Facing the future by Fay Bound Alberti

This will be my last History Girls blogpost, at least for now.

I was recently awarded a UK Research and Innovation Fellowship to study the emotional and cultural history of face transplants - not yet a reality in the UK but since 2005 a method of surgically treating severe facial trauma in many countries. You can learn more about that news here.

Although most of the ethical and experimental groundwork had been carried out in the UK, France was the first country to undertake a face transplant - on Isabelle Dinoire, who had been savaged by her own dog. America, Spain, Mexico and China have all contributed to the “face race”, with varying degrees of success. 

From the vantage point of a historian of emotion, what is striking is the lack of coherent, psychological understanding of the global impact of face transplants. We have no long term data on their emotional effects, or the challenge they might post to the idea of the self.

And how much more problematic are questions of identity, appearance and emotional wellbeing in the age of the selfie, when looks seem to be everything?

Which is where my project comes in. I will be working with people living with disfigurement (as a legal term though not a comfortable one), surgeons, nurses, face transplant recipients and donor families. And thinking about what face transplants mean at a cultural level - working with artists, writers (including History Girls' own Louisa Young) - ethicists and philosophers.

This is a transformative opportunity for me, and a chance to make an impact in a complex but critical field. It's also a major time commitment, which is why I have to say farewell for now.

There is always a silver lining: taking my place will be the historian Susan Vincent. Sue was my PhD contemporary at the University of York, and she has written wonderful books on the histories of clothing, hair and fashion. I interviewed her for this blog back in November 2018.

Thanks for everything, fellow History Girls and readers! Keep in touch.

www.fayboundalberti.com 

Never again by Mary Hoffman

February is really Suffragette month on the History Girls. Out guest on 29th January was Diane Atkinson, who ushered in the centenary of women in the UK getting the vote with her book Rise up, Women!

But before we launch into that, I want to go back five days to Holocaust Memorial Day. I had to be in Oxford on 26th January and stumbled upon a moving and thought-provoking little exhibition in the Town Hall.

It was called Never Again and I was expecting images like the one above of the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. But there was so much more in the exhibition (the photos were all taken on my phone, with permission, so forgive the quality).

This was the first exhibit to catch my eye - a chart of the coloured badges prisoners wore and what they signified. The headings across the top are:
Political Enemies, Professional criminals, Foreign forced labour, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sex offenders (usually male homosexuals), Asocials, Roma and Sinti).

That was an early lesson for me: I had no idea Jehovah's Witnesses were one of the categories of people rounded up.

There were other lessons too, about the number of children who survived the camps - tiny compared with those who perished but still more than I expected.

My own association with the Shoah is not personal but literary. My German Great-grandfather never returned to his native country after migrating here in the 1870s and two World Wars put paid to my father investigating his ancestors, so that I have no knowledge of whether the Heidelberg Hoffman(n)s were Jews or whether that Georg Hoffmann's lateral relatives supported the Nazis.

So I found out what I know from books and first among all others, from the writings of the late, great Primo Levi. I was doing an Italian A level course in London in 2000 and our tiny group was offered a choice to study Levi's Se Questo è un Uomo (if this is a Man) or Tomsai di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). I voted for the Lampedusa (which I had read more than once in English and have since read and studied in Italian) but the majority wanted the Levi.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to cope with it but I am SO glad I lost that vote. Not just that book - although that is the best - but The Truce, The Drowned and the Saved, The Periodic Table are all part of my mental and cultural furniture and I can't now imagine not having read Levi.

Another Italian book - a novel, this one - expanded my understanding further of what happened to the Jews in Italy. This was Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, in which a prosperous middle class Jewish family in Ferrara open their tennis court to young Jews who have been banned from using the towns' tennis club.

At first the Finzi-Contini see themselves as safe from persecution, the benevolent elite, helping those less fortunate, but of course in time their own fate is sealed.

One of our formerly regular History Girls, Louisa Young, has been writing a fabulous sequence of novels which start in WW1 and move through the first half of the twentieth century. The most recent, Devotion, also educated me about the group of Jews in Rome who were members of the Fascist party. Not those who later realised the error of their ways and gave back the tessera, the token that showed membership of the party. But quite fanatical "devoted" followers of Mussolini.

The paterfamilias in Rome simply can't believe that Mussolini meant his kind of Jew when the racial laws were introduced in 1938. After all, he has worked hard for Il Duce, as an engineer involved in many engineering problems. But there is only one end for all the Jews.

All this reading and more taught me how gradual the demonisation of an entire group of people is, how slowly they become classified in others' minds as so "not like us" as to become dehumanised.

And the exhibition showed how this is happening all over again with Muslims. Not an original idea but seeing the two juxtaposed in a small room in a town hall in a city so long associated with learning, enlightenment, liberalism and freedom of ideas was chilling.

"No more mosques" is no different from the ideology behind Kristallnacht.

And "no benefits for migrants" is as clear a statement as you will get of the "not like us" approach. Migrants are then not seen as human beings needing food and warmth and shelter and health care and friendship.

And that is why I appeal to all those who care about history and about how the "now" we are living in will one day be the "then" that people of the future will study and shake their heads over. "Why didn't they see what was under their noses?" they will ask.

There is a march against racism on Saturday March 17th, in London, Glasgow and Cardiff, which I urge you to go on.

Remember, women didn't get the vote by reading books and sighing. They got out there and demonstrated. We can do the same. And we can do something to stop the new rise of the hate-filled right.

I'll finish this post with the poem by Primo Levi that I read on every Holocaust Memorial Day:

Shema

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.

Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann

http://www.standuptoracism.org.uk

Facing the Future as Someone Else: A History of Face Transplants by Fay Bound Alberti

Faces matter. They tell the world who we are and where we come from. They reveal our individuality, our genetics, emotions and ethnicity. But faces are also 'matter,' a composite of tissues, muscles and nerves that can be changed by cosmetics, art and surgery.  Face transplants are no longer science fiction, which they were in 1997 when Face/Off hit the cinemas, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and directed by John Woo. Since 2005, it has been possible to perform face transplants, in which the face of a dead donor is overlaid on the body of a recipient. That recipient will more than likely have undergone some traumatic event or accident, and multiple reconstructive surgeries before receiving a new face. What must it be like to wake up as someone else? To have to learn to speak, eat, smile and inhabit a totally different visage? What would it be like for your family? Or for the family of the donor, constantly looking for and hoping to find (or not to find) an essence of their loved one. 

I have been thinking a lot about these kinds of questions. I'm writing a history of face transplants from the 1950s to the present, focusing especially on post 2005, when the 38-year old French woman Isabelle Dinoire became the first face transplant recipient. Hers was a partial transplant; her nose, chin and lips had been lost when she was savaged by her pet dog. Isabelle was unconscious at the time, having argued with her daughter and taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. Whether or not it was a deliberate overdose has proved contentious: could she have given true, informed consent for a face transplant when she was depressed enough to commit suicide? When she couldn't possibly have known what the world had in store for her? 

As it turned out, the world was very interested. The hospital that treated her released pre- and post- operative photos. The media immediately picked up the story: they wanted details from her neighbours, her friends. They wanted to know what it was like to have someone else's face; what it was like for her family and the family of the donor. They discussed whether she would be able to kiss, to have a new relationship, to return to her old existence. Life was never the same again for Isabelle. She remained dependent on her doctors and did not return to full time work. She constantly watched her skin for signs of tissue rejection. She lived with a face that she described as half her own and half somebody else's. When Isabelle died of cancer in 2016, her doctors denied it was in any way connected to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs she had been taking - though those drugs are known to increase the risk of cancer. I have written in detail about Dinoire elsewhere. Her case is important - not just because of her own experiences as a female patient undertaking a cutting-edge technique, but also because it draws attention to the limits and obligations of what has been called 'Frankenstein science'. Where do we draw the line in medical experimentation? What can and can't be transplanted? Who decides?

I have not included images of Isabelle Dinoire in this blog post, since some readers might find them upsetting. But they are widely available online. So, too, are images of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard, who also performed the first hand transplant. The hand transplant was not ultimately a success, because Clint Hallam, the recipient, could not bear living with it or dealing with the possibility of tissue rejection that occurred. For transplants to hold, massive amounts of immunosuppressants must be taken. Doctors are experimenting with alternative methods, but to date these have been unsuccessful. 

The history of face transplants is a history of experimentation, of trying to master the complexities of the different tissues making up the face. People with transplanted faces do not gain full facial mobility, so in addition to belonging to the realms of both the living and the dead, they are both healed and not healed. Isabelle Dinoire said that she felt like a 'monster' before her operation, when her wounds were visible and like a 'circus freak' afterwards, when everybody knew that she was the first face transplant recipient. Other people's responses to disfigurement and transplantation are hugely important. Face transplant surgery can be traced back to World War I and to the development of plastic and reconstructive techniques as a consequence of soldiers being wounded in ways and numbers never before seen. 

Another History Girl, Louisa Young, has written beautifully on questions of facial reconstructive surgery and social rehabilitation in My dear I wanted to tell you and the follow-up novels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion. I first met Louisa in 2006, when we were both contributing to the Wellcome Trust's first public exhibition, which was on hearts. Louisa had written her glorious Book of the Heart and I was working on a history monograph, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion. Eleven years later, by a wonderful serendipity, I find myself working on the history of face transplants soon after the publication of My Dear, I have something to tell you.  

Maybe that isn't such a coincidence as it might appear. After all, hearts and faces have a lot in common. I became interested in the history of transplants because of what they tell us about our bodies - and how we feel about them. Heart transplant patients often claim they have received more than a stranger's heart; stories abound of people's personality or even their cravings and abilities changing as a result. Transplants are gifts, from one person to another (at least in the UK where donors are not paid). They provoke a range of emotional responses: fear of having a new organ, disgust that organ is assimilated into their own bodies, gratitude to the donor, guilt that s/he has died while the recipient lives on, and so on. Isabelle expressed both revulsion that her tongue touched the dead lips of her donor as well as gratitude for her new face. There is an added poignancy to the fact that Dinoire's donor was a young woman who committed suicide. In life as in death, the two were linked together forever. 

May competition

To win one of five copies of Louisa Young's new novel, Devotion, please answer in the Comments section below.

Then send a copy of your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

Closing date 7th June

We're afraid our competitions are open to UK Followers only.

Give an example  of a little known fact you have come across in your reading about a well documented period or event or person. (Through history books or historical fiction)

Devotion by Louisa Young

Photo credit: Sarah Lee

It seems strange to welcome Louisa Young as our June guest. Until very recently and from the beginning she has been a full time History Girls and has only recently stepped back a bit to the role of Reserve, so we shall hear from her again.

Louisa Young is the author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins), set between 1908 and 1919, a story of love, death and the origins of maxillo-facial reconstructive surgery in World War One. The sequel, The Heroes' Return, was published by Borough Press in 2014. She has also written The Book of the Heart (Flamingo), a cultural history of that most emblematic organ, and A Great Task of Happiness (republished 2012), a biography of her grandmother the sculptor Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Scott of the Antarctic. Her first novel, Babylove, was listed for the Orange Prize.
  As half of Zizou Corder she has co-written five children's novels with her daughter, including the Lionboy trilogy, which is published in 36 languages.
 
She read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London, where she has written the second sequel to My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. Called Devotion, it deals with a long neglected aspect of WW2 in Italy and is another highly recommended read.


Welcome "back," Louisa!

A long long time ago I sat with an American friend of my dad’s, a photographer and art historian, who has lived in Rome since the late 1940s. When I was a child he lived in a house on the Tiber Island, which to me, then and now, was and is the most romantic place in the world. Now, it is all rather well-organised:

 When I first went, it wasn’t quite like this: 

with boats and mud, so that you could believe the legend of it being built on the bones of Tarquin the Superb, the tyrant whose body was thrown into the river in 510BC. The shape, boat-like, was first re-inforced in the First Century: slabs of marble gave it a prow and a stern, commemorating the boat which brought a statue of the healing god Aesculapius and one of his holy snakes from Greece, after an outbreak of plague in 293 BC. The snake apparently leapt off the boat and swam to the island, which was seen as a sign that this was the best place to build Aesculapius's temple, and after that came the hospitals which are still there. Of course an island is always a good place for a hospital, specially when diseases are infectious. A carving of the Aesculapian rod and snake are still visible on the rock at the prow.

The stairs in our friend’s house were made of white marble, and if you looked out the window at the back the river tumbled and rushed below. We ate fried artichokes, and the grownups drank gin and It (Italian vermouth i.e. martini) and we could nip and talk to the strange post with four heads on it, or try to climb into the hospital grounds so we could do a proper circumnavigation of the island. Alas he moved, later, to a flat in a palazzo in Sant’Angelo, known as Piazza Tartaruga, Piazza Turtle, because of the little turtles balanced on the bowl of its central fountain. But that was a lovely flat too.

Someone - my father? - pointed out to me in a neighbouring street - via della Reginella - how the building behind the palazzo, thought the same height, contained five floors, where the palazzo had three. The apartments in that building had lower ceilings, smaller windows, more occupants. This, I learned, was where the edge of the Jewish Ghetto had been. Big-roomed palazzo outside the gate; many-floored lodgings inside. It is too narrow a street to photograph this, but here is the street in 1944:

And here is the street now, four cobbles replaced and named in honour of Grazia di Segni, born 1889
Giuditta Spizzichino, born 1922, Ada Spizzichino born 1915, and Rossana Calò, who was two years old. They were all arrested on October 16 1943,  deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

Our friend the photographer told me a story about a room in a flat just outside where the ghetto walls had been, a room with no windows, discovered by a new tenant in the 1960s. The tenant asked the landlord about it, what it was, and after some trouble and pursuit of the matter received the answer that ‘This was where the Jews hid during the Nazi occupation’. He was surprised, as he knew the family concerned had been devoted Fascists. Why would they have been hiding Jewish people?

‘Oh, they were hiding the Fascist Jews.’

Like many people, I have had a tendency to look at history from where I am, rather than from where people were at the time. 'Fascist Jews’, in the 21st century, seems a nonsense, impossible. But from 1920 there were Fascist Jews: immigrants from eastern Europe determined to prove their nationalistic loyalty to their new home country, communities in the west and the south who had been in Italy for hundreds of years but still felt it best in the interests of self-preservation to go along with the flow of public opinion, and in Rome a community which was there before Julius Caesar, before Christianity, before the split of Jewry into Sephardi and Ashkenazi even. It is the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora.

Remember what a  mess Italy was after WW1? Remember the Russian Revolution, and how utterly terrifying that was? Remember D’Annunzio and his lances, and how useless the government was? Remember how Italy as a country was not yet fifty years old, and how the walls of the Roman Ghetto only came down in 1888 - not even thirty years earlier?  Now, we know exactly why Mussolini was a terrible, terrible idea. Then, they didn’t know. And Jewish families had no special gift of seeing the future, and all the more historical reasons to be nervous.

Which all added up, for me, to the setting for a novel.

It’s called Devotion, and it’s out on June 2, published  by Borough Press. It continues the story that started in WW1 in My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, moving things on to the next generation. Tom, the English boy, loves his Roman Jewish cousin Nenna. Nenna loves her father, Aldo. And Aldo loves Mussolini. The moral? Be careful what you devote yourself to.

A Tiny Nautical Quiz, by Louisa Young

I have sealag, or jetlegs, or both, or vice versa . . .  I have been sailing, far away, and I am swaying mildly at my desk as I write this. Forgive me if it comes out jumbled. My arms ache and though tanned and wild-haired I am also covered in the inexplicable bruises of a rowdy passage and quite a long night sail.

Several questions came up in the course of the voyage, and we decided, as we lay about on deck, or  drinking rum below, late at night, that rather than googling we would use the old-fashioned, the historic, way of gathering information.

'And what is that?' the younger reader inquires.

'Oh child,' we answer. 'Long ago, before the mighty Google, if we didn't know something we used to ask each other, and, if nobody knew, we would make it up.'



Questions:

Q1: What is grog, actually?

Q2: Why is St Lucia the Helen of the Caribbean?

Q3: What are the Pitons? Very small volcanos? Very picturesque slagheaps?

Q4: Was Josephine black?

Q5: Did she actually have free passage for all the roses she bought from an English supplier? And was the French navy really under instructions to confiscate all seeds and seedlings and plants it found on English vessels, on her behalf?

Q6: What happened to Josephine anyway?



Q7: And what happened to Emma Hamilton?


Q8: Would you sail the Atlantic?

Q9: How do you pronounce Bequia?

Q10: Is this an orange, a lime, a lemon, or what?

Q11: Why is that called a Bimini?

Q12: Who was the only woman to sail with the Argonauts?

Q13: Are there any place names more romantic than Soufrieres and Malgretoute?




Answers:

1) Undrinkable bilge-water rendered drinkable by the addition of lime juice and your naval ration of rum.

2) Because she was passed from hand to hand so often between the English and the French. Seven times, to be precise, in the 17th/18th/19th centuries.

3) Volcanic plugs, like King Arthur's Seat. Only pointier.

4) No.

5) Yes.

6) He put her away; and she died before the wars were over.

7) The country wouldn't recognise her, and she took to drink, and brought up her daughter in a sort of mirror image of what so often happened. Emma admitted that Nelson was the girl's father, but not that she herself was her mother. So young Horatia never really knew.

8) Yes, but then you'd wonder why you bothered. It is however only possible to wonder why you bothered after having done it. Rather like University. (NB: I have not sailed the Atlantic.)

9: Beckway.

10. Hmm. Don't know. It smells like an orange but it's green. Put a slice in the rum, anyway.

11: Because it's a cross between a bikini and Rimini. (No it's not. It's a sort of fitted maritime canopy, a sunshade like on the surrey with the fringe on the top, only on a boat. Perhaps it was invented in Bimini, which we think is in Cuba. Or Florida. Something to do with Hemingway, and fishing anyway. The Bahamas?)

12: Atalanta!

13: No, except perhaps Finisterre.

Overall lesson learned:
Never trust a seafarer's version of events. They know nothing. They come back with no proper historical accuracy and just give you a load of all my eye and Betty Martin. Which is from the Latin prayer much used by Portuguese mariners: Ora pro mihi Beato Martine - pray for me, Blessed Martin, St Martin being the patron saint of taverns and landlords and reformed drunkards. Or perhaps not.

I should probably go to bed.

December Stillness, by Siegfried Sassoon - Louisa Young

These quiet days, between one set of sparkliness and another, are one of my favourite times of year. Nothing showy for you today, just this, sent by a friend when my mother died, four weeks ago.


December stillness, teach me through your trees
That loom along the west, one with the land,
The veiled evangel of your mysteries.
While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down
Deepens, and dusk embues me where I stand,
With grave diminishings of green and brown,
Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;
And let me learn your secret from the sky,
Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birds
In lone remote migration beating by.
December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,
Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

The Little Big Things - Louisa Young

As a history undergraduate at Cambridge in the early eighties, I learnt a lot about Balkans, Corn Laws,  Reforms Acts, Causes of Wars. I had no female teacher after the age of 16. I loved history, but it really was the wars and the laws, the high thoughts and the doings of great men. If I had then the knowledge curiosity and confidence that I have now, I would have said: I've had it with the economic, can we do some social now?  Enough men, bring me women. No more big things please - I want the small. 

By the small, I mean of course the big small. I mean, while Mussolini was making those speeches, what were the farmers' eating? When all those Jews were waiting on the Polish border, what did they sit on? Those cholera figures - so what did those parents actually do, when symptoms appeared in their children? Who did you turn to? What colour was it? What was the greeting commonly used? When did you get your money? How did you clean your bed?

As novelists we need the small - but it's not just that. It's not irrelevant. It's not just amusing, or a curiosity. It's the finding of a voice for those who had none. This is why we need Sarah Waters, single-handedly, it sometimes feels, reintroducing the lesbian to a history which entirely left her out, blanked her, removed her even. Radclyffe Hall's line 'That night they were not apart' is no substitute for a true and proper set of accounts for innumerable lives lived in shadow - or at least loves loved in shadow. And she gives us housework. God, the joy of lying in a warm delicious bath, listening to the washing machine tumbling my sheets, reading in The Paying Guests exactly how much elbow grease and copper-boiling and boiler-twiddling and lugging and bleach and mangling and hanging women were putting into washing sheets in houses just like mine, ninety years ago. 

Jo Baker, in her superb novel Longbourn, based on Pride and Prejudice, describes the maid, Sarah, cast down not only at Lizzie Bennet's carelessness with mud and her petticoats, but at the time of the month when all five daughters, Mrs Bennet, the maids and the cook are - literally - on the rag, at the same time as happens in households of women - and it's Sarah's job to deal with those rags. Esther Freud, in Mr Mac and Me, tells us so movingly and delicately about a small boy's response to his mother's miscarriage. These everyday historical things, tragic but small, normal but fascinating, novelists can give us back, when official history - or mainstream literature (ie, most literature) chose to, or had to,  ignore it. I LOVE that these voices are being slipped back into history through novels. 

My favourite at the moment happens only in the 1970s, the poet Salena Godden's memoir, Springfield Road. It's her life, her childhood. Her mother the go-go dancer, her father the jazz cat, her grandmothers, English and Jamaican (and a great grandmother with a pipe and a red bandana), her brother, her sister, holidays, sweets, chopper bikes, fingerless gloves, skateboards, dandelions, squashing berries with a stick, going farther than you were allowed, falling in love aged seven with the new boy, who pulled up his shirt and said: 'Punch me. Go on, harder.' Her father left, to join the house band of the QE2. Her new dad was not nice. The shared bedrooms, the housing estates, the ice cream vans, white carpets, a tea tray with a pictorial map of Jamaica on it . . . root beer . . . Liking being upside down. Waiting. Missing your dad. Tragedy, comedy, life . . It is another wonderful book.  

I never quite knew what root beer actually is, so when a historian turned micro-brewer turned up at dinner last night I thought well, how convenient, and asked him. He told me about sassafras, and the market for non-alcoholic fun beverages during prohibition. (We looked up sassafras and discovered that its chemical, safrole, was also used in MDMA, and had been banned by the FDA at various stages.) Why was I asking, he wondered. I told him about the book. We'd been talking about grandmothers - his was there; she ran a home store in Boise Idaho in the 60s and 70s. One of Salena's Jamaican great great grandmothers was a Maroon. We knew it meant runaway rebel slave, but  none of us knew the origin of the word - was it the same root as being marooned? Was that anything to do with mare, the sea? Marrone, the big sea? No, marrone means chestnut, or brown . . .  Or the Jamaican band, the Cimarrons? 

We looked it up.  Cimmaron means wild, feral, fugitive and runaway; maroon is from cimarron. It's from the Taíno. Taíno? An Arawak language, historically spoken by the Taíno people of the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the northern Lesser Antilles. This leads us to the Garifuna, the Caribs, and to this, which I offer direct from Wikipedia: 

In the Lesser Antilles, the Carib conquest (which had advanced to Puerto Rico by the time of the Spanish conquest, and is still occurring to some extent among the Carib and Arawak in South America) created a sociolinguistically interesting situation. Carib warriors invading from South America took Taíno wives, or raided north and took female Taíno captives back to the southern Antilles. The women continued to speak Taíno, but the men taught their sons Carib. This resulted in a situation where the women spoke an Arawakan language and the men an unrelated Cariban language. However, because boys' maternal language was Arawak, their Carib became mixed, with Carib vocabulary on an Arawak grammatical base. 

That shut us up. Different languages for the different sexes! 

Here are some more words from that language none of us had heard of. 

barbecue - barbacoa

potato - batata

cacique (Latin American native chief) - cacique

cannibal - caniba

canoe - canoa

Caribbean - Caribe

cassava (yucca) - casaba

coquí (a small frog found in Puerto Rico) - cokí

guava - guayabo

iguana - iguana

hammock - hamaca

hurricane - hurakan

cay - kayo

mauby (a type of Caribbean tree whose bark is used in making a fermented drink) - mabí

tobacco - tabacú

maize (corn) - mahiz

mangrove - mangue

papaya - papáia

savanna - zabana

Mauby! The brewer got excited at that. We looked it up. The internet tells us it's sort of like - haha! - root beer. Only nicer. 

I remembered, later that night, a sweet appley drink a friend at school's dad used to make, back in 70s, known to us as mavvy. I looked it up: you can buy it.  Get some in, for the next barbacoa. 

Ah, the joys of going round in circles.

It's all history. Keep it coming. Big and small. And poo to the Corn Laws.



(NB The novels I mention are all widely available. Springfield Road though is published by Unbound, so most easily found here.)