A wet day in the Iron Age would have had everyone cooped up, getting on each other’s nerves, just like today. Alice is trying to avoid Guy Lambert, as politely as possible. It is not that she has anything against him; he is unassuming, rather reserved, a pale, weedy young man in glasses, with a slight stammer—but it is becoming apparent that he is taken with her. Alice is a bit flattered, but she really doesn’t fancy him in the very least, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise, so she has to be a little discouraging while not conspicuously unfriendly, which is quite difficult under today’s cramped circumstances. He keeps coming over to her table, ostensibly to take a look at her trays.
That evening, Mike Chambers and Paul Sampson have another argument. The dispute begins as they are coming off the hill and escalates later in the school, where it is impossible to ignore what is going on, with the pair of them locked in not entirely sotto voce disagreement in a corner of the big classroom, surrounded by the spoils of the dig—the domestic bric-a-brac, the fragmented weaponry, the crucial snail shells and grains of emmer wheat. People tiptoe around them, pretending not to notice, and eventually retreat to the pub. There, Peter and Brian play darts with the local regulars, Laura and Luke hold hands in a corner of the saloon bar, Alice and Eva do The Times crossword. Later, Mike comes in, drinks malt whiskeys and engages in raucous repartee with the landlord. Paul Sampson is not seen.
Next day, the rain has ceased but the site is still awash, and it is clear that the directors are barely on speaking terms. The only matter on which they are united is the need to get things cleaned up for their eminent visitor. There is much bailing out of the trenches. Mike is in a thoroughly bad mood. He orders everyone about, slags Luke off for his desultory labors in a flooded pit, and snaps at Eva, who is picking her way around in the mud with a martyred expression. The others give him a wide berth. Laura and Alice work together at the drier end of a trench; Laura confides that she and Luke are planning a couple of days away next week: she is going to take him to see her family—she knows Mummy will really like him. Alice perceives that the boyfriend’s days are numbered. She points out that the dig is supposed to be a six-week full-time commitment; Laura laughs merrily.
In the middle of the day, Eva announces that she has another migraine, and returns to the school.
June says that frankly that girl needs to rethink her career plan.
Alice finds a pair of tweezers. They are embedded in the muddy wall of the trench, and are so entirely twentieth-century-looking in appearance that she takes them for just that—a piece of contemporary flotsam. She owns something very similar herself. But no, Mike says that this artifact is from the Iron Age. At the end of the day, it joins the other finds in the tent, where Paul Sampson gives it a cursory inspection—he would rather have an array of snail shells, probably—and Guy Lambert takes what Alice feels to be exaggerated interest. For her, this homely implement is rather touching; for what finicky operation was it intended? Was its owner male or female, old or young? Female seems somehow likely, and Alice has this picture of someone around her own age, which in the first century would be the prime of life.
She does not see herself as being in her prime. She can vote, or join the armed forces, but she is corralled in a category that denotes youth, and immaturity—she is a student. The best is yet to come, she assumes, the time when she will be a fully paid-up member of society, with all that that implies. Whereas back then, up on the hill, everyone was paid up and liable from the word go. Except that everyone is liable, always, when it comes to spears and arrows and the bomb.
Is she the only person here who thinks about this sort of thing? Possibly. None of the others have been on CND marches, and indeed their eyes glaze over if the subject comes up. Patently, they do not suffer from nuclear angst. Well, lucky them.
But Alice’s angst comes in fits and starts, like some chronic disease that flares up at intervals. And right now she is more or less free of it, on this summer day when the world is fresh and clean after the rain and you cannot help feeling an uplift, a cheery disregard of local tensions and indeed of the horrors of the human condition. It is good to be up here on the hill, in the sun and the wind, with the bees and the flowers and a lark somewhere overhead. Though she cannot help noting what a mess the dig has made of the place; before the JCB moved in, and the spades and the picks, there was just springy green turf. Archaeology is also desecration.
Sodding weather.
Causley arriving tomorrow, and the site still as mucky as hell, despite everyone’s efforts, if you can call them that, which in some cases you can’t. Well, the old boy will have seen worse. The point is to demonstrate a well-planned dig, show off the most spectacular finds, turn on the charm, and let him go away impressed with a well-run show about which he’ll chat to his chums in the Society of Antiquaries and maybe mention one’s name in the process.
You’re a bloody creep, Chambers.
One should have doubled the number of student volunteers and put a group full-time on environmental material. With wisdoms of hindsight. Had one realized what Chambers’s performance was going to be like. Too late now.
Causley of course is not too sympathetic to today’s approach—any more than Chambers himself, who appears to be stuck in some professional time warp. All the more reason to show what a properly focused contemporary excavation is trying to do. The man may be sidelined these days, but he has significant connections.
The Grand Old Man arrives half an hour late, by which time the reception committee of Paul Sampson, Mike Chambers, and a delegation from the Wessex Gazette has run out of any small talk that it could muster. They are standing in silence when the car draws up, driven by a young acolyte, who helps Sir John Causley out and hovers respectfully with stick and folding chair to hand. The party makes a slow and deliberate progress up the hill along the well-worn track, which is now extremely muddy. There has been an attempt to doctor the worst bits with straw begged from a local farmer, but even so it is heavy going. Eventually the group reaches the site, where people are pretending to be hard at work.
Contrasting sartorial style is conspicuous today. Paul Sampson has put on a tweed jacket and tie, with cord trousers. Mike wears jeans and a red-and-green checked shirt. The students are much as usual, with Laura in hot pants and a bra top.
Sir John Causley also wears a tweed jacket. He is stout, bald, a little lame and, yes, well into his eighties. Laura, Luke, Peter, and Brian see simply an old boy about whom a lot of fuss is being made. Alice sees a person she knows to be somewhat famous and is a little awed; she has not much come across famous people. June, Guy Lambert, and Eva see reams of text loaded with tables, diagrams and definitive data; it seems a little odd that all this has sprung from the bent figure now struggling over the last fifty yards to this site. Mike and Paul Sampson are acutely conscious of legendary distinction, though neither would for one instant admit this, even to themselves, and have been careful in their different ways to voice their independence of the dinosaurs of their trade. For the reporter and photographer from the Wessex Gazette, this is just another assignment, though rather damper and more strenuous than most.
Mike has given thought to the handling of this event. He has in mind a conducted tour, during which there will be several staged photo opportunities that will feature himself and the great man, and himself gazing speculatively into a trench. He has already briefed the photographer on the most strategic point for a general view of the site. But it is soon apparent that their visitor is averse to tight control. He keeps veering off the chosen course, or lingering over some feature that takes his fancy. He also talks volubly; it is quite difficult for either director to get a word in, let alone a sustained explanation.
Sir John arrives at Trench C, which is Mike’s new excavation through the rampart. Laura and Alice are busily scraping, while keeping a wary eye on the approaching group. Mike launches into an account of the newly revealed section of wall, but Sir John’s attention is elsewhere. He focuses o
n Laura: “Why doesn’t this young lady tell me about what is going on in this trench?”
Laura smiles charmingly. She puts down her trowel and says that, well, they’re sort of opening up this bit and they’re looking out for, well, anything important, and in fact they’ve just found this—actually I didn’t, Alice did—this, um . . .
“Hinge?” suggests Causley.
“Right,” says Laura, beaming. “This hinge.”
Causley sits down in his folding chair. “Now, this might interest you, my dear,” he begins. “When we were digging in Mesopotamia in ’36 . . .”
He continues thus, at length. Laura is apparently entranced. The rest drift over from the other trenches. “Gosh!” says Laura. “That is so interesting. . . .” The Wessex Gazette contingent close in, the photographer busy. Paul Sampson and Mike Chambers stand a little apart, superfluous.
After some while the acolyte clears his throat and murmurs something.
“Good heavens!” says Causley. “As late as that . . .” He heaves himself up.
Paul Sampson steps forward determinedly, talking about the exhibits down at the school: “. . . give you a good idea of the kind of material we’re finding so crucial now to establish the wider picture . . .”
The acolyte murmurs again to Causley.
“Oh dear,” says Causley. “We’ve got this lunch date, you see. Can’t keep our friends waiting. Have to leave that for another time, I’m afraid. Too bad.”
The acolyte attends to the chair, proffers the stick. Causley beams upon the students. Laura bats her eyelashes and says, it was super hearing all those fascinating stories. The photographer takes another shot.
There is a royal progress back down the hill. Mike Chambers positions himself at Causley’s elbow, but is unable to insert more than a few words into the departing discourse. Causley is now recalling Syria in ’34 and Orkney in ’57 and Brittany in ’51. Cornbury Hill is eclipsed by legendary endeavors, put in its place, relegated. Age has pulled rank; Mike and Paul share a certain dismissive feeling for their visitor, as one whose day is done, but it would be quite impossible for either of them to display anything other than deferential attention. And so Sir John talks himself into the car, waves a benevolent hand from the window, and is driven away, leaving the directors of Cornbury Hill ’73 to climb back to the site, more or less in silence. The Wessex Gazette contingent has already made off, and up on the hill the others are sitting around drinking Tizer and munching apples. “What an old sweetie,” says Laura.
People return to the trenches and the pits, to the tents, to the flotation tank. The dig judders into activity once again. It is the middle of August, the middle of the time during which they will be here. Presently the place will be abandoned; in due course all evidence of their labors will be hard to identify. Their occupancy of the hill is but a passing moment. Nothing has happened, in terms of the hill’s experience.
Except that it has, thinks Alice, as she kneels and scrapes. People have rubbed up against other people; they have squabbled, like Mike Chambers and Professor Sampson, or they have started a love affair, like Luke and Laura, or they have made some decision and disappeared, like Penny Sampson, who apparently is not coming back and must be somewhere quite else now, getting on with things that we know nothing about. The thing that has happened, really, is that a whole lot of lives have briefly touched and will then spin off in different directions. Probably I’ll never set eyes on any of these people again, but they’ll always be in my head.
A few days later, the dig features in the Wessex Gazette. There is a photograph, but it is one that pleases neither director. It does not display the site to advantage, nor does it feature either of them demonstrating some point of interest to Sir John Causley. The photograph has Laura smiling up from an unidentifiable patch of disheveled earth, trowel in hand, a vision in a little halter-neck top and matching hot pants.
The Wessex Gazette has also a center spread which discusses the potential effects of a nuclear blast on the region. It shows a map of southern England over which are superimposed concentric rings indicating areas of total devastation, lesser devastation, radioactive fallout, and so forth. Alice studies this, though she would prefer not to do so. And, next day, she seems to see those concentric rings hovering about the landscape—the fields, the drifts of cows, the die-straight line of the road first laid out by the Romans, the melting green-blue distances. It’s not fair, she thinks, it really is not fair to be living now, of all times.
I have taken considerable liberties, in these fictional projections of an alter ego. The disaffected Penny Sampson seems distinctly possible. I did indeed marry an academic, in real life; he was about as different from the misanthropic professor of this episode as is possible. But we are all conditioned in a sense by those to whom we are bound; my real-life husband affected the person that I have become. Without him, with someone else, who knows what twists of personality might not have come about. Miranda of the feckless lifestyle seems a wilder supposition altogether. I am a rather pragmatic and organized person. I was about to write “naturally pragmatic and organized”—but is that the case? Are such tendencies innate, or honed by circumstance? All I can say is that when I was young I much admired those who displayed artistic leanings, the more defiantly flamboyant the better, and when I was about nine I asked to be rechristened as Miranda, instead of my own plodding name. My parents declined.
The Battle of the Imjin River
Personal life is set against the background noise of public events. When I consider my own, each period is flavored with the times. In the sixties and seventies, I endured nuclear angst, like Alice; as a young mother, I looked at my small children during the nine days of the Cuban missile crisis and thought that they might never grow up. My next-door neighbor and I had a strategy worked out, should the four-minute warning go: I would mind our small children, she would dash to the primary school to fetch the older ones. In four minutes?
Before that, there were other points when private life was suddenly skewed by what was going on in the world. At the time of the Suez crisis, I was in Oxford, with that rather dead-end job, but also just getting to know Jack Lively, whom I would marry before too long. He was then a junior research fellow at St. Antony’s College, and was at once in the forefront of those trying to coordinate the university’s protest against the policy of Sir Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, in colluding with the French and the Israelis to invade the Suez Canal zone. I was right behind him, and remember those days as my first experience of indignation at an external event, and of political commitment.
Earlier still, there had been a more cataclysmic disturbance yet. I don’t recall being much aware of the Korean War. I was in the hinterland between school and university when it broke out, being “crammed” for Oxbridge entrance at a boarding establishment in Surrey. The only American girl there was summoned home by her father, who considered that the Third World War was imminent. The rest of us went on mugging up the Industrial Revolution and the Tudors and Stuarts.
Jack was in the last months of his national service. He was twenty-one years old; it would be five years before we met.
His regiment was the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, one of those detailed for service in Korea, along with the Gloucesters, the Royal Ulster Rifles, and the Middlesex. National service had been extended after the outbreak of the war in 1950, and Jack was devastated to realize that he would now be sailing for Korea along with the regular soldiers and reservists serving with the regiment. He had applied for a place at a Cambridge college. Three weeks before the regiment was due to embark, he heard that he had been accepted by St. John’s, and was thus reprieved. Some national servicemen with university places were granted early release. But not all. The army seems to have exercised some form of capricious choice as to whom they let go. Jack was lucky.
And so, by a whisker, he missed the battle of the Imjin River, into which other national servicemen with the Northumberland Fusiliers were flung, some of th
em within days of their arrival in Japan for forward posting to Korea.
A thousand British soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing at the Imjin River, one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of the war. The Gloucesters suffered the worst, and also gained great glory for their stand at “Gloucester Hill,” when entirely surrounded by the Chinese advance.
I might never have known him. We might never have met. There might never have been our children, and theirs, and the forty-one years of love and life and shared experiences, and those long hard months at the end.
What follows supposes what so nearly happened: the fate of a young man who is a shadow Jack for whom events ran differently.
He stared out over the edge of the trench into the darkness. It was three o’clock in the morning. Oh, he had done this kind of thing before—maneuvers on Salisbury Plain. But that was then and this was now—an insane, incredible now that should not be. And the darkness of Salisbury Plain was an amiable, homely darkness, whereas this darkness was malign; at any moment it might hurl machine-gun bullets or a grenade at you. The darkness of Salisbury Plain was a great calm circle, but this darkness was broken by the jagged shapes of hills, it was lit every now and then with flares or a shower of green or red tracer, it emptied into the whine of shells.