Quantcast
Channel: The History Girls
Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live

The Personal and the Political, by H.M. Castor

0
0


Tucked away at the end of a platform at Bristol Temple Meads railways station, there are some photographs taken by Mark Perham (for a project called ‘Reverberations' ) of people who work, or have worked, at the station. When I spotted them the other day, as I waited for a train, they moved me; they made me think how many people have given day after day, year after year of their working lives to that station. They made me think how precious are individual lives – lived only once. And they made me reflect, too, on the fact that when each person retires – or dies – that deep accretion of experience, built up over all those days and years, leaves with them.

I thought of this same point when reading coverage of the D-Day commemorations last week in Normandy. I was shocked to realise that, all too soon, the whole of the generation that served in World War II will have gone.


Ellan Levitsky-Orkin, who served as a U.S. Army nurse in Normandy during World War II, is greeted by a U.S. Army paratrooper during a ceremony honoring the service of U.S. Army nurses during World War II, in Bolleville, France, June 4, 2014. (U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Sara Keller)
(Flickr: D-Day Commemoration) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
When I was growing up, it was the World War I generation that was elderly, whose numbers were dwindling; even so, I heard many desperately moving interviews with veterans on television and radio, and there were many men and women attending the yearly commemorations who had been there. The World War II generation, by contrast, seemed robust and all around me – energetic people in their 60s. My great-uncle told me stories of his war service in the Middle East and my grandfather (to my great delight) gave me the fascinating coins he’d collected while serving in North Africa – and his Army Ordnance Corps badges too. Although both wars were (of course) a very long way from my own experience, neither felt completely out of reach, since the thread connecting me to them was a living one. Knowing (or seeing) individuals who had been involved, and hearing them speak of their experiences, played a huge part in this sense of proximity and emotional connection. As my children learn now about the World Wars at school, I am aware how different it is for them: once a generation has gone, once the events they lived through have passed out of personal memory and into what we call ‘history’, that connection can never be quite the same.


These belonged to my grandfather
This brings me to another point about memory. Last week, with the D-Day anniversary in the news, there was a chilling juxtaposition. As the commemorations were beginning in France, black-shirted ‘Golden Dawn’ supporters were lining up in military formation outside the Athens parliament, singing a Greek version of the Nazi Horst Wessel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_Wessel song, while inside the building their leader (currently charged with murder and assault) gave Nazi salutes and hurled abuse at MPs. Political commentator Pavlos Tzimas has been quoted as saying that Golden Dawn is “a true neo-Nazi force whose aim is to use democracy to destroy democracy.” Its support in Greece is growing.

These scenes, for me, underline the significance of the loss of first-hand memory and experience. The connection between financial crisis, economic austerity and the rise of nationalism and racism rings clear bells for anyone with some knowledge of the inter-war years of the 1920s and ’30s. (Is there any stronger argument than this for the importance of studying history?) Golden Dawn may be a very particular case – an organization that has grown out of the polarization of Greek politics since the civil war of 1946-9, and whose support-base has been boosted by the Greek government-debt crisis – but no one could deny that its rise is part of a wider trend. Right-wing xenophobic parties have scored successes over a wide area in the recent European elections. In Britain, the political party that has benefited from this trend is UKIP. While most UKIP supporters would no doubt be appalled to think of it as having anything whatsoever in common with an organization like Golden Dawn, still it is instructive to note that support for the far-right British National Party has collapsed as UKIP’s fortunes have risen; BNP support has transferred to UKIP.

Xenophobia, it’s safe to say, is on the rise. But what do people imagine that nationalism and xenophobia lead to? Even as we commemorate the D-Day landings in Normandy, are we at risk of forgetting the experiences of the World War II generation? Many in this country who hold xenophobic views might well say that they are admirers of Winston Churchill, yet few realize that Churchill was a strong supporter of the movement for a united Europe. Yes, it’s true that he saw Britain as a special case, having a unique role to play as the link between that united Europe and the USA, but nevertheless he was convinced of the vital need for closer ties and closer co-operation as the best bulwark against future outbreaks of bloody conflict. Whatever problems there are with the governance of Europe, nationalism and racism cannot be the road to improvement – as history clearly shows.

Among supporters of the far right, realistic thoughts of what these political trends might lead to in the long run – even among those extremists who would not be averse to starting a war – seem conspicuous by their absence. Instead, it is all about the expression of anger and distress. In interviews with Golden Dawn supporters quoted here  in The Guardian, the projection of each individual’s own rage and fear onto dark forces ‘out there’ is plain to see. This is how scapegoating operates, and it requires the dehumanisation of the target.

Which brings me back to the importance of the personal connection. When any group or institution (or, indeed, historical event) can be seen in terms of the personal and the specific, fellow-feeling and empathy are much more likely to be evoked. Seeing the individual D-Day veterans and hearing their reminiscences prompts us to think what it might have been like to walk in their shoes. More than this: as long as those with first-hand experience are alive, they have (we hope) the chance to speak up. When, on the other hand, the World War II generation has gone, that part of the electorate that experienced the Great Depression and the rise of fascism will have vanished. (And the reasons why the NHS and the welfare state were established – the reality of what happened to the most vulnerable in society when there was no safety net – will be in danger, it seems, of being forgotten too.), Individual memories, individual human voices will still be heard by historians reading the records but not, I fear, by the population at large – or, at least, not in a way that makes people think, urgently, of their own future and that of their children.




I looked at those pictures in Temple Meads station and I thought how valuable, how precious, is personal history, the lived experience. With each individual’s death, a whole world of experiences is lost. And in cases of the worst, most traumatic experiences, is the determination never to let them happen again lost too? I hope not. But I am worried.


This is my final post as a History Girl, since I am passing the baton to Tanya Landman – and am very much looking forward to reading her posts! It’s been an honour and a pleasure to be included in such a wonderful group for the past three years, and I would like to thank all the HGs, past and present, for their fellowship and support. Huge thanks, also, to everyone who has read and commented on my posts. I shall continue to be involved as a keen reader of the blog!
I am also delighted to mention that my aunt, Ruth Hayward, has recently published a book based on her research into the life and letters of (Jonathan) Wathen Phipps, eye-surgeon to George III, and a close confidant not only of the King, but of three of his sons too. Phippy is published by Brewin Books. 

Au revoir, Harriet! We've loved having you as a History Girl and wish you well for the future. Do stay in touch.

SLAVERY IN THE DRAWING ROOM – Elizabeth Fremantle

0
0
One thing retelling history can do is remind us of the horrors of the past in the hope that they will not be  repeated. Narratives like Toni Morrison's harrowing novel Beloved and Steve McQueen's Oscar winning film Twelve Years a Slave have served to remind us of the story of slavery from an insider perspective, bringing the cruelty home to us in a powerful and uncomfortably intimate way – they give a voice to the victims. But it has been easy for us English to respond from a distance, thinking of it as something essentially that happened elsewhere. It is true there has been much post-colonial discourse on the slave trade, with commentary on why it is never mentioned in Jane Austen; and novels like Heart of Darkness demonstrated anxiety about the destruction of Africa and its people more than a hundred years ago, but now we are beginning to see narratives that put slavery right into the gentile drawing rooms of Georgian England.


Imogen Roberston's latest novel Theft of Life describes a multi-cultural eighteenth century London, its hands drenched, up to the elbows, in blood. In her notes she says, 'Our institutions, our monuments and our culture are all stained and coloured by slavery, and it's not talked about enough,' and what her novel seeks to do, aside from entertain, is open that conversation in an unexpected arena: that of crime fiction. Drawing on stories of Oludah Equiano and Frances Glass she shapes her narrative around the atrocities of slavery, allowing us to see, with each  teaspoon of sugar, that they existed as much in Europe as they did across the Atlantic. She gives her protagonists, whether black or white, a voice and a space to express themselves, showing them all as equally part of the fabric of society even if their status was often unequal. Within Robertson's gripping novel, stories emerge of a bookseller who was once a slave, as was a teacher in the art of swordsmanship; the mixed-race children of slave owners and their female slaves, carry the weight of a past that asks questions about how those, surely one-sided, relationships.

One such story is Belle, which tells of the mixed-race daughter of a naval Admiral and a slave. She was gathered into her aristocratic English family and raised by her grandfather, Lord Mansfield a man who had a hand in the abolition of slavery. Based on a true story, the film addresses issues of race – Belle though well loved is not quite treated as equal to her white siblings – from an oblique angle, placing ideas about 'otherness' at the heart of what is essentially a traditional tale of romance, only here the obstacle to love, so necessary to the genre, is the heroine's skin colour. The impact of the young woman being named Belle highlights both the similarities of this story with that of Beauty and the Beast whose simpering Disney protagonist bears the same name, placing it at the heart of its genre whilst also commenting upon the story of 'otherness' it has to tell. People may want to judge films with a romantic imperative such as this as trivialising an issue that deserves more weight but it is by siting those narratives into genre fictions, be they crime or romance, that they inform a wider audience and that can only be a good thing.


Theft of Life is published by Headline and is out in hardback and ebook

Belle is out in cinemas nationwide from 13th June

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Tudor fictions Queen's Gambit and Sisters of Treason.

Visit her website for information on those and future projects – elizabethfremantle.com

Daughters of Time, Wilko Johnson and Beryl Bainbridge, Catherine Johnson

0
0
In July Celia Rees and I are taking the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time  out on the road and into a secondary school on Canvey Island. Canvey Island is an almost island in the Thames estuary east of London. I have never been to Canvey. As a teenage Dr Feelgood fan I did imagine a kind of pilgrimage and the film Oil City Confidential is a wonderful documentary about the band - including the wonderful fact that Wilko Johnson (maybe better known to some as the mute executioner who beheaded Sean Bean in Game of Thrones) is an ex english teacher who in the early 70s did the hippy trail to Kashmir through Afghhanistan. Simply to honour those things I give you this tune. Roxette.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nyeSGaBcrA


OK, back to Daughters of Time.  In order to prepare for the visit I've been going over my notes and thoughts about my Mary Seacole story. If you've read it you'll know I set the story during the Crimean war, the sum of my knowledge about such war having been gleaned from one of my favourite books ever, Beryl Bainbridge's marvellous Master Georgie.

I am sure I have written about Bainbridge's historical novels on this site before, but they are beautiful. Having said that I've never read According to Queeney, her book about Hester Thrale, I think because I am afraid I might not like it as much.

I first read The Birthday Boys, about Scotts' last journey during my intense polar exploration phase. I think a lot of us are utterly fascinated and appalled by early Antarctic journeys and this book seared its way into my heart. I've read it again and again. Every Man For Himself, about the Titanic is brilliant too but I suppose I always loved snow better than sinking ships.

The thing I find most wonderful about her books is the sheer condensed crafts(wo)manship there is in every line. No word is wasted. If you read too fast you will miss something vital or beautiful and usually both.

My favourite, Master Georgie is set for a large part on the battlefields of this war. It's about lies and truth and life and death and new science of photography.

Roger Fenton's assistant Marcus Sparling seated on Roger Fenton's wagon
Bainbridge's Master Georgie strikes me as a very modern character, a man driven by self. That sounds far from appealing, and indeed he is but the book is told through the voice of Myrtle, orphaned street girl taken in by Georgie's family, she is a kind of cypher - never sure of her place in the household or in the world and so full of unrequited love that it hurts.

My story, The Lad That Stands Before You, concerns a young soldier who's left the North West of England to escape a life working all hours in the mills. It's quite hard to summarise without giving the twist away but Mary Seacole, much loved by the fighting troops on the frontline, helps our protagonist. Mary Seacole was an incredible woman however you look at it. Born on Jamaica with a Scottish father and a local healer and hotelier mother, Seacole was widowed young and worked hard her whole life as a doctress, a healer who used herbs along side nursing skills.



Mrs Seacole travelled widely, to panama to London aged 16 and all over the Caribbean islands. When the Crimean War broke out she went again to London to offer her services to Florence Nightingale's nurses but was turned down.  That didn't stop her, she went to the Crimea using her own money and set up a Hotel - a sort of private hospital that offered food drink and rest and recuperation. On her return and decline into poverty in London, ex soldiers set up a fund for her and her book became a huge bestseller.


Like every one of the women in our book she's  fascinating and exceptional and the problem for me on Canvey will be how to cram her amazing adventures into a teeny tiny school period . And I shall have to be careful not to get carried away by a woman who travelled widely, who was one of the first ever women writers who was a bestseller and who never let circumstances get in the way of opportunity.

Catherine Johnson's latest book is Sawbones  'Both thought-provoking and accessible, this is an impressive historical adventure.' Booktrust website review.




Wagon Wheels

0
0
by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I think of wagons, I tend to visualise the covered wagons settlers used travelling westward in America. But of course wagons were a major form of transport in Europe too - both covered and uncovered. A farmer would stack his hay or straw on an open wagon to transport it to his barn or for sale. Goods were transported all over the country by wagon too.
Up until the early 18th century, most British carts were two wheeled affairs and thus unstable for goods. Lumbering wagons were therefore the main form of transport for heavy goods.
In the days before stagecoaches, passengers could also book a seat on a wagon and travel.
It's thought that initially simple straw bales were used for seats and to divide passengers from cargo. Later, transporting passengers became increasingly profitable as people travelled more, and the conveyances became marginally more comfortable.
Wagons couldn't cover more than maximum 8 miles an hour (and often managed far less) on the type of road surfaces that existed then, so it was slow going. It wasn't just road surfaces that slowed travel down. The roads were also surprisingly narrow, as I mentioned in my last post. In fact in many places they were so narrow that it was challenging to have horses harnessed side by side, so instead the wagons were pulled by horses at length which means one behind the other rather than in pairs. The further away a horse is from the object he's pulling, the less efficient the force he exerts on it. Don't ask me to explain the physics behind this, but apparently it means a long line of up to eight horses, chained together, pulling a wagon was way less efficient than two or three pairs. It must have been quite a sight though. I haven't been able to find a non-copyright picture, or I'd have posted one here.
Waggoners were only allowed to use six horses pulling at length with an extra two allowed for short sections where the road was particularly steep or muddy.
The waggoner walked next to his horses with a stick or a whip to keep them going. Obviously it wasn't possible to drive such a long line of horses from the wagon itself with reins.
I can't help wondering whether wagons caught one another up on the roads and being unable to overtake, ended up in long convoys like big lorries on our motorways today. I think this must almost certainly have been the case.

Austerity – then and now by Emma Barnes

0
0
We have another visitor this month - Emma Barnes - talking about her new novel, The Girl from Hard Times Hill.

Emma Barnes writes books for the 8-12 age group, and recently won a Fantastic Book Award for Wolfie, the story of a girl whose pet dog turns out to be a wolf.  Her new series, Wild Thing, features the naughtiest little sister ever and has been described as "hilarious and heart-warming" (The Scotsman).  The Girl From Hard Times Hill is her first venture into historical fiction.

For a long time, I’d been interested in using my mother’s childhood as the basis for a book. She’d often told me about her experiences growing up in South Wales immediately after World War II. Some of these were challenges particular to the time – a father who served overseas in the RAF both during and after the War, and the resulting relocations for family members. Others were the more everyday experiences of a working class childhood – coal fires, music hall songs, washing day - which already seemed very remote, both from my own childhood, and still more so from that of my daughter and her contemporaries.

The resulting story has just been published under the title The Girl From Hard Times Hill. It’s about Megan, who has always lived in her grandparents’ house in working class Llanelli, in a modest terraced house. Now her father, who has been serving with the occupying forces in Germany, is coming home, and for Megan this represents a complete upheaval to her life. Furthermore, Megan has been told that if she works hard she may pass her Eleven Plus and go to Grammar School, and this represents the frightening possibility of separation from her friends.


My grandad in naval uniform - the model for Megan's dad
It’s a fairly short book, and inevitably some of my mother’s childhood has had to be altered and simplified. However, I hope it’s true in its essentials. In writing it, I’ve had the great advantage of being able to check details against my mother and aunts’ recollections. I knew that Megan could have roller skates, and spend her spare time racing the neighbourhood children, because that is what my mother did. I knew her father could bring her new skates home from Germany. I knew there would be open fires in the school classrooms, a toilet in the back yard of the house and chamber pots under the beds (emptied each morning by her grandfather). I knew Megan and her friends would love to stand on the railway bridge and feel the steam from the trains. I knew the children would call each other from the back alley by shouting “Pammy-oh” or “Davey-oh”, and that they played marbles in the gutter. I knew which musical hall songs her grandmother (“Nana”) sang. I knew about the suicide of a Jewish- German refugee, an aquaintance of the family. I knew all this because my mother and aunt told me.

Perhaps a greater challenge, then, was less in the details but what I felt about the period as a whole. The book will be read in schools, and will help portray the “Austerity Britain” to twenty-first century children who are experiencing a different kind of “Austerity”. To them, the commonplaces of Megan’s post war childhood - an outdoor lavatory, torn up newspapers for toilet paper, a tin bath in front of the fire, several siblings to a bed, gathering horse dung for compost or fuel – probably represent hardship enough. Nevertheless, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to give the impression it was all “hard times”.

For one thing, it’s clear to me that my mother’s childhood, during the period related in the novel, was a very happy one. At a national level, there is no doubt that Britain faced major difficulties postwar. The country was virtually bankrupt, and this was experienced by it citizens through rationing that was even more severe than during the War itself. There were queues, bomb damage, a housing shortage. But for my mother, these barely featured. Her grandparents provided stability and affection (and a stock of sayings, songs and stories which I later grew up hearing). There was an extended network of uncles, aunts and cousins. There was the routine of school, and the entertainment of the cinema every Saturday morning, a weekly comic and books from the public library. And there were all the joys of “playing out” on traffic-free streets: roller skating, hopscotch, skipping, tree-climbing, wall-walking, exploring (a freedom modern children might well envy). It was the threatened loss of these things which meant, for Megan and my mum, “hard times”: not material deprivation.


My mother, her mother and sister
Things may have looked less rosy, of course, to older family members (who are unfortunately not around to ask). Certainly for my grandparents (the models for Megan’s parents) there was considerable upheaval: the separations and relocations, the problems of finding work and housing. It was particularly hard, I think, on my grandmother, who struggled to cope with small children and an absent husband. For Megan’s Nana (based on my great-grandmother) there were the burdens of queues and rationing, and of clothing and feeding a family, including various children and grandchildren that she would not have expected to be her charge.

Even so, these trials have to be put into context. For working class families, times were hard long before Austerity. My great-grandmother left her many brothers and sisters at the age of twelve, to work as a live-in nursery maid to a family in Cardiff. She was overworked and homesick (an experience Nana relates to Megan, when Megan herself is forced to move reluctantly to Cardiff – but with, as Nana points out, continued schooling and in the care of her family). This tough beginning was followed by the backbreaking work of raising eight children, one of whom died in infancy, a husband who served in World War I (and miraculously survived), the loss of her home, and the dreadful depression years of the 20s and 30s. World War II saw the arrival of various family members to take refuge. Were postwar shortages so tough compared to what had gone before?

And what about my grandfather (the model for Megan’s father)? During a desperately poor childhood he sold damaged cakes to raise a few pennies for his mother; he could not take up the chance of a better education because his family could not afford it; and he was forced to leave school at fourteen and join the RAF. This was in many ways the making of him (he travelled, and became a trained aeroplane mechanic) but he also endured the hardship of prolonged separations from his family and what seemed like endless stretches of boredom and frustration during World War II. The hard times that Megan experiences in the book, by contrast, are often the flipside of new opportunities: men returning from the War, new jobs, new homes, new educational possibilities.

The question of how hard these “hard times” were, and for who, is a wider historical question. It is likely to have been the middle classes, used to some pre-war luxury, who most bitterly resented postwar rationing (the British Housewives’ League, set up to oppose it, was a very middle class organization, founded by a vicar’s wife). It’s harder to assess working class experience directly because personal accounts (from Mass Observation and other diary evidence) tend to be middle class. But for the working class, rationing probably ensured a better diet than that of the impoverished pre-War years. There was also high employment, the free medical care brought by the founding of the National Health Service in 1948, and (especially for those who, like my mother, passed the Eleven Plus) better educational opportunities. Certainly the working classes continued voting Labour: it was former Liberal voters who punished the government for Austerity by flocking to the Conservatives in the 1951 election.*
"Nana" - my greatgrandmother
I’ve been able to use the older characters in the book, and their reminiscences of earlier hard times, to provide some of this context. And Megan herself realizes eventually that some of the changes she so bitterly resents may also bring advantages. Perhaps she might be the first in her family to think about training for a profession – as a doctor. Further, although she does not want to leave her grandparents to live in Cardiff, and hates the strict, Victorian-style Grammar School, they are hardly the end of the world. This is something she only realizes clearly when her friend Davy’s father, a Jewish refugee from Germany, commits suicide. “Sometimes, these last months, I’ve felt I was living on Hard Times Hill. But I never was, really. It’s you that’s had the hard times.”

It’s a short book, but I hope it’s long enough to convey to those reading it a nuanced impression of the times: continuing hardships, but also new opportunities; inevitable unheavals, but also changes for the better. “Austerity” then, as now, is a loaded term. Much depended on who you were – and what you thought of what came before, and of what might come after.




* For those who want to read the social history of the period, I’d strongly recommend David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain.

Changing Borders by Penny Dolan

0
0

This week, the world seems full of borders and changes, some too worrying to write about here on History Girls. One change, close to home, comes with the start of the 100 day countdown to the vote on Scottish Independence, bringing the threat of the break-up of Great Britain. I understand why the YES vote carries a political and emotional charge for some people, the thought of any such split grieves me. Note that this feeling is sadness, even though back around 1320, the riled Scots raiders came as far South as Ripon, almost to my doorstep.
“Border” is such a neat and orderly word, as if the legal drawing of a line can solve or exclude age-old problems. History persists, and a border is not as stable as it might seem. Cultural attitudes, problems and symbols lurk for decades after legal aspects are supposed to be tidied nicely away.
Only last week, following by car the hundred or so miles of Yorkshire Tour De France route, I realised the cyclists would be pedalling their way through the great sheep pastures of the old French monastic orders,. They would be passing abbeys like Jervaulx, and pushing their way round the ecclesiastical borders and realms that Henry VIII decided to demolish. With their loyalty professed to their Orders and to the Pope, these monastic regions were, in some ways, foreign countries too.



Two books have nudged this changeability of borders into my mind. One was a random library-sale copy of Ann Leslie’s autobiography, Fighting My Snakes. I read her account of the heady opening of Berlin Wall and her world-weary account of how soon Re-unification sobered the attitudes of both East and West Germans towards their brothers and sisters. Another broken wall that meant trouble.

I’ve also been reading “Dream Land: One Girl's Struggle to Find Her True Home", a novel by the journalist Lily Hyde, who lives and works in the Crimea. This novel, intended for older middle or teen reader, is a thought-provoking story rooted in the Crimean Tatar diaspora during and after World War II.
Set in 1992, much of the story is told through the character and experiences of twelve-year old Safi, alongside her Grandfather’s tales and earlier memories. Urged on by his dreams of their past homeland, Safi’s family leave their comfortable house in Samarkand and move back to the Crimea and their ancestral home on the side of a wooded mountain. 
Here, legally squatters on their own land, Safi’s father and uncles are building a small house. However, the Russian villagers show little love for the Tatar settlers, and the family itself is worn gradually down by the contrast between their harsh "new" life and Grandfather’s hopes. 
Yet, despite all the past sorrows and present disappointments , the book does read hopefully. Safi herself is a wonderful character, a girl brave enough to challenge omissions in the school’s Russian history text books and to stand up for her right to have a home in this “dreamland”. Lily Hyde has clearly drawn on her own knowledge and researches to make this a most memorable book and a tale that deserves telling - maybe even more so given all the changes in that region right now.

Finally, talking of borders, I’d like to include this animated map of Europe, which really made me realise how easy it is, here in the UK, to mistakenly imagine a border as a settled thing. 



Penny Dolan

Madonna del Parto - Celia Rees

0
0
Madonna del Parto - Piero della Francesca


This is my favourite painting in the whole world. It is by the Italian Renaissance paint, Piero della Francesca and is housed in the Museo della Madonna del Parto in Monterchi, a small hilltop town in Tuscany.



By the time you read this blog. I will be there. One of the first things I will do is go and visit Piero's fresco in the Museo just outside the gates of the town. She is the only occupant. the whole building is devoted to her. In a way, this is right, because she is so special, but she seems strangely out of context in this small, unprepossessing modern building. She should be in a church and, of course, she once was but her original home, the church of Santa Maria di Momentana (Santa Maria in Silvis), was destroyed by an earthquake. She was then moved to a cemetery chapel which fell into decay and so finally to her own museum in 1992. 





If you spend any time in Italy, visiting churches, art galleries, museums, you will see plenty of Madonnas, with child and without, annunciations and assumptions, even a few where she is pregnant, or giving milk (as here), but few have the transfixing quality of this one. I am in no way religious, brought up stoutly C of E, but I find Piero della Francesco's fresco peculiarly moving.





She looks like a real woman, and a young one, heavily pregnant, with one hand at her hip to ease her back. She has none of the rich trappings of other Madonnas. She is dressed simply, the beauty of her face lies in its humanity, its ordinariness. There is a strangely long suffering weariness about her (one with which anyone who has ever been pregnant can identify) but hers is so much greater, for this is the face of a young girl, a peasant girl, gravid with a God.  I find this fresco awe-inspiring in the true sense. She is flanked by two angels who have a solidity about them, dressed in a symmetry of colours, in no way etherial, grave, beautiful young men with wings.





 The canopy that they are holding open is decorated with pomegranates. This has been interpreted as a symbol of Christ's passion, and the Madonna certainly has the expression of one who can read what is to come, but the pomegranate also evokes much more ancient, pagan goddesses: the lost Persephone and her mother Demeter, the goddess Hera who is often shown with a pomegranate in her hand as the emblem of fertility, blood and death.  Perhaps this is an indication of a much older tradition. Legend has it that a local stream was sacred to the goddess and into modern times women would bathe there hoping either to conceive or to protect the child within. Certainly, offerings are left in front of the Madonna del Parto, bunches of flowers, more often than not picked from the fields or the garden, simple offerings left by ordinary women asking for the blessing and intersession of this most human of Madonnas.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com 






Ghost Soldier

0
0


by
Theresa Breslin


When Rob and Millie's father goes missing in action while serving on the Western Front during World War One, the children desperately search the hospital trains returning to Edinburgh with the wounded. But there's no sign of him….

The above is part of the blurb for GHOST SOLDIER my new book on World War One for mid-range readers. 

 
The story is a fusion of many disparate ideas that have been gathering in my mind over a number of years: the mainly untold stories of children on the Home Front during the Great War, a close focus on the effect on young children when a father, brother, uncle goes away to fight, and more. While doing research and trying to pull these together into some kind of structure I became quite fascinated by the ambulance trains that operated both abroad and in the UK and I determined that they would feature in the book.  

One of the challenges in writing any kind of fiction is creating what could be termed ‘a credible story line’ I’m sure many of us have met people who, upon discovering that you are a writer, say “I’ve got a good story for you. You’ll never believe this, but…”  Then they go on to relate some fantastical experience, often involving bizarre coincidences. The tale turns out to be true but you simply cannot use it.
                       
With Ghost Soldier the sequence of events happened in reverse.
                          
Following the outbreak of the First World War, Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow was requisitioned by the authorities to be used as a military hospital. A spur railway line was built so that ambulance trains could bring the soldiers directly to the hospital grounds. In recent years, when the old Stobhill Hospital was being demolished to make way for the new one, an appeal went out for anybody connected to the hospital to send in their memories to be recorded. I had blocked out my book and was on a third draft before I got to grips with this archive. In my story the child characters, Rob and Millie, sneak on to a hospital train in a desperate attempt to lo locate their ‘missing-in-action’ dad. They’ve already had several brushes with a possible ghost, a clash with a army procurement officer who wanted to take away their sheepdog’s pups for training as war dogs, and we had just got to the most exciting bit where Nurse Ethel… - but I mustn’t spoil it for you.
Anyway, I took a break from the creative writing to do some top-up research. To my amazement I came across this. One of the contributions to the Stobhill Hospital archive for the years of WW1 was from a gentleman called Mr Lister who remembered his mother helping with the wounded soldiers:
'...during the First World War the troop trains of wounded used to come in on the railway line, which ran then round the back of Stobhill Hospital, just at Littlehill Golf Club, (where we lived) and my mother, when she saw a train of wounded coming in, used to run down and see if she could help, you know tea and sympathy, that sort of thing, and...
…she went down to this troop train this day, and the first stretcher off was carrying my father's brother, who nobody had heard of for two years...
He’d been brought home from Gallipoli having been gassed first and then wounded and he was on the first stretcher off the train…
She recognised him…”

They say, ‘you couldn’t make it up’ but I had done that very thing.
 
At the beginning of World War One the first method of transporting wounded men by rail could hardly be termed an ‘ambulance train’. They were in the main wagonswhich had been used to move cattle and goods about. Scrubbed clean and filled with fresh straw they were used as makeshift units to ferry men from the battlefields to military hospitals within France. As the war progressed however and the number of casualties increased instead of diminishing, then more planning and thought went into improving the conditions for patients and medical staff in transit. Still using French rolling stock units were put together to make trains which provided treatment carriages with wagons made into wards and having a pharmacy and quarters for medical staff. But it wasn’t until nearer the end of 1914 before special constructed ‘Hospital Trains’ arrived from the UK.      
It is possible to find references to and quotes from newspaper articles and journalists who witnessed the soldiers being helped onto the trains. These do describe horrific wounds and can make distressing reading but the plethora of postcards and cigarette cards paint an altogether jollier picture with chaps smiling and hailing each other, supposedly coming from the battlefields but wearing impossibly clean and smart uniforms. The stories of the incredible dedication and bravery of the nurses working on the trains would fill another book e.g. making their way from carriage to carriage via the footplate on a moving train before corridor trains came into use.
And as I go I’m garnering my information, hoarding glittery bits hoping that they might come in useful. The Queen Alexandra nurses have a red cape – yes definitely – that’s definitely a shiny little nugget to be polished very carefully.    
Ambulance trains were used in France and Belgium, but as the war went on they were also used in Britain to take wounded men to hospitals set up in a number of the big cities. Regional railway companies donated units and others were financed by public and private subscription. Thankfully corridor coaches were introduced. By the time they arrived on the train in Britain the men’s wounds had been assessed as they were processed through receiving sheds in the ports before being dispatched onto the trains.
Going from the Channel ports in the south of England extra lines were created so that the train could travel directly to the designated hospital. I do think that, in addition to efficiency, there was another reason for this. It prevented the public from seeing the tremendous number of casualties. It was short stretch for me to imagine that the trains would also stop at remote locations to take on water – vis. near the farm cottage where Rob and Millie live - giving them the opportunity to try to find out what happened to their dad.
I hope I have managed to get the technical details right. – I’m sure I will receive Tweets and Facebook messages if I have made an error re train engine, tender, carriages, taking on water etc

In addition to the research on hospital trains and visiting the Battlefields and the Imperial War Museum other small unexpected pieces slot into place. In that serendipity way that writers some across unusual items I was researching something else and browsing through a very small museum contained in the library of a seaside town – no more than a large room - when I came across a WW1 board game. It had tiny cardboard figures of soldiers and officers and men in Allied and German uniforms. I’m still working out the rules but it became a link to the illustrations within the book.

In Remembrance some of the pity of the war is evoked by quotes from the poetry of Sassoon but also because, interspersed with the titled sections of the book, are some beautiful sketches by Jason Cockcroft. With muted tones; soft white, black and charcoal greys, the poppies, daisies and cornflowers are shown flowering among the ammunition boxes.

In Ghost Soldier the chapter headings are by Kate Leiper who was the artist for An Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy TalesShe has captured innocence and  simplicity, coupled with the inherent dignity, of the children, and the poignancy of the lost childhood toys of the real Ghost Soldier.

NOTE:  Theresa Breslin is appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 13thand 19th August 2014.   

Images Copyright SCARPA
Book Covers via publishers
Theresa Breslin writing on WW1:   
NOVELS:                   Remembrance        Ghost Soldier
CONTRIBUTOR:       War Girls                 Only Remembered

'The Private Life of Pawns' by A L Berridge

0
0


We all know soldiers have private lives. Novels about war naturally devote space to characters’ back-stories, thoughts, feelings and relationships, and everyone knows a manly war hero can be given a softer side by bunging him the obligatory love interest. Yet there’s another, even more private side, and I’m beginning to realize it’s more important than I thought. 

My journey began while working on my present novel of the Crimean War. In ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ my hero is placed for good dramatic reasons with the 34th Regiment of Foot, but I was depressed to discover that the best primary sources are a digest of the Regimental log, a handful of officers’ letters, and a portion of an officer’s journal. Those are all very helpful, but my characters include several private soldiers and a particularly crucial Colour Sergeant, and none of those documents showed much interest in such lowly souls. The log didn't even give names of anyone below the rank of ensign, and casualty lists record them only as numbers of 'Sergts' and 'Rank and File'.



Then came the miracle. A delightful lady called Anne Beal wrote to me about the Crimean Memorial Appeal, and mentioned in passing that her interest in the war arose from the fact her great-grandfather George Clarke had served in it. He was a Colour Sergeant, as it happened. In the 34th Regiment of Foot. And she had a dozen of his letters sent from the Siege of Sevastopol.

We all know those moments when the words ‘Holy Grail’ dance in golden specks before our eyes. I shall draw a decent veil over my embarrassingly slavering response, but fortunately Anne was kind as well as god-sent, and she sent me not only photographs of the letters themselves, but perfect clean transcripts with explanatory notes from her own research. Eleven of the letters were to George’s wife Mary Anne, who’d been left behind with the rest of the regiment at Corfu, one was to her parents, and the whole set covered the exact period of my book.

Original envelope of one of George Clarke's letters - by kind permission of Anne Beal

They were everything I could have hoped for. What I needed most were everyday details of life in the regiment, and George’s letters were pure research gold. How much did it cost to send a letter home? What kind of ‘souvenirs’ did soldiers loot from dead Russians, and what could they expect to sell them for? There were so many of these gems that I’d noted the first six letters before it really occurred to me what was missing.

The war.

After a year’s research I probably knew more of what was happening than poor George did, but I still found the omission intriguing. War is a pretty big thing for a soldier, this was almost certainly George’s first, and yet he seemed hardly interested in it at all. There are dutiful references, of course, but even these are mostly concerned with how soon the siege will be over and he can be reunited with his wife. At first he thinks the siege won’t last long‘for the Russians are actually eating their horses for want of food’, but later notes sourly that despite the constant firing he doesn’t see ‘the slightest alteration in the place’. A month later he still doesn’t know when he’ll be coming home, but thinks ‘there will be no more fighting’. Two months later he writes with endearing honesty: ‘I shall be very glad when this affair is over for I am getting tired of it.’

There could be many reasons for this reticence. The siege was in stalemate, there was little real progress to report, and George himself points out that the regiments were so widely spread that general news was thin and unreliable. Yet even when his regiment is actually engaged, George’s accounts of the action are the briefest I’ve ever seen. Writing on the day after the Grand Sortie of March 1855, he doesn’t even mention it until his third paragraph when he’s already discussed domestic details of money and his wife’s health.

George Clarke's signature - by kind permission of Anne Beal

That’s what’s fascinating. It’s not that the war isn’t worthy attention, but that George is far more concerned with his own quiet little private life. He writes about sick friends, relays news of his brother in the Rifle Brigade, gossips cheerfully about lapses of behavior among fellow NCOs, and is desperate for real newspapers from home. He worries about money and frets about the unreliability of the post, but most of all he is anxious about his wife, and how well she’ll be treated by the regiment without him there to look after her:

I received your two letters dated 11th & 12th December in which I find your face and throat to be much better which gave me much pleasure to read but on the other hand I was sorry to hear of the ill treatment of Sgt Howfield to you. But my dear, don’t have anything to say to him only what you cannot help for I am sure he would do you an injury if he could.

Of course he worries. Anyone would, and the more I read the more I understood how natural George’s approach really was. The famous letters of Timothy Gowing of the Royal Fusiliers might be full of patriotic wishes to ‘strike a blow for good old England’, but Gowing was a young man with no dependents, and those with adult lives outside Crimea were bound to have a different perspective. George’s ‘outside life’ wasn’t just his ‘back-story’, it was pretty well his whole story, to which war was only the backdrop.

And as a writer, that made me think. My job is to keep a story moving forward, to keep attention focused mainly on the action in foreground, but is that really a realistic way to show war? I’ve dealt with a soldier’s all-engrossing home life before in the character of Woodall in ‘Into the Valley of Death’, but that was a significant story, and often the reality is in the sheer ordinariness of everyday life. Shouldn’t I be doing more to show that?

The obvious answer has to be – only with caution. A commercial novel needs to be reality with the boring bits missed out, and if I devote pages to my characters worrying about whether a cake will still be all right after a long voyage then it’s going to play havoc with the pace. But reading George’s letters have made me wonder if there isn’t a greater danger in exploring the real ‘private lives’ of soldiers, and if I need to be very careful about going there at all.

Because ordinary life is universal. Have a character shot in the leg and readers will sympathize in an intellectual way, but have him get cramp or have a stone in his shoe and the reader is instantly there with him. George’s worries are ‘real’ to most of us in a way that war is not, and as I read his letters I completely forgot about research and saw him only as a human being.

That's what trivia does. It's absolutely the truth of soldiering, but it has a power like no other to humanize and make real. Look at this little video, for instance, made by the Donbass volunteers in Ukraine, where from 4’40” the footage is rough video shot at a rebel checkpoint. The English subtitles are delightfully dreadful, but enough key words are translated to tell us what these men are talking about.


From 5’31” the men are actually sitting under fire, but still the conversation drifts round important topics like cigarettes and socks. Trivia, laughter, the stuff of normality, and at once their Russian nationality is lost in the human nature of the universal soldier at war. This is what soldiers are like, this is their real private life, and even if it's a 'front' to help them deal with stress then the 'front' is part of the reality of who they really are.

That kind of trivia we can write. Not too much of it, or we'll destroy the pace of action sequences, but we need to see men talking about the things that really interest them rather than those things the plot demands. They don't talk about the war because they're living the war, and what they really want to think about is everything else.

As George Clarke does. His isn't an epic adventure story, but the letters give an insight into his real life outside the borders of war, and it was impossible to read them without personal feeling. George died of cholera on 30th June 1855, and when I read his last letter of June 23rd I'm afraid I even cried. His poor wife! They were obviously a very close couple, and at the time of his death she was even expecting his child – the baby he so much wanted to see christened. I wondered how on earth the poor woman would cope alone.

George Clarke's last letter

That's a good reaction, exactly the one I would hope for in a reader, but what made this situation dangerous is the fact that I found out. Anne herself told me the expected child was born in August 1855, and since the father was not listed as deceased it seems likely poor Mary Anne didn’t yet know she was a widow. That child was Anne’s grandfather, and it was from him that she learned that Mary Anne had always kept George’s letters with her, and carried them about in his old cutlery holder.

This cutlery holder, to be precise.



George was real, his loss was real, and I felt with full force the personal impact of war. I’ve been campaigning for over a year to erect a proper memorial to our fallen in Sevastopol, but this one man who died there was suddenly proxy for them all.

So perhaps that's the one part of a soldier's life that needs to stay private - at least in an action adventure historical. If I’m writing ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ then of course I must make the reader feel every human shred of the cost of war – but if I want my readers to enjoy the fight then I need to keep back something of what that cost really is.

That sounds like a cheat, but I think it's a necessary one. Generals can't think of their soldiers on so personal a level, or how could they send them to death as disposable pawns? Soldiers don't do it either, and one thing I've learned from veterans is how they condition themselves to laugh and joke even about each other's deaths. It's the only way a soldier can do his job and stay sane.

Maybe the same is true of writers. I admit I take a possibly rather warped pleasure when a reader berates me for killing a character they loved, but I don't want the loss to be so unbearable that they can't enjoy the book at all. I'll go into the 'private life' of my characters, I'll make them as real as I know how, but unless it's absolutely essential for the story then I'm not going to explore their loss beyond the grave.

Perhaps that's a cop-out. Perhaps I even know it is, but I'm beginning to think that when it comes to commercial fiction about war then T.S. Eliot had it absolutely right: 'human kind cannot bear very much reality'.


***
A very, very big thank you to Anne Beal for allowing me to write about her great-grandfather, and for giving permission to show her photographs. There is much more to the story, and I very much hope that one day she'll publish it herself.

Meanwhile the much duller A.L. Berridge's website is here.

Keats, Poetry and Time by Imogen Robertson

0
0

Earlier this month I sat on the floor in John Keats’s bedroom  and Inua Ellams read me poetry. I like sentences like that. The experience was part of a thoughtful and inspiring event put on by Penned in the Margins and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it yet. 

My husband and I arrived at Keats’s House one evening earlier in the month. It was late, but only just getting dark when Penned in the Margins editor Tom Chivers, lead a small group of patrons into the un-lit house. In the kitchen we were joined by Simon Barraclough reading his clever and gentle work about planets, stars and time, then we saw a blackly witty video installation from Ross Sutherland projected on the wall. In the the bedroom was Inua with his twisting, dextrous poems of discovery whose language clothes all his subjects in light. On the ground floor we found Hannah Silver lying on the floor and surrounded by scraps of paper. She made us look at and listen to the room we were in then write phrases and thoughts for her. She laid them out in front of her then, with a loop station and a microphone, created out of them a shimmering, shifting sound sculpture. Our last stop in the house was an audience with Leafcutter John whose minimal, manipulated score of found sounds and musical scraps had followed us around the house.

 



There were, as you can tell, many things to love about this event. It was inspired by a phrase in one of Keats’s letters to his brother in which he speaks of Negative Capability, ‘that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts.’ For me though, creeping quietly through the dark house, the other theme of the evening was time. Each artist was reacting to the house and its history, each was in discussion with its ghosts. To have gone to the house and heard only the poetry of Keats would have been charming, but it would have been sterile by comparison. In the work presented we were given a chance to explore a place, a moment in history and an individual’s moment of history, and our reactions to all of the above. I thought not only of Keats and his time there, but also of all those who have come to the house to find some trace of him. We were part of time laid down in layers, but still moving and shifting as our perspectives were changed. It was time reimagined and engaged with, and I thought to myself, that is what we are trying to do as writers of history - discover and uncover the past, listen to it like a child on the beach with a shell to their ear listens to the sea and then talk back to it. 

Penned in the Margins will be staging the show again during the Ledbury Poetry Festival on 12th July. If you have the chance, do go.

The Game of Life by Kate Lord Brown

0
0

It's good to have your values questioned - why do you write? What do your books say about what you believe in? There is nothing like a school workshop on writing hist fic to keep you on your toes. Adults are a cakewalk - 100 eight year olds pull no punches. The questions ranged from: 'You mean someone pays you to make stuff up?' to the immediate 'How much do they pay you?' (Answer: not as much as J K). From talking to the teachers afterwards, the thing that most interested them was overturning the idea that books appear by immaculate conception, perfect in form.

I showed them a couple of snapshots of the research files and some of the reference books for the new novel, and told them that a lot of this work and reading never makes it into the final story. I told them about late night skype conversations with a 96 year old professor of literature in the US who had been not much older than them when he was Varian Fry's office boy in Marseilles during WW2. I passed round photos of Aube Breton, Andre Breton and Jacqueline Lamba's daughter, who was five years old when she found sanctuary at Villa Air Bel, and told them about our letters. I hope all this gave them some idea how books live and breathe as they come together, the frustration of blind alleys and red herrings, and the sheer joy of uncovering forgotten bits of history and remarkable characters.

This new novel has been something of a labour of love. My research into the artists involved began in 1993/4 at the Courtauld Institute, writing a thesis on surrealism. An unusual name kept cropping up: Varian Fry. Perhaps your writing process is the same - maybe you also have that shadowy mental filing tray marked 'ideas' or 'must look into this when I have time'. I am not sure why some ideas, particular historical figures get hold of your imagination and won't let go until you write their story - why it is that the universe seems to bombard you with signs or moments of synchronicity until you give it your full attention. This particular idea has been maturing for twenty years, and took three to finally research and write. It is the story of 'the artists' Schindler', the real Casablanca.

In 1940 an international group of rescue workers, refugee intellectuals and artists gathered in the old Villa Air Bel in Marseilles. Every artist sheltered in Air Bel, and over 2000 other refugees escaped from ‘the greatest man-trap in history’, thanks to American journalist Varian Fry and his remarkable team at the American Relief Centre (the ARC or Centre Américan de Secours). With the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and funded by the New York based Emergency Rescue Committee, in all they helped some 4000 people survive, working undercover and without official sanction from the US or France.



Artists and writers such as Andre Breton decamped from Paris to Marseilles, and established themselves at cafes like the Bruleur de Loups, and created a remarkable Sunday salon at Air Bel.



Varian Fry (right) had arrived in Marseilles with a few thousand dollars strapped to his calf and a small suitcase, thinking he would be there a matter of weeks, helping the initial list of artists and intellectuals escape. The list was a virtual mirror of the Nazis infamous 'Liste Noire' of artists considered degenerate. In the end, Fry stayed months, until he was forced to leave France by the authorities. They were extraordinary times - Fry and his maverick band of immensely brave relief workers helped artists escape by legitimate and illegitimate means, by escape routes over the mountains into Spain, or by smuggling refugees onto boats, and forging exit visas.

Life was not easy at Air Bel - the winter of 1941 was freezing, and they were so hungry they even ate the goldfish in the ornamental pond. But there was great company, an illegal radio that could pick up the US Jazz programmes for dancing, and there was still wine - the house was a sanctuary, and there was joy, and creativity. It was a beacon of hope at a dark time, and people such as Antoine de St Exupery's wife Consuelo (inspiration for the Rose in the Little Prince), Marcel Duchamp and Peggy Guggenheim flocked there. It was in Marseilles that Guggenheim met Max Ernst. Max said ‘when where and why shall I meet you?’ Peggy said ‘Tomorrow, four, Café de la Paix, and you know why.’ They escaped to America together and married.


Jacqueline Lamba


Consuelo de St Exupery


Marcel Duchamp

The lasting legacy of the artists who came together at Air Bel is the Jeu de Marseilles. Breton spent hours in the library in Marseilles, researching the history of the city's original Tarot deck. He proposed a new game - new suits: Love Dream Revolution Knowledge, symbolised by the flame, the wheel, the star, the key. Brauner, Breton, Lamba, Dominguez, Ernst, Herold, Lam and Masson designed the cards.



It is a rare and beautiful thing, testament to their creativity and their defiance at the darkest time of their lives (and I was thrilled to discover a pack during my research, from a book dealer in France). 

Perhaps you have seen the meme wrongly attributed to Churchill that has been doing the rounds: 'when Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he said 'then what are we fighting for'? I came across the real thing in the MOMA archives, penned by Barr:



Fry, like Barr, believed in the importance of these artists, and in the sanctity of freedom and democracy. In the great game of life, these are things worth fighting for. Asked why he and his team risked their lives to help the artists, he said that their art had brought great happiness to his life and he just wanted to help them in their hour of need. Fry received little thanks for his remarkable work during his lifetime. Now, the US Consulate General in Marseilles sits on Place Varian Fry. But in 1971 when Fry published the Flight portfolio of prints in aid of the International Rescue Committee, he struggled to convince artists to take part – though he was responsible for saving many of their lives.

He was honoured with the International Rescue Committee’s medal in 1963, and the Croix de Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur by the French government in 1967. He died alone in his sleep later that year aged only 59. A manuscript lay at his side. Fry died surrounded by his incomplete notes for a new account of those extraordinary months in Marseilles.

In 1991 the US Holocaust Memorial Council awarded him the Eisenhower Liberation Medal, and in 1996 he was named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ by Yad Vashem – an honour bestowed on non-Jews who helped Jews during the Holocaust. It was an honour shared with Schindler and Wallenberg. He was the first American to be honoured in this way.


When Fry wrote 'Surrender on Demand', he said it was worse than War and Peace with its cast of thousands. Writing 'The House of Dreams' has felt like that at times, with editorial notes coming back time and again asking for yet more characters to be cut. I came to admire Fry and his team immensely, to love the factual characters that form the backbone of my fiction. I hope the novel will eventually bring the little known story of 'the artists' Schindler' to a wider audience. When you look at the restless world we live in now, it is more important than ever to treasure and defend the enlightened values of freedom, democracy and creativity that they fought for.


'The House of Dreams' is being published in German as 'Das Sonntagsmadchen' by Piper this autumn.

Sex and Jo March, by Leslie Wilson

0
0

The March girls and their mother:
Jo is top left (as you'd guess)

I wish I could remember who it was wrote a piece about the sexuality of girls in the nineteenth century, in particular referencing Jo March in Little Women. Jo famously couldn't understand why her sister Meg wanted to marry John Brooke and said: 'I wish I could marry Meg myself and keep her in the family.' The author of this article, which unfortunately I have failed to find in an Internet search, then went on to argue that a restricted-meat diet kept nineteenth-century girls from achieving puberty till seventeen or so; hence Jo's lack of understanding (at least she's not considered to be an incestuous lesbian, as someone averred about Jane Austen.)

I do feel a little uneasy about arguing with something I can only remember in my head, for I know only too well how facts can morph in one's memory; do any of my readers remember the article? But I have been thinking about this for ages, and have been re-reading not only Alcott, but Susan Coolidge on the subject, as well as a biography of Alcott. So I shall go on to reflect on the teenage sexuality (which is considered a modern phenomenon) in Little Women/Good Wives et seq, and What Katy did at School, and also on why I think Jo's creator made her so opposed to flirting, and also why she was married off to Professor Bhaer instead of to Laurie.
Incidentally, I have never heard of a German called Bhaer. He should have been called Baehr or Bähr, which is a fairly ordinary German name, and Alcott must have reversed the letters round, just as people sometimes write Kohlrabi as Kholrabi, though Kohl is the German for 'cabbage' and the name means 'Cabbage turnip'. So if you do misspell in this way; please don't. It is incorrect and gets on my nerves. But enough of the vegetable digression.
Louisa May Alcott aged 20
author unknown. Published 1909 or before
In Little Women, it seems to me (and this is a view shared by Harriet Reisen, author of The Woman Behind Little Women) that Jo represents an alternative role-model for girls (as she has for generations of readers). She rejects the demure feminine role-modelling espoused by her sisters Meg and Amy (Beth seems to me to suffer from a depressive illness; she reminds me so much of my grandmother.) Jo wants to ride, to act, to have adventures, to write, and not to be bothered with convention. She has 'unfeminine' rages and wishes she had been a man. She is, in fact, very like her creator. Being sexually interested in young men, in those days, meant being tied down, and Jo did not want to be tied down. So she sees young men as friends and comrades, playmates, in fact, and gets on with them very well.
Though Katy Carr turns into an Angel in the House and is far from a feminist role-model, she is horrified when she goes to school to find that many of the other girls are romantically obsessed with the young men at the nearby college, and starts a Society for the Suppression of Unladylike Behaviour (ugh!) Other girls, like her vapid cousin Lily, are madly sending out flirtatious signals to men they hardly know, obsessed with clothes, and even a child of thirteen declares that she is 'in love.' This is far from the demure stereotype of nineteenth-century girlhood.

Teenage girls' dance: from Danish Punch, 1879
I doubt if the book would have been written if such behaviour was not common; and indeed, in Little Women, Meg is invited to stay with rich friends who dress her up in sexy clothing, squeeze her into corsets, and make her over in their image, with the express purpose of flirting, which she does, though afterwards she is ashamed of herself. Nor is Meg uninterested in the male sex, and her younger sister Amy likes to hold court too - no matter how ladylike the manner she does it in.
Amy and Laurie


On our side of the Pond, incidentally, there was the correspondant to the 1880s'Girls Own Paper who was corresponding with two young men through the blinds of her bedroom window, and wrote for help when they got too ardent. All she got was a telling-off, though.
I know the age of puberty is considered to have got younger in the twentieth century and maybe was even higher in the nineteenth, but I suspect that is a teensy bit irrelevant. I 'flirted' with teenage boys when I was aged seven or so; it was definitely a romantic feeling, though I had no idea of acting on it in any way, and I was lucky that the boys I was keen on respected this. I think it's quite normal to feel that kind of love well before puberty. A restricted diet, however, was definitely the lot of the Alcott girls; since their father Bronson was too sensitive to earn a living properly, they were virtually starved in their youth, which didn't help their adult health.
It's interesting (and related to this) to reflect on why Jo might have wanted to 'keep Meg in the family.' It is actually a sentiment Louisa expressed when her eldest sister Anna got married. Louisa wanted independence and to earn a living; but her parents were heavily dependent on domestic help from their daughters. Her mother was often ill and her father, as I have said, toured the country speaking, but never brought any money home. The year Anna married was also the year the younger sister Elizabeth (Beth) died, which meant the parents needed Louisa and she had to come home to help them. Reading Good Wives, one finds Jo, after Beth's death, suffering in her role as prop and support to her bereft parents. Anna's marriage was a threat to Louisa's autonomy, and that was probably why she gave the sentiment to Jo.
Jo March was meant to be an independent woman, earning her living just like her creator, but Alcott's readers demanded a romance for Jo, so she gave her 'a funny one.' When she herself did have a kind of romance later in life, it was with a younger man; but the bizarrely-named Bhaer is older, and another version of Bronson Alcott. As one who always falls in love with her male romantic leads, I can imagine that Alcott didn't want to make Bhaer attractive; it might have destabilised her. So Bhaer (bah, what a ridiculous name!) has to be a cuddly oldish man, a kind of gigantic teddy bear with moral stuffing. (They made him sexy in the film, of course.)
Jo and Bhaer (Bah!)
At least Jo does achieve literary fame and fortune later in life, though celebrity becomes quite a burden to her. One can only sympathise. Jo's later tribulations at the hands of autograph-hunters (Jo's Boys) are an exact account of what her creator endured and were perhaps included in the hope that the fans would read and desist. Like Jo, Alcott was often reduced to pretending to be her own parlour-maid, in order to escape the attentions of intrusive worshippers.

Illustrations from Little Women and Good Wives are from my own copy, published 1911 Seeley and Co Ltd, by H.M. Brock. I do like the portrayal of Jo in them, though not the one of her smooching with the bizarrely-surnamed old man.

I do recommend Reisen's The Woman Behind Little Women; it is a fascinating book. And if anyone CAN remember the article about Jo and female sexuality, and tell me the author, I would definitely be very grateful!



SALT AND CRUSHED ROSES - Medieval pregnancy and neonatal care By Elizabeth Chadwick

0
0
Last week we welcomed a new baby boy into our family. (left). At the same time I was reading up on pregnancy and the care of babies as part of my general research, so I thought I'd talk on the subject for my monthly posting.

In the thirteenth century, a Tuscan physician called Aldobrandino da Polenta, left his homeland to become personal physician to countess Beatrix of Provence who was the mother in law of King Louis IX of France. While thus employed he wrote and dedicated to his employer a medical text in French called the Regime du Corps, which translates as Regimen for the Body. (1256) Here is his Letter to her, dedicating the work.
His writings, particularly on the section concerning the care of the mother during pregnancy and then of the newborn child were principally sourced from Arabic works that had been disseminated through Europe in earlier centuries.

His view of pregnancy was that when it began it was like a tree when the fruit was first set and was vulnerable to wind and rain - what we now call the June drop where all the fruits that haven't taken, wither and fall. Then the fruit took a firmer hold on the branch and as it grew became more difficult to  dislodge. Once ripe, however, it was again ready to fall at the lightest touch.
As a result of these stages, Aldobrandino thought it was nto a good idea to bleed the mother or perform medical interventions in the first four months, but that it was all right for a while after that because the child was now firmly established. However,when the baby was at full term it was again inadviseable to bleed the mother.

As far as a mother's general regimen went, he advised her not to eat anything that was too salty in case it caused the baby to be born without hair or nails. She should not eat anything that might cause her to menstruate.  This included such items as haricot beans, rue, parsley - or lupins!  And she was never to gorge herself.  Instead she should eat small meals frequently and they should be easily digestible. Chicken was especially good.  He also cites partridge, blackbirds, kid and mutton as being beneficial.  She should not drink straight wine but cut it with water.  She should also keep calm and avoid anything that might cause stress and anger. Instead she should cultivate all things that gave her joy and comfort, again with particular attention to the first and last months.  She should also put herself in situations where the smells were nice. Her clothes should be fresh and clean and she should not remain out for too long in the sun.

 Aldobrandino suggested that a good tonic for a pregnant woman to take should be made from whole pearls that have never been pierced mixed with root of Spanish pellitory, ginger, mastic, zedoary root (not unlike ginger) cassia bark, cardamom, nutmeg and cinnamon, sea lavender and long pepper.  All of this should be powdered and put into a sugar syrup.  I should think the taste was very aromatic and ginger is good for sickness, but I'm not sure about the powdered pearls!
Zedoary plant


About three weeks before her delivery date, Aldobrandino said the woman should bathe every day in water that had been steeped with mallows and violets, linseed, fenugreek, barley and camomile.  Her thighs and genitals should be anointed with oil of camomile, chicken fat, foam from the top of butter and a compound called dialthea made from the marsh mallow plant.   She was to take fortifying drinks of balsam and wine - or if she was poor, roots of costus and artemisia cooked in wine with a two pennyweight of bull's bile added.
Thus fortified, she should make herself sneeze but hold her breath by the mouth and nose, and then force herself to walk, and go up and down stairs.  Having done her exercises, she should have her feet and hands rubbed and inhale nice aromas while this was being done.  She should also anoint her genitals with costus root and spikenard (for their olefcatory effect).

A mother to be should be kept warm when it was cold, and cooled down when the temperature was warm. Indeed, it was beneficial Aldobrandino said, for her to sit in a lukewarm bath up to her navel.
During labour Aldobrandino suggested an energy-giving drink should be presented to the mother, made from water in which dates had been cooked, and then flavoured with fenugreek. He also advised placing a cushion under the woman's belly to support and comfort her.
Once delivered (and this is assuming an untroubled birth) the woman should bathe and be given nourishing food to eat, and medicines administered for any after pains.

As a side note, what strikes me from the above details is how matter of factly bathing is taken, and how therapeutic. It's another strand of evidence to support the argument that actually yes, people did bathe in the Middle Ages and that it wasn't frowned upon.

So, onto the baby now that he or she had been born.  The next piece of advice from Aldobrandino is rather worrying to a modern mindset.  He advises that the baby should be wrapped in crushed roses with fine salt. This doesn't sound like a good idea but let's go on.  The umbilical cord should be cut and powdered 'dragon's blood' put on it. This is actually the gum of the East Indian climbing palm. Also sarcocolla (similar), cumin and myrrh and the whole covered with a linen bandage soaked in olive oil.  Aldobrandino doesn't actually say he has done this - it's just what's taught.  Or you can tie off the cord with a thread of twisted wool and cover it with an olive oil bandage.

Once the umbilical cord has dropped off, the area should be covered with a mixture of fine salt mixed with powdered costus or sumac or fenugreek or oregano. He then cheerfully advises the mother to salt the baby's whole body with this, particularly  the nose and mouth. (I'm amazed any child survived!).  Aldobrandino says that a newborn child is very tender and easily feels the heat and the cold, so may need this salting more than once to toughen it up!

Anyway, after the mite has endured the salting, it gets a wash thank goodness.(that is of course from my modern perspective!).  Aldobrandino tells his readers that the nurse must have trimmed nails so that she doesn't harm the baby.  She should help it urinate by pressing lightly on its bladder. Of its own accord, a healthy baby will 'fill its bottom nicely.'

When swaddling the baby, the members should be arranged to give them a good shape because it's like forming wax and whatever shape you give a malleable baby now will impinge on its future physical development, so a mother should employ a wise nurse to do this. 'you should know that beauty and ugliness are due in large measure to nurses.'

Having been swaddled, the baby was then put in its cradle to sleep. The cradle was not to have hard things in it (unspecified) but soft things that would comfort it and keep it warm.  It should sleep in the dark because bright light might damage its eyes.

After sleep, the baby should be taken up and washed if necessary. The baby should be washed around 3 times a day and gently massaged and stretched before being dried in soft towels and put back to sleep.

Interestingly when it comes to feeding the child,  Aldobrandino is all for the mother doing it herself as the natural mother's milk is the best source (this rather flies in the face of the aristocratic habit of employing wet nurses, although the latter seems to have been strongly ingrained culturally). The reason for the mother's milk being best for the child comes from the notion that this milk nourished the child in the womb and once the baby was born, the milk reverted naturally to the breasts.

 Aldobrandino 's advice was to put a little honey into the baby's mouth, then press on the breast to squirt out a small amount of milk, and then put the infant to nurse.  The baby should be fed about three times a day, but not to the point where it was bloated.

A good wet nurse, should one need to employ such a person ought to be around twenty five years of age when her health would be at its best. She should have a good colour and be buxom with a good bosom, but not too much flesh.  It was a well known fact that nurses whose breasts were too large were the cause of snub-nosed children! She had to be in excellent health because it was well known that a sickly nurse would kill a child straight away. She ought to be of sound moral character and have a sweet nature. A nurse who was hot tempered or nervous might pass those traits onto the child if one was not not careful.

The prospective employer should also examine the milk produced to make sure it was of good quality.  This involved checking the colour, appearance and taste. 'To know if it is too gross or too thin, take a drop and put it on your fingernail, and if it drops off without your moving the nail, it is too thick. So take a nurse whose milk is neither too thick nor too clear.'
 Aldobrandino also thought it preferable that the prospective nurse had borne a boy child of her own and it should be at least two months since she had given birth.  She should not lie with a man while nursing the child and must certainly not become pregnant (although that might prove less likely because lactation inhibits ovulation) because that would kill her nursling.

A baby should be breast fed until it was two and then weaned, the nurse first chewing up the food herself to soften it for the child. Porridge too could be given made with breadcrumbs, honey and milk. Teething pains and the need to gnaw in order to teethe were to be alleviated with liquorice root or gladioli root because they were thought to strengthen the gums.  The gums might also be anointed with butter and chicken fat.

All this advice by  Aldobrandino  is an interesting mix of lore, some of it very different from our own way of treating pregnancy, childbirth and infancy, and some of it still very recognisable.  I found  Aldobrandino's  notes on the matter fascinating and informative and I hope you do too.  I shall certainly be searching out the rest of his work in translation.
You can find the full translation of the Aldobrandino's thoughts on pregnancy, childbirth and care of the infant in this wonderful book that I'd highly recommend to anyone interested in the culture of the Middle Ages.

NEVER FORGET by Eleanor Updale

0
0
Last month I wrote about coming across a monument to the once-famous author, Catherine Sinclair, and I’m glad to say that it looks as if we will be able to rustle up a little fuss for her in August, on the 150th anniversary of her death.  I’ll keep you posted on that.
In the meantime, I’m staying on the monuments theme. No doubt, like me, you often walk past familiar landmarks hardly knowing why they are there. Sometimes it’s impossible to find out on the spot.  What seemed obvious cause for commemoration when a statue or sculpture was installed now needs an explanation, and too often there is nothing to read.  That’s why I was so glad to come across this obelisk, which is a storybook in itself.


I was in Southport for an awards ceremony (my book The Last Minute was shortlisted, and to my amazement, it won). The weather was balmy, and I went for a walk through that gloriously elegant Victorian  seaside town.
Here’s what I found, and I’m glad to say that I can tell you all about it simply by transcribing the (lavishly punctuated) inscriptions around its base.
First, there’s a wonderful evocation of the mix of private philanthropy and civic pride that characterised the late Victorian age:


THIS
MONUMENT WAS ERECTED
JUNE 28TH 1888,
WHEN A LARGE LIFEBOAT OF
NEW AND IMPROVED PRINCIPLE,
(PRESENTED BY
THE MISSES MACRAE)
AND NAMED “EDITH & ANNIE”,
WAS PLACED UPON THIS STATION.
THIS DAY WAS OBSERVED AS A
PUBLIC HOLIDAY IN CELEBRATION
OF THE MAJORITY OF THE
CORPORATION OF THIS BOROUGH,
AND THE JUBILEE OF THE
CORONATION OF HER MAJESTY
QUEEN VICTORIA.

WMROBINSON COXSWAIN.

I’d love to find out more about all those people, and even more about the events listed on two other sides of the oblesik:


THE "RESCUE"
BUILT BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION
1840, SAVED
THE CREWS OF 20 VESSELS,
NUMBERING 175 LIVES:
BESIDES WHICH 15 SHIPS WITH
THEIR CREWS WERE ASSISTED
TO DIFFERENT PORTS.  
THE “JESSIE KNOWLES”
PRESENTED BY JAMES KNOWLES,
ESQUIRE OF BOLTON.
1861, SAVED
THE CREWS OF 9 VESSELS,
NUMBERING
75 LIVES

ADMIRAL BARTON, HON SEC.
WM ROCKLIFF COCXSWAIN 32 YEARS

THE
"ELIZA FERNLEY”
PRESENTED BY JOHN FERNLEY,
ESQUIRE OF BIRKDALE,
1874, SAVED
THE CREWS OF 9 VESSELS,
NUMBERING 52 LIVES.
THIS LIFEBOAD WAS CAPSIZED
IN A GALE DEC. 9-10.1886,
WHEN 14 OF HER HEROIC
CREW WERE DROWNED.
SHE WAS REPLACED BY THE
MARY ANNA, 1886

J.A.RONINSON, HON. TREAR.
C.A. PILKINGTON, HON. SEC.
CHARLES, HODGE, COXSWAIN.

But the best part of all is the inscription on the fourth face:


Will some kind hand 
please place 
a flower on 
this Obelisk
in honour of all 
LIFEBOATMEN

And what a joy it is that someone has done exactly that.

This business of leaving flowers can be tremendously emotionally powerful. 


It can be awful (in every sense) of course, I can’t be the only person who was taken aback by the sea of cellophane outside Kensington Palace after the death of Princess Diana, to say nothing of the the horrible sign near a London florist at the time of the Soham murders in 2002 (‘You can send flowers to Holly and Jessica from here’).
For a while, I worked on the Mile End Road in London, where there always seemed to be bunches of flowers tied to railings, marking the latest spot at which a pedestrian had lost patience with the incredibly slow traffic lights. They never failed to bring home the tragedy of a life suddenly cut short.  The white ‘ghost bikes’ at the scene of cycling accidents in London have the same effect on me.
But sometimes flowers, and particularly a single flower can be remarkably uplifting.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we all adopted a neglected grave in a local cemetery, dropped by with the occasional flower, and maybe even tried to find out something about the person buried there.
That lovely tribute to lifeboatmen, nearly 120 years on from the erection of the Southport obelisk, fills my heart with admiration for everyone involved - including the mystery person who placed the latest bloom there.



www.eleanorupdale.com

The Jazz Age and the French Riviera Carol Drinkwater

0
0

On 12th June, I attended the Prix Fitzgerald award ceremony at the Hôtel Belles Rives in Juan-les-Pins. The hotel looks out over the Mediterranean and has views all along this famous stretch of French Riviera. I live inland of this smart address on a rundown olive farm and although I am no longer one for swanky parties, this invitation attracted me because it is an award given to honour the memory and literary excellence of F. Scott Fitzgerald whose life and works are intrinsically linked with this coast.
My invitation
The term ‘The Jazz Age’ was coined by Fitzgerald in 1922, the same year The Great Gatsby is set. The phrase was intended to describe the flamboyant, anything goes mood, that had taken hold of America after WWI. Europe and the States were reeling from the effects of WW1, from the phenomenal losses of an entire generation of young men and women who had gone to war and never returned. Those who were alive were grabbing life by the boot strings and partying till they dropped. Seeking pleasure, they were running from the horrors of recent history.


In his first full-length novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), published when he was twenty-four, Fitzgerald described this young generation of pleasure-seekers thus: ‘Here was a new generation ... grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken..’

Another aspect of the post-war disillusionment was an exodus of American writers, musicians and artists across the Atlantic to Paris, known for its more liberal attitudes.

Amongst these were Gerald Murphy and his beautiful wife, Sara, née Sara Wiborg, heiress to her father’s printing-ink fortune. Murphy, a Bostonian, was also to inherit. He was heir to a luxury-leather goods business (still going strong), but his dream was to become a painter.

As both their parents disapproved of their marriage, the Murphys set sail for to Paris in 1921, three years before Scott and Zelda, where they built up an illustrious circle of artists around them. They became acquainted with established as well as the more bohemian crowds. Gerald studied modern art with the futurist Natalia Goncharova and painted sets for Serge Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballets Russes. To celebrate the premiere of Stravinsky’s Les Noces in 1923, Sara and Gerald threw a sumptuous party on a barge on the River Seine where the music played till dawn.

The couple were never less than immensely generous with their wealth and their energetic support of those who were trying to make a name for themselves in the arts.

In that same year of 1923, Gerald collaborated with another expat who had left the States in 1917 to join the French Foreign Legion and whose parties at his luxury flat in Paris were extravagant and scandalous, songwriter Cole Porter. Together, Porter and Murphy wrote a short jazz ballet, Within the Quota. Its success and the fact that it was the first American jazz ballet ever penned was a huge career boost for young Cole who, at that stage, had published very little material.

Cole Porter and his heiress wife, Linda Lee Thomas, introduced the Murphys to Antibes, a Riviera resort alongside Juan-les-Pins little frequented in summer. Gerald and Sara were so enchanted with the location that they bought themselves a ‘seaside chalet’, christened it Villa America and hosted parties and holidays that changed forever the personality of the Riviera. Their guest list included the Porters, the Picassos, the Hemingways, Man Ray, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein... in fact, almost everyone who counted in fashionable, avant-garde artistic circles.

In 1924 Scott and his wife, Zelda, with their daughter, Scottie, fled the craziness of New York and the extortionate amount of dollars their hectic life-style was costing them and sailed to Paris. This was their second trip to Europe. Zelda loved to party and Scott was always at her side even though he already knew that the all-night drinking and hard living was cutting into his writing regime. He craved peace, somewhere to exist more simply, concentrate his creative energies and earn a living. He hoped to find it in France!

The Côte d’Azur (the Blue Coast) was pretty much undiscovered back then. Villa rentals did not claim the fabulous prices that they do today. Winter was the high season, not summer. The British monarchy, the White Russians and, of course, many painters enjoyed the warm, gentle climate of winters here and the softness of the light.

However, around this time, Coco Chanel travelled south with the Duke of Windsor on her arm. She was the first to allow her skin to tan and thereby created the rage for summer sunbathing. Private swimming pools began to be built at the grand villas, Art Nouveau palaces, and this Blue Coast was gearing up to become the most fashionable summer destination in the world.


The piano bar at the Hôtel Belles Rives.
Upon arrival in Paris, Scott and Zelda were introduced to fellow Americans, Sara and Gerald Murphy. The Fitzgeralds decided they would also travel south. Scott was hoping to live ‘dirt cheap’ and dedicate his energies to his work. His first rental was a little further west than Juan-les-Pins, in St Raphael, where he worked on The Great Gatsby (published in 1925). But Scott did not live the life of a recluse. He and Zelda used to motor east along the coast in their little turquoise car to join in the fun at Villa America For Scott, this was a seminal period. His friendship with the Murphys played a vital role in his work and they remained lifelong friends.

And times were changing fast for the Cote d’Azur. This injection of international, predominantly Russian and American, artistic extravagance certainly put Antibes and its neighbouring fishing village, Juan-les-Pins, on the map. Life was one long carnival and those involved lived like they didn’t have a care in the world. The US Jazz Age had crossed the Atlantic and moved south from Paris.

Picasso who was married at that time to the Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova, became so enamoured with Sara Murphy he used her as a secret muse for at least four of his paintings during his neoclassical period.


Woman Seated in an Armchair, Picasso, 1923. Detroit Institute of Art

In 1926, the year after The Great Gatsby had been published to critical acclaim, the Fitzgeralds were back in the south of France. This time they went straight to the heart of its summer playground and rented the Villa St-Louis in Juan-les-Pins. This villa is today the Hôtel Belles Rives. Its present owner who conceived the Prix Fitzgerald has maintained the hotel’s gorgeous Art Deco interior in the public rooms (see hotel’s photo of piano-bar below). She recounts a story of when Scott hired a local band, locked the musicians inside his rented villa in an upstairs bedroom and tossed away the key, forcing them to play dance music all night for his guests, forbidding them to leave before sunrise.


Piano-Bar Fitzgerald, Hôtel Belles Rives.
Ever since those golden summers, Juan-les-Pins has had a taste for nightlife and music, particularly jazz. Jazz has been injected into its blood. Since 1960, each July, the Jazz à Juan festival takes place steps from the villa Fitzgerald rented. First-rate musicians, the top in their field, play beneath the stars and the umbrella pines with the Mediterranean sunset as their backdrop. I have sat in that magical setting on numerous occasions, transported by the notes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Diana Krall, Oscar Peterson and many others.

Even if today Juan-les-Pins is brimming with trendy boutiques and roars with the sound of motorbikes, the sweet sounds of jazz have never entirely died away, but I often ask myself how many of those who come here to holiday have any idea whose ghosts walk alongside them?


View from hotel towards Cannes, 2014

The Fitzgeralds spent their last summer on the Côte d'Azur in 1929, but on that occasion they stayed in Cannes not Antibes. By then the stock market had crashed, the wave of the Depression was crossing the Atlantic, money was tight, spirits were low, Zelda was soon to suffer her first nervous breakdown and they were no longer in a celebratory frame of mind. The party was over. It was time to go home.

Why should the lives of these incandescent people mean anything to us today? Well, aside from the immortal works of art and literature that were born out of that period, a lasting legacy of their encounters and experiences, these artists and jetsetters were ‘The Lost Generation’.

Gertrude Stein, literary critic, art collector, novelist, who lived in Paris with her lover, Alice B. Toklas, whose Left Bank salon was the celebrated Saturday evening event, was also godmother to Hemingway’s son and a guest at the Murphys’ villa in Antibes. She was a very vocal member of that wealthy, expat scene and she it was who, according to Hemingway, penned the expression ‘The Lost Generation’.

Stein was in a garage in Paris where her car was being repaired and she had reason to complain to the management. In response the manager shouted at one of the young male employees: ‘Vous etes une génération perdue.’ ‘You are a lost generation.’

Stein repeated the observation to Hemingway, using it to describe all those young writers and artists who came of age during WWI.

The expression was also taken up in Britain but used to describe the actual loss of an entire generation who went to war and died, whose bodies were never returned to the lands of their birth. These included poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and many, many others, too numerous to name here.


The Murphys on the beach in Antibes with Dorothy Parker
In 1930, Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Beyond that her health was always fragile and she was hospitalized in Maryland in 1932. Her medical costs added another strain on Fitzgerald’s work. He rented the La Paix estate in Towson, Maryland so that he could work and be close to her. Here, he began to write Tender is the Night.

The charismatic ‘Dick and Nicole Diver’, the protagonists of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel, Tender is the Night, were inspired by his good friends, Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Tender is the Night, is partially set along this Riviera coast. It is a celebration and a heart-breaking account of the times ‘the Divers’ spent in Paris and on the Riviera and the people they shared those bitter-sweet, sunny days with and it is partially set at the villa that today has been transformed into the Hôtel Belles Rives.

By the time the novel was published in 1934, the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys had returned permanently to the States. Tragic events had destroyed their happiness, but the golden glow of those Riviera summers of the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, will live on forever in the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises), Picasso and others.

Speaking of that period of their lives in France, Sara Murphy said later: "It was like a great fair, and everybody was so young."

Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 in Hollywood where he was rather desperately trying to earn a living as a screenwriter. He suffered a massive heart attack brought on by alcoholism. He was 44. His funeral was attended by barely a handful, but amongst those present were Gerald and Sara. They never abandoned him.

The few paintings that have survived of the insubstantial collection of work painted by Gerald Murphy are impressive and one wonders whether if life had not spoiled, if the Depression and the ill health of one of his sons had not driven him back to the States, followed soon after by the tragic and unforeseen death of both his sons, might he have found his place as a cubist artist of significance alongside his friend Braque. He exhibited at the Salon des Independants in Paris in 1924 and his work, in particular a masterpiece now missing entitled Boatdeck: Cunarder, was much praised. His work prefigures the Pop Art movement.

In the mid-thirties when life had turned sour for them all and Zelda had been permanently institutionalized, Fitzgerald wrote to Gerald, ‘The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden.’

My cocktail hour at the awards ceremony was a thought-provoking moment reflecting upon all the above. I suspect the hotel’s proprietress had cleverly hand-picked many of her guests from a list of fabulously wealthy Riviera residents (not me!). I sat at a small table on the sideline never daring to venture further. I watched and I observed. Two widows took up seats alongside me: a finely Botoxed Swiss millionairess and her French friend, a princess who told me that she was the wife of a Byzantine prince born in Italy. (If Scott had been in my chair, I feel sure he would have winkled the bones of a short story out of the golden-haired princess). She gave me her card – she was giving out cards like a tea lady hands out cups. The card indeed states ‘Princess ----’.

The champagne flowed, the outfits were sumptuous, glittering in the evening light. Many languages were being spoken as the sun beat down upon the amber-lit Mediterranean. The laureate was an American writer, Walt Stillman, honoured for his film and novelization of film The Last Days of Disco. He gave his acceptance speech in perfect French having lived here for a decade. It was a very swanky party indeed. Fitzgerald would have been in his element but, I suspect, he would have seen beneath all that surface sophistication to the damaged hearts and created yet another masterpiece.


Hotel Paradise is one of two short stories I have written commissioned by Amazon. It is set in the 1990s between Paris and an Art Nouveau hotel along this ravishing blue coast.


www.caroldrinkwater.com

























Welcome to The Heroes' Wecome by Louisa Young

0
0
Photo credit: Sarah Lee
June has been an unusual month, with two of our History Girls, who have been with us from the beginning, nearly four years ago, having big, big novels out that are receiving a lot of attention. On June 1st I interviewed Michelle Lovric about The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters and now I have the opportunity to do the same with Louisa Young and The Heroes’ Welcome.

In January 2012, the History Girls did something we’ve never done before or since – we took over the blogpost date of one of our number and devoted it to rave reviews of her novel Louisa had suffered the loss of her fiancé, the composer Robert Lockhart, and we wanted to rally to her but it wasn’t only that. So many of us had read My Dear I Wanted to Tell You and it had had a tremendous impact, creating quite a buzz among the HGs.



In the months that followed we were thrilled to see the success of the book – a Richard and Judy pick, shortlisted for the Costa, winner of the Audiobook of the Year at the Galaxy Awards – all the while knowing how hard it was for Louisa to rejoice at that while going through such a difficult time personally.

So there was a big investment in knowing that – two years on – the sequel was coming out. The Heroes’ Welcome takes us on to after the end of the Great War in 1919.

The first book tells the story of Riley Purefoy, an intelligent working class boy and his sweetheart, Nadine Waveney, who comes from a higher social class. They are both damaged in different ways by the war but find their way back to each other and to what they had before guns and trenches and grenades did their work.

That doesn’t mean that everything is easy or straightforward and their ability to be at cross-purposes while loving each other so deeply is both moving and instructive.

The other couple who take almost as big a share of the stage in the Heroes’ Welcome are Riley’s old commanding officer, Peter Locke and his wife Julia. Peter’s physical wounds are minor but his post-traumatic anguish drives him to a life circumscribed by whisky bottles and Homer. Obsessively he reads about the death of Patroclus but, returning to his Ithaca, he finds it impossible to relate to his Penelope.

Julia is damaged too but believes, wrongly, that if she just loves Peter enough, he will get better. She is no better at relating to their son Tom, who is bundled back and forth between his horsehair-stuffed grandmother and his parents.




As a reader, one is put through the wringer – by Riley and Nadine’s painful struggle to be a “normal” married couple, by Peter’s frozen state, by Julia’s agonising attempts to rescue her husband and by her ultimate fate.

But there is so much hope too in Riley’s rehabilitation and his production of the kind of pamphlets useful to the men who come limping back into civilian life. And in the future that can happen for Peter’s cousin Rose who is able to stop looking after everyone in the family and train as a doctor.

By the time the book ends in 1927, those who survive have begun to live again and there is even new life to celebrate. But Louisa has described in forensic detail exactly at what cost that hope is achieved. “Died of wounds” is the poignant description of what happens to many ex-combatants but in The Heroes’ Welcome we see that it can happen to civilians too and that not all wounds are visible.

This was another book I had the luck to read in proof and I heard bits of in Venice even before that last October, so I knew it would be another terrific read. It already looks set to be as admired as My Dear … with excellent reviews in The Times, Observer and Guardian.

“So good, so strong, so accomplished, so emotionally powerful,” said Philip Gwyn Jones on Radio 4’s Open Book. And it’s true that these characters, particularly the five principals I have mentioned – and Jack Ainsworth, who is not in the second book for obvious reasons – now feel like people I know and have not just read about.

When I caught up with Louisa this month at the British Library, where she was working on book three, I had already started to re-read The Heroes' Welcome and have finished it since, in heart-in-mouth mode, even though I knew what happens.

I began by asking whether there had always been going to be three books.

Louisa: ‘My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You’ can easily be read as a standalone novel. But it did soon become clear to me that there would be more.

Mary: I always felt strongly that Riley and Nadine would be all right, no matter what happened, even though you put them through a lot.

Louisa: I couldn’t do anything so evil to them as to not let that happen.

Mary: Even though some pretty evil things happen to others?

Louisa: Of course. No bad things, no story . . ..

Mary: Towards the end of the current book, Nadine discovers some Italian cousins she didn’t know about, which is going to be important for the rest of the story. Tell us about your own connections to Italy.

Louisa: I’m a classic Inglese Italianata: conceived there and never got over it. Nowadays I ‘divide my time’, as the author biogs used to say.

Mary: What else can you tell us about the third book, which you are writing now?

Louisa: It’s set partly in Rome and northern Lazio, with these Italian cousins, and takes us up to 1939. Then a fourth book continues what happens in Italy during the war .

Mary: So we will be definitely dealing with the next generation – Tom, Kitty and the Italian cousins. [You will have to read THW, to find out who Kitty is]

Louisa: Oh yes. Tom is pretty much the hero. The new books also approach the complexities of the lives of the Fascist Jews of Rome in the 1930s and during the war, which unlikely as it sounds was a real thing.

Mary: Can you tell us anything about what happens to Rose, Peter’s cousin, who trains as doctor in the 1920s?

Louisa: Rose, again, is someone who deserves a happy ending, and I’ll see what I can about giving her one.



I learned a lot more about book three, currently without a title, which will come out next summer, but if I told you, Louisa would have to kill me.

So I’ll end with a passage from The Heroes’ Welcome.

Riley realises that he needs Peter to be saved as much for his sake as for Peter’s own survival. Peter asks him if he knew what the Sirens sang of to bound Ulysses and his ear-plugged crew. Riley guesses Love, but that is not it. Peter tells him:

“You’d think it would be that, wouldn’t you? Or of some idyllic home they had all come from and were travelling to. Each to their own Ithaca. But no – the Sirens were in a meadow of beautiful flowers and corpses, and they sang songs of the heroic past. Of heroes of war. They sang the truth about the past. That’s what it was not safe for the returning soldiers to listen to. Succumb to that and your ship wrecks, and your companions die. You have to sail on, sail on, into the future. Odysseus was tied to the mast, so he could hear the song and yet survive it. He is tied to the vehicle which carries him into the future, and yelling to be released, to be allowed back into the past. Arcadia – the past – is death. Do you see?”


Photo credit: Sarah Lee


Louisa Young tells the truth about the past but is very good about sailing on into the future.

www.louisayoung.co.uk



D Day + some, by Clare Mulley

0
0
This 6th June was the 70th anniversary of D Day, the day when Allied troops landed in Normandy to start the liberation of Nazi German-occupied western Europe. Despite the moving coverage given to this anniversary, it is hard to imagine the courage of those who took part, or to quantify the terrible losses of that day. As this summer progresses we should also remember the heroism of others who were called to action for the liberation of Europe.

On 5th June I went to the launch of Paddy Ashdown’s new book, The Cruel Victory: The French Resistance and the Battle for the Vercors, 1944, which tells the story of the French maquis who rose up to challenge the Nazi occupiers of their country, declare an area of free France, and tie-up battle-ready Wehrmacht troops who might otherwise be deployed north. 




The Vercors rising was one of the largest resistance actions of the war and, although brutally suppressed, Ashdown argues that ultimately it was nevertheless a ‘cruel victory’. Although I take some issue with this conclusion, that does not diminish the importance of the action in the Vercors, or of this book in assessing it within the wider context of the Allied war strategy, and providing a fine tribute to the men, and women, who served on the plateau. Read my review for The Spectator.

I knew that Ashdown was working on this book because he had been in touch about the role played by Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of the Second World War, and the subject of my last biography, The Spy Who Loved. Paddy describes Christine rather memorably as ‘beguilingly beautiful, extraordinarily courageous and enthusiastically promiscuous’. She was also a brilliantly effective special agent, and ultimately highly honoured for her huge contribution to the Allied war effort. 

Christine serving in France, summer 1944

Christine had been parachuted into France some weeks before the Vercors rising to act as a courier for Francis Cammaerts, the rising star of SOE in France who was coordinating resistance plans to support the Allied liberation in the south of the country. Christine’s role was to take messages between the different resistance cells, and help to coordinate the clandestine supply of arms and equipment. Although she and Francis did serve on the Vercors plateau during the rising, her most important work - work which would make her legendary within the British special services - was yet to come.

Francis Cammaerts, 1944

Allied planes dropping canisters of supplies
to the French resistance in the Vercors, summer 1944

The morning after her retreat from the overrun Vercors battle zone, Christine threw herself into her next mission. Over the next few days she established the first contact between the French resistance on one side of the Alps, and the Italian partisans over the mountains. She then single-handedly secured the defection of an entire German garrison on a strategic pass through the mountains. On her return she learnt that Francis, and two of his colleagues, had been arrested by the Gestapo during a standard roadblock check. Christine begged members of the local resistance to mount a rescue operation. Probably wisely, they rejected the idea. At this point in the war they could not afford to risk either the men or the weapons required for such an operation. In any case, the three men were held in a secure prison and due to be shot within days, so any rescue attempt seemed doomed to failure if not suicidal. Undaunted, Christine cycled over to the prison, assessed the situation, and secured the release of all three men on her own…

Francis and Christine returned to work immediately. The American General Patch, who commanded Operation Dragoon (Anvil), was due to land with his troops on the French Mediterranean coast on 15 August. The American forces' plan was to break out of the bridgeheads and fight up the Route Napoleon towards Grenoble with the aim of rendezvousing there on D-Day +90. They had not counted on French support. Francis’s resistance circuit, and connected local resistance groups, felled trees and blew up bridges to harry and redirect German troop movements while clearing the through roads for the Americans. MRD Foot, the father of SOE historians, believed that Patch arrived eighty-four days ahead of schedule as a result of this brilliant work. Paddy Ashdown believes it took Patch just 72 hours to get through, and he cites this work as one of the greatest contributions of the French resistance to the Allied war effort.

Christine sitting by a water duct near the blown-up bridge at Embrun,
Haute-Savoie, France, August 1944

The Germans stipulated that they would only surrender to the Americans. Poignantly, however, in the event they were obliged to surrender to Lt Colonel Huet as well, the French commander of the tragic Vercors resistance. That evening Francis and Christine went freewheeling down a hill in a US jeep to celebrate the victory.

D Day was a harrowing day of incredible bravery and fortitude. As we commemorate the courage of the men who stormed the Normandy beaches, we should also remember their colleagues-in-arms among the courageous French resistance and the British, Polish and American officers who worked with them either in the invasionary forces or with the special forces in the field. Among them were Francis Cammaerts and Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, who shared their goal of a free Europe, and who would never forget their fallen comrades. 


Christine paying her respects to those lost at the Battle of Vercors
at a memorial event,  July 1946.



After the Battle - a Guest Post by Julia Jones

0
0
Our June guest is Julia Jones, who writes about a sea battle that might be unfamiliar to you.





Julia Jones was running a bookshop and local publishing business in Essex when she discovered Margery Allingham's WW2 autobiography The Oaken Heart. This was a life-changing moment. She's since re-published two editions of The Oaken Heart, written Allingham's biography and spent more years that she likes to admit working through the extraordinary archive material that Allingham preserved from her father, Herbert Allingham's, working life. Closure was finally achieved with Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory which was published in 2012.

Julia and her partner Francis Wheen own Peter Duck, a yacht built for Arthur Ransome, on which Julia sailed throughout her childhood. The return of Peter Duck from her adventures in Russia with the Palmer family was the catalyst that convinced Julia to begin writing fiction of her own – hence the 'Strong Winds' series. It also initiated a friendship with History Girl Imogen Robertson (Mrs Ned Palmer). One of life's neater narrative sequences perhaps?


Julia Jones writing on board
Lovely June weather means open season for naval warfare in the waters around Britain. The 'miracle of Dunkirk' (May 27th – June 4th) was only made possible by several days of light winds and calm sea conditions and the weather forecasts before the D-Day landings (June 4th) have been described as “the most important in history”. That single weather window of opportunity – overlooked by the Germans, gambled on by the Allies. It was, indeed, a game-changer.

Seventeenth century seafarers had fewer resources at their disposal. They could watch the clouds, observe the rings around the sun and check the level of mercury in their barometers but ultimately What You Saw was What You Got in meteorological terms. The morning of the Battle of Sole Bay (May 28st or June 7th 1672, depending which calender you were using) dawned light and fair. The combined English-French fleets were at anchor off the coast of Suffolk. The English had been at sea since the beginning of the month and had been forced to withdraw from harassing the Dutch in order to replenish their supplies and undertake various maintenance tasks. HMS Prince, flagship of James, Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral, was heeled over on her side being careened. James and his entourage had elected to avoid the discomfort by sleeping ashore in the small town of Southwold. It was the day before his brother King Charles II's birthday so they'd stayed up late, partying. Considerable numbers of other officers and crew were also in the taverns.

The Dutch under their great admiral Michiel de Ruyter were more focussed. The union of Protestant England with Roman Catholic France, which had been secretly established by the Treaty of Dover in1670, threatened their survival as a republican nation. De Ruyter was a master strategist who liked to pick his own times for fighting. He discovered the Duke of York's whereabouts from a captured collier and early in the morning of May 28th he and his seventy five ships were nicely positioned to windward and making the most of a light east-south-east breeze to bear down on the unprepared Allies.

It took four hours to get the sailors out of Southwold and back to their ships. Then there was the technical difficulty of getting sailing vessels away from a lee shore. Somehow, in the process James's orders to the French admiral d'Estrees were misunderstood. The French fleet headed south, as per the agreed original battle plan: the English tacked north in response to the new conditions. The English accused the French of cowardice. Admiral d'Estrees wondered aloud whether the reason James had failed to make himself clear was that he hadn't fully recovered from the previous evening's celebrations.



The early morning breeze soon died and by the time the fleets engaged it was a serene and beautiful day. The sails on the ornately decorated wooden warships hung limp and almost useless as they drifted up the coast with the ebb tide, pounding each other with their cannon or dispatching fireships to burn their opponents. “The sea was all day as smooth as a fishpond and the day very hot and fair sunshine, the fairest day we have seen all this summer before,” recalled John Narborough of HMS Prince. By mid-morning his senior officer had been killed and he had been promoted captain of a battered, semi-sinking wreck. The Duke of York was forced to move his admiral's flag first to the St Michael and then to the London as he was targeted by de Ruyter's gunners. The fleets came close to running aground on the Lowestoft shoals but were able put about in time and, when the tide turned at around midday, they drifted back down the coast again, still fighting.

Door and windows rattled for miles inland – as they would centuries later when the heavy guns of both world wars were felt in the eastern counties. Spectators gathered along the low Suffolk cliffs but could see nothing. The lack of wind meant that the smoke from the cannon and the fireships hung over the combatants like shrouds. HMS Royal James, the newest addition to the English fleet and the first to be attacked, endured hours of her own private hell as ships which might have come to her assistance sailed blindly past. Finally she was set ablaze by a Dutch fireship and most of the remainder of her eight hundred crew were burned or drowned.




The lurid end of the Royal James is the subject of one of the most unforgettable paintings in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. It's the work of Willem Van der Velde the Younger and was based on the sketches and observations made on the spot by his father, the elder Willem Van der Velde. He was official war artist to the Dutch fleet (as far as I'm aware he was the first accredited war artist there had been in Europe) and his perspective was unique. Van der Velde would travel on board one of the warships then, as the fighting began, he would transfer onto a galjoot, a small unarmed sailing boat supplied by the Admiral. The sailing master would be instructed to take the artist wherever he wanted to go and Van der Velde would sit amidships sketching events on long strips of paper which rolled up securely as he went. He sometimes included himself in his drawings and labelled one section of his Sole Bay record “My galjoot luffing to be out of the way of the action.”

After the Battle of Sole Bay Van der Velde would have expected to return to his studio in Amsterdam and work up his sketches into highly detailed grisailles which he could sell as far afield as the Italian courts. Sometimes they would be used as in tapestry design. His son, Willem the Younger, would develop his father's notes and drawings into oil paintings for rich patrons.

A freshening breeze developed towards evening and by nightfall De Ruyter's ships were heading back towards his own coast with the English in pursuit. They attempted to fight again on the following day but were prevented, first by fog and then by strong winds. It continued to blow “a stout gale” for the next two days until the Dutch took shelter among the shoals of Walcheren and the English returned to Sole Bay. Overall it had been an inconclusive encounter, though with about 2,500 dead and wounded on both sides. The Dutch had wreaked the most tangible damage: destroying the Royal James and seriously damaging the Prince and several other first rate ships: the English had captured a single, somewhat elderly, warship named the Stavoren.

Strategically however the Allies had triumphed. While De Ruyter and the fleet had been away Louis XIV had invaded overland with a 100,000 strong professional army. It was a cataclysmic moment in Dutch history and the end of their Golden Age. Five of the seven provinces were occupied and the last two, Holland and Zeeland, were only saved by opening the dykes and inundating the countryside. The republic fell, its leaders, the de Witt brothers were lynched and Stadtholder Willem III seized power. Sixteen years later he would also become King of England, deposing James II, the former Duke of York.

The more I learned about the Battle of Sole Bay and its aftermath, the more fascinated I became.



I had been to school in Southwold and studied seventeenth cuentury history. I had learned nothing about the Third Anglo-Dutch war and can only assume that the arbiters of the curriculum were too ashamed of the part played by merry King Charles II and his aristocratic relatives. I was born in Suffolk and from babyhood used to shout out “red wo-wo, red wo-wo” when my brothers or I spotted the distinctive pub sign of the Red Lion, Martlesham. More than fifty years later I stumbled across the fact that it had been the figurehead on that single captured ship, the Stavoren.

Van der Velde had sailed on board the Stavoren to the Battle of the Sound in 1658 when she was trim and newly built. The English used her to fight against her former owners in the summer of 1673 but she was badly damaged at the Battle of the Texel and was eventually broken up, probably in Ipswich. Van der Velde and his son also ended their days in England, though in more comfortable circumstances. War chaos in the United Provinces was too extreme for artists and craftsmen to continue working after the French invasion so Charles II issued an invitation to Dutch craftsmen to settle in England. He paid Van der Velde and his son generous salaries and offered them studio space in the underused Queen's House at Greenwich. There the younger Van der Velde painted his masterpiece, the Burning of the Royal James and the elder supervised the production of Sole Bay tapestries, some of which were hung in Hampton Court Palace. Such pragmatism was non untypical in the seventeenth century.



I'm not a historical novelist however. I write adventure stories and my interest is in the effect of history – the influence that the actions of former generations have on the lives of my young protagonists. As I worked on the first draft of the novel that became The Lion of Sole Bay I realised that my increasing interest in the seventeenth century was threatening my imagining of events in the twenty-first. I couldn't simply cut out the history as I guessed that many of my potential readers would be as ignorant about the Third Anglo-Dutch war as I had been. When I showed school children pictures of the Stavoren's red lion figurehead, for instance, they usually guessed that it was a Chinese dragon. I thought about writing a prologue but that felt clichéd as I'd done something similar in my first novel, The Salt-Stained Book. I experimented with interwoven chapters which were clunky and slowed the pace of the story. Flashbacks were insufficient and possibly confusing without knowledge of the historic context.

In the end I was lucky. My heroine suffers from ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and I was talking to the mother of a child with a similar condition. “Of course the parents often have something similar – I can recognise it my husband and myself,” she added disarmingly. “But we express it differently – in our various obsessive behaviours, for instance.” I looked at the fictional father of my unhappy heroine and realised that my friend was right. His coping strategy for his own disorder was a single-minded fascination with local history. He shared a surname with the Van der Veldes though he'd never been able to trace a direct family connection – much to his disappointment. Why shouldn't he be invited to give lectures on the Battle of Sole Bay? They could be printed at the back of the book so that anyone who wanted the seventeenth century facts could refer to them whenever they chose. Those who didn't would be free to hurry along with the fiction as the lunatic fringe of twenty-first century Dutch nationalism prepare to take back their trophy – the figurehead of the unfortunate Stavoren, the Lion of Sole Bay.



[All illustrations by Claudia Myatt, except the photo of the Red Lion pub sign, taken by Julia Jones]


You can find out more about all of Julia's titles at Golden Duck Publishing.





June Competition

0
0
Are competitions are open only to UK residents - sorry!

We have five copies of The Lion of Sole Bay to give away to those who answer this question:


"What is your favourite novel about any battle at sea – whether historical or invented?"


Leave your answers in the Comments below and remember also to send them to me at readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so I can have email addresses for contacting the winners.


Closing date 7th July

Now we are three! by Mary Hoffman

0
0


It's the History Girls' blog's third birthday today! Unbelievable. And what a three years it has been. HGs have come and gone since July 1st 2011, we have had weddings, widowings, babies born and even a book: Daughters of Time was published in March this year.

Of course we have had many individual books published in that time too (nine in my case) and as individuals have had all kinds of triumphs in terms of travels, prizes and other recognition.

We have had nearly a million hits and now have more in the US than in the UK (even over 4,000 in the Ukraine).

So today is one for celebration and we are having a party. Crack open the Prosecco and cut the cake (GF for me) and join us in a fun party game.

Wikimedia Commons. Credit: Agne27











Match the HG to her three-year-old self:

Some of us have braved putting pictures up of ourselves aged three. Some are in black and white but this isn't a clue! The first three Followers to match all of the following to their younger selves will receive signed books from us. Send your answers to: readers@maryhoffman.co.uk Do remember to check on the Competitions page on 8th July for the answers and to see if you were right. To make it a bit easier, we've linked the names to the History Girls' websites.

1. Carol Drinkwater
2. Katherine Langrish
3. Katherine Roberts
4. Louisa Young
5. Mary Hoffman
6. Michelle Lovric
7. Liz Fremantle
8. Ruth Eastham
9. Caroline Lawrence
10. Joan Lennon
11. Eleanor Updale
12. Clare Mulley
13. Sue Purkiss
14. Laurie Graham
15. Imogen Robertson 
16. Catherine Johnson
17. Kate Lord Brown
18. Elizabeth Chadwick
19. Tanya Landman
20. Eve Edwards


Photo A

Photo B (the dog is not a History Girl)
Photo C
Photo D


Photo E (the doll is not a History Girl)
Photo F (an appropriately placed HG

Photo G
Photo H

Photo I
Photo J
Photo K
Photo L (History Girl + dad)
Photo M (No kittens were harmed in the production of this picture)
Photo N
Photo O

Photo P (a specially hard one!)


Photo Q
Photo R
Photo S (with lovely grandma)
Photo T

We hope you enjoy the party and do leave us a birthday message.


Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images