Welcome

My Fenland garden in the autumn

I don’t know how you discovered this site, but I’m glad you did. There’s all sorts of stuff here.  I’ve been an archaeologist for over forty years and have excavated several major sites, mostly in the Fens of eastern England. I’ve also tried to bring archaeology to a wider audience, with a number of books, radio and television programmes, of which Time Team is the best known. When not writing or digging, I’m also a sheep farmer and keen gardener. But like most people, I get bees in my bonnet – obsessions, call them what you like. Most of  my worries are about the general disregard for the achievements of people in the past and the failure of politicians, both local and national, to learn the lessons of  history. Hence the title of this blog: In The Long Run. So to sum up, this will be the place to see stuff about archaeology, gardening, farming and rural life, books, broadcasting, history and the occasional intemperate rant. It won’t be very formal, because I don’t ‘do’ formality. But I do hope it’ll be fun.

Nearly A Real Writer!

If I am completely honest with myself (something I try to do as infrequently as possible) I’ve always wanted to be a real writer. ‘But you are!’ I hear my sheepdog Twink bark loyally from outside my office’s open window. But what does a mere bitch know about such lofty aspirations? If I’d asked her opinion about flushing stuck lambs out of a half-blocked culvert in a dyke, I might have taken her seriously. But no, not literature: that was never her strong point. But to answer her implied question, I am an author, specialising in archaeology and landscape history – and that’s not the same thing at all. It’s not quite as lowly as writing something like historical romances, bodice-rippers, that sort of thing, but it’s nowhere near the literary stratospheres. Great literary critics would never waste their talents discussing the merits of a book like The Making of the British Landscape. And why not? Because it’s not ‘literary’ in the accepted meaning of the word. It’s ‘factual’ or ‘non-fiction’. And if I may allow myself a brief rant (and digression, which I promise not to prolong), why is it considered OK to label a genre as massively huge in both volume and scope as ‘non-fiction’ by describing  it in negative terms; by what it isn’t?  It’s rather like calling serious novels ‘non-thrillers’ or even better, ‘non-non-fiction’. End of digression.

Real writers write fiction and/or poetry. I once wrote a short poem when I was about twelve, but then I read it again in the morning – and I realised I’m no John Keats. Make no mistake, I love poetry, but that doesn’t make me a poet. Now, however, things are about to change. I’ve written a work of fiction, The Lifers’ Club and when/if it’s published, I already have plans for another. So will I shortly become a fully-fledged writer, rather than a mere landscape and archaeology author? Will I be able to go to Hay and hold my head high in the Green Room? Will I? Please say Yes someone.

And the answer to that question is indeed Yes, but first I must acquire some writerly accessories, and the first of these has to be a shed. Now I’ve published a view of my shed on the Unbound website and frankly it’s a disorganised tip and barely worthy of being called a hut. A bloody awful mess. Truly authorial. Nothing even remotely writerly about it. The likes of Philip Pullman or Roald Dahl wouldn’t be seen dead in such a place (sorry! Not in very good taste, but what the Hell…). Frankly it was deeply embarrassing and I’m very surprised I had the temerity to put it on the website at all (but Twink insisted, the bitch).

The Authors hut

Then yesterday I finished reorganising, or should that be plain, organising it. And it has been truly transformed.  I think everyone’ll have to agree it now looks highly writerly. And just in time for Hay! WHOOPEE! I can imagine setting my laptop on that potting table and dashing off a few Alan Cadbury short stories for the Literary Review, or Granta, or both.

The Writer’s shed

Now to have a writerly shed is one thing: I’ve also got to acquire some lovably eccentric traits for my future biographer, or, better, biographers to discuss at interminable length when I’m dead (maybe I’ll ask my cousin Charles Moore to do me ‘an official’ one, as he did such a good job for [or should that be ‘on’] Mrs. Thatcher). I’ve even asked Twink and she had nothing remotely sensible to suggest, but dropped a bone on my shoes – some sort of hint, I suppose. I then put the problem to Maisie who looked at me as if I was mad. ‘You could always say you loved zip-wires’, was all she could suggest, but I suspect she hadn’t really thought about it at all. Maybe I could claim I liked to sweeten my tea with WD-40 or RoundUp, but they don’t ring true, either. So if anyone has a bright suggestion to make, could they please either Tweet me (@PryorFrancis) or approach me in person or at the Unbound session at Hay-on-Wye? Now that I’m almost a writer, I’d dearly like to be remembered as ‘that lovable eccentric’. Or would I? Should I? God knows. Best ask Twink, as Maisie left the room about ten minutes ago.

For Where is Chatteris?

I can’t think that I’ve lived for as long as I have without discovering the band Half Man Half Biscuit. I thought my life was complete after buying the Leyton Buzzards’ double-sided classic ‘I Don’t Want to Go to Art School’ and ‘No Dry Ice or Flying Pigs’, which we got in 1979 or ’80, and then almost immediately wore it flat. But a couple of months ago our friends Kate and Ian gave us another Damascene Moment with the wonderful 1/2 Man 1/2 Biscuit CD, Achtung Bono, which doesn’t have a bad track on it. And I mean that: not one. Particular favourites of mine are ‘Restless Legs’, ‘Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo’ and the timeless classic, ‘’For What is Chatteris?’ – which is a very fair question.

Ever since I came out of the closet and confessed to the world that I’d written a crime novel, people have been asking me about my hero, Alan Cadbury. So far I’ve managed to find just one photo of him and I once caught a glimpse of his passport which stated he’d been born in January 1971. Maybe one day I’ll find out if he was born in hospital (probably I suspect, the Pilgrim, in Boston) or on the farm in the Lincolnshire Fens. But although I don’t want to give away too much about him at this stage (because I want you to subscribe to the book, if you haven’t done so already), I can confess that he has very eclectic musical tastes – far more so than his more celebrated, albeit fictional, colleague in crime, Inspector Rebus. Alan, like me, is a huge fan of 0.5 M.0.5 B., but I rather suspect he’s been into them for very much longer than my mere two months.

So just to give you a flavour of Chatteris, Alan and The Lifers’ Club, I thought I’d reproduce the two passages that mention the small Fenland market town, which today is in north Cambridgeshire, but is built almost entirely out of the grey/yellowish brick that’s so characteristic of (old) Huntingdonshire. Why oh why did they have to mess around with long-cherished identities, back in 1974? And ‘Humberside??!!’  I ask you! But I rant, nay, digress. Chatteris is just too far north of Cambridge for most commuters, so has retained its Fenland atmosphere. It’s also by-passed on two sides, so isn’t too congested, nor, I fear, too prosperous, either. The cliché is to describe such small towns as ‘sleepy’, but there are too many agricultural workers and a sharp easterly wind for that. It’s also famous for its fish-and-chips. Need I say more? So here are those extracts, which I’ve slightly doctored so as not to spoil the plot, if and when the book does appear. In the first, Alan describes where he’s currently living:

‘You’ve moved from Leicester?’ [Jake asked Alan].

‘Oh yes, seven years ago. After we’d finished the Flax Hole dig. I landed a big site near Peterborough and moved back to the Fens.’

‘Moved back? So you come from around here?’

‘Yes, I was brought up on a small farm near Crowland…’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’m at Tubney.’ Jake was none the wiser. ‘It’s a little village about ten miles away. Near Chatteris. I’m in a grim bungalow. Everything stinks of diesel…

‘Everything? Even the bathroom…’

‘Yes, even the phone. The place used to be owned by scrappies…’

Ali smiled ruefully.

‘Say no more. Sounds like you’d be better off in here…’

‘Except the village pub’s next door.’

Jake’s smile was neither hostile nor friendly.

‘Oh yes?’

‘The Hat and Feathers. I drink there most nights. Keeps me sane.’

‘So you’re OK, then.’

Somewhere outside a loud bell sounded and people started to leave through a door on the other side of the room. Jake glanced up at the clock on the wall, then said with some disdain:

‘I’d better be off. Feeding time at the zoo.’

The second extract is even shorter. It describes a pub about five miles from Tubney (so not the Hat and Feathers). It’s quite short, but then I don’t ‘do’ long moody descriptions. If you can’t say it briefly, then don’t say it at all. So here it is, all three paragraphs of it, again doctored in key places:

Alan hadn’t wanted to meet Lane at the college after the interview. He didn’t know why. It just felt wrong. There were too many eyes in that place, and if Jake managed to detect even the slightest hint that he was seeing the Law, then the whole project would be dead in the water. So he suggested the Old Slodger.

Traditionally, ‘slodgers’ were fenmen of the south Fens; ‘yellowbellies’ were their Lincolnshire equivalents. This pub was a small independent house with close links to a micro-brewery in Chatteris. Alan knew the beer was always good, the food plentiful and fresh, although a bit robust for London tastes, and the company relaxed. He liked it.

He walked into the bar. A couple of the locals said hello, but then they left him alone. That was another thing he liked about the Slodger: Fen people never crowd you. He ordered a beer and a round of sandwiches, then sat down, taking a copy of the local paper from a rack by the fire. He was starting to warm up and relax. After a quarter of an hour, half a pint and a doorstep sandwich, DI Lane entered.

Now I must go out and spray off some persistent creeping thistles. Next stop: Hay-on-Wye!

Grow Your Own. On Spuds and Broad Beans: Better Late than Never

Is the season at last starting to catch-up? If you’d asked me that a week ago, I’d have probably said yes. Now I’m not so sure, as I sit at my desk, with the south-westerly wind howling around the rafters.

In a normal year I plan to have my potatoes and broad beans planted by the end of March, if at all possible. Sometimes this might mean that the early potatoes go in, in the last week of the month, to be followed by the second earlies and early main-crop a week later (often over the Easter weekend). But there’s absolutely no point in planting potatoes if the ground’s too cold and (in this year) wet: they’d simply rot in the ground. So this year I planted them very late indeed – fully a month later than I would in a good year – on May 3^rd. The weather was reasonable and I managed to plant all of them, in five rows: one of first earlies, nearly two of second earlies and three of early main-crop. As I think I explained in earlier Grow Your Own posts, I don’t plant full main-crop spuds, as they mature late in the year and tend to get attacked by slugs in our heavy fen soil. I also refuse absolutely to use slug pellets as these kill toads and hedgehogs, both of which are currently very much in danger.

The secret of growing good spuds is to buy the seed early (I do this in early January) and then leave them on a sunny, frost-free windowsill to let the young shoots (or chits) form.

Potatoes chits after 4 months

Here you can see what to aim for: short, stout shoots, and ideally quite tight and dark; avoid fleshy ones. Then, and very carefully, I place them in the soil, in narrow grooves, or drills, about three to four inches deep and about a foot apart, or a bit more for main-crop varieties. Then cover them with a bank of soil scraped up from either side of your drill, with a pull-hoe or stiff rake (use the back). You’ll probably find that birds, and passing cats, dogs and hares will damage your neat ridges and if that happens ridge them up a few weeks later, ideally just before rain (which will tend to ‘glue’ the loose earth in place).

Seed potatoes in their drill

I usually tap the top of the banks covering the spuds flat, as this allows rain to penetrate better in this dry part of Britain.

You want to get your broad beans planted quite early in the spring to avoid problems in the summer caused by blackfly (like greenfly, they’re sap-sucking aphids), which runner beans are very prone to. So I’m a bit anxious that mine went in so late this year, but having said that, it’s currently far too cold and windy for aphids. So fingers crossed.

Soak your broad beans for at least 2 hours before planting, then I like to add a table-spoonful of ordinary paraffin to the wet beans, immediately before I plant them. This may sound mad, but I was told to do it by an old boy after I’d related how I’d lost 30% of my crop to mice. And I’ve never lost a plant since. Having said that, it’s the sort of thing the bureaucrats in the EC hygiene Gestapo are bound to object to. So don’t mention it to a soul.

Broad beans in their drill

Spread the broad beans evenly across a wide drill and cover with a couple of inches of soil – and make sure they’re all fully buried, or the birds will get them. Then you must keep them watered for at least two weeks. The same goes for your green peas, which I also like to get planted late in March, in normal years. They must be kept wet too (for what it’s worth, I also add a splash of paraffin to them, before planting).

I’ve just been out and taken pics of the beans and the spuds and I have to say I’m delighted by the results so far: germination seems to have been 100% successful. Isn’t growing your own a pleasure? I almost prefer it to writing…

Potatoes after three weeks

Broad beans after three weeks

Of Crowd-funding and Writing

Or should that be: on writing and crowd-funding? In other words, which comes first? I began musing along these lines when I finished Chapter 6 (of 10) in the book I’m currently writing for Penguin. I’d been discussing the impact of the huge and all-encompassing changes that happened in the two centuries on either side of 1500 BC. That was the time when henges, round barrows and other familiar sites and monuments of the Early Bronze Age and later Neolithic went out of use and were replaced by a series of much smaller-scale ritual sites, often associated with water and watery places. Now I don’t want to reveal what the book’s all about – as that might adversely affect sales (and provide free material for some TV documentary-maker to nick) – but as I pushed my laptop to one side and reached across the desk for my nearly-cold mug of tea, made an hour previously, it struck me that the old-style of publishing was a heck of a lot less stressful. Essentially you wrote books and if they sold, you wrote more. And all in all, it was a very relaxing business.

‘Yes, but did you have any contact with your readers?’ I hear a strangled cry from the cheaper seats.

In theory at least, I did, at book-signings in independent booksellers up and down the country, not to mention big events, like Hay-on-Wye, and more recently the excellent festival at Bath. But having said that, I was the one who stood at the front of the room and held forth. The audience listened, respectfully. Essentially I was declaiming; it certainly wasn’t a two-way process. After the talk, I may even have muttered a few well chosen platitudes as I graciously condescended to inscribe their books with my signature… But was it involvement in any meaningful sense of the word? Sadly, I now realise it wasn’t.

The more I have become involved with crowd-funding, the more I realise it’s actually about people. My readers – and what they want. It’s just like the DigVentures excavations. Those digs only work because of the people who take part. Yes, they pay, but they choose to pay. And they buy-in to the whole experience and contribute hugely to the project. And they give of themselves because nobody is ripping them off.  Look, would you expect to be admitted to the English National Opera at Covent Garden, for free, so why should a top-flight excavation be any different? And besides, there will always be ways to go on excavations for free, as a student or young person – just as my books will always be available (and even those published through Unbound) free, at libraries and over the internet.

So maybe in the future writers will have to quit their (award-winning in my case) desks and spend far more time with their readers, either on Twitter, or other social media, or face-to-face at inter-active sessions (rather than ‘lectures’) at places like Hay or Bath. Who knows, maybe purpose-built writers’ pubs and taverns will be built where the interested public could get to meet their favourite (or most loathed) authors? U.S. bookshops are already heading in that direction. No, I honestly don’t think that we’ve even begun to think about the implications that internet-based movements, like crowd-funding, might have on our lives in the future – or indeed on the evolution of urban landscapes.

One final thought: if you’re the sort of lazy, indolent half-wit who is always sponging off your friends and never contributes anything worthwhile to society, then you’re probably reading the correct blog for you. In The Long Run will be right up your street.  But put yourself in my position: how can I possibly fund my detective/thriller if half the crowd who are supposed to be funding it are sitting at home, stuffing their faces with canapés and Champagne while listening to Paul Jones and the Blues Band CDs (I’ll be at one of their concerts on Thursday (May 16^th), in the South Holland Centre, Spalding)? I mean how can I possibly succeed in this venture, let along achieve my next goal (60% funding), if everyone continues to sit on their back-sides with chequebooks and cards wedged firmly in their ever-tighter trouser pockets?? So to these people I say: break the habit of a lifetime and subscribe. It’ll change your life, forever. And who knows, we may even get to meet…

A Moment of Reality

I spent three years as a student at Cambridge and never did so many things. I never visited the Fitzwilliam Museum. I never went inside King’s College Chapel. And I never visited Madingley American Cemetery. I soon put the first two right and have been back to both many times since I left college, back in 1967, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I visited Madingley, together with friends from the Wisbech Society. And I’m so glad I went. I won’t say it was fun, because it was more than that; far, far more.

When we arrived it was overcast and windy, but slowly the sun won out and the weather improved. We got out of our mini-bus and slowly climbed the hill up to the great flagpole, flying the Stars and Stripes. It still felt strange to look up at what is essentially a foreign flag. Then we all turned round and there was a spontaneous silence as we were confronted by thousands of white crosses, below which was the grave of a dead person. Each cross carried the person’s name, rank and date of death and I couldn’t help but notice how many airmen died on certain dates in 1942 and ’43 – presumably on those vast thousand bomber daytime raids. And of course heaven alone knows how many crosses they left in their wake in Germany.

Beyond the crosses the land sloped down to the flat fields of the Fens, which spread for about forty miles, across to the Wash and the North Sea. It’s a landscape I know intimately and love dearly, but yesterday afternoon those crosses transcended everything – and, don’t worry, I’m not about to spout stuff about ‘the price of freedom’, or other clichés, but they brought home to me what it means to be human. You can’t avoid inconsistency and lack of logic. Mankind’s world is an irrational place. War is Hell and war is wrong, but sometimes you have to fight to prevent insanity taking over. That’s why those brave men and women died and the evil they fought was clear to all.

But the times we now live in have changed: threats and evils abound, but they are all different and require different answers and different solutions. Grand-sounding concepts like the War on Terror are totally misguided and will achieve nothing, other than to drive desperate people to greater levels of craziness and extremism. When I looked at those crosses I realised that the lessons of history are all-important. Nothing, but nothing, matters more. And if we close our eyes to them, we will be creating vast fields of crosses that would extend to the horizon, and beyond.

Hold Everything! Alan Cadbury Image Discovered

I’ve been trying to find a picture of Alan Cadbury because the nice people at Unbound thought I ought to give him some publicity in my blog, what with Hay-on-Wye coming up and everything. But when it came to looking through all my old film files and more recent digital images, I couldn’t find anything. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. The thing is, he’s notoriously camera-shy. But then I came across this shot taken on a quarry dig in the southern Fens about five years ago. Alan is the one in black, on the right. The two men are standing alongside a beautifully excavated Bronze Age barrow revetment bank (note the fine palaeosol with truncated B soil horizon – so typical of the early second millennium BC in the region).

I think Alan intends to use this picture for his Facebook page. Very unlike him to promote himself like this – but it’s a free world, I suppose. Or maybe someone has put him up to it? Or maybe even he’s using it as a clever ruse in a case he’s working on. I don’t know, but I must admit, I find it all a bit intriguing…

The Compassion of Solitude

I can’t imagine how grim it must be to be a senior member of the Royal Family and always in the public eye. I think it’s the difficulty of getting away from people that makes life in the modern world such hard work. When I emigrated to Canada in 1969 I was newly-wed, and even with a young wife by my side, I, we, found the loneliness of being in a strange new city almost overwhelming. Toronto seemed the coldest, most hostile place on earth – that is, for about three or four months, before slowly we began to make friends. It was then that I learnt the difference between solitude and loneliness: the first is achieved, the other is thrust upon you. But once you have experienced loneliness you are better able to appreciate solitude.

So why am I suddenly waxing philosophical when I ought to be writing about Alan Cadbury or the planting-out of my potatoes – or indeed some new archaeological revelation? It’s because I spent yesterday travelling in the Fens, on lonely Fen roads with vast stretches of empty fen dykes and horizon-to-horizon Fenland skies with clouds and sharp showers, swooping birds and towering pylons; even the many wind farms on the horizon looked exciting. It’s a solitary landscape, if ever there was one, and I find it’s good for the soul. Landscapes can do this for me: they provide a counter-balance to introspection; they lift and focus, yet they don’t shift your thoughts from where they want to go. I can’t find it within me to think of landscapes as sources of history and the understanding of ordinary people’s lives alone; these are mere academic justifications.

No, there’s far more to landscapes than rational thoughts: I find them more involved – wrapped-up, even – with my own life and ambitions. It’s strange, but I don’t find I’m travelling through a landscape, so much as with one; to me, they’re companionable and almost intimate – and very supportive in one’s darker moments. That’s why I find solitude in such surroundings feeds compassion and sympathy; it doesn’t instil jingoistic pride in Britain, or disdain for foreigners; if anything it fuels compassion. And for what it’s worth, solitude can be enjoyed with someone else, provided he or she is aware. That, surely, is the key to a long-lasting relationship: the ability to allow one’s partner time and space for solitude. And it’s becoming so difficult in this age of incessant Tweets and texts and emails – most of which are merely about the process of staying alive – of earning a living. Solitude, on the other hand, takes you way beyond all of that. But to where? I wish I could tell you, but it’s something you must discover, for yourself.