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

October Competition

0
0
Open to UK Followers only - sorry!

Closing date 7th November



To win one of five copies of James Shapiro's Book 1606, answer the following question in the Comments section below:

"Which of the three plays Shakespeare probably wrote or part-wrote in 1606 means the most to you and why?" (The plays are: King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra)

Then copy your answers to me at this address: readers@maryhoffman.co.uk so that I can get in touch with the winners.

Good luck!

 



Well done, Sister Suffragette! by Mary Hoffman

0
0


I suppose my three daughters first learned of the Women's Suffrage Movement through the rather jolly medium of Glynis Johns singing Sister Suffragette! in Mary Poppins. There was Mrs Banks, cheerfully neglecting her children and marching for Votes for Women! because she was rich enough to afford a nanny, wearing a sash and telling us "our daughters' daughters will adore us." It was all good clean middle class fun.

Scroll forwards ten years to 1974 to the BBC TV series "Shoulder to Shoulder" (available on YouTube) and you saw the brutal reality of the Cat and Mouse Act and the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes on hunger strike.

It was unwatchably horrible, just as is the one force-feeding scene in Sarah Gavron's new film, Suffragette. In reality it happened to many women and many times, causing major health problems in many, such as pneumonia when the feeding tube went into the trachea instead of the oesophagus. Gavron has said that she was influenced by "Shoulder to Shoulder" in making her film.

I knew it was coming and braced myself. The trolley being wheeled along the prison corridor, with its gruesome load of rubber tubing and enamel jug and the gang of people needed to hold each woman down makes the viewer feel sick before the scene starts.

The film takes a fresh perspective in concentrating on two (fictional) working class women who are drawn into the fight not just for votes but equal pay and conditions - a battle still being fought a hundred years later.

Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff) both work in a laundry in sweatshop conditions, made worse by the assaults of the lecherous boss, but have very different domestic situations. Maud is married with one child, George, who has a weak chest; Violet is with a violent husband who impregnates her almost as frequently as he beats her up.

It is Violet who draws Maud into what is now called direct action but then "civil disobedience," a development which lands her in prison and in trouble with her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) - and he is one of the more sympathetic men, at least at the beginning.

They are led locally by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham-Carter), who wanted to be a doctor but ended up  married to a pharmacist. She teaches the women "ju-jitsu" and is modelled on Edith Garrud, a real-life suffragette.

Punch cartoon 1910 "The Suffragette who knew Ju-Jitsu."

Maud's increasing frustration with her work (and the attentions of her boss to her and to Violet's young daughter) and her home lead her further and further into taking action to improve life for women then and in the future. It's an impressive, nuanced performance by Carey Mulligan and one that should win her an Oscar nomination.

But there is a historical mistake in the story of her family - one you find in countless novels too. Sonny, having thrown Maud out of the home, can't cope with working and looking after their son. It leads to a tragic scene, when Maud tries to visit on George's birthday and finds him being taken away by a couple to be adopted. The trouble is that the Adoption law was passed only in 1926 and this is 1912 or 1913 at the latest. At most he could have been fostered and that doesn't have the finality implied in this parting scene.
Emmeline Pankhurst Public Domain

Much has been made of Meryl Streep's "starring" in the film; in fact she has only one scene. She turns in one of her impressive impersonations as Emmeline Pankhurst, first addressing a crowd of women (including Maud) and then fleeing arrest. She was of course often arrested, under the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913, which allowed for the release of women prisoners after their health failed from hunger strikes, only for them to be re-arrested once they had recovered.

Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested May 1914 (Public Domain)
You can't blame the film-makers for bigging up Streep's role; this all-women production needed a big name and must have been thrilled to get her but don't go expecting a great deal.

If the film has a weakness, it is in the portrayal of men. They are jeering, sneering lechers or patronising politicians or they are out to trap and neutralise the women. The only truly sympathetic male in the end is Edith's husband and even he locks her in a cupboard to stop her attending another demonstration. True, it is because of his concern for her failing health, but still ...

There's a rumour that many male actors turned down the opportunity to play parts in the film, written by Abi Morgan, because the roles weren't "meaty" enough. There is certainly no sign of a Keir Hardy or a Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, the latter co-editor of the Votes for Women magazine and himself imprisoned and force-fed when he went on hunger strike.

This is a film about women's struggle and it is put first and foremost, quite rightly. Still, it's a shame that the men were so stereotyped.

Maud finds herself mixing with women of all classes and background and it takes a while to realise that the "Emily" she encounters is in fact Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who through herself in front of the king's horse at the 1913 Derby.

That sequence is magnificently re-created with complete conviction in the direction, costuming and cinematography. If you want to read the story of that day,  I recommend Celia Rees's "Return to Victoria" in the History Girls' first publication,  Daughters of Time.

Memorial edition copyright Lordprice collection
Emily's death, clearly unexpected by the other suffragettes, and her funeral lead to Maud's rescuing Violet's daughter from the clutches of the laundry boss and getting her a job in private service. It's still drudgery and it's not a given that all female servants were free from sexual assault by men, but in the context of the film it is a small victory.

Before the credits roll, we get a list of dates when women got the vote in various countries: in Britain it was 1918, but only for women over thirty (which Maud would have just been) but they had to be householders, so only 40% of women were eligible. Universal suffrage for over 21s came only in 1928. Yes, that's less than a hundred years ago.

It comes as a shock if you didn't know it. The same shock as I felt when reading in Jane Robinson's excellent 2009 book Bluestockings that the university I went to did not award degrees to women until 1948.

It it a serious and important film, not without flaws but reminding audiences of what it took to gain a right that many people now can't be bothered to exercise. It's certainly a rallying cry against that kind of apathy.




And if you want to encourage and inform your daughters with something a bit less frivolous than Mary Poppins, there is a splendid book by one of our own History Girls, Carol Drinkwater, in the My Story series of YA books published by Scholastic. Called simply Suffragette and re-issued this year, it tells the story of another working-class girl, Dollie, who also becomes involved with the movement. It too ends with Derby Day 1913, a date we should never forget.




Charles' Cold - Telling It Like It Was/Is - Joan Lennon

0
0

Here is William Hazlitt's portrait of Charles Lamb, painted in 1804.  And here is Charles' not-in-the-least over-the-top description of the common cold, in a letter to a friend in 1824 -

Do you know what it is to succumb under an insurmountable day-mare,—"a whoreson lethargy," Falstaff calls it,—an indisposition to do anything, or to be anything,—a total deadness and distaste,—a suspension of vitality,—an indifference to locality,—a numb, soporifical, good-for-nothingness,—an ossification all over,—an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events,—a mind-stupor,—a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience...


Oh Charles - we do know - we do -


This has been for many weeks my lot, and my excuse; my fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three-and-twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; nothing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Parke's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an o! I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest... 


Your words touch me - tell more of the details of your discomfort - 


I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me... If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub-street attic to let—not so much as a joint-stool or a crack'd jordan left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little, when their heads are off...


I do so know what you mean -


O for a vigorous fit of gout, cholic, toothache,—an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life—the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold,—a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and everything? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities, but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o'nights, but do not find any visible amendment! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?


Be brave, dear Charles - someday this will all be a thing of the dim and distant past. Someday ...



Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Sigmund Freud, historical novelist? By Vanora Bennett

0
0
An important part of every historical novelist’s work is looking for the first glimmer of the next story. Finding that apparently unexciting fragment from the past that suddenly makes your storytelling lightbulb switch on – the eureka moment - is one of the most rewarding moments of the job. I always have half an eye open for it, whether I’m reading Chaucer or a Cornflakes packet. But, all the same, I was surprised this week to find a humdinger of a historical fiction story idea while following a particularly dry and academic-looking footnote from somewhere else to the 4,000-page Complete Works of Sigmund Freud.

Freud arouses strong feelings. His acolytes revere him for revealing the workings of the human mind. Others loathe him. (The Russian-born author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, was a case in point, always denouncing the dirty-mindedness of the “Viennese witch-doctor”– though, given the child-abuse plot of Lolita, those two men were perhaps never going to see eye to eye). I’ve read a fair bit of Freud, but I haven’t had either strong reaction till now, just a slight wish to yawn at the clunkier translations. It’s always felt very clear to me how hard Freud is striving to be scientific. (This doesn’t put him at the top of my bed-time reading pile). His work is all real, argument piled on theory on case study. He doesn’t make stuff up.


Which is why I was so surprised this week to come across his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, another bearded genius - the Renaissance Florentine painter and investigator of nature, anatomy, birds, flight, war machines and much more – 

because what a brilliantly creative work of the imagination it is. Sherlock Holmes would be proud to have investigated Leonardo the way Freud did, joining up dots no one else would even have seen to produce a quite extraordinary story and producing it with an “elementary my dear Watson” flourish.

It starts in an ordinary enough way. After speculating that Leonardo’s genius came from sublimating his sexual impulses into art and science, Freud tells us the few facts known about Leonardo’s life – that he was illegitimate, raised by his mother as a baby, then taken into his notary father’s home at the age of five, and from there went to train as an artist in his teens. He was gay, probably, and took on beautiful young male apprentices, though whether he actually had sex with men is not known. What became of his birth mother is unclear too.

So far, so ho-hum. Then comes the master’s touch. Enter the vulture.

“There is, so far as I know, only one place in his scientific note books where Leonardo inserts a piece of information about his childhood,” Freud goes on. “In a passage about the flight of vultures he suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from very early years which had sprung to his mind: ‘It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.’”

Freud being Freud, it isn’t that surprising, maybe, that he interprets this memory as being about fellatio. From that he deduces that little Leonardo loved his mother passionately as a toddler, spent all his time with her before losing her at five years old, and could never bear to replace her with another woman, so found his adult near-sexual friendships instead with beautiful young boys to avoid sullying her memory. He looked after the boy apprentices of his later life as he wished his mother had been able to look after him.

But then the fun begins. Freud also tells us that the Ancient Egyptian mother goddess, Mut, was represented in pictures as a vulture. All vultures were believed to be female, impregnated by the wind in mid-flight. Leonardo might have known this, because the Fathers of the Church liked this old pagan story that seemed to confirm that virgin births (such as that of Jesus from Mary) were possible.  “We can now reconstruct the origin of Leonardo’s vulture phantasy. … He also had been such a vulture-child - he had had a mother, but no father.”


Leonardo flagged as a painter in mid-life – he wanted truth to nature too much to ever be satisfied with his creations - and instead spent years designing machines for the Duke of Milan and berating himself for artistic laziness.

But then, as a 50-year-old man, Leonardo’s notebooks show he took in an elderly woman called Caterina, and on her death paid for her burial. Freud’s imagination goes wild here. He takes from a now forgotten Russian novel the idea that Caterina may have been Leonardo’s long-lost mother, with whom he was possibly reunited at the end of her life - and who reawakened his genius for paint.

Soon afterwards, in Freud’s retelling, Leonardo came across a smile that he finally allowed to remind him of the blissful early years he had spent alone with his mother. It was the smile we see in the Mona Lisa, his portrait masterpiece, and then over and over again in the surge of painterly creativity that followed. For the rest of his life Leonardo created figure after figure with that same enigmatic, tender yet terrible smile, finally bringing it to life not only on the face of the Mona Lisa but also on those of St Anne and the Virgin Mary, playing with the infant Jesus, and Leda, and even on the male faces of Bacchus and of a rejuvenated, beautiful, St John, a swaying figure of almost feminine beauty. By being reunited with his mother in his middle years, Freud hazarded, Leonardo must finally have solved the problem of his early sexuality and managed to unite the images of a smiling mother and the beautiful boys into one artistic whole. For Freud, this represented Leonardo living happily ever after.

Fascinating though this was, I didn’t completely buy the theory until I read the footnote Freud added in 1919.

“A remarkable discovery has been made in the Louvre picture [Jesus with his enigmatically smiling mother and grandmother, St Anne] by Oskar Pfister, which is of undeniable interest, even if one may not feel inclined to accept it without reserve. In Mary’s curiously arranged and rather confusing drapery he has discovered the outline of a vulture and he interprets it as an unconscious picture-puzzle: ‘In the picture that represents the artist’s mother the vulture, the symbol of motherhood, is perfectly clearly visible. In the length of blue cloth, which is visible around the hip of the woman in front and which extends in the direction of her lap and her right knee, one can see the vulture’s extremely characteristic head, its neck and the sharp curve where its body begins. ‘

Enthusiastically, Freud added a line drawing of the picture to his article, with the “vulture cloth” drawn in darker than the rest, to support his killer proof, quoting Pfister:

“‘The important question however is: How far does the picture-puzzle extend? If we follow the length of cloth, which stands out so sharply from its surroundings, starting at the middle of the wing and continuing from there, we notice that one part of it runs down to the woman’s foot, while the other part extends in an upward direction and rests on her shoulder and on the child. The former of these parts might more or less represent the vulture’s wing and tail, as it is in nature; the latter might be a pointed belly and - especially when we notice the radiating lines which resemble the outlines of feathers - a bird’s outspread tail, whose right-hand end, exactly as in Leonardo’s fateful childhood dream, leads to the mouth of the child, i.e. of Leonardo himself.’”


It’s stunningly weird - more Da Vinci Code than Da Vinci, in my view – but it’s an absolutely stunning stimulus to the imagination, too. For some reason, that fanciful line drawing has got me wondering, all week, what Leonardo’s mother was like, and whether she can really have had the Mona Lisa smile, and whether she could possibly have come home to die at his studio, and how that would have changed him, and how their early relationship might have made him the artist he was …. And even wondering, just a bit, how you could possibly bring all the crazy-sounding Egyptian-vulture-goddess information dumps into a fiction without it looking too incredibly lame …


So Freud’s flight of fancy has convinced me. Perhaps it is a pity he did stick almost entirely to writing about the scientific reality he thought was in our heads, and smoking cigars. He would have been a great historical novelist.




'She went like the snow': Grace Darling and the price of fame - Katherine Langrish

0
0



Why a post about Grace Darling? Along with Florence Nightingale, and Flora Macdonald who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from mainland Scotland to the Isle of Skye (cue the Skye Boat Song) she must have been one of the best known and most anthologised heroines of my youth. It almost got boring. I’d be arguing with my brother about whether boys were better than girls, and he’d say, ‘Tell me some famous women, then! Go on –!’ and all I’d have would be Queen Elizabeth I, Flora Macdonald, Florence Nightingale and Grace Darling. Oh, and Elizabeth Fry. There must, I felt, be more – which is why The History Girls put out an anthology last year of stories about notable women from British history which does not include any of the figures I just named. ( It’s called Daughters of Time and is available here.)

So why Grace Darling? Here’s her story in brief. Born 24th November 1815 at the little town of Bamburgh on England’s north-east coast, Grace spent her youth in two lighthouses on the Farne Islands (five miles from land) where her father William was the keeper. In the early hours of the 7th September 1838, with a strong gale blowing, the 22 year-old Grace looked out of an upstairs window of the Longstone Lighthouse and saw the wreck of a paddlesteamer, the Forfarshire, which had struck the rocks of Big Harcar at about 4am and broken in two. Grace could see survivors clinging to the rocks. Deciding there was no way the mainland lifeboat could reach the wreck, she and her father set out in their open boat – a 21 foot, four-man coble – to row to the rescue over a mile of open, storm-swept sea. Once close to Big Harcar, William Darling leaped ashore to assist the survivors, leaving his daughter on her own to hold the heavy boat - built for four oarsman, remember - steady in the water, close but not too close to the rocks.  Between them she and her father took off four men and a woman (a Mrs Dawson whose two children had tragically died during the night), and rowed them the mile back to the lighthouse, after which Grace’s father made a second trip with three of the rescued men and recovered another four survivors. Here's how it looked to the romantic imagination of Thomas Musgrave Joy (1812-1866), who also painted the portrait of Grace which heads this post.



When news of the rescue got out, Grace became the nation’s heroine overnight. More than a heroine: a celebrity. Artists besieged her island home, desperate to paint her. Gifts, letters and even marriage proposals poured in - to say nothing of money. Queen Victoria herself gave £50: over £700 in donations was raised. Grace's life changed forever but her fame brought no real good to this shy, naive lighthouse-keeper’s daughter – nor was it welcome. She found it hard to deal with unscrupulous people who wanted to cash in on her name - such as a circus owner who advertised in the Edinburgh papers that the proceeds of one of his shows would be ‘devoted to the benefit of Miss Grace Darling’ and who, sending her £20 cash as if ‘from the people of Edinburgh’, invited her to attend his circus in person to thank the city. It was a piece of shameless marketing, and fortunately Grace was warned by other friends to have nothing to do with it. Even the Duke of Northumberland, from his home at Bamburgh Castle, became involved in Grace’s story, appointing himself her ‘guardian’ and assigning trustees to help her handle the money flowing in. Though Grace was probably thankful for a buffer between her and the outside world, the Duke’s agent, Robert Smeddle, ‘fanned the flames of adulation’ , for example instructing her to sign hundreds of cards which he may well have sold for profit...

Just four years after her heroic deed Grace went down with tuberculosis - an illness quite possibly contracted from one of the many admiring visitors whom she had been obliged to meet.  Her concerned friends moved her from place to place trying to find ‘better air’, and finally to the splendours of Alnwick Castle where even the attentions of the Duke of Northumberland’s private physician could not save her. “She found the relentless attention suffocating and thought everyone was finding fault with her." From the time she arrived at Alnwick, according to her sister Thomasin, ‘she went like the snow’ - a phrase vividly suggestive of the evanescent streaks of whiteness vanishing from the folds of the Northumberland hillsides in spring - and died in her father’s arms on the evening of Thursday 20th October,1842.

I took a boat trip out to the Farne Islands a couple of months ago and spent half-an-hour out on the Longstone: the boats land tourists there largely because of Grace's enduring fame. The thirty or so passengers dispersed across the rocks, and I wandered about, thinking of Grace.  This remote, sternly beautiful spot was her home. From the shore, you can barely see the mainland - most of those dark streaks are long, low islets.



There's no vegetation at all upon Longstone Island.  Only seaweed. If Grace or her father wanted fresh food they would have had to row to Brownstone Island, a mile or so away, where they kept a little vegetable garden tucked away low out of the wind, close to the stumpy little tower which had functioned briefly but unsuccessfully as the first lighthouse. You can just see it, peeping, in this picture.


At home on Longstone Island, the ground is nothing but grey rock fractured into green-fringed channels where the tide runs...




... or expanses of flat, purple-grey pebbles.




All these islands are part of a more-or-less horizontal layer of igneous rock called the Whin Sill, which stretches an arm out to sea from deep under the North Pennines.  The lighthouse sits on its ridge close above the water; there's a concrete landing stage and a tiny bay.


But how clear the water is - and full of grey seals, whose dark curious heads bobbed up all around the boat as we landed. 


The air is about as pure as air can be.  It's hard to imagine a wilder, more isolated home - or one further away from any likelihood of infection. In the picture below, that second window in the white band is the one from which she looked out and saw the Forfarshire broken on the rocks.


Wandering on the far shore of Longstone Island, I became aware of an eerie sound in the air.  Keening, moaning, huff-huff-huffing - hooting like children who make long quavering ghost noises - a group of seals were crying to one another, more than twenty of them, lying on a rocky ridge at the edge of the tide. Whooooo! 

I thought how often Grace must have heard them sing. I wondered about her. I wondered who she really was. Courageous, clearly. Strong, used to the independence necessary for life on these islands, used to rowing and handling boats. Her father's trusted partner.  Her portrait, while doubtless idealised, shows the sensible, quiet face of someone entirely capable within her own sphere. It wasn't her fault she was to be catapulted out of it. Her name can't have helped. Grace Darling!  It seems a name made for a heroine - a Victorian newspaperman's dream. If Grace had been a boy, or if one of her brothers had, with identical bravery, rowed out to the Forfarshire with William Darling instead of she, would there have been all this outcry?  Never: the men would have merited perhaps a reward of a couple of guineas and a paragraph in the local papers - an outcome Grace would probably have greatly preferred. Instead she was forced into the public eye and idolised and feted, the puppet of fortune, the unwilling recipient of gifts and admiration which had to be acknowledged lest a capricious public turn on her and proclaim her ungrateful. A lighthouse keeper's daughter and a heroine: a kind of freak: an uneasy something both more than and less than a lady. It was an impossible role.

Then as now, publicity has a tendency to kill the thing it loves. And too often it loves only for a little while. Build 'em up and kick 'em down: unless they die young, after which it's little consolation to be loved forever.  If she'd never become famous, the healthy young woman strong enough to row a four-man boat for two freezing, salt-soaked miles through raging stormy water might well have lived for fifty more years. Instead she lasted a meagre four, and went like the snow.





Several portraits and many more fascinating details about Grace Darling can be found at the Grace Darling website:  http://www.gracedarling.co.uk/Paintings.html





Remembering, Remembering three quarters of a century of 5 November in Australia – Gillian Polack

0
0



I love the way special days change over time. I just asked my mother what 5 November was like when she was a child. “Nothing,” she said. “My mother said it was Christian.”


In Melbourne, Australia in the late 1930s and early 1940s there was something that happened around Guy Fawkes’ Day, but my mother and her family didn’t do whatever it was, had no idea what the historical event was, and only knew it didn’t relate to them. 

Our front garden (firework-free zone) and one of the cats we protected against the fireworks. Picture: Gillian Polack


I delved a bit further and we got to the bottom of it. When she was a child, anyone who was too far different to the English norm kept their differences at home. Differences were allowed and even encouraged (at times) just as long as they didn’t make it outside the private domain. She was acutely embarrassed when her grandfather made her eat a hot lunch, for everyone else had sandwiches, and she simply wasn’t part of any Guy Fawkes’ activities.

My father, ten years older, had fireworks (crackers mainly, I believe) and played pranks with them when he could. He was also Jewish, but far more Anglo. He got to share and he knew it was a history festival with a religious component rather than a religious festival that should be avoided. He was the one who taught me how to light fireworks, and his sister taught me the history behind the fireworks. It was my cousin David, on his side of the family, who was the member in our generation who got up to mischief with fireworks. 

My two parents were both Jewish (one still is!) but came from different backgrounds and that difference showed. When I was a child we ate the food of Dad’s family (standard Aussie fare) every day, but the food of Mum’s family for Jewish festivals. The best of both worlds.

If we had fireworks in Canberra on Guy Fawkes', this is where they'd be. Picture: Gillian Polack
For 5 November, we followed Dad’s culture, not Mum’s. We had fireworks. but no bonfire. Bonfires needed special permission, this being Australia and it being too close to bushfire season. One year one of my sisters and I found recipes for fireworks (I inherited the book with them and occasionally open the page longingly), and tried to persuade or parents that it was educational to make our own. “No,” was the firm ruling on that one. We had rockets and sparklers and a few of the glorious China-produced fountains. About ten minutes’ worth in all, for only sparklers and crackers were cheap. We didn’t get crackers for crackers were not good for the pets, and because crackers were the sort of thing that boys put in letterboxes. These days crackers are everywhere, especially around Chinese New Year, but in the sixties they were the cheeky cheap “good girls don’t play with these” firework. To make up for this, my sisters and I took the strips of papers from the little cap guns that were around and rubbed them with our shoes on the concrete and got nice explodey sounds that way. We were determined to make loud noises when we were little!

When I moved to Canberra, I brought some of that tradition with me. It’s not possible, though, these days, to have backyard fireworks. Fireworks need licenses here and now and can only be used at quite specific times of year. No more of the stories of blown-up postboxes or damaged children.
Guy Fawkes’ Night  is tonight and Canberra will do precisely nothing. Canberra always did less than Melbourne, though, for Canberra is a city with many Catholics (enough to have a large Catholic school system, where non-Catholics are not permitted to opt out of religious practice) and 5 November, as classically celebrated, is unkind to Catholics.

This change isn’t just in Canberra, though. It’s my great nieces and nephews who are old enough to be excited about fireworks and the Fifth of November rhyme. They’re not. They don’t even know it. If someone said “A penny for the guy,” they’d look blank. This week has been a combination of Halloween (borrowed from the US) and the Melbourne Cup. It’s easier to buy edible eyeballs than it is to buy sparklers today. The eyeballs are half-price, too, and have added squick factor.

This is absolutely nothing to do with the culture of my mother’s childhood, where she didn’t share a public engagement unless it was totally non-religious. The loss of Guy Fawkes’ Night isn’t even due to it supporting anti-Catholic sentiment, which is a bit of a surprise when you get down to it, because that would be a reason for halting a festival in a multicultural multi-religious society. No, it’s gone because the time of year really is shocking for Australia: we’re heading into bushfire season and don’t need extra sparks. Because fireworks are dangerous and most people aren’t taught how to use them safely any more. And it’s too close to the Melbourne Cup. It’s always been too close to the Melbourne Cup, but this was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Halloween, firework-forbidding, and Melbourne Cup: these are the things that lost us 5 November as a festive time.

I find it a touch ironic that the country everyone looks to for those glorious New Year fireworks over Sydney Harbour has lost its major festival of fireworks. Except that seventy years ago not all Australians celebrated it anyhow. My mother didn’t. 

pciture courtesy Wikipedia
Melbourne today


My part of Australia always had a watered-down version of 5 November. Only twice in my life have I seen bonfires. And we’ve never had guys. Now we’re not even pleased to remember it, except as a joke. Three people have made that joke to me this week. It’s about honest men and the Houses of Parliament. All of those three people live in Canberra, where so many politicians work. We’re terribly cynical about everything to do with politics here. And so the last joke lingers, when the fireworks have been forgotten.

Short cuts, serendipity and short-sightedness by Lydia Syson

0
0
In the summer I took a short cut through the British Museum.  I had just recorded a short Vox on ‘Why I Write’ for the Royal Literary Fund Showcase and was on my way to the British Library, where I had a stack of books waiting for me.  But I couldn’t resist the lure of The Waddesdon Bequest, and I was right in the middle of reading Ali Smith’s expectation-defying and utterly brilliant How to be Both.  This a book that urges you to look at both art and narrative more intently, not least because you read it knowing that half your fellow readers will have experienced it in the opposite order.  (In case you're wondering, my library copy started with the Renaissance story.)




My curiosity was rewarded.  The new gallery, which opened in June, has the enticing feel of a Schatzkammer or treasure room, designed to display a rich collection of intricately precious objects in a way that allows that every tiny detail to be appreciated and admired. This is a Renaissance collection created by two barons: Anselm von Rothschild of Vienna and Frankfurt and his son Ferdinand, who became a British citizen in 1860, and built Waddesdon Manor, after which the bequest is named.


I didn’t have time to make notes or take photographs, although some images are available online. What do I now remember?  A series of narratives which made me want to return.  They are nearly all writ small but loaded with promise.  The stories of objects alongside stories told by objects.  Some examples: a series of boxwood prayer-nuts – the most intricate and delicate carving I’d ever seen -  tiny virtuoso displays of virtue (and wealth of course) that could be held between finger and thumb; a black man wearing a jewelled collar or chain which made me think of Leo Africanus being captured by pirates and taken to the pope, or Othello after he has murdered Desdemona; portrait miniatures of exactly the kind Olivia gave to Viola in Twelfth Night with the words ‘Wear this jewel for me’; architectural jewellery like these two elaborate hippocamp pendants, made of gold, emerald and pearls. 

This one is probably from sixteenth-century Italy:

Gold pendant jewel of a hippocamp. A large irregular 'baroque' pearl is set into the front of the enamelled gold body of the hippocamp and is framed by a plain strip of gold, on to which are affixed two small table-cut rubies and, on either side, a star-s
WB.157,
AN1453989001
This one is now thought to be a nineteenth-century Spanish fake:

Gold enamelled jewel pendant of a hippocamp with a female rider. Although fully modelled in the round, the front of this jewel is undoubtedly designed to be seen when the hippocamp is facing to the left. The head of the hippocamp and its mane are burnishe
WB.156,
AN1453992001

So here's a display which also and rightly tells stories within stories – not just how collections are formed, but how the desires of extremely wealthy and influential collectors can create demands that backfire, so remarkable imitations sneak into their treasure houses, and display themselves alongside 'the real things'.

I had a brief fantasy of being in a position to take this shortcut through the museum every day for a year, and devoting five minutes to gazing at a single object each time.  But those library books were waiting for me.  I had stayed too long already.  And then, as I rushed through the Great Court and into the Living and Dying room, heading for the back door which leads to Russell Square, I realised it would be stupid not check if the Museum couldn’t help me with the book I’m writing at the moment. I can’t get myself to the nineteenth-century Pacific, or even twenty-first century Polynesia, sadly, but surely this would be a good place to try to fill in some of the many holes in my imagination and knowledge.  And what should I find in room 91?  An exhibition all about barkcloth: fabric made from mulberry bark known as tapa.  Exactly what I’d just been reading and wondering about. I could actually touch and feel it. One exhibit, from 1940s Tonga even had spitfires on it, commemorating the Tongalese contribution to World War Two.


Queen Salote spitfire, Museum of New Zealand


The next morning I woke up to the announcement that admission charges for council-run museums were back on the agenda, despite Ed Vaizey’s promisethe previous January. I’m ancient enough to remember the dramatic drop in visitor numbers suffered by museums that caved into political pressure to introduce charges.  (The British Museum always held out.  But the V & A suffered badly until the ‘[Roy]Strong is Weak’ campaign held sway.)  Of course there's a difference between national museums and local ones, but all are suffering potentially disastrous funding cuts, while austerity ideology holds remorseless sway.  Solutions need to be found, but I find it hard to believe that introducing admission charges is the way forward.  There are hundreds of arguments against this approach, most significantly the likelihood that this would further widen divisions in a society which already seems more divided right now than it's been for half a century.  Gifts to the nation such as the Waddesdon Bequest were made for the benefit of the whole nation, not just that part of it willing and able to pay for the privilege.  



Lydia Syson

 is an RLF Writing Fellow at the Courtauld Institute for the History of Art, a position previously held by Miranda Miller, now also a History Girl.




RIDDLEY WALKER by Russell Hoban .... by Adèle Geras

0
0


Followers of this blog will know how fond I am of cathedrals. I've written about them often enough, but this post is about something else. It was sparked, however, by a visit to Canterbury Cathedral. This was my first visit. Below is a photo showing towers against the kind of sky that goes with towers very well: full of slightly forbidding clouds. No one who's been here, or who saw the television programme about life in the Cathedral, can be in any doubt about its beauty and majesty and importance as the diocesan church of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The memorial to Thomas à Becket is here, too.




But what the Cathedral brought to my mind more than anything was a book I read when it first came out in 1980.  Thinking about it since my visit, it occurred to me that the afterlife of books was  a strange thing. When I look back on  my reading youth, there are many writers whose work I used to love and who have almost disappeared from the literary landscape, swept away by a rising tide of the new, the whizzy, the fashionable, the prizewinning and so on. I'm thinking of writers like Charles Morgan, Pamela Hansford Johnson, C.P. Snow, Mazo de la Roche, Elizabeth Goudge , and others. Publishers like Persephone Books have rescued and given a new life to writers we might easily have forgotten, like Dorothy Whipple, who 's a particular favourite of mine, and Elizabeth Jenkins and Molly Panter-Downes and we must all be very grateful to them, because many writers  are unread  when their time in the limelight is past.

Russell Hoban is not one of these. He's remembered in certain quarters. His children's books, many illustrated by Quentin Blake, are loved by many. He wrote a book called THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD which I think is a classic, though I'm not sure how many people these days know it or read it. And his adult books seem not to be at the top of anyone's agenda any longer. If you said his name at a dinner party, how many of the guests would have heard of him? I am not at all sure.

Because all of us who write on this blog are novelists, I think it's salutary to remind ourselves that our books will soon 'be one with Nineveh and Tyre'. It's a sobering thought, and I don't want to depress either myself or my fellow History Girls, but I do feel that  most of what most of us write will be forgotten.

Still, there is the upside. Some of what we've written may float to the surface, so to speak, in the distant future. Some History Girls in the 23rd century may come across our books and bring them back to a kind of life. It's in this spirit that I am doing my bit to preserve this wonderful novel. I would like it to be remembered.







Bloomsbury are to be congratulated on keeping in print one of Hoban's most interesting books: RIDDLEY WALKER. This edition, from 2012, has a good introduction by Will Self and glancing through the many enthusiastic reviews on Amazon, I can see that it's mainly the science fiction fans and fantasy buffs who love it. I read it, as I say, long ago and in 1986, I saw a production of it at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre with David Threlfall as Riddley which was completely brilliant. It seemed then  to be the kind of book which could never be adapted, but I suspect that nowadays, people are more likely to have seen RIDDLEY WALKER as a play. 








Back to Canterbury Cathedral. It was when I saw this painting of St Eustace (whose legend is a very strange tale indeed) that I was reminded of Hoban's amazing novel.




 This is  a detail of the painting above. I thought at once of RIDDLEY WALKER because the novel is deeply connected with the story of St Eustace.



 Here is a page from the book, taken at random. When I saw this weird hybrid language, my heart sank. I'd  known Hoban as the author of such novels as TURTLE DIARY and  KLEINZEIT. The latter was odd but marvellous and though it was surreal,  I managed to read it with no difficulty and loved it. It was written in English, which was a great plus as far as I was concerned. 

I must admit straight away that I am not a fantasy or science fiction fan. I do not like books about what happens after nuclear apocalypses. In general, I don't like books I have to decipher.  I opened RIDDLEY WALKER and almost closed it straight away. But I persisted because I was a Hoban fan and I felt that there must be something there. Plus, of course, it was being reviewed and fêted all over the place, back in the day and when I was young, I liked being up to speed with what was new.  I'm much less of a follower of fashion now that I'm older. So I deciphered the first page. Then I deciphered the second and on and on I went, drawn into Riddley's strange language, and his even stranger world. After a few pages, I was reading Riddley's tale with ease.

How to describe this book? How to persuade new readers to try it? It's a bit like THE ROAD, by Cormac McCarthy in that it's post -Apocalyptic. It's set in a world which is very different from ours but in which certain things from our world (Punch and Judy shows, most importantly) have acquired a significance we never gave them. It's set in what is recognisably Kent (there's even a map in the front of the novel) and the Cathedral and St Eustace and his legend are  of great importance. It's a book that's very hard to describe and it's not one that everyone will like, but it's full of humour and some of the sayings like "TRUBBA NOT" (don't worry) have become part of my personal vocabulary. I also like PRIME MINCER for Prime Minister. It's a book which a certain kind of teenager would adore, and did adore when it first appeared. I've written this post in order to draw some attention to it so that hopefully a whole new audience can share Riddley's adventures. And if anyone else out there is a fan, I'd be very happy to read your opinion of this dazzling novel in the comments.

Curing Charms and Killing Kings by Karen Maitland

0
0

I love old dialect words and one of my favourites from the West Country is bless-vore meaning a spell or charm intended to do good. I was suddenly reminded of bless-vores when I heard the news that, in future, Acts of Parliament will only be printed on paper and not on vellum.

Up to 1850, any Bill being presented before parliament was written on a parchment roll. This roll was then sent through various stages in the Commons and the House of Lords, but however much the Bill changed, it was never re-written on a new roll. They simply scratched out words to be removed from the parchment and wrote the amendments over the top. The longest Act of Parliament still preserved in the form of a scroll is an 1821 Act concerning, as you might guess, taxes. It’s almost a quarter of a mile long. Imagine re-rolling that! But in 1849/1850, parchment rolls were replaced by parchment codices or booklets, and from then on, two copies of each Act were printed on vellum, one for the House of Lords and the other to be stored in the Public Record Office.
Halesowen Abbey Scroll of the Magna Carta
on 3 sections of joined parchment.
Photographer: Jacklee


What has that to do with bless-vores, you might ask? The link is that long after paper had become commonplace and cheaper than parchment, written charms or bless-vores were thought to be most effective if they were written on scraps of vellum or parchment rather than paper. In fact for the best results, charms had to written on virgin parchment, that is parchment made from the hide of an animal that had not yet mated, or even more gruesomely on unborn parchment which was made from a calf or kid cut from the womb or aborted. According to Robert Turner, writing in mid-1600's, a London shop called the Lamb and Inkbottle, not only sold inks and parchments, but also potions that would produce animal abortions for customers wishing to produce their own unborn parchment.

Written charms were usually worn round the neck in little bags, sewn into clothes or rolled up and pushed into holes in the walls of barns and cottages to protect the inhabitants from sickness and witchcraft. Buyers were warned that if these charms touched the ground, the power would drain out of them. On the other hand, charms intended to protect livestock or lift a curse from land would often be buried in boxes or bottles in the corners of fields, at a point where the rising sun first touched the field.

12th or 13th century instructions for making a charm (shown on the right)
to be hung round the neck of a woman who wanted to conceive.
The words of the written charms themselves often included biblical phrases, so when you come across one, it’s sometimes hard to tell if this is a scrap of a prayer intended for devotional use or a charm written by a cunning-woman or man, especially as many were written in Latin or cod-Latin with some Hebrew thrown in. A typical example from the 19th century reads -

"Omnes spiritus laudent Dominum.
Misericordiam habe Deus
Desinetur Inimicus. Fiat. Fiat. Fiat."

It is likely that many of these would have been copied or miscopied from prayer books or church inscriptions by the charm-writer who had only a vague idea what the words meant. Often these were sealed with wax or sewn into a bag, so that they could not be read aloud for fear of them losing their power or calling down something worse.

Other charms were intended to read out, like the one sold to a Devon couple who feared their horse had been cursed. The charm-writer told them to read the charm aloud three times. It calls upon the names of three angels and the Holy Trinity and includes the line -
‘I do this to torture and torment that man or woman who has injured us.’

During the Middle Ages, the wearing of charms was not condemned by the Church. Thomas Aquinas said there was nothing unlawful about attaching holy words to the neck. In Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches, 1486) there were seven rules to tell if a charm was holy or evil, amongst them was that the words of a holy charm should not suggest a pact with the devil and should only use phrases that were Biblical in origin. Unfortunately , just a century later, ‘witches’ could be punished or even sentenced to death for possessing any kind of charm, holy or not, especially during the centuries of Protestant rule. But this certainly did not stamp out the practise.

As the Members of Parliament found, one of the advantages of using parchment is that the words can be scratched off and this property was used in some charms intended to cure illness. The charm would be written in full on parchment then every day or every week one line or word of the charm would be scraped off while the owner said ‘As these words are destroyed, so may the sickness be destroyed.’ Such charms were frequently used if a long-distance cure was required.

Another property of parchment is the ability to pour water on it without it disintegrating, so the patient might be advised to pour wine or spirits across the words written on the parchment to dissolve them then drink the dissolved words to produce a cure.

In medieval times this could also be used as test of innocence or guilt. Words from a psalm would be written on parchment then the ink was dissolved in wine and holy water. The suspect would be forced to drink the mixture. If he was guilty the words would choke him and he would cough, vomit, or in some cases even die. It must have been only too easy to condemn an innocent man using this method, by adding an irritant or even poison to the ink or wine.

But times are changing and no longer keeping the Acts of Parliament on vellum, may hopefully save the lives of some animals and money for the taxpayer, but as MP Tory Gerald Howarth remarked,
‘The death warrant of Charles I was recorded on vellum.’
"Whereas Charles Stuart King of England is and standeth convicted attainted and condemned of High Treason and other high crimes, And sentence upon Saturday last was pronounced against him by this by this Court to be put to death by the severing of his head from his body of which sentence execution yet remaineth to be done, these are therefore to will and require you to see the said sentence executed in the open street before Whitehall upon the morrow being the Thirtieth day of this instant month of January between the hours of Ten in the morning and Five in the afternoon of the same day with full effect and for so doing this shall be your sufficient warrant." 

And somehow, all these centuries later, I don’t think I would feel so quite so moved when I look at this momentous document, if the king’s death warrant had been issued on an A4 sheet of copy paper.


The Joy of Roman Britain by Caroline Lawrence

0
0
In 2014, my publishers suggested that I write a series of books for children set in Roman Britain. My first series, The Roman Mysteries, came out over ten years ago and although the books are still used by schools studying the Romans, there is now a whole new generation of children. So the idea of a new Roman series in a different setting was very appealing, especially as Roman Britain is now on the curriculum. 

But how could chilly Britannia compare with sun-soaked Italy? And how would I find historical events as exciting as the eruption of Vesuvius, the opening of the Colosseum and the mysterious death of the Emperor Titus? 

To inspire myself, I sat down and made a list of fun and exciting things about Roman Britain:

1. Julius Caesar’s brief invasion
He came, he saw, he nearly got conquered. Twice in quick succession. As much by the weather as by the half-naked, tattooed warriors. Both times, Caesar managed to get back to Gaul (France) safely. Apart from a flash visit by Caligula in AD 40, Roman soldiers were not to set foot on the soil of Britannia for nearly another century.
Mural of Claudius and elephants at the Museum of London
2. Claudius’ conquest, with elephants!
The doddery emperor Claudius needed to gain the respect of the senators and citizens of Rome. So he decided to do what even the great Julius Caesar hadn't managed: conquer Britannia, the mysterious land at the edge of the world. He did it by sending his best troops. It was the great achievement of his life, and he named his son Britannicus in honour of it. 

3. Boudicca, warrior queen of the Iceni
Whether her hair was red or not, Boudicca has fired the imagination of women and men since she led her troops to destroy three Roman towns in Britain and slaughter as many as 70,000 people. Much has been written about her but this warrior queen will run and run, not least because she has become a historical poster girl for Ginger Power.
4. Mystical, mysterious Druids
As the spoof band members in the cult movie This is Spinal Tap say: "Nobody knows who they were or what they were doing..." Because we know so little about the Druids, you can do almost anything with them. The more I ponder them, the more I suspect they must have a lot in common with nature-loving Native Americans. Especially spooky is the idea of the burning wicker man. 

5. Legionaries, forts and battles
There's lots of fun to be had detailing the life of a legionary, the structure of the Roman army and some exciting battles. And there are thousands of well-informed re-enactors eager to tell us what it feels like to take off chain mail after a long march or how to spark a fire.
6. Famous for hunting dogs and prowling wolves!
Kids love animals and Roman Britain was famous for them, not least for the fact that one of Britannia's major exports were hunting dogs. 

7. Blue tattooed warriors with twisty gold torcs
The current Celts exhibition at the British Museum shows us the type of bling the Britons loved. Gold torcs, silver and enamel brooches, chariots of leather, iron, hide and wood. On all of them animals and faces are hidden in mystic swirls and spirals, once again attesting the Britons' passion for living creatures.
8. Bath Spa
With its creative use of coloured lights and holograms around the ancient ruins and artefacts of the thermal springs, The Roman Baths Museum is probably my favourite in the world. Sometimes you will even find actors dressed as ancient Romans eager to tell you about their lives in Aquae Sulis. The steamy green water would have been clear in Roman times but the place is still wonderfully atmospheric. 

9. Fishbourne Roman Palace
Discovered in the 1960's, Fishbourne is an opulent Italian villa built on the south coast near Chichester. Built in the early days of the Roman occupation of Britain, its garden might possibly be the first on this island, as the natives did not have the Roman concept of imposing order upon nature. Often the site of re-enactment displays and Roman craft workshops, Fishbourne Roman Palace is another great site for schoolchildren to visit.
11. Londinium’s amphitheatre
Underneath London's guildhall are the remains of an amphitheatre for beast fights, gladiatorial combats and other Roman hijinks. Sometimes you can even attend gladiatorial combats performed by enthusiastic re-enactors. These include appearances by various emperors in horse-drawn chariots, period instruments and plenty of fake but realistic blood. Great fun for the whole family. 

12. Roman Wall Blues
A decade or so before the extraordinary Vindolanda tablets came to light, the poet and classicist W.H. Auden wrote a poem from the point of view of a Roman auxiliary soldier serving on Hadrian's wall. It's so good that I am going to insert it below. You can even hear the great man reciting his own poem here


"I shall do nothing but look at the sky"
ROMAN WALL BLUES by W.H. Auden

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.
The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.
Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.
Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.
When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

Although I decided to set the books in AD 94-96 – after Caesar, Claudius and Boudicca and before Hadrian's wall – I can still use elements of the the three earlier stories and also have my characters visit Vindolanda. 

Perhaps the best aspect of writing books set in Roman Britain is that almost every region in England and Wales claims a Roman presence. There are some superb museums with Roman collections, ranging from the British Museum and Museum of London to medium sized collections like that at the Corinium Museum and the Ashmolean to small gems like the Roman Museum in Canterbury. I can't wait to discover more museums and sites, and more of this island's heritage, as I immerse myself in the world of Roman Britain. 

Caroline Lawrence's first Roman Quest book, Escape from Rome, is out in May 2016. 

Art versus Lit-Life – Michelle Lovric

0
0


A few years ago I wrote a children’s book called Talina in the Tower. The eponymous heroine is an impudent book-worm who lives in a tower on the edge of Venice. The villains are some creatures I invented: the Ravageurs. The breed is cross between a wolf and hyena, with all the worst qualities of both. The Ravageurs gourmands, bullies, thieves and cowards, with pretensions to Frenchness. In ancient times, Venice belonged to them. I took my inspiration from the fact that the Santa Croce sestiere of Venice used to be called ‘Luprio’ because wolves once roamed across the sand banks of the lagoon to browse for prey.
My story eventually recounts how, centuries past, a wily Venetian bought La Serenissima from a greedy Ravageur ancestor. The islands and its architecture were traded for a luxe picnic. When Talina in the Tower commences, the Ravageurs are back, and they want revenge, land and obscene quantities of over-dressed food. And to stop them, I offer up only Talina, a couple of children, a professor, an historian and a few cats …

I had great fun devising the Ravageur names and their dialect using a French dictionary of slang. Here are their names:

(Literal translations in brackets):

Frimousse - vicious face

Rouquin - reddish fur

Fildefer - thin
Croquemort - an undertaker's man
Échalas - (a lath) lanky

Lèche-bottes - a boot-licker

The Lady Ravageurs are cruelly given unpleasant mocking names, such as:

Ripopette - worthless

Caboche - (a hobnail) a blockhead

Bourrique - (a she-ass) a stupid girl

Bassinoire - (a warming pan) a boring female
Bique - (a goat) a silly girl

However, in the end, the females will prove that they are in fact clever, funny and brave.

Grignan is the largest, fiercest and hungriest of the Ravageurs. He's hungry for flesh, for Golosi's Mostarda and most of all, for power. The terrifying thing is that he appears to be entitled to it. Although he claims the title of Lord of the Ravageurs, and is feared by even these fearsome creatures, the story will show that he is not always the leader they believe him to be. Petit Grignon was the name of a devil said to consort with a Frenchwoman called Suzanne Gaudry, who was tried for witchcraft in 1652. A wife of a man called Nochin Quinchou was named in the same trial, so I borrowed that one as well.

I lived with those Ravageurs in my head for a couple of years. They are still there to consult, if I want to.

And I was driven back into Ravageur Venice with a shock and a gulp recently.

One of the main joys of the Biennale in Venice is the fact that one is allowed access to certain wonderful palazzi and cloisters that are not normally open to the public. Often, the art is almost beside the point, because the architecture is so dazzling.

But this year I stumbled into an exhibit that put the architecture in the shade, while still profiting from the space.

 
In the cloisters of the old monastery of San Salvador, I found that a hundred of my Ravageurs clustered around a pale replica of Michaelangelo’s Pietà.

The beasts’ body language denoted the ferocity of fear, yet they were also full of blood-lust. They were cowed by the Madonna while irresistibly true to their savage natures.

The creatures were created by the Chinese artist Liu Ruo Wang, working in conjunction with the Republic of San Marino. One of the smallest and one of the largest republics of the world came together to promote contemporary art with dozens of installations and hundreds of events. The "Friendship Project - China" was curated by Vincenzo Sanfo.

Although the installation is ‘site-specific’, her oeuvre did not refer to any specifically Venetian context. ('Tis almost ever thus, at the Biennale).

The website appears to have a bad case of ‘Google Translate’ or ‘Babelfish’, explaining:

This is meant to represent the one hand a complaint against those attacks and destroys the art, the other a conviction against religious persecution a complaint extremely important especially because made by a Chinese artist who makes her cry of pain of His Holiness Pope Francis the guilty silence of the world.

I prefer not to tinker with this translation as I think we can extract the general idea, and (I often find that these translation sites throw up joys. I recently used the site to translate a poem of mine, ‘Vamping the Rat Man,’ into Italian and back to English again. An entirely different poem emerged, full of new ideas.)

And anyway, for me the main joy was to discover that someone had made one hundred of my Ravageurs and smeared them with blood.


Michelle Lovric’s website













A Dark Night in Ballykissane, by Laurie Graham

0
0


Ireland’s centenary year of commemoration of the Easter Rising is already underway. It began, officially, with a re-enactment of the event widely regarded as the rallying moment for republicanism: the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915.  This past August, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, the Irish President and the Taoiseach led a ceremony of wreath-laying and recitation of Padraig Pearse’s famous graveside oration. The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace… 
Padraig Pearse's graveside oration

‘Iconic’ has to be one of the most overused words of the 21st century but when it comes to Irish nationalism Rossa and Pearse are certainly considered worthy of it. 

I have no political axe to grind. British rule in Ireland was unquestionably harsh and terrible acts were committed on both sides in the fight for Ireland’s independence, but as a blow-in, resident only five years in Ireland, I can’t help but take a long, cool view of the heroes and bogeymen and legends of the Easter Rising. Perhaps I can say what an Irishman wouldn’t: that the rebellion of 1916 defeated itself with a catalogue of snafus and misunderstandings.

The first thing to explain is how O’Donovan Rossa came to be buried in Dublin at all given that he was supposed to be exiled from Ireland after serving a prison sentence for treason. Rossa’s ‘exile’ was winked at. Though he settled in New York in the 1880s and drummed up funds there for a Fenian dynamiting campaign in Britain, he returned to Ireland several times and on one visit received the Freedom of the City of Cork.  When he died, in a Staten Island hospital in 1915, the Irish republicans recognised a publicity opportunity.  ‘Send the body home’ they said. ‘We’ll give him a hero’s funeral.’  Indeed it was practically a state funeral and is seen by many as the Easter Rising’s moment of conception.

One of the schemers behind Rossa’s crowd-pulling obsequies was John Devoy, a man perhaps better known for collaborating with Germany during World War I  -  on the basis that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’  -   and running German guns into Ireland. Or trying to.  Devoy’s name is linked to the Fenian calamities of Good Friday, 1916.
John Devoy

A party of men set off from Dublin by train. Their destination was Kerry and their mission, ordered by Devoy, was to make contact with a Fenian cell in Killarney, drive to a wireless station on Valentia Island and steal radio equipment with which to send a fake signal to the British navy warning of a German attack off the Scottish coast and so lure any British vessels away from Tralee Bay where guns and explosives, essential for the planned Easter Rising, were to be brought ashore from a German ship.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  What the Dubliners didn’t know was that Roger Casement had been arrested in Tralee that morning. The local police, knowing of Casement’s connections with Germany, suspected something big was afoot and were out in force, setting up road blocks and questioning drivers. The plan to break into the wireless station was aborted and in the confusion of changed plans the two cars carrying John Devoy’s Dublin men got separated. Without wirelesses they had no means of communicating and in the dark April night the driver of the second car took a wrong turn and drove off Ballykissane  pier into the River Laune. All bar one of the car’s occupants were drowned.   
Ballykissane Pier Memorial to the Drowned

And as if that senseless loss of lives were not enough the landing of the arms and ammunition failed anyway. The men charged with bringing it ashore went to the wrong rendezvous point, the German vessel waiting offshore was apprehended by the British navy, escorted to Cork and scuttled, and the Republican cause lost 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns, and a million rounds of ammunition.

It was but the first of a series of bungled missions, confusions and poor planning that contributed to the swift defeat of the 1916 Rising.

We Need to Talk About Slavery by Tanya Landman

0
0
One of the many reasons I read and write historical fiction is because of the way the past shapes the present. Nowhere is that more evident than with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and modern day America.


Slavery has cast a very long shadow and its enduring impact is the subject of Joy de Gruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.  The book is an eloquent, searing indictment of America’s “most serious illness." She says, "Racism has run like a poison through the blood of American society since Europeans first landed on these shores… American’s denial of their blatant racism and the attending atrocities committed throughout the nation’s history has become pathological.  Such denial has allowed this illness to fester for almost 400 years. It is what keeps this country sick with this issue of race.”


The title sums up what the book is about: slavery, the lasting damage it has inflicted on the African American psyche, and how that can be healed. The book really ought to be required reading both sides of the Atlantic.  And yet I’m guessing it won’t be. Why? Because people in power are reluctant to talk about slavery. David Cameron recently advised Jamaica to "move on" from its painful legacy.

But it’s not just white politicians who sometimes shy away from the subject. I first came across lawyer Bryan Stevenson when he was on Desert Island Discs and subsequently read his book Just Mercy Described by Desmond Tutu as “America’s young Nelson Mandela” Bryan Stevenson has devoted his life to  exposing racial bias in the US penal system.  Earlier this year he secured the release of Anthony Ray Hinton, an innocent man who had spent 30 years on death row in Alabama.  In a Guardian interview Stevenson said,  “What if someone came into the room and introduced themselves by saying they were a Holocaust survivor? Just those two words would make me stand up and give that person an honored place at this table. I would be responsive to them and I would let them talk as much as they wanted about the injury and trauma and hardship they had known. And rightly so. When it comes to the history of slavery and the terror that followed it right up to the 1960s, we have never done that. We do the opposite. You know, even me. I grew up in a segregated community, I couldn’t go to the public school, beaches, certain parts of town.  My grandmother was the daughter of slaves; she grew up in terror of lynchings, joined the great migration to the urban centres of the north to escape. But I never talked about that for the first 30 or more years of my life.”

It’s problematic comparing one atrocity with another and yet Stevenson’s Holocaust/slavery comparison is a pertinent one.  Quite rightly we remember the Holocaust, but there are no days of mourning, no statues, no memorials, nothing to commemorate the millions of Africans that suffered and died as a result of slavery.    We don’t even have a universally agreed word to describe this colossal human tragedy.  'Black Holocaust' is a term that has emerged recently, and  Joy de Gruy also refers to the ‘Maafi’ – a Swahili word meaning disaster, calamity, catastrophe.  But the fact that there’s no definitive word seems to me to be symptomatic of a lack of recognition and respect for the survivors of slavery and their descendants. 


In one of Stevenson’s talks he invited his audience to imagine a situation in which present day Germany had a penal system that wrongly arrested, imprisoned and executed a huge number of Jews.  The thought is abhorrent.  And yet this is what is happening in America.  Black people make up 12% of the general population, yet a vastly disproportionate 50% of prisoners are African American.  Those figures reveal a huge racial bias in the justice system. Stevenson didn’t add, but might easily have done so - imagine a situation in which unarmed Jewish youths were regularly shot by the German police. Unthinkable. But in America unarmed black men are seven times more likely to die as a result of police gunfire than whites. Imagine a situation in which civic buildings in German towns still proudly flew the Nazi flag. Inconceivable. And yet in some American states, 150 years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederate flag still flies. 

In Just Mercy  Stevenson says,  “Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.”


That conversation is long overdue.  And yet how can it even begin?  Joy de Gruy points out, “The fact that the delegation from the United States walked out of the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in August of 2001, a conference that declared American chattel slavery as a ‘crime against humanity’, only served to highlight America’s refusal to acknowledge this period in her own past.”


Collective acknowledgement of historic guilt on the part of white society in both Britain and America is, I believe, essential.  It’s also essential to recognise that white people still benefit from a social system that upholds the privilege of one part of the human race at the expense of another.   


To address this, we really need to talk about slavery. And yes, those conversations will be awkward and uncomfortable and upsetting.   

But if we don’t, “there is going to be more police misconduct, there is going to be more incarceration, there are going to be more wrongful convictions.”   (Bryan Stevenson)


We need to start by speaking and hearing the truth.

Only then can we start on the journey towards reconciliation.



(Note: I have largely talked about the US in this article because both the books referred to were written by Americans.  However, I’m well aware that many of the same problems apply to Britain.)


ON EQUALITY AND THE FEMALE PROTAGONIST – Elizabeth Fremantle

0
0


Middle-aged Novelist Joins Political Party: it’s not much of a headline but as an inveterate political fence-sitter and someone who has never felt a particular affinity with the Westminster suits, whatever the hue, it feels like a big deal to me. The party I've joined is the newly minted Women’s Equality Party and the reason: I agree with them.

Perhaps it’s the same trait that’s made it difficult for me to adhere to a particular cause that also makes me able to construct characters in my fiction: the desire scrutinise things from multiple perspectives. But when it comes to women and equality I struggle to find, let alone empathise with, a counter argument. Who could deny that whatever the gender, a person doing a job should be paid the same as another person doing the same job, irrespective of the shape of their dangly bits?

The women I write about all lived in a world in which inequality went unquestioned. It wasn't until a little more than a century ago that the suffragette movement was, alongside its Votes for Women campaign, battling to open a political discourse about gender equality, as Sarah Gavron’s recent film Suffragette powerfully demonstrates. But the film also exposes the fact that we still have a long way to go and it is this that the WEP intends to address.

What the film does is create a fictional character at its heart, a working class woman, who becomes the lens through which to tell the story of a movement that has become in many minds associated with the privileged classes. Think of Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins, be-sashed and blithely warbling Sister Suffragette in suburban Cherry Tree Lane. This retelling allows us to understand the brutality of women’s lives and the struggle to be heard. One critic lamented the fact that an invented character was placed at the heart of true events, claiming it weakened the message. I disagree; it is exactly the story of that forgotten woman, speaking for all women of her class, that invests the film with its substantial force.

Women’s stories matter; particularly those that have been swept under the carpet of history. It is a cause close to my heart, as my work as a writer is spent excavating such stories. But there seems to be an unconscious societal urge to ignore them or deem them less important than those of men. We have long been aware of a dearth of good roles for women in Hollywood and this spills over into publishing too. Over the last few years Vida statistics have highlighted the imbalance of female authors being reviewed in the serious press. This opened much needed discussion about women writers being given equality in the world of book prizes and led to a call by novelist Karmila Shamsie for a year of publishing only women.

This is a worthy endeavour but there is something more subtle at play, which was exposed by Nicola Griffith’s recent data study in which she looked not at the gender of authors winning prizes but the gender of the protagonists in prize winning novels. The results were staggering in that overwhelmingly, the central characters in the winning books were male – even when authors were female: Mantel’s Cromwell novels are a good example of this.

What filled me with dismay was that even in the light of this, the shortlist of the latest MAN Booker Prize seemed like celebration of men. Of the six, all but one novel (Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread) chosen by judges of both genders, were stories about men or groups of men. It seems from this that we (both men and women) find narratives about men more serious, more worthy of accolades, than those about women.

There is perhaps a tendency to dismiss female focussed literature as romance, rather than idea, driven. Before I’m accused of having a case of sour grapes, I feel that I should state that I want, as much as the next person, the very best books to win awards. But the 2015 booker shortlist poses the question, was there really only a single remarkable book with a female protagonist published in the whole English speaking world this year?

Looking back to the nineteenth century, there is an embarrassment of novels about women and often written by men: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and so on. But the unifying factor of all those works was that they carried a strong moral message for their readers: women who step out of line (particularly sexually) will get what’s coming to them. Thankfully the novel doesn’t exist so obviously as a moral corrective for society any more but just because it is no longer appropriate to force feed moral messages through the prism of literature, doesn’t mean that women’s stories should vanish altogether from serious fiction.

For millennia we have built our societies on stories, with far reaching effects. Think of the enduring messages from Greek tragedy and epic that continue to resonate in contemporary psychological theory. Fiction holds up a mirror to society but it is also asks questions about what it is to be human and sets patterns by which we find ourselves living. In privileging male stories, albeit unconsciously, we are building a society that automatically puts men on top. But by undermining women in this subtle way we are denying ourselves the potential for a rich and diverse culture.

I believe that change occurs only when attitudes shift and it is just such an attitude shift that the WEP aim to instigate in with their policies. By aiming for, amongst other policies, gender balance in parliament, equal opportunities for girls in education, equal treatment of women in the media and an end to violence against women, then perhaps we can begin to explore new narratives with women at their heart on which to build a richer society.

elizabethfremantle.com @lizfremantle










Women’s Equality Party: https://womensequality.org.uk

Nicola Griffith’s Data study: http://nicolagriffith.com/2015/05/26/books-about-women-tend-not-to-win-awards/

Ganseys Catherine Johnson

0
0
Hello! I was going to write a piece about the Morant Bay rebellion, a turning point in the history of Jamaica which happened one hundred and fifty years ago in the parish of St Thomas in the East of the island.

But I left everything too late as usual and for the last week I have had the return of the knitting frenzy come upon me. The feeling that means even if I have three writing projects on the go I have to start something NOW. And I've already talked about my first love, Fair Isle, so this month you're getting Ganseys.

A Gansey? Yes The original working fisherman's sweater, knitted on four lethal double ended stainless steel pins made without any seam at all. It's a marvellous thing, in the past each fishing town would have a different pattern, ranging from the serious and intricate Whitby, a mix of cables and texture, to the workaday Staithes, a symphony of simple moss  stitch.

this is a Staithes Jumper - though not one I knitted - courtesy University of St Andrews

The wonder of these jumpers is manifold, the brilliantly tough 5 ply wool, the double thickness on the sleeve welts,  the way the sleeves are knitted down from the shoulder so they can be re knitted should any kind of fishing accident occur, honestly if you can avoid moths these jumpers will last forever.


I've only ever made two and both of these have been Staithes. My bible for any Gansey is this wonderful little book by Gladys Thompson, first published in 1969. It's not only a selection of patterns, but there's something about the old traditional crafts that do open doors to the past. The ordinary pasts of working men and women, hard scrabble lives at that . Women who spent every scrap of time their hands were free, whether walking to and from work knitting, sitting by the fire rocking the cradle with their foot knitting. Knitting for husbands or sons or brothers who would spend weeks or months away in danger and in freezing temperatures and who might not come home.




If you are any sort of knitter, even an aspirational one I can't recommend this book enough. It has a variety of patterns and some lovely photographs including this chap with a Staithes under his cork life jacket.




Traditionally they were always knitted in dark blue, but the fishermen of the East Coast of Scotland had theirs knitted up in black.

Of course you can get 5 ply in any colour under the sun, but I think nothing beats the navy blue. And there is something extremely satisfying about seeing a jumper growing out from your four needles, like some adult version of a knitting Nancy.


I thought I would start another one, maybe a Whitby this time, but I saw a design by one of my current favourite designers, Marie Wallin, so I've started that instead.

Catherine

My latest book is The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, published by Corgi books

Literary-historical dogs I have known, by Y S Lee

0
0
As the child of Southeast Asian immigrants, I grew up feeling somewhat appalled by the idea of sharing a house with a dog. Yes, our family had dogs when we lived in Singapore, but the dogs' place was in the garden, where they had plenty of shade and water and space to run around. They didn’t come inside the house, much less curl up on sofas or beds. As far as my parents were concerned, dogs were outdoor pets.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because several months ago my children, aged 7 and 4, mounted a vigorous and sustained campaign for a dog. And I’m about to concede defeat. I’ve accepted that our dog that will live in our house and shed on our furniture and need lots of training and exercise and brushing and bathing and veterinary visits and dear god, possibly also tooth-brushing and ear-cleaning and nail-clipping? (Maybe I’ll tackle the history of pet care in a different post.) My point is simply that all this domestic dog chat has me thinking about dogs in literary history.

The first literary–historical dogs I remember noticing was the litter of puppies in Wuthering Heights. They’re never named or numbered, of course; they’re mere props for the vivid illustration of Hareton Earnshaw’s character. As Hareton hangs the puppies (one by one? In a batch? It’s never clearly described) "from a chair-back in the doorway", we readers realize the extent to which Hareton’s own moral growth and intellectual development were strangled from birth.

Branwell Brontë's circa 1834 sibling portrait, with his own image painted out.
What’s most striking to me (as a contemporary reader) about this scene is that Hareton’s sadism towards animals does not expel him from the moral world of the novel. Emily Brontë herself disciplined her beloved dog, Keeper, with physical violence. In 1848, it was a fact of life that puppies (and kittens) were often too numerous and must sometimes be killed at birth. (This practice is relatively recent: my father-in-law had a childhood memory of his father dropping a sack of newborn puppies into a canal in 1950s Manchester.) And Hareton, with the help of Cathy Linton, eventually redeems himself. Together, the young lovers hold the promise of a happy ending for Wuthering Heights– with or without animal companions.

The next fictional dog to make a deep impression on me was Shock, Belinda's indulged pet in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, “The Rape of the Lock”. For me, the poem is a full-on olfactory assault. Let me break it down for you:

1. There’s a crush of people at Belinda’s house. Their combined body heat will heighten the ripeness of early eighteenth-century bodies.

2. This bodily funk will, in turn, be overlaid by the liberal use of perfumes.

3. The room will be lit by beeswax candles, which add their own sweet, thick scent to the air. (In a poorer household, the candles would be made of tallow and thus smell strongly of animals.)

4. As part of the ceremonial serving of coffee, Belinda’s family roasts coffee beans in the drawing room before grinding and brewing the expensive imported drink. Coffee-roasting novices expect the process to smell delectable but the toasting of green coffee beans actually produces a strong burnt aroma as the husks burn off; the roasted coffee smell emerges only at the end of the process. As a result, the smells of body musk and perfume would intermingle with the strong, acrid smell of burning.

Aubrey Beardsley's 1897 illustration of "The Rape of the Lock". At left, the Baron is about to snip off Belinda's curl.

5. The pampered, yipping, little dog Shock (whose name strikes me as a joke about the English pronunciation of “Jacques”), who fails to protect her from assault. I’m not sure how often pet dogs were bathed in 1717. However, in her biography of Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin describes the general domestic atmosphere of the 1650s: "Every house, every family enjoyed its own smell, to which father, mother, children, apprentices, maids and pets all contributed, a rich brew of hair, bodies, sweat and other emissions, bedclothes, cooking, whatever food was lying about, whatever dirty linen had been piled up for the monthly wash, whatever chamber pots were waiting to be emptied into yard or street. Home meant the familiar reek which everyone breathed.""The Rape of the Lock" takes place only 60 years or so later.

My third literary dog was a Newfoundland breed named "Boatswain". Having once read it, who could forget Byron’s "Epitaph to a Dog"? It's engraved on this monument at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family estate.



Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferosity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.
This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery
if inscribed over human Ashes,
is but a just tribute to the Memory of
BOATSWAIN, a DOG,
who was born in Newfoundland May 1803
and died at Newstead Nov. 18th, 1808.
When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,
Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,
The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,
And storied urns record who rests below:
When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen
Not what he was, but what he should have been.
But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,
Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:
While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.
Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honors none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.
Byron’s anger and disgust with human hypocrisy here is all the more powerful because he practised it so well: “Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,/Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit” is a cri de coeur from a restless artist who spent much of his life at the centre of a bubble of scandal.



Byron originally posed for this portrait in 1813, about 5 years after railing against the "vain insect" that is Man. Image courtesy of a Creative Commons license from the National Portrait Gallery.

There’s so much more I could say about dogs in literary history - and in social history, for that matter. But for the time being, I’ll return to my own practical dog research and continue to battle my residual squeamishness about dog odour and dog hair. Wish me luck!

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

Remembrance

0
0
Mine is not the kind of family that has a lot of documentation about its history. I know virtually nothing from any further back than my grandparents' generation; on my mother's side, I don't even know if her parents had any siblings. One day, I tell myself, I'll look into it. My maiden name was Course, which according to dictionaries of surnames probably derives from 'de Courcey'. So who knows, maybe if I went back far enough, I'd find a Norman baron. (Though from my recent reading, they seem to have been a bunch of violent thugs with a penchant for cutting off hands, ears, and any other bits of protuberant anatomy that took their fancy - so I'm not sure I actually want to lay claim to any of their number!)


But what I do have is a very old, very precious Black Magic chocolate box containing letters and photos. Mostly, the letters are in envelopes like the one above. They were returned to their senders, because the addressee, my father, was a prisoner of war - and that's how they came to be preserved. They were from Dad's sisters (he had five) and his mother. Here a few extracts.

Mother: 25/5/40
Dear Bernard

Do just let me know how you are as soon as possible, I know I am impatient it is not any news, I am wanting only to know if you are well, and are quite all right... I know things are bad out there... It is a special day of prayer today for the whole of the nation. I hope things will make a drastic move after Sunday, so if you are too tired I am sending you some ready addressed envelopes if you can only just say I'm alright mam, that will suffice me.

Your loving Mother/too anxious

The letter is written in pencil, on a page torn out of an exercise book. I think what moves me is that you can sense how worried she is, yet how hard she's trying not to make a fuss, not to be 'too anxious'.

Edna: 11/6/40
My dear Bern,

I do hope this finds you well, although we think you must be very busy having not heard from you for a month. We're getting heaps of folks asking about you, fat folks (Mrs Wooliscroft and co); thin, young and old uns, and we'll be right glad when we can tell them you're O.K.

Connie: no date, but must have been written about the same time as Edna's letter. 
Dear Bernard

We still keep looking for a line from you - every post. It is one month since we heard from you but know that there must be some reason. Anyhow we think that you must be alright. A big part of the B.E.F. (British Expeditionary Force) have been arriving in this country - we wondered if you might be one - I shouldn't have been surprised to see you walking down the garden path any day. Anyway, I'm keeping your bed aired for you. Oh yes, I have your room you know. Carrie says she wonders why I should have half the house - 1 room for working* and 1 for sleeping - and they have got the big room with two beds in it - they sleep all in a row. Anyway if you come in the middle of the night I will willingly turn out for you - you see how my affections have improved!!!

We'll have a meal and a seat and a welcome when you return.

Lots of love from Mother & all,

Connie

* Connie was a dressmaker, and probably the dominant one among the siblings, though Edna was the oldest. You can see it in their handwriting: Edna's is beautiful and delicate, whereas Connie's is firm and dark. Minnie Louisa's (Mam's) becomes difficult to read in places, as if she's stumbling over herself trying to get her thoughts onto paper.

Bernard Course, a few months before he was taken prisoner.

In fact, they had five years to wait before Bernard came walking back up the garden path, because he'd been taken prisoner on the way to Dunkirk. Connie was hanging the washing out when the boy brought a telegram saying he was missing in action. Connie, a strong character, decided instantly that she wasn't going to tell her mother until she had more definite news. It must have been several weeks before they were officially notified that Bern was a prisoner of war - but at least that meant he was alive.

Of course he was having a much harder time of it than they were at home. But I think that through their words, you get a sense of their carefully controlled fears. And somehow because it's so controlled, to me it's all the more moving.

NEIL OLIVER at the HARROGATE HISTORY FESTIVAL by Penny Dolan

0
0


Not long ago, I spent a most enjoyable and interesting time at the Harrogate History Festival, a long weekend that is run by the Historical Writers Association., hearing a host of speakers, both “history girls” and slightly more “history boys”.



Among the speakers was Neil Oliver, talking about his first novel, The Master of Shadows,set in the fifteenth century at the siege of Constantinople. What follows is my account of the question and answer session.

Why did you chose Constantinople as the setting for your book?
Oliver had always been fascinated by the city. The Emperor built the city because he was concerned about the power of Rome in the region, Constantinople was both a dream and a physical entity and it seemed throughout much of that time as permanent as a mountain range, lasting more than a thousand years.  A great white edifice, the Wall of Theodosius, defended the city and port across most of its area. Although the city had been besieged on twenty occasions, at the time it was unthinkable that Constantinople could fall.

However, the fall had been predicted by the Prophet, who had said of the downfall that “it will be so when God wants it to be so.” We are still dealing with the ripples dropped into that pond at the time: look where the seat of modern trouble is today, there where the tectonic plates meet. History teaches us that no empire lasts for ever. Does America know this? The wise King David, commented on his reign: “This too shall pass.”  Oliver had been reading about the subject of Constantinople ever since he was 15, so that when he came to writing his novel, it only took him about four months to complete.

What was a siege like?
It was as bad as you would expect. There were rules to a siege: if the city gave up, there would be three days of sacking. However, because Islam had been denied this apple for so long the entire population of Constantinople was killed or taken into slavery to lead anonymous, desperate lives. The conqueror, the Sultan Mehmet, was an educated man, interested in science and engineering and more, and he made sure that the city itself was preserved, especially the great church of Saint Sophia.

This particular siege redrew the map of the world as it was known. In the months leading up to the siege, the Emperor had pleaded with all the leaders of Christendom to come to Constantinople’s aid. His please fell on deaf ears. Not only was the conquest unthinkable, but the churchmen of Western Europe considered the Eastern Christians to be almost heathen. The Pope, no friend of the Emperor, refused the request and no help arrived. When the city fell, it shifted the centre of Christianity and redrew the map between Europe and Asia.

How scary was life like in Britain and Europe at this time?
This was when great areas of Britain were known as the Debatable Lands, and it was the time of the Border Reivers. The ordinary people got no comfort or help from the existence of kings, who were almost mythical beings. Security for most people lay in being protected by powerful local war-lords, and most life was nasty, brutish and short. When asked if, assuming a Time Machine was available, he would go back there, Neil Oliver said no.

He pointed out that, throughout history, the people of Scotland have travelled to other lands in search new destinies. His novel, The Master of Shadows, is about a young man, John Grant, whose unique abilities carry him from his home in Scotland to Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, just as the siege gathers force. John Grant is searching for Lena, a girl whose life was saved by Prince Constantine, although that story is far from simple.

Oliver’s thinking about his character, John Grant, was influenced by Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s book about what makes some peoples successful, particularly the Scots communities who travelled to America in Jacobite times. The Wild West, he suggested, was created by largely Celtic peoples: immigrants of Scottish descent who were used to the owning and stealing of livestock and cattle and were as tough as wild animals themselves. Even the name for these people - red-necks– is an apt description of how the Celtic complexion and colouring reacts as the sun. 

What made you so interested in history?
History was my best subject at school, said Oliver, because it was always taught through stories. He always had a sense of being connected to history because his family were people who had survived. Both his grandfathers had come through the First World War, one as the single survivor in his own community. As a child, he had sat on his grandfather’s lap and felt a metal edge behind his ear, under the skin. His father explained that the ridge was the edge of a part of a shell still lodged in his grandfather’s skull. He was amazed. How could this old man ever have been a soldier? There was also a scar, a clock-shaped mark on the old man’s arm, and ligament damage had curled the little finger and ring finger inwards. Oliver the child noted that his grandfather’s hand looked exactly the same shape as the hand on his Action-Man toy, and was duly impressed.

How do we encourage children to relate to history? For example, do we read history aloud enough?
Fiction plays a large part in encouraging children. He has three, and they learned about history through stories. His middle son has enjoyed books such as The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Prydain, and already wants to know about the Dark Ages.

Don’t forget, he said, that History includes two words: Historicus, meaning enquiry and Historia, or story. History provides the context through which we can understand ourselves as otherwise it is as if we are on a random page of an unknown novel.He had been inspired by his parent choice of books for him, tales of derring-do, with heroes like Shackleton and Scott, and the story of the Aeneid. He suggested that such courage is burnished by the passage of time and buffed by the modesty of the people who were involved. It is others who notice the courageous acts, and great fame comes posthumously. 

Briefly, Oliver wondered what such stories would be like now, in these days of constant Twitter and Instagram: Not again! Pemmican. Sad face, sad face - along with a photograph of that very last meal, perhaps?


Modern media is changing how we do history, so what advice is there for the future?
The biggest change is how much we’re recording because in the past, very little was recorded and now we can record everything. The biggest challenge for the future will be to winnow the wheat from the chaff and to find what is important among all the stuff. He recalled the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the treasured Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a gigantic room among many, many other apparently identical boxes. How will such a secret be found? How will we, in a thousand years, be known about? The role of the editor of all this information will be of utmost importance.

The internet is changing everything, both in a good and a bad way. In one way, it brings people together so we can find people who share our interests and opinions. Once we were defined by just or local and national boundaries but now we can select our identity from among people around the world. However, because of the way the internet works, feeding our preferences, we are in danger of creating an echo culture, where we only hear our own thoughts returned to us.

Neil Oliver spoke briefly about the joy of making television, and how it had allowed him access to places and people he couldn’t get to in any other way, which was perfect for someone who had been a journalist and was therefore nosy about people. 


He was glad that people were happy to see him or speak to him and had discovered that if you are on the television, you can ask people anything and they’ll tell you. He had stumbled into television as a last minute replacement on the Two Men in a Trench archaeology series, and really enjoys the opportunity to tell stories and pass on rare pieces of historical knowledge he hears to lots more people

Asked about the controversy over the Bannockburn site, Oliver said that he’d looked at the area twice as an archaeologist. The main problem is that 99% of the battlefield evidence would have been made of iron. Unfortunately, as the site is on the flood plain of the River Forth which floods in winter and dries up in summer, all the evidence and artefacts would be turned into dust. 

Remember, he said, the evidence of absence is not the absence of evidence. 

Besides, after a battle, the field would be full of scavengers. Within two or three days, most of the objects, artefacts and evidence would have been removed from the site anyway. He spoke about his work on Vikings, and his delight in the discovery of a burial that honoured a young disabled girl, surrounded by evidence of her high status in the community.



Had any history writers inspired him?
He admitted he did not read much historical fiction himself, but gave two examples. He knows and loves the books of Nigel Tranter, and also William McIlvaney’s Laidlaw series, He said that the Laidlaw books are testament to a time he knew but now recognises as the past. They are about a world that doesn’t exist now, not if fifty years ago has become the time before which history begins.

Neil Oliver’s talk was a pleasure (and he seemed even nicer in real life) so I hope you don’t mind me sneaking him into the History Girls blog  today. He does have swishy hair after all, doesn't he?



Thank you too, Harrogate History Festival!

Penny Dolan




Hunter's Moon - Celia Rees

0
0
On Saturday, 14th November, people gathered in front of Coventry's new cathedral. They were there to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Luftwaffe's raid on the city but the old cathedral, destroyed in that raid, was lit by the tricolour and they found themselves standing, not just in solemn remembrance, but in shocked solidarity with the people of another city where the bloodshed was fresh on the streets, the grief still raw.


14th November, 2015


My grandparents and aunt lived in Coventry. They were there on the night of November 14th, 1940. I grew up with stories of that night. It was clear, cold with a full moon, a Hunter's Moon. Perfect for bombing. The raid started early, just past seven in the evening. Some years ago, I ran a Creative Writing Class for Warwick University Open Studies and I set a task: to write about an incident from your childhood.  One man, he must have been in his seventies then, wrote about that night. He'd been out playing with his friends, he said. They made for home when they heard the siren but didn't hurry, it seemed too early for anything to happen, they carried on kicking a football down the street. Then they heard the bombers. Not just one or two but many, a continuous low roar. By the time he was at his gate, incendiaries were falling. He turned to look back and the city seemed to be a sea of fire. All he could think was: 'My dad's down there.' Later that night, as the bombs fell closer and closer,  he was moved to a safer shelter. He emerged to find one half of his street gone and with it some of the friends with whom he had been playing. Younger members of the class listened spell bound, transfixed by his vivid, eye witness account. Ironically, he had been reluctant to do the task when I set it. 'I don't have anything to write about,' he'd said.


Luftwaffe Aerial Photograph

The raid went on for 13 hours. Air defence round Coventry was poor, the bombers had perfect sight because of the moonlit night and they came, wave after wave, with nothing to stop them. A firestorm swept the city centre, firefighters stood by helpless as the water ran out, pipes were broken, their hoses cut or melted. Fire crews came from as far away as Solihull but there was nothing they could do. On the roof of the cathedral, clergy and fire watchers fought a valiant but losing battle. Fire had taken hold in the great wooden beams of the roof and they had to leave the cathedral to its fate. The fires across the city were so intense that the glow in the sky could be seen a hundred miles away. A friend of my brother's lived Sheldon, a suburb of Birmingham, he described watching from his bedroom window as the great red glare that was Coventry filled the sky, light enough to read by.
  
Coventry burning

When the all clear finally sounded, the medieval city centre was destroyed; the cathedral of St Michael's a smoking ruin.  My aunt was the Head of a school in the city centre. She walked in the next day, picking her way through the devastation with the buildings still smouldering and a fine drizzle beginning to lay the brick and plaster dust. She went to see if the school was still standing, clutching the registers, which would become a record of which of the children had survived.

People going to work the next day

Broadgate



St Michael's

Coventry was a small, medieval city, rather like York, but it was ringed by factories. The city had become a centre for the engineering industry and most of the factories had been turned over to war production. Dunlop manufactured wheel discs, brakes, gun mechanisms, even barrage balloons. Hawker Siddeley, Vickers Armstrong, Armstrong Whitworth and Rolls Royce produced planes, engines and associated parts - including the complete Whitley twin engined heavy Bomber. Humber and Daimler made armoured troop transporters and scout cars. Cash's and Courtaulds produced materials for parachutes, G.E.C. radio equipment, British Thompson-Houston electro-magnetic components, such as magnetos and dynamos. Alfred Herbert providing essential machine tools, as did Coventry Climax, Coventry Gauge and Tool, and countless other smaller firms around the city. As did Automotive Products in nearby Leamington Spa. The small town was hit by a stick of six bombs, seven people killed. For a long time this was thought to be a mistake, a German pilot overshooting the target area,  but recent research has found a Luftwaffe map with the A.P clearly marked on it.




Luftwaffe map showing Automotive Products factory, Leamington Spa

A legitimate target, perhaps, but Coventry was a small city with a historic and beautiful centre and it was destroyed in a systematic pattern of bombing designed to raze the whole place to the ground. No city of its size had been subject to this kind of bombing before.  It gave rise to a new verb: to coventrate. Not that many people died, 568 by the official count, with 863 seriously injured and 393 more lightly so. There were probably more deaths. The concentrated use of high explosives and incendiaries meant that sometimes there remained little to identify. Later in the war, the Allies would repay in kind, over and over again. The death toll would pale in comparison with the 42,000 killed in the bombing of Hamburg, 25,000 in the bombing of Dresden, let alone Hiroshima, but Coventry's destruction marked a significant point in this hideous escalation and it came to stand for something more.



Charred cross on the altar of the old cathedral

After the war, Coventry adopted the phoenix as a symbol of recovery and renewal. The city rose again. New buildings replaced the old. A new cathedral was built next to the the shell of the old one. The city itself came to represent sacrifice and hope, peace and reconciliation expressed in the powerful symbols of the charred cross, formed by stone mason Jock Forbes, and the Cross of Nails made from three nails taken from the roof truss of the old cathedral by Provost Richard Howard. The original cross of nails was transferred to the new cathedral, where it sits in the centre of the altar cross.

Coventry Cathedral Altar Cross

 Crosses made up of three of the medieval nails that held together the fabric of the old cathedral have been sent all over the world to churches and communities who have suffered destruction through war and conflict.  With them goes the message: Father Forgive.  

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Playing Blind Man's Buff - researching the world of the war-blinded by Christina Koning

0
0


Most writers of fiction, historical or otherwise, like to set themselves challenges - whether it’s delving into the near or distant past, researching aspects of a skill outside their usual frame of reference (loading a nineteenth century rifle; flying an early twentieth century aeroplane), or mastering the nuances of behaviour and speech of an unfamiliar world. I’ve done my share of all of these. But I can honestly say that nothing has presented me with so many difficulties and potential pitfalls as writing from the point of view of a blind man - which I’ve had to do for my last two books (Line of Sight, and Game of Chance), and the one I’m currently working on (Time of Flight). I hasten to add that it wasn’t mere perversity which made me choose a blinded veteran of the First World War as the hero of my series of 1920s detective stories. 

My character, Frederick Rowlands, was inspired by my grandfather, Charles Thompson, who was blinded at Ypres in 1917 at the age of twenty-seven, and later trained as a telephonist at St Dunstan’s, the institute for the war-blinded, which celebrates its centenary this year. I always knew I wanted to write about Charles, and this gave me my opportunity. It also meant I had to do quite a bit of research - not only into the history of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but also into the day-to-day realities of coping with blindness.

I was fortunate in having access to some very good books on the subject - many of which were lent to me by Bill Weisblatt, the father of a friend of mine, and a former Treasurer of St Dunstan’s. Over the forty-odd years he spent in the job, Bill had amassed a fine collection of memoirs by distinguished St Dunstaners, as well as more general books on the history of this remarkable organisation. Of these, the one to which I had the most frequent recourse (and of which I myself have a copy), is Ian Fraser’s wonderful account of his time at St Dunstan’s, which he joined in 1916 as a newly blinded young man of eighteen, before taking over as the organisation’s head at the age of twenty-four, following the untimely death of its founder, Sir Arthur Pearson. Here is Fraser (or Lord Fraser of Lonsdale, to give him his full title) on his first impressions of St Dunstan’s:

‘I could hear that the hall inside was large, and there seemed to be a lot of people moving very quickly and surely about… The whole hall was carpeted, but paths of linoleum ran through the carpets to help us to walk about… Blind men who were familiar with the place moved with some speed and great certainty. Some whistled or sang out to announce their approach, others just brushed past.’

Here he points up the importance of hearing to the blind:

‘I learnt to make use of all sorts of sounds that I had not bothered to hear before. The difference in echo when going from a room into a corridor, or into another room; the ticking of a clock (usually indicating the mantelpiece); the crackling a fire in winter, or the sounds of birds though an open window in summer - these are some of the sounds that only a blind man needs to hear to form a picture of his surroundings.’

Adding wryly that, contrary to popular supposition, ‘A blind man’s ears do not become sharper - there is no increase in the acuity of his reception of sound-waves. But if the sense of hearing is considered to include the interpretation of sounds, it is certainly improved by the loss of sight…’

Because Fraser was himself having to come to terms with blindness - having to re-learn, not only basic skills such as getting dressed, and shaving himself (‘I have tried various kinds of razor, including safety and electric, but I still use a cut-throat today’), but also having to acquire more specialised skills such as reading Braille - his account has a powerful immediacy. With its wry humour, complete absence of self-pity, and the sheer quality of its writing, this book (My Story of St Dunstan’s, 1961) and its predecessor (Whereas I was Blind, 1942) became an essential source for my story of a war veteran struggling to adjust to life in a sighted world.

Other books in Bill’s collection - which also includes some fine memoirs by veterans of the Second World War - are several about the history of St Dunstan’s. These describe the setting up of the organisation by Arthur Pearson, newspaper proprietor and publishing magnate, who was himself blind from glaucoma. In 1915, after visiting a blinded Belgian soldier in a London military hospital, Pearson resolved to establish a hostel for the rehabilitation of ex-servicemen who had lost their sight in battle. The first premises were a house in Bayswater Hill, which became the Hostel for Blinded Soldiers and Sailors; later, as numbers grew, the hostel moved to a larger property, in Regent’s Park, lent for the purpose by the American financier, Otto Kahn. In this elegant Regency mansion, surrounded by fifteen acres of grounds, men blinded and traumatised by shell fire were given the chance to recover, and to learn the skills which would enable them to face life in the outside world again.

Since most of them were young and fit, their rehabilitation included a lot of sport - rowing, cycling, walking, running (with a sighted guide), football (as played in the 2012 Paralympics - using a ball with a bell inside it), and tug-of-war. My grandfather was a keen rower, winning several medals and cups - which I still have - for this most energetic of sports. Here he is (centre of back row), with the St Dunstan’s team in 1918, proudly displaying their ‘haul’ of silver trophies. Unfortunately, neither of the smiling V.A.D.s in the photograph is my grandmother, Sheila, but the couple did meet at St Dunstan’s - my grandmother acting as ‘cox’, as Charles rowed her around the lake in Regent’s Park.


Here is Fraser again, on the joys of rowing:

‘It demanded physical effort, and there was an exhilaration in feeling the boat glide forward, responsive to the power behind the stroke. There were the distinctive and evocative sounds - the soft splash of the oar dipping into the water, the creaking of the rowlocks, the gentle flurry of feathering - and these, with the smell of the lake and the surrounding park, created a vivid mental picture of the scene…’

Yes, I’ve been lucky to have such a range of wonderful source material - and such inspiring role models as these for my ‘Blind Detective’.  



   




                 

  

     


    
Viewing all 2760 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images