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‘Did she leave a name?’
‘No. I asked her but she said not to worry, she’d come back.’
Ruth thinks of this intermittently as she cooks supper, oversees homework and marks papers, but no one approaches the houses on the edge of the marshland.
Chapter 13
Wednesday 16 June
‘Welcome to Grime’s Graves,’ says the National Trust sign, next to a less welcoming notice saying that it is closed to visitors. Ruth, driving through the gates, can see nothing but a long road, with trees on either side. She remembers the site being a huge field, although it’s surrounded by Thetford Forest. But, suddenly, the sky opens up and she’s driving through a wide space of sun-bleached grass. It reminds her of the ghost fields, the abandoned airbases scattered throughout Norfolk, now mostly converted into farms but retaining some of the vastness and menace of their original use.
There’s a small hut in the middle of the field, with two cars parked outside. Ruth has seen plenty of aerial photos of Grime’s Graves, the eerie lunar landscape pockmarked with craters, like the surface of a golf ball. At ground level it’s hard to see the undulations but Ruth knows they are there. Over four hundred of them, she seems to remember. Each depression marks a mine shaft, long since filled in. Ruth thinks of the wood between the worlds inThe Magician’s Nephew, a book she once read to Kate. Each pool in the wood led to a different world but there were so many and they were all the same. It was possible to get lost in the in-between place for ever. Ruth had found the concept terrifying at the time. Kate had found it funny.
Two men are sitting at a picnic table outside the building which seems less like an exhibition centre and more like the shed Phil has recently installed in his garden ‘for his writing’. Ruth recognises Leo Ballard by his wild grey hair. He waves as she approaches.
‘Well met!’
Oh God, is she going to have to talk in cod Shakespearean all morning?
‘Hallo,’ says Ruth, when she is close enough not to shout.
‘This is Jamie Stirland,’ says Leo. ‘He’s the custodian here. He’s going to take us down.’
Take us down?Ruth had imagined a peaceful chat in the open air (complying with social distancing rules), perhaps accompanied by a coffee from a Gaggia machine that had suddenly materialised in the middle of the field. But it seems that Leo plans a descent into the mine itself. Ruth looks doubtfully down at her shoes. She never wears heels but her flat loafers, perfect for teaching, are not ideal for clambering down ladders. She wonders if she has some trainers in the car. She hasn’t been to the gym since pre-lockdown but, equally, she hasn’t tidied her car either.
The trainers are there. Ruth puts them on and pulls an old jumper over her white shirt. Thus attired, she follows Leo and Jamie towards the place where a small kiosk sits embedded in one of the lunar depressions, looking like a rocket about to be propelled into the atmosphere.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Jamie. ‘It’s very safe. There’s a metal staircase and everything.’
‘There’s a deeper shaft over towards the woods,’ says Leo. ‘That’s just a ladder.’
‘We can’t take visitors down there,’ says Jamie. ‘You need a safety harness for one thing. Here, you’d better wear this.’ He hands Ruth a hard hat. ‘It’s seven metres down.’
‘Thirty feet in old money,’ explains Leo, who seems like the sort of person who mourns the passing of imperial measures.
Ruth is not a fan of enclosed, underground spaces. When she visited Grime’s Graves before, it was to participate in a dig exploring the surrounding area. Although some of the volunteers had gone down into the mines, Ruth had not felt tempted to join them. But she feels reluctant to back out now. After all, it must be safe. The sign outside says ‘not suitable for children under five’. That means Kate could make the trip. Katewouldmake the trip.
Ruth looks at her phone. There’s no signal but maybe she can use the torch. She’s relieved when Jamie presses a switch inside the kiosk and light fills the underground chamber. Jamie prepares to descend. ‘Go down backwards,’ he tells Ruth. ‘That’s what I always say when we have school parties here. You go backwards into the past.’
Ruth approves of introducing children to pre-history. She’s just not so sure about descending below the earth with two men she hardly knows. But she turns and feels with her trainer-clad foot for the first rung. Whatever Jamie says, it’s more of a ladder than a staircase.
The metal steps take several twists. When Ruth finally reaches the bottom, she finds herself in a circular space with cave-like openings all around.
‘The galleries,’ says Jamie. ‘They’re tunnels that go further into the rock. The miners would have crawled along, maybe in the dark, feeling for the flint.’
The galleries are closed off behind grilles. Never, thinks Ruth, am I ever going to explore them. She looks up. Leo is still descending, his feet clanging on the metal steps. The chalk walls seem incredibly high, studded with jet-like stones. Ruth comforts herself with something that she learnt during a previous underground excursion. The Channel Tunnel was rerouted to go through chalky soil because chalk is so incredibly strong. These walls have stood for over four thousand years. They are not going to collapse now.
‘There are three layers of flint,’ says Jamie. ‘Top, wall and floor. The Neolithic miners dug the shafts, using only antler picks and animal bones, like scapula. They excavated the flint and broke it into smaller nodules which were hauled to the surface in wicker baskets. We’ve found the rope marks. Then they filled in the shaft with rubble. It was all very efficient.’
Leo has joined them. He’s slightly out of breath. Ruth doesn’t know how old he is, but he must surely be over seventy. That’s not old these days but Leo doesn’t look at the peak of fitness.
‘We found a fingerprint on one of the antlers,’ says Jamie. ‘The miners probably put clay on their hands to help their grip. The clay preserved the print.’
As she said during the emergency meeting, Ruth is always moved by things like this. To think that a Neolithic miner touched something over four thousand years ago and the mark remained.
Leo is wiping his brow with a handkerchief. He seems uninterested in the fingerprints of the past. ‘What about the ritual element?’ he says. ‘I’ve always thought that descending into the mines might have been an initiation ceremony. Maybe they took young girls down here, into the womb of the earth, when they reached puberty.’
Jamie shoots him a look. Leo said that the custodian was ‘well disposed’ towards him but Ruth isn’t so sure. She finds Leo’s words pretty creepy herself. As for Nelson, he would probably have arrested the man long before he reached the word ‘puberty’.
