Talking history in a writer's fiction... with the writer (Brenda Clough), by Gillian Polack

Because so many readers enjoyed the conversations I have with other writers, this month I’ve asked US writer Brenda Clough in to chat. First up, an introduction, then on with the conversation. It’s not a lot of to-and-fro, because, on this subject and at this moment, neither of us chose soundbites. Brenda has some interesting things to say, too.

Brenda: I've been publishing science fiction and fantasy since the 1980s. And I got into historical fiction in a science-fictional way -- with a time travel novel. You remember Lawrence 'Titus' Oates, right? British hero of Antarctic exploration. He's famous for stepping out into a blizzard with the carelessly British understatement, "I am just going out and may be some time," thus committing suicide to save his fellow explorers.

One of the big problems of time travel is what we may call the butterfly effect. If you step through your time portal to the late Cretaceous and step on a butterfly, will the present be the same when you get back? Or would that butterfly have been destined to nourish some important lizard, who would otherwise have become the progenitor of the human race? You open the door of your time machine and the year 2018 looks really weird, changed! And if this happens with a butterfly, what would happen if you hauled back a person?

So the easy solution to this problem is to go back with your time machine and choose a person to fish out of the past that absolutely will not have a butterfly effect. Someone who is in the historical record as not in the biosphere loop; whose body was entombed in the Antarctic ice ever since he died there in 1912. Bingo: Oates is the perfect candidate for a time travel experiment. He slams the door of his tent, walks out into the storm, and there you are, offering him a ride into the far future. But then, to write the novel (REVISE THE WORLD, from Book View Cafe), I needed to master the vocabulary and worldview of an Edwardian gentleman. I despise with a passion the kind of historical novel where the 14th century Benedictine novice in northern France is named Lindsay and sounds like she was born in Chicago in 2003, don't you? Oates had to sound and think like a guy born in 1880.

So I learned how, and made him sound right. And it was fun! And then, because I had acquired a nifty new skill writing in tight historical voice, I turned to another pet notion of mine. It has long been on my mind that Wilkie Collins sadly dropped the ball. How could he have failed to realize after writing THE WOMAN IN WHITE that there were many many more stories to tell about his incomparable heroine Marian Halcombe? The lady was the Modesty Blaise of the 1860s, Wonder Woman in a crinoline! 

Well, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I wrote A MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN, starting in Serial Box. Deliciously, they're going to publish it in the grand Victorian style, in episodes. I am borrowing as possible from the sensational novels that Collins and Dickens pioneered, not only cliffhangers but secret documents, anarchists, unwed mothers staggering through the snow, enraged menfolk with riding crops, and unpleasant incarcerations in Newgate Prison. And I fixed what a modern reader would feel are the problems with those period novels. Marian deals more realistically with the commonalities of women of the period: menstruation, pregnancy, birth control (or the lack thereof). She chafes at the things that would annoy you or me -- the way she absolutely cannot hold a job, the way she has to act like a foolish female. She has to be a perfect Victorian lady who just happens to be able to kick ass through her petticoats and hoop skirt. I am a fan of the fast and fun ride in fiction, but it has to be historically accurate!

Gillian: It reads to me as if your journey into history has been influenced very strongly by the stories you can tell. Mine has been influenced by the stories others tell.  That leads to profound differences in the way we see history, I suspect. Let's explore this for a bit.

For me there's not a right and a wrong way of talking about the past: there are only consequences. When a writer explains that they've entirely 'got' the Middle Ages and have understood the cultural differences dividing us from them, the immediate consequence is (I admit) that I mentally classify that work as a particular kind of fantasy. Not one with magic, but an alternate world history, with changed values but similar events. This is because that claim changes the story if the writer doesn't know what they know ie if they think they know everything. The sources for that claim to hold don't exist for the Middle Ages: it's that simple.

I own a pronunciation dictionary published in the late nineteenth century. This sort of document combined with early recordings give us an inkling of what some people would have sounded like at that time, in that place. We're getting closer to being able to interpret them that tightly. We simply don't have that kind of source for the Middle Ages.

It's like a recipe, and the less we know about a place and time, the more interpretation the writer has to do. The more of the ingredient 'sources can't help you here - work it out' plays a role. The biggest problem for me, with the Middle Ages, is one that the best writers seldom fall into. Call it a  misreading of the recipe. "There's no secondary material on this. Scholars haven't written about it. I can't read Latin/Old French. Let me make it up. I can, you know." And they do, which is  a good thing... and can result in amazing works. They're set in made-up worlds, though. Not historical worlds. (I talk about things like this in History and Fiction, if you want to explore it a bit more.)

Because I'm a Medievalist, my examples for this are often from the Middle Ages. Our historical knowledge for Western Europe is changing apace. Archaeological work used to be considered a useful discipline but not central. We looked at politics and stories to find out about the Middle Ages. Right now, archaeology is critical. It's driving changes in understanding daily life, for one thing, ranging from nutrition to how tightly wool was spun. This helps us (as fiction writers)  interpret a truckload of written evidence. It means we can bring some parts of the Middle Ages alive like never before. This is what my novel (to be reissued with a brand new introduction, later this year) Langue[dot]doc 1305 did. It's not most fiction writers know, but very like the one historians  knew that precise moment I wrote it.

Why? (I'm full of questions today) I read an analysis of a stew that had once been in a pot (I love archaeology!) and compared it with what we know about cooking from other sources. I looked at reports of bone analysis and found out a lot about who died and where. I was doing that research for another project (The Middle Ages Unlocked, which Katrin Kania and I wrote at the request of writers) and I mainly worked on sources for the Languedoc for the novel, but my background knowledge changed the way I made decisions about plot and character: the novel became quite different to other time travel novels because of this. When we take understanding back into the secondary sources we read for fiction we're capable (if we do the work) of using history quite differently in our fiction.

Historians a novelists alike have the problem of preventing cultural baggage determining the plot. Having a society without women, without minorities who did exist and with minorities who didn't, without basic amenities (cleanliness!) without a sense of what that society was like. This comes down to what I call cultural baggage, but learned initially as historiography and ethnohistory. It's only seeing others in the past through rose-coloured glasses or through hate-coloured glasses or not seeing them at all or only seeing them in predetermined ways.

That's a new part to the question and a really good one to hand over to you on. There are two juicy subjects here, the first is what sources you used to build up those subjects so very thoroughly that they worked in your fiction, and the other is how you handle your baggage. for we all have that baggage and it's a constant battle to remember what it is and how it affects your work. I say this for myself, with my heartfelt anguish.

Brenda: I rely a lot on written material. (Alas, it's really difficult and expensive to physically get to Antarctica and I probably never will achieve it.) With Titus Oates I was fortunate in that every man on Scott's expedition kept a journal -- not only was it a Thing at that period. Everyone was encouraged to. The scientists kept scientific journals, everyone else just scribbled in notebooks. Also everyone wrote letters home, which were very often kept and published later. I have read just about everything every man on the Scott expedition ever wrote. What I look for is word usage, rhythms of speech -- how they talked. Because I want the historical characters to sound like they're of their time.

As to the things that -don't- appear -- profanity, for instance, was totally omitted, also everything involving sex. You wouldn't put cuss words in to the letters home, because they were almost certainly going to be read (even read aloud) by your proud mother or fond sisters, or shown to visitors at the tea table. Oates was one of the most dazzling cussers on the Scott expedition -- it's in the other explorers' journals. The very sailors on their ship were awestruck, British sailors who were probably foul-mouthed beyond anything we can imagine. Not a word of it got into his letters home to his mother. I had to make up his foul language from whole cloth (with much assistance from dictionaries of Edwardian profanity) because there's nothing to quote.

The same things pertain in the period novels. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens never used profanity, because their works were being printed in magazines, and being read aloud by the family fireside. Women (especially in Dickens) were sock puppets, so good and proper than you want to slug them one. Even Marian Halcombe, a proto-feminist heroine, has her role carefully truncated by the author. She's a thrilling presence in the first half of THE WOMAN IN WHITE but in the second half she's a clinging vine, laid low by typhus and the Victorian proprieties. The literary conventions of the day simply required you to have the hero in charge. The only active woman with agency was the villainness (as in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET) and it was essential that she come to a bad end before the last page.

Which is why historical fiction is so fine. We can -fix- it. Have you read Geraldine Brooks' MR. MARCH? It's the story of Mr. March, father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy of LITTLE WOMEN. In the original novel, as you probably recall, Marmee (Mrs. March) is full of platitudes, a truly dull character. In MR. MARCH she's a creature of passion and drive, someone you could actually envision wanting to have dinner with. And I have handed back to Marian all the agency that Collins was obliged to strip away from her. Victorian England was weighted heavily in favor of money and marriage; if you a woman with neither like Marian you were toast. So I fixed it. A well-heeled husband of notable affection and appetite, and she's free to do anything. And, I will point out, a husband you love gives you lots of motivation, when anything threatens him. I hate to contemplate how often I've put Mr. Theophilus Camlet into dire peril so that Marian can rescue him.

Gillian: I feel that we’re at the beginning of a conversation. I won’t try to sum it up or conclude it. Instead I’ll say “watch this space” and invite you back sometime.

How we talk about history - Gillian Polack

Last month you had a light post. This month you have a more solid one. This is because I want to talk about the effects the effects of the worlds writers create. I was in England for a few days at the end of October. It was entirely unexpected, and this was the reason I forgot half my blogpost. I took a ten thousand mile return trip with only a few days warning and quite a few things were affected by it.

The English branch of my family has been in Australia since the middle of the nineteenth century. This means that my relationship with England is mostly through literature and history. Given I’m a writer and also an historian (an historian of England, to boot) it’s not a simple relationship, but it’s not the same relationship that locals have. I noticed this when I walked through the streets of Exeter and when I talked to people at the university. As an Australian, I’m a favoured visitor, but I’m definitely not a local.

Exeter, autumn, 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

I’m giving you pictures I took in Exeter to remind you of this, for it’s important. Very important.

I teach writers how to write about people who come from different cultural backgrounds to themselves. Many writers have no idea how to do this. They write everything from their own viewpoint, as if another viewpoint is impossible to tell a novel from. 

One thing I love about History Girls and why I am delighted to be writing for them is that these writers are aware of who they are. They write in a complex world. This means they’re less likely to fall back on stereotypes due to lazy thinking. 

Exeter's Halloween 2017, picture: Gillian Polack

All fiction writers use stereotypes and tropes. It’s essential to make a novel work. The problem is when we use them unthinkingly. This is why I have such respect for writers who write about others with that bit of care. 

The thing about historical fiction is that it’s ALL about others. We bring the past into the present in a very personal way. We’re bring the lives of others into our lives. This is why respect is so important. 

Those we write about are dead: they can’t argue back. I wanted to argue with a writer all this afternoon, for she wrote Jews into her fiction in a negative way, as if there is no good in our existence. She’s still around and maybe, one day, I’ll get that discussion. I can’t ask any medieval Jews how they feel about work that associates them with the blood libel, for they’re gone.

‘Respect’ doesn’t necessarily mean being nice. It means understanding. It means taking intellectual and emotional steps and working past stereotypes and past hate and past tradition and finding out as much as we can about the real person.

Respect is complicated, Exeter 2017 picture: Gillian Polack

How does this apply to English history? 

I want to talk about two key points here.

First, England is one of the most written-about places in historical fiction, and certain periods are written about more than others. Regency England, Victorian England, the Middle Ages: these all have their own character for us. This character doesn’t come from the actual places and times, but from the number of novels written about them. All the themes and character types are brought together in our minds and create a fictional England.

The England of our dreams picture: Gillian Polack

This is a subject that’s been really well studied for Regency England in particular. Scholars have traced the differences between the actual England of that time and the influence of Georgette Heyer in creating the way we think about these things fictionally. 

I’m one of a number of Medieval historians who work on understanding these things for the Middle Ages. I’m also part of a number of historians who spend time teaching writers how to look beyond the fictional view and to see the people hidden beneath the stories and stereotypes. This is why The Middle Ages Unlocked exists. Writers said to me “We like it that you want us to think harder and do more research, but it isn’t easy – write us a reference book.” Katrin Kania and I did that. That was a much earlier stage in a conversation between historians, readers and writers that will probably last my whole life.

The stage I’m at now is a more troublesome one. 

When I teach world building to writers, I teach them how to think about and research the world for their novel. Traditionally, world building is a subject taught to writers who use fantastical worlds: science fiction and fantasy, for the most part. I teach it to all writers. Novelists who are setting a story in their own street are not actually setting it in the precise world they live in. We write fiction, after all. I use world building techniques as tools to help writers sort this out and create a better story.

Many writers who use history in their fiction tend to ‘own’ the history. They’ve built it for their novel, with a great deal of heart and a truckload of work. This is not a problem if they see it as building a world for their novel, for they’re owning the history for the world of their novel. It can be close to us, but it isn’t us. It can be based on real history, but it’s not the same thing. 

When they say it’s real history, a writer claims deep and special insights into the lives of others. Some of these claims are genuine: they share their characters with us. They don’t share all interpretations of historical people, however, only their own. 

Going back to where I began, this is important in another way, which is my second point. When I or someone else from outside England write about England, when any of us write about a place and time that’s not our own, we need to remember that our special ownership, as writers, doesn't have a more important cultural place than the lives of people who live there. 

Real people lie in our dream places   picture: Gillian Polack

If I were to write a story of Exeter or even a history of Exeter, I’d be writing it as an outsider. This isn’t actually a problem. Outsiders have special insights. Our responsibility is to remember that those who live in a country are connected more strongly than we are. That we write about their home. 

Even our special insights should never be permitted to eradicate their relationship and understanding of their own homeland. 

We entertain. We enrich. We create. But we should do all this with respect.

Women's History by Julie Summers

Sometimes when I am asked what I write I say: ‘I write about people who get themselves into difficult situations and, by and large, get themselves out of them again.’ That usually gets a positive reaction. If, however, I say ‘I write social history about the Second World War and especially women on the Home Front’ people’s eyes tend to glaze over and they move to another part of the room. Same books, different packaging.

So today I thought I would share a little bit of what I do and why. I write because I love it. I can’t think of anything else I would rather be than a writer. I’ve always wanted to write, ever since I was a little girl. I used to make up stories and tell them to my toys and later to my friends. I even used to write stories for my boyfriend in airmail letters when I was living in Vienna and he in London. We’ve now been married for 29 years, so the stories can’t have been too bad.

However, in the end I wanted to write about real people, not ones I had made up in my head. I find that the lives people lead are fascinating. There is no such thing as a typical person or a ‘normal’ reaction and that is what began to interest me. I was working in the art world but found myself more drawn to the artists themselves than to their work. I wanted to know what made them tick. I remember interviewing the sculptor Anthony Caro and his wife, the painter Sheila Girling, about their lives together as artists. Tony told me that it was Sheila who chose the colours for his early sculptures because she had a better eye for colour than he did. I was tickled pink by that, especially as no one had ever interviewed them together before, so the question was not one he had been asked. I like titbits like that. They are just a little quirky.

Anthony Caro's Early One Morning 1962 

When I am interviewing people for my non-fiction books I don’t use any type of recording device because that can be off-putting. I just ask questions and take notes. The interviews generally last about 45 minutes to an hour and in that time I get perhaps three or four sentences I can use, but those are usually gems. For example, I was talking to a lady called Jean Hammond whose story is told in Stranger in the House. Her father was in a German POW camp and when he came home, she told me, they never ate a meal indoors. They sat in the garden or, when it was raining or snowing, under the porch wrapped in blankets. She said it in a matter-of-fact way as if that was perfectly normal. But it was a new one on me. I asked her why and she said she never knew. She imagined it had something to do with his POW experience but as she was a child when he came back she just accepted it.

Jean Hammond with her two grandmothers c. 1940

In researching and writing Jambusters I constantly found women replying to my request for interviews with ‘oh, I won’t have anything interesting to tell you.’ When someone says that my ears prick up and I think: ‘oh, you don’t, do you? Well I think you’re wrong…’ And more often than not they tell me some glorious detail. A woman in an Oxfordshire WI remembered her father coming into the kitchen where members of the Produce Group were making vast quantities of jam. One of the ladies was complaining that she was wasting precious jam as she could not get every last drop from the bottom. So he took a wooden spoon outside to his tool shed and half an hour later returned with a spoon that had a flat side and a sharp point. This was ideal for scraping the jam off the bottom of the pan and everyone was delighted with the design. Needless to say it was copied. I find other gems in diaries, memoirs and in odd collections of notes in the Imperial War Museum archives. It was there that I found Mr Fagg, who worked in the Board of Trade in the war, supervising coupons and taking responsibility for the width of the gusset of women’s knickers, the amount of metal in over-sized corsets and the length of men’s socks. You literally couldn’t make it up. He is one of the key players in Fashion on the Ration.

William Buller Fagg in his Home Guard uniform 

I also found one of my favourite facts of all time at the IWM. Lord Nuffield, the great car maker and generous philanthropist, supplied all the women’s services with sanitary towels for the entire Second World War. These things were new-fangled and very expensive and he knew the young women in the services would not be able to afford them or indeed get guaranteed supplies. It was an act of immense generosity and far-sightedness on his part and no one knows about it. Except you do now! They were known as Nuffield’s Nifties. Writing women’s history is not always easy. There are a few of us who do it: Jane Robinson, Janie Hampton and Midge Gilles to name three I know well. We sometimes find it hard to get taken seriously by male historians who write about grave matters like tanks and planes and battles and generals with handlebar moustaches. In a list of the top 50 historians published last year there were just four women and of those I was the only one who writes about women.

Women are at the heart of my next book, too, but this one contains explosions and secret codes, radio operators and stealth. I wonder how that will be received?

From Blog to Book - Lucy Inglis

Four years ago this month I started the Georgian London blog, to discuss the lesser known aspects of the eighteenth century city. The blog gained traction quickly as it explored immigration, disability, crime, sex and other subjects like retail culture and music.

In turn, that blog meant an agent found me, and almost a year after the blog’s first post I had signed a deal with Viking books (a Penguin imprint) to write Georgian London: Into The Streets. Although I had been working in the eighteenth century for a decade, there was still considerable specific research to be done on each area of London and how it evolved through the Georgian period. That research also fed the blog, but it was important to only blog the stuff that wasn’t going to make the final cut for the book. Sometimes it was hard to choose!

Any writer will tell you that time moves at a different pace in the publishing world. It is the complete opposite of blogging and social media, which are perfect for instant gratification. Publishers are used to taking their time to make sure that every element of the book is right, not just the text. For writers, sourcing maps and images, and securing permissions quite literally takes months. But there is little to compare with seeing and holding your finished book for the first time.

The book is out this coming Thursday, so I’m feeling like a nervous mother putting her only child into school for the first time. But the journey from blog to book has been a tremendous process in which I have learned so much. Not just about a subject I love, but about how books are made, the collaborations that are necessary between writers and editors, the teamwork involved in making books as beautiful and covetable as they are.

I’m still very proud of the Georgian London blog and it is still the largest online collection of free material on its subject. People often ask me why I began writing ‘for free’, about such a niche subject. One Sunday, in the summer of 2009, I stood on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral and listened as the bells called to worshippers and tourists alike. People loitered chatting, or climbed the steps and went inside. I imagined this clamour was almost exactly the same as it had been three centuries ago. I recorded it on my telephone and walked home.

For years I had dragged my husband to churchyards, houses, demolition sites, public monuments and hidden memorials, telling him the stories of people long dead: cabinetmakers, slaves, domestic servants, weavers, chimney sweeps and prostitutes. Back at home I played him the recording, my precious moment of shared experience with Londoners of the past. His dry recommendation was to start blogging the tales I had accumulated and what I believed about Georgian London. The blog’s instant and enduring popularity reassured me that there were people who were as interested in these stories as I was, and that interest sustained me through the long journey of writing the book. It is a tribute to the people of the eighteenth century city and testimony to the eternal feeling that if I could just run fast enough through London’s endless archives I will catch them, grasp their coat tails and make them tell me everything about being a Georgian Londoner. And that is why I blog for free, because the best blogs whether written by one person, or like this one, many, are the ones that are born out of a deep passion on a subject, any subject. The passion of the contributors is what makes them stand out from the millions of others out there and I'm proud to be a History Girl. So if you have something you love as much as we love history, get to it and start blogging, you never know where it might take you.

I hope my love of Georgian London is evident in the pages of my book. My book! Four years ago I hadn’t imagined I would ever say those words. Now I can. It’s been an incredible journey. And as of Thursday, a new one will begin.

The Aliens have Always been Landing, by Leslie Wilson

WHITE BRITONS A MINORITY BY '66
shouted a headline in the Sun last week. This, Professor David Coleman announced, would be due to 'soaring immigrant birthrates', fuelled by 'record-breaking levels of immigration, coupled with the departure of thousands of Brits for a better life abroad,' (white Brits, presumably, though I can think of quite a few black Britons who have had to go abroad in order to get the level of jobs they are qualified for, due to discrimination) and it would 'represent an enormous change to national identity - cultural, political, economic and religious.'

While Roger Scruton mourned, on the pages of the Guardian - which now and again gives its readers a taste of how the other half thinks - over 'Englishness,' which is being trashed by the modern Tory party, including the common law of England, which, he argues, is now being supplanted by 'the abstract idea of human rights, slapped upon us by European courts.'  

Cricket on the village green, via Wikimedia Commons
by geograph.org.uk

I'm not qualified to pronounce on the accuracy or otherwise of Coleman's statistical analysis - though I know it has been challenged, and in any case, projections of future birthrates are notoriously unreliable. But what I want to talk about is the narrative that both of these men are drawing on, a narrative about a historic Britishness - or Englishness - which should be unchanging and stable, but is threatened with dilution by incoming foreigners or foreign ideas. Scruton, too raises the threat of 'wave upon wave of immigrants' who want the benefit of our 'hard-won assets and freedoms.' (He doesn't mention that Britain's past prosperity was greatly contributed to by looted assets from the countries we colonised.)

The immigrants are at the gates: seething verminous multitudes who will destroy our treasured culture.

Flick back through history to 1938, and you can see a headline from the Daily Mail. GERMAN JEWS POURING INTO THIS COUNTRY. 'The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage,' inveighed Mr Herbert Metcalfe, a magistrate at Old Street, referring to the 'aliens entering this country through the 'back door' - a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.' The Observer asserted that by the summer of 1938, there were more Jews in Britain than Germany ever had - this statistic definitely proved to be questionable. And once again the spectre of an eroded national identity was invoked.

Go back to February 3rd, 1900 and we find the Daily Mail again in full cry: 'There landed yesterday at Southampton from the transport Cheshire over 600 so-called refugees, their passages having been paid out of the Lord Mayor's Fund. . .There was scarce a hundred of them that had, by right, deserved such help, and these were the Englishmen of the party. The rest were Jews. . .They fought and jostled for the foremost places at the gangways. . .When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and fawned and whined, and, in broken English, asked for money for their train fare.' These were refugees escaping from the South African war.

Store founded by Jewish refugees, (Wikimedia images,
photo by Michael Maggs)

'Englishness' seems to have remained intact, though, in spite of these past influxes - it must have done, for it to be so threatened again now. It must be intact or there would be no need for anxiety about the fraying, snipping and gnawing away of its boundaries, threatened as this narrative always has it by foreigners and foreign ideas (like human rights, though I believe quite a few British philosophers have been quite keen on that idea from the eighteenth century onwards). 

And yet - what we regard as Englishness (or Britishness) has changed rather a lot from what we thought of as Englishness in the past - which makes me wonder, if Roger Scruton went back two hundred years, how at home would he feel? I don't regard a changing national identity as problematic.

But then, I have to come out and admit that I am one of those dreadful people - deplored by the BNP and the Mail alike - born to a mother who was herself born abroad. I am one of the fifth columnists, apparently.

My mother's baggage tag
for her arrival in Britain, 1947

What is quintessentially English, though? Tyneside dialect, for example? I had a Norwegian student who spent some time in Newcastle and understood Geordie speech better than many English people would, because, she said, they were talking Norwegian. When I went to Oslo, I didn't register the word 'gate' for street, because it seemed perfectly normal to me, having lived for eight years in Kendal, that a street should be called 'gate. (Gillinggate, Stramongate..) The Viking heritage. In 1066, a rather large influx of Normans radically changed English language, culture and custom, not to mention the landscape. How many of us understand Anglo-Saxon?
Incidentally, the fact that the self-appointed defenders of national identity can't decide whether to call that identity 'Englishness' or 'Britishness' shows the United Kingdom's lack of cultural homogeneity even within its borders and among those people you might call its natives.

We have had the Huguenots, who altered our English ways of working with cloth by introducing their far more efficient looms, thus giving this land a commercial edge over the French who had chased the Huguenots out. They were also accused (by pamphlets that must have been the ancestors of the Daily Mail) of threatening jobs, standards of housing, morality, hygiene - and eating weird foods. I believe it's now estimated that 75% of Britons are descended from Huguenots. And undoubtedly a considerable amount of us are descended from Jewish converts, not to mention the smaller doses of different-nationality descent from individual marriages (like myself). This is the national identity which, we're told, cannot survive immigration.

Door, French Protestant Church, London
By Ruskin via Wikimedia Commons

 I can remember, as a child, describing yoghurt to my friends - I could only get it in Germany in those days. 'Yuk!' they said. So, has Britishness/Englishness been damaged by all that yoghurt on the supermarket shelves? How far has chicken tikka masala, that very British dish, eroded our national standards? Or pizza? Or lager? We also have vegemite and US products on our shelves - and on our TV sets - which doesn't seem to trouble the contemporary authors of this narrative. Americans and Australians are white, I guess.

OK - I know it's not all jam (or yoghurt). For example, I don't think it's right for little girls to be mutilated by their communities; I don't like 'honour killings.' I want to see British Muslim girls get an education and not be forced to get married against their will. There will always be tensions between the values we want new incoming Britons to absorb, and their need to remain connected to what they come from. But the things we value can come under threat from very British people - like the attacks on the National Health Service. We can never lean back and take anything for granted.

 Most importantly, considering where I'm posting today - the stories about our national identity are an area where I believe that knowledge of history is quite vital, to counteract that misleading, sadly popular narrative of a heritage which is supposed to be - always at the present moment and with unique dreadfulness -  threatened with annihilation.