Graveyards as a Gateway into History Theresa Breslin

Graveyards…

…are one of my favourite places to be.


OK, it’s a bit odd, but usually I explain it away by saying that I visit them as “Research For My Books” which reassures people, but, truthfully, if I’m travelling I usually visit the local graveyard even if it’s not specifically required for the current novel.

So I’ve trogged round catacombs and crypts, visited ossuaries under the Vatican, shaken hands with the mummified Crusader in Dublin, studied the reconstructed victims of Pompeii, listened to the Last Post at the Menin Gate and left flowers for Édith Piaf in Père Lachaise.

The reason this subject is in my mind is because at a recent YLG Conference in Northern Ireland I was doing a two-hander with the wonderful Sally Gardner on the subject of dyslexia. Sally, author of I, Coriander and The Red Necklace etc enlightened us with personal experience while I talked about the inspiration for and writing of Whispers in the Graveyard. Although this book is not an historical novel the story relies on past events, specifically the burning of a witch. About the time I was writing the book a ring road was under construction in my home town and it was necessary to move the interred bodies out of an old graveyard which lay in the path of the new road.

The Burial Book was lodged in the library where I was working. I began to look at the entries. As a social history it was invaluable, not just for the recording of the passing of my ancestors and how sometimes brief and harsh their lives were, but also revealing the ignorance of the medical profession where regularly people were recorded as having died from ‘Morticia’ which I guess means the cause of death was… death. I studied the gravestones, symbols, designs, codes… and I realised that a graveyard was the perfect place for my dyslexic hero to hide out. Solomon, loves stories and conjures his own from the language of the Memorial Stones. As I began to write and did more research on both my main subjects, the whole thing meshed together - Solomon’s father, the solitary grave, the potential for evil inside everyone, the power of words, the infinite resources of the human mind – the story locked.


After the novel was published my interest in burial places became a passion. And when researching a period of history often I’ll begin with the end, in that burial customs indicate mindset. Particular examples illuminate so much: the occupation and interests of the deceased, size of family, lifestyle and interests, and on and on. Older ones are sprinkled with Guild Marks, or with work tools that are now unfamiliar to us. You can have a guess at some of these. The glove on the 1687 memorial from Elgin Cathedral does not (as one child asked me) mean that Michael Jackson is buried there! Glove-making was big business in those days. Below the personal information about the deceased is one of my favourite inscriptions:




This world is a citie full of streets &
Death is the Mercat that all Men meets
If Lyfe were a thing that monie could buy
The poor could not live & the rich would not die





The Watch Tower with bell was a feature in many kirkyards as the place where someone would guard over a recently interred body and ring the bell for help if the bodysnatchers arrived.

Graveyards are a gateway into history.


Bibliography

Christina Larner, Enemies of God: Dane Love, Scottish Kirkyards: Betty Willsher & Doreen Hunter, Stones: Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, A Historical Account of the belief of Witches in Scotland: Vera Quin & Alan MacAuslan, Dyslexia


Theresa Breslin’s latest historical novel PRISONER OF THE INQUISITION has won the teenage section (12+) of The Historical Association, Young Quills Award, is shortlisted for the Scottish Children’s Book Award and was voted favourite book by the young people shadowing the Carnegie Medal Book Awards.

Feisty Girls - Celia Rees

Not so long ago, fellow History Girl, Eleanor Updale, was complaining in the pages of the Daily Telegraph about the preponderance of feisty girls in the books for children and teenagers that she was required to read in her capacity as a Costa Judge. Now, I have written about a fair few feisty girls myself, as have other History Girls, and I was hard put to think of a heroine, from Elizabeth Bennett to Scarlett O'Hara and Philip Pullman's Lyra, who wasn't feisty, so I'm not sure how far I concur with Eleanor's point of view.

Karen Wallace's Emerald is a good example of the place of the F.G. in historical fiction. Her eponymous heroine is as feisty as they come. Emerald is living in the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1 (who was on the feisty side herself) and she is a bit of a tomboy with little regard for convention or feminine attributes, preferring fishing for pike to needlepoint. She also has a pet bear, which has to put her right up there at the top of the F.G. stakes. She is attractive, strong willed and single minded, as feisty girls often are, but she is also kind, considerate, thoughtful and clever. I don't see these things as negative attributes. Indeed, the counterweights and contrasts within her personality are what gives the story it's narrative drive and power.

Emerald is approaching womanhood and is about to be forced to give up her independence, such as it is, her home and all that is familiar to her, to be married off as her relations see fit. She has no male supporters, a sister who has sold out in the worst way possible and a pet bear under threat of the bear pit. What is a girl to do? What would we want her to do? Woman up, that's what. Be true to herself and start fighting back. Use some of that sensitivity and cleverness to negotiate her way through the snake pit of Elizabethan court politics, conspiracies and all, and save herself, her sister, her bear and her Queen. It makes an exciting, will she, won't she save the day, heart in mouth story. How much story would there be if she'd given up at the first hurdle, agreed to marry a man chosen for her and settled down into a life of domestic drudgery. Not much of one, clearly, and what would have happened to the bear?

Luckily, Karen Wallace allows her heroine to follow her feistiness and delivers a satisfyingly rich, thoroughly convincing, page turning read. She hints at the end that there may be more to come. I hope so. The Feisty Girl has a strong and time honoured place in literature, for children and for adults. Emerald is an excellent addition to this fine tradition.

A Night at the Theatre: Penny Dolan

 “Well after midnight, shrill childish voices woke me. Two small girls appeared around the corner. Rough wool shawls were gathered over their trailing gauzy skirts. Giggling and singing, the little girls danced over cracks in the pavements and hopped along the kerb, their legs thin as those of foals on the farm. Tinsel strands sparkled in their hair and their cheeks were smeared with paint.”

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E

Ages ago, busy at my desk, I caught the end of a Radio 4 programme about theatre children in Victorian times. It included a short contemporary account of young children sent homewards after late night performances, with or without parents.

That account became the initial inspiration for the two six-year-old dancers Flora and Dora, described in the extract above, and also for Kitty, their older sister, about to come round the corner after them but slowed down by the bag of laundry she is carrying home to their two aunts.

I heard the programme before “Listen Again” existed, so I could not check the full content of the programme. Nor did I discover details of when and how the philanthropist Millicent Fawcett got her collection of influential names, including Charles Dickens, to voice their concerns over the moral welfare and risk of abuse of the many young performers.

Afterwards, I contacted the Fawcett Society, asking for more information about the subject but did not hear back. Perhaps the Fawcett office felt present good was more important than some rare archived documentation of historical goodness? The BBC were not able to help me track down the programme either, when I went to it. No record of it, especially as I didn’t have the programme’s title.

Compared to hundreds of child labourers in factories and mines in that period, the conditions of theatre children must have seemed unimportant but there were certainly horror stories.

Dr Ann Featherstone, Lecturer in Performance History at Manchester University, used her extensive research into the penny gaffs, seedy shows and exhibitions of human curiosities of Victoria’s reign to create the dangerous world of her two adult novels, “Walking in Pimlico” and “The Newgate Jig”. Her “past” is not a pretty place.

Later on, the playwright J.M.Barrie took up the children’s cause. By the time “Peter Pan” was staged, there were regulations about the welfare and education of the young performers.

Nowadays, most professionally staged shows have double casts to cover the hours that children are permitted to work as well as rules covering their health and safety, tutors and chaperones to look after them backstage and on tour. I have heard that scenes written for young screen actors have limited lines in the script to allow for this pattern of work and which may, indirectly, be affecting ordinary children’s speech. One wonders.

Nevertheless, some children are always be drawn by the glamour of performance and attention, whether they are fictional characters like Gabriel in Geraldine McCaughrean’s “A Little Lower Than The Angels”, travelling along with a cartload of Mystery Players, or the young film stars of the twentieth century, kept in apparent working condition by mixtures and medicines.

I chickened out from the seedy side. The life of my two young characters, Flora and Dora is hard but they have their watchful sister Kitty as protection and a happy home that becomes a kind of home for Mouse too. However, once-upon-a-time dancer Kitty still has a few dreams of her own.

A Boy Called MOUSE, now in paperback (Bloomsbury)

www.pennydolan.com

A Traveller In Time: Sue Purkiss

A little while ago, I was tootling about from blog to blog, as you do, and I came across a post of Kath Langrish's which I hadn't seen before, and in which she talked about two favourite children's classics, Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knowe, and Alison Uttley's A Traveller In Time. I hadn't read either of them, and was sufficiently intrigued by her description to send for them both.

I read - and very much enjoyed - the first one, and had begun the second one just before we were due to go up to Derbyshire to meet some friends in the Peak District - they had gone up for a party and suggested we should join them afterwards to do some walking. They had already booked a B&B, but you couldn't take dogs there, so as we wanted to take our Jessie, we found another one that did, and they agreed they'd move on and meet us there. (Trust me - there is a reason for all this!)

A Traveller In Time is set in Derbyshire, and so it seemed a very suitable book to take with me. It tells the story of a girl from Chelsea called Penelope, who goes to stay with relations at a farm called Thackers, and finds that she is able to travel back in time - to the time two years before the famous plot, when Mary was briefly imprisoned in a house not far from Thackers, and a young Anthony Babington first became quixotically determined to rescue her.

I read quite a bit of it in the car as we drove up. I know the Peak District quite well. I'm from Derbyshire myself - though from the not-so-pretty bit, in the south - but I couldn't place the setting of Thackers. In Alison Uttley's Foreword, she says it was based on a small manor house which was the family home of Anthony Babington. I'd heard of the Babington Plot. One of my favourite books ever is the Ladybird book of Elizabeth the First, and even now, years after first seeing it, I can visualise almost every one of the coloured plates. Babington's plot was to remove the  Protestant Elizabeth from the throne of England and substitute the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, and in the Ladybird book, Mary cuts a tragic and dramatic figure; dark eyed, dark haired, creamy skinned: always in motion, always in flight.

When we met up with Rosie and Pete, they were full of what a marvellous place they had stayed at the night before. It had once been a manor house, they said, though now it was a farm. It had been associated in some way with the Babingtons, and there was something about Alison Uttley in the nearby church - she had lived in the village, they thought.

I was intrigued. Alison Uttley also wrote a book called The Country Child, a memoir of her childhood on a Derbyshire Farm. This I had read and loved, though not at all recently. Perhaps the house where they'd stayed was this very farm, I thought?

We stayed in Monsal Dale, and had some great walks. (As you can see, it's a gorgeous place.) On the way back south, we were going to stop off at Cromford Mill (the first cotton mill - in fact the first real factory, which is being carefully restored.) The farm where Pete and Rosie had stayed - Manor Farm - was just a few miles up the road, and I was eager to go and see it.

We stopped not far from a village called Lea.. It was a gorgeous autumn day, all sunshine and glowing copper leaves, and the path led through woods and into Lea itself. The farm was further on - across the fields, in a hamlet called Dethick. There is a character in the book called Dethick. I had the book with me: I checked the Foreword again. Yes! It was all becoming clearer. The Uttley farm must have been in or near Lea - she describes it as being 'across the hillside from the manor house'. We carried on - across the hillside. At the top of it was a church, and beside the church was Manor Farm. I went back to the book.

This is how Penelope describes Thackers. 'It was a stone-built farm, with gables and doorways in unexpected places, with barns and cowhouses across the green grassplat and old ivy-covered buildings where fowls roosted and calves sheltered. Only a few yards away was Thackers church, with its twelfth-century tower which rose from the group of trees and haystacks so close to the farmbuildings, the stables and barns, that it seemed to be part of the homestead...'

And there it was. If further proof were needed, we found a small plaque set into a wall, which said that this was the former home of the Babingtons.

I felt really thrilled by this. Why? Well, as I've discussed on this blog before, places are important to me. And in some places, more than others, time echoes - people of centuries ago seem only a few steps away. If you just turned that corner quickly enough, or managed to go through that ancient door on the right day, at the right time - who knows what you might glimpse? This place was one of those. And there were two levels to it. Reach so far, and there would be Alison Uttley running across the hillside, and later, writing her books about the place that fascinated her. Reach a little further, and there would be foolish, romantic Anthony Babington and the tragic Queen of Scotland.

If you think you might like to go and stay at the place, here's the link. I'm told the breakfasts are pretty amazing, too.

The Icelandic Year by Marie-Louise Jensen

I found several versions of Old Norse calenders when I was researching Vikings, and I found them fascinating. I used the old names of the months to structure my book Daughter of Fire and Ice and referred to them again in Sigrun's Secret.

The Norse world divided the year into the twelve lunar months, similar to our calender today. The difference is that each runs approximately from the middle of each one of our months to the middle of the next. And the names are far more colourful and descriptive of the time of year than ours. They are based mainly around the agricultural year which would have ruled the lives of most of the Norse. This version is specifically Icelandic and is taken from The Sagas of the Icelanders:

Harpa-month (mid April - mid May) Meaning unknown

Stekktíð or Lamb-fold time (mid May - mid June)

(Also known in some versions of the Norse calender as Skerpla)

Sólmánaður or Sun-month (mid June-mid July)

Miðsumar or Midsummer (mid July to mid August)

Heyannir or Hay-time (mid August to mid September

Haustmánuður or Harvest month (mid September to mid October)

Gormánuður or Slaughtering month (mid October to mid November)

Ýlir Meaning unknown (mid November to mid December)

Hrútmánuður or Ram month (mid December to mid January)

This month contains the festival of Jól (or Yule) and is sometimes known by the colourful name Mörsugur or Fat sucking month.

Þorri or Thorri month, meaning unknown (mid January to mid February)

Góa or Goa month, thought to be named after a forgotten goddess (mid February to mid March)

Einmánuður or Last month of Winter (mid March to mid April)

I love that the year started with spring, rather than with the depths of winter. And I adore all the names which I hope I've rendered correctly. I found they helped me greatly in my task of visualising the lives of the people I was writing about.

I (Don't ) Want You Back Catherine Johnson

Please note this blog post is set in the 1970s. There are no periwigs, reticules, codpieces or antimacassars. Readers needing a hearty serving of any of the above should look away now.

Yes, yes I know, this is the History Girls...but one day, next year, or the year after, even the future becomes the past. One of the moments that told me I was old was seeing a book in The Museum of London bookshop called 'How We Used To Live; The 1970s'. Gripped with shock, I couldn't even pick it up, but I imagine it was all decimalisation, The Osmonds vs The Jackson 5, and flared trousers. At least that's what I remember. There was also the Queen's Silver Jubilee and Punk, but that was a different, 1970s; greyer than the optimistic, twin-cherry appliqued, early years, tipping into Thatcherism and mass joblessness.

I'm in the 1970s at the moment, writing in 1971, complete with IRA bombs going off in London, smoking carriages on the tube and easy, casual sexism and racism. I'm not saying now is perfect, but I think the political correctness gone mad brigade have forgotten what it was like to be on the end of any kind of ism. Whether you're ignored because you're in a wheelchair (and this still happens often, ask anyone who uses one) or not white, or over a certain age, or a woman, political correctness at least means more people are at least polite to your face whatever their private opinion might be. A bank can't refuse you, an estate agent decide not to sell you a house, or a school can't not put you forward for an exam because of your face.
And that deserves celebration.

Oh dear this has turned into a kind of rant, and not about minuets or bustles or gas lights. I will make sure there's a warning at the top of the page.

And worry not, I will be back in the 18th century any second, I promise. In the meantime enjoy these links http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y11mqB7r0Ww&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iVWg5T7fXM&feature=related
No contest really...
By the way I have a book out right now, and it's set in the future (2012 year so buy it quick to get maximum time travelling value!). http://www.franceslincoln.com/en/Contributor/4110/Catherine_Johnson.html

ECTOPLASM by Mary Hooper

Following publication of Velvet, set in a medium's house in Edwardian London, I recently wrote a piece on Ectoplasm for the children’s book blog in the Guardian. This is an unexpurgated version.

Ectoplasm was purported to be a substance that exuded from a medium whilst in trance: a substance which, it was said, formed itself into the manifestation of whatever spirit the medium was in touch with at the time. It was said to flow from one or more of the medium’s orifices. Yes, even from there.

When I was researching Velvet I found a selection of rather odd photographs showing materials which purported to be this mystical stuff. Accounts of the day describing it say that it was a slimy substance, a fine muslin-like material, something like smoke, or of a rubbery dough-like consistency. Members of the audience, kept at a distance and literally in the dark, were warned against touching any ectoplasm which appeared. It depleted the medium’s own body, they were told. If it was touched, it could kill her. Have a look at these photographs and see if they convince you...

Some mediums didn’t bother exuding anything, but merely pulled the curtains tightly shut across the cabinets they used for going into trances, and appeared through a secret doorway dressed in heavenly white robes. There was a sexual element to all this; sitting in almost-darkness with an attractive lady medium, holding hands around the table, those Victorian gentlemen were getting a lot closer to a lady than they usually did. One evening, Pocky, a small “Indian girl spirit” materialised by Miss Florence Wood, kissed a Mr Gurney two or three times through her drapery and then went on to embrace a corn-merchant “repeatedly”. At a later séance, Pocky was actually exposed as Miss Wood, on her knees and swathed in white muslin. She pleaded that she had been “an unconscious instrument temporarily in the hands of an evil power”.

Another famous medium, Miss Katie Cook, materialised a shapely and attractive spirit who was frequently jumped on by sceptics anxious to prove (after touching her all over) that she was flesh. On one appearance she proved not very ethereal by struggling violently with a gentleman, scratching his face and pulling out his whiskers.

In 1882, The Society for Psychical Research was formed, and as a consequence mediums would sometimes be asked to submit to an examination before and after a séance to show they weren’t hiding anything. Discoveries made included a pump hidden under a carpet ready to inflate a swath of gauze-like material, a medium found with yards of muslin folded into a cube in her cheek, yet another with an assistant in the basement ready to blow up smoke through the floorboards. Mediums could also secrete materials under their voluminous skirts, and sometimes had their arms and legs bound up to prevent them producing anything when the lights went out.

The formation of the Society resulted in the numbers of mediums producing ectoplasm going down, and the numbers being prosecuted for fraud going up. If a Society member was present and the medium was canny, she would say that the dead were being uncooperative that evening and not even attempt to make contact with them. Nevertheless, all the leading mediums were, at one time, caught in wrong-doing and accused of fraud.