Ghost Wall(5)

There wasn’t a campsite in the city so we spent the first night in a bed and breakfast where there were cigarette burns in the curtains and stains on the nylon sheets. The corner shop sold fruits and vegetables I’d never seen before and smelt of jasmine and spices, but Dad wouldn’t go in, wouldn’t let me try the milky and pink and green sweets oozing syrup on trays in the window of the Indian takeaway, the twisted orange knots and the silver you were apparently meant to eat. Paki muck, he said, you don’t want to know what they put in those, here, since it’s the first night I’ll treat you to a fish and chips, how about that? With that tartare sauce stuff you like. That’ll set you up properly.

It was still raining the next morning when Dad made me take the bacon and toast I couldn’t eat and hide it in a shiny paper napkin to make my lunch. We set off along streets in some ways deeply familiar, where front doors opened onto the pavement, back gates onto the ginnel and the houses had one rattling sash window upstairs and one down, the architecture of Victorian poverty, but the voices here were different, the words sung to a tune carried over the sea. Dad’s mood lifted through the day as we reached the edge of the city and set out through fields, albeit fields broken by A-roads crossing the landscape on pilings with no way for pedestrians, foot-soldiers, to get across. The Wall was only a ditch, that first day, but at least it was a Roman ditch, a physical manifestation of Ancient British resistance still marked on the land, and you could see Dad drawing strength from it.



We had come up onto the moor tops, where the high ground rolls under a big sky. Walking up there, it feels as if you’re being offered on an open hand to the weather, though when you look down there are plenty of soft little hiding places, between the marsh grass in the boggy dips and in the heather, vibrating with bees, on the slopes. Molly pulled a packet of fruit pastilles out of her sheepskin bag and offered it around. There’s a petrol station on the road to the village, she said, we can always get more, it’s not as if Iron Age foragers wouldn’t have gone to Spar if they could. Do they have ice-cream, asked Pete. That’s a bit crap, Moll, said Dan, they’d also have had hot showers and hiking boots and microwaves if they could, wouldn’t they, I mean people do, when they can. Doubt it, said Molly, chewing, not the hiking boots, anyway, would’ve felt horrible to them.

She was right. You move differently in moccasins, have a different experience of the relationship between feet and land. You go around and not over rocks, feel the texture, the warmth, of different kinds of reed and grass in your muscles and your skin. The edges of the wooden steps over the stile touch your bones, an unseen pebble catches your breath. You can imagine how a person might learn a landscape with her feet. But we hadn’t yet crossed any bog and I was pretty sure it would feel different in winter. They used to stuff their moccasins with hay for insulation. You too, Silvie, said Molly, offering her packet with a red one at the top, have one if you like. Of course I liked.

We found bilberries, growing amongst the heather on a south-facing slope above a stream below some lumps that the map called roman camp (rems of). There, I said, the one with the round shiny leaves turning red, the berries are under the leaves, you don’t see them at first. Don’t be bossy, I told myself, little Miss Know-it-all, but no-one seemed to mind. The leather soles weren’t much protection once we’d left the path, and the heather tickled my ankles. I unlaced the shoes, hung them around my neck and picked my way up the stream, teetering on rocky pebbles and cautious over weed. Good idea, said Dan, though given how shallow the stream and strong the sun, the water was remarkably cold. I wondered if they’d done this, the old people, the Ancient Britons, paddled where there was no path, stepped in and out of the water because, as Dad liked to say, your skin’s a waterproof membrane, that’s what it’s there for, to get wet.

Despite what I’d said about the sheep, I ate the berries and so did everyone else. They were warm from the sun, with a bloom on them like skin. Bruised skin. I liked the prickle of the calyx on my tongue, the way they burst in my mouth, the way you don’t know until then if it’s a bland or a sharp one. Bet you could make good gin with these, said Pete, you know, like with damsons. Did they make alcohol, I asked. Dunno, said Molly, probably, you would, wouldn’t you? It’s easy enough to do by accident if you’re storing fruit and veg. They had rye, I don’t know when ergot poisoning started but I’m sure they had some psychotropic stuff. Yeah, I said, actually, my dad says, there were things they gave the bog people before they were sacrificed, to quiet them like, or maybe blunt the pain. Pete held up a bilberry to the sun, squinted at it. Maybe I’ll do my thesis on it, he said, that would be fun, do you think you’re allowed to do experiential archaeology on drugs if you forage them yourself? Ask Jim, said Molly, he’d like the idea whether you’re actually allowed or not, don’t you think he probably smokes dope with his friends at home, like after a dinner party, and thinks he’s really cool? It’d be pretty good, said Pete, can you imagine, on your CV? CV, I thought, and felt a thrill of fear, the backwash of my desperation to have such a thing, to leave childhood and dependence behind me, to enter the world. There’s some thyme here, I said, look, it would be good in the griddle cakes maybe, or if they do catch any fish.



They had caught fish, of course. It is only fair to observe that both Dad and the Prof did have the off-grid survival skills about which they liked to talk. When we got back, well after any conventional interpretation of ‘lunch time’, sunburnt and blue-fingered, our bags almost as flaccid as they had been that morning, a small school of silver fish had been suffocated, disembowelled, opened out like pages and strung on a wooden frame to dry in the sun. There was a smell. You’re back at last, said Dad, you know they wouldn’t have gone off lazing around, summer was the busy time, they’d have known what would happen in winter if they couldn’t be bothered to fill the stores. Is that really all you could find? And I dare say you’re all expecting to eat regardless? They wouldn’t have had two old men supplying the whole community you know, the young people would have played their part. Had to, I thought, seeing as how nobody actually lived to be old, seeing as how you and Prof Jim would have been dead and buried years ago, infection or appendicitis, parasites, the leg you broke that time you fell on the mountain. Sorry, said Dan, we did look, there just didn’t seem to be much, maybe a different terrain next time, isn’t moorland a man-made landscape anyway, from sheep-farming? The Prof was more relaxed. Never mind, he said, it’s just an experiment, just to get a sense of the challenges. Here, Alison made flatbreads and there’s lots of fish. Your bilberries should dry in no time, a day like today.