Josselin by Imogen Robertson

I’ve been away on my holidays. This gives me the chance to put up a picture of the town I went to, Josselin in Brittany. Among other things, it has this magnificent castle.

You can read about it in detail here. The castle is still a private home - that of the Duke of Rohan - but during the summer months tourists are allowed in to the grounds and some of the main rooms on the ground floor. It is a rather wonderful place - that fantastic war-ready frontage looking out over the Oust - the river used to flow right along the castle walls until the Nantes-Brest canal was built - and on the inside a riot of renaissance stone work. 

There is also a lovely market every Saturday morning, an interesting and ancient church and a profusion of half-timbered buildings. 

So of course we had a wonderful time and I learned just enough about the history of Brittany to realise I really need to read The Discovery of France by Graham Robb again. 

Then there’s a second, personal layer of history overlaying our time there. My parents first bought a house in Josselin in 1989. It was a complete wreck - ‘épouvantable’ the estate agent whispered ominously, and I remember my Dad peering about the place on the day they signed the contracts saying ‘Oh Celia, what have we done?’ 

My brother, a student at the time, and I, celebrating my 16th birthday, thought it was marvellous. There were trunks in the attic with address labels still glued to them and shreds of purple wallpaper hanging off the walls. There were pans with some strange pottage preserved in the kitchen and plastic cladding hiding the 17th century beams in the living room. My Dad discovered while taking measurements for his plans that there wasn’t a single straight wall or right angle in the place.

Mum and Dad threw themselves into the reconstruction and rebuilding, taking off the modern facade to expose the half-timbering, taking down the barn in the back yard and getting rid of the wall paper (despite my protestations). I spent the following summer with my best friend, Emma, scrubbing the beams in the sitting room, and my 17th birthday polishing the floor in the same room. Mum and Dad found that the house opposite was going for a song and bought that too. I think they’d just run out of things for me to scrub. 

This summer was a bit special then - it marked 25 years since Mum and Dad bought the first house we had a big party to celebrate. Afterwards Mum said all their friends had been talking about what good French my brothers and I speak, but she said it with a certain air of suspicion, as if we’d been keeping it a secret. Mostly though the specialness came from having so much of the family there, we missed one of my nephews, Gregory who was working away in Belgrade, but the rest were all with us  - from Philip who is twenty-three and rather brilliant, to Tessa who is one and the only girl. She seems like a tough cookie though.  Darko looks like an elf and Ranko is very handsome and obsessed with his tan. Adam’s two sons, Dylan and Theo, made sure we played proper games every night - especially the werewolf one - and after a string of friends and boyfriends over the years, I distinguished myself by bringing a husband who sees cooking for 14 people as a really good time.

Places with which we have a long association hold a history that is both personal and universal. There is nothing, for instance, like walking by the Hotel du Chateau where Emma and I celebrated getting our GCSE results to trigger the sort of Proustian reactions so useful to any writer. There is nothing like then walking through the thickness of the castle walls to make you think of the teenagers celebrating their own small victories a hundred or five hundred years ago.

www.imogenrobertson.com

'Last Look - The Truth about Crimea' by A L Berridge

Admit it, you’re sick to death of Crimea. Writing a series set in one war has made me rather single-minded, and looking back over my time at the History Girls I seem to have written about little else. But as this will be my final post here I hope you’ll let me take just one last look at it, and tell the story no-one else in the West seems to want to tell.

They really don't. When the official narrative is that ‘Russia has stolen Crimea’, no-one wants to hear about Crimeans except as Ukraine’s ‘property’ and a pawn in the Great Game. What they forget is that Crimeans are also people, and sometimes ordinary people can change the world. In the last week of February 2014 some of them did just that, and just this once I'd like it to be recognized.

All right, February is hardly history, but I think the story fits here because of what it reveals about the historical process itself. To me it was a unique one, because I know the place, I know the people, and I was aware of what was happening before it was history. Usually I start with the official narrative and work backwards to the primary sources, but this time I’ve watched events unfolding through the eyes of the people actually living them – and been astounded to see the entirely different narrative now hailed as ‘official history’. It’s made me start to wonder how much official history we can believe in at all.

We certainly can’t rely on contemporary media. It was almost fun at first, being ‘in the know’, watching with smug superiority as a Western reporter scrambled round mispronouncing everything and screaming ‘BREAKING NEWS! A Russian frigate is approaching Sevastopol Harbour!’ The poor man obviously didn’t know there’s always a Russian frigate patrolling the harbour entrance to protect the base of the Black Sea Fleet – and sometimes a great deal more. This is a photo from my last visit there, and I hate to think what he’d have said if he’d seen this:

But it didn’t stay funny for long. The tensions were real, of course, and the forces of the Black Sea Fleet did indeed intervene to ensure the referendum went ahead, but the tone of the reportage gave everything an increasingly unfair and sinister twist. The presence of the naval base has always meant a constant stream of military traffic between Russia and Crimea, but suddenly every truck with Russian number plates was ‘proof of invasion’. Conscription in Ukraine had only ended four months ago, Crimea was obviously full of people with military experience, but still reporters wrote excitedly that the ‘little green men’ were obviously professionally trained and the Russian Army itself was invading. 

'Russian' soldiers in Crimea

I knew then what the narrative was going to be, and am not ashamed to say I felt sick. I knew this was a genuine popular uprising, my friends had been talking about it for weeks, but I also knew no-one would ever believe it. 

I switched off the news and went back to work. I’m a historian, I steer clear of ‘current affairs’ for fear of being ‘political’, and it seemed best to keep my head well down.  But even history wasn’t safe. As I already mentioned here, Facebook, Twitter, political and even historical forums were seething with ‘revised’ history which whitewashed Russians out of Crimea’s past, and if I attempted to point out the fallacies I was invariably rewarded with a response like ‘What’s the weather like in Moscow?’ or more simply ‘F*ck off, Putin-bot.’ Even historical knowledge had become suddenly dangerous if it clashed with the official narrative on Crimea.

But history is crucial to all this, and without it we can’t begin to understand why the Russians of Crimea did what they did.  I don’t want to be political, and can’t even say I agree with all of it, but here (just for once) is the story as it looks from their point of view.

It starts as a military one. I’ve already written about the Russian ancestors in Crimea before the Khanate, but when Catherine the Great conquered the peninsula in 1783 it quickly became the heartland of Russian military power. The vital warm water port of Sevastopol became home to the Black Sea Fleet, and the town itself was built to service it. 

This was the place the British, French and Turkish came to conquer in 1854 – and the incredible resistance they encountered forms the centrepiece of the Crimean War. My novels deal mainly with soldiers and battles, but the British were even more awed by the women and children who worked with their own hands to build up by night what the Allied guns destroyed by day. Tolstoy’s beautiful ‘Sevastopol Sketches’ gives a unique picture of the courage of ordinary Russians going about their daily business while the guns fired relentlessly overhead. For me his most unforgettable image is of the pavements shattered by British artillery – and two little girls playing hopscotch over the cracks.

They fought to the end. Only when the French took the ‘Malakoff bastion’ did the civilians finally retreat over a pontoon bridge to the safety of the ‘Severnaya’, but even that was an astonishingly brave operation, performed at night in such disciplined silence that not even the British at their gates knew it was going on. After eleven long months, the Siege of Sevastopol of 1854-5 has to be one of the most gallant defences history has ever known, and no-one demurred when the peace settlement of a few months later returned the town to the people who’d fought for it for so long.

Detail from 'Last Look' by Franz Roubaud - The Evacuation of Sevastopol

That’s surely enough military glory for anyone – but in WWII Crimea had to do it all over again. I must stress that not all Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Nazis, but the fact remains that the only significant resistance to Germany’s invasion of 1941-4 was made by the Russian people of Crimea. The role of Kerch is often ignored, but the resistance held out for months in the obscurity of the catacombs until they were betrayed by locals and murdered underground by poison gas.

Russian soldiers and civilians in the Kerch catacombs

But predictably the brunt was borne by Sevastopol, as they endured their second great Siege. For more than nine long months they held out, suffering sickness and starvation as well as bombardment, and in tying up Germany’s 11th Army for so long they played their part on saving Stalingrad too. Civilian casualties were appalling, and historian Sergey Kiselev claims that no fewer than one in ten of the Red Army’s losses in WWII fell in Crimea.

Memorial of the Eternal Flame in Sevastopol

This matters, even today. Britain hasn’t been invaded for centuries and it’s hard for us to understand, but when a people fight this hard to protect their home, then their sacrifice gives the place a kind of sanctity nothing can erase.

And the people of Sevastopol have a right greater even than that. When Stalin ordered it rebuilt in 1948 he made it a condition that those who’d fled the siege could only return if they gave their own labour for free. So they did. Lawyers, bankers, and accountants took off their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and turned to brick-laying, women cooked, cleaned, carried, and did administrative work, while some even worked cheerfully alongside the men. The beautiful city of Sevastopol that we know today was mostly built by its own people – and what possible right of ownership can be greater than that?

The sense of this is almost palpable even today. On my first visit my guide eagerly dragged me across the Catherina Square to inspect the wall of an administrative building which her grandfather had built himself. But she was proud of the whole city, and it was impossible not to notice how immaculately clean it was kept, how free of litter and graffiti. Child of the Cold War that I am, I assumed this was the same kind slavish obedience to totalitarian states that enabled Mussolini to make ‘the trains run on time’, but my guide (and now good friend) saw it differently. ‘It’s our city,’ she said, puzzled by my lack of understanding. ‘Would you write rude words on the walls of your home?’

Except, of course, that it wasn’t ‘their’ city any more, and the closer I grew to these people the more I began to understand their frustrated yearning for recognition. No-one asked their opinion when in 1954 Khruschev gifted the whole of Crimea to Ukraine, and the old man I asked about it had tears in his eyes as he described what it felt like. ‘Like a sack of wheat,’ he said, blowing his nose noisily. ‘They gave us away like a sack of wheat.’

Maybe it didn’t matter much back in the days of the USSR when the distinctions were more administrative than actual, but when the Soviet Union collapsed and Crimea was suddenly in danger of finding itself in a completely separate country then it mattered very much indeed. Russia finally recognized that, and in 1991 it gave Crimea the chance to vote themselves the status of an autonomous republic which would be independent of Ukraine. Crimeans voted in favour by an overwhelming 94%, and Russia was confident it had given the peninsula all the protection it needed.

So it had – if Ukraine had only respected it. Crimea obviously had its own doubts, and in 1992 sought to clarify its position by announcing full self-government with its own constitution, but Ukraine denounced the movement as part of an ‘imperial disease’ and responded by creating a ‘Ukrainian presidential representative in Crimea’ – a back-door way of asserting sovereignty. Tension mounted on both sides, but only when Russia had safely signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 did Ukraine take the radical (and illegal) step of abolishing Crimea’s own presidency and tearing up its constitution. From this point on, Crimea was ipso facto part of the new Ukraine, whether it liked it or not.

It’s hard to imagine how that felt. It was at least good news for Crimean Tatars, and those who had been unfairly deported by Stalin after WWII were finally allowed to return, but the Russian people of Crimea were cut off from their history, their heritage and nationality, and suddenly became a minority in a land that basically hated them. The hatred would be understandable if it were directed against Stalin or the old USSR, but it was aimed at living people whose only crime was to be born of at least one Russian parent. 

There were economic hardships too. As a Westerner fully aware of the oppressions of the old USSR I’d always imagined independence would be a wonderful thing – but it was only when I went to Crimea that I realized the price that had to be paid for it. Ukraine had kept the worst aspects of the old system (the corruption that saw the rise of the oligarchs) but had quietly shuffled off the good bit – the complete social security that kept a loyal citizen safe for life. Pensions were halved. The free healthcare for which Russians had paid taxes all their lives was suddenly only available to those willing and able to pay bribes. I felt shockingly uncomfortable talking to people whose relatives had died or were dying for the lack of medicine or simple operations we in Britain take for granted.

All Ukraine was suffering, of course, but the predominantly Russian areas of south and east did seem to be hit the hardest. Even a soldier from Ukraine’s own ATO had to confess in a recent interview that he’d never seen poverty on the level he saw in the Donbass, and I can testify myself to what it was like in Crimea. I remember the flavoured water that passed for soup in some of the ‘restaurants’, and how I waited ten minutes for my guide to haggle for her husband’s supper – which turned out to be a single cabbage. It was never anything like as bad as Africa, but seemed all the worse for existing in a magnificent European city with university-educated people just like those I’d meet at home.

 

But as history has shown us in Nazi Germany, economic hardships can lead to a rise in nationalism and the need for easy scapegoats. In came Svoboda and the Right Sector, and by 2010 Ukrainian MP Irina Farion was already telling 5-year old schoolchildren that if they wanted to use their Russian names they would need to pack their bags and move to Russia. I heard all about this and the Nazi taunts of ‘Moskals!’ ‘Vatniks!’ on my first visit to Crimea, and it was already clear that something was going to have to break.

But worse even than this was Ukraine’s creeping desire to smear Russia’s past military heroism, to elevate Stepan Bandera to hero status, and thus make traitors of the gallant men and women of Crimea who gave their lives fighting Nazism. This would be appalling anywhere – but in Crimea it’s unbearable. Crimea, where Russian guide Irina Niverova recently explained to the National Post that “Every stone and every tree… is covered with the blood of brave Russians, and that is what is in our hearts.”

'In Our Hearts' Sevastopol May 9th - children march with pictures of their ancestors

In their hearts and everywhere on their land. Crimean war graves are beautifully kept, their memorials immaculate and flower-strewn, and May 9th celebrates a history of military heroism which is second to none. How could a people like this allow their past sacrifices to be whitewashed away? How could they see the memory of their dead brothers, fathers, grandfathers spat on by the very people they died to protect? And make no mistake about this – that’s what’s happening. I already posted this video from Lviv in 2011 where Russian veterans have the St George ribbons ripped from their chests as they go to lay flowers on their comrade’s graves.

Then came Maidan.

For Crimea, Maidan was an outrage. Yanukovich may well have been as corrupt as his predecessors, but he was the first to improve Ukraine’s economic state, he at least acknowledged the voices of the regions, and he was the legitimately elected President for whom Crimea had overwhelmingly voted. How would we feel in Britain if the losing side of a General Election set London on fire and overthrew our chosen government by force? How would we feel if we saw American politicians encouraging this, and heard leaked telephone calls in which foreign powers decided what our own government should be?

Crimea felt all this, and more.  I have no idea when the first activists made contact with Russia, and none of my friends were ever involved at this level, but everyone knew they had to do something. The West wouldn’t help. It talked a lot about human rights, but every Russian in Crimea knew what The Telegraph has only just admitted – that some Maidan protestors were being funded not only by the US, but also the EU. Russia mightn’t help either, and she’d never officially taken Transnistria under her protection. In January this year Russian Crimeans knew that somehow they'd have to help themselves.

The timeline of how they did it is a matter of public record, but it begins on February 23rd, and no single western outlet has explained what it was that lit the fuse.

It was this. The ‘Khersun Pogrom’. On 20th February Russian Crimeans made their own protest at Maidan, and ‘The Kherson Pogrom’ is the phrase used to describe the events of their homecoming. The western media blackout on it has been absolute, but for the first time there’s a video available with English subtitles to tell us what happened on the night of February 20th 2014. Please ignore the political slogans framed round the narrative, but the primary source material both eyewitness interviews and original gloating footage shot by the perpetrators themselves.

The Right Sector. They attacked the homecoming convoy, burnt the buses, then beat, stripped, and humiliated the people. They almost certainly did worse than that, but all we can say with certainty is that seven of the Crimeans on those buses have never been seen again. When the survivors were finally released the Right Sector thugs taunted them with the threat that they would soon be coming to Crimea itself – and then they would ‘do worse’.

Nor were these empty threats. By 23rd February Yanukovich had been driven out and the new (unelected) government was already making their intentions clear. The raft of new bills included laws to make Holocaust denial legal, to ban Communist Party activity, to make a member of Svoboda the new Prosecutor General, and to deny the rights of minorities (including Russians) to use their own native languages.

Crimea acted. They rallied in their tens of thousands in Simferopol and swore to form their own independent administration, but still no-one quite dared to take it further. Protests were all right, no worse than Maidan had done, but nothing was yet irrevocable. 

Until 27th February when Channel 5 broadcast a leaked conversation between the leaders of Ukraine’s two Neo-Nazi organizations – People’s Deputy Oleh Tyahnybok of Svoboda, and Dmytro Yarosh of the Right Sector.

With apologies for the poor Google translation, here’s a sample of their conversation:

It’s not just idle talk. These are men with significant power in the new regime, and they are talking of Crimea as an immediate target for a punitive operation.

What could Crimeans do? What would you do? History has shown us all too tragically what happened to the Jews of Nazi Germany who sat obediently at home waiting for the axe to fall, and Crimeans weren’t about to make the same mistake. They turned off their televisions, dug out old uniforms from their conscription days, and went out to take the airport while they called on Russia for help.

I don’t want to be naïve, and certainly don’t believe Putin had been sitting idle all this time, but the fact remains that it was Crimeans who made the first move, and Russia’s ‘intervention’ would have had small chance of success without them. No-one can say exactly when Russian troops left their base in Sevastopol, but of the men who initially guarded the borders from Kyiv intervention, some were veterans, some existing members of Ukraine’s own army, some were Berkut – and a great many were ordinary civilians. I even know two of them. I can’t give their names for obvious reasons, but one was a historical re-enactor who went out in his Red Army uniform with a replica gun, and the other was his wife.

The western media wasn’t having it, and every day we heard more screams of ‘Russian troops in Crimea!’ One of my friends sent me a tiny video of  Sevastopol women bringing food and cigarettes to their men on the ‘front line’, but it didn’t look very convincing so I’m afraid I didn’t publicize it.

I wish I had now, because there’s actually something endearingly amateur about it that sets the tone for the whole affair. This was not the slick Kremlin operation the mainstream media would like us to think, but a case of ordinary people showing extraordinary courage in order to save their land.

And they did it. Yes, Russia intervened, Russia allowed the Black Sea Fleet to secure the borders, and Russia finally accepted Crimea into the Federation, but none of that should blind us to the people who really made it happen. History isn’t only about kings and queens and governments, but sometimes it’s made by ordinary people too.

That's all I wanted to show here. In my own novels the Russians of Sevastopol have to be the 'villains', but perhaps that's why I felt I had to do this one last post before I leave. The media ignores them, history will almost certainly ignore them, but even if it's only here in this one blog, I did just want the voices of the Russians of Crimea to be heard.

***

A.L. Berridge's dreadfully neglected website is still here, and one day she'll get round to updating it.

Meanwhile a huge thank you to everyone here at the History Girls for letting me bore all for so long. I've loved being part of it, and hope you'll let me sneak back in for comments.

And just think - you may never need to hear the word Crimea AGAIN!!

 

Writing historical fiction by Christina Koning

‘I don’t like historical fiction,’ a friend said recently and, until a few years ago, I might well have agreed with him. I mean – what’s the point of setting your story in the past, when there’s so much about the present that’s worth describing? Of having to go to all the trouble of recreating a given period, with its customs and its habits of thought so very different from our own; its clothes and culinary preferences so alien; its language so unfamiliar, when there’s such richness to be found in ‘the way we live now’? Isn’t it rather a cop-out, to be writing about events long dead and buried, when you could be grappling with the stuff of the twenty-first century?

Having tried my hand at writing both ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ fiction, I have to say that I no longer see a real distinction. It’s a question of focus, that’s all. When I wrote my first novel, A Mild Suicide, I was describing events that had taken place fifteen years before, in the late 1970s – excavating, as so many début novelists do, my own history. My second book, Undiscovered Country, went even further back into the past – to the 1950s. In its depiction of the manners, clothes and cocktail parties of the era it set out, quite deliberately, to create another world – as different as possible from the one in which it was written. I’m not sure if that made it a ‘historical novel’ or not, but it was certainly a novel in which history played an important part.

Fabulous Time, my third novel, had – as the title suggests – a somewhat tricksy relationship with the past. Moving between Sussex in 1967 and Shanghai in 1911, it played around with the (fashionably 1960s) idea that time is an illusion. The ways in which time can be relived, or made to stand still – through drugs, delirium, or the action of memory – were central to the story. And of course time, in novels, is always an illusion: a construct, by the author, with events lasting years or millennia compressed so that they seem to take almost no time at all, and events lasting a single day – or a single moment – extended to fill an entire novel.

Which brings me to my first ‘straight’ historical novel, The Dark Tower. When I started writing it, more than four years ago, I didn’t think it was going to be any different from my other books. I still don’t see it as different – in the sense of ‘belonging to another genre’. It’s certainly true that it’s set in a more remote bit of the past than I’d previously dealt with (the 1880s) but its concerns remain those of my earlier work. Love, death, loss, betrayal, and the ways that people try and deal with the circumstances that life throws at them.

With my most recent novel, Variable Stars, I’ve retreated (if that’s the word) still further into the past. After the nineteenth century setting of The Dark Tower, the eighteenth century was an obvious choice, perhaps. Except that it wasn’t like that. What drew me to write this story of all-consuming obsession and unrequited love wasn’t, initially, the historical period (the 1780s) in which the events described took place, but the subject – astronomy – and the wonderful cast of eccentrics and enthusiasts of which the world of science at that time consisted.

Although of course, in writing Variable Stars, I did become as fascinated by the period as by the people. Because the more I learned about that astonishing time we call The Age of Enlightenment, the more I wanted to know. Suddenly, fragments – a line from a poem by Alexander Pope; a walk along a Spitalfields street; Romney’s portrait of Sarah Siddons – coalesced into a whole, and I started to get a picture of the world my characters inhabited.

That’s one of the delights of writing about the past. You start investigating one thing, and before you know it, you’ve turned up something else. Anecdotes. Scraps of conversation. Letters. Diary entries. The distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is abolished, and you start to see history, not as discrete and irreconcilable units of time, but as a continuum, of which you yourself are a part.

So if I now feel my friend was wrong to be so dismissive about historical fiction, it’s because I don’t see why it has to be separated from any other kind. After all, some of the best novels of recent years – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Helen Dunmore’s The Siege, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong – have dealt with large historical subjects, without ever losing their focus on individual lives. And to the taunt – ‘why not write about the present?’ one can only reply that writing about the past is a way of doing just that – only with a bit more ‘distance’ to sharpen one’s perspective.

Guns and Knives - Celia Rees

Until very recently, I'd never shot a gun. I was rubbish, predictably, but I felt that I ought to have done so, at least once, having written about them so many times in so many books. Guns, knives, swords, weapons of all kinds, have always been a fascination and writing about them has been unavoidable, in the kind of books I write, anyway. My heroines are as likely to wield a sword as a lipstick and researching the kind of weapons they are likely to use is one of the more interesting avenues to pursue.

Anne Bonney and Mary Dead

Take these two, for example. Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Notorious pirates both and armed to the teeth. The way they are depicted tells a story in itself, not just that they are dressed as men and sailors (breasts helpfully exposed to reveal their gender), the weapons they are carrying show them to be pirates. They both carry several pistols, to be discharged and discarded for quickness of fire when boarding a vessel (an early version of the revolver - pistols were easily replaced) and short, curving cutlasses - a long straight bladed weapon was useless for close quarter fighting on board ship. They also both carry large axes. Cutting ropes was a very effective way of disabling a sailing ship and handy for opening chests and barrels. All handy information when writing about pirates. 

My original impulse for writing pirates came from this picture, Buccaneer of the Caribbean. The term buccaneer derived from the Caribbean Arawak word, buccan, a wooden frame for smoking meat. 'Buccaneer' became the name for the French hunters who used such frames to smoke the meat from feral cattle and pigs they shot on Hispaniola, when they weren't robbing Spanish ships. The long barrelled musket he carries betrays his trade. 

Buccaneer of the Caribbean  from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates

My interest continues to present day weaponry. Eighteenth Century pirates would have been astonished at the power of modern weapons, from the iconic AK 47 Kalashnikov, chosen by the Baader Meinhof Group for their logo,

to the formidable Barrett M107 .50 caliber, shoulder fired, semi automatic sniper rifle, accurate for over a mile, the .50 calibre 9'" shells capable of punching holes through concrete walls.

I had to research both guns when I was writing my contemporary novel, This Is Not Forgiveness.

My current interest is back in the recent past. The Lee Enfield -303 - again, a sniper's weapon and Christine Granville's .35 Radom pistol. Not her very one, you understand, but one like it.

Lee Enfield .303

Christine Granville's .35 Radom pistol - Imperial War Museum

Also the German MP 40 machine pistol. 

MP 40

Quite an arsenal, so it was about time I shot a gun myself.  You'll be relieved to know that no clay pigeons were harmed. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

HISTORY ALMOST DAILY by Penny Dolan.

As this is now the second half of August – the downward slope? -  my History Girl post is very much a “staycation” kind of piece. Besides, I have work I need to get on with come tomorrow.

An interest in history does keep you uncomfortably aware of the faults and follies of the past and of the present. However, it also means that you will come across some small “history treat” or another almost every day: some book, or blog, or object, or building, or story, or place that makes the past alive.

For example, last weekend, I saw a view that I love: the wide, grassy stretch of Blackheath, where the roofs of the nearest houses peep up over the edge of the heath. The heath is one of those places in London where you can suddenly see the sky and, for a moment, imagine other times and other travellers. 

A small faded fairground was a useful reminder that Blackheath has always attracted people of various trades.

 

For much of its life, Blackheath was outside London. 

One route across the grass is named Wat Tyler Road after the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt who met the duplicitous boy-king Richard II here. 

The upland was a safe distance from the city then, although not safe for Wat and his followers.

Another road, the A2, follows the old Roman Watling Street as it made its way down to the Thames crossing at Deptford. The wide heathland is not as smooth as it seems at first glance. Plague pits are rumoured to lie beneath the faded grass and small quarries were opened up for gravel and chalk, later becoming ponds. Some of these were filled in with rubble after the WWII air raids. Blackheath is very much a place for necessary purposes.

Dark purposes too; although the A2 is a now trail of nose-to-tail vehicles but I cannot help thinking of all the carriages and horses that have crossed that slightly dangerous space. The infamous Shooter’s Hill was steep enough to slow carriages and horses and so became a favourite place for highwaymen in the 16th & 17th centuries, complete with a gibbet at the crossroads. Ready for quick dispatch of felons, perhaps?

There’s elegance here too:  Blackheath is edged with elegant old Georgian and Victorian houses, their tall windows and occasional balconies peering across the rough summit, observing the road. 

The Southern edge is marked by the mellow stone wall that borders Greenwich Park, This, of course, is home of the Royal Observatory; the sloping lawns lead down to the Queen’s House and the Old Royal Naval College and the bend in a river once full of ships.

This time, driving, we turned down winding Maze Hill, watching the late afternoon sun shine on the proud glass towers of Docklands opposite.  At the foot of Maze Hill, tucked away across Trafalgar Road, was an interesting looking old tower. The A-Z suggested two options: the almshouses of Trinity Hospital or the Greenwich Power station? The latter, we decided as we hurried onward. . . . Oh dear. Barely ten minutes to cross Blackheath but there’s already so many layers of this history to enjoy.

What about other happy “staycation” moments? A book and biography, “Billy Ruffian” that I’ll blog about another day. A local news story: some new streets in a Leeds estate have been named after “Barnbow Lasses” - the 35 young girls killed (and more injured) during an accidental explosion at the Barnbow munitions factory back in 1916.

 

There's always the regular joy of  names on maps: close to my present home are villages like Nun Monkton and Upper Poppleton and Killighall and Kettlewell and Birthwaite and - to the amusement of visitors - even a river with the Pythonesque name of the Nidd.

There’s the joy of objects remembered, things you only have to think about to feel the history tingle, and they need not be nice. Tipu’s mechanical Tiger is a gruesome favourite, first seen long ago on visits to the V&A with a favourite uncle.  Or, near home, William Burgess’s Gothic Revival church in the grounds of the Studley Royal deer park, where stone birds chase the moths and butterflies up the carved columns. Or moments: out on a walk near Ripley Castle, the excitement of finding a moated site hidden within some trees by Saddler Carr. The information board says it is the remains of a 14th Century manor recorded only as Dark Hall. Nothing more, only the strange atmosphere under the shadowy branches.

 I should also offer the distracting joys of new media: the variety of the posts within this very History Girls blog; the positive energy within the Gentle Author’s “Spitalfields Life” blog; the incredible daily saints on the Reverend Richard Coles Facebook page and the amazing myths and legends within Katherine Langrish’s Seven Miles of Steel Thistles blog. 

 And the wealth of  tv programmes about history - not just those on the Great War - including a re-run of Schama’s History of Britain, missed last time around.

 

I could go on with this plenty:  last night I was at a talk by the "Muddy Archaeologist” Gillian Hovell about all the cultures around the Mediterranean. 

The main thinking point I recall is that the art of a culture reveals what's important to the people: Phoenician pottery is decorated with ships and boats but Mycenian art chooses fighting warriors and horses.

In addition, October’s Harrogate History Festival tickets have just been released. Hooray!

This is very welcome news for those who don’t do/can't afford the whole hotel package from the 23rd to the 26th. So I need to start counting my pennies. Especially as History Girl Elizabeth Chadwick will be speaking there! 

 

So how can history be boring when it pops up around us every day and, for a writer, brings the kind of idle thoughts and interesting facts that help to fill the writing well?

Enough from me already - but now I'm wondering what are your current history joys and pleasures? And what history blogs would you recommend?  

Assuming I have some spare time in the forthcoming weeks . . .

Penny Dolan