Chalky Ghosts: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (1)

Chalk flint picked up from site of Saxon burial ground, 2023

In my last post, I wrote about my discovery that the house where I spent my childhood was not only build on chalk foundations but over the top of what had been a Saxon burial ground. Although initial excavations suggested the location of the site was on the top of a chalk ridge just above my family house, subsequent discoveries found bones and grave sites extending down the hillside and beneath our garden. This haunting discovery was the starting point of THE SLEEPING PLACE project.

The great piles of chalk, excavated to make room for house foundations, and with which my parents later did battle to make their hillside rockery, were knobbly and socketed and vertebrae-like. My imagination was haunted by their memory. Those chalk flints we played with as children, did they include bones? I found many more of them as I re-walked the exposed chalk paths beyond the building line in the early stages of THE SLEEPING PLACE project. The chalk ridge, on which the Saxon burial ground was situated, forms part of a chalk spine which runs from Guildford towards Farnham and is known as The Hog’s Back. All along this ridge, there are heaps of chalk flints chucked in the corners of fields by exasperated farmers or used to line driveways of newly built houses. Who knows what else came up with the chalk, what skeletons? As I started to explore how I might stage some of this archaeology in writing, these bumpy pieces of chalk kept intruding and reminding me of their materiality. At a later stage of the project, this became something I could not ignore.

But in the early stages of the project, I was more concerned with ghosts. Not only was I haunted by the thought of all those buried bones unquiet in the roots of my old home but also by those other skeletons, also white but far more dangerous: the racist myths of a white ‘anglo’-saxon past also buried here in the south-east of England. 

Sketch made in early stages of THE SLEEPING PLACE

‘Some game of chance is played in this country’: From TENTER to THE SLEEPING PLACE

Illustration by Rose Ferraby from TENTER (Guillemot Press, 2020)

There is a line in TENTER which discovers how even the ground ‘becomes spongy underfoot’. The terrain (a field, an ancient battlefield) gives way as it is walked: history, memory and dangerous ideologies around ‘national identity’ become equally spongy as the sequence of poems progresses. The motif of the Bayeux Tapestry throughout TENTER is more about its patched, fraying and repaired edges than about the stable narrative of its central panels. In many ways, then, TENTER looks forward to THE SLEEPING PLACE (forthcoming from Guillemot Press, 2023) which returns to the sponginess of an unstable past but with a new focus on archaeology as provisional assemblage.

By working again with the brilliant team at Guillemot Press to design and realise the material qualities of the book, THE SLEEPING PLACE is able to return to the excavations of TENTER but this time with a commitment to staging any discoveries textually so that the reader is invited to participate in a making and re-making of the past as creative event. The artwork is again provided by extraordinary archaeologist and artist Rose Ferraby, so that image and word can find each other in a multi-layered poetic text. There is a new interest in the use of conceptual constraint in the construction of THE SLEEPING PLACE but also in wordplay, nonsense and ritual to explore the role of choice, chance and affect in the constructions of history. Where TENTER was concerned with dysfunctional narratives of past wars which deny the UK’s current involvement in international conflicts and demonise those displaced by them, THE SLEEPING PLACE engages with the violent and racist myth of a ‘white’ Anglo-Saxon past.

THE SLEEPING PLACE started with my discovery that my family home in Guildford was situated next to the site of an ancient Saxon burial ground, excavated in the 1920s but subsequently built over. The massive sockets of chalk flint and crumbling lumps of chalk that I played with as a child, in hindsight, seem uncannily like human bone. In my next post, I will meditate further on this and other discoveries which led to the writing of THE SLEEPING PLACE.

Lump of chalk flint taken from site of Saxon burial ground, 2022.

Chalk ridge where Saxon burial ground and my family home are situated.