'Keeping History Fresh' by A L Berridge

It sounds horrible to ‘keep history fresh’, as if it were a loaf of stale bread. To me it's particularly repulsive since learning that ‘50 years’ is the magic age for the Historical Novel Society - which means that I too fall under the definition of ‘history’ and need to start checking myself for incipient mould.

But memories fade, all things decay, and there are times history needs a bit of help. 

Archaeologists can rescue whole towns from the past, while restorers work wonders with paintings, sculptures, or a handful of pottery shards to teach us how our ancestors lived. From this one vessel we can learn about the Greeks’ art of painting and pottery, the way they stored wine, the gods they worshipped, the clothes they wore, and the equipment they used in battle.

Yet there’s a shameful part of me that isn’t as excited about this as I should be. Perhaps it’s because I already know these things, perhaps because Ancient Greece isn’t ‘my period’, or perhaps it’s just a failure of my imagination. To me, history being ‘fresh’ isn’t so much about facts I can learn, but about what it can make me feel.

I was reminded of that this weekend as we began a grubby little archaeological dig of our own – the Herculean task of clearing out our ceiling-cracking loft. Working inward from the ladder was like progressing through layers of history preserved in glacier ice. Back in time they went – old EastEnders scripts, my first television pass, teaching notes and old ‘Comprehension Tests’, love letters, signed programmes of school plays, and finally at the bottom just this:

Our loft is dry with insulation, and my sellotaped labels curled and floated with the limpness of cellophane, but the glue that fixed these crushed tissue flowers stayed firm. The paper insert was in place and intact, and although the pencilled words had faded with age I could still make out the words ‘To Louise – From Class 5 and Mrs Terry.’

I was in hospital with TB in my first term at infant school, and would have been just four years old. Too long ago to remember, but the sight of that card brought it back in an astonishing rush. The cartoons on the walls of the Children’s Ward at Addenbrooke’s, the taste of synthetic orange juice, the wonder of the first encounter with a ‘bendy straw’. The card was dusty, but I closed my eyes and felt my nose tingle with a familiar smell of disinfectant.

An artefact can do that if it’s kept ‘fresh’. Had the glue failed and the box yielded only a green card and a scattering of faded tissue, I might still have remembered what it was, but I would never have relived the story behind it. 

But the experience was my own, and history is only ‘fresh’ when it can speak to people who weren’t there, couldn’t know, and probably weren’t even born. To find those things I had to wade further into the jetsam of time and investigate the boxes of memorabilia from my parents’ house. Here were cracked photograph albums with white writing on thick black paper, wartime culinary implements for bashing recalcitrant vegetables into submission, and a filthy assortment of ornaments clearly retained for sentimental rather than financial value. One revolting black object revealed itself to be a plain wooden tankard of my grandfather’s, and considering it unusual enough to deserve exposure I brought it down into the daylight to ‘freshen it up’.

And hesitated. A year after my father died I showed my sister how I’d polished the ashtray that always sat by his desk, and still remember her disappointment when she saw how it had changed.

 

This shiny copper object bore little resemblance to the grimy thing my mother had difficulty wresting from my father’s clutching hands even for long enough to flick it with a duster. In this case, it was the dirt that was the history, and by ‘freshening it’, I’d destroyed it.

My sister isn't alone in thinking that way. Age has its own cachet, and cabinet-makers deliberately ‘antique’ their furniture while clothes manufacturers ‘distress’ their jeans, but when it comes to history then antiquity is even more crucial. We need to know that what we’re looking at is old – which means we want it to look like it. 

Re-enactors are familiar with this dilemma. If we use a shining clean vessel visitors will mutter that it doesn’t look authentic – but if we use a dirty one we’re doing an injustice to history. Our ancestors may not have had our attitudes to personal hygiene, but they washed their clothes, they washed their pots and pans, and even the English word ‘clean’ derives from Anglo Saxon. People in previous centuries arguably took better care of their possessions than we do, because they were much less easy to replace - and we must be true to the historical mind as well as the historical props. 

Olivier Hofer of 'Hortus Bellicus' - a re-enactor who's got it RIGHT.

But my tankard isn’t going on public display, it’s probably less than a hundred years old, and I had no sentimental memory of it, so without more ado I set to work with beeswax and Brasso. And before antiquarians faint at the idea of modern and potentially damaging chemicals, I should mention that Brasso has been with us since 1905…

If I’d known I was going to blog about it I’d have taken a photo before I started, but I didn’t and I didn’t, and can only say that after an hour’s work the tankard finally looked like this:

It’s a lovely thing, but it was more than aesthetic pleasure that gave me the sudden little tingle of history. As long as I’d known it the tankard had been a dull object with a band of dark brown metal round the rim, but now I was seeing it just as my grandfather had done. Obviously he wouldn’t have deliberately purchased something ugly, but now I was seeing it through his eyes, and to do that I had in some way travelled through time. That - to me - is what freshness is all about.

Not my picture, but I think it's the same tree and tower

It can often be hard to achieve. No-one could fail to be moved by a visit to Auschwitz, for instance, and I remember the sick, clammy horror of it to this day, but it took over an hour before I was really able to ‘let it in’. We were in a first floor dormitory with a crowd of tourists and a rather ghoulish guide, and I let my gaze slide away from the bunks and out of the window. 

There was beautiful blue sky out there, leaves of trees big enough to have existed in 1945, then off to the right I saw the chilling structure of a guard tower and felt it like a jolt in the stomach. I’d seen them before, we’d already walked past two of them, but now they were terrifying and I understood why. I wasn’t looking ‘at’ Auschwitz any more, I was looking out from the inside – and seeing through the inmates’ eyes.   

But the real walls exist in our minds. There are lots of ways we can gain virtual first-hand knowledge of the past, but they won’t bring us any closer unless we can respond from inside the same age. This video, for instance, shows hair and headgear fashions of Edwardian girls, but we’re not thinking ‘How wonderful, how cutting-edge’, we’re giggling at the ridiculousness of the outmoded styles. We’re looking at, not looking with, and so remain firmly outside.

Which is (at last) where writers come in. When our imaginations take us inside our own characters, then we too are doing our bit to ‘restore’ the past – and it’s a frightening responsibility. It’s much harder to portray an accurate mindset than it is to show accurate clothes, but a writer who gets it wrong can do as spectacular damage as the well-meaning pensioner of Borja who famously turned a painting of Christ into something resembling a deformed monkey.

It’s still worth trying. I’m currently struggling with it in my latest Crimean novel, where a private soldier’s letter home leaves directions about the ‘china shepherdess from Brighton’. We all know the things, ghastly, simpering, mass-produced fairings, but this is 1855. The whole idea of owning something purely for the sake of ornament was new to the ‘working classes’ where every possession needed to have a purpose. The first cheap ornaments strived to do both – the china cow that was actually a ‘creamer’, the pig that was actually a money box, the coachman that was actually a jug – but to own something for no other reason than to stick it on a mantelpiece and admire it was to be like the gentry, the aristocracy, the Queen. To write this properly I had to see the naff shepherdess as somehow desirable and precious – as it would have been through my soldier’s eyes.

But I still have to communicate that to the reader. I can just tell him, of course, but emphasizing the differences between 1855 and 2013 doesn’t bring him closer to the age, it shoves him further away. There’s only one way to bring him ‘inside’, and it’s the simplest, most important tool in any writer’s box. I can make my characters as historically different as I like, as long as I also make them recognizable as people, and appeal to the universal humanity that binds us all.

It really is that simple, and it applies to every form of restoration in the world. The greatest impact of those reconstructions of Richard III’s face isn’t that we suddenly know what the king looked like – it’s that he has a face at all. He’s a bloke, someone we could know or speak to, someone just like ourselves.
Or again, among the many miraculous restorations at Pompeii, is there anything to touch the power of the resin casts of human remains? 

They’re people. People who lived and loved and felt pain just as we do, who lay down to hide their heads from the mass of burning lava that has given them this extraordinary immortality.

But it is immortality, and that’s at the heart of any attempt to keep history alive and fresh. We’re immortal too, part of the same human story that connects us to these long dead Pompeians, and will one day connect us to those yet to come. Tap into that stream, and we can see history as part of Wordsworth’s own ‘Intimations of Immortality’ – with all ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream.’

'Making Fire' by A.L. Berridge

Historical novelists are generally a charitable bunch, but I suspect we each have our one pet subject that brings us out in historical hives when we see somebody else GET IT WRONG.
Mine, I’m afraid, is Fire.

Unfortunately it’s also the subject writers are most likely to fudge. This particular rant has been sparked by a scene in a Regency romance where the protagonists were strolling happily along a country lane – and then the hero ruined everything by lighting a cigar.

'Regency Love' by Dylan Meconis

The poor lovers hadn’t a chance after that. They could flirt as wittily as they liked, they could even thrash about madly in the bushes, but I was seeing only the glowing red tip of that cigar and thinking – HOW? How did he do that? Was he quietly rubbing two sticks together all the time they were talking? Did he whip out a monocle and catch the rays of the dying sun on his conveniently pre-charred handkerchief? Was the interesting bulge in his tight fitting breeches really a tinderbox, and when he set the heroine ‘on fire’ was he doing it literally?

I'm afraid I suspect the writer had in mind something as deceptively simple as this picture by the scarily talented illustrator Dylan Meconis. And unless the lover also had an asbestos bottle filled with sulphuric acid in his pocket, that simply could not happen.

I'm possibly going into geek-overdrive here, but it’s still a worryingly common mistake, even with writers whose research is otherwise impeccable. I’ve seen medieval heroes escape captivity with only the clothes they stood up in – and start their life on the run by making a fire in the woods. I’ve ‘critted’ a manuscript containing a brilliant description of a seventeenth century bomb – which the villain then lights by ‘striking’ a match. What is it about this one thing that shuts down our usual historical instincts and replaces them with a mindset where ‘making fire’ is an easy, even casual thing, about which nobody thinks twice?

Part of the problem may be that a ‘striking’ match is so ‘low-tech’ it’s hard to believe they weren’t invented until 1826. Another may be simply linguistic, in that not everyone will realize that the 'match' Guy Fawkes was caught carrying would have been only a length of 'matchcord' - hempen rope coated to make it ‘hold fire’ once it had been lit by something else.

17th century 'matchcord'

 Some of the problem may be visual. Sulphur sticks look like modern matches, they go back to the sixth century in China and do indeed ‘catch fire’ – but again, they need to be lit first. Like rope match, these are merely ‘fire-carriers’ rather than ‘fire-makers’, which is perhaps why even the first successful friction match was called a ‘lucifer’.

So how did people actually make fire before that? 

By a method that takes us right back to the dawn of time – the friction between flint and steel. No-one knows when the first caveman discovered sparks could be produced by rubbing flint against iron pyrites, but ‘flint and steel’ immediately replaced the method of ‘rubbing two sticks together’, and created a technique we still use to this day.

Honestly – we do. The fuel in this lighter is modern petrol, but the spark is produced by the action of a little steel wheel on a tiny fragment of flint. It’s effectively a modern tinderbox.

And the tinderbox is where it really started.

The ingredients are simple: a ‘steel’ in a bow shape to fit round the knuckles, a rugged piece of flint, some form of ‘tinder’ (amadou, dry hemp, ‘char-cloth’, or any other material that will ‘catch’ a falling spark) and either kindling or a sulphur ‘spunk’ to bring the spark to bloom.

 How it works is fairly obvious. It’s deliberately dark, but this little video starts with the striking of a spark by flint and steel, the catching of it in char-cloth, and then the transfer by sulphur stick to a beeswax candle.

If you can endure the whole 90 seconds, you’ll also see a musketeer using ‘slow match’ to ignite his charge. I’m sorry the fire-making part is speeded up, but we had to cut out the bits of my husband swearing when he gashed his knuckles on the flint. 

But perhaps I should have left them in – because in reality fire-making is both slow and difficult.  Even experienced re-enactors can be nervous of making fire at a public demonstration because it so rarely works first go. That’s what bothers me when historical fiction gets it wrong – not the lack of technical detail, but the fact that fire-making is tricky, that tinder could be expensive and hard to find, and that whatever different technique is used it can’t ever be casual. If we miss that, we’re not slipping up on a detail, we’re mistaking an entire way of life.

Fire has always been precious, and its original importance is beautifully illustrated in William Golding’s The Inheritors, which follows a band of Neanderthals on their summer migration. The ‘old woman’ of the group carries what is only ever referred to as her ‘burden’, but is in fact a clay pot containing the fire they need to keep them alive. The impression we have is that none of them have fire-making skills, and if the fire ever went out they could never relight it.

The advent of the tinderbox changed all that, but the value of fire persisted through to the 18th century. Once lit, fires were kept burning forever. At night they would be ‘banked’ for safety, using a metal hood drilled with tiny holes which the French called a ‘couvre-feu’ – and the English corrupted to a ‘curfew’. 

The original ‘curfew call’ had nothing to do with martial law, but was simply a night-watchman reminding the citizens it was time to cover their fires for the night.

It sounds wasteful of fuel, but only one fire was needed for a household, and from that single source would come all the hundred other usages needed in the course of a day. Burning coals or timber from one fire would be carried in a bucket to light another. A taper from the fire would light a lamp or a candle, a spill from the candle would light a pipe or a cigar. That’s why we never see Mr Darcy or the Scarlet Pimpernel hacking away with their tinderboxes – the fire is already lit, and all they ever need to do is borrow a little from an existing flame. 

And how important it makes that one fire! For Golding’s Neanderthals the location of the fire defined their home, and in many ways it still does today. The Romans used the word ‘hearth’ to define a home, and it still forms the centrepiece for most houses built before 1970. Central heating has mostly removed the physical need for a fire, but nothing (for me) compensates for the spiritual loss. I can still remember when a family sitting room wasn’t arranged around the position of a television, but around something like this:

 Fire transcends its physical properties, which is why our attitudes to it remained unchanged for so long. The invention of cheap matches should have done away with most of them, but am I the only one who remembers seeing on her grandparents’ mantelpiece something that looked like this?

It’s a jar of spills. My grandmother used them to light the candles, and my grandfather to light his cigars. In Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a key clue actually depends on the position of a jar of spills on a mantelpiece. That seems ridiculous in a novel set during the First World War, but fire was still precious, and even a match wouldn’t be wasted if there was an existing fire source to be used.

That’s the mindset we need to hold when we’re writing historical fiction. I made a whopping great mistake in an early draft of Honour and the Sword when I had a character light his pipe using a tinderbox – when there was a fire already lit in the room. After much thought I actually left it in, because it perfectly illustrated the character’s agitation at the time – but it still originated in a mistake, and one I was determined not to make again. In In the Name of the King I had an officer bring his volunteer musketeers a handful of matches already lit, because it would have made more sense to light them all from one flame than to hang about while a dozen women all got busy with tinderboxes.

That’s what I love most about writing historical fiction – getting inside the heads of long dead characters and seeing a problem as it was in their day. I’ve even learned from it, and when I ran out of matches and was reduced to that hideously messy business of lighting a cigarette from the gas cooker, I put on my ‘historical head’ and made a spill out of screwed paper instead. I used that to light a slow-burning candle, which gave me a light whenever I needed it for the rest of the night. One fire to light a dozen others.

Or a million. Few or none will remain of those fires that were once kept burning day and night, but the idea remains and its spiritual power is as strong as ever. Candles are still lit and kept burning to maintain a vigil. A torch lit from the Olympic flame is carried hand to hand to keep the same fire burning all over the world. Unlike ourselves, a fire that is fed will never die.

 Neither will its history. History for most of us is a broken chain, a series of fragments connected by gaps. Our landmarks might be those of 1066 And All That, lurching from the Roman Occupation to the Memorable King Henry VIII with only minor stops for Alfred to burn the cakes and John to lose his laundry in the Wash. The landmarks of a specialist can be even wider spread, and my dad had Victorian Church History at one end and Mediaeval Law at the other with only the vaguest blur in between.

Fire is different, the universal element that has been with us all the way. We can follow it through our steel-and-flint lighters to our grandfather’s spills, through the lucifers of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ to the matchlock musket, through the sulphur matches and tinderboxes all the way back to a caveman rubbing two sticks together and making a spark that would change the world.

And when we can stand on the edge of that world and see right back in time to its beginning, then that, for me, is when history itself catches fire.

***

A. L. Berridge's website

Website for Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King