Suzy McKee Charnas: Keep on Digging

Keep on Digging

The baby-bones receded from the foreground in due course. I went back out to dig some more, helping to scrape away the clay layer of the earliest Roman presence at Arbeia. It was good to get out in the air again; there was so much sun that Steve and I used our sunblock, and he got a tan in spite of it. Having for the most part such excellent weather, the bunch of us pretty well completed the work of the three earlier teams of the summer's volunteers in stripping the barracks' floor down to the pre-Roman level.

But I wouldn't want to give the impression that life was all work!

On several afternoons staff members took us on outings to nearby Roman sites along Hadrian's wall (although most of the rural areas were closed to visitors because of foot and mouth). I recommend Segedunum, a fort that's been excavated and given a reconstructed Roman bath and a very nifty museum of its own, right inside the nearby town of Wall's End. We reached it by ferry and light rail (and trudging up a godawful bastard of a hill from one to the other). I found the great, brightly painted cargo cranes just beyond the fort site itself (this is upriver, where shipyards still operate) as striking as the site itself, which can be overlooked in its entirety from a viewing tower in the museum building.

Another high point was the private excavation site of Vindolanda, further west along Hadrian's wall, where completely different soil conditions have preserved far more perishable finds than at our site — leather, wood, and cloth items that have to be broken out of the peaty earth. Excavation methods are accordingly different, featuring not the scraping down of minute layers of clay but digging out bricks of peat to be gone over for finds within them. This site is owned by the Burleigh family. We got an impression that there's some envy among the staffs of the publicly owned Roman sites over the richness of Vindolanda (one of our local student members had dug that same summer at Vindolanda, and said it was a wonderful experience).

That was a misty, drizzly afternoon, and my ankle had stiffened up for no good reason that I could identify so all that walking (at least right after walking all over the fort remains at Chesters) was out. I was driven by car down to the souvenir shop and museum where I sat, sipping hot chocolate on a little stone patio out back and looking contentedly over the steep ornamental garden, as the rest of our party ambled in from their walk over the hillside dig.

So we got into the countryside after all, sort of, despite the foot and mouth. It was a bit eerie, actually: whole hillsides brilliant with fresh grass, and not a beast upon them to graze it, and south of the road that bordered this empty pastures more fields, these populated by scatterings of white sheep and cattle. The herds to the south were so far uninfected. Normally, we were told, all those northern slopes would have been full of livestock this time of year. The deserted fields added a flavor of olden times, when this border country was more barren and dangerous, much less populous and busy.

Not everyone attended every trip, or even every work day. Several members of our team disappeared from time to time, or just didn't turn up at a day's work or an evening program, which was a reminder that we volunteers aren't paid for this work but pay instead to do it. Absences undercut the sense of being a team a bit, but that freedom to wander off for a day of sightseeing (or to stay home and nurse a hangover) was part of the experience too.

There's a robust night life in South Shields, centering on the pubs and the lively young people who frequent them — girls in tight short skirts and bitsy blouses in shimmery fabrics, and boys trimmed mightily with tattoos, pierced jewelry, and often shaven heads. Thursday is the big night, for reasons that I never did quite catch. Some of the younger volunteers, guided by one of our more experienced British members who is well into completing his studies to become a professional archaeologist, wandered off to the pubs most evenings, and showed the signs of it next morning.

Steve and I went along on one early visit to a sturdy establishment near the dig. There were a few solitary, mostly elderly drinkers, and the back of the main room, facing the big window on the river, held a small raised stage. I wandered in last and could only find one seat near the group, at an occupied adjoining table. I asked whether it was free, and a large, very relaxed lady with a lager in front of her said, "Go on and sit down, that's for me husband when he arrives to play the accordian." I did, and after a bit he did, and at that point our little group scattered like quail before hunters.

In general, we found ourselves too exhausted to go gallivanting at night, much as we loved the hard cider (neither Steve nor I could drink the famous local beers and ales, with this gluten-allergy thing we both have to deal with now). The presence on some pub windows of flyers about something called "Pubwatch", a voluntary program aimed at creating a commitment to cracking down on fighting in and around pubs, wasn't exactly alluring.

This is an area of heavy immigrant settlement. A few weeks before our arrival there had been a race riot in Bradford, another north country town, splashy enough to make the major papers (I had read about it in the Guardian, at home). My bet is that one way or another, it started in a pub. We were warned to stay away entirely from the pubs in Newcastle, up the river.

I did go to a basement room in one South Shields pub — it was crowded with an attentive audience of cheery friends and neighbors — for a meeting of the local society devoted to the study of the paranormal. The ceiling was low, the air rapidly became smoky, and when the subject turned out to be not the regional ghost stories I had hoped for but UFO chatter that sounded as if it mostly came off the usenet, I slipped away again.

Most evenings, Steve and I walked home to the lively and delicious dinners provided by Caroline Wilson, our local host. We would browse the daily papers, talk a bit, and then retire to our upstairs room to read, write letters, or watch British TV.

TV was a lot better than what I remembered from our last visit, a decade or so ago. We avoided the boring and puffed up "Weakest Link" and the occasional US import in favor of police dramas like "The Bill". There was also a far-fetched murder mystery called "Take Me", with the rather delicious Robson Green, that went on endlessly and on unpredictable nights. It seemed to be about a professional man caught up in a murder at a wife-swapping party, a sort of British, pushed-to-the-edge-and-over "Eyes Wide Shut", only with teeth.

We also took the odd soak in bath salts, me for my mysterious ankle injury and Steve for a hurt knee. A dig offers uneven and treacherous surfaces to walk on to and from your own patch, even worse when it's clay that's been wetted down (by rain, or on purpose to soften the stuff for digging). New volunteers are always warned about the dangers of "slips and trips" on the site.

We talked to Caroline's parrot, a beautiful African grey named Jasper who, proudly displayed in company, sits on her shoulder and kisses her lips right there in front of everybody. She says she went to a pet show, found him there, and couldn't resist; he was eight, but with the calm and restraint of a much greater maturity in my opinion.

Jasper would not talk to us, being much too dignified to perform for strangers. On the other hand, while sitting on the stairs on our last sunny morning at Caroline's waiting for a ride to Newcastle, I traded some whistles and chirps with Jasper through the closed door of his personal quarters (the door was always shut as this room was part of the living space of Caroline's family). I was rewarded at last by a queer, mechanical-sounding voice saying, "Ready? Steady," followed by a sound like cars revving up and racing off. Jasper watches TV with the family and sings along with his favorite commercials. Apparently when the set is off he provides his own entertainment.

Sometimes after dinner we walked along the next street seaward, which rises along the crown of a bluff that looms over the beach and the mouth of the Tyne below. Along the bluff's edge and down its face runs a beautiful green parkland, right down to the beach itself. From up there you look out onto the North Sea, a dark blue band that forms the eastern horizon.

Steve and I took a local bus down to Sunderland, the next big town south of us, on the first weekend. The seaside park ran all along this magnificent coast, left as a wild but public green for people to stroll in and walk their dogs for the several miles between the two towns.

Riding at the front of the upper deck to see the scenery on the way back, we were invaded by yelling, hyperactive pre-adolescent boys on their way somewhere, it wasn't clear where; no wonder nobody else was siting up there! One of the boys turned suddenly to us and asked us where we were from and how we liked it around here. We told him.

He said, " It's crap, where we live!"

I mumbled something about it all looking pretty wonderful to us, coming as we did from a very dry, comparatively empty place in the world. After that we were ignored, and rightly so; I should have invited him to tell us why it was crap, but frankly I had so much trouble understanding his dialect that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to respond sanely to anything more complex than "It's crap, where we live!"

Eithne told us later on that it's not so easy to see the poverty here, because low income housing — the "estates" — tends to be prettily designed on the outside and the nearby countryside is so beautiful. Steve reminds me that dumping on your home area is a way of distancing yourself from it by declaring your own standards to be higher, to be fitting to someone better located, as you hope one day to be yourself.

The Tyneside is not a tourist magnet; there's something of the sense of a struggling poorer cousin to the the richer southern counties, putting its best foot forward to try to attract visitors but not expecting much. This is part of the area of the shut-down coal mines of Billy Elliott and of football hoolidgans, the homeland of the Geordies (natives of the Tyneside, who live where Scots and English fought from castle to castle for generations), and locale of the largest shopping mall (Gateshead, across the Tyne from Newcastle) and the largest cathedral (York Minster, though that's a bit of a stretch southward) in Europe.

This is no slumworld, at least not where we were; I've seen scarier streets in Edinburgh. Urfa Terrace, where we stayed, is one of a number of handsome neighboring streets, the minute and steep front yards beautifully tended and bright with flowers. Caroline's family travels frequently. Her mum went off on a junket to Paris and back while we roomed at Dunlin House, and came home as gregariously cheery and comfortable as when she went. Caroline herself takes her kids to Florida every year to visit relatives there.

And it's far from your isolated wuthering heights country as well. There's an internet cafe in the middle of town that's pretty busy, running off the homesite of Newcastle University; I used it myself several times to read mail.

In fact we saw a news piece on TV about how some towns in the area have linked up a network of computers in neighborhood pubs, so that whole villages can chat together of an evening while downing their ale; extensions are now being considered to link some of those smaller networks together.

The folks we watched were competing in a quiz with another pubful of patrons in another neighborhood, and the atmosphere (insofar as you can get atmosphere from a TV screen) was convivial. The same local net makers are busy designing homepages for their towns to help draw tourists with an inside-view of the attractions to be found here.

The north is hard-bitten, wary, depressed on account of unemployment, and inclined to heavy-handed reliance on drink, but there's no lack of energy, humor, and imagination. I only wish Americans could work up enough local solidarity to do something similar to the pub-nets here.

But the US doesn't have the same acceptance of serious neighborhood hangouts where you do much of your social living (as opposed to our habit of cocooning yourself in your home with your personal, private TV or computer). Endlessly emphasizing "the family" and "the individual" at the expense of the community exacts a range of heavy prices, about which we complain endlessly of course; but the vast majority of Americans shy away from anything that provides a communal value, in which all share and for which all pay (parks, arts and music in the schools, a strong public health system — getting all the buildings to display their numbers, for pete's sake, so you can find a goddamned restaurant at night without half-killing yourself and the driver behind you!).

Never mind; end of rant. But I am a Liberal, and it breaks out now and then. I believe that by junking our communal values and interdependence in favor of a mad-eyed pursuit of social Darwinism and wealth, we have been tearing out our civilization by the roots. What I saw a good deal of in England (and what I see in most other countries) is the positive power of people acting together in their shared interests, instead of the ruinous every-man-for-himself mentality so prevalent here at home.

Damn it, end of rant, I say!

For now, anyway.

When our digging stint was through, we were given a mini-tour of the castles of this coast — there are many — by our English team-member Eithne, as a parting treat.

She drove us to Warkworth Castle where we found the village flower show and fete in full swing, including a colliery band playing on the castle sward inside the outer walls (all that's left of the coal mines now seems to be the bands that each of them used to have, subject of a recent film called Brassed Off). These fellows took off their uniform blazers and sat on folding chairs to play marches and Lloyd Webber tunes, among others. In a long tent that included among its exhibits a little horse made of fruits and vegetables pinned together with toothpicks (carrot legs, kiwi for a head, potato body, mane and tail of broccoli and kale), the entries in the baking contest were sealed off under plastic film for obvious reasons. Some of the quiltwork was spectacularly detailed and fine (well, those long winter evenings while the North Sea storms rage . . . ).

An elderly gent at a corner table talked to an attentive crowd about the display of walking sticks he had carved beautiful ornamental handles for — "They're none of them for sale, because then I'd have none to show." He was not a stick maker, he explained; a stick maker carves animal figures and other ornaments and glues them onto a walking stick's handle. This man had all the tools and stages of his craft laid out on his table to clarify his description of how he carves the handle and its ornamental sculpture (a duck, a fox stalking a bird) out of a single ram's horn, which has the necessary handle-type curve built into it. Then he fastens the complete piece to the upper end of the chosen stick.

He is a stick-dresser, maybe the last one, and proud of it. His audience all but salivated over the fine handiwork he showed them, and he clearly took great pleasure in tempting them with beauties that they could not have.

Outside the tent, a team of three men worked hard and fast at demonstrating the raising of a short section of drystone wall, two outer courses of roughly fitted rocks with smaller, rubbly stones wedged in the middle as fill. On a table nearby I found a display of pamphlets about how to build and maintain various sorts of stone and earthen walls, arts that are in danger of dying out if not actively promoted. If you drive along roads edged with similar walls with a New Englander, she will tell you that the stone walls crisso-crossing that countryside are dilapidated because people with the skills to mend them are few, far between, and horribly expensive.

Right next-door, as it were, another man had set six peeled poles, each about five feet tall, into holes evenly spaced along a single hefty log lying on the ground at his feet. He took a lengthy willow sapling from a nearby pile, split it down its length with a wide-bladed knife, and then wove it between the uprights, making a hurdle or woven panel that could become a section of a wall of wattle and daub wall (the same with clay slapped onto it over the woven splits).

There's a section a wattle and daub on the Arbeia site, a poor, scrawny, crooked thing, that clarified for me just what this thing is that I've found mentioned so often in British novels. Here it was in an elegant and sturdy form: hard work, by the look of it, particularly turning the split sapling around the end-pole, which involved not just a turn but a good strong twist to help anchor it so it wouldn't spring back up along the pole. The craftsman was wide-built man with long blond hair and beard, and it didn't take a writer's imagination to set him in some ancient coastal village with Viking settlers in its population.

He says he sells his woven panels to people for ornamental walls and fences in their yards and gardens. I'm reminded of Ronald Blythe's wonderful book about a rural English village, Akenfield, in which he tells a story of the local blacksmith who survived by making the transition from being a true farrier and tool-maker to producing ornamental iron work and horse brass for the trimming of modern homes, hotels and pubs.

Next door again on the green outside the exhibitions tent, I paid my fifty p. at the coconut-shy and managed to blast my final green tennis ball right over the top of the booth. The fellows running the little tent (for local charities) gave me an extra round free, out of pity.

"What do I get if I win?" I said, squinting dubiously at the three coconuts I was supposed to knock off their stands with the tennis balls.

"Nothin'," replies one of them with a grin. And nothin' it was.

Behind the exhibition tent, at the castle's toilets, I was swamped by a voluble mob of women all speaking Italian. Steve told me later that he had inquired and learned that they were on a tour from Torino, so I guess the fame of the northeast as a tourist mecca reaches further than I had assumed.

Inside the castle itself, a great hollow stone shell sitting on a steep knob of earth and rock, huge and colorful flower arrangements set off the gloomy halls and passageways. The inner rooms are relatively undamaged, and some have been used as film sets (I think Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves was mentioned in the notices on the walls). I got lost more than once, even though the castle isn't large; everything connects with everything else, but many dead ends turn you back again.

From the upper window slits you can look out over the countryside, dotted with sheep (that aren't infected with foot and mouth yet). I had another English experience of beautiful green sweeping pasture and hedge and woodland, all off-limits, from those modest heights.

There was no stopping for lunch near Warkworth that late in the afternoon, everything being either booked up or shutting down for the day, but I spotted a sign for an old coaching inn as we tootled along northward, and we turned back and off our road, toward Lesbury, to find it. The proprietor was just taking in his slate sign offering lunch as we pulled up at about 3 pm, but kindly whipped us up a lunch anyway — first-rate steak and kidney pie, salads for Eithne and Anne, fish and chips for Steve — while one of the drinking patron's sheepdogs begged a belly-scratch from each of us in turn.

We went on to Bamburgh Castle, a vast, rambling pile on another, more northerly headland. Eithne, who has severe arthritis at too young an age, parked up close in the handicapped parking, but not actually in the courtyard as she had done once before — that was booked for a wedding.

We made our way to the great hall where she settled down to wait for us in her wheelchair — she's toured Bamburgh before — and Steve and I and Anne, the eldest of the Earthwatch team who was sightseeing with us, drifted through the public rooms full of arms-displays and other furnishings, museum-style. But in this case there were also family photos set out on some of the tables and sideboards, and stories posted on the walls, about the Armstrongs (who restored the place after its decline in the age of gunpowder) and their successors.

Makes the place feel lived in (which it is); odd, though, to realize that Joseph Armstrong, he who took on the immense task of reclaiming the place from ruin, made his money as an armaments magnate. He owned Vickers, of the famous wartime Vickers aircraft, and was no doubt the sort of person — if not the exact person — G.B. Shaw had in mind when he castigated arms dealers in his stage plays as the chief villains of modern civilization.

As we left near 5 p.m., closing time, the wedding guests were striding up the steep drive into the main courtyard: dashing young things in formal attire and gowns much too light and flimsy for the brisk late-afternoon breezes, and several young men looking formidable and robust in their dress shirts and kilts. Is it that only men with tough-looking legs, slightly bowed with muscle, wear kilts, or do kilts make a man's legs look stouter?

Steve and I now turned to the last phase of our trip: a stay at the Thistle Hotel in Newcastle, right across from the large, handsomely renovated 19th C railroad station. We planned to get around from there by train, sightseeing in the area before heading home. The weather turned rainy, but not enough to put us off a ride to Durham, which is (as promised in any guide-book you care to pick up) one of the prettiest towns ever seen, although in fact it's not that easy to see it all at once except from the railroad station which is situated above the town itself. Durham is built on the hilly banks of a small, steep-sided river and crowned by its Norman gem of a cathedral (and another castle closed to visitors — for a wedding!).

A word about Norman church architecture: Steve and I first encountered this in bulk, as it were, in Sicily almost two decades ago. We love it. Yes, we know it represents ruthless conquest and bullying triumphalism on the part of Norman knights with a Christian bee in their bonnets; but there is something about that forthright, severe style that appeals to us. It seems to oddly homey, maybe just because it's basically building on a human scale, sturdily planted, in the case of Durham Cathedral, at one end of the long Palace Green, which is itself flanked and enclosed by pretty rows of houses leading up to the cathedral like the two lines of an honor guard.

We joined a tour led by someone we would call a docent in America, an elderly lady wearing a flowing red garment over her dress like a British student gown and a badge that read, "Durham Steward". She paced those stony spaces like a medieval churchman herself, slowly, patient and imperturbable, with her neat hands clasped together at waist level, while she lectured.

She showed us the tall 16th C clock at one end of the transept and asked us what was odd about it. None of the twenty or so tourists in the group spoke up, so she pointed out that the five-minute divisions were only marked for four minutes each in a decorative rather than an accurate way, commenting that in those days people counted the hour out in halves or quarters, finding that sufficient; "The minute hadn't been invented yet."

The minute hadn't been invented yet! I loved it. I still love it. It's the kind of observation that an SF author treasures.

A tall young woman with an Indian cast of feature asked, at the end, about the number of monks who had occupied the living quarters at Durham in its heyday. Forty or so, she was told, in an enclosed order committed to doing nothing but praying at the prescribed intervals, all day, every day, alone. They had no congregation.

Forty men spending all their time that way and not even a steady crowd of worshipers to serve — so for what did they live here, doing that all their lives, for whom?

"Why, for the Glory of God," replied our Steward, with a razor-edge of rebuke clipping her mild, cultured voice.

In Durham we found a little tea shop in a courtyard off the main street that served a fresh Greek salad and had a no-smoking sign in its lower room; the British, thank god, are getting more considerate about the lungs of citizens as well as visitors who are not tobacco addicts. This quiet, cozy place sheltered us very conveniently through a brief, hard shower of rain. We took a taxi back to the local station — it's up a ferocious hill and over a bridge, on the site of another castle that was razed to make room for the railroad — and once back in Newcastle we crossed the street and were "home" in our upstairs room with the pitched roof and dormer window. What a deal!

Of course at night, the weather being so warm that we had to keep the window open, we were treated each evening to the shouts and roarings of traffic and drunken pub-crawlers and, every single night, the screech of sirens; but we were high enough above the street to live with it, and the yells and laughter always ended at midnight. I pictured the revelers (and the scrappers) turning into pumpkins on the stroke of the hour. Newcastle recently was publicized as the number-one party town in northern England, I think it is, and is still trying to dig itself out from under that reputation.

York is only an hour south, but for some reason neither of us was in a great rush to visit. We expected mobs of tourists and traffic there. So we went to Berwick-upon-Tweed instead, and took a tour of the great star-shaped bulwark of grassy, earthen walls surrounding the inner town. The idea of earth walls makes perfect sense, once you realize that the cannon balls that can pound a stone rampart to pieces simply sink into a thick dirt bank and disappear.

Another beautiful day, a town struggling on the one hand to build up its tourist industry on the strength of its beautifully preserved and tended walls, and on the other, we gathered from the guide's wry comments, to stay the same; "Of course nothing much ever happens in Berrick," he said with sigh. He was from Durham, originally, and spoke of it longingly even while manfully boosting Berwick, his adopted home.

The train trip to Berwick was notable for something unexpected. On the way up, the train pulled into a little country station and an announcement was made: if there was a doctor on board, would he come at once to car D, please? A young man in a green shirt a few seats down from us got up and hurried down the aisle. The rest of us sat for a very long time, trapped in our car with a deformed and possibly demented young woman passenger who kept uttering loud, formless yowls of protest from her seat. The woman with her, who pushed her chair and tied on her napkin and fed her and wiped her mouth, kept whispering in her ear that she must hush, but the response to this was minimal.

I felt for them both, I have to say, and wondered whether the intermittent squalling and violent shaking of the younger woman's head was an expression of anger at the delay, or perhaps a response to the anxiety and uncertainty in the air. I was angry, myself; this inchoate howling, at close quarters and without much let-up, was very distressing to everyone.

I stepped outside at last, as much to get away from the yelling as anything else, and asked someone — other people were standing on the platform, train staff and some passengers — what had happened.

A passenger, an old lady, had had a heart attack, and was being taken to the nearest hospital, I was told, as a crew of people hurried by pushing a stretcher on wheels. It carried a small, gray-haired woman in a sweater and skirt with an oxygen mask over her face. They got her over the fence alongside the platform with great difficulty, to be loaded into the bright yellow helicopter that had landed there in a farmer's field — the helicopter couldn't be set down in a more convenient spot (the car park of the station, say) because of the dangers of overhead wires on that side.

"Poor thing," said the railroad woman I was talking with, "she was on her way to Berwick with her family on an outing, and she said she wasn't feeling well when she got on, but she didn't want to wait and see a doctor. I greeted her on her way into the dining car, but she no sooner sat down than she collapsed. I think she was already gone when the medical people got to her. But they have to try everything they can to help her all the same, of course."

One of the younger relatives, a son, I think, got into the helicopter to go with the old lady to the hospital (the rest were to follow by car). Up and away then, while people watched, including a man in Wellingtons standing in his field that had been used as an emergency landing pad; the train trundled on, the lives of strangers having caromed off each other at a moment of crisis and diverged again.

The next day, we gave in and went to York (life being short, and you may only pass this way but once). The Minster is immense, and it's got that cake-icing stonework all over it that takes your breath away with the sheer intricacy of it — a sort of northern analog to the black and white marble inlays on the surfaces of southern churches like the Duomo in Florence, maybe. Steve suggested walking around the building first, to get a feeling for its size and grandeur, and he was right; it makes a very powerful impression.

This is a different sort of place altogether than Durham: it's not about earth and earthly authority at all, but about Heaven, every line soaring upward and drawing your eye and heart with it; unlike that Norman stomp of columnar strength that says, "We're here, we're strong, get used to it."

From inside the choir, which was closed to the public and guarded by a white-gowned church functionary, voices rose. The singing threaded through the high volumes of space with unearthly sweetness (I know, it's a cliche, but I can't for the life of me think of better words). We wandered, staring upward at the intricate stained glass, the twining stonework.

But I liked Durham better. I kept thinking of the altar-like table all the way at the back of Durham Cathedral, draped in a modern tapestry on the subject (abstractly) of St. Cuthbert and a couple of his fellows, all in overlapping scale-like forms of glistening gold-edged white, or delicate gray, yellow, and blue. The only place I saw anyone praying was there: a family of visitors, French by their conversation, sat on the benches across from this brilliant alter and the bearded dad got down on his knees and put his hands together, looking across at that magnificence, and spoke softly for a time.

In both churches we couldn't help noticing the notices and displays posted prominently at the entrances, explaining how many thousands of pounds it takes to keep each one running per month. The people who love these beautiful buildings are struggling to keep them alive; hence the gifty shops and bookshelves, and offerings boxes everywhere. we did some happy shopping in the Minster souvenir shop, finding excellent gifts for people back home (their website is www.yorkminster.org).

The city of York itself we decided to save for another time; most people we know who've visited it praise it extravagantly, but we were put off by the crowds and the sheer size of the place (we took a half hour bus tour right from the train station, to get a sense of the city). Maybe we'll go back.

We spent our last free morning taking a walking tour of Newcastle itself, which was a lot more interesting than I think either of us had expected. Selena, a teammate at the dig, had taken it and had recommended it highly; a good tip. Our tour guide was a wiry older man with an enthusiastic interest in his subject, and although there were only four of us — another couple joined us, vacationing from the south of England — he gave us the full work-out, from the magnificent Edwardian shopping mall (nothing from the outside, but a glory of fine woodwork and old-fashioned shop windows inside) to the courtyard of an old coaching inn now surrounded by the town itself, to — what else? — the castle and the traces of a Roman fort. If you are ever in Newcastle with a morning to spare, I recommend the tour as a rich serving of the history of the real, living course of an English town's past.

Then back on the train to London, a sweaty trudge to the Thistle at King's Cross which is not at King's Cross at all but blocks away from the station. It's cheap, for London, and we got seriously lost trying to find our room; but our tiny room had real air conditioning, a prize in that unseasonably hot weather.

There is also a good Italian restaurant across from one end of the hotel, on a corner (nope, can't remember the name — damn!). The waiters do rather make a performance of their echt-Italianness but the food is good and the espresso is excellent. The matter of true ethnicity in restaurants is important in England; I'll never forget eating the flattest Indian meal I've ever had in a little place in Brighton some years back, and only catching on at the end to what should have tipped me off: the waiters were all young, and spoke with English accents. It only takes a generation for a foreign taste in food to vanish, apparently.

Finally it was time to go to the airport. Our cabbie told us he couldn't get to King's Cross Station (which connects directly with Heathrow via train, that's why we had chosen that "nearby" hotel) because of the surrounding Chunnel-related construction. A good fellow, he found us an alternate route.

It stunk. A word to the wise: Do not take the Heathrow bus. It shuffles leadenly through the absolutely packed city traffic, doubling back this way and that, making at least a dozen stops in town (we got on near Russell Square, early in the run). When it finally arrives at the airport it tools around Heathrow itself for what seems like ages before you are dropped at your terminal.

But dropped, at last, we were; and home we came. And three and a half weeks away was exactly right.

Can't wait to go digging again.

Next time, I want doubloons.

--SMC
September 4, 2001