How to read as a writer, by Gillian Polack

There are so many articles these days – on the web and off- that give a guide to how life was lived or how something was experienced in times other than our own. We can fly through London in the seventeenth century, or boat down the Thames. We can hear about the theatre or read how someone cuddled up by the fire to a good book. What all these articles have in common is that they’re articles about something: they’re modern thoughts. 

For many writers, these articles are entertaining and fun, but not where we get the grit for our fiction. We delve into scholarly studies and we check primary sources. Primary sources are the best. Books, articles, pamphlets, ephemera, pictures, objets d’art, everyday items – any primary source. I use them so much that I keep forgetting to explain that the way I read them in order to write fiction isn’t at all the way I read them as a historian.

Today, then, I’m going to address two issues with the same example. I’m going to show you how I (as a writer) read a single primary source for my fiction. At the same time, I’m going to say honestly that this is not even close to the technique I use as a historian. 

History and fiction serve different functions. We research both, but the research can be quite different in style and always leads to different outcomes. This is one of the many reasons there is a difference between historically based fiction and scholarly monographs, after all. I look into this in detail in History and Fiction, but I don’t actually pull apart a primary source to use in a novel. If you want more of the theoretical stuff, and to know what other writers do, History and Fiction is the place to go. Here I’m going to take a source that I think might be of use for the novel I’m writing (slowly at the moment, for the universe keeps intervening) that’s set in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Pepys is very well known for his diary. He wrote it for himself, which makes it even more interesting, for he writes about his place and time in a very personal way. We’re often looking through his eyes when we see the Great Fire of London, for so many modern novels that tell of the Great Fire or that have it as an incident, use his account as their basis. 

As a historian, I regard him as a tremendous primary source for his place and time. I also have to balance his very articulate views with those of others, because Pepys’ importance (both at the time and in our eyes) means that it’s all too easy to use him alone. To get an understanding of how people actually lived, therefore, Pepys only provides one small story.

Novels share that with Pepys. They, too, focus on one small story. It’s what we write. Accounts of places and of times that focus quite sharply on particular people or events. So many novels, therefore, rely heavily on Pepys. This is why he’s not one of my major sources for my novel, in fact. Pepys is the wrong gender for me, in an England where the life experiences of men and women were wildly different. I’ve read him through and taken the information I think I need from him, and then moved on to other sources that more closely meet the way my own characters would have seen their place and time.

When I read Pepys, I always remember that London was different before to after the fire. I took this picture in 2014 to remind me - this is definitely an 'after the fire' view.

This makes him a very good source to use as an example, for you can see how he’s useful and how he isn’t useful for my novel. 

Let’s start with what I’m looking for. I’m depicting the world of women. I’m looking, therefore, for experiences they might have had, for places they might have seen, for anything that’s shared between men and women, for hints of how my characters might see the streets of London when they visit. Unlike Pepys, they were not Londoners, so what he sees as an insider, my women would see as outsiders.

Let me use an online edition (although I used a print edition for the most part). I’ll paste it here and annotate it, with notes on how I would use it to help shape my novel. You might want to check the annotations of others, as well. They help show how modern readers look at Pepys and what they think need explaining for the wider public. You can find the diary entry and its reader-annotations here

 

Again, London in 2014. Even if the buildings change, the streets may be the same. Pepys may well have walked this.

Up, and to White Hall to the Committee of Tangier (1), but it did not meet. But here I do hear first that my Lady Paulina Montagu did die yesterday; at which I went to my Lord’s lodgings (2), but he is shut up with sorrow, and so not to be spoken with: and therefore I returned, and to Westminster Hall, where I have not been, I think, in some months. And here the Hall was very full, the King having, by Commission to some Lords this day, prorogued the Parliament till the 19th of October next (3): at which I am glad, hoping to have time to go over to France this year. But I was most of all surprised this morning by my Lord Bellassis, who, by appointment, met me at Auditor Wood’s, at the Temple, and tells me of a duell designed between the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord Halifax, or Sir W. Coventry; the challenge being carried by Harry Saville, but prevented by my Lord Arlington, and the King told of it; and this was all the discourse at Court this day (4). But I, meeting Sir W. Coventry in the Duke of York’s chamber, he would not own it to me, but told me that he was a man of too much peace to meddle with fighting, and so it rested: but the talk is full in the town of the business. Thence, having walked some turns with my cozen Pepys, and most people, by their discourse, believing that this Parliament will never sit more, I away to several places to look after things against to-morrow’s feast (5), and so home to dinner; and thence, after noon, my wife and I out by hackneycoach 6), and spent the afternoon in several places, doing several things at the ‘Change and elsewhere against to-morrow; and, among others, I did also bring home a piece of my face cast in plaister, for to make a vizard upon, for my eyes (7). And so home, where W. Batelier come, and sat with us; and there, after many doubts, did resolve to go on with our feast and dancing to- morrow; and so, after supper, left the maids to make clean the house, and to lay the cloth, and other things against to-morrow, and we to bed (8).

1. Places are handy. I can locate them on a map and decide if my characters need to pass them or visit them.

2. Individuals are less handy. Unless they’re likely to appear in the novel, their main use for me is to decide if my characters belong to their class or circle and how any reference will be made to them. In this case, I can’t see any reason for mentioning the death of Paulina Montagu, so I just keep on reading.

3. Pepys was a public servant and his life was ruled by Parliamentary sittings. My characters are anything but. I need to know when Parliament is sitting, however, for it will influence the visit to London. Also, it would be a great matter of interest to my characters. Politics in the late seventeenth century were an obsession and a matter of great import and terribly emotional. I will need a timeline of all the Great Events (including who betrayed whom and when) and I will need to know my characters’ views on these things. This mention by Pepys helps remind me that I need to do this. The wonderful thing about doing this as a novelist is that I’m allowed to be far more partisan than I can be as a historian. My characters will have Opinions. This means I develop quite a different timeline and overview to the one that I would develop as a historian, where I’d look more into causes and outcomes of events than into the feelings of women from a given region. To simplify, I can decide who someone would like to throw mud at and why.

4. Duels are terrific fodder. If there’s a duel in London when my characters visit and if there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’d hear about it, then it will be of interest. No more than that for me for this novel, however, for it’s not the stuff of my women’s lives. Pepys is much closer to the aristocracy and the doings of government than my women are. 

Place in society matters at least as much as place in time. The story Pepys tells would be a good one. A duel! How it happened! was stopped! But it can’t happen in that way in a novel with women from a country town as the main characters. The most they could do is gossip about it, or maybe know someone who knows someone. 

The drama has to come from something other than duelling, then, which is a shame, given how much we associate the seventeenth century with duels. I could force a duel in (as many authors do) but forcing the historically unlikely is not my style. In my notes I’ll probably write that I have to find something of equal interest, but that I can’t use a duel. It’s OK, though, for there’s at least one duel in a novel of mine that will be out next year – it’s entirely appropriate in that novel.

5. Food! I know what Pepys was likely to have eaten. Better, I know what my characters would enjoy. I’ve still got to test a bunch of recipes, but I have the tastes of the time and place all sorted. This means that Pepys isn’t giving me anything new, but he does remind me I still have to test recipes. This is one of the reasons the novel’s been put off for a bit – the one I’m writing currently has no recipes to test, so I can do it immediately.

6. Another thing I can check off. I have my transport to London sorted and my transport within London. I know how long it takes to get to a place and even how long it takes to get letters to and fro, in order to plan a trip. These were easy to research as there are books of timetables in the later seventeenth century. Some eras are much easier to research than others!

7. I do not want to know this. I really, really hate the thought of having a plaster cast of my face. It’s a suffocating scary squicky thought. I do know how it was done, however, should I ever need to write about it. 

Oddly, I was interested in this when I was a child and collected gypsum to make plaster of Paris. My mother forbade me to use the oven and my plaster of Paris remained unmade. This is the sort of information that helps with fiction. It’s much easier to check up the specifics of a technique than it is to find out about something of which one has no knowledge at all. I think this is why so many fiction writers are magpies in the way we collect an understanding of this or of that. Which reminds me that I’d make a note at this point about the ‘Change. This is something that will have to appear in my novel, in one way or another.

8. This sentence is the most important in the whole extract for my novel. It tells the normal order of life. This is something that men and women shared. It tells me the role of a maid (and that it’s a single maid and not three maids and a footman) and how she fits in with the house as a whole. I’ve done my homework on this – I know the shape of London households of this level of prosperity. This means I can safely use this sentence to help bring a household to life.

'Samuel Pepys and the Goldfish' by Karen Maitland

I love delving into the diary of Samuel Pepys. He left us a wonderful record of some great historical events as they were unfolding, but for me it is his casual references to the details of everyday life, which always makes me want to find out find out more.

‘Thence home to see my Lady Pen, where my wife and I were shown a fine rarity of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so forever, and finely marked they are, being foreign.’ Samuel Pepys, 28th May 1665

We will never know for certain what these fish were that Samuel Pepys admired, but it is likely that this is one of earliest written references to goldfish being kept in an English house.

The Ancient Romans are credited with being the first to bring fish into the home for the pleasure of their guests, keeping them in tanks made of marble. But these would have been fish such as barbels taken from rivers, rather than fish specially breed for colour and shape.

In the Middle Ages manor houses, monasteries and villages had fish ponds stocked with fish destined for the table. No doubt children got pleasure from feeding them crumbs, but even smallest child would have been aware that, like other livestock, they were there to be eaten. In manors and monasteries fish could also be seen swimming for a few days in tubs of water in the cool of the dairy until the cook was ready for them, but the concept of keeping a fish in the house that you didn’t intend to eat would have been strange to most medieval Europeans.

But in China goldfish were kept and breed for pleasure as early as the Sung Dynasty (960-1279AD). In 918AD a Chinese monk wrote, ‘if goldfish eat the remains of olives or soapy water they die, but a certain bark will prevent them getting lice.’ The writer Yo K’o (1173-1240) described fish breeders in Chung-tu (now Beijing) who could turn the colour of fish to gold.

By 1276 silver, black, red and multi-coloured goldfish were being produced for sale as ornamental fish and by the 14th century an entire porcelain factory in China was given over to the production of fish bowls. Martin Martini, writing between 1646-50 in Hangchow, became fascinated by the ‘little gilded fish’ called Chin-yü. ‘The skin glitters,’ he tells us, ‘being interwoven with threads of gold. The whole back sprinkled as it were with gold dust.’

 If it was goldfish Samuel Pepys saw in the ‘glass of water’ it is likely they came into England via Portuguese traders, who were the first Europeans to bring them on ships from China sometime after 1611. But after the East India Company established a trading base in China in 1672, the British eventually began to import these fish directly from China. One such ship arrived in England with live goldfish among its cargo early in the year 1692, having left Macao in China in September the previous year. Considering Louis le Comte on a visit to China in 1696 had described these finger-length fish as highly delicate and susceptible to injury, it was amazing they survived such a rough journey, not to mention the changes in temperature, and their water can't have been replaced very often on such a long voyage.

By 1711 the Duke of Richmond boasted of owning a large Chinese earthenware bowl full of goldfish which had been imported directly from China, and Horace Walpole was so successful in breeding them in his pond, he gave goldfish away as gifts to friends, sending one man home with a dozen in a ‘decanter’.

 But as Horace found out, keeping goldfish wasn't an entirely hazard free hobby. In 1747 Thomas Gray penned his poem ‘Ode on the death of a favourite cat, drowned in a tub of gold fishes.' The cat in question was Horace Walpole's cat, Selima.

 

 Wealthy Europeans kept goldfish in the large porcelain or earthenware bowls, as they had been kept in China, but once these fish became fashionable in England, unless you had grand entrance hall, keeping these large bowls of water on the floor of an English house wasn’t practical, so the glass goldfish bowl was introduced which could stand on a small table. Early English glass fish bowls were mounted on stems like wine glasses. The idea for these glass fish bowls may have originally come from the water-filled glass globes which were placed on tables to intensify the candlelight when someone was trying to read, write or sew.

Eventually these exotic pets became so cheap that goldfish were given to children by rag and bone men in exchange for the old clothes and other recyclables they had collected. I remember as child coming home with a live goldfish I’d won at a fair. I loved and cherished ‘Goldy’ for years, though thankfully for the sake of all those poor creatures who didn’t survive, giving away fish as prizes has now been banned.

Meeting Mr. Punch, by Y S Lee

As one of the international History Girls, I didn't grow up with Punch and Judy. I knew vaguely who they were, and thought I understood what the show signified: children's street entertainment. What more was there to know?

But just a couple of weeks ago, while holidaying with extended family in Llandudno, I heard a raucous squawking voice that was louder even than the seagulls. I turned around and saw my first real Punch and Judy set-up!

Codman's Punch and Judy, using the original carved puppets from 1860

 My children (ages 7 and 4) immediately drifted over. While I was still reeling from the screeching voice – amplified by loudspeaker - and contemplating Mr. Punch's enormous nose, they settled in for the performance. (Children are such experts in the willing suspension of disbelief.) And while I was startled by the show's violence, the children screamed with laughter and were firmly on Mr. Punch's side. (I only fully relaxed when Jack Ketch, the hangman, appeared. I was on safer ground there, knowing Jack Ketch's reputation for "barbarous inefficiency".)

As my family watched the performance, a woman threaded her way through the crowds, shaking a bottle to collect donations - the main source of income for the show, although there were also souvenirs for sale. The woman turned out to be Jacqueline Codman, whose grandfather founded the Punch & Judy tradition in Llandudno.

There's a delightful story behind Professor Codman's proscenium and set of puppets:



In case you can't read the words in the photo, they say:

Codman's Punch & Judy started in Llandudno in 1860. Richard Codman, a travelling showman, was stranded in Llandudno after his horse died. He gathered driftwood from the beach and hand-carved the Punch & Judy puppets and the proscenium which you still see here today.

I love this kind of family legend, and reading it got me thinking specifically about the Victorian tradition of Punch & Judy. (Ann Swinfen has already blogged here about Punch's origin in commedia dell'arte, and I won’t re-tread that ground.) What I wanted to know was what happened to the character after Samuel Pepys saw "Polichinella" perform in the 1660s. What changed after he was anglicized as Mr. Punch? When did Judy join the show, and how did they migrate from theatres to the seaside?

Although the original Punch was a marionette (as opposed to a hand puppet), most of Punch’s other traits have remained consistent since the seventeenth century: the beaky nose and hunched back, his big stick (or batone, in Italian) – and, of course, that defining squawk. In the 1720s, Jonathan Swift mentions Punch’s “rusty voice” in a poem. Punch novices, like me, will be delighted to learn that the sound is produced by a “swazzle” held at the back of the puppet-master’s mouth. It’s used only for Punch’s voice, of course, which makes the performance of fast-talking multiple characters a miracle of timing and dexterity on the part of the puppeteer, or “Professor”.

In the eighteenth century, Punch acquired an overbearing wife named Dame Joan, who was renamed Judy some time before 1825. Their domestic strife was a central feature of the show – perhaps to give Punch yet another reason to exercise his batone? With Punch now transformed from exotic clown to embattled family man, it makes sense that towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was a dual shift: from marionette to hand puppet, and from formal theatrical settings to street-side performances. These changes are clearly linked. Marionettes are expensive and fragile; hand puppets less so. Marionettes tend to require at least one marionettist (puppeteer) per figure. Once you have sturdy puppets and only one performer, you can also transport a small stage, or booth, and take the show to the audience – or, at least, where you think the audience might be.

By 1828, there was enough interest in Punch & Judy to publish a script of the accepted play (although its accuracy has been challenged), with engraved illustrations by Cruikshank -- yes, the same George Cruikshank who illustrated many of Dickens’s novels. And setting Punch firmly in his new socio-economic context, Henry Mayhew interviewed a Punch & Judy man for his monumental series, London Labour and the London Poor.

Punch’s violently disruptive, anti-authoritarian stance also made him the perfect mascot for a publication that aimed to satirize English society. In 1841, Mayhew cofounded Punch magazine,  borrowing Punch’s energy, popularity, and street cred for his new publication. 

Mr. Punch and Jack Ketch, the hangman

With the expansion of the railways came the creation of seaside holiday resorts like Llandudno, Brighton, and Blackpool – and amongst the sea-bathing machines and donkey rides, there too was Mr. Punch. This brings us back to the Codman family history. Trapped in Llandudno with bills to pay, who better to come to a travelling showman’s rescue than the ever-popular Mr. Punch?

“That’s the way to do it!”, indeed.

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Y S Lee writes the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

Pepys, Egyptian Mummies and Wool Smuggling. by Deborah White

Our guest this month is children's writer Deborah White. Welcome Deborah! (If you read to the end you will discover how seriously she takes her guesting responsibilities).

Deborah White was born in Devon, but lived in an 18ft caravan on a farm in Buckinghamshire until she was three. She loved to read and write stories on her 1914 portable Corona typewriter and secretly dreamed of being an actress. She was inspired to write Wickedness after reading that Samuel Pepys went to see a preserved mummy at Egyptian exhibition in London in 1668.

I am not a historian and I never thought I would write anything even remotely historical, but a serendipitous discovery changed all that. Reading Pepys Diary one summer (as you do!) I came across an entry that referred to an Ancient Egyptian mummy (May 12th 1668. ‘And so parted, I having there seen a mummy in a merchant’s warehouse…all the middle of the woman’s body black and hard’). That little throwaway comment piqued my interest and the more I found out about knowledge of Ancient Egypt in the 17th century, the more fascinated I became. And once I had decided to set part of Wickedness and its sequel Deceit in the 17th century, of course I had to do research. Lots. I ended up with pages and pages of stuff. And I collected little snippets of information I thought I would never find a use for. (Rose Tremain was right when she said you have to do the research and then forget it or it will swamp your narrative. My first drafts were definitely swampy in places.) But one of those little snippets came in unexpectedly useful: wool smuggling. I remember being brought up short when I first read about it. Wool smuggling. Why on earth would anyone want to smuggle wool? But of course like anything, if there is an imbalance between production and need there will always be people profiting from that. (Currently one of Europe’s more bizarre smuggling rackets is the illegal importation of Chinese garlic into the EU.)

The thing was I had to get two of my characters, Margrat and Christophe (neither of whom had ‘safe conduct’ documents) from England across to France ‘under the radar’. Who was already crossing the Channel regularly and in secret? Smugglers. And when I began researching the sort of smuggling that was going on along the Kent/East Sussex coast in the 1660s, I discovered it was largely wool. Apparently by the 17th century it had reached epidemic proportions because English wool was in such high demand in France and the English textile trade was in a poor state. In 1660 it was forbidden to export wool. In 1662 the death penalty was introduced for anyone caught smuggling it. Smugglers then armed both themselves and their ships. Any attempt at arrest was very violently resisted. Why not use guns when, if you were caught, you’d be hanged anyway? (‘As good be hanged for an old sheep as a young lamb.’ This proverb from John Ray’s 1670 collection seems appropriate!) By the 1670s, 20,000 packs of wool (Say 20 fleeces per pack/bale) were being smuggled to Calais annually. That’s 400,000 fleeces a year. (The population of London was approximately 500,000 in 1666.)


The other development that made smuggling much easier, first appeared in Europe in the 15th century. This was a change to how ships were rigged. The introduction of fore and aft rigging made tacking into the wind possible. No more having to wait until the wind was in the right direction. Brilliant! The old square rigged ships could only sail when the wind direction was favourable and so were forced into using proper ports where the ships could stay safely moored up until the wind changed. But smugglers using small fore and aft rigged boats could sail into little hidden bays or even berth straight up onto a beach (as I had my smuggler’s boat do in Deceit.) Obviously this is a huge advantage when you are doing something illegal! And using prominent landmarks to navigate by (The spires of Reculver church for instance were very easy to spot from the sea…so the beach below became a popular landing spot for smugglers.)

A postcard from 1913 showing the spires of the church at Reculver

I also found out that smugglers from around the Romney Marsh area were known locally as owlers. (According to the OED, it was first recorded as a noun in 1690. Although my second novel Deceit is set very slightly earlier, I refer to my smugglers as owlers.)

Maybe they were called owlers because they worked at night. Or because the owl call could easily be used for communication between smugglers…just as the little pewter owl token, passed from one hand to another was a sign of trust. But what a nice little bit of period detail. And dear reader…I used it! Now all I need to do is find a use for all that research into 17th century French theatre design…

Debbie (on left) takes blogging for the History Girls very seriously. Dressed up in a toga (sheet), she is about to sail (fore and aft rigged sailing vessel of course) through the Corinth Canal with her friend Sheila.

You can read more about Deborah and her books at www.deborahwhiteauthor.com 

Dry And Moonshine - Lucy Inglis

On New Year’s day 1660, the twenty-six year old Samuel Pepys decided to keep a diary. He would cease a decade later. His entries are a fascinating insight into the life of a seventeenth century public servant, householder and private man. Sam was vain, stoic, snobby and clever. He cheated on his wife, Elisabeth. He underwent major surgery to remove a large bladder stone, a procedure known as lithotomy; he carried the stone with him and celebrated the anniversary of his operation. He walked the streets of London constantly, between his City home and his Westminster office. The diaries of Samuel Pepys are one of the great private works of the seventeenth century and allow us to see London through the eyes of a man on the make. Although, officially, the new civil year began on March 25th until 1752, Sam, like us, began his New Year on January 1st, with resolutions, thanksgiving, and food. These are some of his reminiscences.

1660 was bittersweet. Samuel and his wife Elisabeth were both well, but they would remain childless: ‘Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold. I lived in Axe Yard having my wife, and servant Jane, and no more in family than us three. My wife … gave me hopes of her being with child, but on the last day of the year … [the hope was belied]’.

The start of 1661 found self-regarding Sam ‘in constant good health, and in a most handsome and thriving condition’. However, this appears to be in spite of the disgusting New Year’s meal served by Mr Pierce’s wife, for ‘she is such a slut that I do not love her victualls’.

1662 got off to a terrible start for poor Elisabeth. Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry’. He wasn’t so sorry that he didn’t immediately go back to sleep again, though.

In 1666 Sam went out to celebrate, and ‘got into the coach where Mrs. Knipp was and got her upon my knee (the coach being full) and played with her breasts and sung, and at last set her at her house and so good night’. Things did not carry on so well at home though, and ‘my wife’s teeth fell of akeing, and she to bed’.

The following year, 1667, the Thames had frozen over and Sam stayed in bed, where he ‘Lay long, being a bitter, cold, frosty day, the frost being now grown old, and the Thames covered with ice’.

In 1669, the final year of the diary, he went ‘back to my aunt’s, and there supped and talked, and staid pretty late, it being dry and moonshine, and so walked home, and to bed in very good humour’.

Writing history is often less about knowledge of the past than the willingness to filter a different time through those who lived there. Sam was sometimes coarse, often an opportunistic groper and always ambitious. He would probably be intolerable to a modern woman, yet his New Years are still relevant to our human experience: the sharp poignancy of trying for a child and failing and the dread of finding a hair in the food at a dinner party, from the mundane hazards of sharing a bed to the frisson of a snatched encounter. And finally, the late night walk home at the beginning of a new year, full of possibility and hope for the future.

Happy New Year! Wishing all the readers and all the History Girls a wonderful 2013. For more on Samuel Pepys, please visit the labour of love that is Phil Gyford’s online version of the diary, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year.

"Pepys Visits The Broads"

By Katherine Langrish

June 23rd

This morning to rise early in readiness for our water excursion, myself having slept at the house of the Cardinal in readiness therefore. At seven come the rest of our party, they being The Scoutmaster, the Muffin man, and Long John. Great bustle and to-do, there being a great variety of things to be taken… At Horning did receive our boat the Sea Mist, a fine roomy craft that is to be our home for a sennight. The Muffin man and the Scoutmaster being the only ones not acquainted with petrol engines, we three others did listen avidly to the teachings of the young man from the boat hirers, feigning ignorance thereof. Whereat much merriment, we being all in high spirits.

June 24th

Sunday, and a most fair, pleasant and lazy day. Did rise early, being awakened at five thirty by the Muffin man, shouting ‘Pike! Pike!’ he, being a light sleeper, hearing the whirr of the reel running out. A fine fish, and being landed and killed, was put to soak for the removal of the muddy flavour that doth afflick freshwater fish. After breakfast did sail to Hickling Broad, a prodigious stretch of water and all so a-sparkle with the sun and dotted with white sails that we did cry out in admiration… Caught by the wind and thrust broadside into the weeds, whereat much laughter and quanting and towing off. So with much fishing and sailing passed the rest of this day… Supped off the morning’s pike with much others and did listen to the service broadcast and the music following and so to bed…

June 25th
A glorious day. Returning to Potter Heigham for provisions, we did moor the boat and go in a body to the shoppe, where the Cardinal did borrow a pair of scissors, and the others making a most ungodly rush at me, and holding my arms, the Cardinal did cut off my moustache. The shoppe people very nervous and distrait, thinking they were to witness a falling-out. Sailing round Horsey Mere the engine did conk out, but occasioned no anxiety, there being plenty of room in which to drift. The wildfowl here a most marvellous sight, this being a bird sanctuary. Did find out and remedy the engine trouble, this being a blocked petrol pipe. Meals being taken when we were hungry, they consisting very finely of all the things that men chuse to eat among themselves, most tasty and abundant. The Cardinal’s dog to swim most grandly, which the Cardinal do attribute to her tail not having been docked…


The year? 1928. The author? My grandmother Emmeline (known to all as Linnie), writing from the viewpoint of my grandfather, her husband William (aka ‘Sam Pepys’). He and his brother and three friends had gone for an ‘all boys together’ spree on the Norfolk Broads in a boat called Sea Mist, and my grandmother – who stayed at home – had the inspiration to write it up as a Pepysian spoof and sell it to ‘The Anglers’ News’. It must have done well, as she followed it up next year with a similar article, ‘Pepys Fishes in Lincolnshire’.

To my great delight this article and these pictures recently came to light with the discovery of a long-lost family photo album.  I'd never seen any of them before, and so I hope you'll forgive this very 'family-historical' post.  But here is a picture of my grandmother – my mother’s mother – as a girl in her twenties. She was born in 1892 and her name was Emmeline Mary Sherwood, though everyone called her ‘Linnie’.


Her own grandfather was a Yorkshire farmer: one cast from a rather different mould than the taciturn cliché: he was a poet (though none of his poems seem to have survived), the inventor of a number of farmyard improvements including a mechanism called the drop-platform plough, and – by all accounts – a bit of a dreamer. Maybe having a poet for a grandfather inspired my grandmother; maybe she was encouraged by her mother, a Knaresborough innkeeper’s daughter who went to Oxford in the 1860’s and read theology – without, of course, being awarded a degree. At any rate in 1905, thirteen-year-old Linnie wrote a poem on the death of the actor Henry Irving. It was published in the local paper. The editor told her parents to encourage her to continue writing. And she did.

No more than today, however, could one then rely upon making a living from writing. She trained and worked for Underwood’s as a demonstration typist – a useful skill for a writer, which opened the path for her to work during 1911 as personal secretary to the Earl of Leitrim in Rosapenna, County Donegal. For propriety’s sake she stayed not at the house, but in the Rosapenna Hotel owned by the Earl, and was known to all by the nickname ‘Miss Yorkshire’. Here it is, in a postcard she stuck into the album:

 – and here - possibly in the room pictured below! - she was proposed to by a visiting Malaysian prince, the son of the Sultan of Johor, but refused him, being already engaged to marry my grandfather William Thornber, also of Yorkshire farming stock, who earned a living as one of the early breed of motor mechanics.

Once married and with children, Linnie began writing stories and poems as a way of augmenting the family income. She also wrote plays for the Sheffield Repertory Theatre: the first, ‘Grey Ash’ (a supernatural shocker about an accursed violin) was broadcast by the BBC, and after that several more of her plays were broadcast. There’s apparently even a recording of her reading one of her stories, and how I wish it were possible to track it down.

As her three daughters grew older, perhaps Linnie had more time to write. Her first book ‘Bitter Glory’ was a historical novel about the romance between Chopin and George Sand, and it was published in 1935 under the male pseudonym ‘Leon Thornber’. You can see the rather unlikely cover below on the left, with Sand glancing coquettishly at the portrait of Chopin.

 However, the book is well researched and serious. It’s of its time, of course:

There was a certain apartment, very large and square and lofty, on the Chausée d’Antin, and there it seemed that spring had taken laughing refuge against the cutting winds and flurrying snow of winter’s last despairing stand. A bright fire leaped on the hearth, casting rosy shadows on the pale panelled walls and the polished floor strewn with rich rugs as bright as summer.

We don’t go in for that sort of fanciful flourish these days (but I like it). And it was well received, although for her next books Linnie stuck to places and people she knew well. Her next book, ‘And One Man’, 1936, was based on her own family history.  Here's her hero, Jude Wayland, waking up in a Yorkshire farmhouse on a bitter winter’s morning:

In the big kitchen below him, he could hear Sarah, his brother’s wife, moving about her morning tasks with the maids. Fire irons rattled, dishes and cutlery clattered, the wooden pump on the sink groaned and gushed, there was a rattle of pails in the outer kitchen. Then someone dragged the coal bucket across the tiled floor, and the noise of it set Jude’s teeth on edge. He sat up in bed in sudden fury. ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried, ‘can’t Sarah keep those women quiet? She knows Dad’s ill.’

One of the most colourful characters in the book, Dicky Lismore, is based on her own father Sam Sherwood, a successful commercial traveller with an eye for the ladies. He meets Jude on a train to ‘Stelborough’ (Sheffield), and rattles on in a style which my mother tells me was pretty much verbatim:


‘It’s a rum place, Stelborough. Filthy, but where there’s muck there’s money, and where there’s money, women go in for being soulful and arty. It’s full of music. Some of it is good, too, but not all. I heard the Messiah there once. God, what a row! Half a hundred withered spinsters piping out, ‘Unto us a son is born,’ and then the basses chipped in ‘Wonderful.’ And it would have been wonderful too, judging by the look of them. They were past the bearing age.’


Her third book, ‘Portrait in Steel,’ followed the fortunes of the Sheffield steelworks via the personal history of one Nicholas Brough, who begins as an idealistic youth at the start of the first World War and ends up in the thirties as ‘a damned hard man’. This novel takes in the wartime steel boom, the slump of the twenties, and the resurgence of the steel industry as the Spanish Civil War starts to bite. It was published in 1938, and the whole of the second edition was bombed in its London warehouse during the blitz and went up, literally, in smoke.

After that she never published another novel, although my mother tells me that she did begin writing one. It had a supernatural theme involving black magic, and as she read it out chapter by chapter to the family, my mother and her sisters were agog with excitement to find out what would happen. But they never did. Linnie was always rather superstitious. Somehow she must have managed to scare herself. She stopped writing it, and after her death my mother could not find any trace of the manuscript.

I was only four years old when Linnie died. My memories of her are hazy, and from a child’s viewpoint – her full blue skirt: the Chinese wastepaper basket under her dressing table, the many pots of bottled fruit she made each summer stacked along the shelf in the passage upstairs, and the dressmaker’s dummy which lay on top of her wardrobe like some sort of pallid Egyptian mummy-case. When I stayed overnight and shared her room, I did not dare to turn my back on it.

Here are two publicity shots of her, taken in 1924 and 1930.  I wish mine came out anything like so well...
How much I should like to sit down with Linnie Thornber and talk about her books and my books and the craft we share!  But as that's not possible I’m just very happy to be able to read the account of my Grandad's far-off and golden 1928 holiday, in my Grandma’s delightfully flippant style:

June 27th
Voyaging from Stalham, did find a most delectable spot, where we did stay all day, fishing and engaging in sports ashore. A great catch of fish, but maggots running short, the Cardinal says they are to be cherished in future. A boat anchoring near, did disclose four lovely wenches, whereat we were all delighted, but should have fared better had their parents not been aboard also. The Cardinal and Long John out at twilight to whisper to two of them. Supped on fish and fruit and coffee, an ungodly mixture which liketh us mightily. 
So ends this day.

'A Fashionable Book' by Katherine Langrish

On 26^th December 1662, twenty-nine year old Samuel Pepys met his friend Mr Battersby, who recommended ‘a new book of Drollery in verse called Hudibras.’  

Eager to keep up with the newest things, Pepys promptly went out and bought the first volume for the considerable sum of two shillings and sixpence.  But he was disappointed.  ‘When I came to read it, it is so silly an abuse of the Presbyter-Knight going to the wars, that I am ashamed of it; and by and by meeting at Mr Townsend’s at dinner, I sold it to him for 18d’.  (And that was a loss of a whole shilling!)

HUDIBRAS is a mock epic by Samuel Butler which makes satirical fun of the Puritans and Presbyterians who had so lately held power in England.  It tells the story of Sir Hudibras, a stupid and arrogant knight errant on whom the poet lavishes absurd amounts of praise.  The book was a huge success, with pirated copies and spurious continuations springing up even before the author could bring out the second and third parts.  With Pepys, however, it completely misfired.  He failed to see what was so funny about it.  

By February 1663, though, poor Pepys was having second thoughts and rather regretted his decision.  Since everyone praised the book so highly, perhaps he had been too hasty in getting rid of it?  Off he went: ‘To a bookseller’s on the Strand and bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so set against that which all the world cries up to be an example of wit – for which I am resolved once again to read him and see whether I can find it out or no.’

Perhaps buying the book for a second time made him determined to persist, but it didn’t make the task of wading through it any less of a chore.  And now he became more cautious.  Nine months later, on 28 November, he walked through St Paul’s Churchyard, famous for its bookstalls, ‘and there looked upon the second part of Hudibras; which I buy not, but borrow to read, to see if it be as good as the first, which the world cries so mightily up, though I have tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty…’

But borrowing it made no difference, either to his opinion of the book, or to his obvious desire that – somehow – he might learn to like what everyone else liked.   

For, on December 10^th, having decided to spend the immense sum of three pounds upon books, he went back to the booksellers, ‘and found myself at a great loss what to choose.’  His real temptation was to buy plays, but he could never quite rid himself of the feeling that plays were somehow rather sinful, so at last… ‘I chose Dr Fuller’s Worthys, the Cabbala or collection of Letters of State – and a little book, Delices de Hollande, with another little book or two, all of good use or serious pleasure, and Hudibras, both parts, the book now in greatest Fashion for drollery, though I cannot, I confess, see enough where the wit lies.’

By now, Pepys has bought Hudibras three times – even though he simply cannot get on with it.  This goes to show how success breeds success, of course.  Hands up who bought the last Dan Brown just to find out what all the fuss was about? 

It would be nice to record that Pepys finally managed to enjoy his purchase, but I fear he never did.  At any rate, the last reference he makes to Hudibras is in his diary entry for January 27^th, 1664.  ‘At noon to the Coffee-house, where I sat with Sir William Petty, who is methinks one of the most rational men that I ever heard speak, having all his notions the most distinct and clear; among other things saying that in all his life these three books were the most esteemed and generally cried up for wit in the world – Religio Medici, Osbourne’s Advice to a Son, and Hudibras.’

And there we are left.  Pepys makes no further comment – but can’t you just sense him scratching his head…?

Images:

Portrait of Samuel Pepys by J. Hayls, 1666,   National Portrait Gallery

'Hudibras' courtesy of James Smith Noel Collection