The seventeenth-century garden yielded most – perhaps because it was there that the most intense vegetable growing took place, in an area that had been the farmyard. Much deep digging on my part, the fruits of which have filled the cake tin. Blue and white willow-pattern china in quantities, which probably dates from late eighteenth century to early twentieth. Other china – particularly pretty green and white fluted sherds with a floral design, remains of some treasured best tea or dinner service, I decided. And, reaching further back in time, a couple of sherds of seventeenth-century salt glaze – the deep yellow glaze with scribbled lines and loops in dark brown. And a fragment of broken handle in the other kind of salt glaze – mottled brown. Much plain earthenware, evidently from large crocks and smaller ones. And there was some glazed earthenware mottled with green that looked like the medieval pots in the Ashmolean and, if so, might have dated from even before the construction of the farmhouse in 1620. An entire sequence of domestic crockery, silent testimony lying there in that richly fertile soil – “scarce below the roots of some vegetables,” as Sir Thomas Browne put it. My vegetables, now.
There were other tantalizing finds. A tiny green glass bottle, just over an inch high. Nineteenth century, by the look of it. But what could it have held? And a little, delicate, cream-colored horn spoon; another valued item, surely, lost rather than discarded.
This was not archaeology, of course. It was fortuitous discovery. And these homely Oxfordshire finds seem a far cry from the exotic implications of the leaping fish sherd. But, for me, all fed into an insatiable fascination with what has been, what is gone but survives in these glimpses afforded by something you can hold in your hand, these suggestions of other people who also held this, used it, made it.
It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my own time frame and into other places – places where things were done differently. Reading has provided me with that, for the most part, but it is objects, things like these scraps of pottery, that have most keenly conjured up all those elsewheres – inaccessible but eerily available to the imagination. The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can’t begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened – that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece – and all those other sherds in the cake tin – expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.
Penelope Lively, Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir
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