Time Song – Searching for Doggerland by Julia Blackburn
Kate Hubbard
At a time when we’re attempting to detach ourselves from Europe, it’s worth remembering that until roughly 6,000 years ago – a mere blink of an eye in prehistoric terms – we were very firmly attached, by Doggerland, a marshy, fertile expanse, stretching from Suffolk to Holland, crammed with woolly mammoths and rhinoceroses, loud with birdsong and home to Mesolithic man.
Emerging after the last Ice Age, Doggerland only disappeared when warming temperatures caused sea levels to rise. Today the bed of the North Sea is littered with mammoth bones.
Julia Blackburn is an impossibleto-categorise writer, curious in every sense. Her subjects have included Napoleon, Billie Holiday, Goya and, most recently, the Norfolk fisherman and artist John Craske.
Like Threads, her book about the elusive Craske, Time Song is a quest, this time for a lost country. But this being Blackburn, it’s a meandering, pottering kind of quest that takes her from the east coast to Holland, Denmark and Gibraltar, meeting professional and amateur palaeontologists, archaeologists and museum curators along the way. Blackburn favours the sideways approach, and her writing has an air of abstraction, a naivety almost, which actually masks a careful attentiveness.
She’s a natural hunter-gatherer herself, always walking with an eye to the ground, in search of a fossil, a fragment of bone or a flint, always alive to the stories objects hold and the words people use, always ‘trying to see through the fact of absence’.
And she has a genius for the imaginative leap, for thinking her way into the past. In the Severn Estuary, she finds a rare flint – a ‘tanged point’, some 30,000 years old; as she holds
it, ‘A man is turning a white stone into a weapon that can spear a mammoth or a bison and, as he works on it, little chips of stone are flying off, black and white and grey like the feathers of marsh birds.’
Blackburn’s search takes her beyond Doggerland as she delves further back into prehistory and tracks down its enthusiasts. These are seemingly an odd bunch – peaceful and otherworldly, generous with information and gifts. When Ray and Gail present her with some two-million-year-old clam shells and a piece of fossilised wood, a typically Blackburnian exchange ensues: ‘ “You don’t mind if I give this, do you, dear?” “No, dear. It’s been on the side of the sink long enough.” They called each other dear, very sweetly, with a tenderness floating in the word.’
Someone else gives her a hair – bright red and pubic – from a mammoth. She visits Bob Mutch, who discovered the Pakefield flints, 700,000 years old and the earliest evidence of human habitation. Bob suffers from muscular atrophy and his assistant, Adrian, is autistic; apparently people with physical disabilities are particularly drawn to palaeontology – ‘You create your own reality and step into it.’
Such faintly surreal encounters are intercut with 18 ‘time songs’, where blank verse is used as a vehicle for telling stories or conveying what might otherwise be dry information – carbon dating for example. The songs are illustrated with delicate, scratchy, hieroglyphic drawings by a friend of Blackburn.
All too tricksy you might wonder? Too self-conscious? But it works. Blackburn’s books always have an element of autobiography; here Herman, her Dutch sculptor husband, who died a few years ago, hovers benignly, his absence, as she puts it, being ‘greater than his presence’. The Tollund Man, who lay in a peat bog for more than 2,000 years, and still has stubble on his chin, reminds her of Herman – the same ‘inward smile’. At one point, she sprinkles some of his ashes – granola-like – on to her bowl of yoghurt and tucks in, an act that startles her and us.
Thirteen thousand years ago, the Laacher See volcano erupted in what is now Germany, leaving 270,000 square miles of air thick with ash for years.
‘Could it happen again?’ Blackburn asks a scientist? ‘Very likely,’ he replies, and soon, since ‘such disasters are the natural consequence of lifting the weight of ice from the land’. Yet there’s nothing doomy about this book. Rather, it’s moving; indeed consoling. The director of the museum where Tollund Man resides says that seeing him every day makes him realise that death ‘is nothing to be afraid of’. Blackburn wonders ‘if it makes more sense to imagine infinity going backwards in time, rather than forwards’.
There’s something reassuring about being reminded that, whatever the causes, our changing climate is part of a continuum, that we’re just passing through and infinitely replaceable.