The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [213]
Keiller didn’t have any direct descendants that we know of. He was a charming, exasperating, obsessive man, both generous and ruthless, who could fly into a rage over almost nothing. He must have been very difficult to live with, and poor Doris Chapman had a hard time. Their marriage limped on, though both she and Keiller had had affairs, until 1947, when she learnt that he had run off to the South of France with Mrs Gabrielle Styles, a professional golfer and heiress. Gabrielle was eventually to become the fourth Mrs Keiller, and stayed with him until he died in 1955 of lung cancer, aged sixty-five. She donated his collection of cow-creamers–there is some dispute, by the way, over whether they numbered 666 or 667–to a museum in the Potteries.
He certainly had an appetite for sexual experimentation–it was the novelist Antonia White who received the unusual invitation to clamber into a wicker basket. (She dubbed him the Marmalade King in her diaries.) There is also a story, revealed to Keiller’s biographer by the son of one of the other participants, that in the 1930s he was one of a group of men who met to engage in ritualized sex with a lady in a South London flat. It is tantalizing to wonder who else was there, and whether the evening’s entertainment was merely erotic or intended to have some magical purpose, sandwiched between the activities of Aleister Crowley earlier in the century, and the invention of modern witchcraft by Gerald Gardner a few years later.
The last air raid on Swindon took place on the afternoon of 29 August 1942, as described in the book, under cover of a dramatic thunderstorm. Houses in Drove Road were destroyed, and a number of people killed. However, there was no crash on Easton Down that afternoon (as far as I know), although there was a Q-site there. British planes were occasionally fooled by the lights of Q-sites, with tragic results. The Starfish sites at Barbury Castle and Liddington existed, and there are bomb craters in both hillforts.
In the present-day story, I have taken considerable liberties with the National Trust’s organization at Avebury. The job of property administrator, as described in the novel, is not one that exists–the entirely fictional Michael is doing the work of several people. He and Graham are not based on any of those who manage Avebury in the real world, nor will you find Corey working in the caf; though you may spot the curator peering at small fragments of Neolithic pot.
Keiller re-erected just over half the stone circle, but most of the ground within the henge remains unexcavated. Every so often there are rumours that someone is planning to put up another stone, but so far it has not happened. But the night of the 22 June 2006 was one of the rare occasions when noctilucent cloud was visible in Wiltshire. Tolemac has recently been cut down and replanted, so looks very different from the woodland described in the novel, and the Goddess, in the form of the tinsel-wigged shop dummy, had sadly been removed from the Swallowhead springs last time I looked. Nothing ever stays quite the same at Avebury. As for the erratic way in which mobile phones pick up a signal in and around the circle, go and see for yourself. It’s a godsend for a novelist, but a mild irritation if you happen to be staying there.
So many people gave me help with the book that I am bound to forget some, and a few asked me not to mention their names. Thank you to all, and forgive me if I have misunderstood, or over-embellished, anything we discussed: responsibility for any inaccuracies or mistakes lies firmly at my door. Much of the background for this book came out of the research I had already done on the Avebury TV programme, with