Let's get the Olympics out of the way shall we? Catherine Johnson

Ok, I know many of you have already yawned, or worse clicked your mouse and moved on. But they are coming, and living as I do, a hop and a skip from the massive new entity that is the Olympic Park I really can't ignore the games.

Of course I can't help mourning what has been lost, the island of allotments where we had summer barbeques, the mountain of used fridges that soared higher than a house, the acres and acres of empty, ignored space. And actually I am going to make a brief digression here. Poor old London is worn out, every bit of her used up these days, I don't know how many of you saw the Punk Britannia documentary on BBC4, but there was footage of Covent Garden in the late 70s, empty and derelict with grass, yes grass, growing up through the cobbles. I can just about remember it.
 
 But back to the Olympics. I am not a fan of crowds or sport - much - but the London Olympics are special in my family. In 1948 my Dad arrived in London. He had spent almost a year in disembarked in Liverpool after travelling from New York and Florida and Jamaica, but Liverpool in 1947 wasn't the friendliest place for a Jamaican, there were race riots and he thought he'd come to London, find some work and watch the games. My Mum still has his programmes, annotated with who won what in how many seconds. If he was alive he'd have loved tickets for the athletics, what's more  he'd have told me off for being such a curmudgeon about the cost and the impact and the horrible commercialism.

Enjoy it, he'd say, like everything else, they'll be over soon.

HISTORY YOU CAN LIVE INSIDE by Emma Darwin

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years ago, when I first crossed the Thames to live South of the River (which as all Londoners know is slightly more drastic than crossing the Channel to live permanently in France), in the daytime Bankside was busy with suits, doctors, and wholesale cabbages. But outside the working week it was Tumbleweed Town: anyone who could fled to the salubrious suburbs, and those few who couldn't had nothing to tempt them out of their grim blocks of flats.

Now the council blocks have been done up, there are university halls of residence, lofts and flats and family houses for urban living, there's Borough Market, the Globe, the Golden Hinde, the London Assembly, at least ten branches of Prêt à Manger, and you can walk along the Thames Path, from Deptford on your bank and St Katherine's Dock on the other, to Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It's full of people living and working and drinking and talking. In becoming more modern, Southwark has become more ancient: it's once again the mirror-image of the city across the tide that gave birth to it.

Southwark Cathedral wasn't built as a cathedral, but as a church: St Mary Overey (as in, Over the Thames). So although it's a fine bit of Early English Gothic it's not particularly large or complex. But it still has that unity in difference which is the great joy of mediaeval architure: the pointed Gothic arches don't come just in large and small, but can stretch broad or high, vaulting above your head, or stooping to make a canopy over a baby's little tomb. Some of the columns are like bundles of saplings, others are great, ribbed tree-trunks; you walk through puddles of colours where the light from the stained glass windows splashes down as regularly as a wave.

There was a hymn, all solid, Anglican harmony, and then the Responsory: call-and-answer with the choir. And then the choir sang alone, weaving in and out of each other as pitched and patterned by Orlando Gibbons, and I remembered Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, saying to his Harriet, "Anyone can have the harmony, if they'll leave us the counterpoint".

As one of Gibbons' contemporaries nearly wrote: Licence my roving notes and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below... But I couldn't - for good manners' sake - rove on foot during the service, thought I've done so in many other churches. So I sat still, and allowed my mind's eye to rove instead, imagining how as you walk and look the clusters of saplings in the different aisles set to partners and then pass on, the ribs like branches stretching out to join those of another tree overhead; triplets of windows dancing between bigger trunks; the arch that opens to a whole new chapel of variations; the path that leads you on, curls you round the back of the altar and brings you to the centre again, under the still, pendulum point of the crossing.

They say that architecture is frozen music. In which case, I thought, gazing up the column by my shoulder to where it sprang up and out into the vault, music is surely liquid architecture. What I'm sitting in - what those nameless medieval masons built - is a fugue in stone; a fugue that you can live inside. And perhaps a piece of music is therefore a building that sings.

So where does that leave the reader and writer of fiction? Like music, writing can only exist for the reader in time but, unlike music, it can only sing one note at once. The Donne (mis)quotation suggests that poets may be closer to music: their words have explicit patterning, repetition and sound. But fiction does have architecture: a novel has pace, scale and proportion, as I found when I started thinking about writing a novel as building a bridge. Ian McEwan says the first thing he knows about a new novel is "the maths", by which, as Pythgoras and Stravinsky would have agreed, he also means "the music". In fiction we can play as we choose with echoes and repetitions of ideas and images, as well as with sounds, and build them into something which you can live inside: the world of the novel not just in the sense of setting and characters, but a structure of sound and rhythm and image.

And historical fiction? Well, there's your answer: Bankside. Many historical novels take the reader to live in the year and moment of the action: - steam trains screeching and puffing above Dickens' head as he tries to rescue a six year old prostitute; two monks turned out of their priory as Henry VIII's men pull the lead off the roof; families emerging from the Tube station air raid shelters to see if their homes are still standing.

Other historical novels are also novels about history. The Golden Hinde is a replica of Francis Drake's ship that he sailed round the world, and there are modern American schoolchildren clambering about on it, snapping each other on their mobiles. But in the 1970s it was moored across the river, and my sister was on it - only because the Tower queues were too long - when the IRA bombed the Tower, killing one and injuring forty people. The Golden Hinde is a world you can enter and live in, a world at once Now, and many Thens, a world built of ribs and beams: wood, tarred and caulked to sail as well as it did five hundred years ago, dancing over the waves with the wind singing in the rigging. The replica embodies the history that it hasn't actually seen but also what it has seen, as novels about history do: a historical novel is history you can live inside.

USING REAL PEOPLE IN HISTORICAL FICTION

by Mary Hooper

It took a while to get round to it, but once I’d done it, I wanted to do it again. Use a real person in my books, that is.

I was very tentative at first. In AT THE SIGN OF THE SUGARED PLUM, a book set in London’s Great Plague of 1665, I used quotations from Samuel Pepys’ Diary as my chapter headings. I thought it would be fun to give Pepys a little walk-on part in the action, so had him pop into my sweetmeat shop, The Sugared Plum, buy some plague preventatives made from the sugared root of Angelica and flirt with my main character, giving her a couple of extra coins when he paid. I did not feel confident enough to name him as Pepys, however, just called him a “gentleman from the Admiralty”. I thought that if someone objected, some real historian, then I’d strenuously deny it was Pepys at all.

I got away with it and naturally wanted to do it again. I wrote a follow-up book set in the next year, the year of the Great Fire, and – reading that Pepys referred to Nell Gwyn as “pretty, witty, Nell” - decided I liked the sound of her. She should visit my sweetmeat shop to buy some crystallised violets! I read two biographies to get a “feel” for her and thought that as long as I didn’t have her flat on her back with Charles II then any still-living ancestors would surely not object.


Thrilled with Nelly, I made her one of the main characters in my next book, THE REMARKABLE LIFE AND TIMES OF ELIZA ROSE, in fact Eliza, my main character, goes to work for her as a lady’s maid. I needed a handsome, gallant highwayman, too, and rather than invent one I found a genuine one: Claude Duval, the mannerly, handsome highwayman, who would often steal a kiss from a lady instead of taking her jewellery, and whose epitaph reads:

Here lies Duval,

Reader, if male thou art look to thy purse,

If female, to thy heart.

I managed to get Charles II into this book too, and then embarked on three novels set in the household of Dr John Dee, who was a magician at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Reading his biography, I found that the queen had visited Dr Dee three times at his home in Mortlake, so included a scene where my main character (an ardent fan of the queen) scurries about trying to light a fire to warm Her Majesty, who had called unexpectedly.

I was on a roll. In FALLEN GRACE, set in Victorian times, I wanted Dickens to put in an appearance, so I checked where he was and how he felt about what I wanted him to do, then had him come into the mourning-wear store where Grace worked to buy himself a black tie. VELVET, being published 5th September, is also Victorian – just – and is about Spiritualism and a certain (fictional) medium. Who better to appear in this, I thought, than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, known to be a keen spiritualist and visitor-of-mediums.

I think that all my modern books suffer from not having real people in them. When a fifteen-year-old talks about a band in a book, it’s got to be a made-up one, because if you put a real one in then chances are that they will have split up before the book has gone to press. Ditto TV stars, pop stars, footballers: your main character can’t have a crush on a real celebrity in case that real person has dropped dead by the time the book comes out. When you’re writing about 350 years ago, however, you haven’t got that worry. The book I have just started writing is set about 1815 but – no, I am not doing the obvious and having Jane Austen pop in for afternoon tea. This time I’m taking a slightly different angle...