The Banker's Niece 12: Stonehenge

Spring 1978

It was a sunny Saturday and Jane and Rick were pootling along the A303 in the Mini Clubman. Pootling rather than speeding for a variety of reasons.  

    As far as Rick knew, the Clubman had never been beyond Bristol before so he’d spent the whole of the previous weekend in the road outside Jane’s house either underneath the vehicle or with his head in the engine in order to ‘give it a good service’.

    ‘It’s burning a lot of oil,’ he said, coming up to Jane’s room, holding an oily rag and wiping his hands on it. ‘We won’t be able to push it.’

    Pushing it was in any case optimistic as the Mini’s top speed was 55mph. Any faster and the whole contraption began to shake, or ‘judder’ as Rick put it.

    Jane had realised early on that she was going to have to be navigator in the partnership as Rick preferred to drive ‘by intuition’, usually reaching the right place eventually but taking a lot of detours en route. ‘The detours are the best bit’ he always said, but they infuriated Jane. Being a novice at the art however and inclined to car-sickness, she had to keep asking Rick to slow down or stop so that she could look at the map and check they were going the right way.

    At least that was her excuse. The truth was, she was in no hurry for them to reach their destination. 
    They’d been through a few towns – Jane had clocked Ilminster, Ilchester, Sparkford and Wincanton - but otherwise all you could see from the car was countryside.

    Gangly lambs frolicked in the fields. They’d passed one whole hillside covered in white blossom. When they paused at a couple of roundabouts Jane had been astonished by the brilliance of the new leaves peeking out of the hedges.

    It was a long time, she realised, since she’d had the chance to notice nature. Nearly six years in fact: three in London and then three in Exeter. Yet when she was a child she spent all her free time outdoors in the countryside. It was where she felt happy.

    Neither had driven from the South-west to the South-east before so they had no idea how long the journey would take. In case they couldn't stop for lunch and because it was cheaper to provide their own, Jane had made them some cheese sandwiches and a Thermos of instant coffee which she was busy passing in turn to the ever-hungry ever-thirsty Rick.

    Rick had put some of their favourite albums on to cassette for the journey and when inspired they sang along. The funny thing was that they were always inspired at the same time: they always burst out singing together. It led her to wonder whether they might have a career together.

    ‘Tell me about your parents,’ said Rick.

    He seemed almost excited about meeting them.

    ‘They’re rich,’ she said.

    She knew that wasn’t something you should say to suitors if you wanted them to love you for yourself but it was the first thing that came into her head. It was also a test. She was well aware that men had pursued her for the wrong reasons, with those disastrous results in one case (but that was behind her now; she tried not to think about it), and she wanted to see how Rick reacted.

    ‘And?’ he said, eyes fixed on the road ahead, concentration unbroken.

    ‘My father works all the time.’

    ‘Doing what?’

    ‘Stockbroker in the City. Family company.’

    Rick nodded sagely but Jane got the impression he didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Come to think of it, she didn’t have a clue either. Her father never talked about his work. When at home he was usually to be found sitting in silence in his armchair, a glass of whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

    ‘And your mother?’ asked Rick.

    ‘She’s very thin.’

    What else was there to say about her mother? Thinness ruled her mother’s life. She hadn’t eaten potatoes, beetroot, bananas and biscuits since her twenties as they were fattening. It was a woman’s job to be beautiful and to be beautiful you had to be thin.

    Jane had been thin all right in her teens, so thin in fact that her periods stopped, and that was good. She wasn’t thin any more, now that she couldn’t stop eating, and that was bad. Every time she went home she could see her mother running her eyes up and down Jane’s body scrutinising her for signs of fatness. Jane had taken to wearing baggy clothes.

              

Having been hilly and wooded, the landscape now turned flat and bare, and a side wind buffeted the Mini. Strange hummocks dotted the fields.

    ‘Hey,’ said Rick, pointing to the left. ‘Stonehenge. Shall we stop?’

    Jane’s stomach gave a small lurch. They hadn’t planned to stop. Why did Rick always have to disconcert her so? She suspected he’d had the detour in mind all along but hadn’t told her in case she panicked about time.

    He was fascinated by archaeology and in his room at the cottage he’d had a whole shelf of books on the subject and a drawer of flat maps that he’d ruled with pencil lines. Sadly, while Jane and Rick squashed together in her Exeter room, all that reference material along with Rick’s cat Cat was now with his friend Geoff.

    They turned on to a smaller road towards a row of hefty grey stones like elephants’ legs. They appeared a lot smaller and less exciting than she expected of this famous prehistoric site.

    Rick pulled on to the verge next to a gate. As they climbed out of the car, the wind caught its doors. Jane zipped up her yellow cagoule, wishing she had gloves and a scarf. Once over the gate (it was tied shut with orange baler twine, impossible to undo), they walked across a field of short grass, through some sheep which scampered off ejecting fans of black droppings.

    ‘Wow,’ said Jane as they came up close.

    The stones were much more impressive now she was standing underneath them. They were at least three times the height of a person and not in a row, she realised, but a semi-circle. Some of them were joined at the top by more slabs of stone and others lay on their backs on the ground. It looked like the end of a giants’ party.

    ‘Whatever was it for?’ she said.

    ‘Ah, now you’re asking,’ said Rick, and Jane immediately wished she hadn’t as Rick sounded as if he was about to launch into one of his technical lectures.

    It wasn’t that he was boring, it was just that he didn’t realise how many gaps there were in her education – like woodwork, metalwork, things electrical, the internal combustion engine, history (due to her own lack of interest in lists of dates and kings) and most of science. She could barely change a light bulb. His explanations seldom made sense and asking questions only led her deeper into confusion.

    Luckily he didn’t say any more. Instead, he took her hand and they sat together on one of the fallen stones. The sheep regained their confidence and ambled around them nibbling grass. Crows fluttered down and pecked at the sheep’s droppings.

    ‘These stones -’ she began.

    ‘Megaliths,’ interjected Rick.

    She could understand that, language being her thing. ‘Mega’, as in big, and ‘lith’ meaning stone like in ‘lithograph’. She saw words in her head as if on a page and once she'd imprinted them on her mind's eye she never forgot them. Rick and his colleague had started to use her as a living dictionary, ringing her from work to check spellings for their crosswords.

    ‘These megaliths,’ she said. She liked the word. It had the same thump as ‘elephant’. ‘However did they get here?’

    ‘Magic,’ said Rick.

    She laughed. ‘And all these humps and bumps in the fields. What are they?’

    ‘Barrows,’ said Rick.

    ‘Barrows?’ said Jane, thinking of wheelbarrows.

    ‘Prehistoric burial chambers.’

    ‘Golly,’ said Jane. That sounded rather spooky. Had anyone been inside these chambers and if so what had they found? ‘This must have been an important place then.’

    ‘Yes indeed,’ said Rick. ‘A confluence of leys.’

    ‘A confluence of what?’ What on earth were ‘lays’? Actually, she wasn't sure what 'confluence' meant either but she could guess.

    ‘Leys,’ he said, ‘L-E-Y-S. Straight lines between prehistoric features.’

    ‘Straight lines,’ she repeated. ‘What, like on your maps?’

    ‘Exactly,’ he said.

    ‘And what are they?

    ‘Ah, another mystery,’ said Rick

    She leant against him, feeling a rush of happiness like a laugh from deep inside her. Life with Rick might be disconcerting, but it was never ordinary. It was like one big fairy story.

    The stones sheltered them from the wind. The sun slanted down on them. All the noises from outside had died away as if they were in a separate reality.

    Rick put his arm around her and they kissed.
    She wanted never to leave this place.

  

‘I should think we’re about halfway now,’ he said as they walked back to the car.

    ‘Just about,’ she said.

    Why did he have to remind her? This visit to her parents loomed like a dark tunnel and she couldn't see how she was ever going to make it to the other end.

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Note Stonehenge was roped off either late 1977 or early 1978 (sources differ), in either case before Jane and Rick visited, and fallen stones have been righted. The above however is how I remember it (with a smattering of Avebury, another megalithic site), and anyway this is fiction so I can say what I like. For more contact English Heritage.