Writing Historical Fiction by Celia Brayfield

November 30, 2013, 4:01 pm

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We have a huge extra treat this month from Celia Brayfield, whose new book with Duncan Sprott, Writing Historical Fiction sounds like a must-read for all History Girls - and Boys.



A bit about Celia:


Celia Brayfield’s first novel, which began in Malaysia in 1938, was written when historical fiction was the love that dared not speak its name. She subsequently smuggled revolutionary St Petersburg, Paris with the Ballets Russes and the Barbary Coast in the eighteenth Century into some of her nine bestselling novels. Her next novel is about the love affair between a French man and an English woman that finally brought Mary Queen of Scots to justice; in retelling this tragic episode in English history, she has used recent research to follow the lives the ordinary people trapped Mary’s doomed court-in-exile. Celia also tutors award-winning students on two of Britain’s leading Creative Writing programmes, at Bath Spa University and Brunel University in London. She is the author of Bestseller (Fourth Estate) 1996, one of the very few guides to writing successful popular fiction from a bestselling author.
 
She is also the guest editor of the winter 2013 edition of Mslexia.

Here she muses on why anachronistic attitudes to love and sex have sometimes given historical fiction a bad name.

Bodice-ripper. Shall we just think about this for a moment? Yes, it’s publishing slang for popular historical fiction for women and it tells us about the mindset, fixed in the Mad Men era, that put historical writing beyond the literary pale for decades. Bodice-ripper believers are sure that that our ancestors were randy as stoats, at it like crazed weasels and permanently breathless with passion.

I think not. The eminent historian Lawrence Stone thought not, in his tome The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) which transformed thinking about relationships in the early modern period and in which observed that people had far less sex at that time than we imagined they did.

Likewise with love. History certainly offers us epic romances – the love of Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt, which endured thirty years and his first two highly advantageous marriages to other women, or the coup de foudre which led Eleanor of Aquitaine to dump the King of France for the unprepossessing Duke of Normandy – later Henry II of England. But the writer who tries to tread a path between accurate history and engaging fiction is confronted by the fact that neither love nor sex have meant the same to our ancestors as they do to us today.

Worse, we have very little evidence to tell us how ordinary people felt, thought and acted about love, and what we do have – the poetry, the erotica, the court testimonies – was not created to provide a record, but to serve a purpose at the time. Finally, worst of all, many authors have made considerable fortunes by ignoring these facts and having Tudor noblewomen act like Essex girls.

Love is the stuff of fiction, particularly popular fiction, but love has not always been the intense, intimate and sexual emotion we recognise today nor was it always considered the best foundation for a marriage and family. History is not on the writer’s side. Mostly, love has been an anarchic challenge to the social order.

Love and the novel have a shared history. Romantic love was defined by the romantic movement of the late eighteenth century, in which the idea that emotions should be all-powerful and should triumph over reason was central. The novel itself emerged at the same time and their linguistic origins are intertwined, with the word romance having double meaning – a love affair or a story. The sociologist Anthony Giddens has suggested that romantic love introduced the idea of a narrative into an individual's life and reinforced the link between self-realisation and freedom.

It is ironic that the period of English history that is currently such a focus of fiction was one of the least romantic. To modern readers, the true Tudor attitudes to love and marriage e are depressingly pragmatic. The immense dynastic marriages of the time, such as that of the Earl of Shrewsbury and Bess of Hardwick, a three-couple alliance which included four of the couple’s adult children, seem cruel and incomprehensible to us.

Equally hard to understand is the story of Lady Catherine Gray, heir to the English throne, who fell in love and married Edward Seymour, the Earl of Pembroke, in secret while negotiations for a diplomatic alliance for her were under way. Within months Catherine’s young husband was sent abroad and his sister, the only witness to their marriage, died. Catherine lost the legal document that proved their marriage, and the priest who married them disappeared. She found herself pregnant, with a child that was, to all intents and purposes, illegitimate. Queen Elizabeth suspected a plot and Catherine was imprisoned for the rest of her life. To modern readers, and to fine novelists including Alison Weir and Ella March Chase, this is a tragic story of true love. To an Elizabethan audience, this is a tragic story of an unbelievably silly and disloyal young couple. And to male historians, alas, it has been proof that Queen Elizabeth was an embittered spinster.

Does it matter that a novelist in pursuit of more readers makes a Tudor lady act like an Essex girl? To me, yes. Surely the reason we explore the past is to find out what human nature really is. If we traduce our ancestors’ feelings, there’s no reason to get to know them at all. And besides, a bodice meant exquisite fabric imported from far-off lands, jewels, gold thread, skilled embroiderers, weeks of work for dozens of people – the man who ripped it wouldn’t be anyone’s favourite.

Extracted from Writing Historical Fiction:The Writers’ and Artists’ Companion, by Celia Brayfield and Duncan Sprott, published by Bloomsbury Academic, December 5 2013.

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Paper, Print and the Georgians - Lucy Inglis

December 2, 2013, 1:00 am

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The British Library’s new Georgians Revealed exhibition is now open. It is a wonderful exploration of works on paper throughout the Georgian period, and the whole thing has a dynamic feel to it that reflects the spirit of the age.

Last month, I gave a Sunday lecture there focussing on the importance of paper during the eighteenth century, but also on the broader themes of life in Georgian London. What makes a Londoner? How was that identity forged? And what part did paper play in it?

Londoners had always been financial animals, but they were becoming consumers on an international scale. For that, they needed a currency they could trust. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 saw the beginning of a move towards standardised bank notes; the first ‘modern’ ones appeared in 1725. That, coupled with recoinage to get rid of the vast numbers of brass fakes swimming around the system, helped to stabilize the pound and create confidence in it. As an aside, the most famous of the Wardens of the Royal Mint, Isaac Newton aged nineteen, made a list of his sins which, along with stealing, ‘punching my sister’, ‘falling out with the servants’ and ‘having unclean thoughts’ was ‘Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne’.

International trade required that this money had a value not only at home, but when compared to other currencies, so, in 1698, a Huguenot named John Castaing began writing up a news-sheet called The Course of Exchange and Other Things. The sheet included stock prices, bullion rates and exchange rates. It was published on Tuesdays and Fridays and sent to the Hook of Holland the same day in bulk.

Owing to the power of commerce, literacy was rising fast. Parents and orphanages found that their children were simply more employable if they could read and write. This rapid rise in literacy was accompanied by a boom in print culture. Thousands of news-sheets, papers, ballads and broadsides were printed in London’s Moorfields, where Grub Street was a real place specialising in tabloid-type publications. Newspapers came to prominence in the reign of George I. They were key to London trade and social life, but politicians were becoming aware of how the press could be used to influence the electorate. Though the government was becoming increasingly aware that it could not control the press, it could - through the Post Office - control its distribution. It franked and sent out the newspapers which were most supportive and least inflammatory to those ‘who keep coffeehouses, that they might be furnished with them, gratis’.

Moorfields was not only the centre of production for the popular press, but it was also the home of many of London’s producers of pornography. Most of this was retailed south of the Strand, where two streets, Wych Street and Holywell Street were almost entirely given over to the sale of London’s saucier material. Samuel Pepys probably represents the average consumer: he had a copperplate print of a naked Nell Gwynn above his desk at the Admiralty; and in the early part of 1688, he purchased a copy of L’École des Filles from John Martin, his bookseller. On a February Sunday, ‘the Lord’s Day’, as he noted in his diary, he went to the office to do some work and have a little read of his new purchase, ‘which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the villainy of the world’. Women also played a part in the production and sale of pornography: Elizabeth Nutt ran a cluster of shops in the Royal Exchange where she sold her more respectable stock, such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub. She was also listed as a ‘Mercury-woman’, printing cheap and often seditious or salacious ballads in Grub Street; in the 1730s, she was printing pornography there, aided by her daughters.

The rise in popular, accessible music was pioneered by John Walsh and his son, also John, from their shop the Harp and Hoboy in Catherine Street off Drury Lane. There, they held the monopoly on producing Handel’s work. Walsh started publishing in 1695 and was soon innovating: using cheap and quick-to-work pewter instead of copper and punches for notes to speed things up.  He had instant success, but his real opportunity presented itself when Handel appeared on the scene. Handel came to London in 1711 with the ink still wet on his opera Rinaldo, which he had been engaged to write for performance in the 1710-11 season at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket.  Aaron Hill, the manager, had decided upon an ‘Italian’ season, and Handel was the man to deliver, his reputation already known in the city. Opera was relatively new to London’s sophisticated set and attempts to establish an English style were damp squibs in the main. Rinaldo - a consciously Italianate opera written by a German - was an instant hit. The quick, cheap production of Handel’s music was key to his success. Hear it at a recital or on the stage, go to the Walsh’s shop, buy the sheet music for your instrument and go home and play Handel’s music.

But paper wasn’t only used for commerce and entertainment. It was also used for education and huge advances in medicine and science were recorded in ambitious manuals and treatises which went on to save thousands, if not millions of lives after their publication. The most important of these was arguably the collaboration of man-midwife William Smellie, surgeon William Hunter and artist Jan Van Rymsdyk. It resulted in two defining works: Smellie’s A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgement, of the practice of midwifery of 1754, and William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures twenty years later. These books are still regarded as the moment modern obstetrics was born.

No lecture on paper, print and the Georgians would be complete without the Romantic poets, and we ended with Keats, Shelley and Byron. Keats was the only true Londoner, described by Byron as a ‘Cockney’ and a ‘dirty little blackguard’. Both Keats and Shelley had backgrounds in medicine. Shelley in particular was interested in Galvinism and the reanimation of the body. The lectures he attended on it coincided with the beginning of his love affair with Mary Godwin and she listened, rapt, as he talked about them afterwards. Later, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, telling the story of a monster brought to life through reanimation and of a need for love that could not be conquered by death. I gave the last words to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose writings, both his poetry and private letters, gave his contemporaries a powerful insight into the dangers of addiction. He died in 1834, in the lull of the reign of William IV. The Georges had gone, and Victoria was still to arrive, but London had changed immeasurably. Coleridge wrote from a small room in his doctor’s house in Highgate, where he was treated for addiction. The view from the window was of the ‘ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul’s and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all...Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day.’

There's hole at the bottom of my garden… by Eve Edwards

December 2, 2013, 10:00 pm

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I'm living with the builders at the moment.  A medium-sized extension on the side of our house appears to demand a foundation hole the size of an Australian open cast mine.  What is fascinating, however, is seeing the layers stripped away in the garden - first the top soil, then the layers of sand and light gravel deposited by the nearby Thames over the centuries (yes, Bible scholars, I live in a house literally built on sand).  I asked the chap this morning if he had found any buried treasure.  Only a few coins, he replied.  What was more exciting than a couple of old pennies was discovering the bricked up coal hole that I had no idea was in the side of the house and seeing how the utilities connected up.  The old gas pipe had a bright blue (and reassuring new looking) hose threaded through it like some clever bypass surgery on the heart of a Victorian house.  It was a mini Time Team moment in my own garden.

I suppose I should count myself lucky as a house down the road from us discovered a burial site when they had their basement excavated.  The police were called and we all got a thrill seeing the blue and white incident tape (and it wasn't even due to filming for Morse).  The bones turned out to be Anglo-Saxon so the police stood down and the archeologists moved in.

Anglo-saxon burials in oxfordshire c. Ashmolean Museum

Slightly creepy to think on whose bones you might be sitting...

Television producers have clocked to the fascination we have to the past we can touch with a spade and digger.  I nod here to the above mentioned Time Team who made dirty fingernails, home knitted jumpers and weathered faces archaeologically cool.

My teenage heartthrob, Michael Wood, took his crew of diggers to the little green outside my parents' house in Long Melford, Suffolk, a year or so ago.  They dug up a Roman road that they had not known was there and revealed a whole layer of history in the village just by making a couple of trenches.  To me that is akin to magic.

I can think of a number of writers who are good at doing the same thing with pen rather than shovel. One of my favourite children's books was Tom's Midnight Garden.  Philippa Pearce caught that sense so many of us have of the different eras layering in the same place - think filo pastry rather than shortcrust.  The John Gordon book, The Giant under the Snow, was another favourite.  As a child, I lived near the earthworks that made up Boadicea's camp in Epping Forest and took idea of Gordon's earthen giant with me whenever I walked there.

The edition I read as a child. Love this cover!

Scratch the surface anywhere in the UK and history jumps out at you jack-in-a-box fashion.  I find that immensely exciting and use it to fuel my writing.  You don't have to travel to see the past; you can just close your eyes and send your imagination down into the earth.

Happy digging!

The Berwickshire News and the Eyemouth Disaster of 1881 - by Katherine Langrish

December 3, 2013, 9:00 pm

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For years and years when I lived near Skipton, we used to take the local paper, The Craven Herald, which I believe was the last newspaper in England to cover the whole of the the front sheet in advertisements - for sheep sales, cattle sales, farmers' markets and local businesses. Sadly, no more. The last time I was up in Skipton and bought the the paper, I found it had at last conformed to the modern norm. The front page is now like every other: a news page with big headlines and photographs.

There was a certain charm in the old ways. The Craven Herald of only a very few years ago was little different from the one pictured above: The Berwickshire News of Tuesday, October 18, 1881 - full of small and large advertisements - for boot shops, milliners, coachmakers, coal agents; for hotelliers, gas-fitters and drapers.  W. Charles of Dunse 'begs to call particular attention to the WATERPROOF 'K' BOOT, as advertised in The Field newspaper' and 'ordered by the Admiralty for the ARTIC EXPEDITION' (sic: missing the 'c' out of 'Arctic' was clearly as easily done then as now.) An 'Establishment for the Board and Education of Young Ladies' offers its prospectus. John Brown calls attention to his Thrashing Machine:

William Graham advertises a somewhat intimidating list of health drinks (what is Khiss Hi Ke Pani?) and follows it up with a variety of sheep-dips:

While, tucked away at the bottom of the page, is this modest advertisement for a monumental mason:

A lot of people may have been looking at this one.  Because almost the entirety of the inside of the newspaper - two whole sheets of closely printed columns - is taken up with the story of the 'Fearful Loss of Life' caused by the tremendous gale of October Friday 14 1881 - now known as the Eymouth Disaster after the tiny fishing village of Eyemouth which lost 129 of its men. In all, the gale cost the lives of 189 men,  but Eyemouth suffered worst.

"Eyemouth" the reporter writes, "is a scene of unutterable woe. Many families are bereft of husbands, fathers and brothers, while there is hardly one in the village who does not mourn some relative. ...The town is full of heartrending scenes."

There follows a list of the lost, extremely touching even today, with the names of the boats in which they made a living:

The Radiant. lost in Eye Bay (7) - John Windram, married...John Fairbairn, married, 3 children; William Gray, married, 3 children; David Fairbairn, single; Alexander Fairbairn, single; John Burgeon, single; and James Crombie, married, 3 children.

That's just one boat. Then there's The Harmony, The Wave, The Blossom, Forget-Me-Not, the Press Home, Lily of the Valley ("Thomas Miller, married, 5 children; Robert Lough, married, 5 children; David Ritchie, married, 4 children, Robert Lough, married, family partly [grown] up; Alexander Swanston, jun., and James Dougal, single"), The Onward, The James and Robert, The Invincible, The Good Intent, The Myrtle, The Enterprise, The Economy and the Fisher Lasses.

All those from one little village - although, in those days of slow communications, the story is amended with a footnote to say "By telegram we learn that the Fisher Lasses has arrived at Shields with the loss of of one of the crew - Wm, Young - the rest are all safe."

Can you imagine with what anxiety this newspaper must have been perused on the day of its delivery?  So many locals lost: so many friends, family, acquaintances. The relief of learning that the Fisher Lasses was safe at Shields; the agony for the family of William Young, the ongoing agony for families who yet had no news. No helicopters then: no search and rescue.  Only the long wait. "Several bodies have come ashore at Berwick..."

How much attention, if any, was paid to the advertisments on the front page?

Well - life had to go on, even in the harshest and hardest of moments.  Here was a local newspaper, dealing with an immense but still local tragedy, doing its best to bring the news, to report the disaster, to mirror the grief and to relay the attempts being made to alleviate some at least of the suffering..

The Berwickshire News was serving its community, as local papers did then and still do today.

The Eyemouth Fishing Tragedy Memorial, St Abbs, from Flickr 1618699659.jpg

Credit:
All the newspaper excerpts are scanned from a facsimile of the Berwickshire News which I  bought from Eyemouth Museum - where much more can be found.

A STRANGE BEREAVEMENT by Eleanor Updale

December 4, 2013, 6:00 pm

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I was going to start this post with an invitation to join me on a visit to an unusual member of my family - but suddenly he's gone. Without him, I wouldn't be here today, and my children would never have been born.  I can hear you sighing already (other people's genealogy can be as boring as their holiday photos) but stick with me.  The real reason I'm talking about this ancestor is that he lived at a site where something extraordinary happened.  The event is worth hearing about in its own right, but I've just come across a re-telling of it that raises an issue close to the heart of readers and writers on this blog: can fiction writers sometimes convey the feel of an event better than mainstream reporters or historians?

I may have mentioned before that one of the driving forces behind my latest book, The Last Minute, and the website that goes with it (www.eleanorupdale.com/minute) is the laziness of the way disasters are reported.  Too often, cliches of language, format and tone cheapen the suffering of those involved, reducing them to stereotypes, and inoculating us against horror.   There's one BBC correspondent, often sent to bloody or desperate locations, whose reports are all so similar, and so bathed in an apparent enjoyment of gloom, that I'm ashamed to say I have to suppress a giggle at the very mention of her name.  But she is simply the extreme.  I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels uncomfortable  about the how images of warfare, and the way they are packaged for us, have become so routine that any shock is short lived - or, worse still, replaced with a feeling of impotent despair which can too easily drift into indifference.

It shouldn't be possible to watch reports from Iraq, Egypt or Syria and continue with what you were doing before they came on screen, but I can, and do, day after day. And I'm ashamed of myself.

I was in the news business for many years.  I know some of the reporters, and I'm certain that they care desperately about the events amidst which they bravely work, but even the best of them can't always get though the screen.

When it comes to TV history, violence is often glamorised or used as wallpaper - with am-dram extras staging sanitised reconstructions to keep our eyes open as the pop professor yacks on.  The pain is no greater than in a children's cartoon.
That's why I was overwhelmed by a fictional account of an event in wartime London which suddenly made me realise what it must be like to be caught up in one of today's episodes of random, merciless killing.

At this point, I had better introduce my late ancestor.  He's about my height but even broader.  This is almost exactly what he looked like.
He was the mighty pillar box behind which my father took cover when a German V1 landed on the Aldwych in London on 30th June 1944.  It saved his life. 
From Edwardian times, he stood on the south side of the Strand in London, not far from St Clement Danes Church.
Now, as I think I've mentioned before, my father spent his entire childhood in institutional care and hadn't a clue who his parents were, so I grew up rather short of forebears.  As a result I have a (possibly rather unhealthy) attachment to some objects, and this pillar box (my 'grandfather') was one of them.
I always used to give him a loving stroke as I passed by. You could still see and feel where the shrapnel hit.  I assumed that he would be there forever, so you can imagine what a shock I got on Monday when I went to photograph him for this blog, only to find that he had gone. A massive building project is underway, and it seems he has  been a casualty of redevelopment.

'My' postbox was where the envelope sign is, by St Clement Danes church at the right of the map.  The other double box is marked by the envelope by St Mary le Strand at the bottom left.

There's another box, a little further down the Strand, near King's College and St Mary le Strand.

I'm afraid that one has a rather doomed look too.  Even so, I think I will adopt him as an honorary uncle.

As you'll have gathered, I always thought of 'my' pillar box as a rather jolly thing, and of the bombing as a minor event at the fag end of a long war.  As far as I could tell on Monday, there is no memorial anywhere nearby.  The attack is unmentioned in St Clement Danes church (which had already been bombed in the earlier Blitz). There's no memorial at the building on the corner of Kingsway which took the worst of the blast, and in which many died (it was then the Air Ministry, and later - as St Catherine's house - the registry of births, marriages and deaths.  Now, it's a rather austere office). For me, my father's V1 was the bomb that didn't kill, and my mother's story of him staggering into a pub in Essex street caked in dust seemed rather comic. I didn't know they were protecting me from the truth.

It took a fictionalised account of the blast, in the novel The Secret Fire by Martin Langfield, to bring home what it was really like to be in that London street just a few weeks after the exhillaration of D-Day.  Of course, The Secret Fire is a novel, and you don't have to read far to realise that much of the plot must be pure invention, but when it comes to the framework in which that fiction operates, the feel seems to me rock-solid, and the more official records I've looked at since finding the novel bear this out.  The stark facts (at least 48 - perhaps 200 - dead, hundreds more injured, tremendous damage to buildings) bear out the strategic significance of the strike, but Langfield's account of the human consequences is compelling.
Here are some extracts:

The Air Ministry’s 10-foot-tall blast walls, made of 18-inch-thick brick, disintegrated immediately, deflecting the force of the explosion up and down the street. Hundreds of panes of glass shattered, blowing razor-sharp splinters through the air. The Air Ministry women watching at the windows were sucked out of Adastral House by the vacuum and dashed to death on the street below. Men and women queuing outside the Post Office were torn to pieces. Shrapnel peppered the facades of Bush House and the Air Ministry like bullets...

Part of the casement of the bomb lay burning at the corner of Kingsway. The dead and dying lay scattered in the street. Groans and cries of pain filled the air, though many could not hear them, deafened by the concussion. Some of the victims were naked, their clothing blown from them by the blast...Banknotes blew in the breeze...

People walked around dazed, blood pouring from wounds some didn’t know they had, the crunch of broken glass under their feet ubiquitous. One woman walked down seventy-nine steps of an Adastral House stairwell to the street, not realizing her right foot was hanging sideways, feeling no pain, stepping over bodies...
 
One man stepped from a doorway after the blast and was sliced vertically in two by a sheet of falling glass.

A news editor of the Evening Standard who came upon the scene couldn’t take his eyes off the trees. Their leaves had all been replaced by pieces of human flesh...

At the end of the book, Langfield describes his sources for this passage.  He has done his research, just as any serious writer would.  But there's something in the writing that gives his account a charge that is lacking from the 'official' sources. 
You can read more in the book, or visit http://secretfire.wordpress.com/the-aldwych-v-1-blast-june-30-1944/
There are some photographs (not used here for fear over copyright) at this site: http://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspxhttp://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspx
And there are better pictures at http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/V1_maintxtd.html though sadly on this (and only this) page of that site, the date of the attack is wrong.

When I knew my father (who died more than thirty years ago) he was passionately opposed to the glamorisation of conflict.  I always assumed that was because of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War.  Now I wonder whether it wasn't, at least in part, due to what he saw in his lunch break in London on that summer day in 1944 - horror he never spoke about In detail.
This chimes in with the immediate reaction of the poet Danny Abse, who was also in the street when the bomb hit.
...the Aldwych echo of crunch
and the urgent ambulances loaded
with the fresh dead...
Abse, then a medical student at Kings College, carried on with his day, walking though the mayhem to get to the dissecting room. It was nearly fifty years before he felt able to analyse his response to the event in his poem Carnal Knowledge, which you can read here.
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.htmlhttp://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.html

Martin Langfield's image of the body parts in the trees, and the sense of an 'ordinary' day transformed will colour the way I watch and listen to news reports now.  That scene could be a street in Baghdad or Damascus. Just as constraints on reporting during the war meant that the true horror of 30th June 1944 was not widely known at the time, our sensibilities limit what can be shown on the screen now.  The panting reporter, often taking up much of the frame, tells us an event is shocking - and we may even be warned in advance of distressing scenes before a news item starts- but sadly I have to admit that it took a fictionalised picture of an event almost seventy years ago to make me realise how numb I had become to the horrors of our own day.  That's just one reason why it's worth reading, and writing, historical novels.

Map from OpenStreetMap.org

www.eleanorupdale.com
I'll be back with you on Christmas Day - and I promise you something more cheery.

LIONHEART by Stewart Binns – a review by Katherine Roberts

December 5, 2013, 4:30 pm

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When Mary asked if anyone wanted to review this book, I leapt at the chance. Crusades! Battles! Knights! King Richard the Lionheart! After just finishing a series about King Arthur, how could I resist?

Although the subject matter appealed, I must admit this is the first time in a while that I’ve read an adult historical novel without a fantasy element. Also I’m a History Girl as opposed to a History Boy, which means I’m probably not the ideal target audience for this book… all of which I'm explaining up front so you can put my review into context.

QUICK REVIEW

This is the story of Richard Lionheart and the Third Crusade, written from the point of view of the king's trusted military advisor and brave knight Sir Ranulf. 

Read it for:

Battles.

History.

Cool anecdotes, such as Richard selling his sword as King Arthur’s mythical sword “Excalibur” to the gullible King of Sicily for an island’s ransom (loved that bit).
King Richard's fabulous horse.

Male viewpoints.
Christian view of the Crusades.

Do not read it if you are looking for:

Romance.

Female viewpoints.

Political correctness (especially if you are female, Muslim, or French).

LONG REVIEW

Stewart Binns writes big, epic novels about real macho heroes. Lionheart is packed full of history – in fact, with the 70-page glossary and detailed maps at the end, in parts it felt almost as if I were reading a non-fiction historical text. But this aspect of the story should appeal to historians, so while I am not enough of a scholar of the period to tell you if the history is accurate, it certainly feels as if it is, right down to the last drop of blood - which gives the novel an authentic atmosphere.

Early on in the book, Sir Ranulf undergoes a sadistic ordeal to prove he is brave enough to be one of the two men sent to guide young hotshot prince Richard on his campaign (the ordeal on page 14 is where the book first grabbed my attention and Sir Ranulf shows his mettle). Richard's second guide is Father Alun, the priest put in charge of the Lionheart’s soul - which proves just as difficult a task as guiding the Lionheart in military matters since, when we first meet Richard, he is less of a hero than a spoiled young prince with a rag-tag army and a campful of whores… do not expect too much political correctness here! Sir Ranulf’s attitude to women is little better, since when he falls for the pretty Basque girl Negu in the king's camp, this promising love interest is described as (children look away now): “the cock was crowing by the time my cock wanted to sleep, but she was still eager for more and would not rest until I had satisfied her one last time.”

Negu, however, is soon packed off to be a nun, leaving Sir Ranulf and Richard free to concentrate on the Third Crusade in answer to Saladin’s jihad in the Holy Land. At this point, the story picks up pace, since the Crusade gives the Lionheart a bigger purpose beyond his petty squabbles with his family back home, and allows his bravery and daring to shine where it is best put to use – on the battlefield, leading his men. Richard’s transformation from spoiled prince to true hero takes place during the Crusade, which also gives Sir Ranulf an opportunity to show some character beyond his obvious purpose as the convenient narrator of Richard Lionheart’s story. In fact, I sometimes found Sir Ranulf to be more of a sympathetic character than the Lionheart himself, and the best parts of the book for me were when Sir Ranulf gets to tell his own story rather than his king's.

Of course, a novel of this kind is not only about one man (or woman). It is a weaving of many different threads into an epic tapestry, and the stories picked for focus are naturally those that most interest the writer. As a History Girl, I’d have liked to see a bit more of Richard’s fierce elderly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was named “Queen of the Amazons” by the men after her part in the Second Crusade. I was also intrigued by the aging nun Hildegarde, another woman Richard respects and seeks counsel from. The younger women seem to be there as mostly eye-candy for the men, but the story of the tragic princesses captured from Cyprus who later travel with Sir Ranulf behind the Muslim lines brought a tear to my eye.

In bringing the Lionheart's story to today's readers, Stewart Binns has chosen to tell the adult equivalent of a boy's own adventure story, focusing on Sir Ranulf and King Richard, and in this respect the book delivers – and delivers big time. This book would make a great Christmas present for the man in your life.

Click here to buy LIONHEART from amazon.

(The History Girls received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.)

***

Katherine Roberts normally writes fantasy and historical fantasy for younger readers featuring feisty heroines such as King Arthur's daughter Rhianna Pendragon (Twitter @PendragonGirl). But she once ventured into nearly adult historical territory with I am the Great Horse, her novel about Alexander the Great told my his (very macho) warhorse Bucephalas, of whom Richard the Lionheart would no doubt have approved!

BACK TO SCHOOL by Adèle Geras

December 6, 2013, 11:30 pm

≫ Next: 'Help! What am I?' by Karen Maitland

≪ Previous: LIONHEART by Stewart Binns – a review by Katherine Roberts

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Fellow History Girl Caroline Lawrence appeared at Roedean School as part of their Classics Week a couple of days before I was there, and led the way. The girls and staff were still talking about her when I arrived, so she was a hard act to follow. But follow her I did, at the invitation of Sue Blood, the librarian. I stayed in Brighton the night before with some good friends in a splendid flat on the front at Hove, and on the morning before setting off for the school, we walked around town. I love Brighton. I love the literary associations, I love the slightly faded glamour of a resort out of season, and I love the Royal Pavilion, which is very beautiful and in the words of Sally Prue, also "BONKERS." I would have put up a photo of it, but then I saw a knitted version, which adds a whole new level of bonkers to the story, so I'm showing you that instead. You can, of course, always Google the Royal Pavilion.

I went up to Roedean just before lunch and the taxi was early so I walked around a bit beforehand, outside. The first thing I noticed was that the colour of the whole place had changed. It used to be grey and forbidding, stony, rather dark against the skyline but now all had been painted butter-yellow, which looked much more welcoming. When I arrived here in January 1955, just short of my 11th birthday and expecting Malory Towers, it was snowing and the lights shining from all the windows dotted the darkness. It was cold and I can't remember being scared except in retrospect. I can now imagine the scene from the point of view of my mother and understand how she must have been feeling. Nearly sixty years later, here I was again and the sun was shining and the place looked terrific.

There was also a notice board, pointing the way to all kinds of delights. We certainly never had a café, and the swimming pool they're pointing out is a fabulous place with heated water. No such soft stuff for us! We swam in the summer in an unheated pool. It was horrendously cold, always.

I was very happy at school. I am naturally gregarious and enjoyed living in company all the time. I took this picture standing outside House Three, which was my house. Miss Ratcliffe, my House Mistress, saw more of me in those years and knew me better than my own mother. She was also my wonderful Latin teacher and I remember her with enormous affection and respect.

Sue Blood took me round House Three and the first thing I noticed was how modern and luxurious everything looked. Of course, it would do. More than half a century has elapsed and things have obviously changed but I was struck by this beautiful carpet (see below) going upstairs in House 3. We had lino: green as I recall. We ate in the House and not, as now, in a beautiful canteen for the whole school, where you can actually choose what you have for lunch. Unheard of, naturally, in my day. You ate what you were given. Asked over lunch what I mainly liked and remembered about being at school, two things stand out. The teaching, without which I would never have got into Oxford and the plays we put on every year. Those school productions, directed by Miss Braund, who is still alive, are golden in my memory. I was Paulina in "A Winter's Tale." I was de Stogumber in a terrific production of Shaw's "St. Joan," and this all happened in the School Hall,which has now been turned into the Library. I didn't manage to take a photo of the theatre as it is today, but that was where I gave my talk and all I can say is: any small town would be happy to have such a place in it. It looked state of the art to me, and it seats about 200 people. I believe professional companies come here to perform sometimes but the huge photos backstage were all of recent school productions and I wished I could have been in them all.

My talk went well, I think. I enjoyed talking to the girls who interrogated me closely on how things were in my time. I told them about HAPPY EVER AFTER, which is a retelling of three fairy tales, set at Roedean in 1962, the year I did my A-levels. Every single thing in that book, I told them, is true, apart from the plots of the three books. The questions kept coming, and it felt very strange to be called 'Madam'....something that hasn't changed. That's what we used to call the staff back when I was there.

I felt like a kind of living historical relic. It was really wonderful to be back. Everything felt completely familiar even though so many things had changed since my day. In a way, it was like going home, mostly because during most of my childhood, I didn't have a "home" to go to in the holidays but visited relatives, friends most of the time. My parents were abroad, and I saw them in the summer holidays, though my mother did visit as often as she could, taking a small flat in London on several occasions. But there was nowhere that you could rely on to be the same day in and day out, except for Roedean. I made lots of friends there and apart from maths and anything sporty, loved my lessons and got on with the staff. It occurred to me that the main thing Roedean instilled in us without even trying was the idea that women were the equals of men. The women who taught us and looked after us simply assumed that the whole world was available for us to live in on exactly the same terms as if we'd been men, and that we could follow whatever path we chose. I'm closing this nostalgic post with a picture of thing I loved most in the whole school: an Art Nouveau-ish carved stone inset into the space above the fireplace in the House Mistress's drawing room. I always thought when I was at school that it represented Sleep and I used to think it was most beautiful. I still do.

'Help! What am I?' by Karen Maitland

December 7, 2013, 4:30 pm

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 Recently I tried to move some savings to an account with a fractionally higher rate of interest than my existing one. Although the amount involved would not have kept an international money-launderer in champagne for a day, I found myself having to answer a catalogue of questions. Tedious, but fine until we came to the question – What’s your occupation?

‘Writer,’ I answered.

‘Sorry that’s not coming up on the computer,’ the young man said. ‘It’s suggesting underwriter.’

 ‘A slightly different occupation,’ I told him. ‘Try author or novelist.’

 ‘Sorry the computer doesn’t recognise either of those as occupations.’

 ‘It’s obviously been talking to some of my relatives,’ I said.

 ‘What about journalist?’ he suggested.

 I considered the label. I do delve into the scandals, crimes, murders and wars in the past, if not the present, so you could call my work investigative journalism. But then I remembered a friend who was turned down for travel insurance because he’d given his occupation as journalist. Presumably they were afraid that if they ever refused his claim for a broken ankle on the grounds he’d failed to declare that in 1978 he was treated for a verruca, he might write a damning article about them in the nationals. Better not to use journalist then.

 ‘What sort of novels do you write?’ my interrogator asked.

 ‘Historical thrillers.’

‘We could put you down as an historian.’

 We could, but last year I attended a talk given to a local history group by a guide working in one of the stately homes. I fell into conversation with the lady sitting next to me, who was raving ecstatically about her favourite historical crime novelist, saying how thoroughly he researched the books, what detailed knowledge he had about local history and how she’d learnt more history from his novels than from any non-fiction book. Later that evening, she mentioned the group needed more speakers.

‘Why don’t you invite that novelist,’ I asked. ‘He’s an excellent speaker.’

She looked scandalised. ‘But this is a serious history group. We don’t invite novelists to speak.

I know that most History Groups don't take that view. I have given talks at a number of different history groups round the country and am booked to give more in 2014. And many history festivals now include a mixture of fiction and non-fiction writers, but sadly that lady's view of historical fiction writers is still prevalent among some readers - if history is presented in the form of fiction, it can't be 'serious'.

 Having gained a doctorate in a different subject, I can say from experience that most historical fiction writers, have carried out enough original historical research for their novels to have more than earned a PhD in history. Of course, I know that writing medical romances doesn’t qualify the author to be a nurse and writing crime novels doesn’t make the author a forensic scientist. And I also know that academic historians do far more than simply research facts. But I am fascinated that while many people say they read historical fiction to learn about history, if that same information is presented in a non-fiction book, the author is regarded as an historian, whereas the fiction writer isn’t. The exception is those authors who write novels based on the lives of royalty or the famous. Why is that?

 'Better not put historian,’ I said glumly.

 ‘So what do you actually do when you’re writing?’ my interrogator asked.

 ‘I sit in an office at home – actually it’s a large cupboard – and type on a laptop.’

 ‘Ah,’ the young man said with relief, ‘then we can put you down as clerical. The computer likes that one.’

 I was sorely tempted to ask if I was now clerical, should I be wearing a dogcollar, but I had a horrible feeling that would then set that wretched computer off on another round of questions about whether I was a bloodhound or a sheepdog. So I quietly I slunk back to my cupboard and started typing again. I know my place.

Next time I'll just keep the money in a piggybank.

---

November competition winners

December 8, 2013, 1:30 pm

≫ Next: Frisco before the Quake

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The winners of copies of Lydia Syson's book, That Burning Summer, are as follows:

Pippa Goodhart
Ruan Peat
Linda
Spade & Dagger


Your copies will come to you from Megan Farr at Hot Key, so can you please email her at: Megan.farr@hotkeybooks.com

Congratulations!

Frisco before the Quake

December 8, 2013, 6:01 pm

≫ Next: One at a time, please – Michelle Lovric

≪ Previous: November competition winners

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A frame of the historic footage of Market Street in 1906

by Caroline Lawrence

One thing that fascinates us about the tragedy of Pompeii is how quickly disaster struck. From archaeological evidence we know that people were cooking, shopping, buying, selling and redecorating their houses right up to the moment Vesuvius erupted.

Recently I came across a piece of San Francisco history that aroused the same poignant emotions in me. The film reminded me of how life can turn to tragedy within the space of hours.

In researching my latest P.K. Pinkerton book I discovered that for a short space of time in the 1860s a steam train disguised as an omnibus traveled up and down Market Street, San Francisco’s great thoroughfare. While searching for photos of this rare conveyance, I stumbled across footage of Market Street shot in 1906. The eleven-minute clip is an amazing glimpse into life over a century ago.

Watch it once. Then read what I’ve written below.

On first viewing you will be struck by the how lively and crowded the scene is. We see men, women and children. There are policemen, paperboys, businessmen, teamsters, even a Chinese street sweeper. Many of the people are on foot. All of them without exception wear hats. Some ride bicycle or horses. Others step up on to cable cars or glance at us from carts. Teenage boys play ‘chicken’ with the cable car on which the camera is mounted. Horse-drawn carriages, carts, drays and omnibuses pass in and out of view. There are cable cars (pulled by an invisible steel cable below the tracks) and automobiles so old they still have right-hand drive.  

You see street signs, street lights, advertisements, flags, the muddy thoroughfare and buildings, including the famous Ferry Building looming at the end of the line. Another thing that strikes you on first viewing is the wild and wacky driving. Horses and carriages come from out of nowhere, pedestrians dice with death and half the automobiles seem to veer rashly in front of the cable car.

Now watch it again, using all your powers of observation. This time you might notice it is the same three or four cars driving in front of the camera, disappearing out of right screen, cutting across from right to left, then reappearing in front of the camera once again. Were these San Franciscans trying to grab their moment of fame by circling the camera? Probably not. The American documentary 60 Minutes (below) suggests chauffeurs and car-owners were hired to drive along Market Street and make it seem busier than it really was.

Knowing this doesn’t make the crazy traffic any less amusing, especially when you see some of the bolder paperboys jumping up onto the back of a car to hitch a ride.

For many years, the library of Congress dated the film to September 1905, six months before the great earthquake. But after hours of meticulous research, movie detective David Kiehn figured out that it was actually filmed only a week before the great earthquake. Even more astonishing is the fact that the film was shipped to New York the very night before the quake. If it had stayed in the offices of the filmmakers just another day it would have been lost forever.

1906 is the infamous date known to all those who grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area. On April 18th a terrible earthquake struck. This quake and the resulting fire devastated San Francisco. Chances are that many of the people you see in this film were lost in that tragic event. The last three minutes of this film clip (above) shows the devastation. So when you watch these films just think what a privilege it is to glimpse a joyous city only days before disaster struck. It also reminds us to be grateful for every day and carpe diem! (Seize the day)

P.S. Never call it 'Frisco'. Only out-of-towners and tourists call it that. Or bloggers looking for a pithy title.

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries, The Roman Mysteries Scrolls and the P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries. Find out more HERE. 

One at a time, please – Michelle Lovric

December 9, 2013, 4:30 pm

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Can you imagine getting so close to one of your favourite paintings that your eyelashes almost graze the canvas? Can you imagine sharing the painting only with a couple of dear friends and a security guard whose love for the work makes you forget the pistol in his pocket? Can you imagine the said guard pointing out the tiny but perfect white cat in the centre of the scene, a cat that is no more than an energetic swirl of an inexpressibly expert paintbrush? And can you imagine doing all of this in a candle-lit abbazia in the middle of Venice?

 

This is an experience on offer for just 50 days this autumn.

Astonishingly, there are only two Canaletto paintings currently resident in Venice – something I have written about for Mary Hoffman’s Book Maven blog. But for this brief and lovely moment in the winter of 2013 you can also see a third: one of his best-known works L’entrata nel Canal Grande e la Basilica della Salute (The Entrance to the Grand Canal and the Basilica of the Salute).

 

 And here is the height of exquisiteness: you can see it in the exact same loggia where, between 1740 and 1745, the artist set up his camera obscura and his easel and sat down to record the wedding cake church of Santa Maria della Salute, the Punta della Dogana, the Palazzo Ducale and the Riva degli Schiavoni. The exhibition is called ‘Gero qua’– Venetian for ‘I was here’.

 

How did this intimate Canaletto experience come about?

It’s a two-hundred-and-eighty-year old story. The art was of course created in Venice. Lady Lucas and Dingwall was the painting’s first owner. It was then sold to Henry Grey, Duke of Kent. In April 1970 a private buyer acquired it at auction at Sotheby’s in London. Now this philanthropist has lent the painting back to Venice.

In order to make the most of the 50 days, the painting is on display 24 hours a day. A maximum of 8 visitors are admitted each hour. The season sold out immediately.

First, at the appointed time, you enter the Benedictine Abbey of San Gregorio and stand in its courtyard, candle-lit from dusk, to hear the history of the place. Then you are led upstairs to the Canaletto loggia, to look at the painting.

 

We timed it perfectly. We arrived just before four, when the light was dimming, so we first saw the painting in exactly the same kind of light that glows from the canvas. As the guard told us, the painting is thought to have recorded a spring afternoon at around three o’clock. We were seeing the matching autumn light at just the same time.

 

We spent a good half-hour with the painting, shyly approaching it at first, and then becoming bolder. We looked – really looked – in deep searching sweeps of the canvas for once, and then at the scarcely changed reality of Venice behind it. We listened to the guard, who had soaked up the knowledge of hundreds of visitors. He required very little squeezing to let forth a gush of droplets of enchanting facts. He told us that scientists had spoken of tracking the blooms of algae that discolour the canals via this painting; he pointed out that, despite the seeming photographic accuracy of the painting, Canaletto had transposed a couple of angel arms, and had scandalously included only thirteen of Santa Maria della Salute’s sixteen steps.

 

He pointed out how successive renovations of the Palazzo Ducale façade had left it sadly drained of the roseate tones that warm the Canaletto. He told us that with a magnifying glass you could make out the features of the faces of people crossing a bridge in the distant background of the painting. He showed us a sneaky profile peering out from behind a column. And of course he told us about the tiny squiggle of a white cat, right in the centre of everything. (I am afraid my camera is not up to it).

And we – two architects, a writer and a chorister, offered up our own bits of knowledge to the absorbent guard. The Danieli Hotel, we told him, was the old Palazzo Dandolo. And we were fascinated by what used to be beside it: the part now occupied by the hotel’s frightful modern wing. Three higgledy-piggledy houses of straggling heights occupy the site in the Canaletto picture. These buildings were not palaces; they were possibly warehouses: this perhaps explains why they were allowed to be demolished. In front of them stretched a long black awning, perhaps for the cafés that were just starting to feature in Venetian social life in the 1740s, along with a craze for hot chocolate and coffee.

Then the guard urged us to go next door to the room where yielding white sofas awaited us. Lying back, almost swallowed by plump upholstery, we watched the work of cinematographer Maurizio Calvesi, who had filmed the details of the painting using an innovative technique in extremely high definition. The camera swooped over the myriad of intimate encounters that made up the human part of the scene, delivering details of faces and clothing that it was hard to see with the naked eye in the original painting.

The restless camera rendered the orderly Canaletto suddenly noisy and messy with human life: the tall man striding through the centre of the scene appears to be talking to himself, angrily. The shoeshine boy utters his pretty patter to his noble patron, no doubt earning himself a tip as he flourishes his snowy-white rag before setting himself to work on those leather slippers. We felt the thud of bales of cotton being unloaded, the chuckling of the dark liquid inside barrels of wine. We saw the cynical face of a nobleman being petitioned for some favour by a commoner, the bulging muscles of the crippled man struggling up those thirteen steps to pray for his health.

 

Canaletto’s quiet painting was now alive for us: we understood that the artist had also recorded the Venetians, their activities, their work, their sustenance in a way that a writer can only envy. Even the mooring pole to the left forefront of the picture had its story to tell. The water of the Grand Canal was in 1740 so clean as to be transparent. Canaletto showed its outline deep into the water.

Then we came back to look at the real painting again, our knowledge enlarged by what we had just seen. Now the sun had set and the painting glowed in the room, more like an animation than a static piece of art.

Regretfully, we left it, at the guard’s most discreet and regretful mention of the hour. We returned to the courtyard where we were offered drinks, and, most of all, a chance to descend from the almost dopamine high of the utter intimacy with a Canaletto exactly where a Canaletto should be.

 

We strolled around the candle-lit courtyard, where another film of the abbazia was projected onto billowing silk, and then slipped out into the darkness of Venice, quite suffused with afterglow. It was a while before any of us could talk again. If any of us had smoked, it would have been the moment for a shared cigarette and a long, tender sigh.

The evening left me wondering about the physical research we writers do. And how it moves us. I am currently writing Venice in 1737 and so ‘Gero qua’ could not have been a more perfect experience for me. But there are other paintings I love, in galleries in London and Venice, which also deserve the ‘Canaletto treatment’. And can we not almost do it ourselves?

I worked as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute for Art for three years, which gave me access to the gallery as often as I wanted. Why did I not spend my lunchtimes as a devotee in front of any one of the magnificent works there? (Well, because I never had a lunchtime, but even so…)

We could all do this: give a painting what it deserves. What if we dared to go to the National Gallery, or the Courtauld, with a view to seeing just one painting, and thus really seeing it? What if we showed it the courtesy of research into its background before we saw it, so that we knew already what details were important? What if we allowed ourselves the luxury of a whole hour with one work, just the triangle of the painting, the writer and the writer’s notebook, with the writer’s words aiming to draw the past into the present?

Perhaps some of you have already shared such a long moment with a work of art of an object from the past? If so, please share.

 

Michelle Lovric’s website

Her eighteenth-century Venetian novels include Carnevale, The Book of Human Skin and The Fate in the Box.

 

Lambswool and Apple Trees, by Laurie Graham

December 10, 2013, 5:30 pm

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It’s wassail season. And what is that exactly? ‘Exactly’ may be difficult. Wassailing is a very good example of how elusive traditions can be. Where they ended up is not necessarily an indication of where they started. These days wassail songs are often included in collections of Christmas carols and hymns, and that’s a very long way from their pre-Christian origins.

To begin at the beginning, or as close to it as I can guess. There was, long, long ago, a Celtic festival called La Mas Ubhail, the Feast of the Apple. The name became anglicised, phonetically, to Lamasool.  It was a November fertility rite, homage to the gods in the hope of a good harvest in the coming year. Wassail has a similar root, waes hael  in Old English being the imperative ‘be thou healthy’ and was addressed to the senior apple tree in the orchard.

In the apple-growing counties  -  mainly in the south west of England and East Anglia  -  Orchard Wassailing, or Apple Howling is still quite common. Every village has its own traditions, songs and incantations, but the common thread is the presentation of bread and ale or cider to the tree, to feed it and encourage it to ever greater efforts. But wassailing has another incarnation  -  the House Wassail, lumped in with Christmas carolling, New Year celebrations, Twelfth Night revelry and everything else that magazines nowadays refer to as The Festive Season.

Twelfth Night is the traditional time for a house wassail : a good-natured and more or less tuneful door-to-door party, wandering around the neighbourhood demanding refreshments and money with boozy menaces.  The Welsh had a slightly sinister version of it called the Mari Lwyd, the Grey Mare, a tradition that’s now being revived in parts of South Wales. And very effective too. If I opened my door and saw a straw-stuffed effigy topped with a horse’s skull, I reckon I’d hand over my loose change pretty quickly.

The customary drink for wassailers is hot spiced ale or cider and one of its oldest recorded versions is a drink called Lambswool. Robert Herrick names it in his poem, Twelfth Night.

Now crown a bowl full, with gentle lamb’s wool…

Sugar, spices and ale poured over roasted apples (see, we’re back to that orchard connection?). In Ireland a more sober version used to be made using milk, presumably for junior wassailers, the Irish not usually being so fastidious about alcohol. Why was it called Lambswool? Was it named for the feast of Lamasool? Or was it because of the fleece-like appearance of the frothy ale and white apple flesh? No-one seems sure.  But here is a wonderful collection of recipes for it.

Now all you need is a good song to go with it as you pass the bowl. There are many recordings around  -  Here we come a’wassailing  is one you’ll certainly have heard, very likely sung by well-scrubbed choristers with perfect enunciation, but in my opinion a wassail song should be as raw and hearty as scrumpy cider, and there’s no finer specimen than this the Cornish Malpas Wassail sung by the Watersons on their For Pence and Spicy Ale album.

And so I wish all History Girls and our lovely readers Waes Hael!

The Year's Deep Midnight by H.M. Castor

December 11, 2013, 5:30 pm

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Saint Lucia (or Lucy) by Francesco del Cossa  (1436-1487) [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;

                The world's whole sap is sunk;…

An extract from A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day, Being the Shortest Day
by John Donne (1572-1631)
(You can read the full poem here.)

Here’s the blogpost equivalent of a little nosegay: a beautiful painting, a rich and melancholy poem, and the moment of the year’s deepest darkness …which is precisely where (of course) we find the light.

St Lucy’s day – which falls tomorrow – was for generations considered the shortest day of the year. It may well indeed have been just that, before the Gregorian calendar was introduced (though there are various arguments about the precise dating of the winter solstice in different centuries, which I won’t go into here). For Donne, certainly, this was the “deep midnight” of the year.

No wonder, then, that Saint Lucy – or Lucia – whose name derives from the Latin word lux (gen. lucis), meaning "light", brings light into the darkness. In Sweden, her day is a festival of light, involving the wearing of headgear that would fall foul of many a healthy and safety regulation.

Swedish girls singing during Saint Lucy's Day (Lucia) celebrations in Vienna, Austria, 13th Dec 2006 by N_Creatures (L1140287)  [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

St Lucia in a Swedish church, 13th December 2006 by Claudia Gründer  [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

According to The Golden Legend, Saint Lucia lived in Syracuse, Sicily, sometime in the earliest years of the 4^thcentury AD. She refused to marry, and instead gave her dowry away to the poor. Her spurned bridegroom, however, accused her of being a Christian and a lawbreaker and had her dragged before the consul. Lucia answered the consul’s accusations and threats robustly – “Do what you think best for yourself, and I will do what I think best for me” – and, with divine help, withstood attempts to drag her (using oxen) to a brothel, to burn her alive and to kill her with boiling oil. She even managed to go on speaking after a dagger had been plunged into her throat, and only gave up the ghost, finally, once priests had brought her the eucharist.

The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucia (c. 1582) by Paolo Veronese [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

In the Swedish festival, the young woman representing Lucia wears ‘light in her hair’, plus a pure white robe and a red sash, signifying the virgin saint’s martyrdom. But as so often with Church festivals, this Christian tradition is mixed with something less straightforwardly holy. According to the website http://sweden.se (“the official site of Sweden”) -

The Lucia tradition can be traced back both to St Lucia of Syracuse… and to the Swedish legend of Lucia as Adam’s first wife. It is said that she consorted with the Devil and that her children were invisible infernals. Thus the name may be associated with both lux (light) and Lucifer (Satan), and its origins are difficult to determine. The present custom appears to be a blend of traditions.

In the old almanac, Lucia Night was the longest of the year. It was a dangerous night when supernatural beings were abroad and all animals could speak. By morning, the livestock needed extra feed. People, too, needed extra nourishment and were urged to eat seven or nine hearty breakfasts. This kind of feasting presaged the Christmas fast, which began on Lucia Day.

Talking animals are clearly a feature of noteworthy winter nights; in England, tradition has it that they acquire the power of speech on Christmas Eve night. However, I must advise against creeping up on the cat- or dog-basket (or hamster cage) to put this to the test, as it’s supposed to be bad luck to eavesdrop on these once-a-year conversations. The foolhardy types in folk tales who try it usually hear a foretelling of their own imminent death, though in The Tailor of Gloucester Beatrix Potter softens the tradition – Lilac-Fairy-like – to make it simply an auditory problem:

…it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning (though there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is they say).

And it’s not only talking that goes on: at the stroke of midnight, when Christmas Eve becomes Christmas Day, cattle are said to kneel spontaneously. In The English Year: A month-by-month guide to the nation’s customs and festivals, from May Day to Mischief Night, Steve Roud tells us that this idea was well established from at least the 18^th century, and quotes an account that appeared in the 1849 edition of John Brand’s Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain:

An honest countryman, living on the edge of St Stephen’s Down, near Launceston, Cornwall, informed me, October 28^th, 1790, that he once, with some others, made trial of the truth of the above, and watching several oxen in their stalls… at twelve o’clock at night, they observed the two oldest oxen only fall on their knees, and as he expressed it, in the idiom of the country, make ‘a cruel moan like Christian creatures’. I could not but with great difficulty keep my countenance: he saw this, and seemed angry that I gave so little credit to his tale, and walking off in a pettish humour seemed to ‘marvel at my unbelief.’

A kneeling cow? It’s hard to tell. Certainly a very tolerant one. The Adoration of the Shepherds (1622) by Gerard van Honthorst [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

Scoffing antiquarians were no doubt bad enough, but Roud points out that this belief in animals’ miraculous awareness of the date at Christmas was put under yet more strain by the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar (which happened in England in 1752). Had anyone informed the animals of the new system? In 1847, Bentley’s Magazine reported a rather neat solution:

It is said, as the morning of the day on which Christ was born, the cattle in the stalls kneel down; and I have heard it confidently asserted that, when the new style came in, the younger cattle only knelt on December 25, while the older bullocks preserved their genuflections for Old Christmas Day, January 6.

[quoted in The English Year by Steve Roud, p.503]

But let’s return to Saint Lucia. You’ll notice that as well as her palm branch, which she carries as a symbol of martyrdom (representing the victory of the spirit over the flesh), she is often depicted carrying eyes on a plate or cup (or, as in the del Cossa picture at the start of this post, on a rather elegant stalk).

Saint Lucia (1635-1640) by Francisco de Zurbarán  [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]

There is no mention of eyes in The Golden Legend– which was written in the 13^thcentury – but two centuries later, gouging had begun to feature in Lucia’s tale, either inflicted on the orders of the bloodthirsty consul, or by Lucia herself, in response to a suitor’s admiration. In some versions of Lucia’s story, her eyes are discovered to have been miraculously restored when her corpse is being prepared for burial.

Light and sight go together, of course – perhaps it was because of this association that eyes became a feature of Lucia's legend, and she herself began to be venerated as the protector of sight.

My fellow History Girl Michelle Lovric, an expert in all things Venetian, tells me that Saint Lucia’s body is in Venice, having been sent there by the blind Doge Enrico Dandolo after he looted Constantinople in 1204. Today Lucia’s mummified body lies in state, her face covered by a silver mask. There used to be a little box, Michelle says, in the Church of Santa Lucia where people could throw the spectacles they no longer needed because of Lucia's miraculous interventions.

Well, I won't be chucking out my spectacles just yet, but I do wish one and all a light-filled Saint Lucia's Day tomorrow.

Finally, a personal postscript. I took this photo in December 1980, when I was ten. I had a Polaroid instant camera (the joys of which are hard to explain to children raised in the digital age) and I spent many happy hours taking blurred, bad photos with it.

Despite the obvious aesthetic drawbacks of this one, I’m so glad I took it. The paper figures shown have become very precious in my memory, both because I loved making them, and because I loved the finished figures themselves.

During Advent that year, a relative had sent my siblings and me a book of paper figures to make – Christmas figures from around the world. There was a Santa Claus, a Baboushka, a Saint Nicholas in full bishop’s regalia, a smattering of wise men, and various other figures that fulfil (or so the book told us) the present-giving role in different countries: a witch, a gnome-type chap with a lantern, a shepherd, and so on. The figures came complete with names and stories, and the whole thing fascinated me.

And one of the figures, as you can see from the photo, was the Swedish version of Saint Lucia. It was my first meeting with her – and always, still, I associate her with this beautiful set of paper figures, which I loved so much.

Despite numerous searches on the internet and in the shops, I have never seen anything like them in all the years since. If anyone else ever has, please do let me know; I would be more grateful than I can say.

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII, for teenagers and adults - is published in the U.K. by Templar, in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, in Australia by Penguin, and in France by Hachette.

H.M. Castor's website is here.

Poodles, Pooches and Political Propaganda

December 12, 2013, 8:30 pm

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George Osbourne has a dog, named Lola (which is, most annoyingly, the name of my own dog). This fact was Tweeted recently along with a photo of the unthreateningly fluffy Bichon Frisse who has taken up residence with the Chancellor and family. I wonder if the hope is that some of that cute cuddliness will migrate by association from dog to owner. Bo, the White House dog (a suitably adorable Portuguese Waterdog), seems constantly available for photo opportunities, should Obama need to remind the world what a good guy he is. But wind back the clock several hundred years to the English Civil War and we have an entirely different picture of the role a dog played in the political arena.

A white poodle called Boy was the constant companion of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a cousin of Charles I, and ruthless commander of the royalist cavalry. Far from being the pampered pooch of today’s politicians, Boy joined Prince Rupert’s famously reckless cavalry charges and was a fixture on the battlefield. He was used for the purposes of propaganda, not to assert the cuddly, human face of Prince Rupert, but to mock the gullibility of the opposition. As the royalist army gained ground in the war, Boy became talismanic of their success. In a culture that widely accepted witchcraft, it was easy for the parliamentarians to cast Boy as the Prince’s familiar, possessed of devlish powers that rendered his master impervious to battle wounds, who was able to catch bullets in his mouth and by association suggesting that the Prince himself was some kind of demon. The royalists used these beliefs to deride their opponents with a satirical poem by Cleveland playing on these fears. Cleveland also claimed that clever Boy would raise his front paws when someone mentioned King Charles and cock his leg on hearing the name of the leader of the Parliamentarian forces (let’s hope Lola doesn’t get any ideas).

Sadly Boy’s supposed demonic powers were not sufficient to save him from his untimely and tragic death in 1644 at the battle of Marston Moor, a brutal routing of the Royalist forces and a turning point in the war.

To what extent the opposition genuinely believed in Boy’s supernatural powers has been a matter for historical speculation, explainedhere by Mark Stoyle, author of The Black Legend of Prince Rupert’s Dog.

Christmas, Paris and Kate Beaton Catherine Johnson

December 13, 2013, 11:41 pm

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There have been some fantastic posts here, so thoughtful and entertaining and erudite. This will not be one of those. I am currently in Revolutionary France in my head and as with all writing sometimes it is the hardest thing and sometimes you have to stop yourself thinking too hard and give in to the impulse of the story and just let it carry you away and onwards and mop up the mess afterwards.

I use a lot of maps when I write historical novels, and there are some cracking maps of Paris before, during and afterwards, when road names changed to things like Rue de l'Hommes Arme, Rue du Contrat Social and Rue des Droits de l'Homme.  

This one's from's 1792. I've used it extensively, imagining how you'd get around, gauging distances and doing a sort of analogue version of Google Streetview which involves dragging your brain down to street level and looking around.

But because of this I have rather let Christmas drift by. I was hoping I might squeeze in a very late present to myself which involved long walks round the city. But alas I've been writing and there are no decorations, the tree is still outside and the freezer is empty. I haven't even bought all my books.

So on that note I thought I'd recommend some disparate and diverting reading. Rush along to your local independent bookshop quick sharp.

Georgian London  Into the Streets  by Lucy Inglis.  I so wish this book had been published when I started writing historical novels. It would have saved me a lot of time. This is a wonderful book with so much useful and fascinating information, law and order, the stink of the tanneries, the bustle of Covent Garden and the mystery of Bow Wow Pie amongst many others. I knew nothing of Southwark's melon pits or Hackney's orange trees and there's loads of wonderful pictures and maps. It's a really useful guide for any reader who's interested in how the metropolis came of age. And I've just noticed it's been shortlisted for the Longman History Book of the Year.

The Big Con by David W. Maurer. Jump forward a couple of hundred years and immerse yourself in the argot and culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. This is a book written by a linguist about the world of Confidence Tricksters. The Sting - the film with Robert Redford and Paul Newman was made on the back of the information in this book. It's full of wonderful and specific criminal slang too, which is always a plus.

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton.  If you have never come across the drawings of Kate Beaton you are in for such a treat. She is a Canadian cartoonist who draws (not always) historical cartoon strips. My personal copy is adorned with a hand drawn sketch of Matthew Henson heading north. I wrote loads of sentences trying to explain them, but you're better off having a look yourself. But consequently I have not done any work at all this afternoon re reading them, and laughing. Here's the link  http://harkavagrant.com/

Happy Holidays

My book Sawbones is out now too http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/view/33334

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Georgian Beauty Remedies

December 14, 2013, 5:00 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen


I'm not adverse to a few moisturisers and beauty treatments from time to time, but I can be quite lazy about anything that takes much effort.
I was looking through my copy of Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife (first published in 1758 and invaluable for describing food in Georgian books) the other day and came across the various beauty remedies towards the back of the volume. I fear if I'd lived in Georgian times, I'd have lacked the motivation to try for any semblance of beauty at all.
A Remedy for Pimples runs thus:
"Take a quarter of a pound of bitter almonds, blanch, stamp them, and put them into half a pint of spring water; stir it together, strain it out; then put it to half a pint of the best brandy, and a pennorth of the flour of brimstone; shake it well when you use it, which must be often; dab it on with a fine rag."
Honestly, I'd rather be spotty. And who could afford those ingredients?
To Whiten and Clean the Hands, Smith suggests the following recipe:
"Boil a quart of new milk, and turn it with a pint of aqua-vitae; and take off the curd; then put into the posset a pint of rhenish wine, and that will raise another curd, which take off; then put in the whites of six eggs well beaten, and that will raise another curd, which you must take off, and mix the three curds together very well, and put them into a gallipot and put the posset in a bottle; scour your hands with the curd, and wash them with the posset."
Next time I read in an old book that a character brews a posset, I will have a lot more respect for the time it would take! I definitely would have been spotty AND lacking white hands!
And I think, looking at Smith's remedy for scurvy of the gums, her readers would have done better to have ignored the long, time-consuming recipe for a gargle and just eaten the six oranges she recommended putting in it.
The cure for breast cancer could come in handy one day though; apparently if you collect the warts from a stone horse and powder them, you can also brew something as a cure with them. Hmm. I suspect you'd be more likely to be trampled to death by the stallion if you tried scraping his warts off than cured of cancer.

A library opens: by Sue Purkiss

December 15, 2013, 6:00 pm

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Now, the eagle-eyed among you may notice that this post has on the face of it little to do with history. It is in fact about something very new - it's about the Library of Birmingham. I went there last weekend, and honestly, it's so full of wonderful things that if I lived up there I'd probably move in. I took some pictures - they don't do it justice, but I hope they will at least give an idea of the scale of the place and the imagination that went into creating it.

This is a rather blurry picture of the Book Rotunda. You go up the escalator, and there, nestling in the heart of the library, is a kind of amphitheatre, a circular structure of book cases containing beautiful old books. So the building is spectacular, but at its heart are books.

If you look upwards, you will see the great glass elevator soaring up to the 9th floor from the 7th floor. But before you reach that, there is so much else to see - an outdoor terrace where you can take your book and enjoy the view over the city and the scents of the herbs, fruits and flowers that grow there; a suite where you can watch films from the BFI for free; a gallery, which at the moment houses an exhibition of photographs of the building of the library, and of the people involved with it. These last photographs are extraordinary: there were a couple of groups which reminded me of the composition and intensity of Rembrandt's group portraits - but I particularly liked the quirkiness of this one - apparently it was inspired by the subject's love of running and habit of doing regular stretches.

You perhaps can't tell from this photo of a photo, but the original gives such a sense of its subject's character.

On the 7th floor is the Secret Garden, a terrace surrounding the building and another lovely place to wander. Then you take the glass lift to the top floor, or if you're a wimp who gets dizzy driving across a flyover, like me, you stagger up the 90 steps to the top.

The Secret Garden

And there you find another surprise - a contrast to the contemporary architecture of the new building. For here is the Shakespeare Memorial Room, which came originally from the Victorian Library designed by John Henry Chamberlain in 1882. It is panelled with wood and ornamented with carvings, marquetry and metalwork, representing birds, flowers and foliage. The book cases are filled with Shakespeare memorabilia.

You emerge to yet another contrast, a terrace with extraordinary views right across the thriving, bustling city to the hills beyond.

As I wandered round the Secret Garden, it struck me that future historians, going by the evidence of this building, would comment wisely that its scope surely suggests that society in Britain at the beginning of the 21st century truly valued books and libraries. Which is a bit sad, really, isn't it? - when so many other libraries are under threat or already closed.

Just before I left, I went down to the lower ground floor to look at the children's library. There are rows of seats, raked so that an audience can watch a performance, talk or reading. And - for me! - best of all: some of my books.

I was there for a couple of hours at least, but still I only saw a fraction of what there was to be seen. I thought it was wonderful. A leap of faith, a triumph of imagination. It was opened in September by Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who survived an assassination attempt and now lives in Birmingham. The last word should go to her. She said: "Let us not forget that even one book, one pen, one teacher can change the world."

LISTENING TO LINDSEY DAVIS by Penny Dolan

December 16, 2013, 10:00 pm

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One of the speakers I was longing to hear at HARROGATE HISTORY FESTIVAL was author LINDSEY DAVIS. Best known her historical whodunnit series about Marcus Didius Falco, she could not ignore her well-loved hero, but she introduced some other of her titles too. 

Like others at this festival, Lindsey Davis credited Rosemary Sutcliffe’s books for inspiring her love of history and writing.  However, in 1989, when she started on her series, she was the only author in England writing about the Romans. Now she knows of thirty-five people who are, today, "writing in the Roman era.” 

Lindsey Davis worked as a civil servant for thirteen years, and suggested that it is good for writers to have a career first. Often those hailed as writers at twenty give up by the time they reached thirty five. Her first success was a romantic novel that, to her surprise, was a runner-up for the 1985 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel prize. 

Having attended, she said, the kind of school that taught her to be a good hard-working girl, Lindsey Davis decided that she would set herself to write a book a year, and to write the kind of book that nobody else was doing. After finishing her first Roman book, THE COURSE OF HONOUR, about Vespasian and his lover Antonia Caenis, she discovered that editors were unwilling to publish it, saying “The Romans were too hard”. The book was not published for another ten years, but she still believes it was her best book. 

Just as importantly, this was the work where she found her writing voice.  She always felt that “Vespasian was a good story” but it was published on the worst day of the year, the second of January, the day where books are buried. Then, needing to find something fast to write about, Lindsey Davis re-used her “Roman background” research, and, as an echo of the world-weary detectives on the radio, she found Falco’s distinctive, first person voice.

She was pleased when THE SILVER PIGS - the first Falco story - was praised for its historical accuracy. Back then she knew no academics. nor could she afford to take public transport to study at a library, so most of her research was from titles found cheaply in second-hand bookshops. 

Lindsey Davis said that she enjoys writing because “you can start off without knowing anything at all about the story”. Those crime serials on the radio had made her fond of baddies and heroes like Philip Marlowe. All she knew when she began was that Falco “was a gumshoe who stops being a gum shoe”. She did the wrong things too: she had no “body” until a third of the way through the plot and she killed off the blonde. By LAST ACT IN PALMYRA, Falco’s character has developed and he is no longer a cheap tec, but has become a spy.

Although the Romans are known for their many gods, she views religion as a fourth generation atheist, and felt thatreligious practice was, to Falco, mostly a social duty.  

Another advantage of the series, Lindsey Davis found, was that she could go on holiday to interesting places for research. Visiting Italy, she observed that what was important to Italians was “family”, so as the books grew, so did the Falco family, friends and relations until she decided the series was a kind of “The Roman Archers”. She based Falco’s mum, who appears in Book Two, loosely on her own mother but said that she got to know all the rest of the family by “colouring them in as I went along”. She explained that the bankers and publishers were often the bad guys. In fact, in that era, a publisher would be a banker, and Falco himself would need the complication of patronage. 

 The early book was influenced by the fashion for “makeovers” on television, and the archaeological discoveries on and around the site of Fishbourne Roman Palace in Sussex, which Vespasian had probably visited. 

Lindsey Davis’s training in the Ministry of Works helped her spot some likely corruption. The small Roman villa down the coast is made of exactly the same materials so perhaps the project manager was creaming off the stock for his own uses? 

This observation might not be true but, as she said so inspiringly, “we can write the possible”.

The Romans, however, are not "her" period. That is the English Civil War, whose history she followed for her novel: ”REBELS & TRAITORS”. 

Lindsey Davis’s family comes from Birmingham, where swords were made for the Parliamentarians so you can tell her view of the Royalists. 

Again, publishers told her “you can’t sell a story based in Birmingham” to which she replied, “But you can sell a story with rape, pillage and murder”, all though she also addedthat it was just a love story between two people form different traditions.

Lindsey Davis seemed to have found “MASTER AND GOD” a tough novel to write. 

(At this point, my friend whispered in my ear that it was a terrific book and how cross she was that she'd lost her copy. Now she just has an e-book version. Me, I bought the book!)

The Emperor Domitian is, Lindsey Davis said, so horrible that she had to put in other characters that she could enjoy writing. He is  not some kind of “joke god”, but an obsessive man dangerously full of paranoia. She said that he was understandable once she saw Domitian as the child born and treated as the “spare” heir, at a time when that would make him very vulnerable, even to members of his own family. 

Despite the requests, Lindsey Davis felt that she had written all she could about Falco. He had reached the end of his story and got what he had always needed: money to look after his family, and the uncomfortable burdens that brings. Falco had, she said, become “a pinko liberal who can’t relate to having slaves.” 

So, finally, Lindsey Davis spoke of her newest character, FLAVIA ALBA, who is both Falco’s adopted, British born daughter, and a female investigator, and who appears in THE IDES OF APRIL, a spin-off series. 

Lindsey Davis warned fans that this new series had only the faintest links to Falco. This is Flavia’s book and readers must not expect to find themselves in a Falco story. Flavia has her own set of skills, and as a woman, she has the advantage of being able to enter places where Falco could not. And more besides, I'd imagine.

Besides, in a rather nice twist, Flavia Alba doesn't live in Falco’s villa. Lindsey Davis has settled her in the disreputable Fountains Court, where Falco lived so many years before. If it has anything like the charm of Falco, this will be a treat indeed, and the season of special book gifts has arrived.

Moreover, Lindsey Davis is very proud of the short chapters in THE IDES OF APRIL,especially the chapter that is just one word long: “OUCH!”   

One day, she wants to write a chapter that is just punctuation. Will that chapter be in the sequel, ENEMIES AT DAWN, I wonder? 

SO, FLAVIA ALBA, 

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO READ, 

SALUTE YOU!

Besides, how can you not be intrigued by an author who has a section of her website designated “RANTS?”  A policy I might adopt!

Thank you for your talk, Lindsay Davis, and I hope that these notes on your session at the Harrogate History Festival ring true, and apologies for any errors or omissions.

Penny Dolan

www.pennydolan.com

Shelve under Venus - or Mars? - Celia Rees

December 17, 2013, 4:30 pm

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Imagine my surprise and delight when I opened my copy of the Sunday Times and found a double page spread in the Culture section devoted to historical fiction. Not only that, but our very own Mary Hoffman was quoted along with  fellow History Girl, Louise Berridge. Our History Girls blog got a mention, too. I was pleased and proud, although not so happy about the theme of the piece.

I dislike gender divides in fiction. I dislike gender divides anywhere. I understand why female writers hide behind the anonymity of initials or an androgynous first name and I certainly wouldn't want to offend or upset fellow History Girls, A.L. Berridge and H.M. Castor. I don't feel I'm 'outing' them, by the way, any lingering doubts as to gender should be dispelled by the fact that they are both History GIRLS. I know it is often not a writer's choice but pressure from her publisher which makes her adopt the initials, but is it really necessary? The pretence is tissue thin. As A.L. Berridge points out, all the reader has to do is open the cover to find that Louise lives in St Albans with her husband. Maybe I'm just jealous because I don't have a middle name, and there's not much to be done with Celia, so I'm destined to stay in the Girlie Ghetto, but we don't have an H.M. Mantel, E. L. Catton, or a Phil Gregory for that matter, and as the Sunday Times article goes on to point out, having a recognisably female first name does not prevent a writer from winning literary prizes or topping the best seller list.

As a writer of Young Adult fiction, where this kind of gender discrimination is rife - if someone mentions a writer by way of a double initial my first reaction is what does she write? - I guess I should be used to this, but it continues to annoy me that women have to don this nomenclatural disguise to even think of appealing to male readers.  What is it with these boys and men, anyway? Do they think that picking up a book written by a woman with a woman on the cover will cause some diminution of their masculinity? Or do they think the book will be per se girlie, all frocks and romance and not for them? Are they incapable of reading the blurb on the back? There is the implicit implication that women writers are somehow unable to take a male point of view, or write about things (war and gore) that might interest men. Setting aside the crude and insulting assumption that male readers are only interested in said topics, there are a legion of examples that prove women writers can shoot a bow and wield a broadsword with the best of them. Oddly, the opposite is never mooted, I guess because it is assumed that no red blooded male writer would possibly want to write from a woman's of view.

What I find most disturbing are the prejudices and assumptions swirling around this perceived gender divide. There is a faint feeling of outrage that, at the moment, female writers are outselling men, that more girls and women read than boys and men. Rather in the way of girls gaining better exam results, this is not seen as a cause for celebration, but rather a reason for hand wringing: the answer obviously being to downplay the female and pander to the male.

Genderisation diminishes us all, writer and reader alike. This tightening straightjacket is being imposed by market driven publishers panicked by the general decline of reading as a whole. It is up to us to resist, to buck the trend. No part or period of history, no human activity, is all male or all female and to suggest otherwise is just ridiculous. As Philippa Gregory has demonstrated, the bloody Wars of the Roses was not an entirely male affair, there were powerful women there who had more on their minds than what kind of head gear they should be wearing. Hilary Mantel has written two Booker Prize winners from the point of view of one of the most powerful and ruthless men in English History.  The publishers should be supporting and encouraging novels which break gender lines, rather than re-enforcing them.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Christmas Cribs & Nativity Tableaux

December 18, 2013, 4:30 pm

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Theresa Breslin

Recently I’ve been engaged in some banter on Twitter with @KatharineEdgar about modern Nativity Plays in schools. We were commiserating re the number we had to sit through and exchanging views on modern interpretations of the Age-Old Story.  

All of which led me to think about Nativity Tableaux of Christmas Past and Christmas Present.  

Every year, on Christmas Eve, my parents would bring out the battered biscuit-tin box containing the family Crib set. I and my siblings were allowed, very carefully, to unwrap the ceramic figures of Mary, Joseph, Shepherds, the Kings in richly coloured garments, ox, ass, and Baby Jesus lying in his manger bed. Under some supervision (?) we’d hammer together a rough shelter for the figures - I do actually recall handling a chisel when I was about seven years old, Health & Safety be danged! - and spread straw liberally about.

After that was done, and the Crib was set up on a side table by the fire, the Big Deal was: Who got to put Which figures Where…

There was intense rivalry for Mary and Joseph and normally these were allocated to the Two Bossy Big Sisters. I’d usually kick up a fuss about this. I didn’t particularly want to take charge of Mary and Joseph but felt obliged to make a token gesture of objecting, in the hope that I could earn an extra biscuit before bed in compensation. Then it was the turn of middle sister and older brother. I waited. With the major characters allocated I knew that I could get the one I secretly wanted. My favourite was the young shepherd wearing a rough coat of sheepskin with a flute held to his lips. I always chose him, this unnamed shepherd. I think it was because he was different. I’d place him on the side at the back to play his music, and imagine how the notes might sound as he watched his sheep on the hillside at night near Bethlehem two thousand years ago

I have a vague recollection of, at one time, being allowed to position the very last figure to go in - the Baby Jesus. This was the privilege accorded to the youngest in the family. My little sister arriving five years after me usurped my role. I will admit to pangs of jealousy when no other child came after her and so she held that post for all of our childhood.

Of course, as soon as she had turned her back I rearranged the baby into what I considered a more appropriate position.

It seems that the oldest known picture of what might be termed a Nativity Scene was found on the walls of the catacombs of Rome. 

Another very old example is the wonderfully simple depiction on a 4^th century sarcophagus in Milan as seen here.

 

The tradition that is followed now is less ancient than those. St Francis of Assisi is credited with creating the first representation of the stable and the manger about a thousand years ago. To inspire spirituality he arranged a living nativity scene with real people and animals in a in a cave near the Italian village of Greccio. Not too long after this Arnolfo di Cambrio made the first set of Crib figures which can still be seen in the church of St Mary Major in Rome.   

 

 

Styles changed to become elaborate and ornate but in recent years have become more simple again.

I love this hand-knitted version a friend of mine has so that her children can rearrange the figures without any damage being done.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               My own family Crib set is very plain.

  

 

Through the years I’ve experienced many living Christmas Nativities of great variety. I’ve watched it told from the Point Of View of the Sheep, Donkey, Innkeeper, Innkeeper’s Wife, Wise Man, the Star etc. You name it. I’ve seen it. This year the Aliens were a startling innovation, but Baby Jesus didn’t look too fazed as he was plonked down in the middle of a stage full of spacemen and green-faced creatures from the Planet Zog.

When my parents died the family agreed that my youngest sister should have the Christmas Crib set and every December she puts it out. The paint is faded and the figures are chipped with pieces knocked off, but they seem to radiate the love and affection of yesteryears .

 

And yes, occasionally, over the Festive Season, when there’s no one about I do find my fingers wandering to rearrange the Baby Jesus in his manger bed.   

Happy Christmas one and all!

Images and Photographs Copyright:  © SCARPA

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