Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  Now there followed a process. Each newly revealed layer was cleaned of earth, drawn on paper plans, photographed and, in due course, removed, so the next layer down could be exposed, similarly mapped and then in turn removed and the next course of stones revealed. To add to the odd sensation of inhabiting several different times, there was also this process of dismantling; of running the narrative of construction backwards.

  Thus, the arena of flattish stones was mapped, and removed. Under them were some more stabilising earth and stones, but the next layer down consisted in just one single, huge grey boulder. It was so big and heavy it must have taken several strong men to manoeuvre it into place. It had presence, and everyone now knew it was a capstone for a cist.

  The Latinate ‘inhumation’ was a word I learned on that site; ‘inhumation’ being distinct from ‘cremation’ as a way of disposing of the dead, but the old word ‘cist’ I already knew. As ‘kist’ it lingers in Scots as the word for a chest or box; a corn chest or blanket chest is a kist. We quickly understood that John had unearthed a Bronze Age cist burial. Now the little covering pavement had been taken away, it was the huge rounded cover stone, or capstone, which had sealed the coffin for thousands of years, which was coming to light.

  The weather remained unseasonably cold and windy. Being outdoors all day, we were attuned to that. When the long ridge of the Ochils was capped by grey clouds, the whole landscape became sullen and powerful. Between showers we worked on. Post-holes and ditches were fine, but now the site had focus. Here were ‘earth mysteries’ indeed; soon something would be uncovered which had lain in privacy and darkness for 3500 years.

  For several days John worked to clean the capstone itself, and he was always ready to lean up from his task and give cheery progress reports. The archaeologists were excited by its state of preservation, no damage or collapse. John cleared an area around the capstone, so it lay exposed like a huge egg a step down from the surrounding ground. Then it was declared ready to be lifted; tomorrow would be the day.

  I was darkly excited by the prospect. Many of us were—how could we fail to be? We were young and this cist burial was very, very old. Even the experienced hands were keen, and they were full of stories both ghoulish and tender. Had we heard about the labourer on a site in York who’d accidentally put his pickaxe through a sewage pipe? Not a sewage pipe: turned out to be a medieval lead coffin. But what’s that green sludge? he’d asked. ‘That’s the body.’ He’d fainted! Had we heard about the Bronze Age woman and her baby, buried together, laid on a swan’s wing?

  It was the last day of May. The fretful weather of the past week had steadied into a sullen gloom. In twos and threes we wandered out onto site at nine o’clock as usual, through the wooden gate and over the field toward the line of sycamores and thence to the henge, scraped and bare. Within the ditch, within the sanctuary of the ring of post-holes, in its hollow was the waiting capstone. We set to our various tasks with trowels and drawing boards and measuring sticks. Low blue-dark cloud covered the whole sky, the hills were obscured.

  * * *

  Though I remember that morning well, I’ve often wondered if I’ve elaborated it, and introduced a touch of Gothic fantasy, but recently a friend from those days, the boyfriend of the DC10, corroborated it. It was a very odd day.

  There was more preparatory work to be done round the capstone, and that took an hour, until at mid-morning the call came to down tools and clear the site. By then the sky was even darker, more like November than May, but close and windless. A small yellow mobile crane, hired from a local firm, trundled onto site.

  We ‘diggers’ herded ourselves onto the far side of the site and watched as the crane driver, called to an unusual task, conferred with the anxious archaeologists. Together they peered at the stone, crouched over it, stood in a huddle, discussed. There was a problem—a supporting stone beneath the capstone had shifted, allowing a spill of earth into the cist, threatening to destabilise the structure and spoil the contents, so, although the weather wasn’t ideal, the task had become urgent. Against the spoil heaps and the black hills behind, the yellow, mechanical crane was a strange trump of modernity.

  At last all was set—and this is the bit I recall. There was some final manoeuvring, and then the crane took possession of the capstone and began to lift it. At that moment, however, the instant we began to violate the grave, a tremendous clap of thunder rolled down from the hills. Even as the crane swung the capstone aside and laid it on the spoil heap, the hills announced their disapproval and, as we moved forward to see what the cist contained, more thunder came, and huge drops of rain began to fall, so immediately a tarpaulin was dragged over the grave, concealing it again from sight.

  * * *

  I fled the threat of the office job, the secretarial college, and spent the following winter in a cold dark cottage on the Orkney Islands, where I wrote a small poem, and called it ‘Inhumation’:

  No-one noticed if he opened his eyes,

  acknowledged the dark,

  felt around, found and drank

  the mead provided,

  supposing himself dead.

  The opening of the cist had lingered in my mind. The whole summer had lingered in my mind, full of possibility. Of course it had—I was seventeen, just out of my big comprehensive school and my parents’ semi. It was a turning place, a henge, a hinge indeed. The exams had been no triumph; if I’d thought about trying for university, which was not an easy process anyway, without a knowledgeable family or supportive teachers the idea was dashed anyway.

  But you could sign on the dole. You could hide among the swelling numbers of genuinely unemployed, and claim a little money every week. That’s what people did: artists, diggers, mountaineers, would-be poets and musicians, anarchists and feminists. Anyone for whom the threat of a job, of conformity, felt like death.

  The opening of the cist under that thunderclap was thrilling, transgressive. So, in its quiet way, was writing poems. The weight and heft of a word, the play of sounds, the sense of carefully revealing something authentic, an artefact which didn’t always display ‘meaning’, but which was a true expression of—what?—a self, a consciousness. This was thrilling too.

  In the cist it wasn’t a man, but a woman. Had I written ‘she’, ‘supposing herself dead’, my poem would have read like a metaphor, as a poem about myself. It wasn’t about me. It was about the body in the cist.

  * * *

  She had been placed, as was the custom, on her right side, crouched with her legs drawn up, her head hard against the top wall of the cist. We looked down onto the skull and long leg bones, which were intact, and gleamed up from the bottom of the stone box, eerie and tender at once. But there was something uncomfortable about the turn and grin of the skull. The angle was wrong. Once the body was in place in the cist, someone had reached in and turned the dead girl’s face to look upward, and toward the east. Then, beside her, they had placed that bowl with its grooved and jabbed decoration. It had been filled with mead flavoured with meadowsweet. Then they had laid the capstone over her.

  It had done well, that food vessel. It had kept its long vigil. Because of the way it had toppled, perhaps the very moment the heavy capstone had been shifted into place, the skull and the bowl seemed to be gazing into each other, mouth to mouth, as though engaged in a long dialogue.

  * * *

  Rather than cooling the weather, the thunder seemed instead to herald the arrival of summer. June opened with clear blue skies and increasingly warm days. Work on site continued quickly—time was limited. Plan, draw, photograph, take it down. It was perfect flying weather; the vintage planes took off and landed. Dig and dismantle—there would be nothing left. Evidence suggests that many Neolithic sites and chambered cairns were not merely forgotten, but ritually closed. Rings of posts were burned in situ by those masters of fire, or stones heaped over the entrances to burial mounds. This work seemed an equivalent. A ritualised undoing.

  Being no longer required, most
of the ‘diggers’ left in the middle of June. There was a final party, of course, and because it was midsummer, it didn’t really get dark. We stayed up all night and at dawn a few of us wandered down to the bigger river, the Earn, and sat under the arch of the old bridge. The water passing under the bridge in the dawn light was satiny, palest grey. Some bats flitted through the arches. I remember an earnest conversation, but what it was about I can’t recall.

  Some folks were going south, down to Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice, to see the sun rise over the Heel Stone and get into the mystic. There was always ribaldry about this, between the ley-line faction and those who scoffed. But the diggers, outdoors all day, with Neolithic dust under their fingernails, were closer to the spirit of the thing than any ridiculous berobed ‘druids’.

  I didn’t go to Stonehenge, but instead left North Mains in the company of a long-haired lad called Pete the Joint and we hitched to the coast, all of thirty miles away, and slept on a headland. How vast the sea, after all that concentrating on a tiny patch of earth.

  Others were moving on to different archaeological sites. It was a bit of a golden age; life as an itinerant ‘digger’ was not impossible, and not intolerable for a while, especially for the young, and we were all young. Every site was an information exchange. In that, the henge probably functioned as it had 4000 years ago. Whatever it was for, it was also a place for romances, graft, parties, huge pots of food and good-natured resentment of the bosses who seemed to know what they were doing. Our off-duty lives probably got us closer to the Neolithic or Bronze Age than any analysis of post-holes and bones.

  * * *

  It would be simple to read much into the business of the Lancaster bomber rolling over the Neolithic henge, the Bronze Age cemetery, but I think it would be trite. It was nothing more than a bizarrerie. Besides, the ‘readings’ wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.

  We are also capable of fire-bombing those cities, and melting their citizens to what Kurt Vonnegut called a ‘foul stew’. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden, detailed to remove the bodies after the US bombers and Lancasters had done their worst. Flight had certainly revealed something of the face of the earth, and also the face of our own capacities. We can reach into a cist-grave and turn the face of the dead girl toward the light, and place a bowl of sweet food in with her, to tide her over into the beyond. At Dresden, the people had crammed themselves into cellars, into cists, hoping to be safe. It was impossible to remove the bodies for burial. They sent in a man with a flame-thrower.

  * * *

  I didn’t know it thirty years ago, but Neolithic sites were often built at the confluence of two rivers, so when I crossed the bridge on the way back to North Mains it was with a different awareness. Prehistoric people would have made the crossing by coracle, or something, and the crossing would have been of ritual significance, an arrival at the centre of the world, a plateau site held in place by the surrounding hills.

  It was May again, the track was the same, rooks cawed, and the farmhouse, far from being demolished, had new windows and a well-to-do lived-in look. When a light aircraft took off and began circling round overhead, I nearly laughed. What’s thirty years in the scheme of things? It wasn’t a Hurricane, though, but a bright blue Cessna. A field away beyond the farmhouse stood the same row of sycamores, with fresh leaves. Beyond the sycamores, where the henge had been, there was no sign of a runway at all.

  No one answered the doorbell, so I made my way to the sycamores, then stood beneath them, trying to recall where exactly in the expanse of fallow field the henge had been.

  The henge was gone, of course, we saw to that. But the runway had never been built. Or, if it had, it had been grubbed up again pretty soon. The Lancaster had arrived alright, but a few short years after the excavation the aircraft museum closed, and the entire collection was sold off. The Lancaster was flown south, but a hangar roof collapsed on it, and what was left was broken up for spares.

  The henge is gone, the director’s report is available to read, the photos are filed away, the Bronze Age woman’s bones—well, they’re in a cardboard box in a city store. The food vessel is reunited with its sister, and displayed in the National Museum, and has nothing to do with this place, this here.

  This here. This same topography. I walked out into the middle of the fallow field on its plateau. With the enclosing hills and twin, east-flowing rivers, it is still the landscape the Neolithic people had understood so acutely, the same earth into which the Bronze Age woman had been lowered. Eastward, vanishing into haze, lay the river valley I’d driven that morning, where once the wild aurochs roamed.

  You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there’s a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate. At least, that’s what I’d been lucky enough to learn.

  THE GANNETRY

  the whole pageantry

  of the year was

  awake tingling

  near

  the edge of the sea

  —W. CARLOS WILLIAMS

  THE COLONY WAS OBVIOUS: half a mile ahead, a column of birds turned bright and white in the summer air. They were visible as a loose plume as we walked over the island toward them, and doubtless visible for miles out to sea. It was exciting, like a fun fair; the closer we got to the cliff edge the more we could hear the racket, the more the breeze brought us the smell.

  The cliffs were south-facing, full in the sun, and five hundred foot high. They formed promontories and bowls, so we walked out onto the broadest promontory and from there looked back into the cauldron the birds had commandeered for themselves. All was squalor and noise: the birds’ tenement was so plastered with guano that it shone, and the airborne birds cast winged shadows on the whitewashed walls. Under these soothing shadows thousands more gannets were installed all along the cliff’s ledges, tier above tier. The flying birds were perfectly silent. Those on the cliff, though, made a loud fretful noise. They were caught up in constant greetings, and constant disputes: about each other, about thefts and incursions, about the indignity of it all—the one demand the empty future makes of them: breed! breed!

  Tim and I grinned at each other. This was what we wanted: a full-blown seabird colony at the height of June.

  Earlier on we’d crossed an imaginary line marked by a little roadside sign which said ‘60’. Not a speed limit—it announced the degree of latitude. Tonight there would be no dark, only an hour or two of ‘simmer dim’ as the Shetland people say—a twilit stillness at midnight, as though the sun were holding its breath. Now, though, it was mid-afternoon, and the hottest day of the year so far. The sun was high, spilling over the sea, lighting the cliff, and every stone and every bird. And every flower. All around us on the sloping clifftop, tufts of pink thrift were in bloom. Each flowerhead shivered in the breeze.

  When I was small, thick brass threepenny bits were still in circulation. A few had an image of thrift, three flowers of course, being three (old) pence on the ‘tails’ side. I remember my father explaining the clever little pun that moved between the coin’s modest amount and the flower called thrift. I was enchanted by it. But what spread before us here was abundance and profligacy—the wide sea under a high white-clouded sky, the cascading light, the public clamour of thousands of seabirds. Sometimes we caught the wistful smell of the flowers, but mostly it was ammonia and bird shit, carried up on the breeze. Bird shit and pink thrift, the smell of summer.

  On a flat stone the size of a door, near but not too near the edge, Tim and I sat down and began to watch in silence, each entering a private, visual world, sometimes using binoculars, sometimes not. In the water far below were rocks and small stacks, with surf breaking around them.

  Just off the cl
iff edge, a few yards away from where we sat, gannet after gannet beat by, with outstretched beaks and hard eyes, taking the corner into the colony at speed, as if bearing urgent dispatches. We were close enough to see their eyes, and they are sharp-sighted, but if they noticed us they made no sign. We were nothing, land things, and gannets disdain land. They disdain land, but every spring they’re lured to their traditional cliffs and stacks by a siren song. Never a summer that isn’t spent like this, in fuss and bother, each pair raising a single chick.

  After a few minutes, I said: ‘It seems like a long time ago.’

  ‘What does?’

  I gestured to the bird-crowded cliff face. I meant the time of breaking waters and nappy buckets and trails of milky vomit down one’s shoulder. ‘Over!’ I laughed. ‘That bit’s over. For me, anyway.’

  * * *

  Tim and I have been friends for years, since our respective children were babies. He works as a radio producer for the BBC. In fact, we met when he asked me to write what he called a ‘radio poem’ for broadcast and I wanted to very much. I was anxious to feel I was still in the game, could still think, because with a new, hungry baby my mind had melted into a puddle of feeds and laundry, and my real life seemed to have been mislaid.

  Now we skive off once a year or so to see some birds. This was today’s plan. We’d been lucky with the weather, so now we’d surrender ourselves to the uproar of breeding gannets. For me, not an ornithologist, the colony was sheer sound and spectacle. A thousand vignettes unfolded on the screen, the cliff face in front of me. Arrivals and departures, bondings and squabbles and fights. Some birds were greeting each other with long upraised necks, others hung in the air, bodies and necks suspended below their wings as though the wings were held up by invisible pegs. We’d watch gannets, and whatever else happened by. There were puffins and Arctic skuas, too. Tim’s a good birder, and he likes the unexpected. If some rarity turned up, he’d see it, and he’d say.