Under Another Sky (13 page)

It is strange indeed that by merely peeling off a wrapper of modern accumulations we have lowered ourselves into an ancient world.

Thomas Hardy, 1885

Wroxeter: ‘It lieth low near merry England’s heart/Like a long-buried sin,’ wrote Wilfred Owen, a Shropshire lad, who used to visit the site of the Roman town as a boy for happy afternoons digging up coins with his younger brother, Harold, or his friend Stanley Webb. I thought of him as Matthew and I chugged there in the camper van, in the heat of midsummer, poppy fields flashing by in a red haze. Wroxeter Roman City – as Viroconium Cornoviorum is now officially described – with its car park, visitor centre and English Heritage signboards, lacked the charm I imagine Owen found here, when he cycled along the lanes, urging his brother to ‘Hurry, Harold, hurry. Think what we may be missing – the greatest find of the century.’ But there is something indelibly particular about the way the ruins inhabit the landscape that cannot entirely be erased by the banality of their presentation. The Roman site has never been built over, and the medieval village of Wroxeter is a short walk away, through sheep-grazed pastures. There is a piece of masonry at the heart of the remains, called ‘the Great Work’, which dominates the skyline: a miraculously tall, pitted, scarred hulk of a single wall, once part of the wall of the
palaestra
, or exercise ground, of the town baths.

In the
AD
50s, the soldiers of the 14th Legion marched here, north-west up Watling Street from London, and established a fort; in the 60s they were replaced by the 20th, which, in the early 80s, set off with Agricola to Scotland. When the soldiers finally left the fort for good in about 90, to be stationed in Chester, the town proper began
to spring up: temples, baths, the basilica, the forum. It became, in all likelihood, the administrative capital of the Cornovii tribe. Soldiers from Faenza and Piacenza were buried here; and a woman called Placida, whose death at the age of fifty-five was marked by a stone set up by her nameless husband of thirty years. In Shrewsbury Museum, which Owen loved, is an inscription dedicating the forum to the emperor Hadrian. Charles Dickens visited Wroxeter in 1859, while the site was being excavated by the antiquary Thomas Wright, and he wrote up the trip for his magazine
All the Year Round
. He described the scene: ‘There is a bright spring sun over head, the old wall standing close by looks blank at us; here and there a stray antiquary clambers among the rubbish, careless of dirt stains; an attentive gentleman on the crest of a dirt heap explains Roman antiquities to some young ladies in pink and blue, who have made Wroxeter the business of a morning drive. An intelligent labourer, who seems to be a sort of foreman of the works, waits to disclose to the honorary secretary the contents of a box in which it is his business to deposit each day’s findings of small odds and ends.’ In the same issue of the magazine, one could read a chunk of the freshly written
Tale of Two Cities
.

Wroxeter lieth low, as Owen wrote, but it is fringed around by Shropshire’s wild hills with their wild names: Abdon Burf; Wenlock Edge; the Long Mynd; Hoar Edge. They say you can see twelve Iron Age hill forts from the Roman town, if you know where to look and the day is clear. Massing greatest of all are the volcanic, gloomy heights of the Wrekin – whose name has a family resemblance to that of the Roman town, as William Camden noted. I used to see the Wrekin’s hunched shoulders from a window in the house where I grew up in Staffordshire: a threatening, tempting presence on the distant horizon.

It was before the First World War that Owen used to come here, before his poetry was transformed into vatic, discordant outpourings by Flanders slaughter. It is tempting to imagine another reality for Owen, if there had been no war, as an amateur antiquary or even a professional archaeologist. One of his biographers, the poet Jon Stallworthy, wrote that as a sixteen-year-old, Owen ‘enjoyed the company of his contemporaries less than the contemplation of the the long dead’. Sometime around 1913, he wrote a poem about Wroxeter, called ‘Uriconium: An Ode’. It is a Keatsian outpouring into which thoughts and associations crowd freely as he reflects on the ruins; just as Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ contemplates the figures locked into stillness on an ancient vase. Walking over the streets of the ancient city, time collapses:

I had forgot that so remote an age
Beyond the horizon of our little sight,
Is far from us by no more spanless gauge
Than day and night, succeeding day and night,
Until I looked on Thee,
Thou ghost of a dead city, or its husk!

The ancient city, its bones revealed, allows him ‘To lift the gloomy curtain of Time Past/ And spy the secret things that Hades hath.’ The city becomes both a way of imagining a descent to the realm of the dead, and a means of contemplating the harsh, repetitive cycles of man’s violence: ‘Yet cities such as these one time would breed/ Apocalyptic visions of world-wrecks.’ Owen would soon be experiencing his own apocalyptic visions: in his masterful battlefield poem,
‘Strange Meeting’, he indeed seems to spy the ‘secret things that Hades hath’ when he describes a dream-state descent through a ‘profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined.’ ‘Uriconium: An Ode’ seems to prefigure the later, greater poem.

In ‘Uriconium: An Ode’, there is also a sense of the countryside’s continuity, indifferent to these minor human squalls: the Roman stones have rooted down into the landscape and become an inconspicuous part of a perfectly ordinary rural English life. ‘The village anvil rests on Roman base’, runs one line; the font in the church is ‘a temple’s column’ (as it still is). He does not mention the pair of Roman pillars that still serve as gateposts for the churchyard. Owen kept up his interest in antiquities through the war years: in April 1918, a month after writing ‘Strange Meeting’, he walked from the Yorkshire town of Ripon, where he was serving at the Northern Command Depot, to Aldborough. There he found ‘Roman Remains, and the finest tessellated pavement in Britain,’ he wrote to his mother. He added: ‘If in 1913 I used to wish to have lived in the 4th Century, how much more now!’ The companion of his youthful outings to Wroxeter was already dead. ‘I thought of poor Stanley Webb when I was among the “Remains”.’

Owen was not the first poet to find in Wroxeter a poetic metaphor through which to express the brevity of the human span. A. E. Housman published his sequence of poems,
A Shropshire Lad
, in 1896. Its deceptively simple, ballad-like verses are shot through with a quietly tearing sense of loss. Critical studies of his work have suggested he was impelled to write it in the wake of the departure to India of his friend Moses Jackson, with whom he was probably in love. His poems of yearning, and of youth cut off in its prime, resonated deeply for readers during the First World War. It was
A Shropshire Lad
, with its feeling for the rhythms of the English countryside, that soldiers read in the trenches, not Owen’s poems, whose creative flowering came at the end of the war and whose work found a public in the decades after it. Housman and Owen stand Janus-faced in relation to the war; Housman’s poems seeming obliquely to anticipate it, Owen’s posthumously shaping the public memory of it.

‘On Wenlock Edge’, Housman’s poem about Wroxeter, which Ralph Vaughan Williams later set to tremulous, febrile music, has one
constant feature: the lashing gale, the ‘old wind’ that has troubled English yeoman and Roman alike. The Roman, now, is ashes under Uricon. And you will be too, soon, implies the poem. But the wind, indifferent and ageless, will go on blowing.

On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

In the summers before the outbreak of the war, the archaeologist J. P. Bushe-Fox was excavating at Wroxeter. A photograph shows him in knickerbockers and a straw boater, guiding visitors in plumed hats around the excavations: one of the little girls, with hair in long ringlets, looks like a character from an E. Nesbit story. One of the students at the dig was Mortimer Wheeler, who would later go on to become one of the most celebrated figures of twentieth-century British
archaeology. He worked on numerous Romano-British sites, and on excavations in India; and, in co-founding the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London, was a crucial figure in transforming archaeology into an academic discipline. Owen and Wheeler almost certainly met at Wroxeter. In a letter to his mother dated 6 July 1913, Owen wrote: ‘I’ve not been to Uriconium again. Perhaps because of those two Oxford Blues, whose colours are to me as red to a bull.’ The ‘Oxford Blues’ were Wheeler’s fellow student diggers.

Wheeler had a good war and emerged a major. But by 1918 his generation, he recalled in his memoir, ‘had been blotted out’. He wrote: ‘Of the five university students who worked together in the Wroxeter excavations, only one survived the war. It so happened that the survivor was myself.’ The ‘Oxford Blues’ were dead. So was Owen, killed on 4 November 1918 as he crossed the Sambre-Oise canal in northern France with a raiding party. Wheeler experienced a profound sense of isolation, which, he wrote, became ‘a dominant element’ in the way he conceived of his life. ‘As a survivor,’ wrote his biographer, Jacquetta Hawkes, he felt ‘he had been entrusted with a mission on behalf of the dead’.

Wheeler himself was not an ‘Oxford Blue’ but studied at University College, London, where A. E. Housman taught him Latin – the great man seemed often distracted, remembered Wheeler, ‘though liable to rally unexpectedly in caustic comment, whether the subject were Martial’s text or its luckless exponent’. Owen had himself passed the matriculation exam for U.C.L., but he failed the exam for a scholarship, without which his family could not afford to support him; which perhaps accounts for his bitterness towards the ‘Oxford Blues’.

In time, Wheeler became the embodiment of the idea of archaeologist-as-hero, a swashbuckling figure and a household name, thanks to a broadcasting career in the 1950s and 60s. In the memorial address given after his death in 1976, he was uncompromisingly described as ‘a fire-breathing giant … relentlessly, inflexibly driven to achieve his aim by a mechanism which enlisted the help of lesser mortals and compelled them to bow in his path’. An early cover for his autobiography,
Still Digging
, shows him in half-profile; Indian excavators toil away in the distance. His military moustache is as stiff as a banner in the breeze, and his gaze is intense, intelligent and just a shade devilish. ‘Women were of immense importance to him and he enjoyed and made use
of them in a marvellous variety of ways,’ wrote Hawkes, who then provided a typology: ‘young girls – including, I have been told, the domestics of at least one country house … women he met on his innumerable cruises and other travels … Any who were attractive, light-hearted and unlikely to interfere with his work … exceptional young women with fine looks … and with the character, vitality and temperament to offer the “resistance” – flint to his steel – that he needed to kindle his fires.’

In 1912, Wheeler had married a bright, small, charming young woman called Tessa Verney, who had grown up in Lewisham in the affectionate, if slightly unconventional, household of her mother and stepfather, who were not married to each other. She and Wheeler met at U.C.L. – they both served on the committee of the college literary society. If Wilfred Owen had passed his scholarship exam, he and Verney would have been exact contemporaries at the college. Verney threw over a scion of the building firm Mowlem to become engaged to the charismatic ‘Rik’, as he was known. She henceforth anchored her endeavours to his, setting her quick mind to the work of archaeology that so absorbed her husband. In 1920, he was appointed keeper of archaeology at the Museum of Cardiff, and the couple moved to Wales with their young son, Michael. Over two consecutive summers, 1924 and 1925, they excavated a remote Roman site at a farm near Brecon, simply known as ‘Y Gaer’ – the hill fort.

Y Gaer, slipped into a crook of the river Usk, is not easy to find. Roger Wilson’s
Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain
gives meticulous instructions, a catalogue of ‘unsignposted crossroads’, and ‘turn back hard on your right’ and ‘the second turning to the left, after crossing a stream’. We coaxed the camper van through the maze of minor roads; Wilson did not fail us. I knocked at the farmhouse door, asking: ‘Do you mind if I look at your Roman fort?’ The farmer did not: in fact he interrupted his lunch to give directions and advice (‘the west gate’s worth seeing’). I asked him what it was like, to have your own Roman fort. He shrugged. ‘I have grown up with it,’ he said, his voice the gentlest of Welsh melodies. ‘I’m more interested in their engineering, in what they could do in that way. These days, we shall be going backwards if we are not very careful. There is a Roman drain out there that still works when it rains. Quite an epitaph, isn’t it, really? Imagine the council doing something and expecting it to last
two thousand years. It’s all plastic piping now. People want it all done yesterday, this is the problem.’