Three Times

1.

A bit of time was buried under Oxford’s Westgate shopping centre for 40 years. In the shoppers’ break between the demolition of one mall and the start of construction on another, archaeologists were able to investigate the friary that once stood there, and look for signs of even older inhabitants of the area.

Few places trade more on their history than Oxford, but the open days at the dig gave an unusually intense connection to the city’s past. There was something about looking into the scoured earth, and the trenches and boxes of finds not yet subject to a fixed narrative, as busy as someone thinking about tomorrow as they walk along.

The friars who lived here in the Middle Ages were meant to be reflective, to consider the divine in the world as they moved about in it. It’s easier for me to believe that this contemplation was something done after a rush of immediate things than that they achieved it in every moment, however ahistorical that may be.

My sense of time must be far different from a friar’s – at once far deeper, in terms of the past and future of the universe, and yet without that infinite spiritual dimension.

An archaeological view of time might be that it is made up of layers, each era is a horizontal stripe in the subsoil, objects distributed densely or sparsely according to the geology and settlement patterns – except where digging or ploughing, subsidence or water has thrown the sequence into chaos.

I always imagine a pristine archaeology under an intense, green, 21^st-century field, under June sun. the hawthorn hedges in the distance are trimmed to stern rectangles, and the topsoil made friable by fertilisers, sandy and slipping through cupped fingers.

2.

When I’m about to climb a tree, I sometimes think of the “light cone” from astrophysics. Imagine the present as a single plane, with two cones projecting from a point – that point is a single event – on it, one into the future, one into the past. Putting it simply, the “past” cone contains causes, starting with the immediate conditions leading to the event, then the conditions that led to those conditions, then the conditions that led to those, and so on. The “future” cone contains everything affected by the event.

In astrophysics the cones expand or contract at the speed of light – for example, wherever the light from a supernova has reached is “affected”. (Apparently this really works in four dimensions, but the cones are easier to understand.)

What has this to do with climbing trees? The “effects” of tree climbing can be dramatic – step on the wrong branch, jump from the wrong height, get swiped in the eye by the wrong twig, and they might well include bleeding, hospital, grief.

Or a robin might settle by my hand as I look up through the trees towards blue sky. Or there might be a nest, or on the ground four deer might pass below me, heads lifted alert but I invisible.

So the “past” light cone of a tree branch – the route I took, the robin’s territory, the weather in the last few days, the disease in a branch, the shape of the tree, the fall and germination of the seed it began as – narrows to the moment when (say it’s a willow) I put my hands on the corrugated bark and swing my feet up.

My skin is already scoring on the bark, the powdery lichen. My shoe sole grips, then slips, I have to swing again, then haul my weight up inside the dome of curling leaves.

At what point does the “present” happen and the “future” cone begin? Of course, it’s every instant, but my mind is always slightly shadowed by the one with gravest consequences, the possible wrong step. Wordsworth, oddly, helps me avoid dwelling on the negative:

“That in this moment there is life and food
For future years”

                                Tintern Abbey

If my “future” cone does not involve falling from the tree, my muscles might remember a few tough trees for some days; scuffed skin will take a while to smooth; I will be consoled in a month (stirring the leaf mould with my toe), or a year (that walk had some good trees in it), or twenty years (that’s the one we used to swing on, look how that branch has thickened now).

But if memory is a record of the present, how in the “future” cone will it come to light again?

3.

There are times when another past crowds into my present. I remember, tired out and watching a concert at St Martin’s in the Fields, looking up and seeing the upper galleries filled with the cream of Enlightenment London society, the pomade from their wigs in a mist around the candle flames.

Some writers fantasise that there are places where the boundaries between the present and the past are thinner, or porous (although it is in the nature of physical laws that they cannot be reversed). Children’s novels like A Wrinkle in Time and Tom’s Midnight Garden first introduced me to the idea that the past and future are both coexistent with the present.

But some real places can be persuasive that the fantasy has come true. Prehistoric monuments, such as the West Kennet Long Barrow in mist, or the Rollright Stones when the sun is low. One night the snow came down in Oxford like static on a badly tuned analogue TV. I got my shoes on quickly and headed into town – never mind the soaking, or the risk of slipping: how many more times in my life would I get to see proper snowfall in southern England?

I got to the city centre while the blizzard was at its peak. The buildings flickered in and out of view as if on an early film. The cold air crowded my chest, got me gasping in huge flakes of ice. Others fell across my eyes, refracting the yellow of the old-style streetlamps in Radcliffe Square.

Few other people were about – all of them were running in one direction or another. But I was wrapped up in the ecstasy of a snowstorm. Perception was so radically altered – colour, sound, the taste of the air – I couldn’t capture detail. Everything came in fragments: that man – in a Victorian gown? That figure – in a monk’s cowl? It felt as though all the mythology of Oxford’s past was breaking through to me as I stood grinning in the dark.

Not every timeslip comes in bad weather. In the Westgate archaeology exhibition the curators had included photographs of flooded ditch marks made by the remains of Iron Age roundhouses found on Port Meadow, northwest of Oxford’s centre. This is land unploughed for 4000 years (although it was used as a horse racing venue in the eighteenth century, among other things). The lack of farming is due to its tendency to flood, demonstrated every years when a lake rises across the grass, and waterfowl calls busy the air.

Another winter, and it was one of England’s coldest for a long while. Even in mid-afternoon the frost lined every grass blade, edged puddles and footprints with ice. The flood lake was thickly frozen and all the birds had been driven off. The plane of the Meadow would have been almost unbroken, if not for the skaters.

Sound moved in spirals from the turns of two skaters. Another pair of feet drew long resounding lines, which echoed from the surface making the flood plain as full of reverberations as an Alpine gorge. This, I thought, must be the sound of those wintry Bruegel paintings, of the Little Ice Age, of Orlando’s frost fair. Strange that one noise could carry such a charge, should let me leap from a gloved and shivering walk into a turn on a smoothed bone skate blade.

I know all these experiences have no basis in the shared reality outside my head. But when I walk through Oxford, using its Saxon streetplan, see the Victorian memorials and the alien values they celebrate, and approach the river – running in this or similar courses since being pushed south in the most recent glaciation – time loses its layers. All of it folds into the present.