Want to know and need to know, by K. M. Grant

In the days before google maps provided answers (of a sort) to all essential pre-travel questions - how long? how far? how much? what way? - before, even, motor cars and motorways, you had to know your horse.  How far could you ride it in a day?  How often should you let it drink?  What does it need to eat?  How long does a pair of horseshoes last?  How do you tell if the creature is knackered or just idle?

You also needed a whole raft of other equine know-how, now restricted to very few.  How many people, for example, are needed to harness a coach and four? Does harnessing said coach and four take five minutes, fifteen minutes, an hour?  Does it matter which horse goes in which position?   If a man drives a curricle, is he better with a steady cob or a speedier half-breed?  What, indeed, is a half-breed? More technical questions are of equal importance:  which bit (the steel bar in the horse's mouth) works best when breaking a young horse to harness?  And for anybody who has ever read Black Beauty, the stand-out question:  is there is ever any good use for a bearing rein.

No historical novel ever reflects the hours of time our forefathers and mothers spent discussing these very important matters. All we get is the occasional 'never mind the carriage, take the gig!' when the doctor must be summoned quick quick quick, or men in a dudgeon high-tailing off at a hand gallop even when at such a pace the horse would blow up in a moment.

In many ways, this lack of reflection is unimportant.  Nobody wants meticulously reconstructed hours of horse-talk or any other kind of talk, except about lavatories.  Children, particularly, always want to know about loos.  You could write a thousand words on lavatories, completely unconnected to any conceivable plot, yet still hold a child's attention, since children are always delighted and deliciously revolted to contemplate medieval evacuations.  On any visit to any castle, it's the ancient stains from garderobes that children remember.

Equine knowledge, though more plodding ('scuse the pun), is still pretty essential to the historical novelist.   I've always felt lucky that horses - at least riding horses - are something about which I can write without much research.  I know, for example, that if a modern horse is fit and you ride well, that 100 miles in 24 hours is not out of the question, with neither horse nor rider suffering any ill effects.  I also know that medieval horses were not nearly as fit or well fed as their descendants.  Yet even in past times a horse could maintain a steady 8 miles an hour, though not for 24 hours.  Oh, and you need to calculate in rest time, and throw out of the window the ponyclub frowning on eating and drinking on the hoof.   As for horseshoes, a set can last up to six weeks if you don't do too much roadwork, and if you can't judge whether your horse is knackered or idle, you shouldn't be riding it in the first place.

I'm very lucky:  my knowledge of horses comes courtesy of my mother.  She had ridden all her life and, after a bout of cancer, took up long distance racing on a kill or cure basis.   (It cured her, for a while.)  In 1985, she and I raced our horse from Vienna to Budapest:  my mother rode, I was groom.  The Iron Curtain still drawn tight, we were always bumping into Russian troops who couldn't believe a horse so small (our little mare was only 14.2) could be so fit.

my mother and Miss Muffet, 150km down, 150km to go

Two hairy moments:  one when the horse mistook the border barrier between Austria and Hungary for an obstacle to jump.  She pricked her ears and prepared to leap.  Guns were raised.  She was most affronted.  The second moment was when she stepped gingerly onto a raft to cross the Danube.   Raft?  It was a few rotten planks lashed together.  She placed her feet with great care and kept her nose jammed into my mother's elbow.   The British stiff upper lip doesn't just apply to humans.  If horses trust you, they'll do anything for you.

receiving their prize - my mother and Miss Muffet came 2nd instead of 1st
because, in true British fashion,
my mother stopped to help a fellow competitor in distress

Riding is one thing, harnessing quite another.  Harnessing one horse - at home, we drove as well as rode - took hours.  And I'm a useless coachman.   The horse seems so far away and if it sets off faster than I intend, I slam my foot on an imaginary brake.   I guess, though, that it takes twenty to thirty minutes to harness a coach and four.  As for the bearing rein, well, it's had a bad press.  It's perfectly true that bearing reins stop a horse lowering its head beyond a certain point.  For Black Beauty and Ginger, it was used simply to make cabhorses look good, whilst making their actual job unforgivably hard.  The bearing rein certainly killed poor Ginger.  Sometimes, though, a bearing rein's a safety measure, stopping a horse from lowering its head so far that the bridle catches on the shafts - that really would have fearsome consequences.   Too much information!  Still, one day it might come in handy.

photographs:  copyright Katie Grant

Coming out, by K. M. Grant

In 1976, I came out.  When I revealed this to my children many years later they were extremely surprised, and really rather disappointed when I told them that 'coming out' didn't always refer to sexuality.  In my case, it meant I did the London Season.  This was not a surprise: it was a shock.  The Season?  Wasn't that ancient history? And really!  What was I thinking!

What indeed.  I came out in 1976, but the Season, those months between Christmas and late-ish June when 'everybody' rushed from dinners to balls to parties of various kinds, evolved through the 17th and 18th centuries.  As Amanda Foreman tells us in her book on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the Season was designed to 'entertain the upper classes while they carried out their political duties'.   For men, the primary duty was plotting.  For women, it was dancing, dazzling and above all, dressing both body and hair:  the Duchess of Devonshire once appeared with fruit, stuffed birds and even a ship in full sail on her head.  Oh, the fun and sweat, headaches and lice.  Later, for parents with daughters, the Season's focus was bagging a husband:  a kind of over-dressed, over-privileged dating agency.

The task of girls was clear:  to be presented at Court without falling over, to cause the right sort of sensation at the right sort of parties and to be married off to Someone Suitable before the Season ended.  Pity the parents obliged to fork out for daughters needing more than one Season to secure their man.  But lucky Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland!  They made fortunes from novels about the Season, since exquisite but poor Lady Jemima meets dashing but scarred Lord Moneybags never goes out of fashion.  Indeed, Barbara Cartland hit the jackpot, and not just with her books.  Her daughter, Raine McCorquodale (the late Princess of Wales's step-mother), was Debutante of the Year in 1947.

I was not Deb of the Year.  But there, in the brochure for Queen Charlotte's Ball of 4th May 1976, after, bizarrely, advertisements for Dettol, North Thames Gas, Woolworths and Playboy, is my name.   I come between Grania Thwaites and Melanie Turner (whatever happened to them), amid all the debutantes who that year donned white dresses and gloves, set sail for the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane and, having been drilled most fiercely by some matron or other, paraded down the ballroom stairs to the March from Handel's Judas Macabaeus and curtsied to a cake.  Yes, a cake, not to the Queen of Puddings or even the Queen herself - she, sensible woman, stayed at home.  The cake came courtesy of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III.  She was a nice woman, most charitable.  Why we remembered her with a cake I can't recall.  Whether we ate the cake, I don't recall either.  Probably not.  As a deb, you were too conscious of your clothes.

I do remember the ball.  It was torture.  Fresh from my convent school and brought up in north east Lancashire, I knew almost nobody.  My dress was not bright white, but cream: a Mortal Sin. The boy hauled in to accompany me had no interest in either the ball or in me.  I had no idea what to talk about.  He made no effort.  I was a nervous dancer.  He was too superior to try.  Over thirty years later, I saw this 'boy' again and reminded him, laughing now, of that excruciating evening.  He looked at me.  I stopped laughing, feeling 17 again, and not in a good way.  Reader, my Season was a failure:  I didn't marry him, nor any of the other debs' delights.  Thank God my parents didn't try again.

The Edit, or How the Delete Button Takes Over Your Life, by K. M. Grant

So, here I am, sitting with my novel after a first meeting with my new editor.  There are revisions to make and things to think about.  I am delighted to do both.  I've been exceptionally fortunate in my book editors.  They do their job:  spotting authorly digressions, catching phrases that shriek 'I'm a writer', plot malfunctions.  I do my job:  imagine a person, a situation, a world and try get everything down intact.

I've occasionally been less lucky with newspaper editors.  Well, to be fair, not editors so much as sub-editors, who are rather different beasts and may, in the great internet revolution, be disappearing.  Many journalists wouldn't miss them.  Sub-editors are supposed to improve copy, correct solecisms, iron out silly mistakes.  Ho hum.  I once wrote a piece in which the age-old conundrum pitching freedom against determinism made an entry.  The sub changed it to freedom and determination.    I was mortified.  My name was on the piece, not the sub's. I did get an apology from the real editor but never discovered whether the sub understood his mistake.

In books, editing is an art.  It's the eye that sees what the author doesn't see.  A good one can make your book, a bad one can ruin it.  It's an arduous job, since some manuscripts need major corrections.    Rather like Canute's ship, an author may, in the end, ask rather despairingly, when does it stop being mine and turn into somebody else's?  But it's the author's book, of course, since the author had the idea and put in the hours.  However, a good editor certainly deserves more than a mention in despatches:  a good editor deserves a sustained round of applause.

My novel needs a small re-ordering.  Yet even the smallest re-order has large reverberations.  You have to unstitch your book, lay out the pieces, move what needs to be moved, then restitch, amending and recalibrating seams which are now out of kilter.  I do it through total immersion.   From the moment I take out the first stitch, I don't leave my manuscript - at least not mentally - until I've got the whole thing  tacked back together.

I use two screens: one for the original text, one for the rejigged text, and I have a working copy which, were it paper, I'd attack with scissors and sellotape, much as, when I worked at Westminster, I used to attack lists of amendments to parliamentary bills.  Marshalling amendments, we called it.  Now I marshall my own text.

When editing, you realise your best friend is the delete button.  Oh, how hideous it is, selecting words, phrases or whole paragraphs over which you've slaved so assiduously, then clicking them into oblivion.  But oh, how much better the text is without them.  When I tell people that before I send a manuscript to my agent I've often deleted 20,000 words, I think they think I'm either lunatic or hopeless.  It's hard to explain to non-authors that quite apart from being lunatic and hopeless (I'm often guilty as charged), sometimes these words act like scaffolding: you need to write them even if you're going to get rid of them.

As I'm busy deleting, re-ordering, re-writing, I think of Victorian writers like Thackeray or George Eliot.  It's enough of a pain moving chunks of text through the computer's copy and paste function.  What on earth was it like when done by hand?  Writing rooms must have been carpeted in novel - a whole house crackling with Middlemarch, a whole street paved with Vanity Fair.  My  editing is confined to my desk and despite my love/hate affair with the delete button, I've no wish to return to the days of tearing up and tossing on the fire.  Editing is hell.  No need to make it look like hell as well.

Fiercely faithful, by K. M. Grant

After the recent conclave, a commentator said of Cardinal Bergoglio, the new pope, 'he's chosen the name Francis, the gentle saint' or words to that effect.  He certainly used the word 'gentle'.  It's an odd word to use in connection with a saint, since saints are only gentle in Ladybird books and hagiographies.  'Gentle' implies sympathy and the gift of self-effacement. Beth in Little Women is gentle.  Though he may have said pretty things - make me the channel of your peace, etc. -  and, so we're told, been able to silence swallows, St. Francis of Assisi was not gentle.  Like all saints before and after, he was something much more uncomfortable:  singleminded.

Francis determined to take Christ's teachings literally and to their bitterest degree.  'Go and sell all thou hast and give to the poor' left him naked.  'Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece' left him and his followers dependent on the charity of others.  Francis revered poverty.  One follower's remark that it's all very well to be born rich and choose to be poor, but that being born poor is a different matter entirely, may not have raised even a smile.

Single-mindedness was combined with literal-mindedness.  When Christ, through an icon, said 'go and repair my house' Francis began rebuilding a church with his bare hands. When Pope Innocent III told him, on first introduction, to 'go and play with the pigs', Francis did just that.  This last turned out pretty well.  In his delightfully unsaintly style, Matthew Paris, the 13th century chronicler, tells us that the following day Francis smelled so bad the pope hurriedly granted all his requests.

Nor was gentleness a consideration when it came to endorsing, or not, Francis's fledgling order.  Whilst tossing up the options - Francis as holy man or Francis as heretic - Pope Innocent had a dream.  In this dream he saw this rough, smelly and slightly unnerving derelict holding up the Basilica of St. John Lateran.  Holy man, then.  Had the papal dream been otherwise, Francis might have been cast out of the church altogether.  Serendipity.  That's the way it went in the medieval church - may still go.

Yet how we long for our saints to be gentle.  If they're not, it's hard to like them.  But the truth is, saints don't want to be liked.  They want to pursue the path of holiness if it kills them, and it often does.  Take the Forty Martyrs, executed for refusing to recognise any faith but Roman Catholicism.  It's not gentleness that helps you face the crushing door (St. Margaret Clitherow), the lonely death in the Tower (St. Philip Howard) or hanging, drawing and quartering (St. Edmund Arrowsmith - a Jesuit like the new pope).  It's a steely faith and a will of iron, neither of them gentle qualities.

Sometimes, we mistake humility for gentleness.  Certainly Francis of Assisi was humble, although by refusing all comforts, getting a follower to drag him through the streets and leaping into ditches of ice and snow if his flesh 'itched' (erring priests, bishops and cardinals take note), you might say that he took public mortification almost to the point of pride.  Indeed, it was he who told Cardinal Ugolino (later Pope Gregory IX) that the Franciscans' calling was to 'follow in the footsteps of Christ's humility' so that in the end they could be 'exalted above the rest of the saints'.   This is not a gentle message and it wasn't meant to be.

I don't think Francis would have recognised himself in the commentator's remark about the new pope's choice of name.   'Gentle's all very well,' he might have said, 'but if you want to be a real saint, forget it.'

End? What end? by K. M. Grant

Writers are often asked how we feel when we've finished writing a book.  Is there a sense of relief?  Are we sad?  Do we actually type 'The End'?

Having answered this question in schools many times, it only struck me the other day, roughly a decade since my first book was published, that I never feel I've got to the end.  I finish the book, certainly.  I write the final line.  But the book never feels quite finished, not because I don't type The End (does anybody?) but because every time I open the book, even when printed, I feel I could make a change: a sentence more precisely written;  a better word chosen; a comma that's begun to irritate.   Worse, and particularly with a historical novel, I absolutely dread finding something new about the period, something that would have been transformatory to include.  As a defence, once a novel is finished, I studiously avoid any dangerous reference books or articles.  Despite this, facts I didn't know contrive to slip into publications or conversations about something completely different - some snippet on armour in a piece ostensibly about garden hoses;  an observation about sailing ships in a romance;  a desert colour in a fashion shoot.

These little facts lurk with the sole purpose of leaping out to slap me in the face.  'Oh crikey!' I think more often than any reader imagines, 'I want my manuscript back'.  Naturally, I contrive to forget the fact as soon as possible.  It's the only way to get a decent night's sleep.  But though I occasionally forget my dogs' names, reducing them to 'hey, dog', and almost always forget to empty the washing machine, those pesky unwanted facts stick.  If I can't include them, my book seems more incomplete than ever.

Do other authors experience the same agitations and alarms?  Even after proofs and copy-editors, more proofs and the application of the pedant's toothcomb, even, indeed, many years after publication, do other authors still feel their work is still wanting a final something?

My hunch is 'yes'.  If you listen carefully to authors giving a public reading, you'll often find they don't read exactly what's written in the book.  They 'improve' it.  And why not?  It's the author's work.  I've seen authors take a pen and rewrite on the hoof.  I do it myself.  It seems that writers must learn to cope with never truly finishing until they're dead and buried, and even then I'm not sure they rest easy.

Despite the above, finishing writing a book, even if one never really feels it to be 'the end', is a moment to mark.   I'm marking such a moment now.  My first foray into the adult world of fiction, the novel for which I, like my characters, have been learning the Goldberg Variations, is finished and, to my great joy, has been bought by Virago.  'Sedition' will be published in summer 2014.   Then begins something new - the long road to the reader.

I've marked the ending of this stage in Sedition's journey as I mark all similar endings:  by grabbing a saw.  Hacking away at my manuscript is swiftly followed by a cathartic hacking away at unruly bits of the garden.  The dogs look on with some concern.  What will happen when the garden can be pruned no more?  They watch me for a while, then creep back inside, counting their legs.

the bletherin by K. M. Grant

The Burns Supper season is upon us, that moment in dreary January when Scots all over the world dust down their Scottishness, their bagpipes and The Complete Burns; when men hunt for haggis and women mash the neeps.   It's a tradition dating back to 1801, so the official version tells us, when

'on the fifth anniversary of the death of Robert Burns, nine men who knew him met for dinner in Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his life and works.  The Master of Ceremonies was a local minister, a liberal theologian and an equally liberal host.  Hamilton Paul and his guests shared Masonic brotherhood with Rabbie and Paul devised an evening which look a bit like a lodge ceremonial, centred on a fine fat haggis; with recitation and singing of Burns's works and a toast (in verse) to the memory of their friend and hero.

It was such a jolly evening, all agreed to meet again the following January for a Birthday Dinner for the bard, little knowing that they had invented a global phenomenon that we know as the Burns Supper which still broadley follows the Reverend's original plan.'

It's an honour, in Scotland, for an English person to be asked to speak at a Burns Supper.  It's also faintly alarming.  First, even if you can recite yards of Burns with ease, unless you are a superb actor, English people speaking Scots sound like deflating bagpipes: more than a little off key.  Second, you must gird your loins to eat like a Clan Chieftan stocking up for a famine.

I girded my loins last Saturday.  I was to speak on 'My Scotland' but before any speeches, there was the Bill o' Fare:

Guid lentil soup made wi' a shank o' ham

...

Great chieftain o' the puddin' race wi' bashed keeps an' champit tat ties

...

Guid Carrick beef pie wi' roastit an bilet tatties an' some rumbledethumps

...

Guid Scotch trifle wi' trimlin tan

...

Ait cakes on a whang o'mighty kebbuck

...

A tassie o'coffee wi' tablet

...

To drink:  whisky, wine and guid Scotch water

It would have floored many trenchermen but, as Burns asked, who in his right mind 'looks down wi sneering, scornfu view/On sic a dinner?'   No 'sneering' or 'scornfu' view from me, only a faint sense of panic. As the haggis was addressed, I adjusted my sash (my husband's a Scot which makes me a sash by marriage) and prayed for a good digestion.  Reader, I did England proud.  I didn't manage every morsel, but I made a decent dent.    

Then we had The Bletherin.  I was to speak in the second half.  Yes, the second half.  A Burns blether is a mighty old thing, not for fearties.

Toast to the Queen

...

Song 'There was a lad'

...

The Immortal Memory (an erudite and witty canter round, under and over Burns - roughly 30 minutes)

...

Song 'Green Grow the Rashes'

...

Toast to the Lassies (15 minutes)

...

Reply from the Lassies (15 minutes)

...

Interval

...

Burns Recitation

...

My Scotland (that was my bit - 15 minutes)

...

Burns Song Medley

...

The Jolly Beggars (15 minutes)

...

Burns Recitation

...

Burns Song Medley

...

Concluding Remarks

...

Auld Lang Syne

There are three Immortal Memories celebrated in Britain: two Scots, James Watt and Robert Burns; and one English, Lord Nelson.  I've no idea what they eat at a Watt Supper or a Nelson Supper - lightbulbs and ships biscuits? - but I doubt the Bill of Fare can match the Burns.  Burns, voted by Scots the greatest Scot of all time, died in 1796 of an infection following a tooth extraction.  It wasn't a romantic way to go, but my goodness, despite the weight of haggis and beef pie, he left some romance behind him.   

Where the Dickens is my Club Card, by K. M. Grant

I'm now so hooked on audio books that those two little earphony white snails dangle permanently down my front.   This is a boon and a curse.  It's a boon, in that what wouldn't our ancestors have given to escape the mundane entirely at their convenience?  Those longuers in hideously uncomfortable carriages would have been transformed by, say, Martin Chuzzlewhit, Vanity Fair or a Philosophy Bites podcast.

The curse is that when Jo is dying (Bleak House), or Keith Talent's at the darts (London Fields), or I'm singing with Mollie (Ulysses) it's hard to concentrate on, for example, the shopping.  Last week, in Tesco's, the brown-shirts had just invaded the Ephrussi house in Vienna (The Hair with Amber Eyes).  At the checkout, they hurled Emmy's dressingtable over the balustrade.  Asked if I had a club card, I heard only the dressingtable hit the marble.  When I got home, my shopping had apparently been done by a lunatic.  No cheese.  Three apples.  Something I had taken for cream but wasn't.  Sweetcorn instead of peas.  Edmund de Waal had ruined our dinner.

In the park, shrieking at my dogs (I'm deaf, with the snails in my ears, and irritable since I don't want to miss a word and the dogs will lag and dawdle to sniff) I felt my mobile vibrate. Unable to find the pause button (iPod nanos are very nano indeed) I pulled a snail out of my left ear, answered my phone and found myself, in a second or two, live on the radio talking about something or other, with Lolita still pouring into my right ear.  I tried to make sense for my radio audience, but they may have got more than they bargained for, with Lolita clearly audible from the dangling left snail.  Why didn't I just pull the whole snail contraption from the socket?  I've no idea.  You become slightly deranged when attached to great literature.

And other people get involved.  Slightly weepy (Ragtime - it's Doctorow reading his own work that gets me) I find myself patted on the shoulder by strangers.   I've given up trying to explain, since this alarms people.  I forget we're inhabiting different worlds and I'm sure they want to enter mine as little as I want to enter theirs.  Luckily, you can't yet get Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety on audiobook.  I'd be a wreck hearing the gravelly tones of Sean Barrett intone, 'There is a point beyond which - convention and imagination dictate - we cannot go;  perhaps it's here, when the carts decant on to the scaffold their freight ... Camille is now, suddenly, calm ... For ten seconds Danton looks away. After that he watches everything ... He watches each death, until he is tutored to his own.'

A little Waugh next.  Scoop, perhaps, if it's available.   I'll be cackling in the post office queue and metaphorically shaking my fist at lorries and buses who dare drown out the voice of William Boot.  At least I hope metaphorically.  Once plugged in, imagination and reality fuse together.  I may not be quite myself.  If you hear I've been arrested, you'll know why.   I went to a convent school so am perfectly at home in institutions and just imagine how many audio books could fill a decent ten year stretch.

Happy New Year!

Keeping souls happy, by K. M. Grant

Every All Souls Day, my family gathers together and prays for all the dead relations.  We're Catholic, so that's a lot of relations.  Mass is said in the chapel at Towneley Hall, our family home until 1902, when a dearth of male descendants caused my great great aunt to upsticks and sell the place for a song.  When my family gathered itself together again, since they couldn't live at Towneley they chose to live in the house previously allotted to the agent who looked after the estate.  Where the agent went, I don't know, but I doubt he was particularly sorry to move from a house memorably, if unkindly, described by my grandmother as a 'suburban villa on a bleak hillside'.  Certainly, the ancient peculiarities of house in which I was brought up hardly make it an Ideal Home - when we were little, more water came through the ceilings than out of the taps.  Thanks to my father, though, it does have a wonderful garden coaxed from from the surrounding fields.  Anyhow, the Burnley Corporation (as it then was) who bought Towneley and turned into a museum and art gallery, eventually allowed us to hear Mass there once a year.

the altar at Towneley, ready for our All Souls Mass

To non-Catholics, Catholics' obsession with the dead seems gloomy and macabre.   But preoccupation with the condition of the dead predates Catholicism by many thousands of years.   Why else did the Neanderthals bury their dead with tools and animal bones, if not to assist them on their way?  Praying for the dead is similar assistance, although for the soul rather than the body, and it's been Catholic practice to have Mass said for the souls of the faithful departed since at least the 8th century.

Catholics are keen on souls.  They're also keen on reparation for sin, hence the doctrine of Purgatory, formally defined in 1274, but connected to the ancient Jewish belief of purification after death.  Purgatory is the place where, unless you've been ludicrously good all your life, you atone for your sins before slipping gratefully into Heaven.

What a load of nonsense, you might say.  You may be right.  But understanding even the most apparently nonsensical religious practices (and this isn't nearly the most nonsensical, if you're on the lookout for nonsense) is vital to understanding how we are all shaped.  Historical novelists need to be careful.  It's fine to show that, for example, people in 14th century Europe disliked religion in the form of priests and bishops, but it would be wrong to remove their healthy respect for God, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.   It wasn't tradition that had them pray for the dead or build chantry chapels for perpetual intercession:   the driving force was the need to get the relations into Heaven asap and by doing so to ensure your own swift passage in due course.   Call them silly if you want. Call them superstitious if you must.  But Catholics' care for the dead was neither silly nor superstitious; they believed, and still believe profoundly, that the dead need us and we need them.

I am not a good Catholic.  In many ways, I'm barely a Catholic at all - it goes in phases and I'm currently in a 'no' phase.  Nevertheless, when I see the Whalley vestments, brought to Towneley during the dissolution of the monasteries;  when I pass through the oak door bearing the initials of John and Mary Towneley, married in 1556;  and when I kneel in front of the sixteenth century altar in the house of my ancestors, I feel challenged.  Do I really know better than them?  And so what if I do?  Isn't praying for the dead better than not praying for them?

After we've done the Dead, we have breakfast in the servants' dining room.  That, far more than the continuation of the All Souls Mass, would cause surprise.  'Good Heavens!' the spectral relations might well exclaim.  'The servants' dining room?  What the hell are you doing in there?'

Books of Stuff, by K. M. Grant

Social networking is here to stay.  Yet neither blogs nor tweets can take the place of the old-fashioned commonplace book on whose pages the owner jotted down thoughts, observations and quotations that happened, at a particular moment, to seem important or interesting.  We still scribble down thoughts, observations and quotations:  they're the lifeblood of Facebook and Twitter.  But it's not the same.  For a start, electronic jottings are all typed, and one of the wonders of the real commonplace book was the handwriting, usually beautifully neat to begin with, then turning more and more scribbly as the entries proliferated amid cigar ash and spilled coffee.    This is George Lyttleton's handwriting, taken from his 'large, blue, hardback' commonplace book.

George Lyttleton's handwriting

Some people think that commonplace books are the same as scrap books:  I don't agree.  To me, scrapbooks are blank books into which you stuff things:  recipes torn from newspapers, cards from people you once knew, old letters not important enough to go into the special old letter box, old leaves picked up somewhere or other, old invitations, old almost anything flat and papery.  The blank leaves of a scrapbook are seldom written on:  they just serve as a binding for everything else.

Commonplace books are not bundles of stuff.  They bear the actual imprint of the owner.  And they're mis-named.  As George Lyttleton asked of his friend Rupert Hart-Davis, 'why is it called a commonplace book when practically nothing in it is commonplace?' (GWL, 2002).   In his own commonplace book, he noted the breeding habits of rabbits (p.29) and a Japanese student's interpretation of the instruction 'stand on your own feet' as 'I must float on my own bladder' (p.58).   Does anybody out there still keep a commonplace book?  I do hope so.

Another type of book long out of fashion is the visitors' book.  Our visitors' book is, after the husband, children, dogs and budgie (the budgie? who am I kidding) the thing I'd want to rescue from a fire.   My husband and I have kept it from the day we were married.  Nobody has to write a remark - I hate doing that myself - only a signature from each person - none of this signing for the whole family - and the dates of visitors' arrival and departure.  Apart from being a highly effective weapon when arguing over the last time we saw so and so, our book follows the trajectory of our lives through the signing of names:  my late parents-in-law and mother;  my father; nieces and nephews from faltering splodge to elegant scrawl; friends from afar; whole pages for christenings, weddings, funerals.  We also have three memorable pages from three memorable visits, filled with the outpourings of Russian pianist Alexander Kobrin. He came, alone, aged 17, to stay for the Scottish Piano Competition.  It was his first adult victory (he was the youngest competitor), and he went on to win a string of other competitions, culminating in the Van Cliburn.  I'm glad he ignored the 'name only' rule.  His pages brim with him.

Alexander Kobrin's entry in our visitors book

And what opportunities for raising danders visitors' books supply!  The rule in our house (as in my parents') has always been that once you marry, if you return to the parental home, you sign the visitors' book.  Our older daughter, married last year, didn't turn a hair.  Friends turned several hairs on her behalf.  'Bloody hell, Katie!  She has to sign to visitors' book in her own home?  That's awful!'  My rather weak protestation that she now has her own home did not placate.  In some eyes, I'm now an Officially Awful Mother.

People who stayed for Eliza's 21st

Anyhow, in our love-affair with electronic media, let's not forget the books in which we scribble.   Facebook and Twitter are all very well, but who wants their thoughts, observations or quotations archived in some impersonal whirring computer barn across the Atlantic rather than lodged in a bookcase, or even stuffed in a drawer?   And if you don't want to forget your visitors, get them signing.  We keep our visitors' book by the front door. If nothing else, it provides something amusing, moving and occasionally perplexing (who WERE those people?) to flick through whilst waiting for a taxi.




Lyttleton, G. (2002) The Commonplace Book of George Lyttleton, York, Stone Trough Books

Interesting Times, by K. M. Grant

Martin Amis has said that if September 11 2001 had to happen, he was not sorry it happened in his lifetime.   I'm sure I needn't press the point that he was not, in any way, suggesting that 9/11 was a good thing.  He was just saying that if it had to happen, this paradigmatic shift in the notions of war and peace, of safety and danger, of power and submission, then he wanted to see, to experience, to watch the unfolding aftermath in all its fascination and confusion.  In The Second Plane, a compilation of journalism and short stories, we can follow him following it.

There have been many paradigmatic shifts in history, some acknowledged at the time, some only recognised much later.  A later recognition was the Battle of Poitiers in 732, during which Charles Martel beat the army of the Umayyad Caliphate and halted the Muslim takeover of Europe.  Had Charles Martel lost, it's possible I wouldn't be writing this:  we might be living under a Taliban theocracy.  Closer to our own time, contemporaries knew the defeat of Hitler marked some kind of turning point.  I'm always sorry for those who died not knowing who'd won the war.  Such an important thing to know.  The tearing down of the Berlin Wall was another turning point.  High on the 'non-recognition at the time' list, however, must be the Norman Conquest.  'Not much happened this year' wrote one monk in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the 1066 page, or words to that effect.  Well, he kens the noo, as Scots like to say.

For obvious reasons, historical novelists are drawn to 'interesting times'.  We place fictional characters amid the action of real events for the very good reason that people like to imagine, or have imagined for them, what it must have been like to be part of something huge.  Equally, the individual experience of the great event can bring the great event to life.  Reading historical novels also an easy, though untrustworthy, way of learning stuff.  And this brings me to a great book I almost missed because it's not on a 'books set around a great event' list.

If you have an iPod, can I recommend downloading E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, narrated by the author himself?   Many readers may know the book already.  If you don't and you care to read it or listen to it, you'll experience America at the turn of the 20th century as you've never experienced it before.   Through its interweaving of lives, both real and fictional, I know Harry Houdini and like him, though his mourning for his mother is vaguely unhinged.  I know J. P. Morgan - spookily dislikable, and Henry Ford.   But most of all, I understand 'the value of the duplicable event' to use Mr. Doctorow's description of the mechanisation of production, and how this changed our perception of everything.

Pace Martin Amis, after listening to Ragtime I'm with Logan Pearsall Smith:  'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading'.   Now that I'm so hooked on audio books I may never go anywhere again.

Calling up the cows - K.M.Grant

After GB’s Olympic triumph, I was going to write about dressage this month, a sport which commentators insist is mysterious and faintly peculiar. Horses doing ballet! Riders doing not much! Well, there you go!

Dressage is neither mysterious nor peculiar. It evolved through pretty straightforward considerations of life and death: your warhorse needed to be smart, obedient and pretty damned nifty to get you out of harm’s way. You needed to teach it to move sideways, backwards, upwards, the full spin, the half spin, and all this instantly and without hesitation. You get the picture. Since you can't teach tanks dressage, after horses fell by the wayside as far as war was concerned, these elegant lifesaving manoeuvres became a competitive equine discipline.

It’s harder than it looks. I was once given a lesson on a horse being trained for the Spanish Riding School. My legs said ‘trot’; it understood ‘half pass’; my legs said ‘medium canter’, it understood ‘wild gallop with motorbike corners’. I dismounted hot and humbled. ‘Serves you right,’ said my own horse primly. ‘Dressage is for real riders.’

Anyhow, my mind teaming with dressage moves and smart things to say, I then discovered something truly horrible. In the huge clearout last year, when we moved the kitchen in a domestic earthquake worthy of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, I seem to have mislaid (please please not discarded) all my dressage books. Indeed, I can find none of my horse books at all; no blue Pony Club Manual 1966, no Keeping Your Pony at Grass (whose cover was disconcertingly yellow – why not green?), no What the Farrier Does given to me, I think, by Father Christmas.

Nothing for it, I'm reduced to cows - the animal kind, not human. In a fit of mental abstraction (I wasn’t even pregnant) I once bought a book about cows – The Complete Cow, by Sara Rath. It’s a great book, a mine of historical and not so historical cow information. Did you know, for example, that ‘soldier’ in Sanskrit, means ‘one who fights about cows’? To my surprise, I’ve consulted this book quite often. Once you realise how important cows have been in the whole of man’s history, it begins to feel rude to gloss over them in a historical novel. Rude and historically negligent.

The cow is not just an animal. As William Dempster Hoard reminds us, ‘the cow is the foster mother of the human race. Form the day of the ancient Hindoo (sic) to this time have the thoughts of men turned to this kindly and beneficent creature as one of the chief forces of human life’ (Rath: 17). We have mythical cows like the Minotaur (I’m counting bulls as well); we have holy cows in India; we have beribboned cows in Liechtenstein (the ribbon goes to the winner of the summer cow beauty pageant) and we have human cows courtesy of the ancient Roman wedding where the woman says ‘You are the Bull, I am the Cow’.

Every family in every historical novel depends on the cow: cows are always a feature. But is a cow ever The Feature, even in a modern novel? I don’t think so. Cows are comic, as in Doreen Cronin’s Click Clack Moo (2000) or David Milgrim’s Cows Can’t Fly, or even subversive as in Munro Leaf’s 1936 story of Ferdinand the pacifist bull. But they’re never heroic. I think there’s a historica gap to be filled. My family had a cow, disconcertingly called Butterfly. Here’s a link to her picture. She was a prize cow, but no beauty, at least she doesn't seem a great beauty to me even bearing in mind that in 19th century portraits, cows always look like oxo cubes. Nevertheless, I think of her sometimes, and of all those family cows that, for centuries and centuries, stood between a child’s life and death: a bit like dressage after all, so it turns out.

Rath, S. (1998) The Complete Cow, MN, USA, Voyageur Press, Town Square Books.
Picture of cow from Fotosearch Stock Photograph RF (Royalty Free) 

Taking the Lives of Others, by K. M. Grant

One sentence in a work in progress can take hours of research.  My sentence reads: 'The executed don't pay for rope, more's the pity.'  Then panic.  In 1794, is this true?

In medieval times, the executed's family paid for the faggots for burning. I have seen one of the bills -   I think it was Thomas Cranmer's (1489-1556), he who was executed by Mary for 'refusing' the pope.  You'll remember that Cranmer had previously signed a recantation of his reforming ideals, and put the hand that signed those recantations into the flames first.  To burn properly, he required more faggots than the executioner had bargained for, so extra faggots were added to the pyre and the invoice.  In the illustrations, everybody seems to be sitting very close.  I hope the onlookers got at least a little bit singed.

But did anybody ever pay for rope?  And if so, did they still pay in 1794?  Dig dig dig goes the novelist.  Tick tick tick goes the clock.   One sentence, almost three days' work.  Well, I say work, but for me, research is real pleasure and writing is the work.  So, three days' pleasure investigating a truly horrible subject, the more fascinatingly horrible the more I read.  In an earlier blog, I wrote about the execution of my ancestor Francis Towneley, who was hung, drawn and quartered for his Jacobite support.  Physical horror.  I wasn't really prepared for the mental horror these new researches uncovered.  Yes, there's worse than a good clean evisceration and a head kept in a basket on the dining room table.

Executioners, so I learned from 'The Executioner:  His Place in English Society' (Robins, 1964) have always been reviled.  In England, you might be awarded damages for being mistaken for a hangman.  In Spain, the executioner's fee was thrown for fear of contamination through direct physical contact, and their house was painted red.  Not only that, after the garrotting (the Spanish method of choice - there were special machines called, unsurprisingly, 'garrots') the executioner was himself always arrested, tried and acquitted because he'd committed murder 'by virtue of my office'.  Weird how justice works.  But what about this.   Since being an executioner was seldom a career of choice, you could have your own capital sentence rescinded if you volunteered to hang others.  Thus, so Robin (p.235) tells us, 'in the seventeenth century a man named Derrick was sentenced to death but pardoned and employed to hang twenty-three others'.  Then there's this story, which really got to me:

'In the days of Charles !!, a father and his two sons were tried at Derby Assizes for horse-stealing.  All were found guilty, but the bench of judges offered to pardon any one of them who would consent to hang the other two.  The offer was first made to the father, who violently refused it.  The elder son was then asked if he would kill his father and brother to save himself, but he also declined.  The offer was, however, accepted by the younger brother, John, who apparently showed a certain aptitude for this work for he was eventually appointed to the post of hangman for Derby and a few neighbouring counties, holding this office to a very old age' (pp. 235-6).

Now, the father and older son may have been rotters.  As a form of final redemption, they may have begged the younger son to do the deed to save himself.  But to show an 'aptitude' and carrying on to a 'very old age'?  John!  For shame!

Executioners were a mixed crew:  some showed more than John's 'aptitude':  they enjoyed the work.  Take Mississippi's Jimmy Thompson, for example, who swapped the career of highway robber for that of state executioner, taking 'great delight in travelling about the state killing people in his portable electric chair at $100 a head'; or Richard Brandon, a London bigamist, who 'prepared for his calling at a young age by decapitating cats and dogs'.  Those not so keen often took to the bottle, though even without the bottle, no eighteenth century felon wanted to be topped by John Thrift, whose work, drunk or sober, was so 'sloppy and inefficient' that he often required 'two or three blows of the axe' to finish the job.

Enough!  And where's the answer to my initial question?  The answer is no, in 1794 the executed didn't pay for his or her own rope.  It's not absolutely clear who did pay, but I expect the executioner did out of his salary (£40 a year in the early 1700s).   He could then sell the rope as a souvenir or, for a small fee, display it in the pub.

At the end of my researches, I read the following, which gave me a jolt:  'In England today, according to evidence given before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, the average fee paid [to] the hangman is £10' (p.239).  The piece was written in 1964 - that's after my birth.  Perhaps it was supposed to be comforting to learn that by this time the rope was burned immediately after the corpse was cut down, but somehow it wasn't.

See how one sentence can lead to a lot of hanging about in unsavoury company?  You're not alone in wondering why I don't just leave the beastly thing out.

Robin, Gerald D. (1964) The Executioner: His Place in English Society, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep 1964) pp 234-253

Hammers, pins and dampers, by K. M. Grant

My current brush with Bach’s Goldberg Variations has led me deep into the world of hammers, pins, dampers, levers, jacks, strings, regulating screws, pedal boards, lift rails, belly rails, wrest planks, escapements and the common or garden spring. This is the world of the oldfashioned, i.e. not electronic, keyboard.

We’re so used to the external shape of painted harpsichords, shiny black concert grands or knocked about family uprights that few delve inside. We employ special tuners to do that kind of thing and thank goodness for that. I’ve been having a good squint at the inside of my lovely Yamaha 6’ 6” grand. Though I study diagrams and read idiot guides, my piano’s innards remain as mysterious as my car’s. Were I to approach it with a lever and tuning fork, it would be well advised to slap down its lid and twang for help.

How on earth did anybody dream up instruments with such fantastically complicated action? It was not necessity. That's for sure. I mean, there was no music hanging around waiting for a keyboard. Music for the harpsichord followed the introduction of the instrument, the first pieces written down in the early sixteenth century to suit its particular idiosyncrasies. I wonder what it was that inspired Bartolomeo Cristofori to think ‘Hang on! What happens if we hit these strings instead of plucking them?’ Whatever, he certainly set something in motion. After the early eighteenth century, when pianos couldn't quite decide whether they were a species of organ, a species of harpsichord or a musical wrong turning, development was rapid. Pianos went from a giraffe piano

to this high spec, high tech Fazioli in less than two hundred years. The pictures don't tell the whole story, of course. The real story lies in those muddling innards.

Pianos get a raw deal on the historical fame front. We hear about venerable violins because of the violinists who play them: Yehudi Menuhin’s Soil Strad; Paganini’s ‘Il Cannone’ Guarnerius; and of course the Amati played, in a most unlikely way, by Patrick O’Brien’s hero, Jack Aubrey, brought to brilliant filmic life by Russell Crowe in Master and Commander.

We revere both the fiddles and the fiddlers.

Pianos are different. Since they don’t improve with age, once they've done their duty, they’re for the scrapheap. It’s fun to see a reconstruction of Mozart’s Walter piano, pedalboard and all.

It's a thrill to touch a piano played by Chopin who, incidentally, gave piano lessons to Emma Wedgewood, later Mrs. Charles Darwin. But you’d not want to play such an ancient old thing. The history of the piano is the history of the discarded.

Yet the piano is good for dramatic moments. In 1837, Paris was agog with the news that an Italian princess had orchestrated a pianistic duel between legato cantabile Thalberg and animatissimo vigoroso Lizst. The result was declared a draw, something Thalberg gallantly, or perhaps rather drippily, accepted. Since Liszt had labelled him a ‘failed nobleman who makes an even more failed artist’, the evening might have been enlivened by a jolly unpianistic punchup. Not that Liszt needed his fists or a poison pen to inflict damage. During one recital in Vienna, he crippled two grand pianos before the interval.

Rather less dramatically, although possibly more painfully, on 14^th December 1921, in London’s Belgrave Square, Paderewski, ‘the most highly paid pianist of all time’* was giving a concert downstairs as my father was born upstairs. My grandmother always maintained that she stifled her cries in deference to the maestro. She couldn’t remember what he was playing, which I considered pretty feeble until I had a baby myself. Perhaps it was Paderewski's own charming minuet, here performed by the great man himself, or this Chopin waltz. I can't get over this performance being recorded in 1917. Hurrah for technology, but a more major hurrah for the piano, without which no house is, in my opinion, ever quite fully furnished.

Hamilton, K. 1998, in The Cambridge Companion to the Piano, ed. David Rowland, p.57

How we annoyed our ghosts, by K. M. Grant

Please forgive a little personal history, but our theme is ghosts, and our ghosts usually appear when we put up our decorations. Only today they didn't. It seems we've rather carelessly annoyed them.

You see, over the summer, we altered the house. When the final child went off to university, it was either that or moving. So we shifted the kitchen, changed the sitting room, did a few things up. We’re very pleased with the result, but it wasn’t until I began to prepare for Christmas that I fully realised how gains entail losses. The doors of the ‘old’ house were pricked full of small holes from Christmas drawing pins; one wall was blotted with strange stains from enthusiastically lit puddings; the hall carpet was pitted with evidence of the Advent candle’s waxy wobbles; and the kitchen table bravely bore the heavy scars of a wreath that went up in flames more than a decade ago.

Our decorations - so randomly collected they might be an Emin art installation – rattle with the ghosts of all the Christmases we’ve had here. I’ve grown accustomed to bumping into them as I tread a well-worn path round the house. However irritable I am gathering bluetack and ladder, as soon as the decorations tumble out of the ancient and most inconveniently sized cardboard box marked ‘Christmas’, a spell is cast. Here's the rather hideous horse that inspired an (unpublished as yet) story that cartoonist Annie Tempest illustrated for me. As you can see from the picture further below, the Christmas Horse* she's created is utterly delightful. You'll also see the little present that one child, or was it another, made when in primary something, and here's the wooden pig sent by my oldest sister 26 years ago, the Christmas after our wedding.


Pride of place always goes to the clown my mother made in ten minutes for the top of the tree the first Christmas my husband and I celebrated alone, unable to go to my home because our second child, just three months old, was too ill to be out of range of the hospital. (This is not a sob story! The baby’s illness was only momentarily serious: she’s now 22 and fit as a flea.)

As these and a multitude of other familiar comforts have slotted into their usual places, I have happily given in to mishy-mashy sentimentality. Oh come all ye ghosties, joyful and triumphant.

Not this year. Impolitely ousted from their dens by joiner, plumber, electrician and painter, the ghosts are in a huff. As I put the decorations up in unfamiliar locations, not one ghost came to visit. Not only that, but it seems we have a fightback on our hands. Cross ghosts must be the reason two sets of lights are operating a ‘go slow’, another set has ceased to function and the bow I tie round the banisters keeps coming adrift. I’ve tried to placate, but I don’t think I’ll succeed because I must have hoovered so robustly after the alternations were finished, I can’t find even one elderly pine-needle to offer as an old welcome.

I was sad at first. I pottered around in a pleading, apologetic kind of way. Now I say stuff it. No irritable ghost is going to ruin my favourite time of year. Never mind Christmas past. Our children are either already home or on their way home. One is bringing her new husband. If the old ghosts want to join us, splendid. If not, I’m doing no more grovelling. New ghosts will arrive in due course. Welcome, all.

*The Christmas Horse image is copyright Annie Tempest.

So, Charles, what did you do on your holidays? by K. M. Grant

I'm highly indebted to Eve Edwards for including in the list of accepted but erroneous beliefs (3rd November), that ‘Napoleon was short’. It reminded me that interestingly, whatever height Napoleon actually was, the perception that he was short was contemporary to him - belittling propaganda, perhaps - rather than something foisted on him by posterity. A nosey ancestor visiting Napoleon on the island of Elba certainly describes the great man as on the small side, although who knows whether that was because he felt it politic to do so.


This nosey chap was Charles Standish. On the Grand Tour with friends in early 1815 and bored with marble heroes – he didn’t think much of Canova’s Three Graces either – he decided to inspect a human villain instead. Napoleon saw him coming. Believing Boney to be ‘history’, Standish answered every question Napoleon asked. What a noodle! Charles didn’t realise that all the questions were loaded and that Napoleon was milking him for information which would then be used to effect a successful escape.*

Knocking about in a drawer, my father had the letter Charles Standish wrote to his cousin Peregrine Towneley of Towneley, Burnley, about this visit. I transcribed the letter, occasionally berating my dead relation for his poor handwriting. I don't have a picture of Charles, but here's a picture of Peregrine in later life, and one of Towneley.


Standish begins with the usual salutations. Omissions are marked with … and I’ve offered, in italics, a few explanatory remarks and notes:

‘We embarked in a small boat for Porto Torreno where we arrived with tolerably prosperous gales in about four hours (18 miles) … His palace, for it is by courtesy called so, is a small house two stories high, built on the top of a rock and overlooking the town on one side and the sea on the other. The strictest possible system of police is established in the island …



He [Napoleon] had us one by one. The first room I was shown into was a small ante-room, where there were two aides-de-camp in waiting, and one or two other officers, all of whom appeared sullen, downcast and most shabby in their accoutrements. It is a fact, by the by, that does not much redound to the honour of France, that Napoleon has not as yet received one sous of the stipend that was guaranteed to him by the Treaty of Paris [signed on 30th May 1814, this restored Louis XVIII to the throne and set out how Napoleon and his family were to be treated]. In consequence of which, he has been obliged to reduce half his establishment and to curtail all the salaries of the people about him, and is now selling all the ordnance on the walls to Tuscany to get a little ready [cash]. He complains of it bitterly but says he will never apply for it.

He received me standing with his back to the fire, draped in a shabby green uniform with the Legion of Honour’s Grand Cross, Iron Crown and several other orders, a very small cocked hat under his arm and a snuff box in his hand, and ever and anon he put it to his nose and took it away again but seemed to make little use of its contents.

I was never more deceived in the idea I had formed of what were a man’s looks. That he is very low in stature and grown extremely lusty, we knew from most recent reports. But his physiognomy I expected to find most markedly striking. On the contrary, it is quite an inanimate face with a light grey eye and fat chops. Altogether those sorts of features that in a crowd would be passed by unnoticed. But I must not forget to say that when animated, he lights up in an extraordinary manner and becomes quite a different man, all fire and animation.’


Standish and Napoleon then spoke about the rumour that when Napoleon had been in Egypt, he had become a Muslim. Napoleon raised an eyebrow. He had certainly tried to court Muslim good opinion, and had even asked how to become a good Muslim. He was pleased, though, to tell Standish how he wriggled out of what might have been a rather uncomfortable conversion.

‘They [the Muslims] told me that I must first leave off the use of wine, and be circumcised. ‘As for wine,’ I replied, ‘I am a soldier and it is necessary for my wellbeing. As for being circumcised, not having much to circumcise, this would be impossible … these parts are not toys with which to amuse children.’

Standish was a Catholic, and as such was barred from serving in the army or navy. This gave Napoleon the opportunity to be rude about the stupidity of the British, and sneakily to add:

‘But the Princess of Wales, she is pretty lively is she not? At least that is what people say. However, there is something not quite right about her. She is not young, eh? But you love the older woman, you funny old English, don’t you.’


With disarming, self-deprecatory charm, Napoleon then asked ‘what do they say about me in France?’ Being a polite kind of chap, Standish answered in a polite kind of way that Napoleon had lots of friends, particularly in the army, and writes ‘This seemed to delight him and he betrayed it by a sort of vulgar wriggling of his whole person as an old woman does who is delighted with a scandalous story.’ Reading this, I sensed a distinctly pricklish Charles getting his own back for Napoleon’s rudery about the British.

There is, of course, lots more of this letter**, but you have the flavour. One of its delights is that it was written entirely unselfconsciously, i.e. not for posterity but for ‘my dear Peregrine’, a cousin of whom Charles Standish was extremely fond. Standish jokes about the inordinate length of the letter and promises ‘sternest silence till we next meet’. He signs off in the rather pretentious manner typical of the Grand Tourist, and if you’ll forgive me, I’ll do the same.

Affettuosamente tuo,
Katie Grant
November 28th

* Charles Standish’s letter is dated January 17th. Napoleon escaped from Elba on February 26th.
* *More of the letter was printed in a piece I wrote about it for the Daily Telegraph of Saturday 24h April 1999, and in the Quarterly Journal of Military History, Autumn 1999, Volume 12, No. 1, Primedia, USA.

Wiggery by K. M. Grant

Not a bloody blog this month; a wiggy one instead. Perhaps it’s because I have such awful hair - a miserably skinny plait in childhood – that when meandering round the web, gearing up to write, I suddenly ordered wigs. Not wigs to wear every day – things are not that dire yet. I wanted wigs to get me in the mood. Hard choices had to be made. I toyed with Saloon Madam, Medeia and Geisha and eventually plumped for Marie-Antoinette, Pompadour, pink milkmaid and a blue Marge Simpson affair. Wigs without heads look rather silly. Dotted about this post are photographs of me bewigged. I also look rather silly.

Indeed, wigs are always funny. When my mother had cancer and lost all her hair, we found much to amuse in the proffered wig selection. She opted against, in the end, and went for the bohemian scarf look. It was a light moment at a dark time.

It’s not just our era that hoots at wigs, though. I think wigs have always raised a smile. The splendidly named Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing from Paris in 1718, was most amused by friends with their Hair cut short and curled round their faces, loaded with powder that makes it look like white wool, and then on their cheeks to their chins, unmercifully laid on, a shining red japan that glisters in a most flameing manner that they seem to have no resemblance to human faces, and I am apt to believe took the first hint of their dress from a fair sheep new raddled.
(From Anne Buck’s comprehensive Dress in Eighteenth Century England, B. T. Batsford Ltd., London 1999.)

The word ‘wig’, short for ‘periwig’, seems to have appeared in 1675, but the idea of the wig has been around since the ancient Egyptians suffered sunstroke. As with so many other things, wigs were born of practicality but, because humans are really peacocks, soon found themselves suborned into the great world of vanity. Decorated with preposterous appendages and all stuck together with bacon fat, they were not only 'must wears', they also made useful homes for assorted creepycrawlies. It wasn't unknown for a lady to go to a party bearing one family of mice on her head, only to return with another. Wigs were useful to balding men and even if you weren't bald, saved you the bother of washing your hair. Royalty turned them into a character statement: Elizabeth 1st famously wore a smart red wig to show she was a smart, fiery kind of gal; Charles II preferred a loose silky one, to show he was a loose, silky kind of chap.

Powdering the wig, as Alice’s grandmother does in my How the Hangman Lost His Heart, was not without its dangers, as Gay’s poem ‘Trivia’ illustrates:

You sometimes meet a Fop of nicest Tread
Whose mantling Peruke veils his empty Head
Him, like the Miller, pass with Caution by
Lest from his Shoulders Clouds of powder fly.
(again, courtesy of Anne Buck)

A Powder Tax instituted in 1786 indicates that there were enough 'clouds' for the Exchequer to take an interest. I can find no record of this tax being abolished.

My wigs (unpowdered, let me assure HMRC) are supposedly strictly for procrastination purposes. They live in a bag by my desk and when I can’t think of anything better to do, I put one on. But our house is chilly and the wigs are beautifully warm. Here lurks a danger. Sometimes I forget to take the wig off, and once got all the way onto the main road before realising the top of my head was still Duchess of Devonshire Aiming to Shock. Unsurprisingly, my children were never keen for me to meet them at the school gate. I considered that a wiggy bonus.

The 'wrong' side of history, by K. M. Grant

OK. Deep breath. Until I married in 1985, hunting was what I did in the winter. That is, I got on my horse and followed a pack of hounds thus, I suppose, becoming one of the ‘unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’ as Oscar Wilde memorably put it.



Legislation to outlaw this age-old practice was passed in the Scottish Parliament in 2003 and at Westminster in 2004. Good riddance, said many people. I was not one of them.

What has this got to do with historical novels? Two things. Firstly, novelists normally imagine the past rather than experience it directly. Secondly, it raises an interesting dilemma.

Apropos the first point, when another writer rang me wanting to know about real, old-fashioned hunting, as opposed to what goes on now, my first reaction was to send him to one of the many books that include hunting scenes: Surtees, Somerville and Ross, Trollope, or the books written by the Pullein-Thompson sisters in the 1950s and 60s – Christine P-T’s A Day to go Hunting was a particular favourite of mine. He shook his head. He’d read books. What he needed was to sit with somebody who’d really climbed onto a horse on a frosty morning, shaken out the reins, pulled on gloves and shivered with chilly anticipation. He wanted to know practical details about scent (the fox’s, not mine) and, more urgently, whether what he’d written rang true. In other words, he wanted to experience hunting from the horse’s mouth (or as near as he could get) and I was that horse. It was strange. The writer was older than me, but reading his stuff made me feel like Methuselah. As somebody who had hunted in the pre-ban way, I was now actually part of a vanished world. I’d become a bit of history.

I also feel part of history when I go deer stalking. For those who imagine I’ve got some kind of blood lust, let me reassure that the number of deer on the remote Scottish island on which I found myself a few weeks ago outstrips the number of humans by miles, and that culling is both crucial and legal. I quite accept, though, that I’m hardly essential to this process, so readers may feel I am a bit enthusiastic in the John Peel department. Be that as it may, despite argocats having largely replaced ponies as stag pick-ups, stalking provides a connection with the past that’s not breathy or wispy but as solid and tangible as the rifle. As I walk, crawl and slither behind the professional stalker, I might be my grandfather or great grandfather. I see the same view. I’m thrashed by the same rain. I feel the same stomach flutters, the same respect for the stag, the same rush of pity quickly overtaken by objective calculations of distance, movement and angle necessary for a clean shot. I witness the same gralloch*. The other week I even shot with a rifle employing a bolt action familiar to anybody who fought in the First World War. I find in stalking a sense of living history in the active sense of that phrase.


'The Road to the Isles'.

By now, some readers may be spluttering into their cornflakes, which brings me neatly to my second point. We often debate how to tackle the different moral perspectives of the past: can our hero be a hero if he doesn’t condemn the slave trade? Is our heroine going to meekly accept being married off? But nearly always the dilemma is academic and literary rather than live. There’s no question that the writer abhors both the slave trade and women being considered chattels. The question is only whether historical characters can be imbued with modern moral values.

With bloodsports, it’s different. The issue is still potent. What’s more, there’s a presumption that modern writers, being nice people, must disapprove. It’s certainly true that these days hunting appears in historical novels less often than would be accurate and almost never without condemnatory undertones. Indeed, I contend that were I, today, to offer a book commending derring-do on the hunting field, nobody would publish it. There is, after all, no group on earth as illiberal as nice people who disapprove.

Hey ho! How strangely post-modern to be a historical novelist who ends up on the ‘wrong’ side of history.

A small aside. Sitting in the gunroom after stalking, the stalker told how he’d once admired a guest’s elderly rifle. ‘Still in perfect condition,’ the stalker remarked. ‘Where did you get it?’

The reply was unexpected. ‘I bought it at auction. It was Goering’s.’

Though Goering was a keen shot, both he and Hitler were passionately anti hunting with hounds. That’s not the reason I might have refused the gun had it been offered to me. There’s real, and then there’s real.

Word of the day: gralloch: the art (and it is an art) of disembowelling the carcass on the hill. Oddly, it's more fascinating than gruesome.

My First History Teacher by K. M. Grant

My first history teacher was my grandfather, not just because he loved the past and took me to Hadrian’s Wall, but because he had history embedded in his face. Though barely of age, he fought in the First World War and, through bravery and mischance, a piece of casing from a Mills bomb ripped into his cheek. It was thought he would die, but he did not, though the bomb casing was never removed and such was the damage to his facial nerves that forever afterwards his cheek sweated when he ate so the flow of history was quite visible, as it were. I often wondered about this wound, but with the stupidity of the young never asked my grandfather much about it. It wasn’t that I thought it dull: I thought it too personal.

(A small aside. In a curious twist, since 1990 the right hand side of my face has also sweated when I eat. The reason, I’m afraid, is not nearly so poignant as my grandfather’s. My nerves were damaged during a parotidectomy (don’t look it up or you’ll think you need one too). If only my grandfather had lived longer, we might have shared the red spotted handkerchief with which he dealt with this irritation.)

I remember no history being taught at my Catholic primary school, but at my convent boarding school, history was taught with violent enthusiasm by Sister Mark. It is she who ranks as my first history teacher because she was the first teacher of history I had come across for whom history was a thrill. Nor did she feel any need to disguise this thrill just because teaching history to schoolgirls is a serious business. Far from it. She ended each lesson on a cliff-hanger, her favourite adjective was ‘devastating’ and her account of the Crimea left me open-mouthed with horror and pity. We learned a great deal about Gladstone and Disraeli, and so infected did I become with the former’s style that Sister Mark warned me, tongue only half in cheek, against becoming ‘inebriated with the exuberance of [my] own verbosity’. It was useful advice.

Sister Mark also introduced our class to a history textbook whose dry facts were occasionally relieved by flashes of imagination. ‘The Socialists wanted real power, not lollipops’ sticks in my mind, though I’m afraid I can’t remember to which socialists the lollipops had been given. That was my introduction to historiography, since only then did it strike me that history textbooks were written by real people, not fact-checking robots. That particular book was written by one M. L. R. Isaac, headmaster of Latymer Upper School. Though I never met Mr. Isaac, I still think of him as one of my first teachers because he taught me the value of surprise.

At a convent school, nuns all consider themselves history teachers of a sort. Our school was no different. The Forty Martyrs were often invoked as figures of veneration, though Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was never mentioned, our headmistress taking a pretty dim view of Protestants. Nevertheless, Sister Mark did an excellent job ad maiorem Dei gloriam, as befitted her vocation.

K.M. Grant has written nine historical novels, the most recent of which is Belle's Song. Find out more about her and her books at kmgrant.org

heads and horses, K. M. Grant

Don’t read on if you’re squeamish. I’ll start gently. Earlier this month, Mary Hooper used the phrase that always strikes fear into the heart of the historical novelist – ‘if someone objected, some real historian’ (my italics). My fear is almost worse: what happens if my family object? I, you see, have not only commandeered the lives of real people – Chaucer is a major character in Belle’s Song, not as the benign Grand-daddy of English Lit but in his lesser known role as a spy – but I’ve made merry hay with my relations. All safely dead, of course, although since in our family there’s little distinction made between the dead and the living, that’s no guarantee of safety.





It was natural to seize on Francis Towneley, my six times great uncle, always known to us as Uncle Frank. In fairness, I didn’t seize the whole of him: I just seized his head, because there it was, on a spike above Temple Bar, ready for the plucking. Uncle Frank, an ardent Jacobite, ‘suffered for his prince, August 10th 1746’. Suffer he certainly did. He may have declared that it was ‘better to die by the sword than fall into the hands of those damned Hanoverians’ but the sword wasn’t what King George II had in mind. Uncle Frank was the last man in Britain to be hung drawn and quartered. If you’re not actually eating, you might like to read this rather terrific description (with thanks to ‘Old and Sold’ ).

After he had hung for six minutes, he was cut down, and, having life in him, as he lay on the block to be quartered, the executioner gave him several blows on the breast, which not having the effect designed, he immediately cut his throat : after which he took his head off : then ripped him open, and took out his bowels and threw them into the fire which consumed them, then he slashed his four quarters, put them with the head into a coffin, and they were deposited till Saturday, August 2nd, when his head was put on Temple Bar, and his body and limbs suffered to be buried.



That’s the worst over. Or perhaps not. Uncle Frank’s head, having been viewed by both Horace Walpole and Dr. Johnson – Walpole wrote to a friend ‘I have been this morning at the Tower, and passed under the new heads at Temple Bar, where people make a trade of letting spying glasses at a halfpenny a look’ – it was rescued by a family member and eventually returned to Towneley Hall, where my great great aunt, Lady O’Hagan remembered it being kept in a basket on the sideboard. Oh, there’s more, but suffice to say here that Uncle Frank’s head rolled straight in to How The Hangman Lost His Heart.

I don’t stop at people. In 1861, my family had a Derby winner, Kettledrum. A jokey bet had been placed on him when still a yearling, and when he turned up trumps, my three times great grandfather found himself the unexpected recipient of £2,000. Ever conscious of his immortal soul, he built some churches, and if you ever visit the small jewel that is St. Hubert’s at Dunsop Bridge, you’ll see four small carvings of a horse’s head on the side pillars of the altar.



I always loved Kettledrum.  In his portraits, he looks so worried! And he’s not even the right colour: he is painted as bay but was actually chestnut. That clinched it. He galloped into Hartslove, a fine successor to Hosanna in Blood Red Horse. But here fact and fiction collided. To the Towneleys he was Kettledrum. To the de Granville family, he was The One and so, in Hartslove, published in a fortnight, The One he remains and his story is rather different. Yet I kept the year – 1861 – and the race too. I have dedicated Hartslove to Kettledrum but still, my family may be quite cross with me, though I hope not as cross as King George was with poor Uncle Frank.