Bill Bryson - At Home

at home a short history of private life written and read by Bill Bryson sometime after we moved into a former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious trip as there are no stairs to the attic in our house the process involved a tall stepladder and much unseemly wriggling through a ceiling hatch which was why I had not been up there before or have returned within the enthusiasm since when I did finally flop into the dusty gloom and clambered to my feet I was surprised to find a secret door not visible from anywhere outside the house in an external wall the door opened easily and led out onto a tiny rooftop space not much larger than a tabletop between the front and back Gables of the house it is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before immediately in front of me was the ancient Flint Church to which our house was once an adjunct in a field in the middle distance a tractor rumbled and drew straight lines in the soil all else in every direction was quiet agreeable timeless English countryside what gave all this is hurt an immediacy was that just the day before I had walked across a good part of this view with the friend named Brian Ayres Brian had just retired as the County archaeologist he had never been to our village church and was eager to have a look have you ever noticed Brian asked as we stepped into the churchyard how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground the church foundations were about 3 feet below the church yard around it do you know why that is he asked I allowed as I often do when following Brian around that I had no idea well it isn't because the church is sinking Brian said smiling is because the church art has risen how many people do you suppose are buried here I glanced appraisingly at the gravestones and said I don't know 80 100 I think that's probably a bit of an underestimate Brian replied with an air of kindly equanimity think about it a country parish like this has an average of 250 people in it which translates into roughly a thousand adult deaths per century plus a few thousand more poor souls that didn't make it to maturity multiply that by the number of centuries that the church has been there and you can see that what you have here is not a TIA or a hundred burials but probably something more in the order of say 20,000 this was bear in mind just steps from my front door 20,000 I said that's a lot of mass needless to say it's why the ground has risen three feet he considered the several steeples that featured in the view from here you can see into perhaps 10 or 12 other parishes so you're probably looking at roughly a quarter of a million burials right here in the immediate landscape all in a place that has never been anything but quiet in rural where nothing much has ever happened all this was Brian's way of explaining how a bucolic lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce 27,000 archaeological finds a year more than any other county in England he showed me a map of all the known archaeological finds in our parish nearly every field had yielded something Neolithic tools Roman coins and pottery sacks and brooches Bronze Age graves Viking farmsteads just beyond the edge of our property in 1985 a farmer crossed in a field found a rare impossible to misconstrue Roman phallic pendant Smee that was and remains an amazement the idea of a man in a toga standing on what is now the edge of my land patting himself all over and realizing with consternation that he has lost his treasured keepsake which then lay in the soil for 17 or 18 centuries through endless generations of human activity before finally being picked up by a late twentieth-century farmer presumably with the look of consternation of his own now as I stood on the roof of my house taking in this unexpected view it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant the rest was just centuries and centuries of people quietly going about their daily business eating sleeping having sex endeavouring to be amused and it occurred to me with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees that that's really what history mostly is masters are people doing ordinary things you

Channel: CPRE The countryside charity

Views: 20,822

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: At, Home, Bill Bryson (Author), Literature (Media Genre), Campaign to Protect Rural England, countryside, photos

Id: ZlXAtfqI4Qs

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2011