Ghost Wall(4)

So, said Dan, Silvie, what, short for Sylvia? Sulevia, I said. I was about to say, as I had been doing since I first started school, she was an Ancient British goddess, my dad chose it, but they were already exchanging glances. Sulevia’s a local deity, said Dan, Jim was talking about her the other day. Northumbrian goddess of springs and pools, co-opted by the Romans, said Molly. So you come from round here? No, I said, we’re to the west, Burnley way? She shook her head. You’ve heard of Rochdale then, I said, but she hadn’t. Near Manchester then, I said, northwards. Yeah, she said, OK but your dad’s not a historian, right, how did he know about her if you’re not local? I could feel myself turning red. He’s a bus driver, I said, history’s just a hobby, he wanted me to have a proper native British name. I saw glances again. What, I said, people have all sorts of weird names, at least it’s not some random word, River or Rainbow or that. Yeah, said Dan, it’s just interesting, I’ve never met anyone with that kind of name.

Well, I said, you have now. And look, there’s a hawk, I think it’s a sparrowhawk, look at the wings. I squinted into the sun and pointed, tracked its ascent into the darkness at the top of the sky.

Good eyes, said Pete. Right, a proper British name. What’s he mean by that, then? Nothing, I said, he likes British prehistory, he thought it was a shame the old names had gone. Right, said Pete, you mean he likes the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere, that if he goes back far enough he’ll find someone who wasn’t a foreigner. You know it’s not really British, right? I mean, Sulevia, it’s obviously just a version of Sylvia which means – of the woods in Latin, I said, yes, I do know, a Roman corruption of a lost British word. There are actually people who know Latin where I come from, we do have books. I could hear my accent shifting as I spoke to them, talking posh and then getting angry and speaking normally again. My face was going red. Peter, I thought, you know that’s really a biblical name, how does it feel to be called a rock, are your parents really into Christianity then?

A raven called and I squinted into the sun. Right above us, there, the sun glinting white on its black wings. It called again, warning or advice: I’d bugger off now if I was you, mate. So it’s actually more of a Roman name, Dan said, does he know that? I wriggled my shoulders, as if I could shrug away the questions. Yeah, I said, probably, he does actually know quite a lot about Roman Britain. Why, asked Molly, if he’s a bus driver? The pine trees on the ridge bowed and you could see a breath of wind passing over the heather, dying before it reached us. He’s interested, of course, I said, that’s why we’re here. OK, said Pete, fair enough, and we walked in silence for a few minutes. The sun shone. The raven circled low. I ran my hand over my hair to feel the heat it had absorbed. You couldn’t really hear our feet on the path, just the movement of skin and cloth, the sound of your own hair against your ears, a grouse startling at our approach. The raven said something derisive and left us to it.

You planning to do archaeology at university then, asked Dan. I shrugged. Dunno, I said, not really planning to go, I don’t think, I’d rather just get a job, get started. There were still grants then, it would have been a way of escaping Dad’s control, but also, it seemed to me, a way of postponing what I imagined as real life, extending the adolescence I couldn’t wait to leave. I probably won’t get the grades anyway, I said. Stop questioning me, I thought, but I didn’t quite know how to ask anything of my own. How do you leave home, how do you get away, how do you not go back? What’s the best way to Berlin from here? Where are we actually going, I asked, what are we actually looking for? Actually, I thought, stop saying actually, it’s stupid. You heard the man, said Dan, edible plants, and he kept going as if he knew what he was doing and the rest of us kept following him.

The sun strengthened as we reached mid-morning, bathing moor and trees and fields in summer yellow. There was no shade, I remember everything a little flattened as if in one of those over-exposed photos it used to be possible to take. There won’t be any berries or anything on the moor, will there, it’s just heather and peat, isn’t it, no point going up there, said Pete, and I waited and glanced around at the others before I said well, you’ve probably thought about this and I dare say I’m wrong, but would it be worth looking for bilberries, I mean it’s probably the wrong time of year, a bit early, specially up here.

Mid-July. The moors above our town were covered with them by early August. Dad didn’t like to stop on his walks, hadn’t come up here to footle about like an old woman at the market, but he’d slow down while I picked a handful and caught him up, and when we camped in Scotland he’d leave Mum and me half a morning to gather what we could while he went in search of food more exciting to catch.

Oh, you mean blueberries, said Dan, yeah, sure, it’s worth a look, where do they grow? I glanced around again. I didn’t mean blueberries. I’d never eaten blueberries, which as far as I knew were a kind of American oversized bilberry robust enough for the pies people ate in films. Everyone kept walking. Molly had lifted her face to the sun and half-closed her eyes. No, bilberries, I said, south-facing slopes, usually, sheep like them too, best not to eat them unwashed, there’s a parasite in sheep pee. Wow, said Pete, you do know a lot, where’d you learn all this? Dad, I said, my dad taught me.

We followed the green-signposted Public Footpath along a stone wall and over a stile towards the moor. As the hill rose, we could see Roman Dere Street, the road to Hadrian’s Wall drawn across the next rise as if it was made of something different from the rest of the landscape, as if someone had drawn it with a ruler on a photo. Dad and I had walked the Wall’s whole length, Newcastle to Carlisle, at Easter the previous year. I remembered the approach of this road near the best bit, the section where the steep ground and sudden drops made a millennium’s worth of northern farmers not bother themselves to pull down milecastles and miles of dressed stone to build sheep-pens and byres. We had stopped there to eat our sandwiches and I’d half closed my eyes, imagined hearing on the wind the Arabic conversations of the Syrian soldiers who’d dug the ditches and hoisted the stones two thousand years ago. I’d tried to hold the view in my mind and strip the landscape of pylons and church towers, to see through the eyes of the patrolling legion fresh from the Black Forest. They weren’t even really Roman, Dad had said, they were from all over the show, North Africa and Eastern Europe and Germany, probably a lot of them didn’t even speak proper Latin. There were even Negroes, imagine what the Britons made of that, they’d never have seen the like. We were only two days out from Newcastle, a city that had upset Dad, and I knew better than to challenge him; even the word ‘Negro’ was already some concession to my ideas because he preferred to use a more offensive term and wait, chin raised, for a reaction. The day we arrived he’d taken me not to the Roman cases in the city museum or to the sorry remnants of the Roman castle under the Victorian railway bridge where we would have been out of the weather, but to the docks, idle and strewn with rubbish. Come on, girl, walk, don’t you look away from this. It’s only water, won’t get further nor skin. This is what there was, this is what’s left. The wind from the Siberian steppes sliced across the North Sea to whip us with rain. I had on one of Nan’s knitted hats, the sort of thing I wouldn’t wear if anyone I knew might see me, but still pain started up in my ears as I followed him across the concrete waste. Cranes reared above us like the ceremonial pillars of a lost civilisation, intricate with rust and disintegration. The windflowers and morning glory that are either holding together or pulling apart England’s abandoned buildings and roads and railways flattened under the weather. Look at this, he said, look at it. Used to send ships all over the world from here. Look at it now.