SUMMER IN FEBRUARY by Adèle Geras

If you follow this link, you will find an account of my involvement with the Alice in Wonderland celebrations to celebrate the anniversary of this novel's publication. 

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2015/08/two-alice-anniversaries-by-adele-geras.html

The piece makes no mention of what happened at the end of term, after we'd put on a play of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Christ Church Meadow in the summer of 1965. The whole company went to Cornwall and put it on in the beautiful Minack Theatre. It rained a lot. I sat on rocks looking out to sea to sing the songs that I'd previously sung hidden up a tree. I have very happy memories of a beautiful place, but a very rainy one.

Then in the winter of 2013, I spent a couple of days in a cottage in Mousehole. We visited the Eden Project and Land's End. And as we left, a huge storm raged over the county, causing damaging and scary floods.

So imagine my surprise when the two days of summer, real summer, which hit us in February, were the exact days that Jill Paton Walsh and I were in  St. Ives. She has written most movingly about this place, in Goldengrove and The Serpentine Cave.  She spent much of her childhood here, with her grandparents. She and  John Rowe Townsend had a flat here for 17 years. When she suggested a visit, I was delighted to agree with her plan. 

This (above) was the view from my hotel bedroom.  Our aim was to see as much as possible in a very short time and the main thing on our agenda was ART.  St. Ives has drawn artists to it for many decades and it's the quality of the light that does it. Hard to describe but very clear to see once you're there. The Godrevy lighthouse was exactly opposite this window and that is Virginia Woolf's lighthouse, so I was eager to see it. Every morning it was wreathed in mist, but it emerged after a few hours, white and beautiful.

Above is a photo of the garden at Barbara Hepworth's studio. It was  thrilling to walk around the garden, stand in the place where she worked and above all, to listen to stories about the artist and her history.  Jill  knows so much  about the town and its artists that I felt privileged to be going round it with her. 

Here is a Hepworth sculpture that I admired particularly, for its colour as much as its shape.

One of the great things about St Ives is the fact that you can walk everywhere. We strolled down the hill towards the Tate from the Hepworth studio and passed the house where Alfred Wallis lived. I took a photo of his plaque because I love his work and know it from the wonderful collection of his paintings in Kettle'sYard in Cambridge. 

The shop window below has nothing to do with Art or History. It shows, on the top shelf, a heap of raspberry meringues. Just saying the words to myself as I type them makes my mouth water. I didn't buy one but am now regretting it!

On our second day, we visited the Bernard Leach pottery. It's on a main road above the town and most beautifully arranged for visitors. You can walk through the working part of the studio and see the kilns, and watch a video of Leach himself, talking about his work.  Pottery is still made here and sent all over the world. I bought a small celadon bowl by Joanna Wason. 

After leaving the Bernard Leach Pottery, we drove to Zennor. In the church there, I looked up and saw this model ship. Jill explained that replicas of ships were made and hung up in the hope and belief that God would then protect the real vessel, out on the dangerous, rock-studded seas. 

But the real attraction of the church in Zennor is the mermaid, carved on the side of a bench. She is most beautiful and stories behind the carving abound. From the artist who carved this in Zennor to Hans Andersen; from Carol Shields to  Imogen Hermes Gowar and her recent novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, we are entranced and fascinated by these creatures. This mermaid is haunting, in its beauty and simplicity.

I'm very conscious that this is more a Geography Girls post than a History Girls one and I will try and return to more historical matters next month. I felt I wanted to write about this beautiful Cornish town, whose history was all around us as we strolled through its street, and whose phantoms walked beside us in the bright sunlight. For Jill, these spirits were the  personal and beloved  ghosts of her late husband and her grandmother. For me, it was the artists, the fishermen, the lifeboat crews and the townspeople.  And always,  out there at Godrevy, the lighthouse.  That Lighthouse. 

(detail from a birthday card sent to me by my friend Lynne Hatwell. The painting  of Godrevy lighthouse is by Diana Leadbetter.)

Ferreting About - Celia Rees

I spent this weekend at the Children’s Writers and Illustrators ‘Joined up Reading’ Conference organised by The Society of Authors . The Conference is a wonderful chance for authors to get together, catch up with old friends, make new ones and attend various talks and sessions about writing related things. There was a good showing of History Girls (past, present and (maybe) future) and many of them came with me to a session on Sunday morning run by authors, Gillian Cross and Elizabeth Laird.

The title of the session was: The Art of the Soluble: how do I ferret out what I need to know? Gillian and Liz are very experienced, highly acclaimed writers. They have won major prizes, been short listed for everything, written I don't know how many books between them on all sorts of subjects. Neither is 'grand', although they could be; neither show any trace of arrogance, although in terms of achievement and reputation, they have every right to do so. They are the opposite: disarmingly modest and generous to a degree.

I like them both enormously, but what I admire most is their courage.They are brave writers committed to following the idea, no matter how difficult, or how big a challenge. They are also very versatile. Following the idea means that neither of them will be pinned down to one genre, one age group, one subject. They are also pretty fearless. They don't back away and they don't back down.

There are lots of things to be scared of in writing, mostly to do with different kinds of failures from minor to epic, and it's good to know:

a) That other writers feel this way.

b) What they do about it.

Gillian nailed the first, confessing to feeling 'terrified' when she first had the idea for Where I Belong, a book that was going to involve Somalia and Fashion when she knew almost nothing about either, but once she had the idea, it wouldn't let her go, so she set about finding out. This is what she does, no matter what the subject or setting: going to libraries, Amazon, AbeBooks, the internet, talking to people, watching films, studying maps and clips on YouTube, building up information, gathering detail, until she's got enough to write with accuracy and authority. As she spoke, the table in front of her piled up with maps of the Horn of Africa, fashion magazines, every kind of book from Somali poetry to The Devil Wears Prada as well as the fashionista's mood book she kept while writing.

As for b) (see above) Liz Laird said that we have to find what we're frightened of, face it and do it anyway, because the idea won't go away. She speaks from experience. Her novel A Little Piece of Ground was written from a Palestinian point of view and some of the responses to it were extremely hostile and deeply upsetting, but she knew that might happen and had to deal with it. Liz added her own material to the growing heap on the table. Not least, a volume of the diary that she has kept for many years. This is a uniquely personal and valuable personal resource. She doesn't have to wonder what she was doing on a particular date, she knows, so she didn't have to struggle to remember the incident that sparked her book, Oranges in No Man's Land, all she had to do was go to the appropriate diary.

Neither writer was at all 'precious' about the amount or kind of research they undertook for their books, whether they were writing contemporary or historical fiction. They did not really differentiate between the two forms, using similar resources for both. Liz warned against including too much research when writing historical fiction, citing the lack of period detail in Jane Austen. If J. A. didn't feel the need to fill page after page with minute descriptions of dress and modes of transport, then maybe the historical novelist should take a leaf out of her elegant notebook. On the other hand, a thorough knowledge is vital. Gillian mentioned the writer, Jill Paton Walsh who, to her horror, discovered a vital piece of information which could have invalidated an entire historical novel. 'What does it matter?' someone said to her, 'No-one will know.' To which she answered, 'I will know.'

This is a blog about historical fiction so I have to mention the closing speaker at the Conference,. Allan Ahlberg. He is a writer who combines all kinds of qualities: modesty, playfulness, courage, intelligence, wit and grace. I regard his book, Peepo, as one of the great works of historical fiction and it never fails to make me cry.