A weekend in London

“Way to spend a weekend isn’t it, knee deep in a muddy plague pit digging up the bones of the dead.”

 

“Better get used to it, another hundred weekends before it’s all cleared.”

 

“How many’s buried here then?”

 

“Terry reckons it’s between 25 and 30,000.”

 

“Sheesh, that’s a lot of dead.”

 

“Half a city died altogether, 250,000 out of a population of half a million. That’s why it’s not a burial as we know it, it’s more like a refuse pit of the dead.”

 

(There is a silence as the two men slowly scrape sticky city clay from the bones, easier said than done, as the bones have lain in the soil so long they have almost merged with it.)

 

“Slow business.”

 

“’tis slow. Put back the development by two years, Terry says.”

 

 “So what they gonna build here?”

 

“Luxury flats. Terry reckons the cheapest one’ll be £5 million, the biggest ten times that. Not for the likes of you and I.”

 

“So they’re gonna be put out by the delay.”

 

“Oh yeah, they’re have nowhere to live. I can see them, your Russian oligarchs, city bankers and premiership footballers, all huddled together in cardboard boxes on the Embankment waiting for us to finish.”

(There is laughter, then silence)

 

“What’ll they do with the bodies? Bury them?”

 

“Bury them! They’ve not even dug ‘em up yet.”

 

“No, but it’s dead people, you can’t just – well, what do they do?”

 

“Museums mostly.”

 

“What, 25,000 skeletons. That’s enough for the biggest ghost train in the universe, not a museum.”

“Not one museum, there are thousands, all over the world. Kevin sent me a pdf of the list, take a look.”

 

“These all want a skeleton?”

“At least one.”

 

“But these are mostly Chinese. Why do Chinese museums want the bones of a 17^th century London plague victim?”

 

“It’s what museums do – artefacts from around the world. There’s not a museum in England that’s not got a cabinet of Chinese bric a brac. Ere, look at this one.”

 

(He points to the bottom of the page of the pdf document.)

 

“The Keswick Teapot Museum! What’s that?”

 

“Exactly what it says. I went there once. It’s just a collection of tea-pots, though there’s also a tea-rooms that does a pretty fine cream tea.”

 

“I don’t understand. Why would a teapot museum want a human skeleton?”

 

“There’s a personal connection. If you read on, the museum’s gov’nor had traced his family tree and found that his great, great, great, great, great something or other died in this parish at the time of the great plague.”

 

“Yes, but they’ll never find them, there’s 25,000 sets of bones it could be.”

 

“They don’t mind, they’ll take any old bones, just an arm or something from the site, something they can refer to as coming from the same grave as their ancestor.”

 

“It’s a bit macabre though, an arm from the same plague pit as your great, great, great, great aunt. Who wants to look at that while they’re guzzling their tea and scones?”

 

“It’s stand out from the rest of the teapots that’s for sure.”

 

(They scrape on, in silence for a while.)

 

“What do you recon it is?”

“Well, it’s dead, I’ll tell you that much.”

 

“But male, female, adult, child?”

 

“Well, you can’t tell what sex it is from what we’ve uncovered, but from the size of it it’s certainly not a child and is probably male. Look at the arm, it’s as big as mine, I’d say 5 foot 8 or 9, which is really tall for those days. Unlikely to be a woman.”

 

“Wonder what he did.”

 

“Who knows? City like London, could’ve been anything. Plague wasn’t choosy.”

 

“Maybe an archaeologist then?”

“Could be. Maybe he spent his life in an eleventh century plague pit digging up bones and wondering what they used to do.”

“How many you say died?”

 

“Half the city. About 250,000.”

 

“That’s worse than a war.”

 

“It was. They barely managed to bury the dead, hence this bloody great pile of bones. There wasn’t a family that wasn’t affected, every workplace, every street. Everyone lost someone, some lost everyone, there are tales of mothers who lost a dozen children, husband, siblings plus grandkids.”

“How do you even grieve on that scale?”

 

(There is another period of silence, interrupted only by the soft scraping of mud from bone.)

 

“There’s not even a word for it. Grief for an entire city.”

“Guess all the word-makers died.”

 

“Guess they must ‘ave.”

 

“And yet …”

 

“And yet?”

 

“Life goes on. A city soon becomes a city again, every dead tradesman leaves an unfilled market, every dead householder leaves a property ripe for development, once the plague is past there’s soon money to be had, opportunities to be grasped, fortunes to be made.

Thirty years after the plague, the population was back to half a million, life goes on, 30,000 corpses are soon forgotten, built on, no-one remembers they’re even there, until a property developer gets a shock 500 years later.”

 

“Well, you say NOBODY remembers, the Keswick teapot museum bloke remembered.”

 

“Yeah, but all he found was a gap, a missing ancestor, no grave. People notice the absence, but it doesn’t stop 2 million people traipsing across a built-over plague pit every day, oblivious to what lies beneath.

 

“That’ll be us soon, I suppose, forgotten bones, a city built on top of us without anyone so much as noticing.”

 

“Perhaps. And in 500 years time there’ll be a space age version of you and me poking at our bones with hover-trowels.”

 

“God, 500 years in the soil, followed by another 500 years on the wall of the Chatteris Spoon Museum.”

 

“Ah, that’s where I’d love my arm to end up, on the wall of the Chatteris Spoon Museum.”

 

“Bollocks, they’re having my leg, your arm can find its own spoon museum. I’m having Chatteris mate.”