'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.

Women of the World - interview with Helen McCarthy by Eve Edwards

Eve Edwards

Helen McCarthy

In conversation...two women of the world.  Helen McCarthy, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, has just published the first account of the role of women in the diplomatic service.  As I served five years in the Foreign Office myself before turning into a historical novelist, I was the designated History Girl sent to get my telegram of information in time for close of play.

From: Edwards, History Girls Central

To: All 

Security: Unclassified

Priority: Immediate

Summary: Forgotten story of pioneering diplomats revealed in McCarthy's engaging narrative history.

Text:
Have you ever asked yourself when women were allowed to join one of the most prestigious of professions, that of the diplomatic service?  My guess would have been in the interwar period, at the same time as women got the vote, but I would have been way out.  Though the Home Civil service was opened up in that period, women were not allowed to join the Foreign Office until 1946, and even then they had to leave on marriage.  That rule was not lifted until 1973.  In the 1990s I worked with women who had had their careers cut short due the the unfortunate fact they were female and had fallen in love.  Their male spouses were, of course, not expected to make the same sacrifice.  My first question to Helen was therefore if she had a personal connection to writing the book?

Helen: No but I have a very keen interest in women's history, especially how they broke into the professions.  I was working on women’s activism around the League of Nations and the idea of international government in the 1920s and 30s, which is when I discovered this fact about women’s ongoing exclusion from the diplomatic profession.  What looked like a small subject grew to be a much larger story and I realized that no one had written the narrative history going back into the 19th century and on into the post-1946 period so I decided to do it.

What surprises came up during the research?

Helen: I conducted many interviews with the pioneers who joined in the late 40s and 50s.  I was surprised how accepting they were of the marriage bar, most saying they didn't let it bother them, either because they weren't planning on marriage just then or thought it would be fun to try diplomacy for a while.  Of course, the bar might have acted as a deterrent to those to whom it was an immediate problem - married women or those in a relationship - so the protesting voices were silenced that way. The generation who joined in the late 60s and 70s were much more vocal in their opposition to the bar.

The second surprise, which seems to run counter to the bar, is how socially progressive the FO was in other ways.  In the 50s it was one of the first workplaces where it was acceptable to address colleagues by their first name.  Other civil service departments were still more formal.

Why do you think the theme of women in diplomacy is important?

Helen: Firstly, it's a fascinating story that does not fit the standard chronology of feminist advances in other walks of professional and public life.  Ideas about women's unfitness for diplomatic roles and the conflict with the role of diplomatic spouse lingered far longer here, even when women had proved themselves in field either in wartime or in other diplomatic services.  For example, the FO barred women from postings to the Middle East even after they were allowed into the service, despite the fact that Nancy Lambton had worked in Iran and Freya Stark in Iraq during the Second World war with diplomatic status and been praised for her work.  They were dismissed as exceptions that proved the rule – in Lambton’s case even by her own ambassador.  It was the 1980s before the first female diplomat of the new intake was sent to the Middle East.

The debate in the 30s and 40s about allowing women into the FO revolved around perceived gifts of their gender.  Was that the result of contemporary gender conditioning or do you think there is any truth in the view that women do diplomacy differently?

Helen: I'm going to duck the straight answer here as that delves into the thorny question of whether men and women are different ‘by nature’!  However, I think the language over gifts has now become embraced by the diversity agenda.  What were seen as feminine gifts, such as ‘intuition’ or ‘empathy’, are now welcomed as part of the drive to recruit from a wider gender, regional, ethnic pool to reflect the diversity of the country.  Out of fashion is the 'right sort' recruitment where it was believed that only chaps who had gone to the same schools and universities would represent the country effectively.

Who is your diplomatic heroine?

Helen: There are lots of wonderful characters in my book but if pushed I would pick Mary Moore (nee Galbraith) who joined in 1951.  She was a fascinating interview subject who conjured up brilliantly the masculine atmosphere of the Third Room where diplomats of her grade worked.  Suddenly after being kept out for decades the doors were open to women and Mary found herself in the UN Security Council sitting behind the British Ambassador during the Suez crisis as his aide.

If you turned to writing fiction, which person or place from your book would you choose for your novel?

Helen: New York and Washington during the Second World war.  Women were dispatched by London to win the hearts and minds of ordinary American people as part of the campaign to get the US to enter the war.  Winifred Cullis, to name but one, evoked the atmosphere vividly with her account of her trip in a fast lift at the Rockefeller Center and her lecture tour of the country.  She was rubbing shoulders with an eccentric diplomatic community in Washington, the embassy including such figures as Isaiah Berlin and John Wheeler-Bennett.

Would you have made a good diplomat?

Helen: No, my language skills are not up to the job and I would have been homesick.  I might have managed well on the making contacts and political analysis but I'm not sure about my schmoozing skills.

Here is a quick test of your diplomatic etiquette.  Do you know what the diplomatic honours are known as in the service?

Helen: Oh dear...

Former Second Secretary Political Section Edwards: CMG (Call me god), KCMG (Kings call me god), GCMG (God calls me god).  I've forgotten what they really stand for!  Who is more senior: a duke or a marquis.

Helen: marquis?

Edwards: No.  A duke.  But never mind I never had to know that either - it was all in a book somewhere.

Recommendation:
Helen McCarthy was sent a probing set of questions prior to interview and performed well under cross-examination.  I recommend you read her book and consider her inclusion on invitation for all future QBPs (Queen's Birthday Parties) held at History Girls Central.

Edwards

There's nothing much happening in history... by Eve Edwards

This is not so much a post about history but about the vagaries of publishing historical fiction for a younger reader.  You see, I always ask my agent and publishers for feedback after they've been to Bologna and Frankfurt, usually prefaced by the question 'what's the big trend?'.  I've been doing this long enough to know that the publishing trade gets VERY excited VERY briefly about the next big thing.  We've had wizards, vampires, dystopian, New Adult, now it's real life stories in the style of John Green that are apparently the BIG THING.  Oh yes, and everyone wants middle grade fiction.  YA is out.

And historical fiction?  Well, there's not much happening there apparently.

But like Ozymandias, each conquering trend has its day and disappears into the sands of publishing.

There is nothing like a book fair to get the gossip going.  Even my agent and editors reporting back do so with a roll of the eyes, meaning they know the trend is probably already on the out by the time they are talking about it.  I treat it somewhat like checking the barometer, giving it a tap to see if the weather is going to be fair.  I wouldn't make decisions about what I'm going to write next based on it.

However, I think it is true to say that historical fiction for a YA audience has been struggling for some time, quite unlike the adult market for the genre.  A few core titles are considered enough by many schools to cover key topics - two of the main ones my own children have been handed are produced by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse and Private Peaceful.  (And I'm not envious - really I'm not ;-) )  I find this interesting as I also write for the thriller, fantasy and contemporary romance genres. I have noticed a marked difference in the kind of readers I get for my YA historical.  Dare I say it but they are the kind of girl I was when I was at school: usually bookish, probably quite mature for their age, and keen readers.  They've hunted the books down, rather than seen them on a table in a bookshop or talked about on Goodreads.  I'm the same writer under another pen name doing the same kind of 'reading level' work in contemporary romance but there I get everyone, from the girls who read everything to the ones who rarely pick up a book.  So is it that history just doesn't capture this age group?

This is where I welcome your views.  You see, I love history so I can't see how it might come across as obscure or not their thing.  Complex fantasy epics are taken in their stride.  If you can follow the Byzantine plot Game of Thrones you can probably read War and Peace, let alone most YA historical fiction.  So I refuse to believe younger readers can't manage them.

So perhaps it is part of the decline of a reading culture?  I think there might be more in this.  The English literature syllabus seems to have narrowed to a very few channels and I can't see much encouragement in the history syllabus for reading historical novels (and here I speak as a parent as I've got children doing A levels and GCSEs in the subject).  Outside of school, there is little suggestion in culture that history might interest teens unless it is wrapped up in some kind of fantasy.  Historical drama evokes Downton Abbey and the older age group of audience.  Dr Who does something to remind younger viewers that history can be adventure but there has been a lack of decent historical plots of late (Elizabeth I in the 50th Anniversary - oh dear...)

And finally, there is the innate conservatism in a very difficult publishing world.  No one wants to commit resources to a part of the market which hasn't performed that well, forgetting that successes are unpredictable and can spring from anywhere. In recent times, both The Book Thief and The Boy in Striped Pyjamas have done well for new second world war stories. It might be that in a few years time the next Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games comes wearing an historical costume just as Gladiator shocked movie studios by turning into a hit.

Has anyone else heard differently?  And those of you in the teaching profession or librarians, do you find teens are happy to pick up historical fiction?  Could the presentation be changed to help break down that barrier if it exists?

My next book, Dawn (Penguin), is YA and set in WWI, concluding the two book series on the war as seen by teenagers.  Out 3 July.

Invent a Punctuation Mark - and defend it: Musings on the History of Exams by Eve Edwards

This year is a long dreaded year in our family.  I knew it was coming when I had my second child in 1998.  Two children, two years apart - that meant the time would come when we would have them sitting major examinations at the same time, both asking to be let off chores, both feeling the stress...
Hormones are enough to cope with but then add GCSEs/A levels on top - who thought that was a good idea?

As an involved type of parent on the Arts side (I'm a liability when it comes to Maths or any of the science subjects) - I have been looking at past papers and timetables.  It will probably come as no news to you that there is a debate as to whether exams are 'dumbed down' in the UK from the experience of previous generations.  Many readers of this blog work in education so will be all too familiar with this dispute.  This post isn't so much about that, though I do have a view which I'll put out for comment at the end.  No, what it prompted me to ponder was just what is the longer history of exams?  When did it begin to be thought of as a good way of sorting out the educational sheep from the goats?

I suppose the first requirement of a society to have examinations (beyond the obvious one of begin developed enough to have an education system) is to believe it desirable to appoint people on merit rather than through a hereditary principle.  Your king can become one because his dad sat on the throne but you wouldn't want your doctor to operate on you for gallstones just because his father had done the odd operation or two.  No sir, you want to know he has practised and studied for himself.

Many ancient civilisations had exams for young men to pass - that surely was the seed of the Olympics - a competition for all kinds of skills.  However, for the start of my history of exams, I was thinking of a national, written test in a form that modern school children would recognise.

My money is on the Chinese being the first - as in so many things.   Their famous civil service tests may have started way back in the 7th century (we are in the mists of time here so dates are uncertain).  Then followed centuries of fluctuating fashions in education, not to mention changes in dynasty, but it seems that some basics remained in place: the idea was to find the best administrators to serve the emperor and it was possible for some of those in far-flung areas or from humble backgrounds to advance socially if they had sufficient skill.  At one point, the sought after skills included ability to compose poetry, which in my more fanciful moments I think we should introduce to our present day civil service.  Imagine your tax return coming in blank verse - or passport application as a limerick.  There was a young man from...

So if the Chinese get the prize as the society with the longest exam history, who has the most extreme?  This is a matter of opinion - medical training comes to mind - but for pure torture, I think BUD/S training for US Navy Seals might be up there - 6 months of basic underwater demotion/seal training.  It includes the aptly named 'Hell Week' when they try to put off recruits by pushing them to the edge and beyond their limits.  It fits my description because there is some paperwork among the physical torment.  And I thought my week of finals at Cambridge was bad.

And what about the most brain teasing exam in history?  I think this might go to All Soul's in Oxford who have a long an honourable tradition of interesting examinations.  The exam is held to select two Prize Fellows to hold their position for seven years.  I was just looking through the past papers and they are a hoot - especially the General Knowledge paper.  One question is 'Devise a new punctuation mark - and defend it.'  I'd love to sit an exam like that - a bit like wandering into Alice in Wonderland.

There is much more to be said on this theme but I think it is time I arrived back at today's examination students - are the exams they sit dumbed down?  The first thing I noticed was the length of papers.  The longest written exam at GCSEs that most students take is English language coming in at 2 hours 15 mins.  Hang on, didn't exams all use to be 3 hours back in the day?  I think there is a removing of that intense pressure - possibly for very good reasons - but it does seem a gentler exam experience now.  And content?  Well, I've been favourable impressed by most syllabi studied by my children in the Arts - history taught thematically, some interesting course work (compare the portrayal of a disintegrating mind in Macbeth and Frankenstein), but yes, I guess that some of it seems not very stretching and answers on the tick-box scheme.  But then, thinking back, we too had our shortcuts, our set answers, our 'predict what's going to come up this year' strategies.  Maybe the dumbing down accusation is because the industry of education makes this all the plainer thanks to YouTube videos and revision guides?  The craft of taking exams is more transparent.

What do you think?

A Good German? by Eve Edwards

For me, part of being a historical novelist is challenging myself with the question: in this era, what kind of person would I have been?  On what side would I have fought?  Roundhead or cavalier? Whig or Tory or radical?  Mod or rocker?

Recently, thanks to a rummage through an Oxfam bookshop, I picked up Joseph Kanon's The Good German.  It is set in Berlin in 1945 and falls into the spy thriller category but also taps into some intriguing historical themes that go far beyond a good page-turner.  I can highly recommend it for its portrait of a ruined city and the early days of partition.  I was particularly fascinated because the Nazi round up raises one such difficult question for me. Had I had the misfortune to be born a Berliner in those years, what kind of German would I have been?  I hope that I would make all the right choices, but a good novel like Kanon's confronts me with the very real possibility that I would not.

It is easy to imagine everyone on the 'enemy' side was bad - it helps make the history books cleaner, more white hat/black hat as Hollywood prefers in its superhero movies.  But history isn't clean or simple.  Last week Deutsche Welt ran an article by Anne-Sophie Brandlin  - translated and reported in The Week under the strap line: Grow up, America - we aren't all Nazis.  The writer is tired of the lack of nuance with which the events of WWII are portrayed and argues that Berlin 'is packed with reminders of the past' whereas in Washington in the National Mall there is not a single memorial to non-American victims of the Vietnam War.  I don't know if that is true and the contexts are very different, but I get the point Brandlin is trying to make.  Most Germans are not slow to acknowledge their 20th century faults but they also need to be allowed to portray recent history in its full complexity without being accused of trying to bury ugly truths.

That was why it was intensely moving this week to read Clive James' essay on Sophie Scholl in his  Cultural Amnesia - an amazingly broad and erudite essays collection on 20th century thinkers.  If you thought he was only a TV critic, think again.

Sophie Scholl with brother Hans and Christoph Probst,
leaders of the White Rose resistance - photo from US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Back to Sophie.  Is her name familiar to you?  It wasn't to me, but she deserves to be up there with Anne Frank as one of our heroes.  She joined with her brother in the White Rose resistance movement - young Germans who knew the Nazis were evil and did what they could to register their protest.  She was executed at age 21 by the Gestapo in 1943, along with her brother and other members of the group.  The most remarkable aspect of her bravery was she was told she did not have to die - she could claim she was misled and be spared the guillotine. Instead she chose to stick by her principles and is reported by the chief executioner to have died more courageously than anyone else he had led to the block.  I'd like to declare her an unambiguous good German.

We are running a theme of cranky ladies this month on the blog but Sophie is too great to be saddled with that title. She was 'cranky' in the sense that word is often used to attack women: those who refuse to fit in, make themselves awkward for their society.  Good for you, Sophie. I can only hope I would display a fraction of your courage if ever I had to make such a difficult moral choice.

www.eve-edwards.co.uk

The History of the Future - by Eve Edwards

Over Christmas I chanced upon the original Starwars films (parts now called IV and V) being shown on TV.  These were the cult films of my school days - I collected the bubblegum cards and played games based on the world in the playground.

I can't show the Death Star due to copyright but here is Mimas,
a moon of Jupiter that looks just like it! Thanks to NASA.

'These are classics, so much better than the new ones,' I announced confidently to my fifteen year old son so we sat down to watch.

Oh dear.

Yes, they are much better than the more recent clutch of three, saved by a knowing humour missing from the solemnities of parts I-III, but I had forgotten just how stilted the love dialogue was in them - or maybe I didn't notice.  Add to that, I now see how much they reflect their era of late 70s, early 80s - they are a little history of what we thought the future would look like (though technically Lucas claims them for long long ago in a distant galaxy...).  Good (American) guys fighting an evil empire - the men's hair - the futuristic white Leia costume that somehow look like a Biba trouser suit - the 70s is everywhere - I'm sure you know what I mean.  Even the sexual politics is very much of its time - Leia a kind of Germaine Greer fighting for her rights among the masculine warriors while the Hollywood male (Harrison Ford) manages to quell her with a kiss.  I missed this as a kid but now wish Leia had kneed him in the place where he did most of his thinking.

That set me thinking how futuristic films and novels are so often the best way of accessing the preoccupations of the present.  To change my metaphor, they are a boiled down stock of all most intense flavours swirling around in society.  One of the first futuristic novels I can think of is Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826).

This is probably her most interesting novel after Frankenstein.  The scenario is a dystopian one of debates about monarchy and republicanism all swept away by a terrible plague that wipes out all but the lead character - The Last Man.  You don't have to think for very long to see how this reflects her era of the failing romantic spirit, the fears of everything being cancelled by death.  So many of her own generation were dead by then; on the larger political stage, France had gone from beacon of revolutionary ideas back to creaky old monarchy.  The mid 1820s had seen a banking crisis (sounds familiar?) and Mary Shelley was living a marginal existence trying to raise her son.  No wonder all the best days seemed in the past.  (The  human world ends in 2100 by the way; from the increasing alarming pace of climate change, maybe she knew something when she picked that date? Or is that just my 'spirit of the age' showing?)

Next major work I thought of was The Time Machine by H G Wells (1895).  Much better know, you are probably aware that this captures the ripples of the Darwinian evolutionary debate with a society that has divided in to useless, pretty Eloi and underground predators, Morlocks.  There are also fascinating reflections influenced by the Marxist debate of where class and society is going.

And then there is Zamyatin's We (written 1921) - one of the best reflections in the Russian revolution even though it is sci-fi. And George Orwell's 1984 (1949) - we haven't come to the end of the lessons that teaches us, have we?  The examples are popping up everywhere now I am looking for them.

So that leads me to the rather pleasing conclusion that to understand the past we need to be familiar with the future.  I'd love to hear you thoughts as this is a huge topic and I'm sure you'll have your own gems to share.

Christmas songs - like 'em or loathe 'em? by Eve Edwards

Now the New Year has arrived and we are packing away the tinsel and glitter, I wanted to ask if you have a favourite or a hated Christmas song?  If so, I'd like to hear about it because something happened to me this Christmas.  I have developed a serious aversion to the popular versions of seasonal songs, even the good ones.  As for Frosty, Rudolf, Santas stuck up chimneys: you all make me want to emigrate to a country with no Christmas traditions.  I suppose there is a perverse pleasure in listening to the Beach Boys' doing 'We Three Kings' - it is truly so awful I say listen to it at your peril - but mostly the songs manage to squeeze out all trace of Christmas cheer in me, particularly when I hear them in shops.

This is not a new phenomenon.  My grandmother (b. 1910) worked in stores all her life and I remember her bemoaning the tape-on-loop of Christmas songs which was played from November onwards - this memory is from the 1970s and maybe started even earlier in her career.

It started me thinking about the history of Christmas music as annoyance.  In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, of course, hates carols (adding another layer of meaning to the title). I find myself sympathising with him as one young caroller

stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

 'God bless you merry gentleman! May nothing you dismay!'

 Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.

The boy does it to punish Scrooge as everyone knows he hates all Christmas sentimentality and yes, it is very annoying to have a carol shouted at you through the door.  When we lived in London we had one bunch who came round in about October and only knew one verse - and collecting for themselves, we guessed.  They were not successful.

The tradition of annoyance is much older though and can be traced to the old British and Irish tradition of mummers.  The tradition still going strong in many parts of the country.  Near where I live, in the villages south of Oxford, there are still bands of these mummers going about at Christmas as a kind of rough carol singers and play performers, often using the pubs as their venues (drinking and Christmas songs have a long history too!).  The key is they are disguised by their costumes so the behaviour has a carnival element of topsy-turvy about it.  They are worlds away from shop muzak and use annoyance for the right reasons: the shaking up of the social order, reminder of older practices, the release of a (E P Thompson) Customs in Common style under-class energy.

Thinking back to some of the best loved carols, there is a hint of this in the words, isn't there?  'So bring us some figgy pudding…we won't go until we've got some etc.'  There a menace to the words if sung vigorously enough!

In modern England, this is perhaps more a memory than a reality (I imagine the costumes cover a fair amount of bankers and doctors) but mummers I've seen are happily untidy and amateur - not sickly slick like many other Christmas traditions.

Perhaps you'd like to tell me your favourite and least favourite example of Christmas music in the comment section below?

Happy New Year!

There's hole at the bottom of my garden… by Eve Edwards

I'm living with the builders at the moment.  A medium-sized extension on the side of our house appears to demand a foundation hole the size of an Australian open cast mine.  What is fascinating, however, is seeing the layers stripped away in the garden - first the top soil, then the layers of sand and light gravel deposited by the nearby Thames over the centuries (yes, Bible scholars, I live in a house literally built on sand).  I asked the chap this morning if he had found any buried treasure.  Only a few coins, he replied.  What was more exciting than a couple of old pennies was discovering the bricked up coal hole that I had no idea was in the side of the house and seeing how the utilities connected up.  The old gas pipe had a bright blue (and reassuring new looking) hose threaded through it like some clever bypass surgery on the heart of a Victorian house.  It was a mini Time Team moment in my own garden.

I suppose I should count myself lucky as a house down the road from us discovered a burial site when they had their basement excavated.  The police were called and we all got a thrill seeing the blue and white incident tape (and it wasn't even due to filming for Morse).  The bones turned out to be Anglo-Saxon so the police stood down and the archeologists moved in.

Anglo-saxon burials in oxfordshire
c. Ashmolean Museum

Slightly creepy to think on whose bones you might be sitting...

Television producers have clocked to the fascination we have to the past we can touch with a spade and digger.  I nod here to the above mentioned Time Team who made dirty fingernails, home knitted jumpers and weathered faces archaeologically cool.

My teenage heartthrob, Michael Wood, took his crew of diggers to the little green outside my parents' house in Long Melford, Suffolk, a year or so ago.  They dug up a Roman road that they had not known was there and revealed a whole layer of history in the village just by making a couple of trenches.  To me that is akin to magic.

I can think of a number of writers who are good at doing the same thing with pen rather than shovel. One of my favourite children's books was Tom's Midnight Garden.  Philippa Pearce caught that sense so many of us have of the different eras layering in the same place - think filo pastry rather than shortcrust.  The John Gordon book, The Giant under the Snow, was another favourite.  As a child, I lived near the earthworks that made up Boadicea's camp in Epping Forest and took idea of Gordon's earthen giant with me whenever I walked there.

The edition I read as a child.
Love this cover!

Scratch the surface anywhere in the UK and history jumps out at you jack-in-a-box fashion.  I find that immensely exciting and use it to fuel my writing.  You don't have to travel to see the past; you can just close your eyes and send your imagination down into the earth.

Happy digging!

Builder's bum or housemaid's knee? by Eve Edwards

This October, the builders of Britain have been issued a challenge by a new health minister, Jane Ellison: they are to shape up, pull up and stop displaying so much cheek, so to speak.  I had to chuckle: a kind of feminist revenge for years of wolf whistling perhaps on Ms Ellison's part?

However, with my History Girl's thinking cap on, it started me wondering about all those sins against posture and more serious ailments that have a profession attached to them.  What happens when the profession no longer exists as a big enough class to have its own illness?  The ailment travels on to find a new host, just like a virus.

Take housemaid's knee - proper name prepatella bursitis.  Wiki tells me it has also been known as nun's knee, coal miner's knee, carpet layer's knee etc etc.  I imagine the predominant term depends on who does what in your area.  I remember that term being used by my grandmother (born 1910).  She was not of the social status to have a maid herself but born in a time when there were plenty around to make it a recognisable tradition.  Mrs So-and-So down the road had 'housemaid's knee'.  We all understood she did not have to be a maid to get it, just to have a dodgy joint.  Go to the GP today and it would seem odd for her to say to you if you had sought advice for the same problem 'oh yes, you've housemaid's knee.'  The condition is moving on to attach to a new profession.

Poor old miners have lots of illnesses named after them.  Pneumoconiosis, miner's lung, is caused by inhaling particles.  This is also sometimes called Potter's rot when the stuff breathed in is silica.  Miner's white finger is caused by vibration from using power tools.  The list goes on. Googling the term, I was interested to find many personal injury firms advertising their services to take on claims.  Clearly there is still enough of a mining heritage in this country to make it a recognisable term but in another few decades, will that too have passed on to a new profession?  Will it become road menders finger or something like that?

For the posher folks there is the refined tennis elbow (inflamed tendons) and golfer's knee (a twisting problem rather than a kneeling one so different from housemaid's).  Odd how illnesses come with social status attached.  Miss Joan Hunter Dunn might have tennis elbow but never miner's lung.

So when setting a novel back in the past, I think it perfectly fair to speculate what earlier times may have called their problems.  Did the Romans have charioteer's back?  Did the Greeks suffer from sculpture's lung?  Were castles of Europe manned by guys complaining of archer's elbow? If you have any real or imagined ailment to add, please do so below.  I've got a little list (note to self: add Executioner's wrist for Tudor stories).

I've spent much of my time with trench foot and shell shock recently so I am sure you know what I have been writing about.

Eve

Carry On Up the Gothic Kyber by Eve Edwards

Terrible dark things happen to British men when they go to India - at least according to the fertile imaginations of the late Victorian short story writers.  While doing some research into the gothic stories of the 1890s - the same decade as Dracula and Dorian Gray - I came across a whole sub genre of what we have to call oriental gothic - and a fabulous little sub group it is too!

I remember reading Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism, when at college.  He exposed the false assumptions coming from the Western world about the culture of the Middle East and Asia but I don't remember anything quite like these stories.  You have 'The Mark of the Beast' by Kipling - a terrifying tale about what happens to Europeans who disrespect Indian deities.  The offender gets bitten by the Silver Man, a holy leper with no features, and turns into a werewolf-like creature.  In B.M Croker's 'The Dak Bungalow at Dakor', any overnight visitors are haunted to the point of madness by the murdered victim seeking justice.  And in the wonderful 'The Phantom Rickshaw', again by Kipling, a Raj Englishman is tormented to death by the ghost of his former lover, Mrs Wessington. There are many many more, some of which started life as ephemeral pamphlets sold on Indian railway stations to amuse the passengers.  Look out the window and the gothic stared right back.

Bombay station 1905: Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries

H.G. Wells did his own sort which happened to be set largely in the distant west - the Pacific and the Amazon, but I am bending my rules here to include him because the setting is equally exotic - distant empire.  You might be familiar already with the chilling 'The Island of Dr Moreau' - a scientist creating were-creatures in the overweening manner of Frankenstein.  You can probably guess that it doesn't end well for him.  Even creepier to my mind is The Empire of Ants, set far up the Amazon.  In best disaster movie fashion, ants get sentient and start to take over.  I'm half convinced that this is entirely plausible!  They may be small but they are mighty - and invade all orifices.

What is particularly interesting to me is that the Kipling and Wells stories make it quite clear that it is the European who has crossed the line and brought the punishment on himself, like Victor Frankenstein playing god and being pursued by his own creation.  Mrs Wessington is a stalker, in life and after death.  The Indian context is rather by the by, a glamorous backdrop to an old tale of sexual betrayal. Fleete falls foul of a country he doesn't understand, having a just punishment meted out to him for his asinine behaviour in the temple. Dr Moreau, a heartless vivisectionist, creates the cruelty that kills him.  This are all rather clever commentaries on the empire project, questioning European supremacy. The gothic genre is doing its familiar job of making us look into the shadows of our selves as well as the external setting of scary huts in forests, claustrophobic islands, alleyways and jungles.

Kipling

Where has such oriental gothic gone?  I am now thinking that we place out gothic horror in space.  Darth Vader could be seen as a Frankenstein turning into his own creature.  The Borg from Star Trek - if you don't know them take a moment to watch a 1990s episode with Patrick Stewart - for my money one of the scariest monsters of them all.  Even Doctor Who has its moments in this genre.  Anyone got other suggestions?  Warning: once you get going, it is fairly addictive!

Eve

The secret of the orange sheep - by Eve Edwards

Mark Twain was a clever chap.

For research for my next book project, I am thinking about late nineteenth century writers and he bobbed to the surface today.  He is not alone in his wit in this era, of course, but I was reminded today of just how apposite are so many of his sayings.  You probably have heard repeated over the last few years his banking wisdom: 'a banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.'  Really, I think after reading that there is no need to go study that degree in Economics; he has said all you have to know.

One of his most famous sayings is 'Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.'  That's where the orange sheep come in.  Our family holiday took us to Glenlyon, a glen just north of Loch Tay in Perthshire.  Imagine the rolling hills, clouds that hang on the mountain sides making the dark pine plantations seem like they are on cold fire, the birds of prey poised over prey, glorious stone bridges arching like grey cats stretching over a peaty rivers, green fields full of orange sheep with black faces and legs...

Come again?

Yes, orange sheep.  Not the usual mark of tupping on the back or ownership smudge but completely orange.  If you don't believe me, here is the picture.

Please note the rectangular plantation behind courtesy of the Forestry Commission - the Scottish landscape going very post-modern.  The vision of tangerine sheep provided my family with an hour of speculation, ranging from the boring (dipping treatment) to the fashion statement to the invasion by alien sheep theory.  The problem for a writer is that you can't just drop that into a passage of description without it seeming, well, very odd and in dire need of explanation.  In the real world, such things aren't explained, they just are.

As if to underline this point, just down the road from the orange sheep is the noted village of Dull.  Twinned with Boring, Oregon.

How can we be expected to drive safely, people of Dull, if you sprinkle your fields with alien creatures?  Now I am having nightmares about what exactly you might see on one of their highland safaris!

Mark Twain had clearly come across a few of his own 'orange sheep' moments to make his comment.  I wonder if any reader of this blog has one or two to share with us, particularly if they have found them as part of research for a historical book and had to discard them as too unusual to fit in fiction?

(P.S. My latest book, Dusk, is now out.  Sadly lacking in orange sheep but there are some very surreal 'real' moments from World War I, taken from diaries or accounts of the time.)

A short history of shopping therapy - by Eve Edwards

It is probably a familiar moment for many if not all of us: you've had a bad day, so you just pop down to the shops and cheer yourself up with a little shopping therapy, buying something small and spirit-lifting, frivolous.  It is such a part of modern life that we even counsel others to do it, advice on a parr with 'make yourself a nice cup of tea', or 'have a hot bath with scented candles'.

My question is: when did shopping therapy begin?

Shopping as a leisure pursuit was certainly around by the end of the eighteenth century.  The Earl of Glenthorn in Maria Edgeworth's Ennui (1809) passes an idle hour with a 'lounge' at the watchmakers.  A little earlier than that, in Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778), we see the heroine mentioning the word as if emphasising its modishness: 'We have been a shopping, as Mrs Mirvan calls it, all this morning, to buy silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth.' Perhaps she is highlighting here that it has become an activity in itself: before that people shopped for goods, now they go shopping.

This is not to say that previous generations couldn't go to the fair when it rolled into town, or buy something to lift their spirits from the pedlar, but I think something is coalescing by the end of the eighteenth century: a social practice of shopping for its own sake.

This leads to scenes such as the familiar ones in Pride and Prejudice where Lydia and Kitty have to make do with the limited shopping opportunities in Meryton.  They are living out on the small local scale the imagined wonders of shopping in a metropolis such as London or, disastrously, Brighton.  Shops become possible venues for flirting - Pride and Prejudice again - anguished heartache (Persuasion), or just learning the social ropes (Northanger Abbey).  

But do any of these fit our modern idea of shopping as therapy?

I suppose Kitty and Lydia would argue that it was a kind of therapy for them, cheering them up during the tedious days of being a gentleman's daughter in a small place.  From their generation onwards it gets more established and with it come the development of larger shops to cater for this taste.  I think we have hit here a chicken and egg situation: which came first - the large department stores or the public who wanted them?  In Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, social historian Judith Flanders looks at the rise of these large shopping districts in London, Paris and elsewhere.  Many times the shopkeeper presented his tactics as new - the invention of sales, window displays, life styling, buy-one-get-one-free and so on - when in fact he was just making over an old practice that had served other retailers well.  Selfridges, Liberty, Heals (furniture), and Harrods all rose out of this period. Shops no longer just wished to sell us things, they wished to entertain, draw us back by their quality of service, make their goods part of our lives and image (is this also the start of mass market designer culture?).

I was wondering if there were any pivotal scenes in late Victorian literature set in these wonderful locations and couldn't think of one immediately (it's too hot!).  If your memory is better than mine, please leave a comment as I'd like to follow it up.  My vision of London shops is rather Dickensian, quirky little stores selling old clothes or butchers with geese hanging outside on hooks; I'd like to refocus it on a cutting edge, Empire London where shops were like palaces and the customer was king.

I have a family history interest in this too as my grandmother worked in the London stores in the 1920s.  She told me stories of the film stars and bright young things who used to come to her counter.  No longer did the lady stay outside in her carriage and have the goods brought to her (as had been the practice in the early nineteenth century); now almost everyone except possibly the king and queen came into the store for their shopping therapy.

Shopping had arrived and has remained at high tide for a century.  Only now is the tide receding as Amazon and online sales take us away.  My grandmother - and Kitty and Lydia - would hate it.  What do you think?

You can visit my website at www.eve-edwards.co.uk but don't forget to buy a real book in a real bookshop where you can *sigh* browse!

Game of Thrones - historical roots of fantasy by Eve Edwards

I wandered into my kitchen yesterday to find seventeen-year-old daughter watching what I thought was Game of Thrones.

Jeremy Irons lookalike?

'Oh, no.  It's The Borgias,' she says (she is doing history A level so I guess this counts as homework).
I watched for a few minutes as Jeremy Irons and some improbably beautiful women plotted seduction, murder and church politics.
'Is it historically accurate?' says concerned mother.
'Um, yes, very.'
Ho-hum, think I.

She's also watching The White Queen because, she tells me, of the presence of Max Irons.  We agreed that was about as realistic looking as The Tudors (Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Henry Cavill).  Henry miraculously escapes corpulence as if he is the Tudor Dorian Gray.  Readers, if you don't know who these three gorgeous guys are, they are worth a google (though that sounds vaguely rude so I apologise).

Henry Cavill

I have two historical points to make, which I hope you as followers of this blog will feel free to comment on, gainsay, challenge and generally kick about over a cup of coffee.  The first is the way we see history, not so much in books, where it is easier to live with snagged teeth or a bad complexion.  TV and film more often than not turn our ancestors into a cast of superheroes and villains (and surely it is no coincidence that Henry C is now playing superman after playing a super noble).  Philippa Gregory is quoted on the BBC iPlayer website as saying 'It looked exactly as I imagined it.'  Out of context, the website is inferring her blessing on the whole production which is far more sanitary than my imaginative rendering of the later Middle Ages, time of small pox, crop failures, no dentistry to speak of and low life expectancies.  Too much for the living room?  Possibly.  But the Beeb is doing what we have always done: they have gilded our forebears with the rosy glow of what we would like them to have been like rather than what they were.  Elizabeth even wears clear varnish on French polished nails.  Check the trailer if you don't believe me.  It's a gorgeous fiction based on fact so we don't care too much, just as no one really wants to ditch the mythical King Arthur for his historically more plausible contenders.  As you can see, the medievals were also doing this to their predecessors.

Elizabeth Woodville

My second point is that, so far as many people are concerned, history might as well be fantasy and fantasy is a pretty good substitute for history.  We seem to be crunching up in the middle of both genres.  My mistake about Game of Thrones is understandable because the cutthroat politics might well be that of the Borgias with added magic and dragons so I should not be blamed for thinking it was the same programme.  My teenage son is particularly keen on this book series and is reading them as I did Tolkien at his age.  The Byzantine (note the word) complexities of alliances and betrayals is like something out of real history - just more fun because no one real is suffering.  He also claims to have gained much useful historic knowledge from Assassin's Creed, the video game.  (And in case you think he's in danger of turning into a megalomanic killer, he is clearly channelling all his angst via the screen rather than bringing it into his daily life as he is a peaceful chap - but that's another debate.)

My view is that the most powerful fantasies are always in truth about us and our real history.  I tell young writers that fantasy is often about taking something from ordinary life and putting it in the laboratory of a fantasy world to run as an experiment on human behaviour.  Personally I find Borgia politics depressing so do not watch or read any of those mentioned above.  I prefer the more humane focus on the moral courage of the individual both in history and fantasy, so I'm a fan of Tolkien rather than George R. R Martin.

What's your historical/fantasy cup of tea?

My latest book, Dusk, set in World War 1 is just out.  You can watch the book trailer below.
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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.

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...

History is pointless - by Eve Edwards

Building on my last blog post in March - history is annoying - I have decided to tackle the even more contentious issue of history being pointless.

'What?!'  I hear you cry.  'Run this woman out of the History Girls for heresy.'

*Sounds of gathered History Girls organising a posse to chase me out of town* (I would respectfully suggest you pin the sheriff star on Caroline Lawrence as she knows all there is to know about cowboys...)

But hold your horses, my friends, this is not a Michael Gove type argument to strike the subject from the school curriculum.  It's really a cheeky way of getting you to read a more serious argument about the mistreatment of history as a means of point scoring, the claim 'we won' or 'it was your fault'.

HMS Monarch

I was thinking about this theme in connection with some research I am doing into the Battle of Jutland for something I am writing on World War 1.  I was particularly drawn to this encounter because my great-grandfather fought in it as a Chief Petty Officer - Gunner on board HMS Monarch.  That made each shell burst so much closer as had he been standing in the wrong place, I would not be here.  I had only vague impressions of this battle before I began reading up on it.  I knew it was the major sea encounter of the war and that British sea supremacy was confirmed in that the German fleet did not make another serious attempt to get out of its home waters afterwards.  I was therefore surprised to discover that the German High Command claimed it as a victory.  And here we come to the point scoring.  On a strict tally of lives and ships lost, the Germans did indeed 'win'.  If you choose to score it on another scale - that of who left the encounter with the most ships, heavier fire power, freedom of movement - then the British navy carried the day.  As one commentator put it: it was like the German navy was a prisoner who escaped his cell, roughed up his guard, but then returned to sit behind a locked door.

So both sides won - or lost - depending on your perspective.

It reminded me of how unreliable history becomes when turned into a point scoring exercise.  (Let's not even start on the 'who was to blame for WW 1?' discussion).  Looking round the world there are so many present day conflicts where a historical tally of grievances is used as justification for current atrocities.  Clearly it would be reprehensible to forget, or sweep under the carpet, injustices committed, especially when those affected are still alive, yet there are many cases where the wrongs seem to a third party about equal and still the two sides are only interested in their own points.  Would it not be better to use history to understand, rather than score?

Moving away from the academic discipline of history to fiction writing, I suppose that is what a good historical novel does: it equips you to understand the perspective of someone on the other side.  I really valued reading last year, Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada, which is based on the true story of an ordinary man trying to stand up to the Nazi regime.  Written in the years immediately after the war, this book helped me see a possible answer one of those great historical questions: how on earth did a civilised nation like Germany let Hitler do what he did?  I can now imagine just what it was like to be a civilian in Berlin and can grasp why the population as a whole 'allowed' the holocaust to happen and how difficult it was to resist.  I highly recommend this book if you haven't yet read it.

So to recast my title in a more honest fashion now I've got you to read to the end: history should not be about point scoring; the best use for it is understanding.

Eve Edwards
www.eve-edwards.co.uk