A Time to Blossom

Coming to blows…

“Craig, are you planning to leave some sausages for anyone else? That’s three on your plate already, and a fourth in the serving tongs…”

“This isn’t my plate, mum, it’s dad’s, and this fourth sausage was destined for your plate. I’m just having two, same as everyone else. Do you want a fried egg to go with your bacon and sausages, dad, as well as the tomatoes and hash browns? The hash browns are the ones me and gran conjured up to make Nat feel at home.  They’re good, aren’t they Nat? Like the ones Milly makes?”

Nat smiled at Craig from behind a large cup of coffee and laid on his best downtown Pittsburgh accent. “They sure are, bud…”

Craig placed the breakfast plate in front of his dad and then turned back to take his own plate off the counter where he had been helping his gran serve breakfast. Only his dad noticed as Craig took an extra spoonful of mushrooms and a second fried tomato from the griddle and popped them on his plate, obscured by a stack of hash browns.

“It’s amazing how fast time has flown,” said Nat as he sipped his coffee and then picked up his knife and fork to begin breakfast. “It’s hard to believe it’s already my last full day here. Thanks again everybody for making me so welcome.”

“If you two boys have any energy left after your last few days out canoeing and biking, I have a suggestion as to what you could do today,” said Craig’s gran. “It’ll definitely interest Craig but I’m not sure about you, Nathan, so don’t hesitate to speak up if it’s not your thing.”

“What is it, Gran?” asked Craig, suddenly very interested in more than just if he could manage to grab a couple more rashers of bacon if no-one else wanted the leftovers on the griddle.

“Well, Craig, do you remember when you visited us about two years ago and your grandad took you to the radiography lab to let you watch as he X-rayed a Viking sword that had been excavated?”

“Definitely do, gran! It looked just like a big lump of corroded rust and mud, Nat, but when the X-rays were taken it had an amazing structure to it. The Vikings kind of knitted their best swords together from iron and steel. That’s why I wanted to go to Jorvik the other day and see the sword exhibition they have on at the moment.”

“Well, not exactly knitted,” chuckled Craig’s gran, “The proper technical term is ‘forge welded’, but yes, they do have quite an impressive manufacturing process. We’ve been studying that particular sword, and a few others like it, for over three years now. This afternoon we’re going to try and replicate something similar at the university. We have a specialist archaeological blacksmith working with us and he’s visiting today to conduct an experimental archaeology workshop for some of my students. They’ll heat up some iron and steel and then try to emulate the techniques the Viking smiths would have used to make the sword. You and Nathan could come along and watch if you like.”

Craig glanced at Nat, trying not to sound too enthusiastic. “We’d be okay with that, wouldn’t we, Nat?”

Nat was grinning. “Definitely! I think I owe Craig a look at the swords, I got in the way of a visit to the Jorvik centre when I went and did all my shopping. I’d be happy to go see an archaeology class on swords.”

Craig’s eyes lit up like beacons. “That’s sorted then, Nat. We’ll go to the university this afternoon. And maybe this morning, if gran will give us a lift into York when she goes to the university, we could go to the Railway Museum too? I think you’d like it, Nat.”

Nat smiled as he looked into Craig’s puppy dog eyes. “Yes, we can go the Railway Museum too. If your gran doesn’t mind giving us a lift. We don’t want to be an inconvenience…”

“That’s no trouble at all, Nathan. I can drop you both off in York on my way to the university and show you the bus you’ll need to catch to the university at lunch time,” said Craig’s gran.

“There you go, Natters,” laughed Craig. “Two bus rides in one holiday! Way better than Shane’s space rocket trip. This is shaping up to be another perfect day.  Err, does anybody mind if I grab that last rasher of bacon? It’s looking a bit sad and lonely, sat there all by itself on the griddle…”

* * *

Nat lowered his phone after taking a few pictures of Stephenson’s “Rocket” and stood in awe. “This is amazing, Boots. Just to think that this is the first real steam train, and it still exists.”

“It wasn’t the first, Nat, just the first really successful one. The information board says so. Just that the others before it weren’t very reliable. This was the first real train that could run an inter-city service. Liverpool to Manchester. And back again, obviously.”

“It looks like cartoon steam engine doesn’t it, Boots? A big iron boiler and a chimney. It says here it could go at 30 miles an hour. Imagine that, back in 1829.”

“Wait until you see ‘Mallard’ or ‘The Flying Scotsman’, Nat. They’re proper trains.”

“I guess it’s quite apt that we’re looking at trains, Boots. Like did you know that all the squads at Allegheny Alcatraz are named after men who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, and the current fresher dorms are all named for the first ever recipients? Parrott. Bensinger. Mason. Pittenger. Reddick. Buffum. They got their medals for the Great Locomotive Chase: taking a train raiding and ripping up the tracks to Chattanooga to mess up the Confederate supply routes.”

“Hey, I know the song about that, Nat. ‘The night they drove ole’ Dixie down’ It goes:

Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train
Till Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65, we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it's a time I remember, oh so well’

Nat smirked. “Err, not quite, Boots. That’s just a song, not about real stuff. And Bensinger and his guys were Unionists, not Confederates. I meant it though, Boots, what I said to your mom about your singing. If you had some lessons you’d not be bad.”

“Yeah, sure, Natters. Singing lessons are for girls. Now come on, let’s go show you the Mallard. I think it’s in the next hall along. Unless you want to stop for a snack first? That 1920’s style platform café over there is real, it sells proper food.”

“No, I’m good, Craig. That breakfast you and your gran made has filled me up. Let’s go see the Mallard. What’s special about it?”

* * *

“There, Natty, is Mallard. Fastest steam train ever built. That’s what is special about it. World record holder. Did a hundred and twenty-six miles an hour way back in 1938. Just look at that streamlining. It was one of the first trains to use a wind tunnel test at the design stage. They’d only just been invented for aeroplanes, so sticking a train in a wind tunnel was innovative for the time. The top speed was all down to a fingerprint too.”

Nat looked puzzled. “A fingerprint?”

“Yes, Nat. A fingerprint. Well, a thumbprint really. The wind tunnel model was made of clay, and the man who put it in the wind tunnel for testing accidentally squished the bit behind the funnel with his thumb and left a dent. On test, they spotted that the model with the dent actually had better streamline flow and smoke lift from the funnel than the original undamaged model. Something to do with vortex separation caused by the dent. So, they shaped the real train’s casing with a small depression behind the funnel too and that gave them a couple of extra miles per hour because it was making the boiler more efficient.”

“It doesn’t say anything about that on the information board, Craig,” responded Nat.

“Doesn’t need to. I know it because when grandad brought me here a couple of years ago he got talking to the museum’s chief curator and he told us about it. It’s in some of the books too, I think. There are loads of books in the museum shop. You can check.”

“No, I’ll believe you, Boots. There’s definitely a depression behind the smokestack, so it must be for a reason.”

“That train over there, Nat, the big red and gold one, was Mallard’s rival. It’s the Duchess of Hamilton, the two of then vied time and again to be fastest for their respective rail companies. Mallard won, but the Duchess was only a fraction slower. Just a couple of miles an hour less. Probably no thumbprint…”

“She’s a real beauty, Boots. Just look at all that streamlining, and the Art Deco styling. I’d love to ride on a train like that. It looks way more stylish than our Amtracs.”

“That gold colouring is real gold, Nat. The curator told us. It’s gold leaf, sparkled like crazy in the sun. They wanted to be the most stylish as well as the fastest. They just had to settle for most stylish. It even went on a tour of America in 1939 and visited the New York World Fair. People flocked from all over America to see it.”

“It looks in good condition, Boots, everything oil and polished as though it could just start up and go.”

“Some of the trains here do run, Nat. Mallard and the Flying Scotsman do. Just on special occasions, but they still do run. Grandad took me to see one of them, we viewed it from a bridge just a few miles down the track. Got covered in soot and steam when it went by. Old trains like this have real character, Nat, not like modern electric locos.”

“Maybe they’ll make a comeback, someday, Boots. They’re better for the environment. Don’t produce as much pollution.”

“Hardly, Nat! I just told you, me and grandad got covered in smoke and stuff. They make clouds of it. And carbon dioxide too. Electric trains are way cleaner.”

Nat stood his ground, lowering his voice a little, making Craig strain to hear him. “Not necessarily, Craig. External combustion runs at lower temperature, doesn’t produce the complex nitro-compounds that internal combustion engines like petrol and diesel do. The nitro-compounds are the real killers. And electric trains might be clean as they go by, but all that power comes from somewhere, probably coal and gas, so it’s only shifting the pollution around, not getting rid of it.”

“Yeah, if you say so, Nat.”

“I’m serious, Craig. I’ve looked into it. Imagine a modern steam engine, using a flash boiler powered by hydrogen, producing nothing but water, and even using that to top up the boiler. No ashes to clean out at the end of the day and ready to run in minutes, just like a diesel loco. You should be working to design something like that when you graduate. You’re smart enough.”

“You’re starting to sound like mom and dad, natters. They’re always saying I should go to university and get a degree before joining the marines. Something to fall back on, dad says.”

“Would that be a bad thing, Craig?”

“Come on Natty, let’s go to the next hall. They’ve got the Flying Scotsman in there.”

* * *

“Well, well, if it isn’t the Tweedle Twins again,” laughed Lizzie as Craig and Nathan followed Craig’s gran into the hustle and bustle of the engineering lab at the University. “Jackie, come and see who’s here again. Obviously can’t keep away from us…”

“Tweedle Twins?” asked Craig.

“Dumb and Dumber,” smirked Jackie. “Our very own Romano-British master and servant.”

Before Craig could respond, Nat stepped forward and smiled. “Nice to see you girls again, I’m looking forward to learning what you can teach us this time. We’re here for the sword class. There’s an expert coming to teach us, isn’t there? You must be helping out too.”

Craig’s gran smiled as Nathan took control of the situation then said, “Yes, we’re having a practical experimental archaeology session for the remainder of the day. We’re here in the engineering lab rather than our own faculty because we need to use their furnaces and some of the precision measuring equipment. We have Owain Hartford here again to give us another practical session. He’s an archaeo-metallurgist and swordsmith. That’s him over there, making some adjustments to the furnace and setting out the components of the sword he’s been making with us all semester. Come on, I’ll take you over to meet him whilst Lizzie and Jackie set up their precision balance and the other students get their equipment ready too.”

Owain paused from his preparations as Craig’s gran made the introductions. Owain was a big man, broad shouldered and well-muscled, wearing a thick leather apron over an old woollen pullover scarred with small holes and burns. As he shook hands, rough and calloused, with Nat, Craig grinned and said, “That’s a better beard even than Hagrid!”

“Useful too,” laughed Owain, “Keeps the sparks and hot flux off my face! Now, I understand from your gran that you two might be willing to help me with the forging? The students are going to be hard at work with their scientific experiments but you look as though you both might be capable of a little physical work, helping me to hammer the sword to shape. Past history as slaves too, I hear…”

“Definitely!” Craig almost shouted. “I can whack stuff with a hammer, forge some steel. I’ve seen it done online. Nat might be able to help out too, he’s fairly strong.”

“That’s settled then, you’ll be my beaters. Master smiths always had a team of beaters, younger smiths still learning the trade. They watched and copied, learned the craft, did all the hard work whilst the master smith just stepped in to do the difficult bits. Let me show you where we’ve got to over the past few weeks. I’m just setting out the display over here on these tables.”

“I’ll just go and get them both a pair of overalls from the stores,” said Craig’s gran. “I’m sure your mother won’t be pleased if you go home with your clothes covered in spark burns and smoke.”

“Thanks, gran,” said Craig.

“Now, starting at this end of the table, where the girls are setting up their balance, we have the basic raw materials for the sword. Charcoal and an iron bloom,” said Owain. Before Craig or Nat could ask, he continued, “Charcoal, I’m sure you know about. Bloom iron is a mix of enriched iron and rock, silica mainly, mixed together like a sponge. The furnaces the pre-mediaeval smiths used didn’t get hot enough to melt iron ore and separate the iron from the rock.  The furnaces were like a clay tower or chimney with a bellows pumping air in at the bottom. They would stack layers of iron ore and charcoal in them, light it, pump air through – that was work for the slaves if ever a job was – and then let it slowly settle down. The rock would gradually be burned away, reacting with the fuel and air, and the heavier iron rich mush slowly sank down the stack to the bottom to form an iron sponge or bloom. It could be up to about fifty per cent iron instead of the two or three per cent iron rich ore that started the process.”

Craig and Nat both nodded.

“Next along the table, we have that silvery-grey, football-sized lump. That’s an iron sponge or bloom we made a few weeks ago. The students weighed it and compared it with the weight of the raw ingredients we started with in order to work out the efficiency of the enrichment process. Did chemical analysis of the iron content too, seeing if it had distinctive traces of elements in it to identify the source of the ore and fuel.”

“From that, we can also work out thing slike how many acres of woodland would be needed to produce all the charcoal a smithy might use each year. Calculate the effects of deforestation on the environment.” Craig’s gran had returned from the stores and handed Nat and Craig a pair of overalls each. “There’s a lot more to archaeology than just digging things up. If we excavate a village forge, we won’t usually find a sword or sickle or a plough, those all get sold and moved on when they are made. But we do find tons of slag, burned waste and so on. Quite literally tons of it if the forge was in use for a long time. So we try and work backwards, calculating how long it was in use, how much iron it produced over its lifetime, assessing what it might have been making. Ploughs or nails. Buckets or arrows.”

“Now,” continued Owain, moving along the bench, “Once we have the bloom, we’re getting to where the smithing really starts. The beaters would heat up the bloom again, getting it red, even orange hot, making it soft, then place it on the anvil and hit it hard with their big hammers. The residual silica – rock – is soft and squirts out, a little bit with every blow. Make sure you wear safety glasses for that, grow a beard too if you can. Liquid rock droplets aren’t something you want to get hit by. How do you think this pullover got so many holes in it? After only a minute or two the bloom gets too cold and hard and so needs to go back in the furnace to reheat. Hammering all the rock out to make pure wrought iron can take many hours of work and needs a team of beaters.”

“So, I guess,” ventured Nathan, “You can start working out the economics of the process. How much labour is used, what skills are needed, all adding up to the final cost of the stuff the smith made.”

“Precisely that, Nathan,” said Craig’s gran. “And iron was very expensive. Much rarer than Hollywood would have you believe too. Most Vikings wouldn’t own a sword. They were very expensive and used a lot of iron. You could make several spearpoints and an axe using the same amount of iron as was needed for a sword. They were far more useful too, most of the time. Especially the axe.”

“Dual use technology,” grinned Nathan.

“Recycling was key too. If a sword broke, it would get turned into other stuff. Knives first of all probably, then work its way down to mundane things like nails over the years. That’s why we only tend to find really good swords on the digs.”

“How come?” asked Craig.

“It’s what we call survivor bias,” said his gran. “If you were an average Viking, but happened to own a sword, it would be passed on down to your heirs when you died. It was too valuable to be wasted by being buried with you. Unless of course, you were a rich chieftain, in which case things were different. Then you’d own a really good sword, but so too would your heirs in all probability, so they could afford to bury your good sword with you, or use it as an offering to the gods in a bog burial. So those tend to be the ones we find, the better than average swords that didn’t eventually get turned into nails and horseshoes.”

“Just think,” laughed Owain, “In a thousand years from now, archaeology students will begin thinking 20th century man drove around in Rolls-Royces because a few of those will survive whilst all the Fords will have been scrapped…”

“I guess that’s like in the train museum, Nat,” said Craig. “We saw the Mallard and Flying Scotsman, but I guess most people back then didn’t travel on such stylish trains. Probably went by bus most of the time, or walked places.”

“Got it in one, Craig” said his gran.

Owain moved further along the bench and handed Craig a slim bar of iron, about a foot long, to inspect. “That’s the next stage. Beating the wrought iron out into a bar. Put two or three of those together, side by side, and you have the makings of a sword. Heat them up, hammer them together, make them become one piece three times as wide. That’s what we call forge welding. A bit of shaping, drawing it out to about twice the length and grinding an edge on it and you have a sword blade. The sort a good smith could make in a day. An average sword that would get recycled eventually and so lost from the archaeological record.”

Craig passed the bar to Nathan and nodded as Owain continued. “But imagine you’re a great smith, a master smith, somebody called, say, Ulfberht. Trained by your father, another master smith, learned the secrets of sword making almost before you could walk. Then you might do something different. Something truly spectacular. And that’s what we’ve being doing this semester. Learning and trying to replicate Ulfberht’s sword-making process. Making a pattern welded sword.”

“Like the one Grandad x-rayed?”

Owain grinned. “Yes, and you two, as my beaters are going to do all the hard work while I take the glory. We know Ulfberht’s name, but we have no idea who his beaters were.”

* * *