Writing the Bedlam Trilogy by Miranda Miller

October 28, 2013, 5:01 pm

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Our guest this month is Miranda Miller. This what she says about herself:

Miranda Miller has published seven novels, a book of short stories about Saudi Arabia and a book of interviews with homeless women. Hilary Mantel has said of her novels, "Miller's intricate fictions are lit by the dark flickerof a strong and original imagination." She has just published 'The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd,' (Peter Owen), Part Two of her Bedlam Trilogy. She lives in North London with her husband, a musician, and has a daughter and two stepchildren. She is a Royal Literary Fund
fellow at the Courtauld Institute. 

Over to Miranda: One morning about twelve years ago I was lying in bed, half awake, when I saw the image of a young woman in Victorian mourning clothes crossing a busy modern road. I wrote two more novels before this persistent young woman became the heroine of Nina in Utopia (Peter Owen 2010).

Nina visits our London and, being a tourist, gets it all wrong: she thinks we live in a Utopia, where all are equal and the evils of money and violence and war have been conquered.  Nina sees "a wonderful city where men and women live quite freely and without lies and hypocrisy."  "Everywhere we went he paid with his visiting card. I saw many others go to a hole in the wall near the restaurant where we sat and take bundles of money from it! So I think there has been some great Chartist revolution and the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has opened her coffers to all."

When she returns to her own time and tells her husband she has seen this wonderful future and shows him drawings she has done of our London, he, understandably, thinks she is mad and has her confined to Bedlam.

Now at this point I thought I was writing a Gothic novel and that conditions in a mental asylum in 1853 would be horrific. Then I started to do research and discovered that at that time a remarkable man, Dr Charles Hood, had become Resident Physician at the Royal Bethlem Hospital and had carried out a number of reforms. One of the patients in the Criminal Lunatic wing at the back of the hospital was Richard Dadd, a painter who has always interested me. He became a minor character in Nina in Utopia and when I finished writing that novel I was still fascinated by him, so I decided to give him a novel of his own.

Peter Owen agreed to publish The Bedlam Trilogy, about the links between art and madness. Part Two, The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd, has just been published and I am half-way through Part Three, King of the Vast.

Richard Dadd was a promising young painter of twenty-six when he murdered his father and was confined to the Royal Bethlem Hospital, and later Broadmoor, for the rest of his life. With the encouragement of the doctors he continued to work and his most famous painting, the Fairy Feller's Masterstroke, is in Tate Britain. In these two novels I try to explore his inner life and his relationship with his doctors. Richard Dadd's long years of incarceration were not lost. Heroically, he continued to produce mysterious and beautiful work. As attitudes to mental illness have changed his reputation, and his prices, have soared.

In my novel Richard Dadd visits Tate Britain and tries to steal his own painting before being thrown out into  frightening darkness. "There are figures slumped in doorways asleep under piles of bedding.  I am tempted to join them, but it is so cold that I'm afraid I won't wake up again.  I have no bedding, no friends, nothing to eat or drink. Nobody going nowhere with nothing. The longest night I've ever known and the loneliest."
 

Richard Dadd

Most historical novels ask what we think of them, those long dead people. In these three novels I try to imagine what they would think of us, and each of the three main characters has some vision of our London.

  Miranda's website

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October in the Cabinet of Curiosities, by Laurie Graham

October 29, 2013, 6:30 pm

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No, not a gravy boat, though it would make a very pretty one.

This is a bourdaloue, once the salvation of many a lady caught with a full bladder in a public place. The only problem was, having used it she needed someone to empty it for her. If she didn’t have a maid I suppose she could have slipped it under a chair and nonchalantly kicked it over with the toe of her dainty slipper. 

I find it interesting to see things that were once a part of my daily life becoming collectable antiques. I was born too late for a bourdaloue but not for a chamber pot. Growing up in a house with no indoor plumbing it was an essential item under every bed.  Mine was pink. My parents had one in blue and white willow pattern. The unenviable job of emptying them each morning fell to the females of the house. When you were deemed old enough to empty your own gesunder you knew you’d really grown up.

Gesunder was one of its several affectionate names. As in ‘gesunder the bed’.  ‘Jerry’ had a similar etymology, during and after World War Two.  Po (from pot-de-chambre) was the favourite in our neighbourhood, which caused a lot of stifled mirth when we did the rivers of Italy in school.

The chamber pot wasn’t a very hygienic thing but by the 20^thcentury it was at least  used in the privacy of the bedroom. Up to the 19^th century gentlemen, full of claret and ready to progress to the port, depended on finding a po in the dining room sideboard, though of course they’d only use it after the ladies had withdrawn. Why, you may ask yourself, didn’t they go to another room relieve themselves? What, and risk missing a bit of gossip or a good joke?

Writers of historical fiction sometimes get berated either for bringing 21^st century sensibilities to their creations, or for not doing so. Personally I’m in the ‘tell it how it really was’ camp. And the bourdaloue is a good reminder that spending a penny hasn’t always been a private affair. I wonder, by the way, how long the expression ‘spending a penny’ will remain in circulation. On Horsefair Street in Leicester sixty years ago a penny used to buy you a very comfortable call in a spotlessly clean cubicle. Nice warm wooden seats too.  Those were the days. As for bourdaloues  -  named by the way, after a French priest famous for his bladder-testingly long sermons - they are now collectors' items. And chamber pots look very nice planted with geraniums.

October Competition

October 30, 2013, 5:01 pm

≫ Next: The Undying fascination of Anne Boleyn by Mary Hoffman

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Competitions are open to UK residents only, we're afraid.

To win one of five copies of The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd by Miranda Miller, our October guest, just give an answer to the following question in the Comments below:

"Which historical character can you imagine visiting 21st century England, and what would she or he think of us?"

Closing date 7th November

The Undying fascination of Anne Boleyn by Mary Hoffman

October 31, 2013, 5:01 pm

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If you put "Anne Boleyn" into a search engine, you get over two million results. Do the same on Amazon and you get over six hundred book titles. She plays a starring role in the two Man Booker Prize-winning novels of Hilary Mantel, which are being dramatised both by the RSC (where she is being played by Lydia Leonard) and on television (as yet casting not announced).

Welsh National Opera currently runs a Tudors season containing Donizetti's Anna Bolena. On Facebook there are pages called On the Tudor Trail and The Tudor Library, the latter listing over fifty current fiction and non-fiction titles about Henry Vlll's second wife, who died 477 years ago. Claire Ridgway runs a site called The Anne Boleyn Files which minutely examines every detail of Anne's brief and eventful life.

It is as if we still can't quite believe in that sequence of events from January to May 1536 that changed the world's view of Henry from handsome, golden, chivalric prince to bloated, bloodthirsty tyrant. As Hilary Mantel says, "we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation" (Guardian 11.5.2012)

(And I have just reinvented and killed her again in my latest novel).

Shown on BBC2 this May, The Last days of Anne Boleyn, presented by Dan Jones, pitted historians David Starkey and Susannah Lipscomb against novelists Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory. Anne was guilty as charged, she was totally innocent, she slept with her brother (Gregory), she swore before God on what she believed to be her last morning that she had done none of the things she was charged with (Mantel).

With such a wash of interest in the woman who was Queen for only three years, you would think it impossible for anyone to come up with a new angle but Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger have achieved it in their book In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn. These are the writers who run the On the Tudor Trail page on Facebook, the latter also having a site with the same name and the former one for her own fiction and non-fiction writing on "England's most iconic Queen Consort."

Divided into sections Early Life; The Courting Years; Anne the Queen; The 1535 Progress; Boleyn Treasures, the book is meticulously researched and well illustrated, with a Boleyn Family Tree and six maps.

After Hans Holbein

The Tower of London features in Anne the Queen because the Queen's Lodgings in the Royal Palace (no longer extant) were completely re-decorated for Anne's Coronation. But in that same section, the writers dispel several myths about her execution, which didn't take place where the memorial now stands on Tower Green.

The White Tower at the Tower of London.

Anne Boleyn was almost certainly born at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, but that house has been altered several times in the intervening centuries.

You can more easily imagine yourself in Anne's shoes at Hever Castle.

Hever Castle, the Boleyns' family seat

Anne went to Belgium when she was about twelve, to serve in the court of Margaret of Austria and was later in France, where as a teenager she learned to dance, to play musical instruments and generally behave like a Court lady. something that served her both well and badly later on in life.

The authors have tracked down all sorts of places associated with Anne Boleyn and visited most of them themselves, even though Grueninger lives in Australia. From Windsor to the Field of Cloth of Gold, Eltham Palace to Notre Dame, they have left no stone unturned in the search for locations where Anne is known or believed to have spent time. It is as thorough as it it is fascinating.

(I recommend reading this book alongside the late Eric Ives' excellent biography, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn.)

 

'A Welch rarebit and a pot of beer'. Georgian Debating Societies - Lucy Inglis

November 2, 2013, 2:34 am

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Yesterday I went to Bristol to film with Lucy Worsley for next year’s BBC4 series Georgian Revolutions. We were talking about debating societies, their effect on society as a whole and the move to what is called, rather vaguely, ‘sociability’. Sociability is one of those academic terms that don’t really mean much and encompass a whole slew of ideas, but we managed to pick it apart from various angles and extract lots of Georgian goodness in the process.

Filming is one of those strange processes where you become both subject and object. Because, usually, most of us history girls sit behind a screen or in a library or archive for a lot of our working day it can be a bit intimidating. You have to remember all your facts whilst the cameras are on you and be placed, mic’ed, repositioned, herded and posed repeatedly whilst you ask each other about what words like ‘enlightenment’ really mean and whether your noses looks shiny.

That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable, because it is. We were filming in a Georgian pub and the atmosphere was great, as was the conversation. The ‘Revolutions’ series doesn’t only look at the obvious changes during the Georgian period, but at the huge though gradual changes throughout society that happened over the eighteenth century, and this particular episode was looking at the revolution of 'politeness' from the angle of conversation and debate. At the beginning of the century, philosophical ideas about rationalism and the nature of what was ‘true’ were filtering down the people on the streets. Discussions in coffeehouses by the intellectual celebrities of the day, such as Isaac Newton were recorded by authors and journalists, who circulated them throughout the country and in Europe.

Coffeehouses were called the ‘penny universities’ because of their penny admission fee, including a cup of coffee, and were seen as a place to become educated, and not just because of the quality of the conversations going on. From the end of the seventeenth century, coffeehouses often kept libraries for the use of the visitors, as well as a stock of newspapers. These coffeehouses libraries were sometimes, and quite often in the case of Oxford, run by the coffeehouse owner’s wife. One writer noted that they were in fact, the ‘sub-Librarians‘ who had ‘usurped their Husbands in the execution of this office’.

But the coffeehouse debates weren’t limited to geniuses like Newton. Debating societies were emerging and, after initially meeting in each others’ houses, the members increasingly began to favour meeting in taverns where they could discuss pressing matters over a ‘Welch rarebit and a pot of beer’.

One of the most prominent of these was the Robinhood Society, which, after moving around in its early years, met at the Robinhood and Little John pub in Butcher Row near the Strand. It had initially called itself the ‘Societe for Free and Candid Enquiry’, before taking on the name of the tavern where it met every Monday evening, where, ‘After the fatigues of the Day, Men of Various Occupations in Life, meet to dissipate the Gloom...and either in Flashes of Wit or solid arguments improve their judgment and entertain their imaginations.’

The members took the matter of debate seriously, and drunkenness was disapproved of. There ‘are drinking clubs. This is a disputing one. At those places, men feed their bodies; at this they feed their minds’. Questions were written on slips of paper and submitted anonymously. The moderator then read out the questions and hands were raised to vote. The question with the most votes won and was the subject for the evening.

The members of the club came from all levels of society and included:

A baker

Doctor

Governor of the Plantations

Soldier

Author

Actor

Comedian

House painter

Genius (yes, he's down as occupation 'genius')

Cabinet-maker

A noted bug-doctor (pest controller)

A stockbroker

An illiterate brazier

A highwayman (called Bob Scamper - brilliant!)

The questions they debated initially didn’t cover religion or politics (to avoid charges of sedition), but by the 1740s they were discussing all subjects, including:

Whether the common methods of educating Youth in this Nation are not very defective, both with respect to morals, and a knowledge of the English tongue.

Whether a spendthrift or a miser is the most useless member of the Community.

Whether faith and belief are not one and the same thing?

Is a plurality of wives justifiable?

Should obey be removed from the marriage vows?

Whether it is consisted with the common sense of Mankind to believe that the Supreme Being could be born of a Virgin?

Whether the power lodged in a Prime Minister be not too great to be entrusted with any subject and if, in Time, it will not sap the very vitals of our constitution?

Women were largely excluded from debating societies until later in the century when their own societies such as La Belle Assemblee were formed, and by the 1780s the societies were meeting in halls and theatres so that the sexes could attend together, rather than taverns of coffeehouses. However, many women still attended the debates wearing masks, particularly those who would be contributing and not just listening. One advertisement announced the topic for debate as ‘Is it not detrimental to the world to restrain the female sex from the pursuit of classical and mathematical learning?’ and adds, ‘It is particularly hoped that Ladies will avail themselves of their masks and join in the debate’.

Builder's bum or housemaid's knee? by Eve Edwards

November 2, 2013, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: "The Black Loyalists" by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, reviewed by Katherine Langrish

≪ Previous: 'A Welch rarebit and a pot of beer'. Georgian Debating Societies - Lucy Inglis

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This October, the builders of Britain have been issued a challenge by a new health minister, Jane Ellison: they are to shape up, pull up and stop displaying so much cheek, so to speak.  I had to chuckle: a kind of feminist revenge for years of wolf whistling perhaps on Ms Ellison's part?

However, with my History Girl's thinking cap on, it started me wondering about all those sins against posture and more serious ailments that have a profession attached to them.  What happens when the profession no longer exists as a big enough class to have its own illness?  The ailment travels on to find a new host, just like a virus.


Take housemaid's knee - proper name prepatella bursitis.  Wiki tells me it has also been known as nun's knee, coal miner's knee, carpet layer's knee etc etc.  I imagine the predominant term depends on who does what in your area.  I remember that term being used by my grandmother (born 1910).  She was not of the social status to have a maid herself but born in a time when there were plenty around to make it a recognisable tradition.  Mrs So-and-So down the road had 'housemaid's knee'.  We all understood she did not have to be a maid to get it, just to have a dodgy joint.  Go to the GP today and it would seem odd for her to say to you if you had sought advice for the same problem 'oh yes, you've housemaid's knee.'  The condition is moving on to attach to a new profession.

Poor old miners have lots of illnesses named after them.  Pneumoconiosis, miner's lung, is caused by inhaling particles.  This is also sometimes called Potter's rot when the stuff breathed in is silica.  Miner's white finger is caused by vibration from using power tools.  The list goes on. Googling the term, I was interested to find many personal injury firms advertising their services to take on claims.  Clearly there is still enough of a mining heritage in this country to make it a recognisable term but in another few decades, will that too have passed on to a new profession?  Will it become road menders finger or something like that?

For the posher folks there is the refined tennis elbow (inflamed tendons) and golfer's knee (a twisting problem rather than a kneeling one so different from housemaid's).  Odd how illnesses come with social status attached.  Miss Joan Hunter Dunn might have tennis elbow but never miner's lung.

So when setting a novel back in the past, I think it perfectly fair to speculate what earlier times may have called their problems.  Did the Romans have charioteer's back?  Did the Greeks suffer from sculpture's lung?  Were castles of Europe manned by guys complaining of archer's elbow? If you have any real or imagined ailment to add, please do so below.  I've got a little list (note to self: add Executioner's wrist for Tudor stories).

I've spent much of my time with trench foot and shell shock recently so I am sure you know what I have been writing about.

Eve

"The Black Loyalists" by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, reviewed by Katherine Langrish

November 3, 2013, 9:00 pm

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“They had a passion for freedom, and they acted upon it.”

This wonderful book is by my friend Ruth Holmes Whitehead, a distinguished historian and ethnologist who worked for over forty years at the Nova Scotia Museum. Ruth is the author of several books on the history, culture and stories of the Mi’kmaq, the Native American nation which still inhabits New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We met while I was writing my third book for children, the story of a 10^thcentury viking ship’s landfall on the coast of North America and the crew’s encounters with Native Americans. I approached Ruth for guidance after reading her collection of Mi’kmaq tales: ‘Stories from the Six Worlds’. She lent me the benefit of her years of study, and helped me escape many a pitfall.

Now she has turned to a different but equally fascinating subject: the “more than four thousand black men, women and children [who came] to Nova Scotia as a direct result of the American Revolution (1755-1783).  They came as freeborn persons, as former slaves who had seized freedom from the chaos of war, or as indentured servants. Some came still chained to their enslavers. They came fleeing the British surrender of the thirteen American colonies… [As] these colonies fell to the Americans, mass evacuations of British forces and supporters to their remaining centres of power began to take place.”  The book concentrates on the South Carolina Black Loyalists, many of whose names survive in ‘The Book of Negroes’, a record of black people evacuated from the port of New York.

Early in the war, the British government had offered emancipation to any slaves who would desert their rebel masters.  This was no moral imperative, but a pragmatic attempt to impoverish the American economy and weaken the rebel war effort. Motives aside, however, freedom was on the table, and many enslaved men, women and children took advantage of the offer, escaping behind the British lines, or to the British ships patrolling the east coast from Maine to Georgia.

Runaways risked much.  There were severe punishments on recapture – up to and including death:

“Whoever apprehends the said run away, and delivers him to the warden of the workhouse, shall have Three Pounds reward…” wrote William Harris in 1752, “but whoever brings his head alone, shall be paid Ten Pounds.”  The price of murder continued to rise. Three years later, Thomas Smith offered £10 for Frank, alive, but promised £20 for his head. By 1770, William Waight was offering £10 for a man named May, alive, and £100 for his head alone.

Such savage penalties were clearly designed to terrify.  Ruth Whitehead describes how the wealth and economy of the Carolinas depended upon slaves; many slave-owners were extremely rich. The estate of Thomas Shubrick, a South Carolina landowner, was valued at his death at “the Sum of two Million, one hundred three thousand, eight hundreds Pounds Currency”; this sum was inclusive of over three hundred enslaved people, whose names are tersely recorded in a seemingly endless list: “Dye, Will, Moll, Peter, Philander, Ammon, Dick, Attus, Duke, Richmond, Mingo, London, George, Cuff, Bram, Cato, Molly, Castalia, Jemmy, Mary, Phillis, John, Tony, Nancy…”

A pass issued by the British to Cato Rammsay: illustration from the back cover of the book

The Black Loyalistsilluminates a fascinating and moving episode of history which I’d known nothing about. There are so many paradoxes, not least that black people should fight on the side of the King – for the promise of freedom – in the very war which Americans fought for independence. It was not an easy transition. Many of the men joined the Loyalist armies as soldiers. But what about families, what about the women? The children? And what happened when the British surrendered? The American forces under George Washington demanded the restoration of property, including slaves, and it fell to individual British commanders to interpret orders and make decisions on whether to honour early promises. Some Black Loyalists were abandoned, but for those who made it to Nova Scotia, there were still many challenges to face: home-building, earning a living, and coping with often hostile attitudes from local communities.

Each and every one of their stories, if we could fully know it, would be an adventure.What about Savinah Miles, twenty-five years old, who “ran from John Miles’s plantation in the Indian Lands of South Carolina, taking her daughter, Venus, with her. Venus was only nine years old when she escaped with her mother, who kept her free for the next nine years, before boarding L’Abondance [the Royal Navy transport which took the largest complement of Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia].”

‘Kept her free for nine years.’ If only we could know more.

Ruth Holmes Whitehead took eighteen years to write and research this book which is both a work of scholarship and a labour of love, gracefully and clearly written with some poignant personal touches. Ruth herself was born in South Carolina and has found slave owners among her own ancestors; her co-researcher Carmelita Robertson has “multiple Black Loyalist ancestors who escaped … during the American Revolution.”  As Ruth says:

I sat beside a dying woman once, at Remley’s Point, South Carolina.  She liked the sofa in the living room where she could gaze out all night long through her open door. “I lies here,” she said, “and dead people come and put their hands on my head.” Dead people come and put their hands on my head: a really good metaphor for living in the Carolinas. The weight of a past that includes slavery lies heavily on the landscape, yet there have always been moments of grace and basic goodness. Those who were enslaved here experienced that dichotomy of good and evil.

Black Loyalists

Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities

by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, Nimbus Publishing 2013

China and My Mum - A Story in Pictures - Joan Lennon

November 4, 2013, 6:30 pm

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Jean Alaithia Lennon was born in 1921 on Mount Emei (one of the four Holy Mountains) in Sichuan Province, China.  By the time she was three, her father (a medical missionary) had died of typhus and malaria.  There was unrest in the province and it was not considered safe for her or her mother or baby brother to remain. They were taken down the Yangtse on an American gunboat, back to Canada.  They didn't return.

Those are the bones of the story, but I have very little flesh to lay over them.  My mum didn't remember that time at all, and her mother was my ghastly grandmother (to distinguish her from my lovely grandmother) who didn't talk about it, or at least not about my mother's part in it, which was the part I always wanted to know.

And yet, and yet ...  Look at the photos.  Hints of the story are there.  You can see the seeds of the woman in that little girl.  And that fierce finger in the last photo as my mum is poised to run.  An entire relationship in a single gesture.

Joan's website.
Joan's blog.

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Black Swans and the Value of the Unknown – Katherine Roberts

November 5, 2013, 6:00 pm

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black swan

Not that long ago,  Europeans assumed all swans were white. Until the sighting of the first black swan in 1697, when Willem de Vlamingh explored the Swan River in Western Australia, nobody other than the Australians thought a black one could ever exist. Now we know black swans do exist, and they are beautiful as you can see.

Apart from this post being a good excuse for some pretty swan pictures, I'd like to introduce you to a book a friend recommended called Black Swan. In it there's an interesting concept called an “anti-library”, which argues that the unread books in your library are more valuable to you than those you have read.

Now, I know all the history lovers out there are going to say wait a minute! Surely the more books you read, the greater your knowledge, which makes all those books you have read valuable? Books, after all, define our history.

But even if you have read all the books in the world, then what about the knowledge – the “anti-history” if you like – that has not yet been discovered, or has been lost/burned/suppressed/forgotten along the way? Isn’t this anti-knowledge just as important? In fact such undiscovered knowledge, when it comes to light, can often change what was once widely accepted as true. Once, remember, everyone believed all swans were white. Now that black is known to be just another colour of swan, the current “anti-swan” is the pink swan nobody has yet seen… which is not the same thing as saying a pink swan does not exist, of course.

Ok, before you get too excited, I’ll admit to some digital fakery here.

 

But what in the green river, I hear you ask, do coloured swans have to do with the History Girls?

Once upon a time (i.e. 15 years ago, when I started my professional writing career), there was no blogosphere. Authors wrote books, and – if they were lucky or talented or persistent enough – got their books published, after which the publisher did all the PR, and booksellers did the bookselling. The author had very little to do with this side of things, except for turning up to do a reading now and again. I even remember my late agent telling me that I couldn’t write an article about my first book for a magazine, in case this clashed with something my publisher was doing, such as selling an exclusive extract to a national newspaper (er...in my dreams).

Over the past few years, all that has changed. Authors are expected to have an online platform and be available to their readers online. Fine maybe if those readers - like the lovely reader who has made it this far through my post - come to them. But not so fine if the author seeks out potential readers and hammers on their virtual doors (just think how you feel when a pushy double-glazing salesman calls!). I think publishers can just about get away with this, especially if they are giving away freebies such as review copies of hot new titles, but authors doing their own PR need to take care not to put their foot in it - the virtual door, I mean.

white swans

Let's go back to the swans. On publication day, that exciting debut author you know nothing about and are therefore rather curious to find out about, must become known - in the process losing some of their value. Whether this value is to booksellers in the form of actual sales figures, to their fans in a less-than-airbrushed photograph showing the odd wrinkle or two, to school librarians who might be disappointed to see their hero is actually shorter than they thought and wears glasses, or to potential readers exposed to a thousand and one blog posts, tweets and Facebook pages... the author is now part of the white swan crowd, doing the same things all the other white swans are doing. And as we all know, beautiful as white swans are, only the black ones (or the pink ones?) tend to stick in people’s memories.

So - paradoxically - unless you are a celebrity of some sort or have written a best-seller the world already loves, perhaps the best way to remain valuable as an author is to stay as mysterious as possible. Retreat behind a pseudonym, write under initials, use a digitally-enhanced photo, wear sunglasses, maintain online silence, paint yourself green, whatever it takes.

 

green swan anyone?

 

Which is why this post talks about swans and contains only a tiny bit of history. Please express your horror below.

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Katherine Roberts has just finished her Pendragon Legacy series published by Templar, where King Arthur's daughter sets out on a quest for something that should not exist in this world... no, not a pink swan! Watch the trailer HERE

For more details of this series and Katherine's other books visit www.katherineroberts.co.uk

THE LAST RUNAWAY by Tracy Chevalier. A review by Adèle Geras

November 6, 2013, 11:00 pm

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On March 29th of this year, Tracy Chevalier herself wrote on this blog, all about how she researches her novels. It was a fascinating piece and I said in the comments box at the time that I was longing to read the novel. Now I have read it, and I enjoyed it very much and would like to draw it to the attention of those people who love a good historical novel which manages to convey a whole lot of interesting information about a period (pre Civil War America) which we don't know terribly well, but who also want a rattling good story, which will involve them in the lives and loves of its protagonists.

Chevalier is drawn to the artistic or craft process. In her most famous book, The Girl with the Pearl Earring she goes into some detail in order to show us the way Vermeer mixed his paints; the way the paintings were set up and you closed the novel knowing a great deal about what it was like to be a painter at that time, as well, of course as what it was like to be his model. In perhaps my favourite of Chevalier's novels, The Lady and the Unicorn, the subject is the weaving of the famous set of tapestries presently in Musée de Cluny in Paris.

Here, our heroine, Honor Bright, leaves England to accompany her sister Grace to Ohio, which might just as well be on another planet. When Grace dies, Honor is left to make her own way in this strange new world, and the story of her adventures is full of romance, trials and tribulations, discoveries and awakenings. The book moves along swiftly. We see most things from Honor's point of view and there are her letters scattered through the text. She becomes aware of the existence of the Underground Railroad, a way of helping black slaves escape from their servitude in the South to safety in the North. The historical detail is very accurate and we hold our breath with Honor, who, towards the end of the book is hiding her part in the Railroad from her husband and family.

For me, though, the most beguiling aspect of the novel is the quilting. Reading about 'quilting frolics' and the different roles that quilts then played in a woman's life was enthralling. The different styles, the variations and nuances and colours and fabrics are cleverly mirrored in the patchwork way the book works: a bit of farm life, a bit of a letter, a memory of home, a whiff of a love story, a threat of great danger, and someone at the centre of it trying to make sense and harmony of her life as best she can. The characters in this novel, from milliners, to bounty hunters, to all the worthies of the Quaker community, and the (mostly) women who surround Honor most of the time, are all very well brought to life. The black characters too, strange to Honor, are given their fair weight in the story and one of the best moments is when Honor sees a quilt made by one of the Negro (sic) women and remarks on the difference between the two styles of quilting she has met in America, both of which are different from what she was used to in England.

I don't know whether Tracy Chevalier will take it as a compliment, but I intend it as one when I say that I think The Last Runaway is a perfect teenage novel, too. I think that anyone from about the age of 14 who likes an exciting, romantic, historically accurate novel will enjoy this book and I would urge fans of, for instance, Celia Rees's Witch Child, to try Tracy Chevalier. I am wondering where her curiosity will take her next.

Hersende, Haemorrhoids and Healing Water by Karen Maitland

November 7, 2013, 4:30 pm

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King Louis IX receiving envoys

Last week I was privileged to give a joint talk on Medicine through the Ages with Ruth Downie, author of the wonderful series of Roman novels. Preparing for our discussion, reminded me of a remarkable 13th century woman doctor called Hersende, who become Royal Physician to King Louis IX of France. Some researchers have suggested that her title – Magistre Hersende Physica– indicates she studied medicine at University.

In 1248, she accompanied King Louis on the Seventh Crusade to conquer Egypt, receiving 12 Parisian deniers a day, which was an excellent rate of pay. Unfortunately for Hersende, instead of the French capturing Egypt it was the French army who were taken prisoner by the Egyptians and she was held captive, along with her king, until the ransom was paid.

Crusader Seige painted for King Louis in 1250

After they were released in 1250, Hersende went with the army to Acre. As well as being physician to the king, she tended to the illnesses and injuries of his favourite nobles, including treating them for haemorrhoids and anal fistulas, a common hazard of riding for hours in hot, sweaty armour. And if this was not work enough, she was also put in charge of the health of the many camp-followers. That was not an easy task given that she had to deal with unknown fevers, stomach bugs, childbirth and STDs. But Hersende survived and eventually returned to Paris where she married Jacques, an apothecary, which must have been an excellent business arrangement.

The illustration on the left shows a cure for gout by cutting  and burning the feet, while on the left is an operation on haemorrhoids.

Talking of matches, today, 8th November, is the feast day of St Cybi and St Tysilio, two 6th century saints who were great friends. They both settled in Anglesey, with St Cybi living on a small island off the coast, probably bridged by a causeway. They used to meet halfway every day to pray and talk, but poor Cybi had to walk facing east in the morning and go home facing west in the afternoon, so he got the full sun on his face all day and legend has it, he became so tanned he was known as Cybi the Red or Tawny. While Tysilio, coming the other way, always had his back to the sun, so he was known as Tysilio the Pale or Fair.

St Cybi does have something in common with Hersende, for the saint also had a reputation as a healer, though only when he was dead. It seems he struck a rock with his staff when he first landed on the island and a well sprang up, whose waters were said to cure blindness, scrofula, scurvy, rheumatism and warts. But to be a cured you had drink the well water mixed with equal amounts of seawater twice a day for seven days and bath in the same mixture before retiring to bed in a nearby cottage. If you found yourself growing warm in bed, the waters were curing you, but if you were cold the saint’s blessing was not with you.

St Cybi’s holy island eventually gave its name to the town of Holyhead, while St Tysilio's name is incorporated in the most famous place name in Britain – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch
Which, I’m told, means St Mary’s Church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio of the red cave. I wonder how often that place name gets tweeted!



13th Century Anatomical Illustration

Writing on the Right Side of the Brain

November 8, 2013, 9:18 pm

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by Caroline Lawrence 

I just finished a wonderfully stimulating week as Writer in Residence at Summer Fields, a boarding school in Oxford for boys of late primary and middle school age. I leapt at the chance to come: now that my own son is grown-up and living in Los Angeles,  I wanted to re-connect with my target readership.  

Summer Fields School, Oxford

All week, I have been doing right and left brain activities with the boys. The left-brain plot structure exercises were great and the literate Summer Fields boys took to them like Hollywood screenwriters in the writers' room. We identified some of our "Achilles' Heels" and then came up with a story in which our hero would learn a strategy to deal with his weakness. 

Caroline teaching at Summer Fields

Here are some of our titles (all fictional, of course): "Mr Guy Nice" for a boy who is worried about being too eager to please and falls in with a group of delinquents. "The Debate", about a boy who is afraid of public speaking and must come up against his talented older brother in a debate. "The Sleepover" about a hypothetical younger sister who is afraid of the dark but has been invited to attend a sleepover at a popular girl's house. What will happen when the lights go off? 

An exercise they found more challenging was one I often use to generate ideas: continuous writing to a piece of music. I call it (Day)dreaming a Setting.

Before I did this exercise I had to explain how the right and left hemispheres of the brain control different mental functions. 

This clever Mercedes Benz advert (above) is quite a good summary of left and right brain function. The LOGICAL LEFT BRAIN says: "I am a scientist. A mathematician. I love the familiar. I categorise. I am accurate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am practical. Always in control. A master of words and language…" In the ad, the left brain is painted in black and white, with lots of words. 

(This part of the brain loves listing plot beats and working out story structure.)

The CREATIVE RIGHT BRAIN says "I am creativity. A free spirit. I am passion. Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roaring laughter. I am taste. The feeling of sand beneath bare feet. I am movement. Vivid colours. I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas. I am boundless imagination…"

This exercise is one I used to do when I taught art at primary school. I first came across it twenty years ago in one of the books that has changed my life: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

I ask the children to close their eyes behind cupped hands, rest their head in their hands and their elbows on table. And breathe. Then I put on a piece of music and ask them to imagine the colour of the music. The taste. What scene does it describe? What time of day is it? What can you feel beneath your bare feet? Are you inside or outside? On earth or somewhere else? In the past, the present or the future? Who is in the scene with you? What are they doing? What can you smell? What can you feel? How do you feel? 

Although I used to do this for many years in my art classes, when someone else asked me to do it in a creative writing class, I bridled! The teacher put on a piece of yearning violin music and told us to "Close our eyes and imagine the scene." A little voice in my head said, "This music is too emotional. I hate this kind of music. What a stupid exercise!" That little voice was my left brain, always critical. Sometimes you want criticism, other times you don't. The left brain hates not being in control and it was just scared. So I reasoned with it. "Look, I've paid money to be on this course. I may as well try to get my money's worth." 

My left brain backed off and my creative right brain stepped forward. 

It showed me a picture, vague at first, but becoming clearer as I went along with it. Red brick buildings in the fog. A Roman town. An ancient Roman town. Ostia, the port of Rome. Where my (then) work-in-progress was set! And out of the fog came a funeral procession. Mourners carrying a bier with a body on it. I knew it was one of my characters. But which one? I had to wait until it came closer to see. My subconscious knew but my conscious brain hadn't yet realised. Then at last I saw who it was, and I knew it was TRUE. It was good. It was right. Yes, it was sad, but it had to happen. Logical arc-planning left brain and creative, intuitive right brain were in agreement. But left brain had to back off to let my right brain show me what was deep within. 

funeral procession from Roman Mysteries title sequence

I was working on my third Roman Mystery at the time but this incident does not appear until book thirteen, where one of my characters has a prophetic dream of a funeral procession in the fog and realises someone close to him is going to die. It even appears in the opening credits of the BBC television series based on my books. That's how powerful that image was.

caravan of camels

I was so excited by this that I started using this exercise with other music. I was listening to jazz guitarist Larry Carlton at the time and put on a piece called Slave Song because the title made me think of Nubia, one of my four main characters. The music immediately evoked a slave caravan crossing desert on camels. Yes, the title was suggestive but that didn't matter. It was a powerful, moving scene and it went straight into the book I was writing at the time, The Pirates of Pompeii. 

Buddha Lounge disc 1

Fast forward, ten years. As I left my London apartment to get the train to Oxford, I grabbed a CD, one I hoped the boys wouldn't have come across before: Buddha Lounge 1. Mainly instrumental. A nicely atmospheric variety of upbeat, intriguing and spooky tracks.


Over the week I played a selection of songs in eighteen different English classes. I asked the boys to visualise the music for a minute or so, then I got them to open their eyes and write without stopping, another way of confounding the left brain. 

"Don't worry about neatness or sense or spelling or grammar," I told them. "Just keep the words coming. If you can't think what to write, write I can't think what to write. I can't think what to write. until something comes to you." 

At first the boys found it hard. Were they doing it right? "The only rule," I said, "is keep your hand moving. Keep writing something, anything. If you are panicking that is just your left brain afraid of losing control. Tell it to chill."

The class teachers were game and tried it, too. One teacher was able to do it but confessed it gave him a headache here. (He tapped his left-brain!) Another teacher wrote in her native language, French, and found her handwriting changed after the first few sentences as she got the "hang of it". A third teacher "saw" a bright room with no doors, windows or even light switches. He realised he was a baby in the womb. 

The reason I'm writing this in the History Girls blog is to encourage all you writers of historical fiction. Put on a piece of period music, or the nearest thing. 

Get a piece of paper. Turn it sideways to show your left brain you are doing something new. Take a fibre-tipped pen or a crayon to show your left brain you are doing something new. 

Now put on the music. Close your eyes. Let the music conjure up a scene. Not just sights but smells, sounds, tastes, textures, emotions, movement and detail. 

Got it? Then write! 

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries, The Roman Mysteries Scrolls and the P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries. Find more of her writing tips on her website at www.romanmysteries.com 

Literary Travellers Then and Now by Elizabeth Laird

November 9, 2013, 4:01 pm

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Just back from travels in Kerala, around the south western corner of India. Here's a picture to set the scene:

The backwaters in Kerala

Florence Nightingale

I've been musing on the nature of tourism. The modern experience of travel is, frankly, shallow and artificial compared to that of our literary forbears. I've been reading Winter on the Nile by Anthony Sattin, which follows the journeys of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, who both (though they never met) happened coincidentally to be sailing in the leisurely fashion of the day up the Nile to visit the antiquities. Their journeys took months. Nightingale, in particular, prepared herself assiduously.

She learned to decipher heiroglyphics. She read everything she could find on the religion of ancient Egypt. She recorded every thought and every impression in her letters and diaries. She had time to do it, too. Her journey took many months. She spent days in each place, sometimes returning again and again to a particular temple to allow its charm and meaning to soak into her mind.

Flaubert took a more laddish approach, spending much time in the local brothels, fascinated by the women he met there, then spending hour after hour lounging on the deck of his Nile houseboat, ostensibly doing nothing, while, no doubt, Mme Bovary began to take possession of his mind.

On the very evening of the day that my husband and I left snow-bound London, we were sweltering in the heat of Cochin as if transported by a genie. Victorian travellers would have found our approach hopelessly frivolous. I can't pretend to have learned a single word of Malayalam, and certainly never tackled its script. Instead of writing letters home, we skyped our children from time to time, and babbled to them (forgettably) about what we'd been doing. Instead of sitting for hours with a sketchbook on my knee and a pencil in my hand, I snapped away with my camera, taking far too many photographs.

It's clear from Nightingale's letters that her experience in Egypt had a profound effect on her. She had time to muse, to gain insights into the places she visited and her own reactions to them. We, on the other hand, spent no more than three days in any one place, and then sped on, afraid of boredom. We simply didn't give Kerala time to change our lives and our perceptions as Nightingale did in Egypt.

We had one great advantage, however, over Nightingale and Flaubert. They would not have found any novels by Arab writers in bookshops in Cairo or Thebes which could have given them instant yet profound insights into the minds and lives of the people they encountered. We were luckier. In India, especially in Kerala, there is a wealth of fiction that offers us mental short-cuts, taking us into the heart of people's lives.

Arundhati Roy's justly famous novel, The God of Small Things celebrates Kerala in unforgettably beautiful writing, taking one to the heart of the place and the people.

The backwaters near near Arundhati Roy's childhood home in Kerala

David Davidar'sremarkable historical novel, The House of Blue Mangoes, follows the lives of one family from colonial times through the travails of the independence movement to the India of the present day. It's a book of great beauty, of atmospheric descriptions and memorable characters.

And for those who want to laugh out loud while they learn more about India than they ever thought they could, Shashi Tharoor's masterpiece, Show Business, takes Bollywood by the throat and shakes the truth out of it, in ways that you'll never forget.

        

(Michelle Lovric is experiencing IT problems and will be back in this slot on 10th December. We are grateful to of our Reserve History Girls, Elizabeth Laird, for providing us with today's post).

Frail Tenements of Clay, by Laurie Graham

November 10, 2013, 5:30 pm

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I was present recently at the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s branch of the Richard III Society and one of the questions before us was, what are we going to do?  We need, it was agreed, a crackingly good programme for our first year  -  a couple of accredited speakers and perhaps a study event  -  to catch the eye of potential new members. What would interest people? Overwhelmingly the topics suggested dwelt on that body in the car park. The King’s now verified scoliosis, for instance; how would it have affected him as a warrior? Or how about the recently disclosed evidence of his ringworm infestation; what did it tell us about his life and times? And those battle wounds, so clearly visible on his bones after more than 500 years; which of them would have been the actual death blow? 

Now I’m not squeamish about death and disease. Medical sciences were my subject long before I was a novelist. And yet I find myself slightly uneasy about this taste for recreational autopsies. Are we maybe watching too many television forensic investigator shows?

When King Richard’s remains were found last year I felt enormous gratitude to all those from Philippa Langley onwards, who had made it happen, and also for the science that made identification a certainty. I have mixed feelings about the facial reconstruction but on balance I welcome the reminder it has given us, if nothing else, that Richard was a young man.  Thirty three. The wounds to his skull and pelvis bear witness to the violence of hand to hand combat. Do we need to analyse his death any further than that? He went to Bosworth Field understanding perfectly well that he might not survive the day, and perhaps he didn’t much care. His wife was dead, his son was dead, and the Cousins’ War was a nest of vipers.

There are instances in history where there might be some justification for breaching the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room. Did Henry VIII have syphilis, or diabetes, or McLeod Syndrome? Would one or any of those diagnoses explain his destructive nature and his frequent recourse to the axe? Would it make him a more forgivable figure?
 

Haemophilia in Queen Victoria’s numerous descendants certainly had profound consequences for the Romanov dynasty. If the Tsesarevich Alexis hadn’t been haemophiliac the Tsarina wouldn’t have fallen under the thrall of Rasputin and Russia might have learned to love its German Empress. Perhaps, perhaps.   

And if we know why haemophilia has apparently disappeared from the remnants of Europe’s royal houses  -  monarchs now know better than to marry off their daughters to first cousins  -  it would still be interesting to know where the gene sprang from.  Could Victoria’s mother have been a carrier? Or was Queen Victoria the unfortunate source of a spontaneous mutation? Such things do happen.  

George III’s porphyria, a diagnosis that is still debated, led to the Regency, but the life of the nation wasn’t greatly affected. Life went on. Revolution didn’t come to our shores and eventually political reform did.  Yes, it would be interesting to have a firm diagnosis, but it would hardly change our view of George’s reign.  A more interesting point would be whether his porphyria (or whatever else it was) has now been bred out of the Royal Family? But actually it’s none of our business.

As for King Richard, my thoughts are that he should be laid quickly and finally to rest. A Catholic funeral mass and a tomb worthy of an anointed King.  No more picking over his bones, no judicial reviews, no soi disant descendants bickering about his resting place. And no more forensics. He died a violent and horrible death along with many others, on Bosworth Field. Time to close the autopsy file.

A different kind of remembering? by H.M. Castor

November 11, 2013, 5:30 pm

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I was going to write an entirely different post today about Remembrance Day – I had it fully imagined, and even half written – but something else has swept it off my mental desk. Something that’s still about the world wars, in part, and most certainly about remembrance: it’s a juxtaposition, in fact, of three different things.

First, a picture appeared last week in a newspaper’s online gallery – it was a copy of this picture of a woman and child:

This photograph is from a Victorian book called Street Life in London, which documented the lives of some of the city’s poorest citizens. It was published in 1877, with text by Adolphe Smith and photographs by John Thomson. A rare original copy is currently up for auction (hence the gallery in the newspaper).

I know this book well, because I bought a facsimile copy of it some years ago (you can find details of the same edition here). Every one of its photographs and each accompanying piece of text is fascinating but, right from the start, one image grabbed me most particularly (and painfully): this same photograph. In Street Life in London it is described, not as a portrait of “A woman and child”, as the gallery caption puts it, but as a picture of a “crawler” – a horribly vivid term. The accompanying article defines the word like this:

Huddled together on the workhouse steps in Short’s Gardens, those wrecks of humanity, the Crawlers of St Giles’s, may be seen both day and night seeking mutual warmth and mutual consolation in their extreme misery. As a rule, they are old women reduced by vice [though neither case the text goes on to describe involves any vice at all]and poverty to that degree of wretchedness which destroys even the energy to beg. They have not the strength to struggle for bread…

[Street Life in London by A. Smith & J. Thomson, p.108]

Adolphe Smith’s text then tells the stories of two widows who, through ill health, have lost their ability to work, and therefore also their lodgings.

The woman [in the picture], though once able to earn money as a tailoress, was obliged to abandon that style of work in consequence of her weak eyesight, and now her great ambition is to “go out scrubbing”. But who will employ even for this menial purpose, a woman who has no home, no address to give, and sleeps on the workhouse steps when she cannot gain admittance into the casual ward?

[Street Life in London, p.110]

(This same workhouse, Smith later notes, punishes with imprisonment and hard labour anyone who seeks refuge in its ‘casual ward’ three times in the same month.)

At the time this picture was taken, the woman was earning a little bread and tea by looking after the child pictured with her, while its mother (who had formerly been a “crawler” living on the same doorstep) worked in a coffee shop. Because the woman had no home, the child was “kept out in the streets through all weathers.” She told Smith, “it pushes its little head under my chin when it is very cold, and cuddles up to me, so that it keeps me warm as well as itself.” Smith reported, however, that the child was wheezing and coughing – its health was clearly suffering from the exposure.

The situation is almost unbearable to contemplate. And although I was glad to be reminded, through seeing this picture, of this interesting book sitting on my shelves, it was a painful reminder too.

But I mentioned a juxtaposition, didn’t I?

So, I saw this picture last week. Then, a couple of days later, I happened to read two articles by two different writers.

The first was a piece by Harry Leslie Smith, entitled ‘This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time.’ (You can read it here.) Harry is 90 years old, a survivor of the Great Depression and a WWII RAF veteran. In this thoughtful and passionately argued column, he talks, among other things, of how many of the war dead from the First World War were poor:

My uncle and many of my relatives died in [the First World War] and they weren't officers or NCOs; they were simple Tommies. They were like the hundreds of thousands of other boys who were sent to their slaughter by a government that didn't care to represent their citizens if they were working poor and under-educated.

[The Guardian, 8^th November 2013]

Harry feels that our modern view of World War I – which will feature in a lot of media coverage next year when the centenary of the outbreak is marked – is losing touch with the harsh realities of the soldiers' lives away from the trenches.

We must remember that the historical past of this country is not like an episode of Downton Abbey… I can attest that life for most people was spent in abject poverty where one laboured under brutal working conditions for little pay and lived in houses not fit to kennel a dog today. We must remember that the war was fought by the working classes who comprised 80% of Britain's population in 1913.

[The Guardian, 8^th November 2013]

Harry argues that it behoves us at this time of commemoration to consider the home lives of the soldiers, and the lives of the families they left behind, both during the war and afterwards. Those soldiers, after all, came from the same society in which the “crawlers” lived. Although 37 years separated the publication of Street Life in London from the beginning of the First World War, no revolution in social care had occurred in the meantime, and many people still lived in life-threatening poverty. In Love and Toil – Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (OUP, 1993), Prof. Ellen Ross says that “starvation deaths continued to be a regular occurrence even in the kinder years after 1870.” Indeed, the cases detailed in her book show just how often poor mothers went without sustenance in order to feed their children – or the children of their neighbours. In the summer of 1905, for example, when a poor widow named Annie Higgs was found dead of starvation in Long Street, Shoreditch, it was discovered that her three young children had been kept alive for many weeks by food offerings from the surrounding poor households.

Can we truly imagine, now, the life of the “crawler” or of poor Annie Higgs? Can we truly imagine the type of country this was before the creation of the welfare state, when people were found dead in the street for want of food? Looking at the abject poor in other countries, perhaps we can. But even in this country, those lives and deaths occurred not so very long ago. One of my great-grandfathers was killed in an industrial accident one day in May 1909, leaving his wife with five children to support, and no income – no pension, no compensation, no child benefit, no help of any kind whatsoever. They got through – goodness knows how – without recourse to the dreaded workhouse, but my grandmother (who was 9 at the time of the accident) bore the psychological scars of the experience to the end of her days.

Many of the Tommies Harry Leslie Smith writes about returned from the unimaginable horrors of the trenches, only to be faced with unemployment and homelessness; the governments of the 1920s were unable to deliver a “land fit for heroes”. No wonder that, two decades later, the overwhelming feeling following the end of the Second World War was that the whole of society must take responsibility for the whole of its citizenry. The push for social reform and the creation of a welfare state gained huge support in 1945, not least from members of the armed services, and resulted in a shock defeat at the polls for Winston Churchill – despite his huge achievements as wartime leader.

Would it be fair to say that the generation that fought in World War II decided that life must be viable for all citizens: for the child born to the poorest family; for the aged and the infirm; for those permanently disabled by war – and for all people with disabilities; for those whose mental health had been damaged by war – and for all people with mental health problems?

And yet… back to my juxtaposition. There was the photograph of the Victorian “crawler”. There was the article on poverty behind the trenches. And the third thing?

The third thing was an article by the journalist Polly Toynbee, about the current government’s 'benefit sanctions' system, which is a system of docking benefits or taking them away altogether from claimants who are deemed unworthy (you can read the article here). The Department of Work and Pensions has recently published statistics showing that, for example, nearly 600,000 jobseeker's allowance claimants had their benefits docked or stopped in the eight-month period up to June 2013.

The idea behind this new, tougher system is to make sure people are actively looking for work. Toynbee, however, has discovered from speaking to job centre staff that they are specifically encouraged to find ways to stop people’s benefits regardless of the situation. Staff are given sanction targets to meet, and punished if they fall below them. Toynbee writes:

"You park your conscience at the door," [one job centre worker] tells me. "Sanctions are applied for anything at all to hit the targets."

…People are often sanctioned for a no-show at appointments they never knew about. If they call to rearrange an appointment, "we don't answer the phones, so that's a bit tricky". A flowchart on the wall shows how to raise a successful sanction.

…Someone with a disability who is knocked off employment support allowance can reclaim while awaiting an appeal. "But we are explicitly forbidden from telling them that – in black and white in the briefing pack – so these often very ill, quite confused and low-capability people are easy meat."
[The Guardian, 8^thNovember 2013]

The effects of these sanctions can be utterly disastrous. I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading about the case two years ago of Mark Mullins and his partner Helen, who killed themselves rather than carry on with their lives of desperate struggle. And, tragically, they have not been the only ones.

Now, two years later, the number of people in situations of desperate difficulty is rising. As people lose their income, too often – like the “crawler” in John Thomson’s photograph – they also lose their homes. The charity Crisis says on its website:

After years of declining trends, 2010 marked the turning point when all forms of homelessness began to rise. However, it is likely that homelessness will increase yet further, as the delayed effects of the economic downturn, cuts to housing benefit and other reforms all start to bite.

The same website states that rough-sleeping figures for London have shown a 62% rise in the last 2 years.

Harry Leslie Smith argues that though we wear poppies and pay our respects to the dead of the two world wars (as well as other conflicts), we are in grave danger of forgetting the ideals of his generation, of undoing their hard-won achievements and of ignoring their hard-earned wisdom.

The “crawler” photograph is a picture of what poverty looked like before that same wartime generation decided – through the social reforms made after World War II – that a civilized society cannotview its members solely as economic units (worthless unless able to produce financial capital), and must care for its most vulnerable citizens. How can we say we are truly remembering and honouring that generation when we are dismantling precisely what they – who sacrificed so much – worked so hard to build?

Photograph by Alan Stanton (Nation Wide, Nation Deep) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org /licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The website for Shelter (England) is here.
The website for Shelter (Scotland) is here.
The website for Crisis is here.
Homeless Link's website is here.



www.hmcastor.com

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Elizabeth I’s Virginity, the Fate of the Princes in the Tower and Other Things We Know We Don’t Know in Historical Fiction – By Elizabeth Fremantle

November 13, 2013, 2:00 am

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It is rare that a definitive truth emerges from history, like that of Richard III’s remains, proving that he did indeed suffer from scoliosis. But he also suffered from Tudor propaganda that, through writers like More and Shakespeare, sought to depict him as monstrous. As sixteenth century beliefs regarded deformity as the Devil’s work a crooked shape must have been a convenient way to describe his inner wickedness.  But much recent fiction has attempted to rehabilitate Richard of York. Philippa Gregory in her Cousins’ War series is clear: Richard is the good guy (give or take a little ruthlessness) without even the slightest crookedness about the spine – the antithesis of Shakespeare’s black-hearted crookback. Gregory’s agenda is, I suppose, to articulate an opposing story to the one that has endured for five hundred years – the York story – as a way to illuminate the lives of the women of the period and her straight-backed Richard is an intrinsic part of this. Fiction gives us license to explore the possibilities thrown up by fragments in the historical record. But the king in the car park is an undeniable truth, creating a shift of knowledge, which perhaps works to devalue Gregory’s fictional perspective – make it seem incomplete or less based in truth.

                                     Anthony Sher as Richard III – Royal Shakespeare Company 

What Richard III’s bones cannot tell us though, is whether the princes in the tower died at his hand or by his order. This story is perhaps the most enduring of the historical mysteries and has been explored endlessly in fiction. Emma Darwin in the excellent A Secret Alchemy cleverly creates a fictional scheme wherein both the Richard III camp and the Lancastrians are equally culpable, whereas Gregory’s villain is unequivocally a Margaret Beaufort driven by a combination of blind ambition and religious fervour. But her story has a further complication, which leaves one son alive to reappear later as the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Weir however, in A Dangerous Inheritance, keeps us in the dark, something that Amazon reviewers found frustrating, as if somehow they were expecting a definitive truth to emerge from her fictional story. Even genetic tests on the boys’ suspected remains would not shed light on the murderer. We would however, learn where and at what age they died and whether one of them did survive to potentially return as Warbeck.

                                                             The Princes in the Tower

There are many truths we will never know. I have been asked surprisingly often whether the Virgin Queen was truly a virgin and I’m always surprised that people think I might know something that historians have not got to the bottom of in hundreds of years of poring through the historical record. Such a question was even posed during Elizabeth’s lifetime when rumour and scandal ran rife and many sought to discredit her by destroying her reputation. As she plays a large part in my Tudor trilogy, which covers her life from girlhood to old age I had to engage with the problem of how to convey an unknown in a convincing way in my fiction. Had Elizabeth been a central character I would have been compelled to take a position on the question of her love life, but as she inhabits the margins of my novels and is only seen through the eyes of other characters it was possible to show her from a perspective of partial view.

When, as a fourteen year old, and living in the household of the dowager Queen Katherine Parr, Elizabeth had something on the spectrum between a flirtation and a full blown affair with the man in the position of stepfather to her, Parr’s fourth husband Thomas Seymour. We know a certain amount about this ‘affair’ thanks to Elizabeth’s close companion and mother figure Katherine Astley’s testimony at Seymour’s subsequent treason trial. Astley describes in detail the mornings when Seymour would visit Elizabeth in her bedchamber in which a certain amount of slap and tickle took place, sufficient for Astley to have words with Seymour. It is also suggested that Parr joined in some of these ‘games,’ in particular a puzzling scene in which Parr is said to have held Elizabeth down while Seymour cut her dress into ‘a hundred pieces’. Finally we learn that Parr discovered Elizabeth and Seymour in ‘an embrace’, which precipitated the girl being sent away from the household.

                                                  Elizabeth I as a girl – the Royal Collection

In describing this episode in Queen’s Gambit I chose to take the liberty of setting it in a bed with the guilty couple naked, but deliberately held back from showing the sexual act as I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide what had really happened. The only evidence we have from the horse’s mouth, as it were, is in a reported conversation in which Elizabeth confesses to Jane Grey that she ‘lay with’ Seymour, another statement that remains open to interpretation by the reader.  Alison Weir, however, in The Lady Elizabethtrod an entirely different path, fully exploiting contemporary rumour, and depicting the Seymour affair as ending in a secret pregnancy. Interestingly, as Anna Whitelock points out in Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, Elizabeth left strict instructions that she was not to be disembowelled or examined after death, fuelling notions that she had something to hide, and most sources agree that her wishes were obeyed. I occasionally wonder whether, if some evidence should emerge of an early pregnancy, my own interpretation in Queen’s Gambit might seem incomplete.

                                                      A depiction of Amy Robsart's death

The death of Amy Robsart, who was discovered with a broken neck at the foot of a flight of steps in 1560, is another Elizabethan story riven with uncertainties: was it suicide, was it an accident, was it murder and, if so, by who’s hand? Fingers at the time pointed towards her husband, Elizabeth’s favourite, Leicester, who, people believed, had his sights set on marrying the Queen; but then all sorts of dreadful deeds were blamed on Leicester, who was deeply resented in court circles. A TV mini series has an ailing and beleaguered Emilia Fox, playing Amy Robsart, throwing herself into a stairwell – so suicide. In my second novel Sisters of Treason I have forwarded the possibility that perhaps it was the Queen’s loyal statesman William Cecil, Leicester’s enemy, who had the most to gain from Amy Robsart’s death – so perhaps murder. It is only a suggestion mind, and born of gossip and speculation amongst my characters, because I firmly believe that, though readers often hope for the satisfaction of finding the loose ends of history neatly tied, there is certainly a place for ambiguity in historical fiction.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel Queen's Gambit, about Katherine Parr is out in hardback now and paperback early 2014. Sister's of Treason will be out in spring 2014.

We Have No Claim On The Stars, Hedd Wyn another War Poet Catherine Johnson

November 14, 2013, 12:12 am

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Ellis Evan's home

It's November. The poppy wreaths have been laid and by some modern edict it seems everyone, especially those in public view must wear one or be damned. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/13/charlene-white-newsreader_n_4265355.html 

It may be just me or it didn't seem to be such a big thing in the 70s and 80s. 

Anyway, in spite of that I am remembering a poet of World War One. A shepherd who only reluctantly joined up in 1917 when those in protected professions were called on. His family who farmed the bleak uplands close to the village of Trawsfynnydd in North Wales had to send one son. Ellis Humphrey Ellis went to protect his younger brother Robert. He was 30. 

He went for training in March, was allowed home to help with the harvest and, because he was finishing a poem, didn't go back. The military police came for him in June. He left the poem Yr Arwr, (The Hero) on the kitchen table and re wrote it from memory en route to France. He died at the Battle of Passchendaele on July 31 1917 

In the mountains where he lived Welsh was the only language, there may have been some English in school, perhaps if you went for a day with The Band of Hope to the seaside at Llandudno or Criccieth or maybe in town, but if you look on a map, there are very few towns, in fact this area was one of those flooded in the 1920s to make a reservoir to serve the cities of Birmingham and Liverpool. 

The Eisteddfod is still the premier Welsh language poetry, literature and art festival. Held yearly alternating between north and south wales, it moves around, a kind of Glastonbury with poetry.

Poets compete for the Crown and the Chair, the crown is for pryddest , free verse, the chair for cynghanedd, a very strict rhyme and metre form. Ellis Evans had been writing poetry since his youth, competing and winning local Eisteddfodau, a tradition of worker poets which has always been strong in Wales. Poems are entered using Bardic names, and Ellis Evans entered the 1917 Eisteddfod as Hedd Wyn - perfect peace.

Poets compete with pen names, and Hedd Wyn (Blessed Peace) was the pen name of Ellis Humphrey Evans, a shepherd and poet from North Wales who died at the Battle of Passchendaele on July 31 1917 aged 30 on the Pilckem Ridge when a nosecap shell hit him in the stomach and he was mortally wounded. 31,000 allied soldiers died on that day too.

Hedd Wyn's story was made into a  film in 1992

When the Eisteddford was held in September that year (in Birkenhead with David Lloyd George in attendance) his final poem, Yr Arwr, (The Hero) was awarded the highest accolade in Welsh literature, the Bardic Chair. When the prize is announced the name of the winning poet is called three times to summon him, or her, from the crowd. When this happened in 1917 (In the presence of then Prime Minister David Lloyd George) there was no answer; the hall fell silent. In honour of Hedd Wyn the Chair was draped in black cloth and the ceremony continued around an empty black clad chair, the 1917 Eisteddfod was called a festival of tears.

His poetry is as moving and affecting as any of the English War poets and he is well known in Wales, but as he wrote in his mother tongue and there are only a few translations his work isn’t as well known as Owen or Sassoon.  His war poetry includes Rhyfel, Yr Awrwr  Nid a’n Dango, and Y Blotyn Du. This is one of my favourites.

Y Blotyn Du

Nid oes gennym hawl ar y sêr,
Na'r lleuad hiraethus chwaith,
Na'r cwmwl o aur a ymylch
Yng nghanol y glesni maith.

Nid oes gennym hawl ar ddim byd
Ond ar yr hen ddaear wyw;
A honno syn anhrefn i gyd
Yng nghanol gogoniant Duw.

The Black Spot

We have no claim to the stars
Nor the sad-faced moon of night
Nor the golden cloud that immerses
Itself in celestial light.

We only have a right to exist
On earth in its vast devastation,
And it's only man's strife that destroys
The glory of God's creation.

Trans. By Alan Lwyd

His grave in France reads under his name, Hedd Wyn, Chief Bard.

Click this link to hear children of his local school recite 'Children of Trawsfynnydd in Welsh.

 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=312344258906660&set=vb.567492016594944&type=2&theater

Cant

November 14, 2013, 5:54 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

In early Georgian times it became fashionable, especially for well-to-do young men to speak 'cant' or slang; the language as spoken by the poor or more especially by the less-respectable members of society. Namely, the sharpers, the sharks, the bites, the wild-rogues, the varlets, the queer-bluffers, the rascals and scoundrels.

There is a lot of fun to be had. I've not yet been able to master the vocabulary fully enough to create a canting character, and in any case I think it might be bewildering for my young readership, but I do like to throw in a few Georgian expressions now and again. Some of these are cant and some are simply expressions that have fallen out of usage.

We had some discussions about some of these at the copy-edit stage recently. Because most are outdated and unheard-of now. Where would be the fun if they were still current? But who today knows about job horses, match-bays or wantyres? Horses are no longer our form of transport.
Nor do we any longer have such widespread suffering from gout, so the expression 'in the gout' to depict an ageing gentleman rendered grumpy, difficult and at times incapacitated by a painful condition is no longer familiar.
I also wanted a character to use the expression 'sick as a cushion' for comic effect. Then when called upon to defend it, I couldn't find it anywhere. One of my editors did track it down in the OED (hurrah!) but in the end we settled for 'sick as a parrot' which is probably more comic.
I haven't yet managed to work in 'farting crackers' to a manuscript (a cant term for breeches) although I fully intend to one day. But I did have to track down an era-appropriate term for a man's privates. I found tool, which I thought was comic without being crude. And did you know that a cant term for testicles was 'whirlegigs'? I don't even want to think about how that might have originated...
 Here is the cover of the new book (publishing next June) that provided the fun:

Autumn competition winners

November 15, 2013, 1:00 am

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We have had a few IT problems here at The History Girls so are repeating the winners of the last two Competitions.

 

September (Robert Low)

 

Sam

Alice

Mark Burgess

 

Please contact Cassie Browne cassie.browne@harpercollins.co.uk, if you not already done so, to claim your copies.

 

October (Miranda Miller)

 

Marjorie

Alice

YoungHistorian7

Ruan Peet

Mark Burgess

Please contact Michael O'Connell michael@peterowen.com to claim your prize.

Congratulations to all, especially Alice and Mark, who seem to have won both months!

Remembrance: by Sue Purkiss

November 15, 2013, 5:00 pm

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It's that time of year again.

Remembrance. Remembering. As I've written before on this blog, my father, like most of his generation, fought in the war. Well, he didn't do all that much fighting; he was taken prisoner on the way to Dunkirk. Years later, he would watch Remembrance Day parades, the Royal Military Tattoo and suchlike with a slightly sardonic glint in his eye, shake his head, and say: "Why do they want to remember it? Why can't we just forget ?" It was understandable. He'd had what he called 'a bad war'. His memories didn't link up with the smart uniforms, the well-phrased speeches.

He was not alone. It's a well-known phenomenon that many soldiers don't wish to speak of their experiences. As far as possible, they want to forget. But they can't. They can suppress them, but often the memories rise to the surface in old age; this happened with Harry Patch, the 'last surviving Tommy', who only began to speak of his experiences in the trenches when he was over a 100. It happened with Felix Weinberg, who only recently wrote a memoir, Boy 30529, (which I reviewed here last month) about his experiences in the concentration camps; he saw no reason to speak about what had happened to him till he was an old man - he was determined not to be defined by what had happened to him. It happened with Eric Lomax, who was a prisoner of the Japanese. His suppression of his memories caused him great emotional difficulty, and it was only when he faced up to them with the help of Amnesty International, and even went to meet one of his former guards, that he found a measure of peace. (He wrote about this in The Railway Man.)

Earlier this year I went to visit the battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders. We were based in Ypres, and we went a couple of times to the Menin Gate to hear the last post. If I'm honest, I found the experience a little disappointing. I had imagined the gate looking out over a plain, with a few observers standing in a circle round the trumpeter - I think I must have seen this painting, by Will Longstaff, with its drifts of ghostly soldiers, and based my expectation on that. Instead, the archway is in the centre of the town, with a busy road running through it. This is closed off for the ceremony, and the space under the arch is crammed with people, so that all you can really see is other people's heads. But when you look at the names inscribed on the archway afterwards, and take in the fact that there are 54,896, and these are only the names of those British soldiers with no known grave who were killed between 1914 and 15th August 1917: then something of the scale and nature of the slaughter begins to reveal itself, and the experience is both sobering and moving.

Siegfried Sassoon, with the anger of the survivor, did not respond to the gate in that way. This from his poem, On Passing The New Menin Gate:

Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

But of course these reminders are not principally for the participants. They're for the rest of us. And they're so important. Surely, the more of us they bring to see the horror of war, the more chance there is that we will do everything we can to avoid war in the future - or that's the hope, even if it sometimes seems a vain one. 

Flanders is littered with cemeteries - all beautifully kept by the War Graves Commission - and with museums that tell the story of those days incredibly well - particularly the recently re-done Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres itself. Here are just a few pictures.

A small cemetery in Ypres; a little later in the summer, these flowers must have been beautiful.

I hope you can read these words, from the museum at Tyne Cot Cemetery.

These figures were in one of the few German cemeteries; the Belgians were less generous with their grants of land to the vanquished, and so here there were far fewer individual graves. The stonework was dark grey, as opposed to the white stone of the Allied graves.

Finally, a personal remembrance. During the war, my father palled up with a softly spoken Hampshire lad called Eric Shepherd. Shep, as Dad called him, had an astonishing way with animals - even the fiercest dog could be gentled by him, a gift that must have come in very handy when the prisoners had the chance to 'liberate' food! He was a lovely man, and he died last week, aged 93. Rest in peace, Shep.