Io Saturnalia! by Alison Morton

Temple of Saturn, Rome (Author photo)

Rome Saturnalia was THE most important Roman festival. Heavy on feasting, fun and gifts, it was originally celebrated in Ancient Rome for only a day around 17 December (today!), but it was so popular it expanded into a week or even longer, despite Augustus' efforts to reduce it to three days, and Caligula's, to five. Like today's Christmas, this holy day (feriae publicae) had a serious origin: to honour the god of sowing, Saturn. But also like modern Christmas, it was a festival day (dies festus). After sacrifice at the temple, there was a public banquet, which Livy says was introduced in 217 BC. Afterwards, according to the poet Macrobius, the celebrants shouted 'Io, Saturnalia' at a riotous feast in the temple.

Modern mid-winter habits echo Roman conspicuous eating and drinking, and visiting friends and giving gifts, particularly of wax candles (cerei), and earthenware figurines (sigillaria). Masters served meals to their slaves who were permitted the unaccustomed luxuries of leisure and gambling. A member of the familia (family plus slaves) was appointed Saturnalicius princeps, roughly equivalent to the Lord of Misrule.

The poet Catullus describes Saturnalia as 'the best of days' while Seneca complains that the 'whole mob has let itself go in pleasures'. Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while the rest of the household celebrated. Sound familiar?

Macrobius described a banquet of pagan literary celebrities in Rome which classicists date to between 383 and 430 AD. So  Saturnalia was alive and well under Christian emperors, but no longer as an official religious holiday.

But alongside ran the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (the birthday of the 'unconquerable sun'), a festival celebrating the renewal of light and the coming of the new year and which took place on 25 December. By the middle of the fourth century AD,  the dominant Christian religion had integrated the Dies Natalis into their celebration of Christmas. So it seems that Saturnalia wasn't the official ancestor of Christmas after all. Never mind.

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In Roma Nova, Saturnalia is celebrated in much the same way. Here's a tale straight from the Mitela household in Roma Nova...

From the journal of Carina Mitela, Roma Nova, 17 December - Saturnalia

"Thirty-six hours later, we were snowed in. The newsies were having a field day with their graphs and charts. The ploughs and tractors were out soon enough despite it being an official holiday and were attempting to keep the main city roads cleared.

Although most of the public Saturnalia celebrations were cancelled, the priests would make the usual grand sacrifice and invoke Saturn’s blessings. I pitied them today; it was a Greek rite and they’d have to shiver in sleeveless fringed tunics, with heads bare instead of a warm woollen toga snuggly folded over the head. It was a sure bet they’d turn up the heating in the Temple of Saturn and have every open brazier burning hard.

My husband, Conrad, and our youngest daughter, Tonia, sat in silence at breakfast. Our eldest, Allegra, had called first thing to say she would join us just after two when she finished her shift. She looked tired on the screen; hopefully she’d get some sleep before tomorrow. She’d been called in with the rest of the military to help ensure vital services were kept running.

‘I’ll be there, Mama, as long as there are no further disturbances in the city.’

‘What do you mean “disturbances”?’

‘Unfortunately,’ she said in the driest tone I’d ever heard her use, ‘some people seem to think the custodes concentrating on the bad weather crisis means they can help themselves to what’s in the shops. I’ve been freezing my, er, extremities off in the Macellum district all night. We came across some kids with a crowbar in front of a smashed window, pulling stuff out of an electrical goods shop. The alarm was going, but so were others. As soon as they saw us, though, they ran like the Furies were after them.’ She chuckled.

The sight of half a dozen Praetorians marching towards you with intent and attitude would make anybody run.

‘But they’ve opened the basilica for the public banquet. My oppo, Sergilia, has caught guard duty there,’ she added, making a face. The law court hall was huge and could accommodate up to a thousand. But good luck to those trying to keep order.

After checking last details with the steward for the celebration meal later, I retreated to my office for an hour to check my messages and that nobody had found my stash of gifts for the 23rd. Sigillaria was important not just for the kids who loved new toys, but when adults gave each other something to compensate for the excesses that would surely happen today.

Normally on Saturnalia morning, my cousin Helena and I would sip a glass of champagne and exchange jokes and snippets of gossip. She had more than a finger on the pulse of city life; its lifeblood ran through her. She’d also forewarn me about any particularly risqué activities the household were planning for today.

Ceding my place at the head of the Mitela tribe for a day to the princeps Saturnalicius was all well and good, but even misrule and chaos had its limit as far as I was concerned. But for a few hours, the house would be overrun with noise, people, stupid but fun dares, overeating, games, theatricals and stand-up of dubious taste, arguments, falling in lust, laughter and progressive drunkenness. Helena would make sure the children were safe out of the way when the horseplay became a little too raunchy.

By early afternoon the atrium blazed with light. Everywhere was covered in ferns, spruce and pine. In the centre was a large square table covered with linen, silverware, glasses, candles and the best china. I smelt roast pork, lemons and spices. In tune with the reversal of the day Junia, the steward, was enthroned in my usual place. Conrad handed me a glass of champagne. He was on waiter duty. His Saturnalia tunic was bright orange. He shrugged. Then grinned. Wearing over-colourful clothes was traditional, but a strain on the eyes.

‘It’s only for a day,’ he whispered.

‘I know,’ and smiled back. ‘But I wish Gil had been able to make it.’

Our thirteen-year-old son had been staying in the country with Conrad’s cousin and was caught in the atrocious weather. We’d be lucky to see him before Sigillaria. Gil loved the madness of Saturnalia. My geeky son would turn into a shiny-eyed imp of mischief, darting around, laughing and joking, pulling pranks I didn’t know he knew. Now he’d be holed up with Conrad’s serious cousin for days. I only hoped they had enough food and the electricity hadn’t been cut, like the phone.

‘Well, Tonia’s having fun.’ Conrad pointed to her skipping between people with trays of hors d’oeuvres, watched anxiously by the steward’s son, and me. I could see at least one of the trays coming to grief, contents slithering across the marble floor.

‘Io Saturnalia!’

I blinked at the hearty shout from the household and guests gathered around and raised my glass, then bowed towards the steward. She went to speak, but a blast of cold air and a loud thud interrupted her. All heads turned towards the atrium doors, now open. Allegra, in her military fatigues and winter parka, cheeks burning with the indoor heat, tore off her field cap and shouted, ‘Io Saturnalia’. 

Everybody shouted back, the noise filling the atrium. I hugged her to me, ignoring the cold and wet of her thick coat.

‘I’ve brought you something else, Mama,’ she whispered in my ear and nodded towards the double doors. On the threshold stood a lanky boy – pale, shivering and wide-eyed. He was enveloped in a survival blanket.

 Gil.

'I found him trudging through the city,’ Allegra said. ‘He’s walked the ten kilometres from Brancadorum to get here and –.’

But I didn’t hear the rest of what she said. I ran to the door and crushed him in my arms.

Io Saturnalia, indeed!"

Alison Morton is the author of the Roma Nova thriller series featuring modern Praetorian heroines. More at alison-morton.com 

How to win a short story competition by Imogen Robertson

Designed by H Wigstead 1795

© The Trustees of the British Museum

There is not, I think, an easy or reliable answer to that question, but it’s something I’m thinking a lot about this month. I’m judging the Historical Writers’ Association / Dorothy Dunnett Short Story Competition and it’s a humbling business. 

First of all the sheer number of entries we’ve received has been remarkable. Thanks to the sponsorship of the Dorothy Dunnett Society, we’ve been able to keep the entry fees reasonably low (I hope everyone is rushing out to by the re-issues of Lady Dunnett’s works), and that might be part of the reason. The second is, I think, the broad appeal to the imagination of historical fiction. Any place, any time, any size and shape of incident, great epoch shifting moments, or personal, intimate revelations - whatever you want to write and whatever sort of writer you are, you will find stage and characters and setting to fire your curiosity in history books and archives. I’m reading adventure, action, quest, romance, crime, war, alongside intricately worked, subtle portraits of individuals and communities. I'm delighted to say the standard is extremely high. Well, I'm delighted as a reader, but it makes the role of judge a lot more difficult. 

So how to choose? Well, obviously I feel very much as Antonia Senior did judging the HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown. The best stories have passion and are succeeding according to the terms they set for themselves. The very best are also beautifully written, not just competently, professionally written, but written in prose which is crackling with character, surprising and transporting. What’s clear is that we have more stories of exceptional quality than we have prizes to give, so I feel both challenged and very privileged to have such a field to pick from.

L'orange ou le moderne jugement de Pâris

Philibert Louis Debucourt 1800

© The Trustees of the British Museum

But:

There are a lot of stories which are perfectly good - the writers show promise and flair, there's imagination and sympathy - but for one reason or another the story doesn't quite fly off the page. I wondered why, if there is something particular about a competition story, or a historical story and what I might advise a writer to consider when they enter. The following is what I’ve come up with:

Here's one thing to bear in mind in the context of a competition - your judge isn’t choosing to pick up a magazine or a book, or click on a link and read just one short story. They are reading lots and lots of them. With the best will in the world, you are cooking for someone who’s already pretty full.

Le Ventiquattr'Hore dell'humana felicità

Guiseppe Maria Mitelli

© The Trustees of the British Museum

So a strong opening is key. A first line which presents me with a strong immediate image of a character and a situation makes me sit up quickly. An opening line about the weather is less likely to do that. Then there is originality of the setting. The Second World War still seems to exert a strong grip over our collective imaginations. That’s not a surprise, as I heard Elizabeth Buchan and Clare Mulley saying at a talk on Tuesday night, it is a period we are distant from but still connected to by family stories, and of course the drama of it, the huge moral choices faced by ordinary people makes it a compelling place to set one’s fiction. But if you are going to write about the Second World War, just be aware that you are part of a big crowd. You are going to have to fight harder to make your work stand out. Look at the sweep of history, is WWII the only place you can go imaginatively? If the answer to that question is yes, then fair enough, but just to give you an idea, I’d say nearly half of the stories I’ve read in competitions with a historical angle have been set between say 1935 and 1950. It doesn’t mean I dismiss those stories, but it makes me actively hungry to read your entry if it’s set outside that period.

Voice. Have one. There is a sort of neutral third person point of view which is almost ubiquitous these days. It may comment lyrically on scenery or action, it may contain within it strong lines of dialogue which convince as the voice of a living individual, but, by and large it floats above character like a slightly weary fog. Now, in novels prose which has a strong and particular flavour can get quite wearying, but that sort of prose certainly does punch through in short story competitions. It doesn’t need to be a monologue or the privileged viewpoint of an individual but an opening paragraph with its own particular crackle and bite has me cheering a story on rather than sitting back and hoping something happens soon. Think of it like stepping off a plane, that moment on the top of the steps as you emerge from the recycled atmosphere of the cabin. The air might be freezing, or heavy with humidity, you might be confronted with sounds and scents you’ve never met before, but it says loudly and immediately ‘we are somewhere different now’. And now your judge is leaning in, excited and eager to see where you are going to take him or her next.

Terracotta Campana relief showing a chariot-race

First Century Roman

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Remember this is fiction. A lot of stories try to rush through a lot of politics, a lot of years, individuals disappear and the words seem to shade into a non-fiction summary. They are telling rather than showing, trying to cram too many facts into a story until it becomes, in Josephine Tey’s phrase, ‘history with conversation’. I don’t think that’s makes for a great short story. A short story needs to be like a slashed sleeve, a sudden vivid stripe of life. A moment, or short series of moments which acts like a torch beam in the Aladdin’s cave of the period showing much, but suggesting much more.

And lastly, respect the form. Every story has its own length, and if an idea has grabbed you and wants a book out of you, it’s not going to be put off with fewer words. It will fight against the pleasures and constraints of the form. I don’t mean every story has to end with things neatly tied up, that can feel very heavy too, but they should have a sense of completeness to them. These are prose sonnets and shouldn’t feel cut off. They are an inhale and exhale, a whole thought which suggests a whole person, a whole time, a world, so that your reader or your judge reaches the end, sits back with a gasp or a sigh and needs a moment to return to themselves and the present.

That’s the way to win a short story competition. 

Books
Phyllis Gardener 1924
© The Trustees of the British Museum

www.imogenrobertson.com

Not Five but only Four Postcards by Adèle Geras

Once upon a time, I used to collect period postcards. I have lots of them, in assorted files and boxes in my house. I picked them up at book fairs, and in second hand shops where there were often cardboard boxes full of them. It was fun to look through them and considering them now, I see that my taste ran to Victorian and Edwardian family groups, devoted engaged couples and fat babies sporting waterfalls of lace. 

Then, one day, I came across what was obviously a set. I bought all five of them. They struck a real chord with me. Since that time, which must have been in the late 80s, I've thought a lot about why these particular images meant so much to me.  I was, and still am, very interested jn photography and had written a short story called The Poppycrunch Kid about the supernatural power of the camera. [This appears in a book called Letters of Fire, long out of print.] I wrote a poem about the  men I imagined taking these haunting photographs.

Then, the IRA  bombed the centre of Manchester in June, 1996  and suddenly, the subject of ruins was once more in my mind.

That day, the day that  Manchester was bombed, I was in town. I wanted to buy a wedding present and went to Piccadilly on the bus. I found the square unusually full. When I made my way towards Debenham's I was stopped by a policeman.

"You can't cross this line,  Miss. There's been a bomb threat," he said. And as he finished speaking, the bomb went off. It was very loud and very frightening and hideously close to where we were. 

The aftermath was amazing. Crowds of silent people lined up in a very orderly manner to board any bus they could...the buses were all pressed into service to evacuate us  from the scene. There were also queues around phone boxes. Remember those?  In 1996 hardly anyone  had a mobile. I certainly didn't.  I went straight home on one of the buses. Four miles away, my husband had heard the explosion.

A few days later, we  went for a walk together through the city. Seeing all the shops, all the pubs, all the places we were used to seeing whole suddenly and shockingly broken, shattered and empty was traumatic, horrible. I can remember standing outside a pub which had a defiant notice chalked on a board outside. You can't kill  Manchester, you bastards! it said, and I was reduced to tears. No one was killed that day. Only the fabric of Manchester: the stones, the glass, the wood lay in pieces and I felt heartbroken.

I remembered these postcards. Here they are. I've copied the English words printed on each card. They are also there in French. Under the title it says: La Guerre, 1914-17 LCHParis  

Reninghe Belgium (the church bombarded by the Germans)

Pervyse (Belgium) The ruins of the church

La Panne (Belgium) Effect of a 75 on a spys (sic) house

Nieucappelle (Belgium) View of a brewery after the bombardment

There was a fifth postcard. The best of them all and I cannot find it. It may be in another file and it may surface  again one day.  It is of the same soldier who appears in the Nieucapelle Brewery photo but it's a different pose. The only description I have of it is in the poem I wrote shortly after buying all five. It gives, I hope, a good description of what was shown.  I'm sorry I have only words to convey its power.   The poem follows: 

Five Postcards: La Guerre 1914-17 LCH Paris

L.C.H Paris photographed the War,
sent men to tiptoe over stones cracked open
(but oh, the mud on patent leather shoes
accustomed to sliding
round and round the ladies! The hands
that draped silk gowns alongside cardboard urns
and tucked undying flowers into décolletages
will touch raw air outside the studio.)

Pervyse, Nieucapelle, Reninghe, La Panne,
les ruines, les ruines après le bombardement.

With difficulty on uneven ground
they found flat places,
covered their heads with black,
looked for something representative.

Here, a numbered bomb
blew the spy's house
to dust under a dune of bricks.
Only one corner, the last window
as they were.

Then, two grey church views:
free-standing arches rise in fields
of carvings scattered into shards.
Towers show white skies
through torn lace of masonry,
windows with no glass.

The brewery roof has gone, leaving
a lattice of timbers.
There's a soldier in this picture,
embarrassed by his own survival.
Behind the camera, under the dark cloth
he imagines the head, a skull's curve.
He's propped his bayonet 
against the sandbagged wall
and made his own, much smaller conflagration:
lighting a cigarette,
breathing out the smoke. 

THE PAST AS PLACE by Jane Borodale

Weald and Downland Open Air Museum

What is it exactly that makes a place? It’s something I think about a lot. Trying to describe the experience of being in a place is a very layered, shifting kind of thing. I love the way that linear time makes no sense when applied to the physicality of a location, it’s all muddled up, bits of the past can be utterly current under our feet.

And landscape itself is filled with clues of how it might have been when people used it differently. I always think of place as one of the main protagonists in any story, speaking volumes without dialogue, not as a backdrop but as an active player. And trying to read a landscape or environment is one step closer towards knowing the people who live or have lived previously in it.

Poplar Cottage from Washington, Sussex

I was recently lucky enough to spend a year as writer-in-residence at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in Sussex, where over 50 vernacular buildings have been rescued from destruction and painstakingly reassembled on a beautiful 40-acre site in the Sussex chalk Downland. These are buildings that were used by peasants, labourers and tradesmen – people intrinsic to their working landscapes. It’s a place close to my heart as I grew up in the Downs nearby and spent formative hours at the museum as a child, sneaking in through the fence. In those days there were only a few houses, mostly unfurnished, but to a child it was a delicious portal to the past.

Now it’s a fully assembled village, in itself an entirely new place: 15th-century Wealden hall-houses, smoke-bay cottage, 17th-century farmhouse, medieval barns, working watermill, granaries, early 19th-century tollhouse, working Tudor kitchen. Many of the houses are authentically furnished to a specific period.

Bayleaf, Wealden hall-house from Chiddingstone

The museum community includes skilled carpenters and conservators, curator, an on-site historian (who was very generous with her expertise), woodsman, gardener, miller, blacksmith, stockman, working animals of traditional breeds. It’s the combination of rigorous scholarship and physical experiment there that I found so inspiring. There is so much for the imagination to feed on – but not in a vaguely ‘heritage’ or theme-parkish way; this museum is an ongoing investigation into building technology across six centuries and the ordinary lives of ordinary people of the south-eastern region. It’s a large-scale celebration of the commonplace embedded in its landscape.

During my residency I wrote about four of these houses at the museum, but in the context of their original sites. I wanted to try to make each house-portrait into a narrative arc that gave a sense of time swooshing along, a kind of flipbook of moments. (The end result was The Visitor, which at the moment you can download as a free eBook at Lovereading.co.uk to read on a computer or Kindle etc.)

Medieval house from North Cray

During research I spent a lot of time absorbing the character of these buildings, as well as facts and social history, through the seasons. (In winter huddling gratefully near the fires kept burning in many of the hearths – how extremely smoky, ashy, cold and draughty the past was!) I also found reading historical maps and applying or mentally layering them over existing sites really fascinating. 19th-century tithe maps, particularly if looked at alongside census records across the century, reveal tantalising glimpses of lives and occupations and family relations to the land. Who owned a particular set of fields, who lived at the blacksmithy, how old the shoemaker’s son was in a given year and whether he had a wife… Having these place-specific kind of shards or snippets from the past and standing in the same place today, makes a kind of double-place – an overlapping or convergence of times that we’re free to animate with our imaginations whether we’re visitors, readers or writers.

The more I write fiction the more I realise how my idea of the past is bound up with place, and that what I write is an attempt to pin down aspects of time that are captured tangibly in the actual matter of place (building or landscape) as traces, marks, buried pieces, snagged things, steepings, footprints. Maybe ‘pin down’ is too dry and specific; I suppose I mean that writing stories is a way to create the illusion of somewhere that appears whole enough to climb inside, if only for the duration of reading. (When it really works of course it becomes an entirely new place in its own right, lodged in the head and carried around indefinitely.) The past is a place we can only visit in our minds – and how very many ways it can be constructed. Historical fiction positively demands that we try to dwell in it, to ‘be’ inside its moment, trying it out in time and space. And places like this museum are a rich source of information about how things actually worked in terms of scale and physical effort within a given environment.

Winkhurst Tudor kitchen

I miss those residency mornings shivering in the marvellously-stocked timber-framed library, buried in copies of WH Hudson learning about shepherds; afternoons propped in corners of soot-blackened halls with a biro and notebook. I miss finding out the practical details: how extremely heavy the churn handle becomes as the cream turns to butter, what the strain and creak of millwheels driving stones to grind the flour sounds like, the particular smell of pig meat being freshly butchered. And I miss the site-visits out across the southern counties to where the buildings came from, armed with maps and thermos, ducking under barbed wire, looking for clues, often finding that curious whisked-away feeling of something physically gone from a place but somehow still current in so many ways. It goes without saying how loss or absence itself can have a powerful presence on the flavour of a place – and as writers of historical fiction we’re all occupied in describing absences, aren’t we?

Bayleaf farmstead from Chiddingstone, Kent

I’ll end this rather elliptical set of thoughts with the happy news that the Weald and Downland Museum are holding their first ever Historical Fiction Day on 5 Aug 2012, to consider and explore aspects of writing that draws on the past through place and character.

Speakers include bestselling authors Alison Weir and Maria McCann. Click here to buy tickets for the day or to find out more.

And their Historical Short Story Competition (1st prize 1000 pounds, judges include Kate Mosse and Emma Darwin) has a deadline of 22 June – just one month away today!

It would be really nice to meet some of you at the HF day, or read your stories…