The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [212]
In 1938 Avebury had been captured on amateur cine film by Percy Lawes. The television company I worked for, Available Light Productions, really did show the restored footage to villagers at the Red Lion, as Overview TV do in the parallel-universe Avebury invented in the novel. It had not occurred to me until I saw Percy Lawes’s film that the stone circle is largely a reconstruction, and that, like an old time squire, Keiller knocked down part of the village to achieve his vision.
For me, the fascination of Keiller is his ambivalence. He was the last of the great amateur archaeologists, funding his own projects, but also one of the first to dig in a scientific manner, his excavations conducted with a scrupulous eye for detail that put many of his contemporaries to shame. For some, as local historian Brian Edwards puts it, he was the serpent entering Eden, destroying their community. Yet he also provided decently paid employment for local men, at a time when agricultural wages were so low that many farm workers could not afford the rents in the council houses built especially for them.
As for his sexual ambivalence, there were indeed four wives and countless mistresses, but some personal glimpses in the letters (those that weren’t destroyed by his executors) suggest that he might have been attracted to men as well as women. Homo-eroticism was fashionable in the 1930s, particularly among men of Keiller’s class who had been to public school, and possibly more than one of the young archaeologists whom Keiller encouraged was homosexual, though not openly so. Keiller writes of being bowled over and bewitched by a young man he met at a dinner in London–Sing Ho! for the Brushwood Boy!–but whether he did anything about it, the letters do not reveal.
This is a novel about what we can’t know, as much as what we can. So what’s indisputably true, and what isn’t? I wanted my story to reflect the ambivalence of Keiller’s relationship with the village, so I chose to base it around an almost biblical story of seduction. Frannie is an invented character, and so are her seducer Donald Cromley and her friend Davey Fergusson. But several of the other people who appear in the 1930s/40s strand of the story really lived, including Mrs Sorel–Taylour, Doris Chapman, W.E.V. Young and Stuart Piggott. My regret is that I have had to exclude so many others from the story, or it would have been hopelessly over-populated.
Keiller was a larger-than-life character, and I have tried to be as realistic as possible in my portrayal of him, so that the events Frannie witnesses at the excavation itself (such as the discovery of the Barber Surgeon) are described with some accuracy, though I have taken a few liberties with dates for dramatic purposes. The Barber Surgeon’s skeleton was indeed believed destroyed in a bombing raid on the Royal College of Surgeons but, amazingly, was rediscovered in a storeroom at the Natural History Museum nearly sixty years later. A ceremony led by Keiller brandishing a chalk phallus did take place in the Manor garden, witnessed by Mrs Sorel-Taylour–though at Hallowe’en, not Imbolc.
The question of Charlie is more delicate. Keiller removed his (or her) actual skull, and replaced it with a cast, which remained with the skeleton until only a few years ago. But what you see in the museum today is the genuine article: head and torso have been reunited. There is a serious debate about how we should treat human remains uncovered by archaeology: should they be reburied, or kept (on display or on storeroom shelves) as a research resource? I wouldn’t presume to have an