HISTORY DOESN’T LOOK THE SAME ANY MORE by Eleanor Updale

February 24, 2015, 6:30 pm

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When I was young, I watched a lot of black-and-white films. They were on the telly every wet weekend afternoon, and although I must have seen some of them many times over, I never lost the sense that the people in them looked odd. Those women with their cinched waists, full dark lips and tightly waved hair were peculiar. You ever saw anyone looking remotely like them anywhere else. The past really was another country.

Not one of us

Earlier fashions were even more foreign: skirts to the floor, flapper dresses, even men’s hairstyles such as buzz cuts and slicked-down college boy styles were unfamiliar on the eye.

Something has changed. The people around us in our everyday lives now wear such a wide range of clothes that almost nothing surprises. It seems to me that there is almost no distinctive ‘21st century’ style - at least, not yet.  Fabrics may be different and easier to launder, but almost all looks are (often deliberately) reminiscent of something that has gone before. Even school photos now feature blazers, badges and boaters that would have looked antiquated fifty years ago.

Until very recently, it was only the shoulder pads and big hair of the early 80s that looked comic to the modern eye. Now they are beginning to make a comeback, and soon nothing from the 20th century will raise a laugh. If you see television archive material from the 60s, 70s or 80s, the language and attitudes might be a clue to their date. The green tinge of the film (caused by the copying and storage customs of the time) will tell you it is old. But the clothes? it’s only the fact that everyone in shot seems to be wearing a version of the same style (and the presence of cigarettes) that suggests this isn’t the present day.

Of course, our lives have changed in many ways, the new role of technology being the most obvious. As I type this, a robot is vacuuming the floor for me. But innovations are not always for the better. The machine I am working on now makes me unhappy every day - and cost me more than the proceeds of the last piece of work I wrote on it. 

All of writers know that, thanks to the capabilities of our software, we are now not only composers, but editors, typesetters, and accountants. Our days are spent battling with printers instead of sharpening pencils. But, on the plus side, at least we can back things up, and don’t lose whole manuscripts on trains any more.  And, with a few clicks, we can actually see people from the past.

One of the influences my generation’s perception of near history was in the way we viewed old newsreel footage. Until recently, this was shown on ‘modern’ cine equipment, which ran at a slightly different frame-rate from the cameras on which it had been recorded. The result (as anyone over about 45 will remember) was a comic jerkiness. People in the past were not like us. They were less sophisticated. They couldn't even walk properly.  Their regrettable political judgements were somehow the product of their less formed minds.

Lloyd George with the King in a clip from 1922

You can see the whole thing here:

ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYeLTdW2b4c

Lloyd George was one of the first politicians to feature regularly in newsreels.  I always thought he looked a bit of a prat.  Now that we see the films at (almost) the proper speed, it’s easier to appreciate that people like him were, in most of the ways that really matter, just like us.

Last night, while doing the very 21st century task of assembling furniture using wordless instructions, I watched an old edition of Steptoe and Son. I’m old enough to have seen the first episode on transmission, in 1962. In those days, we laughed at the shambles of junkyard that surrounded Harold and Albert. Now the programme looks like an edition of the Antiques Roadshow. If the sad couple auctioned off the contents of their house, they would be made for life. 

What would a teenager of today make of it, I wonder? Almost certainly, they wouldn’t see anything remarkable in a man in his thirties still living with his father. That was a crucial ingredient in painting Harold’s pathetic character way back then.

Maybe I’ll try muting the sound and writing a 21st century script to go with the pictures.  It might be the story of a poverty-stricken academic caring for his dementing father (a retired doctor?) with insufficient help from Social Services.  The words will be different, but the set and the costumes can stay the same.


eleanor@eleanorupdale.com

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A potted history of French Algeria, Carol Drinkwater

February 25, 2015, 4:01 pm

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Last month I wrote a little about the events surrounding the Charlie Hebdo massacres in Paris along with my reflections, observations while travelling in Algeria seven years ago. I am continuing along a similar theme today: Algeria and a broad brushstroke of the events that led to the Algerian War of Independence.

The French colonial empire constituted colonies, protectorates and mandated territories. In fact, there were two French colonial empires - the first was in decline by 1814. Its second began with the conquest of Algeria in 1830 followed soon after by territories in southeast Asia known as Indochina or Indochine. Vietnam was amongst them.

                                                                      Abd al Qadir

The French invasion of Algeria began in early July 1830 and continued through to 1847. Within a short time, the French had gained control of the coastal areas as well as Algiers, the capital city, and before long, they began infiltrating the rural areas into the mountains and desert. Algeria is a vast and diverse land which at that time was under Ottoman rule. There were rebellions and pockets of Muslim resistance led by such heroes as Abd al Qadir but, eventually, France conquered Algeria. They colonised it and Europeanised it. They ruled it as a French colony with Christian values and paid little attention to the traditions and tribal customs already in place. The Muslims and Jews lost their education systems, their lands, their rights. They were French subjects but not citizens. The countryside was taken for agriculture. Private demesnes, estates were erected. The majority of Algerians were forced to vacate the fertile lands. The colons, European settlers, moved in. Massive vineyards sprung up in a land of abstinent inhabitants. Tobacco, olives, citrus fruits, wheat, all were being produced in abundance and most of the crops were shipped back to France from ports built by the French. The cities and coastal resorts were designed along French planning lines. Some of the cities were beautiful, architecturally elegant. Ports were constructed, roads built… But the lifestyle being assembled had little to do with the Algerians' way of life. This Mediterranean land was a mixed population of predominantly Berbers and Arabs with communities of Jews who had fled Spain during the years of the Reconquista and had settled peacefully in Algeria. A few Christians were resident there before the French arrived, but they were a minuscule minority.

In 1856, Napoleon III offered the Algerians the right to French citizenship. Few accepted because they would have been obliged to renounce sharia law. Later in the nineteenth century – between 1870 and 1880 - the French offered the Jews an automatic right to citizenship. This gesture split the Muslims and resident Jews. From that time on, the Muslims began to perceive their Jewish neighbours as accomplices, friends of the colonisers.

                                                            Jews and Muslims together

Education was a privilege offered to citizens, not to subjects.
The Algerian Muslims began falling behind academically. Denying a colonised people the right to education is a very efficient weapon to keeping them under control. Without the means to read and write and therefore to learn and develop, they are rendered impotent.
Even when a basic education was on offer, it was a Christian one.

In spite of the challenges, during the first part of the twentieth century, Algerian nationalist movements were springing up and gaining ground. The most important and enduring was the National Liberation Front (FLN). By the 1930s, the FLN was protesting loudly against French rule. Even so, the Algerians fought with France during the Second World War, as they had done during the Great War. They were loyal to France and the Allies.
In a curious way, their loyalty was the straw that broke the camel's back and fed the seeds of the War of Independence. The French government had promised the Muslims, the Algerians, that if they fought with their ruling nation, they would be given a voice within the decision-making of their territory. However the colons, the settlers, who held the political power and wealth in Algeria (and many supported the Vichy government), strongly opposed this. They saw danger, perceiving all Muslim intervention as a threat against their sovereignty, their right to Algeria.

In 1943, Muslim leaders met with the French to hand over a manifesto. It demanded that Algerians be given equal rights. The request was more or less denied. Tensions rose and by the end of the war, when thousands of Algerians went out on the streets to demand their rights, they were met with violence.
On the 8th May 1945 in the city of Sétif a bloodbath occurred.

                                                         Sétif's very imposing central Mosque

During my travels for The Olive Tree, I visited the city of Sétif, which today is staunchly, exclusively Muslim. I walked its streets and was the only woman out and about in public. No restaurant opened its doors for me. Men only. Men sat in huddled groups in outdoor cafés smoking and they studied me with dark mistrusting eyes as I passed by. I have rarely felt so ill at ease, such an outsider.

I have often been asked about the locations I have most enjoyed visiting on my travels round the Med and Algeria has always been high on my list.

Here is a link to an article I wrote for the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2009/jun/14/drinkwater-algeria-mediterranean

But Sétif stands out in my mind as the exception. It was the only place where I stayed in a hotel and not with a local family. I was warmly invited, but I declined. I felt the need to be alone for a few nights, to catch up on my notes and to allow the thousands of sights and experiences I was receiving on a daily basis to sink in quietly. While I was there, using it as a base for excursions to some of the most magnificent Roman ruins in north African, I began to learn a little about the city's modern history. On 8th May 1945, while the Allies were celebrating victory, approximately 10,000 citizens from in and around Sétif also took to the streets to celebrate, but also to demonstrate. The demonstrations soon turned nasty. Scarringly nasty. Some Algerians began chanting words against their colonizers. They unfurled Algerians flags, which were banned at the time. The police began to crack down, to confiscate the flags. Crowds turned on the police, several of whom were killed. The police retaliated and began to shoot into the crowds. This, in turn, caused more violent responses and within no time not only the city but the surrounding countryside was, literally, up in flames. For days after, French planes bombarded villages, wiped out farms and homesteads while warships trained their weapons on the cities and the mountains where ‘the rebels’ had gone into hiding.

Somewhere in the region of forty thousand people lost their lives over those few days (no precise figure has ever been agreed upon). Approximately two hundred were French. The rest, Algerians. It was a massacre that was barely reported in the press. It took until 2005 for the French ambassador to Algeria to acknowledge France's responsibility.

Although the Sétif Massacres were barely reported, it was a turning point. The French began to implement changes: they passed school reforms, they offered limited opportunities for Algerians to enter politics but, tragically, it was too little, too late. The relationship between France and Algeria and the French colonials living on this amazing territory was deteriorating fast. By 1954, the war for independence was underway. It was a long and savage war. Both sides have much to answer for. To this day, the history of the French occupation of Algeria with its cruel colonial legacy is a blight on the French psyche. It is unusual to find anyone who will talk about it although that is slowly changing.

President François Hollande made a state visit to the country in December 2012. While there, he acknowledged that France’s occupation was brutal and he called for a new relationship between the two countries. “For 132 years, Algeria was subject to a profoundly unjust and brutal system of colonization,” he said. Hollande listed several sites of massacres including Sétif where seven years ago, the Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, compared French war strategies to those used by the Nazis. He begged France to “make a gesture.. to erase this black stain.”
Hollande’s visit was the first step towards a rapprochement. A gesture towards turning a page in what many consider the darkest chapter in France’s modern history.

The Franco/Algerian story is a very complex one. I have been fascinated by this chapter in French history for a long while, but more so now because I have just delivered my new novel, The Lost Domain, which centres around a family of Pieds-Noirs and their relocation into France from Algeria. Pieds-Noirs, which translates as Black Feet, are Europeans, French citizens, who were born on the continent of Africa. The name comes from the idea that they took their first steps on the soil of the Black Continent. Hence, black feet.
During and after the Algerian War of Independence (1952 - 1964), nearly one million Algerian-born French citizens were forced to leave the only homeland they had ever known, to make a new start in France. Their arrival was not greeted with warmth. The Pieds-Noirs were not popular in France. Many mainland French still hold them largely responsible for the war that tore Algeria apart and almost bankrupted the motherland.

Living in France today are upwards of four to five million French-Algerians, including (but not exclusively) the Harkis. Harkis are Algerians who collaborated with France, who fought against the Resistance during the War of Independence. When Algeria won its independence, the Harkis fled their native land and settled in France.
They were traitors in Algeria, but they were certainly not greeted as heroes in France. Most live their lives, now with their children and grandchildren, as second-class citizens. For decades they have been struggling to find employment, war pensions, decent living conditions, respect. They live in the banlieus, the suburbs, in ghettos riddled with poverty and tensions. They live in a narrow, dispiriting interstice, neither members of one society nor the other. How easy then for those seeking the next batch of jihadists to find their material: young men with an uncomfortable identity, with little to hope for....

Of course, I am not suggesting that every son or grandson of a Harki or French-Algerian is a sure target for the Jihadists, but I do believe that there is a lack of support and opportunities for the majority of these French residents. Life is very exacting for them.

By contrast, here is an exception. This photograph is of the brilliant footballer, Zineddine Zidane, born of Algerians in the banlieus of Marseille. This is very tough Le Pen country and Zidane struggled as a youth to make his way.

And here a Nobel laureate, (who also loved and played football), born into a poverty-stricken Pied-Noir family, Albert Camus, whose monument, headstone, I visited at the Roman seaside ruined city of Tipasa.

                   …."this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow"….


Blue and yellow. Vibrant Mediterranean colours. The sun and the sea. In Algeria, it is also the sky and the desert.

My new novel, The Lost Domain, uses some of the historical material written about here as an almost silent background, a haunting of the past. It is the story of two women. One, a Pied-Noir, who escapes to France in 1962 as the war is ending, with her small son and her sister-in-law. They have lost everything in Algeria and are obliged to begin again in the mother country where they find themselves most unwelcome… and then a small girl is pitched into their lives and befriends the son….

Coincidentally, while I was writing this blog I received an email from a woman who had read my last month's History Girls post. She lived in Algeria during the seventies, over a decade after the country had won its independence. She told me that her cleaner, a woman called Fatima, missed the French. She "lamented their departure and felt that they had taken good care of the local people". I thought I would add this because every story has so many layers, every history page a thousand footnotes. I will post more about The Lost Domain at a later date.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

A Pirate's Life - Celia Rees

March 17, 2015, 5:30 pm

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For the past couple of years, I've visited King Edward VI School, Handsworth, on or around World Book Day. The whole of Year 8 dress up as pirates, along with members of staff, and we have a jolly day of workshops in music, dance, drama, art and creative writing, all  based on my book Pirates! Lots of piratical fun.

I didn't write Pirates! as a dressing up option for World Book Day but I like to think I've made a contribution. A pirate outfit is easy to put together and ticks most of the boxes described by  Caroline Lawrence in her excellent History Girl post on 9th March, Dressing Your Hero.  

When Caroline asked fellow History Girls for World Book Day dressing up suggestions based on characters in our books, I naturally volunteered Pirates!  The pirate outfit is iconic and  instantly recognisable and there is a reason for every part of it. 

The skull and crossed bones is a universally recognised symbol of death. Its use stretches back to the Middle Ages and it still signifies poisonous materials. It was routinely used in the margins of ships' logs to make a death on board. This is probably where the pirates took it from. The black or red flag marked with the skull and cross bones was a potent warning to ships to heave to and surrender. 

Although the skull and cross bones was the generic flag,  pirates liked to personalise so that ships would know, not just that they were being attacked by pirates, but specifically  by Blackbeard or Black Bart Roberts, or some other notorious pirate. 

Pirate Flags

The dart pointing at a red heart on Blackbeard's flag, top left, meant no quarter. If there was any resistance, everybody on board would be killed.  Back Bart had two flags, the first (just below the centre), shows him drinking with death, the flag beneath shows him balancing on skulls representing Barbados and Martinique. He had a particular dislike for these islands and any ship hailing from either could expect no mercy. 

What about the rest of their clothes? Pirates liked dressing up. The flamboyance often associated with pirate captains came from their habit, when plundering a ship, of taking the richest clothes, velvets and silks, for themselves. 

Black Bart Roberts

Black Bart Roberts is described as wearing 'a rich crimson Damask Waistcoat and Breeches, a red feather in his Hat, a Gold Chain round his Neck with a Diamond Cross hanging to it...' (A General History of the Pyrates, Captain Charles Johnson). Pirates could also be extremely vain. Edward Teach (Blackbeard) is described as accustomed to twisting his signature beard 'with Ribbons, in small Tails.' (A General History of the Pyrates, Captain Charles Johnson).

Edward Teach - Blackbeard

It is not hard to see where Johnny Depp's look came from in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Johnny Depp - Captain Jack Sparrow

We owe the sartorial detail to this work: 

  

The author, one Captain Johnson, was really Daniel Defoe. He based his History on contemporary sources, interviews and letters. The History proved wildly popular and ran to several editions. It is still the best source book on pirates. Nearly everything in later books can be found between its pages and, because it was written by Daniel Defoe, it is as exciting to read as any novel. 

Daniel Defoe was the first to detail the adventures of these two most notorious pirates:

Ann Bonny and Mary Read

 'Most notorious' because they are women. This is a particularly telling image. They are depicted with their shirts open. We can clearly see they are women by their breasts. This is not an 18th Century version of page 3; it has a far more serious purpose. They have to be shown in this fashion because in every other way they are dressed like men. They are wearing the short jacket, loose trowsers, soft hat, and latched shoes of the sailors of the time.  Their breasts show them to be women; their weaponry - short, curved swords for fighting on board ship; several pistols for quick firing: axes for cutting ropes when boarding - shows them to be pirates. 

Original cover rough for Pirates!

I didn't have to go much further than Defoe's General History to find the descriptions I needed for my pirates, or for the reasons they dressed they way they did. Everything about their appearance tells us something. They dressed like sailors, because that is what they were before they became pirates and they would still be wearing the distinctive, practical clothing needed for life on board ship. The  major difference in appearance between a pirate and a sailor would be the weaponry the pirate had slung about him (or her). 

Even the most popular images of pirates tell us something about pirate life.  Take  Treasure Island's Long John Silver. His peg leg and parrot have become popular cliches but there are good reasons for both. 

Jim, Long John Silver and his Parrot, N.C. Wyeth

Parrots were routinely brought back by sailors from tropical parts, as pets or to sell. A broken leg was a common injury, sustained when falling from the rigging. The limb was often smashed so badly that it had to be amputated. For an ordinary sailor, this could mean the end of a life at sea and he might well be put off at the next port. A one legged sailor was of little use on board ship but pirates looked after their own. An injured pirate would be given compensation and kept on in some capacity, probably as cook. Similarly the iconic eye patch. Eye injuries were common from flying ropes' ends but, again, a pirate blinded in this way could expect to be protected. 

'A short life but a merry one' was a pirates' saying and it was certainly a great deal better than life on board naval or merchant ship. Aside from the primitive health insurance, pirates could expect a fair share from any prize taken and it is no wonder many answered the call, who will go? The spoils could be enormous, pirates could live (and dress) like princes, but that has to be set along side the risk. Any pirate caught and sentenced could expect to share the fate of Captain Kidd.  

Captain Kidd gibbeted over the Thames at Tilbury Point

A short life but a merry one, indeed.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Taking to the Air: More joys of research by Christina Koning

March 19, 2015, 4:10 am

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As aviation features in my forthcoming novel, Time of Flight - the latest in a series of detective stories, set in the late 1920s and early 1930s - a visit to the Air Museum at Shuttleworth in Bedfordshire seemed imperative. Here, a marvellous collection of vintage aeroplanes - some dating from before the First World War - is to be found. Everything from a 1909 Bleriot XI (the oldest plane in the collection) to the relatively modern Tiger Moths, DH Comets, Sopwith Pups, Avro Tutors and other magnificent aeroplanes of the period, is on view in a series of hangars, through which one walks in ever-increasing awe.

The thought that anyone ever managed to get these beautiful but undeniably flimsy-looking machines to fly is astonishing enough; the fact that they are still flown, eighty or a hundred years later, beggars belief. But the museum regularly puts on Air Shows, at which these splendid old aeroplanes take to the air. Included in the collection are gems such as a 1912 Blackburn Monoplane (the oldest aeroplane still flying), resembling nothing so much as a gigantic child’s toy, made out of paper and string, and a 1910 Bristol Box-kite, which looks almost too unwieldy to fly. Aeroplanes were still being constructed out of wood and canvas (actually Irish linen, covered with ‘dope’, or glue, to make it watertight) well into the 1920s, when metal fuselages became the norm.

This 1916 Sopwith Pup is one of the aeroplanes flown by pilots of the Royal Flying Corps (later the RAF), during the 1914-1918 war. To the dangers inherent in flying such machine through strafing ‘ack-ack’ fire, and the difficulties of keeping a steady enough path for your gunner to direct his own fire at the enemy, was the fact that none of the British ’planes carried parachutes. It was thought that these might encourage cowardice - and a readiness to jettison an expensive machine, by ‘baling out’ too soon. No wonder most pilots carried a revolver with them, to avert a still more terrible death…

Since my story is set in 1931, I was particularly interested in the ’planes of that era, which seem wonderfully sleek and streamlined, by contrast with the First World War models. Here is a 1931 Tiger Moth (also featured above), developed from the popular De Havilland Gipsy Moth for use as a racing machine.

And here’s a 1931 Avro Tutor, which, with its ease of handling, would have been ideal for anyone competing in one of the numerous Air Races, such as the annual King’s Cup Race, or the Schneider Race. Flying during the 1930s was a hugely popular spectator sport. Inspired by the record-breaking flights of aviators such as Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, and others, the public of the post-war era found itself becoming increasingly ‘air-minded’, with people being encouraged as a matter of government policy to take to the air. This seems an almost inconceivable attitude today, when we are being encouraged not to fly, and the horrors of climate change are what one thinks of first, when one thinks of air travel.

But no such qualms troubled the ‘Golden Age’ of flying. And, in that spirit, one can set one’s twenty-first century misgivings aside, and just enjoy the collection for what it has to offer to the enthusiast - or to the novice, like myself. It was started in the 1930s by Richard Ormonde Shuttleworth, a wealthy young industrialist and landowner, who indulged his passion for speed and state-of-the-art technology by competing in any race going, on land or in the air.

Photograph of Richard Ormonde Shuttleworth (1909 - 1940) reproduced by kind permission of the Shuttleworth Trust 

Obviously something of a daredevil, Shuttleworth amassed a collection of racing cars, including Bugattis and Alfa-Romeos, in one of which he won the first International Grand Prix at Donington in October 1935. Flying soon overtook motor-racing as Shuttleworth’s chief enthusiasm, and, with his friend George Stead, he flew his Comper Swift aeroplane 6,000 miles in order to compete in the Viceroy Trophy Race in India. Shuttleworth’s meteoric career was brought to a tragic end when he was killed piloting test aircraft during the Second World War. His remarkable collection remains - a testimony to the bravery and occasional foolhardiness of ‘those magnificent men…’ (and women) in their flying machines.

THE STARS' TENNIS BALLS by Ann Swinfen

March 19, 2015, 5:30 pm

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We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied
Which way please them.
            John Webster (1580?-1625?), The Duchess of Malfi, IV.iv.52 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
            William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Julius Caesar, I.ii.134

It seems appropriate on this astronomically important day, which sees the spring equinox and an eclipse of the sun, to take a brief look at the relationship between celestial bodies and humankind. 

The two quotations above from near contemporary Renaissance dramatists reflect two diametrically opposed views: is our fate determined at our birth by certain conjunctions of the stars, or is our fate in our own hands? It is the age-old dispute between predestination and freewill, which has torn mankind apart in violent religious disputes. If it is less bitter nowadays, it is perhaps because we live in a largely secular society. 

When for thousands of years humans lived in a world free of light pollution, it is little wonder that they looked up at a night sky peopled by a changeable moon and wheeling stars and believed that their own lives must be inextricably linked to these distant and unknowable bodies. Early peoples developed extensive astronomical knowledge, as demonstrated by their monuments like Stonehenge:

and Maes Howe:

Tales of the gods living amongst the celestial bodies must have existed long before writing and are firmly embedded in the traditions of all early nations. The Greeks saw and named images in the patterns of the stars which we still recognise today in the symbols of the Zodiac.

The wise men, coming from the east, were led to the birthplace of Jesus by a wandering star, which may have been a comet.

Comets, even more than fixed stars, evoked wonder by their seeming visitations from some incomprehensible Elsewhere and by their mysterious transit of the heavens. Surely they must foretell some joyous event or – more likely – disaster. The Norman invasion of England:

Even more terrifying is an eclipse of the sun, when (depending on your religion) the sun is gobbled up and spat out by some monster, or the hand of God blots out the sun as a warning to mankind of His power and mankind’s helplessness. According to Virgil, there was an eclipse of the sun on the day Julius Caesar was murdered:

If our fate is somehow tied up with the movement and positions of the stars, especially at the moment of our birth, then surely a man skilled in reading the heavens can help us make sense of our lives, warn us of times and places to avoid, inform us of appropriate dates for important ceremonies, even foretell our death. The art of drawing up astrological charts was known to the Romans and persisted right through the Renaissance and beyond, until the development of science in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment cast scorn on such beliefs.

Simon Foreman

 Simon Foreman, apothecary, alchemist, astrologer and serial rapist was a contemporary of our dramatists Shakespeare and Webster. He made a very comfortable living out of the preparation of astrological charts for his clients, who came from every walk of life. (At any rate, those who could afford his fees.) 

John Dee

Another contemporary, Dr John Dee, mathematician, mystic, book collector, alchemist, astrologer, and amanuensis to angels, cast charts for the greatest in the land. Queen Elizabeth I chose the most auspicious date for her coronation based on his advice, and she was a woman of immense intelligence and learning. It was not merely the ignorant and gullible who believed in the influence of the stars.

Today, of course, we know better. Or do we? Why, then, do magazines and newspapers persist in publishing predictions based, it is claimed, on reading the stars? And it seems that the ancient debate about predestination versus freewill must continue for ever.

 By the way, I’m a Libra, so that must mean that I am a rational, well-balanced person, mustn’t it?

Ann Swinfenhttp://www.annswinfen.com

The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum by Imogen Robertson

March 20, 2015, 5:30 pm

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There are many good reasons to visit Chichester. There’s a fine cathedral, some brilliant architecture, and a great second-hand bookshop. The library and its staff are also lovely. I know that because I was there on Thursday talking about historical crime fiction with Laura Wilson and Ben Fergusson. I was very glad to be invited, then became frankly over-excited when I realised I now had an excuse to stay the night and visit the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum the following day.

One of the things Ben, Laura and I discussed at the event was how, as historical novelists, we often have to find voices for people who didn’t leave much in the official record. It was a particular problem with my latest book, Theft of Life, which I’ve blogged about here, but it is common to writers of every period. If you want fully rounded, convincing characters who do not come from the diary-keeping, letter-writing, will-leaving minority you have to work a bit harder. That is what makes a place like Weald and Downland Open Air Museum such a god-send. It is a collection of vernacular buildings from the south east of England dating from the late medieval period to the late 19th century. It’s also a home for the preservation and investigation of the crafts which built them and sustained the people who lived in them.

We can still walk through some remarkable manor houses and stately homes, but the ordinary dwellings of the majority got over-written or erased from the landscape more often that not, just as the people who lived in them are often absent from the written record.  This place helps fill in the gaps. Each building at the museum is packed with careful reproductions; wooden plates, horn cups and spoons - there’s a working Tudor kitchen, beds complete with straw mattress and blankets made in the original manner and dyed onsite with locally grown plants. And because they are reproductions you allowed to touch. Feel the fabrics, the weight of a leather jug or the warmth from the fire. 

In Poplar Cottage, the windows are not glazed, but fitted with lattices covered in oiled linen. I’d read about these windows and wondered how much light they would be likely to provide but no informed guesswork is ever going to replace actually standing in the the room. Fascinating for anyone, but the novelist in me just kept wanting to hug people.

All the volunteers are knowledgeable and friendly. We quizzed Phillip in the mill about construction materials and millwrights, then just enjoyed the sound of the mill working - much quieter than I’d expected, but the whole building vibrates gently, and we ended up in a long discussion about what herbs to mix with the rushes to keep away flies in the Bayleaf Farmstead. Tansy, it turns out, is nature’s fly spray. Oh, and there’s a shire horse… 

Now this may be one of the times when my fellow history girls all go ‘oh, we go to that place all the time,’ but if any of you haven’t found it yet do go. You may well find me doing one or other of their rural trades and crafts courses. Any year where I can boast I’ve learned to mow with a scythe has got to be a good one. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Good Luck Flowers by Kate Lord Brown

March 21, 2015, 5:30 pm

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In many parts of the world, from the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, South East Asia, India and Pakistan the dried and milled leaves of Lawsonia inermis the mignonette tree, also known as the Egyptian privet, are prized. The small shrub has fragrant white or reddish flowers, but it is the elliptical leaves which are mixed with lemon juice and essential oils to produce a cooling, scented paste which imparts an intense rust red dye for the skin and hair.

The word henna comes from the Arabic hinna. Originating in the Middle East, and sometimes called mehndi or mehendi, adorning the body with henna paste is a tradition dating back thousands of years. Here, at fetes and children's parties it is as common to find a henna artist as a facepainter in the UK or US.

Each region has its characteristic designs. Khaliji henna of Eastern Arabia and the Persian Gulf, practiced here, employs ornate floral patterns and natural forms. In African designs the motifs are more geometric, and Indian henna is abstract and linear.

Henna plays an important part in celebrations throughout the year, such as Eid, but it is central to traditional weddings. The night before the wedding is known as laylat ul henna - the night of henna. Artists from a local salon are booked to come to the house of the bride to adorn the women. The paste is ground fresh from the leaves, or applied ready mixed in cones of coloured cellophane rather like piping bags for icing cakes. The tips are cut away to a fine point to allow the artist to deftly paint the designs, squeezing the henna paste through the tube. They are incredibly skilful - I bought a couple of tubes from the local supermarket to have a go at home, and it looked nothing like this:

Henna symbolises good luck and health, and it is traditional in the Arabian Gulf for the bride to wear a green gown embroidered with gold on henna night - a symbol of new life and abundance. The guests throw petals and money in celebration, and enjoy music and dance. The bride, her female relations and friends settle down to relax and talk as the henna artists paint the intricate patterns on their hands and feet. The process can take hours, during which the person receiving the design cannot move in case the paste smudges. It is an intimate and calming ritual, which necessitates the bride being still and surrounded by the support of her closest female friends and relations, no doubt an excellent practice for pre-wedding nerves. I remember having an intricate tribal pattern applied a few years ago, sitting next to a fully veiled local woman who was having her legs covered from thigh to ankle in ornate flowers. Perhaps it is a way of expressing yourself when so much is forbidden, and hidden.

It is important to let the paste set and dry - the mud will eventually flake away to reveal the patterns. Sugar and lemon juice can be dabbed on the design to intensify the colour and make the pattern last longer. At first the design will be a light ochre colour, but overnight it deepens to a rich brown. The design is only temporary, and therefore acceptable to Islamic tradition (which forbids permanent tattoos). The intricate floral patterns of khaliji henna will fade gradually over a period of up to three weeks, a lasting reminder to the wearer of family, celebration and good luck.

Emma Homan, painted by John Bradley, observed by Louisa Young

February 26, 2015, 4:30 pm

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I met this little madam at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She's American, a New Yorker; her name is Emma Homan, and she was painted around 1844. Look at her! She's two.

Look at her face: 

Her bracelet - her ring and her rose!

Look at her slippers - her pantalettes - her embroidered borders!

Look at her cat! It's in a rose bush. And it's quite clearly bonkers -

She was painted by an artist called John Bradley, one of those elusive characters who leave behind a common-enough name, some work, an address or two, insubstantial dates, and an air of mystery. Though he is thought of now as an American painter, there's reason to think he was originally English: he signed himself as being from 'Great Britton', and this magnificent cow -  Painting of a Prize Cow in a Field, is signed 'Drawn by I Bradley, Honington, Suffolk 1827' - I Bradley being Iohannes Bradley. 

This pair of portraits of children,  and 'consigned to Bonhams Ipswich from a deceased estate' in 2005, are signed 'I. Bradley, Limner, Suffolk 1830'. For a while I thought ah, he must have moved around, from Honington to Limner - and then I realised ah no, limning is what he does. He is a limner - from illuminator, I suppose. 

1. a person who paints or draws.

2. an itinerant painter of C18th America who usually had little formal training.
3. a person who describes or depicts in words.

4. an illuminator of medieval manuscripts. 

Two years later he usefully placed himself in New York by painting a Staten Island merchant, Asher Androvette, holding a copy of the November 29 1832 edition of The New York and Richmond County Free Press. It was signed, I. Bradley Delin. 1832. 'Delin' meaning, what delineator? He who drew the lines? One of his techniques was to put pale lines around faces, figures and objects to highlight them. It's what gives his paintings their air of light. Illuminating them.

The Met label for Emma Homan says:

Though there was a John Bradley of unlisted profession who arrived from Ireland in August 1826 on a ship called Carolina Ann, he probably was not been the John Bradley who was painting pictures of cows and children in Suffolk in 1830. Blogger Milton Trexler reports that 'After a thorough investigation of passenger ship lists, [we find that] four individuals named John Bradley arrived in New York between 1830 and 1832: one on March 27, 1832, aboard the ship Citizen out of Liverpool, age 21, listed as Irish and a laborer; another on June 14, 1832, abbreviated as Jno. Bradley, on the ship Robert Peel out of Hull, age 20, listed as from Great Britain and a farmer; another on August 27, 1832, on the ship America out of Liverpool, age 20, listed as from Ireland and a labourer; and a boy, aged 15, listed as Irish and a farmer aboard the William Byrnes on August 14, 1832. Yet none of these gentlemen, due to either age or occupation, seem likely candidates. A search of Boston and Philadelphia port records and a search of original U.S. naturalization papers with John Bradley signatures also produced inconclusive results.' 

Since our John Bradley was a professional painter in Great Britain before leaving for the US, one would expect him to record his profession on the ship's passenger list as 'painter' or 'limner'. He was known as being 'of the English school'; the music on the piano in another painting is a well-known Irish ballad, The Angel's Whisper. There were several Bradleys, some of them called John, living in Staten Island in the 1830s. One is registered as having 'aliens' living with him - perhaps one was John, during the five years before he could apply for citizenship. One was in an asylum.  Well, by the 1840s he was living in Soho - on Hammersley Street and later Spring Street, making his living as a painter, portraitist and miniaturist. An artist living downtown! After 1847 there is no more trace of him. We don't know how old he was, whether he married, had children. But I fell in love with young Emma, and the idea of a man who could paint a two-year-old like that - such a little queen. These vague scraps of story set one to wondering. I imagine John Bradley in a Joseph O'Connor novel, Star of the Sea or Redemption Falls, leading a wicked and complex life. During the times when people in New York lived in their community of origin - Irish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Jewish - the Village was where you went to live if your own community wouldn't have you, or you could not longer stand it in your community for whatever reason. As we know it retains the reputation of being home to the gays, the artists, the drugtakers. the musicians, the transgressors . . . There is a suggestion that John Bradley was originally a painter-and-decorator. I find I like him. I could make up a life for him. 

A tiny bit more research brought me to these girls, Emma's almost-twins: Little Girl in Lavender, whose cat is rather less psychotic, and her roses a little redder. Vice President Bush chose her from the National Gallery of Art in 1981, to hang on the wall in his home. And Young Girl in a Green Dress: same basket, same trousers, same flower pot, same fat little hands. 

And here is a boy, feeding rabbits.

and this chap, about whom I can find nothing whatsoever.

And here, The Cellist, with his abnormally long arm and tiny delicate musical feet.

 These two have borrowed his red curtain

Why do I love these portrait so much? It's partly the colours and the items, so strong, delicate and simple - the little red book, the parti-coloured hobby-horse, the coral necklaces, the lace, the bunch of leaves, the sheet music. But more, it's the eyes - so particular, such a straight gaze. 'I am here', they say, just as clearly as any Velasquez. And you think about what they might have had to do to get there, to the stage of being painted, albeit by a self-taught chap who gets the arms wrong. 

They remind me, actually, of Lorenzo Lotto's Portraits: The Young Man, and the Woman inspired by Lucretia. 

But back to Emma. The Met gives her dates, and a married name emerges - Emma Holman Thayer. She - if she it is - grew up to be a writer!  I am delighted beyond reason by this discovery. She wrote a novel called The English-American, published in Chicago in 1890. 

I investigate. It is terrible. It is set in a London that has clearly never been visited by Emma, nor anyone else, and has characters like this, the maid: 

That is one of the better pages.

My disappointment is considerable. I had hoped for better from Emma.

She has also, though, written and illustrated some books about Wild Flowers: Wild Flowers of the Rocky Mountains and Wild Flowers of the Pacific Coast. The text is just as bad:

But the drawings are nice. Really nice.     

So I forgive her, and I still love her. 

Here is her neighbour at the Met - not painted by Bradley. 

He's a boy. No wonder he looks so furious. 

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All About Ida, by Clare Mulley

February 28, 2015, 12:23 am

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This year’s Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film went to Ida, an extraordinary, haunting, Polish historical drama directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. The film follows the story of two fictional women. Ida is a young novitiate nun on the verge of taking her vows when she is directed to meet her only living relative. Wanda, her aunt, a deeply-damaged former Communist state prosecutor, curtly informs Ida that she is Jewish, ‘a Jewish nun’. The two then embark on an uncomfortable road trip into the Polish countryside and their own family’s devastatingly sad war-time past. You can watch the trailer here.

Universally admired for its expressive use of stillness and sparse dialogue, its stunning and original cinematography, and understated explorations of anger, grief, guilt, choice and national and personal identity, picked up a host of awards in Britain and Europe, before collecting its Oscar. And yet, the film has also proved to be controversial.

Ida is fictional narrative set in the Poland of the 1960s, and commenting both on the suffering inflicted by the Second World War, and the difficulties faced by those coming to terms with their loss, their actions, and the possibility of redemption. It is at once deeply personal and unavoidably political.

Some Polish critics fear that while the history behind Ida would be known and understood by most Poles, internationally the film might promote false stereotypes of Polish complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust. This is not an unfounded concern. Reports and documentaries sometimes still talk about ‘Polish concentration camps’ when referring to the Nazi German camps set up inside Nazi-occupied Poland, and Polish contributions to the Allied war effort, from providing the first German enigma coding machine, to vital contributions in campaigns in North Africa, Italy and even in the Battle of Britain, are often underplayed in the press, books and films.

At the same time, across the board, whether provoked by Tudor novels or Polish films, commentators are increasingly challenging the seemingly porous boundary between historical fiction and non-fiction, and the debatable responsibilities of authors and directors to convey not just the ‘truth’, but ‘the whole truth’, through their fictions. With painful recent histories such as the events and aftermath of the Second Word War, these tensions are all the more raw.

Me with Rebecca Lenkiewicz at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden (courtesy of Steven Larcombe)

A few months ago I was delighted to interview Ida co-writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz when she visited my local independent cinema, Saffron Screen in Saffron Walden. Previously best known as the author of Her Naked Skin about the suffragettes, the first original play by a female playwright to be performed at the Royal National Theatre, Rebecca is not unknown to either success or controversy.

As well as talking about the powerful minimalism of the script, the casting and cinematography, I asked her about the relationships in the film, not just between the two women, but between innocence and knowledge, honesty and concealment, and Poland and its past. ‘Poland has a complicated history with its past’, Rebecca replied. ‘Ida is the story of the tragic events around one family and its consequences. It is about unearthing knowledge, a meditation about love and loss. It's not a political statement. It questions faith and knowledge and tells a fictitious story that might well have happened.’

More recently, when I asked about the responsibilities film-makers have regarding historical accuracy and contextualisation, Rebecca emphasised that ‘it's important to be informed and to honour the subject, but fiction is not reportage. I would never feel comfortable attempting to write about an era or a real person without as much knowledge as I could garner before trying to recreate them. Research is one of the joys of writing. When you have some grounding then you have more scope to imagine.’

Ida director and co-writer Paweł Pawlikowski’s past work also rests on political themes, such as war, and deportations, but his focus has deliberately stayed personal. ‘Every good film is a bit like a dream,’ he told the BBC recently, ‘that’s what I usually aspire to, rather than some social document.’ 

Rebecca Lenkiewicz taking questions at Saffron Screen, Saffron Walden (courtesy of Pawel Komorowski)

Opinion remains divided however. Interestingly, during the discussion after the film screening in Saffron Walden, the Brits and the Poles in the audience focused on quite different aspects of the film, and there was certainly some concern around the depiction of Polish history. Now Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute has criticised the film for being anti-Semitic, and the Polish Anti-Defamation League has set up a petition, already signed by 50,000 people, asking Ida’s producers to state, at the start or end of the film, that:

• Poland was under Nazi German occupation.
• The occupiers conducted a programme to exterminate the Jews.
• Poles hiding Jews risked the death penalty not only for themselves, but for their entire family.
• Thousands of Poles were executed for helping their Jewish neighbours.
• The Polish Underground State harshly punished those Poles who harmed Jews, and 
• The Yad Vashem Institute recognises Poles as the largest group of the "Righteous Among the Nations" for helping Jews.

Since Ida won its Oscar I have been asked several times whether I think it is an ‘anti-Polish’ film. I do not. And, as an independent work of art, I do not think that it should have contextual facts imposed on screen before it starts, or after it finishes. A film, like any work of art, is always open to interpretation by its audiences, but it must remain independent if it is to have an authentic voice. Its own voice.

Ida may not explicitly state the loss of a fifth of Poland’s population, including three millions Jews, during the war, or the appalling dilemmas forced onto the surviving population. However, the pain and conflicts are built into the atmosphere and locations, and embodied within the characters, and the story encompasses both fear and courage, crime and compassion. This is a film stripped down; a film that implies far more than it says, and shows just how much more, less can sometimes convey. At the heart of Ida, both the film and character, is the question of how to deal with the past when it is uncovered and laid bare. That it has provoked such controversy around this very issue should be seen as a compliment. While I regret that many British people may not know the full historical context behind the film, I feel that Ida adds greatly to that conversation, and does so in the most elegant, thought-provoking whisper.

Child migrants to Australia by Rosemary Hayes

February 28, 2015, 4:01 pm

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Some years ago I was asked by my then publisher, Penguin Australia, to write a story about child migration to Australia, a subject about which I knew nothing. However, from the moment I began to research it, I became totally hooked, and the resulting book ‘Blood Ties’ was published in 2001.

There were many religious and philanthropic organisations in the UK who sent children overseas ‘for a better life’ but it seemed sensible to focus on one – Barnardo’s – whose history was well documented and whose archives I could access.

In my editing days I had worked on a children’s book about Dr Barnardo, so I knew something about him and his work.  He started his first ‘ragged school’ in London in 1867 which gave a basic education to poor children.  Then, in 1870, the first boys’ home, in Stepney, was opened.  This gave food and shelter to desperate boys and, following the death from exposure of an 11 year old who was turned away because the shelter was full, their policy was never to refuse entry to a needy child. Indeed a sign was posted outside the home ‘No destitute child ever refused admission.’ 

In 1876, Barnardo’s home for girls was opened in Barkingside and it is still there today; this is where I began my research. The place is no longer surrounded by leafy countryside as it was in the late 19^th century and the buildings have long ceased to house destitute girls, but there is a library there where friendly staff showed me records and explained how the home was run and the original thinking behind the child migration scheme, which began in the late 19^th century and continued until 1967. But more of that later.

For its time, the Barkingside home was enlightened.  Children were not housed in some grim institution, but in cottages which surrounded a large green area and each cottage had a ‘cottage mother’ who looked after up to 20 girls  Many of these cottage mothers were, apparently, well meaning, well bred, Godfearing spinsters and although some were loving and sympathetic to their charges, others had little understanding of the needs of children and were more rigid in disciplining them. However, a lot of the girls must have come with overwhelming problems and it can’t have been an easy job.

The girls’ home was looking to the future, too.  When they were old enough, girls worked in a purpose build steam laundry on the site and were also trained for domestic service.

There was a church on the site, too, and a church choir in which many of the girls sang, and celebrations held to mark such anniversaries as Empire Day.

However, not all children in Barnardo’s care remained in the homes. Many were boarded out or emigrated. First to Canada then, after the First World War children began to be settled in large numbers in Australia. The Australian authorities welcomed immigration from Britain as a means of tackling the labour shortage after the war and curbing non-white immigration from Asia. Barnardo’s sent its first official party of 47 boys in 1921. They were followed two years later by 32 girls. The charity sent a total of 2,784 children to Australia, mostly in the years before 1939. Emigration was suspended during the Second World War and resumed in 1947 but the numbers sent after the war were much smaller and the scheme finally ended in 1967.

What did surprise me, when I was reading through the experiences of ex-Barnardo’s children who had emigrated to Australia, was the randomness of the whole thing.  It seemed that children were selected, shown a few pictures of life in Australia and told that that’s were they were going then, a few weeks later, they were on board ship.

Children were encouraged to see Barnardo’s as their family and weren’t allowed to access their records. In some cases, emigrating children were told that their parents were dead, even though this may not have been true.  It was a very different age and it was genuinely thought that this could help a child make a fresh start. The emphasis at that time was on moral and physical welfare rather than emotional wellbeing.

My story ‘Blood Ties’ was based on an amalgam of the experiences of emigrant children and I based the Australian part of the story on the home at Picton in New South Wales. Here, all the children, to an extent, helped run the place, doing domestic and gardening jobs, then, when they were old enough most of the boys were sent to work on farms and the girls into domestic service.  Some of these ex-Barnardo’s children looked back with gratitude and had only good to say of the organization, others had had less than happy experiences.  Many of them, in later life, began searching for their roots.

‘Blood Ties’ tells the story of a young Australian musician, Katie, who is diagnosed with leukemia shortly before her grandmother dies.  Only then does the family learn that Gran was a Barnardo’s child, sent from England to live in the Picton home. Time is running out for Katie and as the family searches desperately for a bone marrow match, Katie begins to relive her gran’s experiences through a series of vivid dreams.

One of the letters I received from readers was from an ex-Barnardo’s boy, then in his seventies, who was still searching for his natural family and was convinced he knew the grandmother in the story. I hated telling him that she was fictional but his letter was a powerful reminder of the importance of roots, of knowing where you come from, who you are, and of the psychological damage that can haunt you all your life if you do not.

In its time, child migration was considered an appropriate response to the social problems of the day, even if, by today’s standards, the practice seems cruel. Charities genuinely believed that migration gave children a chance to escape from poverty and offered them a fresh start in a healthier environment. These ideas continued largely unchallenged until after the Second World War when the emphasis shifted towards keeping children and their families together in their own communities.

(Mary Hoffman is still away but in a different place)

MUSIC WHILE YOU WORK, by Leslie Wilson

March 22, 2015, 5:30 pm

≫ Next: DALLYING WITH DICE - a medieval pastime by Elizabeth Chadwick

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Music affects me in two ways when I’m writing. Firstly, there’s the music that actually occurs in the novel – a lot of Django Reinhart and Louis Armstrong in Last Train from Kummersdorf . When I was writing Saving Rafael, I had a cd called ‘Berlin by Night’ which contained popular music from Germany in the Nazi period. Not, I hasten to add, Nazi songs, but songs ranging from ‘Lili Marleen’ to disguised jazz, given a German title and lyric to make it more acceptable to the authorities. It has ‘Es geht Alles Vorüber’, the smash hit of the end of the war, the one that people played over and over again. Its message: ‘Everything passes, everything goes by, and every December is followed by May’ annoyed Propaganda Minister Goebbels – not martial enough – but that made no difference. My mother associated it, bitterly, with the letter she got telling her her first love had been killed in action – but she did have her Maytime after all, when she met my British father.

I listened to that cd over and over again, and composed the ‘theme lyric’ for the novel, in slight imitation of a terribly shlocky number that had me frankly laughing my head off. Jenny, in the novel, knew it was trash, but because it was playing the first time she realised Raf was interested in her, it got terribly important to her.
And yet – the scene where my young hero reaches across the table and starts playing with Jenny’s fingers comes, not from any of those contemporaneous songs, but from Tchaikowsky’s Violin Concerto (in D Major, I believe). I’d been wondering how to write that scene just before I was taken abruptly into hospital to have a tumour taken out of my spine. The second night after my surgery, I had a dreadful moment when I woke up and thought: ‘Somebody’s in pain,’ and then realised it was me – just as authors describe in many novels, and I always thought they’d made it up! But the thing that made me cry was that I thought I’d lost my novel. I got some more opiates from the nurses, calmed myself down – they were dealing with an emergency in the room and the last thing they needed was an author agonising – and then the next morning I was listening to the Tchaikowsky on my personal stereo and suddenly I was in the Café Kranzler again. I’d found the novel! Such a relief, because honestly, it was an awful moment, and I realised how important a companion the novel I’m working on is to me.
Tchaikowsky wrote the concerto as a love-letter to a young violinist – who didn’t reciprocate his affection – but it is the most passionate, flirtatious, wonderful bit, and the part of the slow movement I was listening to was just like someone playing with their loved one’s fingers. I had something to write on, so I reached out – I had to lie flat in bed – and scrawled it down.
There’s a jazz cd by Abdullah Ibrahim called ‘Water from an Ancient Well’ that my brother gave me, that I played over and over again while I was writing Kummersdorf.
 Music so often releases something in me, and it’s vitally important to me for that reason. I can’t imagine writing without music. If I didn’t have any of the machines that are our personal musicians nowadays, I’d have to sing for myself, or relearn to play the piano and play every morning, as Jane Austen did. Perhaps that would be better, who knows?
But I’m a twentieth/twenty-first century writer, though I write historical fiction. My childish imagination was fired by ‘Music and Movement’ and by the stacks of wonderful glossy records, ‘78s, that lived in our house in Kendal – my parents didn’t have a lot of money, so I guess these were left over from a YMCA jumble sale, since my Dad worked for the YM and the house was a YM house. We lived over the office. Anyway, I have wonderful memories of my brother and me, on wet Lake District days, putting on The Night on Bald Mountain, and dancing excitedly to it. And that music surfaced years later when I wrote my novel about a witch persecution in the 17th century, Malefice. 

DALLYING WITH DICE - a medieval pastime by Elizabeth Chadwick

March 23, 2015, 5:30 pm

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Two men playing at a dicing table. Detail from the Prodigal Son window at Bourges Cathedral Note that the chap on the right has no money and is down to his underpants.

Last month I reviewed LOST LETTERS OF MEDIEVAL LIFE by David Crouch and Martha Karlin.  One of the letters in the collection is from a man refusing to help a friend's shiftless kinsman who has fallen into debt.  Part of the letter calling time on the kinsman says in translation:
I do not wish, nor am I able to lend him anything of mine for he is an inveterate dice player and he loses everything that he gambles...  He goes on to say that any money lent to the kinsman will disappear the same way and 'those who were with him in the tavern when he lost (either 10 marks, shillings or pounds)...gained everything, right down to his underpants (braccas).

Plainly gambling away one's wherewithal has been a folly for as long as dice have been around (and probably longer. I hazard that cavemen gambled the odds with bones or stones), but my concern is with the medieval aspect of the the vice.

Gambling with dice seems to have largely been a male folly. Men were mostly the ones with access to the cash and more leeway to go out losing it.  It was a game associated with drinking, and tended to have a rough, macho element to it.  It could lead to rowdiness, violence and - as in the case of the above mentioned young man - nudity!  Men would get drunk, wager all their money followed by their clothes and possessions.  This is alluded to in many works of literature of the period. Wace, writing of a dice game in the Roman de Brut of 1155 describes it in very similar terms to the above. The man who sat down to play clothed, might arise naked at the close of play.' 

Another literary source, the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal, completed in 1226,  reveals that dice were used to settle disputes.  The argument below is settled by a simple game called 'Highest Points.'
The poem's hero, William Marshal had won a horse at a tourney but was having trouble obtaining it from its erstwhile owner. In the end, after some discussion, the men agreed to play dice for the animal.  'Let the horse...be the sole property of the man throwing the highest score with three dice.  Isn't that the way? Shall it be so?'
The men agree and 'Three dice were brought which quickly slipped out of the hand as soon as they were thrown.'
Which makes one wonder if there were dice that didn't slip out of the hand so easily and if such dice were fixed.
As it happened, the other man threw a nine and the Marshal threw eleven, so he won the horse, which is as one would expect from a tale lauding our hero!

The main dice games of the Middle Ages were 'Highest Points' (plus poins)  played as above mentioned with three dice thrown onto a dicing board or table - highest score takes all, Then there was ''Raffle' also played with 3 dice.  In the latter the hope was to throw all three dice alike, or failing that, to throw a pair with a higher value than one's opponent.  Hazard was a dice game very popular from the thirteenth century onwards and the ancestor of the modern game of craps. Its name came from the Arabic word 'al-zahr' meaning a die.  It was played like the other with three dice.  There is only one thrower per round who is decided by agreement of the other players, or by all the players throwing the dice to see who goes first. If the player with his first throw scores a 3,4, 5, 6, 15, 16, 17 or 18, then those scores are called 'hazards' and he wins. If he scores them with his second throw, however, he loses.  If neither his first or second score is a 'hazard' it is called a 'chance' and will be anything between 7 and 14.  He goes on playing until either his first score or second score comes up again. If it's his first score he wins. If it's his second, he loses.

A replica die owned by the author. Bone with a ring and dot design.

We know from the pipe rolls that King John enjoyed gaming. He gave his illegitimate brother William Longespee money so that he could gamble. and in the summer of 1210 John could be found whiling away the time on his Irish campaign by wagering at dice. He'Lent to to Robert de Ros for play, when he played with Warine FitzGerold at Carlingford, and the King was his Partner, £1.17s 4d whereof he returned 14s 8d. Also to the same Robert £1. 0s 4d when he played with the same Warine, and the King was again his partner in the game. (Praestita roll, 12th year of King John).
There is a tale from the medieval French Fabliaux in which a minstrel is brought into hell by a demon and left in charge of all the souls there while the devils go out looking for more. St. Peter turns up in their absence and plays dice with the minstrel until he wins all the souls the latter is supposed to be watching for the devils and promptly leads them out of hell and up to heaven.  The minstrel is in dire trouble when the devils return to find the place empty. They decide he's a rotten servant and throw him out.  He runs all the way to heaven and St. Peter lets him in, and that, says the tale is why minstrels, among other rogues and gamblers are refused entry into hell!

A game of dice chess.  The Prodigal Son Window Chartres Cathedral. Again, no money and he's lost most of his clothes!

Chess at this time was sometimes played with dice too, adding in an element of chance to the game. It  was seen as slightly inferior and less intellectual than unadulterated chess and as a game slightly more fit for ladies' to play than straight dice, the chess element lending it the respectability of a parlour rather than tavern game, although it could be both. A lady who gambled with dice was risking her reputation, although it was considered acceptable to do so in a social context if the company was mixed and the men put up the money for the stakes.  This happened for example in 1260 when Count Alphonse of Poitiers, brother of King Louis IX invited everyone to play dice in his chamber and paid for the ladies' stakes himself so that no one was embarrassed and no reputations called into question.

Dice and shaker. Museum of London.

The dice themselves were generally rather small and usually carved from bone with ring and dot patterns marking out the six sides. They are frequent finds on archaeological dig sites.  The dice were sometimes fraudulent. The set above which can be seen in the Museum of London are all fixed.  Three only have high numbers and three only low. The rest are weighted with mercury to fall the same way every time.  The pewter shaker in which they were found was originally a pot for birdseed.

Although it is often said that the past is a different country, I am often struck by the similarities between then and now. Some things are hard wired.  My personal view is that the past is the same country, but just a few bus stops further back. Crane our necks that little bit further, and we can catch sight of our ancestors in the distance.  Gambling has gone digital in a huge way and TV programmes bombard us with late night adverts to be cool and get down to the online casino. Where presumably some of us, in the grip of too much wine and adrenaline will end up losing our virtual underwear!

Elizabeth Chadwick is the author of several best-selling novels set in the Middle Ages including THE GREATEST KNIGHT about William Marshal and THE SUMMER QUEEN and THE WINTER CROWN about Eleanor of Aquitaine. She is currently working on her third novel in the Eleanor trilogy THE AUTUMN THRONE.

The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlist by Elizabeth Laird

March 24, 2015, 5:30 pm

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The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

The Zone of Interest is a terrifying book by a writer who inhabits his subject with passion. The foul details of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz Birkenau (called Kat Zet in the novel), are gut churning in their reality. Only the sickest imagination could have conjured up the scenes Amis portrays, but no imagination brought them into being. This is not a fantasy. The horrors are real. The Zone of Interest is a historical novel, written with respect for its terrible subject.

There are few linguistic fireworks in this book, and the writing forbears to draw attention to itself. Any humour is subtle, and arises from the manifest absurdity of the Nazi project and the monstrous buffoonery of the camp commandant, Paul Doll.

But The Zone of Interest is also a love story, and the reader is forced into feeling some empathy for the main character, Angelus Thomsen, the nephew of Martin Bormann, a cynic and womaniser who becomes disenchanted with the Nazi regime as he becomes erotically obsessed with Hannah, the camp commandant's unhappy wife.

The character of Szmul, the head of the Jewish Sonders, whose job it was to clear away the ghastly remains of the murder machine, remains understandably more opaque. There was a place here where even Amis did not dare to go.

The subject of the Shoah has been treated in recent novels with sentimentality that belittles the horror. It is a subject that deserves only the greatest reverence and respect which Martin Amis accords it in this unforgettable novel.

The Lie by Helen Dunmore

In The Lie, set straight after the First World War, Helen Dunmore delves with great sensitivity into the enduring trauma of guilt and grief that so many survivors had to suffer.

Daniel Bramwell, a young man without a family, returns to his native Cornwall for want of anywhere better to go. He is given a rudimentary shelter by Mary Pascoe, an old woman in her last illness, and he sets about growing vegetables on her patch of land. When she dies, he follows her request and buries her in her own garden. The small lies that he is forced to tell become greater and greater and soon dominate his life.

Suffering from guilt and shell-shock, Daniel is haunted by his memories, particularly by his failure to save the life of Frederick Dennis, his childhood friend and "blood brother" who had become his commanding officer. Frederick appears to him in nightmares, reeking of earth, "exposed in all its filth, corrosive, eating away at the bodies that had to live in it."
But there is more than horror in this novel. There is tenderness in Daniel's care for old Mary Pascoe, in his attempt to bring her garden back to life, and above all in his growing friendship with Felicia, Frederick's sister, who is herself wounded by grief and loss.

Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre

Venetia Stanley was one of the great beauties of Charles 1st's court. Painted by Van Dyck and celebrated by Ben Johnson, she had all the star quality of a Marilyn Monroe or Lady Diana of a later era. But as she reached middle age, and her beauty began to fade, she went to desperate lengths to try to preserve it, recruiting the charlatan physician Lancelot Choice and becoming addicted to his potion, Viper Wine.

There's a terrific verve to this exuberant and inventive novel which hurtles along at a thrilling pace, sweeping into its embrace great characters from Charles 1st's court, such as Venetia's husband, the alchemist Sir Kenelm Digby, Cornelis Drebbel, the eccentric inventor who launched a submarine into the Thames, other great beauties at Court, notable lords of the time and King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria themselves.

Opinions will be divided on the eruption of the twentieth century into the text, via special powers enjoyed by Venetia's husband Sir Kenelm, but they are all part of the fun in this youthful and hugely enjoyable novel.

In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds

A new novel by Adam Foulds is to be keenly anticipated, and this one fulfils all expectations. His spare, sharply observed writing brings to life a moment in Sicily at the end of the Second World War, when the Allies unwittingly facilitated the return to power of the Mafia, which Mussolini had strenuously attempted to suppress. 

The novel opens on a remote and rocky hillside, where Angilu, a young shepherd, is forced to surrender his sheep to Ciro Albanese, a local Mafioso. The old cards of corruption and connivance are reshuffled as the Allies arrive to liberate Sicily from the Fascists. Will Walker, an English officer, and Ray Marfione, an Italian American soldier, struggle to understand what is happening in the country they are occupying, their efforts impeded by incompetent superiors.

Adam Foulds has spun an intricate web of lives, in which the forces unleashed by war draw everyone out of their familiar worlds. Forced to operate in strange and shifting circumstances, the characters each bring with them the baggage of the worlds from which they come, and inevitably collide in misunderstandings.

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut

Arctic Summer is a book of profound compassion and sensitivity. It recreates the inner life and emotions of Morgan Forster (E.M.Forster), his yearning for romance and affection, and the lonely agony of being homosexual (a "minorite" in Forster's words) in a hostile and unsympathetic world.
The book draws heavily on Forster's own diaries and letters and Galgut's depth of research is impressive, but it is a novel, not a fictionalised biography. The long, unproductive years between Howard's End and A Passage to India are fully imagined, and the characters who inhabit Forster's life and emotions are vivid and touching.

The novel follows Forster's slow progression towards the writing of A Passage to India. He embarks on a journey to India to visit his Indian friend Syed Ross Mahmood. His love for Syed is unrequited, and this is a relationship that can never satisfy him. There is more affection in his affair with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl, and the scenes in both India and Egypt are vividly evoked.

It was on his second visit to India that Forster began to understand the corrupting effect of power on love, as he struggles with his feelings for a barber at the court of the Maharajah of Dewas. Galgut shows how Forster's emotional journeys are  preludes to the writing of A Passage to India, surely one of the most profound studies of colonialism, power and love ever written.

A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie

The mark of a novel worth reading must surely be that it plays out a moral argument, and A God in Every Stone achieves this with vigour, passion and style. It careers along with unstoppable momentum, scooping up characters, attitudes, places and ideas and meshing them into stirring political events in Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and India.

The story opens in 1914. Vivian Rose is a young Englishwoman who is in love with Tahsin Bey, a Turkish archaeologist. Following a hint he had sent her, she travels to Peshawar. There her life becomes entangled with two men, the former soldier Qayyum Gul, who has returned wounded and angry from the horrors of trench warfare in France, and his young brother Najeeb.
As the push for Indian independence gathers momentum, the characters find themselves forced to take sides in the struggle. Here Kamila Shamsie shows her true understanding of what it is like to live through violent civil unrest. Events, like shards of broken glass, are fragmentary. They follow each other at frightening speed, and it's only afterwards that the pieces can be put together and some kind of picture revealed.

At its heart this is a story of betrayal, broken loyalties and the crumbling of empires under the onslaught of war, big themes brilliantly illuminated in this ambitious novel.

The Ten Thousand Things by John Spurling

The central character of this mesmerising novel is Wang Meng, a bureaucrat who lived in the fourteenth century during the final years of the Yuan dynasty, as a new Ming emperor swept away the old and brought a new dynasty to power. But Wang Meng was also a master painter, some of whose exquisite landscape paintings are still treasured in China today.

Wang Meng sought a quiet life, wishing to devote himself to the creation of works of art, a process which John Spurling follows in passages of serene beauty. But China is in turmoil and the artist is inevitably pulled into the maelstrom, meeting along the way powerful characters such as the White Tigress, a warrior queen, other master painters devoted to their art, and a restless young monk who will rise to the heights of power. Others spring to life: Wang Meng's beloved servant Deng, Jasmine the good-time girl, and the Emperor Zhu himself.

In spite of the stirring events it portrays, there are no literary histrionics in The Ten Thousand Things. The writing is spare, enriched with perfectly placed details and a vivid sense of place, so that fourteenth century China unrolls before us like one of Wang Meng's painted scrolls.

An artist's haven by Carol Drinkwater

March 25, 2015, 5:01 pm

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                                                                        Mirófountain

I have been focusing quite a bit on war recently so I thought for this month’s blog I would choose a subject that is closer to home and of a lighter aspect.
A love story. This true story is set along the Côte d’Azur, the Blue Coast, but it began in the north of France in Lille.

In 1908 in the town of Hazebrouck near Lille a boy, Aimé, was born to a railway employee and his wife, Monsieur et Madame Maeght. At the outbreak of WWI, Monsieur Maeght set off for the war never to return. Worse, the family home was destroyed. Aimé, now six years old, along with his mother and three siblings, was evacuated to the Gard in the south by the Red Cross. Aimé was bright and he was passionate about art, poetry and music. After a brilliant school career, he attended art school in Nimes, but he decided he could not pursue his artistic ambitions because he had the responsibility of his family to consider. He turned instead to the printing trade and decided to study lithography. Once he had gained his engraver’s diploma, he had no difficulty finding himself a job with a printer in Cannes. He was twenty-one years old with, it is reported, “spades of charm”. He joined the choir in the church in the Suquet.

Within a year, he had met a local girl, Marguerite Devaye. She was the daughter of wealthy trades people. They married the following year. He was twenty-three. She, nineteen. In 1930, Adrien, their first son was born. Their lives were blessed. Aimé was bursting with ambition and plans. In 1932, whilst still empoyed at the same printer’s, he opened his own shop near to the famous seafront, La Croisette, and christened it Arte. He began exhibiting paintings in the window. Soon, Aimé’s print shop was also a gallery. Pierre Bonnard, who lived in the hillside village of Le Cannet overlooking Cannes, visited the gallery and requested of Aimé that he colour his lithographs.

Bonnard’s request was the turning point in Aimé Maeght’s life. A friendship between them was born. From hereon, the greatest names in modern art frequented Aimé and Marguerite’s lives.

                                                       Marguerite Maeght, Henri Matisse

When the war broke out, Aimé discreetly put his printing presses at the services of the Résistance, whose leader, Jean Moulin, opened a gallery in Nice as a cover for the underground work he was doing. In 1943, when Jean Moulin was arrested (he died from wounds inflicted by the Gestapo on a train to Germany), Bonnard begged the Maeghts to move inland. Their second son, Bernard, had been born the year before. They moved to Le Mas des Orangers, a villa outside Vence. Henri Matisse was a near neighbour. Marguerite sat for Matisse for a series of charcoal paintings.

After the Liberation, the Maeghts, encouraged by their celebrated friends, opened a gallery in Paris, the renowned Galerie Maeght. Aimé soon became one of the twentieth century’s most respected art dealers and art publishers. The Maeght lives were blessed, until tragedy struck.

In 1953 their second son, Bernard, died of leukemia. The couple were, understandably, heartbroken. Fernand Leger advised them to take a trip to America. A month after their son’s death Braque visited Aimé. Here is what Aimé wrote of that visit:
‘When Braque came to see me in Saint-Paul a month after the death of my little boy, I was in the depths of despair. He said, “Since you want to do something that goes beyond the business of art dealing, that you seem to despise, and I understand you, do something here, something without a speculative purpose, that would enable us artists to exhibit sculpture and painting in the best possible conditions of light and space. Do it, I will help you.” ’
"Create something that will live on after you…" encouraged Braque.

And the seed was sown...

Whilst in the United States, the couple visited the private art foundations of Guggenheim, Barnes and Phillips and were very impressed. Although still deep in grief they decided, upon their return, to build a property near their home to house their private art collection. At that time, they were not intending it to be open to the public. It was to be a haven for artists, writers, poets; somewhere to congregate and share their ideas. Miró and Braque in their different ways encouraged the Maeght couple to create a space where exhibitions could be held, where young, lesser known artists could also participate.

                                          A part of the Joan Miró Labyrinth. The Artwork is
                                                   La Fourche, or The Fork and the Devil

                                                    
"The night gradually rises from the hills of Provence, all the way to Miró's Fork and Devil,"             wrote André Malraux.

A beautiful pine-clad hillside outside the village of Saint-Paul de Vence is the location. The Catalan architect, Josep Lluis Sert, who had just finished designing a studio for Miró in Mallorca, was brought in to assist. However, the local prefecture refused the planning permit. It was only when the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, stepped in that the project was given the green light. Malraux, a writer himself, was a man of passion and vision.

One astounding moment during the preparations for the foundations was the discovery of a ruined chapel on the land. Marguerite saw this a good omen. The Maeght couple restored it and it has been integrated into the labyrinthine structure displaying splendid stained glass windows designed by Braque and Raoul Ubac. It is the Chapel Bernard.

The construction took four years. Artists and workmen picnicked together regularly on the site. Sadly, Braque died the year before completion.

On the 28th July 1964, the Fondation Maeght was inaugurated by André Malraux (also a former member of the French Resistance) who in his opening discourse declared, “this is not a museum”. An accurate observation:  It is indeed an indoor/outdoor structure created by the artists and architects themselves, a Mediterranean playground full of joy and colour. A marriage of art and nature. The inauguration dinner was held in the Giacometti courtyard. Ella Fitzgerald and Yves Montand were the evening's concert. The Maeghts had financed everything themselves. It is their monument to their departed son, Bernard. Today, its director is Adrien Maeght, older brother of long-deceased Bernard.

http://www.fondation-maeght.com/index.php/en/the-foundation

Earlier this week, while still waiting for editorial input on The Last Domain, I decided to give myself a treat. It is spring here, full-blown. warm and flower-filled. A day out on my own seemed long overdue, so I set off for the Fondation Maeght, situated a ten-minute walk outside the ramparts of the medieval village of Saint-Paul. It is in the final throes of celebrating its fiftieth anniversary last year.
Here follow a small selection of the photographs I took at this serene and magical place.

                                                                Giant Seed, Jean Arp

                                                         Les Renforts,  Alexander Calder

Giacometti figures in the Giacometti Courtyard

Fountaine, Pol Bury  

                                                           Personage,  Joan Miró

I want to close with an extract from a correspondence sent to Miró from Aimé Maeght:
"Yes, my dear Joan, we will create a unique work in the world that will remain in time and in minds as evidence of our civilization, that through wars, social and scientific upheavals will leave humanity one of the purest spiritual and artistic messages of all time. These are the stories I want to make visible to the generations that follow us and to show our grandchildren that in our very materialistic age the spirit remained present and very effective thanks to men like you."
29th August 1959

Marguerite Maeght died in 1977. Aimé Maeght followed her, his most loyal ally, on 5th September 1981. Both are buried in the cemetery of Saint-Paul de Vence. Chagall lies nearby.
Alongside her octogenarian father, Adrien Maeght, Aimé and Marguerite's granddaughter, Isabelle, presides over the foundation now. It remains a family affair. And, in my opinion, an inspirational love story.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Merci pour les fleurs, as they say in France. A Tiny Quiz by Louisa Young.

March 26, 2015, 5:30 pm

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We hear so much about the hatchet jobs, the insults, the meanness and jealousy. Only today on Facebook one author was complaining about another calling him a ladypart, and a journalist was having the vapours in her misunderstanding of John Crace's satires in the Guardian - how dare anybody be mean about the sainted Robert MacFarlane?  Pah. I wish everybody would just be nice. Well, I kind of do, until I check the magnificent, virtuosic rudeness writers can produce for each other. 
So today I offer you another Tiny Quiz. It comes in two parts: Insults and Compliments.

Who said this about who? They're all by writers, of writers. 

1) 'Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.'

2) 'I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.'

3) 'Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.'

4) 'It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?'

5) 'I don’t think XX was very good in bed.'

6) 'I cannot abide XX’s souvenir shop style and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches.'

7) 'A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.'

8) 'A great cow full of ink.'

9) 'I suppose half the time X  just shoved down anything that came into his head.'

10)  'X  is famous, not XXX (its author). XXX is an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.'

11) 'X was a drug addict. XX was an alcoholic. XXX was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. XXXX took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized, anyhow. XXXXX killed himself. XXXXXX was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer -and if so, why?'

Ach well. Let's change channels to the happy dance of appreciation and positivity -  

Two: Who said these wonderful things, and about who or what?

1) 'She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers ... it really is a bloody wonderful book'

2 'My favourite piece of information is that X, brother of XX and XXX, died standing up leaning against a mantlepiece, in order to prove it could be done.'

3) 'If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'xxxxxx' is worth any number of old ladies.'

4)  'XXXs aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.'

5)  'As a young child I wanted to be an XX because XXs were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.'

Why was it so much harder to find compliments? I wonder. 

ANSWERS- Insults:

1) D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce 

2) Mark Twain on Jane Austen

3) Evelyn Waugh on Proust

4) Elizabeth Bishop on Catcher in the Rye

5) Auden on Browning

6) Nabokov on Conrad

7) Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound

8) Gustave Flaubert on George Sand

9) Wodehouse on Shakespeare

10) Nabokov on Nabokov

11) Bennet Cerf on Coleridge, Poe, Marlowe, Pope, Chatterton and Byron.

Compliments

1) Hemingway on Beryl Markham
2) Douglas Adams on Bramwell Bronte, brother of Charlotte and Emily
3) William Faulkner on Ode to a Grecian Urn
4)  Flaubert on Books
5) William Burroughs on Writers

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Women Making Waves: The Newton Women’s Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, 2015, by Clare Mulley

March 27, 2015, 5:30 pm

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Sporting history will be made this month when for the first time, on 11 April 2015, women will row in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the same terms, and on the same waters, as men.

Although held intermittently since 1927, until recently the women’s race has been seen as the rather feeble younger sister of the famous men’s race. However this year the two women’s teams will follow the same tough 4.2 mile (6.8km) course on the Tideway - the powerfully tidal stretch of the Thames in London - from Putney to Mortlake, rather than the separate 1.25 mile (2km) stretch of the calm waters of Henley to which they have previously been relegated.

Newnham College Cambridge crew, 1919 (courtesy of theboatraces.org)

What has made this possible is not, of course, a sudden increase in female interest, fitness, strength or ability. Despite romantic images of ladies lolling their fingers in rivers as they are rowed upstream by strapping young men, women have in fact always enjoyed an active role on the water. The subject of my first biography, Eglantyne Jebb, the future founder of the charity Save the Children, was passionate about rowing on the Isis when she was a student at Oxford's Lady Margaret Hall in the 1890s, and she was a woman who regularly played hockey and fencing, and rode horses and bicycles - on one occasion with such vigour that she was cautioned by the police.

Eglantyne was too early to participate in competitive rowing, as female Oxbridge rowing crews only started to compete against each other in 1927, provoking endless abuse from male and female spectators along with claims that the race was unfeminine and bad for female health. The first race between the Oxford University Boat Club and Newnham College, Cambridge, was held on the Isis. Since the two crews were not permitted on the river at the same time, they had to be judged separately on 'time and style’. Inevitably objections were still raised and, according to The Times, ‘large and hostile crowds gathered on the towpath’.

Miss Pomphrett, 1937 OUWBC cox with the Francombe Cup (courtesy of theboatraces.org)

It was only in 1935 that the race became a direct contest over a half mile (1000 yard) stretch of the Isis, the Camb or, just once, on the Tideway at Barnes. Betty Francombe, who had progressed from stoker to coach of the Oxford women's team, donated the cup, which is still being presented.

The 1942 Cambridge crew (courtesy of theboatraces.org)

In the mid-1950s however, drama struck when the Oxford crew went over a weir during training the day before the race and, as a result, were banned from the river. Funding evaporated overnight, the women's boat clubs almost sank from sight, and no more women's races would be held for almost ten years.

It was two Oxford engineering students who revived the women's races, still in the face of open hostility, in the early 1960s. At first the crews had to fight even to take part in the inter-college ‘bumps’ races but, supported by a college Canon who enthusiastically coached the team he called the ‘Perspiring Persephones’ or ‘Swetty Bettys’, they had an impressive run of success. Despite being branded, ‘a ghastly sight’, and even ‘an anatomical impossibility’, the race now became an annual fixture, moving to the Thames at Henley in the 1970s.

Rowing has recently been gaining enormous popularity as a sport among women, and British rowers are world class. At the 2012 Olympics, Britain topped the medal table for female rowing with four golds, and an impressive nine medals overall. Nevertheless the press still managed to send mixed messages. Britain's most successful rower, Katherine Grainger, who claimed gold after three consecutive silvers, was reported as having finally shaken off the nickname, ‘the bridesmaid of rowing’, and more coverage focused on her dreams of being introduced to David Beckham now that she had won gold. At the time she had been a world champion since 2000, and held a law degree, a master’s in medical law, and was working on a doctorate on the science of homicide which she has now achieved.

Cath Bishop (L), Katherine Grainger (R) winning silver at the Athens Olympic Games 2004 (courtesy of theboatraces.org)

While British women were leading the world at the Olympics, there was still little support for the sport at home however. The women’s Oxford and Cambridge teams have faced persistent lack of media interest, funding, and access to professional facilities. Until recently, the female crew even had to pay their own train fares to the rowing lake, while the men were driven in branded mini-buses. Now however, the women have won the support and sponsorship of a London based company. Shocked to discover that they had not had any commercial sponsorship previously, Helen Morrissey, the female CEO of Newton Investment Management, felt that simply putting the company’s name on the women’s shirts was not enough; she wanted to ‘influence the evolution of the event’, and has lent her support to campaigns for more recognition and investment in female rowing.

Hopefully 2015 will prove to be a turning point. ‘It means a huge amount to have the boat races coming together on the Tideway’, rowing World Champion Cath Bishop, now chair of the Cambridge University Women’s Boat Club, says. For her, the two crews, their sponsors and supporters, this is about putting the female rowers on ‘the same stage as the men’, and finally bringing parity and equality to the boat race. I think Eglantyne Jebb, Betty Francombe, and the other female rowing pioneers would have been delighted.

The Men and Women's Blue Boats weigh-in together on 19 March 2015. The Cambridge mens crew and women's crew topped the scales. (courtesy of theboatraces.org)

The cherry on the cake is that this year the BBC will be covering the women’s boat race live, as part of the same flagship national sporting event as the men’s race, to be broadcast to 200 countries worldwide. Commentator Clare Baldwin has also decided to cover the women's race rather than the Grand National, scheduled for the same day, in the hopes that the equal billing being given to the female crews will have a 'ripple effect all across society, business and sport'.

‘I’m really hopeful that when people see the women rowing across that same course, on the same day, with the same buzz and excitement around them,’ sponsor Helena Morrissey says, ‘it will make people stop and think…’ History is being made on the Thames in two weeks time, and whether you back Oxford or Cambridge, I hope you will support this watershed moment.

c. Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com

@ClareMulley

With thanks to Lucy Ward

Patrick Gale: A Place Called Winter, by Louisa Young

March 28, 2015, 5:30 pm

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Photo credit: David Gwinnutt.

A while ago my friend Patrick Gale, who I met at a reading a million years ago, when I was a tiny newbie and he was a glamorous experienced well-known writer, mentioned an ancestor of his, Harry, who had had to go to Canada at the start of the 20th century, and it wasn't clear why, or who had made him. Nothing gets us going like a family mystery, and his mother's Cowboy Grandpa, who fought Indians, built log cabins, slaughtered bears with his bear hands and so on, was a perfect one. Plains Cree garments and bearskin mittens in the dressing up box backed up the tales. And many years later, Patrick came across a little handwritten memoir, from which he hoped he might learn why his grandmother had been brought up by aunts and uncles after her own mother's death, and why his great grandfather was never spoken of.

Well, he found out all sorts of things: that Harry and his brother had married two sisters, that his great-grandmother had been in love with another man at the time of the wedding; that some family members were rather controlling. A fortune was inherited but money ran short, the baby was born, and then Harry was obliged - but why? - to head out to the wild wastes of Canada. And why without his wife or child? And why, after his wife's premature death, was their daughter not sent to join him, nor even encouraged to keep in touch with him? And when Harry visited the UK in the fifties, why was no bond  kindled? Why, as an old man, did he return alone to Canada?
What novelist could resist? What Patrick did with this half-formed tale was to find out all the facts - he took a long research trip to Canada and found Harry's homestead, still a working farm, near the town of Winter, now a ghost town. But what he really needed was the emotional heart of the story - the why. The one he found was simple, completely believable and utterly tragic. If Harry were gay, everything falls into place: the secrecy, the shame, the bloody old-fashioned Englishness of it all.

    Harry at the time of his marriage, and
   below, in 1953, with Patrick's mother,
   grandmother and sister



As somebody once said, 'There'd be no skeletons in closets if we didn't put them there.' Patrick takes out the skeleton of his great grandfather and gives him, in A Place called Winter, a terrifying and profoundly sympathetic story which makes the modern person gasp with gratitude that we don't live then, while having to acknowledge that actually, across our modern world, there are many places where things are no better now at all. Patrick calls it a cross between Maurice and Brokeback Mountain - but like all of Patrick's novels it has a complex and understanding web of human relationships, and alongside the love story, three very different women help Harry to really learn who and what he is as a man. I hugely recommend taking a look for yourselves. You could start with the two excerpts below.

London

From Jermyn Street Harry wandered down through St James’s to the park and then up on to the Strand. He went into a chemist’s shop and bought a small bottle of laudanum and, because it looked alarming on its own, a packet of blackcurrant pastilles in a pretty tin. He leant against a shopfront, uncorked the bottle and sniffed the contents, which smelled of alcohol and cinnamon, then remembered the stuff had to be taken in water. There was a Lyon’s corner shop nearby, so he went in there and asked for a pot of tea and a glass of water to go with it. Experimentally he added just the recommended number of drops to the water and knocked them back.

It tasted bitter, rather unpleasant, but it was only right that death should. Given time and the right space in which to do it – a quiet corner of a park, perhaps – he could imagine tipping in the whole bottle and gulping it down. How much worse would it taste? And did it matter, since he’d be dying by then?

A current of warmth began to surge through him to the top of his head, and suddenly everything seemed to slow down, the bustle of horses and buses in the street, the chatter of people and clatter of china and cutlery at the tables around him. It seemed as though all the joints in his body relaxed, every ache, even the memory of how an ache felt, lifted away. He could quite easily have lain his head on the table before him and fallen asleep.

Then he noticed a crowd on the pavement opposite. They were milling around the window displays of a place that clearly had been a shop but now, instead of a shopkeeper’s name, announced CANADIAN EMIGRATION in large letters. Curious, doing his best not to slur his words, he paid for the tea, left the laudanum bottle behind, merely smiling at the nippy who called after him holding it up, and crossed the Strand for a closer look.

It took him a while to press through the crowd. There was a model of a farm – a pretty wooden house with a veranda and gingham curtains – surrounded by an ingeniously simulated field of golden wheat, and above it an announcement he could not quite believe, of free land. One hundred and sixty acres could be had, it said, for nothing but three years’ partial residency on them and what sounded like minimal work. He read all he could of both window displays – the second had a similar announcement above a model train encircling a placid herd of identical cows – then pushed inside, queued to speak to a clerk and was sent away with a brightly coloured leaflet about homesteading in the Last Best West. It gave advice about shipping lines that sailed to Halifax from Liverpool and a list of outfitters who could equip him for the adventure. One of these was at the other end of the Strand, near the Savoy, as was an agency for the shipping lines.

The outfitter, already used to such enquiries, handed him a list that was remarkably like those he and Jack had to tick off when packing for school. Dress suit, he read. Best tweed suit. Tennis suit. One cloth suit of ‘leather suiting’ and extra trousers for same. Three suits hard in wear. Cord trousers two pair. Ulster coat. Pea jacket. Mackintosh. Dressing gown (useful as extra warm garment in extremis).

Flannel shirts twelve. White shirts two. Flannel pyjamas four. Winter and summer drawers – four pair apiece. Four vests. Twenty-four pair socks. Six collars. A cholera belt. An India rubber bath. Portmanteau for cabin. White cravats and cuffs. Cardigan. Two jerseys (Guernsey knit for endurance). Twelve pocket handkerchiefs. Six Turkish towels. Waterproof sheet (large and of best quality). Pair large blankets. Rug. Six pair dress gloves. Three pair hedging and ditching gloves. Two pair Canada mittens. A housewife with buttons, needles etc. including saddlery needles and waxed thread. One pair boots. One pair high boots. Dress shoes. Unnailed shoes. Slippers. Ambulance braces. Helmet of Jaeger wool.

He had absolutely no idea how Canadian mittens might differ from the English variety and was faintly alarmed at the prospect of a cholera belt, whatever that might be, but reading the list evoked the adventure pleasantly even before it was under way.

Canada

As summer turned to glorious autumn, Harry bought himself a gun and learnt to shoot rabbit and duck, which Jørgensen showed him how to prepare for the kitchen, and his wife and Annie how to cook. He had worried that Jørgensen might renege on their handshake and ask him to move on with the coming of winter, not wanting an extra mouth to feed when there was less for a hired hand to do about the place, but his fears were groundless. Jørgensen still made good use of him every day. Until the snows came, there remained ditches to keep clear, fences to mend, and winter supplies to collect and store. And once snow lay thick around the place – shoulder deep or more where it blew into drifts – the animals still had to be fed and bedded in the barns, and ice melted for them so that they could drink. There was dung to be forked from the barns before it froze like rock, and logs to be piled for the kitchen stove. And of course there was always snow to shovel, snow of a texture and depth he would not have thought possible. As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty, like the hard crystals that formed on the inside of the windows. The cold did something strange to the quality of sounds around the farm, deadening all background noise so that the smallest scratching or whisper was emphasised. It was easy to see how the unwary settler could die in such a scene, lulled into marvelling at its deadly beauty even as his blood began to freeze. Just once Harry lingered outside as a blizzard got under way, amazed at the scale and savagery of it, but was furiously dragged indoors by Jørgensen and given a lecture about losing fingers and toes to frostbite and the impossibility of getting a doctor out until spring.

As winter progressed, he came to understand the hunger with which Goody had eyed his meagre library when she first saw it. He had soon read everything he had with him, rereading much of it, and fell to trading books with the Jørgensens. With so little choice of entertainment and such long nights amid the stupefying silence and snow, far from any neighbours, the usual demarcations of books for women and books for men, books for children and books for their elders became irrelevant before the imperative of diversion. He read Jane Austen, which he had never thought to do before, and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and Black Beauty as well as Jack London, Fennimore Cooper and Hans Christian Andersen. He even found himself, just like his employers, slowly turning the pages of the latest Eaton’s catalogue, which displayed everything from wooden house kits (up to eight bedrooms large) to cream separators, from guns to underwear, the latter modelled by coyly simpering women. (Men’s underwear, he noted, was listed but unmodelled, the men in the catalogues rarely appearing in anything less than evening dress.)

Winter had come on them suddenly, whereas spring arrived by slow, unconvincing degrees, far later than he’d have expected. What Jørgensen called chinooks, warm winds from the western mountains, arrived and began to shrink the snow into patches of dirty ice rather than melting the lot overnight the way warmer weather would have done at home. A thaw was announced with loud cracks around the place before it turned all Harry’s laboriously cleared ditches to so many little canals. With the spring melt came a flurry of unexpected visitors, as neighbouring households emerged from the long freeze like so many bears, hungry for news and less familiar faces and other people’s baking. Mrs Jørgensen cursed these visitors, who often arrived at the least convenient moment, when she had her hands full of chores or nothing but leftovers to set before them, but she welcomed them, too, being as hungry for faces and talk as anyone else.

Patrick Gale was born on the Isle of Wight in 1962, raised in Winchester, where he studied at the Pilgrims choir school and Winchester College; he then read English at New College Oxford. He lives on his husband’s farm near Land’s End and is a keen gardener and cellist. He is a director of the Charles Causley Trust and the Cornish arts and spirituality charity, Endelienta. He chairs the North Cornwall Book Festival and is secretary of the Penzance Orchestral Society.

He has written fifteen novels, including the bestselling Rough Music and Notes from an Exhibition. His fourteenth novel, A Perfectly Good Man, won a Green Carnation award and was a favourite recommendation among Guardian readers in the paper’s end of year round-up.. His latest novel, A Place Called Winter, is a Radio 2 Book Club selection. He is currently writing an original, gay-themed, part-historical drama for BBC1 called Man in an Orange Shirt, and adapting Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence for BBC2.

Cabinet of Curiosities: Great Uncle Andrew's Compass by Elizabeth Laird

March 29, 2015, 4:01 pm

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My brother Graham inherited a kilt from our father's uncle Andrew. It was made to last forever, and so it would have done if it hadn't been for the moths which turned it eventually into a fine lace.

Uncle Andrew had his kilt tailored for him when he was transferred from the Highland Light Infantry into the Black Watch in 1916. The kilt was meant to be a practical garment, keeping the warmth in and the water and mud of the trenches out. He was probably wearing it when he wrote this short letter to my ten year old father, on 24th April 1916. (I've transcribed it below.)

                                                                          5^thBlack Watch          

                                                                          Brit Expeditionary Force

                                                                               France                                                                                                 

                                                                                   24/4/16

 

My Dear Clelland,

            Very many thanks for your wee note from 2 Balmoral Place. I have just had a letter from your Father. So convey to him my thanks. I came out the trenches at 1 am this morning and arrived here about 4.30 a.m. after 4 days and 4 nights in. We had to find our way back, over unknown ground by compass. I am now in a French Farm so am very comfy. Well Clelland write me a letter whenever you feel inclined.

            Give my love to all at Lurland not forgetting yourself.

                        Your affectionate Uncle,

                                    Andrew

The kilt eventually came to me - or what was left of it. Reluctantly, I took my scissors to it, hoping to salvage some useful bits. It was hard work. The woollen serge was so thick that it was quite hard to cut.

In the same bag was Uncle Andrew's sporran. I put it aside, and it was only a few months ago that I opened it for the first time. In it I found his compass. Was it the same one he mentions in his letter? I suppose it must have been. On the back is an arrow mark, showing that it was government issue, and below that is the date. 1916.

Shortly after Andrew wrote this letter, he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He can't have had much time to become an experienced pilot, and his plane was lost over the Somme in November 1916. He is buried in the vast military cemetery at Varennes, along with so many thousands of other young men. The inscription reads "Second Lieutenant Andrew Clark Laird, the Black Watch, Attd Royal Flying Corps 22nd November 1916 Aged 22."

I mistrust the patriotic hoo-ha over the centenary of World War One. It was a horrible, unnecessary, insane massacre of the innocents - and it was a long time ago. I really don't want, ever, to read another novel about the awfulness of trench warfare. I keep my memorials of Uncle Andrew, his letter, his compass and his medals, in a drawer and show them to young relatives from time to time. But I like to think that Uncle Andrew, and the millions who died with him (including my mother's uncle John) would prefer us to look forwards rather than back. Instead of re-imagining old wars in which we were self-righteously victorious, they might have encouraged us, if they'd had the chance, to pay attention to more recent wars for which we the British have been responsible, to do what we can to understand the causes of modern conflicts and fight against the ignorance and prejudice which give rise to lethal hatreds.

March Competition

March 30, 2015, 4:01 pm

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We have five copies of Patrick Gale's A Place Called Winter to give away to the best answers to the following question:

"Name another book that re-creates for you the atmosphere of a country in a particular season and say why you chose it."

Please leave your answers in the Comments section below.

We regret that our competitions are open to UK residents only

Queens of England by Mary Hoffman

March 31, 2015, 4:01 pm

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No April Fools here - this is no joking matter.

Here are two splendid volumes written by Elizabeth Norton and published by Amberley Press that will sort you out once and for all about English queens both regnant and consort. Read in conjunction with Helen Castor's splendid She-Wolves and Sarah Gristwood's Blood Sisters, they will earn a place on many a writer's reference shelves.

It was a bit of a surprise to find the first book's opening section containing Guinevere but it was headed The Early and Mythical Queens. We start properly with Boudica and the much less well-known Cartimandua. There is no pictorial representation of Boudica (though a subject beloved of 19th century painters and sculptors, there seem to be no contemporary images of her) but I can't guarantee you will never feel the same about her once you read what she did to the women of the Roman settlement in London.

Queen Bertha in stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral. Image courtesy of Elizabeth Norton.

Queen Bertha (539 - c. 612) was the wife of King Ethelbert of Kent and is important for being credited with bringing Christianity to England. She certainly had Pope Gregory's blessing to try and she managed to convince her husband to be baptised.

From a thirteenth-century English Manuscript. © Jonathan Reeve

This much later picture shows a medieval king and queen embracing and I'm hoping that Bertha and Ethelbert handled his conversion as affectionately.

From Liber Regalis (Coronation Book of Richard II) executed in 1377 or 1378. © Jonathan Reeve

There seems to be evidence that Richard ll was very attached to his first wife, Anne of Bohemia. She was a religious reformer too, ordering an English translation of the Gospels,  and the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. She died, like so many of the English queens consort, before the age of thirty, but not of childbirth. The teenage couple enjoyed a luxurious life together until her death from the plague in 1394 left Richard bereft. His second wife, Isabella of Valois, was a mere child but by all accounts the king was kind to her. The queen in Shakespeare's play is an amalgam of the two.

Elizabeth Woodville. (Ripon Cathedral portrait)

Shakespeare gave us other queen consorts, including Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward lV, later presented in the fiction of Philippa Gregory as the White Queen. It was a love match - or at least a lust match, with Elizabeth being a widow with two sons when Edward's roving eye lighted on her. She played her hand well, holding out for marriage but the marriage with someone other than an European Royal princess infuriated many of his entourage including the Earl of Warwick. And Elizabeth had a vast family, who gained influential titles and positions.

Elizabeth of York (Ripon Cathedral portrait)

When the Cousins' War ended with the accession of Henry Tudor, he needed to bolster his claim to the throne by marrying the Lancastrian strain to that of York and he chose Elizabeth of York, oldest daughter of Edward lV and Elizabeth Woodville. She had narrowly escaped being married to her uncle, Richard lll. There have been rumours that she would not have minded this as much as you would think.

Mary Tudor Image courtesy of Ripon Cathedral.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that the first queen regnant of England was Mary Tudor, so overshadowed is her reputation by that of her more charismatic younger sister, Elizabeth the First. The second volume begins with Mary's mother, Catherine of Aragon - surely England's saddest queen. (Though her daughter runs her a close second).

The first section of the second book deals with all six of the wives of Henry Vlll, queens consort some of whom had that title for a very short time.

Victoria as queen from stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral. © Elizabeth Norton and the Amberley Archive. The two Elizabeths and Queen Victoria vye with one another for the longest reigns. Elizabeth the First for 45 years, Victoria for  65 and our current queen for 63 and counting. The very touching photo below shows Elizabeth as an unaware baby, with her mother later to become a queen consort herself, to George Vl.

Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon with her daughter, the future Elizabeth II. © Elizabeth Norton and the Amberley Archive.

Elizabeth Norton

I'm very grateful to Elizabeth Norton for putting in all the work that these two books represent. And now I'm going to file them on my bookshelves.