The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

'Some years ago the late Miss Stewart Mackenzie of Brahan,

'The Drover's Dogs' by Susan Price. Artwork by D Simpson

Ross-shire, informed a friend that in the course of journeys by coach in the late autumn from Brahan to the South during her childhood about the year 1840 she used frequently to see collie dogs making their way north unaccompanied. On inquiring of her parents why these dogs were alone, [she] was informed that these were dogs belonging to drovers who had taken cattle to England and that when the droving was finished the drovers returned by boat to Scotland. To save the trouble and expense of their transport, the dogs were turned loose to find their own way north. It was explained that the dogs followed the route taken on the southward journey being fed at Inns or farms where the drove had ‘stanced’ and that in the following year when the drovers were again on the way south, they paid for the food given to the dogs...’

     It was this quote from A. R. B. Haldane’s ‘The Drove Roads Of Scotland,’ which gave me the idea for ‘The Drover’s Dogs.’ I first read Haldane something like ten years before I started writing it. Those dogs spent all those years prowling around my head, trying to sniff out a story.

     I’ve often been struck by how dogs distinguish between human adults and children, even though the child may be much bigger than the dog. I once knew a large Staffordshire bull-terrier who very clearly understood that I was a junior member of the family and took up a very protective attitude towards me. I’ve been told of collies who appoint themselves protectors of children at family gatherings, rounding them up and herding them together. They don’t attempt to herd the adults: only the children. 

       So I began thinking of a child in trouble, who runs away and is adopted and protected by the drover’s dogs. At first, I planned on the boy being an escaped factory ‘apprentice.’ These were child-slaves in all but name, who were bought from workhouses on the pretence that the money paid was to indenture them to a trade. This was a corruption of the long and honourable tradition of apprenticeships. The factory ‘apprentices’ were taught no skill except how to operate unguarded machinery, were badly-fed and clothed and, at night, were locked into the factory sheds where they slept on the floor.

       There were various reasons why this didn't work for the book I wanted to write. The dates didn't fit. Before the factory system was well underway, the droving trade was dying. Also, I wanted my drove-roads to be in Scotland and most of the factories which used children as slave-labour were a long way from Scotland. My runaway boy would have had to run a hundred and fifty miles or more before he met my drove dogs.

       Then my Scots partner, told me about the ‘bondagers.’ These were farm-labourers who were ‘bonded’ to a farmer and in Scotland, this system survived into the early years of the 20th Century. They often wore a distinctive costume — especially the women — which distinguished them. It seems, like many other professional costumes in the UK, to date from the 17th Century.

        For many centuries, in all parts of the UK, farm-labourers went to Hiring Fairs, and stood in a line, offering themselves for hire to farmers, who chose a likely looking man, or girl, and came to a deal with them about board and wages. The term of hire usually lasted for a year, from May to May, and the labourer might be provided with lodgings and food. Even clothing, or cloth to make it, might be included.

Bondagers by John Dougall

     In the North of England, and in Scotland, this system took on its own nature. A farmer would often hire a ‘hind’ or ploughman with the expectation that the hind’s family would supply additional labour at no extra cost to the farmer. (In the same way, fishermen’s wives and daughters were expected to work day after day at the stinking, dirty job of cleaning fish without being paid themselves.) If a hind’s children were too young to work and his wife unwilling or unable, then a hind would often hire people from outside his family, to fulfil his obligations to the farmer he worked for.

     In theory, an unhappy farm-worker could leave his or her place and find other work. But in practice, it wasn’t so simple. There was no union, and pay was often desperately low. If you left one place, you couldn’t be sure of finding a better one — and risked earning a reputation for being unreliable, so no one else would hire you.

      Also, under the system in the North of Britain, if a whole family was hired as a unit, then your sense of loyalty to your family was brought into play. If a teenage son or daughter left, this might result in their parents and younger siblings being turned out of work — perhaps even out of their tied cottage. Younger children had little choice if their parents set them to work.

       My partner told me of an account he’d read, by an elderly man recounting his childhood. He’d been ‘bonded’ to a farmer who mistreated him, fed him badly and worked him beyond his strength. At night he had to sleep in a cold, damp shed, on a damp mattress through which thistles grew.

       He'd escaped this by joining the army when World War I broke out. All his fellow recruits complained bitterly about the terrible army food, the stark barracks, the uncomfortable beds and coarse uniforms — but the bondager-boy couldn’t remember ever being so well housed, clothed and fed. He thought all his birthdays had come at once.

       It was this boy I bore in mind when I invented Sandy Longmuir, the hero of The Drover’s Dogs who, at ten years of age, is bonded to a farmer until he’s twenty-one.  “I remember the day my mother sold me very well,” Sandy says. He doesn’t appreciate his mother’s desperation and is heart-broken when he runs back home to her, and she makes him return to the farm. “Thomson paid us good money, and that money is spent. You’ll go back.”

     When Sandy cries out that, if she makes him go back, he will never love her or speak to her again, she replies, “I will bear that burden along with all the others.”

     So Sandy returns to the farm and is beaten for running away. After that, he decides that he cannot bear this life for another eleven years and, despite believing that he will be hung for stealing himself if he’s caught, he waits for a dark night and runs away.

    Fearing pursuit, he walks himself into exhaustion and finally lies down and sleeps beside the road.

I lay on the grassy bank beside the drove road, locked up tight in sleep. I was jerked awake to darkness and cold, my ears filled with a wet snorting and snuffling.

     Above me, outlined against the night sky, were two pointed ears. Something panted, and dripped water on me.

     My head filled with monsters – things from the bottom of lochs, dragging themselves ashore, stinking of mud, to sink their fangs into me…A wet nose shoved under my chin, and whiskers prickled me. A hot tongue slathered across my cheek. I was about to be eaten!  Then the monster said, “Rrroof!” And I laughed. I forgot all about monsters. I forgot about being cold, damp and by myself in the dark at the side of a road. Or, at least, I minded those things less – because I knew I had been woken by a dog, and a friendly dog at that.

       Sandy realises that he has fallen in with drovers’ dogs on their way home, and decides that he will follow them to wherever they’re going, since he has nowhere in particular to go. He fancies himself a man in charge of two dogs — but soon discovers that it’s the dogs who are in charge.

I don’t think those dogs ever mistook me for their master. They were good herd-dogs and I think they knew exactly what I was — a little calf, lost from the herd. A lost little pup wandering loose. They knew that what they had to do was take me in charge, and herd me along, and watch over me, until they had brought me somewhere safe.

     So I’d engineered the meeting of boy and dogs — now all I had to do was discover where they were going, and get them there ‘over Scotland’s lochs and mountains.’

     I hope to tell of that, and more of the droving trade, in another blog.

Susan Price is the Carnegie Medal winning author of The Ghost Drum, and the Guardian Prize winning author of The Sterkarm Handshake.

The Drover's Dogs is the first of her books to be a self-published original.

  The long-awaited third book in her Sterkarm

 trilogy, Sterkarm Tryst, is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

 

Thanks to Susan Price for stepping in with a reserve post as Antonia Senior is dealing with illness in the family.

A Brief History of Mince Pies by Katherine Clements

This weekend I’m making mincemeat. As I scoured the Internet for a suitably simple recipe, I wondered about the history of mince pies and just how far back their association with Christmas goes.

I’m fascinated by receipt books of the 17th century. These were essentially compilations of home remedies, housekeeping and cookery tips, recorded by women (and sometimes men) as 'how to' guides, intended to be passed down through the generations. Some were published. They're a treasure trove of information about domestic life. I suspected they might have a thing or two to say about mince pies. As usual, I ended up down a research rabbit hole.

But before we get to the 17th century, let’s rewind.

The Forme of Cury © University of Manchester Image Library

One of the oldest cookbooks in the world is the Forme of Cury – a late 14th century manuscript detailing recipes from ‘the master cooks of King Richard II’ (and written about by fellow HG, Catherine Hokin here). In it there is a recipe for Tart of Flesh, which contains minced pork, lard and cheese, sweetened with figs, raisins, wine, honey, pine kernels and spices. This is the earliest reference I can find to a pie made with meat and sweetened with dried fruit and spices – an extravagant dish, surely meant to be eaten at times of celebration. It seems that didn’t change much over the ensuing centuries.

It's often said that mince pies were originally made in an oval or square shape, to represent Christ's crib, but food historian, Ivan Day, says there is no evidence to back this up. Instead, pies were often made and presented in intricate shapes and patterns. Several documents give instructions and template designs. The association with Christmas may well have arisen simply because they were a luxury item - a symbol of wealth and prosperity, associated with the feasting and revels of the festive season, particularly Twelfth Night.

17th century mince pie designs. Image © The Welcome Library

In Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, compiled in the early 17th century, she details a mincemeat recipe including “equal parts of minced cooked mutton, beef suet, currants and raisins with ginger, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, orange rind, salt and a tiny quantity of sugar.” Gervase Markham, famous for his book, The English Huswife, first published in 1615, saw fit to include a very similar recipe:

'Take a Legge of Mutton, and cut the best of the flesh from the bone, and parboyl it well then put to it three pound of the best Mutton suet & shred it very small; then spread it abroad, and fashion it with Salt Cloves and Mace: then put in good store of Currants, great Raisins and Prunes clean washed and picked a few Dates sliced, and some Orenge-pils sliced; then being all well mixt together, put it into a coffin, or into divers coffins, and so bake them and when they are served up, open the lids and strow store of Sugar on the top of the meat and upon the lid. And in this sort you may also bake Beef or Veal, onely the Beef would not be parboyld, and the Veal will ask a double quantity of Suet.'

By the way, whilst it’s true that mince pies were associated with Christmas feasting, it’s a myth that Oliver Cromwell made them illegal. There is no mention of mince pies in the various acts and ordinances concerning the celebration of Christmas that were passed during the years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (see my article about Cromwell and Christmas over on H for History for more info on that). Particularly zealous Puritans might have troubled themselves over the consumption of foods traditionally linked with Christmas – a celebration that had the whiff of Popery about it. This was made much of in the satirical literature of the time, such as in this piece by Royalist poet, John Taylor.

There were lately some over-curious, hot zealous Brethren, who with a superbian predominance did doe what they could to keep Christmas day out of England; they did in divers places Preach Me for dead in Funerall Sermons, and labour’d tooth and nail to bury me alive in the grave of oblivion; they were of opinions, that from the 24. of December at night, till the 7. of January following, that Plumb-Pottage was meer Popery, that a Coller of Brawn was an obhomination, that Roast Beef was Antichristian, that Mince-Pies were Reliques of the Whore of Babylon, and a Goose, aTurkey, or a Capon, were marks of the Beast.
Christmas In and Out (1652)

Mince pies were eaten at other times of year too. Samuel Pepys ate them to celebrate a friend’s wedding in January 1662 (perhaps they were leftovers?) and there are plentiful mentions of them in contemporary literature without any reference to Christmas at all.

Throughout the 18th century, mince pies started to get sweeter, due to the import of cheap sugar from the plantations of the burgeoning British Empire. Recipes in Edward Kidder's Pastry and Cookery (1720) and Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747), both require 1lb sugar – a lot more than Elinor Fettiplace’s ‘tiny quantity’. And by this time, pies had changed shape. The intricate constructions that were a hangover from the Tudor table were abandoned for the circular form we’d recognise today.

Edward Kidder's Minc'd Pyes.

By the 19th century it was still usual for mince pies to include meat. Roast beef was apparently the choice of Queen Victoria’s famous cook Charles Francatelli. His Mincemeat à la Royale also included a liberal dousing of festive booze:

To equal proportions of roast-beef:, raisins, currants, suet, candied citron, orange, lemon, spices and sugar, add a proportionate weight of stewed pears and preserved ginger, the grated rind of three dozen oranges and lemons, and also their juice, one bottle of old rum, one bottle of brandy, and two of old port.

There are clues that the amount of meat was being reduced by this time. Another celebrity chef, Mrs Beeton, included two recipes for mincemeat in the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (1861). The first, for "excellent mincemeat" is meat-free, while a second includes 1lb of beef – that might sound a lot to our ears but it was proportionately less than we see in most 17th century versions.

So when did we lose the meat?

It’s hard to say but it’s likely that as the 19th century progressed and sugar became cheaper and widely available, tastes changed. By the 20th century, the only trace left was the suet still used today.

So, if you fancy impressing your nearest and dearest with something historical this Christmas, you could have a go at the BBC’s Victorian Mincemeat recipe and sample mince pies just as Queen Victoria herself would have done. Personally, I’d take a leaf out of Francatelli’s book, and go heavy on the port.

image @Mermaid Photography, Wikicommons

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The original snake oil - Michelle Lovric

This post is a companion piece to mine of November 10th, about the grand ceremony of confecting Venetian Treacle.

This post looks at what went inside this Venetian drug that captivated the imaginations of sick people from the old world to the new.

 

The name teriaca derives from the Greek therion, used to describe vipers or poisonous animals in general. It was celebrated in a poem by Nicander of Colophon in the second century BC. Originally it was used to treat bites from venomous animals but later it came to be used as antidote to all kinds of poisoning.

 Of the antidotes used in antiquity the most noted was a theriaca variant - mithridatum, which was composed by the doctor of Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, who, constantly in fear of being poisoned, used it every day in small immunizing doses, after testing it on prisoners.

 t was said that the recipe was uncovered in Pompeii in a box belonging to the king and from that we get the old name of the electuary of mithridatum.

 

 

The Testa d'Oro, or Golden Head apothecary in Venice. Faintly,
in the painting under the window,
 are the old names for teriaca

 

 It was Andromachus the Elder, the doctor of Nero, who perfected the recipe, adding the flesh of vipers to improve its efficacy. By this time the number of ingredients was up to 60.

And so was born teriaca magna or teriaca di Andromaco, as it would be known in Venice.

 The recipe was further refined by Crito, the doctor of Trajan.

Galen wrote a treatise about it.

With the crusades came more trade with the Orient, and Venetian merchants introduced numerous medical preparations into Italy, among them teriaca.

It arrived in London in mediaeval times of Mediterranean galleys imported first under the supervision of the Worshipful Society of Grocers who named it “Venetian Treacle.” This, I suggest, is because it had undergone the “Venice effect” of adapting and sexing up with theatre and appeal to the imagination plus exquisite packaging.

 The Venetians prepared it as an electuary, a thick syrupy liquid medicine, usually licked from a spoon.

Teriaca was the sovereign remedy for an infinite number of illnesses, from abdominal colic to malign fevers, from migraine to insomnia, from angina to the bites of vipers and dogs, from hearing loss to coughs. It was also used to cure madness, to reawaken sexual appetite, to bring vigour back to a body that was weak, and to protect people from leprosy and plague.

Teriaca was administered in various ways and quantities depending on the illness.

For fevers, it was used with wine mixed with honey; distilled water was the vehicle when it was used as a stimulant.

For teriaca to have the maximum efficacy the whole body  had to be completely purged before it was taken.

Such was the Venetian faith in the efficacy of teriaca that every family, even the poorest, kept some, almost as a talisman, to safeguard themselves from all the ills that beset mankind.

In fact, those that kept old teriaca boasted that it was the strongest and best, because it was supposed to be left to ferment for a while. It was thought that teriaca wasn’t usable until six months – some even said six years – after it was made.


The composition of teriaca/mithridatum could vary from 54 to 70 ingredients, here in Italian and

 here in English.

ingredients for teriaca in their 8 classes


 Roots: Iris, Balsamorhiza deltoidea, Potentilla reptans (creeping cinquefoil), Rheum rhabarbarum (garden rhubarb), Zingiber officinale, Angustifolia odorata, Gentiana, Meum athamanticum (spignel), Valeriana, Corydalis cava (hollowroot), glycyrrhiza


Stems and barks: Cinnamomum zeylanicum (cinnamon), Cinnamomum aromaticum (cassia)


Leaves: Teucrium scordium (water germander), Fraxinus excelsior, Clinopodium calamintha (lesser calamint), Marrubium vulgare (white or common horehound), Cymbopogon citratus (West-Indian lemongrass), Teucrium chamaedrys (wall germander), Cupressasae, Laurus nobilis (bay laurel), Polium montanum, Cytinus hypocistis


Flowers: Rosa, Crocus sativus, Lavandula stoechas (French lavender), Lavandula angustifolia (common or English lavender), Centaurea minoris


Fruits and seeds: Brassica napus (rapeseed), Petroselinum (parsley), Nigella sativa, Pimpinella anisum (anise), Elettaria cardamomum, Foeniculum vulgare (fennel), Hypericum perforatum (St. John's wort), seseli, thlaspi, Daucus carota (carrot), Piper nigrum (black pepper), Piper longum (long pepper), Juniperus (juniper), Syzygium aromaticum (clove), Canary Island wine, Agaricus


Gums, oils and resins: Acaciae (acacia), Styrax benzoin, Gummi arabicum, Sagapeni (wax of an unknown tree, possibly some kind of Ferula), Gummi Opopanax chironium, Gummi Ferula foetida, Commiphora (a tree from which myrrh is derived), incense, Turpentine from Cyprus, oil from Myristica fragans (nutmeg), Papaver somniverum (opium poppy)


Animal parts and products: Castoreum, Trochisci Viperarum, Narbonne white honey


 Mineral substances: Boli armen. verae, Chalciditis (copper-containing substance), Dead sea bitumen

 The  ingredient that was always included was the flesh of vipers, and this too had its special methods of preparation.

They could only use non-pregnant females, which had to be caught in the Euganean hills in the spring some weeks after coming out of hibernation – not in the summer, otherwise they wouldn’t hold the antidote and would provoke excessive thirsts. Vipers caught before hibernation were too fatty.Once caught, they had to be dried and fermented to a precise point.The vipers were gutted; the heads and tails removed. Then the flesh was boiled in spring water salted & perfumed with dill, then worked into a paste with dry bread and then finally cut up and shaped by hand into little balls that were left to dry in the shade.

 

As a consequence of the great production of teriaca in Venice
the vipers of the Euganean hills became extinct, so the Venetian apothecaries were forced to buy them from the hills of Vicenza, Verona and later from Friuli. Finally the spezieri had to take to breeding them in tanks.


Here is a teriaca jar – a lead sample jar -
The lid is inscribed ‘TERIACA FINA ALLA TESTA DORO IN VENET’,

 

which translates as ‘At the sign of the Golden Head in Venice’ –

The big question - Was teriaca any use? I suggest that it was an excellent stimulant and a great boon to any suggestable patient who wanted to believe in it.

 Meanwhile, it conforms in every other way to the perfect definition of a quack product – a cure all of exotic provenance, and very expensive.

 

 

A Short Story by Caroline Lawrence

Eye of the Beholder

Irving sighed and glanced at the glowing red numbers of the atomic clock as he poured himself another cup of coffee. It was only 2 am, he had another three hours of monitor duty. As he tasted the coffee, he grimaced and forced himself to swallow, despite the involuntary contraction of his throat. It was the only way he could get his eyes to stay open at this hour. 

The door slid open and Steve entered, looking as if he hadn't slept for a week. 

'Check the monitor, Irv,' he sighed. 'The satellite might be transmitting early.' 

'Fat chance,' growled Irving, but he moved over to the screen and, collapsing into the yellow chair, reached forward and pressed a red bar on the right of the screen. 

The grey of the screen melted into blobs of twitching colour and Irving was suddenly sitting upright and wide awake. 

'Hey, we're getting something. The satellite was early!' He turned a black dial and the picture jumped into focus. 

Five minutes later, when Steve found his voice, he gasped. 'It's unbelievable! A planet thirty-two light years away having technology so similar to ours!' 

'We're only seeing their roads, Steve. The similarity may end there.' 

'But look! That car looks almost exactly like antiques I've seen in films. If the trees weren't that weird colour I'd think the satellite had landed outside.'

'I wish one of them would get out of his car. I want to see if they look like us.' Irving leaned forward. 

'Can you pull it in any closer?' Steve asked. 

'I think so.' Irving adjusted some dials and the picture moved in.

'Look, that car is stopping!' shouted Steve. 

'I see it! I see it!' Irving twisted a dial and the picture shifted to the motionless car. 

The occupant emerged. Irving and Steve stared hypnotised for a few seconds and then Steven gasped, 'Oh, my God!' and averted his eyes. 

Even Irving, with a scientist's cold detachment and intense curiosity could not help but be slightly sickened by the organism which was examining the engine of its car.

'I never thought anything could be so horrible,' whispered Steve hoarsely as he closed his eyes to blot out the memory of the thing. 

'Get hold of yourself! Go get the others,' Irving said, calling upon all his will power to keep his eyes fixed on the screen. 

'Right away,' gasped Steve, thankful for the chance to escape. 

As Steve slithered out of the room, Irving reached out a slimy, clear yellow tentacle and raised his coffee to his beak. Thank God, he thought, I'll never get the chance to go to Earth. 

How does this short story qualify for The History Girls blog? It's an historic document, written when I was 16 years old... over forty years ago! I found it while going through some papers last week. To me, the most surprising thing is how little my style has changed. I have always likes Sci-Fi and when I wrote this I was heavily influenced by Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Mr Glendening, my inspirational English teacher at Gunn High in Palo Alto, gave me a generous A- and astutely commented 'The idea is not original, but it is well done.'

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL HISTORY GIRLS, BOYS & ALIENS! 

'Getting Pregnant the Medieval Way' by Karen Maitland

St Anne, with her daughter the Virgin Mary

and grandson, Jesus.

There’s been much discussion recently about whether certain expensive treatments sold by some private fertility treatment centres actually work. For centuries, women desperate to conceive have tried many different methods of getting pregnant, particularly on this day of the year – 8th December – because this was considered by the Medieval Church to be the day when a woman who wanted a baby was most likely to conceive.

8th December was the Feast Day on which the Church celebrated St Anne’s conception of her daughter, the Virgin Mary. Therefore, a woman praying at one of the important shrines to Mary, such as Rayne, near Braintree in Essex, stood a good chance of becoming pregnant.

But the 8th December was also the feast day of a 6th Century saint, St Budoc and his conception proved not quite as happy for his mother, Azenor. According to legend when she revealed that she was pregnant her husband accused her of adultery, stuffed her in barrel and threw it into the English Channel. Azenor gave birth to Budoc whilst floating in the sea, and the barrel containing mother and babe was eventually washed ashore in Ireland where Azenor provided for her son, the future saint, by becoming laundress at Beau Port monastery, near Waterford.

In the Medieval and Tudor period the inability of a noble woman to give her husband an heir could, as we know, result in him divorcing her, incarcerating her in a nunnery or even finding a way of killing her, so women of all classes often resorted to drastic methods to conceive.

In fishing communities, women were advised by their mothers to make love when the tide was coming in as that would wash a baby into the womb.

The powerful mandrake with the mad and dying dog

which had been used to pull it from the earth.

It was also a long-held belief that if a woman was having trouble conceiving, a friend should give her parsley seeds to plant. As the parsley grew, a child would grow inside her. Since parsley is very slow to germinate – ‘the seeds go down to the devil seven times before green rises above the earth’ – this may have been simply a way of helping the woman to ‘relax and give it time.’ However, on no account was the woman to eat the parsley as they also believed if it was eaten three times a day it would produce an abortion. Another widely used herb, for those who could afford it, was the very costly mandrake root which is mentioned as an aid to fertility as far back as the Book of Genesis.

Since ancient times fish have been associated with fertility. The salmon was a symbol of a woman's sexual organs. One medieval recipe for getting pregnant was to take a fish that had been found inside another fish and fry it with a hare’s liver until both were dried. Grind to powder with flour and drink in water. The hare was linked to the ancient goddesses of fertility, so many fertility remedies involved consuming parts of a hare, including drinking powders made from its dried skin or stomach. If the woman wanted to conceive a boy she should drink a powder made from “hare’s eggs” – the testicles of a male hare – before making love.

Some fertility aids sound decidedly unhygienic today. One calls for a woman to insert the brains of a male and female bird into her ‘womb’ before sleeping with her husband. Another to smear the fat and brains of a dove on her ‘privy parts’ for three days, or the brains and blood of a bat. One ‘cure’ was for a woman to sit or lie above a pot in which the lungs and liver of sheep were boiling in wine, so that the fumes entered her womb. Only when this had thoroughly ‘warmed her’, should her husband lie with her, and then only in a warm and draught-free room.

Women could buy amulets of herbs or charms from cunning women or they could make one themselves from a hen’s egg containing a live chick. The whole thing was burned and the ashes tied in bag bound with green and white thread and hung round the neck.

A number of communities also had stone-keepers. There were many sites which, from ancient times, had been places where women would make offerings to the old gods or spirits to help them conceive, these included figures of men and animals carved into the hillside, certain standing stones, some rocking stones and springs such as The Well of Fertility (Tobat an Torraidh) on the Isle of Sky, to which cattle were driven to drink to help them conceive and which women used for the same purpose. Many of these ancient pagan sites were destroyed or taken over by the Church during the medieval period, but small stones were carried away from these places and handed down through the generations to the stone-keepers. 

Photographer: Lisa Jarvis. 'The Maiden Stone, Traprain Law.'

Legend has it that if a woman walks naked through

the gap she will conceive.

If a woman wanted to conceive she went to the stone-keeper who allowed her to hold the stone and the spirit of the place from which the stone had been taken was believed to call a child into her womb. Even today, there is a male stone-keeper in Lincolnshire who has a stone which has been used for generations and is said to have originally come from Cahir, County Limerick, Ireland. Money never changed hand for this service, but the woman was usually required to leave some kind of offering which was personal to her such as a rag from a favourite dress.

Up until 1920’s the pillars of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London were believed to have been hewn from stone taken from an ancient fertility site and were regularly embraced by women who wanted to conceive, as was a granite block on a hill in Glenavon, Grampian.

Milking a reindeer.

Drinking milk of various animals or drying it and using it a pessary was also recommended by many medieval physicians because of the obvious link between lactation and pregnancy. Donkey milk, horse, deer and bear milk were among those thought be most effective in aiding conception. I wonder who volunteered to milk the bears!

But Christmas will soon be upon us with its bunches of mistletoe which have long been associated with fertility. A medieval woman who wanted to conceive would tie a sprig close to her belly or around her arm, so be very careful where you put your mistletoe this festive season!

AFRICA.......by Adèle Geras

I am posting the link below to Lantana Publishing's page about the book which has just been published. It's called A WISP OF WISDOM, and brings together many writers and a wonderful illustrator in a volume which was created to raise money for the Cameroon region but which we all hope will be enjoyed by readers in the UK as much as by their African counterparts.

This will tell you about the origins of the books and let you know which writers are involved. The illustrator is Emmie van Biervliet

https://www.lantanapublishing.com/shop/special-project/cameroon-stories/


Here are the illustrations for my story.








But what I want to do here, briefly, is talk a bit about my experience of Africa. I've never visited the Cameroons, but have lived at different times in Nigeria, The Gambia and Tanzania. Also, although I can't remember it, I spent some months in Egypt as a young baby...my mother used to tell stories of how she carried me in her arms up and down and up and down to stop me crying and waking the neighbour in the next door room (we were in a hotel) only to discover the next day that he was completely deaf.

When my father was posted to Nigeria in 1950, I was 6. My mother looked up Nigeria in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and was horrified. She said to my dad. "But Laurie, there are two pages of diseases you can get!"Nevertheless, to Nigeria we went. I remember nothing but good things. I went to a wonderful school attached to the University in Ibadan. That was where my teacher and my class gave me the book, OUR ISLAND STORY, about which I've written a blog post on the History Girls. We then moved to Lagos and I can remember tradesmen coming to the door of our house with the most wonderful crocodile and snakeskin shoes and bags. Then we went to Onitcha, where there were fields of lilies outside our house and where the bats came out at twilight in such numbers that we had to retire to the safety of my parents' double bed under the mosquito net to avoid them. I am terrified by the very thought of bats to this very day. Then in Kaduna, near Kano, I did get one of those diseases that my mother dreaded: jaundice. I wasn't terribly ill but I remember going to the doctor and giving some blood from the inside of my elbow. I've not been keen on intravenous stuff ever since...he had some difficulty finding a vein.

Below is a photo of me and my dad taken around that time.



My parents then went to the Gambia. My father was Assistant Attorney General in what was then a British colony. Here I had a really wonderful time, whenever I visited. By this time, about 1956, I was at boarding school and used to go out every summer for the long school holidays. I usually flew on BOAC, on a plane exactly like the one seen recently on THE CROWN on Netflix, taking the young Princess Elizabeth to Kenya before she came to the throne. In those days, pilots used to invite children to visit the cockpit to have a go at flying the plane! The exclamation mark is intended to express my wonder, both at those innocent times and at my own daring. I am now flying phobic and haven't been up in the air for 20 years.

There was the sea. My father was permanently dark brown and loved lying in the sun, on the sand, stretched out with no Factor anything on his skin. I've always been very unkeen on the sun and have worn a hat and cover ups on the beach even when I was extremely young.

The Bishop of the Gambia was a friend of my parents and one day, he took me to visit the sick. We went to a part of what was then called Bathurst where Africans lived. It wasn't a shanty town but it was different from the houses where the Government officials and Colonial staff lived. I was struck by the contrast in the way our lives were organised. This was the first time I'd ever thought: how come we live like this when they live like that? How come they are servants in our houses? Because you couldn't escape that this relationship was what was common and the injustice of it was clear. I was present at a moment just before Independence from Colonial Rule was happening all over the Continent.


I wasn't thinking about such matters. I was busy falling in love. Dakar, the French colony, was next door to Gambia and somehow young men who were much more glamorous than what I'd been used to in England appeared at parties in the Club: French men! Young cadet soldiers, mostly. They were older than me by some years. I was fourteen and fifteen when I started going to dances at the Club, and the first person I fell in love with was eighteen. These dances were innocent affairs by today's standards. My father would drive me there and wait till the fun was over, often very late into the night. He read back numbers of Punch and the Illustrated London News in a quiet room and then drove me back to town when the dancing was done. He had no objection to my flirting with these men, but had no intention of letting me drive home with anyone who'd been drinking.

When I returned to school, I always took with me a huge biscuit tin full of peanuts, roasted at home. Gambia was famous for its groundnuts, as they were called, and I loved them. I still do. They didn't last long when they were shared out among my friends back in England.

When my father was in Gambia he invented a method of voting that cut out corruption. I'm not at all sure how it worked but it involved different coloured marbles being dropped into an oil drum. Here's a picture.




His idea was hailed as a real break through at the time and I wish I'd paid more attention to how it operated. I imagine each candidate had his colour...and it was 'his' in those days...and you put an appropriately- coloured one into the drum to indicate your preference. This method or a variant of it is still being used. It's just ousted Gambia's ruler after years and years in favour of a young man who used to work at Argos in Kilburn, I think. Good luck to him and I hope Gambia thrives under his rule.

From Gambia we went to Tanzania. Then, in 1960 or so, it was still Tanganyika and it was the most wonderful place. I loved it. Here's a picture of me on our verandah.



That's the sea behind me and Zanzibar is so close that I could smell the cloves and cinnamon from where I was sitting when the wind direction was right. Julius Nyerere was our next door neighbour. My father was by then Chief Justice and oversaw the handing over of power at Independence. FREEDOM was the slogan of the day: UHURU!We used to sing a song to a calypso kind of tune:

"Uhuru, uhuru, this is what we're going to do:

No more work and no more tax,

We'll sit in the sun and just relax!"



I did a few Saturday jobs while I was there on my summer holidays. I led guided tours in French to the jute factory and other local sights for tourists on the cruises stopping in Dar-es-salaam, and was a bit offended to be told I had a Belgian accent. I also read some poetry on the radio to help students up country who were studying for British Ordinary Level School Certificate. One of the poems was Balder Dead by Matthew Arnold.

I've not been back to Africa since 1962. It's changed enormously since then, of course, but these are some of my own memories. I hope very much that everyone who buys A WISP OF WISDOM will enjoy the stories written by me and my co-contributors.

The Proper Olden Days

I love old school magazines. In 2004, when I was a teacher, I based an exhibition about the school’s experiences in World War One largely around a stack of 1914-1919 school magazines. In 2014, I revisited these magazines as stimulus for my story ‘Each Slow Dusk’ in Walker’s The Great War. I’ve also plundered them for convincing Christian names for my 1918-set teen WIP, and I'm always moved by the juxtaposition of hockey matches and deaths on the Western Front. 

As I’ve confessed here before, I was always a History Girl. ‘Tell me about the olden days,’ I would beg my gran, born in 1908, and she obliged with stories of the shirt factory and Sunday school and naughty Aunt Annie smuggling a kitten up to bed in her pinny. I was enchanted by the kitten but even more by the pinny. The pinny was proof that Aunt Annie came from the real olden days.

The pupils from the magazines – all those Ediths and Kathleens and Gilberts  -- didn’t go to school with Gran and Aunt Annie – they were just that bit older and further up the social scale – but they might have sat beside them on the tram.

Mummy, born in 1947, came from the olden days too: not quite so olden but still firmly black and white, gym frocks and Elvis.

Then the world shifted to boring colour when I was born in 1968.

Because I didn’t come from the olden days. Obviously. And because I don’t have children, nobody has ever asked me, ‘Tell me about when you were a wee girl in the olden days.’ So, though I know rationally, that I lived through history – rather a lot of history, given that I grew up in seventies Belfast, I rarely, in my imagination, think of it that way. History was big, and happening somewhere else.

And then, last week, I saw this tweeted picture from my old school library. 

I was charmed. Elizabeth and I are still best friends, and I’m still trying to encourage younger people to read.  I’d forgotten about the Junior Library Club. But there it was, a tiny bit of the history of my own old school, and of my own olden days. 1987, it would have been. Not long enough to be proper olden days, of course. And then I thought again. When I was ten, my mum was thirty. The olden days she described were less than two decades ago. 1987 is nearly thirty years ago. 

I do come from the proper olden days. I have only just realised it, thanks to Twitter and an old school magazine.