Treasures of Time Read Online Free Page A

smiled, and they walked away up over the fields with arms round each other.
    Avebury ran with school children, larking among the stones like puppies, chivvied by fretting teachers. Tom, standing beside a sarsen, picked idly at the skin of lichen, and thought of Stukeley. He said to Kate, ‘He nearly got things right, you know, old William S. He was convinced Stonehenge was pre-Roman, he was sure Inigo Jones’s stuff about it being a Roman temple was nonsense, he was onto the idea of there being a whole prehistoric sequence, with different types of site fitting into different periods. And then he mucked it all up with lunatic theories about the Druids. He got religion and spoilt everything by trying to fit the facts to the argument. He chucked out truth and a scientific approach to the past for the sake of a convenient theory – and an emotionally appealing one.’
    Kate said, ‘Lots of people do that. A woman came into the museum in the summer wanting a recipe for beeswax. To polish her furniture with.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘What I said. She’d seen our section about nineteenth century household management and she wanted to make beeswax.’
    ‘P’raps she kept bees.’
    ‘No she didn’t. It was just a fad. I felt like telling her to go out and buy a tin of Mansion polish from the supermarket next door.’
    ‘You’ve got no respect for tradition. They’ll be throwing you out of the museums department.’
    ‘Museums are one thing,’ said Kate, ‘real life is a different matter altogether.’ She ran slithering down the grassy rampart, saying, ‘Let’s go somewhere else, there are too many people here.’
    He caught her up at the bottom, and she said suddenly, in an odd tone, almost shy, ‘Shall I take you to one of Dad’s old digs? His big site is just near here – Charlie’s Tump. I was about six when they were working there, I can remember it vaguely…’

    They climbed steeply, up a path creamy with thin chalk mud, leaving the road and the village behind, climbing into the wind, away from voices and cars, climbing it seemed upwards and backwards into a quieter older place, where sarsens lay undisturbed like grey islands on the turf and sheep turned bland, enquiring faces as they passed. The wind was sharper up here; it plastered their hair to their heads and fringed Kate’s ears with pink. She stumped up the path a yard or two ahead, like a tough little pony. Tom saw the green dome of the barrow on the skyline and called out, ‘Why Charlie’s Tump?’ and she shouted back, ‘Oh, it’s just the local name – some nonsense about Charles I. There’s a good view from the top. That’s Windmill Hill, over there, and East Kennet the other side of the valley.’
    He stood on top of the barrow and the green flanks of downland swooped around him in a circle, windy and ancient, swept by moving bands of sunlight that lit now this section and now that, in a shaft of green and gold and rich light brown. Marvellous, he thought, I’m in the wrong racket, that’s my trouble, I should have gone in for archaeology, a nice outdoor life instead of all this unhealthy bookwork. He turned, and saw Kate standing below him, staring towards a skinny copse at the edge of the field, a scatter of trees around a dip, furred over with the bright green of new leaves, and shouted, ‘Come and tell me about this dig – what happened?’

    I am digging, like Aunt Nellie and Daddy and Tony and Brenda and the one with the funny name. This is my dig, all my own, nobody else can dig here. This is my button that I have dug, and my bone and my bit of sharp black stuff and my bottle top.
    There is hot sun on my back; if I poke this spider with a bit of grass it runs into a hole and watches me, inside; when I press my eyes with my fingers I can see red circles, then blue ones, then purple ones.
    I can hear Daddy and Aunt Nellie talking. Daddy talks to Aunt Nellie in a special voice, it is not like the voice he talks