The right to dig, by Vanora Bennett

After 13 years in increasing despair at never getting to the top of my London borough’s apparently endless allotment waiting list, I applied to another London borough a few weeks ago and immediately – starting last Saturday – got a half-size allotment of five poles.

Half-size! That’s deceptive. My new smallholding is huge, at least the size of my house, surrounded by other plots of either twice or four times the size, and charming brambles and wildflowers and fruit trees in blossom in between (it is not quite in the perfect condition of the plot in the picture, by the way; I just borrowed that picture). Call me over-enthusiastic, but at the end of my first weekend, even if I ache a lot, my plot still seems an absolute paradise of fruit and veg and flowers and bees and fascinating sheds and delightfully Chekhovian characters and tea and bric-a-brac and happiness.

Which has all, naturally enough, made me wonder how it came about historically that a bunch of middle-class London characters such as my fellow allotment-farmers and me have been so blessed. Who gave the citizens of England the right to five or ten poles of land somewhere near where they live, for not much in the way of rent, and when, and why? Is it all just to give us a chance to out-Fearnley-Whittingstall Hugh and live poshly off the finest of fresh food without paying the supermarkets for it? Is it part of living in a democracy? Or is it something to do with being afraid of hunger - digging for victory in the Second World War - or an older right still, corresponding to older hungers? Was it once a way for the poor to feed themselves and ward off starvation, like the Russian dacha-and-allotment system that (sometimes) kept the Slavic version of the grim reaper away at tight times in the 20th century?

The answer, it seems, is that there are at least two allotment histories merged into one outcome, and all these sets of suppositions are true.

On the one hand, there was a long-running and serious story about alleviating poverty. The enclosures movement that saw peasants squeezed off common land as it was hedged and allocated to a single owner, making it unavailable for traditional shared farming, caused unrest through history and in particular sent crowds of the hungry poor into towns to kick-start the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. But the fightback on behalf of the dispossessed also eventually made it mandatory to make growing land available to the poor and displaced.

Secondly, in a fairly separate strand of history, the middle classes prospering in towns as a result of the Industrial Revolution then clamoured for “city allotments” to do a bit of digging, but also to have a garden to relax and escape the confines of the city – partly because of a 19th-century obsession with gardening and partly as a show of wealth. These “posh” plots became known as “pleasure gardens” and often had brick summerhouses or follies. Families might even stay the night in their city allotments, which were surrounded by hedges or fences – but the plots didn’t survive the spread of Victorian villas with their own gardens later in the 19th century. Most were turned into “normal” allotments, or built on.

So it’s the other, more brutal story – the one of brutal eviction of peasants from the land – that really brought us the Paradise Regained of modern allotments, I’d say.

A 19th-century question: how little land does a peasant need to stop revolting?

The enclosure movement in the late 18th century helped shape modern Britain. Enormous swathes of the English countryside were enclosed and the new fences planted altered the look of the landscape for good. By the mid-19th century, most common land in Britain had been enclosed and a whole class of rural people dispossessed. Throughout this period, according to The Allotment Gardener, movements came into being to try and fight for some ground for the common labourer who was quietly losing his all. As early as 1649 protesters calling themselves the “Diggers” demanded the “right to dig”. A group of hungry men led by Gerrard Winstanley, they organised a mass trespass on waste land in St George’s Hill, Surrey, sowing it with vegetables and wheat. 

Winstanley was a cloth merchant whose business had been ruined in the Civil War; he had, in January of 1649, published The New Law of Righteousness in which he envisioned a just and harmonious society guided by spiritual regeneration through Christ. He explained his belief that the miseries of the world result from men turning from God, whom he equates with Reason, to satisfy greed and the pursuit of power. Poverty and inequality stem from the selfish buying and selling of land and property, and could be eradicated by communal living and an acceptance of the risen Christ, he wrote: "Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?"

The New Law of Righteousness was published as the trial of King Charles I was drawing to a close. Four days later, the King was beheaded at Whitehall. England was declared a "Commonwealth and free state". In this revolutionary atmosphere, it seemed possible that all tyranny and oppression could finally be brought down and Winstanley's utopian vision become reality.

 

In April, to prove their point, Winstanley's Diggers started planting St George's Hill. 

Their idealism, it turned out, was misplaced. The new authorities didn't like it. A Kingston court indicted and fined them in July. 

By August, harassed off the land, they moved on. 

But the idea of a “right to dig” had taken hold.

The social unrest caused by the process of enclosure led to a number of private initiatives to provide the common man with land to grow and provide for himself. This was mainly driven by private land owners who commonly believed that not only would a small patch of land be worth more to their workers than an increase in salary, but that it also kept them away from the ale house, making them better workers. These sponsors didn’t want workers turning up too tired to work at their paid employment, however, so they wanted the size of the allotments provided to be restricted.

The age of legislating for social improvement was at hand. The General Enclosure Act in 1845 offered “field gardens” of up to a quarter-acre for the poor, but the Act was poorly framed and made little real difference. After an election in 1884 in which allotments were a political hot potato, in 1887 an Allotments Act was introduced, which made it possible for local authorities to acquire land for allotments and also made it compulsory for local authorities to provide allotments where there was demand for them. Local authorities resisted however, and this led to further Acts in 1894, and then finally the Smallholding and Allotments Act of 1907. This was the defining measure, still in place today, which forced councils to provide allotments where there was demand. Under it a local authority is obliged to provide allotments if there is demand from more than six people (unless, as with central London, there is insufficient space).

New century, new stimuli: veg gardening as a response to war and fear

Until now handing over land had seemed, to many in the governing classes, a where-will-it-all-end pandering to the demands of the greedy poor.

World War One changed that. With the German blockade biting and people worried about where their food would come from, the authorities stopped going slow and hastily tripled the number of plots available, which rose from half a million to one-and-a-half million by 1917 (this fell back below a million by 1929).

Enthusiasm hit another peak during the Second World War. All sorts of land was given out to allotment plots – even parkland and city gardens.

My father remembers the central garden of the square where he and I both grew up – St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, west London - being turned over to vegetables during the War when he was a small boy. The picture on the left is of Hampstead Heath.

It was the age of the Dig for Victory campaign, with the government exhorting gardeners to grow, grow, grow and get the family along to help too.

The numbers of allotment holders shrank dramatically after the war ended. An era of ready-made food and Wonderbras, and the uncoolness of the flat-capped-old-man-gardener image, looked set to kill off forever the idea of it being fun growing your own veg. Yet every decade or so another TV programme would come along that would briefly send people rushing for an allotment again – “The Good Life,” in the Seventies, and then in our time almost anything by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

21st-century hip

Think organic. Think the rise of green parties everywhere. It’s all reflected down at the allotments too. There are about 300,000 potholders in the UK today, and, according to the National Society for Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, there are another 100,000 on waiting lists. (No, make that 99,999 – this week I’m crossing myself off the waiting list I’ve been on for so long). The average age has shifted down several generations. I’m at the old end of my field, it seems. Many of the people I met were in their 30s and 40s: mums with children, young men with girlfriends ... like fresh-faced Katie and many others on YouTube.

My allotment field is a place of kindly advice and shared cups of tea, and cheerful internationalism too. Savvy immigrants from the gardening nations are all strongly represented here. There’s an Afghan guy growing an astonishing number of crops on his plot, just down from me; and a pair of Cypriot brothers who’ve had side-by-side plots for longer than anyone can remember on the other side of him. Below that, a double plot – 20 poles! Pretty much a farm, with three sheds and a greenhouse and more fruit trees than you can imagine – belongs to Svitlana, from Ukraine, who farms it with her sister and her sister’s small children. She kindly offered me tea and the use of one of her sheds to store my stuff. She keeps a nip of vodka and a couple of tins of sardines in hers, too, in case a party is needed.

I used to worry about what I’d do if a world-changing catastrophe hit - Brexit or Grexit or Donald Trump or a terrorist strike. Now I know, and it is strangely reassuring.

If all else failed, I’d still have the freedom to go to the place that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers campaigned to be called into existence, all those centuries ago, and subsist by the sweat of my own brow; to exercise my “right to dig.”

Vanora Bennett's website

What is history? by Vanora Bennett

“What is history?” was the kind of big question I remember being asked to answer in long, shakily self-important essays at school.

Back then the abstraction felt a bit of a waste of time.

The question only took on an exciting and personal new meaning once I started writing fiction set in the past, when it became my business and pleasure to look for stories I could think of as historical in some way, then retell. The various bits of the past I identified as history worth retelling started with (1) the Tudor period and went through (2) several earlier times in medieval England, before moving on to (3) 20th-century Russia.

It felt like cheating to be writing about the 20th century - going to the very edge of the parameters of what was allowed in a style with some quite strict genre conventions. Could it really still count as proper history, what I was writing, I'd agonise, if the women wore short skirts and people made long-distance phone calls and drove cars? But when I went to the Harrogate historical writing festival in 2014, and heard James Naughtie talk about his novel – also classed as “historical” although set as recently as the 1970s – I realized I’d actually been hopelessly unimaginative in my classifications, not cheating at all.  It was time to define history far more broadly. History was pretty much everything, everywhere, that had happened longer ago than in my short-term memory.

Since then I've been looking in some much more adventurous times and places than before for anything that might count as history - any story that encapsulates something unique about a moment in the past and is relevant to the present at the same time. And here's the latest one to really, really catch my imagination. It's from the Sixties, and Zambia. I happened upon it only a day or two ago. I am still a bit fluttery and in love. And I’m fully confident that, although the events in it happened in my lifetime, it is very definitely historical.

The Zambian space race

The plot goes like this. Back at the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union were in a frantic race to launch their respective countrymen into space. They weren’t the only ones trying to get to the moon. In Zambia, shortly after independence from British rule, school science teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s dream of space travel led him to establish the new nation’s very own space academy in an old farmhouse seven miles ouside the capital, Lusaka.

Nkoloso was serious about the mission. He applied for a £7 million grant from UNESCO, assembled a motley space crew (a 17-year-old girl called Matha and two cats), and trained them by rolling them down hills in oil drums.

This is the subject of young filmmaker Frances Bodomo’s recent short film Afronauts, a bold fusion of history, science, political critique, and imaginative fantasy. She shows Matha, a young albino girl — pictured above and played by model Diandra Forrest — training for her own moon shot on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, aware that she may be sacrificing herself to sustain family pride and a national dream.

Drama, deception, self-deception - and dreams

It's the story of outsiders, trying to get inside the drama of their day. It’s a story of deception and self-deception. And it’s a story of dreams - big, wonderful, and all-enveloping, even if they're impossible in real life.

“I heard about the real Afronauts, and for me it was a wonderful story from this era of moon fever — how imagination is boundless and doesn’t need to be tethered to possibility,” Bodomo, a hip Ghanaian raised all over the world and now living in America, is quoted as saying in one of her many interviews. Researching the story, she learned the would-be spacemen never launched. “They just dissipated into the blind spot of history. That made [the story] much more exciting for me because it’s only accessible through imagination, emotion, desire, and interior life.”

Her well received short is brilliant (check it out for yourself online – there's a teaser and an interview or two with the auteur) and now she's also got a grant to turn it into a full-length feature film.

What I like most, apart from the beauty of her flickery black and white filming, is the playful yet positive way that Bodomo reimagines her wishful-thinking Zambian Walter Mitty. As she says,  “Nkoloso was essentially a prankster, but what he did was really profound. When you’re outside the grand narrative of history, to get in by playing the game is futile. You have to poke holes in the game. Leave cracks in it, open it up, redefine it.”

So is this prankish story from way outside the grand narrative real, proper, kosher history?

You betcha. To me, the space race already seems as archaic as Henry VIII’s codpiece or hanging, drawing and quartering. So does the end of the British empire - the story behind this story, in a narrative about people in a poor newly enfranchised nation trying to grab a bit of the excitement of the era when, even if free, they still have no money and so are still locked out. But the struggle of outsiders will always be of our time; the allure of dreams, too. I’d say that combination makes this the real deal - a pretty damn fine historical story.

Slaves, Fish, Crochet, by Vanora Bennett

I didn’t intend to go to the art exhibition now on at London’s centre for Russia-lovers, Pushkin House. I was there for a talk on something else Russian and cultural in the same room, to do with the novel I’m researching, and very interesting it was too. Yet, as I listened to the talk, I couldn’t help but be struck by the textiles hung on the walls. They weren’t particularly astonishing when you first came in. Their (brilliantly) bizarre wrongness took a while to sink in, and make you stare.

The artworks were big blanket-like knits in dingy colours, with dividing lines that made them look like brick walls (think Pink Floyd album covers), and with graffiti-like Russian words in bright wools sewn on. Slogan type words, only backwards, or upside down, or altered; or swearword type words.

On another wall there were some neatly crocheted multi-coloured shapes – the kind of sweet table-mat thing you can imagine a granny with a slightly wonky sense of colour working, over a nice cup of tea. But these shapes were Russian letters, and the letters were strung together in more words, and, again, they were quite subversive, altered, wrong versions of Soviet slogans.

It was definitely confusing to see all those very butch power words – the shorthand script of the Soviet elite who, in their 70 years in power, gave us Stalin and the Gulag and millions of deaths, and the brutal vocabulary of choice of the violent Russian underworld that flourished under them – re-rendered here in neat, fluffy, well finished plain-and-purl-and-a-bit-of-embroidery. If you ever wanted an illustration of the feminisation of history, this was it.

It was only after the talk was over, and I turned round and noticed the quietest exhibit of all, at the back of the hall, that I actually burst out laughing.

This one was a large white lacy oblong, with frilly edges – the kind of cosy, conservative decorative item one might expect to find on a wire, not quite covering a cobwebby dacha window somewhere, with snow outside and whichever kindly auntie had done the crocheting glancing proudly round at it as she passed more tea (possibly from a samovar). It looked the concentrated essence of a particular kind of Russian innocence – the get-away-from-politics-to-the-simple-life mood that makes country weekends in those little wooden houses so enchanting. At least, it looked that way until you looked more closely and saw, all mixed up with the intricate patterns, that its main decorative feature was the – wildly inappropriate - great shouty Soviet propaganda word, PRAVDA (TRUTH), also the name of the main Soviet-era newspaper, followed by a disconcerting question mark.

The pieces, it turns out, are the work of a young Moscow artist called Olga Bozhko.

The exhibition blurb says Bozhko “plays with ideas of memory and history as they are reflected both in the language of the streets and in the language of government propaganda. She is fascinated by the way everyday Russian language mutates alongside ever-changing Russian perceptions of history. Living and working in Moscow, Bozhko pays attention to the graffiti, advertising and government slogans which comment, often unconsciously, on Russian society today.”

“The works for installation were knitted by hand - a symbolically soft and feminine medium. The large size of the works imply a considerable investment of labour and time: we usually associate this type of labour with domestic craft, which sets out to ‘wrap’ home life in comforting, soft hand-made material. But the images and particularly the inscriptions on the works are unsettling. Some of them imitate brick walls covered with angry graffiti, others - net curtains - but with slogans woven in to them. In the context of the elegant early Georgian architecture of Pushkin House, they turn into politically-charged comments on the past and present of Russia.”

The one that struck me most wasn’t in the room at all. It was at the bottom of the stairwell.

It’s a large hand-knitted fishing net, in the red, white and blue colours of the Russian flag.

The inscription Bozhko has snuck into the middle of the net looks and sounds like the heroic early Soviet propaganda slogan, “Raby Ne My” – “We Are No Slaves”. Between 1917 and the onset of perestroika in the mid-1980s, this phrase always featured in the Soviet primary school literacy programme and as a result resonates today with generations of Russian-speakers.

By now, though, I knew better than to take Bozhko’s slogans at face value. So I looked again. Sure enough, she’d changed a few letters to give a very different message, “Ryby Nemy”, or “Fish Are Dumb” – the title of her exhibition.

“This play on words,” Pushkin House’s gloss on the show says, “shows how very subtle changes can disarm (and in fact then re-arm) a powerful propagandistic message. To Russian ears, the phrase ‘We are no slaves’ is associated with one of the grand ideological narratives of the last century; ‘fishes are dumb’ may be read factually or of course as a metaphor for silent shoals of people caught in nets of government propaganda.”

“I like these,” I said, with growing fellow-feeling. Bozhko seemed so clearly the visual equivalent of so many female historical novelists today – cleverly re-examining the past, using new methods and materials and values, emphasising some things more and de-emphasising others, poking a bit of quiet fun at some of the sacred cows of tradition, and generally filling in the gaps left by the male academicians who did the writing first time round.

“I don’t,” the man sitting next to me replied, in cross David Starkey style. “I decided that before you got here.”

But you might enjoy Bozhko's mocking girl challenge to the orthodoxies of modern Russian history if you are open-minded. Even if you're male.

See Vanora Bennett’s website

Sigmund Freud, historical novelist? By Vanora Bennett

An important part of every historical novelist’s work is looking for the first glimmer of the next story. Finding that apparently unexciting fragment from the past that suddenly makes your storytelling lightbulb switch on – the eureka moment - is one of the most rewarding moments of the job. I always have half an eye open for it, whether I’m reading Chaucer or a Cornflakes packet. But, all the same, I was surprised this week to find a humdinger of a historical fiction story idea while following a particularly dry and academic-looking footnote from somewhere else to the 4,000-page Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.

Freud arouses strong feelings. His acolytes revere him for revealing the workings of the human mind. Others loathe him. (The Russian-born author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, was a case in point, always denouncing the dirty-mindedness of the “Viennese witch-doctor”– though, given the child-abuse plot of Lolita, those two men were perhaps never going to see eye to eye). I’ve read a fair bit of Freud, but I haven’t had either strong reaction till now, just a slight wish to yawn at the clunkier translations. It’s always felt very clear to me how hard Freud is striving to be scientific. (This doesn’t put him at the top of my bed-time reading pile). His work is all real, argument piled on theory on case study. He doesn’t make stuff up.

Which is why I was so surprised this week to come across his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, another bearded genius - the Renaissance Florentine painter and investigator of nature, anatomy, birds, flight, war machines and much more – 

because what a brilliantly creative work of the imagination it is. Sherlock Holmes would be proud to have investigated Leonardo the way Freud did, joining up dots no one else would even have seen to produce a quite extraordinary story and producing it with an “elementary my dear Watson” flourish.

It starts in an ordinary enough way. After speculating that Leonardo’s genius came from sublimating his sexual impulses into art and science, Freud tells us the few facts known about Leonardo’s life – that he was illegitimate, raised by his mother as a baby, then taken into his notary father’s home at the age of five, and from there went to train as an artist in his teens. He was gay, probably, and took on beautiful young male apprentices, though whether he actually had sex with men is not known. What became of his birth mother is unclear too.

So far, so ho-hum. Then comes the master’s touch. Enter the vulture.

“There is, so far as I know, only one place in his scientific note books where Leonardo inserts a piece of information about his childhood,” Freud goes on. “In a passage about the flight of vultures he suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from very early years which had sprung to his mind: ‘It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’”

Freud being Freud, it isn’t that surprising, maybe, that he interprets this memory as being about fellatio. From that he deduces that little Leonardo loved his mother passionately as a toddler, spent all his time with her before losing her at five years old, and could never bear to replace her with another woman, so found his adult near-sexual friendships instead with beautiful young boys to avoid sullying her memory. He looked after the boy apprentices of his later life as he wished his mother had been able to look after him.

But then the fun begins. Freud also tells us that the Ancient Egyptian mother goddess, Mut, was represented in pictures as a vulture. All vultures were believed to be female, impregnated by the wind in mid-flight. Leonardo might have known this, because the Fathers of the Church liked this old pagan story that seemed to confirm that virgin births (such as that of Jesus from Mary) were possible.  “We can now reconstruct the origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. … He also had been such a vulture-child - he had had a mother, but no father.”

Leonardo flagged as a painter in mid-life – he wanted truth to nature too much to ever be satisfied with his creations - and instead spent years designing machines for the Duke of Milan and berating himself for artistic laziness.

But then, as a 50-year-old man, Leonardo’s notebooks show he took in an elderly woman called Caterina, and on her death paid for her burial. Freud’s imagination goes wild here. He takes from a now forgotten Russian novel the idea that Caterina may have been Leonardo’s long-lost mother, with whom he was possibly reunited at the end of her life - and who reawakened his genius for paint.

Soon afterwards, in Freud’s retelling, Leonardo came across a smile that he finally allowed to remind him of the blissful early years he had spent alone with his mother. It was the smile we see in the Mona Lisa, his portrait masterpiece, and then over and over again in the surge of painterly creativity that followed. For the rest of his life Leonardo created figure after figure with that same enigmatic, tender yet terrible smile, finally bringing it to life not only on the face of the Mona Lisa but also on those of St Anne and the Virgin Mary, playing with the infant Jesus, and Leda, and even on the male faces of Bacchus and of a rejuvenated, beautiful, St John, a swaying figure of almost feminine beauty. By being reunited with his mother in his middle years, Freud hazarded, Leonardo must finally have solved the problem of his early sexuality and managed to unite the images of a smiling mother and the beautiful boys into one artistic whole. For Freud, this represented Leonardo living happily ever after.

Fascinating though this was, I didn’t completely buy the theory until I read the footnote Freud added in 1919.

“A remarkable discovery has been made in the Louvre picture [Jesus with his enigmatically smiling mother and grandmother, St Anne] by Oskar Pfister, which is of undeniable interest, even if one may not feel inclined to accept it without reserve. In Mary’s curiously arranged and rather confusing drapery he has discovered the outline of a vulture and he interprets it as an unconscious picture-puzzle: ‘In the picture that represents the artist’s mother the vulture, the symbol of motherhood, is perfectly clearly visible. In the length of blue cloth, which is visible around the hip of the woman in front and which extends in the direction of her lap and her right knee, one can see the vulture’s extremely characteristic head, its neck and the sharp curve where its body begins. ‘

Enthusiastically, Freud added a line drawing of the picture to his article, with the “vulture cloth” drawn in darker than the rest, to support his killer proof, quoting Pfister:

“‘The important question however is: How far does the picture-puzzle extend? If we follow the length of cloth, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, starting at the middle of the wing and continuing from there, we notice that one part of it runs down to the woman’s foot, while the other part extends in an upward direction and rests on her shoulder and on the child. The former of these parts might more or less represent the vulture’s wing and tail, as it is in nature; the latter might be a pointed belly and - especially when we notice the radiating lines which resemble the outlines of feathers - a bird’s outspread tail, whose right-hand end, exactly as in Leonardo’s fateful childhood dream, leads to the mouth of the child, i.e. of Leonardo himself.’”

It’s stunningly weird - more Da Vinci Code than Da Vinci, in my view – but it’s an absolutely stunning stimulus to the imagination, too. For some reason, that fanciful line drawing has got me wondering, all week, what Leonardo’s mother was like, and whether she can really have had the Mona Lisa smile, and whether she could possibly have come home to die at his studio, and how that would have changed him, and how their early relationship might have made him the artist he was …. And even wondering, just a bit, how you could possibly bring all the crazy-sounding Egyptian-vulture-goddess information dumps into a fiction without it looking too incredibly lame …

So Freud’s flight of fancy has convinced me. Perhaps it is a pity he did stick almost entirely to writing about the scientific reality he thought was in our heads, and smoking cigars. He would have been a great historical novelist.

HISTORICAL FICTION PICKS FOR 2014 – by Elizabeth Fremantle

As the end of 2014 is approaching I felt it was time for a round-up, so here are some of the historical novels that have made an impression on me this year.

I'm a die-hard fan of Sarah Waters, but with THE PAYING GUESTS (Virago)
she surpassed all my expectations. The novel is set in the 1920s in a genteel suburb of South London where the socially awkward Frances Wray lives with her difficult mother. All the men of the family are gone and the two women strive to maintain appearances in their straightened circumstances. Frances feels their money worries may be resolved with the arrival of Len and Lil Barber who are the paying guests of the title. But the couple burst into the Wray's quiet world with their late-night drinking sessions, loud music and flirtatious behaviour. Inevitably Frances is drawn into this world with devastating consequences.

This begins as a story of love, told with intensity, passion and meticulous writing, but, as so often with Waters's narratives, it is not what it first seems and becomes increasingly dark as a central violent event takes hold of the story. Though it is long and meanders at times, I was completely gripped from start to finish.

I discovered Richard Skinner at a literary festival this summer and was intrigued to hear him talk about his novella, THE VELVET GENTLEMAN based on the life of Erik Satie, whose piano music has always captivated me. It is published in an anthology called THE MIRROR (Faber).

Skinner's approach to historical fiction is highly imaginative – when a novella begins with, 'I died yesterday,' you know your disbelief will be stretched in interesting ways. Satie tells his own story  from a kind of limbo presided over by a Mr Takahashi who is in charge of filtering arrivals through to the afterlife. But in order to move on Satie must choose a single memory to take with him, leaving all the others behind and this provides the opportunity for him to recollect the events of his life. He is characterised as a rather unpleasant individual, plodding miserably through life, but because of the originality of the setting this only serves to make the story more interesting, as does the portrait of a Paris populated by characters such as Cocteau, Picasso and Debussy. An intriguing and memorable read.

Imogen Robertson's latest novel THEFT OF LIFE (Headline), the fifth in her Westerman and Crowther series deals with the slave trade in Georgian London. Robertson draws on the lives of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass for inspiration for her narrative which highlights the atrocities of the slave trade allowing the reader to understand the extent to which the drawing rooms of England were stained with the blood of slavery. When a slave trader is found dead, spreadeagled in a London cemetery, in what appears to be a case of straightforward revenge murder Robertson's doughty pair of proto-detectives discover that things are far more complex than they first appear. And so begins a gripping story of brutality and evil that uncovers dark revelations about the slave trade.

Elizabeth Buchan has changed direction with I CAN'T BEGIN TO TELL YOU (Penguin), a novel set in rural Denmark in the Second World War. Kay Eberstern is married into a well-to-do Danish family and finds world turned upside down with the Nazi occupation of her adopted country. Her husband Bror is determined to preserve his estate and family legacy by cooperating with the Germans but for Kay this is morally impossible and she becomes embroiled in resistance and espionage for British Intelligence, risking everything for what she believes to be right. This is a well researched and beautifully pitched novel that is full of revelations.

Suzannah Dunn has a way of getting to the heart of any story by exploring the edges of the action. In THE MAY BRIDE (Little Brown) it is the intriguing story of Katherine Filliol, wife of the ambitious courtier Edward Seymour, who was rumoured to have cuckolded him with his father. Fascinating enough on its own, this story is as much about its narrator as it is about its protagonist. She is the quiet observer at Wolf Hall, a woman who will become queen, Jane Seymour. Told with the benefit of her hindsight, allowing the silent narrative of her queenship and her ultimate tragedy to hover at the margins. Dunn is a master of the ordinary, making the mundane seem extraordinary with her attention to detail.

I don't normally read fiction which inhabits the same historical space as my own whilst writing but I read this in preparation for the Harrogate History Festival where we appeared together and I'm very glad I did.

What I will be reading over Christmas: I can't wait to hunker down with a hot water bottle and these two highly praised novels over the holidays.

I always look forward to Vanora Bennett's fiction, for the depth of her research and the deftness of her storytelling. Her latest novel THE WHITE RUSSIAN (Century), set in the Russian emigre community in Paris, tells of Evie a rebellious young American who leaves New York in search of art and adventure in Europe, finding herself embroiled in murder plots, conspiracies and illicit love affairs.




Antonia Hodgson's debut novel THE DEVIL IN THE MARCHALSEA (Hodder) has been recommended to me by so many people that I simply have to read it. Set in London in 1727 the wayward Tom Hawkins finds himself in the Marchalsea prison, a place gripped by fear and suspicion in the wake of the brutal murder of one of the inmates and Tom is sharing a cell with the prime suspect. He must risk everything to uncover the truth, or be the next to die. It sounds un-put-downable.



My own novel SISTERS OF TREASON sequel to QUEEN'S GAMBIT is out in hardback and will be out in paperback on January 29th. For more about me and my books, go to elizabethfremantle.com