Tess (9 page)

You understand now, Ella.

And, Baby Tess, you are the soul of the first Tess – for the Celts believed that death is only a midpoint way in life. You have returned for your next half of life, as free and bracing (if you help to make it so) as the life of those Celtic women warriors, who lived in tribes and along with the men dyed their gold hair golder still. And worshipped trees and water. Lakes and bogs and streams and springs. And oaks and hazel. And mistletoe.

The druids taught that there was transmigration of souls. And, knowing they would live on in another body, the women and men of the children of Danau had an extraordinary courage.

Tall, golden-haired, they loved to wear high torques of gold at their necks and to fashion bronze mirrors where they could see their beauty.

They celebrated the dying and returning of the year.

They had a cult of the head; and severed heads abound in their forts and roundhouses.

They cut mistletoe with a gold knife – for it was ‘all-healing' and must on no account fall from the oak or apple tree to the ground. As you did, Tess.

They worshipped water, and the women were free. To live in their own time, the waxing and waning of the moon. From the Celts comes the word fortnight, for it was in the two phases of the moon that they lived, endlessly dying and reborn.

Well, I told you this was a story about a tree and water, and a mother and daughter. And, as all women know, it won't end well. Baby Tess, it is for you to end it well after all.

Even then, in the days of the druids, the end of the matrilineal age was in sight.

The brave Celtic women warriors – and many were as prepared as Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni in the east of England, when the Romans came and raped her daughters and threatened her with vassaldom – had already seen the beginning of the end spelt out for them.

The gods became male gods. The severed heads, like that of the screaming prisoner, ‘confined and penned', of Bettiscombe, were more frequently female. Bound, gagged and blindfolded, women lay dead and naked in shallow graves for the crime of adultery.

Women were becoming expendable.

And on the side of the hill at Cerne Abbas a Giant appears. His triumphant phallus is as long as a field and rears up on the side of the hill towards the Dorset sky. His club twirls in thin grassland over chalk soil.

Barren couples, still, in the month of May, go and sit astride the Giant's cock, symbol of the overwhelming new power of Celtic man. They pray to conceive a child; and they have forgotten entirely the powers of fertility of the Great Goddess Earth.

So now it is that summer afternoon at West Bay, where the noise from the hurdy-gurdy makes Retty's eyes smart with tears – and Maudie, who is used to noise of all sorts from the caravan site at Charmouth, takes advantage of Retty's confusion to nick a sixpence from her purse and run off to buy a candyfloss.

Tess clings to the wall of death, taller and braver than Alec or Victor – just as the Celtic women, defending Maiden Castle against
the cruel and invincible attack of the Romans, came out with slings – and stones from Chesil Beach – to break the heads of their adversaries.

The boys in the wall of death all look longingly at Tess. She is so brave, and so beautiful.

As the wall spins, there isn't a boy who doesn't worship her.

So why, only a little while later, has Tess somehow conceded defeat? After all, she's still a child: and she's bigger than Alec at this stage, and much brainier at school.

The dipper – maybe that's where she – Tess, I mean – had her fatal lack of nerve.

Because she'd shown nothing – except amused contempt – in the ghost train, although Retty grasped that it was the screaming skull that had come to get her, and even Maudie thought the woman in chains and rags was the ghost of that horrible motor accident on the Lyme road the week before.

As for the fortune-teller, Tess got her colour back all right after a few minutes – especially when Alec and Victor started teasing her about the serious expression she had on. (‘What was it, Tess?' I asked as we went over to the queue for the big dipper – nearly everyone in the queue a good few years older than us, I have to say – and she pretended to bend down to do up her shoe so she could speak to me really softly.)

– Liza-Lu, don't be a silly girl, Tess says in that patronizing tone I can't stomach; and don't like to think about to this day. But I knew she wanted to tell me all the same.

– The old bat says I'll kill a man and marry two, says Tess. And she breaks out in a fit of giggling so loud I should have guessed there was something wrong. But, of course, I'm too overawed by my elder sister to add up anything at all at the time.

Like if you're told at so tender an age of an unusual and violent fortune in store for you, then maybe you do panic and try to climb down off the big dipper like she did that day.

When the machine juddered and the cars stopped, there was a hush and then a lot of screaming, like air being let out of balloons or the shrieks girls give off when they catch sight of themselves in the funny mirrors of the fair.

I remember thinking, it was like being caught in the branches of a great big tree, like the tree on the map in Mrs Moores' school-house, a Traveller's Tree from Australia or somewhere – and you would never, never be able to get down.

But Tess wasn't at all pleased.

We all walked back in silence, along that road from the fair; and we didn't care how many lifts we thumbed, to get home.

The Romans landed in southeast England in 43 A.D. probably in Kent, and pushed westward, overcoming some fierce opposition. They crossed the River Frome at the ford, a spot we now call Dorchester, and must have been astonished to see before them the huge ramparts of the castle. Vespasian was a good general and would have recognized from his experiences in North Europe that the multiple ditches and ramparts meant slingers. He would have seen the western gate, recognizing the strength that the maze of
alleyways between the ramparts gave it. He would have noticed that the peace which had fallen on the countryside had allowed a few huts to be built very close to the eastern gate. A man destined to be emperor would most definitely not have missed such a tactical blunder.

The defenders of Maiden Castle must have known that the Romans were coming and would have been prepared. All the farmers from outlying crofts would have gone inside for safety. The water containers would have been ready, the piles of sling pebbles placed at points along the walls. When the Romans approached they would have kept their distance, wary of the sling, perhaps marching a small reconnaissance band around the castle. The Celts, in the time-honoured fashion, would have hurled the odd pebble and a vast quantity of abuse at the band of men in their body armour and uniforms. The Romans, battle-hardened by their march across northern Europe and southern England, would have ignored the defenders. They had seen all that before. If there were, among the defenders, any from the mainland or survivors of battles to the east, this would have been no surprise. If not, then to the roughly clad farmers the sight of disciplined, unperturbed, uniformed troops must have been sobering.

Away in the distance a corps of Roman soldiers busy themselves assembling the invading army's artillery, the ballistae – stone – or spear-throwing engines. The defenders are not aware of the potential of these machines, nor of Vespasian's evolved tactic of softening up the enemy. The twang and thud of the machines is fascinating, the crash of stones among the huts less so, the shrieks of speared men much less so. A confused panic grips the defenders who do not know how best to defend themselves against the death raining down on them as they stand in their impregnable fortress, scientifically constructed to be out of reach of the invaders' weaponry. By the time they recover their wits, the Romans have started to advance, not towards the west gate, but towards the east. The defenders load their slings, whirl them around their heads and release a mass of pebbles, but the Romans have been this way before. Each man raises his shield, and the whole group takes on the appearance of a metal square, so well drilled that the stones rain
down with much noise but little hope of penetrating the armour plating. The defenders aim at the uncovered legs of the first row. Some Romans fall, some defenders are shattered by ballista missiles. The metal square reaches the outer rampart of the gateway and starts a desperate surge forward and upward towards the castle. The untidy group of huts near the gate is fired, the smoke causing enough confusion to allow the attackers to make progress, outflanking the defenders. The gate is forced, the Romans form a bridgehead in the village itself. Reinforcements pour in, start to fire the huts inside and to hack at women and children. There is panic among the defenders and they fall back in disarray, pursued by, at first, the disciplined might of Rome, at last, by a blood-lusted mob of victorious soldiery.

It is unlikely that the action lasted very long, or that the legion suffered great casualties. But at the end, the Romans, incensed either by the unexpectedly bold resistance, the difficulty of the capture of the castle, or the frightening and damaging bombardment of the slingers, went wild, attacking women and children, until they were called off by their officers. The legion withdrew to a camp below the castle after having closed the two gates and left the villagers to the night and to their dead.

The villagers who were still alive buried their menfolk and families in shallow graves. Fearful of the soldiers still camped so close, perhaps able to hear the wild victory party, they worked hurriedly. There could have been no great ceremony but no one was interred without the food and drink they needed on their journey to the afterworld. In some graves a small gift was added, a family heirloom, the present from a young widow or an orphaned child.

Fifty years ago the war cemetery was discovered and the graves were opened. The opening of a recent war grave would, today, be met by a storm of protest. But it was all so long ago, the people are not even a memory; the archaeologist wins out. The report of the excavation includes photographs of the remains. Each grave was identified by a letter and number. Each skeleton was examined for damage. A woman had her hands tied behind her back and three sword slashes to the head. A man was hit ten times across the head. Another skull was shattered by a ballista arrow. Many skeletons
show no evidence of violence – the sword-thrust to the heart leaves no trace on the bones. The photographic record is, at first, interesting, enlightening. Finally it is sad, sickening. No one ties the hands of a dead person. The woman was tied first, slashed after. No one, in battle, has the time to strike an opponent ten times across the head.

The museum in Dorchester has the remains, as excavated, of one grave. The skeleton is famous and much photographed. Embedded in the spine is the metal head of a Roman ballista arrow. The spine and spinal cord were probably severed. As I stand beside the glass case, a group of schoolchildren arrive beside me. They are delighted by the exhibit. The arrow, they decide, would ‘come tight', and
hurt
. They depart for the next case. They are right, it would have hurt. And this is no abstract pile of bones, but the remains of a real man who, though he lived many years ago, lived none the less, and was afraid, and hurt, and died.

Maiden Castle – from Mai Dun, the big hill – is a pleasant place to be on a sunny afternoon in late summer. The grass is lush, with wild flowers poking through. You must watch your step or nature in the raw, a cowpat, forces itself on you. The ditches and ramparts are alive with the noise of children; what were defences are now an adventure playground. It was like this in the days before the invasion when the scene was equally pastoral and filled with the same happy, excited noises. But beneath your feet as you walk still lie the unexcavated remains of the warriors who fought and died that day in a failed effort to maintain their liberty.