London (169 page)
It was quiet in the trench. Sarah Bull glanced at her co-workers and smiled to herself. She had been on many digs before, but she had particularly wanted to join this one because it was being conducted by Dr John Dogget.
Dr John Dogget was a Londoner through and through. “My grandfather was a fireman in the Blitz,” he had confessed to her once. He was also a curator of the Museum of London where she had recently come to work.
Sarah loved the museum. Perched up on a big pedestrian area a few minutes’ walk from St Paul’s, its windows looked out on a large, handsome fragment of the old Roman wall of London. It was a growing tourist attraction and the parties of schoolchildren who were brought there seemed to love the place. The whole museum was arranged as a walk through history, from prehistoric times to the present day. The curators had created whole scenes, accompanied by the appropriate sights and sounds, into which the visitor walked: a prehistoric camp, a seventeenth-century room, a whole eighteenth-century street, Victorian shops – even a model of old London which lit up as you heard extracts from Pepys’ diary of the Great Fire. Accompanying each exhibit were articles from the time, from flint arrowheads to a real, fully stocked costermonger’s barrow.
Behind it all, Sarah knew, lay hard scholarship. As an archaeology graduate, this was what had attracted her to the place. There were new finds, often huge discoveries, being made all the time: the little Temple of Mithras and then, only a few years ago, the discovery that the old Guildhall was actually standing on the site of a huge Roman amphitheatre. Roman roads and medieval buildings were regularly being uncovered. A charming recent find just by the old wall had been the remains of some coins and moulds used by a Roman forger and, by the look of it, jettisoned in rather a hurry. The curator in question had been able to demonstrate exactly how the forging of the coins was done.
And then, of course, there had also been young Dr Dogget. With his cheerful temper and the white flash in his hair, he was as popular as he was easily recognized. Rather curiously, he had webbed fingers. “Good for swimming and digging,” he had wryly informed her. He was always so busy, and she, as a new recruit, was of course so junior, but she was hoping that at this dig he might notice her for the first time. The question was, as well as Roman artefacts, did he also like blue-eyed blondes?
The trench was on a small site overlooking the Thames. It was not often that archaeologists got the chance to dig in the City of London, but when a building was demolished and another built in its place, arrangements could be made for an excavation. There had been so much building since the City and East End was devastated in the Blitz that its quality was uneven. Some of the work, like the huge developments of the docklands now that containers and huge vessels had taken the dock activity far down the estuary, Sarah thought was good. The building where they were excavating had, in her opinion, been inferior, so she was doubly glad to see it replaced. The owners of the new building had even agreed that, if the archaeologists uncovered anything really exciting, they would construct an atrium and build round it, so that the remains could be viewed by the public. They had already gone down ten feet below the old basement, which meant that, standing in the bottom of the trench, at her eye level she was looking at a layer of gravel that would have been the surface in the time of Julius Caesar.
It was mid-afternoon, and only a few puffy white clouds had appeared in the bright spring sky when the deputation headed by Sir Eugene Penny arrived. He inspected the place carefully, came into the trench, listened carefully while Dr Dogget explained to him exactly what they were doing, asked a few questions – Sarah had made sure that they were intelligent – and having thanked everybody, left. When he was introduced to Sarah he shook hands politely, then paid no further attention to her whatsoever.
No one at the museum had any idea that her family owned a large brewery, and certainly not that Sir Eugene Penny, alderman, was her cousin. She preferred it that way. But the museum, like all such institutions, was always short of funds for its ambitious projects and if anyone was likely to find a way of getting them, she thought it was probably her cousin.
After he had gone, for a few minutes Sarah allowed herself to walk by the quiet river. It was cleaner now than it had been for centuries. You could even catch fish in it again. It was also carefully managed. The gradual tilting of the island that had been raising the water level for so many centuries had been counteracted by an elegant flood barrier across the stream. London might have some things in common with Venice, but it certainly wasn’t going to sink under the water. Allowing herself a last look down to Tower Bridge and up to St Paul’s, Sarah returned to the trench.
It was amazing how quiet London could be. Not only in the big parks, but in great walled enclosures like the Temple, or in the old churches like St Bartholomew’s, there was a silence that seemed to take one back for centuries. Even here in the City the office buildings rising high over the narrow streets provided a screen so that the sounds of London’s busy traffic could scarcely be heard. She glanced up at the sky. Still blue.
Dr Dogget had gone. One other archaeologist was in the trench at the moment, scraping away patiently at the surface. Sarah went down to join her. As she did so, she remembered a talk she had heard John Dogget give to a party of older schoolchildren. He had outlined the work of the museum, and of the archaeologists too. And then, to put this work into focus, he said something she had liked very much.
“Imagine”, he had said, “a summer. At the end of it the leaves fall. They lie on the ground. They almost dissolve, you might say, but not quite. The next year the same thing happens again. And again. Thinned out, compressed, those leaves and all the other vegetation build up in layers, year after year. It’s the natural process. It’s organic.
“Something similar happens with man, and especially in a city. Each year, each age, leaves something. It gets compressed, of course, it disappears under the surface, but just a little of all that human life remains. A Roman tile, a coin, a clay pipe from Shakespeare’s time. All left in place. When we dig down, we find it and we may put it on show. But don’t think of it just as an object. Because that coin, that pipe belonged to someone: a person who lived, and loved, and looked out at the river and the sky each day just like you and me.
“So when we dig down into the earth under our feet, and find all that is left of that man or woman, I try to remember that what I am seeing and handling is a huge and endless compression of lives. And sometimes in our work here, I feel as if we’ve somehow entered into that layer of compressed time, prised open that life, a single day even, with its morning, and evening, and its blue sky and its horizon. We’ve opened just one of the millions and millions of windows, hidden in the ground.”
Sarah smiled to herself. She had liked that. And standing there in the trench, looking at the place where perhaps Julius Caesar had stood, she reached out her hand, and touched.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to the following, all experts in their respective fields, who gave advice, provided information and in many cases read and helped me correct text that I had written. Any errors that remain are mine alone. Ms Susan Banks, Museum of London Archaeology Service; Mr David Bentley, Museum of London Archaeology Service; Mr John Clark, Curator, Museum of London; The Reverend Father K. Cunningham, St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place; Mr A. P. Gittins, Tom Brown, Tailor; Mrs Jenny Hall, Curator, Museum of London; Mr Frederick Hilton; Mr Bernard Kearnes J.P.; Dr Nick Merriman, Curator, Museum of London; Mrs Lily Moody; Mr Geoffrey Parnell, Curator, Tower of London; Mr H. Pearce; Mr Richard Shaw, Lavender Hill Reference Library; Mr Ken Thomas, Archivist, Courage Breweries; Mrs Rosemary Weinstein, Curator, Museum of London; Mr Alex Werner, Curator, Museum of London; Mr R. J. M. Willoughby.
I am grateful to the Directors and librarians of the Guildhall Library, the Museum of London Library, and, as always, the London Library for endless courtesy and assistance.
No thanks can be enough to Ms Eimear Hannafin and Mrs Gillian Redmond of Magpie Audio Visual for their unfailing help and good humour in the typing and constant altering of the manuscript.
Special thanks are also due to David Bentley and Susan Banks in the preparation of maps, and to Andrew Thompson, Siena Artworks, London, for map design and execution.
As always, I should be lost without my agent, Gill Coleridge, and my two editors, Kate Parkin of Century and Betty A. Prashker of Crown Publishers. I thank them all for their unfailing support and encouragement.
To my wife Susan, my children Edward and Elizabeth and my mother, I owe a huge debt for their respective patience, support and hospitality.
Finally and most importantly, I must record that without the curators, especially John Clark and Rosemary Weinstein, and the staff of the Museum of London, this book could not have been written. The Museum of London has been for me, throughout this book’s long gestation, a source of constant inspiration.
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