The Little Big Things - Louisa Young

As a history undergraduate at Cambridge in the early eighties, I learnt a lot about Balkans, Corn Laws,  Reforms Acts, Causes of Wars. I had no female teacher after the age of 16. I loved history, but it really was the wars and the laws, the high thoughts and the doings of great men. If I had then the knowledge curiosity and confidence that I have now, I would have said: I've had it with the economic, can we do some social now?  Enough men, bring me women. No more big things please - I want the small. 

By the small, I mean of course the big small. I mean, while Mussolini was making those speeches, what were the farmers' eating? When all those Jews were waiting on the Polish border, what did they sit on? Those cholera figures - so what did those parents actually do, when symptoms appeared in their children? Who did you turn to? What colour was it? What was the greeting commonly used? When did you get your money? How did you clean your bed?

As novelists we need the small - but it's not just that. It's not irrelevant. It's not just amusing, or a curiosity. It's the finding of a voice for those who had none. This is why we need Sarah Waters, single-handedly, it sometimes feels, reintroducing the lesbian to a history which entirely left her out, blanked her, removed her even. Radclyffe Hall's line 'That night they were not apart' is no substitute for a true and proper set of accounts for innumerable lives lived in shadow - or at least loves loved in shadow. And she gives us housework. God, the joy of lying in a warm delicious bath, listening to the washing machine tumbling my sheets, reading in The Paying Guests exactly how much elbow grease and copper-boiling and boiler-twiddling and lugging and bleach and mangling and hanging women were putting into washing sheets in houses just like mine, ninety years ago. 

Jo Baker, in her superb novel Longbourn, based on Pride and Prejudice, describes the maid, Sarah, cast down not only at Lizzie Bennet's carelessness with mud and her petticoats, but at the time of the month when all five daughters, Mrs Bennet, the maids and the cook are - literally - on the rag, at the same time as happens in households of women - and it's Sarah's job to deal with those rags. Esther Freud, in Mr Mac and Me, tells us so movingly and delicately about a small boy's response to his mother's miscarriage. These everyday historical things, tragic but small, normal but fascinating, novelists can give us back, when official history - or mainstream literature (ie, most literature) chose to, or had to,  ignore it. I LOVE that these voices are being slipped back into history through novels. 

My favourite at the moment happens only in the 1970s, the poet Salena Godden's memoir, Springfield Road. It's her life, her childhood. Her mother the go-go dancer, her father the jazz cat, her grandmothers, English and Jamaican (and a great grandmother with a pipe and a red bandana), her brother, her sister, holidays, sweets, chopper bikes, fingerless gloves, skateboards, dandelions, squashing berries with a stick, going farther than you were allowed, falling in love aged seven with the new boy, who pulled up his shirt and said: 'Punch me. Go on, harder.' Her father left, to join the house band of the QE2. Her new dad was not nice. The shared bedrooms, the housing estates, the ice cream vans, white carpets, a tea tray with a pictorial map of Jamaica on it . . . root beer . . . Liking being upside down. Waiting. Missing your dad. Tragedy, comedy, life . . It is another wonderful book.  

I never quite knew what root beer actually is, so when a historian turned micro-brewer turned up at dinner last night I thought well, how convenient, and asked him. He told me about sassafras, and the market for non-alcoholic fun beverages during prohibition. (We looked up sassafras and discovered that its chemical, safrole, was also used in MDMA, and had been banned by the FDA at various stages.) Why was I asking, he wondered. I told him about the book. We'd been talking about grandmothers - his was there; she ran a home store in Boise Idaho in the 60s and 70s. One of Salena's Jamaican great great grandmothers was a Maroon. We knew it meant runaway rebel slave, but  none of us knew the origin of the word - was it the same root as being marooned? Was that anything to do with mare, the sea? Marrone, the big sea? No, marrone means chestnut, or brown . . .  Or the Jamaican band, the Cimarrons? 

We looked it up.  Cimmaron means wild, feral, fugitive and runaway; maroon is from cimarron. It's from the Taíno. Taíno? An Arawak language, historically spoken by the Taíno people of the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the northern Lesser Antilles. This leads us to the Garifuna, the Caribs, and to this, which I offer direct from Wikipedia: 

In the Lesser Antilles, the Carib conquest (which had advanced to Puerto Rico by the time of the Spanish conquest, and is still occurring to some extent among the Carib and Arawak in South America) created a sociolinguistically interesting situation. Carib warriors invading from South America took Taíno wives, or raided north and took female Taíno captives back to the southern Antilles. The women continued to speak Taíno, but the men taught their sons Carib. This resulted in a situation where the women spoke an Arawakan language and the men an unrelated Cariban language. However, because boys' maternal language was Arawak, their Carib became mixed, with Carib vocabulary on an Arawak grammatical base. 

That shut us up. Different languages for the different sexes! 

Here are some more words from that language none of us had heard of. 

barbecue - barbacoa

potato - batata

cacique (Latin American native chief) - cacique

cannibal - caniba

canoe - canoa

Caribbean - Caribe

cassava (yucca) - casaba

coquí (a small frog found in Puerto Rico) - cokí

guava - guayabo

iguana - iguana

hammock - hamaca

hurricane - hurakan

cay - kayo

mauby (a type of Caribbean tree whose bark is used in making a fermented drink) - mabí

tobacco - tabacú

maize (corn) - mahiz

mangrove - mangue

papaya - papáia

savanna - zabana

Mauby! The brewer got excited at that. We looked it up. The internet tells us it's sort of like - haha! - root beer. Only nicer. 

I remembered, later that night, a sweet appley drink a friend at school's dad used to make, back in 70s, known to us as mavvy. I looked it up: you can buy it.  Get some in, for the next barbacoa. 

Ah, the joys of going round in circles.

It's all history. Keep it coming. Big and small. And poo to the Corn Laws.



(NB The novels I mention are all widely available. Springfield Road though is published by Unbound, so most easily found here.)

Sarah Waters - Celia Rees

Last week, I went to see Sarah Waters at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. I was there purely as a punter, a fan, no magic access to the Green Room this time. Just like any other reader, I like to go and see my favourite authors and hear what they have to say about their writing. As a writer, I go to see if there are any tips I can pick up - you never know - and as a sometime performer, I like to see how other authors present themselves on the platform or stage. I've appeared at Cheltenham a few times myself and I like both the town and the Festival. One tiny gripe about the latter. I was there in the evening. Waterstone's Book Tent in full swing. I looked in vain for Children's and Y.A. titles, however. Then I noticed another, smaller tent, shut and darkened. 'The Children's Books are in there,' I was told, as if any fule should know, delivered with a look that seemed to say: why would the Children's Bookshop be open at 7:30 in the Evening? Children will be in bed, for goodness sake. 

That apart, it was a very rewarding evening. Sarah Waters has a quiet, unassuming way about her which readers warm to immediately but which speaks to me of enormous assurance and confidence. She is not afraid to use self deprecating humour or to admit to problems, confusions, worries and concerns about her books as they are being written. With that, she's won over the writers in the audience (well, me, anyway).  Not that I needed winning over. I've been an avid fan since I first picked up a copy of Tipping the Velvet in 1998. 

I was flying to Belfast and was looking for something to read in W.H. Smith's in Birmingham Airport, which I feared might be a fruitless task, when I saw Tipping the Velvet. I have a passing knowledge of Victorian Underworld slang and was intrigued. I'd never heard of Sarah Waters but the title was enough for me. I started reading on the plane and went on reading when I got to my hotel. I tried to slow down, to make the book last, but just couldn't stop. I recognised immediately that here was a story teller of rare power, writing about a 'hidden' history, exploring a world that seldom appears in period fiction or non fiction.  Better than that, I'd discovered a new writer and I've followed her ever since.

She said at Cheltenham that she makes 'an imaginative leap into [her characters'] perspective', and that the story comes from 'what the characters need to do and how they feel about it.' Her knowledge of her period, the period in which her characters live, is immaculate.  It is built up through intense research, using the writing of people who lived at the time: letters, diaries, novels. This seems a good model for any historical writer. It seems a simple idea. If you are going to write about people living in a particular period then that's where you need to go to find out what they thought and felt, but what they did actually think and feel is often surprising. Our ideas about what it was like to live in wartime or post war Britain, as in The Night Watch, or The Little Stranger, are often coloured by hindsight, filtered through modern pre-perceptions or the distorting glass of memory. Waters' unearths the unexpected, continually confounding lazy, cliched views of the past.

She never allows her research to overburden the text. She uses it to make her period come alive to the modern reader and to give validity to her characters as they move through it. Her extensive reading of contemporary sources imbues her writing with a feeling of the times she is describing, not pastiche, more authenticity, and her plots work with the precision of a swiss watch. Her latest novel, The Paying Guests, the subject of her talk at Cheltenham, is just as clever, accomplished and absorbing as the others, a kind of Suspicions of Mr Whicher from the inside out.  

I'm just left thinking, 'How does she do that?'

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com