Random Thoughts in August - Celia Rees

I was lucky enough to be asked to the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year.  A flying visit,  up one day, back the next, so I didn't have much time to mooch round Edinburgh, one of my favourite cities. I have never actually set a book there but I did once go on a ghost tour and found plenty of material for a whole series of spooky books (back when I wrote that kind of thing).

I was there for an event, in conversation with Sally Gardner, who although not a History Girl, is an excellent writer of historical fiction, whose titles include I, Coriander, The Red Necklace and The Silver Blade. Our Chair was ex History Girl, Nicola Morgan. We were there to talk about our latest books. Her novel, The Double Shadow, is historical but like her other fiction has a fantasy twist to it. I was talking about This Is Not Forgiveness, which is not historical, but I guess soon will be. 

Afterwards, we were taken for lunch (there have to be some perks) and Sally and I had a very different, more intense, more private conversation about writing. What else? Put two writers together, especially when they write in a similar genre, and the conversation always comes round to some aspect of our craft. It is always interesting to know how someone else works, what someone else does, how they go about things, with historical novels, how they research. Sally is very different from me. She likes to consult experts in the particular field that interests her. I don't do this. That's always made me feel vaguely guilty, that I'm really a dilettante. I've always been a tiny bit scared that when I explain what it is I want to know, what it is about, they will tell me, 'Oh, no, you can't do that!'. So I prefer to nose about on my own.

The beauty of these conversations lies in what you learn about yourself as a writer, not just the other person. Talking to Sally, I realised, yet again, that there are no rules, no right or wrong way to go about things. There's just what works for you. One can can learn from other people, but one doesn't have to be like them. 

You can even break your own rules or working habits. For example, I don't usually consult documents. My primary sources have tended to be published letters, diaries, novels, plays, poems, songs. I don't go to the archive offices and ferret about in dusty papers. I'm not a historian, I tell myself, I don't have to do that, but recently you would have found me in the Imperial War Museum Research Room, opening boxes and undoing bundles of letters. It's not how I normally work, but it seems right for the project I'm working on now. 

Every writer has to learn to follow his or her instincts. Do what feels right. Fiction writing differs from non fiction. It is much more intuitive. A lack of discipline is sometimes an advantage. What I really like is being able to explore odd avenues, go off on tangents. As you can see, I have been doing 'proper' research, which also includes going to the library (I have always done that). In my case, Warwick University Library. August is a good time to visit. It's quiet in vacation time and they have a coffee bar downstairs, as well as an excellent collection of books. I'm still capable of being distracted, however, going 'off task'. Walking along the shelves, I spotted this book. 

Not on my reading list, nothing directly to do with my research at all, I just knew I had to get it out. Through the wonders of the internet, I have now downloaded it as a pdf file. It is not directly relevant, but I'm not writing a definitive history of the period. I'm looking for plot lines, ways into characters. That is what this book can give me. I also know that I'm past the background research stage and into something new. 

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

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.

Talkin bout a revolution... - Celia Rees

I have a confession. My next novel, This Is Not Forgiveness, is NOT historical, it is a contemporary novel, but motions to throw me out of the History Girls may be premature. I have another confession. This Is Not Forgiveness is about to be published (Feb 2nd) so this post is going to be a blatant plug for it. I'm not even going to try and disguise it. So, if you want to take issue with that, then feel free to do so in the comment box below.

Every book I write begins with an idea. The idea for this book came from a film: Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. It’s the story of two boys and a girl. The boys are old friends and they both fall in love with Catherine, played by the captivating Jean Moreau. She is an extraordinary girl, unconventional, a free spirit who won’t be owned by either of them.

The film was made in 1962, and is based on Henri-Pierre Roche's novel of the same title, published in 1953. The novel is set before and after the First World War and is a semi autobiographical account of the love triangle between Roche, the artist Marcel Duchamp, and American artist, Beatrice Wood. She died at 105 and might, or might not be, the partial inspiration for Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron's film, Titanic - such are the fascinating facts one unearths through research, but I digress. There is a plenty of history there, different periods of the Twentieth Century, but I find the film (and the book) curiously timeless. I was watching the film when I suddenly thought: ‘You could up date this. Make it now.’ I began to imagine the story I would tell and felt no temptation to make it into historical fiction. It was a strong idea and I wanted to set it in the present. My very first novels were contemporary thrillers. After more than ten years away, I wanted to see if I could still do it. I wanted to go back to my roots.

I began to write it as a love triangle, but that didn't work. I might be able to write lots of things, but straight forward Romance is not one of them. When I'm writing historical fiction: Witch Child, Pirates!, Sovay, The Fool’s Girl, my primary interest is in how historical events impact on my characters’ lives: witch persecution, the sugar trade and slavery, the French Revolution, Elizabethan fear of Catholic spies. I decided that I had to find similar big themes if I was to make this book work. I had my characters, two boys and a girl, so I began to look at the wider context. What is happening in the world around them? How could this could affect and shape their lives? Today’s events are, after all, tomorrow’s history.

We live in interesting times. I decided to make one of the male characters a career soldier, back from Afghanistan, he's been wounded and is suffering from Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This opened the whole thing out for me It gave me something to research in the way I'd become used to, something to explore. I read accounts of soldiers engaged in warfare, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but other wars, too, like Vietnam and the Second World War. The effect war has on those fighting doesn’t change. I watched films, like The Hurt Locker, TV documentaries, series like Generation Kill, and ‘soldier vision’, footage shot by the soldiers themselves.

Making one of them a soldier, helped to differentiate the male characters from each other and added weight and relevance to the story. But there was still the girl. I wanted her to be different, like Catherine in Jules et Jim, so I decided to give her an interest in radical politics. Make her an Anarchist. I have to say, that that idea was received with a certain amount of scepticism. Young people interested in radical politics? Very ’Sixties. Then, suddenly students were marching through London, smashing windows, fighting with police, hanging from the Cenotaph, throwing bins at the heir to the throne’s car. That initial scepticism vanished and I found myself writing and re-writing as events unfolded.

Suddenly, it was all kicking off, not just here but everywhere from Egypt to Wall Street. Revolution? Maybe. It is too early to say. History? Certainly. As I said, we live in interesting times...