FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE DIG at Shap I can only suggest that readers refer to Professor Alan Jenkins’s standard work, English Archaeological Records, published by Oxford University Press in 1939 – though for reasons that will become clear it is not a book I can enthusiastically or wholeheartedly recommend.
Shap itself is a perfectly pleasant little Westmorland village, the sort of place where one can imagine living a perfectly pleasant life along the perfectly pleasant one-and-only street, going about one’s perfectly pleasant business during the week and then on Sundays saying one’s perfectly pleasant prayers to one’s perfectly pleasant God in one’s perfectly pleasant little church, and enjoying a perfectly pleasant pint of Westmorland ale in one of the perfectly pleasant country inns. Shap, like so much of England – and indeed like so many of the English, as they once were, until very recently – is perfectly pleasant. It is charming and inoffensive, and completely clogged on the day we arrived with car and lorry traffic escaping to Scotland and, presumably, with many Scots cars and lorries escaping to England in the opposite direction. Shap is not a destination: it is a place entirely en route, a perfect nowhere.
But the surrounding area! The surrounding area is something else entirely. The surrounding area – the wider parish of Shap, Shap Rural, as it is known, to distinguish it from the village – is simply astonishing. It is England at the extreme. It is ultimate England. Of all the places we visited during our time writing the County Guides it is probably Shap that remains in my mind as the most extraordinary. The vast plateau of fells and dales, the sudden peaks and valleys, the perfect dry-stone walls, the ravines and the waterfalls: it is a place entirely self-invented and self-contained, a place perfectly poised between the Lakeland mountains proper and the big bluff sweep of the Pennines, the remote kind of place where a man might wish to go late in life and wait happily to die. Sometimes, when I imagine for myself another life, a good life, a life of ease and peace, I don’t think of the Caribbean or the Côte d’Azur, I think of Shap, maybe somewhere up above the village, or in the lonely valley of Swindale, with nothing to do but to admire the fells, the sheep and the heather, to think and to remember and to write. Our business in Shap that morning turned out to be a grim matter indeed, but the view was nothing short of magnificent.
Morley was already excited by the sight of the area’s granite works and its limestone quarries, and by the beauty of the tiny little chapel in the hamlet of Keld – another ‘essential’ detour – but when he spied the standing stones of Shap he was, frankly, in ecstasy. He gave a deep sigh of satisfaction, took a deep breath in through his nose – one nostril, then the other, in his usual pranic fashion – and smoothed out the corners of his moustache. A pleasant smile spread across his face and he relaxed. This is what Morley lived for: England and its history. (Indeed, in What I Live For (1930), an anthology in which he asks various writers, politicians and all the other usual suspects what they live for he answers his own question, indirectly, by quoting Shakespeare from Henry V: ‘Follow your spirit, and upon this charge cry “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!”’)
Shap’s stone circle stands at the south end of the village and consists of a collection of boulders of varying sizes which once formed part of a much larger collection of standing stones, what Morley in the County Guides calls ‘one of England’s many ancient reckoning places’. Over the centuries the stones have been gradually moved and manhandled and hauled away to be used for other purposes – for hardcore and foundation stones, and doubtless for decorative garden features – and yet for all the destruction wrought upon the site what remains is still rather impressive, like a small ruined Stonehenge. It was all the more impressive the morning we arrived for being the scene of a busy archaeological dig, with all the associated tents and equipment and tools. That day it undoubtedly felt like an important place, a place where something might happen. Shap, according to Morley, is ‘the Avebury that nobody knows’: it is, moreover, ‘a sacred space’. I am not entirely convinced. But it is certainly a site of great drama.
‘Look! Look!’ cried Morley, like a boy coming across a travelling circus or a country fair. ‘We’re here!’
The first thing I noticed on our arrival at the dig was not the stones but an old motorbike and sidecar parked at the entrance to the field leading to the stones. It was no ordinary motorbike and sidecar. The sidecar had been converted into the most peculiar contraption: where the passenger might usually sit, a large black metal box had been installed, connected by a series of coiling pipes and wires to the motorbike’s upswept exhaust. Miriam parked the Lagonda and Morley of course leapt out and became instantly and utterly intrigued by the thing, and stood examining it in some detail, warming his hands on the sides of the box and then carefully sketching the design on one of his waistcoat-pocket notecards.
‘Remarkable,’ he kept saying. ‘Remarkable. Look at this, Sefton. English ingenuity, eh?’
The sidecar itself was painted in the most ornate fashion, with the words DORA’S STATION CAFE AND OUTSIDE CATERING – CATERING FOR ALL TASTES picked out in bold – if rather unskilled – gold calligraphic lettering.
As we stood admiring this peculiar machine a buxom woman came hurrying across the field towards us, becoming all the more buxom as she approached. She would have made an excellent Carmen, Morley later remarked. (‘With that accent?’ said Miriam. ‘The perfect accent,’ said Morley, who claimed that the accents of the north of the country came closest to the sound of the ancient settlers of Europe, and thus brought us closer to our common ancestors and our true selves. At least, he sometimes claimed that it was the accents of the north of the country that brought us closer us to our common ancestors and our true selves. At other times he suggested it was the accents of the south of the country. And the west. And the east. His ideas were not always entirely consistent. For a snapshot of his view at a single point in time – during a particularly ‘northern’ phase – see his paper ‘In Search of the English Ur-Accent’, in Pictorial Geographic magazine, vol.26, no.2, 1934.)
‘Aye, aye,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Aye, aye,’ said Morley in return, in what I assumed was supposed to be an approximation of the local accent. ‘Excelsior Triumph and a Steib sidecar. If I am not mistaken.’
‘And surely you are not mistaken, sir,’ said the woman. ‘My pride and joy.’
‘That’s quite a little stove you have there,’ said Morley, who had thankfully returned to his normal speaking voice. ‘I was just warming my hands.’
‘On my hotbox?’ said the woman.
‘Quite magnificent,’ said Morley. ‘I was just saying to my colleagues here.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘A beautiful machine. The motorcycle and the stove.’
‘Do you know anything about motorcycles?’ she asked. It was a silly question; Morley knew a thing or two about everything.
‘Only a little,’ said Morley.
‘Well, I’m sure I could take you for a ride some time,’ said the woman. ‘If you were interested?’
‘Do you know,’ said Morley. ‘I might just take you up on that. Dora, is it?’
‘It is indeed,’ she said. The pair of them shook hands.
‘And you cater for all tastes, I see?’ said Morley, indicating the lettering on the sidecar.
‘I certainly do my best,’ said Dora.
‘I’m sure you do,’ said Morley. ‘I’m sure you do.’
Miriam coughed loudly several times during the course of this carry-on and frowned noisily and disapprovingly towards Morley. He took no notice, of course. No slouch herself in the art of English flirting, Miriam knew exactly when her father was getting out of his depth, which was often. Morley was endlessly flirting with women without apparently realising that he was doing so – and this sometimes got him into serious trouble. (The episode with the Texan oil millionaire’s widow certainly springs to mind: that was a narrow escape. And all the trouble with the German countess. And the wife of the Scottish laird. The mixed-up divorcee who bought him a pet leopard. The poetess. The actress. The other actress. The list is surprisingly long.)
‘I’m afraid we really don’t have time to talk about motorcycles at the moment, Father, do we,’ said Miriam, making a statement rather than asking a question. ‘Remember, we’re here for the dig.’
‘Don’t let me hold you back then, my dear,’ said Dora, who was busy getting busy about her business. ‘They’re over there. You can’t miss them.’ She hauled a couple of trays out of the sidecar hotbox, using a pair of old leather motorcycle gloves, and stacked them one on top of the other. The trays were full of golden steaming pies in white enamel pie plates.
‘Of course, of course,’ said Morley. ‘Don’t let us hold you up.’ He took a long, lingering theatrical sniff, which sounded rather like the reverse of a trumpet fanfare: this was yet another of his less than pleasant habits. ‘But may I say, whatever those pies are, Dora, they smell absolutely delicious!’
‘Well, thank you, sir. Herdwick lamb and juniper pies,’ she said. ‘A local speciality.’
‘I wouldn’t mind a little nibble on that myself,’ said Morley.
‘I might be able to treat you to some leftovers,’ said Dora.
‘Oh, for goodness sake!’ said Miriam.
‘Here, let me help you, Dora,’ said Morley, entirely unconcerned. And he moved to take a tray from her.
‘That’s very kind of you, sir,’ she said, giving him one of her motorcycle gloves. ‘You don’t want to burn your fingers now.’
‘Quite,’ said Morley.
‘Father!’ said Miriam.
‘Where do you want these then, my dear?’ Morley asked Dora, holding the tray aloft in a gloved hand, for all the world as though he were a waiter serving drinks at the Criterion.
‘I’m just taking the last few bits over for the professor and his students,’ she said.
‘Jolly good,’ said Morley.
‘Father!’ said Miriam again.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Come on, lend a hand. Sefton? Chop chop.’
Miriam tutted and folded her arms in disgust – she was hardly going to act as a waitress – but I dutifully took another tray from the hotbox, this one full of boiled potatoes and enamel pots of mushy peas, and all four of us strode across the field towards a big white bell tent. Or rather, three of us strode, and Miriam sulkily followed, picking her way between cow pats in her unsuitable heels.
‘This is where they eat,’ whispered Dora, before we entered the tent. ‘And don’t mind him.’
‘Who?’ said Morley.
‘The professor. He’s full of babblement, but his bark’s worse than his—’
‘Bite?’ said Morley.
‘Exactly,’ said Dora, winking at Morley. ‘Don’t let him badger you.’
We entered the tent to find perhaps a dozen people seated around a long trestle table which was set out with simple picnic food: oatcakes and oat bread and pickles, modest Westmorland fare. At the head of the table was a man who held a glass of dark wine in one hand, his eyes screwed small against the smoke of the cigarette held in his other. He wore a white shirt and cravat, and his long greying hair was swept back from his forehead, giving him the appearance of a poet or perhaps a playboy film director, the kind of bohemian fool I sometimes came across in Soho. He was not in fact a poet or a playboy film director. He was Professor Alan Jenkins, of Oxford University no less, and the author of English Archaeological Records, published by Oxford University Press in 1939 (as previously mentioned, though again, might I emphasise, not wholeheartedly recommended). Professor Jenkins is, I understand, generally considered to be the world’s leading expert on megalithic structures, and he may well be – it is a subject about which I am ill-equipped to comment. I can safely say however that Professor Jenkins is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading experts in incivility. Of all the preening pompous twits we ever came across in our perambulations, Jenkins ranked among the very greatest.
‘Herdwick lamb and juniper pie, Professor,’ said Dora, serving him with a pie in its enamel plate.
‘Not exactly high table, is it?’ said the professor, snorting, to the attractive young woman seated on his right, who laughed uproariously at what was presumably intended to be a joke.
‘More damson wine, Professor?’ asked Dora.
The professor waved a hand and Dora indicated to Miriam with a nod of her head that she should fill up his glass from a bottle on the table, while she continued to dole out the pies. Miriam vigorously shook her head in response, indicating that she would be doing no such thing, and Dora shook her head back in disappointment, while Morley nodded to indicate to Miriam that she should bloody well do as she was told. It was quite the little dumb-show we were enacting, though the diners – young and earnest, mostly male and mostly dressed in expensive rough tweeds – were so absorbed in their meal and their apparently hilarious conversation that none of them seemed to have noticed us. But when Miriam sullenly reached across the table to take the bottle to pour the wine – she and Morley having been vigorously nodding and shaking heads at one another now for quite some time – Jenkins did take note. Miriam’s, after all, was not a wrist to be ignored.
‘Well well,’ said Jenkins. ‘And who is this?’ He turned around to look at Miriam, apprising her instantly with a wolfish grin. But then he saw Morley and then he saw me and his smile and his tone immediately changed. ‘And who on earth are you?’
Morley drew himself up to his full height and announced himself in his customary fashion – ‘Swanton Morley, sir, at your service’ – which I always thought marked him out as a provincial, suggesting someone who might have come to perform some lowly tradesman’s task, unblocking a sink perhaps, or sweeping a chimney, hanging a door, or some wallpaper. (‘For the working classes I am a builder of great palaces, Sefton,’ he once told me, many years later, in his darkest hours, when he had rather come to doubt his achievements. ‘But for the bourgeoisie I will never be anything more than a cheap paper hanger.’)
To my great surprise, Jenkins greeted us warmly.
‘Well, well, Mr Swanton Morley! We have been expecting you. Very good of you to join us.’
Little did we know we had walked into a trap.
Jenkins clapped his hands to silence the table.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ he announced. ‘We are honoured to have with us at our humble dig today a very distinguished visitor. A very distinguished visitor indeed. You may be familiar with his work in the popular press. He is a journalist and the author of a number of books for children – isn’t that right, Mr Morley? And it seems he also has an interest in archaeology—’
‘A very amateur interest,’ said Morley.
‘Indeed,’ said Jenkins. ‘Indeed.’
Dora, having finished distributing the pies from her tray, took Morley’s tray from him and went on around the table.
‘It is extraordinarily kind of you to allow us to visit, Professor,’ said Morley.
‘Kind?’ said Jenkins, taking a great swallow of his damson wine, and setting the glass down firmly on the table. ‘Kind?’ He made a sort of doleful face. ‘Oh no, Mr Morley. I don’t think it was my intention to be kind, sir. One is kind towards children and animals, isn’t one?’ He appealed here with a smirk to his gathered students, who smirked readily in response. ‘No, you seem to have misunderstood, Mr Morley. I wasn’t being kind. I was simply curious to meet the man who had the audacity to suggest in some inferior daily rag that I am the poor man’s Howard Carter!’
Some of Jenkins’s students, to their credit, winced at this rather sudden and direct attack and even Morley himself – accustomed as he was to being patronised by the rich, the superior, the university educated, and the upper middle classes – was clearly rather taken aback. He coughed apologetically.
‘I think I know the article to which you are referring, Professor, and I can assure you I was merely suggesting—’
‘“Merely suggesting!”’ Jenkins interrupted. ‘“Merely suggesting?” And who are you, sir, to “merely suggest” anything to me? You who base your superior knowledge on … sorry, what exactly? The fact that you have written The Children’s Guide to Archaeology?’
Jenkins was playing to the gallery here – and they were enjoying the show. Several of the male students guffawed, others tittered. Everyone was grinning: everyone except for me, Miriam, Morley and Dora.
‘I have certainly spent much of my working life doing my best to offer some schooling to those who have no access to a formal education—’ began Morley.
‘Well, bully for you,’ said Jenkins, taking up his glass of damson wine again and knocking back a final mouthful. ‘Bully for you. Well done.’ He held out his glass towards Miriam, indicating that she might refill it for him. She did no such thing.
I was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable, and fearing the worst. It wouldn’t take much more provocation for either Miriam or Morley to explode.
‘Just tell me this, Mr Morley,’ continued Jenkins. ‘Have you suffered for knowledge at all, as I have? And as my students have? Living outside’ – he waved his hands around him – ‘in this sort of squalor.’ The site was not in fact in the least squalid. On the contrary. It was rather better appointed, and certainly less damp and draughty than my old digs back in Camden. ‘Have you made sacrifices for knowledge, sir?’
‘I believe I have, Professor, yes,’ said Morley modestly. His life in many ways was a living sacrifice to the cause of knowledge.
‘And do you have the degrees and professional qualifications to prove it? The credentials?’ – which are of course the only things that count to men of Jenkins’s stature. Credentials. Awards. Certificates. Citations. Chaff.
Morley remained silent.
‘No? Really?’ Jenkins made another sad, clownish face. ‘I thought not. In which case might I suggest, sir, that in future you leave serious scholarship to serious scholars and stick to scribbling about whatever pathetic subjects you actually know something about?’
This caused another ripple of laughter among the students.
Miriam had had enough.
‘How dare you, sir!’ she said, hands firmly on her hips. It is a terrible cliché of course to describe someone’s eyes as ‘blazing’ but Miriam’s eyes were indeed in that moment alight with indignation. I had seen them before. And I can see them still.
‘Pardon?’ spluttered Jenkins, who was clearly not accustomed to being challenged.
‘I said, how dare you! Do you talk to every stranger you meet like that?’
‘I talk however I damn well please to whoever I damn well please, miss,’ said Jenkins, pushing back in his chair.
‘Whomsoever,’ Miriam corrected him.
‘And who are you exactly?’ said Jenkins.
‘Never mind who I am, sir. Whoever I am I would expect a show of better manners from a gentleman of your so-called education and standing.’
‘Would you now?’ said Jenkins, twitching rather like a horse dug by a sharp spur. ‘Would you now, girl?’
‘Yes I would. And I am a woman, sir, not a girl, thank you. I’m assuming you can tell the difference?’
The young woman sitting on Jenkins’s right gave a tiny clap of her hands at this.
‘Have you quite finished?’ said Jenkins, glancing from the young woman and back to Miriam.
‘No, I have not,’ said Miriam.
‘Well, might I point out, young lady, that we are engaged in serious scholarly research here and that you would be—’
‘And might I point out, sir, that any man of any education would rather be called a rascal than—’
‘– be accused of a deficiency in graces,’ said Morley, finishing what was presumably a quotation.
‘Thank you, Father,’ said Miriam.
‘Finished, the pair of you?’ said Jenkins.
‘No,’ said Miriam. ‘I have not. I’ll tell you when I’ve finished. To paraphrase Dr Johnson, sir, I find you utterly deficient in graces. You invited us here to join your dig, we came in good faith, and you have proceeded to insult us. Is this how you teach your students to behave?’ That seemed to hit the mark. Jenkins shifted uncomfortably on his seat and set his jaw in defiance. ‘Is it? I think you’ll find you owe us an apology, sir. At the very least.’
‘Young lady,’ said Jenkins through gritted teeth and lowering his voice. I wasn’t quite sure whether he was going to get up and strangle Miriam or whether he was going to knock Morley down. Either way, I feared for our safety. In fact, he stood up and made an elaborate bow. ‘Please forgive me. I seem momentarily to have forgotten myself. Please: I insist that you join our luncheon.’ He clicked his fingers and beckoned Dora over with a finger. ‘Set some more places for our guests, woman.’
‘Certainly,’ said Dora.
‘And I’d expect you to show rather more manners to those serving you, sir,’ said Miriam.
Jenkins laughed. ‘Do you know, I think you may be one of the most impertinent creatures I have ever met.’ He paused here for effect. ‘I rather like it.’
‘Whether you like it or not is of little interest to me,’ said Miriam, seating herself at the table, while tossing back her head in a way that suggested that it was actually of great interest to her. ‘And I am not a creature.’
‘Oh, I think you are,’ said Jenkins. ‘But do forgive me for any offence caused. It was perhaps the wine talking.’ He waved towards the bottles of damson wine. ‘Local plonk. One perhaps underestimates its effect. Stronger than one thinks.’
‘Really?’ said Miriam. With which, she poured herself a glass, I took a seat beside her, and Morley beside me.
‘Go easy on him,’ said Morley, leaning over to Miriam. ‘Mortuum flagellas.’
And so – eventually – we all settled down to a lunch of Herdwick lamb and juniper pies in a tent at the archaeological dig at Shap.
After the lunch, and before getting back to work, the students stood around chatting and smoking, invigorated, excited, full of vim and vigour, clearly having enjoyed the little spat between Miriam and Jenkins. It probably wasn’t every day that an archaeological dig saw such a spectacle: Miriam had become quite the centre of attention, as no doubt she had fully intended. (‘There is more than one way to prove the existence of God,’ as Morley liked sometimes to remark. ‘All of them inconclusive. Most of them incomprehensible. And none of them particularly interesting.’ And there is more than one way to become the star of the show: most of them mysterious, some of them nefarious, and Miriam expert in them all.) Morley was still eating slowly at the table, but then he did insist on chewing every mouthful of food thirty-six times or more (‘If it was good enough for Gladstone, Sefton, then it’s good enough for me’). Jenkins wisely kept a safe distance from both Morley and Miriam, briefing students and quaffing yet more of the admittedly delicious damson wine, while Dora bustled around, tidying up. It was a scene of peculiar domestic contentment, in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere in Westmorland, though my thoughts, as usual, were bellowing in my mind. I calmed myself with cigarettes, the wine and pinch or two of Delaney’s powders.
Miriam had struck up a conversation with the young woman who had been at Jenkins’s side during the lunch. She was tall and thin and strikingly good-looking – almost another version of Miriam, indeed – and she was laughing at Miriam’s jokes as enthusiastically as she had earlier been laughing at Jenkins’s. Her name, I gathered, was Nancy. I stood by, listening to the conversation. She was explaining something about the dig to Miriam.
‘… but I don’t think he’ll be allowing you to get too close to his trench!’ she said.
‘Well, I wouldn’t touch his trench if you paid me, Nancy,’ said Miriam.
Nancy stifled a laugh as Jenkins approached.
‘Something funny?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you know, just girl talk,’ said Miriam, flashing him a sarcastic smile.
‘Well, sorry to break up your party, ladies, but it is probably time to get back to work,’ said Jenkins, looking at Nancy with, I thought, a rather proprietorial air. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, Nancy?’
‘Do you not want me to show them round, Professor?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure there’s anything much to show,’ said Jenkins, ‘that would be of interest to the … amateur.’ He smiled unpleasantly at Miriam. ‘Did you say it’s some sort of guidebook your father is writing?’
‘That’s correct, Professor,’ said Miriam, taking a deliberately long time to light a cigarette. ‘But not an archaeological guidebook. That would be rather de trop, don’t you think?’ (Again, as mentioned, for an entirely de trop archaeological guidebook, see Jenkins’s own English Archaeological Records.) ‘No,’ continued Miriam. ‘Father’s guide is to the whole county of Westmorland. Part of a series of guides to all the counties of England, covering history and geography, and topography, and … well, all the -ologies and -ographies and -onomies.’ She took a long draw on her cigarette. ‘Including archaeology, of course. Of little or no interest to a specialist like you, naturally. But I know Father is interested in including some information about your little dig here. I’d certainly very much appreciate it, if you might allow us to have a peek at what you’re up to.’ She moved a little closer to him as she spoke. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t mind if I could spend a little time in your trench with you.’
Nancy did her best to keep a straight face.
‘Well,’ said Jenkins, clearly not quite knowing what to say and doubtless both offended and flattered by Miriam’s extraordinary attentions – as men were often both offended and flattered by Miriam’s extraordinary attentions. She really had the most peculiar effect on people. He adjusted his cravat. ‘I’m sure you couldn’t do any harm. Nancy, you stay with them and make sure they don’t get up to any nonsense.’ He smiled – uncertainly this time – at Miriam and with that strode off, his students following him, trowels in hand, back to dig in the trenches.
I allowed Miriam to finish her cigarette with Nancy and went to fetch Morley from the tent. He was still at the table, all alone, but had finally finished eating. He looked lost in thought. He looked pale. He sometimes had these moments – where he seemed to be thrown out of gear, and out of time. He wiped his mouth distractedly with a napkin as Dora came to clear his plate.
‘Now pay you no mind to the professor, Mr Morley,’ she said. ‘Billy the Bully I calls him.’ She leaned over him and Morley smiled up at her.
‘You know, Dora, if you don’t mind my saying so, you remind me of someone. Something about you …’
His eyes, I thought, looked a little watery; indeed, he seemed overcome with emotion. He sighed deeply and then, to my great astonishment, he half closed his eyes and moved to lay his head against Dora’s not inconsiderable breast.
‘Mr Morley?’ said Dora, more in pity than in shock. She looked at me, concerned. ‘He’s come a bit all-owerish,’ she said quietly.
Morley was suddenly very embarrassed.
‘Is everything all right, Mr Morley?’ I asked.
‘No, yes, I mean … please forgive me.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Dora patiently. ‘What is it, love? What’s the matter?’
‘My wife …’ Morley began. ‘She … Only recently … I’m so terribly sorry. It’s just I sometimes get these … It’s …’
Dora touched his arm gently. ‘You’re all right,’ she said. ‘I understand. Grief has its own timetable, Mr Morley. Nothing you can do about it. You just have to find a way to carry on, don’t you?’
Morley looked up, clearly consoled by this, while Dora, entirely unfussed and calm and practical, began to wipe down the table beside him.
‘There’s my husband today, up there in his signal box. I said, “George, there’s no trains running, stay at home, love.” But he feels like it’s his duty, you know.’
‘Your husband’s a signalman?’ asked Morley. ‘In Appleby? George Wilson? Was it him who …’
Dora nodded and continued with her work.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Morley. He reached out and touched her arm. ‘I had no idea, my dear. It must be a terrible time for you.’
Dora nodded again. The two of them seemed to have understood one another: an understanding had passed between them. Morley suddenly seemed rejuvenated.
‘Right. Come on then, Sefton. We should leave this good woman to her work. Let’s have a little look around, shall we? Thank you so much, Dora.’
‘No, thank you, for all your help,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. Man like you, sir. Thank you.’
I was glad to get back outside the tent and Morley seemed to be restored to his usual self. We joined Miriam and Nancy by a vast stone, several hundred yards from the centre of the dig where Jenkins was busy working. He could be heard clearly in the distance, barking out orders to his students.
‘Some sort of Oedipus complex, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Miriam. ‘Are you familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ said Nancy. ‘I’m studying archaeology.’
‘Archaeologist of the mind, Freud,’ said Miriam. ‘You simply must read him.’ She was forever recommending Freud to people. ‘You’d very much enjoy it.’
‘I’m sure I would,’ said Nancy, gazing at Miriam in admiration.
‘Now, young lady, tell us about this stone,’ said Morley.
‘Well,’ said Nancy. ‘This is what is known as the Googleby Stone. Though the locals sometimes call it the Goggleby Stone. Something like that. Shap, as you probably know, Mr Morley, is an area famous for its standing stones and this one seems to have been part of what may once have been a whole series of avenues and circles stretching right across the landscape.’ She spread her arms to include the vast space around us.
‘Mmm,’ said Morley. ‘It must really have been quite spectacular.’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Nancy. ‘Particularly when you think that when they were first quarried you’d have been able to really see the pink crystals in the granite here.’
Morley peered closely at the stone and stroked it affectionately, as if it were one of his dogs at home and he were looking for ticks.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘Quite quite remarkable. The achievements of our ancestors. Astonishing, really.’
As Nancy continued to explain the history of the area to us, Morley walked all around the stone, once, twice, three times, stroking it and humming to himself as he did so. The thing towered above us. It looked rather like a huge fat triangle poking upside down out of the earth, or like an arrowhead piercing the ground. Having walked slowly all around it, having seemingly absorbed every aspect of it, Morley then paced back several steps, in the direction of a dry-stone wall, in order to get a distant look. He squinted his eyes and stretched out his arms and made little box shapes with his fingers, framing the stone against the backdrop of the landscape.
‘Might be worth a photograph or two, eh, Sefton?’ He took out his notebook. ‘What do you think?’
‘Indeed, Mr Morley.’
‘Just trying to work out the geography of the place. Just trying to understand the pathways and the shape of things. The elevations and depressions and the …’ He took another step back again and stamped on the ground to establish his place and then looked down, having clearly noticed something underfoot.
‘Has Jenkins been digging here?’ he asked Nancy.
‘No, not as far as I know,’ she said.
‘Well, someone has.’ He knelt down and examined the earth beneath him, and then peered through a hole in the base of the dry-stone wall. ‘Hmm. What do you think of this, Sefton?’
‘Erm.’
‘I think this is what the locals might call a hogg-hole,’ he said, ‘to allow sheep to pass from one pasture to another. Isn’t that right?’
‘I’m sure it is, Mr Morley.’
‘But no sign of sheep here, are there?’
I looked around. There was indeed no sign of sheep.
‘And what about this?’ said Morley. Next to the hogg-hole was a patch of bracken and heather that looked to have been recently piled up. ‘A site of some interest, for someone.’
‘Well,’ said Nancy. ‘It’s all very interesting around here, I suppose.’
‘With the standing stone just there,’ said Morley. He turned his back to us. ‘And the river there.’ And then he turned again. ‘The wall following the lie of the land. The perfect spot, I would have thought.’
‘Perfect for what, Father?’ asked Miriam.
‘Some structure of some sort?’
‘Like?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Morley. ‘But someone’s clearly found something here. Or made something here …’
‘Locals, probably,’ said Nancy. ‘You occasionally see a few of them up here, looking around, hunting for treasure, I expect.’
‘Hmm.’ Morley’s moustache began twitching: I knew all the signs. ‘Well,’ he continued, ‘I wonder if we should just have a little explore ourselves.’
‘Oh but I really don’t think you should,’ said Nancy, becoming flustered. ‘No. I don’t think that would be a good idea at all. Jenkins’ll absolutely blow his wig if he sees you.’
Morley peeked round the Googleby Stone towards Jenkins and his students in the distance. There was absolutely no way he could have seen us behind the stone.
‘I don’t think that’s very likely to happen,’ he said. ‘Do you?’
Nonetheless, Nancy looked worried. ‘He did say for you not to get up to any nonsense,’ she said.
‘But we’re not getting up to nonsense, are we, Sefton?’ I thought it best not to answer. ‘On the contrary. It would be such a shame to have come all the way here to a dig and not actually to have dug, wouldn’t it? That would be the nonsense. Don’t you think?’
‘I’m really not sure it’s a good idea,’ said Nancy.
‘Just a little dig around here,’ said Morley, pointing to where the earth had been disturbed around the bracken and heather.
‘We’d need a spade, Mr Morley,’ I said, hoping that this might put him off.
‘Well, I just happen to have a little something with me,’ he said, proudly producing a small trenching tool from his jacket pocket. ‘Always carry one with me.’ (Among the many other things he claimed always to carry with him, depending on our predicament, was a hunting knife, a penknife, string, a compass, a flint for making fires, a complete first aid kit, a good book, a pack of cards, a whistle, a harmonica and a change of underclothes.) ‘It’s a beautiful day, we have a spade and history all around us and beneath us. It would be remiss of us not to explore just a little, would it not?’
Miriam huffed and folded her arms. She’d seen it all before.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Morley. ‘You two ladies keep a look out for Professor Jenkins and Sefton and I will have just a quick poke around here. Give us some colour for the book, wouldn’t it, Sefton? We can hardly say that we were at Professor Jenkins’s famous dig at Shap but we didn’t actually get to dig.’
Nancy looked at Miriam. Miriam rolled her eyes.
‘Quick dig,’ said Morley. ‘Couple of photographs. One of me. One of Sefton. Then we’re away, Nancy. I promise.’
Which is how I ended up down on my knees with the little spade, digging deep into the ground, Morley standing above me, Miriam and Nancy watching nervously from a distance. I cleared the bracken and heather and dug for a few minutes. There was nothing of course but earth. And more earth. Morley took a couple of pinches and examined it carefully. I kept digging. Yet more earth.
And then suddenly there wasn’t earth any more. There wasn’t anything any more. As I dug a shaft opened up below me and then the ground gave way and I found myself falling forward, swallowed up into some kind of pit.
I fell face forward several feet into total darkness, thudding down with incredible force. Winded and terrified, I quickly wrestled myself around and scrambled to my feet, thinking I might be buried alive. Gazing up I could see light above my head. The first thing I heard was Miriam. She didn’t sound overly concerned.
‘Oh Father. What on earth have you done with him?’
‘I haven’t done anything with him,’ said Morley.
‘Is he all right?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Morley. ‘Sefton?’ he called rather sheepishly. ‘Sefton? Can you hear me?’
‘I told you we should have left it alone,’ said Nancy.
‘I’m fine,’ I called up. ‘Thank you.’
‘There we are!’ said Morley triumphantly. ‘Can you see me, Sefton?’ He was leaning out over the edge of the hole, his face just two or three feet above the top of my head.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are you hurt?’ cried Miriam, who did not deign to lean over the edge.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘Thank goodness,’ said Miriam, although in fact she sounded rather disappointed.
‘Now, Nancy, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Morley.
‘I don’t know, Mr Morley,’ said Nancy.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘It could be a souterrain,’ said Nancy.
‘Exactly what I was thinking!’ said Morley.
‘A what?’ said Miriam.
‘An Iron Age structure,’ said Morley. ‘Sort of an underground pit. Used for storage.’
‘Well, if it is,’ said Nancy, ‘Jenkins is going to be absolutely furious!’
‘Or delighted?’ said Morley.
‘Furious,’ said Nancy. ‘He was convinced there was a souterrain around here, but it looks as though he’s been digging in the wrong place!’
‘But someone has been digging in the right place,’ said Morley. ‘They must have been down here recently for it to open up like that. Probably looted it already …’
‘Shouldn’t we get him out?’ said Nancy.
‘We probably should,’ said Miriam.
‘But you never know,’ continued Morley, ‘we might be lucky, might find an artefact, some coins, or some pottery or some such. No harm in looking, is there? Sefton, I don’t know if you want to have a little look around while you’re down there? Before we get you out?’
‘I’d quite like to get out, actually,’ I said.
‘What can you see?’
‘Nothing at the moment.’ I was staring into darkness and at earth walls, but as my eyesight became accustomed to the dark, and with the little light filtering through from up above I thought I could make out a sort of primitive shelf built into the passage – and I gingerly put my hand out towards it.
Which is when I discovered the body of the woman.