The History Girls

Like most people, the history I studied at school was mostly about men and wars and politics. Public history, if you like. I liked it better when we got occasional insights into the mundanities of everyday life. I didn’t always remember dates or get excited by laws and treaties, but I was forever putting my hand up to ask questions like, What did they wear? What were their bathrooms like? What did they eat?

My personal history bookcase, built up over years, reflects this early preference. There are a few worthy tomes on political history, mostly things I have bought with good intentions or inherited from my father (who almost certainly didn’t read them either). But mostly it’s social history. Private history, if you like. Books about how ordinary people – and some extraordinary people – lived and loved and looked after their families in earlier centuries. There are books about suffragettes and spinsters, the WI and the Girl Guides, sex and schooling. These books are well-read, often more than once. These books are where I go when I don’t feel like fiction.

The bookcase has its own history of course. For a start, it was made by my late father. When I photographed it for this blog, I thought I should remove the clutter, but then I realised that these bits and pieces are part of my own history and my family’s. The carriage clock is hideous and doesn’t work, but it was presented to my grandfather on his retirement in 1977 and thus I can’t bear to throw it out. The tweed mouse, favourite toy of a long-dead cat, was made by my best friend from school, Elizabeth. And the little doll, a seventies favourite called Jenny-my-best-schoolfriend, was a Christmas present from my granny when I was eight. And history doesn't stop -- the suffragette doll was a present for my fiftieth birthday last year, and bought to mark my 2017 novel Star by Star.

So, the history is in the books, but not only in the books. History is never only in the books.

This post is going to be a bit different from my usual kind. It's somewhat of a confession. It will be light on photographs because I haven't the energy to go fossicking among Wikipedia Commons to find pictures of the protagonists, so I'm going to assume you all know what each of my cast of fascinating characters looks like. They've been in front of the nation for months now and you will each have your own image of every single one.

I'm going to confess two things. The first is my complete fascination with the coverage of the Brexit crisis. The second is my obsession with the necklaces of our Prime Minister, a subject I can't bring up much on Twitter for two reasons. The first reason: I have vowed to shut up on on Social Media about politics. Any political opinion gets you abused, trolled, and insulted, so I try to keep firmly silent. And if I were to write about the PM's jewellery, I might be accused of being trivial, or writing about Mrs May as a woman. Heaven forfend! For the purposes of this piece, all you need to know is: I was and remain a Remainer. That's it. Anyone who thinks I'm going to yell and scream about Brexit has another think coming. The actual leaving of the European Union is not my concern here. Rather it's how I've reacted to total immersion in the coverage of the last few months in Parliament. I will say it here: I am hooked. A total Brexit news junkie. I watch everything I can: the news and Newsnight of course but also Politics Live every single day and it's on a series link on my telly so that I can catch up with the programme if I happen to be out when it airs at 12.15. on BBC2. For those of you who don't know it, it's 45 minutes of six people talking, under the guidance of the excellent Jo Coburn. She has a good mix of people on the show: men and women, Labour, Tory and every other party, young and old and you often get a visit (especially on Wednesdays, when the programme takes in Prime Minister's Questions) from the redoubtable and always impeccably-dressed Laura Kuenssberg.

Here is my Brexit blanket. It's perfect tv knitting and it's growing apace.

Okay, Brexit. What I really love about tit and especially in the last couple of months since we didn't leave on March 29th, is the drama. And the dramatis personae. For a drama is what it really is. There's the wonderful setting of the House of Commons leaking already and in danger of falling down altogether if measures aren't taken, but meanwhile both picturesque and historic. Then there's a very huge and important Ticking Clock. Any writer will tell you that such a thing is an enormous help in making everything more tense and exciting. And you have a dream cast! What an array, what a veritable gallimaufry of people is ranged in front of us! There's something for every taste: Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ken Clarke, Michael Gove, Boris-who-doesn't-need-a-surname (which may become important in any General Election) Keir Starmer with his intriguing hairstyle, and of course the Leader of the Opposition about whom I will say nothing. In charge of the Government for good or ill is Theresa May, who came into office after the Referendum result produced another drama ( see Boris and Michael Gove, above.)

We also have another cast in Europe: Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron (who comes decked in Napoleonic trappings and has an Older Wife...the stuff of soap operas). They are fascinating in themselves. I like listening to Laura K and Katia Adler when Mrs May goes to Brussels or Strasbourg, because they paint a picture of our Prime Minister being..well, not exactly welcomed and you can understand why. We are, after all, trying to leave. (But in parentheses, I loved the video clip of Merkel and May exclaiming over an iPhone at the coincidence of both wearing a royal blue suit on the same day.)

Now look at our heroine: here's a 62 year old woman. She's diabetic. She has to get up very single day and put on decent clothes and an iconic necklace, and stand in front of more than 600 people who are constantly at her for not doing this, not doing that, not listening to them, listening too much to the others, especially the DUP under Arlene Foster. who seem not much given to gentle, emollient chat. She is not much liked. She's not clubbable. She doesn't have the gift of the gab. She's wooden in interviews. She's called the Maybot. The ERG group in her own Party would like to see her gone. They failed in a coup attempt...that was dramatic. I was glued to the sofa for all that, you may be sure. But her Weeble-Like gift for getting up again when knocked down is amazing.

There are others who think they'd make a better fist fit if they were Leader...but not a single one of them wants their fingerprints on a Bad Deal and to be left holding the Brexit Baby. Also, very importantly, no one has a PLAN to put up against Mrs May's Deal. Not one single idea put forward has the solid support of Parliament behind it. And, like it or not, the UK voted to Leave. This is the background to every single drama: we voted to Leave. I was desperately sorry that we did and sincerely wish we hadn't, but I fail to see how overturning a democratic vote by another Referendum would be the answer....oops. Sorry. A bit of politics there. Back to Mrs May and her necklaces.

Here's another confession. I adore jewellery and can talk about it for hours with anyone interested. When Mrs May first took office, my immediate thought was: hurray! Something new to look at every day. And she's done me proud. Her necklaces are brilliant. I like some more than others. The metal chains and complicated silver affairs are terrific. Best of all, I love her green glass beads, which are I think, faceted glass. She has a similar ruby-looking one, and sometimes she wears gobstopper pearls. And a couple that look like those models of atoms: globes clustering together that you find in science labs. Mrs May wears good bracelets too. There's one which bears an image of Frida Kahlo. Often her chain necklace has a matching bracelet...I could go on.

She's got the knack (rare) of knowing where a necklace should sit on your chest. Nothing dangles. Nothing chokes. Every piece falls in exactly the right place.
She has the advantage of height but also the tall woman's stoop, as if she's trying to disguise it.
Her shoes are legendary. She has good legs. Not every one of her outfits works, but she has a better strike rate than many other public figures. I did get a little tired of the famous pale blue coat....but I live in hope that the warmer weather will see the back of that.

Look closely and you'll see my Brexit blanket has grown...but now we're in unknown territory. At the time of writing, we have an extension till October. But will we leave in time to avoid the dreaded European elections? Will a Tory-Labour agreement about something be reached? Will the group that's prevented us from leaving agree to get May's deal through Parliament? Will there be a vote of confidence? Will the Government fall? Will Theresa May survive for more than a month or two? She has shown remarkable stickability. See "no one else has a plan" above.

I'm writing this during the Parliamentary recess in April. Who knows what will have happened by the time this post goes live? May have to add a Ps or maybe not. In any case, I'm longing for the break to be over so that the drama can begin again. This is a kind of interval and I want to be back on the sofa with Laura K, Katia A and Andrew Neil who does the best interviews of all and lets no one at all off any hook. I want the performances to resume in the Mother of Parliaments. The cast of characters is always full of surprises. There will be alarms and excursions. Social Media is helping meanwhile..but the Drama goes on and this particular one has that priceless thing: not a single person knows what's going to happen in the end...back to the sofa to see if there's a Final Twist!

In the last few weeks, people have been flocking to see the wonderful bluebell woods in Devon, where the carpet of flowers spreads beneath the trees like a violet-blue mist. I heard one visitor say, the bluebell wood was ‘an enchanting place’. They thought so too in the Middle Ages, but unlike the 21st century visitor, they did not mean it was beautiful, they regarded bluebell woods as places of sinister and dangerous bewitchment.

Bluebells were harvested as early in the Bronze Age, for the gluey sap which was used to fixed feathers to arrow shafts. During the Tudor period, bluebell sap was used as starch to stiffen muslin and the immense ruffs worn by the Elizabethans. It was used as a glue in bookbinding, because the poisonous sap also discouraged insects from attacking the books. In the Middle Ages, bluebells were thought to be a cure for leprosy, consumption, snake bites and spider bites. Bluebells could prevent nightmares if the flowers were threaded and hung over the bed. But whatever you needed bluebells for, you never went to collect them alone.

Photo: Dr Richard Murray

Bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

A child who picked bluebells alone would be spirited away by the fairy folk, never to be seen again. Even an adult who ventured into a bluebell wood by themselves was in mortal danger. They would be pixie-led, and forced to wander round and round, unable to find their way out, until they died of exhaustion, unless someone else entered the wood, thereby breaking the enchantment, and guided the bewildered victim home. Bluebells were known as Deadmen’s bells, because whoever hears them ringing, is listening to their own death knell and will be taken by a malicious spirit within weeks.

Pig trapped by his nightmares of goblins.

From 'The Fairy Caravan.' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

The much-loved children’s author, Beatrix Potter, makes great use of these old superstitions in her only full-length novel for older children The Fairy Caravan (1929). In the novel, the circus characters have to travel through a small bluebell wood, Pringle Wood, and are warned not to eat anything they find there because they will never leave if they do. Even though most heed the warning, they still find themselves going round in circles for hours, until the pony pulling the caravan almost collapses with exhaustion. The pig, who naturally disobeys the injunction, is trapped in a hollow tree by his own hallucinations and is only finally rescued by the pony who protects himself with fern seed plaited in his mane, which was a amulet that medieval travellers used to render themselves and their horses invisible to evil spirits. The pony also asks the blacksmith to reverse his horseshoes. Again, people thought that by reversing your clothes and wearing a garment inside out you could break enchantment or a run of bad luck.

Pony searching the bluebell wood for pig.

From 'The Fairy Caravan' (1929)

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

Bluebells are highly poisonous, and when not in flower the bulbs can be easily mistaken for ramsons or wild garlic, which often grows in the same habitat, so the warning that you might never leave the bluebell wood if you ate anything there was probably sound advice.

Whenever I see a bluebell wood, I am reminded me of a circle game we used to play as children in the sixties.

"In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
In and out the dusty bluebells,
Who will be my master?

Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
Tipper-ipper-apper on your shoulder
I am your master now."

In some versions, they are called ‘dusky’ bluebells or ‘Scottish’ bluebells. There is much speculation about the age of this song. Some say that it refers to the hiring fairs that took place around April-May, but a group of country children in the 1900’s reported that ‘the master’ in the song was the sinister Fairy King, who like the pied piper, would lead unwary children dancing into the underworld, from which there was no return. This is probably not, of course, the original meaning of the game, but it is interesting that Edwardian children were still aware of the ancient superstition.

Other common beliefs were that if you placed a garland of bluebells on someone you wanted to question, they would be compelled to tell the truth. Perhaps the sweetest one is if you manage to turn one of the flowers inside out without tearing it, you will eventually win the one you love. Again, it is the act of physically reversing an object, which turns or reverse your fortune. The task also requires patience and gentleness, two qualities which might well help a young lad or lass win the heart of any future lover. Either that, or it took so long to master the art, you might well have stopped fancying the person by then, which solved the problem.

hemlock in spring (Wikimedia Commons)

by Caroline Lawrence

As I write this, in May 2019, I’m working on a book set in ancient Athens. As usual, I’m seeking out as much sensory detail as possible: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. I do that to spark synapses in the imaginative right brain, thereby bringing the book alive to young readers. But I’m also doing it for the same reason I write my books: to transport myself back in time.

In my latest book, The Time Travel Diaries, a 12-year-old London schoolboy named Alex goes back to third century Roman London to find a blue-eyed girl with an ivory knife. She was a real girl whose grave was found not far from the site of Shakespeare’s Globe. In the sequel, which I’m working on now, Alex goes back even further to witness the death of Socrates.

figurine of Socrates in the British Museum

Socrates was the famous fifth century BC Greek philosopher who was the first to bring philosophy down from the stars and into men’s lives. He buzzed around Athens like an annoying mosquito, challenging ancient Greeks to make sure their souls were noble. He’s the one who claimed that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Finally the politicians and the people he’d pestered decided that enough was enough. They charged him with impiety and sentenced him to death.

And so, in early summer of the year 399 BC, seventy-year-old Socrates had to drink poison hemlock.

Apart from a possibly spurious verse, Socrates left not a single written word. But like Jesus, who also died a martyr’s death, he was immortalised by his disciples, the most famous of whom was Plato. Plato is, of course, a giant of western philosophy. All his so-called dialogues have survived and he has been studied avidly without ever going out of fashion for two and a half thousand years. Plato taught Aristotle and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.

But it was Socrates who started it all. Without him, our culture would look very different.

David's famous 'Death of Socrates' (1787) Wikimedia Commons

Over the past two and a half millennia scholars have debated the accuracy of Plato’s portrayal of Socrates. For example, at the end of the dialogue called Phaedo, Plato writes vividly of Socrates’ death. He describes how Socrates bravely downed a cup full of hemlock and asked the executioner what he should do next. ‘Walk around until your legs begin to go numb, then lie down.’ Socrates duly walked around, gently rebuking a dozen or so of his friends for wailing and weeping. He reminded them that it is right to die in dignified silence.

As the paralysis worked its way up, he lay down on his prison cot. The executioner pinched his calves and then thighs, asking if he could feel anything. As the pinches went higher, Socrates calmly said he could not feel anything. ‘When it reaches your heart,’ said the man who had given him the hemlock, ‘it will be over.’ Socrates covered his face and lay quietly. Suddenly he uncovered his face and spoke his last words to his aged best friend: ‘Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget.’ Then he covered his face again. A little later Socrates twitched and when the executioner uncovered his face they saw that he was dead. Crito gently closed his friend’s mouth and eyes.

The death of Socrates is so calm and dignified that many commentators argued that Plato was sugar-coating the description. They claim that real hemlock poisoning would have included violent convulsions and other unpleasant symptoms. This is because over the years several different plants have received the name hemlock, including ‘water hemlock’ and a kind of fir tree.

Although Plato only refers to the poison as the pharmakon (the drug) in this dialogue, he mentions hemlock in a few other places (e.g. Lysis), using the Greek word konion.

In an article published in 2001 by Enid Bloch: Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth? Bloch concludes that if konion refers to conium maculatum also known as ‘poison hemlock’, then ‘Plato not only told the truth, he did so with astounding medical accuracy.’ You can read the article online HERE. A slightly longer version of this paper was published in 2002 in The Trial and Execution of Socrates: Sources and Controversies. This version of Bloch’s article contains sixty-five footnotes, some of which describe the smell of hemlock and the bodily sensations it arouses.

One feature of the plant that everyone from Pliny the Elder to Dioscorides has mentioned is the strong or ‘heavy’ smell. Some commentators have likened the smell of hemlock to that of mice or even cat urine. In footnote 64, Professor Bloch confesses that she has never lived with either cats or mice so she can neither confirm nor deny this observation.

hemlock in winter (Chelsea Physic Garden)

In footnotes 12 & 63 Bloch tells how a gardener at Cornell University’s Poisonous Plants Garden showed her various types of hemlock and other toxic plants. Krissy Faust even gifted Bloch with some poison hemlock plants so she could study them in the privacy of her own home. When Bloch remarked on the gnarled appearance of the roots, Faust explained that in loose or sandy soil the roots would have grown straight down, like carrots but ‘in the hard clay of Ithaca, New York’ the roots become bent and twisted in a way which perfectly illustrates one Greek description of the roots as koilay kai ou bathia (twisted and not deep).

In footnote 65 Bloch relates how on several occasions she has brought hemlock into her Socrates classes. She offers students the opportunity to examine the stalks, always warning them of the possible toxic effect of merely sniffing the plant. ‘Virtually everyone’ who has a sniff reports an ‘immediate feeling of car-sickness and a mild but sharp headache’. Bloch herself describes the queasy sensation as something closer to morning-sickness than car-sickness but acknowledges that most of her students might not be familiar with that particular kind of nausea.

Elsewhere in the article Bloch says the scent of hemlock is ‘like a very heavy, peculiar tea, clinging obnoxiously in the mouth and nose, as if it had entered the body and not let go.’ A 12-year-old Time Traveller like Alex might describe the smell as Cat Pee Tea.

So, although Bloch believes that Socrates died peacefully and with dignity, her findings also persuade us that drinking hemlock was nonetheless very unpleasant. Kids, don’t try this at home!

The Time Travel Dialogues, Caroline’s sequel to The Time Travel Diaries, will be published in 2020.

The protagonist of my forthcoming novel is called “Sorrowful Lily”, and her burdens are great: she’s an orphan with none of the secret sacred ties that bind all Venetians to one another in affection; she’s the self-doubting daughter of a madwoman; worse, she’s particular scapegoat of a cruel Sicilian badessa in the grim convent where she’s brought up.

However, Sorrowful Lily is coaxed into a rare moment of optimism and joy by a phenomenon that I think unique to Venice – the way illogical and unlikely light dances on the undersides of bridges, on high facades and on ceilings, places where these lacy kinetic illuminations don’t seem to have any business to be.

Lily’s experiences what some call “gibigiana” and others “sbarlusso” when she tries to run away from her latest captor, the woman who runs the mysterious hotel where she's been sent to work as a punishment for setting fire to the convent. Venice, meanwhile, has been glowering grey and sunless for months since someone stole the foot of the city’s beloved Saint Lucy.

To Lily’s horror, the Signorina turns out to be the sister of the very badessa she thought she’d left behind at the convent. Worse, Lily remembers that the last orphan sent to “The Hotel of What You Want” was never seen again.

In this extract from The Wishing Bones, Lily’s just crossed the hotel’s threshold for the first time ...

The door was open. I breathed the air of freedom and took a step towards it.

   ‘Aldo!’ shouted the Signorina. ‘Show her what happens to girls who try to escape!’

    I fled. But my first turn led me into a blind alley that ended in a canal. At a safe distance from the water, I leaned panting against the bricks watching the ripples of the waves that were reflected like starbursts on the underside of the arch. We Venetians have a word for that watery, wavering light: sbarlusso.

   Of course, with Saint Lucy’s foot gone, the light was sunless and today the sbarlusso winked sadly, like a widowed uncle.

‘Sbarlusso,’ I said aloud, still panting. That’s what my life would be like – free, scintillating, lively – without sisters from Sicily to insult, bend and beat me. I would find decent work. I would make some secret sacred ties of my own.

    I felt the rumble of footsteps before I even heard them. Then my arms were pinioned behind my back and a sack thrown over my head. I smelled garlic, meat and anger through the coarse weave.

   A man’s voice told me, ‘Thought you’d get away? Don’t make me laugh. I know all about you. You are the daughter of a madwoman. You are not destined to live free. Your wits are not up to it, girlie.’

   This coarse high voice must belong to Aldo, I realised, the man the Signorina had summoned.

   ‘And if you try that again,’ he whispered, ‘I won’t bother bringing you back. I’ll drown you like a kitten in a bucket. Who’s going to miss you?’

And so Lily is dragged away and back to servitude in the hotel, where the exclusively English guests regularly fall into declines and disappear.

I won’t pretend that The Wishing Bones isn’t a very dark novel. And indeed my last post in this parish was about Venice in the physical and metaphorical night. But even the deepest darkness becomes monotonous without light – which is why I allow Lily a little of it.

Not far from me in Venice is a glass shop called “Gibigiana”.

The owner told me this week that he’d named the shop after the phenomenon because of the light trapped inside the best of his delicate productions – like this teardrop of a bottle.

And it's true that the best Venetian glass does reflect what you see on the facades of buildings that breathe in the light of the water:

It was a luminous April this year. But I talked to Gibigiana's proprietor Stefano on a rare day of monsoon-like rain that had driven all the tourists off the streets. They sheltered disconsolately under awnings and in steaming cafes. The light was not dancing through Gibigiana's windows - but somehow, magically, it was still there in the mirrors and jewellery.

Stefano told me that 'Light is different in Venice'. He explained that's because water acts as a mirror, doubling the light and making mischief with it, playing, deceiving.

Meanwhile, he saw that day's kind of rainlight as a “fascino decadente” – a decadent charm, and I understood exactly what he meant.

No one can look at Venice's sbarlusso, in all its forms, without experiencing a strange effect on one's mood. It's a phenomenon of newly-coined light in old or ancient places: a light that's suddenly tarnished with memories.

So I guess sbarlusso really is the right kind of light for a dark kind of novel.

Michelle Lovric’s website

The Wishing Bones is published on July 25th . New web-pages have just gone up, using the wonderful night-time photography of David Winston to set the scene for this dark story.

One of the characters is a young Casanova. I shall be talking about him at the Casanova in Place symposium in Venice at the end of June.

My mother, Mona Eastwood

The second Sunday in May is ‘Mothers’ Day’ in Australia. My darling mother died on 28 August 2011, at the ‘ripe old age’ of 91 years. I still miss her.

And so, in honour of Mothers’ Day I thought I’d share an edited version of a letter my mother wrote to her oldest nephew (my cousin, now almost 90 himself) some time in the 1980s about her parents and her childhood in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie.

My mother always said that Kalgoorlie bred special people. They certainly had to be hardy. Kalgoorlie-Boulder, usually known as just Kalgoorlie, is located 595 km (370 mi) east-northeast of Perth at the end of the Great Eastern Highway. The city was founded in 1889 and developed during the Coolgardie gold rush, on Western Australia's "Golden Mile".

The concentrated area of large gold mines surrounding the original find by Paddy Hannan in 1893 is often referred to as the Golden Mile, and was known at one time as "the world's richest square mile of earth". During the 1890s, the Goldfields area boomed, with a population exceeding 200,000, composed mainly of prospectors. The area gained a notorious reputation for being a "wild west" with bandits and prostitutes.

It was around this time that my mother's family (who were teetotal Methodists) arrived from Goulburn in New South Wales and set about making Kalgoorlie their home.

Mum's grandfather, Richard Everett, was a master mason, and may have had a hand in building some of Kalgoorlie's landmarks such as the Town Hall (above). He brought his family with him to the frontier town: Wilfred (23), Louisa (20), Alice (17), Albert Victor (15), Ida (13) and Clara (10). The oldest girl, Amelia, was married and stayed behind in Sydney.

Mum's family arrived before the opening of the ‘golden pipeline’ (commissioned in 1896 and was completed in 1903), a major engineering feat by which 23,000 kilolitres (5,100,000 imp gal) of water per day flowed to the Goldfields from Perth. Prior to this there was no proper water supply to the town.

My grandfather met the Everett family when they were in Perth getting ready to go to Kalgoorlie in around 1898-9. He fell hard for Louisa, threw over his job, and followed her. They married in 1903.

Although the railway line reached Kalgoorlie in 1896, but it wasn’t until 1917 that a line was built across 2,000 kilometres (1,243 mi) of desert to connect Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta in South Australia and consequently to the eastern half of Australia.

The first train heading east from Kalgoorlie in 1917

When the gold began to peter our (or so it was thought), the population decreased dramatically. In 1901, the population of Kalgoorlie was 4,793 (3,087 males and 1,706 females) which increased to 6,790 (3,904 males and 2,886 females) by 1903.

A sense of the small-town atmosphere is given by this article in The Kalgoorlie Miner of 17 March 1933, when Mum was 13

*************

KALGOORLIE AND EASTWOOD/EVERETT FAMILY MEMORIES by Mona Williams (nee Eastwood)

My father was James Wilkinson Eastwood (b.Everton, UK 1872, d. Kalgoorlie Australia 1923). He came out to Australia from Liverpool, England, sometime in the 1890's to take up a clerical position with the W.A. Government Railways at Fremantle. He worked in the

Mum's mother, Louisa Mary Everett,
as a young girl

Fremantle office of the Railways until September 23rd, 1899, when he left to follow my mother to Kalgoorlie, where she had travelled with her family.

This date was revealed to me from a little job locket (or watch fob) given me by my mother as a keepsake of my father. It bears the inscription: -

"W.A.G. Rlys
Presented to J.W. Eastwood Esq. as a token of esteem by his fellow employees, Fremantle, 23.9.99"

In January 1902, when my mother was 23 and my father 29, they married and took up residence in the house built for them in Campbell Street, Kalgoorlie. This is still occupied, though somewhat changed in appearance by the enclosure of the front verandah and cutting down of tall peppercorn trees planted by my father.

The house was similar to this one.

Five daughters were born - Frances Louisa (1903), Marjorie (1906), Kathleen Ida (1908), Jean (1911) and Mona (1920). As I was not quite two years old when my father died, I have no memory of him and have to rely on other people's anecdotes.

He worked as an Accountant in an office in the Exchange Building, Hannan Street, Kalgoorlie.

The Exchange Hotel and Building

When his youngest brother, George Douqlas Eastwood (26) was killed at Gallipoli, my father joined the Australian Infantry Forces. He was then 43 years old and lied about his age to join up, leaving my mother with four daughters aged 4 to 12 years. He served in France, first in the infantry and then in the Pay Corps after being wounded and when in hospital recognised as having Accountancy qualifications.

The only memento we have from his Army service is a brass serviette ring with the name "Arras" (it once had a crest, but this is now missing).

In May, 1922, my father died (cause pneumonia) leaving my mother in a precarious position financially as there was no widow's pension in those days.

Mother often spoke of my father. She said he always remained essentially very English in his ways, although he did not have a very noticeable accent. The Sunday dinner was always a traditional affair with father presiding as "carver" of the roast meat, and vegetables being served in tureens. Soup first, of course, and sweets to follow.

Mother's two brothers - Wilfred and Victor Everett ran a carrier's business from their adjacent homes in McDonald Street, Kalgoorlie. The large back yard held their horses, lorries and sulky (during the 1920's) and later their motor truck. Grandma Everett lived with us in Campbell Street during the last ten years of her life, when she was blind from glaucoma. Each Sunday afternoon one of the Uncles would drive the horse and sulky to our place and take out Grandma for a "jaunt' around the "Boulder Block" (mines territory).

Wilfred, who was a Boer War veteran, died when I was little, but Victor lived to a good age and was well looked after in later years by Aunt Edie (Wilfred's wife), who was a most hospitable lady and often had our whole family for the customary Sunday "tea" - cold meats and salads, fruit salad, jelly and icecream and all varieties of scones and cakes, set up on a large table on their side verandah.

Victor's wife was a grave disappointment, running off with another man and leaving her two daughters (Marjorie and Doris) to be brought up by Wilfred and Aunt Edie, who had no children. They owned a pianola and we had great sing-songs around this instrument.

Grandpa Everett died in 1908 from Asthma, leaving Grandma to live on until 1936. She was a dear little lady (see photo right), whose "going out" outfit was a long black sateen dress, little black boots (she was born with a club foot) and a black "cloche" hat trimmed with black lace. She still retained some of her Scottish sayings (no accent, though) and insisted on calling Kathleen "Katherine", the former being too "Irish". She was a twin and two sets of twins that I know of have been born later in our family.

Grandma's uncommon name "Archina" was perpetuated only once. It was given by Auntie May to her older daughter (she is usually called" Archie" and I don't know whether she appreciated the honour).

While on the subject of names, I might mention why I was given the name "Mona". It is a common name on the Isle of Man (early English maps call it "Mona's Isle"). Castle Mona was the name given to the home built for the fourth Duke of Atholl, who was Lord of Mann before the title was given to the reigning English monarch in 1765. It is now the Castle Mona Hotel and is used as such. Ships belonging to the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company bear such names as "Mona I" and "Mona's Isle".

My father [whose family had moved to the Isle of man in the 1880s] wanted each daughter after Frances [who was named for his mother] christened Mona but mother would not consent until I, the fifth girl, appeared instead of the much-wanted son. Then Father registered me as Mona without consultation.

I have a little Isle of Man silver emblem showing the "Three legs of Man" with the name "Mona" underneath (as its symbol, the Isle of Man has a shield showing three legs sheathed in armour running clockwise and a Latin inscription meaning "whichever way you throw me I will stand").

Kalgoolie in 1930

In late 1939 (shortly after the start of World War II), I sat for the Commonwealth Typists' Examination and scored the second victory for the Eastwoods, again coming top of the State [Marjorie had also topped the State some years earlier]. The examination was a test in English, Arithmetic, Typewriting and Shorthand.

I was appointed to a Department in Fremantle and that was the start of the Eastwood move to Perth. Jean was offered a buying job with Chas. Moore & Co. in Hay Street, Perth, and mother, Jean and I moved to our newly built house in Perth. Mother's share of Grandma Eastwood's estate enabled her to pay cash for this (about £1,175, I think).

The old Kalgoorlie house was sold for a very low figure because prices were down during the war. I think mother was sad to cut her old links with Kalgoorlie after so many years. Living was very hard, with water and comforts scarce, yet building went on apace and Kalgoorlie-Boulder is still prospering after 100 years, even though gold prices fluctuate. Tourism, of course, is a boon to the Goldfields.

Mention of the "Arras" serviette ring reminded me of one of mother's stories about her Everett/Eastwood marriage. One of the wedding presents was an ornately embossed hallmark - silver serviette ring. Whether this came from my father or one of the English Eastwoods, I do not know. It bore the initials "L.E" and, when the presents were displayed, one of the guests was undiplomatic enough to quote the following couplet:

"Change the name and not the letter,
Change for worse and not for better."

Mother never revealed her thoughts on this.

by Antonia Senior

A smaller than usual post this month, because we've all been horribly ill and the house and my work are in chaos. Before the plague hit South London, I was lucky enough to go to Rome for the weekend with a group of girlfriends. We jettisoned kids, dogs and husbands in favour of culture, vats of vino blanco and the kind of carb-and-ice cream fest that induces near comas.

The visit was serendipitous. Despite being booked a year ago, it coincided with the opening of the Domus Transitoria to the public for the first time. Hidden underneath later Flavian additions on the Palatine, the Domus Transitoria was Nero's palace before the great fire of AD 64.

We arrived early on the Palatine - before the crowds. It was gloriously empty, with wildflowers pocking the grass under a blue, Spring sky.

I'd booked the tickets in advance, along with entrance to the Houses of Augustus and Livia. I had visited these roped off parts of the Palatine a few years earlier, but wanted to visit again to show them to my friends. It was a good decision - the people behind the archaeological park have utterly embraced technology, and the results are inspiring.

When I first visited, we had a guide - who was excellent but expensive. This time, we were treated to a show. Lights and video picked out the extraordinary frescoes and completed them in front of our eyes. The mosaics were extended, and explained. It was atmospheric and incredible - and we had it completely to ourselves, while outside, crowds traipsed through the usual paths. And it was cheap. I don't quite know why it was so empty: I booked here - https://www.coopculture.it/en/colosseo-e-shop.cfm

There is now a similar light and sound show now at the Domus Aurea - Nero's post-fire palace. I saw that a few years ago, wearing a hard hat, again with a guide. I am planning another trip to Rome next year, just to see what they've done with the light and video at the incredible, extensive Aurea complex.

After the Houses of Augustus and Livia, it was time for the main event. We descended some hidden stairs into the cold, underground world. The first room you enter is the Nymphaeum, once a sort of fountained hall.

It's atmospheric in the way of ruins - it needs a little imagination and some borrowed expertise to bring it alive. But, the experts here have gone one step further. They have introduced Virtual Reality headsets. After donning the sets, we watched the ruins transform into an incredible hall. We watched eras come and go. We got vertigo, as the floor dropped away behind beneath us, then remade itself. We flew upward, soaring up and above the atriumed roof to see exactly where we were in the incredible Cityscape of Julio-Claudian Rome.

Us with our headsets on - feeling much cooler than we looked!

In one sense, you lose something. I love an ancient ruin - and the sense of scrambling across the sad remnants of history. But it is brilliantly done, and the virtual reality is incredible. It was genuinely quite terrifying when the floor appeared to drop away. A perfect marriage of past and future.

by Deborah Swift

I love the fact that writing historical fiction takes me up all sorts of byways. Whilst researching for my new book set in the mid 17th Century, I wondered what sort of glasses they might have drunk from, and whether by then, it would still be pewter or horn. When did glass make an appearance for the everyday person? Not early enough for my book apparently, for though glass for windows and chunky simple cups had been made in England since the 13th Century, the impurities in the glass made it brittle and unsuitable for fine tableware. Fine glass was imported, usually from Venice. But in the later 17th Century a new method was developed by George Ravenscroft - a method that would mean England could produce its own glass to rival that of the Italians.

Anglo-Venetian glass with Dutch engraving - National Gallery of Victoria

George Ravenscroft was a trader in goods such as currants, glass, and lace. During the years he was trading, and before he arrived in London in 1666, he lived in Venice. Being involved in the glass trade, he was able to observe the method used by glassmakers in Italy, but soon came up with his own version of glass manufacture, using a mixture which was produced with a high lead content. Experiments he made between 1674 and 1676 gave a brilliant transparent and hard-wearing heavy glass which we now know as 'lead crystal.'

Secret Formula

The circumstances surrounding Ravenscroft’s role in the invention of lead crystal are not very clear. 17th Century records of the manufacturing process are incomplete, but moreover, Ravenscroft was rather secretive about his ingredients and processes. He was wary, as one might expect, of competitors copying him.

It is thought he had assistance from Sir Robert Plot FRS, who had the idea of using flints from Oxfordshire river beds. In Murano, Italy, where the best glass of the era came from, very expensive white flints from the River Po were used. Historians cannot agree on how Ravenscroft was inspired to use lead in the production of glass. Was it an accident, or had he pinched the idea of adding lead oxides to the glass from the glassmakers of Venice? To add to the confusion, an Italian book about glass making - L'Arte Vetraria, written by Antonio Neri in 1612, was translated into English by Christopher Merrett in 1662. Here's a quotation from the book describing lead glass when molten:

"This sort of glass, lead glass, is so runny that were it not cooled, and taken up by turning to wind a gather, it would be impossible to work. It is so runny that it would not even hold onto the punty, because it is as loose as soup. This arises out of the lead calx causes it to become very fluid."

Crizzling

Adding lead oxide to the glass made it less viscous than ordinary glass when heated. Because of this, it could be worked for longer without re-heating. The early glass Ravenscroft made was subject to developing a crackled surface known as crizzling, (what a lovely word!) caused by too much potash in the mix. But by1676 Ravenscroft had improved the glass, making lead glass, which contained a higher quantity of lead oxide, thus preventing crizzling. Lead glass has a higher refraction that previous English glass, making it sparkle, and ring like a bell if you gently strike the edge.

A well-crizzled decanter from the V&A

Unique Glass Patent
Ravenscroft was granted a patent from King Charles II in 1674 to be the sole manufacturer of lead crystal in England. His prices were one shilling for a claret glass, rising to one shilling and eight pence for the heavier beer glass. Ale at this time was a strong drink that required a bowl of four fluid ounces, whereas a wine glass held only two. Because of Ravenscroft's invention, the prices of glasses dropped steeply until by the end of the century it was six shillings a dozen.

A George Ravenscroft glass, also in the V&A

Ravenscroft's was a short but glittering career that lasted only five years,as he closed his manufacturing business in Henley-on-Thames in 1679. The following year he joined the Vauxhall glassworks, working with the company until his death in 1683. By the late seventeenth century, the trade in Venetian glass was in serious decline, whilst in England there was a boom in glass manufacture. The English couldn't get enough of this light, clear glass and it was produced in ever-growing quantities to meet burgeoning demand at home and abroad.

Read more about it from Glass Historian David C Watts

Sources:
English Drinking Glasses - L M Bickerton
History of Glass - Dan Klein and Ward Lloyd

'That bald rat.' Official court portrait of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi by Kano Mitsunobu (1561-1608)
‘Your beauty grows day by day. Tokichiro complains about you constantly and it is outrageous. While that bald rat flusters around trying to find another good woman, you remain lofty and elegant. Do not be jealous. Show Hideyoshi this letter.’

So speaks the unexpectedly kindly voice of Oda Nobunaga in a letter addressed to Nene, Hideyoshi’s wife, around 1575. The imperious Nobunaga was, at the time, lord of half Japan and determined to conquer the rest of it in short order.

Hideyoshi, ‘that bald rat’, also known as Tokichiro, was Nobunaga’s right hand man. As the adage went, if a nightingale refused to sing, Nobunaga’s response would be to kill it. Hideyoshi’s would be to persuade it to sing - and to sing the song he wanted.

I love the way the letter takes us all the way back to 1575 and gives us a sense of Nobunaga’s, Hideyoshi’s and Nene’s personalities. At the time Hideyoshi was 37 and famously had an eye for the ladies. Nene was 25 and they’d been married for 12 years.

Hideyoshi on his horse with his splendid headdress
(unknown artist)

Meanwhile in England, some 6000 miles away, Elizabeth I - born in 1533 and a near contemporary of both Nobunaga (b 1534) and Hideyoshi (b 1537) - was on the throne. That same year, 1575, Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester organised a magnificent three week party at his lavish palace, Kenilworth, as an extended marriage proposal to his queen. He failed, of course.

Wives of the Warlords, Part II

Monkey
Twelve years earlier, in 1563, Nene was thirteen, strikingly beautiful and vibrant with a wisdom and calm beyond her years. She was the daughter of a mid-ranking samurai and lived in the castle town of Kiyosu where Nobunaga was daimyo. She had plenty of suitors, handsome eligible samurai of high rank. But there was also Tokichiro, a short, scrawny 25-year-old with a face like a monkey. People called him ‘Monkey’, which didn’t seem to bother him.

Hideyoshi with some of his ladies by Sasaki
Toyokichi - Nihon Hanazue, 1896 (Walters Art
Museum; gift of Mr and Mrs C.R.Snell Jr.)

Tokichiro was low class, of farming stock, but had miraculously risen through the ranks to enter Nobunaga’s service. He’d been Nobunaga’s sandal bearer, stable boy, gardener and other menial jobs. He certainly didn’t seem to have many prospects. But Nene decided to marry him. One can only assume it was a love match - extraordinary in those days.

By the time Nobunaga sent his letter, Tokichiro had risen in rank to daimyo and was building his first castle. He was now a general with the name Hideyoshi. He was a superb strategist and a brilliant man. But his key quality was his golden tongue. He could talk himself out of the most hopeless of situations and charm people into doing practically anything he wanted. In fact he turned around battles just by his ability to use surprise tactics and his powers of persuasion.

He was also genuinely likeable. Nobunaga became fiercer with age and was prone to terrifying rages. But whenever he heard Hideyoshi’s voice in the distance, a smile would twitch the corner of his lips. He’d be unable to carry on being angry no matter how hard he tried. Hideyoshi had the unfailing ability to make him relax and laugh.

The Power Behind The Throne

Lady Kodai-in - Nene in old age
(after Hideyoshi's death she took the tonsure)

As Hideyoshi was building his castle, a town sprang up around it. Being a kind-hearted man, Hideyoshi didn’t demand a huge amount of tribute from the townsfolk. But the people in neighbouring towns started to complain because they had to pay so much more tribute than the folk in Hideyoshi’s new town so he decided he’d better increase it.

At this point Nene stepped in. Throughout their marriage he discussed everything with her and when they were apart they regularly exchanged letters. Very few of hers remain but his have been collected and translated. On the matter of tribute, he writes to her that he has followed her advice and decided not to raise it. ‘Because you refused I froze it. Although I issued a new order, because you refused it I decided to exempt their tributes.’

After Nobunaga’s shocking murder in 1582 Hideyoshi set to work to finish off his project of bringing Japan together under his banner, transforming it from 260 warring princedoms into a single unified peaceful country. While he was away campaigning it was Nene’s job to run the castle. She was in charge of the money and of taking care of his mother and their adopted children and of policing and punishing miscreants.

Hideyoshi cherryblossom viewing
with Lady Chacha

Nene advised him on everything - from how to run his military campaigns to how to run the empire. He in his turn wrote to her describing every political decision and every military action - hostages taken, heads taken, how he overcame this clan and that clan. He also wrote on projects he was just beginning to think about, like subjugating Korea and China. Nene always had wise advice to give.

Some of his letters to her are rather sweet. After describing his latest military campaign he writes that his skin is getting dark and his hair is turning grey and he’s afraid she might not like him any more.

Concubines

Then there were the concubines. Any sensible warlord’s wife knew perfectly well that her husband would have concubines - it went with the job. Hideyoshi did however take it rather to extremes. The Jesuit priest Luis Frois who was around at the time wrote that he had a hundred concubines - though as a Jesuit Frois probably wasn’t clear on exactly who was a concubine and who was a lady attendant. Nevertheless it was pretty good going for a short scrawny bloke with a face like a monkey.

Lady Chacha (Yodo Dono)

Nene put up with it all with good humour - until Lady Chacha came along. It’s impossible to imagine how people felt over four centuries ago. Nevertheless we can guess that Nene wasn’t happy.

Nene never had any children and neither did all those concubines - until Chacha. When Hideyoshi was 52 Chacha (who was 23) gave him a son and heir, Tsurumatsu. Hideyoshi doted on him and wrote him many letters signed, touchingly, ‘Daddy’. But the ‘little prince’ died when he was two and Hideyoshi was distraught. Then Chacha gave him another son, Hideyori, who survived him and became his heir.

Chacha was a famous beauty and came from the most noble possible lineage. She was the daughter of Nobunaga’s sister, Lady Oichi, another famous beauty who had gone to her death in a blaze of glory, accompanying her husband in death when he fell foul of ... yes, Hideyoshi. While Nene was modest and down to earth, Lady Chacha was a prima donna and when she became the mother of the heir demanded her own castle. Hideyoshi had one built for her - Yodo Castle, half way between Kyoto and Osaka.

Hideyoshi with some of his women
by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Japanese Renaissance

In the end Hideyoshi reigned for twelve years after unifying Japan and ushered in a glorious golden age of the arts. He loved culture, perhaps because he had grown up without anything, in poverty. He studied Noh dancing assiduously and became a great aficionado of the tea ceremony. He once famously invited the entire populace of Kyoto to a ten day tea ceremony (though he got bored and it only lasted a single day) and he filled Kyoto with beautiful buildings and was a great patron of the arts. The Momoyama period has gone down in history as a Golden Age.

He died - not on the battlefield but in his bed - in 1598. Both Nene and Lady Chacha survived him. The question was, who would be his successor? Wisely, Nene backed Tokugawa Ieyasu - who, as the adage went, waited and waited for that stubborn nightingale to sing; and now finally it sang. Lady Chacha and her son Hideyori backed those who opposed him and, like her mother, Chacha ended in a blaze of glory, killing herself as Osaka Castle went up in flames around her.

For, as all students of Japanese history know well, the age that followed did not belong to Hideyoshi’s rather useless heir, Hideyori, but to the stolid, patient Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan just as it was coming out of the Tokugawa period and is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

All pictures courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Alas, there are no pictures of the young Nene.

'Monkey.' Portrait of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi

This will be my last History Girls blogpost, at least for now.

I was recently awarded a UK Research and Innovation Fellowship to study the emotional and cultural history of face transplants - not yet a reality in the UK but since 2005 a method of surgically treating severe facial trauma in many countries. You can learn more about that news here.

Although most of the ethical and experimental groundwork had been carried out in the UK, France was the first country to undertake a face transplant - on Isabelle Dinoire, who had been savaged by her own dog. America, Spain, Mexico and China have all contributed to the “face race”, with varying degrees of success.

From the vantage point of a historian of emotion, what is striking is the lack of coherent, psychological understanding of the global impact of face transplants. We have no long term data on their emotional effects, or the challenge they might post to the idea of the self.

And how much more problematic are questions of identity, appearance and emotional wellbeing in the age of the selfie, when looks seem to be everything?

Which is where my project comes in. I will be working with people living with disfigurement (as a legal term though not a comfortable one), surgeons, nurses, face transplant recipients and donor families. And thinking about what face transplants mean at a cultural level - working with artists, writers (including History Girls' own Louisa Young) - ethicists and philosophers.

This is a transformative opportunity for me, and a chance to make an impact in a complex but critical field. It's also a major time commitment, which is why I have to say farewell for now.

There is always a silver lining: taking my place will be the historian Susan Vincent. Sue was my PhD contemporary at the University of York, and she has written wonderful books on the histories of clothing, hair and fashion. I interviewed her for this blog back in November 2018.

Thanks for everything, fellow History Girls and readers! Keep in touch.

www.fayboundalberti.com

At the end of April, we had a few days down on Exmoor, venturing just over the border from Somerset into Devon. Unfortunately, a heavy bank of rain (closely followed by Storm Hannah) was paying a visit at the same time - but in fact that turned out to be a Good Thing, because it led us a National Trust house nearby called Arlington Court. We'd never heard of it, but were delighted to have come across it.

Arlington Court: photo from the National Trust.
(All other photos are mine.)

Relatively speaking, the house isn't huge - but it's packed full of interesting things. The last owner, Miss Rosalie Chichester, was a great collector, and she left everything to the Trust.

Her father, Sir Bruce, died when she was only 15. Until he became ill, he had lived lavishly, spending money he didn't have on the estate and on entertaining - so that Rosalie inherited a hefty burden of debt, as well as the house and its acres of parkland. There's a room upstairs which is furnished to reflect her personality and interests at this point. She had her two pet mice stuffed when she died, and there they are, encased in small glass cases on the mantelpiece. There are books, toys, drawings and pictures; it's a comfortable, slightly shabby room, and you get the impression of an eager, enthusiastic personality, a girl who loved her home but was also curious about the world beyond.

As the owner of an estate which was saddled with heavy debt, she was never going to attract swarms of suitors, and she never did marry. But it doesn't seem to have bothered her: she certainly didn't become a reclusive, quiet spinster. She was careful with the estate, cancelling her father's extravagant plans for expansion, and over a number of years she managed to pay off the money owed. In any case, she had her own ideas about what she wanted to do with the grounds in particular.

For a start, very unusually for this part of the world, she was adamantly against hunting. So she had an iron fence erected round the park: it was to be a safe haven for deer and any other animals which chose to seek refuge at Arlington. In order to study the natural world which she loved, she had an observatory built. She was also a keen photographer, and some of her pictures form a slideshow of the estate as it was at the beginning of the 20th century

As time went on and the debts began to clear, she used the extra money she now had at her disposal to travel widely with a paid companion. You can see at the house some of the journals she wrote; there is one of New Zealand illustrated with lots of sketches of the people, places and things that she saw.

She was a keen collector, and she used one room in her house as a museum for all the curiosities she ammassed. Its glass display cases are crammed with pewter mugs, pretty china, masses of exquisite shells - and model ships. Her grandfather had been a sailor, and her nephew, Sir Francis Chichester, was to become famous for being the first man to circumnavigate the world by himself. For her part, she expressed her interest in matters maritime by collecting the most beautiful models of ships of all kinds, and they are to be seen all over the house. This one is made out of spun glass: another was made by French prisoners of some war or other - the ropes are made of tightly woven human hair.

A conch - shades of 'Lord of the Flies'!

Pewter and china in the museum

More model ships

A scrapbook, with a page of jokes

The house, bright and comfortable, full of what some might call clutter, surely reflects its last owner's personality: lively, interested in everything, cheerful and creative. I suspect she would have been great company.

There's also a lovely little garden (which naturally needed to be walled because of all the animals), which at the time we were there was splashed with vivid pink and crimson azaleas. In the wider parkland there were lovely drifts of pale blue camassias.

The National Trust has its carriage museum there too - so if you ever want to know exactly what a brougham, a phaeton, a gig or a mail coach looked like, this is the place to go. The centrepiece of the collection, which is the only thing one is not allowed to photograph, is the Speaker's Coach, a vision in gold, extraordinarily ornate, straight out of a fairytale. The last speaker to have used it was George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy - a lad from the Welsh valleys, who must surely have reflected, as he rode in it, how very unexpected and various life can turn out to be.

With the gardens full of rhododendrons and exotic blooms, today seemed a good month to re-post this review of History Girl Sue Purkiss's plant-hunting adventure for junior/middle-grade readers.

How does one start to hunt for plants? My own love of plants began with Cecily Mary Barker’s picture-and-verse Flower Fairy books, Yet the works are not pure fantasy: Barker’s charming fairies, first appearing in 1923, were based on drawings of real children in her sister’s kindergarten, while the detailed flowers and settings are painted with meticulous, botanically-accurate skill. The Flower Fairies taught me- and no doubt many others – to find and identify common plants, even though some of those flowers are rarer than they used to be.

However, Barker’s pretty fairies - still hovering around today – can surely only charm a very particular young audience. There’s space for bolder books about the history of the plants and stories for older boys and girls who would welcome tales of adventure.

I was very pleased to come across JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY, a novel for 8-12 year olds, written by fellow History Girl Sue Purkiss.

Inspired by the lives of 18th century plant-hunters, Sue has written a fast-moving historical adventure story. Jack Fortune, the young hero, is energetic and most interestingly naughty. Bored, and not allowed to attend school, he can’t resist devising tricks that shame his stern widowed Aunt Constance and horrify her genteel guests.

As a character, Jack is immediately likeable - and trouble! When he accidentally damages a priceless object, Constance summons her brother, Uncle Edmund, insisting that he take responsibility for his young nephew.

Uncle Edmund refuses; not only is the scholarly bachelor unused to children but he is about to depart on his first plant-hunting trip to India. Jack, hearing this exciting news, wants to accompany the expedition so Uncle Edmund reluctantly agrees, while Aunt Constance, unable to face any more disobedience, agrees despite the dangers.

From this point on Jack and his uncle – and the reader– experience a new life full of challenge and interesting people and places. They sail to Calcutta, cross the Great Plain and travel through the jungle before reaching a high mountain kingdom with a hidden valley. All the way, Jack and his uncle face setbacks and dangers: vagabonds, wild animals, “mountain sickness” and, at last, reports of a huge, legendary being who brings death to any intruders in the Hidden Valley. Moreover, Jack soon realises that an unknown traitor is spoiling the expedition’s food supplies and stirring up problems with local villagers. Who wishes them ill? Is it Sonam, their guide or Thondup, the heir to the throne who accompanies the party, and whom Jack has begun to admire?

Sue Purkiss’s plot moves along with plenty of pace and action and just enough description to fix the story in its historical time and place without overloading her young reader’s enjoyment. She also touches lightly and skillfully on darker issues such as servants and colonisation, but lets the bold adventure end as happily as it should.

However, I felt the book was about more than the plant-hunting quest: Jack and Uncle Edmund make a wonderfully odd and warm partnership, and the hardships met on the expedition teach them more about the other.

Bookish Uncle Edmund slowly reveals his bravely determined nature and his passion for plant-hunting. Gradually, Jack sees the burning passion that lies behind Uncle Edmund’s search, and his desperate hope that the plant will bring him fame, fortune and the approval of the influential Sir Joseph Banks when - and if - they ever return to London.

Meanwhile, faced with real demands and responsibilities rather than endless tea-parties and polite manners, Jack becomes the boy-hero he was meant to be and is even able to accept his own inherited artistic gifts and inheritance.

One of the particular reasons I enjoyed JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY was that, despite the difficulties Jack and his Uncle face, the adventure is a positive and hopeful experience and one that might encourage children to look beyond everyday life and issues in school and out into a much wider world with all its interweaving histories.

Penny Dolan

ps. Years after the Flower Fairies, my gardening interests led to a set of children’s stories based on the history of British gardening, written for re-telling at RHS Harlow Carr gardens.

NB. Alma Books have also created some downloadable activities to support of this title: http://almabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Jack-Fortune-Activity-Book.pdf as well as an interview with the author Sue Purkiss: http://almabooks.com/interview-sue-purkiss-author-jack-fortune/

I own several different packs of Tarot cards. Over the years, I've used them for inspiration and divination. In various ways and guises, they've found their way into the books I've written. The name derives from the Italian tarocchi , a pack of playing cards used from the 15th Century for various card games, some of them still played today in various parts of Europe: Italy, France and Austria. Like common playing cards, the tarocchi pack is divided into suits: coins, clubs, cups, and swords, which equate with our more familiar diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades. It has the same numbered cards, from one to ten and ‘face’ cards: King, Queen, Knight and Jack or Knave. There is also a single separate card, the Fool, which equates with our Joker, and has no face value but can be played in different ways, depending on the game, and is therefore, in some ways, the most valuable card to have.

The tarot pack was not just used for playing games, it was also used for cartomancy, the art of fortune telling, with the different cards and suits attributed with different significances and meanings. The esoteric tarot developed from this. One of the earliest packs used in this way was the Tarot of Marseilles . The design has changed very little. This is a 1751 pack and the pack I use today.

The biggest difference between a tarocchi pack, a pack of ordinary playing cards and an esoteric pack is the Major Arcana (the greater secrets). The Minor Arcana (the lesser secrets) is almost the same as in a conventional pack of cards. Fifty six cards, divided into four suits, ten numbered cards, with the addition of a Knight into the face card suits. The Major Arcana is different. It contains 22 cards without suits: The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Heirophant (or Pope), The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World, and The Fool. The cards are numbered from I to XXI in Roman numerals with the Fool, like the Joker in a conventional pack of cards, having no number.

For many people, this is where the fascination, mystery - even fear – lies. In a reading, cards from the Minor Arcana are just as significant to the querent but it is cards from the Major Arcana that appear to hold the greater meaning. The central images appear simple but there is a strangeness about them. The backgrounds and the details within them are heavy with symbolism and invite you to look deeper in. The cards are not just for divination. They can be used for meditation, creative inspiration or as arresting images in their own right.

My favourite card is The Fool, titled Le Mat in the Tarot de Marseilles. In more modern packs he is shown as a young man walking, seemingly unaware, towards the brink of a precipice. He is accompanied by a small dog and holds a rose in one hand and carries a bundle over his shoulder. He is accompanied by a butterfly and above him, the sun shines in the sky. The Fool belongs to the tradition of the Wise Fool, the Sacred Fool. The rose he carries symbolises innocence and hope. The dog at his side, sometimes tearing at his clothing, symbolises old ways of thought seeking to hold him back. The pure light of the sun shines down on him and his bundle contains an accumulated store of wisdom and knowledge. He is led on by a butterfly to new adventures and higher attainment. That he is stepping towards a precipice, doesn’t seem to matter. He knows he will be just fine.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

I thought for this month’s post I might do something a bit different. Rather than write a piece on some part of Roman history I thought I would recommend some Roman related things that I have enjoyed and that you might too.

Books

When I became Roman obsessed in the early 90s there really wasn’t much in the way of ancient Rome set fiction. What there was were weighty, long and frankly, dull books in the vein of Ben Hur and Quo Vadis. Which ,yes I did read but by Jupiter’s fiery thunderbolt they were a struggle.
But then I stumbled across a few books that gripped me in their story and not once did I have to skip chapters of long philosophical meanderings to get to the ruddy plot.

I, Claudius – Robert Graves

The classic book that has forever, probably unfairly, set our views on the Emperor Claudius. Here he is the underdog in the nest of vipers that is the Julian Claudian clan. He’s clever and able but he can’t show it if he wants to survive. But survive he does through the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius and Caligula. Which is no mean feat given the family members who are popping off left, right and centre of him.

This is also notably the book that casts Livia as a mass murderer intent on getting her son, Tiberius to be emperor. You do have to wonder when she found the time for all that murder let alone why she bothered when the Tiberius portrayed here is such a freaky pervert. Really she should have bumped off everyone much sooner. I mean at one point there is only Agrippa and Augustus standing between Tiberius and emperor-hood. Surely that was the time to strike? Why wait until Agripppa has children who clutter up the system? It makes no sense.

Elsewhere Graves tries to make more sense by straightening out that Julio Claudian habit of giving everybody the same name, e.g. Agrippina becomes Pina, Drusus Castor. Which takes all the fun out of trying to work out which generation of Julia is bonking about the place.

It’s a work of classical fiction. But with sex a plenty, skulduggery a muchly and all the best bits of Suetonius wrapped up as literature.

The Falco Series – Lindsey Davis

Whereas I, Claudius concentrates on life in the palace and the fierce battling to be emperor, the Falco books examine life for the ordinary Roman making do. Yes, Imperial types such as Vespasian and Titus do feature and act as sometime employer of Falco but the emphasis is very much on Rome’s ‘others’.

Falco himself is from the rough Aventine district where he works as a detective for hire. Falco’s job gives Davis scope to explore wide ranging aspects of ancient Rome, such as criminal gangs, religion, law, gladiatorial shows and slavery. She also takes Falco out of Rome into the provinces like Britannia and Germania.

They are written as a 40s crime noir but with the twist that although Falco is your typical cynical, hard edged tec he is burdened with a large interfering family. Philip Marlow never had to counter with a Ma like Falco’s!

In fact it is Falco’s extended family, friends and enemies that make the series so enjoyable. Not least his arch nemesis, palace spy Anacrites. Now I know my fellow writer and ex History Girl, Alison Morton will disagree with me most passionately on this, but Anacrites is by far the best character. Possibly because Davis maintains him as a man of mystery, the genuine noir loner, for nearly the entire series.

Falco says of Anacrites that ‘he could be pleasant and was tolerable to look at’. By which I think we can deduce he is well sexy and charming. For which I will forgive his occasional attempts to murder Falco.

Augustus - Allan Massie

This was the book that cemented my passion for ancient Rome. It is a simply brilliant telling of the rise of Augustus from the man himself. Massie gets Rome's first emperor dead on; his sentimentality but ruthless ambition, his never ending drive and controlling nature. If you ever wanted to understand how devious Octavius become benevolent first citizen Augustus, this is the book to read.
Massie followed this up with Tiberius. Another absolute cracker of a read, Massie reject those Capri stories about Tiberius and instead paints a credible picture of a humiliated but proud man. It has never been bettered as a portrait of Tiberius, nobody has come even close. Highly, highly recommended.

Other books worth reading:
Steven Saylor’s hero Gordianus the Finder flexes his detecting muscles in Late Republican Rome. It would be difficult to write a dull book about the late republic, it is positively bursting with characters and incidents. Both of which Saylor uses magnificently.
His portrayal of Marcus Caelius Rufus is stuck in my head as definitive and nothing but nothing can shift it.

Also see Ruth Downie's Medicus series for another Roman detective, this time based in the wilds of Roman occupied Britain.

Podcasts
Podcasts! They’re like radio shows that you can listen to anytime you like! And seemingly the technology is there for any bod with a bedroom and a microphone to inform the nation about their particular passion. Which has done wonders for history broadcasting.

Totalus Rankium

As the introduction informs, this podcast “ranks all the emperors from Augustus to Augustulus” not unlike a game of Top Trumps.
Our presenters Jamie and Robb review the record of each Roman Emperor giving them a rating for

Fightius Maximus – Were they an all conquering Caesar? Or a hide in a march until the battle is all done with type of emperor?
Opprobrium Crazium – Meglomania alone won’t get you a high ranking, best to juice it up with dollops of scandal, a dash of sadism and a strong belief that your horse would make a decent politician.
Sucessus Ultimus – With all the power in the world, how well did they wield it?
Imigo Facius – With extra points for sexiness, a commanding chin and a truly great beard.
Tempo Completo – How long did they reign for?

And then finally deciding whether they possess a certain Je Na Caesar

As you can probably guess from the above, this is no serious history programme. It is a very funny, sometimes nonsensical, sometimes idiotic and always hilarious podcast.
Where else can you hear about the Flavian conquest of the east on two Vespa mopeds?
Or the students that plagued Antoninus Pius’ life with pranks?
Not to mention Elagbalus and his unique way of hiring staff based on their erm advantage.

Highly recommended. Though a word from the wise, probably best not to listen to at work. Unless you want to spit tea all over your desk from laughing, as I once did.
Series One took us up to the fall of the Western Empire. They are now covering the Byzantines who are properly extreme in a cut off your nose, eunuch-tastic way.

Roman Things to See (if you’re not in Rome)

British Museum
Upstairs in the Roman Gallery you have the treat of hanging out with scary Augustus head. Be sure not to look in his eyes.

Look out for the clever positioning of the bust of Tiberius, a clear three paces behind that of his mother Livia. Ha! Also Hadrian and his lover Antoninus directly facing a bust of Hadrian’s wife Sabrina. Ouch!

Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge
Having lived near Cambridge the vast majority of my life I had somehow, shamefully, never quite managed to visit the Museum of Classical Archaeology.

I put this right a few months ago. Situated in the grounds of one of the colleges this Museum is a joyful collection of plaster casts of famous Greek and Roman statues.

Augustus kindly points the way to the toilets. Gent

L.J. Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors Series of books.

The “inspirational homes” I discussed in my previous two posts represented the sort of mediaeval houses that might have been lived in by the poorer members of society and those of the “middling sort”. We saw how the way of life afforded by the homes of the wealthier members of society included more space, a little more privacy, a degree of greater warmth and light. The peasants might have thought the homes of the yeoman farmer and the merchant offered unbridled luxury compared to their own modest houses, even if, to us, those “luxurious” houses still seem distinctly lacking in comfort.

So what of the houses of the gentry? I am not considering here the great castles and palaces of the aristocracy, for none of the characters in my novels have such high status. But my novels do have knights and their ladies, the sort of people who held manors big and small, some of which (though not all) included a manor house. Manor houses might have been relatively modest, scarcely much different from the yeoman’s farmstead, Bayleaf, that I described last month. Others might have been quite grand, almost castle-like, with high crenellated walls, towers and moats. And of course there were manor houses of all sizes in between. But what perhaps they all had in common at this period was that they were centred around a main great hall, had a number of other rooms and most likely a solar on the first floor.

These posts concern buildings that have “inspired” me in my writing about the homes in which my characters live. For the previous two posts, the houses I discussed came from either the Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex, or English Heritage. In today’s post, the “inspirational home” again comes from English Heritage.

Stokesay Castle is a 13th century fortified manor house 7.5 miles (12 km) north-west of Ludlow in Shropshire. It is perhaps not quite the right style for a Hampshire manor house, but nonetheless I love it and its interior in particular lives in my head as I write about the homes of my lords and ladies.

Stokesay Castle, Shropshire
By Andrew Mathewson, CC BY-SA 2.0

This wonderful building was constructed in the 1280/90s. It was extended and refurbished during the 17th century, but it is the 13th century aspects of the house that are my “inspiration”. The house is another merchant’s house, built at almost exactly the same time as John Fortin’s house in Southampton, which we saw last month. In Shropshire, the wool merchant Laurence of Ludlow, one of the richest men in England, bought the manor of Stokesay in 1281, and soon embarked upon building his grand house.

Ten years or so later he obtained a licence to crenellate – or fortify – his house. Although Edward I’s conquest of Wales in 1284 meant that there was now relative peace in the border counties, it seems that bands of thieves continued to roam the countryside and Laurence wanted to ensure that his new house was secure. However, the fortifications did not detract from Laurence’s apparent desire also to demonstrate his sophistication and wealth.

The house is surrounded by a walled moat, though it is not clear if it ever actually held water. An entrance through a gatehouse (17th century, though there was probably an earlier one) leads into the courtyard or bailey. The huge courtyard area (the grass in the photographs would not of course have been there) would have contained additional buildings, such as a kitchen, bakehouse and storerooms.

The main house has an enormous hall and an upper private solar area, and there is a tower at each end of the main building, also containing various private rooms and facilities like privies. To the south is a high crenellated tower, and to the north a tower whose roof balances that of the solar block at the other end of the main central building. On the west side of the building, however, the upper storey of this north tower juts out in a grand jetty. You can see this jettying in the first photo.

By Tony Harrison from Farnborough, UK -
Stokesay Castle Shropshire IMG_8744, CC BY-SA 2.0

By LisaPB73 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The great hall lies between the north tower and the solar block, beneath the wide span of roof that you can see in the picture above. On the east wall, overlooking the bailey, are four pointed gables, three of which have double lancet windows with a circular light at the top.

The vast space of the great hall has a magnificent cruck roof. Originally, the curving timber beams that hold up the roof – the “crucks” – reached further down the walls than they do now. Apparently they were replaced with stone in the 19th century when they began to rot. Nonetheless the roof is one of the glories of the hall.

Chris Gunns/Stokesay Castle, the great hall/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Nick Hubbard - Stokesay Castle-21
Uploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY 2.0

The high windows on the east side of the hall are matched by others on the west wall, making the great space really very light. Today, the windows are fully glazed, but originally it is likely that glass was put only in the top windows, leaving the lower ones to be covered by shutters in cold or wet weather.

Another of the hall’s glories is the wonderful staircase, most of which is original – that is, remarkably, its treads are over 700 years old! It leads to the upper rooms in the north tower. You can get a splendid view of the hall from the top of the staircase. But it is possible that, on special occasions, minstrels played on the gallery area at the top of the stairs.

It is imagined that the lord, Laurence, and his family and guests would have dined at a table set at the opposite end of the hall from the staircase. This table might well have been raised up from the floor on a dais. The rest of the household would sit at tables set along the side walls. The central hearth – octagonal in shape – was located in middle of the U shape of the tables, the smoke apparently curling up and out of an opening in the roof. I suppose that with the room being so very large, one might not have really noticed the unpleasantness of the smoke. Though it might also be true that the fire would have struggled to heat such an enormous, and enormously high, space!

It is thought that a timber screen might have been installed between the dining area and the staircase, sheltering the diners from the draughts coming from the great main door, which gave access out into the courtyard and the kitchens. It might also allow for the dishes being brought in from the kitchen to be given a discreet last-minute once-over to ensure they met Laurence’s undoubtedly high standards.

The north tower reached by the staircase has its original tiled floor and the remains of wall paintings. Interestingly (given that the great hall has a central hearth), there is a fireplace on a wall in both of the upper rooms. The top floor room overhangs the one beneath by means of a supported jetty on three sides (see the first photograph), although the windows themselves were added in the 17th century.

At the southern end of the hall is the two-storey solar block, which it is thought Laurence and his family used as their private living area until the south tower was built. The ground floor of the block contains what was probably a storeroom. The upper room of the block was refurbished in the 17th century, converting it into a panelled chamber, so sadly there is no sense of how it originally appeared. This room was accessed by an external staircase (the existing one is not original), and it seems that the staircase was sheltered by a “pentice”, a sloping roof attached to the wall. You can see the line of it in the photograph below, just underneath the cut-off window.

The Solar, Stokesay Castle
By Tony Grist - Photographer's own files, CC0

Beyond the solar block is the tall south tower, the most castle-like part of the house, built perhaps as a further demonstration of Laurence’s power and taste. But it was also where he moved his private quarters.

The room on the first floor has six windows giving views in almost every direction. Four of them are large enough to accommodate window seats, where – with a cushion or two, perhaps – it must have been very pleasant to sit on sunny days. But the windows were not glazed and had to rely on shutters to keep the heat in and the weather out. Fireplaces and access to a privy were provided for both this room and the one on the floor above. Plenty of mod cons!

By LisaPB73 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Sadly in some ways, English Heritage hasn’t attempted to furnish the mediaeval parts of Stokesay Castle, although there are a few pieces of furniture in the solar refurbished in the 17th century. It would be wonderful in particular to see the great hall furnished with cloth-covered tables, and benches, perhaps great tapestries on the walls, and to have a fire burning in the hearth, as they do in the houses at the Weald and Downland Museum. But I must put my disappointment aside and simply use my imagination and try to visualise what life in this wonderful building must have been like.

Clearly, Laurence of Ludlow’s fortified manor house was state-of-the-art in the 13th century. The grandeur of Stokesay Castle is undisputed, but the comforts of fireplaces and privies, the light offered by the large windows, the availability of lots of space and even a little more privacy, all of these surely contribute to its status as luxurious accommodation? But one presumes that, on his manor, while there might have been a few relatively affluent villeins whose homes were closer to the Bayleaf farmhouse we saw last month, the majority of his tenants undoubtedly lived out their lives in one of those small, dark, smoky cottages – with no luxury at all.

https://www.wealddown.co.uk/

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk

Labyrinths have always been a source of fascination to me. None more so than the famous lair of the Minotaur in ancient Crete. According to Greek myth, this bewildering structure was designed by the inventor Daedalus (father of the doomed Icarus) at the behest of King Minos. The maze was built in the city of Knossos to hold the half man/half bull monster to whom 7 youths and 7 maidens were sacrificed each year as tribute owed by the Athenian King Aegeus to Minos for killing the Cretan king’s son. The minotaur was ultimately slain by Aegeus’ son, Theseus, who was sent as one of the sacrificial youths to Knossos. Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, fell in love with the prince and assisted him to kill the monster and then escape the labyrinth by giving him a ball of thread to enable him to retrace his path.

Classical pattern, medieval pattern, modern walking labyrinth and hedge maze

A seven course single path design known as ‘unicursal’ became associated with the labyrinth on Cretan coins as early as 430 BC, and became common as a visual depiction of the legendary labyrinth from Roman times onwards. In later religious tradition, large labyrinth designs set into floors were walked and used for private meditation or for therapeutic purposes based on the concept of a pilgrimage from the entrance to the centre where God awaits. In comparison, a maze is a complex pattern with branches and dead ends known as ‘multicursal’ which require a series of choices to be made in order to safely navigate. Medieval garden hedges are a fine example of these.

In the ancient world, the feat of escaping a labyrinth was associated with a triumph of life over death. In some cases, navigating one was seen as a form of initiation where a boy was required to enter as a child and emerge as a man after surviving danger. One such initiation ritual was known as ‘The City of Troy’ in Rome and Etruria.

The City of Troy was a reference to the labyrinth of Crete. Yet what was the connection between the legendary cities of Troy and Knossos? An explanation comes from both archaeological evidence and the poetry of the Roman poet, Vergil.

Tragliatella Vase

In his great epic, The Aeneid, the Roman poet Vergil tells of the wanderings of Aeneas, the son of Anchises and Venus, following the fall of Troy. After fighting to defend the besieged city, Aeneas escaped carrying his father on his shoulders while leading his young son Ascanius (who later came to be called Iulus) to safety. According to Roman tradition, during the funeral games for his grandfather, Ascanius took part in a processional parade or dance called the Game of Troy (Lusus Trojae) while mounted on a horse given to him by the Carthaginian queen Dido. The young prince and his companions performed a complex weaving pattern by riding between and around each other as though threading their way through a labyrinth. Vergil drew a comparison between the tortuous convolutions of the rite to the twisting pathways within the Minotaur’s den at Knossos. He also referred to the manoeuvres of the game as mimicking the ‘Crane Dance’ performed by the youths Theseus saved from the Minotaur. From Vergil’s description it is clear that completing the game involved great skill to avoid injury or death.

The column split apart
As files in the three squadrons all in line
Turned away, cantering left and right; recalled
They wheeled and dipped their lances for a charge.
They entered then on parades and counter-parades,
The two detachments, matched in the arena,
Winding in and out of one another,
And whipped into sham cavalry skirmishes
By baring backs in flight, then whirling round
With leveled points, then patching up a truce
And riding side by side. So intricate
In ancient times on mountainous Crete they say
The Labyrinth, between walls in the dark,
Ran criss-cross a bewildering thousand ways
Devised by guile, a maze insoluable,
Breaking down every clue to the way out.
So intricate the drill of Trojan boys
Who wove the patterns of their prancing horses,
Figured, in sport, retreats and skirmishes

(Aeneid, V. 5.580–593 Translation by Robert Fitzgerald)

Vergil conjured the image of the Lusus Trojae when writing in the 1st century CE, but there is archaeological evidence of its existence dating from the late C7th BCE. The Tragliatella Vase discovered near the Etruscan city of Caere (modern Cerveteri) depicts two horsemen emerging from a spiral marked with the word ‘Truia’. A line of marching warriors is also displayed on the wine jug which seems to suggest that the vase portrays a military ceremony similar to the one of legend. As the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, it is plausible that the equestrian ceremony that was later referred to by Vergil was in fact an Etruscan tradition.

Detail Tragliatella Vase City of Troy design

The Game of Troy was ‘revived’ by Julius Caesar who claimed to be a descendant of Iulus (Ascanius) and was performed by the young sons of high ranking families. It was not associated with any particular religious festival and was conducted at funeral games and in military triumphs. Suetonius and Tacitus also wrote of the Lusus Trojae which appears to have become more of a military review by the time of Nero.

With my love of all things Etruscan, I found the etchings on the humble Tragliatella Vase intriguing enough to inspire me to include an episode in my book The Golden Dice: A Tale of Ancient Rome involving the Troy Game. Yet what strikes me most about the Lusus Trojae is how legend, poetry and history are intertwined and held fast by a strong thread from two epic stories that inspired three great civilisations: Etruria, Greece and Rome.

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tales of Ancient Rome saga. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com

Images are courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Anyone who cares about history is obsessed with dates. We locate rulers with them. We decide what's historical and what's too close to our own lifetime to dare creep into that camp with them. As historical fiction writers we frequently weep over them and wish we could smudge a birth date here or a battle there to make our plot lines work. But how many, to borrow a phrase from 1066 and All That, can we trust are genuine - is it, as Misters Sellars and Yeatman would have it, really only two, reduced from four as two weren't memorable?

Warren Field Lunar Calendar: University of Birmingham

Trying to keep track of the time goes back almost to the dawn of it. The first formulized calendars date from the Bronze Age, but the title of 'world's oldest calendar', awarded in 2013 (more than three sources quote this date so I'm going to accept it) goes to an arrangement of twelve pits and an arc in Warren Field, Scotland which is approximately 10,000 years old. The oldest-still-in-use award is claimed by the Jewish calendar which was introduced in the ninth century BC.

The Lost 11 Days: Today in History

Baked into the development of all our measuring systems is the differing lunar year (354 days) and solar year (365 days). The Roman Calendar, 45 BC, introduced the concept of leap years to try and solve this mismatch. By the time the Gregorian Calendar was floated in 1582, the Roman's miscalculation of the solar year had thrown the seasons, and therefore Easter, out of sync. Pope Gregory's attempts to solve this involved changing the leap year system to a new calculation based on years divisible by four rather than an extra day every four years. Or something on those lines that defies my understanding. Anyway it obviously worked because, as we all know, Easter is now an immovable feast. Not everyone liked the changes: Germany resisted the swap until 1700 and England, as warm then to the idea of European regulations as it ever was, stuck it out on the old system until 1752. By this point the seasons were so messed up, Parliament took the rather fabulous decision to advance the year overnight from September 2nd to September 14th, thus removing 11 days at a stroke. Take all this into account and is it any wonder that the dates we choose as significant can sometimes feel more like a collective act of will than a fixed and certain point?

Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Which brings me back, finally, to where you might have thought this article was going: the beginning of the Wars of the Roses. Dating the start of conflicts is always a troublesome thing. I remember my confusion at school after being initially taught that dates were absolute and then being introduced to the Hundred Years War. Rounding down its extra 16 years seemed to offend both the laws of History and Maths. That the conflict was a series of wars and didn't even attract that name until the nineteenth century was a revelation left for university, by which time I was, luckily, a more cynical creature. If the Thirty Years war lasted longer than the 1618-1648 timeline given to it, I don't want to know.

Perhaps the problem goes back to our need to define the reasons for a key event in a way that can be regurgitated in an exam format. Four causes good, one cause even better. The start date for WWI is recorded across all common sources as 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. If asked, I would guess most people would state the main cause as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand - or, as Baldrick so beautifully puts it in Blackadder Goes Forth, when 'Archie Duke shot an ostrich because he was hungry'. That act has become our shorthand for all the colonial and dynastic disputes that went before. Similarly we start WWII on 1 September 1939 with its blitzkrieg images rather than the 1938 Anschluss, or the 1933 Nazi rise to power, or the end of WWI... Obviously only the world's biggest bore would refuse to accept the commonly-agreed answer and we'd soon lose the pub quiz and all our mates if we disputed every date. The narrative of remembering is however, as always, in the victors' hands.

Henry VI Part One

Today, May 22nd, is the anniversary of the First Battle of St Albans, fought between the rival houses of York and Lancaster in 1455 and commonly given as the starting point for the Wars of the Roses. The battle itself was a short-lived thing, lasting less than an hour and without major casualties (in context of the engagements that would follow), apart from Edmund Beaufort, Earl of Somerset who was killed. Its consequences, however, were widespread. The alignment of Somerset with the House of Lancaster led not only to his but to the death of all his male heirs, ending the House of Beaufort. The bravery displayed by the Earl of Warwick began the myth-building around him which led to his 'kingmaker' title and his later over-reaching. King Henry VI's capture paved the way for the Duke of York to reclaim his position as Protector of England and take again the controlling hand over the kingdom the Lancastrians had only just seized back following the King's prolonged period of physical and mental incapacitation. And the Yorkists won, so they liked to remember it.

The battle started the openly bloody phase but it did not start the civil war. The origins of that go back to the eleventh century and the first Plantagenet king, Henry II, and his battling brood. No one sat comfortable on the throne for two hundred years and then, in 1399, the key split came: the deposition of Richard II by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. That particular tussle split an already hostile family into two competing branches (the Lancastrians following Henry's line and the Yorkists from Richard) and the original Game of Thrones began. What finally tipped the dynastic feuding into full-blown conflict? A weak king. The saintly Henry VI with his catatonic illness was, by any measure, unfit to rule. Pair that with a strong man in opposition (Richard, Duke of York), a Queen with a long-awaited heir and no intention of relinquishing power (Margaret of Anjou) and all the fortunes tied up in aristocratic privilege and it's little surprise that a war erupted. And our shorthand for all that is the First Battle of St Albans. (And yes, I appreciate that's a whirlwind tour but there's a lot more detail in my novel, just saying). Perhaps the next question should be when did the civil war end? Easy: 1485 and the Battle of Bosworth. Except, of course, it didn't - the ramifications were still shaking the throne when the Tudors climbed on it.

Mary Beard's Twitter Challenge

Causes and dates. We need them to make sense of where we are in the world and what brought us here but they aren't always reliable. A few months ago, Mary Beard asked her followers on Twitter to set future exam questions on what got us to Brexit. The answers were depressingly entertaining. A Level, 2069: Summarise the latest plan for Britain to exit the EU. Discuss the shifting relationship between Britain and Europe, using examples from 6200 BCE, 55 BCE, 43 CE, 410 CE, 865, 1066, 1534 and 2016-2019. To what extent did Brexit mean Brexit? My particular favourite was the short and to the point: When did Brexit End? Hopefully we can all agree on a date to that soon.

The Valence Casket, commissioned by the de Valence family circa 1290's V&A Museum

Once every three years it comes time to negotiate a new contract with my publisher. My stint with The History Girls has seen me through my Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy, The Summer Queen, The Winter Crown and the Autumn Throne, followed by Templar Silks and the forthcoming The Irish Princess (September).

My new contract, freshly signed is for two novels still to be written, as yet untitled, and a third one cheekily slipped in, titled The Coming of the Wolf, set just after 1066. I wrote the latter some time ago. It's a prequel to my first published novel The Wild Hunt. The Coming of the Wolf will have a blog to itself in the coming months, but it's not what I want to talk about today.

People often ask me how I choose who or what I am going to write about.

What tends to happen is that even while writing the previous book, I will be on the lookout for future projects. Very often the research for a current project will turn up something that sparks my interest and with initial curiosity piqued, I will then delve a little deeper and find out if the subject is just a passing fancy or whether it has a longer shelf life. Sometimes the subject matter will have been covered by another author, but it doesn't bother me. The deciding factor is me asking a prospective protagonist: 'What you can you tell me about yourself that is true to your life but that you have never told anyone before?' And if they want to enter into a contract with me, they sit down and tell me their stories. It is definitely a two way process. We both have to want to travel with each other.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was fascinating to research because from the in depth research I conducted, she bore little resemblance to the woman portrayed in several of her popular modern biographies, and often bucked the trend of the image fostered in the mainstream. However, I must have done something right because Michael Evans quoted my research in his work 'Inventing Eleanor' for Bloomsbury Academic and cited my research, commenting that I was a historical novelist who had managed to avoid the popular misconceptions about this great queen.

William Marshal's story 'The Greatest Knight was a worldwide bestseller for me and continues to be so; we are still travelling together 15 years later as I continue to study his life for my personal interest beyond the remit of historical fiction. Sometimes a character is for life rather than just the time it takes to write a book to order.

Study of tomb of William de Valence, Westminster Abbey. Wikipedia

The first of my new unwritten novels, currently untitled, came about because I happened to pick up a biography of one of William Marshal's granddaughters. Her name was Joanna de Munchensey and she married King Henry III's half-brother William de Valence. Should you potter along to the Dictionary of National biography, you will find a fairly long article written about her husband. You can visit his beautiful tomb in Westminster Abbey too.

What you will not find in the DONB is an entry for Joanna de Valence. Nor will you find her resting place because it has long been lost. The former seems hugely unfair, but one of those instances where the woman has been written out of the history and subsumed by her husband's achievements, which were only possible because of her. Her biographer, Linda Mitchell, in Joan de Valence: the Life and Influence of a 13th Century Noblewoman comments that "Joan de Valence exerted an influence on the political, social and cultural landscapes of the thirteenth Century, one that has been neglected and perhaps even deliberately erased..."

Mitchell's biography and her statements championing Joan immediately piqued my curiosity and led me to invite Joanna de Valence to the table - her husband too, who had his part to play and appears to have been a loving and lifelong partner from their marriage in their late teens through to their sixties. She was his 'Dear friend and companion'more than twenty years into their marriage and their last child was born around ten years after he wrote that endearment greeting to his wife. Mitchell comments that the completely unfair character assassination of William de Valence by historians and chroniclers has led to his 'erasure as a viable historical character' And William's erasure has led to an 'even more profound erasure of Joan in historical discourse.'

Rather like Mitchell, I was astonished at the dismissal of this lady from the records given her contribution and standing. We do have a few records from her household accounts in later life that paint a picture of a warm, busy, sociable and very capable lady who was legally and politically astute and refused to have the wool pulled over her eyes. However, for most of her life, she is ascribed no input or value. Her contribution is either glossed over or given a negative spin. Her husband is often dismissed as an arrogant foreign sponger (in spite of the majority of his household knights and servants being natives) and his loyalty to Henry III and Edward I is set at naught and shrugged off. But there are always two sides to every story, and it's time for the coin to be flipped and another side shown to the light.
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I relish a challenge, especially if it involves an underdog or someone who has been done down by history. Last year, with Joanna on my mind, I visited the Welsh Marches with the intention of going to Goodrich Castle which was Joanna's favourite home in the years following the Barons' Wars of the 1260's and a place she built up during her time as lady of Goodrich. We hired a holiday home for the duration of our stay, and it turned out, the owner of the holiday let was descended from Joanna and William de Valence via one of their daughters. Yes, some things are meant to be!
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Goodrich Castle. Author's photo.

I first fell in love with Venice when I was ten and since then I’ve been back many times. Heightened awareness of climate change made my recent visit even more moving. In November last year high winds combined with a seasonal high tide put much of Venice under water and created havoc as schools and hospitals were closed and people were advised against leaving their homes. Climate change related art has dominated the Venice Biennale this year. One of the more surreal sights in this dreamlike city is a white skyscraper floating past the end of a medieval street - actually a monstrous cruise ship, which damages the fragile lagoon ecosystem and pollutes the waters. Il mare la chiama - the sea is calling its bride, Venetians say when wind stirs up the water of the lagoon. There’s a very real danger that the sea will destroy its bride.

Thomas Mann compared entering Venice by one of the road or railway bridges to entering a palace through the back door. I’ve always used that door but now the approach is even more dazzling because of the Alilaguna, a frequent boat service from Marco Polo airport that takes you to every part of the city. On this visit I had time to explore some corners of the city I hadn’t seen before.

The church of S. Pietro di Castello has stood on this site since at least the 7th century. In the very early days there was a annual festival here when betrothed couples came to the church, the girls carrying their dowries in a little chest. In 944 Istrian pirates stormed the island and abducted the girls, with their dowries. The Doge led his fleet, pursued them, and triumphantly returned with both the girls and their money. This bizarre scene was reenacted in the Festa delle Marie for five hundred years. Now S. Pietro is a Palladian church with a sleepy grassy campo in front of it. It was Venice’s cathedral for two hundred and fifty years, until Napoleon deposed the last Doge and made San Marco, formerly the state church of the doges, the cathedral.

This is Gam Gam, my favourite kosher restaurant, just by the main entrance to the Ghetto. The origins of this word, which has spread all over the world, can be traced to the word gheto, which in Venetian means a foundry. This are was once an island where Venetian Jews were confined after sunset by decree. As Jews from all over Europe settled here each synagogue belonged to a different nationality—German, Italian, Spanish, and Sephardic. Last month it was heartbreaking to see armed soldiers guarding the ghetto against the violence of neo fascist anti-semitic groups like Casa Pound.

Torcello is one of the more remote islands in the lagoon. Venetians call it Torre e Cielo, towers and sky. Once twenty thousand people lived here and there were convents, a bishop and a thriving wool industry; then people left as malaria struck and canals silted up. Torcello is now more commercial than it used to be with some shops, cafes and restaurants, but has very few permanent inhabitants. On our last visit we met one of them - an old man playing chess with himself outside a house with a ‘for sale’ sign. He asked Gordon to stay and play chess with him but we were worried we’d miss the last boat back to Venice so we hurried on (and have felt guilty ever since). This year we noticed his house was boarded up, with an ATM machine where his front door used to be.

In 1678 Vivaldi was born in a campo, or piazza, round the corner from where we were staying, He taught the violin to the girls in a nearby foundling hospital, the Ospedale della Pietà, and was later promoted to music director. He was nicknamed il Prete Rosso, the Red Priest, because of his red hair (not his politics). It was frustrating to find that, of the vast quantity of covcerti and operas he wrote, only The Four Seasons seems to be regularly performed now in Venice. Many of his concerti were composed to celebrate splendid ceremonies like this one.

Before Napoleon conquered the Republic there were four great Ospedali in Venice that combined medical care with charity work. Their musical ensembles of orphaned girls, or cori , were remarkable in a society that disapproved of professional female musicians, apart from a few adored operatic divas. In 1743 Jean-Jacques Rousseau heard one of these choirs at the Ospedale dei Mendicanti and described their singing as “far superior to that of the opera, and which has not its like,either in Italy or the rest of the world.” These talented girls had to perform in raised galleries which had grating that hid the female singers and musicians from the eyes of the audience.

On another walk we wandered into Ospedale. surely the most beautiful working hospital in the world. On the Campo San Giovanni e Paolo there appear to be two great Renaissance churches next to one another; one of them, with a magnificent façade, is actually the main entrance to Venice’s hospital, an extraordinary complex of ancient and modern buildings that includes the Historical Medical Library, the Museum of Anatomic Pathology and a fascinating Pharmacy Museum.

This is the entrance to Arsenale, the shipyard of Venice during the great days of its empire. Founded in the twelfth century, it’s a huge walled area that still covers over a hundred acres and once employed two thousand workers. By the sixteenth century a galley could be built here and launched in a day. It’s guarded by the lions of St Mark and at the bottom of the door you can see sculptures of the Greek gods and allegorical figures. The statue of Nike, the winged goddess of victory, was added after the Venetian fleet helped to win the great sea battle of Lepanto in 1571. There’s also a bust of Dante and a quotation from Canto XXI of his Inferno, where he compares hell to the pitch made in the fiery depths of the Arsenal.

April 25th is both the Feast of St Mark, the patron saint of the city, and also the anniversary of the day in 1945 when American troops liberated Venice from Nazi and Fascist domination. A series of plaques all over the city, near bridges, remind you of the names of individuals who died fighting fascism (similar plaques in the pavement all over Berlin are memorials to Jewish families who once lived there). !n Giardini, the gardens where much of the Biennale takes place, young Venetians sang traditional songs and complained about their housing problems. We watched as an elderly crowd assembled to reminisce about the war and then marched off carrying a banner celebrating the courage of the Partigiani, or Resistance.

This photo shows the remembrance festival for Resistance fighters held last year in St Mark’s Square.

The permanent residential population of Venice is now only 53,000 people, most of them older, and each year about a thousand residents move away from the city. Venice is visited every year by twenty million tourists - who sometimes wonder why Venetians are less friendly than most other Italians. One hopeful development is the rise of the ASC, the Social Assembly for the House, a grassroots movement that helps families under threat of being thrown out of their homes by landlords who can, of course, make far more money out of renting their apartments to tourists than to young Venetians. Combined with the threat of climate change, there is a real risk that depopulation will turn Venice into a wondrous museum.

I am in the north of England promoting my new novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, which was published last week, 16th May.

Yesterday, my stop was organised by the White Rose Book shop in Thirsk. The event was held at the Rural Arts Centre, which is a rather lovely location in this fine old market town. My B & B accommodation was ten steps from the Herriot Museum. The Herriot Museum stands as a memorial to the veterinary surgeon, Alf Wight, who practised his animal wizardry for almost his entire career here in this once-remote location. Agricultural England. Thirsk remained the home of his practice even after he had become a world-wide sensation with his series of memoirs recounting his life working in the Yorkshire Moors.

Alf was born in Sunderland in 1916. He died in Thirlby four miles outside Thirsk in 1995. By the time he passed away, Alf, whose pen name was James Herriot, was an an international sensation. Not only had his books sold by the millions in English and translation everywhere in the world, they had been the inspiration for two cinema films, ninety episodes of television plus two television 'specials', Alf brought recognition to this area of Yorkshire. Like almost no other - until perhaps The Hobbit films shot in New Zealand - Alf quite literally transformed the impact of tourism on north-east England. It is over forty years since we began shooting the TV series and The Herriot trail remains big business today.

Alf with his wife, Joan. Joan was the inspiration for the character of Helen, the wife of James Herriot in the books. The role that I had the good fortune to play.

Principal cast of the TV series All Creatures Great and Small. The actors surrounding me are (anti-clockwise) Mary Hignett, Peter David, Robert Hardy and Christopher Timothy.

Our filming actually took place in the Yorkshire Dales rather than the Yorkshire Moors so I didn't have many opportunities to visit Thirsk back in the days when I was shooting. We came over to have dinner from time to time with Alf and Joan and I have been to Thirsk since the series finished. In 2016, the cast came together along with many locals and admirers from all over the world to celebrate the centenary of Alf's birth. It was a very special occasion, not least because it was the last time we all had dinner with the late Robert Hardy who died in August 2017.

This week when I stepped off the train, Thirsk was bathed in warm sunshine. A glorious mid-May day. My event for THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF was scheduled for 7.30 pm. After signing boxes of books at the White Rose bookshop, I was free to wander the market town.
My digs for the night, Kirkgate House is a Georgian property sitting in between The World of James Herriot Museum and a magnificent privately owned home.

23 Kirkgate was the original address for the veterinary practice of James Herriot/Alf Wight, known in the books as "Skeldale House". It is packed with memorabilia and also displays a part of the set we used for the TV series of All Creatures Great and Small. I popped in to say hello to everyone but I find walking around it an emotional experience. It is rather like taking a walk through one's own past.

Memorial plaque to James Herriot.

St Mary's Church is a fifteenth century parish church just along the street. I wanted to pay a visit. I have never had an opportunity in the past. Its interior is really rather lovely. Stained glass windows depicting St George and the Dragon. It has an organ, eight bells in the tower.

Alf and Joan - James and Helen - were married in this church as was their daughter, Rosie, I read.

The next stop was York. I had forgotten how beautiful this city is. I was talking at St Peter's School, one of the oldest schools in Britain, founded by St Paulinus of York in 627 AD on the banks of the River Ouse. It is the third oldest school in the UK and the fourth in the world. A magnificent setting. It was a memorable event and I felt honoured to be invited there to talk about my books and travels. Afterwards, I had my photograph taken with a portrait of the very handsome Guy Fawkes who was an Old Peterite, a student at the school. Fawkes was born in Stonegate, York in 1570 and executed in London in January 1606. He was, of course, involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot.

I am on the train now to Peterborough heading to the Deepings Literature Festival. Deepings is a place I had never heard of, in Lincolnshire. Two days to discover a new - to me - patch of England while I talk about and read from THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF.

As I write the novel is being offered at half price here
https://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Edge-Cliff-Carol-Drinkwater/dp/1405933348/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

And can be found in all good bookshops. I hope you will look out for it.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

by Deborah Swift

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