The Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder - by Lesley Downer

Dawn over the Ayeyarwaddy (Irrawaddy) at Mandalay

'What will our descendants think of us when they read that the British banished the King of Burma, annexed his country, and proceeded to govern it by officials of their own race? Historians will add that we saw no harm in this, though we always resisted such a fate to the death when it threatened our own land.' - Maurice Collis, The Journey Outward, 1952

King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat
and her sister Princess Supayalay

In 1885 King Thibaw of the Konbaung dynasty was governing Upper Burma from his palace in Mandalay. He was 26 years old and had succeeded to the throne after his father, King Mindon, died suddenly in 1878. Following Mindon’s death, seventy nine of the king’s relatives who were potentially Thibaw’s rivals were murdered in a plot hatched by Thibaw’s implacable mother-in-law to make sure that he took over the throne.

Thibaw was convinced that his father’s apartments in the palace were haunted by Mindon’s ghost. He had them moved out of the palace grounds and rebuilt as a monastery. It’s a gorgeous building made of teak and covered in intricate and delicate carvings depicting the Jatakas, the Buddhist scriptures. You can still see King Thibaw’s meditation couch there. As it transpired the vast palace complex which forms the heart of Mandalay was destroyed in World War II. King Mindon’s apartments were the only part of the palace to survive. 

Thibaw set about reforming the administrative structure of his kingdom, Upper Burma. His government was one of the best educated the country had ever seen, including many scholars who had returned from Europe and were fluent in the Burmese classics as well as English and French. 

King Mindon's palatial apartments,
now the Shwenandaw Kyaung, Mandalay

The British had annexed western Burma in the First Burmese War of 1824 and had ruled Lower Burma for thirty years, since the Second Burmese War of 1853. Jane Austen’s brother, in fact, Rear Admiral Charles Austen, commanded the British Expedition of 1853 and died in Burma of cholera. 

The king was determined to win back his kingdom and started making moves to align more closely with the French, signing a Franco-Burmese commercial treaty which both he and the French swore had no military or political clauses. But the British were not convinced. There was also the Great Shoe Question. Visiting British dignitaries refused to remove their shoes on entering Thibaw’s palace, causing deep offence. 

Old capital at Sagaing, outside Mandalay

In 1885 Thibaw issued a proclamation calling on his countrymen to liberate Lower Burma, thus providing the pretext the British were looking for. Declaring that the king was conspiring with France, they denounced him as a tyrant who reneged on his treaties and sent an invasion force of 11,000 men in a fleet of flat bottomed boats and elephant batteries. Great paddle steamers crowded with troops thrashed up the broad Ayeyarwady - the Irrawaddy, as the British called it.

Mandalay fell almost immediately. The next day the British escorted the king and his wife away on a bullock cart. It was said that Thibaw begged for his life but his proud queen refused to bow her head. They were exiled to Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, in India, where they lived out their days. Thibaw’s kingdom was officially annexed by Britain on January 1st 1886.

Stupa at Bagan

To crush any residual support for the monarchy, the British painted Thibaw as an ogre, despot and drunkard, uniquely weak, not up to the task of government, all of which was taken until recently as gospel.

British rule was hated. Resistance by fighters whom the British derided as dacoits or bandits continued for many years and for the colonialists Burma was a hardship posting.

Four years after Thibaw’s fall, in March 1889, a little-known 23-year-old journalist called Rudyard Kipling passed through Burma. He was there for just 3 days, in Rangoon and Moulmein. In his famous poem, Mandalay, he conjures up the magic of Burma and the siren call of the east:

‘ ... “If you’ve ’eard the East a callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.” ...’

When Boris Johnson quoted Mandalay when he visited the Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon in 2017, he was lambasted on the basis that Kipling was a racist and a colonialist. But when the poem was first published in 1890 what annoyed everyone was the line, ‘An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay’, China of course being not across the Bay of Bengal at all but a long way north and east.

Sunset over the stupas of Bagan

Thirty years later, starting in 1922, another young Englishman called Eric Blair spent five years serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Moulmein. I spent much of our own trip along the road to Mandalay reading George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934. It’s a savage indictment of colonialism. But it’s also a paean to the extraordinary spell the east can cast, evoking Burma’s maddening heat, drenching monsoon rains, dark tangled forests and mesmerising culture in glorious prose.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale based on a true story, set in nineteenth century Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration. It’s out now in paperback. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

The picture of King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and her sister Princess Supayalay in late November 1885 is made from a negative found in the Royal Palace, Mandalay, and is by an unknown photographer; in the collection of Willoughby Wallace Hooper, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

The other pictures are mine.

The Perambulator in the Hall: Writing with Children Before CBeebies - by Anna Mazzola

I love my children, and know how lucky I am to have them. But I also love writing, and writing and young children are not necessarily compatible. Hence summer holidays pose a challenge.

There has been much discussion in recent years about how modern writers deal with the so-called ‘pram in the hall’, but I began to wonder how writers occupied their children in the days before Peppa Pig. And how did families and writing intersect?

The gender divide

Asked recently how she had had produced so much work with two children, author Lauren Groff replied: ‘I understand that this is a question of vital importance to many people, particularly to other mothers who are artists trying to get their work done, and know that I feel for everyone in the struggle. But until I see a male writer asked this question, I’m going to respectfully decline to answer it.’

It’s true, of course, that women are still asked this question far more than men, but go back a century or two and no would even have considered asking a male author about his work/life balance. The time-honoured way of writing with children was to have a dutiful wife to look after them, and ideally a hoard of servants. Charles Dickens had ten children. Tolstoy had thirteen. I don’t believe anyone ever asked them about their childcare arrangements.

Mark Twain’s children weren’t allowed anywhere near his study and would ‘blow a horn if they needed him’. Thomas Mann angrily removed any child who disturbed his work. However, E.B White said he often wrote in his living room 'despite the carnival that is going on all around me.' George Orwell’s adopted son remembers him as a ‘hands on’ father who looked after him following his mother's death. After JG Ballard lost his wife to pneumonia in 1964 he brought up their children alone while continuing with his writing, and his children remember him as a kind and dedicated father. These were still, however, the exceptions.

From kitchen tables to different contintents 

For women, historically the primary caregivers, the situation varied greatly. During 19th century, some female writers had wealth that enabled them to pay for nursemaids or governesses to occupy their children while they wrote. However, that was not always the case. Elizabeth Gaskell often wrote at the kitchen table, with her children around her. Frances Trollope, who began writing at age of 53 to support her sick husband and six children, sat down at her desk each day at 4 a.m. and completed her writing in time to serve breakfast.

Some writers left their children with others for long stretches in order to write. Daphne Du Maurier left her young daughters with a nanny and their grandmothers for many months so that she could finish Rebecca. She once wrote, ‘I am not one of those mothers who live for having their brats with them all the time.’

Enid Blyton, though she wrote of idyllic childhoods, seems to have had little time for her own children. In her memoir, A Childhood At Green Hedges, Enid Blyton’s youngest daughter recalls that, ‘Most of my mother’s visits to the nursery were hasty, angry ones, rather than benevolent. The nursery was a lonely place.’

Some took it a step further. Doris Lessing, in her autobiography, Under My Skin, writes of ‘committing the unforgivable’ and leaving her ten-year-old son, John, and six-year-old daughter, Jean, to grow up with their father in Rhodesia. But, as ever, the full story is more complex. The woman who once claimed ‘No one can write with a child around’ in fact kept her young son Peter with her and continued to care for him throughout his life.

Similarly, though Muriel Spark acquired a reputation as un-motherly for leaving her son with his mentally ill father in order to pursue her writing career, the reality seems to have been far more complicated and painful.

The prize for deserting ones children in order to write in fact goes to a man: Jean-Jacques Rousseau abandoned all five of his children at foundling hospitals. And then of course wrote Emile, a novel lauded for its insights into the nature of children.

Carving out space

Most writers, however, did what we all do, which is to try to carve out writing time from our daily lives.

Some wrote at night. Ursula Le Guin said, ‘I would go up to the attic, and work 9:00 to midnight. If I was tired, it was a little tough. But I was kind of gung-ho to do it. I like to write. It’s exciting, something I’m really happy doing.’ Toni Morrison began writing as a single mother to two young children. 'Writing was something for me to do in the evenings, after the children were asleep.'

Others, like Trollope, woke ridiculously early in the morning. Sylvia Plath rose at 5am when the sedatives wore up and wrote until her children woke up. Within two months she had produced nearly all the poems that comprised Ariel.

Adapting writing 

Many writers had to alter their working practices or style in order to fit around family life.

When, in the 1780s, Hester Thrale was criticised for having written Anecdotes of Dr Johnson rather than a full biography, she countered that 'if one is to listen all Eveng and write all Morning what one has heard; where will be the time for... having one's children about one?'

Others used the constraints of family life in order to create. Celia Fremlin's brilliant Hours Before Dawn came from her sleep-deprivation following her second baby. Alice Munro has said that she began writing short stories because as a young mother she had no time to write novels: ‘When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines, it’s hard to arrange for large chunks of time.’

Shirley Jackson told herself stories while doing the laundry. ‘All the time that I am making beds and doing dishes and driving to town for dancing shoes, I am telling myself stories,’ she said in one of her lectures. According to Jackson’s biographer, ‘The idea for “The Lottery” came to her while she was grocery shopping with her daughter Joanne, then age 2. After they came home, she put away the groceries, put the child in her playpen, and wrote the story.’ One can only assume she didn’t much like the other shoppers.

Now it’s not just the women who have to adapt their writing to family life. Michael Chabon and his wife, Ayelet Waldman, have four children and share the childcare so that they can both write. Karl Ove Knausgaard has said, 'When I started to write I thought I had to be isolated. I went to lighthouses in the sea, and uninhabited islands. But then I had children and I realised I had to do it at home. I’ve never written as well as I have since having children.'  In a recent interview, Robert Harris also dismissed the notion that you had to write somewhere remote, saying, ‘You really need domestic routine and life going on around you, I think.’

I question, however, whether their domestic routines involve small children regularly coming up to their desks demanding that they locate small plastic toys or separate a fight. Perhaps I should do as another (unnamed) writer does: hang a sign on the door saying, 'Only knock in the event of blood.'



__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. And a mum.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

A Brief History of Writers’ Misery by Janie Hampton

Many people aspire to it, but the job of writing is not easy, and never has been. ‘The most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions,’ said the Victorian biographer John Morley of writing. 

Juvenal warned in the first century AD that ‘An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.’

William Caxton 1422-91

William Caxton's celebrated the invention of printing by publishing The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, the 15th century equivalent of The Little E-Book of Text Messages. Publishers soon cottoned on that people really wanted something a bit more lively and an early best-seller was Merry Tales of the Madmen of Gotham.  Martin Luther was not keen on the opportunity given to non-religious books: ‘The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure or limit to this fever of writing; everyone must be an author; some out of vanity to acquire celebrity; others for the sake of lucre and gain.’

Dr Johnson was quite clear on the matter: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’

Dr Johnson 1709-84

Even Gustave Flaubert said, ‘To practise art in order to earn money, flatter the public, spin facetious or dismal yarns for reputation or cash – that is the most ignoble of professions.’

Louis XIV didn’t like books, ‘I see no point in reading’; and Jean Jacques Rousseau agreed, ‘For they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand’. When Edward Gibbon finished writing The Decline and fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, he knelt on bended knee and presented a copy to HRH the Duke of Gloucester. ‘Another damned, thick, square book!’ said The Duke. ‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh Mr. Gibbon?’

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1771-1845) was a barrister, a Whig politician and so prolific an author that Sydney Smith said of him, 'He not only overflows with learning, but stands in the slop. He is like a book in breeches. He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.’

Elizabeth Montagu 1718-1800

Mrs Elizabeth Montagu was immensely rich, well educated and loved parties – she once gave a breakfast in her feather-lined boudoir to 700 guests. After she became bored of card-playing, she only invited people who liked books, such as Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Horace Walpole. Rousseau was not amused by these early Book Reading Groups which encouraged women: ‘Every blue stocking will remain a spinster as long as there are sensible men on earth.’

Mary Russell Mitford  1787-1855 

Women writers have never had it easy, even from each other. Mary Russell Mitford wrote in 1815 that before her success, Jane Austen was ‘the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly ever and was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen.’ After her success poor Jane ‘stiffened into the most perpendicular, precise, taciturn, piece of wood. She is still a poker - but a poker of whom everyone is afraid.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806–1861 

When Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in 1861, Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of  Omar Khayyam, wrote to a friend ‘Mrs Browning’s death is rather a relief to me. A woman of Great Genius I know, but what is the upshot of it all? She and her Sex had better mind the Kitchen and the children; and perhaps the Poor. Except in such things as Little Novels, they only devote themselves to what Men do much better.’  The letter was read by Robert Browning 28 years later. Understandably upset, he wrote a poem to the now dead Fitzgerald, threatening to spit at him with the lips that had once kissed his beloved wife.

Lucile-Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, 1804–1876, was described by Nietzsche as ‘a great cow full of ink.’ 

Amanda McKittrick Ros 1860–1939

Supporting the argument against women writers, the American critic George Jean Nathan believed that ‘perhaps the saddest lot than can befall mortal man is to be the husband of a lady poet.’ Sadly, Amanda McKittrick Ros, the wife of a stationmaster in County Antrim, did not help. Mark Twain considered her 1897 novel Irene Iddesleigh ‘one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.’ The novelist Barry Pain failed to notice she had no sense of humour when he reviewed it as ‘a thing that happens once in a million years’, and mockingly termed it ‘the book of the century.’Mrs Ros took such a dislike to him that in her next book the whole introduction was devoted to Pain’s appalling character and defective personality. She then made a point of tracking down her critics and loved to see if she could ‘wring from the critic-crabs their biting little bits of buggery.’

Eric Blair alias George Orwell 1903-50

Maybe writing is bad for us. 

George Orwell died only four years after announcing: 

‘Writing is a horrible, exhausting struggle, 

like a long bout of some painful illness.’




www.janiehampton.co.uk

George Orwell and the Civil Wars by Claire Letemendia

Claire Letemendia has just joined us - welcome! From November the regular spot of the 2nd of each month will be taken buy another newcomer, Gillian Polack.
As a new member of The History Girls Reserves, I’ll introduce myself by confessing to two passionate affairs in my life. My obsession with the English Civil War era started when I was about ten, growing up in Oxfordshire surrounded by historical sites related to that turbulent time. I’m still a victim, as I dive into my third novel of a trilogy about the shadowy exploits of Laurence Beaumont, a Royalist spy in the First Civil War. Meanwhile, in my twenties I enjoyed an intense seven year relationship with George Orwell, writing about his political development for my PhD. I believe his true birth as a committed socialist dates from his experience in the Spanish Civil War serving with a radical leftwing militia on the side of the Republican Popular Front against the army of General Franco. As was the Cavaliers’, the Republicans’ was a lost cause; the war ended in their defeat and a long period of authoritarian rule. Orwell went on to describe both the military action and the complex political in-fighting within the Front in what I consider his best non-fiction work, Homage to Catalonia.

Here’s a photo of Orwell (tallest figure standing, third from the right) taken in March 1937 at the front near Huesca, in Catalonia. The woman in the picture is his wife Eileen, who had come from England to visit him. On the 20th of May that same year, he was shot through the neck by a sniper’s bullet. Had it struck him just a millimetre to the left, he would have been dead and perhaps lost to posterity as an author. His voice remained permanently weakened.

But is there any connection between the man most celebrated for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four and the English Civil Wars? Curiously enough, yes. Much earlier in the thirties, after his stint in the East with the Burma Police and his forays into the world of English tramps and Parisian low life, Orwell worked briefly as a private tutor while he was struggling to begin his writing career. Richard Peters, one of the boys he tutored, remembers him saying he would have sided with the Cavaliers during the English Civil War ‘because Roundheads were such depressing people’. Peters saw him as ‘temperamentally… a Cavalier, lacking the fervour and fanaticism of the Puritan.’

Later on, while teaching at a boys’ prep school, Orwell composed a play for his young students to stage about the Battle of Worcester and King Charles II’s timely escape from capture by Cromwell’s forces. Yet again Orwell showed his preference for the Cavaliers, although not much of his future promise as a writer. In letters to friends, he described the play as ‘mucky’ and complained how he had to make all the suits of armour himself. One boy who acted in it must have felt more enthusiastic since he kept a copy, now in the Orwell Archive at University College, London. It does contain some rather cringe-worthy speeches, and concludes:

MESSENGER: Sir! Sir! The king’s escaped! His ship has left the harbour. They fired that shot as they crossed the bar. The soldiers arrived just a minute too late.

CAPTAIN CHAMBERS: Ten thousand curses…

SIR JAMES DIGBY: Good people all, this is a joyous time/ When our good king, long in most dangerous plight/ Is safe at sea and bound for friendly France./ We’ll honour it with song, and silver too/ Sir Edward here and I will give you all/ To drink good health unto his majesty./ Long may he flourish, and soon come the day/ When the usurper Cromwell ends his sway;/ Peace, freedom and prosperity shall reign/ When England has her own true king again!/ Come, sir, if you’ve a song, let’s hear it.

Orwell rarely wasted any of his personal experiences, cannibalising them instead for his fiction. The play pops up in his novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, as does the mind-numbing activity of constructing armour with brown paper and glue.

The above scene was painted by Francis Henry Newbery in 1924-7, shortly before Orwell wrote his school play. It depicts the flight of Charles II through the town of Bridport in Dorset, on his way out of England after the battle. Disguised as a servant, he apparently stopped at the George Inn for a quick bite.

Orwell’s interest in the Civil Wars resurfaces in 1940, some five years before Animal Farm appeared. He returned to the subject with a far more mature political perspective in a review of some books for The New Statesman and Nation, a publication that had turned down two of his pieces on Spain, probably because he had castigated the British left, especially the intellectuals, for refusing to criticize the totalitarian aspects of the Stalinist regime and its ruthless suppression of the radical and Anarchist parties during the Spanish war. Of Christopher Hill’s groundbreaking work, The English Revolution, he writes: ‘Obviously a Marxist version of the Civil War must represent it as a struggle between a rising capitalism and an obstructive feudalism, which in fact it was. But men will die for things called capitalism and feudalism, and will die for things called liberty or loyalty, and to ignore one set of motives is as misleading as to ignore others.’ Of another book, he remarks: ‘It is a pity that [the author] fails to make a comparison between the seventeenth century and the one we are now in. A parallel undoubtedly exists, although from the Marxist point of view the latter-day equivalents of the Diggers and the Levellers happen to be unmentionable.’

Clearly Orwell felt a community with the radical egalitarianism and anarchism of those two sects suppressed by Cromwell: at this point he was keenly awaiting a democratic socialist revolution. And he seems to be hinting at a darker parallel: between modern-day capitalists with Royalists; and Marxists or possibly Stalinists with the Puritans. In a separate article, however, he talks of twentieth century war as a quite different animal from previous historical conflicts. Sheer power, of itself and for itself, had become the prize, as Hitler and Stalin had grasped all too well. This, in a nutshell, is his warning message in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eight-Four: not that a truly democratic society will never exist or that human decency will inevitably be crushed, as happens to Winston and Julia, but that such things can occur if we’re not watchful and allow our liberties gradually to slip away.

Reading again the Putney Debates between the Levellers and Cromwell’s faction in the army, I was reminded of the animals suffering under the pig dictatorship in Animal Farm: they had fought so hard to rid themselves of human rule, only to witness their struggle for freedom and equality betrayed. The Levellers had argued that nearly all men should have a vote. In the words of Colonel Thomas Rainsborough:

‘For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’

For Cromwell, these radical ideas threatened not just law and order, but the sacred distinction between property owners and other Englishmen. And so the Levellers’ subsequent attempted revolt was firmly stamped out.



Images: Wikipedia Commons