The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [18]
Better respect the stones, girl…
Frannie would tell me stories about growing up in Avebury, playing among the stones. Overgrown, then, hidden among trees and bushes. Loved them stones, we did, but we didn’t think they was anything special, not until…She brought me here to show me where her parents’ guesthouse had been, now an empty green space. Pointing down the high street. Baker’s there. Butcher’s further on, used to slaughter ‘is own meat. That white cottage was the forge. Blacksmith was called Mr Paradise. Sam Pratt, he were the saddler…Wouldn’ believe it today, would you? Nothin’ but a post office, everythin’ else for bloomin’ tourists. Eyes narrowed against the smoke from her cigarette, searching for the lost village, wishing it back. Could imagine ‘em coming along the high street now, ‘cept they never comes back, do they? Nineteen twenties, thirties, when I were a little girl–I tell ‘ee, India, thic there times was magic. Frannie tried to speak what she called ‘nicely’, but Wiltshire dialect crept in whenever she talked about the past. No, they never comes back, that’s for sure. Not the ones you want to, anyway.
She took me to the museum, and showed me the skeleton of the little boy that had been dug up at Windmill Hill, in the 1920s, with his big, misshapen skull. She patted the top of his glass case, and said, You’m still here, then, Charlie. There was a funny smile on her face, the muscles around her mouth twitching, her jaw grinding and wobbling as if her false teeth had worked loose.
Keiller, though…did she ever talk about Keiller? She must have mentioned him–you couldn’t talk about the village in the 1930s without reference to what he did to it, but I don’t remember her banging on about him the way everyone does here, with that mixture of admiration and loathing usually reserved for figures such as Oliver Cromwell, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Gates.
I cross the main road on the bend by the Red Lion and follow Green Street through the stones, past the gap in the houses where Frannie’s old home stood. The lane continues beyond the circle, eventually petering out to become a white scar on the flank of the hill: the old coach road from London to Bath, now a chalky, rutted bridleway, known as the Herepath. Thousands of years ago, it might have been another ceremonial route into Avebury. Some people think that since there were stone avenues to south and west of the circle, perhaps rows of stones ran east and northwards too. John swears that by dowsing in the fields he’s found evidence of buried megaliths beside the main road to Swindon.
The skyline is dotted with spiny beech hangers–the Hedgehogs, Wiltshire people call them–planted over ancient round barrows. The Ridgeway, a track even older, runs along the top of the Downs. When dusk gathers, it can feel like the loneliest place in the world up there, peopled only by ghosts.
A small red car with European plates is parked on the verge at Tolemac–the stretch of the lane I like least. The neat, wedge-shaped plantation of pine, ash, wild cherry and beech holds a particular set of memories from my own childhood and still gives me the jitters, all these years later. Bare twigs scrape against each other like dry, bony fingers. This afternoon woodsmoke is in the air: someone’s camping under the trees.
woodsmoke overlaid with the acrid smell of burning plastic, a van on fire, branches above it catching light. A cut on my hand, blood beginning to ooze between my small fingers…
Most of my itinerant childhood is a blur: odd moments caught in the memory crystals. My mother Margaret–Meg to her friends, but always Margaret to me–never had a job, unless you count dancing on stage with Angelfeather at free festivals. In winter we lived