My Day Out, by Sue Purkiss

A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alfred the Great, called Warrior King. A few days ago, I had the great privilege of reading from it on the Island of Athelney - the secret place in the marshes of Somerset, where in 878 Alfred hid from Guthrum and his Danish army. I had an audience of experts: the Badger class from North Newton Primary School.

And I do mean experts. When I'd gone into their classroom earlier, I'd seen that the walls were covered with information about the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. There were maps, there were pictures of warriors, there was information about what they wore, and there were stories. On the whiteboard was an Anglo-Saxon riddle which the children were trying to solve, and at the back of the room was a welcoming sign saying Waes hael, Sue Purkiss! When the teacher, Simon Day, took the register, he said 'Gode morgen, Jess/Josh/whatever' - and the children answered 'Gode Morgen' right back, without batting an eyelid. They were all thoroughly engaged - immersed even - in the period.

They had been reading Warrior King together, and when they'd realised that I lived quite close, they'd got in touch and asked if I would like to come and talk to them about writing the book, and then go with them to Athelney.

Would I!

Athelney was where the book began. It's a magical landscape, where history touched by myth is almost palpable, and it was such a pleasure to share it with the Badgers, their teacher Simon, and their two teaching assistants, Vicky and Claire. They were all so enthusiastic; there wasn't a great deal I could tell them, because they already knew so much.

Here are the Badgers climbing up towards Alfred's monument, which was erected in Victorian times. The farmer had kindly cleaned the inscription, and moved the cows which would usually have been in possession. In Alfred's time the long green mound would have been higher: the land has settled, partly because of the weight of the monastery which the king caused to be built in celebration of his victory over Guthrum. (If he'd lost, would we all be speaking Danish now? Certainly the course of history would have been different. All the other English kingdoms had been overrun: Alfred was the last man - just about - standing.)

We looked out towards nearby Burrow Mump, one of the conical hills which rear up above the levels: another is Glastonbury Tor, visible in the distance. Simon told the children to write notes about what they were seeing, hearing, smelling; they discussed whether there was anything that would touch them, or that they could taste, and they agreed that they could feel the touch of a cool soft wind, and wondered whether the Mump would have been used as a lookout post; they decided it almost certainly would have been.

Then we moved across to the other end of the mound, where, some years before, the Time Team had uncovered stones which had been burnt at temperatures which would only have been reached in the heat of a blacksmith's forge; this must have been where weapons were forged for the decisive Battle of Edington. They also found a knife there - the Badgers reminded me it was properly called a seax - made of steel, which was an expensive, high status metal made only for extremely high-ranking leaders.

So this was where Alfred's camp had been: and this was where I read from Warrior King. Marvellous!

After this, we went on to climb Burrow Mump (small but quite steep), and had lunch beside the ruined church which was given to the National Trust by the landowner after the Second World War, to serve as a memorial to local people who had been killed.

Then Simon got the children to look round at the countryside spread out for miles below us: vivid green fields intersected by willow-edged rhynes (ditches), leading to low hills on the horizon. He pushed them to describe exactly what they were seeing, and to use alliteration and kennings (descriptive phrases such as peace-giver, for a king, or death-singer, for a sword), just as the Saxons would have done.

Here are Simon, Vicky and Claire - inspirational teachers and teaching assistants. It was a privilege to see them at work; it was education as it should be: vibrant, creative, magical.

Thanks to them for inviting me - and to the Badgers, Waes hael!

And just as a postscript - here's a picture taken not far from Burrow Mump during the floods almost three years ago. Perhaps this was more how it looked in Alfred's time: mysterious, haunting - and very, very wet.

The Alfred Jewel comes home: Sue Purkiss

The Alfred Jewel

There is great excitement in Somerset at the moment (no, it's true; in the hills and on the levels, they speak of little else!) because for just one month, a great treasure has come home. It's the Alfred Jewel, and it must be one of the most exquisite works of art ever to have been found in a field after having been lost for centuries.

It's surprisingly small - a mere 6.4 cm long. It consists of an enamelled picture of a man who holds a flowering plant in each hand. This image is set under a piece of rock crystal, which is encased in the most exquisitely chased gold setting. It's shaped like a tear drop, and the apex of this is 'carved' into an animal's head - maybe a boar or a dragon? - in whose jaws is an empty socket. The gold back plate is engraved  with a stylised plant design, while the reverse of the animal head is patterned with overlapping scales.

And very significantly, there is an inscription, worked into the framework in open letterwork. It says: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN - 'Alfred ordered me to be made.'

The Alfred in question was almost certainly Alfred the Great - so this jewel is a direct link with him. We know this because it was found on the Somerset Levels in 1693, in a field near North Petherton, only a few miles from Athelney, where Alfred fled in 878 from the Viking leader Guthrum - and from which he emerged to fight a decisive battle at Edington. After this, for the rest of his reign Alfred had the upper hand, and so was able to get on with rebuilding Wessex and making life better for his people. He later founded a monastery at Athelney.

No-one knows for certain what the purpose of the jewel was. But that socket looks as if it was made as an attachment to something. Perhaps it was fixed onto a crown - but the smart money is on the theory that this was an aestel - a pointer: used to follow the writing in a book. It is known that Alfred gave copies of Pope Gregory's 9th century best-seller Pastoral Care to bishoprics throughout his kingdom, and that with each book he sent a precious aestel. Perhaps this was the one he gave to Athelney.

Who was the man in the picture? It has been suggested it's Alfred himself. This doesn't seem likely to me. So far as I know, there wasn't a tradition of portraiture at the time - and if you were going to make a portrait, there would be easier media to use than enamel. Perhaps it's a saint - we don't know. More questions: how and when was it lost? How did it survive, under the surface of a field, without harm, for hundreds of years? If it had been found today, the site would have been minutely investigated for clues - but of course none of that happened in the 17th century.

What did happen was that the jewel was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 by the antiquarian Thomas Palmer, the son of Nathaniel, who had been the owner of the land where the jewel was found. Not long after that, it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, and there it's been ever since.

The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the first university museum in the world, and it was built to house the 'Cabinet of Curiosities' of Elias Ashmole. Philippa Gregory has a very interesting account of its founding in her novel Virgin Earth (which, by the way, along with its predecessor, Earthly Joys, is a really excellent read), which concerns the fortunes pf plant collectors and explorers John Tradescant and his son. She suggests that the core of the collection was that of the Tradescants, which had been tricked out of them by Ashmole. Whatever the truth of that - and the Tradescants' collection was certainly the foundation of Ashmole's - the Ashmolean was and is a treasure trove. I went there to see the Alfred Jewel some years ago, when I was researching my novel about Alfred, Warrior King. It took me ages to find it, and eventually I spotted it tucked a way in a dim corner of a crowded display case.

But since then the Ashmolean has been re-fashioned into a glorious space, and the Alfred Jewel, far from being hidden away, is a striking focal point with a display case that sets it off beautifully.

Only not this month, because we've got it - it's only on loan, but for these few weeks, it's home.

I went to see it the other day, and I marvelled over how tiny it is. How on earth could the maker even see to create such exquisite detail? And just to think, that Alfred (I have to admit, I think of him as 'my Alfred') actually held this in his hand! (Because I'm sure he did. He ordered it to be made, so he would certainly have inspected it when it was done.)

Seeing the Jewel was the purpose of my visit, but I can't finish without a word about the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. Like the Ashmolean, it has been recently remodelled, and it's gorgeous. In fact, it's so gorgeous that it deserves more than a skimpy paragraph. So on second thoughts, I'll give it a post of its own next month. When the Alfred Jewel will have left us again, and we will be bereft...

Floods in Somerset - some reflections: Sue Purkiss

A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alfred the Great, called Warrior King. The Vikings launched a surprise attack on Alfred, on Twelfth Night, 878. His army had been stood down for the winter: he had no choice but to flee. He headed for Somerset, for the marshes - he knew the country well because he had hunted there. With him (in my story) was his daughter, Aethelflaed...

When she awoke, the snow had stopped again, and veils of wispy dark cloud were flung out against a sky that flared with bands of gold and orange and scarlet. Oddly, the ground seemed at first to be the same colour as the sky, till she blinked and realised that she was in fact looking at a great sheet of water... Treetops stood out above the water, and the surface bristled with spiky dark patches, which she supposed must be reeds.

"This is the summer country," explained Alfred. "Somerset. In the summer, it's land. But it's very low lying, and in the winter, it floods and the hills turn into islands. Mostly you need a boat, but there are a few ways through on foot, and I know them."

He knew them, but the Vikings didn't - and so he was safe. One of those islands was Athelney (the Isle of Princes), which was his refuge; another is the small hill now called Burrow Mump.

This time last year, the news was dominated by images of the flooded Levels. I went down there not long after Christmas - it's about twenty miles from where I live - and took some pictures. There is very often water lying on the fields - it's not unusual not to be able to get to Athelney. For instance, I took this picture several years ago, when I was there researching Alfred's country; this level of inundation is routine.

Water lying near Athelney

However, last year was different. This is what I saw. And this was before the water had risen high enough to flood whole villages.

This is normally a field.

So's this.

The water here was almost over the road, but so far, not quite.

This is Burrow Mump, a small hill with a ruined church on top. Close by is the King Alfred Inn, which became a centre for community action when local people decided that the authorities weren't going to give them the help they needed, so they'd better help themselves.

This was the view from the top of Burrow Mump. The water is almost into the village, but so far, not quite.

So - the levels were very watery in Alfred's time - flooding is not a new phenomenon. The area is below sea level, so it's not surprising that it floods. It has been drained to some extent since the Middle Ages - the monasteries at Athelney, Muchelney and Glastonbury led the way. Then last century, much bigger drainage channels were constructed.

The two main rivers are the Parrett and the Tone, Towards the end of the last century, the management of the rivers and rhynes was rejigged, and they stopped dredging the rivers. The local people were not happy; the new regime seemed to go against what common sense, and years of experience working this very unusual landscape, suggested.

Last year, a system of land management which had apparently worked well for so many years failed. Although the moors had always flooded previously, people's homes had not. There were exceptional factors; unusually high tides forced water up the Parrett till it had to overflow, and there had been so much rain in previous months that the ground was sodden and could not absorb all the excess water. But the people insisted that, had the waterways been properly dredged, the water would have flowed more easily and the disaster would not have occurred. At first the authorities demurred, but now they seem to have changed their minds, and dredging has begun again.

Some of the people who were forced out of their homes have only just been able to return. A few, in despair, sold up at rock-bottom prices. Most didn't. Livelihoods were affected: it's been a very hard year.

I'm no expert, obviously. But it just strikes me that, particularly where you have a difficult and unusual environment which has been worked for centuries - then you really should listen to the people who live there and in particular, those who work the land. They are the keepers. They're in tune with the land, and they know what they're talking about.

Pictures: copyright Sue Purkiss

Detecting the Dark Ages, by Sue Purkiss

At one point when I was researching Warrior King, my book about Alfred the Great, I was trying to nail down his brothers. Not literally, you understand: the Vikings may have gone in for that sort of behaviour, but not me - and anyway they lived (approximately - very approximately) eleven hundred years ago.

Alfred the Great

I was trying to pinpoint how old Alfred was when a particular incident was said to have occurred. Alfred had four older brothers. Their mother had promised a book to the first one of them who could learn how to read it. Alfred couldn't read at all, but he wanted that book: so he persuaded a monk to help him to learn it off by heart - and he got it  The story is told to indicate his determination, a certain degree of cunning, and his love of learning.

But there are all sorts of problems with it. Alfred was born in 849. In 851, his second oldest brother, Aethelbald, (he had four older brothers altogether) was fighting a battle against the Vikings alongside his father. Is it feasible that his mother would have issued such a challenge to a toddler and to grown men - fighting men? Just how old were all these brothers? How did they die? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is vague about such details. For that matter, when did Alfred's mother die? In 855, when Alfred was six, his father, Aethelwulf, married Judith Martell, a Frankish princess, but the chronicle doesn't tell us when he lost his first wife.

This all seemed rather untidy, and so I got in touch with an academic historian who knew a good deal about Alfred - up until I'd begun researching this book, I had known virtually nothing about him. Alfred's brothers were giving me the runaround, I told her. Could she tell me when, precisely, they were born? No, she couldn't, she said cheerily. My guess was as good as hers. But, she pointed out, as a novelist, that gave me a good deal of freedom. Facts were few and far between, so what could I do but make the rest up?

Just recently I've returned to the Anglo-Saxon world. In Warrior King, Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed (I called her Fleda for short, and to have one less Aethel-whatnot cluttering up the place) was the viewpoint character for two thirds of the book. It ended with Alfred defeating the Danes, but I knew that in later life, Aethelflaed had married the Lord of the Mercians, and after he died, was chosen by her people to be their leader - in battle as well as at home. She was named Lady of the Mercians, and, with her brother Edward, Alfred's successor as King of Wessex, she carried on Alfred's work; she was clearly a remarkable woman.

Now, I've come back to this part of her life. There's very little about her in the Chronicle, although she's mentioned in the Annals of Ulster as a great and revered queen. After all, she was only a woman - presumably the monks who wrote up the Chronicle weren't very interested in women.

But now I've got hooked on the mystery surrounding the fate of another woman. In the summer of 919, Aethelflaed died. Her daughter, Aelfwynn, succeeded her - but only for a few months. Just before Christmas, the Abingdon version of the Chronicle tells us: ...the daughter of Aethelred, lord of the Mercians, was deprived of all control in Mercia, and was led into Wessex... And that's it. Aelfwynn disappears into the mists of history. The best guess seems to be that she spent the rest of her life in a nunnery.

Aethelfled and Aethelstan

But why? Did her uncle, Edward, think that she wasn't strong enough to hold Mercia against the Danes? Or id she defy him - had she 'gone native', become too Mercian, refused to remain a junior partner to Wessex?

And then again - Edward had sent his oldest (though possibly illegitimate) son, Aethelstan, to Mercia to be brought up at Aethelflaed's court - presumably to bind the two kingdoms even more closely together. So why not marry Aethelstan to Aelfwynne, thus making the bond pretty well indissoluble?

So much room to speculate. And in the end, I suspect that the real reasons for what happened must lie in the characters of the participants in this drama. History books research meticulously a network of cause and effect. What novelists can do is to fill in the vast empty spaces between.

In Search Of Michael: by Sue Purkiss

Tonight, while a few people might be watching Sweden v England on the television, I'll be watching a history programme: Michael Wood's The Great British Story: a People's History. Well, I'm a History Girl - you'd expect nothing less. It's exactly what the title says it is:  a history of Britain from the point of view not of the kings and nobles and upper classes, but of the ordinary people. There's one particular technique it uses that I think works very well: it has the ordinary people of today reading the testimony of the ordinary people of long ago. It's a simple but brilliant way of breathing life into the words of dusty ancient documents. If you've read other posts of mine, you'll know that I'm always banging on about history being about ordinary people as well as the well-known movers and shakers, so you'll understand why this appeals to me.

Michael and I go back a long way. In 1981 - over thirty years ago: can it really be true? - he made a documentary called In Search of the Dark Ages. In nine programmes, Michael leapt about all over Britain in a very fetching sheepskin jacket, exuding enthusiasm about such luminaries as the Sutton Hoo Man, Alfred the Great, Athelstan and Eric Bloodaxe. I did Anglo-Saxon as part of my English degree, and I've always felt drawn in some way to the Scandinavian strands of our heritage. (Still am: The Killing, anyone? Or The Bridge?) So perhaps I was an easy target.

But I think there was something new and innovative about those documentaries and the way they presented history. Suddenly, figures from the dim and distant past were brought to new and vivid life: Michael's enthusiasm was infectious. The way they were photographed added to the air of Scandinavian moodiness and grimness: you can see that on the cover of the hardback of the series. I think this particular shot is of the ridge above Ethandun (now Eddington) where Guthrum the Viking leader woke up one morning to see Alfred and all his forces ranged up on the skyline, about to descend like an eagle onto its prey. Years later, when I wrote a book about Alfred, Warrior King, I went to see this ridge; it's still just as atmospheric. I wonder if the seed for the book was sown when I watched that programme? I didn't think so at the time, I thought it had other roots; but looking back, I'm not so sure.

Since then, of course, there have been masses of popular history programmes on television - David Starkey, Simon Schama, Mary Beard, Helen Castor and many more. But I think perhaps that In Search of the Dark Ages was the mould-maker, with its charismatic presenter using every means at his disposal to convey his enthusiasm for his subject, with its delight in showing us the context and the settings and the artefacts which help to bring history to life. Isn't that what they all do now, to a greater or lesser degree?

And Michael kept on making programmes. I remember my sons cheering when he went in search of Alexander the Great, plunging into the sea fully clothed, climbing mountains, eating lamb cooked on a spit over the fire and then turning to the camera, his eyes shining, to share his excitement: 'Here I am, doing just what Alexander might have done, in the place where he might have done it!!' 


And now he's taking a fresh approach again, involving people in finding out their own local history, and showing us along the way what life was like for most people in centuries past. The old sheepskin jacket - or a worthy successor - is still occasionally in evidence, often accessorised now with a floaty turquoise scarf. I think he's great. He's certainly far more inspirational than any of my history teachers ever were, bless them!

Mind the gap! By Sue Purkiss

At the moment, I'm grappling with a structural problem in the book I'm writing. My story is set in World War Two, and most of it takes place in a prisoner of war camp. My problem is that the significant events of the story  occur in the first two years and the last few months of the war. One of the worst things about POW camps was that from one month to another, very little changed; nothing much happened in the intervening two years, so I have a desert to cross.

A similar thing happened when I was writing Warrior King, about the earlier part of the life of Alfred the Great. (I was going to make a note to myself at this point to choose my subjects more carefully - but a) sometimes the subject chooses you, and b) I guess that actually, this must be a common problem for writers of historical fiction as history is decidedly inconsiderate in the way it spaces out events.)

Anyway, to return to the magnificent Alfred. (Just look at him on the cover there. Isn't he gorgeous?) The problem here was that the bits that interested me occurred when he was growing up, and then ten years or so later, when he was forced to flee to Athelney and take up baking. There was another problem too: Warrior King was a book for young people, and so it would be better to tell the story from a child's viewpoint. After trying out one or two possibilities, in the end I divided the book into two parts. At the end of the first part, Alfred has just become King. He goes into the room where his small daughter is sleeping, and he makes her a promise.

      It seemed to him that he had never seen anything as lovely as the curve of her dark eyelashes resting on the softness of her cheek, and he touched her hair very gently, letting one golden curl wind itself round his finger.
      "Up till now," he said very quietly, "everyone I've ever loved has either died or gone away. Now my last brother's gone, the best of all of us. And so I'm king. And from this day on, so help me God, I'm going to keep the people safe, and I'm going to keep you safe. I will find a way. No matter what it takes."

The second part begins with the great crisis of his reign, when his ability to fulfil that promise is tested to the utmost. And the story is told now by that same daughter, Fleda, who is determined to be part of her father's struggle.

My last post sparked off a discussion in another forum about historical fiction books we knew and loved as teenagers. Frances Thomas reminded us of Desiree, by Annemarie Selinko. Thanks to Kindle, I was able to download it in the wink of an eye, and I'm re-reading it at present. It interests me to see whether old favourites stand the harsh test of time. An earlier, huge favourite, which I borrowed from the library time after time, was The Amazing Mr Whisper by Brenda Macrow.. I was thrilled when I eventually managed to track down a copy a couple of years ago, only to find that it's been superseded by subsequent books in a similar genre (ie, real children find their way into a parallel world which owes much to myth and legend) and the magic was tarnished.

As far as I can find out, Annemarie Selinko was an Austrian journalist and political writer, married to a Danish husband. They were living in Denmark when the war broke out, but fled from the Gestapo to Sweden, where they worked with the Swedish Red Cross assisting refugees. She used aspects of her experiences in Desiree, her last novel, which tells the story of a silk merchant's daughter who  was once engaged to Napoleon and later married one of his Marshals, subsequently becoming Desideria, Queen of Sweden.

Annemarie Selinko was clearly no lightweight, but the same cannot be said of her heroine. Desiree is appealing, bright, courageous and funny, but she is poorly educated and despite the position in which she finds herself, she is uninterested in politics. She is the narrator, so everything must be filtered through her. Somehow, Selinko has to convey through her the complexities of Napoleon's career and campaigns - because the story of Napoleon is at the centre of this book: Desiree's story, beguiling as it is, is a means to an end. How does she do it?

(Interesting, to see an old cover and a recent one!)

Well, sometimes a character imparts an improbable amount of information over a gossip and a cup of hot chocolate, and it doesn't quite work. But mostly, it does. Selinko uses Desiree's political naivety to her advantage: Desiree needs to know what is going on because it will directly affect her marriage and her family - so she nails someone in the know and makes them explain everything to her in words of one syllable. Or again, a political big hitter such as Talleyrand or Fouche explains things to her because they need to use her as a conduit to her husband. Or else she explains things to someone even less clued up, such as her sister or her son.. It's all very cleverly done: so we read a story which seems to be light and frothy, but in fact a vast amount of complicated history is being imparted. I remember 'doing' Napoleon at school, and learning far, far less.

All of which, I think, is suggesting to me how I should approach my current dilemma.. So - better get on with it!

The Lady of the Mercians: Sue Purkiss

When Caroline Lawrence first suggested that we might have a cross-dressing theme going on this month chez The History Girls, I didn't at first remember that there is an instance of a girl dressing as a boy in any of my books. But there is. In Warrior King.Athelfled (she's called Fleda for short in the book) dresses up as a boy, because when her father, Alfred, flees the Danes to go into hiding in the marshes of Athelney, she feels he needs her there with him. As far as he is concerned, she is to go into hiding with her mother and siblings: they will be safer away from Alfred - he's the one Guthrum, the Danish leader, is after. The only way she can go with him is in disguise.

Generally, I think that cross dressing in historical fiction occurs because, as Marie-Louise Jensen has explained, as 21st century writers, we want our girls to get up to all sorts of things which would have been difficult in a long dress. After all, it wouldn't be much of a story if it went: Got up. Helped Mother make breakfast. Did some weaving. Had dinner. Walked in garden. Did some more on tapestry. Had supper. Played the harp a bit. Went to bed. And of course the social and cultural contexts played a part: quite apart from the practicalities, girls weren't expected to do much beyond the domestic. (Or so we believe... I do so distrust generalisations.)

But this wan't why Fleda had to borrow some of her brother's clothes and sneak in among Alfred's small band of riders. No - it was to do with point of view.

I wanted to write about Alfred for all sorts of reasons. I won't go into them here - if you're interested, you can go and have a look on my website, where you'll be warmly welcomed. But there was a difficulty. This was to be a book for young people, and so it needed to be written from a young person's's point of view.

This was no problem at all for the first part of the book, which is about Alfred's childhood - Alfred himself was the viewpoint character. But then I wanted to skip over the intervening years and write about his epic struggle with Guthrum - and in particular, his remarkable feat in emerging from Athelney, when surely no-one would have put the smallest denomination of Anglo-Saxon coinage on him regaining his crown: wiping the floor with Guthrum - and then, astonishingly, instead of executing his foe, converting him to Christianity and making a peace.

The problem was - who was to be my viewpoint figure? At first I toyed with the idea of the narrator being someone in Alfred's household. I tried it out - but it didn't really work for me; I wanted to keep the focus on Alfred, not on some new character. Then I wondered about Alfred's children. How old would they have been?

His son, Edward, was too young to be taking a very active part in things - from memory, he was about seven. But his oldest child was a daughter, Athelfled, and she would have been ten. Perfect! She could go with Alfred into exile in Athelney - she would be his inspiration and his chronicler. But he would not take her knowingly into such danger; hence the cross-dressing.

Interestingly. Athelfled did not spend the rest of her life making cakes or sewing tapestry. She was married at a young age to the King of Mercia. She had a daughter, but no son. When the king died, the people chose to be their leader not a noble thegn or a trusted warrior - they chose Athelfled, who became known as the Lady of the Mercians. The Lady, with her brother Edward, by now King of Wessex, defended their peoples against new Viking attacks.

Whether she wore a dress or trousers, history sadly does not record.

A sense of place: Sue Purkiss

Like a scent, places can be extremely evocative. The right place brings a story alive for me as nothing else can - but it's not always that easy to find. For Warrior King, which was about Alfred the
Great, there was no problem at all. The west of England is littered with sites where you can stand and gaze at landscapes which can't have changed so very much in over a thousand years; as the wind whispers in the trees and a bird is startled up from a marsh with a cry which is the essence of loneliness, it seems that only a very thin veil of mist separates us from the 9th century. Try Athelney in the Somerset levels, or Wayland's Smithy on the ancient Ridgeway, only a stone's throw from the site of a significant battle.

Emily's Surprising Voyage would not have existed without its setting, which in this case was a ship - Brunel's SS Great Britain - which has been lovingly restored and which really begs you to consider and explore the stories of its passengers and crew.

But for the book I'm working on at the moment, it was not so easy to find and visit the place where it was set.

Some years ago, I decided I wanted to write something to do with my father's experiences as a prisoner of war. I didn't have much to go on: for years, he didn't talk about the war at all, and when he did eventually open up about it, what emerged were funny stories, sometimes told against the Germans, often told against himself. At every anniversary of Dunkirk, I would find myself getting indignant on his behalf - yes, it was marvellous that so many men were rescued, but what about the thousands who were't, and spent five years in prisoner of war camps? You never seemed to hear anything about them. But he didn't seem unduly bothered. He just wanted to forget it all, and thought on the whole that everyone else should too.

Then I read a remarkable book by John Nichol and Tony Rennell, called The Last Escape (Penguin). It was about the terrible march west in 1945: for reasons which have never become entirely clear, the Germans, as the Russians were advancing from the east, decided to evacuate the camps (mostly in Poland and eastern Germany), and force the prisoners to walk across northern Europe in the depths of a bitter and icy winter.

Dad had told me a story about something that happened on this march: as usual, a funny one, a story that made you smile at the strange vagaries of war. It was only from this book, though, that I began to understand what that journey must actually have been like. Sadly, by this stage, dad was no longer there to ask. I began to read other accounts, about Dunkirk, for instance. The more I read, the more I realised that dad's stories of hooch made from potatoes, football playing commandants, a guard who spent his time playing on an imaginary violin because he'd once been a member of the Berlin Philharmonic - all these, entertaining as they were, comprised only a tiny part of what life as a POW must really have been like. I wanted to find out more; I wanted to explore how it would be, to do a good deal of your growing up inside the confines of a prison camp. The outline of a story began to emerge.

I wanted to find out where dad had actually been: I wanted a physical reality to map onto the stories I had heard. From records at Kew, I found out the names of the prison camps where dad had been: Marienburg and Thorn. But I knew I would not find these names on a map of modern Poland; names were germanicised during the war. As ever, the internet came to the rescue. Thorn is once again Torun: Marienburg is Malbork.

I knew that dad had worked on farms and in forests, but beyond this, I had no picture in my mind of what he would have seen when he first emerged, blinking, from the cattle truck which brought him on the last part of his journey to Poland. I did not know what he would have seen if he was able to gaze through the barbed wire fence of the camp to the landscape beyond.

I need to know what places look like. I needed to go to Poland.

(This story is too long for one post, so I'm going to split it. Next instalment next month!)

Sue Purkiss: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ (LP Hartley: The Go-Between)

I’ll bet you recognise this quotation. I was firmly convinced I knew it by heart, and yet when I looked it up in Hartley’s novel I saw that I’d got it wrong. I'd thought it was ‘The past is another country’ (and to be honest, my version still sounds better to me!). Out of curiosity, I looked it up on Google, and found that many others have made the same mistake. I think perhaps it’s been conflated with another familiar quote, from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which is something like: ‘… but that was in another country, and beside, the wench is dead.’

Whatever – it’s an example of the shivering sands of memory: we think we

know things, but we don’t. But I think perhaps the point I want to make is almost the opposite one: that we actually know more than we think we do about the way things were in the past. Let’s look at the assertion made in the second part of this quotation: ‘they do things differently there.’ Is it true? Did they do things differently in that other country which is the past?

In many ways the answer is outstandingly obvious: of course they did things differently there. They didn’t have mobile phones, for a start. But in terms of how people thought, what they cared about, how they related to each other, what they were afraid of, how they felt about life – in those terms, were they so very different from us?

My first historical novel was Warrior King, and it’s about Alfred the Great. When I go into schools and talk about it, this is the story I tell them about how I came to write it. I needed to check the story of how he burnt the cakes, I say, just for a detail in some other story I was writing (Finnegan’s Cake, since you ask, about a time-travelling dog. Still inexplicably unpublished, still available…) Obviously, the first thing I did was to turn to Google. Then I realised that the location of Alfred’s unfortunate early attempt at Masterchef was Athelney, which is only about forty minutes’ drive from where I live. I thought that Athelney would be to Alfred as Tintagel is to Arthur. At the very least there would be a bakery or a cafe called Alfred the Cake, and an array of books about the only monarch in British history to be called ‘the Great’ – so off I went.

But there were no itsy witsy shops with punning names, no explanatory pamphlets. Just a discreet plaque, an unimpressive Victorian monument – and an astonishingly evocative landscape of water and willows and glittering birds, which could hardly have changed in the eleven hundred odd years since Alfred fled to the Somerset marshes to take shelter from the Vikings.

It’s an extraordinary story. We know what happened – we know that he emerged to defeat the Danes, and then made a peace which lasted long enough for him to create a country which was stronger and safer for his people. But people then didn’t know that this was what was going to happen. He had only a few men with him – ‘a small troop’ as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it. The Vikings had conquered every other part of England apart from Wessex, and with Alfred out of the way they ‘over-rode and occupied the land of Wessex, and drove many of the people across the sea’. Surely no-one would have put money on Alfred’s chances of surviving, let alone managing to gather an army together and emerge from the marshes to defeat the Northmen.But he did. A number of things intrigued me about this. One was the drama of it: this was a real turning point – if Alfred hadn’t managed to pull it off, England would have been ruled entirely by the Danes, and today we’d be living in a different country and speaking a different language. Another was that here was an extraordinary leader – remarkable and unexpected in many ways which I haven’t space here to go into (read the book!) – and yet today, very few people know anything about him. And yet everyone’s heard of Arthur, who didn’t even exist!

But the other thing was – what was he like? What motivated him? (Apart, obviously, from the understandable wish to stay alive.) He was the youngest of five children, four of them boys. He was clever, sensitive and thoughtful. Would he ever have expected that he would become king? It seems unlikely, given his place in the family. Was he prepared for it? What went through his mind during those weeks when he was holed up in the marshes? How did he manage to persuade other people – and himself – that he could defeat Guthrum, despite all appearances? Where were his family, his wife and children, while all this was going on?

And then I wondered about the ordinary people. What effect did the endless series of battles have on them? Did they care about who ruled them, or were they too busy trying to survive to even think about it?

I wanted to explore what life was like for all these people in that other country which is the past.

They were faced with very different situations and dilemmas, but I don’t think they were so very different from us. I think it’s possible to imagine how they felt, what they thought.

But of course, I could be completely wrong. Now, how is it you can you never find a time-travelling dog when you need one…?

Sue Purkiss