Silent as the Grave - Celia Rees

Last Sunday, my daughter and I went on a pilgrimage to Kensal Green Catholic Cemetery to lay lilies on the grave of Krystyna Skarbek (nom de guerre, Christine Granville) a Polish agent of extraordinary daring and courage who served in the SOE during the Second World War and who was awarded the George Medal, an O.B.E. and the Croix de Guerre. She was a Countess, beautiful, glamorous, everything a female spy ought to be. She was rumoured to have been a friend of Ian Fleming and the inspiration for various Bond girls, notably Tatiana Romanova and Vesper Lynd, although her own life story is far more interesting than anything to be found within the covers of a James Bond novel. She served this country with bravery and loyalty but after the war she was turned away, services no longer required. She came to a sad and untimely end in 1952, murdered by a jealous lover in the foyer of an Earls Court hotel.

This might seem an odd mother and daughter activity for Mothering Sunday, but we had both read her biography, The Spy who Loved by Clare Mulley and I'd discovered http://www.findagrave.com, a site where you can find anybody's grave, famous or obscure.

I've always been a one for reading graves and epitaphs, even when I was a child. I used to walk through the churchyard to school and would often dawdle, reading gravestones, wondering about the  lives of the people buried there. Graveyards and cemeteries have gained greater significance, however, since I became a writer. They are good sources for names, for one thing. If you are setting a book in a particular place in a particular period, the local cemetery will give you a ready made selection which will be both appropriate and accurate to period and location. Just mix them up a bit.

Graveyards, or just graves have been a source of inspiration. I first saw the graves at Llanfihangel Abercowin Old Parish Church & Norman Grave-Slabs in South West Wales many years ago. Legend has it that these are the final resting places of a group of pilgrims on their way to or from St David's and who unaccountably starved to death in this place.  A friend and I became intrigued by the legend, the isolated, ruined church and the grave slabs with their mysterious human figures. There was a mystery here and one that, we felt, was not entirely explained by the antiquarians and historians.

 We wrote a spooky, time shifting screenplay, incorporating other local myths and legends and moving between the Celtic past and the present day. Sadly, The White Dog of Traventy is still in a drawer somewhere (or actually in a small suitcase) . It taught me one thing, don't waste time writing a screenplay. 

Still, some graveyards have been more productive for me. In the 1990s I had an idea for a vampire novel (I want the date noted). I decided to set the story (which would become Blood Sinister) in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Highgate has a fine vampire history. Bram Stoker located Lucy Westenra's Mausoleum here in his novel, Dracula and there have been regular reports of vampire activity, right up until in the 1970s. 

Perfect setting for a book about a vampire. Graveyards are hugely evocative and are wonderful places for creating atmosphere. When I'm writing anything, I visit the setting if I possibly can, have a wander about, notebook and camera in hand. I also collect things. With Blood Sinister, I visited the old, Victorian Western Cemetery in Highgate. Huge and genuinely spooky, a real city of the dead. Lots of famous people are buried here. You can only go round it as part of a guided tour, in case you got lost and were never seen again. Not so much snatched by vampires, more likely to fall into an old vault or crumbling underground crypt. 

I also went to the old cemetery in Coventry where I took this photograph of a mausoleum, which would be the final resting place (or not) of my vampire character. While I was there, I found a bit of the wrought ironwork that had broken off, so I picked it up and kept it. Blood Sinister was always a good book to talk about on school visits. I'd take my 'souvenir' with me as an added a bit of  authenticity.

Cemeteries and graveyards are full of stories: enigmas contained within the epitaphs, dates of birth and death, the ages of the deceased. Even the memorials themselves: the lettering, the type of stone, the weathering can tell you something of the people who lived and died in a particular place. 

Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard

Thomas Gray (1716-71)


Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Interview About a Vampire and other Gothic Topics - Celia Rees

I've been thinking about all things Gothic. I am taking part in a panel event at the Lancaster Festival on 17th October with Cliff McNish, Chris Priestley and Dr Catherine Spooner from Lancaster University. I hope I pass muster.  By the time you read this it will already be over. Being asked to do something like that concentrates the mind. One has to think of something intelligent to say about what drives one's fiction and that involves delving down to find the roots of it.

I have visited the Gothic many times in my writing and it is through the Gothic that I began to write Historical Fiction. I can trace my fascination back to adolescence. When I was a teenager, I used to 'borrow' my brother's books. Most (if not all) would have been considered unsuitable reading, so I would 'borrow' in secret. When I think about it, nearly all my interests, from hard boiled American Crime Fiction to Ian Fleming, stem from these books. One of the books I purloined from under his bed was The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

I scared myself witless, but I was hooked.  The cover makes the book look lurid and trashy, but that's one of the things about Gothic, Dark Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction (posh words for Horror); quite often reputable, serious writers want to write in the genre and their stories are anything but trash. Inside the covers of this and the others in the series are stories by L. P. Hartley, C. S. Forester, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe. From there, I progressed to the works of Dennis Wheatley. Mr Wheatley is not quite in the same Literary League but as a teenager, that did not concern me. I devoured his novels voraciously.

I must have realised that Mr Wheatley's fiction left something to be desired because by the time I was seventeen, I was reading the classics of the genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I didn't think about writing this kind of fiction myself, or any kind of fiction for that matter, but all reading is reference, a conscious or unconscious resource lodged in the mind to be used at a later date.

I didn't become a writer until I was an adult. I was an English teacher in a secondary school when I began writing and it seemed natural to write for teenagers. Not just because I taught them and knew them, but I liked the same kind of fiction they did. Perhaps a part of me had never grown up. I began by writing crime thrillers. Then I saw Francis Ford Coppola's film,  Bram Stoker's Dracula. I came out of the cinema knowing that I wanted to write a book about a vampire. My current publisher didn't want me to do it, so I found a publisher who did.  I re-read Dracula. I'd last read it when I was seventeen.  I remember being seriously scared by it (and I don't scare easily) but I'd forgotten that it is entirely written as a series of 'found' documents: diaries, letters, reports of various sorts. This kind of metafictional device was what interested me now, that and how small, unsettling details scare people (if I was going to write in this genre, I had a craft to learn). I decided to set my vampire book, Blood Sinister, in two time frames: the Present and the 19th Century (crucially, before Dracula was written in 1897 and preferably about the time of the Ripper Murders - why stop at one gothic horror when one could have two?). The 19th Century episodes would be written in the form of a diary that would be discovered and read by a girl living now. A girl with a serious blood condition who is staying with her grandmother who just happens to live opposite Highgate Cemetery...

This was my first excursion into the Gothic and also my first serious attempt at writing historical fiction. I really enjoyed writing in both genre. I moved on from gothic 'horror' fiction but most of my subsequent fiction has been tinged with it because I still find it interesting. Witch Child dealt with witchcraft and witch persecution, transatlantic emigration and european interaction with native peoples but it is written in the form of a 'found' journal and has slightly more than a hint of potent and active folk magic. Pirates! has a diabolic villain in the form of Bartholome, the Brazilian, and his totemic ruby necklace.

I made a more thorough excursion into the realms of the Gothic when I was writing Sovay. I set the novel in 1794, the year Mrs Radcliffe published Udolpho.  Quite apart from the gothic excesses of the French Revolution and the city gothic of 18th Century London, I wanted my heroine to spend at least some of her time in a gothic abbey, Thursley, based on the fabulous Fonthill which was built by the wonderfully eccentric William Beckford who wrote gothic novels and was so stupendously wealthy that he built his very gothic pile to such exaggerated and monstrous proportions that the 300 ft tower fell down three times. I wanted her to undergo suitably gothic experiences there before escaping, as all truly gothic heroines do, so that she might wreak suitable revenge on her dastardly foe.

I have a feeling that whatever I am writing, the Gothic will be there somewhere. It is hard to escape  one's roots and the ideas and images that have always fed one's imagination and will continue to do so. The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic.