Under Another Sky (15 page)

In another room of the museum was an album of photographs taken during the 1928 excavation, its pages much worn by use. I paused at a page showing two pictures of a young woman standing next to a range-rod, the striped pole used to show scale in archaeological photographs. In the first photograph she was in profile, eyes down; the picture’s angle emphasised the lines of her neat bob. In the second, she was looking up into the eyes of the photographer. Her expression was striking, and hard to read: wary? pensive? resentful? As I looked at the pictures, the museum attendant said, ‘Sir Mortimer Wheeler was of course notorious for bringing his girlfriends on digs.’ I felt a sudden rush of illogical defensiveness towards her: this was no girlfriend, but his wife. One anecdote, told by Wheeler in his autobiography, seemed particularly telling of the way they worked together. Sitting eating lunch one summer’s day on a wall of the Lydney ruins, he had contemplated a piece of fourth-century ‘inferior cement’ that had apparently been laid to mend a broken mosaic. ‘Beside it lay a pick, and the conjunction of idleness and opportunity was too much for me. I drove the point of the pick into the cement patch.’ The soil beneath the cement was ‘freckled with minute green specks’. The specks turned out to be 1,646 tiny late-antique coins, probably dating from the mid fourth century. For Wheeler, these
minimi
were a ‘veritable symbol of the Dark Ages’. A newspaper article romantically called them ‘King Arthur’s small change’. It was a find that would ‘alone have justified our two seasons’ work on that lovely spot’, remembered Wheeler. It seems somehow entirely typical that while Mortimer had casually made the spectacular discovery, it was Tessa who followed patiently in his wake, cleaning and studying and classifying the tiny scraps of bronze.

It was on quite a different kind of day – when the wind was blowing strong, and rain threatened from a glowering January sky – that I went to Maiden Castle, in Dorset, one of Britain’s most impressive Iron Age hill forts, which bears down from gloomy heights upon Dorchester and its satellite, Poundbury. I climbed up its high sides, which were twined round, at the summit, with a cat’s cradle of sheer-sided ditches and earth ramparts. This may have been one of Suetonius’s ‘20 hillforts’ that the future emperor Vespasian took, when he fought his way west in the
AD
40s after the defeat of Camulodunum. At the top, the gale blew so strong that you could lean right back into it and feel
it cradling your body; but it scoured the skin on my face and wrenched my words away. In a corner of the plateau there were, like an afterthought, the foundations of a late Roman temple, dwarfed by the great scale of the older fortifications. It is not the only Dorset Iron Age hill fort to have been thus adopted: at nearby Hod Hill, a Claudian-era fort was improvised out of a corner of British earth ramparts, so that two sides of it are regimented and Roman, straight lines marching over the hilltop, and two are formed by the great snaking curve of the Iron Age defences.

Thomas Hardy’s short story, ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, describes the approach to Maiden Castle: ‘The profile of the whole stupendous ruin, as seen at a distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay. It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips. It may indeed be likened to an enormous many-limbed organism of an antediluvian time – partaking of the cephalopod in shape – lying lifeless …’ The story, told in the first person, describes an ascent to Maiden Castle by night, as a storm rages. The narrator is to meet there an antiquary, whom he finds wielding a spade – against the law. ‘I inquire why, as a professed and well-known antiquary with capital letters at the tail of his name, he did not obtain the necessary authority, considering the stringent penalties for this sort of thing; and he chuckles fiercely again with suppressed delight, and says, “Because they wouldn’t have given it!”’ The antiquary begins to dig, and at length discovers ‘a pavement of minute tesserae of many colours’. He goes on with his spade, and draws from the earth ‘a semi-transparent bottle of iridescent beauty, the sight of which draws groans of luxurious sensibility’. Then comes a skeleton; and then a bronze figurine of Mercury. The storm renews itself, more vigorous than before. At the end of the night, the antiquary reburies each of his treasures, though ‘each deposition seems to cost him a twinge; and at one moment I fancied I saw him slip his hand into his coat pocket’. Against the backdrop of the lashing storm, and the unspeakably ancient sleeping beast that is Maiden Castle, the antiquary’s desecration seems both arrogant, and deeply irrelevant.

It was here that the Wheelers undertook a major excavation that began in the summer of 1934. By this time, they had also worked together on Verulamium, the Roman predecessor of St Albans. (Here
the
Daily Mail
had taken an interest in ‘Girl Excavators’, describing Tessa, in a piece of 9 August 1930, as a ‘woman with dark wavy hair and smiling brown eyes, dressed in a business-like brown jumper and skirt, brown stockings, and Wellington boots’, who is ‘directing the important work of excavating the site of the Roman city of Verulam’.) But after St Albans, Wheeler had professed himself suffering from ‘a satiety of Roman things’. Iron Age Maiden Castle was to make a change – though, of course, studying the remains of the Roman temple was part of the job. It was the largest dig the Wheelers had masterminded, with Mortimer as general, and Tessa the ever-efficient aide-de-camp, supervising the many students who came to dig, some of whom would go on to great archaeological careers. William Wedlake, who worked initially as the dig’s foreman, recalled: ‘I well remember Dr Wheeler’s arrival at the site. My first impression was of his long striding legs with equally long arms … I soon noticed that Mrs Wheeler and the staff which he had brought with him from London were trained almost like commandos to carry out the Keeper’s instructions.’ Not for nothing Wheeler’s war career. The digging was hard work, but there was also something of a holiday atmosphere. Tourists came and bought souvenirs: objects of the minor archaeological type, pieces of tile and slingshots. For the student excavators, there were amateur dramatics (including a pageant enacting the site’s archaeological layers, with a pantomime mammoth), and, no doubt, affairs.

Before the third season of digging, in the spring of 1936, Wheeler set off alone on a trip to Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, in order to acquaint himself with the archaeology of the Levant. He also, reported Hawkes, had personal reasons for taking the trip alone; the presence in Palestine of ‘a remarkable young woman, the then reigning sovereign of his love life’. On his way back, six weeks later, he bought the
Times
at the Gare du Nord. Flicking through it on the train, a headline caught his eye: ‘TESSA VERNEY WHEELER’. The article was an obituary. She had died three days earlier, at the age of forty-three, from a pulmonary embolism, the aftermath of a botched operation for misdiagnosed appendicitis. Wheeler pressed the bell-button and ordered a double brandy; a ‘kindly numbness’ spread through his mind.

The excavations at Maiden Castle continued that summer, but for student diggers such as Veronica Seton-Williams – an Australian who
had been drawn to England to study archaeology with the Wheelers, and who had found in Tessa a beloved mentor – ‘the magic of the great hill had gone’. Tessa’s friends felt that her death had been hastened through neglect and overwork, and pain at Wheeler’s infidelities. There was no pause in his pursuit of pretty girls.

In
Still Digging
, Wheeler describes his wife’s death out of chronological sequence, placing it next to his account of Passchendaele. The battle, in October 1917, was ‘the nadir of physical misery’, but, he wrote, he felt its ‘mental effect’ only after his wife’s death in 1936. Passchendaele, he wrote, was ‘the definition of hell’. ‘The cataclysmic rains and such shelling as never was before had churned the whole landscape into bottomless mud, honeycombed continuously with ever-renewed shell holes, every shell hole liable to be an actual grave or a pond of slime into which the wounded rolled from time to time and were choked to death.’ As he picked his way across this deathly landscape, late at night, ‘I flashed my torch to circumvent a shell hole; the thin light lit up an arm and half-clenched hand, thrust from the mud as though to clasp my ankle.’

The report on Maiden Castle was written up, at length, and dedicated to the memory of Tessa Verney Wheeler. The great discovery was of a ‘war cemetery’ at the fort’s east gate, in which Wheeler envisaged Britons interred after bloody defeat by the Romans (‘the fury of massacre rather than the tumult of battle’). He believed that the battle had taken place as the Romans marched west under Vespasian, flattening everything in their path. In a vivid passage in the report, he pictured the survivors of the dreadful onslaught creeping forth ‘from their broken stronghold’ as ‘the ashes of their burned huts lay warm and thick upon the ground’ to bury their dead ‘hastily and anxiously and without order’. He wrote: ‘The whole war cemetery as it lay exposed before us was eloquent of mingled piety and distraction, of weariness, of dread, of darkness, but yet not of complete forgetfulness. Surely no poor relic in the soil of Britain was ever more eloquent of high tragedy.’

The graves are not now thought of as a ‘war cemetery’. Later archaeologists have judged the bodies to have been carefully placed, not hurriedly buried in the wake of a massacre. Even though a handful of them bear the marks of a violent death, there is no evidence that the people were killed by a single, cataclysmic war event. And yet
Wheeler, soldier and widower, dug into the soil of this Dorset hill and found violence, and untimely death. It was as if the three events – the death of his wife, the ghastly scenes of Passchendaele and the slaughter at Maiden Castle – had folded in on each other. As if the grief and guilt and devastation at Tessa’s death could be exorcised only through his summoning up a vision of the dead of Maiden Castle. As if, too, the British dead themselves had been fashioned into imagined being – ghostly warriors – through a memory of the dread and darkness of his own war.

There’s a lot of fine-boned, blue-eyed English madness in Bath, part of its charm, a population with rather more than a fair share of occultists, neo-Platonists, yogis, theosophists, little old ladies who have spirit conversations with Red Indian squaws, religious maniacs, senile dements, natural lifers, macrobiotics, people who make perfumed candles, kite-flyers, do you believe in fairies?

Angela Carter, 1977

The city of Bath exists because of the hot sulphurous waters that surge from the ground in almost appalling profusion. A quarter of a million litres gushed through the Romans’ sacred spring every day, and fed in turn the medieval King’s Bath that was built above it. If you visit the Roman baths, you can see the ancient overflow pipe, the stone around it stained orange from the metals in the water, still carrying away the spuming, frothing excess to the Avon. This scalding bounty is reckoned to pulse up from three kilometres beneath the Mendips. The very water itself is ancient, even by Roman standards: it fell as rain on the hills 6,000 years ago.

When I dunked myself in the open-air rooftop pool at the Thermae, the city’s modern spa, steam rose from the water, and hung in the air like the breath of a giant. It was chill January, and snowflakes declined gracefully from a swollen white sky. Even in the antiseptic environment of the modern, hygienic bathing facility, I caught a hint of grandeur, of mysterious chthonic forces titantically bound beneath the earth. It was easy to see why the Celts’ god Sulis lived here; and why the Romans adopted the cult, merging Sulis with their Minerva, and building, from the late first century ad, the city of Aquae Sulis. For the Romans, all springs were bound to the gods, liminal places where the superficial
realm of the everyday and the great dark unknown of the Underworld collided. They were not to be taken lightly.

This was Bath’s first heyday: its Roman period, when the great temple to Sulis-Minerva was built, in the late first century. Its magnificent pediment was carved with the image – held aloft by winged Victories – of a frowning, Gorgonesque deity, his face circled with snaky hair and beard. Beside the temple was the frequently re-elaborated complex of baths, including a rectangular pool that is now open to the sky and fringed around with fake-antique statues, but was once closed in by a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Altars, tombs and inscribed lead tablets hint that Bath was busy with tourists, or pilgrims, and locals with their curious Romano-Celtic names (Uricalus, Cocus, Oconea, Enica, Senicio). Here were hot baths, warm baths, cold baths – visitors still sling coins, without perhaps knowing why, into the elegant circular cold bath, just as the thousands of Romans flung coins into the sacred spring. A
haruspex
set up an inscribed stone here: Lucius Marcius Memor is the only priest known in Britain who dealt in the arcane Etruscan art of reading the future from the arrangement of the warm, bloody entrails of slaughtered animals.