Making It Up (10 page)

The Sampsons are staying at the pub. Professor and Mrs.; Paul and Penny. It is apparently all right to call them that, except that in his case you somehow don't. He is not exactly matey. Perfectly polite, but in that “us and them” kind of way. It is clear that he sees students as a separate breed. When he explains something, it is in a brisk, functional manner—enough information for people to be briefed and efficient, but that's all. Whereas Mike Chambers gets all expansive and enthusiastic; he's the other kind of archaeologist, all beard and bonhomie. He's a field man, it seems, whereas Professor Sampson is a theorist. Alice did get one of his books out of the library, but she found it hard going—all graphs and diagrams and tables.

Penny Sampson is a lot younger than he is. Around forty, whereas he must be going on for sixty. Apparently she is wife number three—she was a student on his M.A. course, way back. You wouldn't have thought he'd be a lady-killer—
three
wives—but there's no accounting for taste. She doesn't actually have a job, it seems—not as such. The others here have university posts, or they aspire to, like Guy, or they move from dig to dig, like June, but Penny Sampson's always been a sort of assistant to her husband, working with him on digs and then helping with the deskwork afterward, getting it all written up. She's pleasant enough, but seems a bit semidetached, as though her mind might be on something else a lot of the time.

Archaeologists always marry each other; they never meet anyone else. Mike Chambers said that in the pub one night, laughing. The Sampsons weren't around. “Speak for yourself,” June Hammond had snapped. There's a lot of to-and-fro between those two. He winds her up, and then she gets stroppy. But he's like that with everyone. He isn't married himself, it turns out. Nor is she.

June has come on this dig because Iron Age hill forts are her special interest. She is small and stocky, like a pit pony, and as tough as anything. She can move stuff like nobody's business. Mike said, “We don't need the JCB when we've got June,” which didn't go down all that well.

And then there is Guy Lambert, who is a Ph.D. student, which puts him in a sort of no-man's-land between the professionals and the students, though of course he intends to be an archaeologist. The students are the bottom of the hierarchy—the six of them who have signed on for the whole of the dig, and the handful of others who drift in for a few days or so, a bunch of sixth-formers from the local comprehensive, a couple of French girls who are students of some colleague of Mike's, various others.

We're the labor force, thinks Alice. Cheap labor, at that, but we're all volunteers and there's something in it for us, too. It'll look good on our CVs, or we're doing it to please our parents, like Laura, or we're at a loose end, like Peter and Brian, or we've been told to, like the sixth-formers, or we're just interested, like me. Actually, everyone gets interested, to a greater or lesser degree. It would be hard not to—even Laura got quite excited when June uncovered the shield boss. And everyone reacts to the bones; Peter and Brian make macabre jokes, and Laura comes over squeamish, or she did at first, but now even she is pretty blasé. We're the old hands, the veterans; we even get asked to keep an eye on the new-comers, to see that they're doing things right.

They are here for six weeks, the duration of the dig. Two of those weeks have already passed, and now it feels as though they have always been here. Everything is entirely familiar: the camp beds in the primary school are no longer so hard, muscles have become used to kneeling or squatting all day, wind and rain are ignored. They know each other with an odd intensity; the outside world has come to seem irrelevant. And something strange has happened to time: it proceeds neither fast nor slow but seems to have become an entity, unrelated to normal days or weeks. They are in a time scale that is specific to the dig. Which is apt, thinks Alice, given the way history treats time, chopping it all up into sections.

Prehistory has to be neatly divided into segments, and laid out in order: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age. They had to do that before anyone could get a grip on it; they had to establish a chronology. And the system fosters an entire way of thinking; you even look at the present century in terms of decades—the twenties, the thirties, the forties . . . Each with a particular climate and some kind of logo—a flapper doing the Charleston for the twenties, Hitler's ranting face for the thirties, the blitzed facade of a building for the forties. And here they were now in the seventies, which are as yet too close up and intimate to have acquired a flavor. Alice supposes that she must be a child of the seventies—you are deemed to have sprung from the decade of your youth. Does she feel attuned to the times? Well, not particularly. She does not like pop music and she would hate to go to a music festival. She has never tried pot or anything else. She does not feel impelled to explore her sexuality. She is not a virgin, but she cannot chalk up a list of partners, nor would she wish to. She assumes that she has not yet come across the right bloke, but supposes that she will do so one day. Compared with many of her peers, she is in the slow lane, which does perhaps indicate a certain lack of accord with the spirit of the times. She thinks she might have slotted in rather better with the twenties; she has always rather liked the look of that period—the chunky little cars and the girls in frocks and the wind-up gramophones.

Alice finds that she does a lot of thinking, as she kneels and scrapes up there on the hill. She thinks about the bomb, as always, and about the people they are digging up, for whom the Romans were presumably their version of the bomb, because it is the Romans who stormed the hill fort, left arrowheads and spear shafts, provoked sling stones. Other people up here, back then, were also waiting for nemesis. But she thinks too about the others on the dig, because you cannot help but be involved when you are all flung together like this. She thinks how assorted they are, whereas the people up here waiting for the Romans would have been very assimilated, all living the same sort of life, with the same sort of experiences and expectations. Alice, who grew up in Enfield and went to the grammar school, can hardly imagine what it would have been like to be Laura, whose home is called the Old Rectory and who went to Cheltenham Ladies' College. Or Mike Chambers, who comes from County Durham and don't you forget it, and whose father was a miner.

Alice's father works in a bank. His world is all about money. When he picks up a newspaper he always turns first to those columns of small print at the back. When he is with his cronies, they talk about the market and the pound and the dollar and stuff that sends Alice out of the room. Money is boring. Money is
so
boring. And people should not be preoccupied with money.

Actually, she is coming to realize, everyone is preoccupied with money. Certainly, up here on the hill money is a frequent topic. Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers, who are joint directors of the dig, are concerned about the funding. Resources are stretched to the limit, which is why they have only six weeks. Professor Sampson and Mike can frequently be seen poring over a sheet of figures, in the White Hart of an evening.

Peter and Brian are skint. They are trying to save their subsistence pay—the beer money, as it is called—for a spree to Paris planned for the last week of the vacation. So they nurse a pint and a packet of crisps for the entire evening, having eaten as much breakfast as they can and made their sandwiches last all day. Luke is worse than skint, according to him; the bank is getting nasty about his overdraft and he owes his mother and his aunt and the college buttery and Heffers. Not that that stops him making a good evening of it in the pub, or running that beat-up old MG that sits outside the primary school attracting much interest from the village. Eva is worried about whether or not she is going to get a grant to do her M.A. Laura has well-upholstered parents and doesn't have to worry about grants, but she wants to go to Spain with her boyfriend and the parents are getting tight-lipped about providing the funds for this; she is on the dig to demonstrate to them how industrious and committed she can be. She phones the boyfriend from the pub each evening to complain.

Alice herself has no surplus funds, but neither is she in debt and she knows that she can get by on her allowance because she is careful and provident. But in this climate of financial crisis that is clearly a rather boring thing to do—more boring than to be obsessed about money. So she bows to the prevailing culture and trades horror stories of indigence.

Money is in the air, up here on the hill. Not as such—nobody needs ready cash and it is seldom seen; you would hardly know that this group was part of a cash economy. Indeed, exchange and barter seem more likely; there is a good deal of give-and-take, over the sandwiches and apples and soft drinks, during the midday break. But money strums away there in the background, lest anyone forget where and when they are. They may be up on a hillside with their hands in the detritus of the Iron Age, but it is still 1973, with all that that implies.

How did money rate up here on the hill two thousand years ago? Was their world all about money? It was certainly about survival—about enough to eat, about cattle and crops and power, and that's money in another form, thinks Alice.

Occasionally, they dig up money. There are two Celtic coins and several Roman ones in the trays back at the school, neatly packaged and labeled along with all the other finds—the shards, the bones (ox, pig, sheep, human), the spindle whorls, the needles, the inscrutable lumps of metal which are in fact belt buckles or harness fittings or hilt segments or cuirass hinges or awls or gouges or pins. Artifacts. The position of each artifact has been planned—the place where it lay until one of them loosened the dirt around it with a trowel. This is the static record, and it is not the past at all but the present, since these artifacts exist today. Alice managed enough of Professor Sampson's book, with its indigestible diagrams and graphs, to learn that the task of archaeology is to ask questions about the past of this material which is no longer in the past but very much present. The archaeologist is interested in the dynamics of past society; the challenge is to find links between statics and dynamics, to make assumptions about the middle range, which is the space between the two. These assumptions guide the archaeologist from observation of the static artifacts existing in the present to general theories about the dynamics of the past.

But actually, thinks Alice, it is the other way round. Sorry, Professor Sampson. The dynamic is what is going on now, here, today, during these weeks that we are fossicking away up here. It is whatever happened back then that is static, unchangeable, finished with—whereas we are in this interesting capricious dynamic in which the story has yet to unfold. Luke is trying to get off with Laura. Mike Chambers fancies Laura, too, but he thinks no one has noticed. There is definitely bad blood between Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers—words in the trench yesterday that stopped just short of a full-scale row. And what is it with the Sampsons? You never see them together—they hardly speak to each other. None of this will feature in the account of the dig that will eventually be published, but it is this brew of human relations that is the narrative, the dynamic.

Alice is back at the small tent. Eva is looking martyred. She says she thinks she may have to ask to go back to the school early. Professor Sampson is approaching, to check up on what they have achieved today.

 

 

Paul Sampson stares intently at an artifact. As a processual archaeologist—indeed, as one of the pioneers of processual archaeology—Paul knows full well that the interest of this object is its context in the past. The artifact itself is in a sense neither here nor there—or, rather, it is very much here but no longer there, which is why it is an enigma. He must decode this object—wring from the uncommunicating contemporary static in front of him the teasing dynamic of the past.

In fact, the artifact does not require very much by way of decoding, since it is all too recognizably his wife's spectacle case. The green plastic thing in which she keeps her dark glasses. But why is it open, and lying half under the bed? And why is there a further challenging artifact—her blue T-shirt—on the floor by the dressing table? And why is the wardrobe door open? And why, above all, are these objects here, while his wife is not? The last time he saw the blue T-shirt it was on Penny's back, an hour or so ago, up on the hill. And the glasses were in their case, which was on the dashboard of the car, and the car is no longer outside the White Hart, but entirely absent.

Even the most primitive exercise in middle-range assumption suggests that Penny has gone off somewhere in the car, having changed out of the T-shirt that she had worn all day—hurriedly dropping it on the floor and snatching up her dark glasses, allowing the case to fall under the bed.

Why? Where?

The principal guest bedroom of the White Hart has a double bed that sags disconcertingly in the middle, a walnut veneer wardrobe, a scratched deal dressing table, a violently patterned carpet and pink floral curtains. It is suffused with stale cooking smells, as is the rest of the pub. In fact, not much cooking goes on at the White Hart, since the food—on which members of the dig depend in the evenings—consists mainly of Scotch eggs, plough-man's, quiche with coleslaw and a tomato, chicken in the basket, or baked potato with cheese and chutney. The smell seems intrinsic, and indeed is vaguely reassuring. Mike Chambers calls it a cultural indicator: “You know you're in England by that smell.”

Neither Paul nor Penny Sampson is dismayed by the facilities of the White Hart. They have known worse—much worse. They have experienced remote Turkish inns, they have camped in Libya and Greece and Scotland. Penny has not bolted from the White Hart as soon as she could after the end of the day's dig in order to sample the fleshpots of Shaftesbury or Blandford Forum. Nor has she gone shopping, because her purse is lying on the dressing table.