ALSO BY JULIA BLACKBURN
FICTION
The Book of Colour
The Leper’s Companion
NON-FICTION
Charles Winterton
The Emperor’s Last Island
Daisy Bates in the Desert
Old Man Goya
With Billie
My Animals & Other Families
The Three of Us
Thin Paths
Threads
POETRY
Murmurations of Love, Grief and Starlings
Copyright © 2019 by Julia Blackburn
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2019.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to David Higham Associates for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Eden Rock,” by Charles Causley, from Collected Poems, 1951–2000 by Charles Causley (London: Picador, 2000). Copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Charles Causley. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blackburn, Julia, author. Brinkmann, Enrique, illustrator.
Title: Time song : Journeys in search of a submerged land / Julia Blackburn ; illustrated by Enrique Brinkmann.
Description: First United States edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2019. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048745. ISBN 9781101871676 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9781101871683 (ebook).
Subjects: LCSH: North Sea Region—Description and travel. North Sea Region—Antiquities. Submerged lands—North Sea Region—History. Prehistoric peoples—North Sea Region. Mesolithic period—North Sea Region. Blackburn, Julia—Travel—North Sea Region. England—Description and travel. Europe, Northern—Description and travel.
Classification: LCC D965.5 .B55 2019 | DDC 909/.096336—dc23 | LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048745
Ebook ISBN 9781101871683
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover art: “Los Mesoliticos XI” by Enrique Brinkmann © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
v5.4
ep
A great while ago, the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain…
SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night
‘OH,’ I SAY CASUALLY, as if in answer to a question, ‘I’m writing about a country called Doggerland. It’s also known as North Sea Land because that’s where it was, under what is now the North Sea. It emerged after the last Ice Age and with the warming of the climate it became a wonderfully fertile place of rivers and lakes, gently rounded hills and sheltered valleys, reed beds and salt marshes in the lowlands, trees on higher ground and a profusion of life: fish, birds, animals and humans as well. These were a people who left few traces of their passing. They hunted with weapons made from wood, bone or stone; they had canoes cut from the trunks of trees; they had dogs working with them and sometimes buried their dead alongside their dogs. But as the ice went on melting the sea levels rose dramatically – you can’t believe how fast, it could be more than two metres within a century – so the land was inundated, familiar places submerged or made inaccessible. Seven thousand years ago, Doggerbank was still there as an island and then it too was gone.
‘And,’ I continue, carried forward by the idea of it all, ‘I am also writing about what happened in this same area long before the last Ice Age. I go back to the first humans who were here, close to where I live: a cache of worked flints was found quite recently near a holiday camp and then a bit further up the coast there is the little flurry of footsteps fossilised in what was once the soft mud of a river estuary. Five people pottering about some nine hundred thousand years ago; they were probably collecting plants and shellfish.
‘Mammoth,’ I say, ‘great herds of them moving across the grassy steppes when Britain was part of the Eurasian land mass. I’ve collected quite a lot of mammoth bones, along with those of other extinct creatures; it’s best to go looking after a storm has scoured the edges of the cliffs to reveal whatever secrets they have been hiding, but I often forget to go then. I did pick up a lovely stone axehead just recently. It looks like nothing much until you hold it in your hand and feel how well it fits, how sharp it is.
‘Of course I ask myself what on earth I think I’m doing, rattling around like a ghost in such distant landscapes of the past, and this is what might be the answer, or at least part of the answer. I am not especially afraid of my own death, but I am afraid of the death of forests and oceans, the contamination of water and air, the sense that we are heading towards a catastrophe from which there will be no escape. I comfort myself with the knowledge that this is nothing new: the climate has often shifted from extremes of heat to extremes of cold; oceans rising to cover the land and shrinking to reveal it in a different form; living creatures emerging in all their strangeness and determination to survive and some of them manage to hold on, but others do not.
‘I wonder now if it makes more sense to imagine infinity going backwards in time, rather than forwards. When you look at it that way round, you no longer have the vague dread of what the future holds, instead there is the intimation of the enormity of everything that has gone before: a solemn procession of life in all its myriad forms moving steadily towards this present moment. You can almost hear the songs they are singing.
‘There is something else. My husband died a few years ago. He has vanished and yet he remains close, beneath the surface as it were, so perhaps I am also trying to catch a glimpse of him within the great jumble of everything else that has been lost from our sight.’
Contents
Cover
Also by Julia Blackburn
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Map
Part One: Old Time
Part Two: Middle Time
Part Three: No Time at All
Acknowledgements
Part One
Old Time
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think!’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
CHARLES CAUSLEY, ‘Eden Rock’
1
I am looking out across the North Sea on a calm day. The surface of the sea is like a covering of grey skin, breathing softly in and out.
As I stand here, the water that separates me from the mainland on the other side begins to retreat, as if a plug has been pulled. A vast country emerges: low hills and wide valleys, the twist and turn of rivers, the scoop of lakes.
At first this country appears limp and without colour, but then a shiver of life moves through it. The birds flying overhead spiral down to settle and pause on their journey. Seeds take root. Reed beds and salt marshes spread out like shadows across the young mud. Tiny trees appear on higher ground. The rivers are again flowing and fish are racing down them towards a more distant ocean. The old lakes are filling up and animals are moving in, exploring the territory; humans, too, since this is a human time.
I fail to catch the moment of the change taking place, but now the sea is rising. Peninsulas become islands, islands disappear
without trace, rivers break through the banks that defined them. The lower lands are flooded and even before they fall, the trees on higher ground are killed by the salt water in which they stand. The animals and the humans must escape if they are to survive. For a while the marshes and reed beds remain, but then they go under.
I am on a beach close to the shoreline and looking out across the breathing surface of the North Sea. Slabs of thick, peaty soil containing the roots and broken stalks of those reeds from long ago lie scattered on the sand. I pick up a piece of mammoth bone, brown and heavy and still showing the honeycomb that once carried blood and lymph through the living body. I pick up a shell that has been turned into a stone. I look for flints worked into the shape of a weapon or a tool.
It’s getting late. I go home.
2
I live close to the sea and the sea I live close to covers a country we now call Doggerland. This country has been through many incarnations: hot and dry, wet and marshy, cold and ice-bound, but for most of its long time it has in one way or another connected England with mainland Europe.
Much of the fragmented evidence of what this country once was is hidden under the sea, but there is also a lot to be found scattered in the sands and clays and gravels of the land. Deep time lies beneath my feet and if I were to dig into the earth I would witness the past unfolding in layers.
The coastline here is delicate and unprotected; a storm can easily break off great chunks of the soft cliff to reveal lines of brightly coloured sands, a string of dancing shells followed by a band of gravel and then of clay. Bones as well. Just a few weeks ago I found a fossilised piece from the jigsaw of an ancient sea creature, lying below a field where carrots were being harvested, and once I found a human skull, packed tight with soil in which the roots of little plants were growing.
I have been gathering these broken treasures for many years and as I look at them, or rearrange them in different configurations, they seem to become part of my own thought process, part of who I am.
* * *
—
There is a pond in the meadow behind this house. When I first saw it the pond was nothing but mud and the broken skeletons of dead trees and during a particularly dry summer I managed to fish out an enamel teapot and an unbroken Victorian ink bottle with that nice creamy pottery glaze. Now the pond is deep and clean, marsh marigolds around its edges and a family of moorhens scattering across its surface. The tall sycamore tree close by has an odd bend in its trunk caused by its proximity to the brick chimney which was for a while the last remaining evidence of an old farmhouse.
Do you understand? I’m doing practice work here: looking at the tree and seeing the absent chimney, looking at the pond and seeing the wreck of mud. And then I take another step back and the tree has not yet started to grow and the pond is filled with a wriggling mass of tadpoles, from the days when frogs and toads were plentiful in this part of the world. I try to catch a glimpse of the grey silhouette of the cuckoo that no longer comes here to announce the return of spring. I listen to the silence and populate it with the hesitant ding-dong of the cuckoo’s voice.
I walk a bit further to what is called Castle Meadow: a perfect circle surrounded by oak trees and defined by a ditch that floods in the winter. I allow the simple image of a castle to take shape like a child’s drawing and I can see horses pulling carts, dogs following behind, people going through a gate, but then I am distracted and they vanish.
I go to the field that we called the butterfly meadow because in the summer a mass of little butterflies, meadow blues mostly, would billow out in clouds of soft pastel colours as you moved through the tangle of purple flowering vetch that grew among the grasses, and as the butterflies danced I always pictured the children of long ago dancing among them. Perhaps they were on their way to scare crows or pick up flints and set them in heaps. Perhaps they were barefoot. The meadow has become a wheat field and the butterflies have gone.
And then to the adjacent field where I used to find so many fossils, in the days when the farmer who died was still alive. This was the grumpy farmer who went to Australia after a scandal with a local girl, he whose father was made to live in the chicken house at the end of the garden because his mother had banished him there and the grumpy farmer brought food on a plate to his banished father and I suppose that was where his anger started. He never allowed modern machinery on his land and so the ploughing didn’t damage the fossil field. Over the years I found dozens of stone sea creatures in the heavy clay soil, loving soil they called it because it clung to your boots so fiercely you could hardly lift one foot and then the other, and as I walked through that field, I would turn it in my mind into a shallow sea.
Yesterday I went, as I often do, to the nearby village of Covehithe. It has an eighteenth-century church standing within the ruins of a much older church. A narrow road passes the church and heads straight for the sea, but it has no final destination because it has snapped off like a piece of biscuit right at the cliff edge: a layer of tarmac and concrete sticking out over the drop beneath, changing shape after each new succession of high tides.
I followed the path from the village to the coast. Gulls were dipping and holding themselves steady in the air as if they had little hooks in their backs attached to elasticated strings. A kestrel: a glint of tawny feathers. The last of the sand martins.
I slept for one night on the sand of this beach with my first husband beside me and our second child stirring in my belly. We lay on a duvet and under a duvet and I remember the slowness of the sunset and geese creaking and crying in long skeins above our heads. The noise of them stepped over into my dreams.
It must have been around the same time I saw two friends entering the shallow sea hand in hand and laughing and it had never occurred to me before that they were also young in their way, even though they were already as old as I am now. She had recently been treated for a cancer which almost killed her and in order to pull herself through the process of recovery she started to build a flint wall in her garden and every day she went to the beach and chose a big flint and carried it to the car and brought it back and cemented it in place and slowly her strength returned to her as the wall grew.
Once I noticed a tiny black thing as hard and shiny as polished jet, tightly embedded in the sand of the cliff. I pulled it out like a thorn and it appeared to be a fossilised chrysalis. I could see the tightly folded wings and little circles under which lay the still-closed eyes of a creature that never got round to splitting out of its prison and emerging as a moth or a butterfly.
I found my first piece of mammoth here: an almost complete section of vertebra. I keep it on a window ledge, next to a beautiful stone axe from this same beach and another one which my son, who was stirring in my womb while I listened to the geese, picked up a little while ago in the mud of the Thames, close to Tate Modern. There have been so many Thames Picks, as they are called, found along that stretch of the river that people think they were not lost accidentally, but were offerings to whatever gods were interested in such gifts.
Yesterday the coast looked very battered. Big pieces of land had tumbled down, some of them tufty-topped with fresh grass or with the Chinese lantern shapes of a recent sugar beet crop. Within the side of the wounded cliff I could see the arterial systems of drainage pipes and rolls of barbed wire from the defences of the last war or the war before that one. Things here often appear magically out of nowhere and then vanish with an equal magic. Recently a concrete pillbox settled its awkward weight on the sand like a prehistoric creature, and it reminded me of the last scene in Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston thinks he is back in the dawn of time but then he sees the arm of the Statue of Liberty sticking up out of the sand, along with the spiked crown and the 1920s haircut, and he realises he has arrived in the future and the sand is covering the city of New York.
A friend told me of the nuclear command bunker which lies under the
lawn of a garden in the village. Everything is hearsay but it seems it was built during the Cold War and is connected to its twin on the Dutch coast. It is three storeys deep, with enough room to hold thirty important people and enough dry and tinned food to feed them for thirty years. He took a series of photographs inside the bunker with an infrared camera. One of them shows a dour 1960s domestic interior in which a bulbous television set stands close to two stiff armchairs upholstered in that plastic material called leatherette. Another is of a printed notice on a wall with practical information about what you must and must not do, next to a very amateur oil painting of the church and a pinkly flowering cherry tree, all of it set against the bright blue of a summer sky, so the underground people need never forget the look of the world they had lost.
I keep thinking of the bunker and how every year it is being brought closer and closer to the cliff edge, until the day comes when it will begin to topple down on to the beach and maybe strangers with no idea of what it once was will stare at the debris and take away anything they consider worth saving.
3
In 1946 a sparrowhawk flew into the French windows of my great-aunt’s house. Molly, she was called, and she had been dressed in the black of deepest mourning ever since the death of her younger sister, an event she considered her fault because she had said it would not rain, but it did rain and the sister caught a cold which became the pneumonia that killed her.
The sparrowhawk was only stunned, but a week later it made the same dive into the glittering firmament of glass and that was the end of it. My great-aunt had the bird stuffed and mounted very simply on a white perch set in a white box, with an account of what had happened written on a label glued to the back of the box.
Time Song Page 1