The Best Historical Fiction Set on Islands - By Anna Mazzola

Islands, with their closed communities, their remoteness, their uniqueness, have a special place in an author’s heart. Sometimes they become not just settings, but characters in themselves. I chose Skye for my second novel, partly because I wanted somewhere cut off (as it once was), and somewhere with its own folklore, its own beliefs. Others have gone a step further and created fictional islands: Atlantis, Azkaban, Atuan, Fraxos, Hedeby, Svalvard.

Once I’d started thinking about books set on islands, and asking others to give me their recommendations, I realised that there are in fact hundreds of excellent books set on islands. These include plenty of classics (Swallows and Amazons, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, To the Lighthouse, The Old Man and The Sea) and so many crime novels that I’m beginning to think going to small islands is a serious health risk.

There’s also a glut of brilliant historical novels set on islands. Here is a list of my top ten favourites, in which both ‘historical fiction’ and ‘island’ are given a broad interpretation. There will be many I’ve missed, so do comment below.

1. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The novel in which Rhys gives voice to the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress and the wife of a man who, though he is never named, we understand to be Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. He renames her ‘Bertha’, declares her mad, and relocates her from the West Indies to England. Written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, this is a key postcolonial work, which deals with ethnic and gender inequality, displacement and injustice.

2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell, 2010 

Mitchell transports us 1799 and to Dejima, a tiny artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post. Mitchell had been backpacking through the west of Japan looking for lunch when he stumbled upon the Dejima museum. ‘I never did get the lunch that day,’ Mitchell said. ‘But I filled a notebook with information about this place I'd never heard of and resolved one day to write about it.’

In the novel, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his name but falls in love with a midwife, who is spirited away to a sinister mountain temple cult. It’s a fascinating work of ideas, longing, power and corruption.

3. Secrets of the Sea House, Elisabeth Gifford, 2010

Having fallen in love with the Hebridean island of Harris and its legends, Gifford came across an 1809 letter to The Times about a Scottish schoolmaster who claimed to have seen a mermaid. From this sprang her brilliant debut, a dual-timeline novel that tells the tale of a newly-ordained priest, Reverend Alexander Ferguson in 1860, assigned to a parish on a remote part of the island. Over a century later, Ruth, raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child, discovers the tiny bones of baby buried beneath their new house, the legs fused together like that of a mermaid. A beautiful story of love, hope, healing and stories.

4. The Light Between Oceans, ML Stedman, 2012 

Tom Sherbourne returns home from the Western Front trenches of World War I. He and his wife, Izzy, move to an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock off the coast of South West Australia. One day in 1926 a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man, and a crying baby. What happens next leads to a gripping exploration of grief, temptation and love.

ML Stedman said: ‘The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.’ And that is very much reflected in the novel.

5. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, 2013 

Marlon James’ searing second novel, The Book of Night Women, is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century.  It tells the story of green-eyed Lilith, born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother, one of the many slave girls raped by their white masters. Forced to grow up fast, Lilith begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. By no means an easy read, but an essential one, it’s a story that culminates in slave revolt, blood and atonement.

‘I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,’ James has said. ‘But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.’ As the African proverb goes: ‘Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.’

6. The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, 2015

 

The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with 14-year-old Faith Sunderly and her family leaving their home in Kent for the isolated (and fictional) island of Vale. Faith, forever spying, discovers they have fled to escape the growing scandal around her father’s recently published scientific findings. When her father is found dead, Faith sets out to find out what has really happened and discover the nature of her father’s investigations. This leads her to a tree that feeds off lies.
Supposedly YA, but really for all ages, this is one of my favourite Victorian-era novels, and definitely my favourite one about lying plants.

7. The Winter Isles, Antonia Senior, 2016 

Antonia Senior plunges us in to the raw and often vicious world of 12th century Scotland where Somerled, son of an ageing chieftain, must prove his own worth as a warrior. It’s a compelling story of action, warfare, love and sacrifice and one which is clearly rooted in Senior’s love of the West Coast of Scotland.

‘All my favourite places are islands,’ she says, ‘From Corsica to Mull, Iona to Ponza. As a visitor they offer a manageable, enclosed world to explore. As a writer there is something magical about islands: a world within a world. There is often surface beauty, and a sinister underbelly. They are enclosed spaces, in which people are too close to each other - that strange interplay between isolation and oppressive familiarity.’

8. Mussolini’s Island, Sarah Day, 2017 

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating novel.

Francesco, a young gay man from Catania who grew up without a father, is one of those arrested and herded into a camp on the island. Meanwhile, a girl called Elena dreams of escape from her island home, imagining Francesco will save her.

‘It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place,’ Day says of San Domino, ‘and yet was used for such a dark purpose. As a visitor, arriving by boat, the island seems so idyllic, but as soon as you put yourself in the mind of a prisoner being brought there against your will, you realise how terrifying it must have been to arrive somewhere so isolated and stark. That context was really important to me when writing the book-an island can be a paradise or a prison, depending on who you are and the time in which you live.’

9. Sugar Money, Jane Harris, 2017 

Martinique, 1765. The charismatic but damaged Lucien and his more cautious older brother Emile are tasked by their French master with returning to Fort Royal in Grenada to bring back the slaves stolen by the English. Emile knows this to be a reckless mission, but, as with most things in their lives, it is something in which they have no choice. What follows is part adventure, part tragedy, and entirely compelling.

Harris has created a setting we believe in and characters we desperately want to survive. There is nothing sweet about Sugar Money, nor should there be.

10. Mr Peacock's Possessions, Lydia Syson, 2018 

It is 1879 and Mr Peacock and his family are struggling to scratch a life for themselves on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of New Zealand. At last, a ship appears, bringing six Pacific Islanders who have travelled across the ocean in search of work. All seems well until Mr Peacock’s son, Albert, goes missing.

This is a gripping mystery is woven from strands of real history. As Lydia Syson explained in her interview with History Girl Adèle Geras, the story came from her husband’s ancestors, Tom and Federica Bell, who in 1878 decided to take their six children to make their home on an uninhabited Pacific Island called Sunday Island. ‘The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.’

Again, the island setting is crucial to the story, as Syson herself makes clear. ‘The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor.’

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye, will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com 
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

MR.PEACOCK'S POSSESSIONS by Lydia Syson. A review and an interview by Adèle Geras

 

This novel is pleasurable on so many levels that it's going to take me a while to list them all, and to do so without any spoilers.
MPP, as I'll call it, is a novel that explains and illuminates a short moment of history in a place so remote that I'd never (to my shame) ever heard the name Kermadec Islands before. This is where the story unfolds.

The time is 1879. Mr Peacock and his family have bought an island some way off the coast of New Zealand. Some Polynesian Islanders arrive on Monday Island to help the Peacocks turn it into a paradise. It was the dream of such a Utopia that drove the family there, but things are desperate for a while until Kalala and Solomona and the others appear.

The narrative is divided between two points of view, which belong to Kalala and Lizzie, the second Peacock daughter. There are six children at the beginning of the novel and a baby, Joseph, is born soon after they get there. Ada, Albert, Billy, Queenie and Gussie are the names of the others. Gradually, nature is brought somewhat under control and matters improve. Then Albert goes missing...

That's all I'm going to say about the plot, except that it's full of twists and turns and surprising development. It unfolds in tantalising ways, moving from one event to the next in a series of shocks and revelations that are breathtaking but also quite logical. You, as a reader, keep saying: yes. Yes, of course, I ought to have realised that.

In her answers to my questions that follow that review, Lydia Syson, who used to be one of our number on this blog, tells us that the story is based on her husband's family history. This gives a solid layer of fact and real events to the novel. She has also clearly fallen in love with Monday Island and she brings it so beautifully to life that we are there with the Peacocks, in this lush but unforgiving place. We get to know the landscape and the immensity and beauty of the ocean that surrounds the island.

Her greatest skill though is her ability to inhabit her characters. Kalala tells his story in the first person and that works perfectly, where it could easily have been embarrassing. I'm going to quote a passage from the beginning of the book to demonstrate:

High and dry we stand on deck on the big palagi ship called Esperanza, Auckland-bound, and the two-blooded deck boy from Samoa tell me as he passes, without a smile, that the Esperanza is word that signifies hope, in the language of the silver mines. Then on flies my mind, wayfinding without a body, all over and everywhere, wandering, wondering. How long will we voyage in this ever-cooling air, and see no other island?

Lizzie and her siblings are equally well-drawn. You miss their company when you turn the last page. And that's perhaps the greatest achievement of this novel: it stays with you. I've been haunted by it since I finished reading it. I hope very much that it gets the attention and praise it deserves.

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Many thanks, before I ask these questions, to Lydia who's allowed me to use the photographs, and helped me with posting them here.)

1) How did the idea first come to you, and what has changed in the novel between your first impulse and the finished book?

Like my last three books, Mr. Peacock’s Possessions takes off from family history – but this time it’s my husband’s. On a visit from New Zealand, his aunt Madeleine told me the extraordinary story of her uncle’s family, the Bells, who in 1878 decided to make their home on an otherwise uninhabited Pacific Island, hundreds of miles from any other human settlement. Exceptionally remote, it was then called Sunday Island – now Raoul – and it’s the largest in the Kermadecs, a chain of small volcanic islands about halfway between Auckland and Tonga. My husband’s great-aunt was married to the youngest child, ‘King’, who was born on the island in 1889. Tom and Frederica Bell first arrived on Sunday Island in 1878 with six children aged from eleven to one, and high hopes for the future. The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.

(Frederica Bell, Denham Bay, 1907/8)

I could see the possibilities for a novel almost as soon as Madeleine began talking, and I quizzed her furiously – she remembers it well! It turned out that a journalist had written a book about the ‘Crusoes’ of Sunday Island' in the 1950s, based on the memories of King’s sister Bessie, who was nine when they first landed.

But this was a very sanitised account, Madeleine warned me. The real father was even more brutal than the iron-willed ‘despot’ described by Elsie Morton. Morton’s book was gripping in the way survival narratives and island stories so often are: full of hardship and catastrophe, every disaster eventually overcome by hard work and bitter determination – and usually some hymns and prayers. But I found the holes in it more interesting than anything. Who were the unnamed Pacific Islanders who came to work for the Bells two years into the thirty-five they spent on Raoul? Why was one of these ordained?

(King Bell on Raoul Island, 1907/8when the first scientific expedition came to the Kermadecs.)

I picked away at different aspects of Oceania’s broader history. I explored the fascinating history of Niue in particular – named Savage Island by Captain Cook. I read Melville, Ballantyne, Stevenson and a variety of seafaring memoirs And I discovered a world in flux: missionaries, whalers, beachcombers, traders and work gangs criss-crossing the seas, land and people both seemingly up for grabs.

The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor. Family relationships remained at the heart of the novel. But I became preoccupied with faith and doubt, blindness and insight. The parallels I found between the intimate world I was creating and the bigger historical picture allowed the book also to became an exploration of power and possession, and migration, forced and voluntary.

2) How long did it take you to write and what are your working methods? You have 4 children so I imagine juggling doesn’t begin to cover it.

I wish I could pretend I have a writing routine and religiously write x number of words a day. I don’t. Mr Peacock’s Possessions has been made possible by three years of a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship at The Courtauld Institute of Art. So I’ve been teaching for one or two days a week, and trying to research or write for the rest – but of course there are also school visits, CWISL events and organisation (Children’s Writers and Illustrators for Stories and Literacy - and the usual domestic demands faced by anyone who works freelance at home and has multiple teenagers. I have a fantasy of reaching to the floor for my laptop as soon as I wake up, not speaking to anyone, and writing for several hours in bed first thing in the morning. This never happens. But I do often go back to bed when the house has emptied, especially in winter, and I definitely do my best and most concentrated writing tucked up under a duvet at the top of our South London Victorian terrace, with a view of sky and treetops.I am devoted to the writing software Scrivener, which I use to keep my research in order and get a very rough first draft in place. I like to get a good sense of my chronology from the outset, but don’t necessarily write in order. (Scrivener makes this easier than it sounds, and takes the agony out of planning, and also restructuring when you realise it’s not quite working.)

This time I wrote the past tense sequences first – how the Peacock family arrive on the island, and the extreme challenges they faced in the first two years. The events here closely follow what actually happened to the Bell family, and as I started I imagined these sections might have something of the feel of a nineteenth-century adventure story for children. And then the weaving began. . . I started to develop Kalala’s first person present voice – more on that below – and this is intercut with the close third person perspective of Lizzie, Mr. Peacock’s golden girl. And all along beside this, crazy amounts of research – not just history, but linguistics, anthropology, psychology, ornithology, midwifery, botany, geology. . .

After nearly a year, I had the slabby clay of the first draft. My partner read it on his kindle on our summer holiday, and was gratifyingly entranced in canoes and buses and boats while we backpacked with the family around Nicaragua, and I looked at volcanoes and black sand and cloud forest and wondered how different these might be in the Pacific. (An exceptional summer holiday for us – we were meeting our eldest who had been travelling for 7 months.) Another few months followed of fairly substantial rewriting, during which I asked my agent to read just the first 5,000 words, mainly to get her reaction to the voice(s). Then it was time to send it to my new editor. Terrifyingly, but not unusually, she was not the person who’d commissioned the book. I was utterly convinced that my contract would be cancelled any day. I braced myself for weeks. But she loved it. And then the publication date moved back, and we had a great long period of time to work together on the manuscript, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Eleanor Dryden is an extraordinarily dedicated editor, prepared to spend hours discussing every nuance and layer, and brilliant at teasing out what she needed from me. She managed to be patient, demanding, ruthless and supportive in all the right ways. I can hardly even say how many drafts there were in total, but I know that under Eli’s guidance, I went on writing, re-writing and researching for another year before the book was ready to be typeset and shared further. Along the way I had feedback from my brother, my agent, an agency intern, a very old and very trusted friend,Tig Thomas, who very generously reads all my manuscripts just before line-editing stage and always improves them, and also from historian Mark Darby, whom I’d come to know by email after reviewing his Spanish Civil War book for The History Girls, and he read it with a New Zealander’s eye.

I didn’t think then I had the faintest hope of making it to New Zealand, let alone ‘my’ island, so I was particularly grateful to Mark. But to my amazement I ended up emailing my very last corrections in March from Auckland, still swaying from my voyage on the HMNZS Canterbury. Thanks to the Pew Trusts, who’ve been campaigning for years for a much-needed ocean sanctuary in the Kermadecs, [in late February I joined a crew of scientists, educators and young environmentalists on a Sir Peter Blake Trust expedition to Raoul. So now I know what colour the sea there really is and how flying fish behave; I’ve seen the giant limpets, muttonbirds, wideawakes, tropic birds, gropers and turtles in my book; I’ve swum with sharks; I’ve flown over the volcanic crater and I’ve watched the horizon for hours and days without seeing another vessel or habitable land. But, disappointingly, despite months of planning, biosecurity measures and lack of resources meant we were refused landing permits. So I never actually set foot on the island!


(Lydia Syson in the beautiful sea.)
So many different stages then. Seeing the finished hardback just a week ago was a glorious moment. If only – and most authors will sympathise - I hadn’t immediately spotted a typo. Mea culpa. My very final proofread was under difficult circumstances and a mortifying error crept unnoticed into my author’s note: the Maori name for New Zealand is of course spelled Aotearoa – ‘the Land of the Long White Cloud’.

3) Was it your intention to educate your readers in certain aspects of history that they may not have known about? No spoilers, but how the story unfolds reveals something surprising and horrifying...
Yes and no. I was horrified myself by what I learned, and I also wanted to suggest through the storytelling how easily horrific histories can become buried.

We often think of the nineteenth century as the great era of abolition and emancipation, but in fact the slave trade simply changed its name, its organisation, its victims and its locations. After the American Civil War, cotton and sugar production shifted to the Pacific. The people of the small scattered islands of Oceania were particularly vulnerable to exploitation. First the blackbirders came. Then the indentured labour recruiters. The Pacific Labour Trade tore families and communities violently apart, and far too many people have never been able to recover their ancestors’ stories. Slavery and human trafficking continue to thrive all over the world, including in the UK. Purely in terms of numbers, more people are enslaved now than at any time before in history. So though I never want to be didactic, actually, yes – I did hope to draw attention to all these things.

I’m in the middle of putting together an online bibliography for readers who want to follow up on any of my sources, as I have with all my books, and this should be available from publication day – May 17th. Of course I’d recommend reading Mr Peacock’s Possessions first, but after that this article offers excellent insight into New Zealand’s slaving history. It’s by Scott Hamilton, NZ historian and author of The StolenIsland (2016). Australia’s hidden history of slavery is explored here. And you can join Anti-Slavery International – the world’s oldest human rights organisation – here.

4) When I reviewed Jane Harris's SUGAR MONEY, I asked her whether she was nervous at reactions to her writing (very well) in the voice of a young man of different racial origin from her own. In these days of 'cultural appropriation' and the like, did this give you any pause at all? You write very beautifully partly from the point of view of a native Islander!

Thank you! And it certainly did.

As I began work on Mr. Peacock’s Possessions, the world of children’s publishing was waking up to the call for more diverse and inclusive representation. Young readers of all backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities and sexualities urgently needed to see more characters in books who reflected their own lives and experiences. Protagonists, not token side-kicks. Most writers for children felt a shared responsibility to make this happen, with sensitivity and care, no matter what their own identity might be. Meanwhile, in adult publishing, a reverse move was taking place, for equally valid and important reasons. Writers whose colour and class give them easier access to a public voice through publication – including me – have been forced to think more carefully about what stories they have the right to tell. I always felt it was extremely important politically to put my young Pacific Islander, Kalala, at the centre of this story. I don’t want to overemphasise my own anguish – particularly in the context of the truly agonising histories I’m exploring here – but it was a huge dilemma. If, once it became an adult novel, I abandoned my attempt to create a convincing voice for Kalala, if I didn’t allow him to speak for himself, I risked marginalising him and all the Polynesian people in the book. Mr. Peacock’s Possessions could have become just another book about an encounter with the ‘other’ told through the eyes of an ‘innocent’ white girl. One predictable point of view. In rendering the entangled stories of two imagined groups of people meeting and living alongside each other on an invented version of a real island, I needed to portray the ways in which all my characters navigate between cultures. I wanted to draw upon and expose, but never, I hope, abuse the very real and horrific histories which inspired the novel, histories currently little known beyond academia. And I wanted readers to be completely swept up by these histories.

I write about other times and places because my circumstances mean most of my travels are necessarily in my head, and my explorations take place largely in libraries and archives. Of course I’d have loved to go to Niue. I couldn’t. I hope one day I will. I still can’t quite believe that at the very last minute I reached the Kermadecs.

I don’t expect all readers to agree, but it felt wrong to censor myself for fear of an anticipated judgment. And novels simply can’t be written by committee, so a book has to get to a certain stage before it can be shared. In the end, family circumstances in the last six months made it very hard for me to get the manuscript into the hands of the readers who mattered most to me, as I had planned. But before Mr Peacock’s Possessions went to print in the UK, I was overjoyed to be introduced to one very important reader - the multi-talented teacher and writer Ioane Aleke Fa’avae, an expert in the history, culture and language of Niue, and winner of the 2014 Creative NZ Pacific Heritage Award. Thanks to his warm blessing – and a spelling correction – my anxieties about the book’s reception have diminished considerably. And copies of the finished book are on their way to Niue now.

5) Can you speak at all of your next book?
 
I’m afraid not. No mystery…just don’t quite know myself yet.

London's Burning by Lydia Syson

Of course I should have brought binoculars.  Vast though it was - this panoramic wooden sculpture of London’s mid-seventeenth-century skyline, rising from a flat barge in the middle of the Thames - it looked worryingly far away.  And there was a boat in the way.

As you can see, Sunday was a dull, grey afternoon.  We had pitched up absurdly early, friends and family, hoping to find a good spot on the riverbank, which we did.  Armed with a small picnic and some wine, we leaned against the very comfortable wall in front of the Sea Containers Building, watched the world and the water go by, and caught up on life. It was almost three hours before the burning was due to begin.  But I’m a committed queue-er.  I'm used to  sitting for hours by the river outside the Globe theatre to secure my favourite stage-side groundling view and conversation and good cheer always make the minutes slip by with amazing speed. Our previous experience of Artichoke public art events had convinced us it would be well worth the wait. 

The finale of the 350^th anniversary commemorations of the Great Fire of London - previewed in part here by fellow History Girl Imogen Robertson – was promised to be spectacular.  Hundreds of young Londoners - schoolchildren and young people 'not in education, employment or training' - had collaborated over months to bring to life American ‘burn artist’ David Best’s vision of the Restoration capital. 

London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

The crowds gathered behind us…we got talking to a few strangers…and joyous anticipation  flickered and caught hold.  Even the security guard who had to run along the sandy shoreline below us in pursuit of a few triumphantly stray spectators was kind and good-humoured as he retrieved them. Free public art brings peculiar health-and-safety headaches and London 1666 was ambitious: fire and water on top of unpredictable audience numbers.  The Great Fire 350 website certainly suggested a slight anxiety about overcrowding with its insistence that the best views would be online. That seemed unlikely.

As darkness fell, we saw the dome of St Paul’s begin to move, washed with smoke and colour and finally flames: the beginning of ‘Fires Ancient’, a projection by Martin Firrell.  

From Martin Firrell's website.

Out on the river, pinpricks of torchlight moved about the framework of the small city, only to vanish.  Last checks, we assumed, and worried a bit about getaways.  A few pleasure craft seemed to be cutting it fine.  On the dot of half-past eight, the first spark appeared, right at the heart of the sculpture.

 

From the other side of the river...as it started.
London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

Just as it had in the city itself 350 years earlier, fire soon took hold and slowly spread.  Little by little, the exquisite intricacy of the sculpture’s latticework construction stood out ever more blackly against the flames, perfectly visible.  

London's Burning, as above, photo by Oliver Rudkin

A brief, southerly gust of wind, and we felt the heat of it on our faces. At first I thought I’d imagined its warmth, but then it came again, and it was even warmer.Building after building caught light, spire after spire. The crackling intensified.  It had begun like the sound of rain pattering on a hard roof – the kind of summer shower you don’t notice until you look outside and run outside to gather in washing.  Soon it sounded vengeful. The entire barge was alight. 

As above.

The clouds of smoke rushing upwards and eastwards developed an alarming but enchanting underbelly of embers, an abundance of golden sparks.  

The fire-fighting boat which had been hovering nearby moved swiftly in to direct a cooling jet of spray at the danger.

I no longer wanted binoculars.  It felt pointless even to take photographs, yet also impossible not to make an attempt, at least from time to time.  No image, moving or still, could possibly convey the complete experience of a performance like this – sounds, smells, sights and that invigorating sense of mass pleasure all combining to provide a extended magical moment, the more magnificent for being shared with so many. There were gasps as the larger structures collapsed, one after another, spires folding and beams breaking. At one point somebody tried and failed to set off round-singing - "London's burning, London's burning..." Mostly people stood mesmerised, from time to time confiding their wonder in low voices.  This was wonder laced with horror. The spectacle - a visual oxymoron, perhaps - lasted for almost three-quarters of an hour. It was the ultimate in twenty-first-century urban sublime. 

Yesterday morning I was working nearby and couldn’t resist stealing away along the Embankment to see what, if anything, remained.  

Nothing.  The barge had vanished, leaving thoughts and memories.  

Something I learned this year was that on September 6^th 1666, London was a city of refugees: 80 per cent of the City had lost their homes. The rich rebuilt, but the destitute had to survive for years in shanty-towns on the outskirts of London. There will be events today in central London to commemorate this aspect of the Great Fire, and think about contemporary resonances. 

I’m also left remembering my very first introduction to the Great Fire – a lit-up scale model made for the old London Museum (originally housed in Kensington Palace) - and the memorable awe this always inspired when I went to see it as a young child.  As I got older, I noticed its flaws – the cotton wool smoke, the boy caught implausibly running through a flame.  But when Imogen wrote last month that she felt sorry for people born in London, as they could never have the pleasure of visiting the capital for the first time, it made me laugh. We're happy with that! I’m a Londoner, a proud Londoner, and brought up by several generations of Londoners too. The whole city was my playground, as it is now my children’s, and I was always blessed with older relatives who had long delighted in being Londoners.  They shared its secret spots and stories with me and my siblings and cousins, and untiringly took us up the Monument and St Paul's and on the river and in and out of the City's churches, squares, museums and parks. I’m thanking my family now. 

Photo by Oliver Ruskin, details above.

PS.  Some children's fiction thoughts for the Fire of London: Two of my sons were particularly gripped by Pippa Goodheart's Raven Boy.  My daughter read and re-read Mary Hooper's At the sign of the Sugared Plum and its sequel Petals in the Ashes to the point of obsession. Any other suggestions?

www.lydiasyson.com

'No more Hiroshimas' by Lydia Syson

Thirty years ago a new university friend invited me to come and spend Christmas with her family in Hiroshima.  Until I met her, Hiroshima was a word on a banner - an idea, a symbol of something so huge and terrifying and unimaginable that in my nineteen-year-old mind I think it was still a wasteland.  How could the city possibly have been rebuilt? Hiroshima was the cherry tree in Tavistock Square – a ‘never again’ reminder of the worst inhumanity I could conceive and most importantly, a memorial to its victims.  A Cold War child in a left-wing North London household, I had spent my youth marching for CND, passing round petitions, and organising film shows and discussions at school. ‘Enola Gay’ was on the radio and nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds and in our dreams, but we tended to think about dying, not surviving.

Tavistock Square, London
My grandmother, Moira Gaster, helped organise the planting of this tree in 1967
from the seeds of a Hiroshima cherry tree.
The memorial benches opposite are for both my peace activist grandparents.

‘Hiroshima’ seemed untranslatable into bricks and mortar…or as it turned out, concrete and cabbages. In the mid-1980s decorative brassicas were very much in fashion in the window boxes of one of the most modern city I’d ever visited. On my arrival, after a long and memorable Aeroflot flight via Moscow and a journey on a bullet-train, the first thing that struck me was my poor choice of footwear: I’d had no idea I’d have to remove it so often. My winter shoes - slightly Edwardian lace-up boots - took forever to get on and off, and I was shamed by the holes in the heels of nearly every pair of black tights I owned. In those days all the minutiae of everyday Japanese life were thrillingly unfamiliar – the very hot, deep bath, refilled once a week; heated tables and loo seats; wearable duvets; bento boxes, pachinko parlours and meals from slot machines. Meanwhile, although the knowledge of what had happened in Hiroshima hung over me, the city itself at first seemed bland and unexceptional. It was almost disconcerting.

Until my friend took me to the Peace Memorial Park, the open space which had once been the heart of Hiroshima.  Commemorations will be taking place there today as they do every year on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare, remembering more than 80,000 people killed on the day of the attack, and 140,000-150,000 more who died from radiation poisoning in the years that followed. I saw the skeleton dome of one of the only buildings left standing, still preserved as a ruin. I learned of Sadako and her paper cranes. And I was overwhelmed in the museum, which was smaller then than it is today and offered less context to the whole ghastly war, its ending, and its aftermath. All these years later, it’s hard to write about what I saw and felt there. It seemed, and still seems, unspeakable.

The Genbaku Dome - also known as the 'A' dome -
amidst the devastation in October 1945. Photograph by Shigeo Hayashi

Yet somehow - remarkably - Kathleen Burkinshaw, author of The Last Cherry Blossom, published this week in the US by Sky Pony Press, has managed to put into words the experience of growing up in Hiroshima during the Second World War.

From her mother’s memories, and her own careful research, Kathleen has created an original and compelling novel about a twelve-year-old girl trying to make sense of the gaps between newspaper reports, government propaganda and what she gradually discovers for herself: neighbours going to fight who never come home, the pressures of ritual suicide, what it really means to serve your country.   Meanwhile, as her own household changes, with new marriages for both her aunt and her father, Yuriko also finds disturbing holes in her own family narrative. She is forced to rethink her identity at every level.

Kathleen's mother, Toshiko Ishikawa (1932-2015),
with her Papa, Hisao Ishikawa (1883-1945)
 in her most treasured photograph.

It’s a completely absorbing world. All the details of family relationships, school friendships, everyday life, customs, stories, and ideas about honour and shame are woven in beautifully. When pika don hits – the literal translation is ‘flash boom’ – we understand exactly what it has destroyed. Burkinshaw handles the moment and its aftermath with great sensitivity. The Last Cherry Blossom takes its title from a favourite saying of Yuriko’s Papa, and also evokes the spirit of endurance in Hiroshima, manifested in the blooming of cherry trees in Spring 1946 in soil where scientists had predicted nothing would grow for years. There are some books you read as a child which open your eyes, get under your skin, and stay with you forever. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit had that effect on me. I think The Last Cherry Blossom will prove an enduring novel. I also believe that its young readers will grow up asking more questions about where we are now in terms of nuclear warfare, whether we have learned anything from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and asking themselves how they feel about that.

Kathleen with her mother in 2013 (above)
and with her daughter Sara in Hiroshima (below)

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