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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Anne Youngson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction. Real-life locations are referenced but the names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Extract from ‘The Tollund Man’ by Seamus Heaney reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Extract from the dedication letter in the original edition of The Bog People by P. V. Glob re-produced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

‘What Can I Say’ by Kate Clanchy from Newborn: Poems on Motherhood (Pan Macmillan, 2018) reproduced by permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

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For Frank, Cormac and Holly, my dear young people

Some day I will go to Aarhus

To see his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,

His pointed skin cap.

from ‘The Tollund Man’ by Seamus Heaney

An extract from the Foreword to The Bog People by P. V. Glob (Faber & Faber, 1969): Professor Glob responds to a group of schoolgirls who have been in touch with him about recent archaeological discoveries. His book The Bog People is dedicated to the schoolgirls who first wrote to him.

Home again from the deserts and oases of the Sheikdoms I find your enthusiastic letters on my desk. They have aroused in me the wish to tell you and many others who take an interest in our ancestors about these strange discoveries in Danish bogs. So I have written a ‘long letter’ in the following pages for you, for my daughter Elsebeth, who is your age, and for all who wish to learn more about ancient times than they can gather from the learned treatises that exist on the subject. But I have all too little time, and it has taken me a long while to finish my letter. However, here it is. You have all grown older since and so perhaps are now all the better able to understand what I have written about these bog people of 2,000 years ago.

Although we have never met, you dedicated a book to me once; to me, thirteen of my schoolmates, and your daughter. This was more than fifty years ago, when I was young. And now I am not. This business, of being no longer young, is occupying much of my mind these days and I am writing to you to see if you can help me make sense of some of the thoughts that occur to me. Or maybe I am hoping that just writing will make sense of them, because I have little expectation that you will reply. For all I know, you may be dead.

One of these thoughts is about plans never fulfilled. You know what I mean – if you are still alive you must be a very old man by now and it must have occurred to you that what you thought would happen, when you were young, never did. For example, you might have promised yourself you would try a sport or a hobby or an art or a craft. And now you find you have lost the physical dexterity or stamina to take it up. There will be reasons why you never did but none of them is good enough. None of them is the clincher. You cannot say: I planned to take up oil painting but I couldn’t because I turned out to be allergic to a chemical in the paint. It is just that life goes on from day to day and that one moment never arrives. In my case, I promised myself I would travel to Denmark and visit the Tollund Man. And I have not. I know, from the book you dedicated to me, that only his head is preserved, not his beautiful hands and feet. But his face is enough. His face, as it appears on the cover of your book, is pinned up on my wall, I see it every day. Every day I am reminded of his serenity, his dignity, his look of wisdom and resignation. It is like the face of my grandmother, who was dear to me. I still live in East Anglia, and how far is it to the Silkeborg Museum? Six hundred miles as the crow flies? As far as Edinburgh and back. I have been to Edinburgh and back.

All this is not the point, though it is puzzling. What is wrong with me that I have not made the so small effort needed when the face of the Tollund Man is so central to my thoughts?

It is cold in East Anglia, windy cold, and I have knitted myself a balaclava to keep my neck and ears and head warm when I walk the dog. As I pass the mirror in the hall on the way out of the door, I notice myself in profile and I think how like my grandmother I have become. And, being like my grandmother, my face has become the face of the Tollund Man. The same hollowness of cheek, the same beakiness of nose. As if I have been preserved for two thousand years and am still continuing to be. Is it possible, do you think, that I belong, through whatever twisted threads, to the family of the Tollund Man? I’m not trying to make myself special in any way, you understand. There must be other people of the family; thousands of them. I see other people of my age, on buses, or walking their dogs, or waiting for their grandchildren to choose an ice cream from the van, who have the same contours to their faces, the same blend of peacefulness, humanity and pain. There are far more who have none of these things, though. Whose faces are careless or undefined or pinched or foolish.

The truth is, I do want to be special. I want there to be significance in the connection made between you and me in 1964 and links back to the man buried in the bog two thousand years ago. I am not very coherent. Please do not bother to reply if you think I do not justify your time.

I refer to your letter addressed to Professor Glob. Professor Glob died in 1985. If he had still been alive, he would by now be 104 years old, which is not impossible, but is unlikely.

In answer to the first, I would encourage you to make the effort, which need not be very great, to visit us here. There are regular flights from Stansted, or, if you prefer, from Heathrow or Gatwick, to Aarhus airport, which is the most convenient for arriving in Silkeborg. The museum is open every day between 10 and 5, except in winter when it opens only at the weekends from 12 until 4. Here you can see the Elling Woman as well as the Tollund Man and an exhibition looks at all aspects of those who lived in the Iron Age; for instance, what they believed in, how they lived, how they mined and worked the mineral that gives the period its name. I must also correct something you said in your letter. Although only the head of the Tollund Man is preserved, the rest of the body has been re-created so the figure you will see, if you visit us here, will look just as it did when it was recovered from the bog, including the hands and the feet.

In answer to your second question, the Centre for GeoGenetics at our Naturhistorisk Museum is at the moment trying to extract some DNA from the Tollund Man’s tissues, which would help us to understand his genetic links to the present day population of Denmark. You will have read, in Professor Glob’s book, that the index finger of the Tollund Man’s right hand shows an ulnar loop pattern which is common to 68 per cent of the Danish people, which gives us confidence that this study will find such links. Through the Vikings, who came later to Denmark but will have interbred with the existing population, there is most likely some commonality of genes to the population of the UK. So, I would say, it is quite possible that there is a family connection, however slight, between yourself and the Tollund Man.

I hope this information is helpful to you, and look forward to meeting you if you visit us here.

It was generous of you to reply to my letter to Professor Glob, and to try to answer what you understood my questions to be. But they were not questions. The reason I have not visited has nothing to do with the problems of travel. I have passed my sixtieth birthday but am nonetheless quite fit. I could go tomorrow. There have been few times in my life when that has not been so. Leaving aside childbirth and a broken leg, I have always been physically able to climb onto a plane, or indeed a ferry, to Denmark.

This being the case, I am forced to consider what might be the real reasons, because your answer to an unasked question has made me want to be honest with myself. Please be aware, I am writing to you to make sense of myself. You do not need to concern yourself with any of this. I do not expect you to reply.

My best friend at school was called Bella. This was not her given name and is not the name in Professor Glob’s dedication: it is a nickname, based on her ability to pronounce Italian words. She was rubbish at languages, as far as learning to use them to communicate was concerned, but she could act them beautifully. Her favourite word was bellissima. She was able to put a level of meaning into each syllable which varied according to the context so the word seemed to mean more, when she said it, than it actually does. In fact, everything she said had more meaning, more intensity, than the same words used by anyone else.

We were friends from the first day we met, which was our first day at school. She was more colourful than I was; adventurous, alive in the moment. She brought me energy and confidence and I loved her for it. What she loved about me, I think, was the steadiness. I was always there, always had a hand ready to hold hers. We were friends all our lives. All her life, for I am still alive, as you know, and she is not. And all our lives we talked about the time when we would visit the Tollund Man. We were, you see, always going to do it, but not yet. To begin with, we did not want to use up this treat before we had savoured the looking forward to it. We were maybe, also, a little afraid that it would not be what we had hoped. We hoped it would be significant in some way – we could not have told you in what way – and there was a risk it would not be. Our school friends went, helter-skelter. As soon as The Bog People was published in translation, if not before. They came back with an even stronger sense of ownership of the Tollund Man and Professor Glob and all things Danish than they already had. Bella and I thought they were superficial and unworthy and that the experience they had had was trivial, in comparison to the experience we would have. One day.

Then before it was quite the right time, we both made the mistake of getting married too young. I married the father of the child I was expecting, and became bogged down, almost literally, in the life of a farmer’s wife. I have had opportunities enough to ponder on the centuries the Tollund Man spent in the peat, following seams of different coloured silt on the cut edge of a dyke and wondering which of these I would choose as mattress and duvet for a long, long sleep. My life has been a buried one. Bella’s mistake was quite different. She married an Italian. I sometimes think that if we hadn’t given her the nickname, she would not have married him. He was a clever, manipulative man. I used to feel, after I had spent any time with him, as if I had been eating cream cakes and ice-skating both at once. He overwhelmed Bella. He wore her away and when she was paper-thin and empty, he went back to Italy with their child, with her child. It doesn’t seem impossible, does it, for a woman to regain a daughter who has gone no further than Milan? But it was. So many people became involved, pulling in different directions, each with a determination to win, one way or another. Every one of these agencies – the Catholic Church, the courts, the Social Services – was positive their view was the right one. I have never been that certain of anything, myself. After a decade the Italian factions won a final victory and Bella went to live in Italy, too, to be near her daughter.

During the decade before she left, in the darkest times, one of us would suggest we go to Denmark, and the other would veto it. I would say: ‘If we just once saw the face of the Tollund Man, we might borrow some of his calmness.’

She would say: ‘The point of the Tollund Man is the long view. Centuries passing. I can’t take the long view.’

Or she would say: ‘I can’t stand this any longer. Let’s go to Denmark. We might feel as we did when we were girls, full of hope.’

I would say: ‘We’re not girls, though, are we, and we need to see this through before we start letting ourselves look towards better times.’

When it was all over, I stayed at home, with the stock and the crops and my own children. We saw each other, of course, travelled back and forth, but the cares of middle life made us ordinary. We thought and worried and talked about all the things that seem important when the time ahead and the time behind are more or less in balance. Money, health, appearance, partners, children. We hardly mentioned the Tollund Man in this time, though I think we both understood that we still expected to visit him, and that we would both know when the right time had come.

When Bella came back from Italy, she fell ill. She was in and out of hospital, undergoing this treatment and that treatment and always, always talking about when she got better. This time we did plan. We did look up the ways to travel, calculated the cost, worked out an itinerary. It felt as if we were about to complete a circle, reaching out to the Tollund Man at the end of our lives as we had at the beginning. Holding out a hand to a hand preserved from the past, hoping to be part of a chain that in some way preserved us into the future.

She died before we could come to you. I don’t know if I will be able to make the journey without her. I never planned to do that.

Thank you for your letter, and of course I realise my answers were not the answers you were looking for. My business is facts. I collect and catalogue facts and artefacts, from which the facts are deduced, relating to the life and times of Iron Age man. My greatest pleasure in the work I do is to speculate on the facts we do not know, because time has eroded all evidence. But this is not, strictly, my job.

I am sure you will forgive me if I point out those parts of your letter that do not altogether agree with the facts as we know them. First, you speak of choosing strata in the layers of the soil in Suffolk (you use a striking image to describe this, which I would never have thought of myself) as a final resting place like the Tollund Man’s grave. I have researched the soil composition in your part of East Anglia and find it is principally chalky clay left behind by the last period of glaciation, with some lighter, sandy deposits associated with river valleys. Although your country still has peat bogs, I do not believe that any of them are close to where you live. The Tollund Man was found between two layers of peat and I think you would be unlikely to locate such a bed for your final sleep on your husband’s farm.

There were, of course, Iron Age settlements in your area of England. You might like to visit Warham Camp, a well-preserved earthwork, or Grimes Graves.

I am concerned not to upset you, as I see the death of your friend has been difficult, but I also need to correct any assumption you may have made about the Tollund Man ‘choosing’ where his body was left and, eventually, found. The practice at this time, during the early Iron Age, around 600–300 BC, was for bodies to be cremated. This was done with some ceremony and we can assume that it was felt to confer honour on the dead and a safe passage into the next world. Once the body had been burnt, the bones were picked out of the ashes and placed in urns or wrapped in cloth and then buried, often with a small piece of metal – a brooch or an ornament – and it is these remains, in funeral mounds, that allow us to speak with confidence of the way the dead were treated.

The Tollund Man did not die a natural death and was, as we know, not cremated. He was buried in a place far from any habitation in the middle of an area that had been recently exploited for fuel, something we can be sure was precious to the people among whom he lived. The average temperatures were 2–3°C below what they are today and Denmark, even now, can have many nights at below -10°C in the winter. Fuel would also have been necessary to cook the vegetable grains into a porridge; we know this was the diet of the time from the contents of the stomachs of the peat bog bodies and other evidence. The men of that time were in awe of the bogs. They were places of mystery; not land, not water, but something in between, and the Tollund Man would not have seen such a place as somewhere peaceful to lie down for his final rest. This is all very dry and dull, I am sure, and I wish I had the skill to move at once, and more elegantly, to the point I am trying to make. The Tollund Man, I believe, was a sacrifice intended to please whatever power provided the peat.

Now, to the matter of your so-long-delayed visit. You mention your husband and children. If you do not wish to make the journey alone, could you not come with some member of your family? I have children myself – my wife, alas, is not with me any more – and they will usually do something with me I do not care to do alone. They humour me, I think is the English expression. It would be a pleasure to me to show you the museum, if you could find a way of making the trip.

It is so kind of you to carry on writing to me. I find it is one of the benefits of growing older, that people tend to be kind – to pick up the things I drop, for example, or remain patient in the queue behind me when I can’t get my gloves off to open my purse to pay for the things I am trying to buy. But you can’t see me; you are being kind to an unknown correspondent. So, thank you. You have also told me some things I did not know, and I am ashamed of myself. I have lived all my life in this landscape and have never understood its nature except in such superficial aspects as its stickiness, bleakness, ability to grow raspberries, inability to grow rhododendrons. I have never visited any Iron Age sites; I am going to, though. Truly. I have a date marked in the calendar when I can be spared and I will go on that date, no matter what.

Knowing as much as you do about those who lived long before us in unimaginably different circumstances, and who have left so little, but that little so significant – knowing all this, do you not stumble over your own unimportance? I wish the English language had some impersonal pronoun, like ‘one’, which no one uses any more, because that last sentence reads as if I am attributing a lack of importance just to you. To you, Anders Larsen, Curator at Silkeborg Museum, when what I want to say is, wouldn’t anyone feel how paltry their life is, knowing what you (and I mean you, here) know?

You mentioned that I was upset at Bella’s death. It’s true, I was. I still miss her and grieve for her, but, you know, she is so completely gone – cremated, as you tell me the Tollund Man’s contemporaries were – and scattered as ashes, leaving not a trace behind. In contrast to Bella, the bog people are as if newly dead, hardly dead at all, but resting in plain sight, bearing witness to their having been, having lived.

Do not feel you must stop writing. Your letters are making me think, and I am enjoying this thinking, so please do not stop writing. In particular, I have been thinking of what it is that makes history, the sort of history that is my special field. What lasts? What is it that determines what lasts?

I thought first of violence. The Tollund Man and the other bog people died violent deaths. If there had been no violence, their bodies would have been burned, like the bodies of all the other people who lived at the same time. Also, if I look at the artefacts we have from the time in which they lived, I see how many of these are to do with killing. Perhaps this is why we feel ourselves (I feel as you imagine I would) to be unimportant. Because we do not live by, and are unlikely to die by, violence. This must be good. I will accept insignificance in exchange for a peaceful life.

My second thought is beauty. Some of the other surviving objects are everyday and ordinary and have been preserved by accident. But most of them are beautiful. They were put in graves because they were the best. Or they were preserved as objects of religious significance and had been crafted with the most care and attention to beauty as a tribute to the gods.

The preservation of an object of beauty carries meaning, I think, beyond the physical appearance, to those who look at it and handle it after those who first made it and owned it are gone. I am brought to this opinion not only because of what I feel, and notice the visitors feel, when looking at a neck torc or a fertility amulet. When my wife died, she left me a bracelet we had bought together on our honeymoon in Venice, a simple, silver circle with a delicate pattern engraved on the surface; a thing to be held and touched and studied closely for its beauty to be understood. I study it now she has gone because I have no place where I can visit and believe myself to be close to her. No grave, no urn, no place where ashes were scattered. So I see this circle as being the link between us even though we are forever apart. I mention this only in support of my beauty theory. There is no reason I could not have picked a hairbrush or a glove or a keyring, something else she touched thousands of times in her life, as the amulet to keep her close to me. But the bracelet is beautiful, as these other things are not.

Please forgive me this intrusion of my personal affairs into our correspondence.

There is nothing to forgive. I have been personal, too. I am also enjoying the thinking so I will go on writing, hoping you will reply; but I would not be offended if you do not.

I do not agree with you about violence. I live with violence and it is diminishing. Of course, the maiming and killing that are a regular part of my life involve animals, not humans. But it is violence, nonetheless.

When I was first married, the pigs were killed on the farm. The slaughterman was the husband of the landlady of the local pub and was shaped like a spider: short, round body; long arms and legs. He was set in a crouching position through years of heaving barrels up and down cellar steps and manhandling live and dead carcasses. He had no teeth and smelt of blood and slops and sweat. If anyone lived by violence, he did. Yet he is dead now and if I mentioned his name in the village shop, they would remember him only after a pause for thought, or not at all.

The pigs to be slaughtered were driven into a pen outside a shed in the yard. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had much to do with a live pig; they are intelligent animals, but physically incompetent. They are ridiculously easy to steer – it only takes a board held against the side of the head to guide them in the direction you want them to go. They have such limited ability to see in any plane except straight ahead that it is as though the world ceases to exist for them when they cannot see it. We have a phrase in English: ‘like a lamb to slaughter’, which means an innocent who is manipulated towards disaster. I have always thought this saying should describe a pig, because lambs are actually less easy to lead to their deaths than pigs are.

I find myself wondering if this is how the Tollund Man went to his death. I look at his face (in photographs, of course) and imagine he must have, pig-like, allowed himself to be led to the bog and the rope, worrying about nothing except sticking to a straight line. Was there, do you think, an executioner, in the bog? A man who had been chosen or put himself forward for the job of sacrificing the man who was chosen or put himself forward as the offering to the gods? I know, I know, you deal in facts derived from objects and physical evidence. You were not there; no one who was there created an account, how can we ever know?

It is not violence, I would say, but sacrifice that is the key. Look at all the saints. They sacrificed themselves for their faith and are consequently part of the currency of life centuries later: in the religious calendar, in the paintings and sculptures in every gallery; on postcards; commemorated in the naming of churches, streets, squares, buildings. Of course the sacrifice has to be worthwhile, as the saints’ and the Tollund Man’s were, in the context of the time they lived in. It was a sacrifice to something greater than themselves.

I feel I have sacrificed my life, too, but for nothing. I have sacrificed myself, firstly, to the social standards of my parents and their peers, which prohibited me from having an abortion, or having a baby and remaining single. Secondly, I sacrificed myself to the farm. My husband – his name is Edward – is satisfied as long as he has the land, the crops, the stock and the jobs to be done in each season as it comes around. I am not, but because the seasons come round so relentlessly and the jobs are so many, I cannot escape. It is so long since the sacrifice was made, I was so young at the time, it took so many years for me to realise I had made it, that I can no longer say what, exactly, it was that I sacrificed; what it was that would have given me the satisfaction Edward feels every day. Perhaps it was the trip to Denmark – that could have been enough. But the blank space in my life is too great to be overwritten by so slight an act.

I do not want to sound as if I am full of self-pity. I am not. I have had my moments of joy; we have had fun together, Edward and I, and are drifting towards old age in harmony. I have children and grandchildren and they have brought me happiness. But first to not-quite-last, what is it that I have missed by having closed off so many choices so early in my life?

I have just looked up from the page, and seen, through the window, my youngest grandchild, a little girl not yet three years old, running across the yard and stopping to poke her glove through the cover of a drain. She is at the age when to squat is as easy as to sit down on a chair (too long ago for me to remember) and she almost has the glove past the bars when her father, my son Tam, comes into sight and catches her up. He wipes her hands on his overalls and carries her off. She is squealing as the pig squealed. This has made me smile, has made me happy for an instant.

But tell me more about your wife. I want to know why you have no grave, no urn and no ashes.

The story of why I have no grave and no urn or ashes is not an easy one for me to tell and I will save it for a later letter, perhaps, if you continue to write to me as I hope you will, or maybe, even until you visit the museum here in Silkeborg, and we meet, face to face. I can see the Tollund Man every day, if I choose, and like you, I am always moved by his look of calm. You should visit.

Your last letter made me realise how different our lives have been. This needs some explanation, because of course our experience would appear to be so very similar; we were both born into a post-war world and have known no conflict; we both married, had children; we have endured no physical hardship. But my life has been devoted to the past, to small and unchanging man-made objects. When I wake in the night and wonder if, after all, I have wasted my chances and should have done something different with the time and the talents I have been given, I am often terrified by how small are the things I study and how big and beyond understanding is everything they represent.

Now you, on the other hand, have lived in the great space of the natural world, where everything changes. I mean the seasons, the soil, the business of sowing, growing and harvesting, of animal fertility and its consequences. I wonder, when you wake in the night, are you also terrified by the greatness of what you have to deal with, day by day? Or is it so commonplace for you that you feel no fear?

Do you wake terrified? I assume everyone does, at some time. My wife did, often, when she was alive, and I would wake to comfort her. She was never boring, my wife, never ordinary. When we talked about our fears and dreams, she made me feel in touch with what was otherwise just outside my reach. Now she is gone and I have no one else I can talk to about such things.

I end, as always, with an apology. This is not why you started this correspondence, to read about my views on ideas too grand for me to be able to express them as I would like to do, even if my English, like yours, was perfect.

You are wrong, I started this correspondence because I am plagued by the same thoughts you have just so succinctly, and in excellent English, expressed. But my response to you on this subject must, like the story of your wife, wait for another letter because, first, I have a story to tell you. I have been on a journey. I said I would visit an Iron Age site in East Anglia, and I have. On the day I circled in my diary. This might seem like a small boast. I decided which day to go and I went, on that day. It is more of an achievement for me than it seems. I have the idea that other people manage their lives like a set of interlocking boxes, each piece fitted snugly to the next (like your Danish Lego, I realise, as I write this, though what was in my mind was something more crafted, less engineered and colourful), and they can move from box to box in full control and with complete confidence that it is the right time to leave one box and enter another. My life is more like a pile of timber. Random.

Anyway, I went to Warham Camp Iron Age Hill Fort. It is about fifty miles from where I live and I drove myself there. I did investigate buses because I prefer a journey to feel like a journey rather than a trip to the shops, but it would have been impossible to arrange within the tottering pile of planks that I had to negotiate to make it out of the house for that long, at that particular moment. By the time I had cooked breakfast, fed the hens, dealt with the eggs and prepared lunch, it would have been too late to set off. So I went by car. I was going to plunge in with my impressions of Warham Camp, which are batting about in my brain demanding to be set down. But I will restrain myself, so you can see it as I saw it, having travelled there.

It was a lovely day; enough of a wind and a frost to give it bite, blue sky and sunshine enough to give it sparkle. I was troubled by the sun in my eyes on the drive up there, kept having to manipulate the visor to block it out. I am not the sort of woman (and I suspect you would know this without my telling you) who owns a pair of sunglasses. I do not own a satellite navigation system, either, but I had memorised the names of the places I would need to pass through to reach Warham – Thetford, Swaffham, Little Walsingham – and arrived safely.

I parked in the village. There were no road markings but a woman came out of the house alongside the verge where I had parked and I thought at once that she had come to upbraid me for leaving my car there. Edward and Tam, my husband and eldest son, are forever alert to anyone who seems to be treating any inch of our four hundred acres as if they had a right to it. The footpaths that run across it are a constant affront to them, and they know the rules for what you can and can’t do on a footpath to the lowest sub-clause. So I thought the woman had come to tell me that it was her right to enjoy the view from her garden without the inconvenience of my car in the foreground.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There are no restrictions.’ And she set about pruning her roses, which was clearly what she had come out of the house to do. I asked her the way to Warham Camp. She came over and waved her secateurs in the direction I should take. She told me that, if I was interested in ancient earthworks, I should also go to Fiddler’s Hill Barrow.

Meet Me at the Museum

Anne Youngson