Leather Bikini Bottoms!

replica Roman leather bikini bottoms

by Caroline Lawrence 

(This blog post is about how a pair of 2000-year-old leather bikini bottoms in the Museum of London inspired a scene in my new kids’ book, The Time Travel Diaries.)

A few days ago a new case appeared in the Roman Gallery of the Museum of London, near the marble head of Mithras. The display contains objects from the grave of a 14-year-old girl from South London. The girl lived around 1800 years ago in what was then known as Londinium. DNA and stable isotopes tell us she had blue eyes but grew up in the southern Med, possibly North Africa, before making the long sea-voyage to Britannia. Three of the five objects buried with her feature heavily in my new Time Travel Diaries book and I am extremely grateful to curator Jackie Keily for putting them on display. I hope the artefacts will send kids to my book and vice versa. 

objects found in a Roman girl's grave

Artefacts are wonderful for creating the possible backstory of a character and these generated ideas for a story about a blue-eyed girl with an ivory leopard knife almost immediately. 

But sometimes artefacts inspire me in less obvious ways, and I’m certain this holds true of other authors. This happens when you write with Both Sides of the Brain.

Memory masters know that it is often the juxtaposition of strange objects and images that helps fix dry facts or numbers in the head.

That’s why they turn numbers into pictures and then link them to memorable images as with the Number-Rhyme System or the Number-Shape System. 

Number-Shape Memory System

For example, I recently used the Number-Shape system to teach kids the first ten emperors of Rome in order. In less than ten minutes.

You take a left-brain list of the first ten emperors, then make it right-brain-friendly by adding colour, image, movement, humour, rudeness and the five senses.

Example? Number one looks a bit like an arrow. I get kids to visualise an arrow. Occasionally they can’t do it until I help them by being more specific.

‘Imagine a standing-up arrow with a wooden shaft, a sharp steel arrowhead and red feathers’ I might say. ‘Now imagine touching the smooth wooden shaft, the sharp tip (ouch!) and the soft feathers. Now stroke the feathers the wrong way. Now make the feathers a different colour. Or multi-coloured. You choose! Now make the arrow lean towards you and rotate it in 3-D.’

Memory masters teach themselves do this. A few of them can’t help it. The famous Jewish mnemonist ‘S’ (made famous in A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist) not only saw numbers as specific shapes but also associated them with colours and taste,

Once you’ve trained yourself to imagine the arrow in detail, using all the senses, you can apply the technique. Imagine someone firing your steel-tipped, red-feathered arrow into a calendar on a wall opened to the month of August. (Make the image on the calendar evoke August for you.)

By linking an arrow (number one) with the month of August you will remember that Augustus was the first emperor. It sounds cumbersome, but it works because you’re using both sides of the brain: the logical, verbal, numerate left hemisphere and the non-verbal, imaginative right hemisphere. 

In the Number-Shape System, the number two is shaped like a swan. Make yours a giant one, swimming on the River Tiber. (Can’t visualise Rome’s river? Put a giant colosseum behind it. Or make it tiger-striped. Or both!) That will help you remember that Tiberius was the second emperor of Rome.

A number 3 on its side looks like a baby’s bottom. Imagine patting talcum powder on a smooth baby’s bottom and then noticing he’s wearing baby-sized Roman boots. The word for ‘Baby Boots’ in Latin is Caligula! 

And so forth. By making boring facts visual and linking them with bizarre, funny, colourful objects you help cement them in your memory bank of stored images.

(I’ll bet you don’t have another giant swan swimming on a tiger-striped river with the Colosseum looming in your memory banks!)

real Roman leather bikini bottoms

In the same way, juxtaposition of unusual artefacts often inspire scenes in my books. For example, there are a pair of Roman leather bikini bottoms now on display in the Museum of London. These are one of two pairs (!) found in a Roman well. Experts think the bikinis might have belonged to girl acrobats. Near the case displaying the leather bikini bottoms is a delightful model of the port of Roman London, one of my favourite items in the museum.

Great screenwriters like Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Paul King (the Paddington writer/director) know the power of miniatures. I love to stand there and look down at this model of Londinum’s port. The longer you gaze, the more you see.

acrobats in Nîmes 

Remembering some re-enactor acrobats I’d seen at a weekend of Gladiator Games in Nîmes, I suddenly had the image of girl acrobats walking along the side of London Bridge, like gymnasts on a balance beam. That gave me the idea that maybe my young hero Alex has to get to the north bank fast but there is a traffic jam on the bridge. Sarah Dhanjal once mentioned that it took an hour to cross London Bridge in Medieval times.

model of London's Roman Port

Impatient to cross the bridge in order to get to the gladiator games in Londinium’s amphitheatre, Alex hears the crowd of people begin to laugh and buzz like bees (a popular method of applause in Roman times). Alex and his two friends see the reason: four leather-bikini-clad girl acrobats doing cartwheels on the guard rail. 

illustration by Sara Mulvanny

The sight of the girls making their way across the side of London Bridge gives Alex and his friends an idea. They can copy the girls and walk along the guard rail, too. 

This is a great idea because it also involves ‘Crossing the Threshold’ another one of my favourite mythic plot beats, where the hero leaves one world and enters another. As Romans knew, thresholds can be magical places.

As I visualised the scene, using all my senses, a something happened that I had not consciously considered. Alex falls, but not in the way you think… Or maybe you can guess!

That’s the magic of using both sides of your brain when you write by linking concrete artefacts and the sensory imagination.

I’ll be sharing all my best writing tips in my next book, How to Write a Great Story, out August 2019. 

Ways to Die in Londinium

by Caroline Lawrence

When I went back in time to look for the blue-eyed girl with the ivory knife, I never thought I would actually find her. The only reason I took the job was for the money. 

So starts my new book, in which a 12-year-old London schoolboy named Alex Papas is recruited to go back in time to Roman London to find a girl who lived in the mid-third-century AD. 

Why did I decide to leave my usual literary stamping grounds of the sunny Mediterranean and set some books in Roman Britain, specifically London? 

Because whereas Roman Britain used to be dull and dry – on account of very few written sources – the past decade or so has given us some superb material to work with. Recently, more than 14,000 individual artefacts were recovered in the restoration of the Mithraeum to its original site under Bloomberg LP’s new European headquarters. 

Also, scientific advances in DNA and stable isotopes means that archaeologists such as Dr Rebecca Redfern can study a skeleton and determine eye and hair colour, maternal place of origin and even where the subject grew up. 

In 2003, the grave of a 14-year-old girl was found on Lant Street near Borough tube station in Southwark, about half a mile south of the Tate Modern. Her grave goods suggested she was a rich girl. They included two small glass bottles and a clasp knife on a chain. 

The exotic ivory handle of the knife was carved in the shape of a leopard. Despite these rich objects, close study of her bones showed that the girl suffered from rickets, a disease often associated with malnutrition. Her teeth were very bad, too, and suggest that she was either a slave or grew up under hard conditions. Her skeleton is actually on display during free interactive sessions called Written in Bone for kids in Key Stage 2, i.e. aged 8-11. 

The so-called Lant Street Teen came into the headlines recently when her DNA and stable isotopes were analysed. They showed that she grew up in the Southern Mediterranean – possibly even North Africa! – and that she had blue eyes. Even more astonishing, archaeologists can tell that at the age of about nine she made the long and arduous journey to Britannia. Sadly, she died about five years later and was buried with her grave goods on an expensive bed of white chalk. 

I was intrigued by this discovery and thought it would be fun to imagine a scenario that might bring the blue-eyed girl from North Africa to Britannia and explain all the fascinating aspects of her bones. 

Around the same time, I attended the re-opening of London Mithraeum with its well-researched display of artefacts and spooky immersive experience. It occurred to me that it would be the perfect place for a time portal to the third century AD. That was when I decided to write my first timeslip book. 

In the book, originally called Ways to Die in Londinium, my main character Alex has been chosen to go back to Roman London for several reasons. First, he is small for his age and probably won’t hit puberty for a while. Why is this important? One of my contrivances is that for every hour you spend in the past, it takes a year off your life expectancy… unless you are a kid, in which case you only lose a month per hour. That’s why bazillionaire Solomon Daisy hires Alex to go back and find out more about the so-called Lant Street Teen. 

Second, Alex does Latin club at school and therefore knows some basic Latin phrases. 

Third, Alex speaks modern Greek, close enough to Ancient Greek to be just about understood. And Greek was a lingua franca at that time. 

I have a few other contrivances to make the book fun and exciting. For example, the three rules of Time Travel are:  

1. Naked you go and naked you must return. 
2. Drink, don't eat. 
3. As little interaction as possible.

Alex is clever and resourceful. He memorises a map of third-century Roman London and learns several useful Latin phrases such as puellam oculis caeruleis quaero et cultro eburneo (I seek a blue-eyed girl with an ivory knife.) 

Alex prepares in other ways, too. In the back pocket of his jeans, he has a small notebook. One of the page entries reads:

Ways to Die in Londinium:
1. Death by illness (no antibiotics)
2. Death by infected cut (no antiseptic cream)
3. Death by chariot (hit and run)
4. Death by starvation 
5. Death by choking (no Heimlich manoeuvre)
6. Death by fire (or inhaling smoke)
7. Death by rabid animal bite
8. Death by mugger
9. Death by rampaging gladiator

As Alex learns more about the perils of time travel he adds:

10. Death by misunderstood gesture
11. Death by transporting into something solid

And eventually:

12. Death by Angry Priest of Mithras
13. Death by Thames Foreshore Mud

That's only the beginning!  

As a student of history, I am constantly reminded of how blessed we are to live in a time of prosperity, leisure and superb medical care, especially compared to almost any previous historical period. 

On Wednesday 20 February and Friday 22 of the same month from 1-2pm, I’ll be doing two family-friendly interactive talks called Ways to Die in Londinium. 

I will ask kids to come up with some ways that a Roman Londoner might die. 

I will then show them some real and ancient (replica) artefacts and ask which would have been most valuable to an ancient Roman Londoner. 

I might also ask if they can guess which one of the following would have been worth its weight in gold?

Tomato
Chocolate bar
Alarm clock
Glasses
Mobile phone
Savlon
Puppy Soft Andrex 

Finally, I will read some passages from the first Time Travels Diary. 

I want to remind myself (and kids) just how privileged we are to be living today. 


Caroline's two halfterm events at the Museum of London are now sold out but there are other fun Roman-themed events including Styx, Stones and Roman Bones!