Review

The Dig

By John Preston

Published by Penguin

There’s nothing quite like the discovery of buried treasure to stir the imagination. How did it get there? How long ago? What is it worth?

John Preston’s novel is based on the excavation of the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in Suffolk in 1939. He fleshes out the (real-life) characters involved to describe how a small-scale dig became the find of the century and, as a result, was taken over by professional archaeologists. Woven into this story is a paean to a way of life that was soon swept away by the Second World War.

The facts of the Sutton Hoo discovery are well known: Edith Pretty, a widow with leanings towards spirituality, employed Basil Brown, a local archaeologist, to excavate the mounds on her estate. After a fruitless initial search – in which Brown was almost killed when a trench collapsed on him – one of the mounds revealed the ghostly remains of a ship. The wooden slats had long since disintegrated but their sandy shadows remained in the dark Suffolk soil.

Brown was an indefatigable man of few words who would stand quietly, pipe clenched between his teeth, thinking things through before speaking. With the help of Mrs Pretty’s under-gardener and gamekeeper, he calculated that grave-robbers had dug into the mound at some time but in the wrong place. So it turned out.

The first treasure was not, however, discovered by Basil Brown. When word of the dig reached the Ministry of Works, concerns were raised about whether Brown was the man for the job. It was proposed instead that a more experienced archaeologist should take over the excavation. That man – much to the disgust of the chairman of the Ipswich Museum Committee – turned out to be from Selwyn College, Cambridge. His name was Charles Phillips and he ordered an immediate halt to the excavation to give him time to call in his colleagues.

The subsequent work uncovered the most extraordinary, and valuable, hoard containing jewellery, coins and an ornately patterned gold buckle, among other things. The coming of the war called another halt to the dig, but by then it was abundantly clear that the Sutton Hoo ship would need to be examined in much more detail.

Three narrators tell the story in Preston’s novel. Mrs Pretty; Basil Brown; and Peggy Piggott, an archaeologist, newly married to Stuart (who went on to become Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University). A number of other characters from the 1930s appear in the book, but it is these three who, amid all the excitement of the dig, have quietly sad tales to tell. The frail yet steely widow Edith Pretty is desperate to make contact with her dead husband; Brown has the greatest find of his life taken from him; and Peggy – in perhaps the saddest of the stories – realises on her honeymoon that although her husband is affectionate, he is unwilling to be intimate with her.

Preston draws us into these lives, making us believe that this is really how they were. A very British restraint, polite yet flinty, underpinned their dealings with each other. It is the ship burial that dominated their shared lives in that final summer of peace, a stunning glimpse into the past even as the present was collapsing around them.

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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