Slaves, Fish, Crochet, by Vanora Bennett

I didn’t intend to go to the art exhibition now on at London’s centre for Russia-lovers, Pushkin House. I was there for a talk on something else Russian and cultural in the same room, to do with the novel I’m researching, and very interesting it was too. Yet, as I listened to the talk, I couldn’t help but be struck by the textiles hung on the walls. They weren’t particularly astonishing when you first came in. Their (brilliantly) bizarre wrongness took a while to sink in, and make you stare.

The artworks were big blanket-like knits in dingy colours, with dividing lines that made them look like brick walls (think Pink Floyd album covers), and with graffiti-like Russian words in bright wools sewn on. Slogan type words, only backwards, or upside down, or altered; or swearword type words.

On another wall there were some neatly crocheted multi-coloured shapes – the kind of sweet table-mat thing you can imagine a granny with a slightly wonky sense of colour working, over a nice cup of tea. But these shapes were Russian letters, and the letters were strung together in more words, and, again, they were quite subversive, altered, wrong versions of Soviet slogans.

It was definitely confusing to see all those very butch power words – the shorthand script of the Soviet elite who, in their 70 years in power, gave us Stalin and the Gulag and millions of deaths, and the brutal vocabulary of choice of the violent Russian underworld that flourished under them – re-rendered here in neat, fluffy, well finished plain-and-purl-and-a-bit-of-embroidery. If you ever wanted an illustration of the feminisation of history, this was it.

It was only after the talk was over, and I turned round and noticed the quietest exhibit of all, at the back of the hall, that I actually burst out laughing.

This one was a large white lacy oblong, with frilly edges – the kind of cosy, conservative decorative item one might expect to find on a wire, not quite covering a cobwebby dacha window somewhere, with snow outside and whichever kindly auntie had done the crocheting glancing proudly round at it as she passed more tea (possibly from a samovar). It looked the concentrated essence of a particular kind of Russian innocence – the get-away-from-politics-to-the-simple-life mood that makes country weekends in those little wooden houses so enchanting. At least, it looked that way until you looked more closely and saw, all mixed up with the intricate patterns, that its main decorative feature was the – wildly inappropriate - great shouty Soviet propaganda word, PRAVDA (TRUTH), also the name of the main Soviet-era newspaper, followed by a disconcerting question mark.

The pieces, it turns out, are the work of a young Moscow artist called Olga Bozhko.

The exhibition blurb says Bozhko “plays with ideas of memory and history as they are reflected both in the language of the streets and in the language of government propaganda. She is fascinated by the way everyday Russian language mutates alongside ever-changing Russian perceptions of history. Living and working in Moscow, Bozhko pays attention to the graffiti, advertising and government slogans which comment, often unconsciously, on Russian society today.”

“The works for installation were knitted by hand - a symbolically soft and feminine medium. The large size of the works imply a considerable investment of labour and time: we usually associate this type of labour with domestic craft, which sets out to ‘wrap’ home life in comforting, soft hand-made material. But the images and particularly the inscriptions on the works are unsettling. Some of them imitate brick walls covered with angry graffiti, others - net curtains - but with slogans woven in to them. In the context of the elegant early Georgian architecture of Pushkin House, they turn into politically-charged comments on the past and present of Russia.”

The one that struck me most wasn’t in the room at all. It was at the bottom of the stairwell.

It’s a large hand-knitted fishing net, in the red, white and blue colours of the Russian flag.

The inscription Bozhko has snuck into the middle of the net looks and sounds like the heroic early Soviet propaganda slogan, “Raby Ne My” – “We Are No Slaves”. Between 1917 and the onset of perestroika in the mid-1980s, this phrase always featured in the Soviet primary school literacy programme and as a result resonates today with generations of Russian-speakers.

By now, though, I knew better than to take Bozhko’s slogans at face value. So I looked again. Sure enough, she’d changed a few letters to give a very different message, “Ryby Nemy”, or “Fish Are Dumb” – the title of her exhibition.

“This play on words,” Pushkin House’s gloss on the show says, “shows how very subtle changes can disarm (and in fact then re-arm) a powerful propagandistic message. To Russian ears, the phrase ‘We are no slaves’ is associated with one of the grand ideological narratives of the last century; ‘fishes are dumb’ may be read factually or of course as a metaphor for silent shoals of people caught in nets of government propaganda.”

“I like these,” I said, with growing fellow-feeling. Bozhko seemed so clearly the visual equivalent of so many female historical novelists today – cleverly re-examining the past, using new methods and materials and values, emphasising some things more and de-emphasising others, poking a bit of quiet fun at some of the sacred cows of tradition, and generally filling in the gaps left by the male academicians who did the writing first time round.

“I don’t,” the man sitting next to me replied, in cross David Starkey style. “I decided that before you got here.”

But you might enjoy Bozhko's mocking girl challenge to the orthodoxies of modern Russian history if you are open-minded. Even if you're male.

See Vanora Bennett’s website

A Medieval Frame of Mind, by Laurie Graham

Three weeks ago I was in Leicester for the re-interment of King Richard III. Amidst the modest but beautiful ceremonies and the sincerity of the thousands who lined the streets and queued for hours to pay their respects at his coffin, there was something else: the television imperative to keep talking in excited voices even when there was nothing new to say.



Richard III, by Graham Turner

‘Why?’ asked presenter Jon Snow, so forcefully I thought he might levitate clean out of his chair, ‘Why on earth would a King risk his own neck by going into battle?’ 

Granted, the Royal Health & Safety Directorate would advise against it these days, but seriously, it was a question that encapsulates our difficulty of getting into a medieval frame of mind. It’s too easy for us to think of the 15^th century as being like the 21^st century but without indoor plumbing.

Why would a King risk his life leading a cavalry charge? Because he was a warrior, that's why, trained from childhood in military skills, and because in the 15^th century might was right. There was no arbitration. Battlefields were where crowns were won or lost.  

Did Richard fear for his life that August morning at Bosworth Field? Like every other soldier mustered there he knew how flimsy the veil is that separates life from death. Death was a fact of daily life. Richard’s wife, whom he apparently loved, had died, but he was already thinking of the Plantagenet succession and shopping for another bride.  His only child had died too. There was nothing remarkable about that either.

Richard’s personal Book of Hours shows us that like all his contemporaries he lived in the fear of God and the hope of salvation, and if Jon Snow had been around on the eve of the battle to ask him why he insisted on riding forth the next morning, you can be sure that King Richard would have been baffled by the question. His world view was not the same as ours.

It’s a problem every historical novelist faces, to get beneath the sallet and the wimple and into the minds of people who saw the world very differently than we see it today. Tudor historian David Starkey misses no opportunity to sneer at historical novelists but here’s the thing: ‘Serious’ historians aren’t so very different from us.  There are facts and figures, verifiable to a certain extent. Interpretation of them is a matter of joining the dots.  A novelist aims to join the dots in an engaging and entertaining way. When they succeed they may whet a reader’s appetite to know more and to read to read more widely and even more deeply. Nothing wrong with that, Dr Starkey.   

(HOW) DARE WE WRITE HISTORICAL NOVELS? by Leslie Wilson

David Starkey has announced in various media that Wolf Hall is a 'deliberate perversion of history', (though he has neither read the books nor seen the television adaptation so I do wonder how he can assert this). Someone, however, has told him that Mark Rylance, playing Thomas Cromwell, is portrayed as showing grief when his wife and daughters are carried off in a day by the sweating sickness. 'I gather Hilary Mantel has imagined this wonderful tender experience of Thomas Cromwell losing wife and children,' he says, and 'there is not a scrap of evidence for it at all.'


Not all historians hate historical fiction, and many of them are hugely generous towards fiction writers  - I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Michael Biddiss, for one, who referred me to several useful texts on Nazi Germany and particularly to the invaluable documentary history of Nazism by J Noakes and G Pridham - so helpful, particularly when I was writing Saving Rafael. However, much as I respect and value historians, I do not need their permission to write my fictions.
The thing is (Doctor Starkey), that a novel set in the past is not an easy-read alternative to a history book (however carefully we do our research, and some of us, notably Dame Hilary, do it very carefully indeed. Indeed Hilary Mantel's work is widely respected by historians). The term historical fiction may perhaps be a tripwire here. We are writers of fiction, and some of us choose to write about historical subjects.That means that we apply our imagination to those subjects, which is what writers do, and of course we go to places (like someone's probable response to a bereavement) that historians must in honesty hold back from.
In exactly the same way, I might write a story about someone, say, who is a teacher in a North of England town. There is no evidence that such a character exists or that any given human being ever behaved exactly as this character did. If I cannot find it, it is not incumbent in me to leave it out, because the job of a writer is to say: 'What if? Supposing?' It is to write a story.

My grandmother in the '30s

Actually, I researched the novels I set in Nazi Germany very carefully, but this was because my enterprise was to understand what it was like to be a person who had to live in Nazi Germany. That is - as readers of my blogs here will readily understand - something very important to me. The enormous amount of reading I have done about the period, as well as watching videos, talking to people who remembered those times, reflecting on the things that came to me from my own family, was not directed at making my works good textbooks for Year 9s. Some people have found them so, but what drove me was that need to open a window for myself on twelve dreadful years that marked and scarred my immediate family as well as damaging and bereaving millions of others.

In the end, though, it came down to 'What if? Supposing?' Supposing one of the boy soldiers who were drafted into the German Home Guard in 1945 was the sole survivor of his unit; supposing he met a girl on the run from Berlin, who had a very different background; supposing the interaction and relationship between them changed both of them as they trod the refugee road with the fighting going on round them? Supposing  the girl was jazz-crazy, and could play the harmonica, and supposing a fantasy grew legs and desperate people started to believe it? Then you get Last Train from Kummersdorf.

There's another idea about historical fiction that is popular among the chattering classes, even post Wolf Hall. It is that it is somehow tacky, chocolate-boxy, that the proper enterprise of novelists is to describe the present day (preferably grittily). Now I have no objection to grit, but there was just as much of it around in the past - and indeed there is a whole generation of excellent novels that deal with the undersides of history, some written by fellow-contributors to this blog. 

One of my history teachers at school took this line: she said we should avoid historical fictions, which were always misleading and trashy, and concentrate on fiction written at the time we were studying. Maybe she would have liked to have a go at the English literature syllabus and excise such trashy works as Henry IV Part One, (which I studied for A Level). Also, she must have despised such trivial works as War and Peace, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Vanity Fair, all of Shakespeare's History plays, Büchner's Danton's Death, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (which I first saw, incidentally, at Kendal Grammar School with my brother as one of the Women of Canterbury and David Starkey in the star role. The poetry blew me away.)

If the past is another country, it's one that is part of our present. Humans have many means of visiting it and trying to inhabit it; through histories, biography, visiting historical sites, and drama, in which I include the novel. To talk about, mythologise, and speculate on the past is part of what it means to be human, and that makes it a valid subject for literature.

The Queen of the Castle, by Leslie Wilson

When I was a kid, we used to play out; we were free to roam the way the children are in the Nesbit stories, or in Swallows and Amazons, or - diving down the social scale - like the Family from One End Street. Our main hang-outs were the Back Lane or Queen Catherine Street and the dry bed of the canal that ran parallel to Aynam Road, where we lived; and sometimes the builder's yard where we trespassed till chased out and I fraternised with the huge bloodhound bitch (I think she was called Lena) who was possibly meant as a guard dog, but was delighted to see us.

Queen Catherine Street today, Castle Hill in background

I learned to ride my bike on Queen Catherine Street, where my father garaged his car; fell over and scraped my knees on the ridges of stone that lay under the gravel of the Back Lane; sniffed the curious smell of damp limewash and stone that came from the walls abutting the lane - they still smell just the same, and ivy-leafed toadflax still grows on them. My big brother and I yelled, giggled at rude words and chants, ran around, played Cowboys and Indians with our friends (I was a bit of a tomboy), and behaved like unleashed kids anywhere. 

Us on hillside beside Troutbeck,

I think free-playing kids are a bit like pigeons, who suddenly fly up and wheel around the sky, or maybe like roving flocks of starlings. Suddenly someone will yell: 'Come On!' and they'll take off and go somewhere. One of the places we headed off to was The Castle.

The Back Lane

You ran up the Back Lane and into genteel, dull Parr Street; across the bridge that crossed the Canal, up the hill and through the metal gate that let you onto the steep of The Castle's mound, where sheep often grazed and left their currants behind. You crossed the moat, where there were now only nettles, and got into the inner space. There was The Dungeon, where there were often cows, or cow-pats among the long grass, and where we pretended to lock each other in. At first I didn't dare climb along the ruinous wall that led to Queen Catherine's Tower, where was Queen Catherine's Toilet (giggles, we didn't quite believe that people had once gone to the toilet like that,  down into the moat) - my brother used to go straight there, though. When I was older I did climb up there, but it was still scary. 

I used to like to go to the ruins above The Dungeon, where I would perch in a window embrasure and look out to see the invading enemy coming up from Yorkshire. Sometimes this was part of a bigger game, and I had to alert the others; sometimes I would just go and sit there on my own, mentally block out the council houses, and imagine myself back into the past. I stared at the arrow-slots, imagining what it might be like to be besieged there, and pour boiling oil out onto the invaders - a thing we sometimes played at. 

Sometimes I did just shout: 'I'm the Queen of the Castle!'

Queen Catherine Parr was supposed to have been born there, though now David Starkey - who was at school with my brother, incidentally - says she wasn't, and that the Parrs lived in London at that time. Spoilsport. We felt it made our town, and our part of it important - and of course the streets were named after her. My parents had told us that she was the last wife of Henry the Eighth, the only one to survive him, which meant she was The Winner. And she belonged to us. 

Queen Catherine's Tower

Now, of course, there are metal bars across the bits where we once played, and notices warning us not to climb the walls, which are fragile, and doubtless we did our bit in helping them become so. There are information panels, so you can find out that The Dungeon was actually a storage cellar above the main hall - how disappointing! We knew, of course, about the toilet in the tower, and also had seen the fireplace there (Queen Catherine's Cooker, we called it.)

For information junkies, the castle was built in the late twelfth century by an early Baron of Kendal. It overlooked and defended the river Kent (which ran in front of our house, and twice came into our cellars). It began to fall down in the late fifteenth century, and was bought by the Council in 1896 (Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee) as an amenity for the people of the town.

Having a real castle for an adventure playground was a wonderful privilege - my brother and I took it for granted, as we did the wonderful fells and dales, the places that we could go out to at weekends, and the lovely silvery town of Kendal, - but we did appreciate it. We loved it, and still do. I'm sure that The Castle is part of the reason why I became a historical novelist, and am blogging on this site today. 

Colour photos by David Wilson: black and white by Frank Baker.