The Road to Little Dribbling (26 page)

And yet despite their having taken all that care, it now appears that Stonehenge was used for no more than a couple of generations and then abandoned. What made people walk away from it is likely to remain forever the biggest mystery of all.

As you might expect, all this left me in a reflective frame of mind. Trudging back up the long, low hill, I wondered idly what the builders of Stonehenge would have created if they’d had bulldozers and big trucks for moving materials and computers to help them design. What would they have created if they had had all the tools we have? Then I crested the brow of the hill with a view down to the visitor center, with its café and gift shop, its land trains and giant parking lot, and realized I was almost certainly looking at it.

—

I was headed for the county of Norfolk, in the region known as East Anglia, but the Natural History Museum in London had a special exhibition that was highly relevant to East Anglia, so I stopped there on the way. The Natural History Museum is a glorious, overwrought building with a massive central hall dominated by the skeleton of a
Tyrannosaurus rex,
which seems to be poised to attack and devour anyone coming through the front entrance, which in fact wouldn’t be a bad idea at all these days.

I remember the Natural History Museum from years ago as being packed with excellent stuff and seeming almost infinite. The long downstairs corridors, softly lit and tranquil, were filled with tall glass cases of stuffed animals of every imaginable type. It was like being in a frozen zoo. You could study the animals closely, observe their steady gaze and fur and musculature, get a sense of their strength or fleetness, marvel at life’s diverse ingenuity. It was fascinating, even thrilling. Above all, I remember the Natural History Museum as being almost empty of other visitors and very quiet, like a library.

Now it is never calm or empty. Like so many popular tourist destinations in Europe, it is permanently bright and noisy and horrible. Where a long gallery full of stuffed animals and glass cases used to beckon there is now a gift shop. It is not even a gift shop really. It’s a toy store. Gone are the days when you could fob your children off with a pencil case and an eraser. This was like Hamley’s, the famous children’s emporium on Regent Street.

The crowds were loud, intense, and mostly foreign. The atmosphere was that of a Middle Eastern souk or the streets around a football ground before a big game. Nothing about it was agreeable. I threaded my way through the throngs to the special exhibition I had come for, “One Million Years of the Human Story,” which was all about the first people in Britain. I had been wanting to see it for some weeks but particularly I wanted to see it now when I was en route to East Anglia, for that is where the human story in Britain begins.

People, it turns out, have come and gone a lot in Britain. The country has been occupied and abandoned at least seven times. These comings and goings don’t always make a lot of sense. Half a million years ago Britain had a fairly substantial population, but then for about one hundred thousand years no one was in Britain at all, as far as can be told, even though that was a period when the climate was mild and food abundant. At other times when the country was covered in ice hundreds of feet thick, people clambered over every obstacle to get there. Throughout the whole of the long haul of the Paleolithic era, people came and went in ways that seemed perversely at variance with what nature was telling them to do. I suppose it could be said they still do.

In 2000, an amateur archaeologist named Mike Chambers, while walking along the beach at Happisburgh, Norfolk, noticed a flaked flint sticking out of a crumbly sea cliff in a stratum where worked flints shouldn’t be. A team of academic archaeologists moved in and over the next five years extracted thirty-two more pieces of worked flint—that is, human artifacts—which proved to come from an extremely remote past, left by a people so distant from us in time that we know nothing about them. The Happisburgh people were not modern humans. They are usually assigned to a species called
Homo antecessor,
which means “first people,” but that’s just a guess. They left no direct traces of themselves, only the flinty remnants of their industry. Whoever they were, they were the earliest beings yet found in Britain, from nearly a million years ago (hence the name of the exhibition).

At least two other early species of human came and went in Britain before
Homo sapiens
arrived:
Homo heidelbergensis
and
Homo neanderthalensis
(which is to say the Neanderthals). Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia.

The exhibition was everything an exhibition should be—thoughtful, informative, blissfully quiet. I was one of just three visitors, no doubt because it was also rather expensive at £9. (The museum itself is free.) The curators had assembled much that had never been brought together before—the earliest Neanderthal skull in Britain, the world’s most ancient spear, hand axes and scrapers of all shapes and sizes, including those found at Happisburgh—so you could follow the whole story of human occupation over nearly a million years. But the most mesmerizing features were two life-sized, and wholly lifelike, models—one of a Neanderthal, the other of an early modern human. They were made by two Dutch brothers, Adris and Alfons Kennis, who have a genius—that’s really not too strong a word—for human reconstructions. The models were fashioned to look like individuals, not archetypes, so that entering the room was like being with an actual, living Neanderthal and an equally actual early human, a quite uncanny experience.

The Neanderthal was short, about five feet four inches tall, but solidly built and rugged-looking. Neanderthals are a wonderful mystery. Their brains were bigger than ours, for one thing. They lived through ice ages, so needed clothing, but left no evidence that they ever learned to sew. For a long time it was thought that we didn’t breed with them, but now we know that we are 2 percent Neanderthal ourselves. I don’t know why scientists have been so resistant to the idea of interbreeding. You look at the modern humans that a lot of us have slept with and it is hardly a surprise if a Neanderthal maiden or two might have twinkled by the campfire light. Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them. Alongside the Neanderthal, the early modern human looked delicate, almost wispy. He was several inches taller but considerably less robust. There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.

Nearby was a plaster model of the head of a
Homo antecessor,
looking uncommonly happy for some reason.
Homo antecessor
was an entirely new species discovered in northern Spain in 1994. They have never been found anywhere else. No one actually knows that the Norfolk people were
Homo antecessor
. They are assumed to be because they come from the right age, but they could be something else altogether, including even a new species. The model in the Natural History Museum suggested a human-like creature that was good-natured but none too bright, but this, too, is just a guess.

The exhibition ended, inevitably, with a pop-up gift shop. I don’t blame the museum exactly. This is what happens when institutions are told to offer free general admission but also somehow pay their own way. I wouldn’t be at all surprised on my next visit to find the space occupied by a Tesco Express mini-supermarket.

I went and had a look at the rest of the museum. The displays everywhere were dated and threadbare. The room on “Creepy Crawlies,” which I don’t think has changed since I took my own kids there in the 1980s, is relentlessly jokey in a way that makes you want to shoot yourself through the head. Many of the signs were half worn away; this was slowly becoming the Na ural Hist ry Mus um. The labels everywhere were hopelessly lacking in enthusiasm and thought. In the ecology section, a picture of a dolphin, head out of the water looking cheerful and friendly, was accompanied by this message (given here in full): “In 2004 MPs [members of Parliament] called for an end to sea bass fishing in Southwest England following pressure from campaigners to reduce the number of dolphins drowned in trawler nets each year.” I’m sorry, but we just have to look at this ridiculous statement for a moment. First of all, 2004 was a long time ago. Has anything happened since then? Certainly nothing has happened to this label since then. How many MPs called for action? Three? Five hundred? What? Did they introduce legislation? Was it acted on? Was there a reason for particular concern about sea bass fishing in Southwest England? Why not all fishing around Britain—or even all fishing in the world? Even when this information was fresh, it was lame and inadequate. Now it is just out of date and an embarrassment to museumology, or whatever is the word for what these people do. All the museum was like this. The stuffed animals in glass cases that once enraptured my children have been put in storage, presumably deemed too old-fashioned for twenty-first-century display.

The mezzanine overlooking the grand hall used to have a good section on anthropology on one side and yet more stuffed animals on the other. Now the anthropology section is just an empty corridor and the other side is fully occupied by a café—one of at least five in the building. Slowly it dawned on me what’s going on here. The Natural History Museum can’t afford to be a museum anymore, so the directors are stealthily turning it into a food court. Now when I bring my grandchildren, we can sit with refreshments and I can tell them how it used to be. “Over there where that ice cream machine is used to be a glass case with a polar bear in it. Drink up and I’ll take you down and show you where the blue whale used to be. We can get some curly fries there.” It won’t be as informative or educational, but I expect it will be financially viable.

Just beyond this new upstairs café was a lone glass case, and for a moment I thought I had come across an overlooked relic of the way the museum used to be when it was exciting and interesting, but it was a false alarm. It was essentially just an advertisement for Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent, now preserved as a museum. There wasn’t any information about Darwin’s life and achievements, nothing about the
Beagle
voyage or evolution or anything that could be called mildly instructive, just a recommendation to go and see his house.

It didn’t say anything at all about what the snack facilities were like, however, so I decided not to chance it.

Chapter 14

East Anglia

I

O
N A LOVELY BRIGHT
summer’s morning, I was walking the Norfolk coast path between Holkham and Blakeney when I came around a bend and found the way temporarily blocked by a woman and her dog. I stood with the woman and we watched together as the dog dolefully extruded three soft lozenges onto the path.

“Don’t you think that’s a little disgusting, right on the path and all?” I asked in a tone of genuine inquiry.

“I’m local,” she said as if that explained everything. She was well spoken.

“And that gives you the right to let your dog shit on the paths?”

“I’m going to cover it,” she said irritably, as if I were needlessly belaboring the point. “Look,” she said, and scuffed some leaf litter over it, converting the dog’s deposit from a conspicuous hazard into a kind of fecal landmine. “There,” she said, and looked at me with satisfaction, as if this had solved everything.

I stared at her for a long moment, with something like awe, then raised my walking stick high into the air and calmly beat her to death. When she was quite still, I rolled her ample, Barbour-clad body off the path and into the marshy reeds where it sank with a satisfying glug. Then I checked my map and resumed my walk, wondering if there was any place in Blakeney where I could get a cup of tea at this hour.

I like Norfolk. I lived there for ten years until 2013 and have grown convinced that there is nothing wrong with it that a few hills and a little genetic variability wouldn’t fix. For the benefit of the foreign reader, I should perhaps explain that Norfolk has a long-standing reputation for inbreeding. As my son Sam used to say: “Norfolk: too many people, not enough surnames.” I am not for a moment suggesting that the rumors are entirely true, but I will say that when the police do DNA checks after crimes they sometimes have to arrest as many as twelve thousand people.

The other thing for which Norfolk is famed, incontestably, is flatness. Much of it makes tabletops look varied and interesting. But if none of Norfolk is exactly spectacular, parts of it are at least very fine and nowhere is that more true than along the north Norfolk coast. For the ten miles or so between Wells-next-the-Sea (and how pretty a name is that?) and Cley it is buffered on the seaward side by great expanses of salt marsh. These are intercut with channels, some quite deep, that fill with water remarkably swiftly when the tide comes in. It is very easy to lose your way in the chill and wispy fogs that sweep in off the North Sea and to find yourself stranded on a steadily shrinking island of marsh.