In the midst of busy affairs, it brings a moment of peace.
When it is plentiful, one never tires of it.
When there is little, still one is satisfied.
Age does not change its efficacy.
Used everyday, it does no harm.
~Huang Tingjian Song Dynasty
The intoxicating smell of Hong Kong was described perfectly by Martin Booth in 'Gweilo': "Wherever I went, the air was redolent with the smells of wood smoke, joss-sticks, boiling rice and human excrement …'' Walking out into the night streets of Kowloon last week for the first time in fifteen years, the scent was exhilarating - rich incense, fetid durian fruits, meat roasting on roadside braziers, cigarette smoke, exhaust fumes. Much had changed since I travelled round the world with hand luggage, (not least that with two small children in tow it was now more noodles and an early night than Somerset Maugham and cocktails at The Pen). But the smell hadn't changed a bit.
The Chinese have used incense for over two thousand years, in worship and at home. From the pyramids of Egypt to the temple of Jerusalem and the giant swinging thurible of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, incense permeates our daily and spiritual human existence. Here in the Middle East you find small wood or metal 'mabkharas' burning Oud (agar wood) or bakhoor (woodchips moulded with resin, ambergris, musk, sandalwood, essential oils), everywhere from outside the doors of Carrefour to private homes. It's traditional for abayas and thobes to be perfumed by carefully standing over the mabkhara and allowing the incense to impregnate the fabric.
In Hong Kong I loved revisiting the Man Mo temple again, and it hadn't changed (unlike the rest of Hollywood Road, where junk shops and curio stores have given way to Ralph Lauren and chichi bars). That night brushing my children's hair, I could still smell the wonderful incense from the huge coils suspended from the ceiling above the gods of War and Literature. (That's the god of Literature's brass pen/brush top left - devotees light incense then give it a rub for luck or inspiration).
The most touching offerings are the small ones, like the tiny shrine (below), that someone had set up in an alleyway near Central. It reminded me of Bali, where you would wake to find offerings of flowers and incence burning in folded leaves in the door and gateways, or the spirit houses of Thailand where incense jostles with bottles of Yakult. Timeless, intimate acts of devotion whose origins are lost in history.
For those of you who write about the East, have you come across much about the history and use of incense? I wonder when it was first imported to Europe? I brought a bundle of joss sticks back, and burnt them on the first night home. Here, the effect sadly conjured more of my teenage purple tented bedroom than the exotic streets of the East. Perhaps this is one thing that is 'lost in translation', and I'll stick to my favourite 'Sacristy' candle for writing and inspiration: "THE STILLNESS AND BEAUTY WE FOUND IN AN ANCIENT CHAPEL. WOODEN PANELLING WITH YEARS OF BEESWAX POLISH, LEATHER-BOUND PRAYER BOOKS, PILLAR CANDLES AND A HINT OF INCENSE".
I often get asked why I choose to write historical fiction and usually the question leaves me floundering. I think this is because it implies I had some sort of choice in the matter, whereas, to tell the truth, what I have is a series of post-rationalisations. It was what I wanted to write, so that was what I wrote. There was no study of the market place or check list of pros and cons between genres. I was reading a lot about 18th century history, largely inspired by the fresh light cast on the period by the work of Amanda Vickery, and I like reading books where Stuff Happens. Stuff always happens in crime novels and usually quite a lot of it, so I wrote Instruments of Darkness, a crime novel set in 1780.
So if you don’t really decide what you write, the question becomes ‘why do you write?’ I know the usual line is something about a need to communicate; an urge to create and share stories and in so doing stake a claim to some corner of a stranger’s mental landscape, but I don’t really buy that. If that was what writers wanted, wouldn’t we all want to be stand-up comedians? Writers need to be happy spending most of their time alone, and though these days we are all encouraged to do as many events as possible and stalk about the internet letting everyone know how clever we are, most writers I know would rather be off in their towers with their imaginary friends. In fact most writers I know regard the phone as an instrument of torture and have trained friends and family to only ever communicate by email, or text in an emergency.
You need to be driven to write, but driven by curiosity, I think, not by a need for fame and acclaim. Your subject, your story needs to be all absorbing for you. You need to be hungry for the research then obsessive about spending your time in the world you’re discovering.
We are told, too often, write what you know. I’ve always thought that advice about as good as ‘if you want to get an agent follow them to parties with the unbound pages of your latest manuscript’. It speaks to the stereotype of writer as show off who has a desperate need to share their story. A lot of us are shy bunnies and I have no great interest in sharing my story. I don’t think it’s that interesting. I write because I’m fascinated by other people’s stories, particularly those hidden by time and ironed out of history by the grand narratives of wars and rulers. Write what you want to know about, that’s what I say. If you do that you’ll write something interesting.
I did a talk with Liz Freemantle and Vanora Bennett this week and a question came up about the current interest in historical fiction. Liz made the very good point that it might be something to do with the fact that history itself is being written very differently these days. There’s an interest what everyone else was up to while the grand narratives rolled by in a haze of gunsmoke. Social historians, historians of folklore, the researchers going through the account books of the provincial music halls - those are the people feeding historical fiction now, and huzzah for that because I want to know the story of the artist who painted the glass in Westminster abbey, more than that of the king crowned underneath them, I want to know why devil dogs lope along the lanes of Britain, I want to know what it was to huddle in the galleries, eating fish and chips and joining in with the chorus of the comic songs, or what it was to step out onto the stage and sing them. I want to write these stories, because they are what I want to read and they are there, hiding in slim academic volumes or just out of view in the archives, the court records and account books, in the glass and under the stones lying along the old paths. You just have to want to go and find them.
Last month saw an important historical anniversary. 22nd
January 2014 was celebrated with features on the BBC and in every national
newspaper, and marked in special blogs and posts on internet sites worldwide.
So what was it?
Strictly speaking it was the 135th anniversary of the Battle
of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War – but that’s not what the fuss was about. What
we were all celebrating was the fictionalized version of that battle, and the
fiftieth anniversary of the release of a film called Zulu.
How can that be? Would we celebrate the anniversary of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan over that of ‘D’ Day itself? How can any reproduction –
film, novel, documentary, anything – ever be more significant than the events
it reproduces?
Well, obviously it can. Few would have even heard of the
historical King Arthur without the literature of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and no-one
would remember Lisa del Giocondo if da Vinci hadn’t painted the Mona Lisa. We
can all dream of achieving such heights, but I think we’d all agree the
benchmark is set pretty high.
A high benchmark
Yet Zulu has hit it. An ordinary commercial war film with no
special effects, no sex, and virtually no blood, yet article
after article discusses both its significance and its enduring grip on the
British imagination. Zulu has done what we’d all like to do, and for that alone
I think any historical writer would want to study it.
Zulu Exhibition at Cardiff Castle
Many of us already have. Indeed, in the world of military
fiction and re-enactment, familiarity with the film is an essential password to
prove one is serious in one’s love of the genre. My own first re-enactment ‘gig’ was set in the
Thirty Years War, but the ice was only broken with my new comrades when I was
able to answer correctly the simple question ‘Which Victoria Cross winner at
Rorke’s Drift was actually Swiss?’
All right, that sounds alarmingly ‘cultish’, but there are
good sound reasons for the fascination. The 1960s were a golden age for
historical films (Cleopatra 1963, Lawrence of Arabia 1962, Doctor Zhivago 1965)
but Zulu was the first of the ‘British military’ genre, and its success
immediately prompted a scramble for more. The Charge of the Light Brigade,
Cromwell and Waterloo all followed within six years, but none hit the spot in
the same way. What’s special about Zulu goes beyond its qualities as a film,
and I don’t think its successors are to be found in the cinema at all. In fact I think
they’re here, in the world of historical fiction.
Perhaps even literally. The action-adventure school of historical
fiction has been around for years, but the more realistic military genre only
really starts with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and takes off with
Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe. And the idea for Flashman only came to GMF in 1966, two
years after the release of a film he later praised highly in his ‘Hollywood
History of the World’ – Zulu.
He’s far from alone. I’m not aware of any significant writer
in my genre who isn’t a fan, and down at the insignificant end I know how much
it’s influenced my own writing. Yes, it’s a film, it’s a Hollywood epic, but I’d
say it’s also historical fiction of the finest kind, and gave birth to the
genre so many of us read and write today.
That’s why the piece of advice I give most often to aspiring
historical writers is to study Zulu. I don’t mean as a film, as it’s usually
done – but from the point of view of a writer. I know I’ve learned a lot from
it myself and think even some of its most obvious lessons are worth restating.
Take the battle itself, for instance. It’s from Zulu that I
learned the most important part of writing battles is the tension of the
build-up – something the film does so successfully that Peter Jackson claimed
it inspired the Helm’s Deep sequences in his ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. It’s
from Zulu that I learned to sustain long action sequences by dividing them into
individual little ‘chapters’, each with their own defining moments. It’s from
Zulu that I learned action means nothing unless we’ve already been given
characters to care about. All obvious stuff, but how often do we read books or
see films that don’t seem to know it?
Build up is all...
Or the world-building. True, a modern writer wouldn’t get
away with that long opening sequence of Zulu dances, but once the action moves
to Rorke’s Drift we are absorbed so quickly into the equally alien world of the
Victorian military that we’re hardly even aware it’s being done. Since I’ve
been studying Crimea I’m amazed at the authenticity of detail that’s so
casually included here – from the overt Christianity of some British soldiers
to the subtle rivalry between ‘regular’ Army and Engineers. Zulu is an object
lesson in how to be accurate without letting your research show.
Or the language. That too is both natural and totally
authentic – a wonderful anecdote to those who think Victorians all spoke
formally, correctly and without contractions. Even the idioms are right, from ‘the
fuzzies’ to ‘oh, my eye’, and every single character has his own unique voice.
In the whole film there’s only one phrase I’m unsure about (Hook’s “Stuff me
with little green apples”) and one line I think sounds unnatural – Bromhead’s
comment “That’s a bitter pill” on being shot at with their own rifles.
Or the relationships! The totally egregious character of Miss Witt is there only to add misleading sex interest to the truly appalling trailer, but there are three strong character relationships within the defenders, any one of which could sustain a novel all its own. The breaking down of the class rivalry between Chard and Bromhead, the almost paternal love-hate bond between the dying Sergeant Maxfield and the recalcitrant Private Hook, and its simple echo in the journey travelled by Corporal Allen and Private Hitch. When Allen and Hitch are wounded, Hitch asks the martinet corporal if he can now undo his tunic button - and the corporal reaches to do it with his own hand...
Wounded Corporal Allen and Private Hitch
Kerry Jordan as the cook
Or even just the humanity. The most obvious example is the
proper respect shown to the Zulus (‘I think they’ve got more guts than we have,
boyo!’) but I love the way we’re given insight into so many different little
characters – such as the cook who’s laboured under the hot sun to make soup for
a hundred men, and is then ordered to throw it on the fire. Zulu taught me what
can be done with minor characters, and I try to remember it every time.
Stanley Baker as Chard
Not everything works, but I think we can learn from the
flaws too. The character of Chard, for instance, does sometimes slip into
modern attitudes – being anti-war, anti-colonialism, and sympathetic to the
plight of the Boers – and every time he does it the film seems to ‘jolt’. It
doesn’t ‘feel’ right, and a viewer will know that even if he’s never thought
about historical fiction.
Then there are the ‘liberties taken with the truth’. The
most obvious ones are making the Zulus salute the British as ‘fellow braves’ (which
they didn’t), and the 24th (Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot a mainly Welsh
regiment (when it wasn’t) – but there’s still a dramatic truth in both these
things and at least they do no harm. Besides, take the Welshness away and we lose not only one of the best scenes of the film, but one that's been described as one of the greatest cinematic scenes of all time. 'Men of Harlech' has never been the same since.
What I do mind are the ‘liberties’ taken
with real people, and I learned an important lesson when the descendants of
Henry Hook VC complained about the appallingly unfair depiction of his
character in the film. People do care when their ancestors are smeared, and I
saw it again when the descendants of Murdoch complained about the way he was
portrayed in Titanic. There is simply no
excuse for this. If we need a villain and there wasn’t one – then are we really
incapable of making one up?
James Booth as Hook The real Hook
There’s one other real person I mind about – but you won’t
see him in the film at all. His name was Private Joseph Williams of the 24th
Regiment of Foot, and he actually performed the single most heroic action of
the entire battle. When the Zulus began to spear their way through the outer
door to the hospital, Joseph Williams left his loophole to brace the planks
with his own body, and held the entrance
alone while patients were carried to safety behind him. He was killed and cut
to pieces, but if the VC had been awarded posthumously he would most certainly
have ben qualified to receive it. It saddens me that Zulu didn’t recognize him
either.
But in the end it’s a film, and its job is ultimately to
entertain. Few would disagree that it does that, but it’s in the way it does it
that I think I can learn most as a historical novelist. Yes, world-building is
important, and yes, historical context is crucial, but arguably the greatest
aspect of Zulu is the way it can sweep away both. War is universal. When Hook says 'Did I ever see a Zulu walking down the City Road? No! So what am I doing here?' he may be making a historically relevant point about colonialism, but he is also speaking for almost any soldier in any foreign war.
As does Colour Sergeant Bourne in one of the most crucial scenes of the film. Nervous young Private Cole asks him, ‘Why is it us, sir? Why
us?’ to which Bourne replies, ‘Because we’re here, lad. Nobody else. Just us.’
Gary Bond as Cole
And that’s it. A soldier doesn’t need to know the rights or
wrongs of the war he’s fighting – and neither ultimately does a reader. In the end there are only men we care about who must fight to survive. Not 1879, not history, but this moment, here and now.
That for me is the biggest lesson of Zulu. I’ll spend
forever getting my research right and weaving my story in and out of specific
and real events, but the best kind of historical novel is one where you can
throw away the history – and still have a story.
***
A.L. Berridge's website is here, and is nowhere near as good as watching Zulu. Have a look at the scene above instead.
And the answer to the question is (of course) Frederick Schiess of the Natal Native Contingent, from the Swiss Mounted Police.
Noticing a flurry of unusual early morning activity at my
local primary school I realised that it’s about now that children are being registered
to begin school in autumn of this year.
I do distinctly recall my father taking me aged four and
a half to my first day of school. We went into a huge classroom where a red rocking
horse stood in one corner, an abacus on a shelf, and a free-standing blackboard
with easel. There were a dozen or so small chairs and tables. I remember
feeling very pleased that someone had thought to make chairs the correct size
for me to sit on. Our reception teacher was kindly, a plump motherly figure,
who took crying children on her knee and read them stories. She kept a mechanical
tin bank on her desk in the form of a man in a top hat. The money went to
charity. If you had penny to spare you could put in the man’s outstretched hand,
whereupon he would raise it up and the money would drop into his hat. I used to
beg my mother for a penny so that I could play with the bank.
On leaving the infant class life changed dramatically.
Whether it was because class sizes became much larger or due to a different
type of teaching ethos but higher up the school a much harsher regime was enforced.
I was a meek biddable child - yes, truly, I was (then) - yet managed to incur
the wrath of the dragon-teacher, and was punished for what I considered then
and still consider now, a minor transgression.
This involved being belted with
a length of thick leather strap across the palm of my hand. I invite anyone in
favour of corporal punishment to sample a taste of the school belt or tawse (coming
from the word used to cure hide) This leather strap, cut into thongs at one
end, was also known as a Lochgelly, that being the name of the town in the of Scotland
where these vile instruments of torture were manufactured. Each one was stamped
(and in case you question this I do hold the evidence) with the name of a Mr John
Dick. It was a horrible and unnecessary violence wrought upon young children.
Looking at old school photographs reveals more than the
chime of recognition of former classmates. It’s interesting to compare them to
ones taken of pupils today. In mine the teacher’s hat and suit could almost be
ultra-modern. Uniform is essentially the same, although, I notice that when I was
at school, some girls were bold enough to eschew school shirt and tie for a ‘pretty
frock’ on school photograph day. To me the most striking difference in school
photographs from the past and present day ones is that now the children are
actually smiling. Not only do they
look happy to be at school they are obviously being allowed to show it.
The great bonus for me was the access to books. We were
members of the public library and we had books at home but my school books were
a source of enormous pleasure. To this day I still enjoy reading through them.
Science books with intricate diagrams fascinated me. Yes,
I have deliberately chosen the illustration re water management for this blog
post – it may be that certain people should have paid more attention to books
like this!
The Music books are unintentionally hilarious. I’d be
interested to know if anyone else had to learn Good Morrow Gossip Joan. We were spoiled for choice with those
songs in the completely non pc Oxford School Music Book. Boney was a Warrior and the quite startling Rosie’s Skirt:
Ro-sie has a new skirt,
it’s ve-ry big and lum-py
But it fits our Ro-sie be-cause
she’s ra-ther dum-py
When songs were being selected obviously no one thought
ahead as to how a plump schoolgirl named Rosie might feel about hearing this
sung loudly in chorus by twenty fellow pupils.
The History books probably did as much to engender my
love of stories as fiction books. Combined with liberal amount if Greek and
Roman myths I soaked them up, not minding the lists of dates we were required to
learn.
The English dictionary … with exercises. I loved my dictionary. The drawings were
intricate and it had pictures and quizzes and Fascinating Facts. I owe my championship
status at Trivial Pursuit directly to this book.
I’ve a passion for old children’s books but have only
just realised that I might have actually stolen
some of these school books. I’m hoping the dragon-teacher never finds out!
