Belfast 1921 by Sheena Wilkinson

 A photo can tell you so much. 

When I was writing Hope against Hope, set in Belfast and along the new Irish border in 1921, I spent a lot of time walking round East Belfast and trying to see it as it would have been one hundred years ago when I placed my fictional girls' hostel there.  I also pored over old photos. Some streets and buildings – terraced houses, churches and mission halls and shops – haven’t changed too much, but there are new housing estates where once were factories; new motorway links and huge junctions have replaced back allies and tramlines.

 

Belfast in 1921 was on fire – often literally. Northern Ireland, which commemorates its centenary this year, was born from compromise and conflict, an expedient solution to an age-old problem. It was not really designed or expected to succeed; many would argue that it has not. But this is not a political post. This is about two little girls who had their photo taken in East Belfast in the early 1920s – it might not have been 1921, but I like to imagine it was because of the novel. 

Their names are Frances and Annie Duff. Frances is about thirteen and Annie nine or ten. They are my grandmother and my great aunt. They smile out, both with the expressions I remember so well from their later lives as elderly women. (They both lived into their nineties.)  They are well dressed, with the extravagant hair bows I remember from early school story illustrations. Both wear pearls and Annie has a wristwatch. This is clearly An Occasion. 

I like to think that it is June 1921 and that they are all dressed up to go and see the King and Queen open the first Northern Irish parliament at City Hall, as thousands of other unionists did. But possibly not. Gran, an inveterate teller of Stories of the Olden Days,  never mentioned such an outing. But then I knew nothing of this visit myself until I did the research for Hope against Hope, so perhaps I just didn’t ask the right questions. When I look closer at their frocks – all their lives they would call dresses frocks -- I see that they are fashionably short, but with huge hems –  made to last. They contrast with the lace edgings of their best frocks in the photo taken some years before – and I think this is not just a change in fashion, but a change in family fortunes. Their mother, Fanny, made their clothes, and took in sewing after their father died – which I believe was in between the two photos. As was the death of their big sister Sadie. 

 

Unlike the first photo, which was definitely taken in a photographic studio, I fancy this one was taken at home in Beechfield Street. I imagine that I remember that very vase, that little table with its barley-twist legs, but both would have been commonplace in 1921, so they may well have been in a studio.  Wherever they are, I do know that outside was a troubled city, disturbed by rioting and burnings. I know their local Catholic church was attacked in 1920, and that same year, thousands of Catholic workers were run out of the shipyard where Frances and Annie’s father and brothers worked. Nothing of that shows in the photo, but then neither does the tragedy even closer to home – except that Frances, now unexpectedly the Big Sister instead of the middle one, leans rather protectively into Annie – perhaps she is thinking of how fragile a sister’s hold on life can be. Or perhaps she is just doing what the photographer asked: all her life she was a gentle and compliant woman, unlike her granddaughter.

My favourite scene in Hope against Hope is a garden party, where the girls of the hostel at the centre of the story invite neighbouring families for tea, sports and entertainment. Of course I know that’s not where Frances and Annie are going, a treat after the family deaths, a distraction from the troubled city outside their front door. Because I made it up.

But without Gran’s stories, and photos like this, I couldn’t have. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Family of Man" - Exhibition and Book - Joan Lennon

I went to the exhibition The Family of Man in the early 1960s, when it was on its travels around the world (37 countries on 6 continents, over 8 years), and it had a deep effect on me.  My dad bought the book and I re-discover it - tatty and well-thumbed - on my own shelves from time to time, and am moved all over again.

The book can't recreate the experience of the exhibition itself, which was like nothing I'd ever seen before.  "Enlarged, often mural scale images, angled, floated or curved, some even displayed on the ceiling, were grouped together according to diverse themes." (Wikipedia)  I remember being drawn hither and yon, desperate not to miss anything.

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote the introduction, including, in his unashamedly lush language, these words: 

"If the human face is "the masterpiece of God" it is here then in a thousand fateful registrations. Often the faces speak that words can never say. Some tell of eternity and others only the latest tattings. Child faces of blossom smiles or mouths of hunger are followed by homely faces of majesty carved and worn by love, prayer and hope, along with others light and carefree as thistledown in a late summer wing. Faces have land and sea on them, faces honest as the morning sun flooding a clean kitchen with light, faces crooked and lost and wondering where to go this afternoon or tomorrow morning. Faces in crowds, laughing and windblown leaf faces, profiles in an instant of agony, mouths in a dumbshow mockery lacking speech, faces of music in gay song or a twist of pain, a hate ready to kill, or calm and ready-for-death faces. Some of them are worth a long look now and deep contemplation later."

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother (1936)

There's a certain oddness in taking photos of photos in a book of an exhibition, but if you're too young to have seen it back in the day, then maybe I can convince you with some of the images below to buy the book or, as I was delighted to discover, you can see the exhibition, displayed as it was originally designed, in Luxembourg, at Clervaux Castle.  Either way, you won't be disappointed.

(The photos I picked at random are by Elliott Erwitt, Eiju Oraki, Wayne Miller, Gitel Steed, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Al Chang, Jean Marquis, Musya S. Sheeler, Gjon Mili - just a few of the 273 photographers and 503 images that make up this amazing collective work of art.)

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin. 

A LITTLE LIGHT RESEARCH By Adèle Geras.

When I wrote my first full-length novel for children, THE GIRLS IN THE VELVET FRAME, the notion of 'research' never entered my head. I'd taken for inspiration this photograph of my mother and four of my aunts and gone from there. I'd asked my mother what had gone on during this visit to the photographer's studio and she had, oddly, no memory of it whatsoever. That gave me carte blanche. I could make up whatever I felt like.




The main mystery about the photograph was: where was Adèle, the eldest of the sisters and the one after whom I'm named? Where were my mother's three brothers? I turned these questions into a whole plot constructed around the search for a missing brother who's emigrated to the United States of America. I gave the girls the characters of my real aunts, or at least, I made them what I thought they might have been. So the characters were there in one form. I just had to change them from adults to children, a task which I found very enjoyable and in no way complicated.



I had to situate the story somewhere so I used my grandmother's flat in Jerusalem, which I knew from earliest childhood. Indeed, though I didn't know this in 1977 when I wrote Girls, that flat would go on to be the setting of at least three other books.
(BEYOND THE CROSS STITCH MOUNTAINS, MY GRANDMOTHER'S STORIES, GOLDEN WINDOWS)



THE GIRLS IN THE VELVET FRAME is set in 1912. When it came out, a few reviewers commented on how well-researched it was, and how full and extensive was my knowledge of Jerusalem before the First World War. They were quite mistaken. I knew nothing, really, and didn't even bother to find anything out because most of the book is set indoors, in one or another bedroom, kitchen or living room. When anyone in my cast of characters ventured outside (they do go on a picnic at one point!) I simply did a mental walk through Jerusalem, which I know very well and eliminated all the modern buildings. What was left I knew I could write about with confidence. An awful lot of the city has been there for 3000 years.

For later books, I've developed a 'one book per novel' style of research which means that my books are probably not as History Rich (like Wool Rich!) as they might be, but I hope that none of them is actually misleading, historically, or in any way anachronistic. I did make a terrible error and had the cooks in my novel ITHAKA using lemon juice with olive oil to baste meat when lemons were unknown in classical Greece but so far that's the only historical mistake that's been pointed out to me. There are probably a great many others.



When I was writing TROY, I watched a good video of an archaeologist walking round the site and explaining what was where. This, together with a reading of the Iliad, was all the research I did.




Quite often, research means reading novels set in roughly the same period as the one I'm writing about. As for the place, well, there's the method outlined above and if you stick to places you know, that's fine. But you can also adopt the Stef Penney style of exploration: stay at home and look at pictures and film of the place you're writing about. On the whole, I'm not an adventurous writer and tend to stick to locations I know, but I reckon a good writer could knock up a passable jungle story after reading HEART OF DARKNESS, STATE OF WONDER by Ann Patchett and THE MOSQUITO COAST...oh, and THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. I wonder whether anyone out there is such a research slacker?

PS. When I went through my mother's photographs after her death, I came across this one:




It's of Adèle and the table she's leaning on is the same table to the right of the picture of her younger sisters. She was clearly there all the time while the younger girls were having their photograph taken. It was probably decided that as she was an adult, she ought to have a picture of her own. The back of the postcard is stamped with the photographer's name. The purple letters have faded over the decades but I can still read, in Hebrew: ZADOK (surname unclear) T'salam. Yerushalayim. [Zadok....Photographer. Jerusalem).If I'd seen that picture when I was about to write THE GIRLS IN THE VELVET FRAME, I might very well not have bothered. The initial question: where is Adèle? would have been answered.

Outside the Frame by A.L.Berridge

I was sick with jealousy when I read H.M. Castor’s latest post featuring the portraits of Holbein. They’re wonderful, those sketches, they do indeed make the Tudors ‘real people’, and though I still want Harriet’s words to make them live and breathe I can see they’re one heck of a good place to start.

I didn’t have a Holbein in 17th century France, where both Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King are set. French painting of the time is mostly highly formal, and pays closer attention to clothing and setting than it does to the face.







Here, for instance, is a picture of 17th century French clothing, with Louis XIV inside.
Inspired? No, I wasn't either.











Fortunately I tend to avoid writing about Kings and Major Personages anyway, so I can make my heroes look just as I please. Thanks to Penguin I know exactly what André de Roland looks like, and it’s this.







But I wonder if it can sometimes be a drawback to know what our characters really look like. My first venture into historical writing was at age 7 when I wrote shockingly bad ‘fanfic’ based on the film ‘Zulu’, doubtless inspired by the manly glamour of the stars. Then my historian father insisted I do some proper research, and I was horrified to find ‘Lt Bromhead’ didn't really look like Michael Caine at all.



















Superficial, of course, but I somehow didn't feel quite the same after that...

The truth is there's something very uncompromising about photographs. Historical novelists can easily forget the reality of bad teeth, smallpox scars and unwashed bodies when they consider the work of tasteful portrait painters – but photographs show everything but the smell. I suspect ‘scratch’n’sniff photos of the past would be the death of historical romance.

But my next novel (Into the Valley of Death) is set in the Crimean War, and here I have to use photographs. The pioneer Roger Fenton took a huge and impressive collection, but although they certainly show the reality of the bearded and unkempt soldiery (a million miles away from the glamorous young men in the 1968 film ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade') the nature of early photography means they still can’t show personality in the way a Holbein can. The ghostly flatness of sepia robs the figures of substance, while the formality of the poses endows them with the glassy eyes and frozen features of dead people standing up. In a picture where the subject has had to sit unmoving for several seconds nothing natural remains to be read.

Or so I thought. But even modern formal photographs reveal vulnerability the moment we understand what they really are – a manifestation of how the subject actually wants to be seen. In ordinary life we protect ourselves with a string of familiar excuses (‘What, this old rag? I only flung it on at the last minute’) but there’s no escape in a photo. Like it or not, we’re telling the viewer ‘I think I look nice in this dress, I think this expression is particularly winsome’. When the dress doesn’t actually work the result can be devastating. One of my favourite photographs is of a baptism group always known in the family (rather unkindly) as ‘Auntie Mary’s Shoes’…


Historical photos have even more of this quality, because the art was so new and a photograph was a special occasion – perhaps the only one its subject would ever have taken.


Here’s one of my Crimea favourites, of a cornet in the 11th Hussars who looks magnificently martial and heroic until we start to question the suspicious swelling of that puffed out chest. With apologies to the poor man’s memory I’m afraid it makes me think of this famous advertisement for tuna…

This photo gave me the inspiration for one of my characters, not for his appearance, but his personality – just the attitude he takes to being photographed.




Here’s another I think reveals even more:

There’s no pretence here. His posture is slumped as if he doesn’t care what people think of him, and the hunted expression speaks clearly of a man who didn’t want to be ‘taken’ at all. But there’s humour in that face, and I’m almost certain he’s looking at someone out of shot who’s trying to make him laugh. Just on this picture I decided he was his own man, and with a hint of devilry beside.

He was. He turns out to be Captain Verschoyle of the Grenadier Guards, who led a group of volunteers to stand with the 93rd Highlanders in the Thin Red Line at Balaclava, and saved the colours of his regiment at the Battle of Inkerman. He was, in fact, a hero, and I had already planned to feature him in my novel.

I’m not sure we could learn so much from a painting, even by Holbein. He certainly wouldn’t have allowed his sitters to behave as the men in this last picture do, where not even one is looking in the right direction.


It only works when we know what it is – the group photograph of the 13th Light Dragoons who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. The tall man with the beard is Colonel Doherty, who missed the Charge altogether, but these other men all rode into the Valley of Death – and came out again, leaving the bodies of their comrades behind. Those averted heads say it all.

That’s what the best pictures do. They don’t just show what’s inside the frame, but what’s outside it, perhaps even what happened before and after they were taken. It’s easy to imagine my Auntie Mary putting on those horrible shoes with pride in their glorious whiteness, but I can also see the cornet flopping with relief in his saddle the moment the photographer finished, and hear Verschoyle’s laugh as he was released. The faces of the Dragoons are hidden, but even without seeing them I think we all know what they show.

When I think of that, then perhaps I’m not so jealous of Holbein after all.

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A.L. Berridge's website
'In the Name of the King' was published by Penguin August 2011
'Into the Valley of Death' is slated for June 2012