Fran About Town

Dinner around the world

Enchanted forests: the women shaking up nature writing

Pareidolia

1. To be queer in 2019 is to experience a kind of vertigo. It is to not know left from right. Beneath the nod of legal protection, the showy condemnation of homophobia, and the smooth gloss of Netflix shows, something bloody and sinuous writhes. I feel it move underneath under my feet, I feel its tug and its weight and its slippery crimson mass. Beneath the rainbow, the war machine.

In July, 1937, Edith Pretty, a wealthy widow and local magistrate, attended a flower show in Woodbridge, a picturesque, red-brick town on the Suffolk coast, in search of archeological advice. Pretty, who was fifty-three, lived with her son on a five-hundred-acre estate named Sutton Hoo, a few miles outside the town. In Old English, Hoo means a spur of land, and Pretty’s house, a large, pale villa, sat on a bluff overlooking sandy heathland that sloped down to the river Deben. Pretty had always been curious about a strange set of mounds that was visible from the house. The hillocks were marked on maps as Roman tumuli—burial mounds—and a guest who stayed with Pretty once claimed to see a ghostly warrior on horseback, riding through the grounds. An elderly laborer on the estate, known as Old Pettit, swore that the mounds contained treasure. Now Pretty wanted to investigate. At the flower show, she approached a history teacher and antiquarian named Vincent Redstone and asked what she should do next. Redstone introduced her to the curator of the Ipswich Museum, who suggested that she hire the museum’s freelance, self-taught archeologist—a local man named Basil Brown—to take a look at the tumuli.