Chapter 27: Autumn in the Anthropocene

Wells to London

Wells, Norfolk

The family approached from a cul-de-sac. The father was stick-thin and had a horse-like jaw. Two kids clung to his tracksuits; their mother was goggle-eyed. They stared at me as if I was an alien.

“What ya doin?” The father shouted from afar. He sounded suspicious and looked it too.

“Hitchhiking,” I called back.

“You won’t get picked up round ‘ere,” he tutted. The rest of the family gawped on.

“I dunno. I think I’ll be all right. Someone usually stops eventually!”

He eyed me again. “Nahhh,” was all he said. The family skulked past, the kids glaring as they went. I was in Norfolk.

A car stopped. Inside were two old ladies, the driver’s face was wrinkled like the Holkham beach sand and was about the same colour. She smiled and said they weren’t going where I was. The next car was though. The passenger jumped out and opened the door for me. “It’s world kindness day,” she told me, “so we thought we’d do something nice. I don’t know if that means we should be kind to the world or that it’s all around the world!” She chuckled. I didn’t know either.

Her name was Kasha and she was an archaeologist. She recalled hitchhiking back from France with four truck drivers. They’d stopped for rabbit casserole.

She worked for the Cambridgeshire Council. Every bit of land that was built on needed to be excavated before, or at least checked. Cambridgeshire was undergoing all sorts of works, Kasha told me, roads and housing projects mostly. It kept her busy.

“Any interesting finds?”

“Ooo yes!” She was clearly pleased to be asked, “Plenty!”

The most exciting was Must Farm. Found in the fens twenty years ago, the farmhouse was one of the best Bronze Age discoveries in the country. Barely six months after it was built, some 3000 years ago, it burned down. The bogland had preserved what was left. Kasha told me they’d got the fire specialist who’d worked on Grenfell Tower to look at it. He’d said it had been an arson attack. They thought it could have been angry neighbours but no one knew. Nevertheless, it was a rare time capsule from the era. There were strips of meat, textiles and reams of pottery. Some of them were wedding presents, she said.

Kasha told me the East Anglian landscape was dotted with farmsteads in those days. There were so many they could practically walk out of their houses and wave at each other. She explained everything with a beaming smile. Then the Romans came and swept everything away. They brought horses with them and that totally changed the landscape too. Kasha thought this was amazing.

Charly was driving and had barely said a word. I asked him what he did. He was an archaeologist too so I asked what he specialised in.

“I specialise in old soil…” He let it hang for a moment, enjoying the obscurity of his lifelong passion. Charly had been a professor of geo-archaeology at Cambridge University.

“I’d chemically examine the soils found at digs,” he continued, putting in very simple terms something that was very complicated, “So long as the soil’s been sealed, it provides a fingerprint of the landscape at that moment. Locates it right in its environment.”

Stonehenge was a good example. They’d discovered how the human impact on the landscape was much older than the monument itself. Long before the neolithic age, when the stones were put there, people had cleared trees to create huge vistas sweeping across Salisbury Plain. Without those, they could never have built Stonehenge.

He’d recently retired but was grateful for his career. It had taken him right across the world. He’d worked on digs in places like Kenya, America, the Indus Valley and South Peru. He told me they recently discovered an ancient farming system in Kenya that the Masai Mara were beginning to reuse. He’d loved every minute of his career.

I asked about the Anthropocene and the controversy surrounding the term in academic circles. Charly didn’t use it himself, said it was too complicated.

“Humans have had different effects on different places at different times. It seems ridiculous to call the whole thing the ‘Anthropocene’. Most of the debate though is around when it started: the industrial or the agricultural revolutions?” He didn’t have a view either way.

Kasha thought that the ubiquitous plastics were no doubt a clear and obvious human footprint. “But,” she qualified, “Human effects will naturally be seen in other things too. Like stone houses buried by a volcano for example. The Anthropocene didn’t cause that event but we left evidence nonetheless.”

I got out on the edge of Swaffham. It looked like the edge of any town in the country. If a volcano buried it, future archaeologists wouldn’t think much of us.

Peter’s van had the cold but comforting smell of engine oil. He was covered in it and the seats felt greasy.

He’d just sold a lawnmower. “Bought it for £200,” he said, “Sold it for a grand. Not bad for a Sunday morning.”

He had wiry stubble and cropped hair. Doing up and selling ride-on tractor mowers was a lucrative side gig of his. He’d worked it all out. “If you need a ride-on lawnmower,” he explained, “You’ve got a big house and lots of money so you get good cash for them.” In times like these, it’s about finding ways of getting rich people’s money.

His day job was assembling tractor attachments in a plant. Huge pieces of machinery came along the production line, weighing tonnes. He’d single-handedly weld all the bits together. He was the final stop on the line. It was dangerous if you didn’t keep your wits about you, but Simon always kept his wits about him.

When he spoke he had a way of clenching his jaw and sucking his teeth. The tendons in his neck would stand out.

We were driving through Thetford Forest. It was all beach trees and they had finally turned. It was a cascade of autumn, yellow and silky gold. Though it was mid-November, I’d not seen a single tree go brown until then. It had made me nervous. Seeing those colours was like being in a warm bath. It was beautiful.

Peter dropped me at a service station on the A11. It was a straight road down to the M25. There were practically no cars there though. The only cars there were all BMW saloons. I don’t know why.

I was picked up by a middle-aged couple. Kenneth and Andrea were fairly awkward. It was tricky to get conversation going so I busied myself finding the best place to be dropped.

I did manage to gather they were going to Sussex and had been at their daughter’s in Ipswich. Their daughter was a primary school teacher by day and a novelist by night. She wrote dark, gothic thrillers full of atmosphere and tension. She was writing a third now they said. We talked about that for a while but there wasn’t all that much to say.

Kenneth was thin with neat cropped grey hair. A pair of rimless glasses clung to the end of his nose and he spoke with a nasal voice. He was an English teacher. Retired.

I asked what his desert island book would be, trying to get something going. It was Chaucer, he said, his complete works. In the vernacular.

Luckily I’d read some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales so decided to break the silence by recounting my favourite part of the miller’s tale which Kenneth knew well.

The character Absolon is pressing a girl called Alisoun for a kiss through a window. Alisoun doesn’t want to kiss him so decides to trick him instead. It’s “dark as coal” all about so she cunningly presents her arse. In leans Absolon, and is shocked to feel not a smooth chin but “a thing all rough and long-haired”. Realising he’s kissing her arse, the furious Absolon arms himself with a red-hot poker from the fire and prepares his revenge. Meanwhile, his friend, Nicholas, happens to walk past Alisoun and hears of the joke. Nicholas decides he can’t miss this golden opportunity to have his arse kissed so drops his drawers and waits for Absolon to ask for another kiss. He duly does and this time it’s Nicholas’ buttocks that come through the window. Nicholas then “lets fly a fart, as great as if it had been a thunderbolt” but despite being momentarily blinded by this, Absolon is prepared and sticks his red-hot poker right up there.

Kenneth and Andrea shifted uncomfortably in their seats and the thought of red-hot pokers. It’s fair to say things got even more awkward after that so I went back to working out where best to be dropped off.