Under Another Sky (20 page)

Britten’s music for ‘Roman Wall Blues’ was thought lost, until 2005, when a hand-written copy of the vocal line turned up in the possession of a ninety-nine-year-old former employee of the Bank of England, who had been part of the local choir brought in to sing it. In the end, the choir wasn’t used – at the last minute, a crooner from a Newcastle dance hall, whose voice was felt to be more appropriate to the material, was roped in. The music is very bluesy indeed: mournful, bittersweet, with shades of Gershwin’s ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ (
Porgy and Bess
hadn’t yet had its British premiere, but Britten may have heard some of the songs on a 1935 RCA Victor recording). After I told composer Colin Matthews, who was Britten’s assistant in the 1970s, of my interest in ‘Roman Wall Blues’, he kindly offered to write a piano accompaniment to complete the song:

Roman Wall Blues

Over the heather the wet wind blows
I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky
I’m a Wall soldier; I don’t know why.

The mist sweeps over the hard grey stone
My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place
I don’t like his manners; I don’t like his face.

Piso’s a Christian; he worships a fish;
There’d be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I’m a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but gaze at the sky.

The words shiver with the chill of loneliness and isolation. The music vibrates not with the triumphal chords of the conqueror, but with the Southern cadences of the dispossessed: a black American musical form given to the imperial master. Auden’s drama feels very much like a pre-war creation, bristling with the threat of violence. ‘No war can be justified but that of defence,’ Hutton had written, but Auden edited the line from his play text. Perhaps the sentiment felt out of tune with the times.

‘Roman Wall Blues’ brought into poetic form the life of a wall soldier as many still imagine it: a hardship posting on a cold, desperate, lonely edge of the empire. (Though can it have been any worse than a posting on the violent fringes of Parthia? Can its climate have been more uncomfortable than the chill of a German winter, or the relentless heat of an African summer?) If the poem has become less popular than it once was, that may be because since its composition we have gained something extraordinary: the Vindolanda writing tablets. These are a vast cache of real words written in the first century
AD
by Romans living and working a few miles south of where the wall would, some decades later, be built. Had Auden been writing his radio drama today, it is surely the Vindolanda tablets that he would have harvested.

The first of these objects – the word ‘tablet’ lends a deceptively sturdy, lapidary air to these delicate fragments – was discovered by the historian and archaeologist Robin Birley in 1973, digging at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which stood on land at Chesterholm that had been purchased by his father, the eminent archaeologist Eric Birley. ‘If I have to spend the rest of my life working in dirty, wet trenches, I doubt whether I shall ever again experience the shock and excitement I felt at my first glimpse of ink hieroglyphics on tiny scraps of wood,’ he later recalled. He had unearthed two thin fragments of wood, ‘which looked rather like oily plane shavings’. He passed one to his assistant, who observed that it seemed to have some odd marks on it. ‘I had another look and thought I must have been dreaming, for the marks appeared to be ink writing. We took the piece over to the excavation hut and gently cleaned it, discovering that there were in fact two slivers of wood adhering to each other. After gently prising them apart with a knife, we stared at the tiny writing in utter disbelief.’ The tablets, as they gradually emerged,
were so friable that even the faintest pressure – such as removing a bracken frond from their surface – could fracture them, he wrote. Their remarkable survival was down to the anaerobic conditions of the waterlogged ground in which they had been trapped for nearly 2,000 years. When they emerged, delicate and with the consistency of wet blotting paper, they could not be allowed to dry out, or they would fast disintegrate. Complete, they were about the size of postcards. Postcards from the past.

A year later, on a hot spring day in 1974, a papyrology expert called Alan Bowman set out with colleagues and students from the University of Manchester, where he was then a lecturer, for a field trip to Vindolanda. Bowman spent the sunny afternoon getting a headache indoors, having been handed a tablet to decipher. ‘Robin at first thought they might be in Greek,’ he said. They were, rather, in Roman cursive handwriting, notoriously difficult for the untrained eye to read. The tablet ‘was a letter about barley and beer’, he told me, drily. At about the same time, unbeknown to him, Professor David Thomas, a papyrologist based at the University of Durham, was also being consulted about the new discoveries; eventually the two joined forces and worked together for more than thirty years. That excavation, which ran from 1973 to 1975, yielded tablets in dribs and drabs. Later, in the 1980s, came a glut. The material constituted ‘a massive percentage of Roman letters as a whole’, Bowman said. It meant that, from nowhere, suddenly ‘Roman Britain was providing the most important information on the development of Latin in the first century’. Bowman, now a professor at the University of Oxford, has since worked with Thomas on deciphering around 1,500 Vindolanda tablets, dating from circa
AD
85–130.

From these discarded shards – drafts, scraps, lists, memoranda, letters received and thrown away – came a picture of a community. Characters, real people, emerged from the soil: the fort commander at the turn of the first and second centuries was Flavius Cerealis, prefect of the ninth cohort of Batavians, from the mouth of the Rhine in what is now the Netherlands. His wife Lepidina and their children were with him. The tablets contained inventories and shopping lists (‘chickens, 20; 100 apples, if you can find nice ones, 100 or 200 eggs, if they are for sale there at a fair price’). There was a soldier’s note requesting leave; letters about buying items such as hides and corn;
and mentions of booze (the word usually translated as ‘Celtic beer’ is ‘
cervesa
’, which is surely the ancestor of the Spanish
cerveza
). There was a scrap of a military report referring to the fighting capabilities of the Britons, who were referred to by the diminutive ‘Brittunculi’, meaning ‘little Britons’, or, perhaps more dismissively, ‘wretched Britons’ – though it is hard safely to extract the word’s tone. The whole fragment reads: ‘… the Britons are unprotected by armour (?). There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins.’

One correspondent, Octavius, grumbled to Candidus that he had not been sent the promised cash for a planned purchase of corn, and then mentioned he would not be using his wagon ‘
dum viae male sunt
’, while the roads were bad. Flavius Cerialis wrote to somebody called Brocchus: ‘If you love me, brother, I ask that you send me some hunting-nets …’ Brocchus wrote to Flavius Cerealis too, assuring him that he would soon meet the provincial governor. According to Bowman, ‘They didn’t go into their feelings too deeply. It’s mostly “send me two more cabbages”, not great outpourings.’ He added, opaquely: ‘It’s probably just as well,’ as if cabbages were, after all, more his thing than emotions. What this wasn’t was Auden’s vision of chilly isolation. The tablets conveyed a picture of a busy, connected community.

The big surprise, perhaps, was the extent and the depth of literacy among the soldiering men of Vindolanda. Indeed, some of them were clearly also literary. In 2010, Bowman, Thomas and Dr Roger Tomlin, who had joined the collaboration in the later stages of the work, published their interpretations of a set of tablets that had been excavated in the years 2001–3. One of them contained a run of indistinct letters (and bear in mind that the Romans did not put gaps between words) that the scholars read as ‘
certalate
’. The particular quality of the handwriting (a neat copybook style) told them, from experience, to expect a literary quotation. They ran the letters through a database of the whole corpus of surviving Latin literature, and found that this particular combination occurs in just one place – in the line ‘
nunc varia in gelida sede lacerta latet
’, or ‘the spotted lizard now lurks in its chilly home’. The poem from which it comes, known as ‘The Hostess’, is a paean to the virtues of drinking. It’s a hot day, says the seductive Syrian hostess of the poem. The cicadas are bursting the trees with
their song; even the lizards have sought the shade. Lie down, garland your head with roses, kiss a pretty girl, drink from a crystal glass. It is a vision of summertime heat and sexy Mediterranean luxury. It was, and is, also a pretty obscure poem, handed down to us as part of a group of works known as the
Appendix Vergiliana
, once (but no longer) attributed to Virgil. ‘Think of it: the bloody Batavians sitting on the northern frontier reading the
Appendix Vergiliana
!’ exclaimed Bowman in his rich Mancunian accent. Another fragment in the same set of tablets contained the sentence ‘
ante iovem nulli subigeba(nt) arva coloni
’ – from Virgil’s poem on farming, the
Georgios
. ‘Before Jove’s time,’ it means, ‘no settlers brought the land under subjection.’ The line comes from a passage on a lost golden age, a time, impossible aeons ago, when the earth brought forth her Edenic bounty spontaneously, before man had learnt to till the soil.

When I visited him in late 2010, Alan Bowman had just been elected principal of Brasenose College, though his bluff, straightforward manner hardly marked him out as a typical Oxford head of house. His office had a feel of not having quite been settled into. The spine of one A4 file was marked, facetiously, ‘bureaucratic crap’. The task of interpreting the Vindolanda tablets, and other texts that have emerged from the British sod, is one of extraordinary complexity, he told me. It is not just a matter of translating Latin; it is translating eccentric Latin that is often so fragmentary that it contains more gaps than surviving words, written in a script that is faded beyond recognition to any but the most practised eye. He and Thomas are, he told me, cruciverbalists by temperament. ‘I used to do the
Guardian
crossword,’ he said. ‘Now it’s too much like bloody work.’ Tomlin has a slightly different, and complementary, approach: ‘Roger’s much more artistic than me; he sees the work more in terms of images and shapes,’ said Bowman. When I visited Tomlin in his office at Wolfson College, Oxford, half the floor space was occupied by stacks of oriental carpets, the object of another of his scholarly passions. He was about to give a talk titled ‘Knotted Feathers: Birds in Small Persian Rugs’. On a table lay some rolls of paper: Tomlin’s own line drawings. When I half jokingly asked whether he thought he would have been drafted to Bletchley Park during the Second World War, he agreed unhesitatingly. ‘I am sure there are a lot of analogies between what we do and wartime code-breaking,’ he said. (In fact, the don who interviewed
him for a place at Cambridge had been a Bletchley code-breaker who managed to turn out a book on Horace while he was there.)