Open Writing

When I went to see he film "The Da Vinci Code" while watching Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou play at being history detectives I was reminded of my own time in the archives. Unlike Brown's characters I didn't leave a trail of blood and mayhem in my wake, but for me the experience was just as exciting.

It was also nerve wracking.

I remember my first research trip to a proper archive. I was studying the 1630s renovation of a 30-foot-tall medieval cathedral clock case, and I wanted to find out whether any documents related to the work still survived.

I made an appointment with the keeper of the cathedral archives and arrived tongue tied and trembling. There was nothing to be scared of, but I was such an admirer of historians and all places related to the practice of history that I was like an Elvis fan visiting Memphis.

The archive assistant gave me a locker key for my bag then led me upstairs to a search room overlooking the cathedral. It was a long airy room filled with large wooden tables.

I was the youngest person there. I remember an elderly woman with her grey hair scraped back, poring over the impenetrable handwriting of a medieval text. On another table a middle-aged man sat leafing through an enormous and ancient book.

I felt like a five year old at a grown up party.

I nervously told the assistant what I was looking for and he suggested the cathedral accounts and minutes. "The only thing you can do," he said "is comb through the entire year and see what turns up." He placed three large volumes in front of me.

I opened the first page, looked at the spidery 17th-century handwriting and then at the looming cathedral outside the window, and thought, "I've arrived! I'm a proper historian!"

In novels like "The Da Vinci Code" and Elizabeth Kostova's vastly superior "The Historian" researchers find answers relatively quickly. In reality looking for evidence is like searching for a needle in a haystack. It requires patience to comb through page after page, book after book, looking for a single clue.

Eventually I found what I wanted. The minutes contained a record of the meeting where the cathedral clergy decided to grant a sum of money for the clock case's refurbishment. I recognized the names of clergymen who later became famous in Church of England history.

Then in the accounts I found the signatures of some of the men involved in carrying out general restoration work in the cathedral at that time. I thought that the carpenters might have worked on the clock case.

One signature stood out from the others because it was smudged and a big blob of ink had run down the page. I could imagine the man's blushes as he was perhaps chastised by the clerk in charge of the book. It was a thrill to see evidence of a brief and clumsy moment that took place 370 years before.

Yet still it was not enough. I needed to know what had been added to the clock case in the 17th century. The clock had been in the cathedral since the late medieval period, and I wanted to know the extent of the alterations in the 1630s.

Fortunately I knew that the clock case had been dismantled in the 19th century and then re-erected as the first act of the cathedral friends organization in the 1930s. I realized that the architect might have left information on the dates of the clock's parts.

The archive assistant brought me a large architectural drawing. I spread it across the table and stood looking at it. It showed views of the clock case from different angles. Twentieth-century timber was shaded in red.

I discovered to my surprise that much of the clock case had been replaced, and that relatively little of the present structure was more than 70 years old. The architect had noted that some parts of the structure were medieval but there was no mention of 17th-century additions.

I left the archives feeling triumphant. In truth I had not discovered very much about the work carried out in the 1630s, but my own understanding of the clock case had been significantly advanced.

I will always remember that day as the first time I felt like a real historian.

My findings were probably already known by half the cathedral historians in the city, but that day they were mine.

There were many other research trips in subsequent years but I do not recall them nearly as well as that first visit to the archives.