The girl-child had been found wandering, bewildered and alone in a tiny Corsican bay. With the war recently over, Europe was full of displaced children. One more stray was not particularly remarkable, nor was the nightmare confusion in the eleven-year-old's mind. No official questions were asked of the couple who offered her a home.
Slim, dark-haired, dark eyed Catulla, which according to the child was her only name, grew up among the rocks and sheep of her adoptive parents' small farm. Their early times together were difficult, the child had terrible visions of storms at sea and was often inconsolable. They gave her love and support as if she had been their own, reshaped her curiously archaic speech and sent her to the local school. Thankfully, as she grew and the traumas faded, her new life became full and satisfying. The nightmares changed to dreams, becoming a web of personal myths, their threads interweaving with the wonders of growing up in a modernising world. The only lasting damage was her constant fear of deep waters and the sea.
Catulla was intelligent and quick to learn. By the age of seventeen she had progressed as far as Corsica's schools could take her. Her love of ancient history, with which she had a most unusual empathy, took her to university on the mainland, where she studied archaeology and the evolution of ceramics. That was how the fates were able to close the first circle of her life. At the museum next to the university, among the treasures hidden from all but the most diligent researcher, she found a baked clay tablet. It had been discovered among the fragments of a Roman trading galley excavated in a cove on the north coast of Corsica. With a sudden jolt of excitement, she realised that this was the tiny bay where she had been found.
Her hands were unsteady as she examined the writing on the tablet. For her, one word stood out above all others. A most familiar name, the male version of her own. The message had been addressed to Catullus, a Decurion in the Isle of the Britons. Once her natural calm had returned, she began to wonder why the tablet had been found in the wreck of a home-bound trader. The excavating team had deduced its heading from evidence of a cargo of barley from Britain and grain laden ships were almost always on course for Ostia. The message tablet was broken, one corner was missing, but under the microscope it was obvious from the disposition of ferrite crystals that the fracture was ancient, probably made within months of the original firing.
A week later, she was again back in the archive, investigating a different strand in the argument of her thesis. This one led her into the racks holding a mass of smaller finds, some ceramic and some metallic. There she discovered the Bacchus. She would have passed it by, since the catalogue didn't mention pottery, however the site-code seemed familiar. Checking her notes she found it was the same as the tablet, another recovery from the Corsican wreck. The shock, as she opened the tattered cardboard box, was shattering. A chubby, charm-sized god of wine with nothing threatening about it. Nevertheless, it brought back the visions she had not had for years. The box had been on the bottom shelf, she had needed to kneel to open it. Now she was frozen in that position, in front of her the statue seemed to swell, filling her mind. She imagined herself surrounded by the bones of a ship, like a strange wooden temple. Then she found herself listening to the voice of a golden god:
“Close to the dock the Romans had built a large pottery,” announced the soothing tones of Bacchus, “Grain, you understand, like wine, is best transported in huge terracotta crocks and it is sensible to make them as close to the harvesting as possible. The potters diversified by making votive statues of the Roman's gods. For the anxious seamen, visiting the wharf, they did lucky dolphins and beakers for local wine. This work was overseen by the Decurion Catullus, who lived in a nearby villa with his wife and young daughter.”
“The daughter liked to play in the sparkling brook, a tributary to the river, where it passed through the woodlands upstream from her home. There she would swim and catch the flitting minnows or doddering water-snails. There too she met the golden boy, as she thought of him when they were not together in their garden of paradise. He was younger than her by a year or two. A blond cherub of a child, the son of a local artisan. They played and swam, climbed trees and confused each other with their contrasting native speech. He taught her the guttural language of the Iceni. She gave him a smattering of formal Latin. They laughed at each other's mistakes and he came to love her like an elder sister. She mothered him instead of her elegant Roman dolls. He was amazed at her prowess in the water and called her his wonderful mermaid.”
“The childhood idyll lasted all the year, then a baked clay tablet came to her father's villa. Its purpose was both as passport and official proclamation. The seaman who delivered it was unable to read, but since every Roman knew the shape of Augustus' seal, he appreciated the importance of his mission. Its instructions were to pack rapidly and return, promotion was waiting and a commendation for his tireless work. The nervous messenger dropped the tablet as he was handing it over. It fell among the warlike scenes of the mosaic floor and finished up between the feet of the image of Mars. Such an omen was most worrying and much contrition was shown by the clumsy man during his later career in the clay-pits. Sacrifices of grain-cakes and wine were made at the temple. Then Catullus and his family prepared to depart. The adults celebrated the Decurion's promotion with bacchanalian libation, but little time was left for the mermaid to say farewell to the golden boy. There were tears among the minnows during their last lingering swim.”
- Here the narrative seemed to stop and Catulla saw for herself, as if through the wrong end of a telescope: -
It is the next day. Her golden boy, unusually, is mooching through the pottery, disconsolately following his father as he goes about his tasks. In the rubbish heaps, among breakages and failures from the kiln, the boy finds two tiny broken terracotta statuettes. One is the goddess Minerva, but the poor girl has lost her legs. The other is the rear half of a dolphin. The boy, delighted with his finds, imagination flying ahead of him, races to the woodland pool in the bend of the stream. There in the folded roots of a waterside tree he builds a miniature shrine. A bower of curled down leafy shoots with a flat stone for its base. Carefully arranging the two pottery fragments he creates a mermaid goddess of his own and worships it in Latin.
- There the dream faded, slipping behind the soft narration of the god. Catulla shook her head in consternation, but still the voice continued: -
“Far away, on the stormy sea and bound for Gaul, the Decurion's daughter searched among her mater's jewellery. There she found a tiny golden Bacchus, a souvenir from some temple shop. Her mother laughed indulgently and gave it to her. The mermaid carried it away and in a nook of the rolling galley's passenger space she made a little house to converse with the sweet memories of her precious golden boy. The journey was long, once beyond Gaul the fragile vessel hugged the Iberian coast as it beat against the grey seas of the Atlantic. Then at last they passed between the Pillars of Hercules and entered the gentler Mediterranean ...”
- But that was as far along that narrative journey as Catulla could go. Whimpering in fear, she curled herself into a ball on the dusty archive floor. Beating it with her fist and crying, “But it wasn't gentle, it wasn't gentle ...”
They came running, the archivist and his assistant, lifted her tenderly and carried her to their little cubicle by the door. Her friends were called and took her home to the student hospice. For two days she remained locked in her room, sobbing and shaking. Then the crisis was over and in the following calm, she discovered the Bacchus still gripped in her hand, where like a living mould, the raw impression in her palm carried every tiny detail. She put it down and stared at it for a while, willing it to scare her so she could be sure her ordeal was over. It remained a chubby pendant charm, its smile fixed and unresponsive. She wrapped it in her best head-scarf, the one she never wore, then buried it in her shoulder-bag. In sudden clarity, her mind hovered on the edge of a solution to the mystery of her early life. Emotionally sealed doors were opening with tantalising glimpses of understanding. There were other doors still closed, presumably the golden Bacchus did not open those. She wondered if there were yet more discoveries to be made.
It was another, the most common influence of Bacchus, which prompted the breakthrough in her reasoning. She was drinking wine, alone among her friends, soulfully alone in the midst of bacchanalian din. Her hosts, like many givers of student parties, were short of glasses, so Catulla had been honoured with a fine pottery goblet, too good for that event. When later, suffering from its over-use, she let it fall, the disaster made her weep. “The archaeology of parties,” she grimaced to no-one in particular, as she struggled to pick up the pieces.
Suddenly she found herself sober and inspired. Sitting there, cross-legged under the table she knew what she must do. The key to her mystery was not in the destination of the Roman galley, nor at its final resting place. The Bacchus was merely a trigger, the broken tablet an incomplete clue; the truth must lie at the source of the wreck's golden cargo, among the ancient grain fields of Roman Britain. The following morning, she visited the archives and with no great difficulty, purloined the tablet, then returned to her room and packed.
Some research at the British Museum turned-up the three most likely sites. Ones, whose description best fitted her strangely personal recollections. Next day, she set off by train and bicycle, a primus stove for company and a ridge-tent for accommodation. Site one, approached in optimism, failed the test. Site two was also disappointing, then she came to Brampton, a hamlet by the Norfolk river Bure. She checked her copies of the records: In the Emperor Augustus' time the river would have been navigable. There was evidence of a Roman wharf, the remains of one hundred and forty contemporary pottery kilns, pits in the chalk for storing clay or more probably grain and most importantly the site of a villa.
As she approached along the winding country lane from the nearest station, her heartstrings said this place was hers. Turning off onto a piece of straight track, that could well have had Roman origins, she found the farmhouse and spoke to the owner. Yes she could camp, she was told, and yes, the villa was being excavated, despite having been under plough since before the first world war. It was the end of the long summer evening before she pitched her tent, set up the primus, made a simple supper and turned-in under a magnificent harvest moon. Her last thought before sleep was that the roundness of its disk represented the closing of a second circle in her life, just as the discovery of the tablet had closed the first.
The graduate students and volunteer spoon-wielders welcomed her at the dig; to them a beautiful young Italian who was also a trained archaeologist seemed like a gift from heaven. She asked for and was given a trowel, plastic bowl and a place in the trench. She didn't tell them how strange it felt to be digging in what might be her own home. There was an ache of anticipation in her loins, like an urgent desire for physical love, a tightness across the top of her lungs and tension in her fingers as she made the first shallow mark in the soil. Of course nothing happened quickly, the ploughing had scarred the surfaces, spread walls over floors, then churned them both together. Desperately needing to know where she was within the villa, she sought landmarks for her hidden memories, but none emerged. Then the student next to her found the seven marble cubes still in their original places. A fragment of tessellated floor, whose subject would be totally unrecognisable for anyone who had not seen the whole. Before she could stop herself Catulla exclaimed, “Why, you've found the sword of Mars.”
The others working in the trench turned to stare. The certainty in her voice was more startling than the excitement of the find. “However can you know that?” asked the finder, “Might be anything, part of a fish, even foliage.”
But Catulla knew. Her face burned, not as the others thought, from the embarrassment of blurting out an unscientific guess, but from the secret thrill of knowing. Three paces to her right was the spot the messenger had dropped the tablet. The certainty terrified her, but it was knowledge she must hide if she was to retain her credibility. Now she knew where she wanted to search. To get there she had to wheedle an exchange of places with one of the other diggers.
The disciplined pace of excavation became a chore. It took two careful days to find the wall, beyond which she expected to uncover a child's bed-chamber, but there she was stopped by the boundary of the trench. The lunch break gave her the opportunity to ask the dig-master for a divergence from the pre-planned phasing, but she got no more than a “Maybe later.”
It was a frustrated Catulla who returned to the excavation and prepared to continue the careful scraping. Then she saw the tiny triangular clod which in her absence seemed to have fallen into the trench. Since this might easily be another piece of the mosaic, she noted its position and the fact that it had been dislodged from a higher level, then picked it up. It wasn't a tessilla, it was the corner of a clay tablet. The world swam around her, could it be what she hoped? Her personal myth said it might be, but scientifically speaking that was just another pointless blurt. She wrapped it in the relevant page torn from her notepad and slipped it into her pocket. Now all she needed was her shoulder-bag from the site-hut and some privacy.
Excusing herself, she collected her things, wandered down-slope from the villa and took the fisherman's path beside the stream. Curiously the watercourse seemed less important than it should be, smaller, narrower and choked with reeds. The vision of a vigorous brook came to her, which despite her phobia for deep water, seemed friendly not fearsome. In the daydream the stream had a shingle bed, rather than silt and silver-sand, clear water teeming with fish, swirls and eddies digging away at every bend, making pools deep enough for swimming in.
Rounding the reality of a meandering modern bend she came to a broad marshy patch, surrounded by trees. Wondering how far she had come, she dug the OS map out of the pocket in the side of her bag. Curiously, the place was called ‘Mermaid's Head’ and the stream itself was ‘The Mermaid.’ Even in its clogged and overgrown state it seemed right for her private investigation of the new-found shard. She sat on the fallen trunk of a wind-blown elm and felt in her bag. The first thing that came to hand was the tiny Bacchus, who she propped in a crook of the fallen tree. Next she took out and unwrapped the tablet and its prospective corner. Before she could bring them together, the sound of rippling water called her attention to the stream. In her hands, the two parts of the tablet remained un-mated, yet suddenly she saw the pool as it must have been.
Haloed in the low warm light of an ancient sunset, a naked child stood sobbing on the far bank, a once familiar nine-year-old with golden hair, preparing to dive into the pool. As the intervening centuries fell away from her mind, she cried out, but he didn't seem to hear. Then she noticed the miniature shrine on the bank, with its tiny pottery mermaid.
The boy, treading water in the middle of the pool, began a chant; Latin words she understood despite the guttural accent. The chant spoke of sorrow, loss and news of death at sea. Then he called her name and cried out to his mermaid that he was coming to join her. As she watched, he stopped swimming, floated for a moment in front of the bowered shrine, then exhaled and sank, his hair like a broken sheaf of golden barley spreading among the ripples. What could she do, was this all imagined? A childhood insanity returned? Instinctively she jammed the two parts of the tablet firmly together, then, closing her eyes, crushed the phobia from her trembling body and dived into the water ...
On the grassy bank, the shoulder-bag with her passport and twentieth century impedimenta lay forgotten. A discarded head-scarf fluttered among the twigs. High above, in the crook of the tree, the Bacchus smiled. You could almost hear him murmuring, “Full circle, Catulla, full and final circle.”
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Copyright The Mundesley Hermit ©1999 & 2007. All rights reserved.
Beautiful! You have a rare gift, as one writer to another.
I have studied Brampton on the map often, given its Roman heritage; even ventured there once by car. Hard to imagine today that it was once an important local, walled, town and pottery making centre.
Ian.