Here is a Woman Holding a Flint Scraper

Echoes of Beginnings

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I went to primary school near to the Star Carr, an archaeological site of international importance. The site is where, 11000 years ago, give or take, mesolithic people gathered, hunted, lived and deposited ritual objects into the lake that we call Paleolake Flixton. The lake is long gone. Through a series of natural and man made intervention, the lake has drained away first to fenland, bog and finally to spongey agricultural land. It is not noticeable, you wouldn’t know that it had been a lake at all except it holds its water in a high water table, and the villages are respectful of that, clustered around its footprint as they have always clustered around its edges, as the Star Carr folk clustered at its edges as I circle its edges and have always circled its edges. I live on the edge of the lake and have done al my life. I went to primary school near the star carr site and knew a boy whose grandad often found flint scrapers and tools on his allotment near the site. He would bring them into school and one brilliant teacher would hep us to identify them, would encourage us to think of ourselves as a continuation of the story of the landscape.

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My first attempts at translating the connection I felt to this place was in poetry, a series of poems that probed the edges of what I wanted to say.

STAR CARR

Mesolithic site, Seamer, North Yorkshire

Flint arrow heads spilled like lost teeth,
found again, drawn up through the black
peat. They surfaced so often against

the shear side of a spade or beneath
the soft sole of a Wellington boot,
that they became common: a currency

in the playground; pocketed
with leaf skeletons and vole skulls;
our own histories marked out

along the chipped edges. And later,
at the official dig, deer skull hunting-masks
rose from the forgotten lake bed.

Glimpsed through the billow
of a white plastic tent they eyed us
with unwitting curiosity, watching

the new world; their faceless mouths
un-stoppered.

A64

Round the lake edge,
the A64 flattens like reeds
to meet the forgotten shape. Islands
heave from the wheat fields higher
than ground level, sea level, lake level.
Round and round, to work, to home,
always the background of water
chatters beneath my ground. When the mist
settles, the lake is a ghost of itself;
a white shroud, swaddling the earth.
Casting around for arrow heads
on dog walks, measuring out the distance
from Magdaleine Farm, Lingholme Farm,
touching the shallows to the solid. Back drop
to the present, the past smoulders.
I drive through the lake villages,
their names lap a tattoo on my skull: Muston,
Flixton, Folkton, Heslerton. Seamer holds the
ballast, merged to the edge, in memory,
the church built on the remnants of the shore.
Death in the measured church yard meets
the raw pull of the earth, the death rattling down
with fire and water in the underworld
of the lake people. Silent now, awaiting
the next stone to be unturned.

ROUND HOUSE

Discovered at Star Carr, North Yorkshire.
Dated 8,500 BC

This house looks insignificant:
felted to the peat it is a ship come aground,
the worked beams atrophied beneath
the black. We peer down
into its sunken wound.

It is impossible to imagine a death
that could last ten thousand years,
we can’t help but search the bones
of the house for fingerprints:

the heat from the hearth and the gentle rhythm
of blood, a mother moving
amongst the family, counting them up
with smoothing palms.

There are no hearts left in this shell,
no voices to pen a family together. The thing
that was the centre of this place is gone,
this grave is not important.

TRENCH SEVEN

That day, the sun blustered roughly
over ground still springy from the lake.
Twelve thousand years gone and the ground

still drinking its glacial ghost. Peat trench, thin
like a skin over the gravel and sand
where the lake people lay horse bones to rest.

Looking west to Star Carr, it seemed a nothing place,
a field, off against a tree line. But I felt a presence,
I felt possessed by the people and their

deaths. In the quiet scraping of many trowels,
the archaeologist’s constant, I felt
I had undressed them, skinned their lives

in wet, flat pieces. Knelt in the damp- back aching,
eye level with the very ground they walked on,
the very bones that they had touched – I was

a bad maggot, inching into the apple of their existence,
breaking the anaerobic seal to let the hot breath
of fourteen thousand years begin their destruction.

Here is a woman

This week I have been revisiting my own story. I’ve been writing about the day I walked away from the creative writing PhD and set a different course for myself, though I didn’t know it then. Then, I felt like the worst kind of failure. A class failure, someone who had tried to climb away from their working class heritage and failed, had returned to the glacial valley of her childhood, was stuck there.

Here is a woman holding

It took an age for me to realise that I was internalising something about being working class, that to be working class is to be inherently ‘wrong’ - judged, criticised, parodied, expected always to aspire to be socially mobile. And the way to be socially mobile if you wanted to work in the arts was to fit into a mould meant for people from a different sort of background.

Here is a woman holding a

What if, I asked myself, I made my own way, what if I did things for me, not for anyone else. What would that feel like? What would that look like? I screeched myself out in the valley and felt it hold me.

Here I a woman holding a flint

Not long after, I began searching for myself. I went on a pilgrimage to find who I really was because somehow I was in my mid forties and didn’t know myself. I began my journey at my daughter’s grave because it was there that I felt, in the intensity of true grief, bone rattling, destroyer- of- all -things- grief, that I had felt utterly authentic, a true version of myself.

As I made my way around the lake site, (because this place is what I know of home and home was layered with ghosts of myself) I began deliberately remembering, acknowledging the people that came before me, and that included earlier versions of myself. I was acknowledging, forgiving and loving the earlier versions and finding my place in the landscape.

Here is a woman holing a flint scraper

It pleases me to see the earlier versions of The Ghost Lake coming through in poems. And indeed, my next collection is almost like a sister collection to The Ghost Lake. The different forms speak the same truths in a slightly different language. But it was always there, always in me.

Here.

I can’t wait to share the journey with you. It’s fur weeks to launch day today, you can pre order the book wherever you usually buy your books. Lots of people seem to like Waterstones (myself included) So here’s the pre order link:

And here’s what Adam Farrer who wrote Cold Fish Soup had to say about it: