The Buried Circle

Avebury: state of mind as much as a landscape. The place my family came from, where my grandmother was born and brought up–until the old serpent entered Eden, as Frannie used to say. A place I never lived in, apart from a few weeks one long-ago summer, but entering the high banks that enclose stone circle and village has always felt, in some strange way, like coming home.

Below us, the summer fields are gold, ochre, tawny, separated by knotty threads of green hedgerow. I’m getting used to the dangling now; it’s almost–but only almost–exhilarating. We fly over the Kennet and Avon canal, a brown ribbon winding away into the afternoon heat haze, little matchbox barges meandering along it, while the helicopter gains height to rise over the escarpment. I can see the long, double-ridged scar of the Wansdyke, an ancient Saxon boundary, bisecting the Downs, then the land folds and drops away and already there’s the ridiculous pudding that is Silbury Hill jutting out of the fog in the distance, so unmistakably not a natural feature that you can understand why CropCircleCruiseCompany makes money out of people convinced it was plonked there by aliens.

I bring the camera viewfinder up to my eye, and Steve’s hand grips my shoulder, helping to steady me while I get used to the weight.

‘Looks fabulous on the monitor,’ comes his tinny voice, breathless with relief. ‘We couldn’t be luckier with the weather, could we? Shame about the haze–makes the horizon a bit murky.’

‘Can you give me a white balance?’ I say, and he leans over me, inhumanly unworried by the yawning void, holding a piece of white paper in front of the lens. I make a quick adjustment, set the focus to infinity, and film the ground like a gold and green carpet being pulled away beneath us. Slowly tilt up to reveal Silbury and the whole damn distant shebang, humps, bumps, ridges and secrets you can only see from above, fading into a wash of pale umber that then shades into an overhead blue so intense it hums. Through the lens, height, motion and scariness are pared down to beautiful. OK, I’m a bit ropy still on the technicals (did I remember to set the toggle switch to daylight?) but this is what I’m good at, composing a picture: colour, angle, geometry.

Euphoria unexpectedly fills me, and I can even admit the sex last night was good; not to be repeated, but maybe forgivable. Guilt sneaks back with the memory of his fingers strapping me into the harness, and I enjoyed that too–why do I get myself into these scrapes? I should have made it clear before breakfast: I don’t do married men, full stop, after a nasty experience with a tutor at college–but there wasn’t time for conversation.

The helicopter loses height as we fly towards West Kennet Long Barrow–‘Just like a big vulva,’ says one of the passengers, the American woman, as I tilt down so it fills the frame–and then banks to the right, so my lovely shot ends abruptly in the clouds. I can hear the gnashing of Steve’s teeth because we’ve missed a close-up. We cross the A4–‘The old Roman road,’ calls Ed–and come over the green shoulder of the hill. A sigh comes out of me. There, at last, the first white tooth of the Avenue. I hadn’t even noticed I was holding my breath. The rotors are saying it: home, home, home. The image in the viewfinder is blurry, the wind pricking water into my eyes. England’s full of little exiles, and one of them happened at Avebury, for my grandmother, sixty-something years ago. One of them happened there for me, too, in 1989, so both of us were, in our own way, expelled from Eden.

Get in the van, Indy. Now

As far as blood relations go, Frannie is all I have. Grandfather, mystery man: not only did I never know him but neither did his daughter, born at the end of the Second World War after he was killed in action. Mother: well, best not to go there, but let’s just say she died, abroad, when I was in my early teens, having left me with my grandmother when I was eight. Father: itinerant Icelandic hippie my mother met in a backpacker’s hostel in Delhi, and never saw again. That was how I came to be called India. Could have been worse–Mum had been doing the world trip and I might have ended up with any name from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar.

We’re almost there, following the Avenue as it marches up the hillside. From above, the double row of stones looks tiny, but at ground level most are taller than a person. A single figure is walking between them, a dog racing ahead, then wheeling back to jump at the legs of its owner.

‘This must be the way they would process,’ comes a Dutch accent, female, in my headphones, separating the syllables. ‘Up from the Romans’ road, led by their priestess…’

Only a few thousand years out, not to mention one or two other errors, like there were no roads, unless you count the Ridgeway. And as for priestesses–well, I wouldn’t mind betting the boys were in charge back then, with the Neolithic equivalent of Steve leading the party. I swing the camera round–‘Great shot,’ breathes Steve, watching the image on the monitor wedged behind the seats–and pan along the course of the reconstructed Avenue, as we approach the village.

If Silbury Hill is an upturned pudding through the camera lens, Avebury is a bowl, an almost perfect circle of grassy banks and a deep ditch, surrounding a vast incomplete ring of stones. Five thousand years or so ago, those banks would have been gleaming white chalk, enclosing an outer circle of more than a hundred megaliths, with two separate inner circles, north and south, and more scattered sarsens within. Half the stones are missing now, like rotted teeth, some replaced with concrete stumps. Two roads meet near the middle, cutting the circle into quarters, and the village straggles along the east-west axis, a scatter of cottages half in and half out of the circle.

‘This is Avebury,’ calls Ed, moving up a notch into archaeological-tour-guide mode. He told me, last night, he’s doing a part-time MA in landscape archaeology with a view to getting into aerial survey. ‘Similar age to Stonehenge, but bigger–biggest stone circle in Europe.’

‘It’s like a giant crop circle, isn’t it?’ says one of the Americans. ‘D’ya think it coulda been, like, a signal to the aliens?’

Ed grunts in a way that could be roughly translated as For Chrissake, beam me up, Scotty. Down below, dots of colour between the stones mushroom into people as the camera zooms in. There’s a gathering over by Stone 78–the Bonking Stone, so-called because it’s conveniently flat–probably a handfasting. Someone is beating a small drum, arms moving rhythmically and flamboyantly, the sound inaudible above the noise of the rotors. I zoom in further, but it isn’t John.

‘We’ll make a couple of circuits,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll go in as low as I can but the National Trust run the place and they don’t like us doing this. Ready? Hang onto your hats.’ The helicopter suddenly banks steeply, throwing me forward. The camera tries to tear itself out of my hands and I feel like I’m about to be diced by the webbing straps. There’s a dizzy glimpse of wheeling megaliths between my legs.

No. No. ‘Hold on. We can’t do this.’

‘Won’t take long, Indy. The Trust won’t have time to identify us. Tell ‘em you bought the footage in. You and Steve can slo-mo the film and it’ll look gorgeous…’

I don’t care about the Trust or the fact we’re filming without a permit. We’re going round the circle widdershins. Anti-clockwise. The bad way.

Always respect the stones, girl. Sunwise, that’s the way you goes round the circle.

‘Can we go the other way?’

‘What?’

‘The other direction, I mean. Clockwise.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Steve, witheringly. ‘You’re on the left side of the ‘copter. We have to go anti-clockwise, or you’ll be pointing the camera at the fucking sky.’

He’s right, of course. And if I press the point Ed will think I’ve gone barmy. The passengers don’t seem to be concerned that we’re going widdershins. And they’re all probably right–what does it matter if we go the wrong way round?

Except–I never have.

Call me superstitious, but it’s the way I was brought up. Respect the stones, girl, they go sunwise, so should you…

But, as with everything on this production, it seems I have no choice. Widdershins it is. I point the camera away from my dangling feet, and hit the record button.

The helicopter banks away as a dark green Land Rover with the National Trust’s acorn-and-oak-leaves logo on the side comes tearing up the Manor driveway. We managed three circuits and some great pictures, though I say it myself. Hard to go wrong, really, on a day like this–aerial shots always look fab and Ed takes the helicopter round at perfect height and speed.

‘Can we head back over Silbury again?’ asks Steve.

‘No way,’ says Ed, gaining height so rapidly that I’m becoming dizzy. ‘They’d follow along the road, and I don’t want them to identify the helicopter. Some of our work comes from the Trust and English Heritage. You’ve only got about fifty minutes left for the crop circles, anyway, unless you want to pay for another hour?’

‘Fifty minutes?’ squawks Steve. ‘We’ve been filming less than half an hour and I paid up front for two.’

‘Factor in fly-back and landing. Every minute we’re in the air counts.’

‘Oh, great. Now he tells me.’

You have to feel sorry for him. Under all that effing and blinding, Steve hasn’t a clue how the real world turns. He thinks people ought to feel honoured and privileged to be part of his amazing groundbreaking (ha ha) TV production. I ignore the bickering in my headset, and crane my head to look back at Avebury, disappearing behind us.

You’re like the rest of us, our kid, said John to me once, in his flat Brummie voice. Yo-yos. Once Avebury has hold of your string, you have to keep coming back. He’ll be in his cottage on the A4 below, smiling that twisted smile, crushing his roll-up in the ashtray. Look at Frannie. He’s right. After decades of exile, my grandmother sold up the terraced house in Chippenham, where I’d grown up with her, and moved back to Avebury. I thought she was mad. Not how John sees it. He knows why I do my damnedest to resist the pull of Avebury. Her life, Indy. Don’t fret. You need a massage. Or a healing. Drop in and I’ll do your feet.

The Marlborough Downs slide by beneath, a golden landscape sliced by chalky white trackways and dark green hedgerows. Pale grey sarsen stones lie in drifts like grubby sheep. High as we are, the camera lens makes the ground look close enough to tap with a toe. I imagine myself tossing the camera to Steve, jumping down, hiking back to Avebury…It doesn’t help that I feel guilty about Frannie because, in spite of what John says, I haven’t been back, not since Christmas, and I was away again to London on Boxing Day. Could you stay another night? she said, her eyes full of hope. I couldn’t.

Television’s full of wannabes jostling to fill any vacancy. The job at Mannix represents the first time I’ve had anything more long-term than a three-month contract, apart from a set of rip-off merchants in Leeds who took me on for twelve months’ work experience, paying expenses only. (Not much in the way of those while I slept on people’s floors and once or twice in the back of the cameraman’s car.) No wonder I have to grit my teeth, listening to Wonderboy Steve wrangle over how much it will cost to charter the ‘copter for an extra hour. I told him last week we ought to have three hours in the air, not two. But he has the senior job and the mansion flat in Hammersmith, while I’ve the commute from Hades every morning, sharing a bedroom in SW17 with two Australian girls doing the London leg of their round-the-world tour…

‘Indy!’ Mein Führer is about to issue his orders, now he’s told the pilot what’s what. ‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Is what OK with me?’

‘Weren’t you listening?’

‘Of course I was. What I meant was, you’re the director. I do what you ask me.’

‘Fine. Then do it.’

Mmm. Maybe I should have been listening. Never mind, I can wing it.

The ‘copter is banking again steeply. ‘It’s an ankh,’ says one of the American men, pointing at something below. ‘These guys built the Pyramids, you know.’

Really?

The crop circle is lovely, intricate, a series of different-sized circles centred on a long, stave-like axis–nothing like an ankh, as it happens. Inside each big circle are little circles of standing barley. It looks like a radial lay, the crop flattened from the inside of the circle outwards, which some cerealogists will tell you can only be produced by the down-thrust of a hovering UFO’s engine. We’re coming in fast towards it, the helicopter dropping down and down. Damn, the light’s changed. And I’m going to get flare off the sun–but I suppose that’s what Steve wants. Makes it look nuclear-spooky.

The sun goes behind a cloud.

‘Shit,’ explodes my headset. ‘Pull out. Ed, you’ll have to go again.’ I told you, Steve, but you wouldn’t listen, would you? Filming always takes longer than you think.