Everyone likes digging a hole. It’s human nature. We like getting our hands dirty. We want to know what’s going on down there. Gravediggers, archaeologists and gardeners are all professional hole-diggers, which is why, almost without exception, they are such happy-go-lucky people and always turn up on time for work.
Gwyneth Jenkins liked to dig a hole just as much as the next man. She lived in a cottage on the Gower Peninsula – that bit of land shaped like a piece of jigsaw which hangs off South Wales down into the Bristol Channel. In Gwyneth’s opinion, there were plenty of good reasons for living on the Gower, but none better than the fact that you’re never far from the sea. Most days of the year she could smell the salt in the air from her doorstep and when she climbed the hill at the bottom of her garden – something she was in the habit of doing two or three times a week – she could see the deep blue bay spread out below her and, when she was right at the top, more water on the other side.
She was sitting on that big, bleak hill one day in early April and thinking about some of the things that had recently been going on in her life. And perhaps it was these thoughts, without her being especially aware of them, that made her dig the heels of her boots into the ground with such grim determination that the grass began to rip and tear away. A patch of dark, damp earth was revealed beneath it. Gwyneth stopped. The soil looked sort of raw. And, like any girl with a properly developed sense of curiosity, Gwyneth decided to sit back and carry on digging away at it with the heels of her boots.
Four inches down she turned up a flat, grey stone of quite respectable proportions with a sharp edge along one side. She picked it out and brushed the loose earth off it. Gwyneth thought it was a very handsome stone. She took a firm grip of it between both hands, aimed the sharp edge at the ground and started digging. And within five minutes or so she and that flat stone of hers had dug a fair-sized hole out of the side of the hill.
Gwyneth put her stone to one side and peered down into the dark earth. A lovely loamy smell came up from it. Twists of old root and bits of flint were scattered about the bottom. And various many-legged insects, who were clearly not used to seeing the sunlight, went scurrying about the place. Gwyneth noticed something chalky sticking out from the side of the hole. She got a hold of it and pulled it free. She cleaned it up and examined it more closely. And she found that it was actually a long, thin bone, of about four or five inches – shaped like a shoe-horn or the razor shells that got washed up on the beach below.
It was cold and worn and as dry as a biscuit, and she thought that there was every reason to suppose it might have been lying in the ground for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
‘Tired old bone,’ she said and sat and looked at it for a couple more minutes. Then she got to her feet, slipped the bone in her jacket pocket and set off down the hill.
When she got back home she dropped the sharp, broad stone she’d used as a home-made shovel into the long grass at the bottom of the garden – the same place she hid any other bits and pieces she picked up on her travels that were either too big or too plain unhygienic to be tolerated inside the house. But she kept the small bone in her jacket pocket and for the rest of the week took it with her wherever she went. When she stood in church and sang, ‘Immortal, invisible …’ or sat in class and listened to her teacher talking she held it in her hand, deep in her jacket pocket. So whilst she might have appeared to be joining in with the hymn-singing or be listening to her teacher, some part of her was always deep in her pocket with that piece of bone keeping warm in the palm of her hand.
It had never been Gwyneth’s intention to start a bone collection. She just happened to be up on the hill again the following Sunday and to have her digging stone along with her when she noticed a small boulder which was covered in moss and looked quite interesting. She sized it up and found that by lying on her back and pushing both feet against it she could get it rocking backwards and forwards. And once she’d built up a bit of momentum she managed to roll it right out of the way.
The patch of earth where it had been sitting was brimming with creepy-crawlies. Gwyneth ushered them over to one side and gave the ground a knock with her knuckles. The earth was packed tight – presumably from having such a heavy stone pressing down on it. She sat on the grass, cross-legged, made herself comfortable, took up her digging stone and, like a caveman’s daughter, began hacking away at the ground.
It took her a little longer to make any sort of impression than on the previous occasion, but Gwyneth kept steadily at it and after five or ten minutes she’d turned up two smallish bones and a third, curved bone, which looked as if it might once have been part of a larger bone, but was now so old and worn it was impossible to say.
At the end of that second day’s dig Gwyneth took her three new bones down to the stream, washed the dirt off them in the ice-cold water and patted them dry in her handkerchief. She had a closer look at them. Then she took out the bone she’d found the previous week, folded her handkerchief around all four bones and carried them home, with them gently rattling against one another, like wooden clothes pegs rattling in a linen bag.
During the week Gwyneth embarked on two more bone-hunts and quite soon she’d collected so many she had to carry them around in a metal bucket, which she kept hidden behind the garden shed. She seemed to have a bit of a knack for knowing where to find them. Sometimes she’d simply stop in the middle of nowhere, get out her digging stone and, in a matter of minutes, unearth another two or three. Perhaps she just happened to live near a hill with lots of bones in it. On the other hand, she could sometimes walk for miles without the least inclination to stop and have a dig, as if she knew that there was no use bothering, because there was not the slightest chance of there being bones down there.
After a couple of weeks, Gwyneth had enough bones to make herself a simple necklace – a primitive-looking thing which she created by knotting a piece of string around a row of some of the smaller bones. She wore it under her shirt for two days without anyone knowing and could feel the bones against her skin the whole day long. The only time it was in danger of being discovered was when Mrs Madingley called round to see her mother. Mrs Madingley was a large, rather loud sort of woman and the moment she spotted Gwyneth she moved in on her and gave her a powerful hug. Gwyneth could feel all the air being squashed right out of her and was painfully aware of the bone necklace getting pressed between the two of them. When she let her go, Mrs Madingley gave Gwyneth a little pat on the shoulder, but actually looked quite worried, as if she was thinking, ‘What a bony little girl you are.’
A few weeks later Gwyneth dug up her last bone – a shallow, round thing, like the end of a wooden spoon. Her days of bone digging came to an end just as quickly as they’d started. She had a good bucketful by now, which seemed perfectly adequate. If she needed any more she knew she’d have no trouble finding them. In all her digs, she realized, she’d never given much thought to where the bones actually came from. They could have been sheep bones, rabbit bones – even prehistoric bones. But it never seemed particularly important. A bone is a bone, she thought.
Now that she had enough, she got into the habit of carrying her bucket of bones up the hill in the evenings in much the same way that other people take their dog for a walk. One Thursday after school she took her bucket of bones and sat high on the hill looking down over the water. It was still quite warm and, without having made any particular plans to do so, Gwyneth took a handful of bones and began to lay them carefully out on the ground. She put some of the bigger bones at the top and the smaller ones at the bottom. Then she placed some of the straight bones at right angles to each other, with some of the curved bones in between.
The following day she laid them out in a similar fashion, but with the bones lying end to end. The next day she spread them out in an entirely different arrangement.
*
Each time, when she had finished, she stepped back to see what they looked like. On the Sunday, she laid them out and left a space in the middle. Then she tiptoed in and lay down on the grass among them all.
She lay among the bones with the evening sun warming her face and thought of all the bones in her own body: the bones in her arms, the bones in her rib cage and the small bones in her hands and feet. And she imagined what it must be like to be just bones and to feel the wind and clouds roll endlessly over you. She wondered if that would be a good feeling, or no feeling at all.
Two months earlier, she’d been to visit her grandad. He’d sat in his favourite armchair, but for some reason couldn’t seem to make himself comfortable. He kept twisting and turning all the time.
When Gwyneth was small he used to push her in her pram – down to the shops and over to see her auntie. He used to take her swimming in the sea. He was an unusual man, with unusual ideas. But Gwyneth always knew that she could talk to him about absolutely anything and that he would listen and take her seriously.
On that last visit he shuffled and twisted in his armchair as if he was never going to get comfortable ever again. He looked up and shook his head at her.
‘My tired old bones,’ he said.
Gwyneth’s grandad died two days later. Gwyneth never got to see him again. When her mother told her the news Gwyneth burst into tears. She seemed to spend the whole day crying. And whenever she managed to stop herself, the terrible fact that her grandad was gone was always there waiting for her and that would start her crying all over again.
Her mother said that, in time, it might be something she would get used to. But, as Gwyneth told her, it wasn’t something she wanted to get used to. All she wanted was to have her grandad back.
But now, as Gwyneth lay on the ground among all the bones she’d collected and thought of all the bones in her own arms and ribs and hands and feet, she began to feel quite different from how she’d felt for quite some time.
She felt the evening sun on her face and the breeze sweeping over her. She imagined what she and her bone collection must look like from above. She decided to sit up and, not far away, she saw her grandad. Her old grandad just standing there, looking back at her.
It wasn’t a shock or the least bit worrying. It was almost as if she’d expected to find him there. And for a while she just looked at him and thought about him. And eventually she lay back down again.
She lay back among her bones and felt the sun and wind for another few minutes. Then she got to her feet, packed up her bones and went back down the hill. And the following Saturday she took that bucket of bones and buried them in what felt like appropriate places, so that they’d be there, ready and waiting, for anyone else who might be in need of them.