A visit from Kevin Crossley-Holland

This is a big day here - our first ever "History Boy" posting for us! And it's Kevin Crossley-Holland, which is a bit like having a visit from, oh, I don't know, Odin perhaps. (Though his favourite is a different deity) We subjected him to quite a grilling and the results, below, speak for themselves.

This is quite a summery picture, suitable for the unexpectedly sunny spring we have been having.

And here's something about the man himself:


Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, a librettist and translator from Anglo-Saxon, a reteller of myth, legend and folk-tale as well as a novelist. He won the Carnegie Medal for Storm and his Beowulf with Charles Keeping is a contemporary classic. He is author of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths and of British Folk Tales. His 'Arthur' trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and the first volume, The Seeing Stone, won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, a Smarties Prize and the Tir na n-Og award as well as being shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year. He recently published his memoir of childhood The Hidden Roads. 

Kevin is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and patron of the Society for Storytelling and Publishing House Me. Last year, Anglia Ruskin University awarded him an Honorary Doctorate. He has four children and now lives with his Minnesotan wife Linda on the north Norfolk coast. 
 

Thank you so much, History Girls, for according me the honour of being your first ‘history boy’, and for your searching questions. Here goes!


Could you expand on why the story of 'The Green Children' has haunted you for so long?


Imagine an eager, anxious boy lying on the top half of a bunk bed. His sister, three years younger than he is, lies on the bottom. Their father sits beside the bunk, eyes closed, and sings-and-says folk tales, accompanying himself on his Welsh harp.

That’s when I first heard the story of the two green children who were found near the Suffolk village of Woolpit at the end of the 12th century – so says Ralph, abbot of the monastery at Coggeshall (where, traditionally, everyone is a fool!)

At once, I identified with this plangent tale of brother and sister who long to belong and, like all of us at one time or another in our lives, feel lost, feel like outsiders. In a way, they stand for all the refugees, all the homeless, all the people in camps, all the dispossessed, who walk across our Middle Earth.

Later, by co-incidence (in its proper sense), my family moved to a village close to Woolpit in Suffolk… Then Nicola Lefanu and I made a children’s opera (for King’s Lynn Festival with the ENO Baylis Programme) from the story, involving literally hundreds of children. Later yet, I rewrote the tale from the viewpoint of the green girl… And at the last, this most haunting of tales will still be with me.

                                                                             *

Several of you have invited me to describe how I research, plan and generally cogitate before writing, and about my writing process.

As I’ve described in my memoir of childhood, I wasn’t much of a reader as a boy, though I reread Our Island Story until it fell apart, but I absolutely loved my ‘museum’, and with the help of my father learned to investigate and catalogue the items in it (fossils, Roman coins, a lovely Anglo-Saxon burial urn, and my astounding Saracen shield – not to mention my hoard of bun pennies on which I wasted a great deal of time, forever trying to buff them up with Duraglit!)

Always neat and well organised, I wept copiously when I returned from our first holiday abroad (I was six) to find that the family to whom we’d lent our little cottage in the Chilterns had raided and ransacked my toy cupboard.

I bring the same method, I think, to writing historical fiction. What do I need to find out? How am I going to find out about it? What do I have to do to convince myself and thus my readers that we’re on reasonably safe ground?

Well, I guess my answers will be the same as yours. I read and read – original sources most certainly (albeit in translation), serious interpretations of the period in question, and provocative books (often by French scholars) that cast a wider net – Duby on Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, Le Goff on The Medieval Imagination, Eco on Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. And all the while my wonderful PA Twiggy turns up lots of rapid-fire information from the internet.

I look at medieval art, I listen to lots of medieval music, I trawl museums and, in so far as is possible, I spend time in places where my books are set.

Thus I regularly returned to the Marches while writing the first book in my Arthur trilogy, and travelled to Zadar (once Zara) in Croatia, the setting for most of the third book in the trilogy, where the Fourth Crusade Christians laid siege to and devastated a Christian city.

At the same time, I’m beginning to plan the book – its thrust – the ideas I want to explore, the tough issues, the conflicts that drive it along – the characters, possible scenes, details… Ah! You know how it is. I do some of this work on giant spread sheets, but most on handwritten A4 sheets that soon build into piles. So, for my last book: Viking Women, Boat-building, Names, Merchandise, Weaponsmiths, Jewellery, Ladoga, Harald Sigurdsson, Rus, Black Sea, and so forth. Before long, these piles become tottering edifices.

I write entirely by hand with my old Waterman pen in the most lovely cloth-bound dummies given to me by publisher friends (yes, academic books still sometimes begin with dummies!). My writing may look neat, even attractive, but it’s not easy to read, I gather. And when I’m signing books, children and parents sometimes hesitantly come back to ask me to decipher a word. Heigh-ho!

I work on the principle that a working day deteriorates and by and large aim to think, dream, write, revise from about 8.30 or 9.00 until 1.30 or 2.00. How on earth author wives and mothers who often have to fit in so much bitty-piecy work in and around the home, are able to write as well, fills me with astonishment and admiration. My powers of concentration are considerable, but for me it’s a matter of momentum, and I doubt whether I could write in a pick-it-up and put-it-down sort of way.

I begin most days by revising the previous day’s work. It’s almost like tuning an instrument and practising scales: ensuring that my ear is true and that I’m right on the ball. I read my text out loud, or under my breath, and always use a second colour to revise the previous day’s work (and a third when I revisit that) so that I can see at a glance how things are coming on.

Twiggy types my complete revised manuscript and I then put a novel through three or four more fierce revises – quite apart from structural alterations (which I hate), maybe eight or ten small changes per page – that’s to say several thousand small corrections each time round. At the same time, my wife Linda is also working on a draft, brandishing a blue pencil, asking questions and offering invaluable comments about the dynamic, pace, text – everything. In another incarnation, she would have been a wonderful editor. And of course the decline of the publishing editor is a grievous matter – one for another day.

As we know, there’s nothing magic about using language really well and children can learn to do so: that’s why many of us run writing workshops. I think it’s essential that those teachers involved with creative writing classes should also write themselves from time to time.

Last autumn, I was on the road too much, and overdid it (some forty talks, workshops, festival events and so on) but in round terms a new novel may take me about eighteen months. With my forthcoming Presidency of the School Library Association, though, I suspect the next one may take me rather longer.

I reckon that 40% of my writing time is given to research and planning, 25% to first draft, and 35% to revision. Like an hourglass, almost.

                                                                              *



How do I ‘approach deciding on the level of language’ I use in my children’s books?


True, I did write a couple of historical novels in my early twenties, but to all intents and purposes The Seeing Stone was my first novel. I was fifty-eight when I wrote it. And I really didn’t know how to write it, or whether what I was writing was any good. I showed it to my wonderful long term editor Judith Elliott after I’d written 80 pages, and then again when I written another 80… At the heart of my uncertainty were the crucial questions of viewpoint and voice, and pace, and yet I cannot truly claim that I spent hours agonising over them – Arthur’s voice just welled up, like so many of the book’s incidents, the voice of an eager, anxious, active, articulate, imaginative, impressionable young boy of 12 not at all unlike that of his author when he was a boy.

During the 90s, I’d written two libretti, and that discipline taught me several new skills: getting people on and off stage at speed, seeing a relationship or event from different viewpoints, employing nothing but dialogue and internal monologue; altering the texture of the language (intensified for an aria, more relaxed for the recitative that carries the action along). To some extent, I applied these techniques to The Seeing Stone. Thus, many of the very short chapters are akin to arias – written in somewhat poetic prose as Arthur delves into his own thoughts and feelings. More of them, and one might die of indigestion. But as things stand, they seem to work quite well.

As a poet, I’m aware that every syllable counts, and every silence too. The music of language is part of our meaning, and we must harness it, and have it help us to sing.

                                                                         *


This blog post(not that I’ve ever written one before) is surely getting too long. So I’ll turn to the Vikings and their myths and Bracelet of Bones – subject of many of your questions.


It was Wystan Auden who encouraged me to look north to the world of Icelandic sagas, eddaic poems, Germanic heroic legends, and to consider retelling the Norse myths.

Much the most complete and coherent contemporary versions of the myths were written by the 12-13th century Icelander, Snorri Sturluson, and when I read them, I was aware of the landscape between the lines, as it were – the world of ice and fire that Snorri’s original audience must have taken for granted. And it seemed to me essential that any writer thinking of retelling the myths should fully engage with it.

So that’s what I did. With all the zeal of the convert, and to much shaking of heads from family and friends, I threw up my job as editorial director of Victor Gollancz, and went camping in Iceland with my two young sons. I was 36.

Western art has been so much influenced by Mediterranean cultures, and by the Renaissance – and so relatively little by, let’s say, the bracing floes of the North Sea and the Baltic. William Morris and several of the pre-Raphaelites, yes. Wagner, yes. Tolkien, yes. T. H. White, I suppose. Auden himself. Who else – of the first water? Very soon one’s having to scrape around. And yet, we British are of the north-west European world. It’s in our bloodstream, our nervous system, our language, our laws, our landscape, our stories… And so, for obvious and subtle reasons, the myths, legends and sagas are likely to speak to us.

The Norse myths, racy and witty and ice-bright, with sharply differentiated characters, are by no means as subtle and developed as their Greek counterparts. And yet we find in them, and in their nine worlds under the great, suffering guardian tree, Yggdrasill, the full repertoire of human dream and experience. Here are all our own high hopes, ambitions, fears, loves, passions, jealousies, rivalries, conflicts (often with ourselves), sacrifices and self-sacrifices, our wit and lust and greed, and here too our longing for some deeper order and meaning. What more can one ask? Isn’t this precisely why the Norse myths are not only still popular but – as we say in East Anglia – coming again?

I suppose my favourite deity is Thor, the maintainer of law and order, because he’s a likeable blockhead, trustworthy, easily duped, quick tempered but also ready to laugh at himself. But Loki, son of two giants and yet companion to the gods, is the most interesting character in the myths because of his ambiguity, and his own decline and fall – from laughable trickster to murderous enemy of innocence and virtue. (No, I’ve never sent the Loki stone at Kirkby Stephen but will make a point of doing so.) Loki is the agent of change in the myths, and the one in which he and Thor travel with two human companions to the world of giants is vivid, entertaining and scary, but my favourite myth is ‘The Death of Balder’. The loyalty, ferocity, pathos and sheer gravity of this tale, embracing as it does all creation, makes it one of the greatest of all stories, anywhere.


After writing the Norse myths, more than 30 years ago, I thought that was that. But as I described in the foreword to Bracelet of Bones, my wife’s and my discovery of Viking runes in Hagia Sophia (in Istanbul) was the springboard for a novel in which a girl, Solveig, follows her father in 1035 from Norway through the Baltic, Russia, Ukraine and the Black Sea to the city the Vikings called Miklagard.

Solveig’s head is full of the myths she has grown up with, as well as the new Christian teaching that has recently reached Norway. She keeps returning to values embodied in each of them, as well as learning about Islam when she accompanies her father and Harald Sigurdsson to Sicily in the second of my Viking sagas, Scramasax. As in The King of the Middle March and Gatty’s Tale, I find myself drawn to crossing-places and their ferment: places between cultures, belief systems, between land and sea, between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience, actuality and imagination.

As we know from contemporary sources and modern historians, the role of women in Viking society was wide-ranging and potent. I see that one of my A4 pages lists them as household managers (i.e. running largely self-reliant farmsteads), loyal to a fault, inciters of feuds to protect family honour and yet also arbiters in community disputes, scapegoats, praise-subjects, beloved, beautiful and dangerous, feared for their sexual and magical powers. What is missing, yes, is much talk of Viking women as mothers!

I decided that I wanted to find out how a Viking girl might fare on a great adventure without being disguised as a boy. In Scramasax, I’ve ventured further and planted poor Solveig in an army of men. One thousand men; one young woman. Solveig comes face to face with their actions, their values. Will she ever be able to reconcile them with her own?

In selecting a girl as my main character, I’m also accepting, I suppose, that on the whole I find girls more interesting than boys, women more interesting then men. And certainly during the last few years, when my daughters have fallen in love and the elder has married, I’ve been conscious of how the role of father changes. No longer is he the beloved! So you could argue that Bracelet of Bones and Scramasax are novels about a girl defining her changing relationship with her father (and to men) while her author was of necessity redefining his relationship to his daughters.

                                                                           *

And so, to end with, a few little quick replies:


Is Gatty my ‘favourite imagined character?

Yes, actually. Though she began life as a boy: Sneezer. After writing 50 pages she had a sex-change in the mind of her author, and he went back to square one. I’m rather partial to my Annie, too, in Storm and Waterslain Angels.

                                                                            *


If I could time travel and witness one historical event, what would it be?

Maybe the first recitation of (the first part of) Beowulf, whenever and wherever it took place – perhaps at the court of the Wuffings in Suffolk in the seventh century. Of course my eyes would be out on stalks, and all my senses in play, but I reckon I’d be able to understand much of the language too. Or else – well, what about the stunning pagan-Christian Sutton Hoo ship burial, and all the rituals enacted at it? A crossing-place, if ever there was one.

                                                                             *


What am I most proud of?


Wasting very little time. My powers of concentration. Trying to return the kindnesses done to me when I was beginning to write - by enthusing, and enabling others. For all its rivalries and spats, the world of writers (and more especially of children’s writers) is collegiate.

                                                                         *

Do I have rules/views that affect how I retell a story?


Certainly. I laid them in out in my talk ‘Different – but oh! how like’ published in the Society of Storytelling Oracle series.

                                                                           *



And if you…. or you… look into the seeing stone, you’ll see all you can and so must write. Look back (as we historical novelists do). Look forward. Remember the parable of the talents. With all my head and heart, I wish you success in revealing the ‘then and now’ that makes the study of history so fascinating, and the deep and lasting satisfaction of a serious undertaking, well done.

The reflective writer

Thanks so much, Kevin, for all your wonderful answers, and your final gift to us and our readers. Can't wait to read Scramasax!

Ideas and a cream tea. The National Trust and me - Celia Rees

I have belonged to the National Trust for nearly thirty years now. I joined while visiting Moreton Hall in Cheshire. I was with a group from Birmingham University. We were doing a tour of Alan Garner Country. This was long before I thought of writing myself and while I was signing up I had no idea how important membership would be for me. Since then, I have visited houses and gardens again and again, all over the country.

Sometimes, these visits are just for a nose round the house and a wander in the gardens - and the tea, of course, but sometimes the visit has a direct bearing on my writing. I choose particular houses for particular periods, particular characters. It is a quick, shorthand way of getting into their lives.

When I was writing Sovay, I decided that Farnborough Hall, near Banbury in Warwickshire, would be the ideal home for her. A beautiful 18th Century house, not too big, not too small, built in the distinctive local honey coloured limestone with extensive gardens, long walks for restless wanderings and handy follies for clandestine lovers' meetings. Perfect. I could position her here. Near enough (at a stretch) for her father to attend meetings of the Lunar Men in Birmingham, near to one of the great north south routes from the Midlands to London, ideal for a highway woman, and near enough for me to visit with my National Trust card as often as I needed to build a picture of her life and to layer up the descriptions which would be my opening chapter.

Another house that I visited while writing Sovay was Berrington Hall, near Leominster, Herefordshire. It is a 18th Century house, so again, it could provide extra detail for Sovay's home, but that is not why I went there. It houses the National Trust's costume collection. Only a small selection is on display, but I was lucky enough to talk my way behind the scenes and to be shown the kinds of clothes that Sovay and her contemporaries would have been wearing.

Boxes were opened for me, acid free tissue paper folded back to reveal dresses, waistcoats, top coats, shirts and breeches. The garments did not appear old and faded. They looked as if their wearers had just stepped out of them. The colours on the cottons were still fresh and bright, the silks and brocades rich and shining, the embroidery intricately worked with silver and gold thread, jet and glass beading catching the light. Alongside the boxes of clothes stood racks of footwear: polished boots, creased to the wearer's foot, elegant shoes with neat little heels, very kittenish, shiny steel and silver buckles. These clothes belonged to real people. It wasn't just the colours, but the textures: the glaze on the cotton, the shimmer of watered silk, the twill of the breeches, the smoothness of finely woven wool. You could hear the creak of leather, the rustle of fabric. The whole period came alive. It was as though the portraits on the wall in Farnborough Hall, here in Berrington, and in the other houses I'd visited, were suddenly animated, as if the sitters had stepped out of them and were walking around.

This wonderful collection is called the Wade Collection, named after Charles Wade who spent a lifetime collecting all manner of things, not just clothes. His house, Snowshill Manor, is another National Trust property. I've visited there often, not for the kind of reference I'd be looking for at a house like Farnborough, but for more general inspiration. The eclectic nature of his collection seethes with potential. In room after room in Snowshill, something of Wade's restless curiosity and relentless obsession lingers still.

I haven't used Snowshill directly, but I did set a ghost story at nearby Chastleton and Baddersley Clinton makes an appearance in The Fool's Girl.

It is not just the National Trust's heritage collections that offer inspiration. The Installation Artist, Alfreda McHale's works http://alfredamchale.com brightened and enlivened an otherwise drab Charlcote Park this winter.

Her 'Runcible' spoons, knives, forks, cutlery whorled and frilled the borders like metal flowers, while her 'Trolley' line tipping over the Ha Ha brought a smile (the Nat Trust can be a bit short on laughs). 'Seeking Pearls' in the Brew House gave people something to do out of the cold, something to talk about and I have never seen so many enthusiastic comments from the under twelves. She also gave me an idea for a workshop.

Ideas and cream teas. What's not to like?

Who is it? by Susan Price

This is the Grafton portrait, which came to public notice in 1907, having hung in the parlour of a farmhouse since the 17th Century. Research suggested it had once belonged to the Duke of Grafton, but, during the Civil War, had been removed to the farm, either as loot or for safety.


Family tradition alleged that it was of William Shakespeare.

The painting is inscribed, in Latin, ‘Age 24, 1588’, and Shakespeare was certainly 24 in that year. It shows a young man dressed in a velvet doublet, slashed to show the rich lining. An unusual touch is that, instead of the expected ruff, he wears a simple – but expensive – collar of fine, almost transparent, lawn.

At the age of 24, Shakespeare was unknown. How could he have afforded these expensive clothes? It’s argued that, an actor, he’d been into the dressing-up box – but that doesn’t explain why anyone commissioned a portrait of an unknown tradesman’s son, and why a Duke owned it.

Above is the painting known as ‘The Apocryphal Marlowe’. It came to light in 1953, when repairs were made to the Master’s Lodge at Corpus Christi, Cambridge.  An undergraduate, passing the heap of rubble, saw pieces of painted wood sticking out of the rubble. Investigating, he found the badly damaged portrait of a young man in Elizabethan costume.


The National Portrait Gallery confirmed its 16th Century date, but were unable to identify the subject. The Latin inscription reads ‘Aged 21, 1585,’ three years earlier than the Grafton portrait. The poet, Christopher Marlowe, attended Corpus Christi, and was 21 in 1585, the year he completed his BA and began his MA. Students with money often had a portrait made of themselves at this time.

The Master’s Lodge, in the rubble of which the portrait was found, was later, but had housed earlier portraits. It’s unknown exactly how the painting came to be in the wreckage. Accounts suggest, variously, that it had been known previously, but had not been thought important – or that it had been hidden in a cupboard and forgotten. (There is precedence for such forgetfulness. Ingestre Hall in Staffordshire, now displays an immensely valuable tapestry, which was found stuffed at the back of a small ‘coal-hole’. In Durham Castle, a ‘junk-room’, once cleared, was found to be a forgotten, untouched gem of an early Norman chapel.)

Another theory suggests that the painting was hidden because its subject fell into disfavour. This fits well with Marlowe, who enjoyed a fraught relationship with his college. Corpus Christi refused to grant him his MA because he had not merely been absent during term, but rumoured to have been at the Jesuit seminary in Rheims. Given the religious turbulence of the time this was outrageous.

The college was then ordered, by Elizabeth’s Privy Council, to hand over the MA because ‘it was not her Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Countrie should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’ affaires he went about.’

Then, instead of entering the clergy, as any grateful scholarship boy with an MA should, Marlowe became a ‘a filthy Play-maker’ and gained a reputation as an atheist. Shortly after his death, pamphlets circulated, telling how he’d been killed in a tavern brawl, and calling him ‘a Poet of scurrilite’, and ‘a barking dogge.’ They said he ‘cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe’, that he was killed ‘in a Baudy-house,’ and that, ‘Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, worke the ende of impious Atheists.’


So Corpus Christi may well have wished to forget that Marlowe existed. There is precedence for this too. Henry Butts, Corpus Christi master in 1632, worked heroically to relieve suffering during the plague, but later went insane. This was deemed ‘a disgrace’, and his portrait was taken down and hidden.



In both portraits, the sitters are dressed in similar style – the height of late 1580s fashion. It’s interesting that the Cambridge man wears the same kind of simple but expensive lawn collar worn by the Grafton sitter - something not often seen in portraits of the time.

Such an expensive display was illegal, under the sumptuary laws, for anyone below the rank of noble. That doesn’t prove him to be noble, though, since these laws were almost completely ignored. It does mean that, somehow, he had access to money or favour.

It’s been suggested that both portraits are of Christopher Marlowe. They certainly look alike, but, as Blackadder’s Baldrick once observed, portraits are ‘painted to a romantic ideal rather than as a true depiction of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the person in question.’ All Elizabethans look alike.

And both these paintings have been reworked, by different artists at different times. The Cambridge painting was so badly damaged that the restorer had to guess at the eye-colour. Can they still be said to be of the same man? They have the same facial proportions, the same hair-line, same brow-line, same nose.

So who is he the man in the Grafton and Cambridge portraits? The cautious answer is: ‘an unknown nobleman,’ since his dress proclaims him noble, and no sixteenth century playwright was important enough to be painted. The sober, plodding side of me agrees.

But, but… If the farmers who kept the Grafton for centuries truly believed it to be Shakespeare, and weren’t simply after a higher price – isn’t it possible that their family memory became blurred? By the 18th Century, Marlowe was largely forgotten, while Shakespeare’s fame grew. A vague tradition that the portrait was of a famous Elizabethan playwright might easily become, ‘It’s William Shakespeare.’

At 21 Marlowe, unlike Shakespeare, had the favour of the powerful, and, at 24, had been made famous by his Tamburlaine and his ‘silver tongue’. Could he, or a patron – possibly a besotted patron – have commissioned the portraits?  I learned about the paintings when I researched my book, Christopher Uptake, which is loosely based on Marlowe. When the e-version needed a cover I asked my cover artist (my brother Andrew) to use the Cambridge portrait as a starting point.

So now, for me, at least, the puzzle is solved. The man in the portraits is Christopher Uptake.

Who do you think he is?

‘Merry England’, during the reign of Good Queen Bess, was a police state. It was a crime to hear a Catholic mass. It was a crime to be ‘a free thinker’.
Christopher Uptake, a young playwright, is an atheist. In the crowded city, he thinks no one will notice that he never attends church – until the red-haired man appears at his door and gives him a choice: spy on your friends or be tortured and executed.
From then on, Chris plays a desperate game, trying to spare his friends yet save his own life…


Susan Price is the acclaimed author of many novels and collections of short stories. Find the book here.

Susan Price’s website is at www.susanpriceauthor.com

She blogs at http://susanpricesblog.blogspot.co.uk/

And also at http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/


We are grateful to Susan for this post the first of several by occasional contributors. Louisa Young hopes to rejoin us on 27th April.

History in Pictures -The Faraway Island -Dianne Hofmeyr

I asked a 6 year old the other day, if she knew what history was. She replied that she thought it was about people. Then after some thought added she thought the people had to be dead.

I recall poring over classic comics of Ivanhoe and A Tale of Two Cities and over drawings of temples and minotaurs and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and tough-looking Assyrians in small black ink drawings in my first Junior school textbooks. No glorious technicolour iPad app to make them come alive but somehow they were alive for me. It was the pictures not words that captured my imagination. History in a picture book even though pared down, has to capture some essence and sense of the times.

The Faraway Island is based on the true story of the Portuguese sailor Fernando Lopez who was left guarding Goa in the early 1500's when D’Albuquerque sailed back to Portugal to gather re-enforcements for conquering the ‘infidel’. When D’Albuquerque returned with troops two years later he concluded Lopez had been too familiar with the locals and punished him by cutting off his ears, his nose and parts of his hands. Not exactly the subject for a children’s picture book. But Lopez escaped to the jungle and waited until D’Albuquerque had died before he stowed away on a ship to Lisbon. En route he lost heart and jumped ship and swam to a rocky outcrop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where he remained a recluse for the rest of his life.

Definitely not a story that makes a good picture book for 6 year olds. Yet there was something vastly heroic about the man that I wanted to portray, The barren island was St Helena and single-handedly he changed the face of it. Whether he took a bag of rice and a rooster with him or whether a friend threw them into the sea after him, is debatable but he certainly planted the rice. When sailors came ashore years later they found the rice growing. The only sign of habitation on the island was some Portuguese-style clothing drying in the sun. The man was nowhere to be found but they left behind plants from foreign shores – pineapples, pomegranates and lemon trees and some livestock too. And slowly over the years the barren island was transformed by Lopez from rock to an island rich with plants which became a refuelling station for the Portuguese ships.

Absolutely historically correct? I’m not sure. But I hope The Faraway Island captures the spirit of Lopez – the idea of transformation – not just of an island but of the man himself. For those who write ‘real’ history you’ll appreciate the emails between my illustrator and I while we dithered over whether to use the Portuguese flag as it was in 1495 or the new design of 1519. Please note the miniscule size of the flag – who said writing historical picture books for 6 year olds was ever easy!

Little Things That Matter by Eleanor Updale

So often, it's everyday details that give you a feel for the past. You can read a whole dissertation on the trials of domestic service, but understand more from seeing a mangle, a flat iron and an elaborately pleated dress in a museum. Often it's the sum of incidentals that tells you how people lived: the size of a glass, the binding on a book, the shape of a table leg.

Some of the most eloquent witnesses of an age are the buildings it leaves behind: unmissable public manifestations of the values and standards of long ago.

And yet the message they convey can so easily be distorted. Buildings are living, lived-in things, and few survive unchanged. It is also rare for them to stand alone, and a small modification to one can alter not only its own story, but the message given by its neighbours.

I was struck by this the other morning when I was out walking my dog, and I took some photos of changes that spoil everything for everyone. They are not particularly extreme or unusual examples - just a taste of how much damage a little ‘improvement’ can do.


This is a particularly handsome row of houses. I love those domes, which carry on down the street, far beyond the frame of the photograph.



But how much better the road must have looked before one owner decided to get rid of the bulge.





Windows and doors can, unless listed, be changed at will, and yet -- perhaps more than any other feature -- they express a building's character. They are the eyes and mouth of its face.



To my mind, the fine Victorian house on the right of this pair now looks as blank and characterless as the forehead of a botoxed old actress.

The effect of doing away with the glazing bars on the windows is to diminish another solid, integrated terrace.



That change may have been made many years ago, and I like to think that people are more respectful of old buildings now -- though as always we are not very caring of those built by the generation immediately before our own. How many of us would fight to preserve the architecture of the 1970s? Perhaps our children will love all that grim brown brick and those asymmetrical windows.





I once knew a civil servant who had the power to grant or deny the right to demolish old buildings. He was at the height of his powers in the late 1970s, and he simply couldn't see the virtues of buildings designed in the 1920s and 30s, when he was a boy. To his eye, they were cheap and ordinary beyond belief. So it was on his watch that the Firestone Building on the Great West Road disappeared in August 1980.






I don't know whether he suggested to the developers that they could present the conservationists with a fait accompli by sending in the wrecking crew on a bank holiday - but that is what happened, and I know he was very happy with the result.



He was less pleased about his failure to dispose of the Hoover Building, now (despite being occupied by Tesco) one of the great sights on the outskirts of London.

These days, his successors are more careful: more interested in (even obsessed with) the preservation of period detail even in quite recent buildings -- though few would go as far as to fight for the urine-soaked lift in a post-war tower block...yet.

Anyway, back to my walk. Here's some good news. I must be one of the luckiest people in Britain, because I live a stone’s throw from a public library that has been refurbished.




Not only that, but the 'new' library actually contains books, as well as the inevitable computers and DVDs




The council have done a great job renovating this fine building, inside and out, and they have saved much of its turn-of-the-century detail, but one little mistake is driving me mad.

Here is the side entrance - complete with its original door furniture.






Oh, how I would love to steal that handle for my own house!

Its simple shape and craftmanlike composition take us instantly to the time of honest endeavour and personal improvement out of which the library itself was born.



Now here is the front door:



Ignore, for a moment, the casual disrespect shown by the scrappy notice stuck to the wood.
What I can't bear is the idea that someone deliberately chose these naff mocky-georgiany shiny brass knockers:


They look like something from the palace of a footballer's wife. They are totally inappropriate to the style of the building, and not even accurate evocations of the period to which they refer (about 100 years before). They are the Pot Noodle of door pulls, even though they probably cost a fortune. And they speak of an age of exclusion, not striving for equality and enlightenment through education - the sentiment on which the library was built, and which remains utterly approprate 9perhaps more so than ever) today. I have no idea what happened to the original door furniture. Perhaps it has been stolen or sold. But I do think it should be replaced with something as similar as posible. Real knobs and knockers come up on eBay all the time, and there are plenty of architectural salvage firms in this city and on the internet. How have we ended up with this tat?

An architect friend of mine calls such things ‘pixie skit’ (only the k isn’t a k). Surely such badly-targeted mimicking of the past is worse than putting in something well-fashioned that is genuinely of our own time.

Oh, what a lucky woman I am to be able to clog up my mind with such concerns...

One last thing. I'm not suggesting that buildings should never change. But how far should we go? What do you think of this:


Is it OK to deface a fine building to save the planet? Or are the solar panels an adornment?
As renewable power technology improves, will these monsters become period pieces worthy of conservation themselves? Will they be valuable evidence of the obsessions of the early 21st century? Perhaps we should slap a preservation order on them now.

WHAT I'M READING AT THE MOMENT:
Homing, by Alastair Moffat. A book I found while browsing in the library above. It's a memoir of growing up in the Borders in the 1950s. Beautifully written, moving, funny, and packed with historical detail. I'm also dipping in and out of 'All Hell Let Loose' By Max Hastings - a masterly history of World War II.

eleanor@eleanorupdale.com

WALTER SICKERT AND THE DANCE OF DEATH

By Essie Fox

Walter Sickert

In her book Portrait of a Killer, Jack the Ripper: Case Closed the American author Patricia Cornwell claims that Jack the Ripper had been none other than the artist, Walter Sickert, a dominant figure in the school of British Impressionism in the nineteenth century.


Having amassed a fortune with her Kay Scarpetta novels Cornwell spent £2,000,000 buying several of Sickert's paintings, along with some letters and his desk. With these pieces of evidence she hoped to prove the artist's guilt and connection with the Whitechapel crimes by linking Sickert's DNA with that extracted from letters penned in the name of Jack the Ripper. In her efforts to secure forensic proof she cut up one of Sickert's paintings - an act of destruction that came to result in nothing more conclusive than public outrage and derision.


She did however succeed in matching the watermark on Sickert's personal stationery with that used by the author of the Ripper letters. But, as those letters were considered as hoaxes such determined detective work only proved that Sickert may have been a perverted trickster.

Prince 'Eddy', The Duke of Clarence

However, before you condemn her as mad, Cornwell was by no means the first to link Sickert to the Whitechapel murders. Others - tipped off by none less than the artist's illegitimate son, Joseph, suggested that Sickert was involved in the slayings as part of an elaborate hoax to protect Queen Victoria's dissolute grandson, 'Eddy' the Duke of Clarence from a scandal that was breaking out regarding his involvement with a prostitute. The working girl, called Annie, became pregnant with the prince's child and may even have secretly married him - until Eddy was hauled back home again, dying two year later, with Annie kept quiet by being confined in a lunatic asylum. Who knows what was really going on!

Cornwell's theory was more directly inspired by looking at the artist's work and it is true that Sickert's depictions of the female nude were bold, provocative and disturbing scenes  where human flesh is viewed as meat; mottled, pale and drained of blood.


In 1908 Sickert produced a series of four paintings said to be based on the murder of a Camden prostitute called Emily Dimmock, along with the man who may or may not have been her killer. In these studies Cornwell claims that the pose of the bodies have eerie similarities with the Ripper's victims. She also points out that in later paintings, even when the subjects are clearly alive, those images are brutal and voyeuristic, full of aggressive tension.

What is most certainly true is the fact that in earlier years Sickert developed something of an obsessional interest with the Whitechapel crimes, and around the time of those murders he rented a studio in East London, insisting that his lodgings had been previously used by no other than Jack the Ripper himself - though how he could ever know such a thing when the murderer's identity had not been exposed remains another puzzle. 


But Sickert said he knew, claiming to have written the name on some paper which was then placed 'for safe keeping' between the covers of an edition of 'Casanova' - an ironic choice of book, and one that was later mysteriously burned!


Even so, some 'proof' of the link remains with Sickert's painting of that very room being extremely dark and sinister, and perhaps the pink slash  upon the floor is meant to suggest something more visceral than an innocent shaft of falling light.

And now the mystery rises again with Liam Scarlett, the Royal Ballet's choreographer, having recently created a daring new dance after having been obsessed for years with the Sickert/Ripper enigma. 


The ballet opens up at the Royal Opera House on April 5th 2012. It is 50 minutes long, and rather than being presented as a logical narrative, it will be a series of 'canvases' blurring real life and art - much as Mr Sickert may have done.






Essie Fox is the author of The Somnambulist: A Victorian gothic mystery.

The history under the gravestone

My mother-in-law, Wilma Wilson, died a year ago last Friday. So now I have nobody to phone up and ask how you make butter (for 'Malefice') or how you muck out a cowshed (for 'Saving Rafael.') 'In hot weather,' she said, 'the butter just slips through your fingers,' and I gave the phrase to one of my characters.



She was born on a farm near Ballynure, in County Antrim, and in her childhood she lived a lifestyle so different from anything I never knew it might as well have been a hundred years earlier - though there were technical innovations, like the steam-thresher, or 'thrasher' as it was rendered in County Antrim dialect, for the oat crop. All the men came and helped on each others' farms when the thresher came, Catholics and Protestants alike.

But there was neither gas nor electricity on the farm; Wilma found her way up to bed with a candle, and was frightened of the moving shadows in the stairwell. They burned peat on the fire; the beds were covered with patchwork quilts, and there were rag rugs on the oilcloth-covered floor. You washed with a jug and basin.

The kitchen had a big open fire, that heated the boiler. It was nice to sit on the warm lid of the boiler and stir the porridge, cooking in a pot suspended from a big chain. They had cows, so they made their own butter - Wilma learned to make it in a glass churn, but sometimes her father yoked the horse up to a horse-churn, which wasn't such hard work, though it must have needed the watchful eye of the housewife to make sure the butter came right.




Wilma was a hard-working and skilful baker - she was still baking wheaten bread when she died at the age of 89, and we ate the last few delicious loaves out of the freezer, grieving but appreciating her skill that last time. Even after she married and became a Belfast lady she'd go back to the farm on Wednesdays to help with the huge farm bake; potato bread, potato oaten (delicious), soda, wheaten (wholemeal soda), pancakes and slims - which were a kind of skinny scone. Oatcakes were dried out on a frame beside the fire, and there was treacle soda and spotted dog (soda bread with raisins in). All of these were made on the griddle, but scones were made in the oven, and upside-down cake made with apples or rhubarb. 'Mammy' used to sweep the bakeboard with a goose's wing, like the mother in the Seamus Heaney poem.

They had a horse for the field, and one for the trap - a strawberry roan called Rab. They kept chickens, Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns, but Wilma liked turkey eggs best. The iron was heated with coals inside, or on the fire. Social life happened at the Young Farmers' and at church, and, of course, at weddings and funerals, where the coffin was carried to the church, sometimes for miles, by male family members and friends. When Wilma died, her sons, her nephew and two great-nephews, and her grandson-in-law carried the coffin - but only from the church to the grave. It was a very moving act of love, though.

When I was a young married woman, I remember going to see 'Aunt Mannie' (Minnie), whose farm was in the old style, lit by oil lamps and candles, with a Victorian chaise-longue in the best parlour, china in cupboards, a belly-straining spread put out for us to consume as best we could - and Bible texts, whose frames had crosses at each corner, ambushing you from every corner of the house. I'm convinced that 'The Lord Thy God Seeth Thee' hung in the toilet, but maybe this is too good to be true.


It feels odd to be the bridge generation between that way of life - which my father also knew when he spent his holidays on a farm near Weston-super-Mare - and our modern lifestyle with its smart-phones and electricity-guzzling appliances. When Wilma died we were very much aware that one of the last links to that earlier way of living had gone. At least I keep up the tradition of bread-baking and my own grandfather's tradition of vegetable-growing. I'm very glad that I asked my mother-in-law about her childhood and wrote down what she said. There's loads of oral history available, but that kind of knowledge is particularly precious when it comes from the family.

Anyway, I'll leave you with the above photograph of her brother Dave's dog Monty - 'a right good dog, my mother-in-law said warmly - and a recipe for 'Slims' which my grandmother-in-law wrote down in her recipe book - which incidentally is crammed with newspaper wartime recipes, so it's additionally fascinating.

6 ounces flour
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
2 and a half ounces butter
1 and a half ounces sugar
¼ teaspoonful of baking soda.
Pinch salt
Enough milk to mix very stiffly.

Sift the flour, rub in the butter. Mix all the dry ingredients. Add the milk to mix stiff. Turn out onto a floured board. Roll out thinly, about a quarter of an inch. Cut into rounds and bake on a hot griddle till nicely browned and well-cooked.

And here's her shopping list for the 'Thrasher.' The '2 big bakes' refers to the kind of batch I've described above. A lot of work for the farm women!



Incidentally, in the Antrim countryside, creepy-crawlies were called 'alligators.' Does anyone else know that expression?