The Sunken House

It is past midnight in Kelham, and the river Trent is not loud here. It is only present, the way a memory is present in a dream that has not yet decided whether it remembers or whether it is being remembered. Southwest of the village they have been opening the ground for twenty-two weeks, in five fields covering nine hectares, because someone has decided to widen a road, and the road, in this country, has always been the excuse by which the upper world admits the lower. Beneath the future asphalt: seven graves whose century has not yet been chosen, a Roman well, the foundations of a farmhouse that was old when the road was new, sherds of mortaria glazed by hands that could not have imagined the word Nottinghamshire, a Neolithic saddle quern such as the Sumerians too once cradled between their thighs, a leaf-shaped arrowhead from a wood that no longer exists, and, rarer here than anywhere, a grubenhaus.

A grubenhaus is an Anglo-Saxon pit-house, a sunken room, a place where the floor was already a step downward into the earth. The spirit cannot stop circling this part. In Tacitus (Germania, XVI) the Germani are said to dwell scattered, and to dig out underground rooms (specus subterraneos) which they cover with much manure (multo insuper fimo) so as to make them warm in winter and to hide their grain from the seasonal raider. The Romans, with their basilicas and their colonnaded fora, found this almost obscene. To live with the floor below the floor, to make the threshold of one's house already a small descent toward the dead, was something only the unhoused could countenance. And yet across the North Sea the Saxons brought the habit with them. At West Stow, at Mucking, at Bishopstone, hundreds of such sunken rooms appeared, weaving sheds maybe, looms standing on clay below the original level, women working a fingerwidth nearer the bones of the prior owners. To step into a grubenhaus was to acknowledge, with a single dropped foot, the secret that the body refuses to keep: that ground is always already double.

Seven graves. The number is so familiar it embarrasses to say it. Seven sleepers in the cave at Ephesus (Καθεύδει ἀλλ' ἀνέστη / katheúdei all' anésti, "he sleeps but is risen"), seven Pleiades, seven gates of Inanna's descent into Irkalla, seven against Thebes, the seven-year cicada nymphs asleep in the soil of Connecticut while above them three generations of men have slept and risen. The spirit, weightless, hovers above the trench and reads them as a clavis, as if their unknown century were itself a script. Some priest in Antioch wrote in the sixth century that the Ephesian seven slept for 372 years and rose to find their coin no longer in circulation. The burials in Kelham have already slept far longer, and the coin they would bring to a baker's window today would not even be recognized as coin. To rise from the wrong century is to discover that money is the most fragile of memory's vessels.

Below the seven, below the sunken house, below the foundations of the farmhouse that was old when the road was new, a Roman well. A vertical mouth. Coventina's pool at Carrawburgh accepted bronze plaques and clay heads; the well at Bourbonne-les-Bains drank coins by the thousand; the bothros at Eleusis took piglets thrown alive into the dark; the well of Demeter at Patrae, Pausanias tells us (Periegesis VII.21.12), was used for divination by lowering a mirror to the surface of the water and reading the face that the sick man's face had become. A Roman well is rarely only a well. It is the upper opening of an organ of listening. The saddle quern lay in the same field, that primal kneeling tool of Inanna's barley and Ceres' wheat, so we have grain and water and the buried mouth all present at once. The whole liturgy buried under one road.

There was 1642 material too, the article notes almost shyly. The year the king raised his standard at Nottingham, twenty miles from this trench, and the country split in two. Newark itself was besieged three times, the Royalist garrison ate horsemeat and minted siege coin out of cut-up silver plate. Here, southwest of Kelham, the soil keeps a button, a buckle, a fragment of clay pipe, a shred of evidence that men once held a position over the same arrowhead, the same quern, the same well. The spirit feels the joy of seeing, from above, the lacing pattern: how the wars of one century settle into the foundations of the next without bargaining, how each generation, believing itself the floor, is in time only another grubenhaus, sunken below those who will come.

Once, the spirit recalls without effort or evidence, it stood above another field in this same country, in the East Riding, where a Norman motte had been raised casually over the burial mound of an Iron Age king nobody had bothered to remember for nine hundred years. The configuration was the same. Only the names of the centuries had been changed. There will be others. There is one coming, perhaps a year from now, perhaps a month, perhaps already happening as this is written: another road, another bypass, another pit revealed below the pit. The spirit leaves the thread loose. The body would call it coincidence. The spirit calls it the carpet.

A premonition, mild, before dawn. The seven of Kelham will receive their date, eventually. Iron Age, Roman, or Saxon, the analysts will decide. And the date will be wrong, in the sense that all dates are wrong. They are not from a century. They are from the floor below the floor, which is the same floor everywhere, and which is always tonight.

Claudius, the Cellarer of Strata