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CHAPTER 1

A Handshake across Time

A warrior lies adrift in my Christchurch street, recumbent and silent; the only resident in possession of a plot with no postcode. In truth, he never needed post because he could neither read nor write, yet his predecessors built a wondrous Temple that we now call Stonehenge. I first met him, so to speak, when I purchased a bungalow a few doors from him. He lies in a neat, green space, our most aged resident; a prehistoric nestled amongst our pensioner properties. The grassed space is no more than 100 paces long. In the centre is a small mound, covered by a mass of low growing shrub called Rose of Sharon, its rampant periphery shaved into a neat circle by council mowers. This pretend shrubbery is a Bronze Age tomb. I imagine myself devising a myth in which this assumed warrior would suddenly rise up and out of his dark grave, resurrected. He would stand there, short at 167 centimetres yet imposing, a roe deerskin over his shoulder, the haft of a bronze dagger peeking out from his waist and the shaft of a glistening spear in his right hand. He would look at me and speak: I would not understand a word he says.

This warrior, like me, represents change, an unstoppable sequence, where people come and people go, perhaps 125 generations from me to this man. He was about 80 generations after those of his kin who began building at Stonehenge. He has a high probability of being related to me and carrying some of my genes yet he speaks a foreign language, almost certainly a form of Basque. His forebears brought the language with them when they left their ice age retreat down in what we now call Spain. His tribe is my tribe yet I know it not; he lived here, as I do.

It was not by accident that my wife Ann, and I, along with this Bronze Age warrior, chose to live in this little spot of Christchurch in the English county of Dorset. Nature brought our ancestors here as the Ice Age retreated over 12,000 years ago; who were they? It struck me as strange that we know more about Egypt and the pharaohs than we know about our own forebears. We, and they, came here because of the sea. We for leisure, for pretty scenery, for the good life, a bolt hole from the vicissitudes of London life with its toxic air that kills thousands each year. It is our wealthy pensioner retreat. They followed the coast, seeking a place to eke out a living, to hunt and forage for food. Later, they farmed and then traded, and needed a sheltered place for their boats. Everything points to Hengistbury Head as that early site, where silver haired people now walk their dogs. The Head is a shapely peninsular curving around a soft sandy beach landing; a home recognisable from way out at sea.

I often look out over to Hengistbury, aware that archaeological excavations in recent years in the Channel Islands and Isles of Scilly have changed our view of how people first populated this coast. After the Ice Age, people moved north along the French coast, probably as hunters on foot, as logboats had yet to be invented. That coast was still joined to the English side, although it was further out than now. Over time, the glaciers melted and as the sea rose, it flooded the Channel and separated England from Europe. It also isolated the Channel Islands from the French coast and flooded much of the Isles of Scilly, creating the islands we know today. The people experienced all this and knew precisely where the islands and mainland were situated. By 3000 BC, these sea people had created a maritime region which archaeologists now call the Western Seaways. It included the Belgian and French coast down to Brittany, the English south coast, the Channel Isles, the Isles of Scilly and the Irish east coast, extending up to the Scottish Islands. These people traded, most probably furs, shells, flint, stone from Europe and fish.

All the earliest civilisations developed along a navigable river, what we now term riverine cultures. The reasons are not hard to appreciate because movement over land was difficult and waterways represented the superhighway. On a river, it was difficult to become lost and there was ample water to drink and fish and wildfowl to eat. But, leave the waterway, step into the dense forest and feel the tension rise; the land is dangerous. Not only are you potentially lost within a few miles but there is the danger of attack by bears and wolves and perhaps by unfriendly hunters.

But, there are rivers and there are rivers, so it begs the question as to what is the ideal for a riverine culture? Imagine the need; a calm, navigable, deep river that stretches well inland, without rapids or rocks and with extensive marshes and wetland areas full of birdlife. The length of the river is critical, especially when farming begins, because if it drains just the lands controlled by the tribe then warfare is avoided. Otherwise, extracting too much water upstream to irrigate fields deprives those lower down. They might also foul the water for those downstream. The essential need is for friable, alluvial, silt soils alongside the river so that plants have water beneath them in the summer to grow green and lush, the typical English water meadow. These possess soils that are light enough to be farmed by human labour and without the more efficient metal tools and ploughs that will arrive much later. Ideally, the river opens out into a sheltered bay, with warm shallow seawater for fishing and safe harbouring. There would be extensive forested areas to each side of the river, for hunting and the supply of wood, perhaps the forest stretching to infinity. Rarely, there might be chalk downs up the river, only lightly wooded, with trees like ash that can be felled with flint tools, unlike the much harder oak whose nemesis is to be the metal axe. The chalk soil, unlike heavy clays, can be dug using antler picks. The exposed pure white chalk may well have been a sign of purity to these early people. And surely, if the Gods favoured them then they would place the river running north to south, so the sun warms the valley as it sweeps across in a perfect arc, rising in the east and setting in the west.

You might have realized that I have just described the local River Avon; an exceptional river, the liquid lifeblood watering the perfect tribal land. As a chalk river, it reacts slowly to wet weather and does not flash flood like rivers on clay, such as the Thames or the Severn. The floods are more gentle, adding fertility and calcium carbonate, which sweetens soil, to the water meadows where the people farm. Nowhere along the south coast do these elements come together as abundantly as on the River Avon and its close neighbour the River Stour. Few people appreciate these facts as they drive across the causeway into Christchurch and give the sinuous River Avon a sideways glance on their way to the supermarket. But our ancestors, as farming began, saw the massive food potential of these rivers, little of which we notice today.

Ann and I, having lived all over England and Wales, retired here and felt an immediate affinity. Here, away from the familiarity of my home ground, my senses are stimulated. I possess none of that familiarity often noted in the locals, that inability to see the colour and scent wafting on the unchanging and routine breeze. The local museum, the castle, even the scenery, inspires me whilst it is so often ignored by those who have always lived here, the familiar wallpaper that can never be recalled. When I drift into a new place, I sense my disconnect and then work hard to create, to foster, a new attachment. Christchurch, which attracts many wealthy pensioners from all over Britain, is relatively welcoming, being used to new blood. Nobody here calls me an offcomer, which is good. That was my experience up North, where the locals worry about dissipated newcomers with fancy ideas, especially those from down South.

I walk and muse, and sleep and muse, and wake up with notes to write down, subsumed in thought about these ancient people, my kinfolk. Finally, I decide that I need to create an advocate for the tribe, a person who lived where I live, a neighbour separated by thousands of years, but what date do I choose? The people were all hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago and we know little about them. Yet millennia later they are building great Temples like Stonehenge and creating the beautiful artefacts that now fill our museums. My preferred date, in the Neolithic period, slowly awakes in me. Should this advocate, also my alter ego, be a man or a woman? Our current knowledge of these early periods suggests that the men were the farmers yet still hunted for meat. Being active, they are most likely to give the writer exciting scenarios even though this period appears to have a low incidence of conflict. Men, though, are rather one dimensional. The action man is all machismo and vanity, his stories related to his libido and hunting, and male communication skills are often poor. In contrast, a woman is more social, more family orientated, more inclined to speak to those around her, to discuss tribal issues, to ponder, to see the wider picture. In talking to children and imparting skills, women are now considered to have been the arbiters of language, perhaps even the inventors of language. Today, we see women as possessing more emotional intelligence than men, the so called soft skills of communication and harmonious relationships. In Neolithic society, the communal nurturing of children appears to have been through women. Children were more like little adults and invaluable members of the work team. The men were graduating to farming, with hunting less successful as the game was pushed out by the increasing population in this area. Their society also seems to have maintained a balance of power betwixt men and women; even if the word power is not a word they understand. As evidence of this, analysis proves that a high percentage of women, and children, were interred under the bluestones at Stonehenge. They were all cremated prior to burial and appear to have been members of an elite. Archaeology in general appears to be favouring a gender balance in those early days. This suggests that there was no warrior culture, at least until much later, when my Bronze Age neighbour was interred.

I decide that my fleshed out ghost from the past is to be a woman in her teens, who will bear a child, and is perhaps half way through her allotted span of thirty to forty years; no three score and ten for her so she will not have to fear dementia. Her name is Zuri, the Basque word for white. White, chalk white, shell white, is a sacred colour and when Zuri was born her skin was unusually light. She lives in the Late Neolithic period, the end of the New Stone Age, when that period meets the Bronze Age, in 2200 BC. She has the blue eyes of the hunter-gatherers, a mutation from a single European individual from the Black Sea region. Farming has arrived in Britain as part of the biggest social change the world has ever seen. It appears, in Britain at least, a period in which there was little warfare and a high degree of cooperation. By working together, or force of will, or belief, great Temples and henges were built. Zuri lived in a successful and vibrant society at its peak, yet change was coming and, to use the cliché, things will never be the same again. I decide that Zuri cannot be a narrator because she does not understand facts or chronological sequence. Even the Greek word 'histor', to judge, will not be written down for a further 2000 years. She is bright eyed, quizzical, about 153 centimetres tall, slim and lithe, as are all her tribe; nobody is overweight. Zuri looks you in the eye and possesses that native stature, that nobility of movement that Thomas Hardy, in later Dorset, would call spry. She is tanned by the sun and weather beaten by the salt laden sea and the winds. It is a colour that millennia later will define which women have high status, namely, the white skinned ones. This thought reminds me that when I was young, in the 1960s, I used Spanish holidays to create a new post war status; the suntan. Forty years later, skin cancer has changed my perspective.

Zuri belongs to this land, to this water, to this place, far more than I or a modern person ever could. She lived here and I live here, thousands of years of human life and I sit at the head, albeit only until I die. Zuri's blood is my blood but has a different character. She was attached to a placenta wholly nurtured by water, fish, plants and meat from within the land actually visible from her mother's hut. Likewise, her mother suckled her on breast milk powered from the immediate surroundings. Zuri's body was formed from the very land and water upon which they stood, walked and floated. She knows little of inland Britain, much of which is densely forested. She assumes that we are an island, in part because she knows her people came across the sea from the land where the traders come from. I doubt that she is aware that her Neolithic tribe are pioneers, constantly pushing new farming technology. As I create and vocalize Zuri, sometimes using her native Basque language, I am aware that she and her tribe were far more conscious of the living universe than modern people. I must struggle to understand her mythology and how she might use plants and animals. I need to be empathic, to understand and share her feelings. Yet she has no writing, no dictionary and converses with me in a very limited vocabulary. She is also very superstitious. To her, everything is in the lap of the Gods. Forgive me; I can only write down what facts exist about the Neolithic, a few meagre dots on a page, and fill in the space between the dots using fiction, what some writers would call faction. I could try to validate this approach, to justify it, by referring to archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who called this approach cognitive archaeology. That is a hard call and, ultimately, this is an imagined biography, of an unknown Neolithic woman, literally a handshake across time.

So, I have a new neighbour called Zuri. Her hut was on the promontory, near the centre of Christchurch, where the station now lies on rails that link it to Brussels and Paris. Rest assured that such a woman lived, had children, and died. Her children knew no school and, unlike today, respected their elders from whom they learned their life skills. Like me, she ate fish, plants and meat, made love, argued, but, unlike me, she experienced periods and childbirth. Unlike me, had she remained childless it would have been catastrophic for her. A barren womb would have been a punishment by the Gods and it would have given her sleepless nights.

In my world, I have no children and I do not have to fear retribution. I can count myself along with the growing numbers of people who do not conceive, of single people and those who are gay and lesbian plus the increasing number of women who prefer a career to family. In contrast to Zuri's society, the world has no need of more children and it is a trend that benefits society. We pay our taxes, don't need the state to educate our children and divert those resources into the community. Even those who have children find that they have nurtured wanderers because they increasingly go to university and do not return, they find a life elsewhere. The parents, like me, grow old, and if they can afford it, they have a habit of clustering in favoured retirement places, like Christchurch. Here, I like to call our grey haired mass the gerontocracy, a dominant body of old people, mostly affluent old people but more about them later.

If we, the childless, created a different world then it is also a decision that has social consequences. Zuri, embraced within her community, could not comprehend the absence of family. Perhaps it is all about ifs. If I am widowed then I am alone. Alone, I will die unattended and not with "his family around his bedside" as the obits so often rather smugly state. Even the media have their one-liners ready for the occasion with that graphic headline "Lonely man lies dead in bungalow for 3 weeks."

Zuri would struggle to understand my community and its idle leisure. What would she make of my street in 2017, where virtually nobody rises to go to paid work and quietness rules until after nine each morning. I love my walk along the coast from Friars Cliff to Chewton Bunny and back, which I do most days each week. It is a sensory walk, the audio theme the lapping murmur at the edge of the sea; there is always sea sound, loud or not too loud. Then there is the odour, the ozone, the decomposing seaweed; another constant. As for vision, I see what I choose to see, and every day I see the old and mortality confronts me. Widows and widowers, lone people; companion dogs, canine surrogates for the lost partner; public seats with memorial plaques recording that he or she "Loved this place", and covertly placed cremated remains, snuck into a corner or slipped over the quay edge at Mudeford; a wreath or bunch of flowers, so often exotic vulnerable orchids exposed to brutal salt winds, an anniversary token to past good times, to companionship.

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Excerpted from "My Pagan Ancestor Zuri"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ken West.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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