Word: pits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Every weekend, rain or shine, whenever the ground is not frozen. Commercial Artist Bertram Wymer, 65, his wife Lea and their son John tramp across a deserted gravel pit at Swanscombe on the down-Thames outskirts of London. They walk with their heads down, eying every pebble. At the far end of the pit they enter a wire-fenced enclosure and start digging cautiously with garden trowels. They have been digging diligently ever since the end of the war, and recently they made the first finds of a peculiar treasure they have long sought...
First Englishman. In 1935 another amateur digger, London Dentist Alvan T. Marston, found a fossil bone 24 ft. below the surface in Swanscombe's Barnfield Pit...
Ever since Marston's find, diggers have haunted Barnfield Pit. Most persistent haunters were the Wymers. Bertram Wymer had been digging for antiquities since he was 19. His wife adopted his hobby on their honeymoon, and son John started digging as soon as he was old enough to handle a small trowel. In Barnfield Pit they found plenty of crude flint tools, but for years neither they nor other diggers found anything very interesting. The great prizes-more bones of "the first Englishman" or clues to the life he led-did not show up in hundreds of tons...
...Empire were falling from the tree. Yet the essence of Jenkins' war with the world is neither bound to a period nor insularly British. It is essentially a secular tragedy told in the idiom of understatement (which Novelist Powell admits "has its own banality"); there is a pit beneath the parquet floor and the Old School Tie may become a garrote. It needs all his well-tended prose to keep the corpse of nihilism buried in the garden...
...role of Serafina is a juicy acting plum, and Anna Magnani swallows it whole; skin, pit and all. She is little short of overpowering when she goes into one of her frequent states of towering rage, and when she sulks she seems like a fury with nobody but herself to haunt. Best of all are the comic scenes, which she plays with the broad and leering satisfaction of a peasant. Burt Lancaster tries hard as the bachelor-clown, but even in his most successful moments he appears almost pathetically outclassed...