No Passareu! - Katherine Langrish

A few years ago we used often to stay with friends in Montpellier in the south of France (it's a fabulous city) and each time we went we would make a trip to the possibly even more fabulous walled mediaeval town of Aigues Mortes.

It's the perfect walled city, with a history that begins in the neolithic and runs on through the Romans to Charlemagne, who built the first tower - and on though the reigns of St Louis and his son Philip the Bold.  Once an important port, it silted up during the 18th century, so no significant modern expansion ever occurred, and the town still fits neatly within its massive rectangular walls like a nut inside its shell.

But this post isn't going to be about the town, rather something I found in the town, while browsing the fascinating little shops lining the narrow streets which lead into the central Place de St Louis.

 In a small antique shop, I picked up a little leather-bound book. It looked like a diary, with a lock and a key.

I opened it to find beautiful end-papers...

 ... and then, this hand-painted illustration: a sunburst inscribed 'FRANCE  CATALOGNE', rising behind a lozenge displaying the Catalan colours, framed in branches of laurel. Below that, a ribbon of the French colours, inscribed with the words ' HONNEUR A LA  7e DU 53e '

I turned the next page.  Here was a beautiful trail of ivy leaves and, written in French, these words (my translation), followed by a verse by the Catalan poet Apel·les Mestres i Oñós (1854-1936):

 
This album in which we have written our most noble thoughts, this flag upon whose silk our nimble fingers have embroidered 'La croix de guerre', imperishable glorification of your courage, we offer to you, Catalans from the other side of the Pyrennees, our heart's brothers. champions of all liberty, immortal heroes of the great war,  whom we will forever recognise as having fulfilled the cry of your poet: 

No passareu!, i si passeu,
quan tots haurem deixat de viure,
sabreu de sobres a quin preu
s’abat un poble digne i lliure.

Mes no serà! Per més que feu,
No, no passareu!

You shall not pass! and if you do,
When we all cease to be 
Then you shall know the price
Of beating a free and noble people.
But it shall not be! Despite all your efforts,
No, you shall not pass!

Barcelona, 28 May, 1918

(I'm indebted to a young Catalan friend of my daughter's for the translation of the verse.) Next came yet another elaborately decorated page, a dedication 'To Captain Barthés, Knight of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the 7th Company of the 53rd Infantry Regiment', above a drawing of the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, which is in the Louvre.

And after that, the book is full of signatures and dedications in both French and Catalan, praising brave Catalan men who sacrificed their lives in the defence of France and liberty.

What was all this about? - I wondered.  Well, Spain remained neutral during the First World War.  However, many Catalans felt alienated from the government in Madrid, which they felt did not fairly represent or defend their interests. Catalan industry had struggled after Spain lost Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Exports plummeted; they were unable to compete with British rivals on the overseas markets, while the domestic Spanish market was limited by its poverty.

"The First World War may not have involved Spain, but it resonated for many Catalanistas. One of the subtexts of that War was the right of small nations to self-determination in the face of predatory imperial powers. In addition, the Irish revolt of 1916 not to mention the growing voice of Basque separatism, had an emotional impact on more vocal Catalanists...". (From 'Spain Then And Now'  http://www.spainthenandnow.com/spanish-history/catalonia-1900-1923/default_258.aspx)

The result was that significant numbers of young Catalan men - estimated at between 12,000 - 15,000 - volunteered to join the French army. The majority were killed; it is thought only 2000 or so ever returned home.

Frustratingly, that's as much as I can find out. I'm sure if I read Spanish or Catalan, I could discover more. I'd love to know who Captain Barthés was, and what he did to be awarded the Legion d'Honneur.  I'd love to hear the story of the young men who went north to fight for their ideals. If anyone reading this post can point me in the right direction, I'll be very grateful.  In the meantime, all I can do is turn the pages of this beautiful tribute to the bravery of the young men who went away to fight and who probably never came back.  I read the names of those who signed it.  Lolita Perez y Meila, Maria Carjinell, Rosita Sala, Angela Coch, Paquita Pascual, Conchita Pascual...

And Dolores Soler,  Presentacion Roldan, Conchita Panas, and Carmen Boliva, whose brief Catalan messages are to me only partly decipherable, save for one. 'Oh guerra malahida!' - 'Oh, cursed war!'

Ten things you can’t do with a Kindle – Katherine Roberts

My interview with history boy Ian Mortimer last month suggests that the physical book is still the preferred format for historians, despite the rise of ebooks in other genres. But even if reading them goes out of fashion, physical books can still be used for many other things. For a bit of bank holiday fun, here's my top ten list of things you can’t do with an e-reader:

1. Decorate your living room. Well, I suppose you could… but a row of e-readers sitting on the shelf doesn’t have quite the same potential for colour co-ordination when you change your curtains.

2. Open a secondhand bookshop and spend happy hours browsing the shelves for out-of-print gems. Ebooks never go out of print - where's the fun in that?

3. Press flowers. You need a hefty tome for this, and I find historical non-fiction works very well. Here is “Wonders of the Past” complete with pressed primroses from my lawn (I haven't cut the grass lately...!)

Pressed flowers

4. Book crossing. At least, not unless people start a craze for leaving Kindles in cafes with whole libraries and their amazon credit details loaded...

5. Sign a copy. Yes, I know there’s such a thing as digital signing but it’s really not the same as meeting your readers and personally defacing their book, is it?

6. Smell it. Ah, that musty “old book” smell! I have a friend who won’t buy a book unless he’s had a good sniff first, rather like people who won’t buy flowers unless they are scented – though no doubt it won’t be too long before e-readers come with a synthetic range of smells.

7. Eat it. If you’re a bug, obviously – the larvae of the death watch beetle and common furniture beetle can feed on books. Although one of my school friends used to tear off the corners of pages and chew them when she got bored in lessons. (Perhaps I’ve just got weird friends?)

Mmmm... tasty book!

8. Burn it. Book bonfires can be used for political or religious oppression. Hitler burned books that challenged the Nazi regime. Others have burned Korans and Bibles and other holy books. Burning Kindles might be top of some people’s lists, but it wouldn't really have the same effect and I doubt they would smell as nice as 6.

9. Rest your feet on it. Being a bit of a short-ass, two “Wonders of the Past” volumes are just right to prop up my feet when my chair is raised to the right height for my keyboard.

10. Drop it in the bath. This is my copy of Philip Pullman’s “Amber Spyglass” after being dropped into hot foamy water while I was reading it in the bath. I dried it out on a radiator and finished the story, then put it on my bookshelf (in the orange section) where it is currently decorating my study… see 1.

Could you dry out a Kindle this way...?

So what do you do with your paper books, besides read them?

***

Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fantasy for young readers.

Her latest series the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur’s daughter is published by Templar as beautiful, chunky hardcovers that might be quite useful for pressing flowers and decorating bookshelves after you have read them (you can get them as paperbacks and ebooks, too).

And just to prove I'm not biased, here is a balancing post my unicorn wrote over on his blog: Ten things you CAN do with a Kindle (that you can't do with a paper book).

The Autograph Book - Katherine Langrish

This is an autograph book which was given to my great-aunt, Minnie Davies, by her mother, on January 13th 1911.  Or possibly not: the date below looks  like 13th January1912; it's so close to the corner of the paper that it's hard to tell: but quite a lot of the autographs inside the book are dated 1911.  Which is baffling - unless Minnie's mother gave her the book in 1911, but didn't get around to signing it herself for months? These things do happen.

The book is covered in soft purple suede, with differently coloured pages in pale pink, cream and blue, and people seem to have dotted their autographs around the pages at random, maybe choosing by colour.

A lot of the verses inside are somewhat Hallmark in quality.  "All the sweet things that the birdies/Twittering on the dewy spray/Wish each other in the springtime/I wish you every day," writes 'Auntie Kate' on September 12th 1911.  But 'Uncle Will', on the same day, writes more sternly underneath: "Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms - oftenest, God bless her! in female breasts." (Dickens).

A month or so later, the splendidly named Ethelwyn Strongman is exhorting Minnie thus:

"May she to whom this book belongs/Few troubles have if any/Her hours of grief may they be few/her sunny moments many.

Be a good girl/Lead a good life,/Choose a good husband/Make a good wife."

Pretty soon, though, the entries become more elaborate, and humour makes a welcome appearance with this oil painting - yes, oils! - of a joke:  The Burning Question.  A couple hidden behind a parasol...

 ... and a little boy who interrupts the idyll with the burning question: 'Have you any cigarette cards?'

People clearly went to great lengths to shine in autograph books.   There isn't a single example, in the entire book, of 'merely' a signature.  Everyone wrote a verse or drew a picture.  Did people have a fund of little verses or jokes at the ready, for the next time someone whipped out an album?  I suspect they did.  In 1913 Jock Jowitt of  'Kirkee', somewhere in India (?) must have been happy to have found this simple no-fuss solution:

One half-anna stamp of the King-Emperor, and the simple pun, 'By gum it's stuck'.  Others, however, took the postage-stamp solution to elaborate lengths:

but whoever did this one forgot to add their name.

Romance creeps in. No importunate little boys in this pen and ink picture signed 'Love LL Gordon, 1914'.

And there's a poem from G H C in March 1913:

'You can't stop the sun from beaming/You can't stop the birds' refrain./You can't stop yourself from dreaming,/You can't stop the drops of rain./You can't stop the stars from gleaming/Up in the heaven above,/And you can't stop your heart from beating/For the boy you love.'  It could almost be a Cole Porter lyric.

But the War to End All Wars was looming.  Where was JF heading from or to, in 1916, I wonder, when he paused to carefully draw and paint this?

And the war actually enters the autograph book on these pages here: two carefully executed illustrations by P.V. Bastin, 4th Devon Regt, dated 14.1.15.  The left hand page is a watercolour painting of a ketch entitled 'Running Into Harbour'.  The right hand page, in pen and ink, is labelled in meticulous, tiny handwriting:
'Whitby Abbey (Bombarded by the Germans, Dec. 1914).  What was he thinking of when he drew these?

The last entry in the book, although not the last chronologically, is a set of jingoistic dialect verses entitled - ominously, I think -

'The 'Great War 1914 - 15 - '

Aw! I've listed, mai dear, for a sawjer
Ess, I've tooked the ole shillin' for sure
They've give me a kit and they've give me a gun,
And I'm gwain away to the War.

... An' I'll bet ee a pound to a vardun [farthing] cake
The when us comes marchin' back,
The maidens'll all turn their smiles to me
And give 'Molly Coddlins' the sack.

So blaw up the boogle and sound the Volleen ['the Fall In']
My how they bagginets shine,
'Tion! Move to the right in four.  'Form fours'.
Right. Forward, into the line.

Dalhousie July - 1915 - Geo. E Hart.

I just hope he really did come marching back...


Photos: copyright Katherine Langrish 2012