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Mudlarking

Page 12

by Lara Maiklem


  After my early mistakes, I always take mystery objects home now, just in case. And sometimes, I get a nice surprise. A few years ago I found a small rectangular piece of ivory washed up in a drift of animal bones. Initially, I thought it was the back of a bone domino, but when I turned it over, instead of dots, there was a carved circular pit with radiating lines and the numbers 10, 11, 12, 1 and 2 delicately inscribed onto it. I showed it to a nearby mudlark, who confidently pronounced it to be part of a 1930s barometer, but that didn’t seem quite right to me, so I bagged it up and took it home to research properly.

  I mulled it over on the way back and for several days afterwards. I could tell it was probably ivory from the feel of it and the delicate grain it had that bone lacks, but I still had no idea what it was. Eventually I invited some friends over to see if they had any suggestions. Several bottles of wine later, the only thing we could think of was that it looked a bit like a miniature sundial. I grabbed my laptop and rather drunkenly typed in ‘ivory sundial’, not really hoping for much, yet there it was: a video of a near-identical example being excavated in a historic colonial settlement in Jamestown, America. We gathered round and watched as the archaeologist explained what she was doing, carefully digging and brushing away the dirt before lifting it up to the camera.

  Now I knew what it was, finding out more was easy. My little broken timepiece was indeed a pocket sundial, probably made in Nuremberg in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The circular pit would have held a glass-covered compass, used for alignment, and a string gnomon, tethered between a small iron pin and the lid (all now missing), would have cast a shadow that showed the time. It was an expensive trinket. Whoever had once owned it would have been a person of means, perhaps a visiting merchant or the captain of a ship. I’m sure it would have been proudly shown to friends, its little lid opened and turned until it caught the sun. It may have been taken on long voyages and angled towards the sun in the New World or the Orient. I have read quite a lot about such trinkets since then, learning that they may not have been intended to be precise timepieces after all, but kept as a memento mori, a reminder that life is vanity and death inevitable.

  Even the most obvious objects can remain a mystery until they are properly identified and researched. The shards of two millennia litter much of the foreshore. It’s clear they are broken pots, but the skill lies in identifying them. When I first started mudlarking I was indiscriminate. I’d come home with shards of pretty nineteenth-century china or bright, tightly designed bits of Georgian crockery, simply because they were easy to find. But as my knowledge grew, I became more selective and gradually developed an interest in older domestic pottery, thick artless shards of brown, yellow and green cooking pots, jugs, bowls and tankards. They weren’t as pretty as the blue-and-white pottery or as sophisticated as porcelain, but I was attracted to their comfortable modesty, and the subtle natural colours of the clay and the glazes. Sometimes they were crudely decorated, but even the plain pieces were comforting to the hand and pleasing to the eye, and emanated a distinct sense of purpose and intimacy. History was made tangible and immediate where the potter’s thumb or fingerprints were pressed into the clay, leaving impressions that perfectly fitted my own fingers.

  The earliest medieval pottery I have found on the foreshore is known as shellyware, named for the large pieces of white shell embedded in the coarse brown clay. It dates from between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries and is not very common. The pieces I have are small, undecorated and anonymous. They blend with the pebbles and rubble and are easy to miss. Redware, by contrast, is far more common. Heavy, utilitarian pieces were produced from this in vast quantities for use in London’s kitchens and taverns from around the eleventh century right up to the twentieth. Earlier medieval redware can usually be distinguished by its coarser, sandy texture and the dark grey core that comes from firing at lower temperatures in less efficient kilns. Sometimes they were dipped or splashed with clear or green glazes, which were as practical as they were decorative, preventing liquids from seeping out through the absorbent clay. Of my larger medieval redware shards I have the wide flat rim of a bowl; part of a cup with a small handle, perfectly sized for my fingers and pinched either side by the potter to fix it in place; the hollow handles and short feet of cooking pots called pipkins; and the thick rims of vessels that are decorated with a line of thumbprints, an everlasting signature of the person who made it. I have a small ear-shaped handle from a porringer – a shallow bowl for ‘pottage’, the vegetable-based stew thickened with pulses and sometimes scraps of meat that was a staple food of the late-medieval period – speckled with rich green glaze on top and smoothed underneath by the potter’s thumbs.

  The potter may also have used very simple tools like the piece of flat bone I found that has a wide serrated edge at one end. I puzzled over it for a while until a friend of mine who pots in her spare time sent me a fifteenth-century German illustration of a female potter at her wheel. She is wearing a loose sleeveless dress and her hair is covered with a turban-like wrap of cloth. A lump of clay sits on the floor beside her and her skirt is hitched up to her knees, revealing bare feet turning a wooden potter’s wheel. She is putting the finishing touches to a tall jug or drinking vessel and in her hand is a comb-like object exactly like the one I had found on the Thames. According to my friend, they are still used for decorating and shaping pots while they are on the wheel. The barefooted German potter provided another visual reference for some more unusual shards in my collection. The base of the jug she is making is similar to the grey ‘pie crust’ pot bases I have found in the mud near Queenhithe. These roughly gathered clay skirts were attached to the tall jugs and drinking vessels that came to London from Raeren in Germany, brought along the Rhine in a trade ship, over the North Sea and up the Thames.

  From around 1350 the fashion changed towards white clays, and the potteries on the Surrey/Hampshire border began producing vast quantities of pale domestic ware for the London market. It is difficult not to find pieces of borderware on the foreshore near Queenhithe. It is often coloured with a characteristic green glaze, which was created by filing ingots of copper, grinding the filings finely and adding them to the slip. The colour was enhanced with lead and a potter has told me that it is impossible to recreate its vibrancy without it. The pots were quickly dipped or splashed, leaving areas unglazed, and stacked into large kilns to fire. Shards of this green-glazed medieval pottery can be exquisitely beautiful and look surprisingly modern. The glaze was fired into a range of rich and vibrant speckled greens; I have one very special piece with burst air bubbles preserved in the glaze by the heat of the kiln.

  Much of the borderware was undecorated, but some were scratched with lines and patterns and more decorative pieces had figures and scenes stuck onto them. I have two small green-glazed men that are thought to have broken off a fifteenth-century jug and a fourteenth-century chafing dish. The jug figure may have been a knight, though his helmet is missing, and the other figure may have been one of several that supported cooking pots over the hot coals contained in the chafing dish. They are simple, quirky little fellows with outstretched arms, prominent chins and noses and a simple slash for their mouths. I found them in the same area, several years apart, and both were lying face down in the mud, a lesson to me on the importance of turning pottery shards over before dismissing them.

  Even the most innocuous-looking brown shard can reveal the heavily freckled salt-glaze of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German stoneware; thick custard-coloured spirals, curls, lines and dots on gingerbread-like slipware; or the combed lines of decoration on yellow Staffordshire slipware that looks like the top of a Bakewell tart.

  I have been bringing unusual objects home since I was a child – and I still feel the sharp pang of excitement at spotting something that’s unusual or out of place. It could be something as simple as a dry snakeskin in the grass or a piece of quartz in the mud – covetable objects in their own right but which take
on a magical quality when found out of context. It’s this magic that I try to capture by collecting them.

  I had a ‘museum’ for the things I brought home as a child: a dusty old chest of drawers in the barn next to the house. It had peeling veneer, ornate metal looped handles and three deep drawers, to each of which I assigned a different category of treasure. The top drawer was for natural finds – feathers, broken birds’ eggs, dried leaves, desiccated butterflies and bumblebees, a rabbit foot, a young deer antler and the mummified head of a lime-green budgerigar the cat caught in the garden one summer. Human-made objects lived in the middle drawer – shards of blue-and-white Victorian china, clay pipe stems and glass bottle stoppers from the old midden in front of the house; a George V farthing I found on a molehill; some clay marbles from under the floorboards in the dining room; fishing flies given to me by a distant cousin; and anything else that didn’t fit into the other two drawers. Weight decreed that fossils and unusual stones lived in the bottom drawer.

  My mother had had a museum of her own when she was a child and would delight me with the story of the cat skull, the pride of her collection. She had found it by the side of the road in a state of partial decomposition and rather than wait for the maggots to do their job and risk losing it to another collector, she took it home and boiled it in her mother’s best milk pan to remove the remaining flesh. I loved that story, but bedtime cocoa at my grandmother’s house never tasted quite the same after I’d heard it.

  Despite the number of years I have been visiting the foreshore, my collection is relatively condensed and well curated. Before we moved house, space was limited to a few shelves under the stairs so I learned to be selective. What I brought home lived in an assortment of boxes and zip-lock bags, wrapped in tissue paper, divided into categories and carefully catalogued. Once they were put away, they lived mostly undisturbed and neglected, too time-consuming and difficult to get out.

  I’ve spread out in the new house, though, and my collection has been liberated. I have a muddy table in the corner of the garage, surrounded by bikes and assorted clutter, where I unpack and sort my finds and where I keep all my mudlarking, cleaning and preservation gear. There’s a pickle jar of WD40 for soaking delicate iron objects, a box of latex gloves, wire brushes of varying gauges, ziplock bags in every size, my scrap lead box, a craft drill for buffing and removing rust, Neoprene gloves for the winter, a head torch for nightlarking and a pot of lanolin mixed with soot for rubbing into cleaned coins to enhance their details. There’s a row of Victorian bottles lined along the windowsill that catches the morning sunshine and boxes of pottery shards (sorted by date and type). Bags of shoe soles and most of my clay pipes are stacked neatly on shelves under the bench. A section of the garden is dedicated to old bottles and Tudor bricks, and my hag stones hang on wires from a tree outside the kitchen. In the winter, when it’s not full of tomatoes, I use the greenhouse to dry out driftwood, and I lay out iron finds to spray with WD40 or clear lacquer, which seals them and helps slow down the rust. I hang up larger objects like boat hooks from the roof of the greenhouse with string to paint them with Hammerite.

  The shelves at the back of my office are gradually filling with bigger things: a complete Bellarmine that I swapped with a man in Australia for a clay pipe, my little green Tudor money box, two eighteenth-century free-blown wine bottles, a case gin bottle, a Codd bottle, a Georgian mustard pot and what I think might be an eighteenth-century chamber pot. I keep my coins in a wooden box in numbered trays with a complex grid reference system that corresponds to my written notes. My collection of cloth seals fits neatly into the small plastic wallets of coin collecting books. There are clay pipes displayed in box frames on the wall and my collection of Bellarmine faces stares at me from a glass cabinet next to my desk. Everything is recorded on tiny labels and in notebooks filled with codes that log the find spot, date found, age of the object and any other known details. I’m the only person who understands them. I like the added layer of secrecy, but if I dropped dead tomorrow it’s true that nobody else would understand any of it so I really should write them out properly. One day. Maybe.

  But most of what I have is small enough to fit in the handsome, ink-stained oak printer’s chest, a chance find in a local junk shop, where it languished at the back for almost two years while I agonised over whether to buy it. It sits comfortingly near my desk – my own Cabinet of Curiosities and a grown-up version of my Chest of Drawers Museum. It has eighteen thin drawers, stained black inside with ink from the small pieces of metal type it once contained. I clean the drawers as I need them, carefully sanding away the ink stains and lining each small division with felt, a different colour according to my mood or the general theme of the finds it contains. Green suits my collection of worked bone objects; dark grey shows up glass well; it’s easier to see tiny beads against orange; and one rainy day I threw caution to the wind and lined a whole tray in bright yellow. This is where I keep my unusual shards of more modern pottery. Three-quarters of the chest is now full, not just with my precious finds, but with the hours I have spent searching, my discarded problems and countless daydreams. The rest is waiting for future treasures.

  LONDON BRIDGE

  The bridge of London was overhead, the river at low tide, and the only living being in sight – for it was but half-past six in the morning – was as deplorable a specimen of woman-kind as ever excited a man’s compassion; a bedraggled, mud-be-spattered creature, shoeless and stockingless; and on her head a battered old bonnet, from out of the rents and rifts of which sprouted wisps of grey hair, mud-smeared, as though, in her too eager pursuit of waifs and strays, she had butted her bonnet against the hull of a stranded barge … and there she was ankle deep in the water and with her skirts dabbling in it, washing the tenacious slime from her gleanings so as to give them a marketable appearance.

  James Greenwood, ‘Gleaners of the Thames Bank’, Toilers in London, by One of the Crowd (1883)

  I collect what others have lost; I never lose things myself. Well, almost never, and when I do it really unsettles me. I can become utterly consumed by a missing object. It will play on my mind for days, sometimes weeks, as I run over scenarios in my head hoping to jog my memory, looking for clues. And I have always been good at finding things. As a child, whenever anybody lost anything, they would ask me to find it. I once found the tiny diamond that had fallen out of my grandmother’s engagement ring glinting in the sun under the washing line. It was as if people’s lost possessions found me: even a runaway tortoise in the top field. I called him Houdini and it was only a few weeks before he escaped from me too. The mystery of his disappearance was solved a year later when his bleached shell was revealed by the hay mower, a couple of fields away. Intrigued, I peered inside his remains and made a discovery that fascinated me: a tortoise’s backbone is fused to the inside of its shell.

  I have my mother to thank for nurturing my keen eye. On long walks, she tutored me in the art of looking. She pointed out birds’ nests, mushrooms and caterpillars and taught me to look carefully at the details: the curl of lichen growing on a twig, the subtle patterns on a wet pebble, the veins etched in a leaf. I learned to empty my mind, slow down and lose myself in the minutiae of my surroundings. It’s a skill I have taken with me into adulthood and I’m passing it on to my own children now. We watch ants marching to their nest, wait for snails to emerge from their shells and hunt for unusual pebbles and shells on the beach. I hope one day it will slow them down, teach them to take pleasure in small things and in a world that’s spinning out of control, it will help keep them grounded.

  It took me a lot of time, practice and patience before I started spotting objects lurking in the Thames mud. Mudlarks call this ‘getting your eye in’ and the mistake many people make is looking too hard. Mudlarking is a stubborn skill and the harder you look the less likely you are to be successful. The key to spotting objects on the foreshore is simply to relax and look through the surface. Mother Nature rarely makes perfectly str
aight lines or circles, and as the eye becomes practised, imperfections and patterns start to stand out. The decoration and writing on a coin, for example, is easy for a trained eye to spot. It doesn’t fit in with the organic shapes around it. Some people have a natural aptitude and spot things immediately, but most of us go through a more gradual evolution. I see this on the foreshore all the time, as new mudlarks proudly show me what they’ve picked up and ask if the rusty old welding rods and shards of drainpipe are worth keeping.

  Almost everyone starts by picking up larger pieces – tiles, clay pipe stems or pottery shards – even if you have no idea of the history in your hands, these are obviously man-made. But to find the smaller things you need to get much closer and this has become my preferred method of searching. I kneel with my nose barely inches from the foreshore and immerse myself in it completely, filling every sense. I breathe in the muddy aroma of silt and algae and listen to the sound of water drying on the stones: a barely discernible fizz-pop as it evaporates and the lacquered shine turns to a powdering of fine grey silt. In this Lilliputian world I find minuscule shards of glass and pottery, flakes of rust, tiny blobs of dull grey lead, glass beads no larger than the head of a pin, and brightly coloured fragments of plastic, our disgraceful addition to the city’s riverine history book.

  Weather conditions, the dryness of the mud and light levels can all affect my ability to find things. The smallest variations in light can make all the difference. The best light is when the sun is either coming up or going down, not directly overhead. A bright January afternoon or early-autumn evening is perfect, when the sun is low in the sky and casts its light at an angle. The grey, leaden light that often comes before a storm is another very specific, but rare, light that favours mudlarking. It creates an intense 3D effect that can be disorientating, but which is perfect for picking out even the tiniest of objects.

 

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