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Power Naps for Creative Writing

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by Caroline Lawrence

Recent studies have shown that taking a short nap is a great way of improving productivity in a day.

You admired Google's sleep pods in the 2013 movie, The Internship


Ben and Jerry's employees can go to a designated power nap room. 

detail of a 1964 patent to transform an ironing board to a slant board

My dad – a middle school teacher – used to have a contraption called a 'slant board', which was first patented in the swinging sixties. He would lie with his head higher than his feet, the theory being that the blood flooded back to the brain in the course of a short kip. After school let out at 3.30pm, my dad would lock the door of his office, then recharge his batteries with a fifteen minute nap before doing his marking and lesson plans.
 


Pliny the Elder from the TV series
But the power nap is not a new invention. Way back in Roman times, Pliny the Elder practiced this technique. As any Classicist knows, this first century scholar and polymath was incredibly prolific, producing over a hundred volumes in his lifetime, including the thirty seven volumes of his Natural History, which is still in print today.  

'You will wonder how a man as busy as he was could find time to compose so many books', writes Pliny the Younger to his friend Baebius Macer. The younger Pliny then goes on to give a detailed account of a Day in the Life of his famous uncle at the time he was in his late forties and early fifties. (Pliny the Elder had a weak chest and died aged 55 during the eruption of Vesuvius when overcome by the fumes.) 

Pliny the Elder would rise in the early hours of the morning sometimes as early as midnight, and worked by lamplight. Pliny the Younger admits that his uncle fell asleep easily and that he would often doze off, then wake to resume his work. Shortly before dawn, he would visit his friend the Emperor Vespasian who was also up at that time. Upon returning home, Pliny the Elder would have a light breakfast, then doze in the sun while listening to ancient Roman version of an audiobook (i.e. a slave reading aloud to him). After his sunbathing session he would bath in cold water, eat a light lunch and have a short nap (dormiebat minimum). We know it was a power nap because afterwards he would work until dinner time 'as if he had started a new day'! (Book III letter V in the Loeb edition of Pliny's Letters)
Pliny the Younger (left) from The Roman Mysteries 
Like Pliny the Elder and my dad, I have been taking power naps for years. Through trial and error, I have discovered the best time for me is around 4pm and for about 20 minutes. I find a short nap at this time gives me energy to get through another eight hours, with lights out at midnight or 1am before a natural rising between 5am and 7am. 

If you are a freelance writer, you are probably in the enviable position of being able to do this. But what if you're afraid of falling asleep, missing dinner and waking up in the middle of the night? Or simply of sleeping too long and too deep and waking up groggy? 
Adopt an alternate position on the bed!
You need to find the method that works best for you. Experimentation is the key. However, here are five techniques I have found very useful. 

1. I lie upside down at an angle on my bed, fully clothed but without shoes: barefoot in summer, socks in winter. This posture tells my body that Yes, I am going to sleep, but It's not sleep as we know it, Jim. In other words, it's different. It's a nap. It's a power nap.


2. I draw the curtains a little so that my sleeping space is dim but not too dark. Again, this tells my body that this is not the night-time sleeps. (There are two sleeps by the way, but that's another story!)


3. I put on a fan. The white noise tamps down background distractions and the soft breeze caressing your skin is very soothing, especially during long hot summers.   
a customised power nap playlist
4. In addition to the fan, I plug my earbuds in and listen to music on a very low volume. I choose three or four songs with a beat slower than my own heartbeat. Then I finish with a gently upbeat song that will bring me out of my sleep. 

5. I make customised power nap playlists to tie in with my creative work in progress. To give you an idea, here is one of my power nap playlists, from when I was working on my latest P.K. Pinkerton mystery, The Case of the Pistol-packing Widows. If I choose songs that tie in with what I'm writing, then I get some subliminal input while I'm recharging. (And yes, putting together a power nap playlist is a great way of procrastinating.)

A deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic make many people uneasy about sleeping in the afternoon, even writers who have no disapproving boss and who have the luxury of setting their own hours. If tackled with the right attitude, a power nap can be a powerful tool for reviving energy and stimulating creativity. After all, you're a writer. You are your own boss. 

Don't take it from me. Take it from Pliny the Elder! 

P.S. Images of Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger are from the Roman Mysteries TV series. (copyright © 2008 The Little Entertainment Group) 
P.P.S. If you have any tips, advice or comments, please do share!

Murder weapons - Michelle Lovric

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Lucy Coats and I teach a regular Guardian Masterclass about Writing for Children. Now I also write for adults. And I consider that I write for both sexes, regardless of age. So, being bi-genred? ambi-scritacious? Lithist-Girlboy Book-Trans-Genre? – part of my contribution to our Masterclasses is to discuss the difference between writing for adults and writing for young people.

My position is that I don’t find much difference. Crucial to both adult and children’s novels are pace, the creating of an immediate and intimate engagement with the main character, a proper story arc, having something worth saying, big trouble and at least one belly laugh.

On either side of the age divide, there’s one particular aspect of novel-writing that I like to emphasise. It is this: whether I’m writing for children or adults, I always moonlight as a murderess.

the death mask of Maria Manning, murderess
Stories feed on conflict. Conflict feeds on life-and-death. Death feeds on life. It raises all the stakes. So, in the course of your story-writing, you are almost certainly going to be obliged to kill someone. Whether by sickness or stealth, by old age or violence, with regret or with pleasure, you will at some point start to kill your characters.

I have been thinking recently about all the instruments of death I’ve deployed in my nine Venetian novels.

Venice is a city with a remarkably low crime rate, so I’ve had to test my creativity.

Working backwards … in my latest, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, I used a laundry boat.


'A laundry boat?' I hear you ask, in Lady Bracknell tones.

But as The Harristown Sisters are only just published, I don’t want to give too much away about the exact method.

Given that The Harristown Sisters is all about hair, I’ve also inflicted more than one follicular assassination. I don’t want to say who or when or exactly how, but it concerns certain dangerous quack products for the hair. My sisters sell quack hair potions themselves, yet it is a surprise to them when one falls victim.

Women of the Victorian period used petroleum products to strip the grease from their hair, and it led to several deaths in both London and Paris. The Hairdressers’ Weekly Journal of 31 July 1897 warned how petrol vapour, being heavier than air, could invisibly flow from the point at which the liquid was applied to a flame, drawing an ignition back to the head. This was the fate of the twenty-eight-year-old actress Irene Musa (Mademoiselle Pascaline) who was having a lotion of petrol applied to her head when some drops fell, reaching a lighted stove nearby. The fire rushed to her clothes and hair. Struggling with the flames, the actress tried to throw herself out of the window. Her sister and a woman friend caught her by the feet just before she dropped several floors, but she died anyway of her burns.


In The Book of Human Skin, I used poison from the aconite flower grown in one of those secret courtyard gardens that lurk behind almost every high wall in Venice.



I also used Venice by remote control: smallpox spores hidden inside the pages of a book sent from la Serenissima can prove fatal when a paper cut to the finger goes bad.


The recent Russian edition
of The Remedy
In The Remedy, the weapon of choice – again no spoilers – is deployed under this deserted bridge at night. It is the Ponte dell’Olio at Rialto, with the gracious marble lace of Ca’ d’Oro floating behind it.

In The Floating Book, I wrote of the Syrian printer Johannes Sicculus, falsely accused of minting counterfeit coins. The tools of the two trades were similar and several early printers suffered bad fates. Sicculus’s hands are cut off and hung on chains around his neck before he is decapitated. This takes place between the two columns of the Piazzetta, the traditional place of execution in Venice. His death is witnessed with horror by one of my protagonists, Lussieta, married to a printer herself.


Not far away is the place where the gentle editor Bruno goes to shoot an arrow through the bars of the cell that holds Sosia, his lover. He does this to save her the scarcely survivable torture of being paraded in a wicker cage through the city while scourged in the back along the points of her kidneys, liver, spleen and heart with spurred whips made from horses’ tails. Then she is to be branded on both cheeks and her upper lip with an ‘S’ for Stregoneria or witchcraft. I found exactly this punishment in records of a contemporary trial.

In Carnevale, I used horses and ice. The Grand Canal froze over six times in the 1700s. When that happened, the Venetians took to their newly solid byways with gusto, as this painting of 1708 shows (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)


There were even horse races on the Grand Canal. I used the ice-storm of 1791 for several deaths in the family of my protagonist, Cecilia Cornaro, a painter of portraits and lover of both Giacomo Casanova and George Gordon, Lord Byron.


The lagoon had frozen over five times in my memory and on each occasion all Venice ran mad for entertainments wild enough to obliterate our anxieties. We held an extra-mural Carnevale. Anyone with the use of their limbs threw themselves onto the ice and completed to glide as if footless or to make the most spectacular falls … Beneath us the ice groaned, full of our old, drowned sins. We peered down at it, looking for corpses and golden plates fabled to have been thrown from the Palazzo Labia during antique Carnevale banquets. But the ice kept its dark heart, and our own, hidden from us.

That year, a grand tournament of horses was held on the solid green ribbon of the Grand Canal. The whole family had gone together to watch the event. We climbed the fragile wooden dais near the Carità church and found seats among a hundred other Venetians and a handful of dazzled snow-struck tourists. I sat with my nieces on either side of me, my mother and Sofia behind, and my father in front of us. The little girls thrust their tiny hands inside their panther-skin muffs; my father’s head looked pale and tender in the clear cold air.

With fanfares and flourish of flags the race began. There was a plume of glassy splinters as the hooves rutted the ice. At first the racers galloped in a smooth arrowhead formation. But seconds later a single horse and its rider lost their footing and slid loose from the pack. We saw the pointed head of the horse hurtling towards us and the rider with his mouth open in a silent scream. As the rider and horse collided with it I heard the backbone of the dais snap and then felt myself flying across the ice ….


Cecilia Cornaro faces a different kind of murder - the temptation to end herself when cruel man makes her life unbearable, stripping her of dignity and self-respect.

Byron has bombarded her with his fascinations. But what she believes is his passion turns out to be the shine of her own love reflected back. Soon enough, the monster leaps out of the mirror and commences to trample her, with cruelty or cold indifference which is crueller than cruelty. But fortunately Cecilia, nearly submerged in the swollen Grand Canal, almost letting go of her painful life, has a revelation …


In a short story called Pantegana for Venice Noir, I used the ferro of a gondola thrust between the shoulder blades of a man who deserved nothing better.

In children’s books, you must, of course get rid of the parents. I have despatched parents in particularly Venetian ways.

In The Undrowned Child, I based my prologue on a real life incident in which a gondola was accidentally run down by a ferry. In my case, a murderous flock of seagulls provoke the tragedy, but again no spoilers as to how.


There are two kinds of seagulls in Venice – the small, sweet, black-headed Cocai, and the large cold-eyed grey-backed Magoghe. As seen above. A whole family is drowned in this incident. They find all the bodies except that of a tiny baby, who was on her way to be baptised.

‘The fish ate her,’ people say….

In The Mourning Emporium, poor Renzo loses his mother to an ice flood.

A Heath Robinson contraption whereby the early winter sun is directed to melt an iceberg on which my heroine, Teo, is strapped.


I also ravage the city with ‘The Half-Dead Disease’.

The ship’s cat Sofonisba is made to walk the plank. (I must have been in quite a mood when I wrote that book, as I even kill Queen Victoria.)

In Talina in the Tower, it is Ravageurs – hyena-like creatures who roam Venice with French pretentions, fearsome appetites and murderous intentions.

The Ravageurs too are based on research. There was once a time when the Santa Croce area of Venice was known as ‘Luprio’. And centuries ago wolves used to creep into the city across a mud causeway at low tide.

In Talina, I also deploy death by scorpion. Venetians nursed a superstition about witches, that these ladies could kill by burying a scorpion, wrapped with the victim’s hair, in a pot of sand. As the scorpion slowly expires, so does the owner of the hair.
A witch placing a scorpion into a pot in order to make a potion.
Etching by F. Landerer after M. Schmidt.
These glistening Venetian glass scorpions are made by the hand of a master craftsman at a beautiful shop near San Tomà, and never hurt a soul, despite their terrifying realism.  I did, however, find a dead one next to my bed in Venice the year I wrote Talina in the Tower and was somewhat perturbed, being infected by the Venetian superstition that these sinister creatures signify sad and dangerous journeys.
my domestic scorpion

In The Fate in the Box, I use the bell tower of the Frari church as a place where children are sacrificed in a bizarre and cruel ceremony known as the Lambing. (I hasten to add it is not all as it appears).

But the villain of the piece ends up being pursued up the dim ramp that winds around the bell tower interior by two Sea-Saurs. With the consequences you’d expect.

Here's a miniature Saur I found on my terrace the other day.
Again, perfectly friendly.


I’m working on two new books at the moment, and I’ve been designing myself a carnivorous hotel, loosely based on the work of Chicago serial-killer H.W. Mudgett. I’ve got murderous plans for this sneering stone harpy on the tomb of Andrea Vendramin in the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo.

Anyone like to tell us about interesting murder weapons they've deployed recently?


Michelle Lovric's website
The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters was published by Bloomsbury UK on June 5th this year. This week sees the publication of the American edition, also by Bloomsbury but with a new and very different jacket.
 
And a lovely review of the novel was recently posted by Sue Purkiss of this parish on our brother site, An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

The Gadzooks Question, by Laurie Graham

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Any writer of historical fiction has a decision to make before they commit a single word to paper: how will their characters speak? The more distant the era of their story, the tougher the task before them. We want our characters to be credible and we're aware that language is constantly changing  -  listen to this recording of how a medieval prince might have sounded  - but we don't want to over-tax our readers with archaisms.



Personally I've never dared venture further back than the 18th century. I take my hat off to those who recreate much earlier times, particularly if their novels are set in the heyday of minced oaths. It must be a finely judged thing, whether to drop in the occasional 'gadzooks'.



It is hard for us in these secular times to comprehend the depth of religious faith and practice in earlier centuries. Its thread ran through every aspect of daily life and blasphemy was taken very seriously indeed. 'Sblood was a fairly blatant contraction of 'by God's blood' and Shakespeare used it a lot.
'sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?'  -  Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2, to give you but one example.



'Zounds' was another early oath, presumably first pronounced to rhyme with God's wounds and then metamorphosed to rhyme with 'hounds', perhaps during sterner Puritan times. The 1606 Parliamentary Act to Restrain Abuses of Players made theatre companies more careful about the oaths they spoke on stage. A 'bloody' might cost you a fine you could ill afford.



The use of 'egad' (Oh God!) didn't become common until the 17th century, and 'ods bodikins'   -  another highly minced reference to the nails of the cross, like 'gadzooks'  - appeared later still, in spite of its antique flavour. And of course language, as constantly changing as a river, still comes up with oaths suitable for tender ears or religious sensibilities. 'Dog barnit' is one of my 20th century favourites, a gentle expletive I think you'll agree, when all the world is effing and jeffing like there's no tomorrow. 

My hero by Tanya Landman

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Why do I like this letter so much?It was written by my hero,  EB.White,  to a man teetering on the brink of despair.

Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society – things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock,  for tomorrow is another day.

Sincerely,

E. B. White

Says it all. I have nothing to add.  Just an observation: sometimes children’s authors get dismissed by the literati as lesser mortals because we write ‘for kids’.  Because we tell a story with a beginning a middle and an end.  We make it look easy.  Simple. 

EB.White’s letter is so profound and yet  so clear  in its expression.  Despair, hope, evolution, morality, the very future of the planet and the human race  (even an allusion to Gone With the Wind!) – it’s all there in a few perfectly chosen, perfectly placed words.


As all those who write ‘for kids’ know: simplicity is the most complicated thing to create.



SAY CHEESE: Turkish Women Laugh Back and the History of the Female Smile – Elizabeth Fremantle

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According to Turkish deputy prime minister Bülent Arniç women should not laugh in public because 'a woman should be chaste. She should know the difference between public and private,' and 'chastity is so important.' In response the women of Turkey took to Twitter, posting images of themselves in the throes of laughter or grinning in unchaste abandon, demonstrating the impossibility of controlling the spontaneous happiness of women in a world of selfies and social media.

Arniç's statement may seem utterly absurd to us now but digging down into the past it is clear that this idea is nothing new. The Early Modern period and the Reformation saw the wane of religious iconography and the rise of the secular portrait, but look at any of these images and you will not find a smile amongst them, with perhaps the famous exception of the Mona Lisa, whose 'enigmatic' smile has fascinated generations, partly because of its uniqueness. Surrounded by stern faces the slight smile of La Gaiconda makes for a mystery that reaches far beyond the upturned corner of a mouth.

It is a commonly thought that people didn't smile in early modern portraits because of their bad teeth but this is incorrect. The prevailing belief at the time, as Nicholas Jeeves points out in The Serious and the Smirk, was that women should be modest in their expressions and gestures. Contemporary behaviour manuals stated as much. Smiles and laughter were the preserve of the debauched and occasionally might be found on the mouth of a naughty cherub or a figure such as Eros. Jeeves goes on to suggest that an open smile in a portrait was radical to the point that the image's subject became the smile rather than the sitter, defeating the point entirely.

A portrait's function was not to capture a moment in time, like today's instant photos, nor was it meant as an accurate likeness but more as a demonstration of an overall 'moral certainty' that could only be described by an expression of seriousness. The public face of woman was to show nothing of the dangerous desires that might lurk beneath her surface. Mirth had no place in the public space of a portrait, and where they did it signified danger and moral collapse. After all the abandonment of laughter is easily interpreted as dangerously close to a total loss of control.  A laugh is a spontaneous and often uncontrollable response, something like, says Jeeves, a blush. So in the Early Modern mind laughter was uncomfortably close to the erotic, at best it indicated foolishness, at worst sexual rapaciousness.

There are one or two examples of female smiles in Dutch art, notably Frans Hal's Malle Babbe 1633 in which a woman guerns hideously whilst clasping a tankard, the meaning of which is clear. Hogarth's harlot, in his famous eighteenth century series of images charting the fall of a woman of loose morals, wears a slight smile not dissimilar to that of the Mona Lisa, signifying, one can only suppose, her potential for corruption. So the mirth of a woman is the ultimate signifier of her moral collapse; she might as well display her naked body for all to see. Interestingly, in 1783 Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun painted a portrait of Marie Antoinette which scandalised polite society. Not only was she was 'en chemise' or in her night clothes (though entirely, and to my mind rather modestly, covered up, complete with a large straw hat) but she was visibly and naughtily smiling. We all know what happened to Marie Antoinette. 


It wasn't until the advent of photography that attitudes changed, though there are some wonderful early photographic examples of ferociously stern matrons staring primly out of daguerrotypes. Once cameras could be owned by all the fleeting expression, the glimpse of a moment in time, the holiday snap in which a smile was the norm, became commonplace and from such images was born the selfie and the rise of the pout (which is a whole other issue). It would seem that the genie is out of the bottle and I feel certain that nothing now will curb that wonderful untrammelled Turkish laughter.



Ref: Nicholas Jeeves, The Serious and the Smirk: the Smile in Portraiture

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of Sisters of Treason, the story of Lady Jane Grey's fated younger sisters, and Queen's Gambit which tells of Katherine Parr who survived marriage to Hanry VIII. Find her on ElizabethFremantle.com

YALC, a view from the Green Room by Catherine Johnson

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I know this happened a month ago now but it was pretty big and very new and if - fingers crossed - Malorie Blackman's exciting new initiative takes off here's hoping it was the first of many. If there's anyone who somehow didn't hear I am talking about the YALC the first ever Young Adult Literature Conference. And actually I'm not going to write much about YALC itself, you've heard it all by now, hot and noisy and a roaring success, Patrick Ness, Holly Black, Rainbow Rowell, James Dawson, Tanya Byrne and many many more. I know it should have been cooler and quieter (and those who were there on Sunday say it was) but whatever you might think surely any initiative that puts books in the hands of readers and that has young people (and adults) queueing round the block has to be worth supporting. And it was wonderful to be just a teeny tiny part of it.

I'm not going to write about the panel sessions or the workshops or the signing queues. I simply want to tell you what it was like in the other three quarters of the venue - the whole craziness that is a massive International Film and Comic Conference. I have never been to one of these things. I know my children have - my daughter has visited  San Diego and attended the convention of conventions - so I had an idea what they were like. Even so nothing prepared me for the insanity and oddness of the Film and Comic Con.

Some of the costumes worn by the attendees were fabulous and my favourite was a young woman in a green tweed suit with attached stuffed crows - Tippi Hedren in mid bird attack.  There were plenty of space warriors and Spidermen, Batmen and Daeneryses ( or is the plural Daenerysii? from Game of Thrones in case you're not an aficionado).

me and Sarah McIntyre at YALC

So that was fun and diverting and made me wish that perhaps I'd made a little more effort - as far as the authors went  Lucy Saxon was fabulous as Captain America, and Malorie Blackman was V from V from Vendetta and Sarah McIntyre was fabulous in her Cakes in Space gear.  But what was weird, ranged across the centre of the giant exhibition hall, were the celebrities, rank upon rank sitting behind tables, selling photos and signatures, the really super famous celebrities screened in little plywood booths. Like nothing more than Victorian sideshows or 20th century Soho peepshows.

There were lists, prices, costs going up depending on fame, Stan Lee or Carrie Fisher's handshake and picture cost at least double that of some British woman who was in a couple of Doctor Who episodes in the 1980s.

There were people who'd only ever appeared as aliens, the original R2D2, a very elderly man in a tiny electric wheelchair, various very tanned and very tight smiley women.

It was very odd and from the point of view of a middle aged culturally very low church  woman (no clapping in chapel and no graven images)  not quite real or right. Obviously these conferences are a great income stream if your last decent acting job was as  4th Cyberman. And we've all (haven't we, tell me it's not just me!) sat with tiny or non existent signing queues. But at least then it's our book people want not us. Imagine if nobody wanted you?


As I was doing a workshop - shouting about historical fiction - I got to go in the green room. Here they all were at close quarters, all those people you sort of recognise and think you know - that elderly uncle you grew up with - oh no that's John Hurt. That pretty but grumpy young woman arguing with her mother - no she's out of Doctor Who. That bloke who lives on the corner, no Steven Moffat.

And most telling, on every table there were copious bottles of  pump action hand sanitiser. Because touching the plebs all day must leave you feeling a little dirty....

Catherine.





Posting Inns

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

With the rise of travel and tourism in the 18th Century, coaching inns or posting inns began to spring up all over the country. The heyday of coaching, stagecoaches and the mail coaches wasn't until some fifty years after the period I researched for Runaway, but even in 1725, well-heeled travellers were on their way places - to London, to the newly-popular resorts of Bath, Bristol, Tunbridge Wells and Harrogate and to their grand country houses.
As slowly the roads and carriages began to improve and as the upper class became wealthy unlike ever before, they wanted to travel fast.
In order to do this they needed inns that could supply them with changes of horses as they travelled - whether for their own carriage or for a hired carriage. The early stagecoaches were also established by 1725, with regular timetables on popular routes, especially in summer, and stagecoaches too required fresh horses at each stage.
The inns provided refreshments for travellers - either in their coffee rooms or tap rooms, or brought out to the carriage. The change of horses grew more and more efficient until the best inns on the busiest roads prided themselves on scarcely keeping travellers waiting before they set forth once more on their journey. There are very few of these inns surviving, they fell out of use with the advent of the railways, but the George inn in London is one that still retains its traditionally galleried yard and is worth a quick google for images.
My question writing Runaway was not so much what is was like for travellers in these inns. I've read plenty of fictional and historical-fictional accounts of that. I wanted to know what it would be like in the stables. What kind of a life was it for the horses and the stable boys?
It doesn't take a genius to work out that it was a gruelling life. In the busy season most of the horses would do more than one shift with different drivers every time and no guarantee of being well treated. But according to what I've read, it wasn't only the work that shortened most horses' lives.The quality of the stabling was far more of a factor. Often to cut costs, at least some of the stabling would be run-down and inadequate, with holes in the roof, damp and poor care. The horses who were stabled like this had very short lives indeed.
The stable boys, as far as I can work out (information is scarce) hardly fared better. Stable boys slept in the stables with the horses, so whatever the conditions were for the horses, they shared them. They worked long hours under a great deal of pressure for little pay. I don't think it was an enviable life for boy or beast.

The day I went to Buckingham Palace... by Sue Purkiss

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Well, I don't know about you, but I find it's not all that often that I get an invitation to Buckingham Palace. So when, a few months ago, I was invited to a preview of a new exhibition called 'Royal Childhood' at the Queen's Gallery, I didn't have to think very carefully before accepting.
Painting by Joseph Nash, in the Royal Collection

What I didn't realise was that it wasn't just an invitation to the exhibition; our group of bloggers was also given free run (well. more-or-less) of the state rooms, the day before the palace was due to open to the public for the summer. So there we were - just us, and what seemed like hundreds of young, enthusiastic, very helpful stewards - wandering through the rooms we've so often caught a glimpse of on television; among acres of red carpet and gold leaf, peering up at quantities of portraits and glittering chandeliers, imagining ourselves sitting down at that state banqueting table. It's all very imposing, so the children's toys and clothes which were the subject of the exhibition introduced a nice counterpoint - a reminder that the Royal Family, as well as being a symbol of state, has always been, at the same time, just that: a family.

One of the first rooms we went through was a drawing room - a formal one, where state guests are received. But in the centre (I think for the exhibition only) was a late 18th century dolls' house, made for the children of George III by a carpenter from the Royal Yacht. I longed for a dolls' house as a child, and it was one of my most anticipated Christmas presents ever; but when I'd got it, I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. You couldn't actually play with the dolls very well because the rooms were too small, and you certainly couldn't play with it alongside a friend. But you wouldn't have that problem with this house; it was generously sized and roomy, with lots of gorgeous pieces of miniature furniture, and dolls that were the right size to fit - and it looked as if it had been well-used. (We probably tend to think of George III in terms of his madness - but before he was afflicted with that, he was by all accounts an enthusiastic and very hands-on father, among other things.)

But even better, further on, was a miniature house which was presented to Princess Elizabeth on her sixth birthday by the people of Wales. It is in the grounds of the Royal Lodge at Windsor, but the kitchen (above) has been recreated for the exhibition, and a film gives you a virtual tour. It's perfect: just the right size for children, but too little for adults, and everything works - it has electric lighting and running water. Not surprisingly, it's still used today.

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The main part of the exhibition is at the end of the Queen's Gallery. This gallery, for me, was an unexpected and tremendous treat, because there were paintings there by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others of the Dutch school. This painting by Vermeer, A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman - has so much going on. In the foreground is a chequered floor, which demonstrates the mastery of perspective of the Dutch painters of interiors: it leads the eye to the girl, who sits with her back to us while the gentleman watches her. We're instantly in the middle of a drama: what is she thinking? Is she interested in the man? Is he more interested in her? If only she could turn round and wink at us, let us in on her secrets! And there's a portrait by Rembrandt of one Agatha Bas. She isn't made to look pretty: she has thin, straggly hair, a big nose and a slightly wary, resigned expression, almost as if she's a prisoner of her sober, exquisitely painted clothes - black velvet, snowy lace, and a little subtle gold embroidery. But she's so real: there she is, surely just as she was in life.

The exhibition itself has clothes worn by royal children over the last 250 years: tiny shoes, which another blogger, historical fiction writer Elizabeth Hawksley, pointed out to me were made the same for both feet -
apparently shoes made specifically for the right and left foot are quite a recent invention; little tailored coats and suits; a gorgeous fairy dress with wings. But the dress which really struck me was this one, which was Princess Victoria's first evening dress - it's so tiny!

There are also games, paintings and toys - I thought the use of colour in these paintings by Prince Charles at the age of 8-9 was really pretty impressive - though the sketches further on done by Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Vicky, look positively professional. And any child would envy the 'toy' cars which have been presented over the years. There's just something about child-sized versions of grown-up things that appeals, isn't there? Lucky royals, to have access to such perfect replicas.

There are details of the exhibition here. It's not cheap, but it's a fascinating exhibition in a unique setting, and with so much extra to see as well - especially those wonderful Dutch paintings. There's a special family pavilion with activities for children, a cafe with very splendid cakes etc, and on the way out you walk through the grounds, with a view of the palace; it's quite difficult to believe that you're right in the middle of London. I had a lovely time. My only regret is that I was in a bit of a hurry when I left, and didn't stop to replace my scruffy umbrella with a bright and shiny Buckingham Palace one. (But I did buy a toy corgi. It's for a future grandchild. No really, it is.)

My thanks to the Royal Collection Trust for inviting me!




HISTORY ALMOST DAILY by Penny Dolan.

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As this is now the second half of August – the downward slope? -  my History Girl post is very much a “staycation” kind of piece. Besides, I have work I need to get on with come tomorrow.

An interest in history does keep you uncomfortably aware of the faults and follies of the past and of the present. However, it also means that you will come across some small “history treat” or another almost every day: some book, or blog, or object, or building, or story, or place that makes the past alive.

For example, last weekend, I saw a view that I love: the wide, grassy stretch of Blackheath, where the roofs of the nearest houses peep up over the edge of the heath. The heath is one of those places in London where you can suddenly see the sky and, for a moment, imagine other times and other travellers. 

A small faded fairground was a useful reminder that Blackheath has always attracted people of various trades.


 

For much of its life, Blackheath was outside London. 

One route across the grass is named Wat Tyler Road after the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt who met the duplicitous boy-king Richard II here. 

The upland was a safe distance from the city then, although not safe for Wat and his followers.



Another road, the A2, follows the old Roman Watling Street as it made its way down to the Thames crossing at Deptford. The wide heathland is not as smooth as it seems at first glance. Plague pits are rumoured to lie beneath the faded grass and small quarries were opened up for gravel and chalk, later becoming ponds. Some of these were filled in with rubble after the WWII air raids. Blackheath is very much a place for necessary purposes.

Dark purposes too; although the A2 is a now trail of nose-to-tail vehicles but I cannot help thinking of all the carriages and horses that have crossed that slightly dangerous space. The infamous Shooter’s Hill was steep enough to slow carriages and horses and so became a favourite place for highwaymen in the 16th & 17th centuries, complete with a gibbet at the crossroads. Ready for quick dispatch of felons, perhaps?



There’s elegance here too:  Blackheath is edged with elegant old Georgian and Victorian houses, their tall windows and occasional balconies peering across the rough summit, observing the road. 

The Southern edge is marked by the mellow stone wall that borders Greenwich Park, This, of course, is home of the Royal Observatory; the sloping lawns lead down to the Queen’s House and the Old Royal Naval College and the bend in a river once full of ships.



This time, driving, we turned down winding Maze Hill, watching the late afternoon sun shine on the proud glass towers of Docklands opposite.  At the foot of Maze Hill, tucked away across Trafalgar Road, was an interesting looking old tower. The A-Z suggested two options: the almshouses of Trinity Hospital or the Greenwich Power station? The latter, we decided as we hurried onward. . . . Oh dear. Barely ten minutes to cross Blackheath but there’s already so many layers of this history to enjoy.

What about other happy “staycation” moments? A book and biography, “Billy Ruffian” that I’ll blog about another day. A local news story: some new streets in a Leeds estate have been named after “Barnbow Lasses” - the 35 young girls killed (and more injured) during an accidental explosion at the Barnbow munitions factory back in 1916.
 
There's always the regular joy of  names on maps: close to my present home are villages like Nun Monkton and Upper Poppleton and Killighalland Kettlewell and Birthwaite and - to the amusement of visitors - even a river with the Pythonesque name of the Nidd.



There’s the joy of objects remembered, things you only have to think about to feel the history tingle, and they need not be nice. Tipu’s mechanical Tiger is a gruesome favourite, first seen long ago on visits to the V&A with a favourite uncle.  Or, near home, William Burgess’s Gothic Revival church in the grounds of the Studley Royal deer park, where stone birds chase the moths and butterflies up the carved columns. Or moments: out on a walk near Ripley Castle, the excitement of finding a moated site hidden within some trees by Saddler Carr. The information board says it is the remains of a 14th Century manor recorded only as Dark Hall. Nothing more, only the strange atmosphere under the shadowy branches.

 I should also offer the distracting joys of new media: the variety of the posts within this very History Girls blog; the positive energy within the Gentle Author’s “Spitalfields Life” blog; the incredible daily saints on the Reverend Richard Coles Facebook page and the amazing myths and legends within Katherine Langrish’s Seven Miles of Steel Thistles blog. 

 And the wealth of  tv programmes about history - not just those on the Great War - including a re-run of Schama’s History of Britain, missed last time around.

 

I could go on with this plenty:  last night I was at a talk by the "Muddy Archaeologist” Gillian Hovell about all the cultures around the Mediterranean. 

The main thinking point I recall is that the art of a culture reveals what's important to the people: Phoenician pottery is decorated with ships and boats but Mycenian art chooses fighting warriors and horses.



In addition, October’s Harrogate History Festival tickets have just been released. Hooray!

This is very welcome news for those who don’t do/can't afford the whole hotel package from the 23rd to the 26th. So I need to start counting my pennies. Especially as History Girl Elizabeth Chadwick will be speaking there! 
 


So how can history be boring when it pops up around us every day and, for a writer, brings the kind of idle thoughts and interesting facts that help to fill the writing well?


Enough from me already - but now I'm wondering what are your current history joys and pleasures? And what history blogs would you recommend?  

Assuming I have some spare time in the forthcoming weeks . . .

Penny Dolan

Guns and Knives - Celia Rees

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Until very recently, I'd never shot a gun. I was rubbish, predictably, but I felt that I ought to have done so, at least once, having written about them so many times in so many books. Guns, knives, swords, weapons of all kinds, have always been a fascination and writing about them has been unavoidable, in the kind of books I write, anyway. My heroines are as likely to wield a sword as a lipstick and researching the kind of weapons they are likely to use is one of the more interesting avenues to pursue.

Anne Bonney and Mary Dead

Take these two, for example. Anne Bonney and Mary Read. Notorious pirates both and armed to the teeth. The way they are depicted tells a story in itself, not just that they are dressed as men and sailors (breasts helpfully exposed to reveal their gender), the weapons they are carrying show them to be pirates. They both carry several pistols, to be discharged and discarded for quickness of fire when boarding a vessel (an early version of the revolver - pistols were easily replaced) and short, curving cutlasses - a long straight bladed weapon was useless for close quarter fighting on board ship. They also both carry large axes. Cutting ropes was a very effective way of disabling a sailing ship and handy for opening chests and barrels. All handy information when writing about pirates. 


My original impulse for writing pirates came from this picture, Buccaneer of the Caribbean. The term buccaneer derived from the Caribbean Arawak word, buccan, a wooden frame for smoking meat. 'Buccaneer' became the name for the French hunters who used such frames to smoke the meat from feral cattle and pigs they shot on Hispaniola, when they weren't robbing Spanish ships. The long barrelled musket he carries betrays his trade. 

Buccaneer of the Caribbean  from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates

My interest continues to present day weaponry. Eighteenth Century pirates would have been astonished at the power of modern weapons, from the iconic AK 47 Kalashnikov, chosen by the Baader Meinhof Group for their logo,


to the formidable Barrett M107 .50 caliber, shoulder fired, semi automatic sniper rifle, accurate for over a mile, the .50 calibre 9'" shells capable of punching holes through concrete walls.


I had to research both guns when I was writing my contemporary novel, This Is Not Forgiveness.




My current interest is back in the recent past. The Lee Enfield -303 - again, a sniper's weapon and Christine Granville's .35 Radom pistol. Not her very one, you understand, but one like it.

Lee Enfield .303
Christine Granville's .35 Radom pistol - Imperial War Museum


Also the German MP 40 machine pistol. 

MP 40

Quite an arsenal, so it was about time I shot a gun myself.  You'll be relieved to know that no clay pigeons were harmed. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Writing historical fiction by Christina Koning

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‘I don’t like historical fiction,’ a friend said recently and, until a few years ago, I might well have agreed with him. I mean – what’s the point of setting your story in the past, when there’s so much about the present that’s worth describing? Of having to go to all the trouble of recreating a given period, with its customs and its habits of thought so very different from our own; its clothes and culinary preferences so alien; its language so unfamiliar, when there’s such richness to be found in ‘the way we live now’? Isn’t it rather a cop-out, to be writing about events long dead and buried, when you could be grappling with the stuff of the twenty-first century?

Having tried my hand at writing both ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ fiction, I have to say that I no longer see a real distinction. It’s a question of focus, that’s all. When I wrote my first novel, A Mild Suicide, I was describing events that had taken place fifteen years before, in the late 1970s – excavating, as so many début novelists do, my own history. My second book, Undiscovered Country, went even further back into the past – to the 1950s. In its depiction of the manners, clothes and cocktail parties of the era it set out, quite deliberately, to create another world – as different as possible from the one in which it was written. I’m not sure if that made it a ‘historical novel’ or not, but it was certainly a novel in which history played an important part.

Fabulous Time, my third novel, had – as the title suggests – a somewhat tricksy relationship with the past. Moving between Sussex in 1967 and Shanghai in 1911, it played around with the (fashionably 1960s) idea that time is an illusion. The ways in which time can be relived, or made to stand still – through drugs, delirium, or the action of memory – were central to the story. And of course time, in novels, is always an illusion: a construct, by the author, with events lasting years or millennia compressed so that they seem to take almost no time at all, and events lasting a single day – or a single moment – extended to fill an entire novel.

Which brings me to my first ‘straight’ historical novel, The Dark Tower. When I started writing it, more than four years ago, I didn’t think it was going to be any different from my other books. I still don’t see it as different – in the sense of ‘belonging to another genre’. It’s certainly true that it’s set in a more remote bit of the past than I’d previously dealt with (the 1880s) but its concerns remain those of my earlier work. Love, death, loss, betrayal, and the ways that people try and deal with the circumstances that life throws at them.

With my most recent novel, Variable Stars, I’ve retreated (if that’s the word) still further into the past. After the nineteenth century setting of The Dark Tower, the eighteenth century was an obvious choice, perhaps. Except that it wasn’t like that. What drew me to write this story of all-consuming obsession and unrequited love wasn’t, initially, the historical period (the 1780s) in which the events described took place, but the subject – astronomy – and the wonderful cast of eccentrics and enthusiasts of which the world of science at that time consisted.

Although of course, in writing Variable Stars, I did become as fascinated by the period as by the people. Because the more I learned about that astonishing time we call The Age of Enlightenment, the more I wanted to know. Suddenly, fragments – a line from a poem by Alexander Pope; a walk along a Spitalfields street; Romney’s portrait of Sarah Siddons – coalesced into a whole, and I started to get a picture of the world my characters inhabited.

That’s one of the delights of writing about the past. You start investigating one thing, and before you know it, you’ve turned up something else. Anecdotes. Scraps of conversation. Letters. Diary entries. The distance between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is abolished, and you start to see history, not as discrete and irreconcilable units of time, but as a continuum, of which you yourself are a part.

So if I now feel my friend was wrong to be so dismissive about historical fiction, it’s because I don’t see why it has to be separated from any other kind. After all, some of the best novels of recent years – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Helen Dunmore’s The Siege, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong – have dealt with large historical subjects, without ever losing their focus on individual lives. And to the taunt – ‘why not write about the present?’ one can only reply that writing about the past is a way of doing just that – only with a bit more ‘distance’ to sharpen one’s perspective.

'Last Look - The Truth about Crimea' by A L Berridge

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Admit it, you’re sick to death of Crimea. Writing a series set in one war has made me rather single-minded, and looking back over my time at the History Girls I seem to have written about little else. But as this will be my final post here I hope you’ll let me take just one last look at it, and tell the story no-one else in the West seems to want to tell.

They really don't. When the official narrative is that ‘Russia has stolen Crimea’, no-one wants to hear about Crimeans except as Ukraine’s ‘property’ and a pawn in the Great Game. What they forget is that Crimeans are also people, and sometimes ordinary people can change the world. In the last week of February 2014 some of them did just that, and just this once I'd like it to be recognized.

All right, February is hardly history, but I think the story fits here because of what it reveals about the historical process itself. To me it was a unique one, because I know the place, I know the people, and I was aware of what was happening before it was history. Usually I start with the official narrative and work backwards to the primary sources, but this time I’ve watched events unfolding through the eyes of the people actually living them – and been astounded to see the entirely different narrative now hailed as ‘official history’. It’s made me start to wonder how much official history we can believe in at all.

We certainly can’t rely on contemporary media. It was almost fun at first, being ‘in the know’, watching with smug superiority as a Western reporter scrambled round mispronouncing everything and screaming ‘BREAKING NEWS! A Russian frigate is approaching Sevastopol Harbour!’ The poor man obviously didn’t know there’s always a Russian frigate patrolling the harbour entrance to protect the base of the Black Sea Fleet – and sometimes a great deal more. This is a photo from my last visit there, and I hate to think what he’d have said if he’d seen this:



But it didn’t stay funny for long. The tensions were real, of course, and the forces of the Black Sea Fleet did indeed intervene to ensure the referendum went ahead, but the tone of the reportage gave everything an increasingly unfair and sinister twist. The presence of the naval base has always meant a constant stream of military traffic between Russia and Crimea, but suddenly every truck with Russian number plates was ‘proof of invasion’. Conscription in Ukraine had only ended four months ago, Crimea was obviously full of people with military experience, but still reporters wrote excitedly that the ‘little green men’ were obviously professionally trained and the Russian Army itself was invading. 

'Russian' soldiers in Crimea
I knew then what the narrative was going to be, and am not ashamed to say I felt sick. I knew this was a genuine popular uprising, my friends had been talking about it for weeks, but I also knew no-one would ever believe it. 

I switched off the news and went back to work. I’m a historian, I steer clear of ‘current affairs’ for fear of being ‘political’, and it seemed best to keep my head well down.  But even history wasn’t safe. As I already mentioned here, Facebook, Twitter, political and even historical forums were seething with ‘revised’ history which whitewashed Russians out of Crimea’s past, and if I attempted to point out the fallacies I was invariably rewarded with a response like ‘What’s the weather like in Moscow?’ or more simply ‘F*ck off, Putin-bot.’ Even historical knowledge had become suddenly dangerous if it clashed with the official narrative on Crimea.

But history is crucial to all this, and without it we can’t begin to understand why the Russians of Crimea did what they did.  I don’t want to be political, and can’t even say I agree with all of it, but here (just for once) is the story as it looks from their point of view.

It starts as a military one. I’ve already written about the Russian ancestors in Crimea before the Khanate, but when Catherine the Great conquered the peninsula in 1783 it quickly became the heartland of Russian military power. The vital warm water port of Sevastopol became home to the Black Sea Fleet, and the town itself was built to service it. 

This was the place the British, French and Turkish came to conquer in 1854 – and the incredible resistance they encountered forms the centrepiece of the Crimean War. My novels deal mainly with soldiers and battles, but the British were even more awed by the women and children who worked with their own hands to build up by night what the Allied guns destroyed by day. Tolstoy’s beautiful ‘Sevastopol Sketches’ gives a unique picture of the courage of ordinary Russians going about their daily business while the guns fired relentlessly overhead. For me his most unforgettable image is of the pavements shattered by British artillery – and two little girls playing hopscotch over the cracks.

They fought to the end. Only when the French took the ‘Malakoff bastion’ did the civilians finally retreat over a pontoon bridge to the safety of the ‘Severnaya’, but even that was an astonishingly brave operation, performed at night in such disciplined silence that not even the British at their gates knew it was going on. After eleven long months, the Siege of Sevastopol of 1854-5 has to be one of the most gallant defences history has ever known, and no-one demurred when the peace settlement of a few months later returned the town to the people who’d fought for it for so long.

Detail from 'Last Look' by Franz Roubaud - The Evacuation of Sevastopol
That’s surely enough military glory for anyone – but in WWII Crimea had to do it all over again. I must stress that not all Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars collaborated with the Nazis, but the fact remains that the only significant resistance to Germany’s invasion of 1941-4 was made by the Russian people of Crimea. The role of Kerch is often ignored, but the resistance held out for months in the obscurity of the catacombs until they were betrayed by locals and murdered underground by poison gas.

Russian soldiers and civilians in the Kerch catacombs
But predictably the brunt was borne by Sevastopol, as they endured their second great Siege. For more than nine long months they held out, suffering sickness and starvation as well as bombardment, and in tying up Germany’s 11th Army for so long they played their part on saving Stalingrad too. Civilian casualties were appalling, and historian Sergey Kiselev claims that no fewer than one in ten of the Red Army’s losses in WWII fell in Crimea.

Memorial of the Eternal Flame in Sevastopol
This matters, even today. Britain hasn’t been invaded for centuries and it’s hard for us to understand, but when a people fight this hard to protect their home, then their sacrifice gives the place a kind of sanctity nothing can erase.

And the people of Sevastopol have a right greater even than that. When Stalin ordered it rebuilt in 1948 he made it a condition that those who’d fled the siege could only return if they gave their own labour for free. So they did. Lawyers, bankers, and accountants took off their ties, rolled up their sleeves, and turned to brick-laying, women cooked, cleaned, carried, and did administrative work, while some even worked cheerfully alongside the men. The beautiful city of Sevastopol that we know today was mostly built by its own people – and what possible right of ownership can be greater than that?

The sense of this is almost palpable even today. On my first visit my guide eagerly dragged me across the Catherina Square to inspect the wall of an administrative building which her grandfather had built himself. But she was proud of the whole city, and it was impossible not to notice how immaculately clean it was kept, how free of litter and graffiti. Child of the Cold War that I am, I assumed this was the same kind slavish obedience to totalitarian states that enabled Mussolini to make ‘the trains run on time’, but my guide (and now good friend) saw it differently. ‘It’s our city,’ she said, puzzled by my lack of understanding. ‘Would you write rude words on the walls of your home?’

Except, of course, that it wasn’t ‘their’ city any more, and the closer I grew to these people the more I began to understand their frustrated yearning for recognition. No-one asked their opinion when in 1954 Khruschev gifted the whole of Crimea to Ukraine, and the old man I asked about it had tears in his eyes as he described what it felt like. ‘Like a sack of wheat,’ he said, blowing his nose noisily. ‘They gave us away like a sack of wheat.’

Maybe it didn’t matter much back in the days of the USSR when the distinctions were more administrative than actual, but when the Soviet Union collapsed and Crimea was suddenly in danger of finding itself in a completely separate country then it mattered very much indeed. Russia finally recognized that, and in 1991 it gave Crimea the chance to vote themselves the status of an autonomous republic which would be independent of Ukraine. Crimeans voted in favour by an overwhelming 94%, and Russia was confident it had given the peninsula all the protection it needed.

So it had – if Ukraine had only respected it. Crimea obviously had its own doubts, and in 1992 sought to clarify its position by announcing full self-government with its own constitution, but Ukraine denounced the movement as part of an ‘imperial disease’ and responded by creating a ‘Ukrainian presidential representative in Crimea’ – a back-door way of asserting sovereignty. Tension mounted on both sides, but only when Russia had safely signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 did Ukraine take the radical (and illegal) step of abolishing Crimea’s own presidency and tearing up its constitution. From this point on, Crimea was ipso facto part of the new Ukraine, whether it liked it or not.

It’s hard to imagine how that felt. It was at least good news for Crimean Tatars, and those who had been unfairly deported by Stalin after WWII were finally allowed to return, but the Russian people of Crimea were cut off from their history, their heritage and nationality, and suddenly became a minority in a land that basically hated them. The hatred would be understandable if it were directed against Stalin or the old USSR, but it was aimed at living people whose only crime was to be born of at least one Russian parent. 

There were economic hardships too. As a Westerner fully aware of the oppressions of the old USSR I’d always imagined independence would be a wonderful thing – but it was only when I went to Crimea that I realized the price that had to be paid for it. Ukraine had kept the worst aspects of the old system (the corruption that saw the rise of the oligarchs) but had quietly shuffled off the good bit – the complete social security that kept a loyal citizen safe for life. Pensions were halved. The free healthcare for which Russians had paid taxes all their lives was suddenly only available to those willing and able to pay bribes. I felt shockingly uncomfortable talking to people whose relatives had died or were dying for the lack of medicine or simple operations we in Britain take for granted.

All Ukraine was suffering, of course, but the predominantly Russian areas of south and east did seem to be hit the hardest. Even a soldier from Ukraine’s own ATO had to confess in a recent interview that he’d never seen poverty on the level he saw in the Donbass, and I can testify myself to what it was like in Crimea. I remember the flavoured water that passed for soup in some of the ‘restaurants’, and how I waited ten minutes for my guide to haggle for her husband’s supper – which turned out to be a single cabbage. It was never anything like as bad as Africa, but seemed all the worse for existing in a magnificent European city with university-educated people just like those I’d meet at home.
 
But as history has shown us in Nazi Germany, economic hardships can lead to a rise in nationalism and the need for easy scapegoats. In came Svoboda and the Right Sector, and by 2010 Ukrainian MP Irina Farion was already telling 5-year old schoolchildren that if they wanted to use their Russian names they would need to pack their bags and move to Russia. I heard all about this and the Nazi taunts of ‘Moskals!’ ‘Vatniks!’ on my first visit to Crimea, and it was already clear that something was going to have to break.



But worse even than this was Ukraine’s creeping desire to smear Russia’s past military heroism, to elevate Stepan Bandera to hero status, and thus make traitors of the gallant men and women of Crimea who gave their lives fighting Nazism. This would be appalling anywhere – but in Crimea it’s unbearable. Crimea, where Russian guide Irina Niverova recently explained to the National Post that “Every stone and every tree… is covered with the blood of brave Russians, and that is what is in our hearts.”

'In Our Hearts' Sevastopol May 9th - children march with pictures of their ancestors
In their hearts and everywhere on their land. Crimean war graves are beautifully kept, their memorials immaculate and flower-strewn, and May 9th celebrates a history of military heroism which is second to none. How could a people like this allow their past sacrifices to be whitewashed away? How could they see the memory of their dead brothers, fathers, grandfathers spat on by the very people they died to protect? And make no mistake about this – that’s what’s happening. I already posted this videofrom Lviv in 2011 where Russian veterans have the St George ribbons ripped from their chests as they go to lay flowers on their comrade’s graves.

Then came Maidan.


For Crimea, Maidan was an outrage. Yanukovich may well have been as corrupt as his predecessors, but he was the first to improve Ukraine’s economic state, he at least acknowledged the voices of the regions, and he was the legitimately elected President for whom Crimea had overwhelmingly voted. How would we feel in Britain if the losing side of a General Election set London on fire and overthrew our chosen government by force? How would we feel if we saw American politicians encouraging this, and heard leaked telephone calls in which foreign powers decided what our own government should be?

Crimea felt all this, and more.  I have no idea when the first activists made contact with Russia, and none of my friends were ever involved at this level, but everyone knew they had to do something. The West wouldn’t help. It talked a lot about human rights, but every Russian in Crimea knew what The Telegraph has only just admitted– that some Maidan protestors were being funded not only by the US, but also the EU. Russia mightn’t help either, and she’d never officially taken Transnistria under her protection. In January this year Russian Crimeans knew that somehow they'd have to help themselves.

The timeline of how they did it is a matter of public record, but it begins on February 23rd, and no single western outlet has explained what it was that lit the fuse.

It was this. The ‘Khersun Pogrom’. On 20th February Russian Crimeans made their own protest at Maidan, and ‘The Kherson Pogrom’ is the phrase used to describe the events of their homecoming. The western media blackout on it has been absolute, but for the first time there’s a video available with English subtitles to tell us what happened on the night of February 20th 2014. Please ignore the political slogans framed round the narrative, but the primary source material both eyewitness interviews and original gloating footage shot by the perpetrators themselves.


The Right Sector. They attacked the homecoming convoy, burnt the buses, then beat, stripped, and humiliated the people. They almost certainly did worse than that, but all we can say with certainty is that seven of the Crimeans on those buses have never been seen again. When the survivors were finally released the Right Sector thugs taunted them with the threat that they would soon be coming to Crimea itself – and then they would ‘do worse’.

Nor were these empty threats. By 23rd February Yanukovich had been driven out and the new (unelected) government was already making their intentions clear. The raft of new bills included laws to make Holocaust denial legal, to ban Communist Party activity, to make a member of Svoboda the new Prosecutor General, and to deny the rights of minorities (including Russians) to use their own native languages.

Crimea acted. They rallied in their tens of thousands in Simferopol and swore to form their own independent administration, but still no-one quite dared to take it further. Protests were all right, no worse than Maidan had done, but nothing was yet irrevocable. 

Until 27th February when Channel 5 broadcast a leaked conversation between the leaders of Ukraine’s two Neo-Nazi organizations – People’s Deputy Oleh Tyahnybok of Svoboda, and Dmytro Yarosh of the Right Sector.


With apologies for the poor Google translation, here’s a sample of their conversation:

It’s not just idle talk. These are men with significant power in the new regime, and they are talking of Crimea as an immediate target for a punitive operation.

What could Crimeans do? What would you do? History has shown us all too tragically what happened to the Jews of Nazi Germany who sat obediently at home waiting for the axe to fall, and Crimeans weren’t about to make the same mistake. They turned off their televisions, dug out old uniforms from their conscription days, and went out to take the airport while they called on Russia for help.



I don’t want to be naïve, and certainly don’t believe Putin had been sitting idle all this time, but the fact remains that it was Crimeans who made the first move, and Russia’s ‘intervention’ would have had small chance of success without them. No-one can say exactly when Russian troops left their base in Sevastopol, but of the men who initially guarded the borders from Kyiv intervention, some were veterans, some existing members of Ukraine’s own army, some were Berkut – and a great many were ordinary civilians. I even know two of them. I can’t give their names for obvious reasons, but one was a historical re-enactor who went out in his Red Army uniform with a replica gun, and the other was his wife.

The western media wasn’t having it, and every day we heard more screams of ‘Russian troops in Crimea!’ One of my friends sent me a tiny video of  Sevastopol women bringing food and cigarettes to their men on the ‘front line’, but it didn’t look very convincing so I’m afraid I didn’t publicize it.



I wish I had now, because there’s actually something endearingly amateur about it that sets the tone for the whole affair. This was not the slick Kremlin operation the mainstream media would like us to think, but a case of ordinary people showing extraordinary courage in order to save their land.

And they did it. Yes, Russia intervened, Russia allowed the Black Sea Fleet to secure the borders, and Russia finally accepted Crimea into the Federation, but none of that should blind us to the people who really made it happen. History isn’t only about kings and queens and governments, but sometimes it’s made by ordinary people too.

That's all I wanted to show here. In my own novels the Russians of Sevastopol have to be the 'villains', but perhaps that's why I felt I had to do this one last post before I leave. The media ignores them, history will almost certainly ignore them, but even if it's only here in this one blog, I did just want the voices of the Russians of Crimea to be heard.

***
A.L. Berridge's dreadfully neglected website is still here, and one day she'll get round to updating it.

Meanwhile a huge thank you to everyone here at the History Girls for lettingme bore all for so long. I've loved being part of it, and hope you'll let me sneak back in for comments.

And just think - you may never need to hear the word Crimea AGAIN!!
 







Josselin by Imogen Robertson

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I’ve been away on my holidays. This gives me the chance to put up a picture of the town I went to, Josselin in Brittany. Among other things, it has this magnificent castle.




You can read about it in detail here. The castle is still a private home - that of the Duke of Rohan - but during the summer months tourists are allowed in to the grounds and some of the main rooms on the ground floor. It is a rather wonderful place - that fantastic war-ready frontage looking out over the Oust - the river used to flow right along the castle walls until the Nantes-Brest canal was built - and on the inside a riot of renaissance stone work. 

There is also a lovely market every Saturday morning, an interesting and ancient church and a profusion of half-timbered buildings. 

So of course we had a wonderful time and I learned just enough about the history of Brittany to realise I really need to read The Discovery of France by Graham Robb again. 

Then there’s a second, personal layer of history overlaying our time there. My parents first bought a house in Josselin in 1989. It was a complete wreck - ‘épouvantable’ the estate agent whispered ominously, and I remember my Dad peering about the place on the day they signed the contracts saying ‘Oh Celia, what have we done?’ 

My brother, a student at the time, and I, celebrating my 16th birthday, thought it was marvellous. There were trunks in the attic with address labels still glued to them and shreds of purple wallpaper hanging off the walls. There were pans with some strange pottage preserved in the kitchen and plastic cladding hiding the 17th century beams in the living room. My Dad discovered while taking measurements for his plans that there wasn’t a single straight wall or right angle in the place.

Mum and Dad threw themselves into the reconstruction and rebuilding, taking off the modern facade to expose the half-timbering, taking down the barn in the back yard and getting rid of the wall paper (despite my protestations). I spent the following summer with my best friend, Emma, scrubbing the beams in the sitting room, and my 17th birthday polishing the floor in the same room. Mum and Dad found that the house opposite was going for a song and bought that too. I think they’d just run out of things for me to scrub. 

This summer was a bit special then - it marked 25 years since Mum and Dad bought the first house we had a big party to celebrate. Afterwards Mum said all their friends had been talking about what good French my brothers and I speak, but she said it with a certain air of suspicion, as if we’d been keeping it a secret. Mostly though the specialness came from having so much of the family there, we missed one of my nephews, Gregory who was working away in Belgrade, but the rest were all with us  - from Philip who is twenty-three and rather brilliant, to Tessa who is one and the only girl. She seems like a tough cookie though.  Darko looks like an elf and Ranko is very handsome and obsessed with his tan. Adam’s two sons, Dylan and Theo, made sure we played proper games every night - especially the werewolf one - and after a string of friends and boyfriends over the years, I distinguished myself by bringing a husband who sees cooking for 14 people as a really good time.

Places with which we have a long association hold a history that is both personal and universal. There is nothing, for instance, like walking by the Hotel du Chateau where Emma and I celebrated getting our GCSE results to trigger the sort of Proustian reactions so useful to any writer. There is nothing like then walking through the thickness of the castle walls to make you think of the teenagers celebrating their own small victories a hundred or five hundred years ago.

www.imogenrobertson.com




Art Lovers

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It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry.... If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
EZRA POUND, letter to his mother, 1909

Thinking of this post, I did a search for 'art lovers' (with varied success), then 'writers and marriage'. Alarmingly, the first few posts suggested were not how gloriously creative life can be, but - to paraphrase - '41 Reasons You Should Not Marry Writers'. (Or Artists). 'Why Writers Should Not Marry'. 'A Spouse's Survival Guide ...' You get the picture. Which begs the question: what's so hard about being the partner of a creative person?

I'm just back from a recharging visit home, and a couple of literary festivals in Cornwall and Hampshire, talking about the inspiration for the first two novels. The idea of writing about a creative partnership in my next book is bubbling away at the back of my mind, and I was interested to notice again that none of the writers I met had partners who were writers or artists. Not one. Is it a case of when writers or artists pair up with their peers it can be very, very good - or totally disastrous?

I'm hoping people will offer up suggestions of successful pairings - creative and romantic partnerships fascinate me. Lee Miller and Man Ray, for example, whose brief relationship burnt out but left a great legacy of photographs. Shrugging off the mantle of surrealist muse, Miller went on to have an incredible career as a war photographer.



Hemingway's romantic life has inspired some wonderful novels lately - Paula McLain's 'The Paris Wife' and Naomi Wood's 'Mrs Hemingway.' 

Hemingway and Gellhorn

In 'Die letzten Tage des Sommers', just published in Germany, I wrote about the summer Andre Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba spent as refugees in the south of France during WW2, sheltering in a fishing shack in Martigues. Breton was the magnetic heart of the surrealist movement, Lamba a mercurial painter who was earning a living as a nude underwater dancer in Paris when they met. It was a passionate and equal pairing tested to its limits by the danger they faced during the war.


 Andre Breton

 Jacqueline Lamba (left) with Frida Kahlo

Kahlo and Rivera are another interesting pair - perhaps the secret to creative and romantic success is space (in their case, separate houses if not tea three times a week as Pound suggested). I'd like to think creative partnerships are about inspiration, challenge and support but perhaps finding balance in a relationship is difficult enough without throwing professional competition into the mix. 

How many truly successful pairings between writers, artists and musicians do you think there have been through history - who are your favourite art lovers?

Die letzen Tage des Sommers published August 2014 by Piper



History and Bigotry, by Leslie Wilson

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Paul von Hindenburg, one of the two generals
commanding German troops on 23rd August
1914 at Allenstein

A hundred years ago today was the start of the battle of Tannenberg. It was fought at Allenstein,(Polish Olsztyn), in what was then East Prussia, which is actually 30km away from Tannenberg but in the fifteenth-century battle of Tannenberg, the Teutonic Knights were defeated by the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania, and this battle was renamed in order to wipe out what was seen as shame.

In the 20th-century Battle of Tannenberg, the Second Russian Army was annihilated, and the subsequent Battle of the Masurian Lakes consolidated that defeat. It was also notable for being a battle in which trains were used to transport corps of German soldiers about; the Russians could not use railways, because their trains used a different gauge from German rolling stock. So technology entered the war.
I should be very surprised to read any mention of this in any of the papers today, or read that it would appear on any of the commemorative broadcasts, though it was strategically so important, and the human cost was so enormous (78,000 Russians killed or wounded, 12,000 Germans. 92,000 Russian soldiers became prisoners of war. The Russian general shot himself.) I have been looking at the schedules and not one that I have seen (readers of this blog are very welcome to point out anything I have not noticed) has dealt with the German experience of World War 1, though there have been many which have dealt with hitherto unnoticed contributors or combatants. But these are all on 'our side.'
I find this deeply depressing. I fear it only reinforces the old jingoistic stereotyping which has made the war something to be celebrated, (particularly by our current Prime Minister) as a war 'we' were right to fight, which validates current and future wars. It makes me think of the memorial I saw in a church in Dorset, which bore the quotation from the Bible: 'He who loses his life for my sake shall gain it.' The radical rabbi Jesus, who said: 'Love your enemy', would surely have been appalled by the suggestion that the mass killing of WW1 was done for his sake.
I would love to see the British exploring the German and Austrian experience of the war, while the Germans and Austrians look at what it was like for the British, the French and the Russians (and all the other combatants). This might begin to change people's mindsets and perhaps ward off further wars, with all the death and misery they involve.
In contrast to the Dorset memorial however, what I have seen on many visits to Germany is the transformation of war memorials, originally erected to glorify 19th-century military victories, into what is called a 'Mahnmal' or a warning memorial, complete with an inscription pointing out the evil of waging aggressive war. Clearly, this is a reaction to the glorification of war in Nazi Germany, and the murderous bellicosity of Adolf Hitler (he was furious after the Munich agreement, for 'peace in our time' was absolutely not what he wanted).
Mahnmal in the Luebbener Hain National
Park in Brandenburg. The plate reads:
Millions of victims of two world wars
call for peace.
Photo: J-H Janssen
However, in spite of all the work that has been done, I was horrified to see that there was an arson attack on a synagogue in Wuppertal this July (the old Wuppertal synagogue was burned down during the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938). The attack, and the hostile anti-semitism which German Jews are now suffering, is thought to be the work of Muslims (FREE PALESTINE was daubed on the walls), but nevertheless there seems to be a resurgence of anti-semitism among other Germans. Part of this may be the legacy of the Communist state, which dismissed the Holocaust as the work of 'the fascists' and thus never engaged with it, as eventually happened in the West. Be that as it may, Jews are being attacked and insulted again in Germany - but not only there, or even chiefly there. It is happening all over Europe and also in Britain.

Clearly, in an atmosphere where racism is becoming respectable again, prejudice against Jews will arise, as well as against Muslims, other Asians, Afro-Caribbean people, Eastern Europeans, and so on. But there is an anti-semitism that is not confined to extreme right-wingers; it can be heard among members of the liberal left.
It is 'justified' by the actions of the state of Israel in Gaza. Israel, according to this narrative, is a gigantic bully, supported by America, powerful, nuclear-armed, aggressive and murderous, and comparisons are even made with Nazi Germany. There is an assumption that all Jews, wherever they are, support all Israel's actions, or are responsible for them. Karl Sabbagh, replying in the Guardian letters page to Jon Henley's account of anti-semitism in Europe, says that since Israel describes itself as 'the Jewish state', 'Jews can hardly complain that the actions of the self-identified Jewish state are sometimes criticised as Jewish actions.'
Photo: Doronef via Wikimedia Commons

Leaving aside the crashing lapse of logic in this statement, it does typify this kind of anti-semitism. Jews, according to this argument, have no right to their own individual views and opinions; they must be judged by the actions of the Israeli government. So the Jew you see in the local supermarket is made responsible for the deaths of children in Gaza. And this kind of hostile (and simplistic) assumption is being made by people who condemn other forms of racism. Yet I know that many Jews (including Israeli citizens) are appalled by the bombardment of Gaza and have wanted ja just peace with Palestinians for years and years. 

What is needed here is a sense of history (though what I have been talking about is the last unrolling of a dismal historical scroll), for that image of Israel is itself a monstrous, deceptive construct of self-righteous prejudice. I know that many people (including some who write to the letters page of the Guardian) may dismiss what I am going to say as specious, yet it is not.
pogrom, Bialystock, 1906, by Henry Nowodworski
(1875-1930)

Zionism began as a result of the pogroms in Russia and the Dreyfus case, at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries; the state of Israel was created in the aftermath of the Holocaust and a war that was emphatically not fought for the Jews. The British, for example, were reluctant to take in Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany (though most people believe otherwise) and though I was always told how horrified Britons were by the documentary about Belsen, I watched that documentary through, at the Imperial War Museum, and at no point in the commentary was it stated that the dead and dying people in the camp were mainly Jews. Anne Karpf writes extensively about this blanking-out of the Holocaust, post-war, in The War After. And no sooner was the war over than Mosley and his fascists were out on the streets of London, attacking London's Jews (many of them ex-servicemen) while the police turned away and did nothing.
Furthermore, the Nazis found eager accomplices in most of the countries they invaded; France, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, the Ukraine spring to mind. It is that historical indifference or murderous hostility that fires Israel's determination to defend herself. And as soon as Israel came into existence, its neighbours declared war on it, and many of them are still determined to wipe it out. To be an Israeli has been, from the outset, to be the object of attack, and it helps nobody to dismiss that fact.
This is not to deny the historic and present suffering of Palestinians. For what my personal opinion, as an outsider, is worth, I wish all success to the enormously courageous organisations which have spent years working to bring Israelis and Palestinians together. Some of these have been set up by people who have lost loved ones in the conflict, and are still prepared to enter into dialogue with their counterparts on the other side. We hear little about these initiatives in the newspapers, just as, during the Northern Ireland conflict, the media told us little about the work of groups and individuals, without which the peace process would have stood little chance.
Daniel Barenboim wrote movingly in the Guardian last month: 'Only through trying to understand the other side’s plight can we take a step towards each other.' Those of us who stand outside the Middle Eastern conflict should surely consider the plight of Israelis as well as Palestinians, and Barenboim's words also apply to the WW1 commemorations, for the heirs of the conflict should surely do all they can to learn about and understand the plight of all participants in that horrific tragedy.

FINDING 'ALIENOR': The Journey so far by Elizabeth Chadwick.

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 It doesn't seem a minute since I was sitting over lunch with my agent and editor discussing my next project, which we decided would be three novels on Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Her life story had been on my radar for quite some time while I worked on other projects in which she often appeared in cameo roles. The more mini performances she had, the more my curiosity grew and the more I wanted to write about her.  It didn't matter to me or my editor that a few other authors had recently written about Eleanor. She was their particular version, as was right, and mine would be mine - and very different.

Following on from THE SUMMER QUEEN, September sees the hardcover publication of the second book in the trilogy, THE WINTER CROWN and I am currently  working on the final book The Autumn throne. (we decided on a seasonal theme, although without the seasons in order and just three of them - like a gestation). How time has flown.  

So, how has it been for me and Eleanor so far? 

The first thing I did to make my Eleanor different to the majority was to change her name to Alienor, which is the French version and how her name was written and spoken in her own lifetime.  One source tells us it is supposed to mean 'Another Aenor' since Aenor was her mother's name. Another version (the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, written within 20 years of her death and from eye witness reports) says that it was an amalgam of 'Pure' and 'Gold'.  Personally I don't see why both cannot be correct. It wouldn't be the first time a double pun has been used. The bottom line was that I chose to go with the version of the name that was hers from birth.

Mural of hunting party in the chapel of St Radegone, Chinon. The middle
figure is said by some to be Eleanor of Aquitaine. Others say the figure is
probably male and represents the Young King with his three brothers.
photo courtesy of John Phillips.
I soon discovered when trying to find out what she looked like, that everyone had their own notions and that her biographers played fast and loose with the none existent facts and invented notions of her appearance either from their own fantasies or from enthusiastic but misplaced reliance on questionable evidence. You will hear it mooted that Alienor's visage may be viewed on a mural in the chapel of St Radegonde at Chinon, but such evidence is conflicting and far from proven with points argued for and against her identity as middle crowned figure.

Some biographers envisage her as a sultry brunette with a superb figure, others declare that she was a blue-eyed blond, and still others belive she was a green-eyed red-head. All of this is speculation without proof since no description of her colouring has come down to us.   A scrap of evidence exists in that she had a paternal ancestor named William 'L'Etoupe' which means 'Straw Head' i.e. he had fair hair, but who is to say he passed it down to his several times great grandaughter?  Nevertheless,since this is at least family evidence, I have made my Alienor blue-eyed and dark blond.

Appearance was only the start of the dilemmas. There was Alienor's age when she married her first husband. Older biographies say she was fifteen. Newer research with better scholarship puts her at thirteen. Twelve was the age of consent for a girl in the Middle Ages, and so Alienor was within that parameter, but the difference between thirteen and fifteen, even though only two years is a telling one. Alienor is often portrayed as a sexy, controlling siren, in charge of her own destiny and able to wrap her seventeen year old first husband around her little finger. But when you look at it from the angle of her being thirteen, her father newly in his grave, and adult movers and players surrounding her like vultures round a kill on the plains of the Serengeti, then you have a very different scenario on your hands.

I found myself constantly having to make choices between opposing takes on situations that meant big changes for the way I portrayed Alienor. For example some biographers had her gadding off on the second crusade with wild enthusiasm - she couldn't wait to escape the stultifying confines of the French court. Others more conservatively suggested that actually she might rather have stayed at home and ruled France in Louis' absence and was in fact coerced into going.  There's no proof either way. I chose the path of reluctance for my Alienor because it seemed to better suit the person I was seeing as I read between, through and under the lines.

Another controversy - I think everyone agrees she was controversial - is the supposed affair she had with her uncle Raymond of Poitiers. I have spoken of this before, and you can read my take on the business here I would add that I am delighted that a recent biography of Melisande of Jerusalem, a contemporary of Alienor's, written by historian Sharan Newman, agrees with my take on the matter that it is highly unlikely  Alienor slept with her uncle.

Effigy head of Henry II. Cast Court version V&A
It was interesting when I came to the matter of Eleanor first meeting the future Henry II in Paris in 1151 where she and the 18 year old young Duke of Normandy are thought to have arranged a marriage alliance between them as soon  as her marriage with her current husband Louis VII was annulled. Biographers have speculated that they fell for each other in Paris and that it was lust at first sight, never mind the skulduggery of interesting politics.  I took a step back and asked myself about the situation. Alienor was indeed in the act of procuring an annulment from Louis (or he from her, depends who you read) and she would need to marry again in haste once the deed was done. A rich woman still of childbearing age and with vast lands to her name, could not remain unwed for long. Either by rape or by negotiation she would be a bride again on a very fast turnaround.

Effigy plaque of Geoffrey le Bel
The eighteen year old Henry came to court with his father to negotiate on various political issues. His father at the time was thirty eight and Count of Anjou. A man in the prime of his life, renowned for his good looks and education. Henry had been conceived when he was just nineteen years old. For decades he and his family had been trying to draw Aquiitaine and Poitou into their field of influence. Geoffrey had tried to betrothe Henry to one of Alienor and Louis's daughters some years earlier, but the plan had fallen through when Louis had turned the offer down. Now, here under their noses was a golden opportunity. My question is: Who actually brokered that marriage deal?  Geoffrey le Bel who was still head of the household, the pater familias and in charge of operations, or his 18 year old son, still in training, accomplished though he was? Here was a woman nine years older than Henry, a woman and queen with whom Geoffrey had been accustomed to dealing for almost 15 years. Alienor at that point was of Geoffrey's circle, not Henry's. She had been queen of France while Henry was still tied to his nurse's apron strings.  That they met each other and were not averse to the match is plain, and that they went on to  to produce at least 8 children during their marriage, some at relentless one year intervals, shows that they were compatible, but Geoffrey's very presence at the French court as head of his household and the past history of the Angevin counts to make that link with Aquitaine, tells a story of political wheeling and dealing that seems to me to be obvious, but often overlooked.

As a caveat, Geoffrey is said to have warned Henry against the match with Alienor, declaring he had already slept with her and therefore the union was blasphemous in the eyes of God, but I suspect that the chronicler in question was on a mission to blacken Alienor's name and call Henry into disrepute because he had quarrelled with him. I also think he may have got the wrong man, but that's a whole different path of speculation!  It stands to reason that Geoffrey, known to be eager for the alliance of Aquitaine and Anjou, would wholeheartedly approve the match. Of course, having an uppity older wife himself in the Empress Matilda, he may have cautioned Henry about just how to treat such a woman!

THE WINTER CROWN, the middle novel of my Alienor trilogy, covers Alienor's marriage to Henry II as far as 1174 when he brought her to what is now Old Sarum and imprisoned her there and thereabouts under varying degrees of house arrest for 15 years for her part in supposedly encouraging his sons to rebel against him. It has been a fascinating novel to write and the controversies and differing opinions surrounding Alienor have continued.  There's the view that she turned against Henry because he deserted her for his mistress Rosamund Clifford, but that doesn't hold water when viewed against Alienor's political astuteness and the fact that whores and concubines were a natural part of court life.  Far more likely to have driven her to oppose Henry, was his attempt to annex Aquitaine to England, Normandy and Anjou by underhand means. He marginalised her and he sought to undermine her power. That's what it was about, not a spat over a favourite concubine.
Then there's the suggestion that she ignored her children and wasn't much of a mother. Again, that doesn't hold water in terms of the fact that wherever she travelled she usually had at least two of them with her. While in the usual medieval aristocratic sense the children were attended by a plethora of wet nurses and carers to whom the children became attached, Alienor was generally there in the background somewhere.  How she and the children interacted and behaved with each other is not known, but all of them in their early lives at least had contact with her, except perhaps Joanna and John who would have been little more than toddlers when they were sent to Fontevraud while Alienor dealt with matters political. Even so she had contact with these youngest children at a later stage in their lives, giving sanctuary to one in a time of distress and need and fighting tooth and nail for the other.

I am now in the middle of the first draft of THE AUTUMN THRONE, the final novel in the trilogy, and wondering what other discoveries and controversies await me as I research and write. I am enjoying finding out, and going off the well worn paths to find fresh trails!








TESTAMENTS OF VERA by Eleanor Updale

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This month I was given the highly enjoyable task of talking about Vera Brittain’s great book Testament of Youth at the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Don’t worry,  I’m not going to reprise my entire talk here, but I thought I might share some thoughts with you.
Like many other people, I was first alerted to Testament of Youth in 1979, when the BBC produced a superb (and surprisingly loyal) television adaptation, with Cheryl Campbell playing Vera.


In case you don’t know the book, Testament of Youth is autobiographical, but it reads with the verve of a novel.  At its heart is the journey from the idealism of the early days of the First World War through the heartbreak of losing friends and the horror and drudgery of work as a VAD nurse, to Vera’s espousal of the pacifist convictions which she held for the rest of her life.
The book was published in 1933, and was an instant best seller - as is clear from the cover of my copy, an edition published two years later.  I love the classic yellow Gollancz cover.


 I think that’s one of the most intriguing publisher’s blurbs I’ve ever seen:  One of the two most famous autobiographies?  Which was the other?  And what comic scene at the Gollancz office resulted in that wording?
I suppose it’s likely to have been another book published by Gollancz, which narrows things down a bit. My money is on Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which also came out in 1933.


But Victor Gollancz may have been showing generosity to some other publishing house (Goodbye to All That?) or even looking abroad (Mein Kampf?).  If any of you have ideas, do let me know. 

To get a better feeling for Brittain, I looked at many of her other books too.  She wrote novels (some of them transparently based on her own life) but was best known for her polemics and memoirs.  


Brittain must be an early example of the cultivation of an author as a brand, with new titles harking back to her first big success.  During her lifetime, and after her death in 1970, the names of her books, and posthumous compilations of their source material, involved various permutations of the the words ‘Testament', ‘Chronicle;, and ‘Youth'.
For example, Testament of a Peace Lover (letters written in the Second World War) came out in 1988, eighteen years after Vera’s death,  Her collected Journalism from the 20s to the 60s was given the title Testament of a Generation. Vera’s own wartime diary, on which Testament of Youth was based, was not available to the general public until 1981, when it was published under the title Chronicle of Youth.  
Testament of Youth's searing account of the deaths of Vera's brother Edward, her fiancé Roland Leighton and their close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow was partly responsible for the popular concept of a ‘lost generation’ which has been so widely questioned recently. All those men were born in 1895, two years after Vera, who saw them through a youthful prism of devotion and loss.  Their letters to each other  were published in 1998, twenty-eight years after Vera’s own death, under the title Letters From a Lost Generation

It’s worth following Vera’s story beyond the end of Testament of Youth. Her account of her friendship with the novelist, Winifred Holtby (continued in Testament of Experience and Testament of Friendship) gives compelling insight into the lives of the women who served in and survived the war.  It’s also an intriguing picture of one particular household - with much of Vera’s self-styled ‘semi detached’ marriage to her academic husband ‘G’ Catlin conducted with Winifred on hand under the marital roof.
But it’s the collections of journalism  and political polemic that say most about Vera Brittain the feminist and pacifist.  A particularly remarkable book - published in 1942, with a striking cover designed by Arthur Wragg - is Humiliation with Honour.  


It’s a collection of letters Vera wrote to her children, John and Shirley (later Shirley Williams) about why she was sticking to her pacifist principles despite the rise of the Nazis, and the public vilification she was experiencing because of that stance.

Vera Brittain was, of course remarkable among the women of her generation. You can see that just by looking at the photographs in some of the books, where she is often alone in groups of men agitating for political reform or international peace. But away from the public realm, she was not alone in her in her refusal to be cowed by the conventional treatment of women in her time.  Many who shared her approach to life, and read her books, were working and/or raising families across the land.  Their daughters were the generation of women by whom many of us were taught - a generation which, to my mind, was unfairly underestimated by the feminists of the late 20th century.  The image of the submissive, air-headed household drudge was not always accurate. Many of the women who found themselves teaching in the1960s would today be running companies, or ruling the country.  We were very lucky to have them as teachers, wherever we went to school.  That’s a subject I may return to in another blog, soon.
__

PS A note for those who remember my earlier post about Catherine Sinclair.
I did go to her memorial on the 150th anniversary of her death.  It was a very rainy day. I laid some flowers, and my fellow author, Vivian French placed a little doll there, in honour of her books for children. 



www.eleanorupdale.com


Scarlet Beauties as ancient as Olive Drupes by Carol Drinkwater

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Flowering Pomegranate tree in our garden in the South of France
Various parts of a Pomegranate

Tangerines remind me of childhood Christmases. Can you recall that tangy aroma once you’d pierced the skin with your thumb, peeled it away and the juice began to spray out like an ignited sparkler? Dates were rare in my childhood home. Amber-coloured like big sad eyes, dry and sugary, they arrived in elongated oval boxes, shaped as though to contain school pencils. Each lid had a coloured illustration of a one-humped camel, head held high, clopping over sand.
“It’s a desert the camel is crossing,” explained my father who had spent his war with the RAF gang show entertaining the troops in Africa and the Middle East. He regularly recounted tales to me of Arabian nights, magic and mischief in hot climates and he frequently imitated haunting nocturnal sounds of the desert. His stories, true or exaggerated, gave me a hunger for travel, a desire to uncover the roots of where these exotic foods we ate on special occasions were originally sourced. I longed to hitch a ride with one of those caravans.

It is not surprising then that once I had settled in the south of France on our olive farm, I set off on a seventeen-month journey in search of the history of the olive tree and the early cultivation of its stoned fruit. It is also not surprising that during those months on the road, other flavours, foods, fruits began to excite my interest as well. One was the delectable pomegranate.

When I was in Malta, I stayed in the home of a fascinating couple who were singlehandedly at that stage attempting to ‘re-green’ their island, to reintroduce their neighbours to Malta’s once renowned olive culture by planting saplings grafted with cuttings from a tiny grove of giant Roman trees still flourishing in the twenty-first century on a southern tip of the island.



One morning when I went into breakfast, I spotted on their table a locally-fired pottery dish piled high with pomegranates. Such beautiful fruits, I remarked. Sammy, my host, immediately chose the ripest, skilfully opened up its leathery shell, allowing the juice to bleed on to his plate. He handed it across to me to enjoy. Its seeds and sweet, sweet juice clung to my chin.

I knew that, along with olives and grapes, it was a biblical crop and that it was a fruit much prized in antiquity. I had come across artifacts designed with it at the hauntingly beautiful Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, on the Syrian coast near Latakia, but I had not known that camel trails traversing Africa invariably carried pomegranates. In arid climes, the fruit was an essential source of liquid; it was deemed to be a super-food (I doubt anyone back then used my host’s modern description!). Along with the olive, this unusual fruit’s complex history was drawing my attention. Like the olive, it has an honoured place in the religious beliefs of the three western monotheisms. It is mentioned in the Quran, the Torah, the Old Testament, Babylonian texts, Greek mythology, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and has been used many times as a Christian image of fertility and eternity (see Celia Rees’ HG post on the Madonna del Parto ). It also found its place in Egyptian mythology. Pomegranates were cultivated in Egypt before Moses was born. Look at this exquisite silver pomegranate vase from 1323 B.C found in the tomb of Tutankhamen.



There are some who believe that this may be the fruit that grew on the tree of life while other religious academics have claimed it was the pomegranate and not the humble apple that tempted Eve on the tree of knowledge.

Although one single fruit can produce anything up to 2,000 seeds, Jewish tradition teaches 613 seeds, one for each mitzvot or commandment in the Torah. Designs of the fruit were woven in blue and purple fabric into the hems of the High Priests’ robes. Brass pomegranates were also found as border designs on the capitols of two pillars of the Temple in Jerusalem. It is traditional to eat the fruit at Rosh Hashanah. It represents wisdom and knowledge to the Jews.



In The Odyssey, Homer describes them growing in Corfu, in the fertile gardens at King Alcinous’ palace (Alcinous was leader of the Phaeacians. His people settled in Scherie, modern Corfu, possibly arriving from Sicily).

Sicilian fruit
The Romans imported their pomegranates from Libya, which was also one of their most lucrative olive-producing regions.

Although not a symbol of peace, it is revered as a divine gift by Middle Eastern nations who today are fighting one other; its roots lie with the roots of so many of those divided peoples.

The pomegranate is, as was the olive tree originally, a small drought-resistant plant that botanists would more accurately describe as a large shrub. The difference is that the olive is not deciduous. In the Middle East, both of these fruit-bearing trees can be traced back to 4,000 BC.

Its name, Pomegranate originates from Medieval Latin, pomum granatum, meaning ‘seeded apple’. In Herbrew, it is rimmon.

Since millennia, it has been cultivated in Persia – modern-day Iran, as well as Iraq, Israel, Syria, Mesopotamia: the cradle of the Olive Route. It was traded by commercial travellers along the Silk Road and found its way to China. Today in Southeast Asia, it is a highly-prized fruit, a symbol of abundance.


I asked three Chinese students staying with us what the pomegranate meant to them. One, from the south, recounted a lovely story, perhaps a stanza from a Chinese poem? When a lover declares his affections to the woman of his dreams, if she in return is equally attracted, she wears a robe the colour of a pomegranate and allows her suitor to rest his head between her knees.
I suspect that the robes were the scarlet of the flowers rather than the more discreet red of the fruit’s thick skin.

fruit blossom
In Greece, the fruit played an important role in the nation’s classical mythology. It was the fruit of the dead, the underworld... The goddess Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and forced to live in his underworld. Her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvests, mourned her daughter’s loss and caused all green things to cease to grow. Zeus stepped in and commanded Hades to return the girl, lest the earth grow arid and die. Hades, smart fellow that he was, knowing that no food was to be consumed in the underworld, tricked Persephone into consuming six pomegranate seeds (to quench her thirst from the hot fires perhaps?). The result was that she was condemned to spend six months of every year with Hades underground. Here was the ancient Greeks’ explanation of winter, of the change in the seasons.

Persephone  - Empress of Hades
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Today, in Greece, a porcelain fruit is frequently offered to those moving house. Sometimes, an actual fruit is thrown to the ground. As it splits open, the juice seeps out and blesses the new home and its inhabitants.

Granada, Spanish for pomegranate, named one of its most magnificent Andalucian cities after it. It is the symbol of the city. Every street sign has the fruit painted above it. Federico Garcia Lorca, poet, native of Granada, victim of the Spanish Civil War, executed beneath an olive tree, wrote of the pomegranate:
‘The fruit is hard and skull-like on the outside, but on the inside it contains the blood of the wounded earth.’


Coat of Arms of Granada

Pomegranates were possibly introduced to Spain by the Moors after their arrival in 711 AD. However, I like to fancy that it was earlier, that they were transported to the peninsula’s southern shores by the Phoenicians who sailed the knowledge of olive cultivation from the coast of what today is Lebanon, all around the Mediterranean. Then, passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, they founded their trading post of Gadir along the way, (modern-day Cadiz), before pushing the learned world, its knowledge of botany, maps and exploration further, out into the Atlantic Sea. The Phoenicians were not conquerors; they were traders and they took their business to the coastal cities of Essaouira in Morocco and Portugal in the north. Some say they crossed the Atlantic waters and were the first discoverers of the Americas, but there is no solid evidence, so far, of that.
Whether the pomegranate first reached the Untied States earlier I do not know but it was certainly brought to the Americas by the Spanish Conquistadores. Trees growing wild were found as far afield as US Georgia in the eighteenth century...

I could go on. I haven’t touched upon the fruit’s medicinal or cosmetic properties. What excites me is nature’s role in our evolution, our human history, our diet. It is an interactive story. The seeds of history growing wild, nurtured initially by one or several tribes until the knowledge spreads, until we begin to trade, to battle for land to grow our produce, to cultivate, to protect our knowledge and our crops.
Who knows -  The Pomegranate Route could be my next travel book!

I will finish with a word from Shakespeare, spoken by the young Juliet...

Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

and these more erotic lines from the Song of Solomon:

'I would lead you and bring you into the house of my mother, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I would give you spiced wine to drink, the juice of pomegranates.'

I have never tasted pomegranate wine, but I certainly intend to now.





Carol Drinkwater

Books are a problem, by Louisa Young (note the importance of a comma . . . )

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Todays blog is short; forgive me.
Also, it is a question, and a request.

I am due to deliver a novel in October.

For perhaps four years I have been reading books about the time (1930s), setting (Italy), characters (Jewish Romans), theme (how was fascism for you, if you were both Jewish and fascist? - or, more broadly, how is it for you when you are one thing and also another, and one thing turns against the other?). 

You'd think I'd have read quite a lot, and you'd be right. Our illustrious leader Mary Hoffman provided me with a splendid reading list earlier this summer - already way too late, in the grand scheme of things, for a book which is already up to 90000 words - and it is keeping me busy. And yet yesterday I popped into Daunt's and bought Antonio Pennacchi's The Mussolini Canal (550 pages), Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew by Dan Vittorio Segre, and Susan Zucotti's The Italians and the Holocaust . . .  

I suppose it's procrastination. Distraction? Desperation?

Is it?


WHY DO WE DO THIS????

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME????????

Dear ladies, I can't write more. I have a book to write and, more fool me, books to read. Help!


Hide & Seek, by Clare Mulley

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This month The Folio Society republished one of the great memoirs of the Second World War; Xan Fielding’s Hide & Seek. Described by Antony Beevor as, ‘one of the great modern books not just of the Cretan resistance; it is one of the great books of the Second World War’, Hide & Seek recounts with powerful immediacy, humour and unsparing honesty the drama, tedium, exhilaration and anguish of organising reconnaissance and resistance behind enemy lines on Crete.


The Folio Society's new edition of
Xan Fielding's Hide & Seek,
courtesy of The Folio Society.


I first read Hide & Seek when I was researching my biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent during the war. Christine had saved Xan’s life, at huge personal risk, in the summer 1944 while they were both serving in occupied France. Xan never forgot his debt, and dedicated Hide & Seek to Christine’s memory, so I was thrilled when Folio asked me to write the introduction for their new edition of the book. I now had the chance to look more deeply into the other side of the story, reading around Xan’s life and talking to many people who knew him.

In my experience the people connected with an extraordinary character, such as Christine Granville or Xan Fielding, have been unfailingly generous with their time, papers, photos and stories. Xan had many remarkable friends, from Paddy Leigh Fermor and Bill Stanley Moss, both of whom also served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Crete, to Laurence Durrell, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Millar, Dirk Bogarde and Lucien Freud. Friends, children, and children-of-friends, kindly shared stories with me over sandwiches, or over the internet.

Anecdotes covered everything from Freud’s dead monkey, which was apparently usually kept in his fridge but eventually decomposed when left forgotten in his studio, to Daphne Fielding’s budgerigar, the only creature allowed near Xan’s Remington typewriter, as it ‘delighted in the ping of the bell at the end of each line which heralded an exciting struggle to maintain balance as the roller rotated and carriage whizzed back’. I learnt of revealing private dedications hidden penned inside personal copies of Hide & Seek, and discovered the wonderful advert Xan placed in The Times, when he was seeking work in 1950: ‘Tough but sensitive ex-classical scholar, ex-secret agent, ex-guerrilla leader, 31, recently reduced to penury through incompatibility with post-war world… Would do anything unreasonable and unexpected if sufficiently rewarding and legitimate’. There are, of course, many wonderful stories, and you can read more of them in my introduction to the Folio edition of Hide & Seek.


Paddy Leigh Fermor with Xan Fielding
courtesy of The National Library of Scotland


Besides the stories of this remarkable group of friends I also found - and this is a first – the editorial issues fascinating! I wanted to see the manuscript that Folio was using so that I could page reference my quotes, but here was another issue... Hide & Seek was first published in 1954. Xan wrote from his wartime notebooks - a collection only missing the one volume inconsiderately eaten by Cretan pigs in 1942 - and the book is refreshingly immediate. But in the 1980s he had sat down with Paddy to amend the manuscript for a new Greek-language edition. They removed a few offensive phrases that had not dated well, and modified some of the less flattering character portraits, but Xan did not seem happy with the process.

With admirable diligence Folio tracked down Paddy and Xan’s revisions and set to work deciding which version of the manuscript to print. In the end, being, their editor told me, ‘very conscious of… the risk of tearing the fabric of the text’, they made very few editorial interventions to the original manuscript. As a result, in this edition Xan again speaks his mind freely, vividly expressing his not-uncritical love for the place and people of Crete, as well as the fierce anger he felt at much of the conduct of the war.


Reproduction SOE map of Crete, annotated by Paddy Leigh Fermor
and included in the new Folio edition of Hide & Seek,
courtesy of The Folio Society


Hide & Seek is not the only one of Xan’s books to have been republished recently, nor is The Folio Society the only publisher interested in this rich seam of war memoir. Paul Dry Books republished this and his other Cretan book, The Stronghold, last year, as well as, in 2010, Bill Stanley Moss’s Ill Met By Moonlit, the account of his and Paddy’s kidnapping of the German General of the island that was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. (Xan had been otherwise engaged, and also too dark-skinned to pass as the requisite ‘Aryan’ German officer, so did not take part in that exploit, but some years later he did serve as advisor during filming, lending his own clothes to Bogarde to give an air of authenticity. Striding around in chinos and espadrilles, apparently Xan was amused to overhear Bogarde’s dresser describe him as still looking, ‘like a fucking little killer’.) Moss’s other book, A War of Shadows, was also republished, by Bene Factum Publishing, earlier this year, and Paddy Leigh Fermor's previously unpublished account of the kidnapping, 'Abducting a General' will soon be published by John Murray, while Bloomsbury has just signed up a new account of the same incident by Rick Stroud. Both Paddy and Bill Stanley Moss also knew Christine Granville in war-time Egypt, and Bill and his Polish wife, Zofia Tarnowska, later named their daughter Christine in her honour.

When I write a biography I am always sadly aware of all the fabulous stories that I cannot include, and the incidental but remarkable characters that there is no room to develop although they are often fully deserving of biographies of their own. So I am delighted to have been able to contribute to this Folio edition of Hide & Seek, and even more so that Folio has also added lots of new photos, a pull-out reproduction of his and Paddy's SOE map of Crete, along with some of Xan's previously unpublished correspondence, making it a really terrific new edition.

It turns out that manuscripts also have lives of their own, with hidden stories, strategic translations and freshly edited republications and, as with people, it is only a matter of judgment which versions are the most authentic, which voice most true, and which should be remembered or retold.

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