'The Private Life of Pawns' by A L Berridge

We all know soldiers have private lives. Novels about war naturally devote space to characters’ back-stories, thoughts, feelings and relationships, and everyone knows a manly war hero can be given a softer side by bunging him the obligatory love interest. Yet there’s another, even more private side, and I’m beginning to realize it’s more important than I thought. 

My journey began while working on my present novel of the Crimean War. In ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ my hero is placed for good dramatic reasons with the 34th Regiment of Foot, but I was depressed to discover that the best primary sources are a digest of the Regimental log, a handful of officers’ letters, and a portion of an officer’s journal. Those are all very helpful, but my characters include several private soldiers and a particularly crucial Colour Sergeant, and none of those documents showed much interest in such lowly souls. The log didn't even give names of anyone below the rank of ensign, and casualty lists record them only as numbers of 'Sergts' and 'Rank and File'.

Then came the miracle. A delightful lady called Anne Beal wrote to me about the Crimean Memorial Appeal, and mentioned in passing that her interest in the war arose from the fact her great-grandfather George Clarke had served in it. He was a Colour Sergeant, as it happened. In the 34th Regiment of Foot. And she had a dozen of his letters sent from the Siege of Sevastopol.

We all know those moments when the words ‘Holy Grail’ dance in golden specks before our eyes. I shall draw a decent veil over my embarrassingly slavering response, but fortunately Anne was kind as well as god-sent, and she sent me not only photographs of the letters themselves, but perfect clean transcripts with explanatory notes from her own research. Eleven of the letters were to George’s wife Mary Anne, who’d been left behind with the rest of the regiment at Corfu, one was to her parents, and the whole set covered the exact period of my book.

Original envelope of one of George Clarke's letters - by kind permission of Anne Beal

They were everything I could have hoped for. What I needed most were everyday details of life in the regiment, and George’s letters were pure research gold. How much did it cost to send a letter home? What kind of ‘souvenirs’ did soldiers loot from dead Russians, and what could they expect to sell them for? There were so many of these gems that I’d noted the first six letters before it really occurred to me what was missing.

The war.

After a year’s research I probably knew more of what was happening than poor George did, but I still found the omission intriguing. War is a pretty big thing for a soldier, this was almost certainly George’s first, and yet he seemed hardly interested in it at all. There are dutiful references, of course, but even these are mostly concerned with how soon the siege will be over and he can be reunited with his wife. At first he thinks the siege won’t last long ‘for the Russians are actually eating their horses for want of food’, but later notes sourly that despite the constant firing he doesn’t see ‘the slightest alteration in the place’. A month later he still doesn’t know when he’ll be coming home, but thinks ‘there will be no more fighting’. Two months later he writes with endearing honesty: ‘I shall be very glad when this affair is over for I am getting tired of it.’

There could be many reasons for this reticence. The siege was in stalemate, there was little real progress to report, and George himself points out that the regiments were so widely spread that general news was thin and unreliable. Yet even when his regiment is actually engaged, George’s accounts of the action are the briefest I’ve ever seen. Writing on the day after the Grand Sortie of March 1855, he doesn’t even mention it until his third paragraph when he’s already discussed domestic details of money and his wife’s health.

George Clarke's signature - by kind permission of Anne Beal

That’s what’s fascinating. It’s not that the war isn’t worthy attention, but that George is far more concerned with his own quiet little private life. He writes about sick friends, relays news of his brother in the Rifle Brigade, gossips cheerfully about lapses of behavior among fellow NCOs, and is desperate for real newspapers from home. He worries about money and frets about the unreliability of the post, but most of all he is anxious about his wife, and how well she’ll be treated by the regiment without him there to look after her:

I received your two letters dated 11th & 12th December in which I find your face and throat to be much better which gave me much pleasure to read but on the other hand I was sorry to hear of the ill treatment of Sgt Howfield to you. But my dear, don’t have anything to say to him only what you cannot help for I am sure he would do you an injury if he could.

Of course he worries. Anyone would, and the more I read the more I understood how natural George’s approach really was. The famous letters of Timothy Gowing of the Royal Fusiliers might be full of patriotic wishes to ‘strike a blow for good old England’, but Gowing was a young man with no dependents, and those with adult lives outside Crimea were bound to have a different perspective. George’s ‘outside life’ wasn’t just his ‘back-story’, it was pretty well his whole story, to which war was only the backdrop.

And as a writer, that made me think. My job is to keep a story moving forward, to keep attention focused mainly on the action in foreground, but is that really a realistic way to show war? I’ve dealt with a soldier’s all-engrossing home life before in the character of Woodall in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, but that was a significant story, and often the reality is in the sheer ordinariness of everyday life. Shouldn’t I be doing more to show that?

The obvious answer has to be – only with caution. A commercial novel needs to be reality with the boring bits missed out, and if I devote pages to my characters worrying about whether a cake will still be all right after a long voyage then it’s going to play havoc with the pace. But reading George’s letters have made me wonder if there isn’t a greater danger in exploring the real ‘private lives’ of soldiers, and if I need to be very careful about going there at all.

Because ordinary life is universal. Have a character shot in the leg and readers will sympathize in an intellectual way, but have him get cramp or have a stone in his shoe and the reader is instantly there with him. George’s worries are ‘real’ to most of us in a way that war is not, and as I read his letters I completely forgot about research and saw him only as a human being.

That's what trivia does. It's absolutely the truth of soldiering, but it has a power like no other to humanize and make real. Look at this little video, for instance, made by the Donbass volunteers in Ukraine, where from 4’40” the footage is rough video shot at a rebel checkpoint. The English subtitles are delightfully dreadful, but enough key words are translated to tell us what these men are talking about.

From 5’31” the men are actually sitting under fire, but still the conversation drifts round important topics like cigarettes and socks. Trivia, laughter, the stuff of normality, and at once their Russian nationality is lost in the human nature of the universal soldier at war. This is what soldiers are like, this is their real private life, and even if it's a 'front' to help them deal with stress then the 'front' is part of the reality of who they really are.

That kind of trivia we can write. Not too much of it, or we'll destroy the pace of action sequences, but we need to see men talking about the things that really interest them rather than those things the plot demands. They don't talk about the war because they're living the war, and what they really want to think about is everything else.

As George Clarke does. His isn't an epic adventure story, but the letters give an insight into his real life outside the borders of war, and it was impossible to read them without personal feeling. George died of cholera on 30th June 1855, and when I read his last letter of June 23rd I'm afraid I even cried. His poor wife! They were obviously a very close couple, and at the time of his death she was even expecting his child – the baby he so much wanted to see christened. I wondered how on earth the poor woman would cope alone.

George Clarke's last letter

That's a good reaction, exactly the one I would hope for in a reader, but what made this situation dangerous is the fact that I found out. Anne herself told me the expected child was born in August 1855, and since the father was not listed as deceased it seems likely poor Mary Anne didn’t yet know she was a widow. That child was Anne’s grandfather, and it was from him that she learned that Mary Anne had always kept George’s letters with her, and carried them about in his old cutlery holder.

This cutlery holder, to be precise.

George was real, his loss was real, and I felt with full force the personal impact of war. I’ve been campaigning for over a year to erect a proper memorial to our fallen in Sevastopol, but this one man who died there was suddenly proxy for them all.

So perhaps that's the one part of a soldier's life that needs to stay private - at least in an action adventure historical. If I’m writing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ then of course I must make the reader feel every human shred of the cost of war – but if I want my readers to enjoy the fight then I need to keep back something of what that cost really is.

That sounds like a cheat, but I think it's a necessary one. Generals can't think of their soldiers on so personal a level, or how could they send them to death as disposable pawns? Soldiers don't do it either, and one thing I've learned from veterans is how they condition themselves to laugh and joke even about each other's deaths. It's the only way a soldier can do his job and stay sane.

Maybe the same is true of writers. I admit I take a possibly rather warped pleasure when a reader berates me for killing a character they loved, but I don't want the loss to be so unbearable that they can't enjoy the book at all. I'll go into the 'private life' of my characters, I'll make them as real as I know how, but unless it's absolutely essential for the story then I'm not going to explore their loss beyond the grave.

Perhaps that's a cop-out. Perhaps I even know it is, but I'm beginning to think that when it comes to commercial fiction about war then T.S. Eliot had it absolutely right: 'human kind cannot bear very much reality'.


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A very, very big thank you to Anne Beal for allowing me to write about her great-grandfather, and for giving permission to show her photographs. There is much more to the story, and I very much hope that one day she'll publish it herself.

Meanwhile the much duller A.L. Berridge's website is here.

'Writing to Music' by A L Berridge

There are really only two types of writers: those who need music when they write, and those who don’t. I’m the wishy-washy type who sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t, but if I don’t find the right kind of music somewhere in the process then the novel I’m writing is just never going to fly.

That’s a personal choice, of course, but I’m inflicting it on you today because I’d like to try and understand it better. I’m hoping if I come clean about my own weakness, then other writers might come forward and say why it’s helpful to them too.

Dot and Jim in 'EastEnders'

There’s one obvious reason why writers of historical fiction use music, and that’s as a way of ‘getting inside’ their period. The first time I heard of this was when EastEnders writer Tony Jordan was tackling a set of episodes about the marriage of the two oldest characters, Dot and Jim Branning, and told me he played a constant loop of 1940’s music all the time he was writing. This would have been the music of his characters’ youth, it defined their hopes and dreams, and while he was in their world it needed to define him too.

As a Seventies teen who’d rather not be defined by Little Jimmy Osmond singing ‘I’ll Be Your Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool’, I found this idea at first repugnant. Yet while no-one likes every piece of music from their era, it’s true that their worldview is still shaped by the canon – just as the music itself sprung from something in the zeitgeist that made it popular. 

As writers I think we’d be daft not to use that. If we’re writing about the Sixties, what better way of soaking up the period than listening to its music? Some of our characters may favour the Stones over the Beatles, others (like me) become unaccountably soppy at ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or uplifted by ‘Downtown’, but somewhere in there are ‘their’ songs, and if we listen long enough we’ll find them. 

Which is all well and good if we’re writing about a period after the invention of the gramophone record, but what about those of us working in earlier centuries? It’s true there are wax cylinder recordings, but the crackle and bumping make it no more than a ghost of the music our characters would have made or heard themselves.

1860's organ grinder

If we want to get closer than that, the only solution is to recreate it. My current novel is set in 1855, and I use recordings of Victorian barrel organs to get the feel of the London my characters would have known. Some of the earliest organs still survive (you can see one from 1830 being played here), but even modern ones still give the unmistakeable sound of a world long gone by. So do songs of the Victorian Music Hall, even if the recordings are modern, and for the character of Woodall in ‘Into the Valley of Death’ I spent a good many hours listening to music that sounded like this. I sometimes think my long-suffering husband would have preferred ‘I’ll Be Your Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’…

But London isn’t the Crimea, and for the music my characters would have heard around them every day I’ve played endless hours of military bands. Every regiment had one, they played on the march and in the camps, and if I sometimes found the music infuriatingly jolly when trying to write the tragedy of war – then I think some of my characters felt the same. The Russian music was interestingly different, depending far more on marching songs than instrumentals, and there’s something in the grim heroism of those determined bass voices that really gave me a sense of both the clashing cultures and the reality of what my own characters were up against. The 20th century ‘Legendary Sevastopol’ sounds very similar in style if you want to get the general idea.

Russian military band on Sevastopol Day 2011

But the further we go back in time, the less useful contemporary music becomes. Classical 17th century French music wouldn’t have helped me write ‘Honour and the Sword’ – which is perhaps just as well, since it’s mostly ghastly. Formal court music meant nothing to people who couldn’t afford concerts, and while music specialists may define a period by Haydn or Vivaldi, most ordinary people would disagree. Folk songs, military marches, sometimes church music, these and the sound of bells are about all we can be sure most of our characters knew. 

It’s still a start. The pieces I used most in ‘Honour and the Sword’ were all from the previous century – a folk song (‘La Pernette’), a military song, (‘En Passant par la Lorraine’), and a popular polka which lent itself to Pierre Gilbert’s whistling (‘Bransle des Chevaux’). You can listen to them from the links here, and they’re all good pieces – but I have to be honest and say I never put them on a loop and listened to them as a pleasant background to my writing. Well – would you?

To be honest, I’d struggle with a lot of it. The reason different periods have different music is because tastes change, and if the price of writing a novel in Tudor times is an endless loop of bloody ‘Greensleeves’ then I’d almost be tempted to reach for Little Jimmy Osmond instead. But that, of course, is where my thesis breaks down with a horrible clunk. If I’m not using music as a research tool, then why do I need it at all? Why don’t I just work (as many better writers do) in sober, academic silence?

Well, why should I? Historical novelists aren’t the only writers who use music, and there are lots of ways in which it helps us tap into less familiar aspects of our work. ‘Place’ is one of them, and when I wrote about France in the Chevalier novels it was music that helped most. I didn’t do it consciously, but when I look back at the music I played when writing ‘Honour and the Sword’, it's every bit of it French. Saint-Saëns, Gounod, Massenet – and when I started ‘In the Name of the King’ I became hooked on French Café music as well. There’s nothing 17th century about Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Charles Trénet, Jean Sablon, or Fernandel, but when I wrote to them I was surrounded by French voices, French words, French syntax, French attitudes and French style. 

Those things matter, and I was constantly afraid of imbuing my French characters with inappropriate Englishness. Obviously there’s no such thing as a typical ‘Frenchwoman’ any more than there’s a typical 'Englishwoman', but there are still little differences that mean a lot. For me, the hardest to capture was that almost uniquely French quality of being comfortable not only in one’s own skin but also with one’s own sexuality. That’s important in a time when a poor woman’s body might be the only currency she had, and my English prudishness really struggled to master the correctly pragmatic shrug that would have been my character’s reaction to her situation. The music did it for me. Somewhere between Mistinguett’s cynical ‘Je cherche un millionaire’ and her heartbreaking ‘Mon Homme’ I found the character of 'Bernadette' and knew I was home.

And that’s another use for music – as a shorthand to take us inside a particular character. Opera and musical composers have always used the technique of giving characters their own ‘theme’, and so do those who write scores for the cinema. It sounds ridiculous to need one for one’s own created characters, but I write multiple point-of-view, and after a long section in the voice of one character I find it really helps to have a quick way back ‘in’ to the voice of another.

They can change too. In ‘Honour and the Sword’ Anne begins as a pre-pubescent girl, but as I progressed to ‘In the Name of the King’ her theme tune began to shift from Massenet’s ‘Le Dernier Sommeil de la Vierge’ to rampant Edith Piaf. Even now if I listen to the haunting start of ‘Mon Légionnaire’, I find myself at once inside Anne’s head and thinking with her voice.

If we can ignore the borderline lunacy of this, then it’s a genuinely practical tool. Whether it’s period, place, or character, I use music to ‘get me in the mood’, and that’s incredibly useful when you write to deadline. I can’t afford to sit around wistfully waiting for the Muse to show up; I need a genie’s lamp to make him appear to order. Every novel I’ve written has gradually found its own ‘signature tune’, and a quick blast of it is often all I need to rush to the computer to write. I still have to be disciplined and never allow myself to play it at any other time: that music has to be the bell to my Pavlov’s dogs, and I daren’t risk diluting its potency.

The odd thing is that it doesn’t even have to be obviously relevant. ‘Honour and the Sword’ worked legitimately to the first part of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony Number 3 (the Organ), but ‘Into the Valley of Death’ worked with astonishing improbability to ‘Farewell to Arms’ by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. That’s a ballad to peace, for heaven’s sake, but I used it constantly when I was writing the Battle of the Alma. I can justify it now by saying both are about the tragedy of war; that the steady build echoes the inexorable and heroic advance of the British troops in the full face of the Russian cannon; and that the synthesiser even echoes the sound of the Highlander’s pipes as they marched across the Heights to victory, but I’m not sure if that’s really why I chose it. It was just the piece I happened to be listening to when I first began to ‘get’ the Alma, and the pictures began to form in my head. Maybe the music inspired the words, or maybe the words coloured the music, but after that it’s only a matter of association.

Battle of the Alma: 'Forward, 42nd!' by Robert Gibb

That’s a depressing thought, really, and a salutary warning to avoid really naff music. What if my next good idea happens when someone’s playing ‘The Birdie Song’? Or Little Jimmy Osmond, come to that? Maybe this whole ‘music and words thing’ is a thoroughly bad idea.

But maybe it isn’t. I’ve written this whole turgid post as an excuse to ask other writers if they use it, how they do it, and if it works. I’ve especially wondered about those who write Ancient History, and how they manage in an absence of ‘Rome’s All-Time Greatest Hits’. Do they try militaristic songs from Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany? Do they use anything? Does anyone?

Please. Just tell me it’s not just me.

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A L Berridge's website

'Finding the Words' by A L Berridge

I had one of those bad writing days yesterday. The kind when you spend an hour struggling to perfect a single paragraph, then ‘read it back at a run’ and have your eyes pop out with horror when you see how ghastly it is. The kind, in fact, that historical writers are never supposed to mention. 

Shutterstock, not me. Trust me, it's prettier.

I don’t know why we’re not. Authors of contemporary novels blog about writing all the time, but historical novelists tend to talk about only one thing – history. Even here on ‘The History Girls’ we usually discuss research, re-enactment, historical field trips, all the really labour-intensive stuff we do before sitting down at our computers and letting a novel ooze effortlessly out from our fingertips.

Well, I’m going to break ranks and admit that mine doesn’t always ooze. Sometimes it trickles. Sometimes it coagulates into a sticky clay mass that forms hideous faces to jeer at me. Sometimes I look around at the wonderful writers on this blog and think with shame that I shouldn’t be here at all.

All writers do that sometimes (don’t they?) but it's not something we discuss in historical forums. Research is what sets us apart, research and history – the writing is the same as in any other genre, so why should we bother talking about that?

But it’s not the same, it’s nothing like the same, and I'd argue the writing is even harder than in contemporary novels. It’s true we share the same concerns with storytelling, pacing, characterisation and narrative drive, it’s true we need the same ‘writing tools’ to start with – but the first thing you do when writing historical fiction is throw half of them away. Half your modern understanding of how things (and people) work, half your modern perspective, half your knowledge of the very time you’re writing about – and half of your precious, hard-won vocabulary. If this is a fight, the historical novelist starts it with one hand tied behind her back.

Historical words. Sometimes even reading is difficult...

The words are the thing. Those black squiggly creatures we need to nail to a white screen to make them tell the story we need to tell. Even if a historical writer has decided to ‘translate’ her work into modern English, half her vocabulary will still be useless because it refers to things for which there wasn’t even a concept, let alone a word. True, we don’t need words for computers or telephones or radios before such things existed – but what about those phenomena that have been around and observed long before we ever had words for them?

Here’s a tiny example from my current novel. A wounded soldier is being tended in a freezing cave, and when his friends peel off his woollen ‘Balaklava’ helmet, his wispy grey hair behaves just as we’d expect it to. A modern reader needs only one of the words ‘static’ or ‘electricity’ to know exactly what I’m talking about – but in 1855 my characters can’t use either of them. All right, that’s a good ‘writerly’ challenge, and I duly come up with a detailed description – but in doing so I’ve given a fleeting image an importance wholly disproportionate to what’s going on. There’s a risk that the reader will stop and think, and I want him to move on with the story. There’s an even worse danger that my ‘point-of-view’ hero will seem more interested in a physical peculiarity than in the fact his friend may be dying. So what do I do?

The problem’s everywhere. Even common internal sensations can be tricky when we're not allowed to know about simple chemicals like adrenaline. I try telling myself that's good, that it's better to ‘show, not tell’, but there’s a limit to the amount of ‘showing’ we can do before the action grinds to a horrible halt. My first draft of the Battle of the Alma for ‘Into the Valley of Death’ dealt with three characters facing imminent death for the first time, and there was so much sweating, heart-thumping and stomach churning in the first five minutes they looked ready for the ambulance before ever facing the guns.

Everywhere. Artistic concepts like ‘surreal’, retail terms like ‘wholesale’, technical phrases like ‘crossed wires’ – all out. Psychiatric concepts – no-one can be ‘obsessed’ or ‘fixated’ or even ‘have a thing’ about something, even if I know they damn well do. Computers alone have given us so many useful phrases it’s hard to work out how we once managed without them. I’m old enough to remember when we talked about putting on different ‘hats’ rather than working in different ‘modes’, but I still struggled for nearly ten minutes with the idea of a man trying to ‘process’ his feelings before I came up with the sentence ‘She was hitting him with so many emotions at once he could no longer fathom his own.’

Not great, perhaps, but ultimately I think it’s better. ‘Fathom’ is a lovely word, plumbing the depths, digging down through the layers – it’s much more evocative than ‘process’. Modern language may be full of useful words it’s hard to replace, but there’s a soulless quality to them I’m never sorry to lose. Many are little more than a glib shorthand to save us the effort of thinking what we really mean. Writing historical fiction forces us to look at everything with fresh eyes, as if we are seeing it for the first time. 

All well and good – until we have to communicate it. When there’s an ‘old’ word like ‘fathom’ to do it, then we’re home and dry, but when there isn’t we often have to resort to imagery. That's what I did in the end with my old man's electric hair - I let it crackle and 'float about the lined forehead like torn cobwebs’. Unchanging nature is still the best way to make the unfamiliar familiar – which is why historical fiction is often so bung full of ‘natural world’ imagery as to make Thomas Hardy look positively industrial. 

The problem comes when the natural world is silent. Human invention and behaviour are both complex, and unfortunately not everything can be explained in terms of sun, moon, stars, earth, water, fire, plants, animals and bloody birds. When that happens we have to hunt for other things that will be meaningful to the modern reader but still within the grasp of a protagonist who lived centuries ago. 

It can be done. Writers like fellow History Girl M.C. Scott deal with the Roman world, but in ‘The Eagle of the Twelfth’ we find men with ‘cheekbones jutting sharp as bridges’, blades ‘held forward like clubs’, and slaughter with the ‘dance-like elegance of a mummery made for our entertainment’. It can be done and done brilliantly.

When we’re ‘in the zone’, it can even seem easy. I haven’t had to worry much about the unfamiliar in the Crimea (mud and trenches are well enough known through WWI) but even in my 17th century Chevalier novels I didn't have to look far to find the simile for my hero being goaded by a crowd of men ‘like a bear at a fair’. 

When we do this we’re almost defeating the purpose of imagery, using the unfamiliar to describe the even less familiar, but when we’re behind our characters’ eyes it just somehow happens. In ‘In the Name of the King’ I had the character of Jacques confronted for the first time by a firework rocket, but I was ‘in his skin’ at the time and knew exactly what it looked like. The image that sprang into my mind was this:

Chateau at Lucheux - Wikipedia Commons

That’s the chateau at Lucheux which Jacques would have seen in the distance every day of his boyhood. The modern reader won’t necessarily know that, but he’ll know what a cone is, he knows what a firework is, and even if he’s never seen 17th century French architecture I’m hoping that ‘a pointed cap like the cones on the roof of the chateau at Lucheux’  will give him enough to join the dots.

I hope. That’s what it’s like when it works, when we’re really ‘in period’ and don’t have to ‘translate’ modern ideas into their 17th or 19th century equivalents. When it works, we’re seeing things as our characters do and conveying them as our characters would, and for me there is nothing more satisfying and exhilarating.

When it works. I’m not complaining at what we have to do – I think both our perception and our writing are better for it. I'm only saying that I sometimes find it hard, and really hope I'm not the only one.

And I think it’s going to get harder for the next generation. It’s only when we start to write historical fiction that we realize how fast our language has changed in the last sixty years. William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ (1954) hardly uses a word that couldn’t have been spoken in my Crimean world of exactly a hundred years before – but how many books written in 2012 could have been easily understood by a passenger on the Titanic? 

And the gap is growing. My own childhood was filled with books written long before I was born: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (1865); Beatrix Potter (1902); ‘The Just So Stories’ (1902); ‘The Railway Children’ (1906); ‘The Secret Garden’ (1910). Like most children I knew, I was familiar with Victorian and Edwardian English long before I picked up ‘Jane Eyre’ at the age of nine. Is this still true of children now? How long before even ‘Great Expectations’ has to be taught with footnotes, as Shakespeare is today?

Inkwell dug up near British HQ in the Crimea

The past is slipping away from us. I’m now old enough to see it, to watch as experiences from my youth crystallize and freeze into history. I’m not ancient, but I remember those first writing lessons with pen and ink when we dipped the scratchy nib into an ink-well in the desk that was usually half-full of pencil shavings. A few weeks ago I was writing a scene when a Crimean officer was writing a report, and had to consciously remind myself to describe those things I remember so well: the clink-clink-clink of pen against ink well, the shaking to remove the drops, the careful application of blotting paper afterwards. Time’s whirligig has brought in its revenges rather quicker than it used, and my childhood is now history.

So be it then. That is sometimes our job, to write about the strange as if it is familiar, and the familiar as if it is strange. We must be the translators, the guides who hold the door open to the past and allow the reader to re-enter a lost world - and the only tools we have to do it are our words.

That’s why writing historical fiction is hard. Definitely not because I’m rubbish. Not at all.

Or then again, maybe I’ve just had a bad day.

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A.L. Berridge's website