History where there isn't by Sheena Wilkinson

There’s not much history in my immediate area. No, of course there is – I live in Northern Ireland; the place teems with history, most of it profoundly distressing. 

What I really mean is, you need to look hard for it, at least where architecture is concerned.  I live in the country, in an area of outstanding natural beauty, and I walk every morning. Few of the houses I pass on my daily walks are younger than I am. I’m always struck, when I’m in England, by how many more old houses there are, still lived in and living and beautiful, if only in their enduring.  Though we cling stubbornly to the past in many ways in NI, that hasn’t always extended to preserving our built heritage. 

Most of the houses I pass are fairly new, many of them replacement dwellings. These houses don’t interest me much: what intrigues me is seeking out what they replaced – the tiny cottages where families of ten were reared, the farmhouses turned into cowsheds or fallen into heaps of stones. 

I'm a blow in. I don't know anything about the families who once lived in these places. I imagine their children setting off for school or mass, (other forms of worship were available, but not in the immediate vicinity, which in itself tells us something), walking the roads I walk now. They would have looked in the fields as I do every morning, and seen the sheep and cattle and their young -- different breeds, perhaps, from the ones who thrive on these hills today. They would have seen some of these houses being built and would not have thought of a time -- not so very far in the future really -- when they would have been left to tumble down. When only a passing writer, obsessed with the past and seeking inspiration for a monthly historical blog post, would stop and pay attention.

All these pictures were taken yesterday morning on a five mile walk. I hope you like them. 

Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

Last month my family celebrated two big birthdays. On 11 August I took my parents out to dinner on what would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 1997 but a centenary seemed momentous and one of the things my mother and I have both inherited from her is the love of getting dressed up for a ‘wee race out’.

Granny at 50

I’ve been so busy this year thinking of 1918 as the centenary of women’s suffrage, the end of WW1 and the Spanish Flu, that I hadn’t really thought about its being Granny’s centenary too, and it was good to stop and reflect on it, and on what it meant to be born in that year, in that place. Granny (Elizabeth Rea Pleasants, née Hamilton, always known as Rea) was born and lived her whole life in Downpatrick, the county town of Down, where St Patrick is buried. When she was three, Ireland was partitioned and Down became part of the new Northern Ireland. She came of age as the Second World War broke out, and when she was 51, she saw Northern Ireland plunge into its own bloody war. She never let go of calling the Republican of Ireland the Free State, but in other ways she was the most modern of women. 

Like my other gran, Gran W, Granny P. lived through a great deal of history. Sometimes I wished I’d asked her more about it. But she was so busy, always rushing about. She lived in the moment, not the past. She had neither the time nor the patience to sit down and talk to a small girl about the olden days. But she took me to mass and to bingo. She slipped me embarrassingly generous amounts of money when she had it, which was not always because she was ridiculously generous to many people. The first pound note I ever held in my hand was a ninth birthday present from Granny P.

Downpatrick, 1920s, shortly after partition

1980, I'm 12; she's 62

She sang in the local operatic society and passed on to me her good, strong voice. Mummy remembers always being mortified that her own mummy sang so loudly at mass. After Vatican II she became the first woman lay reader in her local church. In the early 60s she adopted three children, two of them mixed race, an unusual undertaking in a small Northern Irish town. Whereas Gran W was a good plain traditional cook, and much given to baking, sewing, knitting and housekeeping, Granny P experimented with spaghetti and curry as far back as the fifties, but often my quiet granda did the cooking, as Granny was off to a whist drive. Gran W wore a frock and an overall, Granny P wore lipstick and trousers and a fake fur, and kept her hair jet back until well into old age.

I was born in 1968, the third of seventeen grandchildren. So yes, that’s the other big birthday we’ve been celebrating. I compare my granny at 50 to me, and my life to hers. At 50 she was very much the matriarch, whereas I’m single and childfree. Granny was bright, talented, and independent-spirited, but growing up in the twenties and thirties as a young Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, her expectations were marriage, church and family. She was very active in those areas, marrying at 21, but she also found time to work outside the house. She was in the Fire Service during the war, and even left home to work as a children’s nanny as a widow in her late sixties. She wouldn’t have had any thoughts of higher education but when I went off to university in 1987 she handed me £50, more money than I'd  ever had in my life, and typical of her generosity. 

Me at 50 -- not so different from Granny P after all 

She was very much of her time, and yet stood against it. When I do anything especially outré my mother will say, Granny the second! I always take it as a compliment. 

The Winter Solstice at Bru na Boinne by Penny Dolan

In four days time, on the 21^st of December, it will be the annual Winter Solstice. On that morning, a remarkable event takes place at Bru na Boinne, a Neolithic site in County Meath in the Ancient East of Ireland and within sight of the Hill of Tara. This area holds an ancient group of tombs and monuments, constructed around 3,200 BC, and said to be older than the Great Pyramid at Giza or Stonehenge. 

 

Each year, at midwinter, the Solstice sun shines into one particular tomb, the largest of several  grass-topped mounds. The beam of light enters through a cunning opening and reaches along the pitch-dark corridor, deep into the core of the passage tomb. There, for a few minutes, the light widens to shine around the cruciform space where the bones of the dead ancestors waited. Why these people needed to send news of the returning sun so deep into the place of the dead, and in this way, we can only imagine.

This annual alignment was, somehow, designed and constructed centuries ago but now, every year, a small group of lucky people wait within the deep darkness to witness the first Solstice light slide into the tomb themselves, while crowds gather outside on the grassy slopes, wishing they could be there in the darkness too.

However, ordinary visitors can experience a false dawn daily, standing within the burial mound as the tour guide turns off the torch. For a second, one feels a flicker of fear at being buried in the dark forever but then, as eyes adjust to the darkness, the thin thread of daylight appears again. Not a true Solstice, but still a memorable effect. How, one wonders, was this all planned and built and why? And who observed it, beyond the eyeless corpses?  Looking up, the roof of the central chamber is remarkably beautiful, comprising a series of flat stones laying one over the other in concentric circles. If one stone should shift, what then? 

This major tomb or temple, as described above, wears a more recently historical name. This tomb is called New Grange, after one of the granges or store-houses built there by Cistercian monks in medieval times, who valued the wide and fertile valley of the once-navigable River Boyne.

This same fertility must have attracted the early people to the valley in Neolithic times, creating a community of farmers and traders settled and wealthy enough as a group to support the construction of these sacred monuments. Beyond that, we know little. Externally, the tomb doesn’t feel as magical as I might wish, because not long ago, the circular walls were re-faced with large, white imported stones of a kind found scattered around the site. Their crystalline quality, one theory suggested, enabled the great tomb to be brightly visible for miles around, an idea that appealed to the various funding bodies, although to me the bright cladding adds a strange rather than a magnificent quality.

Even so, at the entrance, one must feel impressed, noting the angled roof-box set above the main entrance to let in the midwinter light,  and the enormous boulder placed to guard the doorway. After all this ages, the huge stone still bears rolling, circling carvings that have become emblematic of Bru na Boinne.

Similar carvings decorate the walls of the Knowth tombs nearby on the complex site, where one large grass-topped tomb is surrounded by several smaller mounds and evidence of henges and kist burials. The gigantic “kerbstones” set into the outer walls would have been, so the guide explained, specially chosen for their textures, soft colours and shapes. The surface of each stone inspired its own decoration, whether it is swirling and interwoven waves, circular “sun pattern” carvings or both or even an early sundial on a flat rock, each forming part of this ancient art gallery.

Meanwhile, inside the tomb at Knowth, a smaller and less crowded space than New Grange, there were a couple of chambers, and a chance to gaze down one simple passage, lit by lamps. I waited till all the others had gone and stood there awhile, taking in the more than magical atmosphere of this place. Then I hurried out into the warm, blessed sunlight again.

All good wishes for your own Winter Solstice celebrations and all your holiday festivals.

Penny Dolan

Dateslexia by Sheena Wilkinson

Molesworth, as any fule kno, was cynical about history, which ‘started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.’ And Arnold Toynbee (or Henry Ford, or possibly lots of people) said that history was just ‘one damn thing after another.’ At school, at least for previous generations, it involved mostly learning dates – 1066 and all that.

But history isn’t one thing after another. It’s lots of things all happening at once, with posterity judging which aspects we remember. Take winter 1918, the period when Star By Star, my most recent novel is set, specifically the seven weeks (and one day) between 25 October and 14 December. What was happening then? Well, the Great War was limping to its close; the flu pandemic which would kill at least 50 million people worldwide was raging; in Ireland, Sinn Féin was gearing itself up to fight an election campaign which would, after a great deal more bloodshed, bring about an independent – and divided – Ireland, and of course, at that election, on Saturday 14 December, 1918, women in Britain and Ireland voted for the first time in parliamentary elections, as did working-class men. You can’t see any of these things in isolation: they all influenced each other, and history played out as it did because of the interplay between them.

Writing a book about all that accessible to teens  was challenging, but the book was written in winter 2017/18, when things did indeed seem to be getting steadily worse. It was quite easy to identify with my heroine’s feeling that huge and mostly terrible things were happening in the world around her. Giving her agency to influence what she could actually made me feel better about my own role in history, if that doesn’t sound pretentious.

One of the ways in which I harnessed all this galloping history and domesticated it was by knowing exactly where I was in the year 1918, to the very day. This helped enormously.  The novel’s action begins on Friday 25^th October 1918. Stella, the heroine, however, for a small but important plot reason, has mixed up the dates and believes it to be the 26^th.

So what? Well, I didn’t know a year ago, when I started writing, that Star By Star would be officially published on the 26^th October, which felt serendipitous and funny. When I mentioned this to my editor, Gráinne, she admitted that, perhaps catching Stella’s dateslexia, she had kept mistakenly thinking it was the 25^th – to the extent that she had printed that date on some promotional material. It didn’t matter a jot, of course, but it amused us.

Because the action of the novel is so compressed, I know what was happening in the story almost every day of those seven weeks, and as I embark on various events to celebrate publication, I can’t help thinking, 99 years ago, today… I’m writing this post on 3^rd November, the night when Stella has her first significant encounter with Sandy, the traumatised war veteran who becomes her best friend. Next Thursday, 9^th November, I’ll be officially launching the book in Dublin, and will be very aware of its being the day in the story when a very important letter was sent. And then, next Saturday, at the Belfast launch, I will be so very conscious that it’s 11 November, a date of huge import in the real world 99 years ago too, but also in the story. On both occasions, I will read from the appropriate day in the story, just because I can.

I realise it’s weird to think this way about a story I made up and characters who aren’t real. But I also know that, if we are to bring our histories and our stories and our characters alive for readers, we have to live in them to some extent. Where can we live but days? Philip Larkin said, and I would add, where can we live but stories?

I don’t know what I’ll be doing on 14^th December this year, but I do know that part of me will be living in the story, cheering Stella on as she tries to fulfil her suffragette mother’s legacy on Election Day, a day that would change Ireland, and Britain, forever. In a last twist, my editor has just returned from Barcelona, where, like Stella, she witnessed history being made – though exactly what history, we will have to wait and find out.

Cabinet of Curiosities: Cat O’Lantern (not by) Charlotte Wightwick

Happy Halloween!

I have to admit that Halloween always takes me slightly by surprise, although why this should be, I don’t know given that the shops are full of plastic ghouls, fake cobwebs and tiny witches’ hats for weeks beforehand. But yet again, here we are and the most I have done to celebrate is to watch the brilliantly-costumed edition of Strictly (although to be fair, I also don’t need the fake cobwebs – I have real ones of my own.)

My amazing friend is far more organised than I and sent me a photo of her take on the traditional carved pumpkin – this truly stupendous ‘Cat O’Lantern’ (I advised that the whiskers were necessary, so I think I get to take some credit for this masterpiece of vegetable artistry).

Cat O'Lantern - Photo: Kate Wheeler

As I gazed in awed wonder at its glowing glory, however, I got to wondering about the history of this (actually, when you think about it) rather odd tradition. I knew of course, like most people, that Halloween in its current form is a relatively new phenomenon, although the roots go back a long way. But what about the pumpkins with faces?

It turns out that they too, are older than I thought. The original Jack O’Lanterns were carved, not from pumpkins, but from turnips, and the practice was recorded in both Ireland and parts of England in the early nineteenth century, although the tradition is said to be much older. The faces, with a small ember or stub of candle in them, were designed to ward off evil spirits. In America, Irish immigrants continued the tradition, only now with the native pumpkin.

Traditional Irish Jack O'Lantern  - Photo: rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid

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So now you know.

I’m afraid it all seems like a bit too much work to me – so I shall continue to admire my friend’s feline-veggie handiwork and settle down to watch the Strictly results!

Have a spooky time! 

Cat O'Lantern: Kate Wheeler

Sat Nav -- 1908-style by Sheena Wilkinson

My iPhone map app updated today and now contains singularly useless – to me – information about transport in Japan.  I find no charm in this unasked for, space-hogging data.  

But I find a great deal of charm in this little book.

I found it, appropriately enough, in a National Trust bookshop – Contour Road Book of Ireland 1908. The Edwardian equivalent of a sat-nav, I suppose. Pocket-sized, designed primarily for the cyclist though inevitably of interest to the early motorist, its 250 pages contain lists of routes with details of each road’s gradients, surface and notes on anything of interest along the way.

It’s cute, with its gilt-edged tissue-thin India paper and cross-sections of 2,000 hills, but it’s also fascinating and revelatory, about much more than the state of the roads.   The Preface explains why this volume took ‘eight years to prepare’: ‘Great difficulties have been encountered … as the Maps of Ireland, when the work was started, were hopelessly misleading.’ (Interested readers might seek out Brian Friel’s play Translations for more on that subject.)

Some of the entries read like found poems:

LONDONDERRY TO LETTERKENNY

Description: Class II.

The road has excellent surface,

though with a tendency to be bumpy

for the first 3m;

after that it is better.

The road commands some fine views

of the Donegal mountains.

Irish milestones.

Irish milestones? Ah yes, ‘Some of these are Irish Miles and some English, but these are nearly all noted in the book. The tourist will find that Counties Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Antrim and Armagh use English; the other counties either have both, or only one or two roads have Irish M.S.’ One Irish mile was one-and-a-half English miles. It’s not that different from today, I suppose, when I drive across the border and exchange the Northern Irish signs in miles for the Republic’s signs in kilometres.

And let’s not forget that in 1908, ‘Irish time is 25 minutes later than Greenwich time, but in cross-channel telegrams the latter is used.’

What about the people? ‘No Englishman or Scotsman can ever understand the feelings that sway an Irishman.’ Ireland in 1908, after all, with Home Rule gathering momentum, was a no less complex than Northern Ireland today: ‘a nation fighting out its own destiny in its own way, handicapped by the very powers that make it loveable.’

The characters in my work-in progress, set in1918, will be travelling some of these roads, climbing some of these hills and wrestling with some of these issues of national destiny. I’m often asked how I do research – I’m sure all History Girls are; and the answer is, in many different ways. But this, the stumbling across little gems which tell us so much more than they meant to, is one of my favourites. There are Contour Road Books of England and Scotland too – I may have to start collecting them.