History Boy - Lucy Inglis

This weekend I went up to the Wigtown Book Festival. It is a looong way. But it was more than worth it. It wasn't only worth it to spend time with other writers, eat scads of lobster, drink delicious boozes, sell some books and chat chat chat, it was worth it because something happened that reminded me of exactly the reasons I do what I do.

On Sunday I led two walks around the Georgian planned village of Garlieston with local farmer and historian Tom MacCreath. History walks are always a fluid and unpredictable thing, but these were even more so as I realised that as the walks went on, we were becoming like the Pied Pipers of Garlieston, as retired residents and customers from the Harbour Inn had joined in. We had beautiful weather and I hope a good time was had by all. As one of the residents observed, it had indeed, 'Turned out nice again', in our honour. I signed books from the boot of the festival car and Tom returned me to Wigtown where a lot of people sat around talking about the Booker and Dr Who until midnight and I felt a bit inadequate and made notes of things I need to read.

Yesterday, after a fine breakfast in the Glaisnock Cafe, I gave a talk on Georgian London in the town hall, known as the County Buildings. Georgian London in rural Scotland. Honestly? I hadn't expected the crowd that arrived. I did my usual trick of trying to pack in too much information, but the slightly risky eighteenth century jokes went down well. The Q&A was great and then there was a book signing. My first customer was a ten year old boy. He was with his mum, but the book was for him. I was delighted. But as is the nature of these things (as I am learning), it was all a rush. After the signing, I went back to the Wigtown Bookshop, where I was staying. It was packed, and History Boy and his parents were there. There's no stopping him! He had just bought a book about the Blitz. We talked about Lancaster bombers and Spitfires. I promised to send him another book, if he gave me his address.

The Bookshop in Wigtown runs the Random Book Club. You sign up, and they send you a random second hand book each month. And this gave me an idea: I am going to send History Boy a work of historical fiction (can be fantasy, but must have a historical bent) every month for a year. Ten years old was when my yearning for books kicked in. It was when they became friends, and I wore them out through repeated readings. Those books are still my friends now, broken and tired and a little greasy on the shelf in the hall. The Owl Service, The Silver Sword, Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Machine Gunners, Viking Dawn, The Lord of the Rings, Smith, the list goes on. But it can't only be my choice. That wouldn't be right. So, I am asking for your help. What are the books you remember from that time? The ones that sparked your love of history? Twelve magical, transporting books is what I need. So suggestions in the comments please!

(The festival ended on a slightly less magical note for me. In rummaging for my charger in my bag, I managed to discard a bra at the Bookshop. And then the car broke down on the M40 and I didn't get home until almost four am. But the AA got me back, and the Bookshop have emailed to say they're putting the bra on ebay. So it all turned out nice, again.)

Turning The Lights Out – by Eleanor Updale

How to put children off history with one little book

A few years ago there was a cinema advert with the tag line ‘No one forgets a good teacher’. Various celebs talked about the person who had turned the lights on for them, setting them up for success. Some of the posts on this site have testified to the importance of encountering the right person or book at the right time.

It’s fitting that such folk are celebrated, but I think attention should also be given to people and things that have the reverse effect. I still resent the maths teacher who approached each lesson with the subliminal message ,‘You’re not going to like this, let alone understand it,’ and whoever wrote the mind-numbing text books that repelled my children from French has a lot to answer for. Will I ever forgive the diligent but remorseless woman who taught both my daughters to hate school?

A few weeks ago, I came across a book that seems highly likely to put children off history. I bought it in the Museum of Scotland. I recently moved to Edinburgh, and I love it here. However, I am acutely aware that I know very little of Scottish history. I need to mug up fast, and so it seemed like a good idea to buy a slim work for children, called Scottish Kings and Queens, which was on sale in the museum shop.

I am not in favour of burning books, but if I were forced to contribute to a conflagration, this would be the second volume I’d fling in the flames -- after Penelope Leach’s ‘Baby and Child’ (or The Doormat Theory of Motherhood, as a friend of mine calls it).

This book ought to be good. It's published by the museum service itself, and the producers claim to have had access to its wonderful collection to help them tell their story. There are, indeed, plenty of illustrations, but many of them are the sort of black and white line sketches familiar to some of us from cheap post-war text books. Very few of the colour pictures originate from the museum. The small print at the back reveals that many have been lifted from other publications. The images slice up the text almost at random, and the tone of that narrative combines with them to turn the book into a jumble of factoids and false deductions, with some profoundly misleading juxtapositions of words and pictures. I can’t help feeling that any child for whom this book was an early encounter with history would come out of the experience not only uninspired and misinformed, but also misdirected about how to think historically.

Here are some examples, with my shouty comments in square brackets:

The book opens with a one page essay on Kings and Queens, apparently assuming that the reader has absolutely no idea what they are. Alongside an unlabelled sketch of a man in doublet and hose with a bird of prey on his ungloved hand, it says:

Although it was often thought [When? By whom?] that monarchs did very little except hold court and hunt, there is much more to the job. Below: the present Queen, Elizabeth II, opens the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh in 1998. [Black and white photo of the Queen, which could have been taken at any time, anywhere]

The next page is labelled ‘Royalty at War’. Here is the entire text of the author’s thoughts on this rather large issue:

Monarchs, such as Queen Victoria (below) [scrappy line drawing of QV] 1819-1901 [i.e. her birth and death dates, and not the dates of her reign] honour their subjects for courage in time of danger. [WHAT?? It turns out that this is an excuse for a large photo of a Victoria Cross] The Victoria Cross was introduced in 1856 to award [sic] ‘acts of valour in the face of the enemy’ at the end of the Crimean War against Russia (1853-56).

The image of the medal partly overlaps a photo of George V in uniform, walking along with a handful of unidentified soldiers. Beneath that is a picture of the present queen in overalls. Here’s the accompanying text:

Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) contributed to the war effort during the Second World War by learning about car mechanics [Never mind the double-entendre, what child is going to understand how that helped the fight?] Her grandfather, George V (1865-1936) [birth and death dates again] played a major part in Britain’s military action during the First World War, as the picture (above) demonstrates. [No it doesn't. It's impossible to deduce anything from the picture, apart from the fact that the king was once in the company of some soldiers. If you'd never seen an image of George V, you might not even be able to work out which man is the king. There is nothing to indicate where he was, or when, or why. And does anyone really think that George V played a 'major part' in military action?]

There’s one more paragraph in this ‘Royalty at War’ section:

Back in the 16^th century, Mary, Queen of Scots (1542 -87) [Birth and death dates again, though she abdicated in 1567] was likewise [!!!] engaged in warfare, although it was against some of her own subjects and even her own son. In this picture she is cradling a dying member of her army, supposedly [Whose supposition? What is the nature of the doubt about this?] George Douglas at the battle of Langside [ie, in 1568, after Mary's abdication, so this is not an example of a monarch at war at all] When the battle was lost, Mary was forced to flee south to England to avoid capture.

That’s it. Those few words on the Victoria Cross, Elizabeth II, George V and Mary Queen of Scots (in that order) encapsulate the author’s thoughts on ‘Royalty at War’ in the context of a book called Scottish Kings and Queens. It is utter balderdash.

To the left of the words about Mary is the picture mentioned in the text. The book doesn't tell you this, but it's a lithographic print of a painting by Charles Landseer.
Landseer's image was created some three centuries after the event, but there is no date for it here, or later in the book, when a detail reappears. Delving into the small-print credits at the back, you can find that the image comes from the US Library of Congress, but there is no other information at all. What, then, is this picture doing in a history book – twice? Children are being implicitly invited to see it as ‘evidence’, but, as presented, it provides evidence of absolutely nothing, and there is no warning whatever that the image drips with a Victorian view of Scottish history which, though interesting in its own right, has little to do with the realities of the sixteenth century. It's tempting to think that the publishers chose it for the same reason I am using it here: it is free of copyright.

So we're on page 5, and the clock is already striking thirteen. But things get worse. The book lurches between giving the birth and death dates of monarchs and the dates of their reigns. In some cases it gives no dates at all, leaving us to dive back to the timeline at the front (which gives the reign dates, though without saying so). Another timeline in the back of the book, which has a potentially useful alignment of events in Scotland with what was going on in England and France, inexplicably ends in 1328 – just before the international links get really interesting.

The author and designers seem to fight clarity at all costs, darting around between and within reigns. There are some pieces of complete linguistic nonsense:

Even after the Union of the Crowns, visits to Scotland by rulers of the combined kingdoms were rare [ Derr -- Before that, surely they would have been impossible?]

No distinction is made between women who were ’Queen’ by virtue of being married to a king (eg, as far as I can work out, an eleventh-century consort called Margaret, of whom it is said:

It is thought [By whom?] that around 1069, Malcolm persuaded her to marry him [is the doubt about the date, or about whether he had to persuade her, or whether the marriage happened at all?]. Margaret became Queen of Scotland. [Then? Later? In her own right, or what?]

Another Margaret turns up a couple of hundred years (but only 6 pages) later. This one does appear to have been a ‘proper’ queen, though only a child. The political confusion after her death ‘possibly of sea-sickness’ in 1290 is illustrated with a painting of a glamorous eighteenth-century soldier on a horse. This sits under the words: In 1294 Edward I was at war with France. The text around the picture refers to the beginning of the ‘Auld Alliance’ in 1295 [but surely it wasn’t seen as ‘Auld’ then?].
At last, right down at the bottom of the page, the man on the horse is explained. There’s a note about the Garde Ecossais (set up a couple of centuries after everything else on the page, and three hundred years before the picture was painted). This information is separated from the Frenchified horseman by a wide black band.

That’s typical of the design of the book. It seems to work on the principle that children’s attention span is limited, and that since they will shoot around from one thing to another the information they are given should do the same. The result is not only confusing, but also pretty boring. There is no real narrative, no sense that one thing might be the consequence of another, and frequent interruptions by cutesy anecdotes, leadenly told. A special box artlessly obliterates part of a picture of Dunfermline Abbey to tell us:

Big Head

King Malcolm III was also known as

Malcolm Canmore.

Canmore in Gaelic

means ‘Great Chief’ but it could

also mean ‘Big Head’!

[A generation groans]

But at least that is actually about a king. Take a look at page 23. Suddenly, we hit a heading Wolves in Scotland , followed by drawings of a wolf, a piece of bone, and a diagram of a wolverine skull. Together they take up more than a quarter of the page. Here’s the text:

Wolves were living in the wild in Scotland in the 15^th century, although James I ordered that the numbers should be kept down. The last wolf in Scotland was thought to have been killed in 1743. Below, left, is a fragment of the upper jaw of a wolf, found in Midlothian. The skull diagram shows the position, in red, of the fossil fragment. [This is not an excerpt. It is everything the book has to say on the subject. But why say it at all? What has that got to do with ‘Scottish Kings and Queens’?]

The rag bag is rounded off with a brain-dead game completely unrelated to any real events, thereby missing a chance to reinforce information in a palatable way.

Square 51: New Rebellion! You’re taken prisoner. Throw a six to escape execution and move on to 52. If you don’t throw a 6, return to START! Square 55: Establish a monastery to give thanks for your survival. Move forward one space.

Oh dear.

Children are not stupid. They know when they are being patronised, they know dodgy work when they see it, and they know when two and two are being made to add up five. What they don't have is a repository of facts in their heads, or a feel for the traps of false links and anachronisms. It's hard to imagine that this book will add to their store of knowledge, and worrying to see the sloppy habits of deduction it seems to be encouraging.

There are many reasons to admire the Museum of Scotland, but I’m embarrassed on behalf of my new homeland that Scottish Kings and Queens is being sold there, with official backing.

I hope that it is not typical of the history books children are being given in schools.
If it is, the lights must be going out all over Britain.



www.eleanorupdale.com

The Horrors of History – what do we tell the children?

Barbara Mitchelhill

I’d already written this blog when I read Katherine Langrish’s blog posted on September 5^th on Torture as Entertainment and I agreed with everything she said. But I decided to give you all a double dose of this subject by telling it as it happened to me.

I had never written about WW2 before starting my novel Run Rabbit Run and I gave a great deal of thought as to how much detail of those gruesome years I should reveal to children of 9 to 13 years.

Although my readers are young, they are sophisticated in many ways. On their televisions they view war as it happens in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have seen the violence of the Arab Spring with people left homeless, their families destroyed - but I asked myself where should I draw the line in a book about WW2? I simply decided to avoid the more horrific happenings which could traumatise my readers. Not avoiding the truth but treading somewhat carefully.

Soon after the first draft of the book was completed, a librarian friend asked if I’d read Morris Gleiztman’s Once and Then. I hadn’t but I knew him as a wickedly funny writer for my readers’ age group. I bought the book and settled down to an enjoyable read.

‘Once I was living in an orphanage in the mountains and I shouldn’t have been and I almost caused a riot. It was because of the carrot.’

So began the story in Morris Gleiztman’s delightful, inimitable style which would surely draw in any nine or ten year old. I was already hooked.

This book is set in WW2 and is told in the voice of Felix, an achingly naïve little Jewish boy. But the author soon takes the reader into the horrors of Germany in WW2 , seeing terrifying events through Felix’s innocent eyes. People being captured and shot. A river running blood. Seeing a young friend and his surrogate mother hanging by their necks in the town square. I read on and I felt bad. Really bad. And if I felt bad, what about the nine or ten year old? Although the book is beautifully crafted and elegantly written, this cannot make up for scenes of horror one after another. I’m not saying that we always need happy endings. But I believe that to leave children without hope, is unforgivable.

Michael Morpurgo has written many books for this age group on the subject of the two World Wars and does not hold back from telling the hard truths of conflict. Some of his books do not have happy endings. Some leave the reader feeling sad – but, I believe, not traumatised.

As I came to the final chapter of Once and Then, I hoped (oh how I hoped!) that Felix would find a refuge and someone to protect him. Surely, surely the relentless horror must come to an end, I said to myself. But no. In the last pages, I found that Felix had been living in a hiding hole for three months, his legs growing weaker and his eye sight failing.

End of story.

And this is the reason why I am writing this blog. I am asking the question, where do we draw the line? Is it right, that a book written for young children can be without hope? Do we as writers not owe it to young children to exercise duty of care? To use the equivalent of a ‘nine o’ clock watershed’? I think we do.

Torture as Entertainment by Katherine Langrish

I wasn't going to write about this at all.  I was going to write a post about sailing reproduction Viking ships on the sunny waters of Roskilde fjord one happy midsummer a couple of years back.

But then, reading the Guardian newspaper for Saturday 20th August, I came across a review of an audio book, and changed my mind: so the viking ships post will have to wait till next time.

The column is headed 'Sue Arnold's Choice'.   As you probably know, Sue Arnold regularly reviews audio books for the Guardian, and I often read and enjoy her recommendations, but I guess Jove nods, we all have off days, and this one stopped me in my tracks.  You can find it online here, but I'm going to quote from it anyway.

'Pirates!' by Roy McMillan is an audio book for children which Sue Arnold describes as 'an entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia'.  So far, so good: and I was particularly interested to see that the book follows its subject matter right into modern times.  I used to work for Lloyd's Register of Shipping and know full well that pirates have never gone away, and certainly no longer present themselves in 18th century costumes complete with tricorn hats, parrots, cutlasses and seaboots.  (A costume which has a lot to answer for: take away the parrot and add a black mask and a horse and you have a highwayman, another stereotype of the imaginary long-lost romantic past.)

Real pirates are not and never were romantic, and neither were highwaymen, in spite of the myth of the handsome beribboned rascal who kisses the lady's hand before demanding her diamonds.  There's room in fiction, I guess, for romantic rascals: but that's because it's fiction. With another hat on, I spoke recently at the Mervyn Peake Centenary Conference at the University of Chichester on Peake's classic picture book about pirates: 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'.  Here is Captain Slaughterboard in all his sleazy glory: a comically terrifying character in the tradition of Long John Silver and Captain Hook.  Pirates in children's fiction are almost pure fantasy: as mythical as unicorns. 

History, however, presents the naked facts.  And the naked facts are often extremely unpleasant.  Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with telling children about the nasty things which have been done in the world: but I do have a problem with nastiness which is presented as entertainment.

Time for that quote:  Sue Arnold writes:

"Punctuating the biographies [of famous pirates] are ... graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed 'Gruesome Alert', which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for example, one pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money.  The  unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could only walk on all fours.  Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish."

I'm sorry?  Kids will ENJOY hearing this?

You know, some of them actually may.  The ones without much imagination, and the ones who haven't noticed or bothered to think about the fact that the book follows pirates right up to the present day, and that perhaps torture isn't some quaint old-worlde custom after all.  But I thought books were supposed to broaden our imaginations so that we are more capable of empathy, and I thought history might be a way of making us think more wisely about the present - rather than a lurid chamber-of-horrors freak-show.

My quarrel is not with Roy McMillan's book, which I haven't listened to - it may be well and sensitively written, and the subtitle which the author apparently employs, 'Gruesome Alert', may be genuinely intended to warn rather than to amplify.  My quarrel is with the careless tone of the reviewer.

"Kids are tough" says Sue Arnold.  Well, some of them are and some of them aren't, and parents know pretty well what their own offspring can stand; and what is likely to produce the tap on the bedroom door at midnight and the shivering cry of 'I can't get to sleep - I can't stop thinking about [insert horror of choice]' - so it's a bit silly to name-call those parents who do decide this is all a bit too strong, as 'PC'. 
The world is full of horrors and always has been, we know.  I don't in the least mind children hearing about them - at the appropriate age - as long as the adults who convey this information don't present it as fun stuff.  (Those jolly old pirates, eh? What they got up to!)

My elder daughter studied GCSE history about five years ago, and one of the topics was 'Victorian Crime and Punishment'.  Part of the course involved a close study of the Jack the Ripper murders - including photographs of the victims - for no good reason that I could see (since the Ripper was never caught and therefore never punished) other than its sensation value: educators clearly thought the subject would liven up potentially dull lessons.  My daughter and a good portion of her classmates found it very disturbing, especially as her (female) history teacher appeared to enjoy the topic in a way which was quite out of sympathy with her class.  Indeed, this woman told them with regret she was unable to show them more graphic photos, since when she had done so with the previous year's class, a girl had fainted.

Unlike their teacher, my sixteen year old daughter and her friends understood they were looking at pictures of real people - real women and girls, some maybe not much older than themselves - who had lived hard lives and known terror and pain and early death.  They had been real, not some stop on an East End Jack-the-Ripper tourist trail. 

"Kids are tough".  Let's be sure this doesn't mean, "Kids are insensitive, unimaginative and callous. They need strong meat, even carrion: they won't appreciate anything better."  Let's be sure we don't apply lower standards to children's history books, sensationalising them because we think children won't read them otherwise (and people say "it doesn't matter what they read so long as they're reading" - a statement quite as idiotic as "it doesn't matter what they eat so long as they're eating"). 

And let's agree that just because something happened in the past, doesn't make it entertainment.

See Katherine Langrish at the Cheltenham Festival, Sunday October 16th at 5.00pm, talking with Kevin Crossley-Holland about her book West of the Moon.