Free The Dig by John Preston Page B

be no going back. Besides, I told myself, I needed to uncover one more patch before I could be sure.
    Again, I marked off a six-inch gap in the same widening line and scraped away. Sure enough, I hadn’t been going long when another smudge of brownish-pink sand started to appear. There beneath it was another piece of metal. This time, though, I left it where it was.
    I looked up. The three of them were crowded round, staring down. I could see the boy was bursting to ask another question. Before he could open his mouth, I said, “I think it’s a ship.”
    John Jacobs was the first to say anything. “A ship?” he said. “How do you mean a ship?”
    “A ship that’s been buried in the mound.”
    He started to laugh. “What would anyone want to bury a ship for?”
    “Probably because it’s a grave.”
    “Whose grave?”
    “I don’t know that, not yet. But someone important, I’d say. It must be. They wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble for any little squirt. Think of all the work for a start.
    “They’d have had to drag the ship all the way up the slope from the river. That piece of metal you found there, John — that’s a rivet. These pink patches show where the other rivets are. See how they’ve rusted and colored up the soil.”
    “But, Baz, if it’s a ship, what’s happened to the hull?” asked Will.
    “All rotted away,” I said. “But look here –” and I pointed to where a ridge of hard sand ran from one rivet to the next. “You can see where the strakes were. They’ve left this imprint. That’s all that’s left. That and the rivets.”
    All of them wanted to know how old this ship might be. I told them that I couldn’t be sure about that either. It might be Viking, I said. Or maybe older still, I added.
    “Well, I’ll be —” said Will, and pulled himself up short.
    I looked up at him and grinned. “Quite.”
    I’d been intending to let Mrs. Pretty know what I had found, of course. But Robert must have run back to tell her before I had a chance to do so. One moment he’d been jumping up and down, waving his arms about. The next he was walking along with his mother, tugging away at her sleeve.
    When she reached the mound, I showed Mrs. Pretty the rivets and the patches of sand. Then I told her about finding the other rivet in Aldeburgh, as well as the note explaining how it had come from the ship-burial at Snape.
    She inspected the rivet for some time.
    Then to my surprise she stuck out her hand. “Congratulations, Mr. Brown,” she said. She paused and, as she did so, the corners of her mouth seemed to drift upwards. “I always told you I thought there was something in there, didn’t I?”
    “You certainly did, Mrs. Pretty. You certainly did …”
    She also shook John’s hand and Will’s. We all stood around for a while, grinning like halfwits. By now it was pastseven o’clock and we decided to pack it in for the day. Mrs. Pretty and Robert went back to the house. When we had finished covering over the trench with tarpaulins and pieces of hessian, John and Will suggested we go for a drink to celebrate. But I was too fired up to be able to take any company.
    Instead, I walked down to the estuary. The cow parsley already came up to my shoulders, while the row of railings that marked out the path was all but buried under brambles. Beating my way through to the water’s edge, I sat on the bank with only a few squabbling ducks for company. There were clumps of hairy-stalked nettles, as well as a great expanse of docks with ragged holes torn in them.
    A fishing boat with dark red sails made its way upriver. The only sound was the popping of wild broom pods. When I turned round I could see Sutton Hoo House up on the bluff. The light was blazing in its windows. Behind the house a few spindly pines stood out on the horizon. It reminded me of an illustration from one of the Bible Reading Fellowship books I’d had at school.
    I wished May could have been sitting there beside me.