Making It Up by Penelope Lively

ignored. They know each other with an odd intensity; the outside world has come to seem irrelevant. And something strange has happened to time: it proceeds neither fast nor slow but seems to have become an entity, unrelated to normal days or weeks. They are in a time scale that is specific to the dig. Which is apt, thinks Alice, given the way history treats time, chopping it all up into sections.
    Prehistory has to be neatly divided into segments, and laid out in order: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age. They had to do that before anyone could get a grip on it; they had to establish a chronology. And the system fosters an entire way of thinking; you even look at the present century in terms of decades—the twenties, the thirties, the forties . . . Each with a particular climate and some kind of logo—a flapper doing the Charleston for the twenties, Hitler’s ranting face for the thirties, the blitzed facade of a building for the forties. And here they were now in the seventies, which are as yet too close up and intimate to have acquired a flavor. Alice supposes that she must be a child of the seventies—you are deemed to have sprung from the decade of your youth. Does she feel attuned to the times? Well, not particularly. She does not like pop music and she would hate to go to a music festival. She has never tried pot or anything else. She does not feel impelled to explore her sexuality. She is not a virgin, but she cannot chalk up a list of partners, nor would she wish to. She assumes that she has not yet come across the right bloke, but supposes that she will do so one day. Compared with many of her peers, she is in the slow lane, which does perhaps indicate a certain lack of accord with the spirit of the times. She thinks she might have slotted in rather better with the twenties; she has always rather liked the look of that period—the chunky little cars and the girls in frocks and the wind-up gramophones.
    Alice finds that she does a lot of thinking, as she kneels and scrapes up there on the hill. She thinks about the bomb, as always, and about the people they are digging up, for whom the Romans were presumably their version of the bomb, because it is the Romans who stormed the hill fort, left arrowheads and spear shafts, provoked sling stones. Other people up here, back then, were also waiting for nemesis. But she thinks too about the others on the dig, because you cannot help but be involved when you are all flung together like this. She thinks how assorted they are, whereas the people up here waiting for the Romans would have been very assimilated, all living the same sort of life, with the same sort of experiences and expectations. Alice, who grew up in Enfield and went to the grammar school, can hardly imagine what it would have been like to be Laura, whose home is called the Old Rectory and who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Or Mike Chambers, who comes from County Durham and don’t you forget it, and whose father was a miner.
    Alice’s father works in a bank. His world is all about money. When he picks up a newspaper he always turns first to those columns of small print at the back. When he is with his cronies, they talk about the market and the pound and the dollar and stuff that sends Alice out of the room. Money is boring. Money is so boring. And people should not be preoccupied with money.
    Actually, she is coming to realize, everyone is preoccupied with money. Certainly, up here on the hill money is a frequent topic. Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers, who are joint directors of the dig, are concerned about the funding. Resources are stretched to the limit, which is why they have only six weeks. Professor Sampson and Mike can frequently be seen poring over a sheet of figures, in the White Hart of an evening.
    Peter and Brian are skint. They are trying to save their subsistence pay—the beer money, as it is called—for a spree to Paris planned