Speed, who muttered.

  ‘Turning over … Speed!’

  Frank turned to Alan, nodded twice, and said, ‘In your own time, Alan.’

  Alan took a deep breath and shouted, ‘Davey, I think we’ve got something interesting here!’ He’d been doing television long enough to make the words sound reasonably fresh and original.

  Davey, now back in his cab, looked up, seemingly slightly startled, yet inquisitive. Hmm, Alan t
hought, he can act too. After a few seconds on Davey, Speed panned back to Alan.

  Then Frank said, ‘And cut.’

  Alan breathed a sigh of relief. That was the first scene out of the way.

  * * *

  The two small fragments of pottery were instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever dug on a Romano-British site in eastern England. There was a huge industrial complex of Roman pottery kilns in the suburbs of the small town of ­Durobrivae. Earlier in the Roman period they produced Nene Valley Grey Ware (NVGW) which was later replaced by Nene Valley Colour Coated Ware (NVCC) and both were traded widely across the province of Britannia. The two sherds in Alan’s hands, which Speed was filming in ultra-close-up, were undoubtedly of the distinctive Grey Ware, which has a slightly darker exterior and a paler grey interior. The second of the two sherds had been chipped by the digger bucket to expose the lighter core. So Alan was in absolutely no doubt whatsoever about what they had found. The other thing that interested him was the small size and rounded shape of the fragments, which Alan was fairly certain showed they had been lying around on the surface for some time before they got incorporated into the soil. On Frank’s suggestion Alan found himself explaining these things to Davey, as neither Tricia nor Craig Larsson could be with them until Monday. Nobody had expected this much action so early in the dig.

  But as Alan had already noticed, Davey proved to be a TV natural – and in more ways than one. Somehow he managed to be enthusiastic, but without going too far. He was the perfect representative of the viewing public and instinctively posed the questions they wanted him to ask. As Frank said to Alan at the end of the day, ‘Blimey, that Davey’s good. Craig had better look out!’

  As they cleared a larger and larger area, they found a lot of pottery lying on the old land surface and Alan marked the position of each potsherd with a white gardener’s tag. By lunchtime they had stripped an area the size of a small bungalow and Alan’s bag of 50 garden labels had shrunk to close-on half its original size. Again, the pottery was quite consistent with an early Roman date: first or second century AD, with some hand-made sherds, but mostly NVGW. Then after lunch they began to find a few small sherds of Samian Ware. This was top-quality table pottery made in a distinctive clay that fired to a vivid reddish-orange. Today, of course, it would be glazed, but in Roman times it was given a hard, bright polish known as a burnish. Samian was made in the south of France and was not what Alan expected to find on a small rural settlement in the Fens. And again there were several worn sherds and from more than one vessel. By the end of the day, Alan was in absolutely no doubt: they had stumbled across a higher status Romano–British site that had developed out of the rich Iron Age settlement that Stan had discovered the previous summer.

  As he explained to Davey on camera, in the final interview of the day: ‘The people who imported this fine pottery from the south of France would have been the children and grandchildren of families who had been living in the area for generations. What we’re witnessing here is the process of people becoming Romanised. They basically bought Roman things and then used them. And that was the way the period began for most ordinary folk in Roman Britain.’

  It sounded splendid and Frank was delighted when a few moments later he declared to the crew and a couple of bystanders who had wandered over from the building site, ‘Thank you, Alan. And that’s it, folks. Well done. A great first day. That’s a wrap.’

  Alan sighed. He was exhausted. Filming was much harder work than just digging – and doing both was knackering. He had contemplated going to the pub for a quick beer with Davey, but now found he couldn’t face it. He needed to plan for tomorrow. He climbed into the Fourtrak, his legs stiff from so much standing. Then he thought about what they had found: so much Roman material and some of it very upmarket. As sometimes happened, he found himself thinking about the present, through the past. Were the Iron Age Brits who lived here at Fursey like the Cripps family in the 17th century? Did they take ruthless advantage of new circumstances? And then what happened? Did they hang onto their wealth and status, or did they lose it, through indolence and the Roman equivalent of death duties?

  Alan turned on the ignition and headed slowly along the drive. He smiled as he remembered Frank’s efforts to call the shots. But he had to concede, Frank had been dead right about one thing: it had been one hell of a good first day. Stan wasn’t a great fan of TV but he would have been over the moon about the high-status Roman finds, which had to be a development from his original Iron Age settlement.

  When he got back home he went straight over to the fridge, opened a beer and raised the bottle to his old friend. That felt better.

  Six

  The next day was Friday and to Alan it did indeed feel like the end of the week. Still, he thought, while he walked behind the digger as it tracked its way back to the trench, the pressure’s off this morning. The crew had had to return to London to collect more lighting gear but they all planned to be back on-site to do an end-of-day scene, where Craig would introduce Tricia. Alan wasn’t looking forward to that much. But on the plus side, he thought, I’ve a full day of uninterrupted archaeology ahead of me. And it isn’t raining. So things could be a lot worse.

  As it turned out, his optimism proved short-lived. Alan’s heart sank as he saw the huge frame of Sebastian Cripps climb out of his mud-spattered Land Rover and stride across the site. Alan took a couple of paces back from the digger’s slewing arm, as a nod towards health and safety, and handed his visitor a hard hat.

  Sebastian was the first to speak. ‘Frank Jones phoned last night. It would seem you’ve found a lot of Roman pottery. Is that right?’

  Alan pointed to the two dozen or so white plastic labels on the ground. ‘Yes, it’s proving very rich. These are what we’ve exposed already this morning and we’ve barely been working half an hour.’

  As he spoke he kept an eye on the digger. Then he lifted a hand, as if requesting silence. Both could see that Davey was taking the final cut that would expose the clean, pre-flood clay surface. Alan pulled a small bag of labels from the back pocket of his jeans and walked closer to the bucket, which Davey was slowly pulling back with a look of intense concentration on his face. Sebastian joined him. Nobody said a word. By this point Alan’s eye had become very good at spotting the distinctive colour of Nene Valley Grey Ware, which only contrasted slightly with the darker grey-brown colour of the Roman land surface. The bright pinkish-orange of Samian was much easier to pick out.

  Towards the end of the first pull-back, as Davey was starting to curl the bucket up, Alan stepped forward and picked something off the surface. As he did so he poked a label into the ground. Davey stopped the bucket and Alan went round and briefly looked inside it, turning the loose lumps over with his trowel. He picked another small piece out, then stood back, giving Davey the thumbs up. This was the sign they’d agreed that it was OK to empty the bucket, which Davey did, but this time on the smaller heap directly alongside the trench. This would be the spoil heap that the detectorists would search first when they arrived on-site in a couple of hours’ time.

  ‘More Grey Ware,’ Alan half-muttered to a fascinated Sebastian.

  ‘So what date are these?’ Sebastian asked, as he held the two sherds gingerly in the palm of his right hand.

  ‘Hard to say from body sherds, but probably second century.’

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful. So much history here, in my hand.’

  Alan said nothing. He could see Sebastian was lost in thought. Then he looked up. ‘I do envy you, Alan.’ He was smiling now. ‘I’m sure people say this all the time, but you do have a superb job.’ He paused for a moment, considering his words. Alan could detect that a confidence was coming. ‘I wish I’d been born more academic, like John.’ Again, he paused. ‘John went to Cambridge, of course, where he read archaeology, then history. That’s where he met Peter Flower, you know?’

  ‘Yes.’ Alan nodded. ‘I did know that.’

  ‘But I’d never have got in
. I was always more hands-on, so I went to Nettlesham College and studied agriculture. Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time there. No regrets at all. But even so, I wish sometimes we could have done more about the history of farming and the landscape.’

  Suddenly Alan remembered their conversation at Stan’s wake. ‘That’s right, you told me you enjoyed reading Hoskins.’

  ‘Oh, what a book. Stan loved it, too.’ He paused to draw breath. Alan could hear pheasant calls echoing in the woods beyond the abbey ruins. ‘In fact, it was that book that got me talking to Stan about his work here. He lent me his copy.’

  And you returned it, too, Alan thought. He remembered seeing it on Stan’s desk.

  ‘I thought it was just about walls and ruins, but he showed me all sorts of other things, especially how landscapes changed and how people changed with them. And it wasn’t just a one-way process. You could influence outcomes if you were on the ball. It’s all about understanding what’s going on – and not just in the landscape, but with people, too.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Alan agreed, although he wasn’t entirely clear what Sebastian was referring to in his slightly incoherent fashion. Or was he simply trying to be friendly, as he was with Stan? And if so, why? But he knew he needed to keep him on side, so it was safest just to agree. ‘Especially out here in the Fens. You can’t mess with rising water levels.’ As he spoke, Alan could see his words had gone down well.

  ‘No, you’re right about that, Alan. I think that’s why the second baronet, my grandfather, was so annoyed he had to sell Isle Farm to pay death duties.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  Alan pretended he knew nothing about it. It might persuade him to say more. He suspected Sebastian might be a man of rapid mood swings, but he still couldn’t understand what motivated him.