Jiffy

  Digger I always knew that I was becoming What I had wanted to be. By the calouses on my hands And by the worn curved blade on my trowel. The blade I used to slice the ground Soils of colours. Reddish Browns and greenish greys. Sands and clays, silts and grits. To every soil it's own sound Its own vibration Resonant with the stroking of my trowel. Cool damp smells Are trapped with me In the bottom of the trench Chalky bright and clinical Sand sweet and mellow Rotting vegetation dark and over ripe (Passing over quickly the toxic airs I've known) Sometimes I salivated When my blade cut through the soil Like a knife scooping butter From a butterdish. ( I still do when I think of it) With warm sunshine on my back Sound of birdsong in the woods nearby. My straight sided trench Spoil tip raised one side And the grass topping the layers In the carefully cleaned up section face. Showing horizontal bands Of colour and texture Broken and created By stones rocks and bricks The enduring ...

Drop-out In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were tales of building sites where Roman mosaics and structures were routinely machined through without any effort to record them taking place. In response to this destruction, which was mainly due to urban redevelopment, new road building, and the growth of quarrying that went with them, regional committees were set up across the country. These developed into what became known as the Rescue movement from which active organisations derived. These were set up in museums, in local government offices, as independent trusts or, occasionally, in universities. Funding was precarious, mainly coming from the Department of the Environment’s Ancient Monuments Inspectorate. These organisations created a role for people who would be willing and able to carry out archaeological fieldwork, which was another way of saying “digging”. The people who would do this work became known as archaeological “volunteers”, a title which suggests that he/she migh...

A Bournemouth Boy   1965 “I Can Wait! “ The shop was in Lower Charminster in Bournemouth, a suburb on a main road north out of town, amid a parade of other shops which included a bakers, a green grocers, a tobacconists and newspaper shop, car sales forecourt, and refrigerator salesroom. In this domestic parade was “Antiquities “, a small but bright and beautifully laid out shop selling Middle Eastern pottery and artefacts, some of which may have been thousands of years old. The proprietor of the shop was Michael Ridley, an archaeologist who I had known since I had been 13, perhaps two years before, when I first joined him on one of his excavations with the group of amateur archaeologists that he led, the Bournemouth Archaeological Association. My home was very close to the shop, just up the hill behind it, and it was not much of a detour to call in there on the way home from school. So that is what I did one day because I had something on my mind, and I wanted to get Michael’s advi...