The Lost Battlefield by Elaine Graham-Leigh
This is where our battle was, here, in the top field. Eadwig said the King put his shield wall over there, where we planted the hawthorns last year, a line of great thegns with their helmets all gold and their swords flashing in the sun as they raised their war-yell. The Danes were yonder with the scarp at their backs above the river, and they were fearsome and mighty as well. Or so said Eadwig.
Eadwig should not have been there, but he was twelve that summer, old enough to think himself grown but not old enough to have grown into sense. To be fair to him, he did help us drive the cattle down to the church when Da came shouting that there were fighters coming up the valley. It was only later that he slipped out after the men.
I sat in the nave with the other women from the cotts around. We didn’t talk much. Some of us were spinning, even though it was too dim to see. All my memories of that long day are shot through with the scratch of the thread against my fingers, the whirr and thunk of the spindle in the dark. I kept thinking I could hear the fighting, that every call of a bird outside was some man’s death-cry. Through the gaps between the planks of the nave wall came a low roaring, as if a killing wind were thrashing the trees.
Da and some of the other men came back just before the sun set to tell us it was over. I was worried about what we might find at home, but Da said all the fighters had moved off north-westwards, so there’d been no one passing to fire our thatch in revenge or celebration. In the morning, Da gave Eadwig a leather jerkin, good enough for a thegn and hardly bloodstained. He’s worn it every winter since.
We had to leave the field all that summer for the crows and the worms to do their work. Luckily it was a good growing year, and the men cleared the copse on the other side of the stream for late hay. The next spring the field was full of red flowers. Ulf picked me a posy of them when we came up here, courting.
I’ve never heard who won our battle. We did hear, sometime after, that there was a new King down there in London, but how that happened, I’ve never known. You can still see the hillocks where the bones are, under the turf, but they’re flatter every year as the earth claims them. It’s a long time now since we’ve turned up a spear head in the ploughing. Soon there will be nothing to show that there was ever a battle here at all.
Bounds Green Book Writers 