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THE SUMMER QUEEN: Finding Eleanor of Aquitaine by Elizabeth Chadwick.

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In early June in the UK and  July 1st in the USA, my novel THE SUMMER QUEEN is being published in paperback.  It's the first in a contracted 3 book series about Eleanor of Aquitaine.
I find it entertaining that my UK publishers have called her 'History's most powerful woman' on the jacket shoutline, because personally I'm not sure that she was in her own lifetime. I suppose she is immensely powerful in that the myths, legends and misinformation about her have created a massive groundswell of interest that keep her at celebrity level even today.

The novel was published in hardcover in the UK this time last year and since then I have received numerous reader letters saying 'I love Eleanor of Aquitaine. I didn't think anything new could be said about her, but you have surprised me and refreshed my awareness...you have made me stop and think.'

So, how did I come to add my own work to this frequently trodden path and what's my take?
I had been thinking about writing my own novel about Eleanor for some time. The twelfth century is one of my main stamping grounds as a writer and Eleanor has often had cameo roles in my novels. I had a couple of biographies of her on my book shelves as part of my general reference works and I often came across her in reading other research pieces. I  encountered her in fiction too at times and my curiosity about her grew down the years.  What was she really like?

On reader and history buff forums she was frequently described as a 'powerful woman ahead of her time.' The view was that she was dominant and feisty and would allow no man to put her down or quell her spirit. She was also an alluring femme fatale, accused of having affairs with her uncle and her second husband's father.  Following a marriage to the milksop Louis VII of France who found her too hot to handle, She had a passionate marriage with Henry II, rebelled against his love affair with Rosamund de Clifford, for which Henry imprisoned her for 15 years. Once free, she acted as regent for her son Richard and continued to lead a full and dramatic life until retiring in her last years to the convent at Fontevraud.

My UK editor was keen for me to tackle Eleanor - a woman from history with sales potential if ever there was one! Even in a crowded market place we felt there was room, and I certainly had a gut instinct that there was far more to be said about this remarkable woman if the detritus and accumulated greasepaint could be removed and original colours restored.I soon discovered that it was more easily said than done, not least because audiences have a fondness for that greasepaint and for that 'powerful woman ahead of her time.' The legend has often become the reality.

As I embarked on my research in detail, it  became clear that her biographers couldn't agree on anything about her; indeed some appeared to be writing novels of their own in the guise of biography. The academics frequently disagreed with the popular histories and with each other.  I found Eleanor married to Louis of France at both 15 and 13. Did it matter?  Well yes if I wanted to tell her story with integrity. The age of 13 as opposed to 15 would make an enormous different to the way I crafted her character. The one is barely out of childhood, the other is more knowing. (as it happened I went with 13 because no one else had written from that vein and it was the academics, not the biographers who were mostly arriving at that conclusion based on good reasoning and recent research).

 I found Eleanor variously described  as having snapping black eyes, black hair and a curvaceous figure that never ran to fat in old age, or as a red head with humorous green eyes, or as a saucy hot-blooded blond whom her father was desperate to marry off before her promiscuous nature got the better of her. All very entertaining but there is not a single existing proven  description of Eleanor of Aquitaine that answers to any of those claims. She was given half-brothers who never existed - as I explained in an earlier History Girls blog. The half brother who never was  She was claimed to be a wild Amazon who gaily led her ladies on the 2nd crusade as if it was one long picnic. Or alternatively she was forced into going by her husband Louis VII.  The latter was portrayed as a god-fearing milksop whom Eleanor dominated, despite strong evidence of his violent temper and vicious mood swings. She had a passionate incestuous affair with her uncle or she didn't. My take on it is here: Raymond of Poitiers She had an affair with Geoffrey le Bel Count of Anjou or she didn't. She arranged her own divorce - or she didn't. She indulged secret liaisons with the young Henry of Anjou in Paris under her husband's  nose or she ... you get the picture.  No one could agree and most of the opinions were boiling down to personal biases and speculation. They might as well have been novels rather than non fiction.

 Weaving my way through the differing accounts has proven both frustrating and utterly fascinating.  Eleanor's story has been constantly reinvented to suit each generation and for all that has been written, we actually still know very little and assume an awful lot about her.I love this article written by Ragena C. DeAragon titled 'Do we know what we think we know: Making assumptions about Eleanor of Aquitaine.' Do we know what we think we know.

My own take on Eleanor, having trawled the biographies and other works is that Eleanor was a woman very much of her time doing her best within the boundaries of what society would permit. Any attempt to push those boundaries was immediately and sometimes brutally squashed by her husbands, although she was nothing if not resilient. As to power: She was living at a time when the boundaries of royal women's power was in a state of flux and being redefined. During her marriage to Henry II, she actually wielded less power than any recent previous queen of England had done. Although never crowned queen, I include her mother in law Empress Matilda among them.

Perhaps the reference book I found most useful when writing The Summer Queen was this one - It's not so much a biography as a series of essays about Eleanor's life and times, and it sets out to put in context some of the myths and legends about her, and to debunk some of the more resilient myths. It's the sensible person at the party who doesn't get drunk and makes it home in one piece with their virtue intact!
Currently the best book out there (in my opinion) for telling it like it was
rather than being a modern wish fulfilment list.
For those interested in the research books I used while writing The Summer Queen, I thought I'd list a handful of the other works consulted, warts and all.   I leave you to make up your own minds, as I  made up mine - and then brought my choices to bear in faceting Eleanor's story.

These aren't all by a long chalk, but they are the ones most pertinent to Eleanor herself (or perhaps not!).
Pretty good, but makes mistakes based on mistakes
by other historians. .
Another fairly good one
Beautifully written, but outdated and the whole courts of love thing
is more than high suspicious and has since been debunked. Massive
pinches of salt and back up confirmation needed.
Interesting and somewhat fanciful take but worth
reading. Have the salt ready again.
The same as the Boyd.  Check the sources.
There are several errors. Salt in plentiful quantities
required.
One of the curvaceous figure brigade. Fairly outdated
but still worth the read in order to collect a broad spread
of information.
Very outdated and containing some wrong information
but again, useful to peruse.
Not strictly about Eleanor but I had to
add it because it's another of the sane ones
about the life, times and culture of the period.

More essays.  A good one.
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A FORGOTTEN STAR by Eleanor Updale

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Sometimes you only find out about your home town when someone comes to visit. So it was that on Monday I came across this grand, but somewhat neglected,Victorian memorial poking up from behind a tree in Edinburgh.


Unusually for this city (and for most others, I expect) it commemorates a woman. Even more unusually, it honours someone who wrote for children.  



Clearly, Catherine Sinclair (1800-1864) was well known in her day, and yet I had never heard of her.   
What a shame.  It turns out that she was quite something.  
There isn’t much about her on the internet (though I am indebted to the National Library of Scotland’s site on forgotten authors). This may be a picture of her - but the site on which is appears gives no source for it.

http://www.librarything.com/pic/224250

All the academic children’s literature sites say Catherine Sinclair was the first author to depict naughtiness in children’s fiction.  Never having read any children’s books from before her time, I am in no position to argue with that, though it's tempting to think that they got the idea from her own preface to her most successful children’s book, Holiday House (first published in 1839). The introduction reads like a critique of 21st century education policy and pushy parents:


The minds of young people are now manufactured like webs of linen, all alike, and nothing left to nature… The most formidable person to meet in society at present is the mother of a promising boy, about nine of ten years old… but, if the axiom be true that “a little learning is a dangerous thing,” it has also been proved by frequent, sometimes by very melancholy experience, that, for minds not yet expanded to maturity, a great deal of learning is more dangerous still, and that in those school-rooms where there has been a society for the suppression of amusement, the mental energies have suffered, as well as the health.


Needless to say, Sinclair’s stories are very much of their time, with lashings of religious moralising, but nevertheless they romp along. Beneath the antique language comes an almost shocking (to today’s sensibility) freedom for her young protagonists, with their easy access to scissors, matches and open windows. The adults are far less monochrome than in some of today’s books. There’s a fearsome childminder, of course, but also benign grown-ups willing to recognise genuine contrition in the young.  

The main purpose of the books is to amuse, but they give young readers a chance to try out transgression in the safe playground of print, and to imagine the consequences for themselves and others. For today’s adult reader they are are a gentle reminder that our immersion in the lives of our children, and our cultivation of prolonged psychological terrors to replace the quick discipline of the Victorian nursery might not necessarily be an unmitigated good.


Among Sinclair's thirty or so books are works for adults, including
Modern Accomplishments, or The March of Intellect, a novel gently satirising the expectations Victorian society had for young ladies of good birth.  


It was an international best seller.  The book’s frequent (and heartfelt) assertions of the importance of religious principles help make way for very entertaining exposures of cant and posturing. As a contemporary critic put it in the Inverness Journal:
...we admire the high tone of moral courage which she has displayed in attacking glaring absurdities, which are deeply injurious in their effects, and are often more easily checked by being thus held up to general observation and to ridicule, than by bitter personalities or by a graver style of rebuke.


The saving grace is Sinclair’s generous understanding of those whose behaviour she criticises.  That’s what makes the books worth reading today. And her writing style is sometimes downright beautiful.   
Here’s a little bit, chosen more or less at random. All you need to know is that after a torrent of misfortunes, Colonel Neville, his wife (Lady Olivia) and their only surviving child are in improving spirits as they travel through the Scottish countryside.  Then their coach overturns.  Neville’s wife is unconscious, and he finds the corpse of his daughter:


...nothing awoke him from a stupor of overwhelming grief, till the sudden remembrance of Lady Olivia’s precarious situation roused up the manly energy of his character.  By a powerful effort he stifled his agony, and reflected how much must be done to screen the worst from her knowledge, till she was prepared for the blow; and in silent but bitter anguish Colonel Neville withdrew from the scene of his misfortune and placed himself beside the couch of his suffering wife, resolved that no tongue but his own should reveal to her the last and greatest of all her bereavements.  Night and day he watched with fervent anxiety beside her pillow fearful lest some imprudent attendant, or some accidental circumstance might prematurely disclose it all, and dreading, yet almost longing for the moment when their tears should be mingled together, and might give vent to the the deep tide of sorrow that had so nearly overpowered him.


As someone who has been reduced to a stupor of overwhelming boredom by the fake nineteenth century prose of the Booker winning The Luminaries, I can only say that it is an absolute joy to read the real thing.


But perhaps the most impressive fact about Catherine Sinclair is what she did with the proceeds of her work. In a city starkly divided between the very rich and the abject poor, she took practical action to improve the lives of the least fortunate around her.  She established a mission school, kitchens where the poor could buy a sustaining meal, and a water fountain for people and animals which stood at the junction of Princes Street and Lothian Road until 1926.
Alas, I can’t show you a picture of that, because the only image on the Internet appears to be in copyright, but you can see it here.


In the face of public protest, the fountain was moved to make way for Trams. Funnily enough, there might be room for it again now. The latest tram works have created a pedestrian refuge on the site.  But the dismantled stones are almost entirely lost. Only the top section survives. It sits rather oddly (and unexplained)  by a cycle path near the Water of Leith. It's not far from a Boys' Brigade centre whose predecessor Catherine Sinclair funded, but there is no indication that those who placed the stone there in the 1980s were aware of the link.

This is how the remains of the fountain top looked on Wednesday.


Back in central Edinburgh, the worn-out inscription on the grand memorial lists Catherine’s good works, but the lettering has eroded almost to the point of illegibility. 


The memorial stands only a few yards from Charlotte Square, where the Edinburgh International Book Festival takes place every year.  It’s at the junction of North Charlotte Street and St Colme Street.  If you’re up for the festival, do take a look - particularly if you are there on August 6th, which will be the 150th anniversary of Catherine Sinclair’s death.  I might pop along with a flower.

Here’s  a possible epitaph for her - in her own words - from the preface to Holiday House:


Those who wish to be remembered for ever in the world -- and it is a very common object of ambition -- will find no monument more permanent than the affectionate remembrance of any children they have treated with kindness...But above all, we never forget those who good-humouredly complied with the constantly recurring petition of all young people in every generation, and in every house -- “Will you tell me a story?”

















SUNLIGHT ON LEMON TERRACES AND THE SWEET SMELL OF FIGS – Dianne Hofmeyr

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There’s a small corner of the Western Cape that could pass for being part of the Mediterranean. I grew up here with the sweet smell of figs and sticky pine-nut sap on my hands. Two huge old stone pines stood at the bottom of my road and as a child I painstakingly spent hours chopping the hard kernels against stones to get at tiny morsels of sweet nut. I grew up with the scent of hot sun on tomatoes, on the leaves of rose geraniums and on clipped cypresses, with oleanders whose flowers seemed deadlier by moonlight and long ropes of wisteria and grape vines dripping from pergolas.

It could have been the Mediterranean … but it wasn’t. Then when I was fifteen I read a book that transported me to the real Mediterranean where lemons and olive trees grew along terraces and houses were surrounded not just by stone pines but by towering, almost black cypresses and ancient amphora.

The book was The Story of San Michele and even the Swedish author’s name, Axel Munthe, was enough to transport me into a reverie of sunlight on lemon terraces, where a peasant girl just my age called Gioia, with lips as red as her coral necklace, was kissed by the eighteen year old Munthe, as she showed him up the mountain to the village piazza of Capri. But she refused to climb further and left him outside the church of St Stefano.

Munthe goes on: ‘I sprang up the Phoenician steps to Anacapri. Half-way up I overtook an old woman with a huge basket full of oranges on her head. She put down her basket and handed me an orange.

Just over our heads, riveted to the steep rock like an eagle's nest, stood a little ruined chapel. Its vaulted roof had fallen in, but huge blocks of masonry shaped into an unknown pattern of symmetrical network, still supported its crumbling walls.
"What is the name of the little chapel?" I asked.

" San Michele."

the restored chapel of San Michele as it stands today
In the vineyard below the chapel an old man was digging furrows in the soil for new vines. The vineyard was his and so was the little house close by. He had built it mostly with stones and bricks of the Roba di Timberio that was strewn all over the garden.

How much of the book is dream and how much truth, is hard to say. When he meets a polar bear at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris while studying to be a doctor, Munthe recalls:
‘Of course we spoke in Swedish, with a sort of Polar accent I picked up from him. I am sure he understood every word I said when I told him, in a low monotonous voice how sorry I was for him and that when I was a boy I had seen two of his kinsmen swimming close to our boat amongst floating ice blocks in the land of our birth.’

As a girl of fifteen I take bits and pieces of the book on board. It jumps about as if the author can never be still. An Italian dictionary might have helped but I have a smattering of Latin that gets me through. I fathom that cacciacavallo means ‘cheese on horseback’ but what exactly is‘cheese on horseback’? And did Munthe truly see a sphinx in his dream?

And here where we stand with this beautiful island rising like a sphinx out of the sea below our feet, here I want a granite sphinx from the land of the Pharaohs. But where shall I find the sphinx?’



The Villa of San Michele as it stands today with its stone pines and oleanders. 




Last week I walked down the loggia of Villa San Michele, past the chapel and saw his sphinx. It sat looking out over Capri, face hidden from view, carved in Egypt, transported to Italy by one of the Caesars ... perhaps by Julius as a gift from Cleopatra ... perhaps by Tiberius who built his summer home on the foundation of San Michele, but most likely by Nero who built a villa in Calabria on the mainland, beneath whose ruins Munthe saw the sphinx, in a dream. Decades later he recovered the sculpture and transported it up the 777 Phoenicians steps and placed it on a wall jutting out from the San Michele chapel.

I stroll through the open courtyards of the Villa where terrazzo floors are almost identical to those left behind across the bay in Pompeii.
I sit up on the roof terrace in the sunshine drinking coffee and listening to birdsong, as Munthe probably did – surrounded by his orange and lemon trees, looking through the stone pines to that incredible view and I try to imagine that fifteen year old girl who disappeared into the pages of a book called The Story of of San Michele 

But it’s impossible to write of Mediterranean gardens, without mentioning another garden high above the sea at Ravello. The Villa Cimbrone stands on a treed rocky outcrop from which it got its name – Cimbronium– the Roman word for a wood or forest used for building ships. The earliest references to the villa date back to the eleventh century AD, when the villa belonged to the Accongiogioco family.
Earnest William Beckett visited the villa during his travels in Italy and fell in love with it. He bought it from the Amici family in 1904, and with the help of Nicola Mansi, a tailor-barber-builder from Ravello restored and enlarged the villa and garden and its battlements, terraces and cloisters in a mixture of mock-Gothic, Moorish and Venetian architectural style. The original layout of the Italianate garden was kept, but a strong influence of the English landscape gardeners, Edwin Luytens and Gertrude Jekyll can be felt.

Villa Cimbrone became a favourite haunt of the Bloombury group, and guests included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keyes and Lytton Strachey. Other visitors were D. H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville West, Diana Mosley, Henry Moore, T. S. Elliot, Winston Churchill and Great Garbo with her lover, the conductor, Leopold Stokowski.

I visit in a quiet time between seasons when the wisteria has finished flowering and the first flush of roses is over and the hydrangea are not yet in bloom. But without the distraction of colour, the garden shows its bones and its tracery of veins. The villa is reached on foot via many steps from the Ravello piazza and the garden is strung out all along the cliff high above the sea.

Immmediately beyond the 16th century entrance, is the cloister with its graceful little courtyard in Moorish-Norman style.

This leads along an avenue that takes you to the Belvedere and the Terrazzo dell'lnfinito, lined with marble busts.




The Seat of Mercury overlooking the terraces, is an 18th century bronze copy of ‘Hermes at rest’. The original is on display at the national museum in Naples.

The Hortensia Avenue with it wrought iron well at one end and pergola supported by substantial round terracotta columns, shows renaissance references and inspiration of the Medici villas.


Through a meandering clipped box hedge is the bronze statue of David, produced by the Neapolitan sculptor Gioacchino Varlese, in imitation of the one by Verrocchio in Florence.
In the rose garden there are strong Moorish influences with wonderful tiles and a stone bench with a verse by Omar Khayyam: “Ah moon of my delight which knows no decline, the moon in the sky is rising once more. But as it rises again in future, in this very garden, it will look for us in vain.”


And in the rose garden the wrestler, Greucante.


Visit late in the afternoon when the tourists have left and the light is sublime, and the views that drop down to the steep terraces below, spectacular.


From these gardens, caught midway in taking off my hat, I say goodbye to the History Girls. It's been wonderful being part of this group. But just because I'm not writing won't mean I'm not following.

The Naval Braid, by Louisa Young

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The strangest thing happened. 

Our grandfather Bill lost an arm at Zeebrugge in 1918. He was a second lieutenant on guns during the attack on the Mole, where HMS Vindictive was held in place against the quay by the Daffodil and the Iris (!) bombarding and distracting the considerable German defences long enough for three hulks full of concrete to be sunk in the Zeebrugge Canal to prevent German submarines coming out and harrying shipping in the English Channel. This was an extremely dangerous and controversial excursion: unmarried men were chosen. 

Leading a landing party against the German gun placements was our other grandfather, Bryan Adams. Small world. Bryan it was who ordered Bill below when he was wounded; Bill confessed that he responded with shocking language. They didn't meet again till thirty years later, when their offspring introduced them.  

Here is Bill as a young man: 


Here with both his arms, in Albania, in 1916: 

And here he is in his pomp, one-armed: 


And here is Bryan, many years later. 



An Australian historian and scholar named Geoff Burrows is very interested in Bill's life. (I won't go into it in detail here, but it was an unusual mix of poetry, politics, finance, journalism, war heroism and literature: he married Captain Scott of the Antarctic's widow, introduced arts pages to the Financial Times, was close friends with GM Trevelyan and EM Forster, was a cabinet minister in the 1930s and once proposed to Virginia Woolf in a punt. I should say Bill is not his real name. He was Sir Edward Hilton Young; 'Bill' was given to him by his about-to-be-stepson Peter Scott, who didn't know what to call him so was invited to come up with his own name.) 

One day earlier this year a friend of Geoff's, Mick Forsyth, also Australian, sent Geoff a link to an episode of the Antiques Roadshow, saying he thought he might be interested. Geoff was interested, and sent the link on to us. It was a World War One Special, and on it a beautiful old white-haired lady showed a photograph of her father, Able Seaman John Joseph Crowley, known as Jack, whose family had come over from Cork during the famine, and who served on board HMS Vindictive at Zeebrugge. Here he is: 


and here is his naval record: twenty years at sea. 


Alongside the photographs she showed two strips of worn and faded naval gold braid. Her father, she said, had helped a junior officer whose arm had been badly wounded. His sleeve had to be cut away for the wound to be attended to; Jack Crowley was holding it, and said 'What should I do with it?' The medic said, keep it, as a souvenir. 

Jack didn't keep the sleeve, which would have been bloodstained and shredded, but he unpicked the braid and kept it, and his wife and his daughter kept it, and unless there was another second-lieutenant in guns on the Vindictive that night in November 1918 who lost his right arm, then that was our grandfather's braid, there on the TV, spotted by a man in Australia.

So we all shivered.   

Our sister emailed the show; contact was made. Oh yes, said Phyllis Ballard, it was Hilton Young. She sent me this:

'My Father, John Joseph Crowley
He was born in 1885, in Bath, Somerset. The family had come over from Cork, Ireland, during the Famine. At the age of 17, he joined the Royal Navy in 1902. he went in as a Boy, 2nd Class, and by 1914 he was Able Seaman. He was known to friends and family as Jack.
He worked on the Railway, and arrived in the Swansea Valley, in the 1920`s after the war.He met and married my Mother, Gladys, in 1927. I was born in 1929, and my brother in 1932. His health was very poor due to being gassed whilst serving with the Naval Guns in Belgium. He died in 1939 of a lung condition.
It was after his death that we found out about the incident in Zeebrugge, though he had mentioned briefly, and had referred to the officer being Hilton Young.
The British Legion gave us more detail about the incident. My mother always used to say that Jack had saved someone's life .
I found his naval records in the archives and it appears he served on several different ships. He visited South America, South Africa and even China.
I found the braid amongst my mother`s possessions after she died in 1979, and remembered the story.
In recent years, I've done a lot of research into my family history, and into naval records. I am so pleased the story has reached a conclusion, and I would like to return the braid to you. Perhaps we can make some arrangements to get it to you safely.'


We made arrangements. On my way back from the Hay Festival this weekend, where I had been talking about my World War One novel The Heroes' Welcome  - which deals specifically with coming back from war, with wounds and recovery - I stopped in at Cardiff to meet Phyll and Elaine. 

Here we are, with our ancestors. 


Bill, Elaine, Phyll, Jack and me. The medals are Jack's, behind them is the braid. 

Phyll conducted a small ceremony, in which the braid was formally given from grand-daughter to grand-daughter. We took photos, and I made a sound recording of it on my phone for my mother, who is 91. I would be lying if I said there were no tears, or that some of them weren't mine. No-one is alive now to give a detailed account of exactly what happened amidst the guns and noise and terror and courage of that night, but that sailor with his lovely Buster Keaton face, father and grandfather to these lovely women with their faces so like his, helped our grandfather when he needed it. So we were all happy.

And here is the braid. Ninety five years later. I've brought it home, and I'm taking it round to my mum. Thank you, Phyll and Elaine. Thank you, Jack Crowley.





The Keeper of the Locks by Clare Mulley

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I love my family. Last year, for my birthday, among other things my mum gave me a well-wrapped cigar box celebrating the Brussels Grand Prix of 1910. It made a light parcel and did not rattle when I shook it, but inside was something rather wonderful.



First was a card that said ‘Mary Smith, nee McCombie, 1895-1984’. I was slightly nervous that I might be facing my grandmother’s ashes but instead, below the card, were two chestnut-coloured ponytails, each tied with string. As a schoolgirl, Mary had worn her hair in plaits. In 1911 when she went out to work, aged 16, she had bunched her plaits at the neck, or curved them round her head. But by the 1920s she had a fashionable flapper’s bob and she kept her hair short for the rest of her life. So at some point she must have decided that her long hair was too much trouble and rather regretfully cut it off, or perhaps it was with a sense of liberation that she had her hair chopped, shocking her rather staid aunts as she marked her transition to adulthood and independence.


Mary as a schoolgirl


Mary with her hair up for work.


I have noticed that when a lock of hair is treasured in a film it is usually lush and shiny, and does not look very real somehow. Not so these girlish bunches, which have split ends and several knots, very like my daughters’ hair which I brush and plait most mornings before school. But her long hair must have held great value to Mary for her to have hung on to it all her long life, and clearly the keepsake resonated with my mother too, who could not bear to part with her mother’s treasured bunches either.

Mary’s bunches.
 


With nearly 100 years in a box, the hair has now taken on even greater significance. My own daughters squealed rather delightedly at this family relic from a woman, a great grandmother, who they had never known. But my husband was rather less convinced. ‘Thank goodness it is not a finger’, he said, ‘or even a set of teeth. Perhaps, if it must be kept,’ he added, ‘it could be put to good use, in the mix for some renovating plaster for our walls, or the stuffing for the piano-stool’. My family, he seemed to be suggesting, might be quite capable of keeping anything, and in this he is probably right. Now, however, this box is not just full of hair, it is full of historic-hair, family hair that has been loved and valued by two generations already. Its significance is in its preservation as much as in its DNA. So now I am the keeper-of-the-locks, which sit in their box on the shelf with my prettier old books, some of which themselves were given as school prizes to various great uncles and aunties.


This year my mum, who has clearly if unofficially given me the job of family historian, wrapped me up another of Mary’s treasures; a medal engraved on the back to ‘M McCombie, 2nd Place, Open Competition Girl Clerks, April 1912’. My granny had come second in the country for her civil service entry exams that year, or at least of those girls taking the exams at the ‘Civil Service and Commercial College’ at 1, 2 & 3 Chancery Lane.







 
Mary’s medal, front and back.

A medal seems a much more reasonable thing to keep than some old, slightly tangled hair. Medals are earned rather than grown after all, and they were not once actually part of a human being. But perhaps clever Mary had just as much pride in their hair as her exam results. And, I have realized, it is only the two things together, the hair and the medal, that start to hint at the whole woman behind them, Mary Smith nee McCombie, a smart woman who made her own way in the world, but who also rather romantically refused to ever throw out the long hair of her childhood. Perhaps that is a combination that has a certain power of its own, something to emulate, as well as something to preserve.


   



Mary later in life, with her hair still bobbed.


Silent Noon by Trilby Kent

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This month's guest is Trilby Kent, who has visited us before.



Trilby Kent is a novelist, children’s author and journalist. She read History at Oxford University and completed a MSc in Social Anthropology at the LSE; Silent Noon was written as part of a PhD project that was completed in 2013, from which this post is partially extracted. She has previously contributed to The History Girls on the subject of writing race in children’s fiction; her Young Adult novel, Stones for my Father, went on to win the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Prize and the Africana Book Award in 2012.

Silent Noon

September 1953. Fourteen-year-old Barney Holland is promised a fresh start when he is offered a place at a boarding school on the remote North Sea island of Lindsey. Instead, he is shunned by his peers both for his status as a charity pupil and for being the replacement of a recently deceased student, the popular Cray. The arrival of Belinda Flood, a housemaster’s daughter stigmatized by her expulsion from another school, provides Barney with an unexpected ally. Both outsiders soon fall under the influence of charismatic senior pupil Ivor Morrell, who reigns over the forbidden corners of the school.

A gruesome find and the friendship with a local woman rumoured to have been a wartime collaborator draw the three into an increasingly dangerous web of personal and social shame. Gripped by mounting horror at his discovery of secrets harboured by the isolated school community, Barney personifies the struggle of a young peacetime generation finding its way out of the shadow of war. 


“The past that’s not past yet” (a wonderful phrase coined by Damon Galgut) is a major theme of Silent Noon, which features schoolmasters living with the memory of war and schoolboys who have inherited its legacies, both proud and shameful. Having previously written novels set at the turn of the last century and in the 1930s, I had some experience of evoking historical periods poised on the brink of calamity. Writing a novel set during the post-war years offered a new challenge, for the great drama of the age already lay behind my characters, in the recent past.

My fear of slipping into nostalgia for the 1950s and school stories of that period was slightly abated by the fact that the book is, in some ways, not about the 1950s at all, but rather about the way in which the 1940s lingered, and the 1960s failed to arrive quickly enough.

Furthermore, the fact that ‘my’ islands – Lindsey and St Just – are entirely fictitious allowed me a certain freedom. I was able to identify a moment when Britain and its allies had been victorious in a war fought to defend its borders and beliefs, but which was followed by an anti-climactic unease and sense of isolation in the world, as well as a reversion to conservatism, fears about an uncertain future, and shortages of resources. Today, still, we face an energy crisis, grapple with concerns about international terrorism and war, fear North Korean nuclear tests, bemoan unsocial youth, warily eye China as a rising superpower, and partake in the steady rise of consumer culture.

Asked why she didn’t write about ‘modern times’, Isak Dinesen replied

“I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility… a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.”

It is a sentiment echoed by Thomas Mann in his question, “Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?”

As Guernsey and Jersey felt too small to reinvent for the purposes of my novel, and their wartime stories too familiar, I opted to create a landscape from scratch. In constructing Lindsey Island, I borrowed several elements from the Scottish outpost of St Kilda – the crofts and screes, the outbreaks of infantile tetanus, the Chimney and use of gannets’ stomachs as containers – as well as the awkward position it occupied in the context of wider historical events.

I also researched the histories of two major Channel Island boarding schools to better understand their uses as physical spaces during and after the war. Ms. Dot Carruthers of Elizabeth College was able to fill in the fate of the buildings during the school’s exile to Derbyshire, while Mr. Ricky Allen of Priaulx Library expanded on the college’s use by the Feldkommandantur 515 (Guernsey branch). This was where civil government was administered, affecting everything from occupation costs and price control to police, education, and health services. It was also used as a timber lot; as Mr. Allen was able to quote from J. C. Sauvary’s ‘Diary of the German Occupation of Guernsey’: “Today I had to go to Elizabeth College to see Inspector Hannibal for a permit for coffin material” and “I went to Elizabeth College again yesterday, for a permit for timber. It is heartbreaking to see the old College”. Victoria College, too, was requisitioned to house a contingent of Hitler Youth, but not before masters and boys removed the honours boards and pictures from the Hall and boarded off the library. The 1930-56 college register records that a number of English-born masters and pupils were deported to Germany (“among them Mr. Kennett, Mr. Williams, and Crumpton (the College Porter)”), although their fates are not recorded.

There is an undeniable element of nostalgia associated with the Second World War and the decade that followed it, and one of my primary aims in writing Silent Noon was to resist falling into the trap of exploiting history for its shock value. It is a problem I partly evaded by constructing an imagined geography; but questions of historical appropriation remained, not least because they are of central interest to my characters. Kazuo Ishiguro has said,

“To some extent, we, in a very decadent way, felt envious towards writers who lived in oppressive regimes because they could just describe their everyday life, and it was immediately big and significant”:

“I think the solution that a lot people came to…is that you can either travel … Or you can go back in time. And you can keep talking about Britain, England, Europe, whatever. And you don't have to go back very far to a point when all these values that we take for granted today: democracy, freedom, affluence, all these things were really threatened.” (http://www.writersblocpresents.com/archives/ishiguro/ishiguro.htm.)

Silent Noon was never intended to be a ‘big’ novel, but rather a tightly controlled story about a small group of people in a closed institution. I hope that, although ‘big history’ is touched on, the thrust of the story remains about the young people at its centre trying to find their way out of the shadow of war, and not about war itself. The Carding House School is haunted not only by a recent student death but also by its war history; similarly, the misdirected rage of Barney, Belinda and Ivor is symptomatic of a disenfranchised generation suspended between a glorious past they can’t remember and an uncertain future they can’t envisage.

In this respect, the setting is crucial: isolated from the fields of battle, yet tarnished by memories of a shameful occupation, Lindsey Island is suspended between victimhood and collusion, honour and despair. It sits awkwardly on the fringes of Britain, forgotten in its ‘finest hour’. It rejects a standardized history. Like a teenager, it sulks, it dwells, and it guards its secrets jealously.

I always knew how I wanted the book to end: with an explosion, with a last-minute revelation, and with a freezing of time at the school’s sports day. In Silent Noon, I wanted to resolve with an ending-that-isn’t and a sense of Barney walking away from a specific moment and place while realising that these things – the here and now – would haunt him for the rest of his life. As such, his story concludes with a paen both to the end of his school days and to the complex era in which he comes of age – a past that is certainly not past, yet.

Elizabeth College, Guernsey


Victoria College, Jersey

A Painting for the Cabinet of Curiosities by Imogen Robertson

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I have been broke, very broke or oh-my-god-they-are-coming-for-the-telly broke at various times in my life, and at those moments it’s tempting to look at your past spending and wonder what in hell you were thinking. That thought goes through my mind every time I open my wardrobe door; but no matter what my financial state, the indulgent purchases I have never regretted are my paintings. Some I bought from shows, some from antiques warehouses, and some from the internet. It’s one that came from the latter category I want to talk about today and here it is:



I bought it as an unstretched and unframed canvas on ebay from a man in Glasgow. I think it was some time in 2001. He said he had picked it up at a market and had no idea where it came from. I got it mounted and framed, and hung it on my wall. Now, as you guys are a particularly savvy bunch, you have probably already recognised it as a copy of this painting - Room in New York by Edward Hopper from 1932. 

Room in New York - Edward Hopper 1932


I’m afraid I didn’t realise the connection until 2004 when I went to Hopper’s retrospective at the Tate. As I walked through the galleries, I thought, 'God these remind me of that painting at home'. The original wasn’t on display but I flicked through the Taschen book in the giftshop, and there it was.

I can only assume that my version was painted by an artist who was studying Hopper, and so he copied the picture to understand better the techniques involved. It reminds me of those artists one sees in all the major galleries making copies of the images on display. It makes me think about artists of all sorts learning their craft through exercises in imitation. The characters in Paris Winter spent much of their early years of study copying other artworks, and I know when I read things I love, trying to imitate the cadence of that writing in my own mind is part of my learning process. 

Room in New York - Hopper (detail)
Anonymous copy (detail)
But it's not a direct copy. The faces in my version are more stylised, the paint is not applied with Hopper's smoothness - in mine the darkness behind is breaking through. Though the colours are close, they are different - warmer in Hopper's original. My artist has followed those three patches of vivd red, but they have completely changed the colours in the picture hanging on the wall above the man's head.

Room in New York - Hopper (detail)

Anonymous copy (detail)


Why did the artist decide to change that, of all things? I wish I knew who he or she was and could ask. Perhaps they just did the picture for fun, or as a gift for a friend who really liked Hopper. Perhaps the feeling of isolation and voyeurism in the original attracted them, though the style of painting did not. I can’t say. My version has no signature or other identifying mark I can find. 

So it remains a curiosity, an item that provokes questions rather than provides answers, so I offer it for inclusion in our online cabinet. If anyone has any further thoughts or insights, I’d be really pleased to hear them.


Theft of Life is out now
Paris Winter is available in paperback

May Competition

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To win one of five copies of Trilby Kent's new novel Silent Noon, just answer this question in the Comments section below:

"Name a school story that engages with its historical context in a compelling or unexpected way."

Competition closes on 7th June and is open to UK residents only

Historical First Aid – Mary Hoffman and Michelle Lovric

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Something strange happened in May 2012. My friend and fellow History Girl Michelle Lovric told me she was going to miss a deadline. Now, she might not go as far as I have, in instructing her family to put “She met her Deadline” on her tombstone. But as an ex-journalist, packager of illustrated books and now a prolific writer of novels for adults and children, Michelle knew that I would be suitably shocked.

I had read the first chapter of what was then known as “The Swiney Godivas” while staying with Michelle in Venice the previous August and was intrigued to know how it was developing into a full scale Victorian novel.

At "writers' Boot Camp in Venice - Prosecco an essential aid

For entirely non-literary reasons – which can happen to any of us – Michelle was struggling to finish her novel in time for her July deadline. It is interesting to note that, being primary carers, women writers are especially prone to the non-literary distractions of domestic responsibilities, illness and the other traditional nurturing roles.

Non-literary distraction of a welcome kind - A feline Rose La Touche
Anyway, before her untimely interruption, Michelle’s new book was shaping up nicely to be the usual 150K words, 450 page doorstep but the non-literary distractions made it difficult for her to be sure about what she had written. Her "lovely and highly discriminating agent" Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath told her to put it in a drawer for a little while, and to concentrate on just surviving. (When someone else suggested that she "burn it and give the money back," Michelle was very tempted)

Well, I did what all writer friends do – offered to read the combustible manuscript. (And to be fair, I was very curious to know how it had turned out).

So a spiral-bound typescript arrived in the post and I was plunged back into the world of what is now called The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters. It’s a hardback book that can – and should – now be read by everyone, as it’s published this week. But back then it was just a bound heap of printed A4 pages. What a privilege it is to know writers, as well as to be one! It gives you this rare opportunity to appreciate and even influence a book before it is published.


I was soon scrawling in pencil all over the margins – did you know I am an editor manquée? – But mainly with questions, since what all writers need at this stage is “the innocent eye.” I had to pretend that I had never met Darcy, Berenice and Enda, Manticory, Pertilly, Oona and Ida. Particularly Manticory, the middle one of the seven Swiney sisters from Harristown in Ireland, who narrates the whole of their remarkable History.

It is Michelle’s fifth adult novel since 2001 (There have also been four full-length children’s books) and this one focuses on hair. Her last adult novel was the acclaimed Book of Human Skin, which was the most popular among the judges of the Channel Four Book Club choices in 2011.

Anyone who has ever met Michelle will remember her hair

I had read that last novel, peeping between my fingers, since it had its gruesome moments and Harristown has its dark aspects too. Hair has been an obsession for many people and it reached a peak in the nineteenth century when the novel is set.

The Swiney sisters have it in abundance and in a range of colours but it is the only rich bounty in the home they share with their mother Annora, which is otherwise dirt-poor. They make their own fortune through their singing and the sensuous display, at the climax of their performances, of their massed tresses.

(You can learn more about the settings and the plot, which goes through many convolutions, when Michelle writes her own post about how she researched in Ireland, on 10th June).

But, having been so involved in those convolutions, I wanted to interview her here about the conception and birth of this unusual novel.

First of all, did you feel that I was too severe an editor?

All writers should be grateful for excoriating criticism prior to publication! Anything that allows you to refine the work before it comes out – well, that’s a gift. It is one of the reasons why a traditional trade publishing route is still the preferred option for most of us History Girls, I suspect. If published traditionally, the writer has the attention of a skilled, acute editor – in my case the wonderful Helen Garnons-Williams at Bloomsbury.

But my book was in trouble long before it reached Helen’s desk. In fact, I didn’t know if it would reach her desk at all. And that’s where you stepped in.

I’ll always be hugely grateful to you for what you scribbled on my troubled manuscript. Writing comes from the same place as living. In spring 2012, my head was full of nothing but screaming static. I had channeled raw words and events straight into the book, unfiltered. Truth is stranger than fiction but it is also cruder, less satisfactory, less fair, and makes less sense, quite often. The truth simply isn’t good enough for fiction.

For my own sake, I was beginning to realize that there was only danger in recording things that I hadn’t wanted to live. And the worst crime: it makes for terrible writing.

So one thing that had happened to me by May 2012 was that in the midst of my non-literary traumas, I had somehow lost my literary moral compass.


And the first thing that you pointed out, so rightly, was that, in the draft you saw, I had killed the wrong sister at the climax of the book! I was seeing everything through a glass darkly, but you helped me to see that my Harristown Sisters could eventually save themselves by their own actions and that the survivors deserved to be happy.


I didn't know I'd been excoriating! But I did know that good characters had triumphed over disaster in your earlier novels and I felt that at least one Harristown sister deserved to as well.
By that time, I’d also lost confidence in my future as a writer, which was reflected in a limp ending that trailed away dismally. You suggested some ways to acknowledge the Harristown Sisters’ tragedy and to move on, while acknowledging their past. Without those scribbles of yours, I doubt if the book would ever have been publishable, as no one likes a relentless downward spiral. Every reader seeks a little vicarious redemption, a little satisfaction when an evildoer gets his or her just deserts.

So no, I did not feel you interfered, any more than a surgeon interferes with a patient’s body when she skilfully removes a tumour. After I read your comments, suddenly the book found its will to live, and I sparked off your suggestions and found surprises of my own when I looked into the questions you had raised. The Harristown Sisters gradually became a different, better book. Now I am biting my nails to see if other people think so too.

I was also grateful for your company. While we were nursing the book back to health, we were able to have a lot of face-to-face conversations, and those were as nourishing as the written word. I had the opportunity to argue my case, and that gave me renewed confidence because I found my characters still had things to say for themselves. They came out of their shells and began to prance about in my imagination again.

As I’ve said, I’ll always be grateful, and so will the Harristown Sisters.

And as you say, it is a fine thing to be a writer and have writer friends, in whom I am blessed in quality and quantity. So I also had invaluable and generous advice from Sarah Salway, Carol DeVaughn, Tamara MacFarlane, Jill Foulston and Louise Berridge, of this parish. Louise particularly helped me remove some of the bitter gristle and restore the sweetness. The ms also had expert prontosoccorso from Lucy Coats, with whom I teach the Guardian Masterclasses on How to Write For Children.

You were inspired by the American Sutherland Sisters, who had 37 feet of hair between them. But you chose not to write a novelized version of their lives. Can you explain a little about the real long-haired sisters, and why you decided to create your own Irish characters and set the story in Ireland and Venice?

Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora and Mary Sutherland were an all-American phenomenon of the late 19th century. Nature gave them phenomenally long hair. Bad luck left them poor and motherless but with a father eager to exploit them, peddling a quack hair preparation heavily marketed on images of “The Seven Sutherland Sisters”. To support sales, the girls were put on the road with the Barnum circus. They sang and danced a little. But the climax of their act was the moment when they turned their backs on the audience and let loose their hair, which tumbled to the ground. They were house-hold names in the USA, and made millions, and spent millions in an eccentric and lavish lifestyle. Their fortune collapsed when the fashion for bobbed hair came in. They lost everything, including the grotesque Gothic mansion they’d built. And even their archives were destroyed in a fire. They died in obscurity.



If anything, despite the fire, the Sutherland Sisters were too well documented, too editorialized, and too compartmentalized already to be of direct interest to a novelist. They had been ‘discovered’ by two American journalists Clarence O Lewis and Arch Merrill in the fifties. Both wrote excellent accounts of the sisters, albeit short ones. There were elements I wanted to use – particularly the hair-fall, the madness of the younger sister, and a suspected love rivalry between two sisters. But I definitely wanted to write a novel to which the Sutherland Sisters’ lives gave credibility – not a novel about them.

My other reason for going my own way was to do with my concurrent study of long hair, which focused on the Pre-Raphaelite painters and their poet equivalents. The concept of vigorous female hair as an explicit sexual marker was a European one. European writers and artists developed the ideas of hair as a tent to protect men, as a noose to strangle them, as an object of fetishism, as a way in which women wove stories. I needed my sisters fused to the culture of those ideas.

In order to emphasize the raggedness of the rags-to-riches story, I began my story in Ireland of the famine, with a poor Catholic family scratching out a life on the estate of rich Church of Ireland (Anglican) landlords. Harristown in County Kildare provided exactly what I wanted. I had a fondness for the place as my late cat Rose la Touche of Harristown was named after the most famous inhabitant of the estate. The Original Rose La Touche was the girl obsessively loved by John Ruskin. She died tragically young and is now buried by Harristown’s Carnalway church.

I also liked ‘Harristown’ for its grittiness as a word. So many Irish villages boast romantic names. But there was nothing romantic in the beginnings of my Irish sisters.

The second half of the book has a Venetian setting. Venice is a constant in my novels, as in my life. I was also interested in textures there … hair, stone, water. Venice provided me with the most unusual murder weapon I’ve ever deployed. And the Palazzo Papadopoli gave me rooms with frescoes I could use as part of the story.

"Oona's room" in the Palzzo Papadopoli
How did you come to choose the names of your sisters? Did you consider using those of the Sutherland Sisters? Sarah, Victoria, Isabella, Grace, Naomi, Dora and Mary are classic Victorian names …

It was much more of a creative challenge to find names to express the characters of my sisters, who are not, after all, American girls.

After much research on Irish websites, I chose the name ‘Swiney’ because I wanted a flavour of the barnyard, which, incidentally, is present in the whiff of the best champagne.

‘Swiney’ is in fact a variant of the ‘Sweeney’. I also like it for the madness associated with the name in legend. The intemperate King Swiney or Suibhne throws a precious psalter in the sea. The psalter was rescued by an otter but the King goes mad as a result of a curse. He is finally speared by a jealous husband. He’s the hero of Buile Suibhne or The Madness of Sweeney, which began to take form in the 9th century but appears to refer back to the time of the Battle of Moira in 637. Suibhne or Sweeney may have been king of Dal Araidhe, now County Antrim and north County Down. This story has in modern times been adapted by Seamus Heaney (Swiney Astray) and Flann O’Brien (At Swim-Two-Birds)

[And must be behind T.S.Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes and Sweeney among the Nightingales - MH]

The girls’ names have Irish or hairy derivations where possible:
Darcy Swiney has jet black hair. Darcy means dark in Irish.
Berenice, in legend, lined a temple with her hair.
Enda was a sixth-century Aran Islands monk. But in my mind ‘Enda’ was always short for Delenda, as in "Delenda est Carthago", or "Carthage must be destroyed". Cato the Elder uttered these words in 157 B.C. And there is nothing that Berenice Swiney wants to do more than destroy her twin Enda Swiney.
Manticory is my red haired protagonist. It's a variant of Manticore, one of the fierce creatures in Medieval bestiaries; it takes Manticory a while to act on her fierceness.

A possible Manticory

Oona is the meek, clinging blonde. The name comes from Irish word uan "a lamb". In Irish legend Oonagh was Queen of the Fairies, with long golden hair that flowed to the ground
Pertilly – is the wild card. I simply made it up as I liked the flow of the syllables.
Ida means "thirst" as in "thirst for knowledge." My Ida is the kind of idiot-savant of the family. She knows things through her senses and her intuition.

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters is published on June 5th by Bloomsbury.

Michelle Lovric’s website

The Harristown Sisters Pinterest board

'Be Not Ashamed You Were Bred In This Hospital. Own it.' - Lucy Inglis

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This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Foundling Museum, in Coram’s Fields, London. It is also the 275th anniversary of the Foundling Hospital, started by Thomas Coram to care for London’s abandoned children. There are going to be lots of celebrations throughout the summer and if you haven't been, I would very much recommend going in the next few months.

In 1722, Thomas Coram was fifty-four and had led a hard life at sea. On his return to London, he went to work in the City but chose to live in Rotherhithe, ‘the common Residence of Seafaring People’. Naturally inclined to hard work, he walked to and from the City at dawn and dusk, and was shocked to see so many ‘young Children exposed, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, and sometimes dying’. It took until 1739 for him to raise the money to open the hospital.

Coram’s success lay in petitioning London’s aristocracy and making philanthropy fashionable. William Hogarth and Handel were both governors and the Messiah was performed there for the benefit of the hospital. The first children were admitted on 25 March 1741. There to supervise their admission were the Duke of Richmond and William Hogarth. A crowd had gathered outside, and the porter struggled to close the door on those wanting to get in. Thirty children were admitted, made up of eighteen boys and twelve girls, and ‘the Expressions of Grief of the Women whose Children could not be admitted were Scarcely more observable than those of some of the Women who parted with their Children, so that a more moving Scene can’t well be imagined’.

The Foundling did their best for the thousands of children in their care. They did not turn away children of mixed race. They took in children of insane mothers, and they became increasingly aware that The Foundling served a dual purpose: by relieving parents of a child they could no longer care for, the governors noted that there was a chance they could be restored ‘to a course of Industry and Virtue so that almost every Act of the Charity is attended with a Double Benefit, the preservation of the Child and of the Parent’. One disabled boy, George Grafton, had been admitted aged ten with such severe club feet that he had learned to walk on the outside of his ankles. He underwent a successful surgical repair for the condition, paid for by The Foundling. The hospital also paid for him to be apprenticed to a shoemaker. He returned to the hospital’s employ to ‘furnish shoes for the children’. Blind children were educated for a career in music. One of these, Tom Grenville, became the organist at The Foundling as a grown man, living locally with his wife and family. Some children were too profoundly disabled ever to leave, and were cared for all their lives.

What became of the children who left? Many returned at some point. Some came for help, some for advice, some for information about their parents. One such child was Sarah Billington who, aged twenty-eight, wrote, ‘desiring to be informed who are her parents; she having laboured for many years under the greatest anxiety of mind, wishing to know them’. The governors could do no more than send her a copy of her admission notes.

The Foundling continued on the same spot until the 1920s, when the land was sold for development. All that remains of the hospital today are the colonnades, although in recent years The Foundling Hospital Charity has provided a playground for Great Ormond Street Hospital. Thus Thomas Coram’s legacy still attends to the needs of children at a difficult time in their lives. The pride those involved felt in the institution was reflected in the instructions drawn up by the governors, in 1754, for those about to leave: ‘Be not ashamed that you were bred in this Hospital. Own it.’

Women of the World - interview with Helen McCarthy by Eve Edwards

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Eve Edwards
Helen McCarthy

In conversation...two women of the world.  Helen McCarthy, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, has just published the first account of the role of women in the diplomatic service.  As I served five years in the Foreign Office myself before turning into a historical novelist, I was the designated History Girl sent to get my telegram of information in time for close of play.


From: Edwards, History Girls Central
To: All 
Security: Unclassified
Priority: Immediate

Summary: Forgotten story of pioneering diplomats revealed in McCarthy's engaging narrative history.

Text:
Have you ever asked yourself when women were allowed to join one of the most prestigious of professions, that of the diplomatic service?  My guess would have been in the interwar period, at the same time as women got the vote, but I would have been way out.  Though the Home Civil service was opened up in that period, women were not allowed to join the Foreign Office until 1946, and even then they had to leave on marriage.  That rule was not lifted until 1973.  In the 1990s I worked with women who had had their careers cut short due the the unfortunate fact they were female and had fallen in love.  Their male spouses were, of course, not expected to make the same sacrifice.  My first question to Helen was therefore if she had a personal connection to writing the book?

Helen: No but I have a very keen interest in women's history, especially how they broke into the professions.  I was working on women’s activism around the League of Nations and the idea of international government in the 1920s and 30s, which is when I discovered this fact about women’s ongoing exclusion from the diplomatic profession.  What looked like a small subject grew to be a much larger story and I realized that no one had written the narrative history going back into the 19th century and on into the post-1946 period so I decided to do it.

What surprises came up during the research?

Helen: I conducted many interviews with the pioneers who joined in the late 40s and 50s.  I was surprised how accepting they were of the marriage bar, most saying they didn't let it bother them, either because they weren't planning on marriage just then or thought it would be fun to try diplomacy for a while.  Of course, the bar might have acted as a deterrent to those to whom it was an immediate problem - married women or those in a relationship - so the protesting voices were silenced that way. The generation who joined in the late 60s and 70s were much more vocal in their opposition to the bar.

The second surprise, which seems to run counter to the bar, is how socially progressive the FO was in other ways.  In the 50s it was one of the first workplaces where it was acceptable to address colleagues by their first name.  Other civil service departments were still more formal.

Why do you think the theme of women in diplomacy is important?

Helen: Firstly, it's a fascinating story that does not fit the standard chronology of feminist advances in other walks of professional and public life.  Ideas about women's unfitness for diplomatic roles and the conflict with the role of diplomatic spouse lingered far longer here, even when women had proved themselves in field either in wartime or in other diplomatic services.  For example, the FO barred women from postings to the Middle East even after they were allowed into the service, despite the fact that Nancy Lambton had worked in Iran and Freya Stark in Iraq during the Second World war with diplomatic status and been praised for her work.  They were dismissed as exceptions that proved the rule – in Lambton’s case even by her own ambassador.  It was the 1980s before the first female diplomat of the new intake was sent to the Middle East.

The debate in the 30s and 40s about allowing women into the FO revolved around perceived gifts of their gender.  Was that the result of contemporary gender conditioning or do you think there is any truth in the view that women do diplomacy differently?

Helen: I'm going to duck the straight answer here as that delves into the thorny question of whether men and women are different ‘by nature’!  However, I think the language over gifts has now become embraced by the diversity agenda.  What were seen as feminine gifts, such as ‘intuition’ or ‘empathy’, are now welcomed as part of the drive to recruit from a wider gender, regional, ethnic pool to reflect the diversity of the country.  Out of fashion is the 'right sort' recruitment where it was believed that only chaps who had gone to the same schools and universities would represent the country effectively.

Who is your diplomatic heroine?

Helen: There are lots of wonderful characters in my book but if pushed I would pick Mary Moore (nee Galbraith) who joined in 1951.  She was a fascinating interview subject who conjured up brilliantly the masculine atmosphere of the Third Room where diplomats of her grade worked.  Suddenly after being kept out for decades the doors were open to women and Mary found herself in the UN Security Council sitting behind the British Ambassador during the Suez crisis as his aide.

If you turned to writing fiction, which person or place from your book would you choose for your novel?

Helen: New York and Washington during the Second World war.  Women were dispatched by London to win the hearts and minds of ordinary American people as part of the campaign to get the US to enter the war.  Winifred Cullis, to name but one, evoked the atmosphere vividly with her account of her trip in a fast lift at the Rockefeller Center and her lecture tour of the country.  She was rubbing shoulders with an eccentric diplomatic community in Washington, the embassy including such figures as Isaiah Berlin and John Wheeler-Bennett.

Would you have made a good diplomat?

Helen: No, my language skills are not up to the job and I would have been homesick.  I might have managed well on the making contacts and political analysis but I'm not sure about my schmoozing skills.

Here is a quick test of your diplomatic etiquette.  Do you know what the diplomatic honours are known as in the service?

Helen: Oh dear...

Former Second Secretary Political Section Edwards: CMG (Call me god), KCMG (Kings call me god), GCMG (God calls me god).  I've forgotten what they really stand for!  Who is more senior: a duke or a marquis.

Helen: marquis?

Edwards: No.  A duke.  But never mind I never had to know that either - it was all in a book somewhere.

Recommendation:
Helen McCarthy was sent a probing set of questions prior to interview and performed well under cross-examination.  I recommend you read her book and consider her inclusion on invitation for all future QBPs (Queen's Birthday Parties) held at History Girls Central.

Edwards

An exhibition of French WWI photographs - Katherine Langrish

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I was lucky enough to be in Paris for a long weekend, last weekend, and we walked down to the Palais de Luxembourg.  The formal gardens there are lovely - shady, full of statuary, with an ornamental lake on which little children can sail boats.



Down among those trees to the left is the Orangerie of the palace, currently the location of a superb exhibition of 120 photographs from the First World War, taken from the archives of the newspaper Excelsior, whose photo-journalists must have been among the first in the world.


As I walked around the large, airy space of the Orangerie, I took some photos of my own for the sake of the History Girls blog. (Please be aware, some of them are disturbing.) The exhibition lasts until the end of June, and I recommend it to anyone who can visit.  It follows the entire war experience from 1914 to the Armistice. From the initial euphoria as France declared war (crowds of jubilant people bearing a soldier along, shoulder-high), through outbreaks of domestic hostility (a Swiss shop with a German-sounding name has its windows broken and door kicked in). You see the reality of war beginning to dawn in the sombre faces waving the troops farewell. Then comes the Front...  I've suppose I have read as much WWI literature as most people, but I never truly appreciated, before seeing these photographs, the force of Siegfried Sassoon's remark that the most useful thing any soldier could possess was a good pair of wire cutters.  I'd vaguely imagined 'the wire' as lying around No-Man's Land in loose coils.  It didn't.  It looked like this: a broad, criss-cross, barbed latticework held firmly in place by lines of stakes. 



Imagine 'going over the top' through that.   No wonder they sent men crawling out at night to cut and cut and cut it, to give the troops even a chance of not being trapped and mown down.  No wonder so many never made it; like this poor German boy.



Besides the photos from the Front, I was struck as I went around by the many interesting Home Front photographs.  One mustn't forget how close the war actually got to Paris; at their nearest, the German army was barely 55 km away.  Here, an aeroplane has fallen into a Paris street like a fragile bird: paper and sticks: so light it hasn't even damaged the tree in which it hangs.



And then there are the women, who went to work.  Here, a group of girls construct steel helmets to protect the troops...


Here, serious-faced, another group stands holding the cases of shells which will be the means of destruction. You can see they know it.



This grim young woman despatch rider looks as though she has hardly the patience to wait for the photographer to complete his shot.

  


While here, balanced confidently against the iconic skyline, two more young women connect up telegraph wires.


Lastly, this wedding photograph, in which the white, stricken face of the young bride is mirrored by the sombre expression of the even younger boy to the right (perhaps her brother?).  If this is happiness, it is also tragedy, for though her soldier has returned from the Front, he is blind in both eyes and has lost his hands.



If you can't make it to Paris, you can see many more of the photographs at this website: Parisien Images - just click on the link.

Maya Angelou - Joan Lennon

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You may have listened to this before and after Maya Angelou's death last week, but it feels like a privilege every time.  She offers a vision of history that it can be hard to remember.  We were lucky to have her.  


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Richard Of York Gave/Gained Battles In Vain - Katherine Roberts

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We're having that sort of year. Heavy showers and sunshine, sometimes both at once, which produce one of the most beautiful weather effects we have on earth - the rainbow. And every time I see a rainbow, the phrase in the title of this post "Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain" pops into my head. It's how I was taught to remember the colours of the spectrum - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet - and it's apparently the most common mnemonic used here in Britain (with the exception of Yorkshire, where I've heard it injures local pride... what method do they use in Yorkshire? Can anyone enlighten us?).

But who was Richard of York, and which battles did he gain in vain? For the past 40 years or so, I've had a vague idea of some wimpy northern nobleman swinging a sword angrily at his enemies but still not getting what he wanted - so before I get thrown off the History Girls blog, I thought it was about time I found out more!

Richard Plantagenet... please can I be king of England?

'Richard of York' refers to Richard Plantagenet, the 3rd Duke of York and great grandson of King Edward III. Richard was the second most powerful nobleman in England after the troubled king Henry VI, with a strong claim to the throne. He tried to take over when it became obvious that Henry's bouts of insanity made the young king incapable of ruling England, but Henry's wife Margaret of Anjou would not hear of it. So Richard had to be content with an agreement that he would be crowned king if Henry died before he did.

Richard of York's coat of arms

Richard's 'vain' battles probably refer to the many battles he fought in France and Ireland as leader of the opposition, where he gained much support for his claim to the throne. But all his efforts came to nothing on 30th December 1460 at the Battle of Wakefield, a major battle in the Wars of the Roses fought between the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The Lancaster forces (supporting Margaret of Anjou and her small son Edward Prince of Wales) won, and Richard Duke of York was killed only a few weeks after securing his historic agreement.

The sense of futility he must have felt is expressed in this popular folk song (which I remember learning with all the actions when I used to be a morris dancer.. good for warming up the knees!)



Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

As far as I'm aware, there is no real proof that the Duke of York in the rhyme is our Richard of York from the rainbow mnemonic, but he's certainly one of the more popular candidates. He was quite old at the time of his final battle (49 - a good age in those days, and older than King Henry), fairly grand (second in line to the throne), the Battle of Wakefield was fought near a castle on a hill (Sandal Castle), and Richard commanded 8,000 men and was apparently awaiting reinforcements when he died.

Since Henry was still alive that day, poor old Richard never became king.

the red rose of Lancaster vs. the white rose of York

Now I understand a bit better why my mother, who grew up in Lancashire and wore a red rose on her college blazer and whose middle name is Margaret, taught me the 'Richard of York Gained Battles in Vain" rainbow mnemonic with a sly smile on her face!

Margaret of Anjou... Don't worry, Henry dear, I'll look after England.

How do youremember the colours of the rainbow? And what's the history behind your favourite method?

***

Katherine Roberts writes legend and fantasy for young readers. Her latest series is the Pendragon Legacy quartet about King Arthur's daughter.

Find out more at www.katherineroberts.co.uk where young readers can win signed copies of "Grail of Stars" and Pendragon Legacy bookmarks in this summer's competition (closing date 31st July).


All in the Wrist - a guest post by Frances Hardinge

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We have a special extra guest today, Frances Hardinge.


(If you have ever met Frances, you will know that the black hat is an invariable).



This is what her official biography says about her:

Frances Hardinge spent a large part of her childhood in a huge old house that inspired her to write strange stories from an early age. She read English at Oxford University, then got a job at a software company. However, a few years later a persistent friend finally managed to bully Frances into sending a few chapters of FLY BY NIGHT, her first children's novel, to a publisher. Macmillan made her an immediate offer. The book went on to publish to huge critical acclaim and win the Branford Boase First Novel Award. CUCKOO SONG is Frances' sixth novel. 



What it doesn't mention is that Frances' books, although wildly inventive fantasies featuring everything from goose companions and floating coffee-houses to cheese tunnels and witches in wells, often contain an important historical dimension. It's something we don't often cover on the History Girls although members Katherine Langrish and Katherine Roberts write in the "historical fantasy" genre. So it's a great pleasure to welcome Frances to talk about an important historical element in her latest spooky and eccentric Diana-Wynne-Jonesey novel, Cuckoo Song.

Over to her:
 Right now I am wearing something quintessentially feminine, which no self-respecting man would consider putting on.

What is it? A wristwatch.

Naturally any gentleman would be carrying a sensible, sturdy pocket watch. A watch bracelet is women's jewellery, too frail and ornamental for a man to wear...

Before World War I, this was exactly how “watch bracelets” or “wristlets” were generally regarded. In a much-repeated quote, one gentleman even declared that he “would sooner wear a skirt as wear a wristwatch”.

I stumbled upon this detail during my research for Cuckoo Song, a book set in the aftermath of the First World War. The male suspicion of the wristwatch surprised me. Surely it must have been obvious how practical such an arrangement would be? Apparently not. Wrist watches were considered too small to keep accurate time, and too vulnerable to dust, weather and shocks.


The wristwatch was an old idea, but had been slow to take hold. The Earl of Leicester allegedly gave Elizabeth I an “arm-watch” in 1571. The Clockmakers' Museum have an exquisite, pearl-studded Broillal watch with a black velvet wrist strap, dating from about 1780. In 1810 the Queen of Naples commissioned a watch on a wrist-chain from the Breguet family. However, these were luxurious novelties, and very rare.

Jewelled wristwatches became more common amongst aristocratic women in the latter part of the Victorian era. After the turn of the century, wristlets became more affordable, but were still elegant works of art in their own right, fastened to the wrist with bracelet chains or ribbons.

Most men of that time would not be seen dead in a wristwatch. Curiously enough, the few exceptions were all men with very real odds of 'being seen dead', who wanted to keep those odds as long as possible.

Russian Officer's Watch, 1912
For military officers who needed to keep their hands free for their weapons or horse reins, fumbling for a pocket watch was not only time-consuming, it was dangerous. By the end of the nineteenth century, a smattering of officers from various nations were using wristwatches on campaign. One story claims that this was inspired by a German artillery officer who grew tired of scrabbling for his pocket watch whilst timing bombardments, and instead strapped it to his wrist.

Detail from studio photo of WWI Bavarian soldier (Photo courtesy of Sam Wouters)
The other early adopters were pilots. Timepieces were vital for aerial navigation, allowing one to keep track of distance travelled. Pioneering aviators had enough problems keeping their flimsy and erratic machines in the air, without having to root around for a pocket watch. One prize-winning aviator, Alberto Santos-Dumont, complained so bitterly about this pocket watch trouble that his friend Louis Cartier designed a pilot's wristwatch and named it after him.

The early male wristwatches were essentially pocket watches tied to the wrist. Some even had a sturdy leather strap with a built-in socket, so that a pocket-watch could be slotted inside, then removed at will and worn in the pocket. Others were constructed using pocket watch movements and cases, but with flimsy wire lugs attached so that a strap could be fastened to them.

Leather strap with socket for pocket watch (Photo courtesy of Estate Auctions Inc.)
It was the Great War, however, that finally changed men's attitudes towards the despised wristlet.

In the trenches, assaults had to be carefully timed and co-ordinated, and soldiers could not afford to be delving under multiple layers of their uniform whenever they needed to read the time. Suddenly the few companies producing military-style wristwatches were deluged with orders from infantrymen. The US Army bought wristwatches in bulk for their forces, but the British War Department eyed them with more suspicion. Surely wrist movements would disarrange the delicate cogs? By 1917, however, they agreed to order a trial batch.

Two German soldiers, one wearing a wristwatch (Photo from Sam Wouters' impressive collection of WWI photographs)
A lot of WWI 'trench watches' had 'shrapnel guards' protecting the face. Some of these were metal grids, or perforated shields through which the face was visible. Others had full hinged covers like the front of a “hunter” pocket watch.

The first watches to have luminous hands and numbers were WWI trench watches. Unfortunately the paint used was a mixture of zinc sulphide and radium, which was radioactive! (The health risks from radium was less well understood at the time. Then again, pilots flying night missions in open cockpit planes over hostile territory probably had other health risks on their minds.)

After the Great War, many veterans continued wearing the watches that had served them so well. Nobody was inclined to mock the nation's soldiers for their choice of wrist ornament. The service watch became a badge of honour, and from this point men could wear wristwatches without embarrassment.

I wonder whether the practicality of wristwatches would have been recognised sooner if women had not already been wearing them. Since they were female fashion accessories, surely they could only be flimsy, foolish and impractical? Like women themselves, the wristlets proved during the Great War that they were not simply frail ornaments, but could stand up to practical challenges. Afterwards, neither could be regarded in quite the same way again.



Frances' new novel, published by Macmillan, in which a WW1 wristwatch becomes very significant. You can read more about it on her website.

'Pluck this white rose' by Karen Maitland

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Photographer: focusmycamera
The birthday flower for the 8th June is the white rose. Although seasonal flowers were used in Roman times to celebrate the festival days of the gods, the linking of specific flowers to each date in the year was probably only formalized in Victorian times. But the white rose has more ancient symbolic significance in our history.

The modern lapel button of the US National
Intelligence Joint Duty Service,
incorporating the white rose, ancient symbol of secrecy,
and the compass showing they operate anywhere in the world.
In legend, Cupid gave a white rose to the god Harpocrates, the god of silence, to bribe him not to divulge the amorous adventures of his mother Venus and in early medieval times the white rose became the symbol of silence and secrecy.

White roses were worn in the hair, hung from beams or carved onto the ceilings in meeting rooms and over dining tables as a sign that anything discussed beneath them was to remain strictly confidential and not to be whispered beyond that room. Even today we still describe a meeting as being sub rosa or 'under the rose', when it’s held in secret behind closed doors. And from 1526, the symbol was placed in churches over confessional boxes.

According to the 14th century travel-writer Sir John de Mandeville, roses first appeared in Bethlehem when a virgin falsely accused of a crime was sentenced to be burned to death. When she prayed for divine help, the blazing wood on her pyre was transformed into red roses and the unburned wood into white and so she was saved.
Elizabeth of York holding the House of York White Rose.

The House of York adopted the white rose, symbol of the Virgin Mary and a host of saints, a century before the Lancastrians' took the red rose as their emblem. As Shakespeare says in Henry VI part 2 -
I love no colours: and without all colour
Of base insinuating flattery
I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet.
The rose chosen by the House of York was said to be the 'Dog Rose'. Some claim 'dog' meant worthless while others that it came from ancient belief that its pounded root could heal someone bitten by a mad dog. The white Provence or cabbage rose was adopted by the House of Stuart when the Duke of York became James II in 1685. It was said to flower on 10th June, the day the Jacobites celebrated ‘James the Rover’.
Photographer: Stanley Howe

To dream of a red rose meant you would be lucky in love, but to dream of white rose or any white flower was thought most unlucky even before its adoption by the ill-fated House of Stuart. Perhaps this was because it was associated with girls dying before their wedding day, for it was frequently planted on the grave of virgin.

If a girl wanted to make a faithless lover return to her. She had to pluck three white roses on Midsummer’s Eve. The first she buried under a yew tree, the second in a new grave and the third she placed under her pillow. On the third night she burned the rose and from that moment her errant lover would be tortured with desire for her until he was finally forced to go crawling back to her.

Of course, the Elizabethans would have claimed her lover wouldn’t have strayed in the first place had the girl regularly risen at dawn to wash her face in the dew on rose petals or anoint her face with an ointment made from rose water, which was said to be the miracle serum for a youthful complexion. It was very expensive – so it seems nothing changes. Beauty always comes at a price!



Recharge Your Writing Batteries!

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by Caroline Lawrence

In her bestselling book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron gives practical advice on how to open channels of creativity. One of her techniques is the Artist’s Date. She suggests that once a week you go to an exhibition or matinee or free lunchtime concert all by yourself, to recharge your creative batteries.

I have found this to be a wonderful way of generating new ideas. Not only does the so-called Artist’s Date feed our spirit, it boosts our creativity. Sometimes the best dates are those that have nothing to do with our specialist period or trademark genre.

So here, just in time for summer, are a dozen things from easy and cheap to slightly more expensive and challenging that those of us who write historical fiction can do to recharge our creative batteries.


1. Memorise a song or poem. Learning by heart means just that: we transfer the poem from our head to our hearts, the source of creativity. I am currently memorising Ozymandias by Shelley, sometimes standing in front of the sculpture that inspired it. I've recently committed the first line of the Iliad to memory, and also some songs by One Direction. (Fun!)

2. Play with an artefact or try a period recipe - playing with replica or real artefacts or eating ancient food often brings a surge of ideas as you feel, hear, sniff and sometimes taste an object from the past. My current experiment is tasting unusual flavours of Italian ice cream. Yes, It's a hard job... 


3. Recreate an experience from another time. Visit a London hotel in period dress for a Tea Dance. Wander a meat market like Smithfields early morning. Get someone to bleed you with leeches. I took my strigil and oil flask to the Porchester Spa last month and got a "Roman" massage.

4. Attend a play or street theatre. An acrobat in Covent Garden might suggest ideas for acrobats from your historical period. A play at the Globe in London is a must for Elizabethan specialists but writers in other periods will be inspired, too. 

5. Go to a museum. Contemplate a statue from your historical period in the British Museum, or clothing at the Victoria & Albert, or a portrait at the National Gallery


6. Attend an art exhibition - The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition is about to start. You might get the spark of an idea from something out of left field. I recently dropped by the Matisse exhibition at the Tate Modern and was inspired by his cutout of Icarus, a story from a Greek myth inspired by a WWII dogfight in the sky above France. 

7. Go to the cinema. The 2014 movie Pompeii was full of bloopers, but I found parts of it inspiring. The Two Faces of January brought back the sensation of the sun beating down on Greek ruins and the taste of ouzo. The Edge of Tomorrow reminded me of how powerful humour is in a thriller.


8. Go for a walk. Aimless walks along the riverside or through a park are wonderful for bringing subconscious ideas to the surface. But guided walks are fabulous, too. London Walks are my favourite and this is the season for them. If your guide doesn't inspire you the city itself will. (left: London Walks guide Tom in Notting Hill)

9. Take a class. It doesn't have to be creative writing, though I love doing those. It could be basket-making, pottery or literature. An adult class in Intermediate Latin at the City Lit inspired The Night Raid, my re-telling of a story from Virgil. I've signed up for Virgil in Translation this summer.  


10. Go to a re-enactment event, festival or conference. I have gleaned more insight and inspiration from re-enactors than almost anything else. Last week I attended a conference called Visualising the Late Antique City. Although I'm now planning a historical novel set in the bronze age, things like weaving hardly change. Want inspiration? The Chalke Valley History Festival is coming up soon.

11. Listen to music in public. It can be anything from listening to a busker or a free lunchtime jazz at the Southbank to a full-blown opera at ENO or Dolly Parton at the O2. Let the music wash over you. Watch the musicians. Watch the crowds. Be inspired.

12. Take an expert to lunch (or tea) and pick their brain. Experts love sharing their expertise. Take them somewhere nice, like the Great Court Restaurant or the Kensington Roof Garden.

13. Travel to the country where your book is set (or where you'd like to set your book). This is my favourite way of recharging batteries and refilling the creative cisterns because it often involves all of the above. A trip to Naples last September has inspired a possible new history mystery series for kids. 

Please do add your own suggestions in the comments section or let me know how you get on. Happy writing! 

The slow crows and the thin geese - Michelle Lovric

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the scene of the crime - Harristown Bridge, County Kildare

The poor - like love and crimes against love - tend to leave very little trace in history.



 

The poor of the Irish Famine, who died in their desperate multitudes, left less than most – not even tombstones. If they were buried at all, it was often under hedges, where their bones stood out whitely after harsh rain. Wild dogs would dig up shallow country graves. Not surprisingly, many of the starving staggered into the towns and dropped there, where at least their deaths were witnessed.



 

Researching a notional family of the Famine in County Kildare, I found that it was often through the records of the rich that I could view my quarry properly. So the wealthy La Touche landlords of the Harristown Estate provided my first entrance into the lives of their poorest tenants.



 

In March 2012, I made a wretched rain-sodden trip to County Kildare, to hunt down a habitat for the seven young Swiney girls – Darcy, Enda, Berenice, Manticory, Pertilly, Oona and Ida, who were to be the protagonists of The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, published a few days ago. It was in some ways the loneliest and saddest trip I've ever made.

 

I had not anticipated what would happen to my feelings as I turned trespasser, climbing over fences to enter the beautiful grounds of the  La Touche estate, and seek out the places of my book and the scenes of various emotional crimes. I was searching for the native scenery of the Swiney Godivas, a singing septet born in grinding Irish poverty and rising to stardom and wealth, selling quack medical products.



 

Having looked at our largest organ in my last novel, The Book of Human Skin, I had turned to hair. It interested me as the part of the human body that is most visible, most changeable, being both the aspect of our appearance we can most easily alter (without surgery) and the characteristic that first announces encroaching age. Hair is the only piece of the human body that we still treasure after death. No one would tie a pink ribbon around the kidney or finger of a departed loved one, but a curl of hair is considered a touching relic.



 

A novel built on hair needed an abundance of hairiness. So, in contrast to the thinness of their existence, eked out on the edge of the Harristown estate in the post-Famine years, my sisters are rich in torrents of hair. They may not have enough to eat, and they may suffer the stain of supposed illegitimacy, but they carry shameless luxury on their heads – 37 feet of it between them.


We Swineys were the hairiest girls in Harristown, Kildare, and the hairiest you’d find anywhere in Ireland from Priesthaggard to Sluggery. That is, our limbs were as hairless as marble, but on our heads, well, you’d not believe the torrents that shot from our industrious follicles like the endless Irish rain.


When we came into this world, our heads were not lightly whorled with down like your common infant’s. We Swineys inched bloodily from our mother’s womb already thickly ringletted. Thereafter that hair of ours never knew a scissor. It grew faster than we did, pawing our cheeks and seeking out our shoulder-blades. As small girls, our plaits snaked down our backs with almost visible speed. That hair had its own life. It whispered round our ears, making a private climate for our heads. Our hair had its roots inside us, but it was outside us as well. In that slippage between our inner and outer selves – there lurked our seven scintillating destinies and all our troubles besides.


 

By the time I went to Harristown, I’d already drafted out the Irish parts of my story and written some of the crucial scenes, finding inspiration in the lives of America’s Seven Sutherland Sisters, who really did boast this kind of hair.



 
As with all my books, I needed to replay the first-draft scenes in the places where they occur, using all the five senses to refine and invigorate the writing. Also, I knew I’d be drawing on the sixth sense, that prickle all novelists will know, that prickle between the shoulder blades when you are suddenly aware of your character breathing quietly behind you and reading over your shoulder – and, with luck, sighing in agreement with your words.



In the dizzy narrow lanes of Harristown, I saw my sisters superimposed on the landscape. I didn’t just see them: I heard and felt their lived experiences. The smell of peat fires soured and tanged the air. The sound-track of my visit to Harristown was the keening of the slow crows, the rude kisses of the mud seeking to suck my woefully inadequate shoes down to Hell, and the relentless and seemingly malicious whispering of the rain. I felt rather than thought about the dark conspiracy between poverty and shame. Even if I hadn’t set out to write a sad story, I think I would have been converted to tragedy by the that trip.



 
Before leaving the UK, I had of course collated a snug fat folder of historical maps. I had traced the railway lines and graveyards. I knew the bounds of the Harristown Estate. My first mission was to find the bridge where Manticory, my red-haired narrator, meets the first of several hair fetishists whom she shall have the misfortune to encounter. It is the age of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and thanks to paintings of amoral-looking ‘stunners’, whose wild, rich hair almost spills out of their frames,  the whole of Europe knows now that hair is a signifier of untamed sexual vigour in women. And untamed sexual vigour in women, as every good Victorian knew, was bound to lead to trouble ...
 
 To a child obsessed with reading, the tall figure who blocks Manticory's way seems like troll of the bridge. And the bridge itself is more than a physical place. In meeting that man, at that time, alone, Manticory is separated from her childhood stories, and dragged, by the hair, into a world where the architecture of her body renders her vulnerable to sexual predators. 


No more could I hold back that man’s desires than the river could resist that bridge. He was back at my parting, sniffing like a dog and moaning like a sick person asleep. His arms snaked around to press me against his thighs, where something thrummed against my unwilling chest as if he swished a fox’s tail before the fatal lunge.



‘I’m going to have you now,’ he told me.


 

It was a pity to set such a horrible scene in such a lyrical location.


 

In fact I had a choice of two lovely bridges across the Liffey on the Harristown estate. One, called ‘the new bridge’ was built on the road from the Carnalway Church to Brannockstown. The other one, much older, is to the east, in a more isolated area behind Harristown House, a walk across the fields from Brannockstown. It is here where I set the incident with Manticory and her fetishistic troll.


 

In my mental map of the novel, the bridge stands between the hovel where Manticory lives with her sisters and the Brannockstown, where they go to school.


 

To get to that bridge, I had to trespass on the Harristown Estate, now privately owned (no longer by La Touches) and sturdily gated. Perhaps I acquired a little of Manticory’s sense of exclusion when the gates were not opened for me by the owner, as I had expected, having written in advance.


Maybe the lady did me a favour when, instead, I had to climb a fence, take a damp, lonesome tramp across a bald field and through a copse before I found what I was looking for just as the sun broke out for a solitary shattering moment. 



 


 

The back of grand Harristown House looks down on the bridge. To my mind, there was a certain air of contempt about the grey stone hunched away from the bridge and fields. It leaked into the book, as did the strange sensations of standing on that bridge and feeling Manticory’s helplessness and the shame of her hunger in my own stomach.


 

 
And, as so often happens on research trips, the emotional dynamic of the novel played out with eerie accuracy. At Harristown bridge, I found myself in front of a man with a cruel mask of a face, looking at me with contempt. Just for a moment, I thought I must know him. But he was a stranger, after all. He had no interest in me and quickly walked away in search of something better than myself.

Manticory’s troll, however, has business with her.



 

He wound his other hand around my hair and used it to drag me towards the trees.


 My scalp afire with hurting, I whimpered, and flung my eyes around. The rat-grey back of Harristown House hunched in the distance, its blank windows indifferent to me. The lane was deserted in both directions, with nothing but eddies of the dust rising that we in County Kildare deem ‘fairy-blast’. It was, for a rarity, not raining, though the slow crows hung like widows’ laundry on every still-sodden branch. The light was dimming and the lowering sky took on a magical, churning quality, half of silvery gnats and half of my own giddy terror, by which the clumps of moss that beetled the parapet now seemed to commence to crawl and swarm. Below me to the right, the limpid Liffey flowed into the seven maws of the bridge, which mashed its composure into foaming ruin on the other side.



 

Harristown House was originally built in 1662 by the Eustace family. At the time of my story, the owners were the wealthy La Touche family. David Digues La Touche des Rompieres emigrated from France when his Protestant faith put his family in danger. Trading in cambric and silk poplin, with a manufactory in the High Street, La Touche grew prosperous. His home became the repository for the valuables and money of all the Huguenot community in the city. The family set up officially as a bank in 1716. The La Touches invested in land, acquiring substantial property around St Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square and Delgany. Five La Touches also served as Members of Parliament. When the Irish Parliament was dissolved in the Act of Union, David La Touche, grandson of the founder of the La Touche Bank, bought the grand building in Dublin for the Bank of Ireland, of which he was the first elected governor.



Harristown was acquired by the La Touches in 1768 and became the seat of the Kildare branch of the family in 1783.


 

The 1837 Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland describes Harristown House as an elegant mansion with a stately Ionic portico, beautifully situated on an eminence on the right bank of the river Liffey, which winds through the demesne and is crossed by two stone bridges, one of which, at Brannockstown.


 

At one time it boasted an ornamental lake, but this was filled in at the end of the eighteenth century.


 

It was that vanished house I had to imagine because the original structure was gutted by fire in 1891 and then rebuilt to its current design.


Harristown itself is not really even a village. Now, as at the time the Harristown Sisters is set, it was a rural area sparsely populated. However, it was an electoral borough. Harristown once had had its own railway line including a railway bridge over the Liffey, built in 1885. The line closed in 1959, but, using my faithful railways map, I found the traces of the station. It has been said that the influence of the La Touche family resulted in the railway line being diverted conveniently into the Harristown estate instead of proceeding logically to the nearest town of Kilcullen. My sisters use the line, which also arrives close to the tiny cottage that their mother Annora refuses to leave, even when they become rich and famous.


‘The Master’ of Harristown was John La Touche. A small man with a neatly trimmed beard, the Master was very far from being an absentee landlord. Indeed, during the Famine, he took measures to reduce consumption in his own household, allowing no white bread or pastry on the table. His deer parks were emptied to feed the starving. He also supported Land Reform.


He succeeded to the property in 1844, on the eve of the Famine, and lived there for sixty-two years. His wife, Maria, was a novelist, an opponent of blood sports and a great letter writer. John Ruskin called her ‘Lacerta’, meaning lizard, explaining that she had the grace and wisdom of a serpent but was without its venom.


 

John and Maria La Touche had three children – Percy, Emily (known as ‘Wisie’) and Rose, who became the subject of John Ruskin’s obsessive love until she died in 1875.


In the original draft of my book, poor Manticory Swiney watches Rose La Touche living a childhood dramatically removed from her own. Rose parades around the estate on her white pony, Swallow, handing out religious tracts to the worthy poor, who would probably rather have had a gift of potatoes or Indian Meal without weevils. But as my novel grew in size, Rose La Touche was edited out. She’s there for me in palimpsest – living the life, rich with choices and dignity, which Manticory is denied.


 


The Swineys are, of course, invented, as is their cottage, but I imagined them as tenants of this small house on the Harristown estate, attending the local National School across the bridge in Brannockstown, the nearest village.



 

Annora, the mother of the Swiney sisters, cannot read. Shockingly, that is not shocking. I am indebted to the local historian Chris Lawlor for some sad and surprising statistics, contained in his marvelous book - An Irish Village: Dunlavin, County Wicklow. One Irish Catholic in four did not know their letters. The illiteracy rate in nearby Dunlavin was 22 per cent for Catholics in 1881, though 4 per cent for Protestants.


 

My trip yielded another surprise. My sisters, I discovered, would have spoken English rather than Irish.


 

National Schools were set up from 1831 onwards. The language taught was English. The Famine had in any case wiped out a million poorer Irish citizens, those most likely to use their native tongue. The Famine sent another million away from Ireland, looking for work. English was spoken more than Irish on the east side of the country in any case.


 

 
Chris Lawlor took time out to meet me at the looming grey Killashee House Hotel, and answered my long list of questions with exceptionally good grace though with occasionally widened eyes. By that time I’d already pored through An Irish Village, finding in there the novelist’s treasure of what things costs, where you bought them, and how you earned them.
 



Chris delivered on promises to send on afterwards some examples of particular Kildare/Wicklow sayings and forms of address. His book was also wonderfully useful for a list of local fairies and witches. He agreed with me about the cognitive dissonance of otherwise ardent Catholics when it came to the horned Witches of Slievenamon or the Dunlavin Banshee, in whom many country Catholics believed as implicitly as in God. Annora is a model of piety but she cannot resist a fairy.


 

The Roman Catholic religion remained dominant among the poorer, less educated classes in Ireland, even after the faith was suppressed. With the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 there was a revival of the Catholic faith. It saw another surge in popularity after the Famine, during which the British/Anglican infrastructure had showed itself insensitive or indifferent to the plight of the poor.


 

The suppression of the Catholic faith until 1829 meant that worship was difficult for Catholics even decades after the ban was lifted. Many Catholic churches had fallen into fatal disrepair. It took years for the physical stock of the Catholic faith to be renewed in Ireland. The Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart and Saint Brigid in Kilcullen was not dedicated until 1872. Catholics had to travel miles to worship. So my Catholic sisters might have worshipped at St Joseph’s at Yellow Bog, or at St Peter's, Twomile House, or at the Immaculate Conception at Ballymore Eustace, or at St Nicholas of Myra built in 1815 at Dunlavin. 


 

But in March 2012, I visited St Josephs and St Peters, wrinkling my nose. Manticory was distinctly not there. I went back to my old map of the Burial Grounds of Kildare. It took several encounters with farmer’s wives, before I was buzzed through a gate into a field where I found the ivied, roofless ruins of an ancient church with its own graveyard. Its desolation marked it as a Catholic place of worship.  

 
 
In a niche inside the roofless walls is a stone that reads: 'Eustace Lord Portlester 1462’. Most of the tombstones there are from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indicating active use at that time. Yet the Burial Grounds Survey of Kildare shows that the church was recorded (so presumably functional) in 1837 but reclassified as a ruin in the 1897 – 1913 survey map of the area. It records the denomination as ‘mixed’, but with the prosperous Anglo-Irish of Harristown worshipping at elegant Carnalway, it seems likely that the majority – poor Catholics – would have used this church.



 
One can still visit the beautiful Carnalway church when services are held. I lurked around to catch it open and crept in at the back, as I had set a scene for Manticory there. Carnalway was Church of Ireland – Protestant – as was Harristown’s Master originally. (He later converted to Baptist). So it is an act of heresy for Manticory to set foot in there. I tried to read the quiet stones as she would have done – fearfully, and some strong feelings emerged. Afterwards, I pressed my nose against the iron railings behind which is the overgrown mausoleum that houses the mortal remains of Rose la Touche, who died tragically young of a brain fever.

 

 
Steep, winding Kilcullen was the nearest town of any size to Harristown – with a population of 699 in 1837. It had a market every Saturday a police station, a dispensary and a court of petty session. In my book, it is the place of the Swiney Godiva’s debut. The Kilcullen dispensary is an important place of transactions. Fierce Darcy and her eternal rival the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt, have their first violent encounter there as infants. And Mrs Godlin, who runs the dispensary, is one those characters every writer needs  to invent, as connective tissue between the old and transformed lives of her protagonists. It is Mrs Godlin who will keep the sisters apprised of goings-on in Harristown as they travel to Paris, Venice and London with their singing septet. She makes sure that they know what they need to know, be it gossip or tragedy.



 

My story ends in Venice – a town of four hundred bridges –in a palazzo on the Grand Canal.  Despite the fame and riches that have bought her a new life, Manticory cannot leave her Famined past behind her.


 

It did not bypass my thoughts that all this magnificence was created at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Swineys immemorial back in Ireland were living on oats and sleeping in windowless turf huts heated by roasted dried cow dung, only dreaming of the luxury of a thin goose at Michaelmas.


 

But Manticory’s Irishness is still a part of her. Reflecting on the strange events of her story, she remarks, finally:

 

They say that the Irish don’t understand irony, but in fact we’re teeming with it, like a head full of hair, like a head full of memories, like a moth in a mousetrap, like a sack of shame that empties itself into a book and finds itself redeemed.



 


The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisterswas published by Bloomsbury on June 5th


The publishers have created a rich and fascinating Pinterest board about long hair and literature
 


 


Michelle Lovric’s website



 

Chris Lawlor’s blog is here

Battlefield Blues, by Laurie Graham

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Last month I visited Culloden Moor, the site of the battle that ended once and for all the Jacobite Rebellion and the Stuarts’ hopes of regaining the throne. It was actually a return visit for me   -  I was first there in 1965, begrudgingly accompanied by a boyfriend whose ideas about how to spend a summer holiday did not accord with mine. The relationship was doomed and trudging across a windswept battlefield can only have hastened its demise.

In 1965 there was no Visitors’ Centre at Culloden. Now there’s a restaurant and a gift shop, an audio-guide, an interactive indoor exhibit, weapon demonstrations (with audience participation), and a slightly nausea-inducing surround sound-and-vision reconstruction of how it might have felt to be in the thick of the battle. Strictly in conformity with health and safety guidelines, I’m sure. Back at our hotel I got into conversation with another guest.

‘Ah yes,’ she sighed. ‘We did Culloden yesterday. Waste of a morning, really. It’s just a moor. But did you try the coffee with Drambuie?’

Is there something perverse in me that preferred Culloden when it truly was ‘just a moor’?

Culloden is a bleak spot on the sunniest of days. On that April morning in 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s men lined up, bellies empty, feet wet,  it must have seemed a particularly hopeless place. The simple grave markers are a reminder of what followed. An hour or two of carnage. Bodies stripped by looters of anything of value and tumbled into mass pits. The pressed Highland clansmen, the Irish and the French in the Jacobite army, and the Duke of Cumberland’s well shod Royalist infantrymen. They were all far from home, whichever cause they died for.

Imagine though if some seer had said to them, ‘in the future, 250 years from now, people will come walking over your grave. “Nothing much to see here” they’ll say, and then they’ll go into a building, over there, to buy a wee teddy bear in a kilt and get a toasted sandwich.’

The disquiet I feel when I visit these places is vaguely akin to what I feel about the way children are taught history today. Modules.  The juicy bits. The marketable elements. They are essentially those episodes of history that can be turned into a field trip. And if it’s just a boring old moor with a few wonky grave markers, never mind. You can always bring home a Battle of Bannockburn baseball cap. Why do they sell Bannockburn merchandise at Culloden? Well, it’s all Scotland isn’t it?  And the gift-wrapped Prosecco and chocolate truffles? No, you’ve got me there. I wonder if it's a big seller?

I was discussing all this with an acquaintance who was involved in the search for the body of Richard III.

‘Baseball caps!’ he said. ‘That’s nothing. You should see what’s going on in Leicester these days. I mean, they lost his body for 400 years, couldn’t have cared less where they’d mislaid him, but now he’s been found they’re using him to sell sunglasses.’

Back in 1965 when Culloden was ‘just a moor’ it affected me profoundly. Here, it seemed to say, terrified men and boys stood in the Scotch drizzle and waited for death.

I wasn’t a historian. I was just a teenager who happened to have read John Prebble’s Fire and Sword trilogy. Would an interactive audio-visual exhibit have helped me to become better informed? Possibly. But would it have diluted and Disneyfied the raw reality of a battlefield? I think it would.

The Drambuie coffee though, I will agree, is very good indeed.

 

 
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