I’m at the Scattered Authors retreat this week, in lovely
Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, a History Girl’s paradise. On Monday night I took
part in a very enjoyable bookish version of Desert Island Discs, where
castaways had to choose three books – a ‘classic’, a contemporary book and a
‘wild card’. It struck me, when it came time to think about my monthly post,
that my choices all said a great deal about my love of history, though when I
chose the books it was with no conscious awareness of that. So here they are
for you, with some historical musings, and with thanks to Mary Hoffman (fellow panellist) for the idea!
1. Classic Children’s
Book – Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild, 1936.
I love Ballet Shoes
for its mix of grit and romance, for its three very different heroines, for the
nuanced adult characters and the 1930s London setting. I first read it as a
child in the 1970s, and knew immediately, when I read about the Fossils’ having
to ‘save the penny and walk’, that I was in ‘the olden days’. At that age I
wouldn’t have known exactly when in
the olden days, because I don’t think I would have had the nous to check the
date of first publication, but it didn’t matter. It was a world of nursery
teas, omnibuses and genteel poverty. A world where your frock needed to match
your knickers. Later I knew that this was the 1930s, and understood how shortly
that inter-war period was to come to an end.
Ballet Shoes, of
course, is not a historical novel – Noel Streatfeild was writing about her
contemporary world, which was forty years in the past when I first read it, and
eighty years ago now. My second choice was very different:
2.
Contemporary
Book – A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson, 2014
This is one of the best novels I have ever read, and is
broadly historical – broad in that
sense that its story encompasses about a century. It is, I suppose, a kind of
family saga, except that suggests something much more conventional. A God in Ruins is structurally
unconventional, moving backwards and forwards in time, and there is a conceit
at its heart which I would not dream of spoiling for you which asks questions
about the very nature of history and existence. Once again, as always, I loved
the small material details, but unlike Noel Streatfeild, Kate Atkinson is
looking back, particularly to the years around the Second World War.
Which leads neatly to my third choice:
3. Wild Card – When
Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr, 197X
This is a very different kind of novel. It is historical –
Judith Kerr was writing in the seventies about the thirties, but it is also
based firmly on her own personal history.
As in Ballet Shoes, we are in
difficult circumstances, but here too the children are largely protected by
heroic adults, in this case their parents. Once again, material things matter
and help to bring the world to life – Anna having the right kind of pinafore
for her French school, buying a pencil, travelling to Switzerland by train.
I thought I had chosen these books randomly. And, yes, on a
different day I might have chosen three others. Only now do I see the links
between them: they all write about a similar period, in very different ways.
Between them I think they contain everything I love as a reader of fiction set
in the past, and everything I strive for as a writer of historical fiction.
So – what would your Desert Island books be, and what might
they say about you as a History Girl?
