As I have developed the bullet-proof emotional carapace of the trial lawyer and as dealing everyday with appalling liars has left me with an unshakeable cynicism, I have become fascinated with the things that still move me or which have moved me in the past. Where are these cracks that still allow sympathy and empathy to seep into the iron fortress of my forensic will?

Before going to university I took a “gap year”. Half of it was spent working in solicitor’s office. The other half I spent on my knees scraping at dirt with a small trowel. Colchester, the town in which I went to school, is the former Roman capital of Britain and the site of the first temple built to Claudius. It has, as you can imagine, some interesting archaeology and I decided, along with some other school friends, to spend some time poking at it.

The diggers that I worked with were the best colleagues I have ever had. It is true that there was an unfortunate tendency towards beards and an enthusiasm for real ale that was in inverse proportion to their concern about personal hygiene, but if you looked past the hippie affectations and the disturbing taste for folk music, they were wonderful people.

The team divided into the long-termers: people with post-graduate qualifications in archaeology who lived in the diggers’ lodgings and earned a small premium over the rest of us and the semi-pros like myself who were effectively paid amateur volunteers. “Paid” is something of a misleading term. I got £20 a week for 45 hours of digging. My train fare cost me £13.50 a week. I was lucky as I was not having to live on the money.

The process of archaeology is a simple one. You kneel and peel away soil in layers. Each layer takes you back a few years. The soil you remove is called spoil and you deposit it into a bucket. When the bucket is full you put it in a barrow. When the barrow is full you use a spade to transfer it into the hopper on the front of a tipper and then Mad Frank drives the tipper like a dune buggy up the ever steeper slope of the spoil heap to deposit it. Every month or so, Frank likes to drive clean over the top shouting “AIEEEEEE!” or, less frequently, to take it up so steep an incline that he has to jump clear shouting “HOOOOLLLLYYYYY SHIT!” as the tipper flips onto its back.

Don, our site supervisor lives in the wooden site hut and comes out only to rub his forehead in a worried manner, mumble something and vanish again. His principal responsibility is to come into the tea hut and tell us to get back to work. Gathered around the primus stove at tea breaks is a crew of colleagues who, to a recent former schoolboy, are fascinating. There is Denis Tripp, who has retired from a career in the city and trowels away indefatigably as a volunteer to fill the days. There is Paul, a former merchant seaman and soon to be tax inspector trying to support his family on the meagre sum that is available for his labours. There is Steve 1, who looks like a roadie for a stoner band and who is the most widely-read person I have met to this day. Lucy says nothing but sits rolling cigarettes, occassionally nodding. Rumour has it that a pint of cider and a dance tune transforms her into a dervish. Steve 2 is in the process of conversion into a long-termer and his thoughtfulness ultimately takes him into academia. There is Jenny, a curvaceous student in a halter top and cut off combats who emitted a powerful field of lust-inducing static sexual energy. One afternoon her trousers split over her buttocks and she toured the site showing everyone. The look on the mens’ faces as she appoached was one of sheer panic; terrified how they would cope with being asked to look closely at her rear and comment calmly. Finally, there is Max. Once or twice in one’s life one meets someone you feel you were born to get on with. Max was eternally good-humoured, quick-witted and kind. He spent his money having songs he had written recorded by session musicians so that he could present them to Emma; the colleague he had fallen for. She affected the attitude of Beatrice in “Much Ado”; all disdain until the warm breeze of Max’s sunny disposition simply melted her into submission. I kick myself for having lost contact with Max.

The site that we were digging was a Roman barracks hidden under a former school playground. We each worked in our own hole and when I say hole I mean hole. We were given a strip about a metre wide and three metres long to dig and we just kept going until we were asked to stop. The pattern on the site was for everyone start on a level and then your friends would slowly disappear from view as if they were on some glacially slow sub-terranean elevator. Eventually, you would need a ladder to get out.

The side of your pit would be layered like a tree’s rings, counting back through time. About 8 feet down was a one inch layer of charcoal. This was known as the “destruction layer” and was created when Queen Boudicca marched on Colchester on her revenge campaign and burned the entire city to the ground.

The purpose of the digging was to find things. Most of what we found would be interesting only to an archaeologist: shards of pottery and animal bones. I found a “body shard” (a piece of the main part) of an amphora (a roman storage vessel) that was of a type known as the “London 555”. Only one piece had been found before in a dig in London and an expert flew in from the US specifically to look at this rarity. There was a great anticipation around the little hole I had dug in the hope there would be more. There was more. Lots more. About a thousand pieces. Over the course of an afternoon or so the rarity value fell away to nothing and the american flew away again disappointed.

What we all hoped to find was the elephant. There was a story that Claudius had brought an elephant to Colchester and it had died there. Every time the trowel hit bone I prayed it was the tusk. Usually it was a sheep’s shoulder. I liked to to find coins. Not because of their worth but because that sort of find best stripped away the intervening centuries. It was easy to imagine a roman soldier being jostled, drunk on wine and dropping a coin into a puddle. Next day he’d awake and curse the gods as he ran his hands into pocket after pocket trying to find the money and decry the decision that led him to this god-forsaken rainy shithole on the edge of the Empire.

One find stays with me and it is the real subject of this post. It was, I think, Lucy who found it. She was excavating the floor of the barracks. She had stripped away the characteristic green “occupation layer” and was digging beneath what would have been the floor level. It was a miserable day with a steady drizzle falling from the black sky. We were sticky with mud and grumpy but the rainfall had the benefit of washing soil way from finds as you exposed them. From my own pit I noticed that one by one the diggers were joining a circle around Lucy as she dug. I hopped out of my hole and splashed across to join them. I found Lucy knelt delicately removing dirt from bone and just in front of her knees was a baby burial. The bones were intact, curled foetally in the mud. Lucy stopped and we all just stood, the rain tapping on our hard hats and running down our sleeves, momentarily overwhelmed with sadness for a child that had died nearly two thousand years ago.