Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like water’. He later dug up, from a depth of two feet beneath the surface of the field, a stone weighing 1.27kg that had fallen from the sky. He took it to the police station, then on to the vicar, who shipped it off to the Natural History Museum.
There we know it was classified as a stony chondrite meteorite, composed of feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, white specks of nickel iron and other oddments from which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago. The smooth ‘face’ of the conical rock was understood to have been melted into a shield by its hypersonic flight; the back end was wobblier.
What we don’t know is what Pratt made of his astonishing experience. (On average, only ten meteorites are seen in the sky and recovered each year.) As a veteran of the first world war, was he traumatised over again by the mud-churning missile, or inured to that kind of thing? Did his encounters with the law and church lead to questions of science, philosophy and faith? While there’s a wooden post marking the site of the crater left by the Ashdon meteorite, nobody knows where Pratt is buried.
Historically, meteorites have been worshipped and feared around the world.
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