Tess (5 page)

So you can imagine how pleased my mother was when a new man turned up; and, wonder of wonders, Tess fell in love with him!

So how did we come to accept it all so easily: the ‘seduction', the abandonment and Tess stuck with an infant when she should have been out learning about the world, learning how to save it from greed, exploitation, abandonment?

We shall have to go back again – but to people this time, not to stones.

The earliest people to make a mark on the Dorset landscape were the Mesolithic hunters and fishers, who seem to have had almost five thousand years – from 8000 to 3500 B.C. – in which to pursue their nomadic way of life. Being nomadic, they can't have made much of a difference to the countryside; but they had fire, at least, and axes: there was a settlement, for some parts of the year, just behind Chesil Bank, southwest of Weymouth.

How did they live, the women of these migratory tribes?

Were they as fleet of foot as the men? It's probable; but they were weighed down by their babies; and, anyway, how can you wield an axe with a screaming bundle attached to your front or back?

Were they, on the contrary, still powerful, the ruling matriarchs of communities like the Eastern Mediterranean tribes where, ever since earliest antiquity, it was expected that women would shape society? Where the wife, taking more than one husband, ensured that succession in property and authority passed from mother to daughter?

In this natural state of affairs, which arises from a primitive ignorance of the part played in procreation by the fertilizing male, the Earth Mother was worshipped – the Great Goddess, under a variety of names – and the Great Goddess (unlike the Indo-European Sky Father, with his patriarchal pattern of worshippers and his wife somewhere in the background) had her own ‘family'.

But the family of the Great Goddess was also unlike that of the Sky Father because it had a duration of only a season. The young lover – or son – or brother – who lived blissfully with the Goddess for just the spring and summer, was killed with the ripening of the
fruit and the falling of the leaves: another came with the bursting of buds after the dreary winter.

Possibly, our Mesolithic foremothers lived like this. But, here in the north, things were more complicated again – for only the Mediterranean Earth Mother had established herself alone above male supremacy. When she appears among the descendants of the Indo-Europeans in Europe she is confronted not only with a rather pale northern Earth Mother, but also with a powerful Sky Father. The tendency is for the two Earth Mothers to fall together, although to the end of the pagan period they cause confusion by maintaining half-separate existences both among Northmen and Old English as Frigg and Freya. But to reconcile the supreme Mediterranean Earth Mother and the supreme northern Sky Father was a more difficult matter, particularly as there was a cuckoo in the nest in the person of the Earth Mother's lover, brother or son. When the divine father and mother came together in the north one might expect the lover, son or brother quietly to disappear, leaving little trace. But the lover was too strong and too important to go, and so the mythographers explain the
ménage à trois
in various ways.

We shall see what traces there remain in the north of the young lover or son so closely associated with the Earth Mother. The story is told in detail by the old Scandinavian poets and historians. According to the
Verse
and
Prose Edda
, the goddess Frigg extracted a promise from everything in creation not to harm her son Balder the Beautiful; everything, that is to say, except the mistletoe which seemed to her to be too young to swear oaths. So – Balder led a charmed life and the gods in sport used to cast all manner of weapons at him without his ever taking any harm. But Loki, the mischiefmaker of the gods, discovered Frigg's secret and taking a shaft of mistletoe he thrust it into the hands of the blind god Hoder, who in turn threw it at Balder and brought him to bloody death. Balder went down into the underworld ruled by the goddess Hel …

Is that where Alec – Balder the Beautiful – Alec of the purple shirt and the psychedelic rising sun like a stab wound under his heart, should lie now, under the stones … punished
by the goddess Hel for his crime of seduction, betrayal, abandonment …?

How can we answer these questions, child?

We can say that there is no doubt of the existence of the Earth Mother, the Great Goddess, and her gradual loss of power to the patriarchal god, the Indo-European Sky Father.

And that that primitive ignorance of the fertilizing power of the male had been the cause of this original state of affairs. So when – and how – did men catch on, as Tess, always wise and witty and irreverent, would have said?

(She loved jokes about sex, did Tess. I was the solemn one, learning of the initiation rites at the temple of Eleusis from my mother's old book of Greek myths and legends: Demeter's vain search, in the guise of a nurse, for her disappeared Persephone; Ishtar, deep in the dark temple passageway, in the step-by-step removal of earrings, bracelets, robe. Her eventual ritual deflowering, impaled on a stick.)

– The first striptease, Tess would say. And sounds like some sort of gang-bang afterwards. Can't have been too good in those days, can it, Liza-Lu?

And, as my mother looked up, shocked, from the book, couldn't I hear her thinking, fearing for Tess who was so fearless, so sure she belonged to an age as far from those barbaric days as the earth is from Saturn: be careful, child. For just as bad can happen to you.

Penelope, wife of Odysseus, is a prime example of the end of female succession and the rise of male inheritance and power. Never, until the time of the Odyssey – possibly about the time our Mesolithic foremothers are gathering firewood in Marshwood Vale and hunting the red deer and the otter on the shores of the Fleet – would a woman, once married, have to leave her father's land and come to live in her husband's territory.

Up until the time of the slow, but inevitable eradication of the old goddesses, Penelope would most certainly have kept her name and her entitlement to her land. Odysseus would have come and lived with
her
.

Is this what has been wrong, since those early and almost unguessable days? That the balance was always, by nature, intended to be the other way round – from what we have all lived under, endured, survived through love and struggle: that men should always have been subservient to women, and the old ballad, sung since the ending of that natural way – the ballad of love, seduction, betrayal … and, just sometimes, revenge – is a record of that reversal in the natural order of things?

If Alec Field had been as Balder the Beautiful to Tess's Great Goddess, her son, her brother, her lover instead of her mini-patriarch and casual seducer, would there be a greater harmony in the world?

The nomadic hunters and fishers were succeeded, before 3000 B.C., by a larger and more advanced group of settlers, arriving from the
continent of Europe through the southwest of England. Neolithic people – the end of the nomadic way of life and the establishing of domesticated animals and pottery, the setting up of farming and trade. And gradually, as the animal bones on the sites of these people show, the chalk downlands of Dorset lost their light fringing of woodland and began to be covered by expanses of turf – which remained the basis of agriculture in these areas until the nineteenth century.

Huge barrows and burial mounds give evidence of a new way of life – on Hambledon Hill near Blandford Forum and at Maiden Castle near Dorchester.

The amount of labour involved in erecting tomb and enclosure was considerable. Together, these monuments stand testimony both to the effectiveness of the farming, which must now have been capable of producing a considerable surplus to allow so much labour to be devoted to tasks other than food production, and to the ability of the farmers to undertake large-scale communal tasks. But by the middle of the millennium there are signs that the structure of society was changing. As the farming community had expanded, its need to establish rights to herds and land use must have begun to press. That these rights had on occasion to be defended is shown by the massive defences constructed round the Hambledon Hill enclosure.

At Hambledon, the scale of these defences is quite astonishing. An entire hill with attendant spurs was defended by a ditch and timber-framed rampart system enclosing an area of some one hundred and sixty acres. Parts of the ramparts have been destroyed by fire and there is a density of arrowheads around the entrance to the site. By the central gate the body of a young man has been discovered, with an arrow lodged in his chest.

The time is coming for our departure from the beach. Ella, cold suddenly, and hungry, has run back to her mother's house (her mother has too many cares to make ends meet to worry overmuch that Ella doesn't attend school) and I'll stop my history lesson now. The coming of the Wessex elite, with the Bronze Age, will mean nothing to you, Baby Tess, as you lie in an even earlier age yourself: reptilian almost, with your tiny sloping chin and lidless eyes that blink up at me sometimes when I speak.

You'll know one day what those Bronze Age ancestors of ours did … You'll have the stones of Stonehenge as long in your mind as your poor foremother did – the Tess who went to the Stones with the man she really loved and gave herself up to the gallows.

They built Stonehenge, these Bronze Age people who – at least in Wessex – placed most of their acquired wealth with the dead.

They liked rare commodities. Jet and amber from the shores of the North Sea, shale from Dorset, Irish gold and man-made faience.

They liked to bury all these treasures with the dead. And they liked the annual sacrifice at the Stones at the midsummer solstice, too: the bright red of the life-blood as it trickled from the altar.

The place smells of sacrifice. It's where Tess sacrificed herself, on the altar of love.

Tess is up in a tree.

It's the big ash tree, at the far end of our garden, and Retty and I – and just for this once, Maud, the little girl we're not really allowed to play with – are standing under the tree and looking up at Tess. It's a steamy day, with a gold-coloured mist coming off Chesil Beach; and the figs on the old fig tree that pokes up onto our first-floor terrace are swelling, pale and veined – like, Victor says, those things under there. And he pinches poor Retty until she bursts into tears. Maud, who is Victor's sister, is another of the children from the caravan site at Charmouth who is on the list of proscribed playmates. Which makes them both, of course, as desirable as the latest fad from America (for we're in the fifties now, and the war has left its scar, its feeling of emptiness here). Victor and his sister with knobbly knees and a pigtail that looks as if it had never been undone and combed out, are as tempting as bubble gum or a visit to the pictures at Weymouth, where our mother says there's nothing ‘suitable' on for us at all.

Except for
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
– but how many times have we seen that? We want something with grown-ups, even if it's Doris Day in a bright, girlish frock; or Bette Davis, smoking a cigarette as if she had chosen it specially to get sucked between her lips, her legs in sheer silk stockings, rubbing against each other with a sound like the hiss of the sea on the stones.

Victor and Maud, who missed out on childhood somehow, are as near to that grown-up world as we can get. Their father was in prison once, I heard my mother say to Retty's mother, Mrs Priddle. He went to Scotland for a job, but he's Welsh really, and they caught him even though he thought he'd got that far away. When
he came out the whole family moved to the caravan site near Charmouth.

Now we're going to walk over to Charmouth. There's an ice-cream parlour there, run by a man called Mr Rossini. We know Mr Rossini well, because he short-changed me once (always the youngest: the easily fooled: the idea of a person instead of the real thing. That's how I felt then, at least, and I suppose, to tell the truth, I feel much the same today). We never entirely recover from our early position in the family – eldest, middle one, youngest – like Goldilocks, in search of her identity in the house of the three bears.