May Day by Janie Hampton

'Bringing in branches at Maytime', from 

A Book of Hours by Jean Poyer, 1500

The first of May has been important in our family ever since my grandmother Rachel Gurney was born on that day in 1886. Two years later, her sister Richenda was also born on 1 May. Both survived into their 80s and enjoyed many shared birthday parties.
For over 30 years I have lived in Oxford, where May Morning has been celebrated since mediaeval times with garlands of greenery, dancing and music.
The new growth of Spring has been celebrated in Europe since ancient times: the Romans celebrated Floralia, the Celts observed Beltane, and Germanic peoples had Walpurgisnacht. The early Christian church incorporated the lively pagan traditions involved in  bringing in the May, but by 1250, the Chancellor of Oxford University felt the need to  forbid ‘alike in churches, all dancing in masks or with disorderly noises, and all processions of men wearing wreaths and garlands made of leaves of trees or flowers or what not.’ However Spring is Spring and not easily repressed, so by 1550 in Thame, the churchwardens had again bought fifteen yards of green and yellow fabric and bells to make coats for their Morris dancers. In Abingdon in 1566, the churchwardens‘paid for setting up Robin Hood’s bower, eighteen pence.’ ‘Church ales’, or festivals, were often used as  fund-raising events. The church financed the amusements and sold the ale. Profits then paid for the maintenance of the parish church, and  alms to the poor.
Philip Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses (1583) describes how hundreds of people of all ages ran into the woods on May Eve and made merry all night. At dawn they returned with branches of trees, pulled by twenty or forty yoke of oxen, each with a sweet nose-gay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns. ‘Their chiefest jewel they bring home from thence is their Maypole (this stinking idol rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings, from the top to the bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colours, following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flags streaming on the top they straw the ground about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer houses, bowers and arbours hard by it. And then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the Heathen people did at the dedication of their Idols.’

St. George's Kermis with the Dance around the Maypole', 

Pieter Breughel the Younger, 16th century. 

Note the drinking bower on the right  

In 1598 there was a May Day clash between Town and Gown in Oxford when youths, including the mayor's son William Furness, fought the University authorities. Nineteen years later, a group of  young men were found guilty of insulting the Mayor by dressing up on May Day.  William Stevenson an apprentice, Frost the cobbler, Peter Short the cutler, Tilcock the painter and Pigeon the chimney sweep were held in the stocks for two hours the next market day, with paper notices pinned to their hats describing their offences.

King James I was entertained by ‘Suites for morrice dancers all lyke with garters of bells’ on his first Royal Progress to Oxford in 1605. He described Maypoles and Morris dancing as ‘harmless recreation’ in his 1618 Book of Sports.

17th-century woodblock from the ballad sheet 'The May Day Country Mirth'

During Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate , May revels were shut down everywhere. In Oxford, Anthony Wood reported on May Day in 1648 . ‘ This day the Visitors, Mayor, and the chief officer of the well-affected of the University and City, spent in zealous persecuting of the young people that followed May-Games, by breaking of Garlands, taking away fiddles from Musicians, dispersing Morrice-Dancers, and by not suffering a green bough to be worn in a hat or stuck up at any door, esteeming it a superstition or rather an heathenish custom.’
With the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, May Games returned, to widespread public  rejoicing, and Wood reported, ‘the people of Oxon were so violent for Maypoles in opposition to the Puritans that there was numbered 12 Maypoles besides 3 or 4 morrises.’
However, to  Thomas Hall, Flora was a heathen goddess. He wrote in 1660, Funebria florae, the downfall of May-games, that Flora was ‘the whore of the city of Rome, in the county of Babylon’. She attracted a pack of ‘ignorants, atheists, papists, drunkards, swearers, swash-bucklers, maid-marions, morris dancers, maskers, mummers, may-pole stealers, health-drinkers, gamesters, lewd men and light women’.
By the late 17th Century, singing from church towers was widespread in Europe, and Oxford diarist Anthony Wood, recorded in 1695: ‘the choral ministers of this House do, according to an ancient custom, salute Flora every year on the first of May, at four in the morning, with vocal music of several parts. Which having been sometimes well performed, hath given great content to the neighbourhood and auditors underneath’. They then processed to St Bartholomew’s Hospital on Cowley Road, with ‘lords and ladies, garlands, fifes, flutes and drums to salute the great goddess Flora and to attribute her all praise with dancing and music.’ This was only abandoned after too many  clashes between Magdalen men and ‘the rabble of the town’.

Hornblowers accompany the May garland, from Hone's Table Book of 1827. 

During the 18th century, boys in Oxford blew horns early on May morning. In 1724, Thomas Hearne writes: ‘The custom of blowing them prevails at Oxford, to remind people of the pleasantness of that part of the Year, which ought to create Mirth and Gayety.’ ‘Whit-Horns’ were made from strips of willow bark wound into a funnel and fixed with hawthorn or blackthorn spines. The reed was made of bark and the mouthpiece pinched to create a primitive oboe. From about 1800, Oxford town boys blew their horns at the foot of Magdalen Tower to drown out the choristers.

May Day outside the parish church Great Tew, Oxfordshire, 1911.

The Victorians forgot about the pagan origins of May Day celebrations as they embraced the myth of Merrie Olde England. Three Victorian men helped popularise May Day: Alfred Tennyson with his poem The May Queen; William Holman Hunt with his painting May Morning on Magdalen Tower; and John Ruskin who taught trainer teachers May Day dances at Whitelands College in Chelsea.
By the early 20th Century when my granny Rachel married a vicar, choosing the May Queen was an important part of the parochial calendar. Once seen as a pagan goddess in human form, she was now chosen not for her beauty, but for her regular attendance at Sunday School!

Grand-daughters and great nieces celebrate Rachel and Richenda's
80th and 78th  birthdays, May 1 1968.  The author is on the far left. 

The people of Oxford still celebrate May Morning, starting at 6 a.m. with Magdalen College choir singing the 17th Century Hymnus Eucharisticus from the Great Tower. Church bells then peal out over the city for 20 minutes, and the carousing begins. In Broad Street the Whirly Band  play 'Rough Music'; Sol Samba perform on Magdalen Bridge; and Oxford's community street band Horns of Plenty in Queen’s Lane. Pubs and cafés are open from dawn.
An alternative May Day was started in 1972 by the sculptor Michael Black (1928-2019). His daughter Chess recalls, ‘Michael built a 30 ft high scaffold replica of Magdalen Tower. A full-size plaster ox was decorated with flowers and filled with beer. The Headington Morris men danced outside the Anchor Pub near Aristotle Bridge.Then the dancers came to a slap-up breakfast at Michael's house, cooked by us daughters! Much more drinking and singing followed.’ This year, there will be a wake for Michael in the form of more dancing, drinking and singing at dawn.

www.maymorning.co.uk   www.dailyinfo.co.uk/mayday

 www.janiehampton.co.uk
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Commissioning a reliquary of Rose la Touche - Michelle Lovric

This post is a meditation on the confluence of belief, grief and love. It’s also about how research takes you into places of the heart as well as crevices of the brain.

There are some stabs of wretchedness that all bereavements have in common. The brute sense of loss comes to anyone who loses a parent, a friend or partner, a child, a sibling or trust in someone they thought they knew.

But what do you do with mess of feelings that darken your life when a pet dies? Mixed up in all the mess is shame. Pet-death is first-world problem. The drama in your home and heart is dwarfed by the crises in Syria, Yemen and all the humanitarian scars on the world map today.

And yet, grief there is, and it must be dealt with.

Anyone who has recently lost a cat may need to look away now.

Rose La Touche of Harristown was named after the girl who inspired John Ruskin with devotion. (I urge everyone to read this definitive article by James Spates about the relationship between Ruskin and Rose. It demolishes the prurient myths that have served too long instead of truth).

The human Rose La Touche died tragically young of a brain fever. The feline Rose was a recycled rescue cat, so I could not be sure of her age. She was an inveterate tea-rustler. She liked it with milk and sugar, as I do. She hated pretty much everyone except me, and made her disdain quite clear, which was somehow gratifying. Anyone who telephoned me would be informed by Rose – nosing into the telephone mouthpiece – that any more than a few minutes of my time was an outrageous theft from her. During dinner parties she would sit up in the beams, sneering down at guests and sometimes flicking dust on to their plates.

Rose struggled through her last year. She fell from one of the beams, tearing her side on an old nail, breaking both a leg and her spirit. She was never the same cat. She grew profoundly deaf. She became a night-howler and began to walk not like the Pink Panther but like a prematurely old lady. She had fits.

In the end, she suffered a stroke and went blind. I made the classic error of cruelty through imagined kindness, keeping her alive far too long, anointing her with noxious ointments I had couriered in from America. (Yes, there is quackery for cats too, expensively and emolliently marketed.)

Finally, I let Rose go. Even though I watched her die, I found could not quite accept that she was fully gone. Painfully, I imagined her, like this image, dancing in the dark. Rose and I listened to a lot of Springsteen together, so this image has a sound track.

At the time Rose died, I was thinking a great deal about saints and relics, drafting out ideas for a children's historical novel that eventually became The Wishing Bones. It started as YA but I was asked to change it down to Middle Grade. So I faced the challenge of trying to explain the potency of saints' relics in a way that would make sense to a readership of relative young children of all faiths and none.

In the end, I decided to put my explanation in voice of an orphan named Eulalia, known as ‘Sorrowful Lily’. She lives in a convent on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon, the site of a factory churning out fake saint bones. As guests start disappearing from a hotel in Venice, Lily becomes aware that the fakery is not a victimless crime. The date is 1739. At twelve years old, Lily is in some ways naïve, in other ways very knowing. This is how she relates Venice’s obsession with saints and their relics:

 ‘Relics are bits of saints: fingers, knee-bones, skulls, noses, ribs, toes and teeth. Relics can also be things that saints once touched or wore, such as shrouds, nails or sandals.

   The Venetians were mad for a bit of saint. ‘Mad’ is the only word I can use for it, because the Venetians loved those old bones and rags so much. But, like any fairy-story, the mad love of saints has a certain strange sense to it.

   Now I was brought up with these things and so do not think them so odd. But I do declare and admit that if a stranger were to arrive in Venice from a distant planet they would quite probably find our love of bones very hard to understand. So let me try to tell you how it started.

   In the very very old days, when the Christian religion was as new as a fresh laid egg, it was quite a risky thing to be a good Christian. It was against the law. To be an especially good Christian – doing good works like healing the sick – might bring you to the attention of the authorities and then you could find yourself in deadly trouble. You could even find yourself dead – executed by the leaders who worshipped the old gods.

   People who lived or died this way often became saints, the specially honoured servants of God.

   The holiest saints were the ones who were made to suffer horribly for their faith. These ‘martyrs’ were thought to be a bit like Jesus Christ, because he also died for his religion, nailed to a cross in Golgotha in the Holy Land. ‘Martyrdom’ was what also happened when the Romans tried to make the saints give up their religion and worship the old gods. If the saints refused, then the Romans would boil them in a bath like Saint Cecilia, or roast them on a gridiron, and tear their body with tongs and set fire to their hair, like Saint Eulalia, my own patron saint.

   The braveness of these saints won them the special love of God. This meant it was good for ordinary people to pray to them for help in difficult situations. And the prayer was even more powerful if you had a piece of the saint’s body to pray to.

   The saints might have died on earth; they might have been cut into pieces by those who hated and feared them, but their souls were still alive in heaven and could do you a rare amount of good. You could catch holiness yourself, like a cold, from these fragmented parts of a saint’s body. If you owned one of those pieces or prayed in front of it, you could also get special blessings and promises of great things to come.

   Every time a saint died, other Christians would try to touch a bit of his or her skin and even bones, just to get a smudge of holiness on their fingertips or even to graze it with their own eyes. 

   Years and centuries after they died, these saints were still so holy that even one small morsel of their body, even a rusty drop of their dried blood, or a splintery bone from their nose, or one of their toes, was thought to be powerfully holy. So were the sponges and clothes dipped in their blood or their sweat as they suffered their tortures.

   Even after they’d been buried, if these saints were dug up, their bodies would be fresh and whole, and smell of flowers. Those bodies divided into as many pieces as possible so that lots of people could have the benefits.

   Some saints’ bodies were cut up into so many pieces that it seemed they had as many limbs as a centipede. If you believe it all, Saint Gregory must have had four heads and Saint Mary Magdalene had six complete bodies …

   It may seem a gruesome and unkind thing to cut up these much beloved heroes and heroines, but usually the Romans had already broken their bodies, so they were not whole any more.

    And each piece was as important and as holy as the next. Every tooth and every finger was full of special powers to do rare good. And so these little pieces of saints were prized, and sold, and traded; wars were fought over them.

  Rome has the whole bodies of some of the most important saints, like Peter and Paul. But Venice has her share. Of course we have the body of Saint Mark, our patron saint. The blind warrior doge Enrico Dandolo had also sent to Venice the whole body Saint Lucy, an ampoule with the blood of Jesus Christ, a piece of Saint John the Baptist’s skull, the arm of Saint George, and three nails from the cross on which Jesus Christ had been crucified …'

 

What has this to do with Rose la Touche?

Three years and three more books had passed and two new cats arrived, but I found myself still frightened of revisiting the pain of Rose’s death. Trauma’s like that: you get used to the knife embedded in your feelings and you know it will hurt more to pull it out.

Even in memory, Rose was no saint. But I decided that I would see what it felt like to create something tangible in her memory, intending, of course, no offence to any religion. This was not entirely my own idea. I had always admired the work of my dear friend, the mosaic artist Susie Nickerson Palmarin, and I asked her to help me.

Much of Susie’s work plays on three themes interwoven by the media of found objects, mosaics, ink and mortar. Venice is evoked in the theme of relics and reliquaries: small precious objects caught in glass. Literature is evoked by words in mosaic form: letters as tesserae, words as painting, and painting as words. The rhythms of the spoken word are preserved, expressing the artist’s conviction that writing is in itself art. Finally, the artist brings into play the nature of her own medium, the mosaic itself: an interplay of colour and texture, light and concealment, and softness and permanence.

Susie had made a mosaic reliquary for her own beloved cat Arturo after his death. In this beautiful piece, she created a frame of tiny tesserae that simulated Arturo’s tabby fur. In the centre, she set a tiny white funerary bouquet of his whiskers, which she had saved over the years.

I too had a collection of whiskers, some translucent half-moon nails and the fur the vet shaved from Rose before administering her final injection. Susie offered to make a memorial piece that literally incorporated Rose. It would be different to Arturo’s memorial as Rose herself was of course very different. Arturo and Rose were both tabbies – but one was born in Venice and one (I guess) in South London.

Susie immediately asked me for some words to put into her artwork and to guide her. But I was still tongue-tied with grief. The words had fled. Like all novelists, I write about loss persistently, as the changing rhythms of gain and loss shape every story. But faced with the actual aching absence of Rose la Touche, words seemed trivial. As for writing something ‘artistic’ or ‘poetic’ – that was not appropriate to the continuing brute reality of Rose’s absence. What I was feeling could not be accessorized, elaborated or made picturesque. Yet it was quietly and sometimes loudly omnipresent, like certain kinds of physical pain.

Last year French artist Sophie Calle produced a kind of reliquary for her cat Souris. Calle, famous for her multi-disciplinary collaborations, did it her characteristic way. When Souris was close to death, Calle called on a friend to whisper the words of a song into her dying cat’s ears. Later, she requested a full song as a tribute to Souris. Then Calle asked her friend Laurie Anderson to write something. Offers flooded in from other friends and people who heard about the project. They happen to include Bono, Pharrell, Jarvis Cocker and Jean-Michel Jarre. An album evolved, Souris Calle. Some of the 39 contributing artists knew Souris in life. Others were briefed about her with photographs and a video that Calle prepared about her life with Souris. Here’s a sample. The songs and associated artwork turned into an exhibition in Paris.

As Sophie Calle commented, ‘I am not the only person who has ever lost a cat.’

And nor am I. But like Calle, I felt the need to respond to the loss: to create something lasting from my memories of a cat who lived too short a life.

So how did Rose’s reliquary turn out?

Having given Susie the raw ingredients of fur, whiskers, claws and love, I asked her to surprise me.

And she did. She chose a rose-coloured gesso background and on it she too imagined Rose – housebound in real life – running through a forest of trees in the light of a setting sun – that time when cats are most twitchingly themselves. She set Rose’s corporeal relics into a silver skeleton of a leaf.

The words I finally delivered were without sentiment, Susie reproduced them on the front and the back: Here lie the remains of Rose La Touche of Harristown, the beloved green-eyed tabby of Michelle. No-one knows where she was born but she lived from around 1997 till 2011. She will never be forgotten by anyone who met her and she is sadly missed, sadly missed, sadly missed.

And yes, she still is. But the reliquary helps.

 

Made with Susie’s love, including the immortal parts of Rose, it really does.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Photographs of Susie’s work by Giordano Russo and Aurelia S. Palmarin

The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th, 2019. The extract above is from an earlier draft.
I'm afraid I don't know the source of the image of the cat dancing in the dark, but happy to add credit if someone can identify it.

Thoughts of a Gothic nature - Michelle Lovric

 One of my poems has just been awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Bridport Prize.

Judge Lemn Sissay, kindly wrote of my ‘Niece comes out of the attic’: ‘I was gripped by the gothic in this poem. And by what was not said. It’s beautiful. Powerful. Evocative.’

 Lovely to read, of course, but the word that excited me the most was ‘gothic’. My brain is, at the moment, in a fever of gothic for a new, experimental piece of work, in which I am trying to reconcile a sense of the gothic with some incidents of apparent modernity.

Gothic (henceforth I’ll give the word its deserved capital letter): I come to the conclusion that never, or hardly ever, has one word suffered its meaning to be stretched so far and into so many dimensions.

Here, with apologies, is an uncomfortably rushed and creaky whistle-stop tour of the Gothic, simply to signal its pervasiveness. (I am not going to illustrate it, so as not to impede its speed. I see the reader hurtling alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.)

We started with Goths – Visi and Ostro – ‘barbarian’ tribes of the north, whose rise is associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, including the sacking Rome in 410AD. This first Goth manifestation gave us a language, and alphabet and a script, also known as ‘blackletter’.

Then came ‘Gothic’ art and architecture, generally thought to have seen the light first in 12th century France but spreading in all directions. The architecture was despised by the early art-historian Giorgio Vasari, who saw infidel barbarity in its sinuous lines, pointed arches and ribbed vaults (the same elements, perversely, were adored by John Ruskin, a promulgator of Neo-Gothic in the 19th century. Apart from the 'virtue' inherent in each craftsman's creative contribution, Ruskin favoured what he saw as properly pious love of Creation’s flowing, soaring, irregular shapes over Renaissance man’s sterile geometry.)

Before Ruskin & co came to revive the Gothic in our built environment, the term had lurched into a new form. Literature appropriated ‘Gothic’ to describe the kind of fiction that creates a frisson of ‘sublime’ terror in the reader. Screeching away from the restrained formality of the classical, this literature feasts on heightened emotions, death, unnatural life-forces, secrecy, ghosts, the interplay of irresistible attraction and terrified repulsion. Other tropes: ancient curses, brooding anti-heroes, forbidden loves, the torture, slaughter or corruption (moral murder) of innocent victims, often young. Sometimes the horrifying mystery is resolved as ‘explained supernatural’. Other times, the horror is generated by the darkest sides of human nature. If a journey is taken, it is (forgive me) alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.

Horace Walpole is thought to have started it in England with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was initially published as an authentic rediscovered mediaeval romance. Gothic writers fed on one another’s Gothic imaginings. William Beckford’s Vathek, also originally published as a ‘found’ manuscript, was a favourite of Lord Byron. Another early classic of the genre was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, drafted during a ghost story competition in which Byron himself participated

A generalized Gothic architecture – rich in complicated shadow, beset with ancient dark towers, secret tunnels and dungeons – is often the backdrop. Providing the rib-vaulted settings for evil acts, Gothic architecture seems to exert the dark power Vasari saw in it: monstrous and barbarous, a kind of disorder. As at Hogwarts, both ancient and supernatural mischiefs stir in the very fabric of the castles, abbeys and monasteries where the characters are confined in feverish proximity with all that terrifies them. These buildings are sometimes in a ruined state, redolent of moral, physical or emotional collapse in its inhabitants. Nature relentlessly, even cruelly, takes back what man, in his arrogance, thought he had set in stone immortally. Buildings, like human bodies, can rot. This is the ‘Gothic picturesque’ – the sublime beauty to be found in something that can otherwise connote horror.

Victorian Gothic gave us Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and countless other novels, often played out in three thick volumes. Meanwhile, Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture delivered monumental markers like St Pancras Station. Any commuter can still get his or her daily dose of Gothic there, even now.

 Gothic was not confined to English literature. German had its Schauerroman ('shudder novel') and French its roman noir, all accessorized with similar tropes and settings. Nor was it confined to hardcover. Magazines started embracing the Gothic in Victorian times and have continued to this day.

Then came Hollywood, happy to draw on the Gothic model refined in literature, starting with movies based on the famous texts and then going on to develop its own language and iconography, which often associates young sexuality with violent death. The ruined castle or abbey backdrop is optional.

I find it quite extraordinary how many writers of the 20th century have been labelled ‘Gothic’. There are of course the obvious, like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, but also William Faulkner (‘Southern Gothic’), Joan Aiken (‘New Gothic’) and Margaret Atwood (‘Southern Ontario Gothic’).

Moving on to the late twentieth century and beyond, we have Gothic video games, Goth music (Black Sabbath and their ilk) and the Goth fashion subcultures, which drew its aesthetics both from Gothic novels and poetry, as well as horror movies. Black prevails, with white for gaunt contrast: black nail-polish on pale hands; hair dyed profoundly black framing white faces with lips and eyes picked out in black. Trimmings and silhouettes are borrowed from a least a hundred years before: corsetted waists and lace.

For a while now, the Gothic seems to have moved away from a specific obsession with corpses, decay, curses, judgements and settings that contributed much to a sense of loss, dread and terror. We have moved away from a codified horror with specific visual elements, from innocents sacrificed to darkness, paying the price of ancient curses and hatreds that have festered for centuries.

Or have we? Where we’ve been shows Goth associated with the emotional and decorative paths of complicated and wild darkness. Where are we now? Well, this is what I’m working on and it’s not ready to share. Instead, here’s my ‘Gothic’ poem to be getting on with. Its vintage is April 2017.


                                  Niece comes out of the attic

in my red velvet wedding dress, that old sore rash of silk
shamed into horripilation just like the hairs
that tiptoe up my nape at the sight of her,
thirteen, with no idea.

I thought that tongue of threads had long since gone to die.
But all this time it cooled its heat on the rack
of harmless jumble upstairs,
fever-red undimmed.

Watching zipper trace her bones, the cold clicks down my spine.
The past, that wolf, half-eats tall tousle of brown-eyed niece.
It grips her, neck to calf, in the thousand teeth
of its greed-red maw.

Yet niece is not its rightful prey. The past may brush those narrow ribs
but she must not taste its carnivore breath nor gag its rankling.
So when the graceful gangle comes dancing
out of the attic

I smile with velvet teeth at niece in my red wedding dress.
I chew the truth, gulp down what’s gone, praise
the prance and ripple of her kin kid-limbs
beneath the long-shed skin.


Michelle Lovric’s website

Blue glass seahorses, hair sandwiches and veiled statues - Michelle Lovric

In 1902, the English folklore specialist Edward Lovett went to Venice. He wrote, ‘"I found itinerant hawkers of curios selling the hippocampus, tied in bundles of three with red worsted. These were sold for luck, a poor survival of a very old and grander legend ... I found that the wives of fishermen, nursing babies, kept a dried sea horse on their breasts to facilitate the flow of milk … I am very much inclined to believe that the curious white metal prow of this remarkable boat [the gondola] is evolved from the seahorse.’

Folkloric objects such as dried seahorses, or even glass ones, live hard because of frequent handling. They often don’t survive except in records of anthropologists. So Lovett, wishing to preserve Venetian seahorsery for posterity, commissioned some glass seahorses, which can still be seen today at London’s Wellcome Collection.

Lovett (1852-1933) was best known for his publication Magic in Modern London (1925), which deals with both good-luck objects and folk remedies for various afflictions. One of my favourite recipes collected by Lovett is the Whooping Cough hair sandwich. The idea was that the parents of a child with the disease should trim some hair from the nape of their son or daughter, put it between two pieces of bread and throw it out of doors for an animal to eat.

Lovett’s connections with the Wellcome were strong and continue to be so. He himself curated an exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum called The Folklore of London in 1916.

And his own collection featured in a 2011-12 exhibition called Charmed Life: the Solace of Objects, curated by the artist Felicity Powell. Her undulating display of tiny charms and amulets included a miniature Venetian gondola ferro as well as several of the pink and blue glass seahorses that were thought to be good luck talismans in Venice in the nineteenth century.

            I was very much taken aback at the sight of the cavallucio marino in the London exhibition because at that point I was writing blue glass seahorses into a dystopian alternative 18^th century Venice for a children’s novel. In The Fate in the Box, I was imagining a city where automata were replacing the poor of every parish, who were consequently starving, and in which children were sacrificed in a barbaric ceremony known as the Lambing devised by my villain Fogfinger. Those who rebel against the regime form a band known as The Piccoli Pochi, or The Tiny Few, and their talisman is …. a blue glass seahorse.

            As I often create window displays for bookshops, I decided to see if I could find some blue glass seahorses, like Lovett’s. Countless tramps around Venice revealed only lurid multicoloured seahorses with labels that claimed a Murano provenance, but very obviously lied.

            Inspired by Lovett, I decided to commission some proper seahorses of my own. I took a photograph of Lovett’s hundred-year-old seahorses to Marco Vettor, a proper Venetian glass merchant. A few weeks later he presented me with this beauty, almost an exact replica of those that Lovett had commissioned, also based on the real size of the original nineteenth century amulets.

            I’m now working on the next book, and thought seahorses were behind me. But I was rereading my Ruskin this week for a television programme and came across a charming letter to Charles Eliot Norton, in which he wrote about keeping Venetian seahorses in a basin in his lodgings during a stay in 1857.

            I love coincidences and loved that letter for what it showed of the humour and tenderness of this much misjudged man. Ruskin was disappointed because the seahorses would not curl their tails around his pencil when he wanted them to do so. Nevertheless he advised Norton to get a fishermen to bring him two or three cavalluci next time he was in Venice and to put them in a basin so he could have the pleasure of watching them swim.

            ‘But don’t keep them more than a day,’ he urged, ‘or they’ll die, put them them into the canal again.’

            Here is a video of a Venetian cavallucio being released to the wilds of the lagoon, just as Ruskin wished. 

              In the Miracles & Charms exhibition held in the Wellcome at the same time as Lovett’s, I noticed that the statue of Saint Jude in the church of San Hippolito in Mexico City was given a cloth mask during the Swine Flu epidemic – which was what gave me the idea of the saints having their faces veiled during the reign of terror in Venice created by Fogfinger in The Fate in the Box. 

And from this week, a rare joy has been permitted to the public in Venice – admission to the Conservatorium of Music, which is hosting one of the Biennale exhibitions.

In one of the courtyards I found this statue, veiled just as I had imagined.

None of the staff with whom I talked could tell me anything about the statue.

They were amused that I wanted to know.

‘Un mistero,’ I was told conclusively.

And that was just what I wanted.

Michelle Lovric’s website

Marco Vettor's website 

The Wellcome has made a treasure hunt app using the amulets collected by Edward Lovett and set in Edwardian London.