I’m going on holiday very early tomorrow morning, and tonight we have sixteen people coming for supper and some music. In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest scheduling. And in the middle of cleaning the house, packing and making supper for sixteen I have just remembered that my History Girls pots is due while I’m away! I don’t want to take my laptop on holiday, I need to post NOW. And there is NOTHING in my head to write about. At least nothing to which I can do justice in a short space of time.
But looking back for inspiration through the HG archive, I see that it is, conveniently and unbelievably, ten years since I became a History Girl, and so I am going to reprise that first post, from October 2016, with some brief updating where appropriate. I trust readers will forgive me!
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| Me in August 2016 |
As historical novelists we have the benefit of hindsight. In 2016, I could have had no idea that I would go on to write exclusively historical fiction, or indeed that my personal life would change drastically, from being a confirmed spinster to a wife and stepmother. That I would move to a very different part of the country, and acquire both grey locks and a greyhound.
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| Me last week (August 2026) |
In 2016 I wrote:
I have been a History Girl in waiting all my life. I was a swot who loved school, and from the start what I loved most, apart from English (I was a writer in waiting too) was finding out about the past. Like most children at primary school in the seventies, I did a project on the Vikings, which happened to be an interest of my history-loving father too. I don’t suppose my P4 teacher relished being told by me that there was now evidence that the Vikings may have voyaged as far as America, as that wasn’t in her textbook.
2026 note -- This year I did an eight-week residency in that same old primary school where, fifty years on, they are still doing the Vikings.
The best things weren’t in the books. When I got to secondary school, encouraged by a wonderful teacher (to whom I have paid tribute in another blog post https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/a-letter-to-my-o-level-history-teacher-by-sheena-wilkinson/) I continued to love history, but not just in the classroom. That school, Victoria College, a Belfast girls’ grammar founded in 1859, had its own history that enticed me much more than the too-long-ago Vikings.
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Many break-times found me in a certain little hideaway under the stairs, looking at an exhibition about the school’s evacuation to the north coast during the Second World War. There were photos and letters and old essays on display and for the first time I discovered the joy of the everyday artefact, and the power of old photos to evoke a vanished, but not terribly distant world. I never saw another pupil even glance at the exhibition – I think I’d have been very indignant; it had become my private place.
What made it all the more inspiring was that by then I’d also begun on another long-lasting love – that of old school stories, and the world conjured up by those serious bobbed, gym-frocked girls in black-and-white was closer to the world of Malory Towers and the Chalet School than anything else in my Belfast upbringing. Just belonging to a school that had such photos on the walls was a thrill to me.
2026 note – if I had known, in 2016, that I would be asked to write novels in the classic girls’ school story tradition (First Term at Fernside and True Friends at Fernside) I would have been beside myself with joy.
I had the best history teacher in the world, and romped through the Anglo-Saxons, the Tudors and the Plantation of Ulster. I have especially fond memories of the bubonic plague; then as now I adored anything gruesome about disease and pestilence. (As long as it was safely in a book and preferably now extinct.) I was told off for describing (and drawing) my plague victims with too much verisimilitude – but I like to think that a historical novelist was born in that first form exercise book.
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| In 2016 I had no idea that Name upon Name would be the first in a trilogy |
2026 note – I am, in real life, the most squeamish of people, but that second historical novel, Star by Star, which has just been reissued) centres, along with the end of WW1 and the 1918 General Election, in which women voted for the first time, on the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic. When I wrote it – and the words above – in 2016, it was with no idea that I would shortly, like the rest of the world, experience a pandemic at first hand.)
But it was modern history, which we studied for O Level, which captivated me most. This was history I could almost touch, history my granny could remember: suffragettes and the Great War and the partition of Ireland, and then another war. This was a world I knew from those old school stories, and from the war poets I’d fallen in love with in English Lit. This was a world that seeped through the Victorian and Edwardian streets of my home city, and those black and white photos in the school corridors. A world evoked by the neatly-wound balls of nylon string, made from old clothes, in my waste-not-want-not granny’s Utility sideboard, and by the snaps of her and her friends on Sunday School outings in the twenties, looking exactly like Angela Brazil heroines.
2026 note – my 2020 novel, Hope against Hope, is set in Belfast 1921, in the very streets where my gran and her sisters lived and played. I always liked to imagine that they could have made friends with my heroines.
Aunt Annie, Aunt Sadie (who died at 16) and Gran, in about 1917 |
When I started to write historical fiction – short stories at first and then, last year, a novel set in Belfast 1916 – it was this period to which I kept returning. As I write my second historical novel, due next year and set in November 1918, I’m looking forward to sharing some of those enthusiasms here with the History Girls.
And I promise not to make my plague victims too gruesome.
2026 – I have indeed shared all sorts of enthusiasms, from houses visited, to old books read or rediscovered, to family history, all with a focus on the early twentieth century, and a leaning towards the experience of women. Since 2016, all my output -- seven novels -- has been historical, including my first two for adults.
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| My most recent adult novel, set in 1936 |
I wonder what I shall write, in and out of the History Girls, in the next ten years?
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