Ghost Wall(6)

The basket-weaver came. What kind of job is that, said Mum, fancy making your living weaving baskets in this day and age, but it turned out, of course, to be more complicated than that. The baskets weren’t to sell. Louise was a friend of the Prof, a semi-retired lecturer in textile arts who now spent her days making things by hand, the hard way, for the amusement of people bored by safe drinking water, modern medicine and dry feet. Lecturer in Textile Arts; I caught Dad’s eye as he absented himself. She was wearing a sort of kaftan thing not unlike our tunics although probably more comfortable and certainly, even to my eye, more expensive, with lumpy flat shoes made of cut-out red leather flowers and green leaves sewn together. She’d driven her jeep up the track into the wood and then the Prof pushed her wheelchair up the field, a process that looked uncomfortable for both and unsafe for her but seemed to cause them great hilarity. Dan and Pete went to help but were waved away; thank you, she said, but Jim pushed me into Loch Lomond once upon a time, I’ll see if I can trust him now. It was twenty-five years ago, he said. It was memorable, she said. Anyway, you must be Jim’s students?

The Prof parked Louise’s chair in the shade of the big oak and then went back with Pete to get her boxes of supplies from the car. Mum brought her a birchbark cup of water, offered tea she had no practical means of supplying. Don’t worry, said Louise, the water is perfect and if I want tea later I have a tap and a perfectly good kettle at home. Oh, are you going? Do join us if you like, make a basket. Mum paused. Try it, said Louise, you can stop if it’s not fun. It was the wrong word, Mum didn’t believe in fun. I’ve a mort to do, she said, I’ll be getting on, thank you. More water before I do?

The oak rustled, its shadows pattering over Louise’s clothes and hair. I stood there, had nothing to say. Molly came through the sunlight, introduced herself and knelt at Louise’s side, sitting on her flexed ankles in an elegant Japanese posture that I couldn’t have managed. It’s not easy to sit on the ground in a knee-length tunic. Either Ancient Britons worried a lot less about flashing their knickers than we do or the hunter-gatherer life made them very bendy. Not that they had knickers, probably. And this is Silvie, Molly said, Jim probably mentioned, Bill’s daughter? Short for Sulevia. Hi, I said, feeling myself redden for no particular reason. Molly smiled at me, flicked a plait over her shoulder and started asking questions: don’t you have to destroy an artefact to find out how it was made? Do you use replica tools to make replica objects, and if so do you use replica tools to make the replica tools, how far back does it go? Since the textiles themselves don’t survive, how far are ideas about what people wore in prehistory just guess-work, these tunics, for example? I stood at the edge of the tree’s shelter, leaves moving in my hair, wondering if she’d prepared these questions in advance, worrying that her rapid fire was rude. You don’t talk to people like that, I thought, just come out and ask them stuff, but Molly did and Louise didn’t seem to mind. Well, she said, a lot of archaeology is about taking things apart to see how they work, isn’t it, and we often don’t put them back when we’ve finished, but one of the reasons for making replicas is that you can test them to destruction if you need to. Sometimes I do use replica tools, I have quite a collection of bone needles at home, but you know sometimes you can use the real thing, there are enough medieval loom-weights and spindles around that we can put the real things in handling collections. Really, said Molly, you can spin using the very thing that someone, some woman, used before the Civil War? Doesn’t it feel strange, I heard myself ask, putting your fingers exactly the way someone put hers only she’s been dead for a few hundred years? Louise smiled, as if it was fine for me to join in. Not to me, she said, not any more, anyway, I’m always trying to do what dead people tell me. And specially when I’m making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I’m kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn’t it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind’s doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did. I sometimes think I can tell when two pieces from the same site were made by the same prehistoric person, because the way my hands move is the same. I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.

It’s a shame I couldn’t bring a loom, Louise was saying, it would have been interesting for you to see, perhaps I should ask Jim to arrange a session in my studio next term.

I turned out to have natural talent as a basket-weaver. Silvie’s doing very well, said Louise, look at that, have you done this before, do you do a lot of making? Making what, I thought, but whatever she had in mind the answer was no. Great, I said to Moll, my future is settled, I’ll weave baskets. Maybe not full time, Molly said, you must want to do something, there must be something you like, a starting point. I like reading, I said, but not what we do in English lessons. Um, going for walks? Nothing anyone’d pay me for. She pushed woven reeds down onto their willow frame. Mountain guiding, she said. Working in a youth hostel. Forestry and conservation. What about all the outdoor stuff, foraging, you know more about it than we do. Just the bilberries, I said, and only because of Dad, it wasn’t as if there was any way I could not know that stuff, anyway I don’t think it’s a job.