Dawns rise high over the cliff and green tinges the branches when her people feel the urge to move again. The furred who live nearby have grown wary, leave no prints to follow. The tiny body that she pushed herself inside out to birth stayed thin, sucked only weakly. Eventually it stopped, went rigid like dried tendon. Yet still she carried it, as skin shrunk around stick-like limbs and stretched over shoulder blades. Now the group gathers things to leave, and she feels the pull to join them. But putting down her burden is frightening. Inhaling her infant’s heady birth-smell, still caught in its dark hair, she crouches at the shelter’s edge. The clutched bundle is lowered to the ground and, for the first time, lies apart from her body. The others approach curiously, reach out to prod, pull, stroke; to know. Yet beasts will come later and this precious thing must be protected. She scoops a hollow, slides the already dusty form down, covers it. Embraced by the soft dirt full of their stony leavings, she draws back and joins the people to walk on.

Skies flicker as the days, years, centuries pass. Soils condense and hold the delicate bones tight. Others come and go above but eventually the vibrations of footfall stop. Even icy tendrils from heart-aching cold cannot penetrate to the tiny skeleton. Tens of thousands more winters, then deep thumpings murmur downwards. The weight lessens. Voices come: new people are building a house where none have lived for so long. Patten-shod feet clatter up and down wooden stairs over the small remains, a lullaby of life above death. In a blink, the house too is gone, then sediments shiver and shift as hands pull at the dirt. Clods crumble, and a chink of early summer sunlight grazes the white shatter of eggshell-thin skull. A voice shouts out, ‘Arrête! Os!’ Rough yet gentle hands – like those that last touched this lonely little one – reach down, after so long, to pick it up.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes is as far away from the common preconception of an archaeologist as the Neanderthals are seen as – in her own words, ‘Shambling around in bearskins waiting to become extinct already.’ Her scholarly but highly readable Kindred has each chapter prefaced by a piece of creative, yet relevant, fiction. Ms Sykes reminds me exactly how I fall short as a writer. I’m only part way through but this book is hypnotic. Get it here or at your national Amazon store.

In September 1942, during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands, an order was received that non-nationals of Jersey were to be deported to Germany. At very short notice an English-born retired sea captain, his wife and five children were ordered to report to the harbour with a limited number of personal belongings. The wife describes in her own words the panic that ensued.

Parcels of larger size new suits and woollies and new pairs of shoes were untied.  String and newspapers were strewn about the floor.  By the window stood seven piles of clothing, but so far, no suitcases.  Exhausted, worried and full of foreboding for the future, I knelt down, flung my arms above my head on to the bed and cried, ‘Oh God!’  At that very moment, I saw behind my right shoulder, and very near me, the tall figure of my maternal grandmother.  She was calm.  She said, ‘It will be alright.’  This she repeated.  My grandmother had died in 1939.  Somehow, I flung my body, fully dressed, upon the bed.  I became unconscious.

The apparition was of the Charlotte of Lowestoft, mother of Caroline, referred to in my previous post. The family were reprieved at the last minute and continued to live in Jersey through the Occupation.