To the River (18 page)

In his 1955 book,
The Piltdown Forgery
, Weiner drew back from directly accusing Dawson of being responsible for this sustained act of mischief, which cost the scientific world years of wasted effort, though later he was unequivocal in his condemnation. There has subsequently been an array of lurid conspiracy theories that accuse all manner of prominent scientists. However, the slow debunking of Dawson’s record, much of it carried out quite recently by the archaeologist Miles Russell, goes a long way to identifying him as the culprit. In addition to his impressive tally of false and dubious finds, he was observed by witnesses staining bones and carrying out practical jokes involving the falsification of archaeological relics. Then there’s the matter of Castle Lodge itself, which was leased to the Sussex Archaeological Society on the understanding that they were to have first refusal if it was ever put up for sale. It’s claimed in Lewes that Dawson bought the house by subterfuge, carrying out his correspondence on the society’s headed notepaper to create the illusion that he was working on their behalf, though the first the society knew of this business is when they were served a notice to quit.

What motivated Dawson in these acts is mystifying. He’s frequently said to have been driven by the desire for recognition and acclaim, but this also spurred Gideon Mantell, who never falsified a bone in his life. It struck me that many of Dawson’s finds were attempts to prove a theory already in existence. He specialised in missing links: hybrids that explained the development of one form to another. One of these was the Bexhill boat, which represented an absurd mix between a coracle and a dugout canoe; another
Plagiaulax dawsoni
, the so-called first Cretaceous mammal. The Piltdown man, though considerably more ambitious, was in the same vein, being fabricated evidence for the already extant hypothesis of Darwin’s transitional ape-man.

Bringing such stories to life must have had a profound appeal for Dawson, and it’s perhaps his most accurate epitaph that he was known as the Sussex Wizard. But though the past is sometimes haphazard or resistant to interpretation, that’s not the same as saying it can simply be made up. Dawson’s work has left a stain. The debunking of the Piltdown story is relayed on the same sort of websites that provide scientific evidence for the existence of Noah’s flood, where it stands as gleeful proof that the evolutionists got it wrong. Which is the sort of afterlife you deserve, I suppose, if you can’t tell a lie from the truth.

I turned from Dawson’s house to the new home of the Sussex Archaeological Society, to which they’d moved in 1904. From the outside Barbican House looked Georgian, though I’d been told that beneath the brick façade it was actually far older. The place was arranged over a couple of floors of what had evidently once been a sizeable townhouse. I wandered through rooms filled with the detritus of previous eras, past cases packed with Roman tweezers and Saxon jewellery; a broken rapier; a collection of porpoise bones found buried in the grounds of Lewes Priory; a tile bearing the smiling face of Edward I, his lazy eye just visible; a finger ring with a charm against fever engraved inside it; and an ice-skate made from the compressed thigh bone of a horse. The information on the displays was equally quixotic. In the medieval period they’d eaten porpoise and oysters at Lewes Priory, and drunk weak beer because the water was unsafe. Wool dealers and tanners had thrived in the town, and the traders who passed periodically through were known as
piepowders
for the dust that clung to their feet.

In one of the downstairs rooms there was a woman’s skeleton in a glass case, a necklace of orange and green beads slung about her clavicle. Her knees were pulled to her chest, in the foetal position the Saxons used for burials. There were no Roman bones. A display about the afterlife explained that for the Romans:

Spirits of the dead lived on in the underworld known as Hades. The purpose of the burial ritual was to ensure the successful transition from earthly life to the next world. Provisions to help the soul were placed in the grave alongside the urn or the body … The body would be burnt on a funeral pyre which purified and released the soul. The ashes would then be placed in an urn in the grave which would be either a hole in the ground or a cist, an underground structure of stone or tiles. Mourning would continue for nine days after the burial. Romans never neglected to bury their dead as it was believed that the souls of the unburied were left to wander the gloomy marshland at the gates of Hades for a hundred years before gaining entry.

This last was the fate that almost befell Elpenor, the shipmate of Odysseus who died falling drunk from a roof on Circe’s island. His death hadn’t yet been marked when Odysseus descended to Hades, and he pleaded frantically for his body to be burned and buried in a barrow, complete with armour, with an upright oar to mark his grave. Better than the marsh, I guess, that place of desolation, weed-choked, frog-spawning, leaking dank clouds of gas that seem to burn but emit no heat. A marsh would swallow you whole and spit you out after the appointed century tanned bog-oak black and smelling of reed-mace and cat’s tail. Better to be burned; better to be tucked in a tiled chamber with your tweezers and your coins; better to go up in sparks than be where water has dominion and frets away even the soil.

The story of Elpenor is translated in one of Virginia Woolf’s Greek notebooks, which she kept to accompany her reading of Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides and so forth. Though she never went to school and was educated largely by her parents, Woolf’s classical education was thorough and exacting. She was taught by a series of private tutors, the last of whom, the suffragist Janet Case, became a lifelong friend. The notebook that describes Odysseus’s encounter with the dead was begun in the winter of 1907; a year after her brother Thoby was taken ill with typhoid and died in the wake of a family expedition to Greece. Thoby had been her fellow traveller through the classics, and it may be that she was thinking of him when she appended her description of Odysseus luring ‘the weak races of the dead’ out of Hades with the exulting words ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’

The study of Greek intertwines itself strangely through Woolf’s life, appearing unexpectedly in the more dramatic, even mythic, scenes. It was to Janet Case that she confessed her half-brother George Duckworth’s sexually predatory behaviour, which may or may not have gone beyond fumblings and gropings, and which apparently took place, among other locations, during Greek lessons at Hyde Park Gate. This revelatory conversation has been preserved – albeit second-hand – in a letter to Vanessa from 1911 that reads:

She has a calm interest in copulation . . . and this led us to the revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say ‘Whew – you nasty creature’, when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. By the time I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick.

Greek also took a role in Virginia’s madness, which resembled manic depression and was never satisfactorily diagnosed. During the course of her life she had five major breakdowns: two in the wake of her parents’ deaths; two around the time she married Leonard and published her first novel; and one at the beginning of the Second World War that ended with her death. In the interim she was often physically ill and beset by moods of anxiety and acute depression. These spells of insanity have been repeatedly written about, sometimes by people – among them Leonard, Vanessa and Virginia herself – who experienced them first hand, and sometimes by those who didn’t. Such obsessive rehandling inevitably hardens and reduces a life, turning its complex, contradictory material into a story, with a story’s reliance on intelligible consequences and colourful scenes.

In this manner, it’s possible to boil Woolf’s illness down to a series of vivid statements. From childhood she was troubled by moods of intense anxiety combined with physical symptoms like fever, headaches and a racing heart. During the madness that followed her father’s death she attempted suicide by leaping from a window; later she overdosed on veronal and had her stomach pumped. Often she was very depressed and found it hard to eat, and at their worst these spells would be followed by mania so intense that she didn’t recognise even her husband, heard voices, raved unintelligibly, and physically attacked her nurses. The treatment, which she loathed, was soporific: sedatives; bed rest; a restriction in reading, writing, walking and other supposed excitements; and a diet grotesquely heavy in milk and soothing, plumping foods. Indeed, it is largely because of his insistence on this fare that Leonard gained the posthumous reputation as his wife’s jailer as well as her carer.

Among these lurid titbits of distress, one element is often repeated: that during her second breakdown she ‘had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest language possible among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas’. This detail derives from an autobiographical essay,
Old Bloomsbury
, which was written almost twenty years after the event as a talk for the Memoir Club, a Bloomsbury collective in which members told artfully reconstructed life stories for the amusement of their friends. Its status as verifiable fact is equally artfully unpicked by Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee, who observes in the course of an elegant rereading that Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked poet in
Mrs Dalloway
who later kills himself, is also subject to hallucinations of sparrows singing in Greek.

It’s no longer possible to answer the question of whether Virginia lent Septimus her experience, or whether she invented it for him and then adopted it herself. What remains is the sparrows. They might have existed; they might not. Either way, they remain on the page, ambivalent and ecstatic, singing ‘in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.’

I left the museum then, but on the way up the motte to the castle there was one last reference to the
Odyssey
. The steps coiled around the edge of a walled garden full of pink and white valerian, the sleep-inducing herb that the Saxons called All-Heal. These steps had recently been rebuilt, and each was carved with the name of a benefactor. Amid the family groupings and cheerful exhortations to keep on climbing, someone had chosen the single line
Keep Ithaca always in mind
. Ithaca was Odysseus’s destination, but it was not until I returned home that I tracked the quotation to a poem by Constantine Cavafy, the gay Greek poet who had worked for thirty-three years as a clerk in the Egyptian Irrigation Service.
And if you find her poor,
the poem ends:

Ithaca has not deceived you.

Wise as you have become, with such experience, by now

you will have come to know what Ithacas really mean.

The bees were working away in the valerian, and though the day was hot clouds were banking up on the horizon, dark below and impossibly clean above.
Keep Ithaca always in mind
. Say your prayers, keep God in your heart, have faith, persist. But what if Ithaca is no more than the island of the sirens, a place where time stops: a static heaven at the journey’s end? I’d given up faith in a destination, except to be certain that bones do not always stay buried and that I will undoubtedly be outlived by the plastic bags with which my generation has bedecked the globe, as the Romans’ tweezers outlasted their mortal bodies. Forget Ithaca. This is a drowning world, and there is nothing more sobering than regarding the hopes for the future of someone who is already dead. But then perhaps that is what Cavafy means: that Ithacas exist merely to keep us moving and will dematerialise like a rainbow when the journey is complete.

The shell keep was at the top of the motte, a huge pollarded lime beside it, growing out of a circle of neatly clipped lawn. I went through the doorway and up the precipitous stairs, clinging to the rail like a drunken sailor. There were no tourists; only a couple of pursed-lipped electricians surveying the wiring on the second floor. At the top I stumbled out into the light, and there before me was the town as William Morris described it, ‘lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalky hills’. The river slipped like solder through the fields, and on the other side of the narrow valley through which it passed the Downs rose up again in what was virtually a cliff of exposed chalk, which generations of jackdaws had riddled into holes to hold their courts.

I looked seaward, propping my arms on the rail and gazing out past the roofs of the town and the flickering traffic of the A27. The Levels lay cupped between the hills, flashed with tiny streams, the river carving a snake’s undulating path through lush water-meadows that barely skimmed sea level. I counted the hills I knew by name: Malling Down, Mount Caburn, Firle Beacon, Blackcap, Beddingham Hill with its two dewponds, the Red Lion and the White. The hills in the west defeated me, though dead ahead I could see the strange hump of Upper Rise, which was once an island riddled with rabbit warrens. At my back was Offham Hill with its bald chalk flank, and behind it Mount Harry. A watcher posted here could have seen Prince Edward’s troops ride out at dawn across the Paddock, and caught them later plunging through the Wallands in pursuit of their poorly armed and horseless quarry.

The landscape had the look in the morning light of something permanent, but its appearance was deceptive. Since the beginning of time it had been undergoing the kind of slow-paced, inexorable change that raises hills and carves out cliffs and valleys. All the world is subject to this sort of flux, which goes on beneath our feet and is only rarely discernable to the eye. But there was, as I had dimly seen the night before, another agency working its will on the valley. Man had been fidgeting away here ever since he arrived: man with his picks and his shovels; his restless mind.