Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (19 page)

It is about four inches across; it is slightly curved and is clearly the fragmented base of what has once been a wide, shallow dish, with the round foot behind and the glazed surface above. The glaze is a rich honey color, and on it dance two small black fish. This sherd is twelfth century, possibly earlier, and came from Fustat, the first capital of Egypt, which is today a vast rubbish tip outside Cairo.

A friend gave me the sherd, twenty years or so ago, and it has sat on my mantelpiece ever since, relished for its survival, for its provenance, because it says that a potter a thousand years ago had seen fish leap, because it has traveled through time and space like this, ending up in twenty-first-century London, a signal from elsewhere.

The leaping fish cannot be later than twelfth century because Fustat was burned to the ground in 1168, an order given by its own Arab vizier so as to keep the wealth of the city from falling into the hands of the invading Crusaders. But they could be earlier, because Fustat had been the thriving capital since the seventh century, with a population of two hundred thousand by the time of its destruction. Artifacts from as far away as China have been excavated at Fustat, so it was trading, but it was itself a center for the manufacture of Islamic art and ceramics; whoever made the dish was in the business. Quite an expensive dish, I imagine, and perhaps there were more fish, or a further elaboration of the theme – other sea things.

There is something highly evocative about sherds – the detritus of the past. Crucial archaeological evidence, of course, and, if you are not an archaeologist, this vivid, tangible reminder of people who have been here before, making things and using them and discarding them. The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery.

I am an archaeologist manquée, in a sense; that is the path I might have taken, had life run differently. It ran into fiction writing instead, but I do have a large cake tin full of sherds. Personal archaeology; garden archaeology, from the two old houses in which I have lived, one sixteenth-century, one seventeenth. We didn’t acquire them for the sherd potential – I discovered that by degrees, as gardening enthusiasm grew, and my spade began to turn up items that invited close consideration. The sixteenth-century house had been a rectory, and its incumbents had clearly lived well: many oyster shells, and, most eloquent, chunks of the curved thick glass bases of eighteenth-century wine bottles. Both gardens threw up bowls and stem pieces of clay pipes. The clay pipe was tiresomely brittle, it seems; the past must echo also to expletives as yet another damn pipe fell to bits.

The seventeenth-century garden yielded most – perhaps because it was there that the most intense vegetable growing took place, in an area that had been the farmyard. Much deep digging on my part, the fruits of which have filled the cake tin. Blue and white willow-pattern china in quantities, which probably dates from late eighteenth century to early twentieth. Other china – particularly pretty green and white fluted sherds with a floral design, remains of some treasured best tea or dinner service, I decided. And, reaching further back in time, a couple of sherds of seventeenth-century salt glaze – the deep yellow glaze with scribbled lines and loops in dark brown. And a fragment of broken handle in the other kind of salt glaze – mottled brown. Much plain earthenware, evidently from large crocks and smaller ones. And there was some glazed earthenware mottled with green that looked like the medieval pots in the Ashmolean and, if so, might have dated from even before the construction of the farmhouse in 1620. An entire sequence of domestic crockery, silent testimony lying there in that richly fertile soil – “scarce below the roots of some vegetables,” as Sir Thomas Browne put it. My vegetables, now.

There were other tantalizing finds. A tiny green glass bottle, just over an inch high. Nineteenth century, by the look of it. But what could it have held? And a little, delicate, cream-colored horn spoon; another valued item, surely, lost rather than discarded.

This was not archaeology, of course. It was fortuitous discovery. And these homely Oxfordshire finds seem a far cry from the exotic implications of the leaping fish sherd. But, for me, all fed into an insatiable fascination with what has been, what is gone but survives in these glimpses afforded by something you can hold in your hand, these suggestions of other people who also held this, used it, made it.

It is not enough to live here and now. Not enough for me, anyway. I need those imaginative leaps out of my own time frame and into other places – places where things were done differently. Reading has provided me with that, for the most part, but it is objects, things like these scraps of pottery, that have most keenly conjured up all those elsewheres – inaccessible but eerily available to the imagination. The past is irretrievable, but it lurks. It sends out tantalizing messages, coded signals in the form of a clay pipe stem, a smashed wine bottle. Two leaping fish from twelfth-century Cairo. I can’t begin to understand what that time was like, or how the men who made them lived, but I can know that it all happened – that old Cairo existed, and a particular potter. To have the leaping fish sherd on my mantelpiece – and all those other sherds in the cake tin – expands my concept of time. There is a further dimension to memory; it is not just a private asset, but something vast, collective, resonant. And all because fragments of detritus survive, and I can consider them.