HISTORY YOU CAN LIVE INSIDE by Emma Darwin

A few weeks ago, my daughter's school Chamber Choir was singing Evensong in Southwark Cathedral, so I went along to listen. Many years ago, when I first crossed the Thames to live South of the River (which as all Londoners know is slightly more drastic than crossing the Channel to live permanently in France), in the daytime Bankside was busy with suits, doctors, and wholesale cabbages. But outside the working week it was Tumbleweed Town: anyone who could fled to the salubrious suburbs, and those few who couldn't had nothing to tempt them out of their grim blocks of flats.

Now the council blocks have been done up, there are university halls of residence, lofts and flats and family houses for urban living, there's Borough Market, the Globe, the Golden Hinde, the London Assembly, at least ten branches of Prêt à Manger, and you can walk along the Thames Path, from Deptford on your bank and St Katherine's Dock on the other, to Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. It's full of people living and working and drinking and talking. In becoming more modern, Southwark has become more ancient: it's once again the mirror-image of the city across the tide that gave birth to it.

Southwark Cathedral wasn't built as a cathedral, but as a church: St Mary Overey (as in, Over the Thames). So although it's a fine bit of Early English Gothic it's not particularly large or complex. But it still has that unity in difference which is the great joy of mediaeval architure: the pointed Gothic arches don't come just in large and small, but can stretch broad or high, vaulting above your head, or stooping to make a canopy over a baby's little tomb. Some of the columns are like bundles of saplings, others are great, ribbed tree-trunks; you walk through puddles of colours where the light from the stained glass windows splashes down as regularly as a wave.

There was a hymn, all solid, Anglican harmony, and then the Responsory: call-and-answer with the choir. And then the choir sang alone, weaving in and out of each other as pitched and patterned by Orlando Gibbons, and I remembered Peter Wimsey, in Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, saying to his Harriet, "Anyone can have the harmony, if they'll leave us the counterpoint".

As one of Gibbons' contemporaries nearly wrote: Licence my roving notes and let them go / before, behind, between, above, below... But I couldn't - for good manners' sake - rove on foot during the service, thought I've done so in many other churches. So I sat still, and allowed my mind's eye to rove instead, imagining how as you walk and look the clusters of saplings in the different aisles set to partners and then pass on, the ribs like branches stretching out to join those of another tree overhead; triplets of windows dancing between bigger trunks; the arch that opens to a whole new chapel of variations; the path that leads you on, curls you round the back of the altar and brings you to the centre again, under the still, pendulum point of the crossing.

They say that architecture is frozen music. In which case, I thought, gazing up the column by my shoulder to where it sprang up and out into the vault, music is surely liquid architecture. What I'm sitting in - what those nameless medieval masons built - is a fugue in stone; a fugue that you can live inside. And perhaps a piece of music is therefore a building that sings.

So where does that leave the reader and writer of fiction? Like music, writing can only exist for the reader in time but, unlike music, it can only sing one note at once. The Donne (mis)quotation suggests that poets may be closer to music: their words have explicit patterning, repetition and sound. But fiction does have architecture: a novel has pace, scale and proportion, as I found when I started thinking about writing a novel as building a bridge. Ian McEwan says the first thing he knows about a new novel is "the maths", by which, as Pythgoras and Stravinsky would have agreed, he also means "the music". In fiction we can play as we choose with echoes and repetitions of ideas and images, as well as with sounds, and build them into something which you can live inside: the world of the novel not just in the sense of setting and characters, but a structure of sound and rhythm and image.

And historical fiction? Well, there's your answer: Bankside. Many historical novels take the reader to live in the year and moment of the action: - steam trains screeching and puffing above Dickens' head as he tries to rescue a six year old prostitute; two monks turned out of their priory as Henry VIII's men pull the lead off the roof; families emerging from the Tube station air raid shelters to see if their homes are still standing.

Other historical novels are also novels about history. The Golden Hinde is a replica of Francis Drake's ship that he sailed round the world, and there are modern American schoolchildren clambering about on it, snapping each other on their mobiles. But in the 1970s it was moored across the river, and my sister was on it - only because the Tower queues were too long - when the IRA bombed the Tower, killing one and injuring forty people. The Golden Hinde is a world you can enter and live in, a world at once Now, and many Thens, a world built of ribs and beams: wood, tarred and caulked to sail as well as it did five hundred years ago, dancing over the waves with the wind singing in the rigging. The replica embodies the history that it hasn't actually seen but also what it has seen, as novels about history do: a historical novel is history you can live inside.

Two into one won't go

by Barbara Mitchelhill

Writing is never easy. Often in the middle of creating a book, you find that you need to bring a certain object or a new setting into a story. Something a little bit out of the ordinary that would appeal to children.

This happened to me while I was writing Run Rabbit Run which is set in World War Two. I was well on in the book, having already done lots of research before starting. The story was progressing nicely. My characters had already run away from home, had been separated from their father and now I was about to send them away as evacuees. It was at this point that I thought they should experience an air raid and head for the safety of an air raid shelter. (Isn’t it wonderful being able to manipulate people like that?) I needed to describe the shelter but I didn’t want to write about an ordinary one. I wanted a special, interesting, memorable shelter. There must be some, I thought, although I had only seen small Andersen shelters made of corrugated iron or, worse, brick-built rectangles. They would not do.

Then, after searching for a solution, two came along like proverbial buses in the space of one morning.

Solution number one arrived when a neighbour suggested that I meet her old friend, Joy, who was coming up from Wales to stay for a few days. She had lived through the war and had great reminisces. I would find her very interesting, she thought. So I happily agreed to meet her the next day.

Solution number two came minutes later during a conversation with a friend. She’s the kind of friend who obligingly listens to problems of any sort and has the knack of coming up with solutions. Hadn’t I heard about the Air Raid Shelter Museum in Stockport? she asked. Marvellous place. Well, no. This was the first I’d heard of it but I was anxious to see it and that afternoon, I jumped in the car and drove fifty miles north.

The Air Raid Shelter Museum was in a narrow street in the middle of the town. From the outside it was decidedly un-impressive but the inside was very different indeed. This was no modest shelter. This one was huge. A mile long labyrinth of passages hewn out of the sandstone hills on which Stockport stood, providing shelter for an astounding six and a half thousand people. The locals called it the Chestergate Hotel. The passages were lit with electric lights and, if you got there early, you could grab one of the metal bunk beds. There was even a medical room lined in sheeting to prevent dirt falling off the rock and onto the sick.

But without doubt, the Jewel in the Crown was yet to come. (Sound the trumpets!) Around a corner, I found a row of toilets. Sixteen in all with a constant flow of water in an open pipe beneath. I couldn’t believe my luck! Toilets are incredibly popular with children and, if that weren’t enough, these came with a story. The guide told me how sometimes the children would play tricks by blocking the pipe at toilet no 1 so that the water built up, finally bursting out in a mini tsunami, drenching the backsides of those who were sitting on toilets 2-15 at the time.

I drove back home happy that I had found my special shelter.

The following day, Instead of working on Run Rabbit Run, I went to meet my neighbour’s friend, Joy. She turned out to be a delightful, garrulous Welsh woman in her seventies.

‘Shelter?’ she said, when I broached the subject. ‘Oh no, we didn’t bother with the shelters in the war. We all went into the old mine, see.’

She began to tell me how, when the air raid sounded, the children would run to the cave-like opening of the old coal mine and pile into the waggons which their parents would push along the rails into the hillside. Once well inside, the mine opened out into a cavernous space which the villagers, mindful that they would have to spend time there, had made comfortable with sofas, mattresses, old carpets and chairs. They lit it with lanterns and passed the time singing or playing cards or reading.

‘Great fun it was,’ said Joy. ‘Like home from home.’

Now I had two wonderful shelters for the book. Which one did I chose? It was a close call but I went with the fully furnished coal mine in the end. I shall save the story of the interconnecting toilets for another time.