'Gentlemen, we are at war' - the Great War begins - by Eve Edwards

Winston goes to war

How do wars start?  Usually, far too optimistically.  On 4 August, a hundred years tomorrow as if you needed reminding, when Germany failed to reply satisfactorily to Britain's request that Belgian neutrality be respected, the United Kingdom entered what was to be called the Great War.  Winston Churchill gives a vivid account of the moment:

“It was eleven o’clock at night – twelve by German time – when the ultimatum expired. The windows of the Admiralty were thrown wide open in the warm night air. Under the roof from which Nelson had received his orders were gathered a small group of admirals and captains and a cluster of clerks, pencils in hand, waiting. Along the Mall from the direction of the Palace the sound of an immense concourse singing ‘God save the King’ floated in. On this deep wave there broke the chimes of Big Ben; and, as the first stroke of the hour boomed out, a rustle of movement swept across the room. The war telegram, which meant, “Commence hostilities against Germany”, was flashed to the ships and establishments under the White Ensign all over the world. I walked across the Horse Guards Parade to the Cabinet room and reported to the Prime Minister and the Ministers who were assembled there that the deed was done.”

 His account picks up on the almost holiday atmosphere of the moment.  No one could anticipate the years to follow. It is so much easier to start a war than to end one.

When writing about the war in my two-part series, Dusk and Dawn, I spent a lot of time pondering what it must have felt like to live through it.  The historical novelist is obviously working with hindsight.  You want to shout 'don't do it!' at the governments because you know what is to come.  But the skill is to throw off that problem of too much information and imagine the moment as lived.

Think about 'now' as you read this.  I often picture the present as being like the bow wave forming at the prow of a ship, soon to become the wake at the stern.  No sooner do you see it than it is past.  That's what you have to capture when writing about other times.  Of course, in 1914, it was reasonable to sing songs on the Mall and imagine that this would be glorious.  Problem was the guys on the other side were probably doing the same in Berlin.  Two juggernauts were about to smash into each other, carried along by the same wave of patriotic fervour.

So that's how wars often start.  The news is grim at the moment with a freezing of relations between Russia and the West but perhaps on this day of all days it is worth just thinking about what happens to the people in the path of juggernauts and not rush to raise the tension.

On a cheerier note (!), this is my last posting for a while for the History Girls blog.  I also write as Joss Stirling and Julia Golding and for the moment those names are taking up all my time.  So to Mary, our captain, and the others on the blog, God bless HMS History Girls and all who sail in her.  See you again soon!

Eve

The Elephant in the Room - by Eve Edwards

This blog is coming out on my book birthday - Dawn is dawning, so think of me singing a little round of happy birthday as I sit in my study.

For my entry today I've been pondering the plight of animals in war.  The subject has become a rich seam for authors and film makers.  War Horse is too well known to even mention, but just looking along the shelves of children's fiction you can hardly fail to spot them: Soldier Dog, War Dog, Shadow, A Soldier's friend, The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, A Horse called Hero (see Sam Angus' blog on this site about her book), and my children's favourite, I am the Great Horse (a horse in ancient warfare by History Girl, Katherine Roberts).  I could go on.  Half of these are by the wonderful Michael Morpurgo who has really cornered the market in the animal + war story.  I will try to suppress my envy.  Consider it stuffed like the dormouse in my teapot of literary jealousy.

So when I came to write Dawn, the second and final part of my World War I series for teen readers, dogs, horses and cats were all familiar presences but what about elephants?

Research is a wonderful thing - a real treasure hunt for anyone with an imagination that latches onto the unexpected.  It proves time and again that real life is far stranger than fiction. My idea of London during the German bombing campaign did not include pachyderms but I found a by-the-by comment in Neil Hanson's The First Blitz that started my imagination off on a new track.  On one of the very first night raids, a troupe of performing elephants were evacuated from Chelsea Palace to the Embankment.  The animals belonged to Lockhart's circus which enjoyed a long fame since Victorian times, carrying on even though one of the original owner brothers had died in an elephant stampede.  (Can any elephant expert verify if the Wikipedia entry is correct? I would love to know more about the Lockhart brothers.)

Even in a world at war, the (elephant) show must go on. A writer is very unlikely to make up a detail like that as it is so odd, but I couldn't get these peaceful evacuees out of my mind, parading under the arches while the bombs fell around them.  (Apparently they were very well behaved and didn't stampede, unlike the time that did for the unfortunate Lockhart).  Elephants by the Thames.  I wanted to be there with them so my heroine had, of course, to encounter them.  The plot took off in a direction where she would cross paths with the troupe which necessitated a trip to Westminster Bridge and a charge of treason.  From little elephant acorns a whole story plot grew.

But these elephants didn't give up their hold on me.  They became a whisper in the book through letters and idle thoughts, appearing in cloud formations and generally adding a sense of peace and blessing during times of high stress, such as when the hero is in a dog fight - the aerial sort.  When I think back to the book, it is these creatures I see, trunks gently curling around each other as the Thames burns with the reflected light of fires.

Writing this blog entry, I see I have underestimated the presence of elephants on the home front when I did a search for working elephants.  I hope you enjoy as much as me this photograph of an elephant employed in a munitions factory in Sheffield. Yes, Sheffield.  Not somewhere in the empire but in South Yorkshire.  That gives me an idea.  Hands off, please, Mr Morpurgo, I spotted the elephant in the room first...

You can also read part one now which covered the events of 1914-16. No elephants but a chocolate Labrador does make an appearance.

Old Sport and That Hat: The Great Gatsby - Eve Edwards

Have you seen the Baz Luhrmann version of The Great Gatsby?  I went last week with some trepidation as the critics had been cool and found I enjoyed it more than I expected.  I had spent some of last year re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, including his short stories, and found the Luhrmann hyper-real version of his novel a convincing cinematic take, if not a perfect adaptation.  I've seen many critics bemoaning that it is an unfilmable book - surely something that can be said of any novel that has something to say on prose style as well as plot?  My cinema experience was in the spirit of a story like 'A Diamond as big as the Ritz' with its ludicrous little kingdom and improbable diamond so I wasn't disappointed.  Some of Fitzgerald's fictional worlds were every bit as bizarre as Luhrmann's imagination.

I suppose a mark of a good film is that you continue thinking about it afterwards.  One of the aspects that I've been pondering is the use of contemporary music.  I'm not a fan of rap but it did make me wonder if the Jazz voices of the era had something of the same shock factor.  If you are interested in the mash up approach, the will-i-am track Bang Bang is a good place to start as it mixes the Charleston with his style, making old new and new old.  The soundtrack also drove both of my teenagers to see it so that's no bad result for the director.

But perhaps the star of the film for me was the hat worn by Jordan Baker.  Thanks to copyright I can't drop in a photo, but if you've seen it, you probably know the one I mean.  That hat was a statement, curving round her face like a semi-colon.  Only pop stars who make dressing an extreme sport, such as Lady Gaga and Madonna, get away with that kind of approach to headgear these days.  Poor old Beatrix and Eugene were treated like the ugly sisters at Cinderella's ball for daring to go wild on wedding hats.  They weren't to my taste, but, your royal highnesses, in the 1920s you'd have pulled it off, no problem.

If you enjoy the world of the early decades of the twentieth century, may I put in a plug here for my new book, just out this month.  Dusk is a story for young adults (and older) set in 1914 to 1916, published by Penguin.  It follows the fortunes of a young half-German nurse trainee and a student at the Slade School of Art.

NIGHTJAR AKA THE GOATSUCKER, by Jane Borodale

‘Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-notes unvaried,

Brooding o’er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.’ George Meredith

Caprimulgus europaeus

It’s an obvious thing to say, but some aspects of the past are utterly gone. But every now and then we’re lucky enough to get a fleeting, unexpected taste of what the past might have been like, a tiny hint or reminder – what the painter Winifred Nicholson might have called ‘glimpses through’. I had one of those moments yesterday, when I heard a nightjar.

I’d just gone out to shut the henhouse for the night and was watching a bat flicker across the open space between the hedge and wood. Dusk in May is so deliciously fresh – every evening a little longer, a little more promisingly nearly-summer, and here was a nightjar as well – what a bonus. Tantalisingly, I had to wait for quiet stretches between the noise of passing traffic to listen properly to this strange voice from the past, calling from a time when such things were plentiful in the countryside…

The European nightjar (Caprimulgus europaeus) is a nocturnal summer visitor from warmer places. Although on the increase again, they number just over 4600 breeding pairs in the UK.

It isn’t hard to understand why this modest, reclusive, mysterious bird became associated with the uncanny. Its associated myths pre-date Aristotle, who recorded them, and throughout Europe folklore insisted that the nightjar stole milk from goats’ udders – earning it the name Goatsucker, by which it’s known in many places, from Spain to Russia. Other country names in Britain include ‘Flying–toad’, ‘Fern-owl’, ‘Night-hawk’ and ‘Moth-owl’, which seems exactly right, given that it must surely be the nearest thing to a moth one could ever see in bird-form.

Infrequently seen as they sleep during the day (unless you stumble upon a female sitting on her eggs on the ground), but its appearance lends itself easily to legend. The nightjar has wide, black eyes that shine like a cat’s if caught in torchlight. It has camouflaging, mottled brown feathers like lichen, or a reptile. Its pink gape opens very wide for swallowing large moths, craneflies, chafers and dor-beetles, and the beak is surrounded by bristles, presumably to more efficiently hoover up supper on the wing.

It looks, in short, like a cross between a cuckoo, a moth and a catfish. It is very agile in flight, and has a peculiar serrated middle claw which it uses for preening.

It is also called ‘Corpse Fowl’ and ‘Puckeridge’ – nightjars were also wrongly accused of pecking the hides of cattle and causing the disease called puckeridge (a condition caused by the warble fly which lays its eggs under the skin’s surface).

Naturalist and curate Gilbert White (1720-93) in his Hampshire parish of Selborne often recorded the presence of nightjars or fern-owls, and noted:

‘The country people have a notion that the fern owl … is very injurious to to weanling calves … [but] the least observation and attention would convince men that these birds neither injure the goatherd nor the grazier, but are perfectly harmless and subsist alone on night insects. … Nor does it anywise appear how they can … inflict any harm among kine, unless they possess the powers of animal magnetism, and can affect them by fluttering over them.’

He says ruefully that:

‘It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they are sucked in as it were with our mother’s milk … and make the most lasting impressions, become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them.’

In Yorkshire nightjars were said to be the souls of unbaptised children, condemned to wander the world forever.

Poets love the nightjar, occupying as it does that crepuscular, liminal half-place between day and night where changes happen. Dylan Thomas mentions it in his poem ‘Fern Hill, and Wordsworth describes it like this: ‘The Night-hawk is singing his frog-like tune/ Twirling his watchman’s rattle about.’ (Though he later changed the lines to the rather vaguer: ‘The buzzing Dor-hawk round and round is wheeling.’) Poet and naturalist Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) wrote, ‘While, by the lingering light, I scarcely discern/The shrieking night-jar sail on heavy wing.’ John Clare (1793-1864) mentions it frequently.

The warm undulating churring of its song sounds almost mechanical, like an old Singer sewing machine, or a spinning wheel; or crickets. John Clare described it in a letter as ‘a trembling sort of crooing noise’. The male call is the churring one, at 1,900 notes per minute, which it can sustain for several minutes at a time.

To hear it for yourself, click here to go to a sample recording (Xeno-canto: Sharing Bird Sounds From Around The World).

Listening to the nightjar’s song in the field produces a peculiar sensation – as if the ground itself were vibrating inside your head, almost felt rather than heard, and very hard to pinpoint in terms of location – the nightjar seems to throw its voice like a ventriloquist. If you didn’t know what it was, or if you were fairly steeped in superstition as a way of life, your blood might well momentarily run cold with the eerieness of it. It’s a fabulous, spooky bird. If only there were more. Bring back the nightjar!

Can anyone think of any other wild creature so unfairly maligned?


www.janeborodale.com

Are you receiving me, over? A Sound History - Eve Edwards

I have been listening to the recent BBC Radio 4 programme, Noise: A Human History by David Hendy (you can catch some of it on iPlayer if you missed it).  Fascinating.  He has attempted to chart sound from the very first knockings of stone and wood, singing, drumming and echoes in caves to the most sophisticated uses of noise in our present day.  It started me off thinking about historical sources and what we lack when trying to recreate the past for the purposes of novel writing.  Until recorded sound comes along with a crackle and a hiss, we have some words and pictures but have to guess the soundtrack that accompanied, say, Ancient Rome or a medieval castle.  It is an almost impossible task to recapture it - or perhaps I mean impossible to recapture it without applying a modern sensibility to the experience.  I am not talking about the honourable exception of early music experts who perform music on original instruments - the high culture soundtrack of the past; no, I mean the everyday sound of the streets, forts and farms.

One of the problems is that we think we know what the past sounded like. Take films.  You never see a scene of butch men drawing swords without that accompanying 'eek' from the scabbard.  That's what battle preparation sounds like, right?

Wrong.

The sound is produced by two metals rubbing against each other.  A scabbard was made to preserve the edge on the blade so was very often made of wood lined with wool or some similar combination.  Drawing a sword should be a nearly silent operation, though perhaps there would be a nice clunk as you return the blade to its casing.  This does not get into films because it doesn't sound right.  Realism gets overruled for our fantasy of the past.

Bring our history forward from knights-in-armour to Victorian London and we struggle to conceive of the decibels endured by our ancestors.  Annoyed by the building work over the road?  Victorians put up with that and much more. In Judith Flanders' The Victorian City  she has a fascinating section on street surfacing.  A popular choice was wooden blocks, mainly for the muffling effect. The shopping streets around Oxford Circus was paved with them in the 1840s and 'the shopkeepers state that they can now hear and speak to their customers, even, some noted in wonder, when their windows were open.' (p. 37).  The relief was only temporary.  The wood degenerated rapidly and put the horses at risk so had to be replaced a few years later with granite.  Back to the old rattle, crash, shout of the pre-wooden floor era.

For my next book, Dusk (June 2013), I've been writing about the First World War.  The Wilfred Owen 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' has haunted my internal soundtrack for many years and does an excellent job in poetry of trying to convey the sounds of the various weapons heading the way of the man in the trench - 'monstrous anger of the guns', 'stuttering rifles rapid rattle', 'shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells' - an amazing poem.  But the total blitz on the hearing - and I use the word on purpose - is almost impossible to convey in a restrained poetic measure.  I came to the conclusion that the nearest peace time exposure to that level of sound would be a rock concert - the so loud you can no longer hear it - the deaf for days afterwards.  One of the things that brought on shell shock was not necessarily the exposure to the blasts themselves but the constant noise of them.  We are wired at a primeval level to react to sound in order to survive; we can only bear so much.

I would love an archive devoted to reconstructing historic sound-scapes if such a thing could be put together by some clever university techno-wizard.  It would help me hugely if I could 'listen in' to a surround sound aural history, perhaps accompanied by snatches of conversation and street cries.  It would have to be free of Hollywood or BBC costume drama tidying, a clickable sound track with footnotes to tell me what I'm hearing. Anyone volunteering?

And I suppose after that there would have to be the smell archive...