A STRANGE BEREAVEMENT by Eleanor Updale

I was going to start this post with an invitation to join me on a visit to an unusual member of my family - but suddenly he's gone. Without him, I wouldn't be here today, and my children would never have been born.  I can hear you sighing already (other people's genealogy can be as boring as their holiday photos) but stick with me.  The real reason I'm talking about this ancestor is that he lived at a site where something extraordinary happened.  The event is worth hearing about in its own right, but I've just come across a re-telling of it that raises an issue close to the heart of readers and writers on this blog: can fiction writers sometimes convey the feel of an event better than mainstream reporters or historians?

I may have mentioned before that one of the driving forces behind my latest book, The Last Minute, and the website that goes with it (www.eleanorupdale.com/minute) is the laziness of the way disasters are reported.  Too often, cliches of language, format and tone cheapen the suffering of those involved, reducing them to stereotypes, and inoculating us against horror.   There's one BBC correspondent, often sent to bloody or desperate locations, whose reports are all so similar, and so bathed in an apparent enjoyment of gloom, that I'm ashamed to say I have to suppress a giggle at the very mention of her name.  But she is simply the extreme.  I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels uncomfortable  about the how images of warfare, and the way they are packaged for us, have become so routine that any shock is short lived - or, worse still, replaced with a feeling of impotent despair which can too easily drift into indifference.

It shouldn't be possible to watch reports from Iraq, Egypt or Syria and continue with what you were doing before they came on screen, but I can, and do, day after day. And I'm ashamed of myself.

I was in the news business for many years.  I know some of the reporters, and I'm certain that they care desperately about the events amidst which they bravely work, but even the best of them can't always get though the screen.

When it comes to TV history, violence is often glamorised or used as wallpaper - with am-dram extras staging sanitised reconstructions to keep our eyes open as the pop professor yacks on.  The pain is no greater than in a children's cartoon.
That's why I was overwhelmed by a fictional account of an event in wartime London which suddenly made me realise what it must be like to be caught up in one of today's episodes of random, merciless killing.

At this point, I had better introduce my late ancestor.  He's about my height but even broader.  This is almost exactly what he looked like.
He was the mighty pillar box behind which my father took cover when a German V1 landed on the Aldwych in London on 30th June 1944.  It saved his life. 
From Edwardian times, he stood on the south side of the Strand in London, not far from St Clement Danes Church.
Now, as I think I've mentioned before, my father spent his entire childhood in institutional care and hadn't a clue who his parents were, so I grew up rather short of forebears.  As a result I have a (possibly rather unhealthy) attachment to some objects, and this pillar box (my 'grandfather') was one of them.
I always used to give him a loving stroke as I passed by. You could still see and feel where the shrapnel hit.  I assumed that he would be there forever, so you can imagine what a shock I got on Monday when I went to photograph him for this blog, only to find that he had gone. A massive building project is underway, and it seems he has  been a casualty of redevelopment.

'My' postbox was where the envelope sign is, by St Clement Danes church at the right of the map.  The other double box is marked by the envelope by St Mary le Strand at the bottom left.

There's another box, a little further down the Strand, near King's College and St Mary le Strand.

I'm afraid that one has a rather doomed look too.  Even so, I think I will adopt him as an honorary uncle.

As you'll have gathered, I always thought of 'my' pillar box as a rather jolly thing, and of the bombing as a minor event at the fag end of a long war.  As far as I could tell on Monday, there is no memorial anywhere nearby.  The attack is unmentioned in St Clement Danes church (which had already been bombed in the earlier Blitz). There's no memorial at the building on the corner of Kingsway which took the worst of the blast, and in which many died (it was then the Air Ministry, and later - as St Catherine's house - the registry of births, marriages and deaths.  Now, it's a rather austere office). For me, my father's V1 was the bomb that didn't kill, and my mother's story of him staggering into a pub in Essex street caked in dust seemed rather comic. I didn't know they were protecting me from the truth.

It took a fictionalised account of the blast, in the novel The Secret Fire by Martin Langfield, to bring home what it was really like to be in that London street just a few weeks after the exhillaration of D-Day.  Of course, The Secret Fire is a novel, and you don't have to read far to realise that much of the plot must be pure invention, but when it comes to the framework in which that fiction operates, the feel seems to me rock-solid, and the more official records I've looked at since finding the novel bear this out.  The stark facts (at least 48 - perhaps 200 - dead, hundreds more injured, tremendous damage to buildings) bear out the strategic significance of the strike, but Langfield's account of the human consequences is compelling.
Here are some extracts:

The Air Ministry’s 10-foot-tall blast walls, made of 18-inch-thick brick, disintegrated immediately, deflecting the force of the explosion up and down the street. Hundreds of panes of glass shattered, blowing razor-sharp splinters through the air. The Air Ministry women watching at the windows were sucked out of Adastral House by the vacuum and dashed to death on the street below. Men and women queuing outside the Post Office were torn to pieces. Shrapnel peppered the facades of Bush House and the Air Ministry like bullets...

Part of the casement of the bomb lay burning at the corner of Kingsway. The dead and dying lay scattered in the street. Groans and cries of pain filled the air, though many could not hear them, deafened by the concussion. Some of the victims were naked, their clothing blown from them by the blast...Banknotes blew in the breeze...

People walked around dazed, blood pouring from wounds some didn’t know they had, the crunch of broken glass under their feet ubiquitous. One woman walked down seventy-nine steps of an Adastral House stairwell to the street, not realizing her right foot was hanging sideways, feeling no pain, stepping over bodies...
 
One man stepped from a doorway after the blast and was sliced vertically in two by a sheet of falling glass.

A news editor of the Evening Standard who came upon the scene couldn’t take his eyes off the trees. Their leaves had all been replaced by pieces of human flesh...

At the end of the book, Langfield describes his sources for this passage.  He has done his research, just as any serious writer would.  But there's something in the writing that gives his account a charge that is lacking from the 'official' sources. 
You can read more in the book, or visit http://secretfire.wordpress.com/the-aldwych-v-1-blast-june-30-1944/
There are some photographs (not used here for fear over copyright) at this site: http://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspxhttp://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspx
And there are better pictures at http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/V1_maintxtd.html though sadly on this (and only this) page of that site, the date of the attack is wrong.

When I knew my father (who died more than thirty years ago) he was passionately opposed to the glamorisation of conflict.  I always assumed that was because of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War.  Now I wonder whether it wasn't, at least in part, due to what he saw in his lunch break in London on that summer day in 1944 - horror he never spoke about In detail.
This chimes in with the immediate reaction of the poet Danny Abse, who was also in the street when the bomb hit.
...the Aldwych echo of crunch
and the urgent ambulances loaded
with the fresh dead...
Abse, then a medical student at Kings College, carried on with his day, walking though the mayhem to get to the dissecting room. It was nearly fifty years before he felt able to analyse his response to the event in his poem Carnal Knowledge, which you can read here.
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.htmlhttp://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.html

Martin Langfield's image of the body parts in the trees, and the sense of an 'ordinary' day transformed will colour the way I watch and listen to news reports now.  That scene could be a street in Baghdad or Damascus. Just as constraints on reporting during the war meant that the true horror of 30th June 1944 was not widely known at the time, our sensibilities limit what can be shown on the screen now.  The panting reporter, often taking up much of the frame, tells us an event is shocking - and we may even be warned in advance of distressing scenes before a news item starts- but sadly I have to admit that it took a fictionalised picture of an event almost seventy years ago to make me realise how numb I had become to the horrors of our own day.  That's just one reason why it's worth reading, and writing, historical novels.

Map from OpenStreetMap.org

www.eleanorupdale.com
I'll be back with you on Christmas Day - and I promise you something more cheery.

The Berwickshire News and the Eyemouth Disaster of 1881 - by Katherine Langrish

For years and years when I lived near Skipton, we used to take the local paper, The Craven Herald, which I believe was the last newspaper in England to cover the whole of the the front sheet in advertisements - for sheep sales, cattle sales, farmers' markets and local businesses. Sadly, no more. The last time I was up in Skipton and bought the the paper, I found it had at last conformed to the modern norm. The front page is now like every other: a news page with big headlines and photographs.

There was a certain charm in the old ways. The Craven Herald of only a very few years ago was little different from the one pictured above: The Berwickshire News of Tuesday, October 18, 1881 - full of small and large advertisements - for boot shops, milliners, coachmakers, coal agents; for hotelliers, gas-fitters and drapers.  W. Charles of Dunse 'begs to call particular attention to the WATERPROOF 'K' BOOT, as advertised in The Field newspaper' and 'ordered by the Admiralty for the ARTIC EXPEDITION' (sic: missing the 'c' out of 'Arctic' was clearly as easily done then as now.) An 'Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies' offers its prospectus. John Brown calls attention to his Thrashing Machine:

William Graham advertises a somewhat intimidating list of health drinks (what is Khiss Hi Ke Pani?) and follows it up with a variety of sheep-dips:

While, tucked away at the bottom of the page, is this modest advertisement for a monumental mason:

A lot of people may have been looking at this one.  Because almost the entirety of the inside of the newspaper - two whole sheets of closely printed columns - is taken up with the story of the 'Fearful Loss of Life' caused by the tremendous gale of October Friday 14 1881 - now known as the Eymouth Disaster after the tiny fishing village of Eyemouth which lost 129 of its men. In all, the gale cost the lives of 189 men,  but Eyemouth suffered worst.

"Eyemouth" the reporter writes, "is a scene of unutterable woe. Many families are bereft of husbands, fathers and brothers, while there is hardly one in the village who does not mourn some relative. ...The town is full of heartrending scenes."

There follows a list of the lost, extremely touching even today, with the names of the boats in which they made a living:

The Radiant. lost in Eye Bay (7) - John Windram, married...John Fairbairn, married, 3 children; William Gray, married, 3 children; David Fairbairn, single; Alexander Fairbairn, single; John Burgeon, single; and James Crombie, married, 3 children.

That's just one boat. Then there's The Harmony, The Wave, The Blossom, Forget-Me-Not, the Press Home, Lily of the Valley ("Thomas Miller, married, 5 children; Robert Lough, married, 5 children; David Ritchie, married, 4 children, Robert Lough, married, family partly [grown] up; Alexander Swanston, jun., and James Dougal, single"), The Onward, The James and Robert, The Invincible, The Good Intent, The Myrtle, The Enterprise, The Economy and the Fisher Lasses.

All those from one little village - although, in those days of slow communications, the story is amended with a footnote to say "By telegram we learn that the Fisher Lasses has arrived at Shields with the loss of of one of the crew - Wm, Young - the rest are all safe."

Can you imagine with what anxiety this newspaper must have been perused on the day of its delivery?  So many locals lost: so many friends, family, acquaintances. The relief of learning that the Fisher Lasses was safe at Shields; the agony for the family of William Young, the ongoing agony for families who yet had no news. No helicopters then: no search and rescue.  Only the long wait. "Several bodies have come ashore at Berwick..."

How much attention, if any, was paid to the advertisments on the front page?

Well - life had to go on, even in the harshest and hardest of moments.  Here was a local newspaper, dealing with an immense but still local tragedy, doing its best to bring the news, to report the disaster, to mirror the grief and to relay the attempts being made to alleviate some at least of the suffering..

The Berwickshire News was serving its community, as local papers did then and still do today.

The Eyemouth Fishing Tragedy Memorial, St Abbs, from Flickr 1618699659.jpg

Credit:
All the newspaper excerpts are scanned from a facsimile of the Berwickshire News which I  bought from Eyemouth Museum - where much more can be found.

There's hole at the bottom of my garden… by Eve Edwards

I'm living with the builders at the moment.  A medium-sized extension on the side of our house appears to demand a foundation hole the size of an Australian open cast mine.  What is fascinating, however, is seeing the layers stripped away in the garden - first the top soil, then the layers of sand and light gravel deposited by the nearby Thames over the centuries (yes, Bible scholars, I live in a house literally built on sand).  I asked the chap this morning if he had found any buried treasure.  Only a few coins, he replied.  What was more exciting than a couple of old pennies was discovering the bricked up coal hole that I had no idea was in the side of the house and seeing how the utilities connected up.  The old gas pipe had a bright blue (and reassuring new looking) hose threaded through it like some clever bypass surgery on the heart of a Victorian house.  It was a mini Time Team moment in my own garden.

I suppose I should count myself lucky as a house down the road from us discovered a burial site when they had their basement excavated.  The police were called and we all got a thrill seeing the blue and white incident tape (and it wasn't even due to filming for Morse).  The bones turned out to be Anglo-Saxon so the police stood down and the archeologists moved in.

Anglo-saxon burials in oxfordshire
c. Ashmolean Museum

Slightly creepy to think on whose bones you might be sitting...

Television producers have clocked to the fascination we have to the past we can touch with a spade and digger.  I nod here to the above mentioned Time Team who made dirty fingernails, home knitted jumpers and weathered faces archaeologically cool.

My teenage heartthrob, Michael Wood, took his crew of diggers to the little green outside my parents' house in Long Melford, Suffolk, a year or so ago.  They dug up a Roman road that they had not known was there and revealed a whole layer of history in the village just by making a couple of trenches.  To me that is akin to magic.

I can think of a number of writers who are good at doing the same thing with pen rather than shovel. One of my favourite children's books was Tom's Midnight Garden.  Philippa Pearce caught that sense so many of us have of the different eras layering in the same place - think filo pastry rather than shortcrust.  The John Gordon book, The Giant under the Snow, was another favourite.  As a child, I lived near the earthworks that made up Boadicea's camp in Epping Forest and took idea of Gordon's earthen giant with me whenever I walked there.

The edition I read as a child.
Love this cover!

Scratch the surface anywhere in the UK and history jumps out at you jack-in-a-box fashion.  I find that immensely exciting and use it to fuel my writing.  You don't have to travel to see the past; you can just close your eyes and send your imagination down into the earth.

Happy digging!

Paper, Print and the Georgians - Lucy Inglis

The British Library’s new Georgians Revealed exhibition is now open. It is a wonderful exploration of works on paper throughout the Georgian period, and the whole thing has a dynamic feel to it that reflects the spirit of the age.

Last month, I gave a Sunday lecture there focussing on the importance of paper during the eighteenth century, but also on the broader themes of life in Georgian London. What makes a Londoner? How was that identity forged? And what part did paper play in it?

Londoners had always been financial animals, but they were becoming consumers on an international scale. For that, they needed a currency they could trust. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 saw the beginning of a move towards standardised bank notes; the first ‘modern’ ones appeared in 1725. That, coupled with recoinage to get rid of the vast numbers of brass fakes swimming around the system, helped to stabilize the pound and create confidence in it. As an aside, the most famous of the Wardens of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton aged nineteen, made a list of his sins which, along with stealing, ‘punching my sister’, ‘falling out with the servants’ and ‘having unclean thoughts’ was ‘Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne’.

International trade required that this money had a value not only at home, but when compared to other currencies, so, in 1698, a Huguenot named John Castaing began writing up a news-sheet called The Course of Exchange and Other Things. The sheet included stock prices, bullion rates and exchange rates. It was published on Tuesdays and Fridays and sent to the Hook of Holland the same day in bulk.

Owing to the power of commerce, literacy was rising fast. Parents and orphanages found that their children were simply more employable if they could read and write. This rapid rise in literacy was accompanied by a boom in print culture. Thousands of news-sheets, papers, ballads and broadsides were printed in London’s Moorfields, where Grub Street was a real place specialising in tabloid-type publications. Newspapers came to prominence in the reign of George I. They were key to London trade and social life, but politicians were becoming aware of how the press could be used to influence the electorate. Though the government was becoming increasingly aware that it could not control the press, it could - through the Post Office - control its distribution. It franked and sent out the newspapers which were most supportive and least inflammatory to those ‘who keep coffeehouses, that they might be furnished with them, gratis’.

Moorfields was not only the centre of production for the popular press, but it was also the home of many of London’s producers of pornography. Most of this was retailed south of the Strand, where two streets, Wych Street and Holywell Street were almost entirely given over to the sale of London’s saucier material. Samuel Pepys probably represents the average consumer: he had a copperplate print of a naked Nell Gwynn above his desk at the Admiralty; and in the early part of 1688, he purchased a copy of L’École des Filles from John Martin, his bookseller. On a February Sunday, ‘the Lord’s Day’, as he noted in his diary, he went to the office to do some work and have a little read of his new purchase, ‘which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’. Women also played a part in the production and sale of pornography: Elizabeth Nutt ran a cluster of shops in the Royal Exchange where she sold her more respectable stock, such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub. She was also listed as a ‘Mercury-woman’, printing cheap and often seditious or salacious ballads in Grub Street; in the 1730s, she was printing pornography there, aided by her daughters.

The rise in popular, accessible music was pioneered by John Walsh and his son, also John, from their shop the Harp and Hoboy in Catherine Street off Drury Lane. There, they held the monopoly on producing Handel’s work. Walsh started publishing in 1695 and was soon innovating: using cheap and quick-to-work pewter instead of copper and punches for notes to speed things up.  He had instant success, but his real opportunity presented itself when Handel appeared on the scene. Handel came to London in 1711 with the ink still wet on his opera Rinaldo, which he had been engaged to write for performance in the 1710-11 season at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket.  Aaron Hill, the manager, had decided upon an ‘Italian’ season, and Handel was the man to deliver, his reputation already known in the city. Opera was relatively new to London’s sophisticated set and attempts to establish an English style were damp squibs in the main. Rinaldo - a consciously Italianate opera written by a German - was an instant hit. The quick, cheap production of Handel’s music was key to his success. Hear it at a recital or on the stage, go to the Walsh’s shop, buy the sheet music for your instrument and go home and play Handel’s music.

But paper wasn’t only used for commerce and entertainment. It was also used for education and huge advances in medicine and science were recorded in ambitious manuals and treatises which went on to save thousands, if not millions of lives after their publication. The most important of these was arguably the collaboration of man-midwife William Smellie, surgeon William Hunter and artist Jan Van Rymsdyk. It resulted in two defining works: Smellie’s A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgement, of the practice of midwifery of 1754, and William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures twenty years later. These books are still regarded as the moment modern obstetrics was born.

No lecture on paper, print and the Georgians would be complete without the Romantic poets, and we ended with Keats, Shelley and Byron. Keats was the only true Londoner, described by Byron as a ‘Cockney’ and a ‘dirty little blackguard’. Both Keats and Shelley had backgrounds in medicine. Shelley in particular was interested in Galvinism and the reanimation of the body. The lectures he attended on it coincided with the beginning of his love affair with Mary Godwin and she listened, rapt, as he talked about them afterwards. Later, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, telling the story of a monster brought to life through reanimation and of a need for love that could not be conquered by death. I gave the last words to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose writings, both his poetry and private letters, gave his contemporaries a powerful insight into the dangers of addiction. He died in 1834, in the lull of the reign of William IV. The Georges had gone, and Victoria was still to arrive, but London had changed immeasurably. Coleridge wrote from a small room in his doctor’s house in Highgate, where he was treated for addiction. The view from the window was of the ‘ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul’s and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all...Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day.’

Writing Historical Fiction by Celia Brayfield

We have a huge extra treat this month from Celia Brayfield, whose new book with Duncan Sprott, Writing Historical Fiction sounds like a must-read for all History Girls - and Boys.



A bit about Celia:


Celia Brayfield’s first novel, which began in Malaysia in 1938, was written when historical fiction was the love that dared not speak its name. She subsequently smuggled revolutionary St Petersburg, Paris with the Ballets Russes and the Barbary Coast in the eighteenth Century into some of her nine bestselling novels. Her next novel is about the love affair between a French man and an English woman that finally brought Mary Queen of Scots to justice; in retelling this tragic episode in English history, she has used recent research to follow the lives the ordinary people trapped Mary’s doomed court-in-exile. Celia also tutors award-winning students on two of Britain’s leading Creative Writing programmes, at Bath Spa University and Brunel University in London. She is the author of Bestseller (Fourth Estate) 1996, one of the very few guides to writing successful popular fiction from a bestselling author.

She is also the guest editor of the winter 2013 edition of Mslexia.

Here she muses on why anachronistic attitudes to love and sex have sometimes given historical fiction a bad name.

Bodice-ripper. Shall we just think about this for a moment? Yes, it’s publishing slang for popular historical fiction for women and it tells us about the mindset, fixed in the Mad Men era, that put historical writing beyond the literary pale for decades. Bodice-ripper believers are sure that that our ancestors were randy as stoats, at it like crazed weasels and permanently breathless with passion.

I think not. The eminent historian Lawrence Stone thought not, in his tome The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) which transformed thinking about relationships in the early modern period and in which observed that people had far less sex at that time than we imagined they did.

Likewise with love. History certainly offers us epic romances – the love of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, which endured thirty years and his first two highly advantageous marriages to other women, or the coup de foudre which led Eleanor of Aquitaine to dump the King of France for the unprepossessing Duke of Normandy – later Henry II of England. But the writer who tries to tread a path between accurate history and engaging fiction is confronted by the fact that neither love nor sex have meant the same to our ancestors as they do to us today.

Worse, we have very little evidence to tell us how ordinary people felt, thought and acted about love, and what we do have – the poetry, the erotica, the court testimonies – was not created to provide a record, but to serve a purpose at the time. Finally, worst of all, many authors have made considerable fortunes by ignoring these facts and having Tudor noblewomen act like Essex girls.

Love is the stuff of fiction, particularly popular fiction, but love has not always been the intense, intimate and sexual emotion we recognise today nor was it always considered the best foundation for a marriage and family. History is not on the writer’s side. Mostly, love has been an anarchic challenge to the social order.

Love and the novel have a shared history. Romantic love was defined by the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century, in which the idea that emotions should be all-powerful and should triumph over reason was central. The novel itself emerged at the same time and their linguistic origins are intertwined, with the word romance having double meaning – a love affair or a story. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has suggested that romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life and reinforced the link between self-realisation and freedom.

It is ironic that the period of English history that is currently such a focus of fiction was one of the least romantic. To modern readers, the true Tudor attitudes to love and marriage e are depressingly pragmatic. The immense dynastic marriages of the time, such as that of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick, a three-couple alliance which included four of the couple’s adult children, seem cruel and incomprehensible to us.

Equally hard to understand is the story of Lady Catherine Gray, heir to the English throne, who fell in love and married Edward Seymour, the Earl of Pembroke, in secret while negotiations for a diplomatic alliance for her were under way. Within months Catherine’s young husband was sent abroad and his sister, the only witness to their marriage, died. Catherine lost the legal document that proved their marriage, and the priest who married them disappeared. She found herself pregnant, with a child that was, to all intents and purposes, illegitimate. Queen Elizabeth suspected a plot and Catherine was imprisoned for the rest of her life. To modern readers, and to fine novelists including Alison Weir and Ella March Chase, this is a tragic story of true love. To an Elizabethan audience, this is a tragic story of an unbelievably silly and disloyal young couple. And to male historians, alas, it has been proof that Queen Elizabeth was an embittered spinster.

Does it matter that a novelist in pursuit of more readers makes a Tudor lady act like an Essex girl? To me, yes. Surely the reason we explore the past is to find out what human nature really is. If we traduce our ancestors’ feelings, there’s no reason to get to know them at all. And besides, a bodice meant exquisite fabric imported from far-off lands, jewels, gold thread, skilled embroiderers, weeks of work for dozens of people – the man who ripped it wouldn’t be anyone’s favourite.

Extracted from Writing Historical Fiction:The Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott, published by Bloomsbury Academic, December 5 2013.

November Competition

Open to UK readers only - sorry!

We have five copies of Lydia Syson's book That Burning Summer to give away to the best answers to this question:

'Who do you wish you could have hidden and protected  in an isolated church, and why?'

(If you missed her guest post, take a look at yesterday)

And find out more at:  http://www.lydiasyson.com/that-burning-summer-links-and-background-resources

Closing date 7th December

The Summer of 1940 by Lydia Syson

A big welcome to Lydia Syson, who is our guest for November. Appropiaitely enough in theis onth of Remembrance, she has written a novel set in 1940.

Photo: Sanne Vliegenthart

About Lydia: she is a fifth-generation North Londoner who now lives south of the river. Although writing a novel was a very early ambition, it took her rather a long time to get round to A World Between Us, set during the Spanish Civil War and published by Hot Key Books in 2012. In the meantime, she went from being a World Service radio listener in Botswana to a producer in London, leaving the BBC after her first child was born. Three more children later she wrote a biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed, telling the full story of the charismatic eighteenth-century ‘electric’ doctor. Getting to Timbuktu is still on the ‘to do’ list – explorers, poets and Timbuktu fever were the subject of the PhD she finished in 2003 – but recent travels have been closer to home. Her new book, THAT BURNING SUMMER, is set in July 1940 as the Battle of Britain was raging over Kent. Sixteen-year old Peggy faces a test of love and loyalty when a young Polish pilot crash-lands near the family farm. 

“That Burning Summer” emerged, layer by layer, almost entirely from the place in which it’s set. Years of mooching around Romney Marsh (cycling between its pubs and churches, and walking, windswept, along that peculiar triangle of Kent coast which juts out towards Boulogne, made me see the summer of 1940 in an entirely new light. The more I dug, the more intrigued I became by the ‘underbelly’ of the Battle of Britain: all those elements of wartime life which the propaganda posters are precisely designed to cover up. The uncomfortable truths.

Posters like this have supplied our most enduring images of the era. Propaganda deals in myth of course, and wartime myths - invariably more palatable than the reality – quickly and powerfully come to dominate memory and imagination. So in my childhood, like most Britons, I’d absorbed a fairly standard narrative of World War II: ‘we’ won. It was the ‘good’ war, the ‘just’ war, unlike the futile one that preceded it, and “Britons never, never will be…”

And I here I stop. Because one subversive grandmother (London Granny) used to finish this song off with ‘marrai-ed to the mermai-eds at the bottom of the deep blue sea’ while the other (Country Granny) memorably brought me up short one day in conversation in her kitchen when I was about ten years old with the information that she and everyone else on the South coast of England were firmly convinced in 1940 that Hitler actually would invade. For the first time in my life, I learned that the prospect of losing the war was at one time extremely real. I was shocked. I’d really had no idea.

One half term, exploring a flooded pillbox on the Royal Military Canal (http://www.royalmilitarycanal.com/pages/index.asp) with my children, that conversation suddenly came back to me. The Canal, which curves efficiently from Hythe to Rye, was originally built to repel Napoleonic invaders, and also to control smugglers. It was the first effective line of defense in these parts in 1940, when German invaders were anticipated at every moment. What would it have been like, I wondered, to live on the Marsh then, between canal and coast, listening to the guns as France fell, knowing that your turn was coming next? I imagined the vast and beautiful skies above scribbled over with vapour trails left by dogfights. I pictured a parachute descending, a falling plane, an unknown airman…

These thoughts were mostly prompted by that fact that one of my children was deep in the grip of an obsession with flight, and World War Two with it. After several years of intense discussions of the relative merits of mangonels and trebuchets, we’d moved on to Merlin engines, Hawker Hurricanes and Heinkels. Words like ‘aileron’ had suddenly entered my vocabulary. Eventually, I took my place in the back of a frail 4-seater plane and my ten- year-old son flew me 2,000 feet over the Marsh: his tenth birthday present was a flying lesson. Seeing the Marsh from this height was, unsurprisingly, a revelation.

An even more significant revelation for That Burning Summer came from below the ground. In Brenzett Aeronautical Museum (http://www.brenzettaero.co.uk/Brenzett_Aeronautical_Museum_Trust/Home.html) I first encountered the discoveries of another generation of obsessives: the amateur aviation archaeologists of the 1970s and 80s. Unlike the RAF, they refused to give up their efforts to trace long-lost pilots and planes. In a slightly ramshackle building that once housed land girls, we peered at a scorched German parachute [IMAGE: ‘Remains of German parachute] treasured for years by the girl whose brother had rescued it from a tree, read stories of pilots who’d bailed out of burning planes only to be mistaken for the enemy, and were simply amazed at the sight of aircraft parts that had been buried in the Marsh for decades.

Hurricane cockpit

It seemed unbelievable. How could entire aircraft simply be swallowed up like that, invisible and untouched for decades?

Not just aircraft, but often their pilots too.

Arthur William Clarke, a Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain, was listed as ‘missing, presumed dead’ at the age of 20. In a letter to Arthur’s mother, grimly typed a week after his disappearance, his Squadron Leader strikes a weary note:

‘I am afraid that there is very little hope of hearing from him now. We were on Patrol over Kent, when we intercepted about 30 Enemy Bombers with Escort Fighters and attacked about 10 miles west of Folkestone, we went into attack three at a time and your son was in the second three to attack, nobody saw anything happen to him and after the attack we were split up and returned home separately as usually happens, as nobody saw anything one really cannot say what happened.

It is conceivably possible that he jumped out by Parachute and was carried by the wind out into the Channel where he might have been taken prisoner by a German Torpedo Boat, but I am afraid that is very unlikely…I am sorry I cannot tell you anything more than this, but nobody saw anything. I am afraid this is often the case in these Air Battles.’

Arthur Clarke’s Hurricane had come down unseen, to vanish immediately into Romney Marsh. Forty-six years later, the dogged work of a freelance aviation historian made it possible for his family to put up this memorial near this lonely spot not far from the tiny village of Newchurch. Like many families in the same position, they decided to leave his mortal remains in peace.

‘Nobody saw anything.’ That stuck with me. If a plane could just disappear like that, its pilot with it, and nobody see, what else could happen? What if you were a pilot who had got to a point that you actually wanted to disappear? What if you bailed out just in time, and realised that nothing, nothing on earth, could make you get back into a cockpit? Surely not every fighter pilot was as brave as the smiling young Englishmen celebrated in Churchill’s famous speech, with its electrifyingly Shakespearean echoes. What if you simply lost your nerve? What happened to the Unhappy Few?

Here’s another lonely memorial.

We came across it one day walking with friends at Dungeness, heading east into scrubland, lighthouse and power station at our backs.

“What’s that flag?” one of us wondered out loud.

“Poland,” came my son’s authoritative reply. (There was slightly more of the flag to go by five years ago than there is today.)

Bogusław Mierzwa was killed here on 16th April 1941, after having flown missions in combat against the Luftwaffe since September 1939. This tattered flag made me want to find out more about the Polish pilots who took to the skies over Britain in the summer of 1940. They’ve been described as the ‘forgotten few’. The stories I discovered made me ashamed to have known so little about them before.

When the men of the Polish air force arrived in Britain – over 8,000 were evacuated - they had already experienced multiple invasions. In the first month of the war, Poland was invaded twice: by Germany and then the Soviet Union. Contrary to the myth that their planes were destroyed on the ground in the first days of the war, these men fought bravely then, and many went on to make dangerous odysseys halfway round the world, spending time in virtual prison camps en route, and fighting in the Battle of France too before reaching ‘the Island of Last Hope’. Probably the best-trained pilots in the world at the time, they then had a struggle to convince the RAF to let them fly. Before long, Polish pilots had a reputation in Britain for almost insane courage: they fought with the desperation of the already occupied.

The story I had begun to hatch about a pilot in hiding became suddenly more interesting. I discovered a chilling term: ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’. LMF was hastily introduced in April 1940 to deter aircrew from refusing to fly. Effectively, you were branded a coward. Historians have found RAF medical records on psychological welfare suspiciously incomplete, so I don’t know if any Poles were officially ‘diagnosed’, but I had reached the point by then where imagination could take over. I couldn’t imagine anything more shameful for a Polish pilot than a failure of courage. The character of Henryk began to take shape.

Can anyone know how he or she will respond when truly tested? In June 1940, every household was issued with a leaflet: ‘If the invader comes: what to do and how to do it’. I imagined a child becoming obsessed with the confusing advice it contained. Rule 2 (‘Do not believe rumours and do not spread them’) included the worrying advice to keep your head. Common sense was apparently the best way to tell whether ‘a military officer is really British or only pretending to be so.’ All very well, but what if you were one of those people whose senses weren’t like everyone else’s? I’d recently been finding out about dyspraxia. For various reasons, multiple instructions, short-term memory and organisation can be incredibly difficult for people with dyspraxia. It’s little understood even now. In wartime Britain, any child like that would probably have been automatically dismissed as ‘stupid’ or ‘lazy’. So how terrifying such a set of instructions would have appeared to a boy like Ernest, in That Burning Summer, a quiet, bird-watching boy who’d never had to be ‘manly’ before.

Rumour and the control of information were issues of huge concern to the Government in the months before the ‘Blitz spirit’ emerged. Two weeks after Dunkirk and five days before the fall of France, the over-crowded troopship Lancastria was sunk off the French coast, and as many as 6,000 lives may have been lost. It was the worst disaster in British maritime history but the news was kept secret for fear of its impact on morale. I’d interviewed a number of Lancastria survivors for a radio documentary many years ago, and found the contradictions between the ‘official’ war narrative and their own stories both moving and fascinating.

By 1940, up and down the country, people were (overheard) complaining about the increasingly heavy hand of the state. The pro-democracy Mass-Observation movement had become a tool of the Ministry of Information and ‘Cooper’s Snoopers’ were quickly compared to the Gestapo. Meanwhile Mass-Observation diarists like Nella Last continued to record the kind of casual anti-Semitism we prefer to forget was rife in 1930s Britain, and Communist families on the South coast destroyed potentially incriminating papers in anticipation of invasion and imprisonment or worse. My London grandparents made preparations for a friend to look after my mother in case of their own arrest. Others stockpiled suicide medication and buried treasures of all kinds.

In this climate of mistrust, spyfever inevitably broke out. In playgrounds and post office queues, front parlours and cinemas, it was fed by radio programmes like ITMA and films like Contraband and The Spy in Black. On Romney Marsh itself, suspicions were confirmed by the appearance of four rather incompetent spies on the coast in early September.

But there was another secret threat: from Madrid, and the Spanish Civil War, came the fear of the Enemy Within – ‘The Fifth Column’, ready and waiting to support the invaders when they came. Oswald Mosley and 740 other active fascists were interned in May 1940, but that still left plenty of sympathisers at large to worry about.

Pacifists made easy targets. Orwell declared them pro-Fascist, the Daily Mail called for the Peace Pledge Union to be banned, and an article in the Sunday Pictorial soon after Dunkirk referred scathingly to our ‘national pansies’. Across the country, Conscientious Objectors were dismissed from teaching positions.

The more I read, the more torn I felt. I thoroughly admired the morality of their absolutist stand against war, and the complicated kind of courage it took to maintain. Yet the experience of writing A World Between Us, set among International Brigaders during the Spanish Civil War, had made me less sympathetic than ever with the disastrous policies of appeasement: the non-intervention agreement that turned a blind eye to Hitler and Mussolini’s support for Franco and enabled him to win the war was part of the same thinking. If I felt like this, now, how much harder must it have been to work out the right thing to do in the summer of 1940.

All these ideas kept swirling around my head as I wrote, and found their way into the isolated church on Romney Marsh where much of That Burning Summer is set, and some of it was actually written. You won’t find many direct references to them in the story that finally came out, the tale of ‘a girl, a boy and a crash-landing…’ - Peggy, Ernest and Henryk - but they’re there in the warp and weft of the novel. And I’ll never walk beside the ditches and across the fields of the Marsh and see them in quite the same way again.