'Not yet,' said Angela. 'It belongs here.'
Daphne nodded and looked pleased. As if Angela had at last understood something.
Angela basked in the approval. 'Have you ever dug up anything really interesting? I rather liked Mortimer Wheeler,' she added, dimly remembering a man with a dashing moustache, spotted bow-tie and teeth clamped on a pipe as he leaned enthusiastically across some old bones on black and white TV.
'Really?' said Daphne, as if Angela had said she thought Goering was quite a jolly pilot. 'All pyrotechnics,' she said dismissively. 'Missed about a million points out of a million and two. As for Mortimer Wheeler's ladies - pah! They did all the technical bits and organized, but never, really, got any of the glory. Or rather they did, as in, "Tessa was
such
a help in the sorting and the cataloguing. Real brick of a girl
..."'
'But he got ordinary people interested.'
'Ordinary people are
always
interested. Mostly we're digging up their lives. No, Wheeler was a reactionary old fart,' said Daphne. 'And women - well, my dear, women just did not signify. For instance, when they found one of those bog men and analysed his last meal, the technically minded boffins decided to reproduce the ingredients and cook it up and serve it. Two kinds of barley and bread, largely, made into a kind of gruel, and some herbs. The invited archaeology celebs tasted it and were deeply unimpressed. Mortimer Wheeler said it was so horrible he thought the man had died because he couldn't stand his wife's cooking.'
Angela tried not to laugh.
Daphne smiled too. 'Hil-bloody-larious. The Wheelers and the Carters and the Evanses of this world wanted winners' history. Big guns. A hoard of silver like Sutton Hoo. A tomb as fine as Tutankhamun's. A galleon as rich as the
Mary Rose.
And, of course, when it was rethought years later, they realized that the bog man's gruel wasn't some daft wife's poor culinary skills. It was bitter because it contained something to dull the pain of the bog man's death. Hanging, garotting, stabbing and having his head bashed in being a fairly painful experience.' She gave Angela an amused look. 'There are similar precedents for gentling ritual death throughout the ages. When heretics were burned, for example, the executioner would often be kind, or be bribed, usually by women - mothers, wives, sisters - and give the victim a bag of gunpowder to hold. And Greek and Roman matrons whose kin were to do the honourable thing and take hemlock persuaded the authorities to add opium to it. Otherwise the death went on for days
...
like Socrates. Poor old sod
’
Angela was still wondering which particular piece of violence killed the bog person. 'They - er - certainly wanted the bog person dead, didn't they?' she said.
'Ritual overkill,' said Daphne. 'And just the sort of knowledge that women needed protecting from. How could soft, sweet feminine ladies have any idea about garotting or stov-ing in a skull or slicing through the jugular while stringing the victim up? No wonder we write such good murder mysteries. We've had centuries of having the dark side of our natures suppressed. It's taken us years to be allowed to participate, even in history. Try digging in corsets, long skirts, several petticoats and the Egyptian sun. And if you did they wouldn't let you be present when a mummy was opened. You might see an ancient mummified cock
...'
She laughed. 'Or be staring at female parts while in the company of men.'
Angela felt rather protective and did not tell her that in Maria Brydges's section on the arrangement of a household, she suggested very firmly that books by gentlemen should be placed on one set of shelves, books by ladies on another.
'So if Mortimer Wheeler had found my rush light
...'
'It would be discarded as domestic and minor.'
'But there must have been women archaeologists?'
'Not unless they were rich and prepared to be considered mad. Until this century history used, largely, to be about Big Things. You see a woman stirring a cooking pot or feeding a baby or planting a garden every day of the week
...
The little daily rituals. The ways of being. Never valued until now. And, of course, the assumption that everything was orientated towards the male.
I've
looked at some of those cave paintings all supposedly done by men and
I've
never seen a signature saying Bloke.'
Angela picked up the rush-light holder and thought how perfect for its job it was - even though a rivet was missing -and what a pleasing object. It was beautiful even if it wasn't Roman.
Daphne took it from her and stared at it. 'I went to the Roman palace at Fishbourne to study their almost perfectly preserved mosaic floors. Which are very grand, very impressive, if a little clumsily patterned in places. Pyrotechnic stuff all right. Oohs and aahs from the walkways as the visitors toured around. And then, as I was leaving, the curator came up to me and we talked about the floors. I had seen him earlier, with a blind boy, and he was guiding his hands over a case of objects. So I asked him what they were and he showed me. And when he did, that was the moment.'
'What were they?'
'Guess.'
'Swords? Helmets?' Daphne shook her head. 'Jewels? Tools?'
'Nope. Cooking pots, cups, tiles
...
He wanted the boy to get the feel of the different surfaces. And it was the cooking pot that did it for me. Rough outside, burnt black by the fire, and inside smooth, still with the maker's fingermarks in the smoothing. And as I held
that
item I was there with the woman who had once used it, cleaned it, stored it, used it again. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the big impressive things - the Parthenon marbles and the Mildenhalls - and I could gaze for hours at the Delphi charioteer, of course I could. But a cooking pot is my direct line to the past. The link.'
'Like the rush light?'
'Like the rush light. Even this century the Mortimer Wheelers and the Evanses dug up a very peculiar one-sided view of the world
...
And historians wrote down only half the story. You imagine, in a thousand years' time, a Mortimer Wheeler coming along and unearthing a fifties football stadium in, say, Sunderland. What would he interpret the finds to mean?'
Angela thought. She thought about her one and only visit to
a football match, when she was sixteen and had stood with a boyfriend for one and a half hours, apart from the break, when they bought lukewarm dishwater from a van and drank it as coffee. And she thought how, as she stood there for one and a half hours watching twenty-two men kick a ball about, she could only think to herself, What the fuck is going on?
Angela Fytton, sometime wife to Ian, mother to Andrew, shrugged. 'What?'
'He would interpret the finds to mean that it was a male ritual, from which women were barred. And he would be right. And he would also be wrong. Not only would women
de facto
be excluded, but women would not want to be there in the first place. See? Not forced out, but making the choice.'
'You mean women in the fifties just weren't interested?'
'Exactly
. . . One side of the story only. Think of poor Margery Kempe-'
Angela tried to look as if she did little else.
'Well-to-do, highly articulate, but in the fifteenth century she had to
dictate
her memoirs. And who knows how much her scribe tidied up on the way. No matter how well-to-do you were, as a woman you were seldom taught to read and write. Therefore who wrote the past down? Who observed what was important to record and what was not? Court records, church records, private family records
...
Men, not women. So you have to look at the history of women against the grain. Not necessarily what is put in, but what is left out. Not necessarily, for instance, that women were suddenly forbidden from practising doctoring and midwifery, but that they had been accepted practitioners
up until that time
...
In order to forbid something there is usually a precedent.'
Daphne's eyes were bright and hard, but they suddenly softened. She stopped, threw back her head and sniffed through that extraordinary nose of hers. The air was rich with the scent of hops and yeast. 'You could get drunk on just the smell of that lot
’
she said.
In Angela's opinion, Daphne Blunt looked quite drunk enough. Tm using the original recipe
’
she said. 'I've only just begun. It's almost like a ritual itself - stage after stage of it. Whoever Doll Caxton was, she was a patient woman.'
'Brewing
’
said the Afghan, still sniffing. 'One of the female arts. Once. Well, let's take that as an example.'
'Yes, let's
’
said Angela. Thinking that it hardly mattered whether she agreed or not. She had seen that light in Daphne's eyes once, in the matter of a wrecked chainsaw, and she knew it brooked no nonsense.
In South Common Road Ian had just come in from a particularly gruelling day being dynamic. As he told Belinda. He had also stopped off at the pub with one of his junior colleagues, a young man bemoaning his domestic fate, which he did not tell Belinda. It mattered not.
He took his baby son up the little wooden bridge to Bedford and - after a few false starts - came back down again, a successful father.
As he seated himself on the now decidedly messy white settee, with a glass of beer in his hand and his other hand tucked in the warm and sensual armpit of his wife, he made the mistake of saying 'Good day, dear?' A rhetorical question in his past life. Not a rhetorical question now.
Belinda told him exactly how it was not, nor ever had been, nor ever
would
be - until his children were gone from here. He thought of his ex-wife, yet again. And he felt rising ire. Just when he thought he had got on top of things, the spectre of Angela spoiled it all. He had another beer while Belinda put -perhaps shoved was a more accurate description - a somewhat shrivelled pizza at him.
'We could go out
’
he said lamely.
'Something wrong with pizza?' she asked.
He ate. He drank his beer. He brooded.
Daphne said, 'Brewing, then. In court records when we find a woman being tried for watering down the ale she brewed - a woman, not her husband - this means that if she can be put on trial for the misdemeanour, she must have had the licence to brew in the first place. And here the ale-wife was a powerful lady. Made a deal of money, ran the local hostelry - which is why she wanted to keep in with the church. Similarly, in disputes over wills. Women did not have a disposable income because married women could not leave money - that all belonged to their husbands - although occasionally, at their behest, a sum was allowed for servants. But the bulk of the disputes were always over goods, particularly - back to the spinning - their linens. So when I get all hot and bothered about the way Dorothea Tichborne is too mean to warm the church, I remind myself that not very long ago she would have been forced to hand all her money over to her husband. At least she
has the right to do with her f
ortune as she wishes, even if the rest of us don't like it very much
’
'Ah
’
said Angela, a far-off little past bell of liberation days a-ringing, 'the personal is the historical. And going against the grain is looking for the contradiction which proves the rule.'
'Exactly.' Daphne nodded. 'Take the history of the black population of Bristol in the eighteenth century. We know there were a large number working as servants and in other domestic capacities, but unlike their white counterparts they very seldom feature in the law courts for brawling or thieving or doing damage to their masters. Which - to take it against the grain - must mean that they were not only good employees but that they lived there in harmony, were well thought of and well absorbed.'
Angela picked up the rush light. 'And this
’
she said, 'what does this tell you?'
'Look at the domestic and the domestic brings out the day to day, and the day to day is the functioning - or not - of society.' She touched the rush-light holder. 'Can you imagine how many rushes were used to light a home? Can you imagine how cold the collecting was in winter - dangerous even? Can you imagine how many times each rush had to be dipped in order to make a reasonable-sized taper?' She touched it where the central rivet had come away. 'Shame it's broken
’
she said, 'or you could give us a demonstration.' She laughed, wiggling that fearsome nose. 'But first find your forge.'