SALT AND CRUSHED ROSES - Medieval pregnancy and neonatal care By Elizabeth Chadwick

Last week we welcomed a new baby boy into our family. (left). At the same time I was reading up on pregnancy and the care of babies as part of my general research, so I thought I'd talk on the subject for my monthly posting.

In the thirteenth century, a Tuscan physician called Aldobrandino da Polenta, left his homeland to become personal physician to countess Beatrix of Provence who was the mother in law of King Louis IX of France. While thus employed he wrote and dedicated to his employer a medical text in French called the Regime du Corps, which translates as Regimen for the Body. (1256) Here is his Letter to her, dedicating the work.
His writings, particularly on the section concerning the care of the mother during pregnancy and then of the newborn child were principally sourced from Arabic works that had been disseminated through Europe in earlier centuries.

His view of pregnancy was that when it began it was like a tree when the fruit was first set and was vulnerable to wind and rain - what we now call the June drop where all the fruits that haven't taken, wither and fall. Then the fruit took a firmer hold on the branch and as it grew became more difficult to  dislodge. Once ripe, however, it was again ready to fall at the lightest touch.
As a result of these stages, Aldobrandino thought it was nto a good idea to bleed the mother or perform medical interventions in the first four months, but that it was all right for a while after that because the child was now firmly established. However,when the baby was at full term it was again inadviseable to bleed the mother.

As far as a mother's general regimen went, he advised her not to eat anything that was too salty in case it caused the baby to be born without hair or nails. She should not eat anything that might cause her to menstruate.  This included such items as haricot beans, rue, parsley - or lupins!  And she was never to gorge herself.  Instead she should eat small meals frequently and they should be easily digestible. Chicken was especially good.  He also cites partridge, blackbirds, kid and mutton as being beneficial.  She should not drink straight wine but cut it with water.  She should also keep calm and avoid anything that might cause stress and anger. Instead she should cultivate all things that gave her joy and comfort, again with particular attention to the first and last months.  She should also put herself in situations where the smells were nice. Her clothes should be fresh and clean and she should not remain out for too long in the sun.

 Aldobrandino suggested that a good tonic for a pregnant woman to take should be made from whole pearls that have never been pierced mixed with root of Spanish pellitory, ginger, mastic, zedoary root (not unlike ginger) cassia bark, cardamom, nutmeg and cinnamon, sea lavender and long pepper.  All of this should be powdered and put into a sugar syrup.  I should think the taste was very aromatic and ginger is good for sickness, but I'm not sure about the powdered pearls!

Zedoary plant

About three weeks before her delivery date, Aldobrandino said the woman should bathe every day in water that had been steeped with mallows and violets, linseed, fenugreek, barley and camomile.  Her thighs and genitals should be anointed with oil of camomile, chicken fat, foam from the top of butter and a compound called dialthea made from the marsh mallow plant.   She was to take fortifying drinks of balsam and wine - or if she was poor, roots of costus and artemisia cooked in wine with a two pennyweight of bull's bile added.
Thus fortified, she should make herself sneeze but hold her breath by the mouth and nose, and then force herself to walk, and go up and down stairs.  Having done her exercises, she should have her feet and hands rubbed and inhale nice aromas while this was being done.  She should also anoint her genitals with costus root and spikenard (for their olefcatory effect).

A mother to be should be kept warm when it was cold, and cooled down when the temperature was warm. Indeed, it was beneficial Aldobrandino said, for her to sit in a lukewarm bath up to her navel.
During labour Aldobrandino suggested an energy-giving drink should be presented to the mother, made from water in which dates had been cooked, and then flavoured with fenugreek. He also advised placing a cushion under the woman's belly to support and comfort her.
Once delivered (and this is assuming an untroubled birth) the woman should bathe and be given nourishing food to eat, and medicines administered for any after pains.

As a side note, what strikes me from the above details is how matter of factly bathing is taken, and how therapeutic. It's another strand of evidence to support the argument that actually yes, people did bathe in the Middle Ages and that it wasn't frowned upon.

So, onto the baby now that he or she had been born.  The next piece of advice from Aldobrandino is rather worrying to a modern mindset.  He advises that the baby should be wrapped in crushed roses with fine salt. This doesn't sound like a good idea but let's go on.  The umbilical cord should be cut and powdered 'dragon's blood' put on it. This is actually the gum of the East Indian climbing palm. Also sarcocolla (similar), cumin and myrrh and the whole covered with a linen bandage soaked in olive oil.  Aldobrandino doesn't actually say he has done this - it's just what's taught.  Or you can tie off the cord with a thread of twisted wool and cover it with an olive oil bandage.

Once the umbilical cord has dropped off, the area should be covered with a mixture of fine salt mixed with powdered costus or sumac or fenugreek or oregano. He then cheerfully advises the mother to salt the baby's whole body with this, particularly  the nose and mouth. (I'm amazed any child survived!).  Aldobrandino says that a newborn child is very tender and easily feels the heat and the cold, so may need this salting more than once to toughen it up!

Anyway, after the mite has endured the salting, it gets a wash thank goodness.(that is of course from my modern perspective!).  Aldobrandino tells his readers that the nurse must have trimmed nails so that she doesn't harm the baby.  She should help it urinate by pressing lightly on its bladder. Of its own accord, a healthy baby will 'fill its bottom nicely.'

When swaddling the baby, the members should be arranged to give them a good shape because it's like forming wax and whatever shape you give a malleable baby now will impinge on its future physical development, so a mother should employ a wise nurse to do this. 'you should know that beauty and ugliness are due in large measure to nurses.'

Having been swaddled, the baby was then put in its cradle to sleep. The cradle was not to have hard things in it (unspecified) but soft things that would comfort it and keep it warm.  It should sleep in the dark because bright light might damage its eyes.

After sleep, the baby should be taken up and washed if necessary. The baby should be washed around 3 times a day and gently massaged and stretched before being dried in soft towels and put back to sleep.

Interestingly when it comes to feeding the child,  Aldobrandino is all for the mother doing it herself as the natural mother's milk is the best source (this rather flies in the face of the aristocratic habit of employing wet nurses, although the latter seems to have been strongly ingrained culturally). The reason for the mother's milk being best for the child comes from the notion that this milk nourished the child in the womb and once the baby was born, the milk reverted naturally to the breasts.

 Aldobrandino 's advice was to put a little honey into the baby's mouth, then press on the breast to squirt out a small amount of milk, and then put the infant to nurse.  The baby should be fed about three times a day, but not to the point where it was bloated.

A good wet nurse, should one need to employ such a person ought to be around twenty five years of age when her health would be at its best. She should have a good colour and be buxom with a good bosom, but not too much flesh.  It was a well known fact that nurses whose breasts were too large were the cause of snub-nosed children! She had to be in excellent health because it was well known that a sickly nurse would kill a child straight away. She ought to be of sound moral character and have a sweet nature. A nurse who was hot tempered or nervous might pass those traits onto the child if one was not not careful.

The prospective employer should also examine the milk produced to make sure it was of good quality.  This involved checking the colour, appearance and taste. 'To know if it is too gross or too thin, take a drop and put it on your fingernail, and if it drops off without your moving the nail, it is too thick. So take a nurse whose milk is neither too thick nor too clear.'
 Aldobrandino also thought it preferable that the prospective nurse had borne a boy child of her own and it should be at least two months since she had given birth.  She should not lie with a man while nursing the child and must certainly not become pregnant (although that might prove less likely because lactation inhibits ovulation) because that would kill her nursling.

A baby should be breast fed until it was two and then weaned, the nurse first chewing up the food herself to soften it for the child. Porridge too could be given made with breadcrumbs, honey and milk. Teething pains and the need to gnaw in order to teethe were to be alleviated with liquorice root or gladioli root because they were thought to strengthen the gums.  The gums might also be anointed with butter and chicken fat.

All this advice by  Aldobrandino  is an interesting mix of lore, some of it very different from our own way of treating pregnancy, childbirth and infancy, and some of it still very recognisable.  I found  Aldobrandino's  notes on the matter fascinating and informative and I hope you do too.  I shall certainly be searching out the rest of his work in translation.
You can find the full translation of the Aldobrandino's thoughts on pregnancy, childbirth and care of the infant in this wonderful book that I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in the culture of the Middle Ages.

Sex and Jo March, by Leslie Wilson

The March girls and their mother:
Jo is top left (as you'd guess)

I wish I could remember who it was wrote a piece about the sexuality of girls in the nineteenth century, in particular referencing Jo March in Little Women. Jo famously couldn't understand why her sister Meg wanted to marry John Brooke and said: 'I wish I could marry Meg myself and keep her in the family.' The author of this article, which unfortunately I have failed to find in an Internet search, then went on to argue that a restricted-meat diet kept nineteenth-century girls from achieving puberty till seventeen or so; hence Jo's lack of understanding (at least she's not considered to be an incestuous lesbian, as someone averred about Jane Austen.)

I do feel a little uneasy about arguing with something I can only remember in my head, for I know only too well how facts can morph in one's memory; do any of my readers remember the article? But I have been thinking about this for ages, and have been re-reading not only Alcott, but Susan Coolidge on the subject, as well as a biography of Alcott. So I shall go on to reflect on the teenage sexuality (which is considered a modern phenomenon) in Little Women/Good Wives et seq, and What Katy did at School, and also on why I think Jo's creator made her so opposed to flirting, and also why she was married off to Professor Bhaer instead of to Laurie.
Incidentally, I have never heard of a German called Bhaer. He should have been called Baehr or Bähr, which is a fairly ordinary German name, and Alcott must have reversed the letters round, just as people sometimes write Kohlrabi as Kholrabi, though Kohl is the German for 'cabbage' and the name means 'Cabbage turnip'. So if you do misspell in this way; please don't. It is incorrect and gets on my nerves. But enough of the vegetable digression.

Louisa May Alcott aged 20
author unknown. Published 1909 or before

In Little Women, it seems to me (and this is a view shared by Harriet Reisen, author of The Woman Behind Little Women) that Jo represents an alternative role-model for girls (as she has for generations of readers). She rejects the demure feminine role-modelling espoused by her sisters Meg and Amy (Beth seems to me to suffer from a depressive illness; she reminds me so much of my grandmother.) Jo wants to ride, to act, to have adventures, to write, and not to be bothered with convention. She has 'unfeminine' rages and wishes she had been a man. She is, in fact, very like her creator. Being sexually interested in young men, in those days, meant being tied down, and Jo did not want to be tied down. So she sees young men as friends and comrades, playmates, in fact, and gets on with them very well.
Though Katy Carr turns into an Angel in the House and is far from a feminist role-model, she is horrified when she goes to school to find that many of the other girls are romantically obsessed with the young men at the nearby college, and starts a Society for the Suppression of Unladylike Behaviour (ugh!) Other girls, like her vapid cousin Lily, are madly sending out flirtatious signals to men they hardly know, obsessed with clothes, and even a child of thirteen declares that she is 'in love.' This is far from the demure stereotype of nineteenth-century girlhood.

Teenage girls' dance: from Danish Punch, 1879

I doubt if the book would have been written if such behaviour was not common; and indeed, in Little Women, Meg is invited to stay with rich friends who dress her up in sexy clothing, squeeze her into corsets, and make her over in their image, with the express purpose of flirting, which she does, though afterwards she is ashamed of herself. Nor is Meg uninterested in the male sex, and her younger sister Amy likes to hold court too - no matter how ladylike the manner she does it in.

Amy and Laurie

On our side of the Pond, incidentally, there was the correspondant to the 1880s' Girls Own Paper who was corresponding with two young men through the blinds of her bedroom window, and wrote for help when they got too ardent. All she got was a telling-off, though.
I know the age of puberty is considered to have got younger in the twentieth century and maybe was even higher in the nineteenth, but I suspect that is a teensy bit irrelevant. I 'flirted' with teenage boys when I was aged seven or so; it was definitely a romantic feeling, though I had no idea of acting on it in any way, and I was lucky that the boys I was keen on respected this. I think it's quite normal to feel that kind of love well before puberty. A restricted diet, however, was definitely the lot of the Alcott girls; since their father Bronson was too sensitive to earn a living properly, they were virtually starved in their youth, which didn't help their adult health.
It's interesting (and related to this) to reflect on why Jo might have wanted to 'keep Meg in the family.' It is actually a sentiment Louisa expressed when her eldest sister Anna got married. Louisa wanted independence and to earn a living; but her parents were heavily dependent on domestic help from their daughters. Her mother was often ill and her father, as I have said, toured the country speaking, but never brought any money home. The year Anna married was also the year the younger sister Elizabeth (Beth) died, which meant the parents needed Louisa and she had to come home to help them. Reading Good Wives, one finds Jo, after Beth's death, suffering in her role as prop and support to her bereft parents. Anna's marriage was a threat to Louisa's autonomy, and that was probably why she gave the sentiment to Jo.
Jo March was meant to be an independent woman, earning her living just like her creator, but Alcott's readers demanded a romance for Jo, so she gave her 'a funny one.' When she herself did have a kind of romance later in life, it was with a younger man; but the bizarrely-named Bhaer is older, and another version of Bronson Alcott. As one who always falls in love with her male romantic leads, I can imagine that Alcott didn't want to make Bhaer attractive; it might have destabilised her. So Bhaer (bah, what a ridiculous name!) has to be a cuddly oldish man, a kind of gigantic teddy bear with moral stuffing. (They made him sexy in the film, of course.)

Jo and Bhaer (Bah!)

At least Jo does achieve literary fame and fortune later in life, though celebrity becomes quite a burden to her. One can only sympathise. Jo's later tribulations at the hands of autograph-hunters (Jo's Boys) are an exact account of what her creator endured and were perhaps included in the hope that the fans would read and desist. Like Jo, Alcott was often reduced to pretending to be her own parlour-maid, in order to escape the attentions of intrusive worshippers.

Illustrations from Little Women and Good Wives are from my own copy, published 1911 Seeley and Co Ltd, by H.M. Brock. I do like the portrayal of Jo in them, though not the one of her smooching with the bizarrely-surnamed old man.

I do recommend Reisen's The Woman Behind Little Women; it is a fascinating book. And if anyone CAN remember the article about Jo and female sexuality, and tell me the author, I would definitely be very grateful!

The Game of Life by Kate Lord Brown

It's good to have your values questioned - why do you write? What do your books say about what you believe in? There is nothing like a school workshop on writing hist fic to keep you on your toes. Adults are a cakewalk - 100 eight year olds pull no punches. The questions ranged from: 'You mean someone pays you to make stuff up?' to the immediate 'How much do they pay you?' (Answer: not as much as J K). From talking to the teachers afterwards, the thing that most interested them was overturning the idea that books appear by immaculate conception, perfect in form.

I showed them a couple of snapshots of the research files and some of the reference books for the new novel, and told them that a lot of this work and reading never makes it into the final story. I told them about late night skype conversations with a 96 year old professor of literature in the US who had been not much older than them when he was Varian Fry's office boy in Marseilles during WW2. I passed round photos of Aube Breton, Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lamba's daughter, who was five years old when she found sanctuary at Villa Air Bel, and told them about our letters. I hope all this gave them some idea how books live and breathe as they come together, the frustration of blind alleys and red herrings, and the sheer joy of uncovering forgotten bits of history and remarkable characters.

This new novel has been something of a labour of love. My research into the artists involved began in 1993/4 at the Courtauld Institute, writing a thesis on surrealism. An unusual name kept cropping up: Varian Fry. Perhaps your writing process is the same - maybe you also have that shadowy mental filing tray marked 'ideas' or 'must look into this when I have time'. I am not sure why some ideas, particular historical figures get hold of your imagination and won't let go until you write their story - why it is that the universe seems to bombard you with signs or moments of synchronicity until you give it your full attention. This particular idea has been maturing for twenty years, and took three to finally research and write. It is the story of 'the artists' Schindler', the real Casablanca.

In 1940 an international group of rescue workers, refugee intellectuals and artists gathered in the old Villa Air Bel in Marseilles. Every artist sheltered in Air Bel, and over 2000 other refugees escaped from ‘the greatest man-trap in history’, thanks to American journalist Varian Fry and his remarkable team at the American Relief Centre (the ARC or Centre Américan de Secours). With the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and funded by the New York based Emergency Rescue Committee, in all they helped some 4000 people survive, working undercover and without official sanction from the US or France.

Artists and writers such as Andre Breton decamped from Paris to Marseilles, and established themselves at cafes like the Bruleur de Loups, and created a remarkable Sunday salon at Air Bel.

Varian Fry (right) had arrived in Marseilles with a few thousand dollars strapped to his calf and a small suitcase, thinking he would be there a matter of weeks, helping the initial list of artists and intellectuals escape. The list was a virtual mirror of the Nazis infamous 'Liste Noire' of artists considered degenerate. In the end, Fry stayed months, until he was forced to leave France by the authorities. They were extraordinary times - Fry and his maverick band of immensely brave relief workers helped artists escape by legitimate and illegitimate means, by escape routes over the mountains into Spain, or by smuggling refugees onto boats, and forging exit visas.

Life was not easy at Air Bel - the winter of 1941 was freezing, and they were so hungry they even ate the goldfish in the ornamental pond. But there was great company, an illegal radio that could pick up the US Jazz programmes for dancing, and there was still wine - the house was a sanctuary, and there was joy, and creativity. It was a beacon of hope at a dark time, and people such as Antoine de St Exupery's wife Consuelo (inspiration for the Rose in the Little Prince), Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim flocked there. It was in Marseilles that Guggenheim met Max Ernst. Max said ‘when where and why shall I meet you?’ Peggy said ‘Tomorrow, four, Café de la Paix, and you know why.’ They escaped to America together and married.

Jacqueline Lamba

Consuelo de St Exupery

Marcel Duchamp

The lasting legacy of the artists who came together at Air Bel is the Jeu de Marseilles. Breton spent hours in the library in Marseilles, researching the history of the city's original Tarot deck. He proposed a new game - new suits: Love Dream Revolution Knowledge, symbolised by the flame, the wheel, the star, the key. Brauner, Breton, Lamba, Dominguez, Ernst, Herold, Lam and Masson designed the cards.

It is a rare and beautiful thing, testament to their creativity and their defiance at the darkest time of their lives (and I was thrilled to discover a pack during my research, from a book dealer in France). 

Perhaps you have seen the meme wrongly attributed to Churchill that has been doing the rounds: 'when Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he said 'then what are we fighting for'? I came across the real thing in the MOMA archives, penned by Barr:

Fry, like Barr, believed in the importance of these artists, and in the sanctity of freedom and democracy. In the great game of life, these are things worth fighting for. Asked why he and his team risked their lives to help the artists, he said that their art had brought great happiness to his life and he just wanted to help them in their hour of need. Fry received little thanks for his remarkable work during his lifetime. Now, the US Consulate General in Marseilles sits on Place Varian Fry. But in 1971 when Fry published the Flight portfolio of prints in aid of the International Rescue Committee, he struggled to convince artists to take part – though he was responsible for saving many of their lives.

He was honoured with the International Rescue Committee’s medal in 1963, and the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur by the French government in 1967. He died alone in his sleep later that year aged only 59. A manuscript lay at his side. Fry died surrounded by his incomplete notes for a new account of those extraordinary months in Marseilles.

In 1991 the US Holocaust Memorial Council awarded him the Eisenhower Liberation Medal, and in 1996 he was named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem – an honour bestowed on non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust. It was an honour shared with Schindler and Wallenberg. He was the first American to be honoured in this way.

When Fry wrote 'Surrender on Demand', he said it was worse than War and Peace with its cast of thousands. Writing 'The House of Dreams' has felt like that at times, with editorial notes coming back time and again asking for yet more characters to be cut. I came to admire Fry and his team immensely, to love the factual characters that form the backbone of my fiction. I hope the novel will eventually bring the little known story of 'the artists' Schindler' to a wider audience. When you look at the restless world we live in now, it is more important than ever to treasure and defend the enlightened values of freedom, democracy and creativity that they fought for.

'The House of Dreams' is being published in German as 'Das Sonntagsmadchen' by Piper this autumn.

Keats, Poetry and Time by Imogen Robertson

Earlier this month I sat on the floor in John Keats’s bedroom  and Inua Ellams read me poetry. I like sentences like that. The experience was part of a thoughtful and inspiring event put on by Penned in the Margins and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it yet. 

My husband and I arrived at Keats’s House one evening earlier in the month. It was late, but only just getting dark when Penned in the Margins editor Tom Chivers, lead a small group of patrons into the un-lit house. In the kitchen we were joined by Simon Barraclough reading his clever and gentle work about planets, stars and time, then we saw a blackly witty video installation from Ross Sutherland projected on the wall. In the the bedroom was Inua with his twisting, dextrous poems of discovery whose language clothes all his subjects in light. On the ground floor we found Hannah Silver lying on the floor and surrounded by scraps of paper. She made us look at and listen to the room we were in then write phrases and thoughts for her. She laid them out in front of her then, with a loop station and a microphone, created out of them a shimmering, shifting sound sculpture. Our last stop in the house was an audience with Leafcutter John whose minimal, manipulated score of found sounds and musical scraps had followed us around the house.

 

There were, as you can tell, many things to love about this event. It was inspired by a phrase in one of Keats’s letters to his brother in which he speaks of Negative Capability, ‘that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.’ For me though, creeping quietly through the dark house, the other theme of the evening was time. Each artist was reacting to the house and its history, each was in discussion with its ghosts. To have gone to the house and heard only the poetry of Keats would have been charming, but it would have been sterile by comparison. In the work presented we were given a chance to explore a place, a moment in history and an individual’s moment of history, and our reactions to all of the above. I thought not only of Keats and his time there, but also of all those who have come to the house to find some trace of him. We were part of time laid down in layers, but still moving and shifting as our perspectives were changed. It was time reimagined and engaged with, and I thought to myself, that is what we are trying to do as writers of history - discover and uncover the past, listen to it like a child on the beach with a shell to their ear listens to the sea and then talk back to it. 

Penned in the Margins will be staging the show again during the Ledbury Poetry Festival on 12th July. If you have the chance, do go.

'The Private Life of Pawns' by A L Berridge

We all know soldiers have private lives. Novels about war naturally devote space to characters’ back-stories, thoughts, feelings and relationships, and everyone knows a manly war hero can be given a softer side by bunging him the obligatory love interest. Yet there’s another, even more private side, and I’m beginning to realize it’s more important than I thought. 

My journey began while working on my present novel of the Crimean War. In ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ my hero is placed for good dramatic reasons with the 34th Regiment of Foot, but I was depressed to discover that the best primary sources are a digest of the Regimental log, a handful of officers’ letters, and a portion of an officer’s journal. Those are all very helpful, but my characters include several private soldiers and a particularly crucial Colour Sergeant, and none of those documents showed much interest in such lowly souls. The log didn't even give names of anyone below the rank of ensign, and casualty lists record them only as numbers of 'Sergts' and 'Rank and File'.

Then came the miracle. A delightful lady called Anne Beal wrote to me about the Crimean Memorial Appeal, and mentioned in passing that her interest in the war arose from the fact her great-grandfather George Clarke had served in it. He was a Colour Sergeant, as it happened. In the 34th Regiment of Foot. And she had a dozen of his letters sent from the Siege of Sevastopol.

We all know those moments when the words ‘Holy Grail’ dance in golden specks before our eyes. I shall draw a decent veil over my embarrassingly slavering response, but fortunately Anne was kind as well as god-sent, and she sent me not only photographs of the letters themselves, but perfect clean transcripts with explanatory notes from her own research. Eleven of the letters were to George’s wife Mary Anne, who’d been left behind with the rest of the regiment at Corfu, one was to her parents, and the whole set covered the exact period of my book.

Original envelope of one of George Clarke's letters - by kind permission of Anne Beal

They were everything I could have hoped for. What I needed most were everyday details of life in the regiment, and George’s letters were pure research gold. How much did it cost to send a letter home? What kind of ‘souvenirs’ did soldiers loot from dead Russians, and what could they expect to sell them for? There were so many of these gems that I’d noted the first six letters before it really occurred to me what was missing.

The war.

After a year’s research I probably knew more of what was happening than poor George did, but I still found the omission intriguing. War is a pretty big thing for a soldier, this was almost certainly George’s first, and yet he seemed hardly interested in it at all. There are dutiful references, of course, but even these are mostly concerned with how soon the siege will be over and he can be reunited with his wife. At first he thinks the siege won’t last long ‘for the Russians are actually eating their horses for want of food’, but later notes sourly that despite the constant firing he doesn’t see ‘the slightest alteration in the place’. A month later he still doesn’t know when he’ll be coming home, but thinks ‘there will be no more fighting’. Two months later he writes with endearing honesty: ‘I shall be very glad when this affair is over for I am getting tired of it.’

There could be many reasons for this reticence. The siege was in stalemate, there was little real progress to report, and George himself points out that the regiments were so widely spread that general news was thin and unreliable. Yet even when his regiment is actually engaged, George’s accounts of the action are the briefest I’ve ever seen. Writing on the day after the Grand Sortie of March 1855, he doesn’t even mention it until his third paragraph when he’s already discussed domestic details of money and his wife’s health.

George Clarke's signature - by kind permission of Anne Beal

That’s what’s fascinating. It’s not that the war isn’t worthy attention, but that George is far more concerned with his own quiet little private life. He writes about sick friends, relays news of his brother in the Rifle Brigade, gossips cheerfully about lapses of behavior among fellow NCOs, and is desperate for real newspapers from home. He worries about money and frets about the unreliability of the post, but most of all he is anxious about his wife, and how well she’ll be treated by the regiment without him there to look after her:

I received your two letters dated 11th & 12th December in which I find your face and throat to be much better which gave me much pleasure to read but on the other hand I was sorry to hear of the ill treatment of Sgt Howfield to you. But my dear, don’t have anything to say to him only what you cannot help for I am sure he would do you an injury if he could.

Of course he worries. Anyone would, and the more I read the more I understood how natural George’s approach really was. The famous letters of Timothy Gowing of the Royal Fusiliers might be full of patriotic wishes to ‘strike a blow for good old England’, but Gowing was a young man with no dependents, and those with adult lives outside Crimea were bound to have a different perspective. George’s ‘outside life’ wasn’t just his ‘back-story’, it was pretty well his whole story, to which war was only the backdrop.

And as a writer, that made me think. My job is to keep a story moving forward, to keep attention focused mainly on the action in foreground, but is that really a realistic way to show war? I’ve dealt with a soldier’s all-engrossing home life before in the character of Woodall in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, but that was a significant story, and often the reality is in the sheer ordinariness of everyday life. Shouldn’t I be doing more to show that?

The obvious answer has to be – only with caution. A commercial novel needs to be reality with the boring bits missed out, and if I devote pages to my characters worrying about whether a cake will still be all right after a long voyage then it’s going to play havoc with the pace. But reading George’s letters have made me wonder if there isn’t a greater danger in exploring the real ‘private lives’ of soldiers, and if I need to be very careful about going there at all.

Because ordinary life is universal. Have a character shot in the leg and readers will sympathize in an intellectual way, but have him get cramp or have a stone in his shoe and the reader is instantly there with him. George’s worries are ‘real’ to most of us in a way that war is not, and as I read his letters I completely forgot about research and saw him only as a human being.

That's what trivia does. It's absolutely the truth of soldiering, but it has a power like no other to humanize and make real. Look at this little video, for instance, made by the Donbass volunteers in Ukraine, where from 4’40” the footage is rough video shot at a rebel checkpoint. The English subtitles are delightfully dreadful, but enough key words are translated to tell us what these men are talking about.

From 5’31” the men are actually sitting under fire, but still the conversation drifts round important topics like cigarettes and socks. Trivia, laughter, the stuff of normality, and at once their Russian nationality is lost in the human nature of the universal soldier at war. This is what soldiers are like, this is their real private life, and even if it's a 'front' to help them deal with stress then the 'front' is part of the reality of who they really are.

That kind of trivia we can write. Not too much of it, or we'll destroy the pace of action sequences, but we need to see men talking about the things that really interest them rather than those things the plot demands. They don't talk about the war because they're living the war, and what they really want to think about is everything else.

As George Clarke does. His isn't an epic adventure story, but the letters give an insight into his real life outside the borders of war, and it was impossible to read them without personal feeling. George died of cholera on 30th June 1855, and when I read his last letter of June 23rd I'm afraid I even cried. His poor wife! They were obviously a very close couple, and at the time of his death she was even expecting his child – the baby he so much wanted to see christened. I wondered how on earth the poor woman would cope alone.

George Clarke's last letter

That's a good reaction, exactly the one I would hope for in a reader, but what made this situation dangerous is the fact that I found out. Anne herself told me the expected child was born in August 1855, and since the father was not listed as deceased it seems likely poor Mary Anne didn’t yet know she was a widow. That child was Anne’s grandfather, and it was from him that she learned that Mary Anne had always kept George’s letters with her, and carried them about in his old cutlery holder.

This cutlery holder, to be precise.

George was real, his loss was real, and I felt with full force the personal impact of war. I’ve been campaigning for over a year to erect a proper memorial to our fallen in Sevastopol, but this one man who died there was suddenly proxy for them all.

So perhaps that's the one part of a soldier's life that needs to stay private - at least in an action adventure historical. If I’m writing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ then of course I must make the reader feel every human shred of the cost of war – but if I want my readers to enjoy the fight then I need to keep back something of what that cost really is.

That sounds like a cheat, but I think it's a necessary one. Generals can't think of their soldiers on so personal a level, or how could they send them to death as disposable pawns? Soldiers don't do it either, and one thing I've learned from veterans is how they condition themselves to laugh and joke even about each other's deaths. It's the only way a soldier can do his job and stay sane.

Maybe the same is true of writers. I admit I take a possibly rather warped pleasure when a reader berates me for killing a character they loved, but I don't want the loss to be so unbearable that they can't enjoy the book at all. I'll go into the 'private life' of my characters, I'll make them as real as I know how, but unless it's absolutely essential for the story then I'm not going to explore their loss beyond the grave.

Perhaps that's a cop-out. Perhaps I even know it is, but I'm beginning to think that when it comes to commercial fiction about war then T.S. Eliot had it absolutely right: 'human kind cannot bear very much reality'.


***
A very, very big thank you to Anne Beal for allowing me to write about her great-grandfather, and for giving permission to show her photographs. There is much more to the story, and I very much hope that one day she'll publish it herself.

Meanwhile the much duller A.L. Berridge's website is here.