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

Finding fortune by Pippa Goodhart

While Louise Berridge is busy meeting a deadline, we are very pleased to have an extra guest post from Pippa Goodhart, who takes us from her mother's ring to the Klondike Gold Rush

My Mum, who is no more of a glamorous dresser-up of a lady than I am, had just one extra ring which she would put on if she was going out to something very special. Here it is:

This ring intrigued me as a child because, if you look at the stone, you’ll see it has wild gold streaking through it as well as the worked gold that makes up the Victorian ring band.
The ring had been given to my mother, Christine, by her mother, Dorothy, who had been given it by her mother, Florence, who had (I was told) been given it by her mother, Polly, who had been given it by her brother, William James, when he came back from the Klondike Gold Rush. Here are Polly and daughter Florence:

William James was a traveller and entrepreneur. In about 1888 he brought back silk for Florence’s wedding dress from Yokohama in Japan, the first port opened to western merchants in the late C19th. He apparently has streets (William Street and James Street) named after him in Oxford. But of his fabled trip to the Klondike I know nothing.

So I got reading about the Klondike Gold Rush…and reading…and reading because it is so extraordinarily interesting. After a few fortunes were stumbled upon in the Klondike wilderness of very north-western Canada in 1896, the gold and the news of it came out the following spring thaw. In the two years after that over a hundred thousand people from all over the world did the terrifying journey to get to the Klondike. There are diaries of those who went, stories from characters such as Jack London who were there, and there are telling photographs of characters dressed and posed ready for the adventure, then hollow-eyed, bearded and gaunt as that adventure takes its toll.
Online I found and bought The Chicago Record’s Book For Gold Seekers, published in that Gold Rush year of 1897, and full of maps and shopping lists and information about how to travel and live and mine for gold.

Wonderfully, this contemporary book was cheap because ‘covers and spine are badly faded and heavily rubbed’. I expect that most people reading this blog would have had the same reaction to that description as I had – gosh, it’s actually GONE to the Klondike and back! And it clearly has! With someone called Freemont Russell who signed ownership inside the front cover of the book. The book’s inside pages are pristine, but the outside has been worn by being carried in luggage for thousands of miles of adventure almost into the Arctic.

My story – Finding Fortune – is about a child, Ida, whose mother has just died, and whose father has much to prove to himself and to the grand family of his late wife. He decides to go to the Klondike, which, after all, was British at that time, and Ida determines to go with him. The story is of their journey across the Atlantic, across Canada, up the western US coast, and then inland over the notorious Chilkoot Pass to the frozen lakes where the hundred thousand or so Argonauts had to make boats to take them downstream once the spring thaw let them sluice down the river to gold-mining territory. They had to carry their ton of goods each that the Canadian government sensibly stipulated for people heading to a place empty of shops.

Extraordinarily, once they’d arrived from their months of journeying, many of those who had made the journey simply gave-up. They sold what they could of their tons of goods carried all that way, then got the first ticket home available on the steamships. They saw how few were actually finding any gold, let alone fortunes, and decided to cut their losses. But Ida and Fa are too determined and too desperate to give up …

A problem which any historical fiction writer who develops a passion for their subject must meet is that of selecting from the wonderful facts they want to include in their story. There is the obvious danger that the story is wrenched from its natural story course in order to ‘happen upon’ every interesting trifle in the writer’s bag of historical goodies.

In this story I took to including letters that Ida writes home to her Grandmama – stiff dutiful letters at first, but increasingly chatty as their relationship develops through this one-sided conversation. Those letters become key to the plot, but I confess that I first thought of having them simply as places in which to casually mention the runaway trains on Big Hill, the treacle mixed into the coffee on-board ship, the fact that gold is so very malleable that it can be beaten into gold leaf four hundred times thinner than a hair, that the strictly Presbyterian Indian packers also kept their traditional habit of thanking the spirit of a dead animal before eating meat or working leather, that hundreds of windlasses drawing-up buckets of pay-dirt (soil) make a great sighing sound, that bicycles were sold as just the thing to get over those mountains and down those rivers to the Klondike, that you could buy gold magnets (not) and there were people who purported to be able to taste gold in stream water, that you can cure scurvy with spruce-bark tea, and so on and so on. In letters those things can be mentioned briefly in passing, and don’t clog or distort the main story.

What tricks have you used as ways of including those irresistible tit-bits you long to include but don’t really have the excuse for in your main storyline?

PS After writing ‘Finding Fortune’ I found out a bit more about my Great Great Granny Polly (Mary Ann Rose), who supposedly was given the ring by her brother. It turns out that she died in 1881, sixteen years before the Klondike Gold Rush occurred! Hmm. Was the ring perhaps given to her daughter Florence? Or did the ring come from a different gold rush? Or no gold rush at all? Never mind. That ring set me going to the Klondike in my imagination, even if no relative of mine has ever been there for real!



Louise Berridge (A.L. Berridge) will be back in April)

Joining the historical dots a guest post by Pippa Goodhart

The most human of all impulses is to create story.  Why?  Because we want life to be a coherent narrative that makes some kind of sense.  As writers of historical fiction, looking back to the past, we are joining dots to make stories.  Those ‘dots’ are the bits of real history, be they firm events or a vaguer feel for a time, and the lines that we draw to join them together are our invention.  If we each took the same collection of historical dots and added our own imaginative lines we’d create different stories, all of which would make their own kind of sense, and none of which are likely to be very close to the factual truth of things.  Scientists and philosophers and lawyers do similar tricks, taking little bits of ‘evidence’ and using them to ‘prove’ narratives and theorems.  How many of them get it right?!  It’s essentially the same process, groping after truths through logic.  But we know that our truths are fictional ones, and don’t pretend otherwise. 

             

Here is a brief story of how my novel ‘Raven Boy’ (for junior school children) resulted from the discovery of some historical ‘dots’ that I longed to join together with a narrative.

             

I’d been asked to write a very short story for six year old children about the Great Fire of London (to tie-in with the national curriculum).  I read Pepys’ Dairy for the days of the Fire, wondering how I was going to work this big topic for a young child audience.  Glory be, on being woken (for a second time) by his maid telling him of more than three hundred houses burned to the ground, Pepys, ‘.. made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up onto one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire …etc’  So I had a real child character for my story: Sir J Robinson’s ‘little son’.  But what was he like?  I got in touch with the historians at the Tower and discovered that Sir John Robinson was King Charles the Second’s Lord Lieutenant of the Tower.  The historians knew nothing much about his son, except that there were further Sir John Robinsons down through the centuries, and there’s even one in the present day.  So my boy was also called John, and I wrote about him climbing the Tower to see the Fire with Pepys, and deciding to keep a diary of his own … which is mostly about losing his cat.  So much for that little book, ‘Fire Cat’.  But, because of it, I got a privileged visit to the Tower of London with its illustrator.  We were taken to places where ordinary visitors don’t usually get a chance to go, climbing up onto the roof of the White Tower to try and get an impression of what the view might have been like….except that of course these days you don’t look down on anything at all.  You look up to gigantic office blocks!  But we also got a glimpse inside the house where the Robinsons lived.  And I read signs and pamphlets at the Tower about the myth of how the ravens must stay at the Tower for fear that it, and the monarchy, will fall if they should ever leave.  I read that the birds are protected by a royal decree from the time of King Charles the Second.  

Ordinary, carrion eating, ravens.  It’s a bit like protecting rats by royal decree!  Why on earth did Charles the Second do it?  The answer is that he probably didn’t.  No such decree exists.  Hmm.  But a belief in it does.  That played together with thoughts about the Tower itself (that roof top, that Robinson home, that centre of power full of crown jewels and the Mint and soldiers), the plague trapping and horribly killing so many people within London’s city walls, the Great Fire that destroyed such a swathe of that city, the wars being fought against the Dutch and French at that time, the sound of sea battles clearly heard within London ….and the importance of a raven.  Hmm.  I couldn’t resist reading John Evelyn and biographies of Charles the Second, a history of the Fire, and more, including, of course, just a bit more and just a bit more of Pepys’ Diary.  The fact that each entry is short makes his Dairy so irresistibly just-one-moreish, like sweets!  

And one day I was rewarded with that ‘Hello’ moment that many will recognise; when you know that you’ve met the person who will live and shape your story.  My boy is another real boy in Pepys’s Diary, and I knew at once he was a boy to live an adventure that would join those teasing historical dots, and make sense of that myth about the ravens at the Tower.  Pepys mentions him in connection with another of his visits to the Tower, this time to dine with the Robinsons –

‘No discourse at table to any purpose, only after dinner my Lady would needs see a boy which was represented to her to be an innocent country boy brought up to towne a day or two ago, and left here to the wide world, and he losing his way fell into the Tower, which my Lady believes, and takes pity on him, and will keep him; but though a little boy and but young, yet he tells his tale so readily and answers all questions so wittily, that for certain he is an arch rogue, and bred in this towne; but my Lady will not believe it, but ordered victuals to be given him, and I think will keep him as a footboy for their eldest son.’  

Who was the boy?  I’m with Pepys in that I don’t for a moment believe anybody could lose their way and just wander by mistake through those fortifications and into the Tower.  He was there on purpose.  But what was that purpose?  Aha, I know, I thought.  This boy wants to kill the King!  Why?  How?  When?  And how does a raven come into all this?  Read the story and see!

Pippa Goodhart’s Raven Boy is published by Catnip. ISBN: 978 1846470257

Visit Pippa’s website: www.pippagoodhart.co.uk