She’d enjoyed the drinks in the pub, though she’d only had orange juice. Max had been very interesting, talking about Roman burial traditions. We tend to think of the Romans as so civilised, he’d said, so outraged by the barbaric Iron Age practices but there is plenty of evidence of Roman punishment burials, ritual killing and even infanticide. A boy’s skull found in St Albans about ten years ago, for example, showed that its owner had been battered to death and then decapitated. At Springfield in Kent foundation sacrifices of paired babies had been found at all four corners of a Roman temple. Ruth shivers and passes a hand lightly across her stomach.

But Max had been good company for all his tales of death and decapitation. He’d been brought up in Norfolk and obviously loved the place. Ruth told him about her home on the north Norfolk coast, about the winds that come directly from Siberia and the marshes flowering purple with sea lavender. I’d like to visit one day, Max had said. That would be nice, Ruth had replied but neither had said more. Ruth had agreed to visit the dig next week though. Max has a whole team coming up from Sussex. They are going to camp in the fields and dig all through May and June. Ruth feels a rush of nostalgia for summer digs; for the camaraderie, the songs and dope-smoking round the camp fire, the days of back-breaking labour. She doesn’t miss the lack of proper loos or showers though. She’s too old for all that.

Thank God, SH3LLY 40 has turned off to the left and Ruth can see signs for Snettisham and Hunstanton. She’s nearly home. On Radio 4 someone is talking about bereavement: ‘for everything there is a season’. Ruth loves Radio 4 but there are limits. She switches to cassette (her car is too old for a CD player) and the air is filled with Bruce Springsteen’s heartfelt all-American whine. Ruth loves Bruce Springsteen – the open road, the doomed love, the friends called Bobby Joe who’ve fallen on hard times – and no amount of derision is going to make her change her mind. She turns the sound up.