Jenni Mills - The Buried Circle

Close to the door of the pub, a black 4×4 has drawn up, an orange and white logo on the side: Overview TV. My heartbeat begins to quicken. A woman in a maroon suede jacket and a black polo-neck is unloading a cardboard box from the tailgate, and I follow her in.

Every time I come into the Red Lion, breathing in a comforting smell of beer and cigs and chips, I remind myself that this is where it all began, the renaissance of Avebury, in the inn at the heart of the circle. It’s 1934 or thereabouts. The Marmalade King has, as usual, booked every room in the pub for his staff, and is digging the West Kennet Avenue. Late one night Stuart Piggott is woken by AK hammering on the door of his room. He bursts in like a force of nature. I know what I have to do, he announces–it’s always a have to with AK, always an announcement–I’m going to buy up the whole village. I imagine him lighting a cigarette, pacing up and down Piggott’s room, ignoring the startled archaeologist in the bed and staring through the walls to the dark landscape beyond. Yes, he says, I’ll buy up as much of the place as I can and devote my life to the study of Avebury.

This afternoon the tables in the snug have been rearranged, with chairs facing a screen set up on the far wall. Almost every seat is filled, and the curtains have been drawn, though it’s not yet dark. A young man with deep-set, intense eyes is standing behind a TV camera on a tall tripod, panning round the room and filming people at the tables. They nudge each other and whisper every time they catch the lens pointing their way–no doubt why the cameraman’s jaw is clenched with frustration.

At the back of the room is a long table with a reserved sign. The woman in the suede jacket has set down the cardboard box and is laying out DVDs in neat piles. She glances at me and smiles, as if she knows me, but it’s the professional smile of the TV person, warm and inclusive and utterly meaningless.

‘Hello, girl,’ says a voice beside me, and there’s John, at a table by himself, with a pint at his elbow and the usual scrawny rollup smouldering in the ashtray. ‘Orright? Come and park yourself with me.’

I sit down, checking to make sure I won’t obstruct anyone’s view of the screen, since I’m half a head taller than most women in the room. ‘Didn’t think you’d be here.’

‘Couldn’t miss a chance to appear on the telly.’

‘They aren’t going to be interested in you,’ I say, watching where the dark-eyed young man is pointing his camera. ‘They want people like the Rawlins brothers, who are in the film. You going to spin them your idea about a northern avenue?’ Not that I believe for a second that John’s enthusiasm for dowsing is likely to reveal the archaeological discovery of the decade.

He shakes his head. ‘Get your mates at the National Trust to take the idea seriously and do a full geophysical survey’

‘On the say-so of a mad old hippie with a pair of bent coat-hangers?’

‘You’ll be laughing the other side of your face when I make the cover of British Archaeology! He takes a mouthful of his pint, and tucks back a strand of greying hair that has escaped his ponytail. In 1982 he had short hair and a rifle that killed an Argentinian in the Falklands. ‘No point, though, in pitching it to this TV crew. They’re only interested in Keiller.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Don’t be nave, Indy–you used to work in the business. Telly people get an idea in their heads, that’s the programme they make, never mind the truth. They’ll turn him into a bloody archaeological saint.’

‘Well, he was, wasn’t he, as far as Avebury’s concerned?’

John snorts. ‘Archaeological Satan, more like. He’s the reason you didn’t grow up in a posh house in the village.’

‘You make it sound like it was personal,’ I say. ‘He was only…’

‘Trying to achieve a vision? So was Hitler, round about the same time.’

The camera fixes its cold fishy eye on us, but only for a moment. The cameraman has decided we’re the wrong age to be interesting tonight. Instead the lens settles on Carrie Harper, chair-to-the-parish-council (all said quickly on one breath so you won’t mistake her for something that can be bought in Ikea), resplendent in orange cable knit and a pair of flared jersey trousers that probably date from her heyday in the seventies. But the rustles and whispers have reached a pitch: a man with white hair strides to the front, by the big plasma screen that’s usually for the football. He waves the remote control at us, like a conductor’s baton, and the room falls silent.

‘Welcome,’ he says. ‘We’re going to show you a film. I could tell you what it’s about, but I think most of you know far better than I do.’ The oldies laugh; go on, Mister, flatter us, we like that. ‘It was found at the back of a wardrobe, six months ago, and eventually ended up at my production company for cleaning and transfer to DVD.’ He looks round, taking in their rapt faces, and smiles, a broad grin, directed at them but also at the camera with its pulsing red light. ‘It’s rather special, because it’s a record of the way this village was in the late 1930s. Some of you are in it, and that would be interesting enough in itself. But, more importantly, it opens a window on a critical year for archaeology.’

John turns and winks at me.

‘Nineteen thirty-eight. A year in which Avebury was transformed by the man we’ll see on this footage. We’re going to film you as you watch it, as part of a documentary we’re hoping to sell to Channel 4 or the BBC. Everyone happy?’ Nods and grunts, presumably enough to count for assent. ‘Right. Let’s run it.’ He raises the remote and presses play.

White scratchy lines flicker over a black background. A square of light appears, not quite filling the screen. I’ve been expecting one of those countdowns you see on old cine film, 5-4-3-2-1, or at least a clock with a sweeping second hand, but the picture’s there immediately, and Percy Lawes himself swaggers up to the camera, Jack-the-lad puffing on his cigarette with a knowing smile, enjoying his Hitchcock moment. Frannie remembers him: he figures in her stories of the old days. He was the son of the landlord of the Red Lion, thought himself a bit smarter than the rest, with his little hat and his cine-camera. He went off to Calne or Chippenham or somewhere like that to be a piano teacher, then died a bachelor, and his films would have died with him, except his nephew was curious about the contents of the battered film cans he discovered while clearing his uncle’s effects. On the screen Percy doffs his hat, as if he knows we’re going to be watching in his dad’s old pub nearly seventy years later.

The picture jumps and there’s the village street, not the same as today but recognizable. A dozen or so kids come running up the lane, right up to the camera, laughing. All the people in the audience break out talking and nudging each other, all these old people who are seeing themselves suddenly as they were then . There’s one old lady crying, and in the flickering TV light I can make out in the audience’s faces some of the same features that show on the screen, blurred now with age, plump rosy cheeks that have slipped like melting Christmas candles down their faces, eyes that are clear in then milky now with cataracts.

It’s the little kids who are crowding close to Percy’s camera, but behind them a few older ones hang back, giggling. Could that be Frannie, her hand over her mouth to hide her grin, with a bobbed hairstyle like the Queen wore when she was a princess? Too late, the scene’s changed, racehorses being walked out along the high street to the Gallops, long-gone Classic winners whose bones now moulder under the downland.