An Ordinary War, by Sue Purkiss

  I have recently published - with Writers Review Publishing -  a book which has been a very long time in the making. It's a novel, not a factual account, inspired by the experiences of my father during the war. He was a member of the British Expeditionary Force which went out to France in 1939, but was routed during the German invasion in May 1940. Most of the force was famously evacuated at Dunkirk, but Dad was one of those who wasn't. He was captured on the way there, and was a prisoner of war for five years.

Like many - probably most - survivors of war, he didn't talk very much about his experiences. Eventually, as he grew older, he began to tell a few stories, mostly funny ones. Towards the end of the last century, I began to write some of them down. We would sit by the fire drinking whisky - me with ginger, him with water - and he would talk about things that happened in the forests of Poland more than sixty years before. Often, the stories were light-hearted, but sometimes his face would darken, and he would say something that hinted at grimmer truths. Once, we were talking about eating - he always ate hearty meals, but never snacked, never put on weight. He said something to the effect of: "Most people don't know what real hunger is. And you don't know what you're really capable of unless you've been properly hungry." And then he lapsed into silence, clearly remembering things that he wasn't going to talk about.

Some time after he died (in 2004), I decided I wanted to write a novel based on his experiences. Because the books I was writing were for children and young people, it seemed natural to aim it at young adults. I soon realised that there were massive gaps in my knowledge about what had happened to him, and I began to do research. I'm not a trained researcher, I'm not an academic - I have a degree, but it's in English, not history. So it was an exploration, perhaps, rather than an investigation.

It turned out to be fascinating, and immensely rewarding.

There was one particular incident that, if I was trying to be poetic, I could say fanned what had been merely a spark into a flame. It came about in this way.

I knew that at the end of the war, Dad had ended up in a camp called Fallingbostel, in north-western Germany, from which he was liberated and then repatriated. In a wonderful book called The Last Escape (by John Nichol and Tony Rennell), I came across a picture of several emaciated prisoners sitting on the ground, smiling and chatting. One of them looked very much like Dad. The photo was attributed to the Imperial War Museum, so I rang them up to see if they could tell me any more about the men in the picture.

They suggested I should make an appointment to go and see someone there, so I did.

They couldn't tell me any more about the identities of the men in the picture, but they did give me useful suggestions about other avenues I could follow. Their first suggestion was to go to the National Archives in Kew. Every prisoner who came home, they said, was supposed to fill in a form, detailing how they'd been treated, which prison camps they'd been in and so on - information which I didn't have. These forms were kept at Kew.

So off I trotted to Kew, and explained what I was after. The assistant warned me that the records were not complete: everyone was supposed to fill in a form, but not everyone did. My heart sank. A trait I shared with my father was a deep dislike of form filling. There wouldn't be one for him, I felt sure. He would somehow have managed to get out of it.

The assistant produced for me a large folder - I expect  that everything's online now, but that wasn't the case then - containing the forms for Dad's section of the alphabet. I turned the pages carefully, aware that this was a precious resource, not really expecting to find one for Dad.

But then, there it was. Reginald Bernard Course. I hadn't expected it to be in his handwriting, instantly recognisable from all the letters I'd received over the years - Dad was a great letter writer. And it wasn't just the handwriting. The answers were brief and to the point, and some were quite brusque. I could absolutely picture Dad, impatient with forms and pen-pushers, wanting to be away, wanting to go home, not interested in making a fuss about what had happened to him. I could almost hear his voice.  I stared at the form, and tears came. I wiped them away surreptitiously, and hoped that no-one had seen.

Brief as the form was, it gave me some answers. It told me where he'd been. It told me he'd tried to escape, three times, once with his old pal Shep, whom I'd taken him to see a few years before.

And it gave me the urge to carry on, to follow the trail, which eventually led to this book: An Ordinary War. I called it that because once, when we were chatting about a family friend called Harold, who regularly went to regimental reunions and loved telling stories about the war, I asked him why he clearly felt very differently about it.

"Ah well," he said. "Harold had a good war. I just had an ordinary war."

If you'd like to read the book, you can buy it here.

Also, I have a new Substack, called Telling Tales. Each Wednesday, I post a (very) short story there: these are all stories which have been, quite literally, written on the back of a postcard - an easy length to read over a cup of coffee! Do take a look - here - and subscribe if you'd like an email notification when a new one drops. It's free!

Shoemakers' Museum: in Street, Somerset by Sue Purkiss

Street is probably best known these days for its cut-price 'shopping village'. Busloads of people come from miles away and leave laden with shopping bags full of bargains from Next, Superdry, M&S, Ecco, Le Creuset, and heaven knows where else.

But for two hundred years it was famous for being the home of Clarks shoes. Remember the sandals we used to wear as children? The desert boots we wore when we grew up? Yes, those - and many other iconic items of footwear. Of course, Clarks shoes still exist and are doing very nicely thank you - but like so many other things, they are no longer made in the UK, though the company's headquarters are still here.

And now there is a museum  - Shoemakers Museum. I went along expecting to see those red sandals and to find out more about the history of shoemaking - but in fact, this rather lovely museum is about much more than shoes: it's very much about the Quaker family which founded the company. A notice early on tells us that: Quakers were committed to equality, integrity and peace. They work for a fairer and more sustainable world. It's more than a faith, it's a way of life. The Quaker beliefs and social networks of the Clark family inspired their work for abolition, suffrage, social justice and refuge. Their values influenced how they ran their business, treated their workers and supported their Somerset community. Quakers believed that God could be found anywhere, not just in a church, and they were consequently perceived to be radicals. They were banned from attending university till 1871, so many of them pursued business careers instead.

This was the case with the two brothers who founded the company, Cyrus and James Clark, about two hundred years ago. They came from a Quaker farming family in Street, which was then a small village. Cyrus had a sheepskin rug business. James had the idea - so simple, but so good! - of using the sheepskin offcuts to make slippers, and he commissioned skilled shoemaker Esau Whitnell to design and make the earliest pairs. At that time, shoes were not made in factories, but by outworkers at home. And so it began.

Those first slippers!

The company quickly became successful, eventually having many other factories both in the UK and abroad - the ground floor of the museum tells the story of the company's expansion. There's an endearing film in which several former workers recall what it was like to work for Clarks. All of them say it was like a family. There were social clubs, and on Fridays, one says, everyone went over the road to the pub. There were disputes, of course. People were paid by piecework, and some got a bit carried away and tried to snaffle the lion's share of work - these were called 'grabbers'. But by and large, it really does sound as if Clarks was a very good place to work. Certainly, when all the UK factories eventually closed towards the end of the 20th century, their employees - many of whom had worked for Clarks their whole lives - felt bereft. But the company couldn't fight the way the world was changing, with globalisation meaning that it was much cheaper to produce shoes in the far east. 

Workers in the canteen.

Where the lower floor tells the story of the family, and also of how shoe manufacturing developed, and of the people who made the shoes, the upper floor is devoted to the shoes themselves.

That iconic red sandal - and the Happy Shoe Company.

Marketing posters

The Clarks family are no longer at the helm of the company they founded. But there's no denying the lasting influence they have had on Street. Concerned for the health and well-being of their workers, they funded the building of houses, a library, and an open-air swimming pool which is still used today. Although the factories have closed now - all manufacturing is now done abroad - the shopping village mentioned earlier was built on their land and bears their name, and provides employment for many local people. You can also find out in the museum about how many of the family members absolutely tried to live their lives in accordance with those Quaker ideals.  They were actively against slavery and in support of votes for women, and they welcomed and housed persecuted people from all over the world.

Display indicating how the whole town developed round the shoe-making business.

And there's another, unexpected facet to the museum. A distant cousin of Cyrus and James, Alfred Gillett (1814-1904), moved to Street from Yeovil, where he had been an ironmonger, in the 1870s. He was a skilled and enthusiastic fossil collector. There were at the time a number of quarries in Street, from which blue lias stone was extracted - it was used in many buildings in the town, including the one in which the museum is housed. Alfred discovered some extraordinary fossils of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, and these are now displayed in a gallery in the museum, where there's also a display devoted to Mary Anning, the Victorian fossil collector from Lyme Regis.

The museum consists of a modern extension sympathetically added to an old building, Abbey Grange, which was bought by the Clarks in 1890, and used for a variety of purposes - including at one time as a home for refugees. It sits in a large green space with an old orchard and mature trees; the museum only opened last year, but I suspect that eventually this space will become a garden. It's a tranquil counterpoint to - or refuge from! - the shopping village next door. 

It's a well-designed building, spacious and pleasant to wander round. And it tells you much more more than you might expect, as all the best museums do.

The Whalebone Theatre, by Joanna Quinn - Sue Purkiss

 

I first read The Whalebone Theatre a couple of years ago. Lots of people had enjoyed it, and I did too, but it probably suffered a bit from something akin to 'tall poppy syndrome': do you know what I mean? It's when you hear so many good things about a book/film/place that when you eventually read it/see it/visit it, there's no way it can live up to all those high expectations. Also, I read very quickly, and I think I probably raced through it for the story and didn't accord it the time and attention it so richly deserved.

So I'm glad that Penny Dolan (another History Girl) mentioned earlier this week that she had read it recently, and, already having it on my Kindle, and being in search of a book to read while away on holiday, I was able to dive straight into it.

Reader, I'm so glad I did. It is a remarkable book. Of course, that's already established - it's been a huge best-seller - but it's one thing people telling you a book is good, and quite another to find it out for yourself.

In case you haven't come across it, it's a family saga, a little bit in the vein of Elizabeth Howard's Cazalet Chronicles, in that it tells the story of the fortunes of a well-to-do (to start off with) family, starting just after the end of the first world war, and finishing after the second. In particular, it focuses on Cristabel, a small child at the beginning, a grown woman by the end. But no character is neglected: each is gradually revealed in all his/her complexity - all reveal hidden depths, or indeed levels of shallowness. 

And because of the range of characters, Joanna Quinn is able to explore what is happening on both the national and international stages, in what seems like a perfectly believable and natural way. Old family friend Colonel Perry is key in this. He is a significant figure in one of the intelligence organisations, so he knows what's going on, and is also able to propel some of the other characters into particularly interesting places - notably, into wartime France. He's cool and perceptive, and clearly very fond of the Seagrave family - an enigmatic, pivotal character, though at first he seems like a bit of a bystander.

The writing is subtle and beautiful. I loved the way the author described the slowly unfolding relationship between Flossie, Cristabel's younger half-sister, and a German prisoner of war. They are two gentle characters, and theirs is not a dramatic affair, but it's a very moving one. And the descriptions of the Dorset landscape are simply gorgeous. (I'm sorry for not quoting in illustration of this, but useful as Kindle is, it doesn't easily lend itself to finding quotes.)

But it's not all gentle. Cristabel is a wild creature, prickly and tough: not surprisingly as her mother died at her birth, and her stepmother, Rosalind, ignores her as much as she can. The last section of the book, when she becomes an SOE agent in France, is very powerful - particularly towards the end, when she is searching for her beloved brother, Digby, in Paris, as the allies are marching to liberate the city. There were tears, I must confess, and it's a while since a book has made me cry.

Apart from this being a really good read and a beautifully written book, though, it made me think how valuable fiction can be in shining a spotlight (appropriate: I haven't mentioned about Cristabel's interest in the theatre) on historical events. Because history isn't just about the figures who set great events in motion: it's also about the countless millions of ordinary people who are affected - and often suffer - as a result. People sometimes ask writers which book they would like to have written: well, I would most certainly love to have written this one.

Hannah More, by Sue Purkiss

 Twelve or so years ago, I started a creative writing class in Cheddar, where I live. I tried out several venues, one of which was a house owned by the Parish Council, named Hannah More Cottage. It's a pleasant looking old cottage with whitewashed walls, small windows and a pretty garden: the roof used to be thatched, but now it's tiled. Inside, there's a large room where meetings take place, and where, at the beginning of May, local artists exhibit as part of an annual - and very successful - arts trail. There's also a much smaller room, with book shelves and wooden settles on either side of a fireplace.

It's called after Hannah More because this is where, in 1789, she started a village school. Miss More (after reading about the sort of person she was, I think she would find it overly familiar of me to call her 'Hannah') was born in Bristol, but now lived in nearby Wrington. She was an experienced school teacher, having taught at a school her father had founded in Bristol, and also at schools in Somerset which she ran with her sisters. She was also a philanthropist and a poet, and wrote moral and religious tracts - which sold in large numbers: a series of tracts written in 1796 exhorted the poor  'to rely on virtues of contentment, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence for the British Constitution, hatred of the French, and trust in God and the kindness of the gentry' (Wikipedia) - but still managed to sell over two million copies.

She must have visited Cheddar and been horrified by the poverty she saw there, because she suggested to her friend William Willberforce MP (famous for championing the abolition of slavery) that he should go there and see the benighted state of the poor. Equally appalled, he agreed that something must be done, and offered to finance a school if Miss More would organise it. So, in 1789, the cottage was given a new thatched roof and presumably a lick of whitewash, and 140 children gathered to inaugurate her Sunday school. The part nearest the camera had formerly been an ox shed, but now became the classroom: the front section was a cottage, for the use of the headmistress, a Mrs Baker from Bristol. People complained about this radical idea of educating the poor, but she declared to the Bishop of Bath and Wells: her schools 'taught only 'such coarse works as may fit them [their charges] for servants. I allow no writing for the poor. My object is... to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.' (Also Wikipedia.) School must have been a lot of fun.

Hannah More Cottage

Whatever it was like, the school was soon well established. When she died in 1833, she left £50 towards the cost of a new school in Cheddar, next to the cottage. The Marquis of Bath (whose family still own Cheddar Caves and part of Cheddar Gorge, as well as Longleat) contributed £100 and the rest of the cost was raised by public subscription. This became the National School, only finally closing in 1964, when the Kings of Wessex School opened.

The National School, which followed on from Hannah More's Cottage. It's now been converted into flats.

There is a reproduction of her portrait hanging in the cottage, and I used to look at it and think that she looked like a rather sweet, kindly old lady. Having read more about her, I'm not so sure about that. She was certainly extremely capable, but she was also quite formidable. 

In her youth, she was engaged for six years to one William Turner. He finally broke the engagement, but agreed to compensate her by paying her an annuity of £200 a year for the rest of her life - and it was this that gave her the freedom to pursue her literary interests. She spent a good deal of time in London, meeting Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick (who penned the forward to a play she wrote), and many others. She was anti-slavery, and she became a member of a group of literary women caleed the Bluestockings. But she wasn't a feminist. She refused to read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and turned down an offer of honorary membership of the Royal Society of Literature, seeing her 'sex alone as a disqualification.'

Hannah More was buried in this grave, with her four sisters, none of whom seem to have married. The churchyard is in Wrington, where Miss More lived for many years. It's a lovely village, which probably hasn't changed that much since her time there.

This is a very brief look at the life of someone who contributed enormously to the lives of many children, in Cheddar and in the other schools she founded with her sisters. Who knows how many lives were influenced by her? - and hopefully not only to become sevants. 

She isn't the figure that, based on very little evidence, I had imagined. And this makes me think about the process of creating characters based on real historical figures. Suppose I had been thinking or writing a novel based on her life. (Full disclosure: I'm not.) I could write a book based on the things she did, the people she met and so on: I could make suppositions about how her broken engagement affected her and changed the course of her life.

But there would really be no way of knowing how close I had got to the truth, to the person she really was. And so would it be fair, to take what I know of her, and weave a story round that, knowing that, in all probability, she was a far less sympathetic character than the one I had created?

It's a tricky one.

(Apologies for the erratic font sizing. This seems to happen when you copy and paste quotes, and I've tried but failed to sort it out.)

Cawdor Castle: by Sue Purkiss

 In the early summer of 2022, we were staying in the Cairngorm National Park. It was our first time in the north-west of Scotland, and we were wowed by the ancient Caledonian Forest, the gaunt hills, the sparkling rivers, and the variety of wildlife. However, on a day that was forecast to be wet and windy (in fact it was the latter but not the former), we decided to find somewhere that would offer shelter if necessary. So we went to Cawdor Castle.

All we knew about the place was that Macbeth, at the beginning of Shakespeare's play, was told by the witches that he would become Thane of Cawdor - and thereafter, of course, King of Scotland. So we were expecting somewhere dark and forbidding, probably half-ruined, and naturally haunted by ravens croaking in a doom-laden sort of way.

But the castle turned out to be none of those things. Built of grey stone, with a turreted square tower at its centre, the house is softened by the lawns, gardens and woodland that surround it. Inside, it has the feel of a comfortable home, in which you can imagine a family living happily - though reminders of a dark and bloody past do emerge. And in fact, we were told that the Dowager Countess, who manages the house, does live there in the winter, and even sleeps in the centuries-old scarlet four-poster. "Sooner her than me," commented the volunteer who told us this with a shudder. 

You enter through the drawing room, which is warm and colourful, with comfortable looking chairs and sofas and lots of lamps. There are also lots of portraits, which of course you don't tend to find in the average family home. In an alcove on a staircase there is a bold piece of wall-art, which at a second glance you see is a fan-shaped arrangement of nineteen rifles. (Why only nineteen? What happened to the twentieth?) I imagine these are a consequence of the aristocracy's strange desire to kill great quantities of wildlife, rather than earlier generations' propensity for killing their enemies, or sometimes their relations. But I could well be wrong...

The house is filled not only with interesting objects which generations of Campbells have collected on their travels - pictures, ornaments, sculptures, porcelain - but also with family photographs and some very lovely modern art. The tower is the oldest part of the castle, and was built with a view to defending the castle against enemies and marauders; but now, the top floor is a relatively small, very pleasant living room.

But go down the narrow winding staircase, and you will find this reminder of the building's long history. The castle was founded round about the end of the fourteenth century. Tradition has it that the site was chosen - bizarrely - by a donkey, which was set free and allowed to wander where it would. In the place where it stopped, there the castle would be built. And so it was.

I suppose it's just possible that this may not be entirely true - but what is certainly true is that the tower was built around a tree. The evidence is in the picture below - the tree is still there. It was said to be a hawthorn, but when samples were analysed recently, it was found to be a holly. This seems to make more sense: holly has a place in myth and legend. Certainly it has been credited with protecting the castle from destruction at various dangerous times in its history.

And dangerous times there certainly were. Cosy and comfortable as the castle seems now (apart from this basement, which has a bijou little dungeon tucked away on one side - just the place for unwelcome visitors), the family that lived there were, over the centuries, involved in some very nasty goings-on indeed. For example - in the early sixteenth century, the heiress was a child called Muriel. She was kidnapped by the Earl of Argyll, and, the guidebook tells us: 'For future recognition, she was branded on the hip by her nurse with a key. and the top joint of the little finger of her left hand was bitten off.' When she was twelve, she was married off to Argyll's younger son, Sir John Campbell. Surprisingly, the marriage was apparently a happy one. But this wasn't the end to the drama: Sir John's sister was married to one Lachlan Maclean. Wearying of his wife, he had her chained naked to a tidal skerry; she was supposed to drown, but was in fact rescued by passing fishermen. Sir John then knifed his brother-in-law to death in Edinburgh. He was pardoned, but deemed it a good moment to retreat to Muriel's far-distant ancestral home in Cawdor.

And that was only the beginning. There's far more blood-letting, feuding and killing people in hideously brutal ways - much too much to include in this post.

And talking of blood-letting, what of Macbeth? Was he really the Thane of Cawdor? We asked a guide. She sighed. One might almost have thought she'd been asked this question a million times before. "No. Macbeth was a real person - but he lived long before the castle of Cawdor was built, long before there was even a thane. What's more, there's quite a lot of evidence that he was a VERY NICE PERSON. He and his wife were very well-loved."

So there.

We certainly shouldn't leave Cawdor without a visit to the gardens, which are quite beautiful -see also the top picture. And the woodlands are lovely too, with rhododendrons and some very old trees, and a stream running through. Times have changed since the castle's founding - and in some ways - though not all - very much for the better. (I do wonder how the peasants were getting on while the aristocrats were whirling around killing each other...)

PS For anyone who's enjoying the new Netflix series, The Empress, you might be interested in this post which I wrote about her six years ago, after we'd been to an exhibition about the Empress Sisi in Vienna.

England's Wild West - Sue Purkiss

 Exmoor is easily bypassed by travellers to the south-west: most people head straight on down to Devon and Cornwall, to Dartmoor and Bodmin - probably without realising what a varied and beautiful area they're missing.

The Exmoor coast

Exmoor became a National Park in 1954. Roughly three quarters of it is in Somerset: the remaining quarter is in Devon. It sits on the west coast of England, and is nineteen miles across at its widest, and twelve miles north to south at its deepest. It has a stunningly beautiful coastline (which forms part of the South West Coast Path), steep wooded combes (narrow valleys), energetic, noisy rivers and streams, temperate rain forests (where lichens and ferns grow on trees, and the grass underfoot is soft and starred with wildflowers) - and it has, of course, the moor itself, the home of graceful red deer and sturdy Exmoor ponies: bare, windblown, desolate on a grey day, starkly beautiful on a sunny one.

It's not only modern visitors who have bypassed Exmoor. Even the Romans appear to have taken a look and decided not to bother - there is little evidence of their activity in this area. It's not an easy terrain to farm, the stone is not the kind you can easily build with, and the weather is challenging. It's gentler on the west side, but in the east, spring is a couple of weeks later than elsewhere. And up until the nineteenth century, there were few dwellings where you could take shelter. No wonder gangs like the Doones could roam with impunity. Even today, there are only a few small towns and villages scattered across vast areas of what looks like wilderness.

We've visited the area for many years - my mother-in-law loved it, and moved near Porlock to live in her later years. But over the last couple of years, we've spent more time on the eastern side, not far from Simonsbath, Withypool and Exford. And this is the heart of the original Exmoor Forest: a large area claimed by the Crown after the Conquest. Like the other royal forests - but probably even more so - it wasn't actually a forest. At the centre of the moor is a spindly, wind-bent tree called the Hoar Oak. It's one of the very few trees there is on the open moor, and it clearly struggles to survive. But there were deer, and they belonged to the Crown - even if the Crown, far away in London, seldom bothered to claim them. For hundreds of years, the moor was administered by Wardens. There were even two female Wardens, Sabina Pecche (from 1295-1308) and Margaret Boevy, who took over from her husband and was the Warden for eight years at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was her husband, James, who built Simonsbath House in 1654, said to be the only house in the Forest till 1815. (S H Burton, Exmoor, publ 1952)

The Barle valley

We have a favourite walk which starts at Simonsbath. It goes along the River Barle, one of those busy, bubbly rivers that dances over rocks and pebbles, attracting dippers, grey wagtails and dragonflies among many other creatures. At the beginning, the path is edged by extraordinarily gnarled and twisted beech trees, such as you see all over Exmoor: I'll come back to them later. The woods are soon left behind, and on either side of the valley swoop low, bare hills. At the right time of year you may hear cuckoos and curlews, and you may well see deer grazing in the distance - till one among them lifts its head, sensing danger (us), and off they move with a swift and graceful lope.

The Barle again, near to where the remains of the mine workings are.

After a little while, as you approach an Iron Age fort called Cow Castle, you may notice on the left a few oddly shaped humps. Last year, three people were sitting here chatting. They told us that two of them were about to put on wet suits and explore some nearby mine workings - and that the odd humps were all that remained of some mineworkers' cottages.

We were surprised. This had always seemed to us an intensely rural landscape: it was difficult to imagine industrial paraphernalia in this setting. Yes, our new friends told us: in the nineteenth century there had been a man called Sir John Knight, who had bought the whole Forest in 1818. His son had been convinced that there was iron to be found - and so there was, but not, as it turned out, in sufficient quantity to be worth getting out of the ground.

Bluebells and imported rocks in the Knights' wild garden

This rang a bell with me. Back in Simonsbath, the car park was at the foot of wooded slopes rising up above the river. It was spring, and there were bluebells, pink and yellow primroses and white wood anemones. There were paths through the trees, and a few huge white stones, rather artistically placed. A nearby information board explained that this had been planned as a sort of wild garden by the Knight family, and work was under way to restore it.

Intrigued, I found out more - chiefly from a book about Exmoor published in 1952, by a teacher and lover of Exmoor called S H Burton. Sir John Knight was an industrialist who owned foundries in the West Midlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the middle of the industrial and agrarian revolutions. The pressure was on to make better use of the land - to grow more, for an increased population. Meanwhile, the Crown commissioners wanted more timber to build ships for the navy after the depredations of the Napoleonic Wars. So when Sir Thomas Acland put in an application to renew his lease as Warden of Exmoor, it was turned down; the commissioners decided the ancient Royal Forest should be split up and sold, and trees should be planted there.

The Hoar Oak, which is supposed to be in the middle of the moor.

Well, the first part happened: the second was more of a challenge. If the commissioners had trekked across the Chains to see the valiant, but stunted, Hoar Oak, they would have known that these moors were not a natural home for trees. But they didn't. Sir John managed to buy up most of the land, and he determined to make it profitable.

It wasn't easy, and he encountered a lot of failure along the way. Early on, he built a dozen farms, and encouraged his tenants to break the ground and try out some of the new methods, such as rotational farming. They needed to bring in lots of lime - not found locally - to counter the natural acidity of the soil; it was expensive, it was hard, and it didn't really work. The first lot of tenants were unsuccessful. But, undeterred, the Knights - John and later his son Frederic - brought in local men who understand the land, and they learned to work with it, focusing on livestock rather than on trying to grow unsuitable crops.

A hedge that got away.

And back to those extraordinary beech trees. I have seen and admired them, in a vague sort of way, for over thirty years. But I've only just discovered their history. It was Robert Smith, Frederic Knight's innovative land agent, who had the idea of planting beech hedges as a protection from the weather. Beech hedges hang on to their dead leaves all through the winter, until the new leaves appear, quite late in spring. So they form a barrier. Thousands of beech seedlings were planted, and the hedges were properly, painstakingly, tended, with the shoots being partially cut through and then laid, creating an effective screen against the weather.

In recent years, that practice has become less popular - it's expensive and time-consuming. Some - many - hedges are still lain in the traditional way, but others are cut by machine, and still others have escaped: they're now beech trees, rather than tamed hedges. But because of the way they were originally planted - on banks, often faced with stone - you get these extraordinary twisted roots - and the banks are home to tiny ferns, primroses, mosses and lichens: quite lovely.

'Fourfields' - picture by Jo Minoprio

So another thing to thank the Knights for. And one last word on that. We recently went to see the work of an artist called Jo Minoprio, who has a gallery near Landacre Bridge. She does beautiful paintings, but also extraordinary photographs, many of which were of what appeared to be a small wood, at a place which Jo told us was called Three Combes Foot. We went to see it: it's high up, in a pretty bleak part of the moor. It's not, in fact, a wood. It was originally created as a sheep pound - by the Knights: one of their farms, Larkbarrow, is nearby. It was a space surrounded by a hedge, which gave it some protection against snow and other forms of inclement weather. But it's no longer in use, and so the trees have grown, and now it's like entering a hushed and peaceful glade: quite extraordinary.

The sheep pound - I tried, but it was difficult to take a picture which did this place justice.

It fascinates me that a landscape which looks so wild is actually not so wild after all: in fact much of it has been shaped by two generations of one family, quite recently. Before the Knights came to Exmoor, few people lived or farmed there. And they didn't conquer the land: much of it is still wild. But they loved Exmoor, and they did the best for it. and what became of them? Well, sadly, Frederic's son - also Frederic - died at the age of twenty eight, and that took the heart out of his father. He and his wife are buried at Simonsbath. After doing so much for Exmoor, they slipped away into history.

But now their wild garden is being restored, and they are remembered again. They achieved a great deal. 

But I'm quite glad that the iron mines didn't work out.

Adventures in plant hunting - Sue Purkiss

 Some of you may recall that I have an interest in the history of plants, and particularly in the extraordinary adventures of the plant hunters. (To find previous posts on the subject, just put: Sue Purkiss, plant hunters, in the search box to the right.) So much so that my last book, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, draws on real histories to tell the story of a boy who goes plant-hunting in the Himalayas at the end of the eighteenth century. The plant hunters were - and are - incredibly brave (some might say foolhardy!) and resourceful, so it struck me that they would be an excellent subject for a children's book - and so, I think, it proved.

So when I noticed that among the luminaries appearing at the Wells Literature Festival was one Ambra Edwards, promoting her new book The Plant Hunter's Atlas, I of course booked a ticket and sallied forth, a week ago, to find out more. 

The book is published in association with Kew, and is lusciously illustrated with botanical paintings. As the title suggests, it is organised into geographical areas, and tells of the plants which were discovered (by the west: of course, indigenous people already knew all about them, and in many cases were indispensable in helping the emissaries from Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society in their mission to find new plants) - and the people who discovered them. So we meet old friends such as Sir Joseph Banks, who travelled with Captain Cook on his voyage to discover the Great Southern Continent, botanising enthusiastically, and fraternising possibly even more enthusiastically with the inhabitants of Otaheite (Tahiti), and on his return to England headed up Kew and was responsible for promoting the careers of scientists like the astronomers William Herschel and his sister, Caroline, as well as sending out plant hunters far and wide, in search of plants which would be useful for economic purposes as well as to ornament private gardens. Here too is David Douglas, who must have been one of the most unlucky plant hunters ever. He botanised in North America, and was subjected to storms, shipwrecks, dishonest guides, and every other plant-hunting misfortune you can think of, finally meeting a horrible end when he fell into a pit with sharp spikes at the bottom, designed to capture wild animals.

One of the gorgeous illustrations.

There are many more, but we are also introduced to some extraordinary plants. Take, for instance, the Corpse Lily, found in Sumatra. This produces 'the largest single flower in the world', which can grow to four feet across and weigh up to ten kg. It's a parasite, growing on the Indian chestnut vine: it takes more than two years to flower, and then the bloom - which smells of rotting meat - lasts for a mere week. Then there's Davidia Involucrata, the handkerchief tree, of which a single specimen was found by Dr Augustine Henry in China in 1888. He sent seeds back to Kew, but they failed to germinate, so in 1899 a young man called Ernest Wilson was sent to China to track down this one tree. He had to contend with an outbreak of bubonic plague and the Boxer Rebellion, as well as mountains and river rapids - but, astonishingly, he managed to find the site of the tree from a mere cross on a map: only to find that it had been cut down to clear the site for a smart new wooden house. Fortunately, a few weeks later he came across a small group of the precious trees. Imagine the relief!

The book is a treat, which I am still reading through - and Ambra's presentation was brilliant. But by coincidence, a few days ago another plant history treat came my way, when some friends invited us to go with them to The Newt in Somerset, an extraordinary garden created by South African businessman Koos Bekker, under the direction of Italo-French architect Patrice Taravella. We all know about Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, who created gardens in the 18th century which involved the digging out of lakes, the rerouting of rivers - even the relocation of entire villages. Things these days are not usually done on this kind of scale, and this is why The Newt is so striking - it very much is a creation of that degree of magnitude. Everything is beautifully done, from the newly built tithe barn made out of warm golden stone which provides the reception area, to the curving elevated path made out of metal which takes you through the woods, to the gardens themselves - which of course were not at their best this week, but must look spectacular in spring and summer.

But the treat I mentioned lies at the end of that metal walkway. Inside a building which is tucked into the hillside, with a living roof, is a museum of garden history. And it's fascinating. Of course, it has extraordinary stories to tell. But it's the way it tells them too: it uses technology in a breathtakingly innovative way, so that in a relatively short space of time, you learn an enormous amount about garden history - from the Romans, through Islamic gardens, taking in Chinese and Japanese gardens, Eurpoean and British ones, right up to today. I'll let the pictures tell a little of the story.

The entrance, with tithe barn, cider-making on the left, and a fire in the foreground to ward off the chill.

The Parabola, with drystone terraces and lots of apple trees.

The vegetable garden. Love the flowerpots.

The Japanese room in the museum of garden history. You walk on a pond...

A Wardian case. Was very interested to see this - until the invention of the Wardian case, 

it was a very dodgy enterprise to try and transport living plants across oceans.

Beautifully displayed garden tools - here, flower pots and pliers.

D H Lawrence, Shipley Hall, and a sad irony: Sue Purkiss

 When I was a child, we lived on the edge of a quite large town called Ilkeston, which is in Derbyshire, and which used to be a mining town. At that time the nearest pits had closed down, but there were still quite a few miners who still worked down the pit, but now had to travel. Probably the biggest employer was Stanton Ironworks, where one of my grandfathers had once worked. I'm reminded of Stanton often, because wherever you go in this country, if you look down you will see a draincover which is stamped Stanton PLC. There's a particularly pretty one at the Bristol dockyard where the SS Great Britain is moored.

Anyway, on Sundays we often used to go for a walk in Shipley Wood. There was a rather stately entrance on Heanor Road, and then you walked along a wide driveway, with trees on either side. To the left there were interesting dips, or holes, with a thick layer of dead leaves at the bottom. I don't know what had caused them - perhaps subsidence: more of that later. Whatever their origin, they were great for playing. You could hurtle down into them, or you could play hide and seek - they were excellent. In the spring, there were masses of bluebells, and we would take bunches home and put them in jamjars. I was always a little worried by the fierce signs up all over the place saying: NCB (National Coal Board): TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! But nobody else seemed to bother and nobody ever got arrested.

If you carried on along the driveway, there would soon be a sharp change in the scenery, from sylvan to industrial. For this was the site of Shipley Colliery. It was no longer in use, but everything was still there: the winding gear, black and stark against the sky; a dark slagheap; and a gloomy reservoir. This must have been securely fenced off, because you never saw anyone there. It was ugly, lifeless, a place to walk quickly past.

The road carried on, past a rather nice looking house which had once been a lodge, and then up a hill. To the left, my mother told us, was the site of Shipley Hall. There was nothing left of it now, she said, but she remembered that when she was a child, there were garden parties or summer fetes there, and she had been to one. They were probably held for the miners' families: there's a description of something similar in Women In Love, by D H Lawrence; as I recall it, there's a double drowning in an ornamental lake shortly after it.

Shipley Hall

He may have pictured the scene at Shipley Hall itself, becuse Lawrence came from Eastwood, just a few miles away. He certainly used it as the setting for Connie and Clifford's house in Lady Chatterley's Lover: like the Miller Mundys, who owned Shipley, Clifford Chatterley was a mine owner. Once, when I was older, I was with my parents walking near the site of the hall, and we met an old man who remembered Lawrence. He shook his head and said disapprovingly, "He were a dutty bugger, he were. He put a lot of people from round here in his books, and they didn't like it."

Lawrence wasn't always overly complimentary about the locals, either. In Lady C's Lover, he says: 

'This country had a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. Connie wondered what else they had: certainly neither eyes nor minds. The people were as haggard, shapeless and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. Only there was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious.'

So, yes - thanks for that, Dave. Perhaps that's why he's not as popular round Ilkeston as, say, Hardy is in Dorset, or Jane Austen in Bath and Hampshire. Or perhaps it's just that his books, despite their many remarkable qualities, have gone out of fashion.

But the main reason Shipley Hall has always interested me is because of the sad irony of its ending. The hall, and the Miller Mundys, had been associated with coal mining since the 18th century. They knew about it, and they had been careful to ensure that no tunnelling took place underneath the house. In the early twentieth century, they were said, by the standards of the time, to have been good owners - hence, perhaps, the garden parties for the local children. But in the early twenties, the house, the land and the mine were sold to Shipley Colliery Company. The company decided to mine the rich seams of coal underneath the house. They planned to do it carefully, but then came the General Strike, and all work stopped. As a result, uneven subsidence damaged the house, and eventually it had to be knocked down.

The thought haunts me that this once-gracious house was destroyed by the very industry which had created the wealth of the family who had owned it. Perhaps this is because it echoes a bigger truth: that we have plundered our planet - for coal, and many other things - and are only just realising that in delving for wealth, we are in danger of destroying our home.

To end on a happier note: in Lawrence's novel, Clifford, looking at the wood, says to Connie: '"I want this wood perfect... untouched...Except for us, it would go... it would be gone already, like the rest of the forest. (He believes it to be a remnant of Sherwood.) One must preserve some of the old England!"'

But he got that wrong. The landowners did go, but the land - and the wood - have been preserved. The scars of industry have been cleared away, and the estate is now Shipley Country Park - a beautiful open space for the descendants of those 'shapeless and dreary' common people. (Of whom, incidentally, DHL was originally one.) Let's hope it's a lesson learned. 

The Clara Vine series, by Jane Thynne: Sue Purkiss

I first came across the Clara Vine books a couple of years ago. I’ve just re-read them and caught up the newest one, Solitaire - and I think I’ve enjoyed them even more this time round.

The story - because it is one story, albeit with different, wholly engrossing episodes - begins in Berlin in 1933 with the arrival of a young Englishwoman, Clara Vine. A rather unsuccessful actress, she has heard that the film industry in Berlin is expanding, and, as this coincides with a wish to put a distance between herself and an unwanted suitor, she decides to try her luck. 

She comes to the attention of Goebbels, the minister for propaganda who also has responsibility for the film industry. Through him she meets his wife, and through her the wives of the other men at the top of the Nazi Party - a potentially useful situation which is not lost on British intelligence. Clara, in short, becomes a spy  at the heart of the Nazi war machine.

There’s so much to enjoy in these books. Clara is a fascinating character. Jane Thynne explores the elements of her upbringing and character which have led her to be a good spy: her reserve, her self-sufficiency, her ability to inhabit different personas, to hide behind a mask. She’s a subtle creation: she isn’t an expert in self-defence, she doesn’t get into fights: she survives on her instinct, her intelligence and her quick wits. She’s kind and loyal, and she is in some ways vulnerable. She’s a character you come to care for. 

Each book centres on a mystery of some kind - a murder, a missing person, a plot that has to be uncovered. But all this is set very firmly in the context of Berlin in the years of the Nazi ascendancy. Clara is right at the centre of things, so through her Jane Thynne can tell us how they managed to coerce a whole population to go along with their awful creed: how they convinced the people that they were under threat from enemies within and without, and that the only chance of salvation was to trust in a charismatic leader. It makes chilling reading - more so now than when I first read the books a few years ago. 

The research behind all this is formidable. Jane Thynne is immensely knowledgeable and informative about life in Germany during this period: both the big historical events and the minutiae of everyday life, down to the name of a popular lipstick, the details of the food people ate, the cut of a uniform. She weaves actual incidents - the capture of two spies which almost destroyed the British intelligence operation in Europe, a plot to kidnap the Windsors, Eva Braun’s suicide attempts - into Clara’s story, and does this with such skill that it seems completely likely and natural. 

I think she’s a really excellent writer. I’m astonished that no-one’s made the books into a TV series as yet, and it surprises me that they aren’t far better known. Black Roses is the first one, and it's an absolute cracker.

Lascaux IV - by Sue Purkiss

So my post last month - here - got us as far as the entrance to Lascaux. It's a surprisingly modern building, considering it's the gateway to a cave whose glorious paintings were created 20 000 years ago - but still, never mind. Let's go in, and find out more.

When the artists were decorating the pale limestone walls of the cave with their images of horses, bulls, aurochs, bison, and stags, this countryside would have looked very different. The planet was still in the grip of an ice age. Down here, in the balmy south, the summers would have been quite pleasant - but the winters were bitterly cold. It was too cold for forests. Great herds of animals roamed the land, providing food for the hunters. The sewing needle had been invented, and the people made well-fitting clothes out of skins to keep themselves warm. There were fish in the rivers and berries growing on the low-lying scrub. The people made instruments - flutes and pipes, drums perhaps, which they played at their gatherings and festivals. Some of these, almost certainly, celebrated the creation of new art works deep in the caves. Why did they do something so hard as to paint in places where it must have been very difficult to create enough light to see by? What drove them? Something of the same impulse, I imagine, that made mediaeval masons build soaring cathedrals - but I don't know. Nobody does: we can only guess.

Anyway, the decorating of caves went on for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. And then it stopped. Maybe people's lives changed: maybe it was the land itself that changed. Certainly at some stage, the entrance to the cave was blocked. The artists and their work, the very caves themselves, disappeared into the shadowy spaces of the past: no-one remembered them any more. In our arrogance, we modern humans patronisingly thought of those early people as primitives, whose only purpose was to survive. You only have to look at their paintings to see how wrong that was.

`A beautifully smooth lamp found in the caves. It would probably have been filled with animal fat, with a wick made of juniper ( which doesn't smoke).

Then, in the early twentieth century, there was a storm on a hillside above the small town of Montignac in the Dordogne region of France. A tree was uprooted and a small hole appeared. Farmers frowned when they noticed this; it was a danger to their animals. A goat even disappeared down it. So they blocked it up with branches to make it safe, and forgot about it.

Then, in 1940, when war was raging across the planet, four teenage boys, out with their dog, Robot, heard him barking. When they went to investigate, they saw that he was furiously digging away at the hole, making it bigger. They looked at each other. Curious. They dropped a stone down through the hole.

It was a long time before they heard it hit the bottom.

Over the next few days, they brought makeshift lamps and ropes and let themselves down through the hole into what turned out to be a great cave. Imagine their excitement when they played the light from the lamps over the walls, and caught glimpses of the paintings, still vivid and life-like after so many millenia! This is an area of painted caves - they knew what they had found.

Well, after that, the experts came, and eventually the cave, which became known as Lascaux,  was opened up to the public. Of course it was immensely popular - but its success came at a price. The equilibrium of the cave, which hadn't been disturbed for so many thousands of years, was now destroyed: the paintings began to deteriorate. In 1963 the decision was taken that, to save it, the cave must be closed to everyone except a very few researchers and scientists. In 1983 a replica was opened - Lascaux 11. Marcel Ravidat, one of the four boys who had discovered the cave and had been involved with it ever since, came to see it. After examining it minutely, he declared that he was satisfied - the replica was worthy of its great original!

Then, in December 2016, Lascaux IV was opened. This was the exhibit we were going to see.

We were only there for a few hours, and the story of the creation of this place is incredibly complex. I don't pretend to understand it all. As far as I can gather, although the paintings themselves are produced with absolute accuracy, the layout of the cave is not. You might think that a replica can never be authentic, can only be a pale facsimile of the original. Well - I've never seen the original, so I can't judge. But - before we entered the 'cave', our guide gazed at us all solemnly, and said: "I can promise you - what you are about to see is going to absolutely BLOW YOUR SOCKS OFF!"

And he was absolutely right. What you see is stunning. The paintings are beautiful, created with an economy and perfection of line and colour that would be impressive in any age. And the artists used the contours of the rock to create a 3D effect in some places; a sense of power and movement. New discoveries are being made all the time - for instance, I had read that charcoal fragments had been found in the cave, which were probably used by the artists - a detail I had used in my story. Not true: carbon dating has shown that this charcoal was thousands of years more recent than the era of the paintings, which were done using only natural mineral pigments, which cannot - so far - be dated.

But there is still much more that isn't known. Exactly why the paintings were done is the obvious unknown. Another is the meaning of the ubiquitous patterns of dots and small rectangles.

Yet this museum answers an enormous number of questions. And above all, it sets before us this beautiful art. I've only touched on what there is to know about Lascaux: I'd love to tell you the stories of the four discoverers of the cave. And you might be interested to know how my own story, my current work-in-progress, ties in with that of the cave. But I won't try your patience any longer. I'll just put in some pictures, which will speak more than adequately for themselves: and I'll strongly recommend that you visit the museum if you get the chance. And see if, like me, you then become fascinated to know more about the artists and their people: these early - but not inferior - versions of ourselves.