“I don’t owe you anything at all,” I said, but we both knew I was lying. He really had gone to Cunningham and argued in my favour. Of course, he’d done it knowing that he was storing up favours for the future. But he’d still done it.
“All I want you to do is drive me somewhere,” he said. “How hard can that be?”
I looked out of the windows. “I think the rain’s easing off,” I said.
I couldn’t even remember now why I had applied for the course, apart from it being relatively easy to get on to and promising a certain amount of work in the open air. And, at the beginning, I had been absolutely illuminated with enthusiasm. I had, in fact, been enthusiastic about it for a little over two thirds of my time at university. Then I simply realised that I had never been cut out to be an archaeologist. I had a moment of epiphany at the bottom of a trench just outside Cirencester when I stood up, looked at the trowel I was holding, and thought, hang on, what on Earth is this all about? And right there and then I lost the faith, and I never got it back.
Certainly, there were little moments later, on rainy digs in fields from Wiltshire to Northumbria, when my trowel turned up a piece of pottery thrown just a hundred years or so after the birth of Christ. and I remembered that I had once seen the point of it all, and I did sort of do enough to finish the course and kind of get a degree. But mostly it was just unrewarding backbreaking toil, and anything of interest I found was subsumed uncited into papers published by my tutors — usually Rowland, who loved fieldwork. I was a nobody, a little ant scraping away at the soil. And that was how I was going to stay.
I did, however, have some small talent for writing, and in my final year at university, having finally realised that I had wasted the previous two years, I began to make approaches to various national newspapers, and was finally offered a post as a journalist at the London office of a regional newspaper publisher. When I graduated, I fled to Fleet Street. At much the same time that every other newspaper was quitting the Street for offices in Docklands or Kensington.
I managed to last twenty years on Fleet Street, something which still astounded me when I considered how much of my time had been spent writing stories about self-help gurus, fading soap stars and little boys whose kittens had somehow managed to secrete themselves in tumble driers. Then one day I lost the faith again. Something snapped and I freelanced a couple of thousand words to a listings magazine about an up-and-coming author’s new novel. The novel went on to the Booker shortlist, though it didn’t win, and I was invited onto a couple of television arts programmes to talk about it, and that led to various irregular gigs writing pieces for magazines and newspapers and occasional appearances on arts shows. Engorged with my new-found status as a prophet of the zeitgeist, which was really annoying my employers, I tendered my resignation and officially went freelance.
At which point, of course, all my commissions dried up. Prophets have a short shelf-life. I wrote stuff, and no one wanted it. I was reduced to doing lifestyle pieces for the Observer and the Times. After a while even that stopped and I wound up doing speculative stuff for the Evening Standard’s Friday magazine.
Rowland knew all this, of course; he kept a careful watch on his graduates, ranking them according to how bright they were and how handy they were likely to be in an emergency. Some of the more forward-thinking of his former students had attempted to eliminate themselves from the equation by moving to Canada, Australia and the United States, but I had wound up not only living in London but with increasing amounts of free time on my hands, which was why he had been on my doorstep this morning, “I mean, it’s not as if you have anything better to do today, is it, Jim..?”
About half an hour west of Stonehenge, we encountered some complicated business involving junctions and roundabouts and traffic lights which Rowland navigated me through by saying, “Left,” “Right” and “Straight on” at the relevant points. He wasn’t consulting a road map at the time, which might have been faintly scary, but if he was the world’s worst passenger Rowland was at least a navigator next to none. The rain eased up, the clouds parted, and Rowland kept us on the road. None of this was particularly surprising. He knew where he wanted to go, and nothing was going to get in his way.
When I first met Rowland he had been in his late forties, a short, stocky man with stumpy legs, long fair hair and dirt under his fingernails. He’d walked into the lecture room at the university, looked at the pile of books on the table before him, and then out and up at us, sitting there with our pens poised waiting to write down everything he said.
What he said was, “Put your bloody pens down and listen for a minute.”
We put our pens down. Well, some of us did. I noticed some people making surreptitious notes, as if they thought he was trying to trick us.
He went on, “At some point in the next three years, you’re going to be holding in your hands something that was made a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years after the birth of Christ. Some of you will find the remains of someone who died hundreds of years before Christ was born. These were real people. As real as you or me. What they were not is just like us. They didn’t think like us, and over the next three years I hope you’re going to learn why.”
The main thesis of Rowland’s life was that historians down the ages had made a single glaring mistake: they had assumed that the people they had written about were just like them, only without modern conveniences. It was a bigotry which had been reinforced by countless movies about the Romans and the Egyptians; modern screenwriters had written scripts about gladiators or slaves or whatever, and the roles they had written had been acted by modern actors for modern audiences. The characters all had modern motivations, they spoke recognisably modern English, and everyone who watched those films could identify with them.
Wrong, said Rowland. We could no more identify with a Second Century Roman gladiator or a Bronze Age artisan than we could identify with a squid. Nobody would want to go and see a film that accurately depicted the way those people really saw the world, we just couldn’t get our heads around it. They were not like us, and we were not like them. It all had to do with evolution, with the way the brain learned to interact with its environment. The Bronze Age peoples were only a few generations away from the development of language itself, and they had not yet learned to identify with the ‘thought I,’ said Rowland. They hadn’t yet figured out that if you had an idea, it came from you. They simply assumed it was the word of God. Music was an aspect of divinity, a magical thing. The Celts believed, in the same way we believe that when we push a button on a pedestrian crossing the little red man will eventually turn green and let us cross the road, that gods lived in the rocks and the rivers and the streams. It was real, not even an article of faith. We couldn’t imagine how they saw their world of gods and goddesses. It was simply beyond us. They were not like us.
I was hooked. This wasn’t archaeology the way I had imagined it. Rowland wasn’t talking about digging up the artefacts and remains of people who had been just like us, apart from the obvious handicaps of not having electricity and computers and Woody Allen films. He was describing a discipline which ought, if it were done properly, to be about examining truly alien cultures and trying to understand them. I loved it. From then on, right up until that moment in the trench outside Cirencester, I was a wild-eyed acolyte. And Rowland, with his patient predator’s eye, marked me down as a useful future asset.