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A HIDDEN ROMAN VILLA by Ann Turnbull

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At Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds there is a small collection of Roman artefacts, among them a statue of a local deity, Apollo Cunomaglos - the Hound Lord. Most of the items are from the site of a 2nd century Roman villa on the Sudeley estate. In the 1880s Emma Dent, the chatelaine of Sudeley Castle, organised the excavation and protection of the remains of this villa. Several mosaic floors had been found, and people had begun taking away parts of them as souvenirs. Emma had the best-preserved mosaic removed to the castle and a replica made. This can be seen on the terrace at Sudeley. The Roman mosaic was then re-laid in its original place and covered with a tarpaulin to protect it; and some of the remaining walls were built up to a higher level.

Also in the Roman collection at Sudeley is a quote from Bill Bryson, who came upon the villa while out walking. He describes his wonder at finding the remains of this ancient building in a little wood, and how he sat down there and thought about the people who had come to this place and built a home there so very long ago.

It was this quote that made me want to do the walk and find the villa. Spoonley Wood is only 2km from Sudeley, but it was a hot day and the two of us took a wrong turning and had to retrace our steps, so it seemed further. There are no signposts to the villa, no mention of it anywhere.


We crossed several fields of sheep,


and two ploughed fields,


and followed hedgerows; and at last we came to the little wood.

You could easily miss the villa, even though a path leads right through it. We saw a few low walls, a few stones, a great slab that must have been a doorstep, and a mystery object that looked rather like a shallow kitchen sink.


In an open shed roofed with corrugated iron, under a cloth and weighted with stones, was the original of the floor we had seen at Sudeley. We did not uncover it all, just lifted a corner.


A stream runs nearby, and the OS map shows at least one spring near the villa. The site was quiet and peaceful, and wonderfully free of all explanation. I enjoy the "Roman experience" as much as anyone - places with videos, labels and reconstructions - but this quiet place allowed me to daydream about the villa and the lives of its inhabitants: to imagine the people who lived there going about their work; children playing by the stream; a cat sunning itself on a wall. Perhaps Apollo Cunomaglos, the Hound Lord, once had an altar in this house?


It was summer, the trees were in full leaf and the brambles were dense; they blocked our way and our view. If there was any more to see there, we didn't discover it. So we walked back, leaving the ancient house to peace and birdsong and the ripple of the stream.

Thank you, Bill Bryson. And thank you, Emma Dent.


More information and photos of the site and the mosaic floor can be seen at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonley_Wood_Roman_Villa

Mary Hoffman is away

Living in Time - Gillian Polack

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I was going to write a delightful post about my favourite works of literature (a few of the many) but fate intervened. I confused my calendars and I am two weeks closer to my holiday period than I thought I was. This means that calendars are on my mind: literature can wait.

One of the earliest children’s rhymes recorded in the English language starts “Thirty days hath September, April, June and November.” From memory, this dates back to the thirteenth century. This means that it was written down then and that the manuscript it was written in has survived. It could be older, but we know it is at least as old as that manuscript. Time is a precarious concept, and measurements are parlous.

The rhyme is also deceptive. It’s tempting to think that people in the thirteenth century saw the year in the same way we do. After all, they used the same rhyme to remember the length of the month.

What tripped me up today is that my holiday season uses a different calendar. That is to say, that some of us use two and even three different types of calendars in our lives. In Australia, the Christmas and summer holidays occur at the same time. The whole nation grinds to a halt in late December. Some of us drag ourselves into the workplace in early January (except me – I was always on holiday duty when I was in a regular workplace, for I take my time off around now, instead) and everyone is back at work when the weather is still impossibly hot and the beach impossibly tempting. The UK doesn’t operate like that at all. A short coldish Christmas season and a long holiday in Australia’s winter. Australia notes Christmas as cold (we get cards with snow on and much television explaining that Christmas is a cold time) so we live with the northern hemisphere calendar alongside our own seasons and festivities. Then there is the school year and the work year and the university year and the Jewish year, the Moslem year, the Hindu year and more. So many years, all wrapped into one. 

Most people handle the complexity by focussing on the bits they need to know. We create our own small calendars to manage our personal and family years. I need to know when my holidays are. I also need to know when Christmas is, because the shops will be closed and it’s a good period to get a lot of work done.

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This is far closer to the medieval reality than the strict numbering of days of the month was. Different regions celebrated different saint’s days. Those holidays could change: for instance, a brand-new one was instituted during the twelve days of Christmas just for Thomas (who was murdered in a cathedral and caused a lot of bother for many people both before and after). People kept track of their particular saints and days with Books of Hours, with all the fast days marked and all the feast days.

The fiscal year was different, and so as the regnal year. The law terms were followed by the newly-established universities. System was added to system, and people dealt. Many people would only worry about key dates. Their lives were dominated by those dates and by the seasons. Work was done according to the seasons. No electricity meant that a lot more could be done outdoors and in types of work where natural light was important than in the long summer than in the dark of winter. The dark of winter was the time for quite different activities, normally indoors and in the warmth. Seasons often played a part in whether a war dribbled to a halt or continued a few weeks longer, for it was hard to fight a series of big battles when your foot soldiers were also your peasants and needed to bring in the crops. They’re one of the many reasons for the Hundred Years’ War being so infamously waged in bits and pieces, with gaps both long and short.

My new year is coming up in a bare few days. This is exactly like the experience of many people in the Middle Ages. They had more than one new year, just as I do. There was 1 January, of course (which is my favourite new year, in modern times, if I’m honest, for I like the fireworks over Sydney), but there were celebrations of religious cycles, and of legal cycles and of financial cycles. The regnal year (which I mentioned earlier) changed with each and every king. 

Some people kept track of. Other people relied on those who did. One of my perfect medieval scholars is Bede, for he was a historian. He also pulled calendars together with calculations so that they were workable. An amazing book on the subject talks about Bede and about medieval calendars, but focuses on more recent calendars.  Elisheva Carlebach’s Palaces of Time is a wonderful book. Whenever I start thinking “we all experience time in the same way, because we share calendars” I get the book from my shelf and remind myself of the reality. How we measure time is complex and fascinating. We have good days and bad days. There are safe moments and dangerous moments.



How we shape time is not just through calendars. It’s through seasons and personal experience and changes in light and dark. This means that each of us has a unique experience of time. I’m tempted to invent words to describe it, using the notion of idiolects, dialects and languages. Idiotime is personal, individual. It’s me and my peculiar sense of time and how I manage my different calendars and make my year function. Then there’s diatime: the time we share with a group of others. That would be the Australian calendar, with its summer overlapping with Christmas. And then there’s the broader cultural experience of time, where we share the calendar. 

This brings me back to where I began, for quite obviously the language level of time for us has to include the data that forms the rhyme “Thirty days hath September...”

A Tyranny of Petticoats, by Y S Lee

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Hello, readers. I am tremendously excited to share with you the absolutely glorious cover of Jessica Spotswood's historical anthology, A Tyranny of Petticoats (Candlewick Press, March 2016). Behold!



My friend Cat taught me the phrase "on fleek", and now I just want to walk around now yelling, "It's SO ON FLEEK!"

Here's a bit more about the collection, which combines historical realist and historical fantasy stories:
From an impressive sisterhood of YA writers comes an edge-of-your-seat anthology of historical fiction and fantasy featuring a diverse array of daring heroines.

Crisscross America — on dogsleds and ships, stagecoaches and trains — from pirate ships off the coast of the Carolinas to the peace, love, and protests of 1960s Chicago. Join fifteen of today’s most talented writers of young adult literature on a thrill ride through history with American girls charting their own course. They are monsters and mediums, bodyguards and barkeeps, screenwriters and schoolteachers, heiresses and hobos. They’re making their own way in often-hostile lands, using every weapon in their arsenals, facing down murderers and marriage proposals. And they all have a story to tell.

With stories by:

J. Anderson Coats

Andrea Cremer

Y. S. Lee

Katherine Longshore

Marie Lu

Kekla Magoon

Marissa Meyer

Saundra Mitchell

Beth Revis

Caroline Richmond

Lindsay Smith

Jessica Spotswood

Robin Talley

Leslye Walton

Elizabeth Wein
My ARC arrived in the mail just this week, which means that it's time to proofread my own short story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", one last time. As regular blog readers know, I really appreciate this last chance to check the story and catch any clangers. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to read the other 14 short stories in the anthology. Yes, I could have read them earlier in PDF format, but - call me traditional, if you must - I still find curling up with a print book more satisfying.

I am giddy with delight to be part of this sisterhood, and I owe it all to fellow novelist and worshipper-at-the-altar-of-history Stephanie Burgis: she's the one who first suggested to editor Jessica Spotswood that I might want to be involved. THANK YOU, Steph!

This was my first time contributing to a fiction anthology and I learned so much. To begin with, the parameters were incredibly open: a story with a girl protagonist at any time in American history. Indeed, it was so liberating that I felt almost frozen with indecision - until I realized that fourteen other writers were simultaneously staking out their own historical and geographical territories. Suddenly, it felt like the start of an open-water swimming race: fast and splashy.

I've noticed that in my fiction I lean towards borders and margins, both literal and figurative. Sure enough, I first proposed something along the Great Lakes or in the Thousand Islands area - specifically, a midwinter prison escape from Ontario into New York state, over ice and open water. But Jessica suggested something less marginal and more definitively American, so I began to scan my shelves.

Several years ago, I went on a family holiday to Alaska. True to nerd form, the souvenir I brought back was a reprint of a nineteenth century memoir and travel manual, William B. Haskell's Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields, 1896-1898.



I'd read bits and scraps of it in Alaska, but when I pulled it from the shelf last summer, it fell open to this quotation: "They now say there are more liars to the square inch in Alaska than any place in the world." -- The Seattle Times, August 1897. Clearly, this was fate: I was going to write a story about con artists in the Gold Rush town of Skagway, Alaska.

That story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", is just one of the fifteen in A Tyranny of Petticoats. Gloating over the table of contents, I'm struck by how diverse our geographical choices are: not just Boston and Los Angeles, but Wyoming and Indiana; Washington, DC and Washington State. It reminds me how relatively little I know of American history.

I can't wait to change that.

---
Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

Snorri the Seal fights the Nazis - by Katherine Langrish

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When I was about six years old, my grandparents gave me a book called 'Snorri the Seal'. It was the story of of a vain little seal pup who ignores the advice of his elders and betters about keeping out of trouble in the form of Growler the polar bear and Grab the killer whale - and, instead, spends most of his time admiring his reflection in the ice. Of course, little Snorri does get into trouble. He listens to the flattery of Grab and Growler and is nearly eaten. The story was funny and exciting and the pictures were glorious. I adored it. I read it so many times that the front cover came off, and my mother had to mend it (she found a photo of a fjord to stick on the front).  I still have the book, and I still love it. 




What I never suspected and have only recently found out (I don't think for a moment that my parents or grandparents knew it either), is that 'Snorre Sel' by Frithjof Saelen, published in 1941 in occupied Norway, is a satirical fable, a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda. It sold 12,500 copies before the German administration cottoned on. 

In a fascinating book, 'Folklore Against the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway 1940-1945'  (University of Wisconsin Press), the author Kathleen Stokker explains how this apparently innocuous children's story decodes as a criticism of Norwegian complacency in the face of the dual threat from Germany and Russia. Snorri's enemy Brummelab (transated as Growler in my English version) is Russia. I can see it so clearly now: he looks just like Stalin.


Nazi Germany is represented by Glefs (Grab) the Killer Whale, accompanied by his henchmen the wicked seagulls Sving and Svang (See and Saw) - whose initials are those of the Nazi SS. 





They spy on Snorri and reveal his hiding places to both bear and whale.  As Stokker explains, 'Sporting the red and yellow colours of the Nazi party and having a "false gleam" in their eyes, the gulls incessantly screech, Skui, skui, an allusion to the inescapable Nazi heil og sael salute. Promising Glefs "if you want steak, we can get it for you", the treacherous pair reflect not only Quisling's aid in luring Norway into Germany's grasp, but also the abundance enjoyed by the occupiers and their Norwegian collaborators as others endured crippling shortages...'



Snorri receives many warnings from Uncle Bart (Uncle Whiskers in my version) the kindly walrus, who represents England.  But the little seal doesn't understand why he should be in any danger: "'... I'm not going to do them any harm,' said Snorri, innocently. And Uncle Whiskers laughed so much he had to hold his sides. "That's the funniest thing I've ever heard. Why, if they so much as set eyes on you, they'll be so hungry they'll have a tummy-ache.'"

 
In only the second illustration in the book, we see Snorri having fun sliding on the ice floes. Of course I never noticed, but that ice floe is shaped like the map of Norway. 



Even the Norwegian Resistance itself makes a sly appearance in the shape of the three little shrimps who, unbeknownst to Glefs the Killer Whale, live inside his teeth and cause his toothache.



To quote Kathleen Stokker again: 'Cornered on an icefloe by Glefs, Snorri again remembers Uncle Bart's warnings and feels "almost angry" that his uncle isn't there to save him, reflecting the impatience many Norwegians shared in their view of Britain's inept assistance...  Saelen, like Snorri, holds out hope that Britain would eventually come to Norway's rescue, however. Uncle Bart, he asserts, is stronger than anyone else in the Arctic Ocean; it just takes him a long time to get sufficiently riled.'


Snorri swims for his life to escape Glefs/Grab, diving through a tunnel in an iceberg in the nick of time. At the other end he finds Uncle Bart, who has '"been sharpening his tusks on the back of an old hermit-crab" - according to Stokker,  'an allusion to Roosevelt's 1941 Lend Lease Act that supplied Britain with sorely-needed weapons'.  Ready now to fight, the two of them make a plan. Snorri swims back through the tunnel and pulls faces at Glefs. 
 


The infuriated Killer Whale lunges at Snorri. He becomes hopelessly stuck in the narrow tunnel as Snorri darts out of reach. Meanwhile, Uncle Bart swims around the iceberg and gives Glefs a good thrashing from the rear. Glefs "couldn't do a thing. He was stuck in the ice, and there he will stay till the iceberg melts."

'At a time when England had achieved few military successes and Hitler's armies had yet to lose a single field battle, the story dared to suggest England's victory and Germany's defeat,' says Stokker. 'It moreover endorsed acts of passive resistance... Finally it suggested that like the iceberg's tunnel the long, dark and uncertain passage of Norway's occupation ... would eventually end in sunlight. It is thus little short of amazing that the book, provocatively subtitled "a fable in colour for children and adults" initially not only escaped censorship but actually received high praise in the Nazi-controlled press', which hailed Saelen as the 'Norwegian Walt Disney '.

By the time the authorities caught on, the entire print-run of 12,500 copies had been sold. Saelen was not interrogated until January 1943, when with deadpan aplomb he denied any political intention and asked if they planned to ban the Brothers Grimm? Nonplussed, the Nazis released him, and he went on with his resistance work.  By 1944 he was the leader of the main Norwegian resistance movement, Milorg. Eventually he had to flee via the 'Shetland Bus' to England, where he presented a copy of his book to King Haakon VII, in exile with the Norwegian government in London. 

I'm sure the main reason why Saelen got away with it is that his book works brilliantly on both levels. The subversive political allegory is embedded in a truly excellent children's story full of comedy and drama, with beautiful illustrations. No wonder the Nazi officials were confused. The sincerity of it must have puzzled them: there is real love in the story of vain but brave little Snorri. The pictures celebrate the beauty of the Northlands. These looming snow-covered pinnacles with their sinister almost-but-not-quite faces enchanted me, as a child:




And so did the many underwater scenes, and the crackling little spirits of the Northern Lights, and the bubble boys 'who look after the fish for Father Neptune'.  But now that I've learned, thanks to Kathleen Stokker's book, the real story behind the tale of Snorri the Seal, I understand at last Saelen's final words - words which as a child gave me a wonderful, mysterious yearning for something I couldn't quite grasp...



"That was the story of a little seal who believed that everything was beautiful and nice up there in the Arctic Sea. But it wasn't, even if it all ended happily. And it was from this old seashell that the whole story came. 

"Perhaps you yourself may find a seashell like that one day. And perhaps it will whisper another story to you. Who knows?  So much comes bubbling and whispering up from the bottom of the sea. So much of everything - both good and evil."









Picture credits: 

All artwork by Frithjof Saelen.
Scanned by Katherine Langrish from book in her possession.

 

Victorian Photographs and Women Reading by Joan Lennon

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This is a post in two parts.

Part the first:  There is a wonderful exhibition on at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, running till the 22nd November, titled Photography: A Victorian Sensation.  I highly recommend it if you find yourself within striking distance - but beware - we were there for 1 1/2 hours and only got half way round before being politely booted out at closing time.  (I'll try to go again.)

It was dimly lit and the photographs were small in their beautiful cases, but the curators had cunningly provided electronic display thingies where you could enlarge each portrait to your heart's content.  And that was where the time went.  Being able to look closely at the faces, read the stories behind the lines and the expressions.  The majority were full face and because they had to hold their poses for so long, it wasn't possible to hide behind created persona smirks or "Everything's fine!" animation.  They were vulnerable and open.

Now, a good number of the men's portraits had them with a finger in a book, but very few of the women were shown this way.  As we weren't allowed to take photographs of the photographs, I found this one of the fabulous Julia Margaret Cameron elsewhere in that pose (she is a heroine of mine and, irritatingly, in the part of the exhibition I got "encouraged" out of.  It was my own fault, of course.)



But what those images made me think of was ...

Part the second - paintings of women reading.  There is a similar stillness and lack of defence - the viewer sees the reader's face in repose, but this time without making eye contact.  You will not be surprised to learn I've never been an artist's model, but if I were, I've always thought the best pose to go for would be reading.  With all my clothes on.  This would help with the boredom and goosebumps.  And here are some that I like a lot -



Woman reading a letter by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675)




Reading “Le Figaro” by Mary Cassatt (1844-1926)



Woman Reading by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861)




La Lecture by George Croegaert (1848-1923)





Elisabeth Allan Fraser by Patrick Allan Fraser (1812-1890) 
(She is reading in the dining room at Hospitalfield House, just up the coast from where I live - an amazing place.) 

Do you have a favourite portrait of a woman reading?  If so, I'd love to see it - share a link to it in the comments.  Thank you!  (And go to that exhibition if you possibly can - )


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

Ancient History in Sardinia by Lydia Syson

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I first fell for Sardinia eight or nine years ago, on a summer house swap. Even the milk cartons charmed me. They used to show a cow standing in front of a crumbling nuraghe – a circular, dry-stone wall structure with a passing resemblance to a Scottish broch, but built considerably earlier, in the Bronze Age.  

Nuraghe Ardasái
© Hans Hillewaert, via Wikimedia Commons
We went to visit one nuraghic site near where we were staying (possibly S’Ortali ‘e Su Monti, near Tortolí) and I have a vague memory of dappled shade, intriguing arrangements of stone, and a very petite guide telling us how incredibly tall the nuraghic people must have been  - at least  5’8”!  But I had four small children in tow, mobile internet wasn’t really ‘a thing’, and when I got back home I never found time to investigate further.

Returning for another family holiday last month, I found the milk cartons replaced by dull plastic bottles. But I also discovered that in the last twenty years the official number of the megalithic towers found on the island has risen almost three-fold to 20,000, and that each one was once in sight of another. Earlier assumptions that their primary purpose was military or defensive are being overturned.

View south from Nuraghe Mannu
As an infectiously enthusiastic guide at the cliff-top site of Nuraghe Mannu explained, ancient Sardinia – mountainous, richly wooded and presumably well-watered in the days before it effectively became a colonial outpost, supplying wood and minerals for a variety of conquerors over the centuries, including of course Rome, both ancient and modern – must surely have been populated by communities who collaborated rather than fighting with each other.  They communicated their sophisticated building techniques and shared other knowledge and beliefs in ways at which we can now only guess.  


View from the ascent of Tiscali
Nuraghe Mannu is one of the easiest sites to get to.  We made a very early start to climb up to another, Tiscali, before the August heat became too intense.  The ruins of this village, well-hidden in a partially collapsed mountain-top cave, a great round karstic sinkhole, date from the very end of the Nuraghic era, or maybe later, first or second century A.D./C.E. 

Tiscali
It’s thought by some to have been a place of refuge at a time when Sardinians were just managing to hold out against the Roman invaders: it’s in the wild area still named Barbagia after Cicero’s description of it as a place of barbarians, and Tiscali remains dramatically and enchantingly inaccessible.  Sadly though, thanks to its remoteness and the fact that it’s only recently been guarded, the site has been repeatedly plundered in the decades since its discovery, leaving it richer in atmosphere than artefacts.

Tiscali


I’ve rarely been anywhere so utterly silent.  Not even a cicada could be heard so early in the day.  And we had the place to ourselves, which I think always makes the mental shift required for imaginative reconstruction a little easier.  Still, I confess I struggled a little to picture the place swarming with people and animals. A few days previously, reaching the well temple of Su Tempiesu, still in perfect working order three and a half millennia since it was built, had involved another delightful, steep but altogether shorter walk, through cork oaks, juniper, fennel and fragrant myrtle.

Between visitors, the keeper of Su Tempiesu spends
 his spare time making shepherd's huts and cork watering hose covers

A cork oak
Before we set off, another inspiring and friendly guide showed us around the models, photographs and reproduction bronzetti in the little museum at the top, and explained in patiently slow Italian that the top of the building – originally a truncated pyramid, with twenty votive bronze swords stuck into it with molten lead - had been found in 1953 when the hillside was being terraced to grow tomatoes.  

It was immediately obvious that something 
special was buried beneath the soil as the stones they uncovered were hewn basalt, a volcanic rock which must have been brought to this granite a schist region from at least thirty kilometres away.  The whole complex seems to have been buried by a landslide I can picture the excitement of this discovery, and further investigations thirty years later when the full brilliance of Su Tempiesu’s hydraulic engineering was uncovered as a third, lower pool was unearthed, complete with channels.  Much harder was visualising the ceremonies that once took place here, and what the significance of its alignment to the equinoxes might have been.

At Nuraghe Mannu, climbing up the steps of a single tower, this article linking Bronze Age Sardinia to Atlantis…) I’d love to know how more daring authors go about this.  I’d find so much uncertainty dizzying, but perhaps others discover a liberation in such mystery and temporal distance? 
trying to picture it three times higher, I looked down onto a dense network of low walls spreading out into the undergrowth, wondered exactly who had lived in these houses, and thought how easy I’d had it so far.  Since I started writing historical fiction, I’ve worked in periods so recent I could draw not just on written sources, published and unpublished, but photography, film, and music, never mind artifacts with obvious functions.  I’m not sure if I’ve got the right kind of imagination to take myself back three thousand years or more, to times and places where the evidence is still so sparse, so much archaeological investigation still needs to be done, and about which interpretations are constantly changing.  (In fact, I came home to find this article linking nuraghic Sardinia to Atlantis…) I’d love to know how more daring authors go about this.  I’d find it a dizzying prospect, but perhaps others discover a liberation in the mystery and temporal distance?





Some practical stuff if you are in Sardinia:


As you’ll have gathered, there are nuraghic remains all over the island, so you’re sure to find something near by.  Both Tiscali and Su Tempiesu are well worth going off the beaten track for.  For Su Tempiesu, drive to Orune, and you’ll easily pick up signs from the village.  Guidebooks suggest that the walk to Tiscali is much harder than it actually is, and that you might need a guide! Actually, it’s clearly signposted, once you're on the right road from Dorgali, except from the carpark at the bottom, but you just need to keep following the track down to the river bed and over the bridge and then you’ll see the first sign taking you off to the right.  There are a few steep rocky bits on the way up, but nothing very serious and it's lovely and shady a great deal of the way.  If you are reasonably fit you should manage it in 1.5 or 2 hours, allowing the same amount of time to come back down again, but do take plenty of water. And five euros to get in!  I hadn’t found this before we went, but this map could be very useful.


The trail winds up to the right and then into the gap behind my head.

www.lydiasyson.com

SISTERS by Adèle Geras

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Note: When I wrote this post, I  hadn't read Christina Konig's excellent post about LIFE IN SQUARES. I do hope readers of this blog will excuse a slight overdose of the Bloomsbury Group. My post is sufficiently different from Christina's I hope, for this to be excused. 




The whole world, it seems,  is Bloomsbury Mad. Actually, ever since Vanessa and Virginia Stephen moved to 46 Gordon Square in 1904, the lives of these two sisters and their friends have fascinated biographers, critics and anyone interested in a story of highly intelligent people and their doings: literary, artistic and sexual. Perhaps it's their sexual shenanigans which have kept the interest alive and the recent BBC drama, LIFE IN SQUARES, did concentrate on that aspect of their lives perhaps rather too much. The drama was quite well done, I thought, though Virginia I felt, was woefully miscast and Rupert Penry-Jones, much as I admire him, didn't appear to be much older than James Norton, playing the older Duncan Grant. I saw no good reason why the same actor couldn't have been used for both old and young, but there you are. The series certainly looked wonderful and Eve Best as Vanessa has made me resolve to wear my string of amber beads round the house, as she did. Most importantly, the drama suffered, I though from only being three episodes long. There was far too much happening in all these lives to cram into such a short time frame. If it had been longer, the characters could have been much more fully developed and the situations, and complicated relationships of the Group could have been explained to those of the viewing public who didn't know the intricate stories of these lives. As well as that, more episodes would have been able to convey the artistic and literary importance of these two women, who, in the time allowed, were just beautiful people who swanned around, with occasional bouts of grief and thwarted love to interrupt the apparent idyll.







This (above) is Charleston House, Vanessa's home for most of her life.  You are not allowed to photograph the interior, where Vanessa and Duncan Grant and other artists decorated every available surface. You saw the rooms in the TV series, and they are most beautiful. The scale of the house is very small. It's really a farmer's cottage and feels like it: rough, as well as beautiful. The furniture comes from the Omega Workshop, where Vanessa Bell produced wonderful (unsigned) designs for furniture. Duncan Grant's  work is everywhere. He was the love of Vanessa's life and more than that, her closest friend in the world, except for her sister, Virginia. Anyone who missed the tv series and who is interested has only to put Charleston House into Google to see what it looks like. They will also find many of Vanessa's works reproduced.




Many people can't stand the Bloomsbury group.  Snobbish, they say. Elitist. Spoilt. Anti-semitic. And on and on. This may very well be true but also, clever, ground - breaking artistically, and leaders of the intellectual life of their day, whose lives are still fascinating to many, including me. I can say exactly why I am drawn to them. It's because of the relationship between the sisters. I'm an only child and I suppose I romanticise the bond that can exist between sisters, because I've always wished I had one of my own. In February, I read a novel which I can't recommend too highly. It's called 'VANESSA AND HER SISTER,' by Priya Parmar, and it's published in paperback by, of course, Bloomsbury.  It is completely gripping and deals with a period of their lives when they were young. After reading that, I'm now reading an excellent joint biography by Jane Dunn called 'A VERY CLOSE CONSPIRACY.' That is brilliant and shows one thing very clearly.  No matter what was going on in their love life, or in their intellectual lives, each sister was emotionally the centre of the other sister's world. They were close, and loving and Vanessa never stopped being the chief looker-after of Virginia. We know about Virginia suicide, and that death is, horribly, part of the drama of their lives and their story. But what is clear from what I've read is that Virginia, for many reasons, was always in a state of precarious mental health.  Vanessa was her mainstay. Leonard Woolf also looked after her, but it was her sister to whom she was most attached.



Both sisters  had to be constantly creating.  Virginia fell ill when she couldn't write for some reason, and Vanessa, together with other denizens of Charleston, used their artistic talent to transform everything. Both sisters made beautiful gardens, and the mosaic above shows that every corner of Charleston was worked on: painted, decorated with beautiful pictures and patterns and enhanced by the artist's hand and eye.




Virginia and her husband Leonard took a house just a few miles fro Charleston, in the village of Rodmell. The house is called Monk's House and it's a National Trust property. There is no café and therefore none of the lovely NT scones but it's a wonderful place to visit. The photo above shows Virginia as painted by Vanessa and below, there's a screen painted by Angelica Bell, Vanessa's daughter by Duncan Grant, which looks like something from a stage set. That seems remarkably appropriate. The conversations and situations both at Charleson and in Monk's House were indeed very dramatic. I also think it's very beautiful.



Vanessa's bedroom at  Charleston looks out on to the garden. So does Virginia's at Monk's House. They are beautiful rooms, characterised also by very narrow beds. Below is Virginia's, which is the size of the bunks on overnight trains. This is a single bed if ever there was one. 





And in another part of the same room, at the foot of Virginia's bed, is a bookshelf which I found the saddest and most moving thing in the whole house. It's full of Shakespeare Plays, each covered in paper from the endpapers printed by the Hogarth Press. Virginia covered the volumes during one of the times when she was ill. I took a photo of 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL,' which struck me as ironic. But here we are, still thinking about the sisters, still reading the novels and looking at the pictures and discussing the lives. That's ending well, in many ways. 

'Don't Hang the Messenger' by Karen Maitland

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'I don't care what your delivery sheet says,
 I'm not signing for the white elephant!'
Having waited all day for a ‘guaranteed’ delivery of a package which has not arrived, I find myself wondering if things were any better before our modern courier services.

Since the time of the ancient civilizations there has always been a need for couriers and messengers to deliver valuable packages and vital documents. Both the Persians and Romans established very efficient networks of state messengers, but by the 11th Century in Europe many commoners such as wealthy merchants, town councils and monasteries discovered they needed to develop their own independent courier systems, not least because they wanted to keep their business interests safely away from the prying eyes of government officials, popes and kings. Even universities in the Middle Ages employed their own couriers so that students could obtain money urgently from their families to pay their fees or refill their wine flagons, and these university couriers were given royal dispensation to travel without hindrance.

But maintaining a courier system was an expensive business, not only did the messengers have to be provided with coins for food and lodgings on the road, but they needed money to change horses, pay tolls, buy passage on ships or river craft, and they often had to be provided with the funds to bribe clerks and officials so that they could be admitted straightaway to see someone of importance and not kept hanging around for weeks. So it made sense for individuals to band together to finance a courier service between them. One of the first of these was the Scarsella dei Mercanti Fiorentini founded in Florence in 1357 by a group of merchants, who hit on the bright idea of not only using the service themselves, but allowing anyone who could afford it to pay to use it too, whenever the need arose.

Couriers had to be fit, tough, trustworthy and resourceful. It helped if you could speak several languages as well. On one occasion when a quantity of gold had to be sent secretly from Verona to St Gall, six messengers were dispatched in pairs travelling by different routes disguised as pilgrims. They were warned that if they were caught, the gold would be bound to their legs with their own thigh sinews!

This was probably not an idle threat, since at the siege of Auberoche in 1345, when the French captured a page boy on his way to deliver a message to the English inside the besieged castle, the poor lad was bound and catapulted into the castle from a trebuchet or siege engine, with the letters he was carrying tied around his neck. Unsurprisingly it is said the knights were much ‘astonished and discomforted when they saw him arrive.’


Before the days of modern ID cards, couriers who were carrying valuables or secret messages had to find a way to prove their own identity and that of the person to whom they were delivering the package. The simplest method was to a cut a coin in half, one being given to the recipient who would then match it to the courier’s. Rings were often use to identify the bearer or recipient, as well as passwords and coded gestures. Confidential documents could be concealed in the linings of clothes or laid flat on a wooden board and coated with a thick layer of wax, so that it would appear to be a cheap writing tablet. Not something a thief would bother stealing.

If messages fell into the wrong hands, the consequences could be disastrous. When Calais was being besieged by Edward III in 1346, the French defenders tried to send a letter to their king telling him they were so desperate they would have to start eating each other or surrender if help didn’t arrive. When one of couriers realised he had been spotted, he tied the letter he was carrying to an axe and threw it into the sea, hoping the axe would weigh it down, but it floated ashore and fell into the hands of Edward III who took great delight in personally sending it to the French king, just to add to his enemy’s humiliation.

Quite apart from the hazards of the journey itself, some couriers must have felt very apprehensive
Valette - Grand Master of the Knights of St. John
about the reception they’d receive when they eventually arrived. The accepted laws of chivalry meant that a messenger delivering bad news should be allowed to speak freely without being punished, but men in authority were seldom noted for their sweet disposition and often the temptation to ‘hang the messenger’ proved too great. 

 In 1565, when a courier delivered the message to Suleiman that his siege of Malta had failed, Suleiman flew into a rage and stamped on the unfortunate man. But to be fair, when the Turks had earlier sent a messenger to Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John on Malta, he had ordered the messenger hanged, and only relented when it was pointed out that the poor man was a slave who couldn’t disobey orders. So instead Valette sent him back with the message that he would hang anyone who came to deliver any further communications.

As for that package – I’m still waiting!

Visualising Roman London by Caroline Lawrence

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The historical novels I love to read (and hopefully write) transport me to the past. They make me hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it. Most of all, they make me SEE the past. As a visual thinker that is what is what I crave most.


When I wrote my Roman Mysteries set in Ancient Rome, I had the ruins of Ostia and Pompeii to inspire me, along with the well-preserved frescoes, sculptures and mosaics, and all the art and movies that attempt to envision those places. I know Pompeii better than I know cities on America's east coast. 


When I was writing my P.K. Pinkerton Mysteries, set in Nevada in 1862, I found that photography had been invented just in time to let me look into the past. There were even stereographic photographs that let me gaze into canyons, along railway lines and over the roofs of Virginia City at exactly the times my books were set.


Now I’m working on a book set in Roman Britain during the last decade of the first century. Pre-Trajanic Londinium is not as well-preserved as Pompeii or as well-documented that Virginia City in the 1860s. Scholars are not even sure who the governor of Britannia was in AD 94, the year my book is set.


Luckily, London offers some fabulous resources. The British Museum has rooms devoted to stunning artefacts like the Snettisham hoard and the Vindolanda tablets.


3-D Model of Roman London's port at the Museum of London

The Museum of London (MOL) is even better. Not only does it have bits of the original Roman wall poking up around it, but it has replica Roman rooms, street scenes, delicious artefacts and 3-D models of Londinium’s port and forum.
Gladiator Games in August 2015, sponsored by the Museum of London

They go above and beyond. The MOL stages gladiatorial combats with dedicated re-enactors like those put on last month. Their archaeologists give regular tours of the underground amphitheatre, hidden bathhouses and Thames foreshore. The tech guys at the MOL have even produced a brilliant app of Londinium with an interactive map: you can ‘dig up’ artefacts, listen to ancient street sounds and watch ancient Romans superimposed on modern streets.


Mudlarking with Museum of London archaeologist September 2015


But as I was making a pass over my second draft of my Roman Britain book last week, I wasn’t seeing it.


For me to write something clearly enough for nine-year-olds to get it, I have to get it first. And I was confused. How did the north bank differ from the south? When were the city walls built again? How extensive were the wharves? What was the main building material? What did Londinium look like?


Then I stumbled across a wonderful resource on the Museum of London’s website: the paintings of Alan Sorrell. It was just what I needed: postcards of the world I was writing. Bird’s eye views of the streets and buildings. Inspired vignettes of daily life with great attention to archaeological and historical detail.


A commercial artist who worked in many mediums and on many projects, Alan Sorrell (1904 – 1974) first studied art at Southend and later at the RCA in London and Rome. He spent WWII in the air force. After the war he worked closely with some of the most respected archaeologists of the day. His 'neo-Romantic' training accounts for the often moody lighting of his work. His time with the RAF is reflected in his fondness for aerial views. And his attention to historical detail attests his collaboration with scholars.


London's Praetorium by Alan Sorrell, via the Museum of London

An atmospheric watercolour of London’s Praetorium (Governor's Palace) shows all the features mentioned by Peter Marsden, its excavator. This is one of Londinium’s lesser-known but great buildings (now totally covered by Cannon Street Station.) As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be the setting for a key scene at the heart of my book. With Sorrell’s illustration alongside the sparse archaeological plan and dry written accounts of this structure, I can now write a believable setting for my scene.


Sorrell’s watercolour of the wells beside the Walbrook reminded me to include rubbish heaps in my Londinium. His red-painted goose-neck on theBlackfriars barge encouraged me to add more colour. His aerial view of Londonin the time of Hadrian prompted me to check whether London Bridge had a drawbridge in the mid 90s. The answer is we don’t know, so I’ll have to use my instincts.


Like authors of historical fiction, archaeological artists also need to use flashes of creative instinct when fleshing out the dry bones of the facts. In a preliminary sketch of 3rd century Londinium, Sorrell felt he should give the Roman city a river wall. A notation on his sketch shows that he was asked to remove it for the final painting as there were no remains of such a wall. His theory was justified however, when a few months after his death evidence of a riverside wall was indeed found.


Sorrell’s diligently researched and inspired paintings have finally helped me ‘get’ Roman London.

I am grateful to his family and fans who have made his work available to the world. 



A superb paper on his life and output has been made publicly available on Academia. 

Escape from Rome, the first of four books in The Roman Quests, a new Roman British series by Caroline Lawrence, will be out in May 2016. 

James Bond meets Goldoni, and more musings on the Byron question - Michelle Lovric

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Gregory Dowling’s new historical novel, Ascension, is set in Venice in the 1749. By coincidence, my current WIP is set in La Serenissima in 1740, so I devoured his book with particular voracity. It’s also a fine read – pacy, humorous and well supplied with edge-of-seat factor. So I asked Gregory, whom I’ve known for far too many years, if he would agree to being interviewed. Very kindly, he did.

First, a little background.

Gregory Dowling – novelist and academic – is Bristol-born. He read English at Oxford. It’s now more than thirty years since he moved to Venice, where he is Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University. He has published four novels, co-edited two anthologies of poetry, written various non-fiction books and academic articles on Italian, British and American literature. He has a special interest in British and American writers in Italy, from the Romantic age onwards, and has written extensively about Byron in Venice. From the last fact, regular readers will know that Gregory and I have something to argue about.

But let us not dive head-first into controversy, and begin with the basics.

How did your personal and professional relationship with Venice begin?

First of all, thank you, Michelle, for offering me this chance to talk about my book – and thanks for your kind words on it. I’m very glad you enjoyed it; that means a lot to me.

 I first saw Venice in 1979, after four months teaching English in Naples. I came up to the north of Italy in June to visit an old school-friend who was working at a language school in Treviso and we went to Venice on a day-trip. And then I went back again by myself the next day. And the next day… And I knew I would be going back often. After Naples I did a stint at a language-school in Siena; and then, in January 1980, I got a job at a language school in Verona and while living there (for the next year and a half) I used to spend almost every weekend pottering about in Venice. In summer 1981 I was beginning to think I ought perhaps to go back to England and get a “proper job”—but then I said to myself if I could just have one year living in Venice… And I moved to a language school in Venice. And one year turned into another, and then I was offered the chance to start teaching at the university. And here I still am, now teaching American literature as well as English language. So I never got that “proper job”.
the view from Sant-Elena - Gregory's part of Venice
In a sentence or two, tell us what Ascension is about.

It’s a spy-story set in 18th-century Venice, with a hero, Alvise Marangon, who finds himself, against his will, inveigled into the Venetian secret service. Alvise was born in Venice but brought up in England in the world of theatre and so a certain amount of make-believe comes naturally to him. It is intended as a thriller, with, I hope, some elements of comedy. James Bond meets Goldoni, perhaps…

Why did you choose 1749 for the setting of this novel?

 Well, my choice was originally a little vaguer. It’s still there as an epigraph to the novel: “Venice, under the Dogeship of Pietro Grimani (1741-52).” As I wasn’t tying myself to any specific historic event I was quite happy with that general indication—rather like the old-fashioned convention you find in Victorian novels of leaving the last digit in the date as a dash. Those years attract me as a historical setting for a number of reasons: the final decline of the city is still several decades off; great art, music and literature are still being produced, and—should I so choose in future novels—I can bring in such figures as Casanova and Goldoni, who were very much part of the scene. However, the publisher decided that the “shout-line” on the cover needed a specific date, so after some hemming and hawing I opted for 1749, which seemed right.
Arsenale, setting of one of the climactic scenes of the new novel
One of your characters says, ‘In this city, everything is connected with everything else.’ Can you explain how this applies especially to Venice.

It still seems true to me. Perhaps it is just that Venice, despite its glittering cosmopolitan image, is also at heart a village, where people tend to know what everyone else is up to—and who they are related to.

 Another observation that caught my attention: ‘this city does bring out the histrionic in everyone’. Do you think that this is as true in 2015 as in 1749?

 Well, I suppose we can still point to carnival. However, there is something a little forced and artificial about carnival today (I used the contemporary carnival for the climax of my previous thriller set in Venice, Every Picture Tells a Story, St Martin’s Press, 1991). Or, to put it in another way, the artifice doesn’t seem to come quite so naturally today. Nonetheless, there’s still a good deal of performance in Venetian life, whether at the Rialto market or at faculty meetings at the university.

How do you make use of your locations? Do you physically go to write in the settings of your scenes? Do you superimpose a map or diagram of how things were then over how they are now? I am particularly thinking of your description of the Piazza San Marco at night, which well illustrates how things were different then. I also loved your description of the cheese shop in the middle of the fishiest bit of Dorsoduro.

I don’t feel the need to actually be in the place while writing a scene. Sitting down with my laptop in the Doge’s Palace would be a little inconvenient, after all. But I do try to remain faithful to the city’s geography as it was then, which essentially means remembering that streets like Via 22 Marzo, the Strada Nova, and Via Garibaldi did not exist; that there was just the one bridge over the Grand Canal; that Venice itself was a true island… Obvious things like that, for a start. It’s possible that a real expert might find I’ve allowed my characters to cross a bridge that wasn’t there at the time and I’ll be happy to accept correction on such points. However, I won’t lose too much sleep over it, since it’s the overall faithfulness to the period that counts, I feel. And I hope I captured that in such things as my descriptions of Piazza San Marco at night.

 I’m glad you liked the cheese shop; that, of course, is purely imaginary. I’m not drawing on any records of such an establishment in the archives.
Sant'Isepo, one of the little-known corners of Venice explored in the novel

Were you able to go inside the Palazzo Garzoni to research the scenes you set there? Was that during its recent restoration?

Actually, the department I belong to at the university was situated in Ca’ Garzoni for many years, until the university sold the building. So I know the palace well. I allowed myself a little licence in describing its attic, mind you. And I never climbed on to the rooftop either…

The Missier Grande is inevitably part of the crime-and-punishment scenario of all novels set in Venice. But your book offers the first time I can remember him being an actual character with a personality. How did you come up with your particular and charismatic Missier Grande, in the context of his political role?

I was drawn to the character precisely because he is usually such a vague figure. I imagine that at the time a certain anonymity was considered desirable, in order to instil the necessary awe among the populace. That gave me some scope to make what I wanted, more or less, of the figure. I was also intrigued by the fact that the post was held by figures for fairly long periods, amid a context in which most positions of authority had very strict time-limits. So I was interested in how this would affect relations between such figures.

How do you deal with the issue of info-dumping – trying to get on with the story while accommodating the need to explain the strange workings Venetian life in the 18th century? Lately I have been shucking off history in favour of character in my books, but that doesn’t mean I don’t do the research. However I find that I increasingly discard explanations of Venice from the novel I submit, partly to avoid the editor’s red pen. What is your attitude to the balance between educating the reader and entertaining him/her?

Well, the particular position of my hero-narrator helps here. He is Venetian by birth but not by upbringing, and that means he has had to learn most of the strange workings of the city for himself. Also he is a professional cicerone, so it isn’t too unnatural that he should occasionally feel the need to explain things as he narrates. And I also imagine that a reader who chooses such a novel will have a certain amount of curiosity about the city and the period and thus a certain degree of toleration for such information. Having said that, I will always tilt the scales in favour of entertainment over education.

I understand that you, your wife and children were charmingly inserted by your father into a copy he made of a Francesco Guardi painting of the Bucintoro, the Doge’s ceremonial boat, which features at the climax of the novel. I am envious of that picture! I guess this is what historical novelists do – we insert ourselves into history. Do you agree? And can you tell me more about the painting?

 
My father, after he retired as a G.P., took up painting, something he hadn’t done since schooldays. He regularly attended an art-class for years and did countless view-paintings, as well as portraits. Occasionally he did copies of famous paintings. One of these is of the Francesco Guardi painting you refer to, and in the bottom right-hand corner he included my own family: myself, my wife Patrizia and our two sons, Christopher and Alessandro.

 
Judging from the fact that Patrizia and I are holding the boys in our arms, the painting must have been done about 24 or 25 years ago. The painting now hangs in my father’s bedroom, just one of numerous Venetian views that cover three of the walls of the room. It is possible that when I began thinking of a plot for the novel, I was unconsciously influenced by this painting, since, as you say, we have been inserted into history—into a particularly splendid moment of history.

It’s hardly a secret after my novel Carnevale that I fail to admire Byron. I find much of the poetry facile, and even brilliant poetry could not make up for the cruel way he treated his mother, daughter Allegra, and nearly every woman who passed through what I cannot even bring myself to call his ‘romantic’ life. As far as I am concerned, Byron’s only big love affair was with himself. I enjoy his letters, but only because I like the dark, vicious humour there. I still pity his targets. Those letters are rampantly self-conscious, knowingly destined for publication. So they are only half letters; other half is posing with curlicues. Well, I got off the fence! I think you would defend Byron, would you not? Tell us what about your own writings on him. 


Byron by George Henry Harlow,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Well, now here is where I could wear out your and your readers’ patience, since I could bang on about Byron for pages and pages (if we can refer to a blog having pages). The first thing to say, of course, is that Byron’s behaviour is at times indefensible. The story of Allegra is a terribly sad one and Byron comes out very badly from it. (People might be interested in this half-hour BBC Radio 4 programme by Michael Symmons Roberts that was made about her short life a few weeks ago, in which I feature briefly: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b064ygl5 ) And I won’t try and defend his behaviour towards his wife, either, just as I wouldn’t try and defend that of Charles Dickens or that of Graham Greene towards their wives. But it is worth saying that not all women had such negative experiences with him; you only have to read Teresa Guiccioli’s adoring account of his life to see that. And another interesting case is that of Mary Shelley, an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman who had every reason to have a very negative view of him, since she was so closely tied to the story of Allegra, but who after his death had to admit to the enduring fascination he exerted over her.

And if you want to get a much more positive view of Byron it is well worth reading accounts of his last year, the year of the so-called Greek adventure. A very good book on it came out two years ago by Roderick Beaton, Byron’s War. It’s a period that is extremely well-documented, since almost everyone who came into contact with Byron during his time in Greece wrote their own accounts of the story and of his death. And it is clear that Byron made a strong and favourable impression on most of these people, who are extremely diverse in character and background. Particularly touching is the account by Teresa’s brother, Pietro Gamba, who accompanied Byron to Greece and also died there; before meeting Byron he had tried to warn his sister against associating with him, influenced by the tales he had heard of Byron’s behaviour; after meeting him he became one of Byron’s most loyal friends.

Another book that is a passionate defence of Byron the man as well as Byron the poet is the recent L'estate di un ghiro - Il mito di Lord Byron attraverso la vita, i viaggi, gli amori, le opere by the Italian critic Vincenzo Patanè, who lives and works in Venice, the first full-length Italian biography of the poet. A very good book.

 But of course the real reason we continue to be fascinated by Byron is his poetry and here I have to disagree vigorously with your opinion—while at the same time acknowledging that there is a nugget of truth in what you say about it. There is a lot of Byron’s poetry that is “facile”, as you put it; it’s the stuff that made Byron famous: much of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Oriental Tales etc. The kind of stuff that created the Byronic legend, and made him famous throughout Europe. The kind of poetry that Byron himself said had “corrupted the public taste”. It’s enjoyable enough, in its own rather undemanding way, but it is not what keeps Byron’s reputation so high today. Byron’s greatest works are the poems he wrote in ottava rima, the Italian stanza form he encountered in Italy: Beppo, The Vision of Judgement, and, in particular, Don Juan. Beppo gives us a delightful picture of Venetian society, in a story that works as a parody of his own oriental romances. The Vision of Judgement is one of the greatest satirical poems in the language, and is also highly imaginative. Don Juan is an extraordinary work, varying in tone and register from canto to canto, ranging from tender love poetry to bedroom farce, from epic adventures to literary parody, from scenes of war to humorous reflections on religion, politics, high society… While his poetry in the “Byronic” style had a huge and immediate influence on so many of the other European Romantics of the day, in all fields of art, from Turner to Delacroix and Gericault, from Tchaikovsky to Berlioz and Schumann and Verdi, Don Juan had a long-lasting but even more powerful influence on such great works as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Auden’s satirical poetry and, to come up to our own days, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. In fact, I’d leave the last word on Byron to Auden, by far and away the best critic on Byron.

“Whatever its faults Don Juan is the most original poem in English; nothing like had ever been written before. Speaking for myself, I don’t feel like reading it very often, but when I do, it is the only poem I want to read: no other will do.”

 Which writers, in your opinion, do Venice justice on the page? (I’d love to ask you who doesn’t deliver, but let’s not be uncharitable, shall we? At least to the living.)

Well, I’ll start with Beppo, then. And in fact I could remain with Byron to make a distinction between those writers who are good at the Childe Harold vision of the city—describing Venice in terms of sheer romantic spectacle—and those who are good at the Beppo mode—describing Venice in terms of its daily life, depicting it, one might say, from a more intimate point of view, the point of view of the long-term Venetian resident. Some, like Byron, can do both, but in general writers tend towards one or the other.

The best of the former kind is Anthony Hecht in his extraordinary poem The Venetian Vespers, which contains some of the most moving descriptions of the city’s beauty in all literature: I’m thinking of the end of the second section and the beginning of the third, with the description of the interior of San Marco, or the final section, with its sunset description. All as part of a great psychological portrait of a tormented American exile in the city. Other poets I admire on the city are James Merrill and John Drury.

Henry James also has some wonderful descriptive passages; perhaps not so much in the novels (although the storm and its aftermath in The Wings of the Dove are wonderful) as in his essays in Italian Hours.

Remaining more or less in that period, I would say that the best of the “Beppo”-type writers is William Dean Howells, in his wonderful book Venetian Life, a great account of everyday life in 19th-century Venice.

My favourite essayist on the city is Mary McCarthy, whose book Venice Observed contains some of the most acute and brilliant descriptions of different aspects of Venice, but most particularly its art.

Novels I’ve enjoyed that are set in the city are Miss Garnet’s Angel by Sally Vickers, with its wonderful pictures of Dorsoduro and the Guardi paintings in the church of Angelo Raffaele. Vikram Seth’s pages in An Equal Music are brilliant; there’s a wonderful range in them, from the magnificent descriptions of the Carpaccio paintings in S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni and the mosaics of Torcello to the homely depictions of life in S. Elena, my own part of town. So he manages to do both Childe Harold and Beppo.

And to turn to fiction in my own genre, Donna Leon is always reliable for pictures of Venice today (even if the city is, of course, rather less crime-ridden than one might expect from a reading of her novels). Rather more melodramatic, but enormous fun, is the crime novel Lucifer’s Shadow by David Hewson.

I have a guilty fondness for the novels of Simon Raven, and two in particular have well-drawn Venetian settings: Brother Cain and The Survivors.

Andrea Molesini, among Venetian writers, is extremely imaginative in his children’s novels set in the city, particularly Tutto il tempo del mondo.

Fruttero and Lucentini wrote a strange but very atmospheric novel set in Venice, L’amante senza fissa dimora, which I translated for Chatto and Windus; however, for some reason, after publishing two other books of theirs that I had translated they decided not to proceed with this one, which was a pity, since it was perhaps the best of the three.

For my own purposes—that is, to get the sense of 18th-century Venice—Andrea di Robilant’s books have proved invaluable, particularly A Venetian Affair. As, of course, have the works of Goldoni and Casanova.

And that brings me to your own novels, which I have greatly enjoyed. I particularly love the imaginative extravagance of your children’s books. I may even have got the idea of putting the story of Marino Faliero at the heart of my book from the use that you made (although very different) of the figure of Baiamonte Tiepolo.

Thank you so much, Gregory, for this tour around your literary Venice. You have almost swayed me about Byron. Almost.  I too love the Hecht and the Howells, different as they are.  And you have added to my books-to-buy-list, very expensively.

Michelle Lovric's website
Photographs of Venice by Gregory Dowling.
Portrait of Gregory Dowling, and photograph of the Guardi painting, by Barnaby Dowling.

Last Orders, by Laurie Graham

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Jack the Ripper guided walks are a hugely successful tourist attraction in the East End of London but as I discovered when I was researching The Night in Question, 117 years on very little remains of the murder sites.  Bucks Row, where Polly Nichols’ body was discovered, has been renamed Durward Street and is hardly recognisable.  Only the old Board School, now converted to apartments, still looms over the place.
  
Bucks Row
The north side of Hanbury Street where Annie Chapman was killed, in a yard behind a cat’s meat shop, has also been redeveloped. The site of Dutfield’s Yard where Lizzie Stride perished is now a primary school playground. Mitre Square is all corporate steel and glass, and the Dorset Street rookery where Mary Kelly lived and died is long gone. Visitors interested in the Whitechapel Murders have to be satisfied with a few familiar street names and a lot of atmospheric spin.  But they can then retire, for liquid consolation, to the Ten Bells, a pub which has undisputed connections to the murders of 1888.
 
It’s perhaps worth pointing out that in Victorian London not all purveyors of alcohol were pubs. Anyone with a couple of pounds for a licence could set up a beer shop and sell ale, beer and cider. But only public houses licensed by a magistrate could sell spirits. Gin consumption had declined by the 1880s. Rum or brandy would have been a more likely choice for those who could afford stronger drink.

Pubs and beer shops were very important to the indigent population of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, people who often lacked all domestic comforts, living hand to mouth, sleeping in doss houses when they had money and in doorways when they didn’t.  Little wonder Jack’s victims were all known to frequent drinking holes. They were places they could stay warm and dry for an hour and rest from their endless trudging, places where they could take a drop of something to deaden their hunger and fatigue, and perhaps catch the eye of a man willing to exchange the price of a drink for a threepenny upright.

The Ten Bells
The Ten Bells pub on the corner of Commercial Street and Fournier Street displays a list of Jack’s victims which, to the disapproval of many Ripperologists includes the name of Martha Turner, also known as Martha Tabram.  Everything about the Whitechapel Murders is open to debate, including the number of women Jack murdered. The so-called ‘canonical five’ excludes Martha but I’m with the Ten Bells on this. I consider her to have been one of his victims, possibly his first. But my purpose today isn’t to conduct a body count. Let’s get back to the pub.

The most definite connection between the Ten Bells and the Ripper murders is Mary Jane (aka Marie Jeanette) Kelly, reckoned by many to have been his last victim and by some, myself included, possibly not to have been his victim at all. Mary Kelly was a regular at the Ten Bells. Two other victims, Lizzie Stride and Annie Chapman were also known to drink there, indeed tradition has it that Annie was seen in the Ten Bells just a few hours before she was murdered.  On the night Lizzie Stride met her fate she’d been seen drinking elsewhere, in The Bricklayer’s Arms, a beer shop on the corner of Settles Street and Fordham Street. That building still stands. It’s now a convenience store.
formerly the Bricklayer's Arms


Mary Kelly was also a regular at the Britannia pub, known more familiarly as Ma Ringer’s.  It stood on the corner of Commercial Street and Dorset Street.  When Mary was killed the regulars at the Britannia and the Ten Bells had a whip-round to buy flowers for her funeral. Annie Chapman was known at the Britannia too, and was remembered for getting into a fight there perhaps over a man, perhaps over money, perhaps over disputed ownership of a piece of soap. Such were those women’s lives. The Britannia was demolished years ago when the Dorset Street slums were cleared and Spitalfields Market was redeveloped.

The Frying Pan pre-gentrification
Finally, there was the Frying Pan pub, on the corner of Brick Lane and Thrawl Street. Polly Nichols spent her last evening there, drinking away her bed money, which is no doubt why she was on Bucks Row at 3 am that fateful morning looking for trade. The Frying Pan has had several incarnations since Polly’s time, and is now the Brick Lane hotel (en-suite rooms, WiFi and air-conditioning) and the Sheraz  Bangla Lounge restaurant.  I wonder what poor Polly would make of that. 

So if you’re ever in Whitechapel and want to tread some genuine Ripper-related ground I’d say you could do worse than a drink in the Ten Bells followed by a balti on Brick Lane.   


   

Cat Woman by Tanya landman

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I suppose my fascination with Siamese cats started with Blue Peter’s Jason. I remember walking all the way to the Civic Centre in Gravesend, Kent with my brother when I was about six years old because there was a cat show on and Jason himself was going to be there in the flesh! He didn’t disappoint and I was star struck.                                 


However, as an adult I hadn’t ever planned on keeping a Siamese of my own.  I was working in theatre and then – when the boys were small and I’d started writing – we were often away from home and keeping a pet didn’t seem fair.


But then, one fateful afternoon, I went to collect my son from his friend’s house.  I was sitting on the sofa waiting for the boys to finish their game when a small kitten emerged, climbed on to my lap, put his paws on my chest, fixed me with his bright blue eyes and started purring.  It was love at first sight.


It turned out that the friend’s mum had been given the kitten by her husband.  He was in the armed services and was off on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Presumably to give her something to take her mind off it he’d bought her the Siamese she’d always wanted.


I was utterly bowled over by my first encounter with that kitten.  She gave me the breeder’s contact details, but as I walked home with my children that afternoon I thought the trouble is, I don’t want anycat. I just happened to have fallen in love with that particular animal.


When my son’s friend’s mother’s husband returned safely from his tour of duty he started sneezing the moment he walked through the door. Amazingly, he was allergic to cats.  It wasn’t long before I had a phone call. Was I interested in re-homing him?


It felt like Destiny. I blithely agreed. I mean, a cat was a cat, wasn’t it?  Past experience had taught me that cats are more attached to property than people so I reasoned that it didn’t matter if we went away for the odd weekend. As long as we left him enough food and water he’d be fine, wouldn’t he?


Wrong!


You see, Edgar had picked me out.  I had been chosen. I was his. Any attempt of mine to go away always meets with enraged protests.  He follows me down the path, yowling and biting my ankles, trying to drag me back.  If I spend a night in a hotel he walks around the house screaming his head off at the rest of the family, jumping on their heads at 4am and demanding, “Where the f*** is she??”


Edgar has strong opinions on everything.  In the early days there were plenty of things that Edgar disapproved of.  Bath- time was one of them. He really didn’t think the boys should be immersed in water. He’d sit on the side of the bath and try and lift them out by the scruff of their necks.


Having gone down the Pet Ownership road we decided after about a year – under constant pressure from my youngest son – that we might as well get a dog too. Edgar would be fine, I thought  – after all, he’d been brought up with dogs by his previous owner, he’d be OK with a puppy.


Wrong again!!


Edgar has never missed an opportunity to launch an assassination attempt.  He is a Ninja.  The Jackal of the feline world.  Not surprisingly the endless dog/cat dramas found their way into a book – Attack of the Blobs!!!


As any of my friends on facebook will testify, Edgar has some truly revolting habits.  Does it make one iota of difference to the way I feel about him? No, it doesn’t. There is something about a Siamese – a truly regal quality - that makes you feel humbled and grateful that they have chosen to bestow their presence on you.


For a non-cat owner I guess that sounds weird,  but I’m not the only person to feel that way.  In fact, I’m in some rather star-studded company (although I’m not entirely sure Jane Fonda should be doing that to her cat…)


 

Jean Cocteau
Patricia Highsmith


Alan Ginsberg

Vivien Leigh
John Lennon

Fred Astaire
Frank Zappa
Marilyn Monroe
Errol Flynn
Clark Gable and Carole Lombard






Elizabeth Taylor

Jane Fonda



Peter Lorre
Laurence Olivier

DOG TALES – Elizabeth Fremantle

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It is no secret that I'm a dog lover and a recent research trip to look at Dutch art offered up a multitude of painted canines which brought to mind the dogs in my novels.  My work is teeming with  the creatures but they are not only included on authorial whim, the beloved pets of my protagonists can more often than not be found in the historical record.

The first of these is Katherine Parr's dog Rig who is featured in Queen's Gambit. When I was first researching the book I visited Sudeley Castle where Queen Katherine died. There are a few personal items that belonged to her in the collection there: a love letter she wrote to Thomas Seymour before they married, as well as a lock of her hair and a tooth, both taken from her grave when it was rediscovered in the eighteenth century. It was the tooth, clearly an item of great sentimental significance to have been buried with her, that particularly resonated for me. It was not a human tooth and seemed to have once belonged to a small dog. Knowing about her dog Rig I thought it possible that this was a carefully kept relic from a beloved pet. From this I gained a glimpse of understanding across the years about my protagonist and her love for her canine companion.

Many women in the Tudor court had small dogs, as we can see from the portraiture of the period. An amusing anecdote which made it into Queen's Gambit is that of Katherine Parr's dear friend and fellow religious reformer, the Duchess of Suffolk, who named her dog Gardiner. Seemingly innocuous, the name was in fact an audacious dig at her enemy Bishop Gardiner a religious conservative who would eventually attempt, and nearly succeed, to topple Queen Katherine.

Another Katherine, Lady Katherine Grey, of my second novel Sisters of Treason, had a great love of animals and kept a number of dogs. We know this because it is recorded that her pets, canines amongst them, destroyed the furniture in her rooms when she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. I characterised her as a girl who loved to be loved and what more fitting a symbol of this than a pack of small, adoring dogs. We have no names for her pets so I had to invent them and one, Stan, has a story of his own. As I was writing the first scene of Katherine Grey surrounded by her pets my editor emailed to say that her much loved terrier had died, so I thought it fitting to name one of Katherine's puppies in memory of him.

Dogs feature again in Watch the Lady but my protagonist, Penelope Devereux's puppy Fides is pure invention. I have included however The Earl of Leicester's old russet and white hound, who wanders about lost at Wanstead after his owner's death. This dog was taken from a painting from the mid 1560s where such a hound can be found in the corner of the image gazing lovingly at his master.

Dogs were often included in portraits to signify fidelity and presumably the hound here is included as a demonstration of Leicester's loyalty to Queen Elizabeth, who favoured him and many believed might marry him. Interestingly though, he is said to have had a flirtation with one of the Queen's maids Lettice Knollys (later to become his wife) in 1565 and by 1568 he was conducting a liaison with the recently widowed Lady Sheffield, who maintained they had married in secret even on her deathbed. This was never proven and the son they produced was named a bastard. In the light of this it is amusing to speculate that the dog in the painting might well be there more as a way to cover Leicester's disloyalty, than to indicate his faithfulness.

There is a delightful picture of Arbella Stuart, the heroine of my next novel, with two parrots, a pair of finches, a monkey and a small white dog. I rather fancifully took this dog to be Geddon, Mary Queen of Scot's Skye terrier who it is said had to be prised from her decapitated corpse. I have imagined that the animal found its way back to  Arbella at Chatsworth with Mary's host/jailer, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was Arbella's step grandfather. Another portrait of Arbella in later life, shows her with a tan and white spaniel tucked in the crook of her arm. In the novel this little dog, which I named Ruff, becomes the device by which she encounters someone who is to change the course of her life.

It's hard to imagine creating the world of a novel without including the creatures that were so much part of the fabric of life in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, either as pets or working animals. For me they are a means to conjure the past and also a way to help draw my characters. The way an individual responds to the  animals, as well as the people, around them can reveal a great deal about their personality.


Find out more about Elizabeth Fremantle's books on her website elizabethfremantle.com



Pretty Woman 1795 Catherine Johnson

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I was initially going to title this blog Sex In the City. I have been researching loads for an adult (not that sort of adult thank you very much) project I'm working on. It's set among the low and high life of late eighteenth century London.

Women, as usual in history, had a tough time. The best most could hope for was a half decent marriage and perhaps an early but comfortably off widowhood (widows after all were independent).  In the 18th century, as today the gulf between the rich and the poor yawned wide. If you were very rich you might be comfortable but married off against your will with no recourse to separation or divorce. If you were very poor you could suffer a short brutish life on the street.

As part of my research I was back to reading Harris' List. Harris List strikes me as insufferably sad. In case you haven't come across it it's a kind of mid eighteenth century bachelor's guide to what was available on the streets, where to go, how much and what to expect. A kind of pre-Internet Internet, a phone box in the west end with none of the pictures.  It does give you glimpses (mediated via Harris who called himself the Great pimp) into history, but when you start thinking about the real people, the flesh and blood women behind the words it's just woeful.

And once you were ruined there was no turning back. A very small group of prostitutes managed to make the leap out of the tied brothel and into the keeping of one man, a smaller number made it to marriage. Fewer still a marriage that had anything to do with love. A notable exception was Elizabeth Armistead.

Elizabeth Armistead was born in 1750 in South London, but little is known about her early life, she might have sold flowers or vegetables, she might have been slightly posher, perhaps a lay preacher's daughter. What is known is that by her teens she was working in one of the most expensive and well appointed brothels in London and was a favourite of Viscount Bolingbroke, the Earl of Egremont amongst others. In 1776 Town and Country Magazine stated that she 'could claim the conquest of two ducal coronets, a marquis, four earls and a viscount.”
An engraving of a painting by Reynolds, currently in Chertsey museum c 1781

She was moved out of the brothel and kept as a mistress by a string of wealthy men. Elizabeth Armistead was one  of the 'Toasts of The Town'. She even caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. (An affair she  ended by taking an extensive tour of Europe so as not to offend him).

Elizabeth was smart, she hosted salons where Charles Fox, leader of a Whig faction met and plotted. She and Charles Fox were platonic friends for years before they became lovers in 1785, at a time when he was leading the country in the Fox/North coalition.

Charles spent more and more time in Elizabeth's house in Surrey, increasingly it became his  refuge from Westminster. They married in 1795 and the new Mrs Fox lived quietly and although reconciled with Fox's children, stayed out of the limelight of society.

Even though Charles Fox died in 1806 heavily in debt (his gambling had resulted in his twice becoming bankrupt) Elizabeth outlived him, granted a pension by George IV. She died in 1841 a day short of her ninety second birthday.

A (very) rare happy outcome for a girl from nowhere.

If you're interested, Katie Hicks book Courtesan has the whole story.

Catherine

PS a question. I am corralling British set historical novels for children and teens that feature main character that are POC. Black or Asian really.
So far I have Tanya Landman's  new next month Hell and High Water
S.I. Martins Jupiter Williams and Jupiter Amidships
Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy's  Toby is more than a sidekick
Julia Goldings Cat Royal Series has Pablo.
Celia Rees's Pirates has  Minerva and I reckon the boat can count as an extention of Empire!

Werewolves

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by Marie-Louise Jensen


I had a new book out in late July. Which was weird because I didn't see it until mid August because I was in Europe when it appeared.
I arrived at a friend's house in Germany and she (being a wonderful friend) had ordered a copy. That was my first glimpse of the print edition. Cue squeaks of excitement.

The book is a short novel for younger readers and was originally written as an interactive e-book for 10-11 year olds in schools.
Educational publishing - that strange animal, where not offending religious schools takes precedence over what people believed in the past.

Because let's not beat about the bush; the Norse believed in shape-shifting. In the saga of Egil Skallagrimson (not a tale for the faint hearted and certainly not for children) we are told in quite a matter of fact way that Egil's grandfather was known to be a shape-shifter. He was even called Kveld-Ulf (Evening Wolf.) Egil himself has beserker tendencies and behaves a lot more like a werewolf than a man a lot of the time, splitting enemies heads open with axes and other charming incidents.

The Christanisation of Iceland happened peacefully shortly after his death and his son had his body exhumed and reburied near the chapel that was built on his land. I can't believe he'd have been happy with that. He was a true pagan. Forgiveness and meekness were totally alien to him.

By all accounts, the official acceptance of Christianity in Iceland was a formality. The country was threatened with conversion by force from Norway if the population didn't accept the new god. Sensibly, they accepted him and privately continued with their worship of the Norse gods for many years. To this day, the majority of Icelanders confess to believing in 'The Hidden Folk,' - elves.

But my 'werewolf' wasn't allowed to be real. Which was fine. It made for a perfectly good mystery story anyway. But the people of Viking-age Iceland would have had no trouble believing in werewolves. I should think they'd have been more astonished if you said such things didn't exist. Even after the arrival of Christianity. Werewolves, trolls, elves, ghosts and other supernatural beings were an indisputable part of the rich and brutal fabric of their world.


Things to do in Brussels - by Sue Purkiss

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You quite often see a little bit of Brussels on TV, don't you? It's generally a bit of one of the European Commission or Parliament buildings, used as a backdrop for a reporter relating the latest bit of news about some aspect of EU policy, or the latest twist or turn in Britain's tortuous relationship with Europe.

But there is much more to Brussels than this. Well, everybody knows about the chocolate and the beer, and lots of people know about the Manneken Pis, the little statue of the small boy having a pee. (But did you know that in one of the beautiful baroque buildings in the Grande Place, there is a display of the many little outfits in which, over the years, the little statue has been dressed for special occasions...?)

We go to Brussels quite often - we have family there, including two grandchildren. We're just back from there now, and here, to give you a flavour of the city, are some of the things we saw and did.



You may recognise that this is a Smurf. Quite a large one. Apart from chocolate and beer, Brussels' other great export is comic strips. The Smurfs, Asterix, and my elder grandson's personal favourite, Tintin, all hail from Belgium, and the weekend before last, there was a comic strip festival in the big square in front of the royal palace. Everyone was there: several Tintins, Captain Haddocks and Snowies; Asterix, Obelix, and heaven knows who else, all inexplicably playing musical instruments; ditto more Smurfs; and to top it all off, there was a Tintin Car Rally. This consisted largely of cars which had appeared in one or other of Herge's books, along with a few interlopers - notably a Batmobile.


Here's Tintin (whisper it softly, but I think he was a girl) and Snowy. 'He' strolled about smiling enigmatically and posing for photographs. 'He may not have been a dead ringer for Tintin, but he certainly had style.


This was the star of the cars - an Oldsmobile, lovingly cared for and the subject of much admiration. 


The cars entered the square under an inflatable purple archway. But when this glamorous car load arrived, the archway was quite overcome and promptly collapsed, which the ladies in the back seat thought was hilarious.

The whole thing was very relaxed, with cars and people milling about, much eating of chips, churros, waffles and ice cream, and not a health-and-safety rule in sight.


For our next outing, we hunted down the Musee d'Ixelles - no easy task as it's not in the centre, But we persevered because we were keen to see a special exhibition - 'Belgian Landscape'. Now, if you've ever driven to Brussels from Calais or Dunkerque, you may well have noticed that this particular bit of Belgian landscape is not especially varied. It's flat and it's green and there some nice trees, and that's about it. So we were interested to find out more about Belgium's other landscapes. Well, this didn't really happen, but we did see this nice picture of sand dunes, by Anna Boch - and some very lovely other paintings in the general collection, which has art from the 19th century up to the present.




Much easier to find is the Musee des Beaux Arts. It's just round the corner from the royal palace, on top of a hill, looking down on the lower city where the poorer people used to live. This is a wonderful museum/art gallery, with a very good shop and a pleasant cafe. The only unfortunate thing about it is that you have to choose which section to buy a ticket for; you can't wonder at will. We went for the Old Masters, because we wanted to see the Breughels...


... which, of course, were marvellous. A lot of the other Old Masters featured crucifixions, women with their eyes raised piously to heaven, and dead birds - but I always like the earlier pictures. Here's a detail from one such:


I've always loved the look of medieval gowns, and I thought this one was exquisite. (Unfortunately the security was draconian; they wouldn't let me take my handbag, which meant that I didn't have my notebook and so couldn't take note of the painter or the subject. She was a saint - that's all I can tell you: a very elegant one. Humble apologies for such lackadaisical scholarship.)


After the Old Masters, we had lunch in the museum cafe. We sat outside, looking over the rooftops, guarded by these splendid fellows as we ate delicious cheese with some sort of 'sirop' and grapes.



Another thing Brussels is known for is its Art Deco architecture. This is all over the place; you just have to look up, and the chances are that you will see a decorated panel or a balcony made of sinuously curved wrought iron.



The chief splendour of Belgium lies not in its landscape, but in its cities. Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven, Bruges; they're all beautiful. This is Aalst. I once sat beside a girl from there on the Eurostar, and she told me that she thought her city was just as lovely as these more famous ones. I've wanted to go and see it ever since, and last week we did. It's small, but it certainly has a lovely square, with this old belfry and cafes in front of the tall houses whose gables are decorated with curlicues. Why is it, I wonder, that all over Europe, cities both in the north and the south have these squares where people sit outside, drink coffee or sip wine and watch the world go by - but Britain does not?

Brussels is not as picturesque as these better preserved old cities. But it's vibrant and often unexpected - and of course, there's the chocolate. And the waffles... and the ice cream... and lots of art.

"A ROYAL WELCOME" at Buckingham Palace. By Penny Dolan

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Once I heard a writer talk about finding the right word for the “thing you’d drink from” for an exact historical setting. “Goblet” seemed too grand, “beaker” sounded too ancient and “glass” did not fit the time or the object. “Cup” was the word finally chosen. This always struck me as a clear example of how, in historical fiction, the right word is needed for small objects as much as for the grandest items, However, I’m sure that every correct term is known by those involved with the meal that I‘m writing about today.

One sunny morning this summer, I walked through London’s Green Park, heading for Buckingham Palace. I’d been invited, along with a small group of bloggers, to visit the annual Summer Opening of the State Apartments.This year’s theme, “A Royal Welcome”, was an interpretation for the public of all that was involved in welcoming visiting Members of State to an official State Banquet, set within the impressive state rooms where these meetings usually take place.

From the side gates, we were led towards the Grand Entrance where the Australian State coach, horseless, was a reminder that Ambassadors and similar visitors would not be arriving on foot. We went up a few carpeted steps before pausing in an opulently gloomy space, observed by stern, stony-eyed busts. Ahead rose the Grand Staircase, that leads all visitors – us included – suitably slowly towards the brightness of the State Apartments above. The dark and light created a moment of architectural drama that must have an impact on anyone approaching an audience with Her Majesty.

The Throne Room, at the head of the stairs, was dedicated to Investitures and Honours, displayed documents, looping videos and portraits of the many people honoured by the Queen during her long reign. Then we were led into the main part of the exhibition: the preparations for a State Banquet, always held on first night of any official State Visit. The matter of who is being invited is diplomatically planned and negotiated between officials at the Government and the Palace, often over three years or more, and the purpose is the development of good trade and political relations between the prestigious visitors and Britain. This was a useful thought to bear in mind when the hard work and careful preparations were shown within the next cases.

The Office, the first display showed some of the administration involved to make sure the 170 guests, particularly the Guests of Honour, feel as much at their ease as possible. We saw the cupboard of thick files, each bearing the name of a state or country, as well as the writing desk where invitations are prepared by hand and, on a table nearby, the deep wooden tray filled with invitations, and the small booklets also sent to each individual guest.

Inside the booklet, along with general notes and the night’s menu, is the seating plan. A red dot marks the guest’s own seat, and the plan would also show the names of those seated nearby. In addition, the administrative staff also check that each guest knows enough of any foreign language to converse with their neighbours and - if not a first visit - that the guest is seated so they can meet a different group of people, widening the spread of the relationships. This intense planning perfectly illustrated that the evening is about trade and diplomatic relations, not principally about being with friends in the everyday sense. Though no doubt pleasant, a State Banquet was starting to feel like royal work.

It would be work certainly for the Kitchen. Victorian copper pans, regularly re-lined, hung gleaming from a rack, alongside a set of chef’s whites with embroidered insignia. Although four courses are traditionally served (fish, meat, pudding and fruit) the kitchen table on show concentrated on the third course, with a display of recipes and moulds used for the creation of a chocolate bombe, the State Banquet favourite. 
 
There was also a charming tray of delicate sugar-work orchids, “national” flowers used to personalise the banquet of a visiting President. There were also rows of chocolate buttons, moulded and gilded to match the real buttons on the palace livery.  Would any of those embossed buttons be taken home discreetly as treats for children?


The Wine Cellar display hinted at bottles stored somewhere within the palace walls, as well as the glassware. With four wines served at the meal, almost seven hundred delicate glasses must be inspected beforehand for breaks or splintered edges. What I would call the crockery and cutlery came next: the golden plates, almost like those in a fairy tale, must be counted out. True gold is soft, so the plates are really made of silver-gilt. The gilt cutlery too, must be counted out, as well as the china plates and dishes used for the other three courses. With so many guests, no single set is sufficient for the entire table, so a variety of plates, cutlery and glassware will be used for the meal. The exhibition showed a pretty blue Georgian dining service, along with the huge wooden storage chests that keeps it safe when not in use. I could not help thinking of old tales of travelling royalty and their long baggage trains.
 
The Queen herself will obviously look her best at such events, so "A Royal Welcome" included a display based on the work of her own dressmaker, Angela Kelly, as well as three examples of designer gowns worn by Her Majesty during her long reign.  



(Further on, in the Music Room, there was a display about the work of the Royal Garden Parties, where our guide explained that Her Majesty often dresses in a single “block of colour” for such events, which made identification and photographs much easier. Of course, I’d seen that the Queen dressed like that, but I hadn’t truly appreciated quite why.) 

At last, we came to the huge Ball Room where an enormous u-shaped table was shown in full banqueting glory, spread with place settings, flowers and ornate decoration. Tiny dots of lights shone down over each place, instead of the usual candles, to make sure there was no danger of fire during the long hours of this public exhibition. However, one end of the table had been left as it would be at the start of preparation, with the measuring rule still across the white cloth, and places still to be laid (rather like a bad “Downtown Abbey” staffing moment, although in a most superior situation.)  The white napkins are folded into a neat “dutch bonnet” pattern so they sit easily on the plate and also so they can be moved discreetly if there are sudden changes in guest numbers. When seated for the Banquet, the Queen and her State Visitors face the huge pipe organ once housed in Brighton’s Royal Pavilion but – no doubt thankfully – dinner music will be provided by the Countess of Wessex’s String Orchestra or other musicians, and be pieces by Elgar, Gershwin, Debussy, or even themes from the Harry Potter movies.

In all the rooms of “A Royal Welcome”, there were short video loops showing all the various staff at their work in more detail. On one of the three screens in the Ballroom was the moment when the Queen’s Piper and his band greet the start of the State Banquet, followed by the procession of wonderfully synchronised waiting staff. all in scarlet jackets, each allocated to a set group of diners. A discreet “traffic light” system regulates the serving around the table, or so I heard, as it would certainly be difficult to see the head of the table from either foot. There was also a short, clever time-lapse video, showing the whole process of table preparation, banquet and clearing away all within three minutes. 



How briefly all the Royal Party and guests seemed to be sitting there! You can find a version on the Royal Welcome website, too.

After leaving the Ballroom, we were led into the State Dining Room. This is where, on a long polished table, the exchanged State Gifts are displayed for viewing, along with all those previously received. (Someone whispered that, during a long ago state visit, there was some embarrassment when a second chess set was received for display.)

On show we saw gifts such as elegant Japanese porcelain and a delicate gilt temple from Indonesia, but what a surprise the Queen must have had when she received this traditional Tree of Life plaque from Mexico: the heavily coloured ornate surface was covered in tiny images of her own self and her life as a monarch.

What did I feel at the end of “A Royal Welcome”, after all the magnificence and the life size Georgian portraits and the bright chandeliers and gilded ceilings and walls?

I admit I felt respect for all that the Palace staff that keep this great enterprise running.


Also, knowing that the original Banquet shadowed for “A Royal Welcome” was only one of many the Queen must have sat through during her long reign - now the longest of any British Monarch - I felt a sense of the work this must be for Her Majesty as well : to be always the centre of such events even when you felt unwell or unwilling, and with so much history and tradition constantly around you and your duty that must be done.   
 Not, I felt, a life many would long for.

Finally, as with achy feet, I eyed the golden sofas and single footstool in the White Drawing Room, I ended up hoping that the Queen’s private rooms give her and her family a place to relax comfortably when they are away from “the shop”, and free of “the function of promoting peace, good relations and trade.” 




Many thanks to Buckingham Palace Press Office for inviting me, as one of the History Girls, to visit this year’s “A Royal Welcome”.  There are still ten days to go before this year’s showing finally ends on 27th September 2015. Each year has a different theme, and last year’s exhibition, “A Royal Childhood”, was visited by History Girl Sue Purkiss.  Quite how, I wonder, will Buckingham Palace celebrate 2016?

Penny Dolan
A Boy Called MOUSE, pub Bloomsbury.

Orderly and Humane - Celia Rees

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Like most of us this summer, I've been shocked and moved by the images of refugees in flight from the turmoil of the Middle East, fleeing conflict by any means they can, making the long and perilous journey on foot, by boat, and on foot again, trekking towards Europe, seeking to find some sort of security, a new life for themselves and for their children. 

Syrian refugees
This mass movement of people is unprecedented in recent times. In casting about to find any kind of analogy for what we are seeing in our newspapers and on our screens, the nearest most reporters and correspondents can find is the movement of German populations fleeing from the advancing Russians and then the further mass expulsion of ethnic German populations after the Second World War. 

German expellees 
Until recent events, the mass expulsion of Ethnic Germans (the Volksdeutsche) who had been living in the different countries of Central and Eastern Europe, often for centuries, was rather lost to history, just another of the consequences, a postscript to the manifold horrors of the Second World World War. It is, however, worth recalling it now. The scale of the population movement was astonishing. 'The expulsion of the ethnic Germans was not only to be by any measure the greatest forced migration in human history, but may well constitute the greatest single movement of population'*. The operation permanently displaced at least 12 million and perhaps as many as 14 million people. They were the Sudeten Germans, Carpathian Germans, Volga, Baltic, Bessarabian Germans, the Germans of Poland and Pomerania. Some of these populations lived in places very distant from the geographic Germany and most had been there for a very long time. No matter how long they had been there, and some could trace their settlement back to the Teutonic Knights of the 13th Century, they were going to have to move. At Potsdam outside Berlin the victorious Allies, Britain, America and the USSR, were coming to an Agreement about the future of Europe. 

Article XII states: 

'The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognise that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.'

Refugee children in Berlin
The expulsions spread beyond the countries stated to include the Baltic States, Yugoslavia and Rumania. It was, as George Orwell commented:
'...equivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia, or the combined populations of Scotland and Ireland.' 
 
Refugees on the road
The expulsions were neither orderly, nor humane. Deaths were estimated to have been between 500,00 to 1.5 million. Lieutenant Colonel Byford-Jones' eye witness account gives some idea of the chaos and suffering involved:

'As the morning wore on, we met thousands of people carrying sacks, rucksacks and portmanteaux, who had obviously been on their way for days along that same long, weary road, sleeping at night in barns or on the roadside ... Women who had lost husbands, and children, men who had lost their wives; men and women who had lost their homes and children ... There were also little children who were alone, carrying some small bundle, with a pathetic label tied to them.'** 

A Junker, who had once owned large estates, told him:

'You can keep travelling, sir, and you will see streams of people moving west - millions of them. So they will continue to come like streams of ants throughout the summer, the winter, next summer and next winter, And on the way, in villages, you will find those who have been left behind because they are too old, infirm, ill; and on the sides of the roads you will find graves that are unmarked except by wood crosses made from the branches of trees. they are...the new dispossessed, without homes, without hope, destined to wander from place to place, ever pushed on.'**

The last sentence has a horribly familiar ring about it, doesn't it?  This mass movement of people happened in Europe within living memory. The current crisis has not yet reached anything like these proportions but winter is coming on and there seems no let up in the numbers coming. There have been too many deaths already. We study history so we can learn from it, let's hope that we do. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

*'Orderly and Humane', R.M. Douglas
**'Berlin Twilight', Lieutenant Colonel W. Byford-Jones

'Strange how potent cheap music is...' Listening to the sounds of the past - by Christina Koning

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When you’re trying to recreate the past, there’s nothing quite so evocative as listening to the popular music of an era, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months of researching and writing my soon-to-be-published novel, Game of Chance. The book is set in 1929, on the eve of the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression, and much of the action takes place in a snow-bound London, where poverty and unemployment are already much in evidence. I wanted to portray this - but also to show the deep class divisions in the society of the time. And so my story, a murder mystery, moves between several very different worlds - from the shabby backstreets of New Cross and Shoreditch, to the more affluent squares and closes of Knightsbridge and Mayfair; from the bohemian circles of Camden Town and Notting Hill, to the country houses of the Home Counties. One thing all these otherwise disparate worlds had in common was the music of the times - available to any home that possessed a wireless, and also to be heard across the capital in nightclubs and at fashionable parties.
In researching this, and putting together a playlist of some of the most popular tunes of 1929 (see attached link), I was struck by how many of the songs still to be heard today were first written and performed in that golden era we call the Jazz Age. Melodies such as Gershwin’s incomparable ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, Bix Beiderbecke’s ‘Singin’ the Blues’, or Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy’, date from that year, as does the wistful ballad, ‘I’ll See You Again’ (performed by the Master himself), from Coward’s operetta, Bitter Sweet. Perhaps more surprising, is that many of the songs later recorded - and made their own - by renowned artists such as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald, were first performed, often in rather less sophisticated versions, in the late 1920s. 

‘Singin’ in the Rain’ - later made famous by Gene Kelly in the 1955 movie of that name - is one of these, its up-tempo 1929 version sung by one Cliff Edwards. ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ (later a Sinatra classic) was recorded no less that four times in 1929 - by Harry Richardson, Eddie Walters, Eddie Cantor, and Paul Whiteman. There were also several recordings of ‘My Blue Heaven’ - another song which has been covered many times by artists in the years since. ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ - later memorably performed by Marilyn Monroe in the 1959 spoof of the Roaring Twenties, ‘Some Like It Hot’, was first recorded by Helen Kane thirty years earlier. Other perennially popular favourites, such as ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird’, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ and ‘Dream A Little Dream Of Me’ also first hit the airwaves in that remarkable year.    
In writing Game of Chance, I had a great deal of fun incorporating snatches of some of these wonderful songs into the chapters describing a glamorous party, held at the Cadogan Square home of a beautiful ‘Society’ hostess. Amongst the popular ‘hits’ being played by the jazz band hired for the night, is the show tune ‘Oh, Lady Be Good!’ from the musical of that name, whose lyrics beautifully encapsulated the dreamy sensuality of the mood I was trying to convey:

Oh, sweet and lovely lady, be good
Oh, lady, be good, to me;
I am so awf’lly misunderstood,
So, lady be good to me…

Other tunes now familiar from later ‘covers’, but then brand-new, included ‘Ain’t She Sweet?’, ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ and ‘Let’s Misbehave’ - another song whose lyrics stay just the right side of suggestiveness:

We’re all alone
No chaperone
Can get our number
The world’s in slumber
Let’s misbehave…

The prevailing mood of many of these songs is a sort of manic cheerfulness - a refusal to be ‘downhearted’ in the face of trouble and hardship. One particularly touching lyric - ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’ (with music by Jimmy McHugh and words by Dorothy Fields) was apparently inspired by the writer and lyricist spotting a young couple looking in the window of Tiffany’s jeweller’s shop in New York; the title line was supposedly said by the young man to his girl. Whether this is an apocryphal story or not, the song (later recorded by Billie Holiday) does capture something of the spirit of the times, with its mixture of bravado and wry resignation:

Gee, I’d like to see you lookin’ swell, baby,
Diamond bracelets Woolworths doesn’t sell, baby;
Until that lucky day, you know darn well, baby,
I can’t give you anything but love…

Nor is this the only song from 1929 whose determination to ‘look on the bright side’ acknowledges that there is a darker side to life. The perennially popular, and (to my mind, at least) rather too jaunty ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’, presupposes that the ‘happy days’ in question haven’t always been ‘here’. The almost insufferably bouncy ‘When the Red, Red, Robin, Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ contains the lines

There’ll be no more sobbin’
When he starts singin’
His old, sweet song…

No wonder these tunes proved so popular throughout the Depression and during the Second World War. They were the musical equivalent of the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ posters put out by the Ministry of Information in 1939 to ensure that people didn’t succumb to gloom and despondency during the Blitz. They celebrated love, life and happiness in the face of looming disaster. And, dammit - they were catchy!

For these and other musical treats of 1929:




    





   



       
     



Joshua Hodgetts - Master Glass Engraver by Ann Swinfen

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It all started with a small piece of glass. When I was nine years old my two great-aunts, retired schoolteachers, gave me a little oval of reddish-brown glass, about two inches high by an inch and a quarter wide. The top surface had a thin overlay of white glass which had been cut away to create a cameo of two birds on a branch, surrounded by foliage and flowers. This was all enclosed by a narrow oval line, and the edge had been smoothed and gimped.

‘It was made by our uncle,’ one of my great-aunts said. ‘It was a ’prentice piece, made when he was fourteen.’

‘We thought you should have it,’ her sister said, ‘because you share his birthday.’

I loved it at once. It was so delicate and pretty. There was nothing you could actually do with it, except look at it, but that didn’t matter. I treasured it and everywhere I went, it went with me, even to university, generally amongst my handkerchiefs, to keep it safe. As time passed, I wondered about the basic piece of glass. Viewed from the front it was convex, so eventually I decided it had been cut from a bottle, perhaps a beer bottle or one of those Victorian bottles for fizzy drinks (like ginger beer), which had a marble inside as a stopper. Clearly my young great-great-uncle had not been given a valuable piece of glass to practice on. Yet he was so skilful! The older I grew the more impressed I was that a boy of fourteen could create such a lovely piece.

Then a few years ago, my husband asked what I would like for Christmas. ‘What I would really like,’ I said, ‘would be to have my great-great-uncle’s piece made into a pendant.’

We took it to a jewellery designer who had made other things for us, and I explained that I wanted a very simple gold frame to hold it. She also suggested a small motif at the top, based on the flowers and the leaves in the cameo. So this is what it looks like now:


I wish I had asked my grandmother or her sisters to tell me more about my great-great-uncle. Their father, John Hodgetts, was a police sergeant in the nineteenth century, and the glass engraver was his younger brother, but I didn’t even know his first name, or anything else about him.

Then when my mother died, I inherited an exquisite jug which I knew was also his work. It was clear glass, not cameo work, but the design was in the same vein as my little piece – beautiful birds amongst foliage. Very William Morris.

For some time I had been tracing my husband’s family tree, which was easy because the Swinfens were armigerous land-owning gentry and much of the work is already done, but finally I decided to look into my maternal grandmother’s family and learn a bit more about this mysterious great-great-uncle. It’s been a little more difficult.

I discovered that his name was Joshua Hodgetts, born in 1857 and died in 1933. His wife was called Annie Maria and they had four daughters (Gertrude, Florence, Fellian and Amy) and four sons (Rupert, Frederick, Charles and Sydney). That was as much as I discovered at the time, but then last summer we met up with my cousin Susan and her husband when they came to Scotland for the Commonwealth Games. They were staying in Callander and commuting to Glasgow for the games.


Now you may be familiar with Callander under another name. As ‘Tannochbrae’ it featured in the long-running series, ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’. If you remember the series you’ll remember that the doctors’ home and surgery was a fine Victorian house standing on a hill above the town, called Arden House.

Well, that’s where my cousin was staying – it’s now a B&B. We sat out in the sunshine on a terrace that I remember from the series, looking out over spectacular views of surrounding mountains and rolling farmland, just beautiful.

Susan had brought with her an album of family photographs (some more than 100 years old) salvaged from our great-aunts’ house and including some of our mysterious great-uncle Arthur Hand, our grandfather’s brother born 1881, who went out to Alaska. No one knows what became of him. Then we began talking about our great-great-uncle, Joshua Hodgetts. By now I had discovered a little more about him. The gifted fourteen-year old had risen to be a master glass engraver. It seemed Susan had also inherited an example of his work, a vase.

My interest in Joshua reawakened, I managed to track down a little more information about him. I discovered that what I had thought of as ‘cameo’ glass was actually called ‘intaglio’ glass. For much of his adult life Joshua worked at Stevens & Williams, a glass manufacturer in Stourbridge, where he was their chief engraver. Stourbridge had been the centre of English glass-making since the seventeenth century and the intaglio glass made there in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the best in the world. Joshua was one of their most outstanding artists, his work was in huge demand, and he was put in charge of the intaglio department. He was a keen amateur ornithologist and botanist, which explains his recurring motifs, very much in tune with the Art Deco and Arts and Crafts movements of the late nineteenth century. Some of the birds he portrayed are not British but exotic Birds of Paradise, much admired by enthusiasts of the fashionable Chinoiserie style. A man passionate about his work, even after he retired he still took on private commissions.

More research was needed. So far I’ve discovered that there was a glass-making firm called Hodgetts, Richardson & Son who were involved in the Portland Vase project. This Hodgetts was William James Hodgetts, almost certainly the William Hodgetts who was the father of Joshua and his elder brother John, my great-grandfather. And there was an artist, Emily Hodgetts, who produced two paintings of Richardson’s glassworks around 1840-50, but I haven’t been able to establish where she fits into the family.





Joshua worked for Hodgetts, Richardson and Pargeter (the original name of the company) as a very young man before he went to Steven & Williams. While at Richardson’s he developed and patented the very first ‘threading machine’, which was used to apply long, spirally wound trails of glass. Venetian glass style required this use of glass threading on the main body of glass. Previously it had been a very difficult and time-consuming process when done by hand. Around the same time Joshua contributed to Richardson’s award-winning stand at the Parisexposition of 1878.

There is a discrepancy between the sources. I have found that one claims that it was William J. Hodgetts who invented the threading machine, not Joshua. I suppose it could have been either of them, or both.


Since seeing Susan, I have done a bit more research and discovered that our great-great-uncle is FAMOUS! People from all over the world collect Joshua Hodgetts glass and pay thousands of pounds for each piece. Heavens! The picture above is a decanter by him which is in a glass museum. Here’s a vase, sold three years ago for nearly £7,000:


And another museum piece:



An intriguing 'ring' decanter:


More of his exquisite work:



Even the base is decorated:
Finally, three vases:




It just shows, one shouldn’t take one’s ancestors for granted. I wish I had inherited his talent, but I’m so glad I share his birthday, and that – as a result – I own what is probably his first surviving piece, made in 1871 by an exceptionally talented boy.

Ann Swinfen
http://www.annswinfen.com
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