The History Girls

Ralph Allen by Marie-Louise Jensen

2012-03-15T01:00:00.000Z

I think everyone who lives in Bath has heard of Ralph Allen, though he is not nationally known. A Bath state secondary school is named after him, the grand house he built on the southern slopes of the city is now a private school, and the steep road that leads to and past it is called Ralph Allen Drive.

Here in Bath, we know him mainly as a great entrepreneur who transformed the city: he had a vision of how the city could look if it were to be rebuilt. To this end, he opened a quarry on the downs on the southern side of the city and built a sort of tram/railway to bring the stone down. He built a show home (now Prior Park College) to advertise the wonderful mellow Bath stone and sure enough, the city was rebuilt. The honey-coloured Georgian buildings are one of the features that make Bath so popular as a city to live in and as a tourist attraction.
But all this was of local importance. Ralph Allen had very limited success marketing his stone further afield and so his influence did not extend beyond his own city.
But in fact he had been involved in events of national importance earlier in his life, when he was postmaster in Bath. He could even have been said to have helped shape British history.

In 1715, when the Jacobite forces planned to rise up against the newly-crowned Protestant King, George I, Britain stood at a crossroads. Parliament had chosen a distant heir to the throne who wasn't even British, to avoid what they saw as the calamity of another Catholic monarch on the English throne. They even made a law to support their decision. But many Tories and High Church supporters saw the betrayal and rejection of the true Stuart heir as an outrage. And so rebellion was planned, plots were laid; forces and weapons were concealed strategically.
Fashionable Bath was to be the centre of rebellion in the south. But somehow, the plans were foiled. The government forces knew where the weapons were concealed and which men were ringleaders. General Wade marched into the city and arrested them; the gunpowder and other weaponry was seized and the status quo was preserved.
The man who was the key to this defeat was none other than Ralph Allen himself. He used his position as postmaster to open and read mail; in effect he was a spy for King George. His reward was to be granted great influence in reforming the post office, where he then made his first fortune. His second fortune came from the quarries - he used the money he had made in the post office to fund his venture.
Whether you view Allen as a hero of the people who saved Britain from civil war, or the sneaking and treacherous letter-thief who prevented the accession of the true King to the throne will depend on your sympathies; Tory or Whig, Catholic or Protestant. Either way there was no doubt of his significance. It is a strange fact, though, that locally he is known only as postmaster and quarry owner. His role as spy is not general knowledge. But I have, of course, cast him in my latest book in this secret role.

I Heart TV Catherine Johnson

2012-03-14T09:05:00.004Z

A very brief blog this month. Out of shot, I am in one of those loops of confidence that all writers have, I think we must all be on rollercoasters of self doubt with peaks of 'whoohoo I'm amazing' (or at least good) to troughs of 'I'm crapper than crap'. Anyway on with the show....
My last post was about books leading to other books, this month's is all about that pernicious new upstart TV. In the dawn of the novel reading was seen as dissolute and time wasting, in the same way that TV was for us 60s and 70s kids, and no doubt, as Computer games will be in the future.
And although I know very little about gaming, I grew up with TV. We didn't have a set at first but I can remember sitting at Mark Shallcrosses' house watching Robinson Crusoe.
When we did get black and white set I was still young enough for Andy Pandy and Bill and Ben, then the Pogles and the Clangers, not to mention White Horses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR6z8GUywyc), The Singing Ringing Tree, The Double Deckers, (http://www.thedoubledeckers.com/ )Crackerjack, Jackanory and Blue Peter. Carries War, The Owl Service, Children of The Stones (featuring a particularly snotty girl in the year above me at school), The Tomorrow People,The Monkees of course, Ace of Wands (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAAyt7-yQ8w). and Follyfoot (you can sing the theme tune yourselves, go on I know you want to).

I loved them all. Even The Banana Splits which was almost like looking into a strange acid tinged world beyond the understanding of any suburban British kid.

I loved the BBC2 historical dramas on Sunday afternoons, and I Claudius (the girl from Children of the Stones was in this too) Monty Python, Survivors (nightmares!) and later, dramas like Edge of Darkness.

I've even lifted ideas from TV and used them, shamelessly, in books. A Nest of Vipers? Well of course it's Hustle (just finished on BBC1) only with teenagers set in the early eighteenth century. Next years title? OK I admit it, Silent Witness set in 1792. There you go, what can I say? Have to dash now, there's something on I wanted to watch…..

NEWES FROM THE DEAD - Mary Hooper

2012-03-13T01:00:00.000Z

I like to have real people in my books, but usually they
only have walk-on parts. NEWES FROM THE DEAD was my only book to be based on both a real-life person and a real-life incident, and is the name of a pamphlet sold in the 17th Century to record the words of someone who was purported to have died and then come alive again. As this someone – a young woman named Anne Green – was a
convicted murderer who’d been hanged, her recovery was thought to be a direct message from God to show that she was innocent.

In December 1650, Anne Green was a lowly servant at the house of Sir Thomas Reade, a powerful land-owner in Oxfordshire. Anne became pregnant by Sir Thomas’s grandson, a “forward” seventeen year old scholar, and terrified and alone, miscarried in the outside privy after six months. The baby (as later a midwife certified) never drew breath, but Sir Thomas was told of what had happened and, fearing for the marriage prospects of his grandson, had Anne despatched to Oxford gaol to await trial for infanticide. Anne was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. What was more, as a convicted felon her corpse was then going to be taken to be dissected. Interested parties: Oxford medics and scholars, apothecaries and anyone who could afford a viewing ticket, could come along and watch.

The day came. The hanging was a public one held in the courtyard of the prison and some of Anne’s family and fellow-servants came to support her. Admitting that she had sinned by sleeping with a man - but still pleading innocence of infanticide, Anne was hanged, at the last calling upon God to convey her quickly to Paradise. After thirty minutes a doctor certified that she was dead, then she was cut down, placed in a coffin and taken to a room over an apothecary’s shop in Oxford.

Interested parties gathered in the small, cold room; the two principal doctors picked up their instruments to begin cutting...and then Anne made a “raddling noise” in the back of her throat. One doctor said it was merely some air coming back from the lungs. A student thumped on her chest to help bring up the rest of this and the instruments were wielded once again. But then Anne’s eyelid was seen to twitch.
This presented the doctors with a dilemma. Should they proceed
with the dissection and “finish her off” or try and revive her? There was
consternation in the room, shouts for and against. Sir Thomas Reade was keen
that she should be re-hanged, others agreed, saying that she belonged to God now
and he must have her, yet others said that she had miscarried, not given birth,
and her trial had not been a fair one.

For me, the best part of writing a book is the research, and
it certainly proved so in this case, for I seized upon details of Sir Thomas
Reade’s house and family, of the doctors that were present, of the hour-by-hour
care of Anne, of her very gradual recovery and of attempts to turn her into
some sort of prophetess and the book almost wrote itself. I even found out that

Christopher Wren, then a seventeen year old scholar, had been present at the dissection
and written a poem about it.

Anne did recover, and with the money collected from the interested parties who came to see her, appealed for and was granted a pardon. As for wicked Sir Thomas, he was taken ill and died two days later, which seemed to be further proof of Anne’s innocence.

Anne married and earned a living travelling with her coffin and telling her tale at various taverns. She died in 1665 (which is the year of the Great Plague, of course) but I have been unable to find how she
died or where she is buried. She remains the most fascinating person I have ever written about.

Our February competition winners

2012-03-12T10:07:00.000Z

And the winners are:

The Girl in the Mask
Kit Berry
Astrid Holm
Chloe S

Please contact Jennie Younger (jennie.younger@oup.com) and give your land address

Sword of Light
Chloe S.
Orli
Astrid Holm
Kit Berry
Madwippit

Please contact Nic Wilkinson (nic.wilkinson@gmail.com) and give your land address

Congratulations!

"WITH BEARDS AND WITHOUT BEARDS" by H.M. Castor

2012-03-12T01:00:00.003Z

This post almost didn’t make it to your screen. I was so sucked in by the subject matter (a research book) that I very nearly couldn’t haul myself out in time to write these words. The book in question is as alluring to me as a large plate of cakes and as treacherous as quicksand. It mesmerises me and I can get lost in it for days. Time and again I have opened it to look up some small item (a job that should have taken moments), only to resurface several hours later, having entirely forgotten the original task in hand…

Before I tell you more, I must just explain that on April 1^st my Tudor historical novel VIII is coming out in paperback, and so I am embarking on a busy few months, giving talks about Henry VIII, about my research, and about exactly what I think the connection is between Henry and Anakin Skywalker (an angle that – as Caroline Lawrence seems similarly to have found with Yoda (see her post here) – invariably goes down well in schools). In between events, I am writing a completely different book (still a Tudor historical novel, but to me it is an entirely fresh project). It is a common experience, of course, for writers to be busy promoting one book while they are writing another, but it produces a strange gear-crunching in the brain: you must haul yourself out of one mental landscape and retrieve another from your memory. Depending on how intensely you are involved in your work in progress, it can be a little disorientating.

So, to help me retrieve the world of VIII for my events, I thought I would write today about one of my favourite Henry-related research books.

It’s called ‘The Inventory of King Henry VIII: The Transcript’. When writing VIII, every time I needed to put an object under Henry’s fingers, a jewel on his clothes, or a hanging on his walls, I turned to this book. Here is a picture of it – suitably huge, weighty and golden.

Henry VIII died on 28^th January 1547. Six months later, a mammoth project was begun: to make an inventory of all the moveable property he had left behind. The job took 18 months.

The modern job – of transcribing, indexing and editing the inventory – must have taken a good deal longer than that. This Herculean task has been completed by Philip Ward and Alasdair Hawkyard, under the expert editorial directorship of David Starkey, and the resulting book – even though it is in a large format with small type, and entirely without illustrations – is more than 500 pages long.

And I love it. Oh, how I love it.

Starting at the back, the index is a joy. You can look up everything from dog accessories (chains, collars, leashes – of various specified sorts) to cutlery, from games (including chessmen, card-tables and ‘Hens and a Fox’ – does anyone know how to play that?) to weapons (of which there are a fantastic variety, as you might imagine). You can look up toilet equipment, toys and timepieces, heraldry, horns and hourglasses. Everything from bath linen to artillery is here. Under ‘Designs’, there are designs for weapons, for bridges, for castles & for gowns. There are musical instruments, clocks, walking sticks, ‘Oliphants’ teeth’ and many, many pieces of jewellery.

Then, when you turn from the index to the relevant item in the inventory itself, there is very often a fascinating amount of detail provided. The men who compiled the inventory aimed to weigh every piece of precious metal, to count every jewel (as well as the holes where jewels had dropped off), to describe every piece of cloth and its trimming. Nothing was too small to mention. One entry reads simply, ‘Item, one pearl loose by itself’.

Detail, as I said, abounds. Under the heading ‘Refuse Stuffe at westminster in the Chardge of James Rufforth’ there is a wonderful entry concerning the ‘carrying chairs’ in which Henry, towards the end of his life when his ulcerated legs gave him great pain, was carried about his palaces (pity the sweating, straining men who did the carrying!):

Item Twoo Cheyres called trauewes [meaning ‘trams’ the index suggests, and I suspect pronounced ‘travoes’] for the kings Majestie to sitt in to be carried to and fro in his galleries and Chambres…

And we’re even given detail of the chairs’ fabrics:

…couered with tawny vellat allouer quilted with a cordaunte of tawny silke with a half pace vndrenethe euerie of the saide cheyres [that is to say, I think, a footrest attached to each of the chair’s front legs, as on many modern wheelchairs] and two fotestoles standing vppon everie of the saide halfe paces [so, the footrests are padded] enbrawdred vppon the backe of theym and the toppes of the twooe highe pomelles of eueries one a rose of venyce golde and frengid rounde aboute with tawnye silke.

Two further similar chairs are described, and of the second it is said: the same cheyre did serue in the kings house that goeth vpp and downe. Clearly Henry had some kind of stairlift, though no details (sadly) are given of how it operated. How I wish I could see a drawing of Henry’s “house that goeth up and down”!

The compilers of the inventory went to the Tower of London and Hampton Court, to Windsor and Westminster, to Beaulieu and Greenwich (and many other places), looking it seems into every room, no matter how small, and searching every cupboard and shelf. What I love most of all is that some of the most private spaces – small ‘closets’ next to Henry’s private bedrooms, for instance – are found to be stuffed with a chaotic mixture of items. And reading the transcript, it feels as if you are there, looking over the compilers’ shoulders, as they sort through the mess…

For example, at Greenwich in a small room over the water-stairs, they find (and for ease of reading, I have modernised the spelling):

First, upon the Shelf next [to] the door on the left hand, 17 boxes and Coffers… and under that Shelf, a Clock, a glass of Steel [a mirror made of polished metal, I assume], 4 battle axes of wood and 2 quivers with arrows, a painted table [possibly a portrait?], two window leaves, a pair of balances with weights…

Item in the window next [to] that Shelf, a round map, a standing glass of Steel in a ship…

Item a branch of flowers wrought upon wire…

Item a box with 5 slippers of velvet for women…

Item one little coffer, empty …

Item a gun upon a stock wheeled…

Item a lace for the mantle of the garter…

Item a night Cap of black velvet partly embroidered.

Item a piece of a pattern [design] for a fort…

Item a piece of a unicorn’s horn...

...and so on, and so on.

From this room over the water-stairs we can move, with the compilers, into other intriguing private rooms, ‘The lower study, being a bayne [bath]’ and ‘the highest Library’. In the latter, nearly 300 books are listed as having been found in separate desks. Their bindings are described but not their titles or contents. However, next we find a book with a very particular subject:

Item a book written in parchment of the process between king henry the eight and the lady katheryne, dowager. [i.e. Henry’s divorce!]

And in the same library:

Item under the table 16 books. [Could this mean on the floor? So it’s not just me who stacks books there…]

Item in the Jakes house [the loo – this is a library with an en-suite!] a picture and certain cases.

Item in a long settle is certain old papers and trash [spelt ‘trasshe’].

Item in a like settle is like old papers.

How I would love to see even the smallest piece of that ‘trasshe’! I find it beguiling, too, to learn that corners of Henry’s palaces were every bit as crammed & disorganised as my own loft.

So, we’ve seen part of the fascinating muddle at Greenwich; at Westminster, under the heading ‘Stuffe in the Study nexte the Kynges olde Bedde chamber’ the compilers took things one shelf at a time. On the first shelf, they found a leather case containing 4 ‘patentes’ concerning Queen Jane [Seymour], as well as three designs for war machinery, 2 targets painted with Henry’s arms, 2 boxes containing green sarcenet bags in which were stirrups & spurs, and several cases of beautiful knives (each described in detail). On the second shelf, among other things, were more knives, a velvet-covered box with nothing in it, books & papers, documents, ‘Tooles of Surgerye’, a puppet, a lantern, a clock, ‘A little boxe of crimson Satten embrodred contayninge shertes and other things for yonge children’, combs, and ‘A painted boxe with A dryed Dragon’ – I have read a suggestion that this might be some kind of herb, but I hope it’s more likely to be a real dragon (i.e. a lizard) – and a book of songs made out of linen-cloth needlework. There are two further shelves, but I will stop there!

The picture built up by the inventory is rich, complex & intriguing. Many items are sumptuous, but some are ‘old and sore worn’ – sheets are threadbare & stools have broken legs or missing feet. Of course, these are highly unlikely to have been still used by the king, but we find that Henry valued some old items just as we might – there is a sword, reputed to have belonged to Henry V, and the Order of the Garter robe that belonged to Henry’s older brother Arthur. There are, too, unextinguished traces of people who had fallen from favour – for example, in Greenwich there is a chair that must surely have belonged to the long-dead Cardinal Wolsey (and the chair had clearly seen better days):

Item one chair of wood covered over with plate of silver parcel gilt, embossed with Cardinal’s hats … one of the feet thereof lacking of the said Silver plate parcel gilt…

Also at Westminster we find a list headed ‘Stuffe brought frome the late Erle of Essex House at the Austen Freers Attaynted’ – this Earl of Essex being Thomas Cromwell, who was executed six and a half years before Henry’s own death. The list of ‘stuffe’ kept includes beds & bedlinen. There is also, at Greenwich, a bedstead decorated with the cipher of Queen Jane, on which the valances and counterpane are decorated with the cipher of Queen Anne. Which Queen Anne (Boleyn, or of Cleves) isn't specified - but could anyone really have had restful slumber in such a spot?!

Though Henry’s own children were, by the time of his death, too old to play with toys (even the youngest, 9-year-old Edward, would probably have considered himself beyond all that), the inventory does feature children’s toys, some sufficiently sumptuous that I am tempted to assume they belonged to royal children (rather than the offspring of courtiers). Might they have been kept for sentimental reasons? In ‘Sondrye parcelles’ in ‘Tholde juelhous’ at Westminster we find this richly dressed doll:

Item a great baby lying in a box of wood, having a gown of white cloth of silver and a kirtle of green velvet, the gown tied with small aglets of gold, and a small pair of beads of gold and a small chain and a collar about the neck of gold.

And, after more dolls, another kind of toy is listed: one little Tower of wood, white and gilt.

Of course, grown-ups had their own varieties of play, and the section headed ‘The Revelles’ makes entertaining reading. Under ‘Maskinge garmentes for men’ is listed,

Item 12 dozen Visors or Masks for men and women, new and serviceable, with beards and without beards.

And under ‘Maskinge garmentes for women’, amongst many other things, there are:

Two pairs of slippers of crimson Satin, Two Coifs of venice gold with perukes of hair…

Item 2 frocks or under garments for Egyptians…

Item one winding Sheet of Lawn striped incarnate with Crosses of Crimson Satin.

The mind boggles. The imagination races. I could go on – but I won’t. There are 17,810 entries after all! But I will leave you with a question. Many items, inevitably, are somewhat mysterious, and here's one entry that just now caught my eye. Seven 'Rackettes for the tennys' is clear enough as a description, but have you any suggestion as to what game 'two handes battes of Siluer guilt' might have been used for?

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK (where the paperback edition will be available from April 1st), and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

William Shakespeare - Workaholic and Businessman by Barbara Mitchelhill

2012-03-11T06:00:00.001Z

Whilst I was writing Road to London, I had to view William Shakespeare through the eyes of Thomas Munmore, my thirteen year old protagonist. Thomas lived in Stratford-upon-Avon at the height of Shakespeare’s success and would have regarded this local hero as a superstar in the way that today’s teenagers would fawn over their pop idols or their football stars. Thomas must have heard the common gossip about the younger William who was probably regarded as a Jack-the-Lad, marrying in haste to a woman eight year’s older and gaining a reputation as a poacher. Tittle tattle said that he had been caught poaching and had fled Stratford to become an actor in London – a daring thing to do when actors were seen as little more that rogues and vagabonds.

William Shakespeare

Thomas must have found that very exciting particularly when he had made such a success of his life. Only five years after leaving his home town, he had written sonnets so popular they would have topped Waterston’s Best Sellers’ List and his plays were performed for the Queen Elizabeth herself – the equivalent of winning an Oscar. Like many of Manchester United goal scorers, Shakespeare bought himself a large house – the second finest in Stratford with five splendid gables and ten fireplaces (the equivalent of central heating). With this amount of wealth on display, what boy wouldn’t want to follow in his hero’s footsteps?

A sketch of New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon.

But William Shakespeare’s wealth did not come from his plays. None were published in his lifetime and royalties and performance rights had not been invented. He would have been commissioned to write plays for a flat fee of around £6 for both the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the Admiral’s Men, two of the most successful acting troupes. He wrote in the way that Alan Ayckbourn writes plays today for the group of actors in his theatre in Scarborough.

But Shakepeare’s talent was not only for acting and writing. He was also a shareholder in the theatre and I couldn’t resist putting my favourite story about Shakespeare’s financial exploits into Road to London.

Richard Burbage

Soon after he arrived in London around 1592, he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and became an actor-shareholder. The troupe performed at London’s first theatre – named The Theatre - which had been built by James Burbage (the father of the actor, Richard Burbage, who was one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men). But the land on which The Theatre was built was leased from Giles Allen and when the lease ran out, the men quarrelled and Giles Allen refused to renew it. This meant that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men had to move to temporary accommodation at the nearby Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. Two years later, James Burbage died having failed to resolve the problem of the lease thus leaving the Theatre in Allen’s hands. Now The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were in danger of becoming homeless.

Richard Burbage discussed the matter with the five actor-shareholders which included William Shakespeare and they all agreed to provide 10% of the buildings costs for a share of the profits. They set about looking for land to rent and, in December 1598, found an inexpensive plot south of the river in Southark and signed the thirty-one year lease. They also decided that, as James Burbage had built The Theatre, they had the right to dismantle it and use the materials to build the new one.

The frozen River Thames

The weather was bitterly cold that winter and a great snowstorm blanketed the city just after Christmas. But the shareholders had to move quickly before Giles Allen returned from the country where he was visiting his family. Together with a number of workmen, the shareholders gathered in Shoreditch and began work on dismantling The Theatre. A crowd of onlookers soon gathered and friends of Giles Allen arrived to protest and they attempted to stop them but supporters of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were determined that they should continue.

The Globe Theatre, Bankside.

Each piece of the timber frame from The Theatre was marked and transported to the site. Some say they were taken across the frozen Thames on wagons but this is unlikely, given the weight of the timbers. They were reassembled on Bankside to build the theatre that was to be named The Globe. But even with the timbers in place, the cost of building would be considerable. Buying tiles for the roof was out of the question and so the cheaper option of thatch had to be used. This was a mistake in view of the fact that the thatch caught fire in 1613 and the Globe was burned to the ground.

Shakespeare’s initial investment of £70 was a large sum in 1599, but the yield would be great
– about £100 per annum.

Historical Cafe Society - Michelle Lovric

2012-03-10T00:44:00.000Z

You might want to make yourself a nice cup of coffee before you read any further.

While you are reading, I’ll be following in the footsteps of Goethe, Goldoni, Casanova, Byron, Dickens and Proust. I’ll be sitting in rococo splendour, sipping sour-sweet hot chocolate through a moustache-making muff of whipped cream, having dragged my fat manuscript to Caffè Florian at San Marco in Venice. I’ll be dipping my fluted wafer into the dark brown dregs while I correct my chapter. Because at Florian they don’t mind at all if you write your book while you enjoy your chocolate. As one of the white-coated waiters reassured me recently, ‘This place is a work of art, so of course you may create more masterpieces here.’ (Ahem).

Today Florian is a gilt-edged jewel-box of a café with a maze of painted rooms set with velvet banquettes and delicate tables. Few realize that the café’s beloved and ancient-seeming appearance is in fact a fairly recent development. When Florian first opened on December 29th, 1720, there were no windows on San Marco. The cafe consisted of two rooms, simply furnished. Tassini records that in those days all the cafes in the city were ‘undecorated, badly lit, lacking windows or any protection against the weather and overflowing.’ In those days it was known as the Caffè alla Venezia trionfante (the Café of the Triumphant Venice). Fairly soon, however, it was soon renamed Caffè Florian – nothing to do with the Saint Florian who was clubbed, burned, spiked and drowned – but after its original owner Floriano Francesconi.

Florian was an immediate success with both Venetians and foreigners, partly because it was one of the few establishments that permitted women. It was also perfectly placed at the heart of the city’s drawing room, the piazza of San Marco. E.V. Lucas observed that ‘the original Florian was wise in his choice of site, for he has more shady hours than his rivals opposite.’ By the middle of the eighteenth century, Florian had spread into two extra rooms.

The place has always taken itself very seriously as an institution. Eugene Schuyler recorded, ‘We stopped at Florian’s for a cooling drink, and thoughtlessly asked the waiter at what hour the café closed. “Closed, sirs?” he said with astonishment. “The doors of Florian’s have not been shut for three hundred years.”’

One of many legends of Florian concerns the great sculptor Canova, a regular customer. The owner suffered dreadfully from gout. Canova, no doubt settling his coffee bill in the process, modelled the man’s leg in plaster so that he might have a shoe made to ease the pain.

Coffee, originally sold in Venice as an expensive medicinal preparation, was only one of the reigning beverages at Florian: hot chocolate was ascendant in the eighteenth century, recalling a time when chocolate was so highly valued that ten cocoa beans were worth one rabbit, one hundred a slave and twelve a night with a courtesan.

It was in the eighteenth century that the Venetian poet Antonio Sforza wrote a delightful ode to hot chocolate. I translated it for my anthology about Venice a few years ago. Here’s a taste:

It has no beginning or end,
this love that I have for the
daughter of cocoa,
cinnamon, sugar and vanilla;
I would go three hundred miles
barefoot just to drink a
little cup of it,
I would pawn my Breviary
and my robe.
Truly my guts
are (And I wouldn't like to tell you
any wickedness) for chocolate
like a pig's lusting after acorns.
I would give up all beverages —
I would give up tocai, and malvasia —
and the whole genealogy of wines:
If I could only be given
that holy liquor which
touches my heart,
which only to name it
makes my mouth water.
But there are lots of idiots
who believe that the Gods' ambrosia
would be a better drink than chocolate …
He who never tries it could not believe
how many blessings it has for us,
delivering us first of all from all evils,
apart from death …
My soul, dead and buried;
will go begging, that my flesh,
turning under the earth
till it becomes earthenware,
shall not be made into plates or urinals
but instead into little royal cups
for holding Chocolate
So that after death
I shall be still in my beatitude.

The Florian we see today is the result of a massive restoration, redecoration and expansion in 1858. By this time, the Francesconi family had sold up. The new owners commissioned Lodovico Cadorin to undertake the work. Like the Eiffel Tower in its early days, the innovations at Florian were at first received badly. The expense was as great as a palazzo on the Grand Canal, some lamented, but most of all the Venetians hated the idea of any change to their beloved meeting place.

They soon came round, and their loyalty has never swerved since. Venetians often huddle in the bar at the back, while the tourists (and the odd writer) occupy Cadorin’s richly decorated rooms. Some choose the Sala degli Uomini Illustri (Hall of the Illustrious Men) hung with the portraits ten notable Venetians including Marco Polo, Goldoni, Marco Polo, Titian, Palladio and my old favourite Enrico Dandolo, the blind warrior doge who pillaged Constantinople and sent back the body of Saint Lucy to Venice. (His portrait is particularly ferocious, while Marco Polo is the heart-throb of the room). Others favour the Sala del Senato (Senate Hall), left as you enter. Here, the vivid allegorical paintings represent the arts and sciences. This room is famous for being the place where the idea of the Venice Biennale was dreamt up. If you turn right, you’ll be surrounded Pascuti’s paintings of lush ladies and their lovers in the Sala Cinese. Walk through to the Sala Orientale, and you’ll find seven full-length portraits of women in harem trousers and tunics, framed by gilded oriental arches. The one dark-skinned lady is shown topless with white silk shimmering from her waist. She holds a long golden pipe. Women are yet again the theme in the Sala delle Stagioni (Hall of the Seasons), sometimes known as the Sala degli Specchi (Hall of Mirrors). In the early 20th century, the Sala Liberty was added. Today, it’s hung with large photos of modern people in Carnevale costumes.

William Dean Howells patronised Florian just when Cadorin’s new restoration would have been shiny and new. In his Venetian Life (1867), he confessed that ‘we spent by far the greater part of our time in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians call those that lounge habitually at the Caffè Florian.’ He explained how Florian served as Venice’s social Switzerland during the hated sixty-year Austrian occupation. I hope you don’t mind this long quotation: I couldn’t resist it, partly because it’s so easy to transpose these wry, sly observations onto modern-day coffee shops anywhere.

‘In regard to the caffè there is a perfectly understood system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another; and Florian's, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought a demonstration of any kind.'

He wrote later, ‘By all odds, the loungers at Florian's were the most interesting, because they were the most various ... The Italians carefully assorted themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak, they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground, or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had never any thing else but lounging at Florian's to do; but I really know none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble, useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian father, when asked of what profession his son was, "È in Piazza!" That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian's windows at the ladies who went by.

'At the Caffè Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in Austrian- German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely, intelligent- looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking against their legs ...

'Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called), under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caffè Specchi, frequented only by young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian's. Across from this caffè is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice is an index to every man's politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial, no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caffè Suttil, rather Austrian, and frequented by Italian codini, or old fogies, in politics: gray old fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the elders at Florian's.'

I don’t always go to Florian to do my work, but as usual I’ve just slipped some Florianisti into my current book. I usually ‘use’ the Sala del Senato, but today I’ll be patronizing the Sala Orientale, because I’m writing a little scene set there. It’s going quite well, but I might need a second cup of that hot chocolate, don’t you think? Waiter!

I wonder if other History Girls or Dear Readers have researched historical coffee shops for their novels? If so, do tell.

Michelle Lovric’s website
Enrico Dandolo, of the Sala degli Uomini Illustri, features as a character in her Venetian adventure for children, The Undrowned Child. Florianisti Byron and Casanova are characters in Carnevale. Minguillo, the villain of The Book of Human Skin, also hangs out there. The anthology that contains the full version of Antonio Sforza’s chocaholic poem is Venice – Tales of the City.

Some History Girls are listing their current reading at the end of their posts.The following may give a clue as to the contents of the aforementioned fat manuscript:
Rebecca Baillie et al, Braided Together, Hair in the Work of Contemporary Women ArtistsAnthony Butler, The Book of Blarney
Glenn Hooper, ed, The Tourist’s Gaze, Travellers to Ireland 1800 – 2000
Colin Clair, Human Curiosities
Alfred Perceval Graves, ed, The Irish Fairy Book

Day in the Life of a Kidslit Author

2012-03-09T00:11:00.002Z

Caroline with spittoon at Hay on Wye

by Caroline Lawrence

This month I am hectic with school visits. I try to cram these into the months of March and October to leave the rest of my year free for research and writing. This month I literally have an event every single weekday. It's going to be a marathon.

Friday 2 March was the fifth day out of twenty. Here's how it went:

5.30am - I wake up before the alarm. This is good. Go to computer and do a few quick checks. My American publishers have given me some last-minute changes to the MS of my second Western Mystery which is about to go into production, but I can't faff about with those now. Must get ready.

6.00am - Make myself my special breakfast: scrambled eggs with jalapenos, oregano, sunflower seeds and grated cheddar. Plop in a bowl. This can be eaten in about 5 minutes and it keeps me going for many hours.

6.30am - brush teeth, put on makeup, get dressed in black jeans, buckskin fringed jacket from the Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival, cowboy boots from R. Soles on the Kings Road, cowgirl hat from White Stallion Ranch, Arizona.

6.45am - In a suitcase: pack up posters, props (including my antique spittoon), a few extra books to give away on impulse. In my backpack: make sure I have food for the journey back, my iBook, gizmo to connect it to projector, power lead, train tickets, info about school on printed out sheet in case my iPhone dies.

7.05am - I bid my still-sleeping-husband goodbye and walk to Clapham Junction.

7.28am - Board the train to Reading. I was on the same train yesterday when I went to Prince William's old school, Ludgrove Prep, but I today I go to the very front. For an extra £9 I got a first class supplement to Bristol and back. Yay. It's nice and quiet in there.

7.45am - Listening to Pacha Ibiza Chillout Classics on my iPhone, tweeting and flipping through the Metro newspaper when the guard helps a blind man into the first class half-carriage. He sits at the table across the aisle from me. Pats his things to make sure everything is there. After about ten minutes he makes a phone call to wish his 10-year-old grandson Happy Birthday. I can't help listening and gather that the boy is dressing up for World Book Day. I have a brainwave: to offer the man one of my books for his grandson! But is that presumptuous?

one of my books

8.30am - We are only a few stops from the end of the line: Reading. I know the man is getting off there. I take the plunge, tell him I couldn't help overhearing. I am a kidslit author on the way to a school... would his grandson like a signed book for his birthday? Roman or Western? The man is thrilled. It's his nephew and he'd like the Western. It's only after I've signed the copy of The Case of the Deadly Desperados that he tells me his nephew is slightly Aspergers. I get a shiver. "So is the main character of this book," I say.

8.40am - Bid blind man farewell and good luck. Get off train.

8.57am - Get on train to Bristol Temple Meads, bang on time. First class is LOVELY. Nice leather chairs, complimentary copy of the Times newspaper on tables, empty and quiet. Free coffee, fizzy water and oranges, too! I take out my laptop, plug it in and review my talk, tweaking it slightly for a girls' school, though they have invited in kids from at least two other schools.

10.15am - Arrive at Bristol bang on time. Get taxi to school. My iPhone says it should take 12 minutes to get there. I use the timer function because I have to catch a specific train back and I want to know how long it will really take me. My iPhone is almost right. It takes just under 14 minutes to reach the school. I should allow at least 20 minutes for the return journey.

10.30am - Librarian meets me outside reception of the independent girls' school I'm speaking at. She signs me in. Tells me some visiting schools have already arrived. We go to the auditorium. Big screen: yay. A stage to stand on: yay. Working lapel mike: yay. My iBook hooks up with their projector: yay! I get out my sponge-stick, spittoon and a few books and go up on stage. It's now almost 11.00. I'll be talking till 12.00. I have to get a one o'clock train back. I tell the librarian this and say I'll have to leave at 20 minutes to one. She nods.

11.00 Standing on stage in front of 320 kids waiting for the Deputy Head to come an introduce me. I'm never nervous because it's fun and I am the world expert on my books. Everybody is looking at me in silent expectancy. No deputy head. The night before an old friend posted a message on my Facebook page. Apparently her daughter is with one of the visiting schools. "Is Chloe here?" I ask. Girl five rows back shyly raises hand. "I know your mum and promised to give you a free book. Come on up and get it!" "No!" cries Chloe, horrified. So I get someone to pass a free book back to her. Humiliation averted!

Yoda - classic example of the mentor

11.05 Deputy head comes gives brief welcome and I'm away! I talk about how I learned to write and I share my best tips, including images of archetypal characters from films kids would know. It's going well when about two thirds of the way through the talk my Yoda slide won't come up. In fact the whole powerpoint show has frozen! Aha! From up on stage I can see the problem: the power cable to my computer was never plugged in. Poor little critter is almost out of battery. Still talking, I go across the stage, down a few steps and plug it in. Success! Yoda appears to great acclaim to illustrate the "mentor" archetype.

12.00 I finish with my now-famous sponge-stick routine (the spongia was Roman toilet paper) because it is good to go out with a bang. Nice applause and a thank you from the librarian, then I go down to sign books. We sell about 40 which is very good. I give quite a few Western Mysteries posters away.

12.30 I've finished signing, which is just as well. I need to catch that 1.00 o'clock train. "Have you booked me a taxi to the train station?" I ask. "I'll do that now," she says, but eek! She doesn't. She's still fooling around with books and a box. "I've really got to catch that train," I say. "I hate having to run for trains. My train goes from platform 15," I add. "That will add a few minutes." At last she goes to the office to call a taxi.

12.45 The taxi arrives in the long drive of the girls' school. It's going to be cutting it terribly close. The British Rail live departures app on my iPhone says the train is exactly on time. Curse British Rail! How dare the train be on time! Long story short: despite all his efforts, the taxi gets me to Bristol Temple Meads THREE MINUTES TOO LATE. Argh! The three minutes the librarian was faffing about with books in boxes and not ringing my taxi.

Bristol Temple Meads Rail Station

1.03 At Bristol Temple Meads, I know I've missed the train so I don't rush. The driver commiserates. I pay him, get receipt, go to barrier. "Has my train gone?" I show the ticket. "Fraid so. And your ticket was only valid on the one o'clock. You'll have to catch the half past." "Can I buy a ticket on the train?" "No, love, you'll have to buy a new ticket there." He points to the ticket queue. I queue up. Go to the window. Ask the woman if I can at least get part payment for the next train. "Your train hasn't left yet," she says. "WHAT?" "The one o'clock train is slightly delayed. It's still on platform 15." Argggh!

1.07 I rush to the barrier again. "Oh, hey," says the barrier guy, "your train hasn't gone after all." ARGH! No time to throttle him now. I have to run all the way to platform 15. Apparently Bristol Temple Meads is Britain's oldest and LARGEST train station.

1.09 Charge through the ticket barrier, down the ramp, along the underpass, WHERE IS PLATFORM 15? There! Right at the end... up the stairs in my stupid Western outfit, fringe swinging, hat bobbing, boots clonking, struggling with suitcase full of sponge-sticks and spittoons. Argh!

1.12 There's the train on the platform. All the doors firmly closed. The way they do for a taunting 30 seconds before the train departs. "Is it going?" I gasp to nobody in particular. "Not quite yet," replies nobody. I go to the door. Open it. And I get on. Stand there gasping. Can't believe I made it. Heart thudding, feel sick, going to have HEART ATTACK in cowgirl costume.

1.15 Ah! First class. Leather seat. Trolley with black coffee, water, orange. Bliss. Over tannoy the guard gives an explanation. "Because of fatality at Bath, this train is leaving 15 minutes late... but we hope to make up time." Feel bad about fatality, but glad I made the train. Feel happier when driver tells us the person wasn't killed, just hurt and is now in hospital. Have a late lunch on train (I always carry food with me). Some pre-grilled chicken breasts, an orange, almonds and black coffee. Chill out.

Caroline & Hella

2.15 Arrive at Reading on time. I have an appointment to meet Dr Hella Eckardt, ancient bone expert and senior lecturer in Roman Archaeology at the University there. She greets me as I come out of the barrier and takes me to a little ice cream/coffee shop called Tutti Frutti. They make their own ice cream. Famous for miles around. I'm going to treat myself to an ice cream after the near fiasco with the train. And a double espresso. I choose lemon meringue (after sampling a couple of others) and Dr. Hella opts for mango.

2.30 Hella is a forensic archaeologist, her specialty multi-ethnicity in 4th century Roman Britain. She's a detective who uses grave goods, decaying bones, skull measurements and isotopes to build up a CV for the dead person. (Apparently you can tell what a person ate between the ages of 7 -10 by isotopes in enamel of the 3rd molar!) A while ago, I wrote fictionalised accounts of some of Hella's bodies, like the Ivory Bangle Lady, as part of her aim to make the topic to the attention of the public and especially kids. She wants to do a whole website, and we have a good time bouncing ideas back and forth about ways to make the site fun and accessible for kids.

Ivory Bangle Lady by Aaron Watson of the Diaspora Project

3.15 Hella is walking me to the barrier when our way is blocked by a woman with a charity bucket. We bristle until she says the magic word: Rome. She plans to ride a bicycle from Rome to Reading! The three of us stand chatting for a while and I give her a copy of one of my Roman Mysteries actually set in Rome, The Assassins of Rome. She is thrilled. Promises to read it in Rome!

3.42 Catch the train back to Clapham Junction. First class is empty and I doze a little.

4.45 At Richmond a bunch of sullen, testosterone-laden hoodies get in. The guard obviously has on ongoing feud with them. They come into my first class compartment he turfs them out. They snarl at him and give him the we're-only-going-because-WE-want-to look. The guard then LOCKS ME IN. "I'll be right next door," he says. "Just give a thump when you want me to let you out." And thus the last leg of my train journey is spent locked in first class with angry teens glaring in at me, the "stupid woman in a cowboy hat."

5.00pm ish Home to field all the emails waiting in my in-basket, then to have a wonderful dinner of chili con carne and burritos prepared by my husband Richard, who is the cook in our household. Yay!

a selection of my Roman books

Just another Day in the Life of a Kidslit Author.

Books sold: 40+
Books given away: 3
Posters given away: 30+
Trains missed: 0
Heart attacks: 0
Assaults by surly youths: 0
Ice creams consumed: 1
Smiling faces: lots
= a Good Day!

From the Sketchbook: Stealing History

2012-03-08T00:15:00.000Z

By Teresa Flavin

When a bronze head was stolen from Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Museum on a Sunday afternoon last month, I was taken aback. The Kelvingrove buzzes with visitor activity on weekends and the idea of someone swiping the late Gerald Laing’s Dreaming from under the noses of so many people seemed ridiculous. But it happened.

One wag suggested that the thief was on his way to visit scrap metal dealers with the head in a bag, but only a few days after the incident, police were given an anonymous tip off and the sculpture was found near the museum. I visited the Kelvingrove when I heard that Dreaming had been rescued, hoping to see it for myself, but was told that it wouldn’t be back on display until it had been cleaned and checked over. There was a bit of speculation that the theft had just been a prank. Whatever it was, at least there was a happy ending.

This cannot be said about countless other thefts of art and objects around the world. Interpol’s December 2011 poster for “The Most Wanted Works of Art” lists six items stolen between July and October last year and provides a chilling snapshot of “cultural property crime”. It includes a painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger from a Paris gallery, a Renoir from a private home in Washington, D.C. and a statue from a museum in Damascus. One can imagine thieves planning these “capers” and executing them, Hollywood-style, despite guards and high-tech security systems.

We are familiar with the brazen thefts of famous paintings like Edvard Munch’s The Scream (one version was stolen in 1994 and the other in 2004) and Cezanne’s Auvers-sur-Oise taken from the Ashmolean Museum on the eve of the Millennium. As a former Bostonian, the crime that still haunts me is the unsolved theft of thirteen masterworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Every time I visit, I am drawn to the empty frames kept on display and mourn the loss of the Rembrandts and Vermeer’s The Concert. We know and love these paintings; their disappearances make headlines, not least because of their popularity and huge commercial values, but also because the public enjoys an unsolved mystery.

Looking at the rest of Interpol’s “Most Wanted” list, one might be surprised at the other three crime scenes; an icon and a statue were taken from monasteries in Athens and Ulaanbaatar and the magnificent Codex Calixtinus manuscript vanished from a safe in a Spanish cathedral.

If you search the “Recent Thefts” section of Interpol’s website, you will find photos of a cuneiform tablet from Iran, an imperial order from Suleiman the Magnificent in Turkey, ornate French clocks and many ancient oil lamps, wheels, figurines of bulls and horses stolen from the Museum of History of the Olympic Games in Olympia. These items may not have the cachet of a stolen Vermeer or Munch, but they deserve their share of attention.

There is further sobering viewing under many sections devoted to stolen Iraqi and Afghan items. War and deprivation have brought not only the tragedy of lost lives but of lost history. Greece is suffering the theft of artefacts as its financial crisis worsens and staff cuts have left its collections vulnerable. The authorities recently decided to stop excavating some antiquities, and to rebury others, in order to protect them.

Last weekend the heart of St Laurence O’Toole, preserved since the twelfth-century in a heart-shaped wooden container locked inside an iron box, was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. This relic of Dublin’s patron saint has attracted pilgrims since medieval times. The thief is believed to have hidden overnight so he could do his dark work undisturbed. Uninterested in the church’s gold chalices or candlesticks, he cut through iron bars to get at the heart and take it away for his own, or someone else’s, purposes. It’s a powerful and disturbing image.

Cultural property crime is estimated to cost $6 million annually. But the loss goes beyond money. When a unique object vanishes, it’s as if one small part of our human memory goes with it. The twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus tells us the story (and shows us illustrations) of pilgrimages to the tomb of St James the Apostle. The nineteenth-century wall clock teaches us how clockmakers innovated and perfected timekeeping. That simple clay oil lamp connects us with makers of the past and opens up our imaginations.

Teresa Flavin is the author of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, art historical fantasy novels for age 9 and above. This month’s charcoal sketch is of one of the stone lions inside the Boston Public Library, which Teresa hopes is far too large ever to be stolen. She is currently working on the final book in the trilogy.

PURE by Andrew Miller. A review by Adèle Geras

2012-03-07T07:30:00.032Z

This is the cover of Andrew Miller's novel which won the Costa Award this year. Eleanor Updale has already written about it in an earlier post where she was discussing her experience of being a Costa judge. She has a great many interesting things to say about the book, with which I entirely agree. The link to Eleanor's post is HERE

But there are certain remarks I want to make (and which I hope will add to Eleanor's contribution) about a novel which deserves to be written about more than once. The first is that Pure is, more than almost any other historical novel I've read, with the possible exception of 'Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel, devoid of 'pish-tushery'. That is to say, the language is at one and the same time entirely modern and also (and this is the harder bit to pull off satisfactorily if you're a writer) completely of its own period. Andrew Miller does it brilliantly. We are persuaded that people going about their business in the eighteenth century are very like us and even though the physical facts of their lives, their clothes, their burial customs, their food and sanitary arrangements and so forth may be different, we are all little changed by the passage of the centuries. It's always hard to quote a passage to demonstrate such things but here is one of my favourite scenes. Barratte has gone back to Valenciennes, which is his home, to see his family and to recruit the services of his friend Lecoeur.

"In the kitchen - that scrubbed and orderly world where even the light seems to lie like lengths of rinsed muslin - their mother is rousing the fire, dropping small wood onto small flames. She scalds cider. They drink it hot enough to make their teeth ache, put bread and apples in their pockets and set off with the mare to saw a fallen tree, an old elm uprooted in the autumn storms."

That 'rinsed muslin' is so perfect that it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

Jean-Baptiste Barratte comes to Versailles in 1785 to undertake a commission for an aristocrat. The cemetery at Les Innocents is too full and the whole site must be excavated and moved to Montparnasse. Barratte stays in the house of the Monnards. He meets the organist of the church. He meets an educated prostitute and falls in love with her. There is an attempt on his life. He comes across the young men who will, in a few years, be part of the French Revolution. Miller takes advantage of the knowledge we have that his characters do not, throwing shadows from the Revolution and the Terror backwards to affect the doings and feelings of the protagonists of his novel. Already there are graffiti going up on the walls of Paris and we know what they mean better than Jean-Baptiste does. He hires men to undertake the work and buys himself a pistachio-green suit to celebrate the fact that he's now in fashionable Paris and not the country. It's a shame, by the way, that the suit has become blue on the cover of the paperback but that's just nitpicking on my part. The cover image is very striking.

This is the market place that is almost part of the graveyard. The people who live and work there are affected by the project in many ways but what makes this novel different from many others is the plainness and spareness of the narrative. Miller has not loaded us down with facts, statistics, information or descriptions. In many ways it's a very minimalist book. I can imagine settings like an excavated graveyard, a ruined church, and the palace of Versailles might bring other writers out in a positive froth of adjectives and clever similes and over-the-topness of every variety. There are many who wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to show off the stuff they'd gleaned from their research but Miller is economical with the details. Of Versailles, for instance, we see a corridor and later on, a kind of glorified shed in the astonishing final pages of the novel. We see the floor on which a dog relieves himself and Jean-Baptiste watching the yellow stream as it makes its way across the wooden parquet tiles. The graveyard shows its presence subtly, too, through the tainted breath of the Monnards who live on top of it; through the smells of the house; through the way the food and water taste of death and decay in a real and not a metaphorical way.

I was a bit nervous about the engineering, to begin with. I though there might be altogether too much detail about the struts and the joists and the tools and the process but I needn't have worried. Miller tells us just enough so that we know what's going on and not so much as to baffle and confuse us. At no time, (even though the digging up and carting away of remains is what's going on) are we in any doubt where our attention is supposed to be. The pages are full of amazing minor characters, including the doctor, Guillotin, the young woman, Jeanne, who becomes pregnant as the result of a rape, Marie the Monnard's maid and above all the thirty miners whom Barratte has brought up to Paris to do the digging up and transporting of the corpses. The miners are always there, getting on with things in the background and the small details we're given of them and the way they live on the site provide a rich setting for the main action.

This is one of the charnel houses. If you look carefully, you can see the skulls piled high in an orderly manner. In this book, the living treat the dead in many ways as though they were still alive. Respect is granted them, for the most part even though some of the miners deck themselves in stolen rings from dead fingers. Also, of course, we who know what's coming in four years or so will catch all the metaphorical resonance. The putrefaction of the graveyard will be mirrored by the corruption of the state. Also, the sometimes brutal things done to the corpses as they're moved about and carted around remind us of the Terror to come.

The present tense, which I'm not overly fond of, works extremely well here. Eleanor remarked on it (she's not generally a fan either!) and she too was won over completely. I don't know how he does it, but Miller's present tense, instead of drawing attention to itself, and instead of being a device to make the text more 'modern' and more like television, has the effect instead of slowing things down in a way I can't quite analyse and also of forcing a kind of simplicity on the writer. The effect is stunning. Once again, one of my favourite sayings proves its truth: "It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it."

The structure is perfect. The book ends where it began, in Versailles and with a scene of tremendous power. Anyone who's been to the Sun King's palace will appreciate how much Miller has left out. He's resisted the temptation to dazzle us with mirrored hallways and ornate gardens and instead he has focused on corridors and outhouses. Miller has eschewed obvious magnificence and showiness for a plainer and darker truth; a more readily understandable depiction of eighteenth century life.

I urge anyone who enjoys a really good and interesting historical novel to read this book. I've never come across Miller's work before but I will certainly seek out his other novels now.

PS I forgot that we'd agreed to say on our posts what we were reading at the moment! I am about to start THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes. This year's Booker Prize winner.

Quest for Camelot – Katherine Roberts

2012-03-06T04:00:00.041Z

By the time this post goes up, I’ll be in Wales doing publicity in schools for my new book Sword of Light. A rather strange choice for an author tour you might think… until you realise my book is about King Arthur’s daughter and part of it is set at Camelot. Since there isn’t a Geography Girls blog (at least not as far as I know... are you out there, Geography Girls?), I hope you won’t mind this post on Arthurian geography as a change from Arthurian history – after all, archaeological digs are a good way to uncover history!

Wales has long been associated with King Arthur. If you consider the red dragon on the Welsh flag, it makes perfect sense that Arthur Pendragon - the “head dragon” - should have lived and ruled there. But even Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose statue stands in the atmospheric Circle of Legends at Tintern station along with King Arthur's, admits that Arthur originated in England and the legend spread across the border.


Circle of Legends: www.thecircleoflegends.co.uk

Arthurian names abound from Cornwall, up the length of England and Wales, and as far as Scotland. In some parts of the west country you can't walk your dog without tripping over an "Arthur's stone", but as yet no historical evidence has been found of King Arthur's court and its Round Table. So where exactly was the famous Camelot?

1. Caerleon, Wales.
A popular choice with its Roman remains and mention by Nennius. Many Arthurian novels have been set here.

2. South Cadbury Castle, Somerset.
Another popular location, and the site of a dig by the Camelot Research Committee in 1966... they discovered evidence of an iron age hill fort but not of King Arthur. From this flat topped hill, you can see Glastonbuy Tor (sometimes called the ancient Avalon), and the village of Queen Camel is nearby. The River Cam could have been the location of Arthur's final battle against Mordred.

3. Kelliwic, near Padstow, Cornwall.
This is close to the River Camel and Camelford, which is another possible location for King Arthur’s final battle on the field of Camlann against his nephew Mordred.

4. Scotland
Many locations in Scotland have Arthurian names, and "Arthur’s Seat" is in Edinburgh. I favour Scotland for the villain of the story, Prince Mordred, but that might be because I'm a west country girl!

5. Hollywood
The fabulous medieval Camelot Castle of our much-loved Arthurian films is probably pure fantasy, but certainly very romantic.

6. In the sea
I recently came across this location in the TV series "Camelot", which placed Arthur's castle teetering on the edge of a nameless windswept cliff… the theory being that Camelot and its Round Table has long since crumbled away and fallen into the sea, which explains why we have found no trace of King Arthur’s court. Quite a neat idea.

7. Camelot Castle, Tintagel.
You can stay there today. Really. This one is not a ruin, and it's on my wish list for a Pendragon Legacy event... or, if the books sell well enough, maybe I'll book a night or two there to celebrate the end of the series!

So where did I decide to set my Pendragon Legacy series? Well... if you haven't guessed yet, you’ll have to read the first book to find out!

SWORD OF LIGHT (Book1 of the Pendragon Legacy) is now available in hardcover priced at £9-99, and if you're very quick there is still time to enter the History Girls February competition to win a FREE copy by naming a fairy horse (competition closes tomorrow, 7th March).

More details of the Pendragon Legacy quartet and Katherine's earlier books can be found at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

and you can follow Rhianna Pendragon on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Great Cathedrals in Time and Space by Emma Darwin

2012-03-05T01:01:00.008Z

If you dropped in at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern recently, you might have seen Tacita Dean's work, Film, which was the twelfth in the Unilever series. I was lucky enough to be asked by my cinematographer friend Sam Garwood to a private view for the film industry: the sponsors were companies like Kodak (sharp intake of breath), the BSC, and Arri. I assumed it would be the kind of event that I once described to my offspring as "just a stand-up and shout": long on polite shop-talk and short on cake and bouncy castles. The only difference from the book-industry equivalent would be the gender balance and the fact that I wouldn't know anyone. And, it being February in the dear old/new Turbine Hall, it would be cold: even the invitations had suggested that guests might like to Wrap Up Warm.

Yes, it was all those things but it was more significant than that. Thanks to the ease and speed of digital - and undeniably the particular advantages it offers, while analogue has other advantages - the industry for analogue film is dying. The big, commercial studios are convinced that the future is digital, and without their money flowing in, the facilities to deal with film from shooting to projecting are shutting up shop. Kodak have filed for protection against their creditors, and something like twenty-eight out of the thirty film processing companies in London have closed down in the last two years. And because there's no one to handle your film, film itself is going the way of... well, can you think of any other creative medium that has ever just ceased to be available? Evolved, shrunk, got more expensive, fallen out of favour, yes. But just, plain, vanished? So there's a campaign, of which Dean and the likes of Martin Scorsese are only the most visible parts, to get photographic film named a UNESCO World Heritage... um, Thing. That would open the door to all sorts of help and funding for those who want or need to use and support it, just as in our own industry National Short Story Week is the umbrella under which all sorts of good initiatives can then huddle, confer, publicise themselves, and make grant applications.

Tacita Dean says that she "needs film as an artist needs paint." So, unexpectedly, a routine standup-and-shout turned out to be something more important, though what that was, perhaps, was according to how you saw it. A call to arms? The mustering of an army? A battle-charge? The last rites? A wake? Or a re-birth of the medium into a new life in a rather different world, where it's no longer taken for granted as the medium of transmitting stories, but defined by and used for its particular, essential, physical and aesthetic qualities?

There are parallels with other industries, of course, although they all need to be prefixed by mutatis mutandis, because our eyes don't work in the same way as our ears, so the shift from cinefilm to digital moviemaking is not the same as the shift from wax cylinders to digital tape to mp3 files. And different again is the shift from manuscript to printed book, to e-book: the medium in which our words are transmitted is secondary to the message it carries, and the printed book is a near-perfect, and astonishingly cheap, technology when you compare it to the paraphernalia of even the most guerillerish of film makers or sound artists.

But still... Maybe it was the walk along the South Bank, through Borough Market, past Southwark Cathedral (which I blogged about recently) and the Golden Hinde, on a damp, mild-scented February evening, with the lights of London glittering and shifting on the water... Maybe it was the fact that I'd had a good day working on the novel, so that what Rose Tremain calls "the anarchic, gift-conjuring, unknowing part of the novelist's mind" was wide awake in me... Maybe it was the wine, which was nicer than book industry bashes usually supply... Who knows?

The Turbine Hall is a cathedral of the early twentieth century, the era of big, grubby powerstations in the middle of big, grubby cities, the electrical age. You enter by the west door, and the party was on the upper deck, which spans the middle of it: we stood in the soft dark to watch the colours and forms in Film that flowed and flowered where the east window is. There's a west window, too: it gets a starring moment in Film, so there's a metaphysical but also physical link that runs the full length of the nave. Then we turned aside, to where the speakers were spotlit on the platform on one of the long sides of the hall, and heard each of them make a call to arms.

And suddenly I saw us all as the ordinary folk of a Reformation world - the world of Galileo and Columbus, Newton and Harvey - the world that could turn the space inside a great, Gothic cathedrals on its axis, so that the people gathered round a pulpit to hear an argument rather than before an altar to witness an event. I heard what was said as something akin to Luther's and Bucer's argument: that we should return to the plain, unmediated origins of our experience, and keep hold of the raw, analogue, temporal business of being human creatures who exist in space and time and community, so that we can take it with us as we also grasp the new opportunities of the new age, for art and understanding.

I've no idea what the story is, in this moment - story in the novelist's sense, that is, not the journalist's. Those people in the Grote Kerk of 1673, above, were the first who could go home and read what we'd recognise as a novel: Tacita Dean's form and medium are a product of the electrical age as mine are of that humanist age: But if ever there was a moment when the past was present to me and yet by being so present, filled me with the knowledge of how immeasurably distant it is, it was that evening in the Turbine Hall. Dean makes her art by running the film through the camera again and again, masking different layers, layering different colours and lights, stacking up images or leaving them alone. Historical novels get written in rather the same way.

Seidr Magic - Katherine Langrish

2012-03-04T01:01:00.001Z

When I was writing ‘Troll Blood’ (the third book of my Viking trilogy ‘West of the Moon’), one character stubbornly refused to come to life. She was a young woman, Astrid, wife of the rough seafarer ‘Gunnar One-Hand’: and for ages I couldn’t find out who she was. Was she shy, timid and quiet? Tough and adventurous? Proud and stiff? Nothing seemed right, till one day as characters finally do she took scornful pity on my efforts, leaned in close and breathed in my ear, ‘There’s troll blood in me.’ At once I knew who she was. Manipulative, damaged, vulnerable, difficult Astrid became someone I really loved. Here’s where my heroine Hilde meets her for the first time:

Hilde turned, nearly bumping against a tall girl standing next to her, muffled in an expensive-looking dark blue cloak with the hood up. A brown and white goatskin bag was slung over her shoulder on a long strap, which she clutched with long thin-wristed hands. She had ice-maiden skin, so white and thin that the blue veins glistened through, wide grey eyes, a neat straight nose like a cat’s with little curling nostrils, and pale closely-shut lips.
Their eyes met. For a second Hilde felt she was looking into the eyes of a deer or a hare, a wild animal who glares at you before bolting.

And Astrid has - literally - a whole bag of tricks. She is a seidr-worker.

Seidr (pronounced roughly: ‘saythoor’, the d isn't a d but the letter ð) was a variety of Northern magic involving the arts of prophecy, spirit journeys, healing (or causing harm) and illusion. The word may come from the same root as the English verb ‘to seethe’ which means ‘to boil’ – like Shakespeare’s three witches boiling up spells in their cauldron.

Seidr was thought of as female magic; men might practise it but they endangered themselves and their reputations if they did. A woman skilled in seidr was regarded with awe, respect and a tinge of fear, as a prophetess or priestess. In Erik the Red’s Saga, there’s a famous passage in which such a woman is invited to the house of Eirk’s son Thorkel:

There was a great famine in Greenland; men who had gone out fishing caught poor catches and some never came back. There was a woman there in the Settlement whose name was Thorbjorg; she was a seeress … so …to find out when these hard times would cease, Thorkel invited her to his home. A high-seat was made ready for her, and a cushion laid down in which there must be hen feathers.
When she arrived in the evening, together with the man who had been sent to escort her, this is how she was dressed: she was wearing a blue cloak with straps which was set with stones right down to the hem; she had glass beads about her neck, and on her head a black lambskin hood lined inside with white catskin. She had a staff in her hand with a knob on it, it was ornamented with brass and set around with stones just below the knob. Round her middle she wore a belt made of touchwood, and on it was a big skin pouch in which she kept those charms she needed for magic. On her feet she had hairy calfskin shoes with long thongs… on her hands she had catskin gloves.

Thorkel and his family greet her with anxious courtesy, offering her special food - ‘porridge with goat’s beestings’ and ‘for her meat the hearts of all living creatures available there.’ Thorkel asks how soon she’ll be able to give them the news of the future which they are hoping for, but she calmly responds that she’ll have ‘nothing to announce till next day’ after a good night’s sleep.

Finally, however, the prophetess gives the show she’s made them wait for (and thus appreciate better). Seated on her high seat, surrounded by the women and aided by spirits called up by chanting, she reassures Thorkel and the settlers that the famine will not last beyond the winter, that spring will bring good things; and she answers the questions of all the men who approach her: ‘She was free with her information, and little indeed of what she said failed to come about’.

Reconstruction of a Viking house at Brattahlíð, Greenland. To such a house Thorkel would have welcomed the seidr worker.

It’s a rare glimpse of a pre-Christian Norse priestess (although the saga specifically names a couple of Christian Greenlanders who feel uncomfortable with the proceedings, it’s clear that most of the settlers are only too grateful to have their worries set to rest by such an awe-inspiring figure). In other sagas, though, we can see the ‘witch’ element coming more to the fore in descriptions of such women, as Christian views became more widespread.

In ‘The Saga of Grettir the Strong’, an old woman cuts runes on a floating tree trunk, smears them with her own blood, walks round it widdershins – against the sun – and tells Grettir’s enemies to push the tree into the sea so that it will float to the island where Grettir has taken shelter, and bring him harm.

In ‘Eyrbyggya Saga’, a woman called Katla uses seidr magic to save her son Odd from a band of his enemies. On seeing them approach the house, she tells her son to sit next to her as she spins her wool. Though Arnkell and his men search the house, they don’t see Odd, only Katla’s distaff with the clump of wool on it. They leave, but suspect they’ve been tricked and come back a second time. Katla is combing Odd’s hair, but to the war band it looks as though she is grooming her goat. The third time, though Odd is lying on a pile of ashes, the men ‘see’ only Katla’s boar asleep there. Each time they leave the house, the men realise they have been fooled by Katla’s magic arts. Not until they enlist the help of another woman skilled in seidr, Geirridr who hates Katla, do Odd’s enemies succeed in capturing him. (Of course this story also illustrates how normal it was in those days for people to share their living space with large domestic animals.)

Stories such as these from the sagas should remind us that our modern, twenty-first century sceptical viewpoint is not really up to the task of understanding the world of early medieval people. To do so, we need to suspend our disbelief. Men like Thorkell and his neighbours, Arnkell and his warband, not only believed in seidr but shared their physical world with malevolent ghosts like Glam of Grettir’s Saga, and trolls, and wizards and sendings. Such things were not delightful tales to them, but fearsome realities. Fantasyland was real.

I think we often forget that ‘reality’ is something we construct. So much depends on our beliefs. Just as schoolchildren know for sure, via playground lore, that the dishevelled house on the corner, the one with the peeling paint and lopsided windowframes, is inhabited by a bloodstained ghost (and will often invent odd little placatory rhymes and rituals to be used if they have to go past it), so our ancestors’ concerns and actions were coloured by their perceptions and beliefs in creatures which, to us, are unreal fantasies. We can hold such beliefs at arms’ length, a tacit wink passing between author and reader as we congratulate ourselves on knowing better than our poor deluded characters, or we can immerse ourselves and our readers in the perceptual world of the historical past. I make no apology for preferring the second option.

BANKERS' BONUSES AND OTHER INCENTIVES by Eve Edwards

2012-03-03T06:00:00.000Z

Did you get your bonus? Somehow my publisher didn't remember me in this round and I won't be able to shop for that Porsche I had my eye on.
What did you say? Authors don't get windfalls? Crumbs - then I won't write. I have no incentive and will go elsewhere.

Of course, such a dialogue is absurd. I'm in writing to create the best book I can, touch as many readers' lives as I can and pay the bills if I can. I am sure even the best paid writer of us all, J K Rowling, was never motivated for a second when writing Harry Potter by the notion that she would become a billionaire and, in government speak, she has been a significant wealth creator for the UK economy.

I have been appalled at the debate about bonuses over the last month, not so much the numbers but the assumption that people won't do a good job unless paid a gazillion pounds for the privilege. If you accept the argument that bankers are an internationally traded commodity who will swim away to the highest paid position regardless, then what you get are top people whose personal bottom line is cash rather than anything more public spirited. We don't say the same for top scientists, surgeons or cabinet ministers; part of their reward is the prestige of their position and intrinsic interest of their task, but I'm beginning to sound a bit too much like Radio Four here; what I'm heading for with this blog post is history.

The debate about Stephen Hester and Co started me wondering about the historical precedents as to whether it is a good idea to attract those who are incentivised by money rather than the desire to do the best job they can. Henry VIII had a few advisors who could be said to have fitted this profile. While I thoroughly enjoyed Hilary mantel's Wolf Hall, I did find it more than a little generous about the banker-style greed of Thomas Cromwell (perhaps there is more to come on this in the second part?). I think it is often the little things about historical personages that reveal their 'true' instincts and I was interested to read while researching Tudor London that one of the things Cromwell did was move his garden wall in his town residence, knocking down a neighbour's house and stealing his land. Cromwell was so powerful thanks to his wealth and position, the poor man next door could do nothing about it. Hard to unknot this particular enigmatic character but in there is arrogance, money and ambition - not a very healthy combination and I still tend to come down thinking him to be on the villain side of the fence even after Wolf Hall. Mantel may have moved the boundary a little (very fitting considering her subject) but he still would not be on my Christmas card list.

I have been trawling the period for a counter weight and have come up with the rather unsatisfactory example of Francis Walsingham, who ran Elizabeth I's security service. He was definitely not in it for the money and is calculated to have spent the modern equivalent of £7 million of his own wealth (over £48,000) running his spy network. His motivation was primarily religious because the Tudor 'terrorism' he was fighting came from Rome and Walsingham was a devout Protestant. Some self-interest was in there as well as doubtless in the event of a Catholic coup he would have been one of the first against the wall. Problem for my thesis is that, while he helped sustain the State in Elizabeth's golden age of (relative) peace, he was also violent and ruthless in his methods and not someone who one would feel at ease breaking bread. I find him a fascinating character and 'borrowed' him for The Other Countess as one of the people out to persecute my heroine and her father for their Catholic links, but I also could understand his world view particularly when I translate his particular flash point (the Pope and his assassination order on Elizabeth) to a modern equivalent (Islamic extremism and indiscriminate attacks). Politicians in our own time have been guilty of riding roughshod over human rights through fear; Walsingham was similarly motivated but also like modern extremists so sure he was right that he felt he was blessed in his reprehensible actions.

OK: money-grabbing and fanaticism both make bad motivations for holding important offices. That encourages me think better of our imperfect political system which offers very little in the way of financial incentives at the top and doesn't favour extremism.

I wonder if any of you have a favourite historical figure who rivals our modern bankers in their greed? Or could suggest someone who was at the top for all the right reasons?

Walking The Line: Culture Shock by Linda Buckley-Archer

2012-03-02T07:40:00.008Z

One of the big thrills of discovering historical fiction as a child (in my case, the usual suspects: Sutcliff, Treece, Garfield) was the realisation that – even if these characters were long dead, and even if they wore different clothes and spoke a little strangely – fundamentally they thought, felt, feared, loved and hoped just like us. And, arguably, writers who deal with history and its relation to the present, within the context of fiction, have a vested interest in creating empathy. If readers can’t relate to the protagonist of a novel, the writer has a major problem.

But there’s the rub: our ancestors weren’t ‘just like us’: they were the product of another age, and another culture, and therein lies the interest. So it’s up to the novelist to walk that line between remaining true to the mindset of a period and creating a narrative that reaches out to a modern reader. Historian Robert Darnton, in his brilliant, The Great Cat Massacre, puts it this way:

We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.

Without wishing to put you all off your breakfasts, Darnton (focusing primarily on eighteenth-century France), describes the widespread practice of cat torture and cat killings. In Semur, on the dimanche des brandons , children would tie cats to poles and roast them over the huge bonfires that celebrated the first Sunday of Lent. In Aix-en-Provence, at the Fête-Dieu, they played something called the jeu du chat which consisted of throwing cats high in the air and smashing them onto the ground. Darnton also tells the story of the printers who, in 1730s Paris, amused themselves by catching all the cats they could in the neighbourhood, giving them a mock trial and then proceeding to hang them. Darnton comments, fascinatingly, on the folklore and rich social symbolism that fed into this grotesque feline massacre. It is not easy, today, to countenance a sense of humour quite this Rabelaisian (Darnton’s epithet – I can think of a few more).

I note that Hilary Mantel, whose Bring up the Bodies we anxiously await, wrote on similar lines in the latest Royal Society of Literature Review. Outlining her approach to writing historical fiction, she comments:

Generally speaking, our ancestors were not tolerant, liberal or democratic. Your characters probably did not read the Guardian, and very likely believed in hellfire, beating children and hanging malefactors. Can you live with that?

Your immediate reaction to Hilary Mantel’s remark may well be, yes, if you can’t live with that you shouldn’t be a historical novelist. How many writers, though, would have the courage to pay more than lip service to a dictum that demands total adherence both to the letter and spirit of historical accuracy? Indeed, how many editors would not be making frantic pencil comments about losing readers in the margin of the first draft? I’m playing devil’s advocate, here, but, actually, it is no small thing. Eve Edwards wrote a thought-provoking post last month (entitled Censoring the Past), questioning whether we had the right to sanitise vocabulary from a less politically correct age, and I suppose I’m just extending that conversation. We all know how well children respond to the ‘yuk’ factor of history, particularly when it is presented in a darkly comic way. But in my capacity as a YA novelist, would I dare create a protagonist (and I don’t mean a villain) who believed (like his peers) that it was okay to beat his younger siblings, and to enjoy a good day out at a public hanging, and thought that it was acceptable to burn a cat alive and funny to hear its cries of agony? I suppose that my non-committal answer would be: I’m all for administering doses of culture shock but I’m also aware of the need for walking the line.

Ask yourself these questions. If you were writing about a child in 17^th–century Burgundy, would you:

a) Include or omit the interesting historical detail about burning cats on the first Sunday of Lent?

b) Presuming that you did decide to include the detail, would you have your protagonist observe or actively participate in the cat burning?

c) If your protagonist observes only, would you allow your character to hoot with laughter along with everyone else as the wretched animal is incinerated, or would you have him or her turn mournfully away to camera and bemoan the cruelty of man?

Or, d) Would you tear the relevant page out of your notebook and conveniently forget you ever came across this disturbing historical detail. After all, your readers will never know...

Linda Buckley-Archer's Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster (US and UK)

February Competition

2012-03-01T03:30:00.009Z

February competition

In case you missed this yesterday at the end of Anne Rooney's post about vampires, we are re-posting our latest competition today.

Two History Girls have new books out now and we have some to offer as prizes.

To win one of three copies of Marie-Louise Jensen's The Girl in the Mask, answer this question:

"If you were a notorious 18th Century highwayman (or woman in disguise), what alias would you give yourself?"

To win one one five hardbacks of Katherine Roberts' Sword of Light, try this one:

"If Lord Avallach gave you one of his fairy horses, what would you name it?"

Leave your answers in Comments below, mixed in with comments on Anne Rooney's blogpost.

Closing date 7th March.As usual, only UK entrants.

The New Elizabethans by Mary Hoffman

2012-03-01T01:01:00.006Z

BBC Radio 4 is asking listeners to send in suggestions for the most influential and important people of the second Queen Elizabeth's reign, to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee this year here.

Jim Naughtie will run a series of radio programmes about 60 such nominees from June onwards. Sixty names for the 60 years of ER2's reign. They don't have to be British, just to have had an influence on British life.

I'm sure there will be the usual dreary list of Prime Ministers, sportsmen and pop musicians; Naughtie has already suggested that Rupert Murdoch might be such a name. Well, there's no denying he has had an influence!

You have till 9th March to make your nominations to the official Radio 4 site. So far listeners have suggested:
Barbara Castle, John Rutter, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, Rose Heilbron QC, Raymond Damadian, Vivienne Westwood, Elizabeth David, Ted Hughes, Leo Baxendale, Tim Berners Lee, Richard Attenborough, Stephen Fry, Professor Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Alistair Campbell, JK Rowling, Russell T Davies and Paul McCartney among others.

But this is The History Girls and we can make our own rules. I thought I'd consider who were the great names of the first Elizabethan era and see if we could come up with equivalents.

Elizabeth 1 - well, of course she has her equivalent on the throne now but times are very different. The first Queen Elizabeth could speak Latin, Greek, French, Spanish and Welsh. I have heard our present queen speak French and she did it, though grammatically accurately, just exactly in the same accent as she speaks English. Fortunately there are no recordings of Queen Bess's linguistic skills. She was a great orator; her distant successor's annual Christmas Speech is perhaps not a fair comparison.

But the first Elizabeth's greatest accomplishment was staying alive! She survived many rebellions and plots and did well even to survives scandals and questioning in the Tower before she even reached the throne. Our present queen's ascension was tame by comparison though no-one would suggest it was easy for her to take up the crown in her twenties, after George V1's sudden death.

The first Elizabeth could - and did - send traitors to the block. ER2 lost the power to execute for treason as late as 1998 though she never exercised it. (Capital punishment for murder stopped in 1969, though the last hangings were in 1964).

A quick trawl through the intellectual life of both reigns suggests that they were equally rich in scheming politicians and advisers. On poets I reckon the score is roughly equal, if you leave out Shakespeare. Sir Philip Sydney and Thomas Wyatt versus T.S.Eliot, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes.

Musically the great trio of Byrd, Tallis and Gibbons to be offset by Britten, Tippett, John Tavener, John Rutter. Artists: well only really the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard to put alongside Lucian Freud and David Hockney, John Piper, Barbara Hepworth, Jacob Epstein, Henry Moore, Elizabeth Frink. I think the New Elizabethans do rather well out of that comparison.

Playwrights? Well, we have to bow our heads before the towering dominant genius of the first Elizabeth's time and as well as him there was Christopher Marlowe. It seems absurd to talk about John Osborne in comparison! Though we do have Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, Micahel Frayn. What about the actors in the plays? We can't know how great Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn or Will Kemp actually were but ER2 has had a wonderful bunch to choose from, from Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier, Ashcroft, Tyzack through to the Redgraves, McKellen and the amazing Mark Rylance. I think perhaps the moderns have it.

Science and philosophy: Would you like to square up Francis Bacon against Stephen Hawking, John Dee against Richard Dawkins? (Actually I think Tim Berners-Lee is the best equivalent to John Dee.) But I'm afraid both lists so far are heavily weighted towards males.

So here is my challenge: suggest some equivalents to the following Old Elizabethans.

Mary, Queen of Scots
Bess of Hardwick
Arbella Stuart
Elizabeth Bathory

John Dee
Sir Francis Bacon
Sir Walter Ralegh
Inigo Jones

Or any others that take your fancy.

As for my Radio 4 recommendations, I won't give you 60 but I think David rather than Richard Attenborough because he's the modern equivalent of a global explorer, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten - oh, quick, some women: Shirley Williams, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, Judi Dench, Elizabeth David, Angela Carter, Jill Tweedy, Lynne Truss.

Also Rosalind Franklin, Alistair Cooke (born in Salford; his Letter from America was a big influence in British radio), Thomas Heatherwick, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, The Incredible String Band and the Beatles, Kenneth Branagh, Steptoe and Edwards, Tom Watson.... You will see this is rather random.

Writing the (un)dead by Anne Rooney

2012-02-29T01:01:00.003Z

Anne Rooney by Luki Sumner, House of Sharps

Our guest author for February is special in a new way. Anne Rooney has been helping behind the scenes since we started this blog last July. While not listed as one of us, she has performed the valuable role of Technical Support for the whole group, teaching us much and resolving our mistakes and muddles. And believe me, many of us were on a steep learning curve when we started!

So we were delighted to discover that, while not technically a historical novelist, Anne has been introducing some historical characters into her latest series - and a bizarre and fascinating mix they are!

About Anne:

Anne Rooney writes fiction and non-fiction for children and adult non-fiction on a bizarre range of topics. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow for several years, and blogs as Stroppy Author. Anne lives in Cambridge with one-and-a-half daughters, a pig, two ferrets, a population of chickens that varies according to the appetite of the fox, a tortoise and possibly a turtle.

Over to Anne:

Thank you, History Girls, for inviting me to guest here. I'm not a real History Girl - I just lurk behind the scenes, bullying the electrons when things go wrong in a digital kind of way.

Although I haven't published a historical novel, I've dragged a few historical characters into the twenty-first century to feature in my forthcoming vampire series (stifle that yawn, please; these are a very different kind of vampire).

A historical novelist writing about a real figure does a lot of research into the person's real life and times. But what if you want your historical figures still to be alive? You don't need to know just what they were like hundreds of years ago - you need to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century and look at what they would be like now. It's all very well to know how Samuel Pepys or Henry VII behaved then, but how would they be after they'd witnessed the First World War and the Space Race?

Take a step back. Vampires live a long time. Conventionally, they live forever. Mine don't exactly live forever, but because vampirism is a disease that eradicates telomere* shortening, they live for at least ten times as long as non-vampires. Diseases strike at random, so although many vampires are just routine folk, some are not. Amongst my vampire coterie I have [spoiler alert] Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis Pasteur, Elvis Presley and Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper - well, I could do what I liked with him because no one knows who he was. But the others can't be made up.

Anton Raphael Mengs, self-portrait

That's not strictly true. I made up the character Ignace before I decided he was previously known as Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. I'd written the first book in the series and named the principal vampire Ignace. Then I was looking up Guillotin to see if he would fit into the second book, set in Paris, and discovered his second name was Ignace and I had sort of used him already. But I'd use the picture on the right while writing him. On the basis of this portrait, and not any information about the man (it's actually Anton Raphael Mengs, a painter born in Germany in 1728), I'd written a character who was slick, debonair, a bit of a rake, and - incidentally - the chief vampire of the western world. But by happy coincidence Ignace shared a name with Guillotin, and that's who he became.

Joseph Ignace-Guillotin

The task then became not to recreate Guillotin as he would have been in the late eighteenth century, but to develop him as he would be now, in 2012, if he were still alive. So we have a man who invented the guillotine and is a vampire. Why did he invent it (or refine it, actually, though he's generally credited with its invention)? The usual reason given is that he did it to make execution less painful. Why did he care? He needs a motivation. And here it is, all laid out ready in real history...

The mother of Marie Antoinette was Maria-Theresa of Austria. In 1755, Maria-Theresa sent her private physician, Gerard van Swieten, to investigate vampirism in Moravia. He (being a vampire, in my world) reported back that vampirism is a load of b******. So MT outlawed all those vampire-killing tactics people were using. This naturally led to a surge in the number of vampires, and something had to be done. That something was the French Revolution. (And you thought it was all about oppressed peasants and a broken system? LOL! That's what they wanted you to think!)

Guillotin's eyes and nose on Mengs

Because all his aristocratic vampire friends were being killed in rather unpleasant ways and he couldn't stop them dying, Guillotin invented (refined) a way of killing them that would be relatively painless - the guillotine. (Because we all know vampires can be beheaded, staked or burnt.) Indeed, three of the six articles he presented to the National Assembly serve the purposes of vampire dynasties extremely well:

Article 4: No one shall reproach a citizen with any punishment imposed on one of his relatives. Such offenders shall be publicly reprimanded by a judge. [So you can't persecute the relatives of a vampire, assuming they are vampires, too - which they probably are]
Article 5: The condemned person's property shall not be confiscated. [Vampires have built up enormous wealth over their centuries-long lives; vampire families are not about to hand it over to the state]
Article 6: At the request of the family, the corpse of the condemned man shall be returned to them for burial and no reference to the nature of death shall be registered [goes without saying...no staking, and if they were not beheaded, it might be possible to fix them. And we don't want doctors looking too closely]

What can be extracted from his story to draw Guillotin as he would be now, if he'd continued to live? Well, he took credit for inventing something he only appropriated and improved, so that suggests a certain degree of self-importance, selfishness, opportunism, even arrogance. He has turned his not-inconsiderable intellect to the task of working out how to kill people with minimum pain. Though the aim is compassionate, the task is gruesome. Perhaps it takes a certain amount of detachment to tackle this problem? Perhaps it takes so much detachment that this character is rather lacking in empathy. And from this, I developed Ignace as he is now, two hundred years later.

Ignace is a psychopath. Using Simon Baron-Cohen's Zero Degrees of Empathy as a handbook to psychopathy, I made him type zero-positive: someone whose psychopathy is not deliberately turned to harm, and often produces flashes of inventive, scientific or mathematical genius. The interest in solving the logical problem of how to kill people with minimal pain that he showed in the 18th century has become, in the 21st century, an obsession with discovering the scientific nature of vampirism. He runs a research centre in Russia; he is ruthless and some of his methods are less than ethical. But - like many psychopaths - he is superficially charming and sexually attractive. He seduces the Jack Wills model vampire when she is newly-turned vulnerable (and 350 years his junior). He excuses the awful things he does (such as buying slaves from the flesh markets of south-east Asia for his experiments) with a cool logic. He wrong-foots his wife into killing her lover to prove a point. And he keeps a very high profile prisoner in his castle for 800 years. (The prisoner's identity will be revealed in series 2, but HG readers will guess from the clues.)

So much for Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur is also a vampire, working in Ignace's research centre near Yakutsk. In life, Pasteur was a passionate scientist. He was so keen to find a vaccine to protect people against rabies that he sucked the saliva from the mouths of infected dogs with a pipette. I took this passion, and his portrait (right), and made a man who is jovial, compassionate, has a sense of humour and is fiercely intelligent. He is still dedicated to science, but he's a realist. He's found that he can't prove vampirism is a virus, and is biding his time, doing pointless experiments so that Ignace continues to fund his research while he hopes for inspiration or luck. Luck comes in the form of a young Iraqi refugee and Pasteur instantly recognises the boy's brilliance. Pasteur doesn't look very jovial in this photograph, but of course people didn't smile for photos in the 19th century.

Dmitri Ivanovsky

Another 19th century scientist I've recruited is Dmitri Ivanovsky, the Russian biologist who first identified viruses. The Dutch scientist Beijerinck is usually credited with the discovery of viruses - but he did eventually concede Ivanovsky's prior claim. So I made Ivanovsky a modest man who is kind and helpful, unassuming and self-effacing. He's also rather fragile - as he looks in this photo. Maybe he wasn't like that - maybe he was very cross that Beijerinck got the credit first off, and should have been motivated by bitterness. But I don't read Russian, and there don't seem to be any accounts of Ivanovsky's character in languages I do read, so I reckon he's fair game. He and Pasteur are foils to Ignace's ruthlessness.

There's nothing much historical to say about Jack the Ripper except what we can deduce from his crimes. I've made him a zero-negative psychopath following Baron-Cohen again, as that seems fairly consistent with what he did. My editor wanted him to be a ridiculous, figure - more a John Christie - but that didn't seem in keeping with the accounts of his crimes. So he's tall, strong, rather handsome and very frightening. He's also calculating and ambitious. There will be more of him in the second series. He started as a minor character, but - appropriately - has claimed a larger part and won't be pushed away. I'm not brave enough to mess with him.

Elvis Presley

How would Elvis Presley be if he were alive now? For one thing, he works in a chip shop (in Eastbourne). We know that because Kirsty McColl said so ('There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis'). He's still a talented musician; overweight, with a tacky hairstyle and too much hair dye. Elvis has only been a vampire since the 1970s, so there was no need to consider how his character would have matured and crystallised over centuries. But he's still dealing with his fate.

Elvis is very resentful of Ignace, who insisted he disappear with a fake death because an Elvis who didn't age or die would be a serious embarrassment. (Vampires who refuse to disappear with a fake death have to be disposed of. J.F. Kennedy is a prime example of this sort of stroppy vampire, addicted to success.)

I don't think there's anything quite comparable to keeping historical figures alive and functioning until the present. It's not like a time-slip or having someone wake from a coma, as they have experienced all the intervening years. There's no surprise at modern technology, no ignorance of the social and political scene. (Indeed, the vampires have all the time in the world, so they're rather good at keeping up with developments.) Instead it's a question of intensifying the normal maturing of characters - finding the key traits of a person and distilling them far beyond what would happen over a normal lifespan. It's a very unique kind of challenge - and thrilling. I think I'll be trawling history for people to drag out of the grave for a long time. Just off to polish my spade...

* telomere = a bit of spare chromosome at the end each chromosome. It doesn't code for anything useful, but each time a cell divides and the chromosomes reproduce, a bit is lost from the end of the chromosome. For most of our lives, it's a bit of useless telomere that's lost, but eventually the telomere is all gone and the useful part of the chromosome starts to be eroded. That's why old people go wrong easily - their chromosomes are getting cut off.

The first six Vampire Dawn titles are published in March 2012 by Ransom Publishing: Die Now or Live Forever; Drop Dead, Gorgeous; Life Sucks; Every Drop of Your Blood; Dead on Arrival; In Cold Blood. They are short, intended for readers who can't tackle a full-length novel. (Age 12+)

Follow Anne Rooney on Facebook or twitter: @annerooney. Follow the vampires, if you dare, on Facebook or twitter: @vampiredawn.
Websites: Anne Rooney; Vampire Dawn

February competition

Two History Girls have new books out now and we have some to offer as prizes.

To win one of three copies of Marie-Louise Jensen's The Girl in the Mask, answer this question:

"If you were a notorious 18th Century highwayman (or woman in disguise), what alias would you give yourself?"

To win one one five hardbacks of Katherine Roberts' Sword of Light, try this one:

"If Lord Avallach gave you one of his fairy horses, what would you name it?"

Leave your answers in Comments below, mixed in with comments on Anne Rooney's blogpost.

Closing date 7th March.As usual, only UK entrants.

Notable History, by K. M. Grant

2012-02-28T00:01:00.001Z

Music is notably absent (see what I did there) from most novels, historical or otherwise, except as a useful scene setter: a lyre in a Tudor romp; a piano in a Victorian parlour. I think even Dickens largely gives it a miss.

This was wise. As somebody once said, ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture: it’s a really stupid thing to want to do’. Stupid, probably. Tempting, absolutely - and not just writing. I recently tried to describe to my husband the delights of the Rhinemaidens’ song at the beginning of Act III of Gotterdammerung. Boredom in seconds. When I plugged in my iPod, he was charmed (well, as charmed as he ever is by Wagner, about whose genius we will never agree).

In his overview of my current obsession, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Peter Williams asks ‘what kind of language could convey the realm of the imagination opened up by its very opening bar?’ I agree. But writers capture that realm of imagination in different ways. Music isn’t only about describing the music itself; it’s an integral part of imaginative memory.

For example, I remember almost nothing about the film Elvira Madigan, but every time I hear the Andante of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 I see a field of spring flowers and two impossibly beautiful people in love tastefully doing what people in love often do.

It’s impossible to hear Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice without images of Disney’s Fantasia bubbling up. Poor Mickey! Sometimes the associations are not nice. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, is a player in A Clockwork Orange. Bach’s Passacalia and Fugue in C minor accompany the bloodbath in The Godfather, and I refuse to watch the Hannibal Lectern film in which, so I believe, the Doc does something frightful whilst listening to the Goldberg’s Aria.

It’s wonderful how music transcends its own time far better than books. Early novels are rightly part of the canon of literature, but who really reads Richardson’s Clarissa for pleasure? It’s stuck in the eighteenth century. The music of J. S. Bach (died 1750), on the other hand, still surprises and delights. Quite often, I’m listening to something unfamiliar and am amazed to find it’s not far short of three hundred years old.

Music is fluid and adaptable; it lives and breathes, so doesn’t date as words date. In some senses, there’s no such thing as historical music, apart perhaps from early operas. Once you’ve got over the shock of the big burly hero as castrato (listen and weep), Handel’s Tamburlaine is an ordeal verging on torture, particularly if the director insists on all the da capos. I take my hat off to modern audiences who pay good money to sit through it.

My work in progress, set in 1794, has five girls learning to play the Goldberg on a new-fangled pianoforte.

This is an unsigned pianoforte, made in 1795. The image comes from the Frederick Collection.

Part of my research is attempting to learn Variations myself, about which I'm writing a blog. The book is a historical novel, yet by moving the Goldberg onto the piano, I’m bringing it up to date, as it were. Old music played on a familiar instrument (even if my girls' pianoforte is hardly a modern Fazioli, see below) marries the past and present more easily than, for example, re-writing Walter Scott in modern idiom. I would never attempt to do that. (Do you have trouble with Walter? I'm afraid my attention soon starts to wander.)

Yet danger lurks in writing a historical musical, as it were. I’ll get into trouble for all manner of reasons: the variations were written for two manual harpsichord, not a piano; although the aria and two variations do appear in Sir John Hawkins' History of Music, there’s no record of an extant copy in London before the nineteenth century; it’s a work of difficulty far beyond five girls, at least three of whom are indifferently talented. Daunted? You bet. Disheartened? Occasionally. But the joy of writing about music is that just listening counts as work and I can never get quite enough of that.

Lies, Damned lies and statistics by Mary Hoffman

2012-02-27T01:01:00.009Z

We're having a brief reflective pause on the History Girls blog today to look at some vital statistics. This has nothing to do with Emma Darwin's post on wearing the right underwear but is an inside peek at what topics people have been drawn to since we started in July 2011.

Those who administer a blog are privy to a special "Stats page". Anyone can see that we've had nearly 92,000 "views" since we started and have 258 followers. But you have to be an "admin" to know that our most popular post ever, with 1,200+ views is Caroline Lawrence's on Roman Christmas. (Actually the real most popular post with 500 views more than that is Pauline Francis's Guest Post on Elizabeth the First and perfume. However that one has also attracted the most Anonymous Spam comments, so I think we can suspend belief about some of those hits. Something about that correlation brought the Spammers out in force - I daren't put the link again).

The majority of our pageviews are from the United Kingdom, as you might expect, but nearly half as many are from the USA and it's interesting to see there are twice as many views each from Russia and India as from Italy!

Facebook drives more traffic to the site than does Twitter. The greatest number of Comments (26) used to be for Katherine Langrish's blogpost on Torture as Entertainment but that is now neck and neck with H.M. Castor's post on The Bewildering Boleyn.

If you look at the Cloud arrangement of labels on the right-hand side, you would think that our major pre-occupation since we started has been Cross-dressing! That's because Caroline Lawrence suggested we might take up a theme in a given month and ten posts in September/October responded to that idea.

But Christmas was equal with Cross-Dressing in the number of mentions!

It will be very interesting to look again at the end of June and see what the Stats have been after a whole year of blogging. But just a quick thank you to all our followers, commenters and page-viewers - even the Spammers. We are very pleased that the figures are so healthy.

Louisa Young will be back soon

Death and Poetry in the Karoo - Dianne Hofmeyr

2012-02-26T06:00:00.008Z

I have fallen under the spell of a vista. It has stirred up a deep-seated identity with soil and rock. I’m lost in a world of sepia, ochre and rust where having forgotten to pack my camera, I’m forced to look harder. Through a portal of soaring rocky folds that seem made of ancient paved brick where the road crosses the river 25 times, I come to the Karoo.

Karoo… the name is odd. It comes from a language of clicks - karo, karro - meaning ‘hard’ or ‘dry’. And it is dry and hard, with a gaunt, spectacular grandeur that subdues me. I can’t imagine its impact on the young British soldiers who were first offloaded here in 1899. Names like Outeniqua, Oudtshoorn, Meiringspoort, Weltrevrede and words like kopje and veldt must have faltered on the tongues of men from Harlech and Bristol who came to fight a war against the Boers in the semi-desert of the Karoo. Is this the place that gave name to the soldier Mad Carew in J. Milton Hayes’poem The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God ?

In 1901 when Rudyard Kipling was sent to report on the Anglo-Boer War, he wrote of the soldiers who sat through cold nights guarding the single train line that ran through the Karoo, from ambush by the Boer commandoes. It's a vision of stark loneliness in a very dark world.

BRIDGE-GUARD IN THE KARROO

Sudden the desert changes,
The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
Stand up like the thrones of Kings—

Ramparts of slaughter and peril—
Blazing, amazing, aglow—
’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl
And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
Lit by the last of the sun—
Opal and ash-of-roses,
Cinnamon, umber, and dun.

The twilight swallows the thicket,
The starlight reveals the ridge.
The whistle shrills to the picket—
We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the empty metals shine—
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

We slip through the broken panel
Of fence by the ganger’s shed;
We drop to the waterless channel
And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,

And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
As the sheep click past to the fold—
And the click of the restless girders
As the steel contracts in the cold—

Voices of jackals calling

And, loud in the hush between,
A morsel of dry earth falling
From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And the solemn firmament marches,
And the hosts of heaven rise
Framed through the iron arches—
Banded and barred by the ties,

Till we feel the far track humming,
And we see her headlight plain,
And we gather and wait her coming—
The wonderful north-bound train.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the white car-windows shine—
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

Quick, ere the gift escape us!
Out of the darkness we reach
For a handful of week-old papers
And a mouthful of human speech.

And the monstrous heaven rejoices,
And the earth allows again,
Meetings, greetings, and voices
Of women talking with men.

So we return to our places,
As out on the bridge she rolls;
And the darkness covers our faces,
And the darkness re-enters our souls.

More than a little lonely
Where the lessening tail-lights shine.
No—not combatants—only
Details guarding the line!

Thomas Hardy wrote two poems highlighting the blight of the Anglo-Boer War. The first, A Wife in London written in 1899 is about the irony of a wife receiving a letter from her husband on the day after she has received the news of his death. The second Hardy poem, Drummer Hodge, is about a young man ignorant and innocent of what lies ahead who wouldn’t have known the meaning of the strange words that give meaning to the Karoo but whose body would become nourishment for the veldt in years to come.

DRUMMER HODGE - 1899
I
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined - just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

II
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

III
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

I wonder if Rupert Brooke had read Hardy’s Drummer Hodge when he wrote these lines in The Soldier in 1914?

IF I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England.

Reams could be written of this war and of the soldiers who never returned to their families in England and of the Australians who gave their support to Britain. And reams could be written of the Boers who suffered and died under Kitchener’s Burnt Earth Policy and the Boer wives and children who were rounded up and put in Concentration Camps and died of cold, starvation and typhoid.

My maternal great grandfather from Yorkshire had his sheep farm in Natal expropriated during the Anglo-Boer War. My paternal grandfather fought on the side of the English. In my husband’s family there were those that fought on the side of the Boers. No wonder I feel a deep sense of identity with this vista of the Karoo.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Some of the History Girls will be putting up books they've recently read (without reviews) at the end of their posts. These are two I've recently read - the first by our own History Girl, Louisa Young, short-listed for the Costa which deals with the ravages of WWI and The Sisters Brothers which is a cowboy story with a difference set in similar terrain to the Karoo which was short-listed for the Booker:

HISTORY ON THE LINE By Eleanor Updale

2012-02-25T00:01:00.000Z

I’ve written here before about my joy at moving to Scotland, and my grand romance with Edinburgh isn’t over, but I have let my heart stray. Now I’m in love with a railway line.

My business and family lives have me shuttling between London and Edinburgh several times a month on what must be one of the world’s greatest train journeys. It’s given me an idea for a book.

For the East Coast line is an historian’s delight – especially if you sit on the right hand side of the carriage on the way up to Scotland, or the left-hand side on the way down south. The route takes you past breathtaking sights, loaded with history. My fantasy book traces that line, telling the stories of many of the places you pass.

There are all the obvious ones: the big cathedrals at Peterborough, York (above),

and Durham (below) - and even Lincoln when there’s a problem and the train gets diverted.

There are the magnificent bridges at Newcastle, the wild sea coast looking out to Holy island, and the beautiful man-made taming of that coast at Berwick-upon-Tweed (still at war with Russia, some say, thanks to a cock-up of treaty drafting in 1856).

Along parts of the journey, the train runs parallel to the A1, which is itself the successor to the ancient road that joined south and north from the earliest times. The settlements whose stations fly by so fast that it’s hard to read the names on the signs are the old stabling and coaching centres of centuries ago: Grantham (home town of Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher – now apparently raped by the identikit warehouses of the retail trade); Darlington (which still sings of a past of prosperity and industry); ancient Dunbar, Prestonpans, and many more.

If you’re a regular on the line, you can afford to look out of the other window at the crucial moments. While everyone else is gasping over the sea view at Berwick, you can catch the majestic Tweed carrying the weight of Borders history through rolling hills. From the high track above Durham there’s an unmatched panorama of Victorian domestic and industrial building, and a steep, straight road that looks like a ski jump in the winter. At the other end of the route, just outside King’s Cross, there’s Alexandra Palace, high on a hill: birthplace of television news, and the site of a dramatic fire in 1980. And all that is a just a hint of the gems along the way.

Just imagine being able to make the journey with a book that told you about some of the great events, from invention and industry to battles and bombings, that have taken place just beyond the carriage window. I would love to write it. Any takers?

"Pepys Visits The Broads"

2012-02-24T10:54:00.000Z

By Katherine Langrish

June 23rd

This morning to rise early in readiness for our water excursion, myself having slept at the house of the Cardinal in readiness therefore. At seven come the rest of our party, they being The Scoutmaster, the Muffin man, and Long John. Great bustle and to-do, there being a great variety of things to be taken… At Horning did receive our boat the Sea Mist, a fine roomy craft that is to be our home for a sennight. The Muffin man and the Scoutmaster being the only ones not acquainted with petrol engines, we three others did listen avidly to the teachings of the young man from the boat hirers, feigning ignorance thereof. Whereat much merriment, we being all in high spirits.

June 24th

Sunday, and a most fair, pleasant and lazy day. Did rise early, being awakened at five thirty by the Muffin man, shouting ‘Pike! Pike!’ he, being a light sleeper, hearing the whirr of the reel running out. A fine fish, and being landed and killed, was put to soak for the removal of the muddy flavour that doth afflick freshwater fish. After breakfast did sail to Hickling Broad, a prodigious stretch of water and all so a-sparkle with the sun and dotted with white sails that we did cry out in admiration… Caught by the wind and thrust broadside into the weeds, whereat much laughter and quanting and towing off. So with much fishing and sailing passed the rest of this day… Supped off the morning’s pike with much others and did listen to the service broadcast and the music following and so to bed…

June 25th
A glorious day. Returning to Potter Heigham for provisions, we did moor the boat and go in a body to the shoppe, where the Cardinal did borrow a pair of scissors, and the others making a most ungodly rush at me, and holding my arms, the Cardinal did cut off my moustache. The shoppe people very nervous and distrait, thinking they were to witness a falling-out. Sailing round Horsey Mere the engine did conk out, but occasioned no anxiety, there being plenty of room in which to drift. The wildfowl here a most marvellous sight, this being a bird sanctuary. Did find out and remedy the engine trouble, this being a blocked petrol pipe. Meals being taken when we were hungry, they consisting very finely of all the things that men chuse to eat among themselves, most tasty and abundant. The Cardinal’s dog to swim most grandly, which the Cardinal do attribute to her tail not having been docked…

The year? 1928. The author? My grandmother Emmeline (known to all as Linnie), writing from the viewpoint of my grandfather, her husband William (aka ‘Sam Pepys’). He and his brother and three friends had gone for an ‘all boys together’ spree on the Norfolk Broads in a boat called Sea Mist, and my grandmother – who stayed at home – had the inspiration to write it up as a Pepysian spoof and sell it to ‘The Anglers’ News’. It must have done well, as she followed it up next year with a similar article, ‘Pepys Fishes in Lincolnshire’.

To my great delight this article and these pictures recently came to light with the discovery of a long-lost family photo album. I'd never seen any of them before, and so I hope you'll forgive this very 'family-historical' post. But here is a picture of my grandmother – my mother’s mother – as a girl in her twenties. She was born in 1892 and her name was Emmeline Mary Sherwood, though everyone called her ‘Linnie’.

Her own grandfather was a Yorkshire farmer: one cast from a rather different mould than the taciturn cliché: he was a poet (though none of his poems seem to have survived), the inventor of a number of farmyard improvements including a mechanism called the drop-platform plough, and – by all accounts – a bit of a dreamer. Maybe having a poet for a grandfather inspired my grandmother; maybe she was encouraged by her mother, a Knaresborough innkeeper’s daughter who went to Oxford in the 1860’s and read theology – without, of course, being awarded a degree. At any rate in 1905, thirteen-year-old Linnie wrote a poem on the death of the actor Henry Irving. It was published in the local paper. The editor told her parents to encourage her to continue writing. And she did.

No more than today, however, could one then rely upon making a living from writing. She trained and worked for Underwood’s as a demonstration typist – a useful skill for a writer, which opened the path for her to work during 1911 as personal secretary to the Earl of Leitrim in Rosapenna, County Donegal. For propriety’s sake she stayed not at the house, but in the Rosapenna Hotel owned by the Earl, and was known to all by the nickname ‘Miss Yorkshire’. Here it is, in a postcard she stuck into the album:

– and here - possibly in the room pictured below! - she was proposed to by a visiting Malaysian prince, the son of the Sultan of Johor, but refused him, being already engaged to marry my grandfather William Thornber, also of Yorkshire farming stock, who earned a living as one of the early breed of motor mechanics.

Once married and with children, Linnie began writing stories and poems as a way of augmenting the family income. She also wrote plays for the Sheffield Repertory Theatre: the first, ‘Grey Ash’ (a supernatural shocker about an accursed violin) was broadcast by the BBC, and after that several more of her plays were broadcast. There’s apparently even a recording of her reading one of her stories, and how I wish it were possible to track it down.

As her three daughters grew older, perhaps Linnie had more time to write. Her first book ‘Bitter Glory’ was a historical novel about the romance between Chopin and George Sand, and it was published in 1935 under the male pseudonym ‘Leon Thornber’. You can see the rather unlikely cover below on the left, with Sand glancing coquettishly at the portrait of Chopin.

However, the book is well researched and serious. It’s of its time, of course:

There was a certain apartment, very large and square and lofty, on the Chausée d’Antin, and there it seemed that spring had taken laughing refuge against the cutting winds and flurrying snow of winter’s last despairing stand. A bright fire leaped on the hearth, casting rosy shadows on the pale panelled walls and the polished floor strewn with rich rugs as bright as summer.

We don’t go in for that sort of fanciful flourish these days (but I like it). And it was well received, although for her next books Linnie stuck to places and people she knew well. Her next book, ‘And One Man’, 1936, was based on her own family history. Here's her hero, Jude Wayland, waking up in a Yorkshire farmhouse on a bitter winter’s morning:

In the big kitchen below him, he could hear Sarah, his brother’s wife, moving about her morning tasks with the maids. Fire irons rattled, dishes and cutlery clattered, the wooden pump on the sink groaned and gushed, there was a rattle of pails in the outer kitchen. Then someone dragged the coal bucket across the tiled floor, and the noise of it set Jude’s teeth on edge. He sat up in bed in sudden fury. ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried, ‘can’t Sarah keep those women quiet? She knows Dad’s ill.’

One of the most colourful characters in the book, Dicky Lismore, is based on her own father Sam Sherwood, a successful commercial traveller with an eye for the ladies. He meets Jude on a train to ‘Stelborough’ (Sheffield), and rattles on in a style which my mother tells me was pretty much verbatim:

‘It’s a rum place, Stelborough. Filthy, but where there’s muck there’s money, and where there’s money, women go in for being soulful and arty. It’s full of music. Some of it is good, too, but not all. I heard the Messiah there once. God, what a row! Half a hundred withered spinsters piping out, ‘Unto us a son is born,’ and then the basses chipped in ‘Wonderful.’ And it would have been wonderful too, judging by the look of them. They were past the bearing age.’

Her third book, ‘Portrait in Steel,’ followed the fortunes of the Sheffield steelworks via the personal history of one Nicholas Brough, who begins as an idealistic youth at the start of the first World War and ends up in the thirties as ‘a damned hard man’. This novel takes in the wartime steel boom, the slump of the twenties, and the resurgence of the steel industry as the Spanish Civil War starts to bite. It was published in 1938, and the whole of the second edition was bombed in its London warehouse during the blitz and went up, literally, in smoke.

After that she never published another novel, although my mother tells me that she did begin writing one. It had a supernatural theme involving black magic, and as she read it out chapter by chapter to the family, my mother and her sisters were agog with excitement to find out what would happen. But they never did. Linnie was always rather superstitious. Somehow she must have managed to scare herself. She stopped writing it, and after her death my mother could not find any trace of the manuscript.

I was only four years old when Linnie died. My memories of her are hazy, and from a child’s viewpoint – her full blue skirt: the Chinese wastepaper basket under her dressing table, the many pots of bottled fruit she made each summer stacked along the shelf in the passage upstairs, and the dressmaker’s dummy which lay on top of her wardrobe like some sort of pallid Egyptian mummy-case. When I stayed overnight and shared her room, I did not dare to turn my back on it.

Here are two publicity shots of her, taken in 1924 and 1930. I wish mine came out anything like so well...
How much I should like to sit down with Linnie Thornber and talk about her books and my books and the craft we share! But as that's not possible I’m just very happy to be able to read the account of my Grandad's far-off and golden 1928 holiday, in my Grandma’s delightfully flippant style:

June 27th
Voyaging from Stalham, did find a most delectable spot, where we did stay all day, fishing and engaging in sports ashore. A great catch of fish, but maggots running short, the Cardinal says they are to be cherished in future. A boat anchoring near, did disclose four lovely wenches, whereat we were all delighted, but should have fared better had their parents not been aboard also. The Cardinal and Long John out at twilight to whisper to two of them. Supped on fish and fruit and coffee, an ungodly mixture which liketh us mightily.
So ends this day.

German Silesia - from revolution to degermanisation, by Leslie Wilson

2012-02-23T01:00:00.000Z

After the First World War, Poland, which had previously been split up between Germany, Austria and Russia, was now reinstated as a nation. At the same time, the future of Upper Silesia was in question. Naturally, both Germany Poland wanted this important mining and industrial area - and those members of the Allies - notably France - who desired above all the weakening of Germany were keen that Poland should have it. There was a plebiscite to decide which nation Upper Silesia should belong to.

There was apparently a suggestion, which wasn't taken on board, that the post-war settlement should allow Silesia to be an independent nation. That might well have satisfied the feelings of Silesians. But the plebiscite gave them the choice between becoming either 'Polish' or 'German.' The polls yielded a majority in favour of remaining German (59.6%). However, in the eastern parts of the region, the majority voted for Poland. Though Germany at first assumed that the poll result would give them the whole of Silesia, eventually it was decided that a segment (containing some of the richest industrial assets, such as Kattowice) was shaved off the east of Upper Silesia, and became part of Poland. During the campaign, there was brutality and intimidation from both nationalistic parties, and several Polish uprisings, culminating, post-referendum in 1921, in a bloody battle on the Annaberg. My grandfather, who was from Lower Silesia, fought there on the German side.

It's a line in his cv, a medal hanging next to his First World War medal. 'Für Schlesien,' it says. 'For Silesia.' He died in 1968, years before I got really interested in the topic. So I can't ask him about his motivation or his experiences. I do know that - as I've said in last month's blog - he was far more 'German' than my grandmother.

Anyway, the remainder of Silesia remained German, though the Silesian language was still spoken, that odd mixture of West-slav and German dialect; it continued to be spoken all the way till the end of the war, though the official language was German. Silesia, of course, went through the traumatic experiences of the rest of Germany during the next twelve years. First there was the horror of the Inflation period, then the gradual economic reconstruction, during which time my grandparents married and had one child - only one, because my grandfather said the times were too bad to have more children. But heavy unemployment and high child mortality persisted, even in Upper Silesia.

At this time my grandfather was studying hard for promotions in the police force. He was, like many of his colleagues, a Social Democrat. The SPD (Social Democratic Party) was the strongest party for many between-the wars years in the western parts of Silesia, while the Catholic Centre dominated in the east, unsurprisingly, given the largely Catholic character of that region.

There was an increase in violent anti-Semitism during those years, and in 1920, during the Kapp Putsch, six Jewish citizens of Breslau were murdered by the Freikorps (nationalistic extremists). Jews were discriminated against in their careers, and in public life. Nevertheless, the Nazis were for a long time a minority party, whose election percentages remained in single figures.

In 1929, the Wall Street Crash tolled the death-knell of Germany's fragile economic reconstruction, tossing millions into unemployment and poverty, and hugely boosting the popularity of both the Communist and the Nazi party. Their supporters formed paramilitary organisations who fought pitched battles in the streets - one of my mother's early memories was of mattresses being put in the windows to keep the bullets out of the houses. My grandfather, then stationed in Hindenburg/Zabrze, was out there, policing those battles, trying to keep his men from joining in, because - I have read - 'nowhere in Germany were the police harder on the Nazis than in Upper Silesia.'
In the 1932 elections, the Nazi upsurge amounted to 43.5% in the Breslau electoral division, 48% in Liegnitz - both in Lower Silesia - but only 29.2% in Upper Silesia, where the Catholic Centre remained strong. The Communists were also stronger in Upper Silesia than in Lower Silesia, though they only got 17% even there. As the world knows, in 1933, Paul von Hindenburg, the president after whom my mother's birthplace had been renamed, faced with the danger of civil war, decided to invite Adolf Hitler to become Chancellor. That was in January. On 27th February the Reichstag went up in flames, and the purge of the Left began. Communist and Social Democratic politicians were dragged off to 'wild' concentration camps, many of them murdered. Hermann Goering drafted a new law - to reform the civil service. The police came under this law, and my grandfather's career was severely threatened.

I've told the story, with very little alteration, in Last Train from Kummersdorf. He was accused of being a 'Leftist' - which he was - and saved because my grandmother went to 'a very important person' to plead for him But I shan't write at length about that today. In 1938, my grandfather was moved to Graz, in Austria, at the Anschluss, and never returned to work in Silesia, though there were many family visits.

In 1939, a faked 'Polish raid' on a radio transmittor in Gleiwitz was the excuse for a long-planned German invasion of Poland - and those parts of Silesia which had gone to Poland were returned to German rule. In an eastern corner of that section was a place called Auschwitz.

97% of the population of Kattowice/Kattowitz were frightened enough to claim that they were really Germans - but the Nazis ignored these assertions, and made their own division into Germans; ethnic Germans who hadn't asserted their German nationality before the invasion; persons of indeterminate origin, and Poles who hadn't been 'anti-German.' It was bad luck to be in the 'indeterminate' category. Worse luck to be Jewish, of course. But the horrors of the German occupation of Eastern Europe are well-known. Auschwitz moved into its dreadful place in history. There's something else, that I only found out recently, which is that throughout Silesia monuments and inscriptions that related to the Piast duchy of the past were erased during the Nazi period.

Silesia was a major location for munitions production during the war - but also a 'safe' area, supposed to be bomb-free. Towards the end of the war, there were almost half a million evacuees living there. But in 1944, the Americans, operating out of Italy, got their bombers as far as Upper Silesia. The end was coming.

On land, the Russians had already crossed the frontier into Poland. The rape and slaughter some members of the Red Army inflicted on civilian populations were useful propaganda to keep the Germans fighting to the bitter end. They weren't just 'atrocity stories,' though. Silesia suffered its share of this when the Soviet troops got there. And its Gauleiter, Hanke, decided to make a 'heroic' last stand in Breslau (now Wrocław). To which end he drove, old people, women and children out of the city, in temperatures of -15C. About 18,000 people of them died. Hanke didn't stay to the end, however. Like most of the Nazi leadership he ratted on the people, but not by committing suicide; he left by plane before the city fell, and was never heard of again. Breslau was left in ruins.

Many Silesians fled before the Red Army, and got a cold welcome further west; some refugee 'treks' like the ones I've described in Last Train from Kummersdorf were still wandering around a year later, unable to find anywhere to stay. The diarist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich described a barefoot Silesian child in one of these miserable processions who said: 'My feet hurt.' She lifted them up and they were raw and bleeding.

This time, the whole of Silesia was given to Poland. Churchill was against it, but Stalin insisted, because he wanted territory to resettle the Poles he intended to drive out of their own homes in the Polish Ukraine and Byelorussia. The official transports were formed in spring 1946, but even before that it was the turn of German Silesians to be driven from their home. Some were taken to prison camps, where many died.

One may say that this only mirrored the dreadful crimes Germany committed in Poland, but I think that's a cop-out, because those who suffered weren't necessarily the guilty parties. Neither the children who died in freezing cold railway carriages, or the little girl with the bleeding feet deserved what happened to them. Nor, I think, had my crusty old great-grandfather from the mountains, who hated the Nazis, and, having been deported at the age of ninety, died in a displaced persons' camp in the new East Germany, refusing all my grandfather's attempts to bring him to the west, because he couldn't believe he'd never see his home again.

In Upper Silesia, it was the middle classes who were deported. The working classes remained and were largely polonicised, which caused some suffering. They were to speak Polish, not Silesian, and all German-language inscriptions were now erased, just as the German government had tried to erase all trace of the Polish past. Even gravestones had the German writing hacked off. Here's one, in a churchyard in Zabrze.

In Lower Silesia the entire population was removed.Here's one of the deportation lists.

Meanwhile, new Silesians arrived, the people from the new Russian territories who were given the choice between becoming Russian or moving - or no choice at all. Traumatised and homesick, though these people were, glad to find themselves moving into the often comfortable homes the Germans had been expelled from - right down to furniture, crockery, and bottled fruit and jam- many of them never really settled down in Silesia, always afraid that the Germans would return and they would be be driven out again. The next generation, happily, is more settled.

And what does all this mean to me, personally? As a teenager, my school history books declared that Silesia, like Poland, had been invaded by Germany during the War, and that the Germans who were deported had been semi-criminal carpet-baggers. I knew this wasn't true. When I told people where my mother came from, people looked blank, so I gave up, and said my grandfather lived in the Rhineland.

But I can remember my grandmother weeping about family members 'driven out in the middle of the night, into the snow.' And I used to look at my toys and make mental lists of which ones I'd take, if we in our turn had to flee. That has given me, in adulthood, sympathy with the refugees and asylum-seekers so vilified in current society.

Many Germans, even, look askance at you if you say your family comes from Silesia - perhaps because of a pain they can't deal with. And I do wonder why people can't deal with what is, after all, simple historical truth? Silesia was my mother's birthplace, and my family's home. Now other people live there and it's their home. I totally accept that, but the country is nevertheless part of my identity. Why should I pretend otherwise?

In 2009, I finally visited Silesia, having wanted to for years. But I'll write about that next month, to stop this one getting as long as War and Peace.

At the moment, I'm reading Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge's biography of Vera Brittain; this is because I've just re-read Testament of Youth, and I wanted to know what someone else thought of her.

Even the Ghosts are Reading Books - Emma Darwin

2012-02-22T08:30:00.034Z

Everyone knows that writers are also readers, and by writers I don't (for once) just mean novelists. We need books, and we need more books than we can afford or house, so we need libraries. But we also need books, as far as is possible, when we need them: not before (because working with too much research is like trying to catch a waterfall in a cup) and not after (because it can be hard to re-route a story which has gone off on mistaken rails). I have friends who almost live in the gorgeousness of the new British Library, which has moved out of the Victorian-neoclassical glories of the British Museum Reading Room to live next to the Victorian-gothic glories of St Pancras station. I have other friends who bring joy to their local librarian's heart by using every drop of all that professional expertise, but neither of those are quite what I need; the essence of my practice as a writer is that when I'm doing research, fact-checking is the least important part of it. The more important stuff is what I can't really know that I'm looking for, so certainly couldn't find in a catalogue.

One day back in the 1840s, the story goes, the great historian Thomas Carlyle was sitting in the British Museum, waiting for the books he'd ordered to be brought from the bookstacks. He waited for an hour and a half, unable to get any further with what he was working on, and when they arrived they were the wrong books. And because of how the Library worked and still does, even if he did re-order them, by the time they'd been retrieved and brought to him, most of the working day would be over. Up he got and walked out, and on his way home to Chelsea he vowed to found a library where scholars could go into the bookstacks for themselves, browse, find and retrieve what they wanted, and take it home.

The London Library began on the first floor of the Traveller's Club, in Pall Mall, and Thackeray was its first auditor. It grew fast, and soon moved to its current home round the corner in St James's Square; Eliot (George), Dickens and my own great-great-grandpapa were among its early members. Its current president is Tom Stoppard and you'll see many a face you recognise from a book jacket and many more that you don't, as you look up from where you're tucked in a corner in Science & Miscellaneous Quarto, digging among the early books about photography. (Why is Photography not in the Art Room? Well, the library was founded only four years after Fox Talbot patented the Calotype, so I'll forgive them.)

But it is, very emphatically, a working library not a social club: this blog entry gives you a better idea and more pictures than I possibly can. There is now very nice room tucked up in the eaves to have coffee and eat the sandwiches you brought with you, as there wasn't when A S Byatt set the first scene of Possession there, but that's about the only visible concession to modern habits. Oh, and the enormous e-library you can get at from home, the wifi, and the Twitter account: just follow @TheLondonLib. It's recently somehow found space in a very crowded corner of the world to enlarge itself considerably, mainly thanks to the success of another member's little book of comic poems about Cats: Eliot (T.S). Essentially, though, it's just the nicest place in London to work, and the library that best combines practicality (once you've got the hang of its idiosyncratic classification system) and scholarship, and that's why I and thousands of other writers of every kind are members.

But none of all these delights would be worth the membership fee if it didn't do what I want. A central tenet of the Library's philosophy is that knowledge grows, develops, shifts, but it is never outdated. And so, unlike public libraries they never get rid of a book. This is particularly useful for the historical novelist, because the pre-siftedness of a history book may well not tell me what I need to know.

So, in The Mathematics of Love Stephen and Lucy drive along the north coast of Spain, from San Sebastian to Bilbao. Google Earth and a cheap plane ticket could tell me about the physical geography, but what about the human geography? I only found the answer by kneeling on the iron-gridded floor of the bookstacks, in Topography>Spain: an 1860s guide to travelling in Northern Spain, complete with engravings by Honoré Daumier. There was an overloaded diligence staggering along those mountain roads, the costumes of market women, farmers, sailors, priests and nuns, evocations of crumbling villages and bustling towns, the usual English horror of Catholicism and the pity for the picturesque peasants that they weren't allowed to know any better... even a picture of the writer preaching Evangelical Protestantantism to a group of urchins on the beach. And most delightful for me, were observations of the lingering scars of the Peninsular War. Perhaps the innkeeper the author found more welcoming than most in San Sebastian was the son of the man who welcomed Stephen fifty years before. For A Secret Alchemy the formal history books were essential, of course, as I was dealing with real historical characters, so some of the time my booklist looked more like a historian's, even though I'd hesitate to show it to the really proper historians around me in the Reading Room.

And the Work in Progress? All I'll say now is that not only has that shelf of very early photography books been well-explored, but the one I have on my desk at home has patches of chemical stains. And since the science, like the art, of photography, is eternally restless, I can probably narrow down those stains to about twenty years or so. I wonder who put them there? It's not really essential to the novel that the 1913 Baedeker to Southern France, which is next to it on my desk, has pencil notes in the margin about mountains climbed and hotels stayed in. It has a list in the back, in the same hand, as the scholars say: Photographs, and a plan for the week. Who was it?

You'll have gathered by now that for this historical novelist, at least, part of the joy of the London Library is that I'm walking (kneeling, writing, longing for coffee) in the footsteps of my fellow-members of and in the past. They have their stories too, and since the Work in Progress has real historical people in it, and some of them were members of the London Library, maybe all I'll have to do is sit there, at one of the quiet single desks in some corner of the stacks, and listen for the whisk of petticoats or the harrumph of a handsome pair of whiskers. In the London Library even the ghosts are reading books.

Fanny Burney by Imogen Robertson

2012-02-21T00:01:00.000Z

I was inspired by Marie Louise Jensen’s post on Aphra Behn, so may I put forward another pioneer, the wonderful Fanny Burney? Virginia Woolf said "All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds." Fanny Burney she called “the mother of English fiction”.

Novelist, playwright, diarist and letter writer she is one of those stars of the 18th century whose liveliness and delight in skewering her characters (real and fictional) made the period come alive for me.

In fact, I’m indebted to her whole family. Her father was a respected musicologist who travelled Europe to study music, I used his observations of castrato singers writing of Anatomy of Murder; and her sister Susan left in her diary a wonderful account of the opera season of 1781 which was also invaluable.

Fanny remains my favourite though. She published her first novel, Evelina, anonymously in 1778, and it was an instant hit. She seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed hearing her friends praise the book to her, not knowing that she wa

s the author, and laughed at herself for it. When her identity became known, she found herself admired and befriended by Hester Thrale, another writer of very useful letters, Samuel Johnson and Sheridan. If her play of the following year, The Witlings, is anything to go by, not all her acquaintances were literary luminaries of such standing.

This play, never produced in her life time, has a very thin plot that serves as a vehicle for a full-blooded satire on amateur writers and their admirers. There is Mr Dabbler, who wants nothing more than an opportunity to read his verses and have them praised; Lady Smatter who misattributes every half-remembered quote she comes up with; Mr Codger who never manages to finish a thought, because everyone about him is so keen to speak themselves, he never gets beyond his ponderous introductions and my favourite, Mrs Sapient who states the obvious and banal as if it is the fruits of long study. We’ve all got a bit of those character in us. The play has real vigour and bite. It’s also very funny, and the non-romantic hero, Mr Censor, has such a talent at cutting these monsters down to size, you could call him a sort of proto-Darcy. Actually even though Witlings was never produced (women writing comedy was pushing it a bit), Burney was a huge influence on Jane Austen. Does this, for instance, sound familiar? ‘The whole of this unfortunate business," said Dr Lyster, "has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE.” (from Cecilia 1782)

Sorry, I can’t resist just quoting a moment from Witlings:

Lady Smatter: I was reading, the other day, that the memory of a poet should be short, that his works may be original.

Dabler: Heavens, madam, where did you meet with that?

Lady Smatter: I can’t exactly say, but either in Pope or Swift.

Dabler: O curse it, how unlucky!

Lady Smatter: Why so?

Dabler: Why, madam, ’tis my own thought! I’ve just finished an epigram upon that very subject! I protest I shall grow more and more sick of books every day, for I can never look into any, but I’m sure of popping upon something of my own.

Lady Smatter: Well but, dear sir, pray let’s hear your epigram.

Dabler: Why,— if your Ladyship insists upon it — [Reads.]

Ye gentle Gods, O hear me plead,

And kindly grant this little loan;

Make me forget whate’er I read

That what I write may be my own.

Lady Smatter: O charming! Very clever indeed.

Beaufort: But pray, sir, if such is your wish, why should you read at all?

Dabler: Why, sir, one must read; one’s reputation requires it; for it would be cruelly confusing to be asked after such or such an author, & never to have looked into him. especially to a person who passes for having some little knowledge in these matters.

The whole play is online here. It’s well worth a read. Now, I can’t cram half of what needs to be said about this woman into a blog post, so can I recommend the brilliant biography of her by Claire Harman? Just to turn that suggestion from a temptation to a necessity, think of the following choice nuggets, (and this is aside from her importance from a literary point of view). She was a witness to the madness of King George III. He chased her through the gardens at Kew. She wrote one of the most harrowing accounts of surgery pre-anaesthesia that exists, describing her mastectomy; and here’s the one that really makes my eyes widen thinking of what she saw and experienced in her life - she was four years older than Mozart and died the year Cézanne was born.

'An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?' by A. L. Berridge

2012-02-20T00:30:00.000Z

A few months ago I visited a military museum as part of my research for ‘Into the Valley of Death’. The wonderfully obliging curator showed me every detail of the uniforms, but when I askedwhen the regiment’s smooth-bore muskets were replaced with the Minié rifle Isaw for the first time he was unprepared. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, hastening tolook in the records. ‘I thought you’d be writing a historical romance.’

There was no need to ask why. Several members of the CrimeanWar Research Society had already asked ‘Are you writing a romance?’, and I somehowdon’t believe they’d have put the same question to a man. Yet before I start ranting about sexism, there’s actuallygood statistical foundation for these assumptions. If you browse the authors inthe Historical Novel Society, there’s no doubt ‘romances’ are written overwhelmingly by women, while ‘action andmilitary’ are very firmly the province of men. There are exceptions, of course,and writers like Robyn Young, Philippa Gregory and M.C. Scott have all provedwomen can more than hold their own in a military world, but in generalthere’s a truth to the expectation that women don’t write war. What I want toknow is – why?

The best explanation I can think of lies in the adage thatwe should only write what we know. As someone with imagination I’m not sure Iagree with that, but when I read the novels of men like Douglas Reeman or George MacDonald Fraser, it’s impossible not to recognizethat someone who has actually fought in a war will have far greater knowledgeand understanding of it than I can aspire to.

It’s also true that the one placewhere nobody bats an eyelash at the nature of my research is the Crimea itself,and when I attended the parade on Sevastopol’s National Day it was easy to seewhy this was.

(Is it just me, by the way, or is that poor lad in themiddle struggling to find somewhere safe to put his elbow?)

We can see this kind of scene everywhere now, but women inthe Ukraine have been an essential and active part of the military since thedays of Russian rule, and I was moved to see so many of them marching with theveterans of WWII.

Here, at least, is one place where no-one thinks it strangethat a woman should be interested in the business of war.

But I don’t believe military service is the only factor. Many of theforemost male writers in this field have no more experience than I do,but still no-one queries the credentials of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden,Robert Fabbri or Simon Scarrow – and I doubt anyone asks if they writeromances. There’s something else at play here, a long-standing perception thatthe subject of war is somehow unsuitable for women.

I first encountered this at the age of 8, when my sistersand I were so fascinated by the film ‘Zulu’ that we not only ‘played’ itrelentlessly, but even wrote an appalling series of ‘Zulu Weekly’s about it.All might have been well had our poor parents and schoolfriends remained theonly unwilling recipients of this dross, but we also sent one to the actorStanley Baker himself, and the next thing we knew the Cambridge Evening Newswas at the door. An article about our insatiable blood-lust appeared the nextday, and a week later they were back with a camera.

Yep, that's me with the plaits. Sorry.

We were too excited by the glory to recognize the tone ofthe previous article, and when the BBC asked my father to participate in adiscussion about the impact of cinema on impressionable minds while weperformed Zulu dances in the background, we were devastated when he said no.Apart from the insanity of actually wanting to be filmed frolicking in nothingbut gym knickers and cotton wool, we simply didn’t get what it was all about. Ithought it was our age that made us exceptional, but my mother pointed outwearily that boys much younger than us played at violent westerns all the time.What made this a story was the fact that we were girls.

I should have seen it, really. We should have known when thereporters wanted us to wear skirts for the picture, and when the photographerwrapped one plait round my shoulder to make sure it would show. We certainlyshould have suspected it when the question we were repeatedly asked was ‘Andare you all really bloodthirsty?’ We weren’t, actually, and the one shot of thefilm we none of us liked was the (now ridiculously tame) close-up of a spearplunging into a soldier’s chest, but we could see what the nice adults reallywanted and obediently gave them a resounding ‘Yes!’ They wanted freaks – nicelittle girls who liked blood and gore – and I’m afraid that’s what we gavethem.

But it’s not the ‘gore factor’ that militates against usnow. The Patricia Cornwell school of pathologists analyses mutilations to thehuman body even Jack the Ripper didn’t imagine, and no-one says women shouldn’twrite crime. Nor is it the horrors, and no-one reading Karen Maitland’s ‘TheGallows Curse’ or Michelle Lovric’s ‘The Book of Human Skin’ ever doubts theability of women to ‘write dark’. It’s just war.

And only real ones. We can write fictional or legendary ‘maybe’wars, as in Rosemary Sutcliffe’s ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’, but real wars thatpeople died in – no. There's perhaps a fair point there, in that such warsshould never be trivialized or glorified – but why would a woman be morelikely to do this than a man? No-one could read Louisa Young’s beautiful ‘MyDear, I Wanted To Tell You’ and fail to be moved by the truth and poignancywith which she conveys the real tragedy of war.

But there is a difference. We’re allowed to write about waras a background to a love story or a setting for a tragedy of human endurance;it’s only the day-in day-out action of it that’s not apparently our business. ‘Intothe Valley of Death’ is my first full-scale venture into writing about war, andwhile it’s concerned with the pity and horror of the Crimea Ican’t deny there's excitement and adventure too. Yet there’splenty of that in the work of Bernard Cornwell, and I doubt many would questionhis suitability to write it. It’s just women who shouldn’t go there. Just us.


The closest women should get to war

It seems there’s a perception that women must always bedilettantes, that their involvement trivialises what should be avery serious masculine rite. I felt this first when researching for my novelsset in 17th century France, and approached a local fencing club for helpchecking the choreography of my sword-fights. The very helpful Secretary dulyforwarded my query to one of their experts, but I don’t think I was meant tosee the reply. The man responded to the Secretary without seeing I was copiedin, and all he said was ‘Tell her to watch “The Mark of Zorro”’.

Yet whatever one may think about that man (and trust me, Ihave), the fact remains that somewhere under the sexism is a real andlegitimate point. War may at times seem a world of almost masonic mystery wherewomen shouldn’t tread – but how would women feel if a man wrote a novel set ina community of nuns? War is different. There is a kind of unique brotherhood forgedbetween men who stand under fire together, who face death and privation, whohave to maim and to kill and stay sane. There is a kind of comradeship verydifferent from that normally enjoyed by women, and if I can’t even acknowledge it thenhow on earth can I write about it? I do acknowledge it, I’ve talked extensivelyto modern day veterans to attempt to understand it – but why should I even try?

Perhaps because I write about people: my ‘men’ are asimportant to me as my ‘women’, and my interest is almost wholly in character.If we’re considering gender stereotypes, then there may be some truth in theidea that men are more interested in facts and women in emotions, but that’s alousy reason for a woman not to write about an event when emotions can never bemore heightened, friendships can never be more intense, and the personal stakescan never be higher. It’s a rotten reason for saying women shouldn’t writeabout war.

Why they should is another matter – and seeing how long thisalready is I’ll have to save it for another post. All I’ll say here is that ifthere’s one thing we History Girls all have in common it’s our ability to care aboutcharacters who lived a long time ago and went through experiences we will(hopefully) ourselves never know. Among many others, I care about men who weresoldiers.

Is that so very wrong?

***

A.L. Berridge's website

'Into the Valley of Death' comes out May 2012.

As if! by Theresa Breslin

2012-02-19T00:28:00.010Z

I was more amused than outraged when those words "As if!" were used as a complete sentence by one of the characters in Downton Abbey. For me it was just another of the many idiosyncrasies of a series which takes a look at a supposed aspect of life at the beginning of the previous century. But when I heard the same sentence uttered during Spielberg's version of War Horse I was startled. Did I mishear? And if not, am I wrong in thinking this to be an anachronism?

Historical novels are prone to anachronisms. I would hesitate to take anyone to task about this and not just because I'm sure a careful combing of my own books might reveal embarrassing glitches. I respect my fellow writers who work extremely hard and labour over their craft, also writers of historical fiction have the particular hurdle of 'Time Truth' However I'll make an exception and share my recent "find" in a School Book Fair of a story that has Queen Elizabeth the first cycling ( yes, on a bike!) between Hampton Court and the Palace of Westminster. There's also the children's TV series that has Mona Lisa, disguised as a boy, working as an apprentice painter in the same studio as a teenage Leonardo da Vinci, and hanging out with a streetwise kid named Mac ( that's Machiavelli to you and me). I know it was a deliberate decision to 'modernise' the action but I find this quite painful to watch. Does it raise valid questions? I mean, how do we know that Leonardo and Lisa didn't run around Florence in ( the equivalent of) trainers and high-five each other? Is it as out of place as having a character curtsey before the 16th Century when this form of obeisance evolved at the French Court? I do believe the rightly revered Rosemary Sutcliffe did.

However its the language more than anything that intrigues me. The thrill, the fascination, the power of word, the literal meaning coupled with emotional resonance, the freight that a phrase can carry. A writer can lift the language above the ordinary, can corral emotions, create the illuminating shaft of light to send into a dark corner of the mind.

As Solomon, the dyslexic boy in Whispers in the Graveyard thinks:

Words, words are different.
I heard someone reading poetry on the radio once. The phrases stayed inside me for weeks, exploding in my head, thrusting and twisting in my gut.

I'm very disappointed that Garrow's Law has been axed from television as I loved the dialogue and the diction. So caught up in the sweep of the story and the skill of the acting I was unaware of any inappropriate words.

Ah indeed! Choosing the words is the challenge.

I discovered 'chaffering' in a 15th Century journal so I knew it was fine to have that in The Medici Seal. But.... To maffick or not to maffick? That was the question. I can't recall where I found this nugget but I knew I had to have it. It's such a decisive sounding word and I thought to deploy it to inject a bit of spit into a variety of situations. A quick dictionary looksee revealed that maffick is derived from Mafeking, the South African town besieged during the Boer War of the 19th / 20th Century and so I felt I couldn't use it in a book set in the Middle Ages. At home I whined so much about having to take it out that my family began to incorporate it into anything said withing my earshot, as in,
"Don't maffick about. Hurry up and eat your dinner"
"Someone's mafficked my tennis racquet."

When they were young, my children, like many others, often made up words. A day could be 'bilby' or 'gilp' vis. dull / overcast. I believed that one of my offspring had invented 'splendiferous' until I came across it in a thesauarus. I'm still not sure about 'horipillation'. It's coming up red on the Spell Check, but then quite a few of the Scots words I use do too. like 'dreich' (misty, drizzling day) but, strangely, not 'fleer'. In the present work-in-progress I have resisted the temptation to write that Mary, Queen of Scots, is surrounded by a fanfaronade of niddering mulligrubs, although her fate might have been less tragic had she realised this. 'Chortle' was coined by Lewis Carroll in the late 19th century, meaning something between a laugh and a chuckle. Can you Chorltle with a Wortle? Sorry. Wortle is definitely one of the children's contributions - haven't worked out yet whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective. Obviously people were chortling prior to the late 19th but is it OK for me to use that word to describe what they were doing?

Do all writers of historical fiction check the etymology of every word they use?

As if!

Theresa Breslin's latest historical novel PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION won the teenage section of The Historical Association, Young Quills Award, is shortlisted for the Scottish Children's Book Award, and was voted favourite book by the young people shadowing the Carnegie Medal Book Awards. WHISPERS IN THE GRAVEYARD won the Carnegie Medal.

January Competition winners

2012-02-18T21:52:00.000Z

... are now posted up on the Competitions Page.

Sorry for the delay in notifying you all. This has been because of illness, jetlag, snow delay and insomnia on my part! (Mary Hoffman)

Meon Hill - A Valentine's Day Death - Celia Rees

2012-02-18T00:01:00.002Z

For me, Valentine's Day is not just a time for cards and flowers. I grew up in the West Midlands and every Valentine's Day, the local T.V. (ATV Today, we had it on before Crossroads) had a feature about the gruesome murder of of Charles Walton up on Meon Hill, just outside Stratford-on-Avon. Walton was killed in 1945 but the case was unsolved and had overtones of witchcraft. Enough to fascinate my brother and me (we were both fans of Dennis Wheatley) and to stick in my head.

The details of the murder were, indeed, bizarre. Walton was murdered on 14th February, a significant date in itself, but associated by the old calendar with the Celtic Festival of Imbolc. He was an old man, in his seventies, and out on the hill hedging and ditching. He was a farm labourer, living in a little cottage in the small village of Lower Quinton. When he didn't come back for his dinner, his niece went to look for him. She found him with his throat slashed with his own bill hook which was still embedded in his neck. He was pinned to the bank by a two pronged pitch fork and a large cross had been carved into his chest. It looked very like a ritual murder and Walton had a reputation for witch craft. The only thing that was missing from his body was an old tin watch. He was rumoured to carry a scrying mirror, a piece of mica, in the back of it which he used to overlook people and ill wish them.

Whatever the motives, the locals shut up like clams and eventually the famed Fabian of the Yard was brought in to try and crack the case. He never did, It was his only unsolved murder. It was said that he came back every year to walk the hill, re-visit the site, go for a pint in the pub and remind the villagers that he had not forgotten. He always believed that they knew the perpetrator but held to a code of silence. The village of Lower Quinton, which lies beneath the hill, is a small place, a few farms and a collection of cottages clustered round a green and a pub, the College Arms. It must have been quite isolated back in 1945 and, even now, it often seems eerily deserted. It's rare to see anyone about and it is still impossible to find anyone willing to talk about the case.

On one of Fabian's visits, he encountered a black dog. When he asked a boy if he had seen the beast, the child ran away. Later that day, a black dog was found hanging in a tree. This might just have been an incident of macabre cruelty, perhaps to warn him, but there were long associations with black dogs in the area. Walton himself was known to have encountered a black dog nine times in his youth. After the last occasion, he learnt that his sister had died. These black dogs were not regarded as ordinary hounds, but manifestations of the Barghest and the other black dogs of British Folklore. Meon Hill was said to be hunted over by the Cwn Annwn, the spectral hounds of the Mabinogion; another legend says it was the Yell Hounds, the Devil's Dandy Dogs, following Herne the Hunter, harrying the souls of the unshriven down to hell. Meon Hill itself is rumoured to be the haunt of fairies - and of witches who still gather there. It is a place regarded with superstition, even dread, by some living thereabouts. There are those will not walk on the hill in the daytime, let alone at night.

The stories are many and odd and exert a fascination. I've revisited the place several times in fiction. The first time was with Colour Her Dead, now long out of print. I changed the name of the hill, the village beneath it, the details of the case, but kept the unsolved nature of the crime. What interested me was the missing watch. With so much time elapsing, I began thinking: what if it turned up in a junk shop somewhere - in nearby Stratford, say? Put there by someone clearing somebody's effects with no idea that this is vital clue to an unsolved murder. What could happen then? So are books born. I changed the victim to a child and the watch to a handful of beads found in a junk shop by 17 year old Jude who likes to make her own jewellery. It has been out of print for ages, but I was pretty proud of Colour Her Dead. Very Ruth Rendell, even though I say it myself.

The next time Meon got a mention was in The Fool's Girl. Shakespeare coming home on May Day, after Beltane. I took a bit of poetic licence, but the hill is visible for miles around and he might just have been able to see it from the old road between Stratford and Oxford. He would certainly have known it and its reputation. The hill even appears in my new book, This Is Not Forgiveness, under the guise of Beldon Hill, casting its spell, exerting its powerful natural magic in a whole new way.

STEPPING INTO BLEAK HOUSE by Penny Dolan

2012-02-17T10:18:00.001Z

I’ve just finished reading “Bleak House”, almost hard on the heels of Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens. It is the first time I’ve read all the way through,although I have begun it more than once and my head is cram-full of questions and ponderings.

Many of the History Girls will be far better acquainted with the The Inimitable, so all I am offering are my currently swirling thoughts, with apologies to any scholars.

To begin with, Dickens is not exactly a perfect writer. He often shows what, in current view, a writer should not do. He creates over-long descriptions. He creates puffed-up elongated scenes, admittedly for the entertainment of a different historic time. Read now, some of these needed more attention than is available on insomniac nights.

As my eyes slid along such paragraphs, I conjured up Victorian fathers reading onward, aloud, while the not-entirely-rapt listeners drifted into a doze or played with the cat or concentrated on a particularly troublesome embroidery stitch during such passages.

I felt Dickens glorying in the sound of his own prose, of his own voice. I hear him reading his work aloud to his trusty Foster. Dickens must have killed some of his darlings - but it doesn’t always feel so. Can the relationship between writer and chosen reader or editor get too close? Do all writing critique groups fall into self-perpetuating attitudes? Maybe there is an acoount of these meetings?

Besides, Bleak House veers and slides from one genre to the next. Is it a mystery? A ghost story? A crime novel? A romance in response to Jane Eyre? Possibly a historical novel, set as it is before the arrival of the railways? The novel has a jackdaw quality, as if Dickens picks up an attractive idea and runs with it for a while before pulling another out of a more interestin hedge. Aren’t we all given to worrying about writing the next new thing?

Published in instalments, there’s a definite creaking to his planning at times. I’d almost heard strains of "Thank God I had that idea!” at times. Not quite the Robert McKee story structure method, set out with cards or diagrams or planned by Scrivener.

There’s an emotional randomness about the characters, even though I’ve now seen notes that show this character is the mirror of that character and so on. I don’t know enough to feel convinced Dickens worked like that, not at first, although the Romantic element of the novel insists he pull everything together tightly the end.

The written cast, with their eccentric names, burn on the page unevenly and plentifully, from the main characters to those like Miss Flyte with her caged birds of doom to the wonderful woman that is Mrs Bagnet. I feel I shall shall strive to be Mrs Bagnet in future.

It is hard to read Dickens freshly now. Having seen early episodes of the BBC’s most recent Bleak House, Mr Guppy will ever be Burn Gorman.

I’m also sure that Anna Maxwell Martin’s intelligent and sensible face was the one image that helped me cope with Esther Summerson’s almost impossible first person account this time.

I can see what Dickens intends to do through Esther's Narrative but I am not sure I like the way he is doing it.

But above all, what stood out for me was that Bleak House has another quality too. It is offensive.

It is offensive and offended about much of his society, as if Dicken's eyes and heart are worn out with what he has seen.

Over the course of the 380,00 words, Dickens castigates the whole working of the legal system. He shows it feeding of itself, existing only to multiply costs and empty pockets into its own coffers. Not, I thought, unlike some no-win-no-fee scams, or some of the consultancy firms involved in government projects or those saviour companies that arrive to asset-strip after takeovers. Entirely legally.

Dickens started Bleak House in 1851, after a year’s break, not that the whirlwind man ever had such a thing. In that period, as well as items of journalism, he had helped Angela Burdett-Coutts plans for slum clearances. He had was instrumental in setting up her home for fallen women, even to suggestions for decoration of the rooms. He helped to set up a Guild of Literature and Art, intended to help poor writers and artists, put on huge theatricals to raise money for charitable causes and more besides.

He had been watching the dark and dreadful side of Victorian England - poverty, unemployment, disease, squalor, harsh working conditions, jobless soldiers, the burden of the elderly, quarrels over public and private rights, the content of education, the lending and borrowing of money, the divisions and inequalities in society - just when the Great Exhibition was prominent in every paper and journal as “a showcase for Britain”, although those words might be taken from a more recent time.

Bleak House, as a book, works despite its difficulties because, so often, the pages ring with emotion and indignation. The personality of Dickens – his “good character” – comes through so strongly that one is held to the story despite the onslaught of relationships and relations and the effusive paragraphs.

The book is just as “offensive” now, making the reader brood on what has changed, if anything, and what has not. Only a few of his fifty-nine characters end up with happiness and often hard-bought.

I want to discover more about how Dickens actually wrote this novel. Are there any History Girls who have studied the Dickens archives, I wonder?

Arthur Calder-Marshall's unabridged edition has notes suggesting that Dickens drew his characters from real people. Was John Jarndyce as a kinder portrait of his father? Georgina the model for Esther? Leigh Hunt the sponger Skimpole? No doubt there are more real people and places offered as inspiration.

However, what fascinates me is how on earth did he weave it all together? How did he hold it all in his mind? The scope and the content of Bleak House is unsettling.

Dickens is not always a perfect writer but somehow he makes himself a most, most memorable one

www.pennydolan.com

Penny Dolan's novel for 9-12 year olds, A BOY CALLED M.O.U.S.E., is published by Bloomsbury

Mind the gap! By Sue Purkiss

2012-02-16T06:00:00.001Z

At the moment, I'm grappling with a structural problem in the book I'm writing. My story is set in World War Two, and most of it takes place in a prisoner of war camp. My problem is that the significant events of the story occur in the first two years and the last few months of the war. One of the worst things about POW camps was that from one month to another, very little changed; nothing much happened in the intervening two years, so I have a desert to cross.

A similar thing happened when I was writing Warrior King, about the earlier part of the life of Alfred the Great. (I was going to make a note to myself at this point to choose my subjects more carefully - but a) sometimes the subject chooses you, and b) I guess that actually, this must be a common problem for writers of historical fiction as history is decidedly inconsiderate in the way it spaces out events.)

Anyway, to return to the magnificent Alfred. (Just look at him on the cover there. Isn't he gorgeous?) The problem here was that the bits that interested me occurred when he was growing up, and then ten years or so later, when he was forced to flee to Athelney and take up baking. There was another problem too: Warrior King was a book for young people, and so it would be better to tell the story from a child's viewpoint. After trying out one or two possibilities, in the end I divided the book into two parts. At the end of the first part, Alfred has just become King. He goes into the room where his small daughter is sleeping, and he makes her a promise.

It seemed to him that he had never seen anything as lovely as the curve of her dark eyelashes resting on the softness of her cheek, and he touched her hair very gently, letting one golden curl wind itself round his finger.
"Up till now," he said very quietly, "everyone I've ever loved has either died or gone away. Now my last brother's gone, the best of all of us. And so I'm king. And from this day on, so help me God, I'm going to keep the people safe, and I'm going to keep you safe. I will find a way. No matter what it takes."

The second part begins with the great crisis of his reign, when his ability to fulfil that promise is tested to the utmost. And the story is told now by that same daughter, Fleda, who is determined to be part of her father's struggle.

My last post sparked off a discussion in another forum about historical fiction books we knew and loved as teenagers. Frances Thomas reminded us of Desiree, by Annemarie Selinko. Thanks to Kindle, I was able to download it in the wink of an eye, and I'm re-reading it at present. It interests me to see whether old favourites stand the harsh test of time. An earlier, huge favourite, which I borrowed from the library time after time, was The Amazing Mr Whisper by Brenda Macrow.. I was thrilled when I eventually managed to track down a copy a couple of years ago, only to find that it's been superseded by subsequent books in a similar genre (ie, real children find their way into a parallel world which owes much to myth and legend) and the magic was tarnished.

As far as I can find out, Annemarie Selinko was an Austrian journalist and political writer, married to a Danish husband. They were living in Denmark when the war broke out, but fled from the Gestapo to Sweden, where they worked with the Swedish Red Cross assisting refugees. She used aspects of her experiences in Desiree, her last novel, which tells the story of a silk merchant's daughter who was once engaged to Napoleon and later married one of his Marshals, subsequently becoming Desideria, Queen of Sweden.

Annemarie Selinko was clearly no lightweight, but the same cannot be said of her heroine. Desiree is appealing, bright, courageous and funny, but she is poorly educated and despite the position in which she finds herself, she is uninterested in politics. She is the narrator, so everything must be filtered through her. Somehow, Selinko has to convey through her the complexities of Napoleon's career and campaigns - because the story of Napoleon is at the centre of this book: Desiree's story, beguiling as it is, is a means to an end. How does she do it?

(Interesting, to see an old cover and a recent one!)

Well, sometimes a character imparts an improbable amount of information over a gossip and a cup of hot chocolate, and it doesn't quite work. But mostly, it does. Selinko uses Desiree's political naivety to her advantage: Desiree needs to know what is going on because it will directly affect her marriage and her family - so she nails someone in the know and makes them explain everything to her in words of one syllable. Or again, a political big hitter such as Talleyrand or Fouche explains things to her because they need to use her as a conduit to her husband. Or else she explains things to someone even less clued up, such as her sister or her son.. It's all very cleverly done: so we read a story which seems to be light and frothy, but in fact a vast amount of complicated history is being imparted. I remember 'doing' Napoleon at school, and learning far, far less.

All of which, I think, is suggesting to me how I should approach my current dilemma.. So - better get on with it!

A Forgotten Pioneer by Marie-Louise Jensen

2012-02-15T00:30:00.000Z

One might think that the first woman in English literature to make her living as a professional writer would be an icon for us all. She blazed the trail for every one of us, after all. But does any one know her name?
Aphra Behn was the courageous and talented woman in question. I'm glad to say, her works ARE still in print - though she's not precisely a household name. Her plays, once so popular, are rarely performed now, though they did stay in the theatre repetoire for over a hundred years.

Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn, born Aphra Johnson in 1640, is a shady and fascinating character. Little is known about her except that it's thought she lived for a spell in Surinam and was widowed after only a short marriage. In 1667 Behn served as a spy for King Charles II in Antwerp. This seems a daring and unusual thing for a woman to have done at that time. Unfortunately, it seems she discovered little of much use for the King. In the way of kings, he therefore considered it beneath him to actually pay her for her loyalty to the crown. This led to her being imprisoned in 1668 for the debts she'd incurred in his service.

In Aphra Behn's day, women had very few choices for earning money. Marriage or becoming some man's mistress were the two main choices for a woman of birth and education. Behn chose neither, opting instead to write her way out of debt. She wrote plays, stories and poems and became both highly regarded and successful. She was not the only woman playwright of the time, but she was the first and the most successful.

The era being the Restoration, the Comedy of Manners was the vogue. In the hands of Congreve, Wycherly and the like, these were bawdy, rather heartless romps of intrigues and betrayals. Aphra Behn turned the genre into something different. She was subversive and addressed the dire situation of women; both nobly born and courtesans.

In The Rover, arguably Behn's best known play, Hellena is a young girl ordered by her father and brother to marry an elderly man. She has plenty to say on the subject of young girls marrying old men; so much so that when the play was performed in the Georgian era, some of her best speeches were cut short, because they were considered too outspoken and shocking.

But Behn didn't restrict her concerns for women to the wealthy classes: the tragedy of the courtesan who gives her heart to a roving soldier only to be utterly betrayed is a moving part of the play. No wonder Behn is considered a feminist. Her life and her works shrug off the conventional, call for choice and openly criticize the restricted role of women.

I rediscovered Behn and her fabulous play whilst researching what kind of reading material my narrator might have had access to in 1715. Given that The Girl in the Mask contains both spies and girls who won't accept their place in society, it was simply too good to resist. Behn, her life and her play all have an important part to play in my own character's rebellion against social norms. She is quite simply an inspiration.

A Love Note To My Unlovely Local Library Catherine Johnson

2012-02-14T08:57:00.002Z

There's only a sort of love in this post. I've never really written an out and out romance, the book that most closely fits the bill won't be out for another year (at least) so I thought about this instead. A week ago was National Libraries day and I owe plenty to Hackney Central library. Young readers often ask where do you get your ideas from, and the answer, more than once, has been my library.

This happened ages ago, the book in question STELLA, is now out of print, but it came about because of lots of things all swirling about, and coalescing around a book I picked up by accident: Lou Taylor's Mourning Dress. A Costume and Social History.
As a Londoner I have always loved our wonderful cemetaries. I grew up in North London, and when I was young and Highgate was closed to the public we would often climb in, a pretty big dare as the place was always in the local paper due to satanist activity. Funerals are a big thing with my family too, my Welsh grandmother had a fantastic collection of funeral cards from 1898 onwards. Invitations with the date and a quote or two from the Bible. Lovely things.

Then I went to the library with my kids, as usual. However the library had moved into porta cabins, draughty and clunky like two biscuit tins stacked on top of one another. And of course the children's department was on the top floor. Not at all conducive to an afternoon spent lazily flicking through the racks of picture books or sprawled on a beanbag with Six Dinner Sid. However, the reference dept, squeezed and squashed into about an eighth of it's usual space was right next door. I started on the spiritualism and stopped when I found Lou Taylor's (a fashion historian in Brighton) marvelous book. I took it out three borrows in a row and wrote STELLA. I even wrote Lou Taylor a card to say thank you.

The library offers so many wonderful mind jogging opportunities. If I ever get stuck with an empty brain I am right there. One books leads to another and a million new questions spread and grow. It is lovely.

When the library moved into it's new modern (and definitely toxic) new home the book had been moved. I eventually tracked it down the plate in the front warned it was now not to be lent out, but only for use in the library. I had to buy my own

This is one of the many, lovely illustrations; Mrs Howe of New York in Mourning dress.

A VISIT TO MORTLAKE - Mary Hooper

2012-02-13T03:35:00.000Z

When I was writing my book set in the household of Dr John Dee (At the House of the Magician) I did a little light research in the village where he lived: Mortlake, SW London. Sadly, there is precious little left now to connect the magician to the place, just a 60s block of flats named John Dee House and looking about as unmagical as it is possible to get. There is no trace of his herb garden, his library or the huge house visited at least twice by Elizabeth I, who rode over on her horse from the Palace of Richmond. One of Dee’s biographers says that the house shared a garden wall with the church, though, and I made use of this knowledge with a scene in my book where Dr Dee tries to raise a spirit from one of the graves (this scene prompted by a 16th Century illustration).

But Dee is not actually buried in the churchyard there, which was a disappointment. To see a fascinating tomb, however, you should make your way to the Roman Catholic church a few hundred yards away, where the explorer, poet, and translator of erotic books, Sir Richard Burton, is buried in a striking above-ground sepulchure. When I first saw it, some ten years ago, it was in a sad state of decay and looked more like an dilapidated air-raid shelter, half-lost in undergrowth. Now it is restored to its former glory and resembles an Arab tent being gently ruffled by wind, complete with Catholic and Moslem insignia, including crucifix, star of Bethlehem and gilt crescents which turn and shimmer at any movement of the air.

Admire its eccentricity and read the plaque about Sir Richard’s life - but don’t go yet! You can climb a small ladder at the back and actually look into the tomb through what used to be a beautiful stained-glass window (but is now, thanks to vandals, just a glass square). Inside the tomb, the intricate, velvet-covered coffins of Sir Richard and his wife Lady Isabel can be seen, and hanging over them, oriental lamps which once shone a “dim religious light” through jewel-shaped facets of coloured glass. The floor is of white, veined Carrara marble and there are pillars in the shape of finely moulded bronze serpents. I could also see huge candles in silver candle sticks of graduated heights, immortelles and wreaths of long-dead flowers.

Sir Richard died in 1890 and the following year Lady Isabel wrote his biography, which was a great success. With some of the money earned she embellished the mausoleum by putting up festoons of camel bells in the roof of the tent, “so that when I open or shut the door...the tinkling of the camel bells will sound just as it does in the desert.” She visited the tomb regularly and spent what would have been her thirty-third wedding anniversary in there. When she died in 1896, she joined her husband permanently in a matching coffin.

IN PRAISE OF ALL THAT by H.M. Castor

2012-02-12T01:00:00.003Z

History is a serious business. The number of woman-hours that the History Girls, as a group, spend on meticulous research into their different chosen time-periods, the hours spent searching for the right detail, combing through drafts to spot anachronisms, reading around and behind, above, below and every-which-way through a subject in order to get a feel for it must be prodigious. Certainly, a good number of posts on this blog have been concerned with research. Research – fascinating, absorbing and so often surprising – is, after all, one of the great joys of writing historical fiction.

However, along with the delight comes, often, a large dollop of worry (have I got it right?). And so, as something of an antidote, I wanted to write today about history books that joyously fling such concerns out of the window. I wanted to write in praise of silliness about history.

My favourite silly book about history has to be 1066 And All That by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. First published in book form in 1930 (having previously appeared in Punch magazine), it bears the marvellous subtitle:

A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates

It’s a parody of the style in which history was taught in schools at that time, in particular of the popular history book Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall (1905). I was going to say I hope that, despite this, it can still be appreciated now but, rummaging around on the internet, I find that Our Island Story was reprinted in 2005 with the aim of sending a copy to every UK primary school (did that happen, does anyone know?), and was named by David Cameron as his favourite childhood book… In that case, 1066 And All That must surely be finding a whole new generation of fans.

(And by the way, for anyone who doesn’t know the book, it does not criticize this kind of history teaching – just makes it wonderfully hilarious.)

The premise of the book, stated in the

COMPULSORY PREFACE (This Means You)

is as follows:

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.

This, of course, is a great comfort to all children/students faced with the terror (as I so often was) of history exams. More comfort is to be found in the delectable sprinkling of Test Papers throughout the book…

7. King John had no redeeming features. (Illustrate.)

…

10. How would you dispose of:

(a) A Papal Bull?

(b) Your nephews?

(c) Your mother? (Be brutal.)

…which often come with additional bits of advice:

N.B. – Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

Cheering only that which is Memorable, 1066’s confusions, of course, become eminently Memorable themselves. I am for evermore unable to read anything about Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck (pretenders to the throne during Henry VII’s reign) without thinking of them as Lamkin and Warmneck, as they are called (amongst other variations) in the book. Any mention of the opposing sides in the English Civil War (about which I know pitifully little) causes a popping-into-my-head of the surely indisputable assertion that the Cavaliers were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’, while the Roundheads were ‘Right and Repulsive’. Meanwhile, let me only approach 1689 ever so vaguely and I remember instantly that there existed a curious monarch named Williamanmary (who was, of course, an Orange).

There is even something serious to be said for the silliness. The concept that history is explained in terms of what is and is not a Good Thing, as in

The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.

is one that is it always important to remember (i.e. what is the prejudice – personal or cultural – of the writer whose book/essay/film/documentary I am reading or watching?).

Also, the idea – which is a running joke in the book – that countries vie to be ‘Top Nation’ is eminently relevant: chillingly so in 1930, but also of course throughout the Cold War and no less so, I fear, today.

But I am not writing about seriousness. So let me leave 1066 And All That and show you, instead, this:

It is the notice at the front of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon’s No Bed for Bacon (first published 1941), and I cannot tell you how delicious I find it.

In a sense, it is nonsense. The book is packed with jokes and references which reveal the authors’ detailed knowledge of the life and plays of Shakespeare, and of Elizabethan England in general. But it is also, as Ernest Brennecke wrote (with approval) in a review in the Shakespeare Quarterly, “irresponsible, irreverent, impudent, anachronistic, [and] undocumented.” Bravo!

What is the story about? Here is Ned Sherrin’s summary in the introduction to the 1986 edition:

No Bed for Bacon, if it has a theme, imagines that Sir Francis Bacon wishes to acquire a bed that Queen Elizabeth has slept on to leave to his children’s children’s children as a gilt-edged investment. Lady Viola Compton, a young girl from the Queen’s Court, visits the theatre and is so infatuated by Shakespeare and his plays that she disguises herself as a boy player and inspires Twelfth Night and the playwright’s affection.

The story also features Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Walsingham, Lord Burghley, Ben Jonson and Richard Burbage (among others), features every Elizabethan cliché you could want (potatoes, puddles and cloaks, plus the Armada) and is both unflaggingly energetic and gleefully silly.

One of the running jokes is that Shakespeare obsessively dithers over which spelling of his signature he prefers.

Another of the running jokes will ring bells with all Shakespeare scholars:

“Very well then,” [Bacon] said. “There is only one thing for me to do. I will take my suggestions to the Master of the Revels and you will be made to use them.”

Shakespeare sprang to his feet.

“Master Bacon,” he demanded passionately, “do I write my plays or do you?”

Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.

The book was written, astonishingly, in London at the time of the Blitz. I say astonishingly, because Brahms & Simon were both air-raid wardens, had a very tight publisher’s deadline and – due to the demands of their warden duties – sometimes only managed to meet for as little as an hour a day.

(But if, as a deadline-harassed writer, this achievement depresses you, let me lighten things by mentioning that they didn’t find it easy. In her diary, mid-way through the project, Brahms wrote: ‘Why did we ever start it? Why did we ever suppose we were the people to do it? Why didn’t our agent stop us?’ A feeling that I’d wager most writers have experienced, erm, once or twice.)

I could go on... There is the perennially delightful schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, of course, from the 1950s - the inspired creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle - who gives us his view of History in Down With Skool! ('History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse') and writes, surely, the most entertaining essays one could want (Molesworth 2, by the way, is Nigel's little brother):

Meanwhile they discovered books and lots of people learned to read. This is nothing to boste about aktually as even molesworth 2 can read, but they thort it was wonderful and it all led to skools chiz chiz chiz.

It also led to KNOLEDGE.

A Serf: We are not hapy in our lot.

An Aprentice: Nor in our lot either.

This meant the Rise of the People and the People hav gone on rising ever since like yeast...

... but, in searching for a finale for this appreciation of all things historical and silly, I just want to bring things up to date. Due to the fact that I have two young children, I am more familiar than I might like with children’s TV. Reliable pleasure, however, is to be found in watching the award-winning Horrible Histories series. To those who don’t know it, I address a plea: do take a few minutes to watch the following two songs, which are (I think) wonderful. And, of course, very very silly.

First, a spoof boy band called ‘The 4 Georges’ sings ‘Born 2 Rule’ here.

And second, a Viking song called ‘Literally’ here.

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.