The History Girls

Last week, my friend Barbara and I went on a bit of a pilgrimage to visit this ancient tree. A wild pear (Pyrus Pyraster), the ancestor of our domestic pear trees, it stands at the top of a hill, close to the village of Cubbington in Warwickshire, overlooking the Leam Valley. It is thought to be at least 250 years old, is the largest of its kind in Warwickshire and the second largest in the country. It was voted England’s Tree of the Year for 2015, it came 8th in the European Tree of the Year 2016, but its days are numbered.

To get to the pear tree, we walked through South Cubbington Wood. We were greeted by the sharp, clear rat-a-tat of a woodpecker as we stepped under the trees. It was not a spectacular May day, the sky was overcast and a fine rain was falling, a small rain, the kind that gets things growing. The woods were just coming into full leaf and the woodland floor was carpeted with bluebells and white wood anemones. Violets and primroses showed in the mossy hollows.

South Cubbington Wood is a quiet, pretty place. Generations of children have played here and people come regularly to walk and to exercise their dogs. It is close to the village of Cubbington and within easy walking distance of the nearby Leamington Spa but it is set in fields and seems distant from the town.

It has been here a very long time. An outlier of the once vast Forest of Arden, it would have been old when Shakespeare was alive. This patch of ancient woodland has probably been there since the end of the last Ice Age.

Christopher Saxton's 16th Century Map of Warwickshire

But it will soon be no more. This might be the last time for us to see the ancient woodland in its Spring new leaf and the old pear tree in full blossom before HS2 comes powering through this peaceful, timeless landscape. Hence the pilgrimage. In the construction of the railway much of the wood will be destroyed, including the half a dozen rare wild service trees (Sorbus torminalis) that grow there. The wild pear tree will be grubbed up. Hedgerows will be torn out, fields obliterated, public footpaths and ancient rights of way cut as the railway passes Cubbington in a cutting a hundred metres wide and up to nineteen metres deep and leaves the Leam valley scarred by an embankment nine metres high.

Cubbington's old pear - Frances Wilmot

It is not just South Cubbington Wood that is set to go. Sixty three Ancient Woodlands will be threatened as HS2 cuts though England's heartland.

Woodland Trust Website

The HS2 project has not been without controversy. Feelings have been running high both locally and across the country.

When Baroness Young made the case for our ancient woodlands during the House of Lords debate on HS2, she spoke for many:

'The Minister said that he was proud that HS2 had not demolished a single grade 1 listed building. Ancient woodlands are the grade 1 listed buildings of the environment. They are the richest terrestrial habitat for wildlife. It is not just about the trees, it is about birds, plants, butterflies, beetles and, most distinctively, those undisturbed soil communities of fungi, mycorrhizae and micro-organisms that have been maturing away for between 400 and 10,000 years, and it is about the lost fragments of the wild wood that once covered our entire country after the last ice age. To qualify as ancient woodlands, they need to have had continuous tree cover and largely undisturbed soils since at least 1600. They are therefore the equivalent of grade 1 listed buildings. They are the cathedrals of conservation, but they have been reduced to a fragment of their former extent. Only 2% of the land area of the UK is now covered by ancient woodland and it is heavily threatened by a range of threats.
Ancient woodland is not just important, it is irreplaceable.'

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

The Garden by Andrew Marvell

(With thanks to Barbara Crowther)

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Something interesting I'm often asked in interviews is how I balance fact and fiction in my novels. And it's a very important balancing act! I often tell the following anecdote: I used to belong to a writer's group in Berkshire, which ran a twice yearly short story competition, just within the group, and on a theme. One spring, the theme was the town where we were based, Newbury. The stories were judged and scored anonymously, and the one I rated the highest, and which went on to win, gave an overview of the history of Newbury itself via the rise and fall, the life and times of one Newbury family across the generations. It was well written and I was pleased to have learned something of the town's fascinating history. Except, I hadn't. When I approached the author of the story to congratulate him, he told me airily that he'd made it all up.

Newbury clock tower in the middle of the last century, from the Francis Frith Collection

I was outraged! I thought I'd learnt something. I thought he'd done research. I knew his characters were fictional, but I'd supposed their actions to be based in historical fact. At that time, I had just started to write my first novel with a historical setting, and the incident taught me a valuable lesson. I wanted readers to come away from one of my books entertained and moved, but also able to feel that they'd learned something. And if they'd learned something about a piece of history that was completely new to them, then so much the better. I think there has to be a bond of trust between historical fiction author and reader - trust that, however extraordinary the story, the author has done enough research to bring their story alive, and to portray society, place, manners and politics of that era as faithfully as possible.

Because if you can just 'make it all up', what's the point? You might as well write a fantasy novel (though this might be the trained historian in me speaking!). And it's often easy to spot when an author hasn't done enough research into their era, and can't furnish the story with real detail. But here's a big but: what if the demands of your story go beyond the established facts? In The English Girl, which is set during the Jebel War of 1958-59 in Oman, I needed a certain set of characters to meet. But, realistically, I knew from my research that they probably never would have. So, I tweaked history. I had officers of the SAS, newly deployed in the battle, find the time to have dinner at the British Residence in Muscat, so that my characters could get involved with each other. In The Night Falling, I wrote one of my fictional characters into a real life massacre of starving Italian farm workers by fascists landowners - though I was careful to give the names of those who really did die at the back of the book. In both cases, I stuck to the true course of events as closely as I could in all other respects.

Now framed and on my wall, the photo of a Puglian peasant wedding from 1920, found in a Devizes junk shop, that initially inspired The Night Falling.

I'm similarly nervous about using real-life characters in my novels. With a very few exceptions - the Sultan of Oman, for example - everybody with a speaking part in one of my novels is fictional. I don't even like the term 'based upon', because it still implies some filching of a famous person's actual life, career or personality - putting words into their mouths and deeds into their lives that they never in fact spoke or did, though there are a great many authors who are quite happy to do this, and make it work very well. I tend to go with the term 'inspired by'. To give a couple of examples, my character Maude Vickery, intrepid Victorian female explorer in The English Girl, was inspired by Gertrude Bell (as I talked about in an earlier blog). In A Half Forgotten Song, the character of Charles Aubrey was inspired by the charismatic, Welsh, post-impressionist artist, Augustus John.

Augustus John, photographed in 1914. Brooding charisma present and correct.

In both cases, I took themes from these characters' lives - what it was that made them extraordinary - and used that as the starting point for a character of my own - one who embodied what had fired my imagination about the original, but one in whom I could invest the personality, motivations, and titillations I needed for my story. I once heard Phillip Pulman say that writers are like magpies, and I think this is particularly true for historical writers. We can roam all of history, picking out the bright, exciting parts that catch our eye, and gathering them together. With Augustus John, for example, it was his beautiful drawings of women that caught my eye - I'd known them for years, having worked in a printing factory in my summer holidays from college, where we printed a book of his work. Like a magpie, I swooped in on the idea of a man of huge talent and irresistible magnetism, who loved women and saw no reason to limit himself to his wife, mistress or mistress's sister... But I had no wish to write a biography of the man. I wanted to take a man like him, and put him into extraordinary events of my own creation.

Augustus John's 1924 portrait of Alice Appleton Hay

But it's a tricky business. Obviously, no serious author of historical fiction would include glaring anachronisms, or deliberately set out to rewrite history to better suit their plot. But at some point, unless you are writing a serious, factual tome, this rewriting of history is bound to take place. So perhaps that is the bond of trust between reader and writer - that the author will only tweak in small ways - and in plausible ways - in a wider setting of historical accuracy; and that the reader will forgive them for it, and enjoy the story as much as the history!

If you had lived in the Middle Ages and wanted an animal companion, what would you have chosen? A good deal depended on your gender and occupation. For ladies of the gentry and nobility, one breed above all was the favourite, this one:

The Maltese is alleged to go back, as a breed, for a thousand years. Certainly the existence of small, white, long-haired dogs of the Maltese type, as the pampered pets of wealthy women, is attested in the iconography, not only paintings but even tapestries.

Clearly the ownership of such a dog was a status symbol, just as certain breeds today can become fashionable for a time, then be replaced by the latest fad, often these days by some new cross-breed (never to be called mongrels!).

These little white dogs were pampered pets, sleeping on embroidered cushions or the owner’s bed, and frequently shown wearing velvet collars adorned with bells.

Moralists raved against the keeping of such dogs, usually fed on expensive white bread and milk, food which should have been given to the poor. The dogs lived mostly indoors, only venturing outside on a lead or carried by a loving mistress, though they must surely have attended to the needs of nature, which might often have involved a long trek from the lady’s private chambers to the garden. Perhaps a servant took care of such problems. The dog would accompany its owner when travelling, either on horseback or by carriage:

When the dog died, it would be mourned as deeply as any modern pet, and many were given marble monuments. Poets and friends of the bereaved owner would write elegies or appropriate epitaphs for the tomb. For the owner it meant the loss of a beloved daily companion.

But was it only women who owned such dogs? For their male counterparts, who spent much of their life outdoors, there were also animal companions, but they tended to be different. Favourite dogs were hunting dogs, who might be trackers, retrievers, or killers. Their descendants are still with us today in the various retrieving breeds, including spaniels, tracking dogs like fox hounds, or the hunting breeds like wolf hounds and boar hounds. These male-owned dogs did not share their owners’ homes, but lived in kennels, and their collars were practical and serviceable, sometimes adorned with spikes to protect their throats in a fight.

Men of the nobility also owned favourite horses, who clearly could not be pets, but lived in stables, and various types of birds of prey, who were kept in mews, although they are sometimes pictured indoors, where a favourite hawk might be seen perched on a special stand.

Another group of men did keep indoor pet dogs: clergy and scholars (many of the latter also being in holy orders). Like the wealthy ladies, they tended to favour the small white dogs, quiet companions often shown curled up at the owner’s feet while he studies or writes. Sometimes there might also be another, bigger dog, more of a watch dog. Petrarch favoured large dogs and even wrote about them in surviving letters.

Dogs, of course, were not the only pets. Cats were not merely companions but served a useful purpose too, since they kept down mice and rats in the home, a laudable occupation as commemorated in the ninth century Irish poem Pangur Banby an anonymous scholar. The moralists who condemned pet dogs seem to have been more tolerant of cats, who were probably less spoiled and less expensive to keep. They also seem to have been much more difficult for contemporary artists to depict!

The typical native British cat was grey with black stripes, probably still the commonest form of moggy to this day. Our own rescue kitten is of this type. However, from the fourteenth century a type of Syrian cat began to be imported into Britain. They were a tawny brown with black stripes, a tabby colouring, and these exotic animals were much coveted, selling for high prices. Merchants would buy them and import them, often via Greece, Cyprus, and Italy, and if they survived the journey they would become the latest fashion accessory for the wealthy.

Another small mammal which often occurred as a lady’s pet – and unfamiliar today – was the squirrel. These are generally depicted with a collar and lead, presumably because they were apt to run away. They were, of course, red squirrels, the invasive American greys not yet having reached Europe. One can be seen in the arms of the woman at the front of the carriage below, while the woman at the back is being handed a small white dog. The ladies were off on their travels, taking their pets with them.

The only other type of animal which was regularly kept as an indoor pet was the monkey. Some ladies loved the creatures, despite their destructive habits, dressing them in little coats and treating them like substitute children. However, they were most popular amongst the higher clergy, who sometimes kept more than one and lavished rich food and affection on them, a practice which was roundly condemned as improper and immoral.

These abbots and bishops, like their secular counterparts, also kept horses, hunting dogs, and hawks. Chaucer has much to say (and mock) on the subject, as indeed he mocks the Prioress with her dogs.

Birds were the last of the main types of pet. These were often singing birds, our common garden songsters. Sparrows were popular, and had been ever since Catullus wrote two poems lamenting the death of his mistress Lesbia’s pet bird back in Roman times. These birds frequently had elaborate cages, some even of gold and studded with jewels. There was no limit to the ostentatious bling for such pets.

What can surprise us is the number of parrots which were kept. A parrot sounds like a very exotic pet for the Middle Ages, yet they seem to have been fairly common. These were Indian parrots, the green rose-ringed parakeet, and they appear in the margins of manuscripts, form the subject of large illustrations, and occur in portraits of their owners. Moreover, being more talkative than cats and dogs, they spawned a whole literature of their own. They had a tendency to narrate satirical poems and stories, all the way from Scotlandto Spain.

Pets in the wrong place could raise hackles. Nuns had a habit of taking their little dogs (and rabbits) into divine service with them. Repeated injunctions failed to eliminate the practice altogether, though keeping pets in nunneries was tolerated as long as they were not taken into church. So many animals were kept in monasteries that it aroused the wrath of the authorities, but once again it had little effect.

The other institutions which tried to clamp down on the keeping of pets were the universities. Again and again Oxford and Cambridgeissued regulations banning the keeping of pets by students. These boys came up to university at a very young age, some as young as twelve, and one can have some sympathy for a homesick boy wanting the companionship of a favourite dog. However, as many students came from the landed gentry, they also liked to bring their horses, hawks, and hunting dogs. The university bans grew ever more desperate, excluding dogs, birds, monkeys, deer, ferrets, badgers, foxes, wolves, and bears. Bears??

As far as I know, these regulations are still in existence and more successfully enforced, though when I was at Oxford there was a student who kept a pet python. He used to come to parties with it draped round his neck . . .

Most of the literature and the portraits depicting animals relate to the upper classes, but we should not assume that it was only the wealthy who kept household pets. Certainly the less wealthy could not afford collars and cages of gold, or costly embroidered cushions for their pets to sleep on, but many families would have owned a cat, one of those simple grey and black striped moggies, to keep the rats out of the vital food stores. Most accusations of witchcraft against poor old women involved claims that her pet cat was a satanic familiar. And a family dog does not have to be a pampered overfed Maltese, carried everywhere like a toy. There were ordinary household dogs, even in humble homes, like this one:

So, if you had lived in the Middle Ages, which kind of pet would you have chosen?

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Now, given that to see this post you must have access to the internet, I'm assuming you've all seen this. The latest optical illusion that is tearing through the ether.

I spent a long time thinking, there's a badly made brick wall and feeling sure there was something else I was supposed to be doing other that looking at it, then I cheated and read the hints. Stop reading now if you just want to keep staring.

There's a cigar shoved in between the bricks and sticking out at a ninety degree angle, and once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. It's obvious. Which is a bit like historical research...

Yup, I will try and justify that. When I first started thinking about the 18th century I imagined a world where women were almost completely lacking in agency. It did not occur to me that women were powerful economic players, owned and ran businesses or were active in politics. But then I had my cigar moment, and I started seeing evidence everywhere. Women speaking at meetings, women listed as print shop owners, women making and selling their cheese in markets, women painters, engravers, designers and writers. All of a sudden they were obvious. Waiting just below the surface of things to be recognised.

I would imagine that everyone who writes for the History Girls has had a similar moment of revelation and confirmation. For a while it seemed to me there were references to business women in every eighteenth century text I picked up. Every copy of the The Gentleman's Magazine, every text book on farming, folk beliefs or natural philosophy added new names to by list of women entrepreneurs and inventors until I began to believe they were legion. Which brings me on to the red car syndrome, more properly called the frequency illusion. Just to explain the red car syndrome. You know when someone in your family buys a new car, say a red one, and suddenly it seems that the same car is much more common on the roads than you had thought? Now you are driving a red car it seems everyone else on the roads is too. Of course this isn't true. There are exactly the same number as there were before - plus the one you just bought - it's just now a bit of your hindbrain is really looking for them and flagging every example which passes by. You're not aware of the fact you are looking for them and ignoring all the others, but that doesn't change the fact that you are.

Same with my legion of entrepreneurs. Yes, there were a lot of independent women out there, more than I had thought there would be, but now I was really looking for them. Each name felt like a victory and a confirmation, but I realised I was in danger of letting the big picture go blurry. I was ignoring the fact that for every woman I came across there were a hundred men. I had to contain my excitement and temper it, remembering all the disadvantages, legal and societal, that women were suffering under at the time.

It's worth remembering when you get excited about some new insight or line of enquiry, you may just spotting all the red cars and not keeping an eye on the flow of traffic.

But don't let that stop you getting excited in the first place. The wall / cigar thing is still really cool.

www.imogenrobertson.com

The research demands of my second novel have required me to spend much of my time recently in fourteenth century birthing chambers. I have been buried in tracts on the rituals and beliefs surrounding pregnancy and the many hazards of delivery. These have proved a fascinating revelation, if somewhat gasp-inducing given that I spent my own twentieth century pregnancies resolutely refusing to read a thing or accept the inevitability of how it was all going to end.

For many women of the upper classes, pregnancy rituals began outside the birthing chamber. Very public pilgrimages to pray for conception or a safe delivery were common, particularly to religious sites associated with the Virgin Mary such as Our Lady of Caversham and the shrine built in 1061 at Walsingham by Richeldis de Faverches which was reputed to house a vial of the Virgin's milk. Once her time drew close, however, childbirth became a secluded affair from which men, unless the circumstances were exceptional or the child was royal, were very much excluded.

Woodcut, Der Swangen Frauen, Rosslin, 1513

Medical treatises on childbirth were available in the fourteenth century although it is difficult to gauge their practical importance. The most common, The Sickness of Women, was a translation of a far earlier work by Trotula de Salerno. Trotula was a wealthy woman, born around 1090, who became a professor at Salerno's Schola Medica Salernitana. She held forward-thinking views on the value of pain-relief in childbirth, encouraging the use of opiates and herbs. It is a stretch to imagine many midwives knowing this work: most were apprenticed young, were illiterate and learned their skills on the job. The actual practice of midwifery was unlicensed, and therefore overlooked, until the 1500s when the Church got rather jumpy about these unregulated women with their mix of charms and religion and their ability to perform baptism, one of their sadder duties when the child was not expected to survive. However, the importance placed on tackling pain rather than accepting endurance as a woman's lot (the religious, male view) can be seen throughout their birthing practices.

15th century illustration, midwife at birth

So what was life like for the expectant upper-class mother confined to her birthing chamber? With the regard often shown for the sensory aspect of medical procedures in this period, her experience was conducted in a place kept dark, quiet, scented with purifying herbs and warm. Tapestries lining the walls depicted only soothing images. The birthing chamber was, in may ways, an external recreation of the womb, its aim to ensure the safest transition for the child and therefore, hopefully, life for both baby and mother. Symbolic barriers to the womb opening were removed, especially if the labour was proving complex: cupboard doors were opened, knots untied, hairpins removed. As with battlefield surgeries, chanting was an important part of the calming process. Prayers would be offered to Saint Margaret who managed to get herself spat out of a dragon's mouth. Other charms have been found which mix Latin with English but all require their words to be repeated three times: a hangover from pre-Christian days perhaps.

The whole process of labour was embedded in ritual. The mother, who would deliver sat on a birthing stool not in a bed, might wear a gemstone on a girdle such as amber, sard or jasper which had first been rubbed against her thighs to ease the pain. The German Benedictine abbess Hildegarde of Bingen (1098-1179) wrote down a form of words to be used during the application of the stone to help summon the child, a wonderful example of religion and 'magic' overlapping:

Just as you, stone, by the order of God, shone on the first angel, so you child, come forth a shining person, who dwells with God.

Lacnunga, MS Harley 585 f.185 r.v

Birth girdles were commonly used throughout the social levels. These could be sewn together from strips of parchment bearing charms and prayers and handed down through families or, for royalty, could have real iconic status such as the girdle of the Virgin held at St Peter's Westminster which was used by Henry III's wife Eleanor or the girdle of St Ailred kept at Rievaulx Abbey. In addition, the mother might have amulets or charms placed on her stomach to speed contractions, coriander put on her thighs to attract the baby and poultices of eagle's dung or rose water (possibly to counteract the eagle's dung) rubbed in to alleviate the pain. For a particularly difficult delivery, the midwife could take the thread she had used to measure the women's progress with, turn it into a candle wick and then burn it while offering prayers to their preferred saint.

Once the baby was safely delivered, the rituals continued. The cord had to be burned to get rid of the sins thought to be transmitted with conception. Herbs would be used to make the baby sneeze to expel any last remaining sin. Vinegar would be rubbed on the baby's tongue to ensure speech would follow. These were all purposeful, happy rituals: birth had been survived by both mother and child and, although dangers remained, the midwives' main task had been completed successfully.

It is impossible to determine whether or not any of the methods employed to relieve pain actually worked - I am definitely on the fence when it comes rubbing gemstones to ward off speeding-up contractions and can just imagine the reactions of most modern women if it was suggested. That, however, is not the point. With child and maternal death rates so high, a medieval midwife's main aim was to get labour completed as quickly as possible thus minimising the chance of complications. The best way to ensure this? A calm, trusting mother who believed herself to be in safe hands. Some things, at least, do not change.

When I set out to write a novel about a witch in the seventeenth century (choosing the time that a local witch, from Waltham St Lawrence, was prosecuted and hanged, it wasn't just important to do the historical research, as I've described in a previous blog (Who were the Witches). I had to do what every writer needs to do, to inhabit the world of my book.

Whitchurch St Leonard, my fictional village, lay in the chalk country of the Thames Valley, where pockets of clay alternate with chalk and gravel, and flints lie everywhere in the soil, as local vernacular building attests.

flints and clay

I have all three in my garden, so when I wrote the first chapter, where the witch's daughter and son-in-law bury her covertly in the churchyard, I had an idea of what they were contending with. They were digging into an existing grave, but all the same:

'Hard work,' says Margaret, Alice's daughter, 'even digging into ground that's been turned before. Flints stop the spade, and the clay's heavy.'

I know all about that, when the spade hits a flint, which could be small, or it could be eighteen inches wide, gnarled, knobbly, and weirdly beautiful, but you don't appreciate that when you're sweating and struggling, trying to find where it ends and get a purchase on it. The strain of that work has written itself into the aches and pains of my poor arms, shoulders, and back. Some things don't change, though I've never dug six foot down into a grave.


The Bell, Waltham St Lawrence, rubble-filled walls.

Opposite my house is a 16th century farmhouse, and while I was writing Malefice, the friend who used to live there took me upstairs and opened a door set into the wall, that led to a cupboard. Inside there I could feel the fill in between the timbers: chalky rubble, horsehair, twigs and rags; the texture of the past. In the days before such houses were lime-washed, their white surfaces must have been much rougher than nowadays, and scratchy, as I described when Margaret remembered pressing herself to a house wall, the day Royalists and Parliamentarians fought in the village street.

bluebells scrambling up an ancient road edge, Kent

Where you can easily find remnants of the past is in the woods, on the bridle paths that were once roads, often deeply sunken with the passage of time. Paved with flints, very often, in this country where it is the local stone, and walkable in dry weather in spring and summer, often mired and squelchy in winter. That's what travel used to be like, and you can get a sense of it still, even if you're wearing high-tech walking shoes or boots.

'You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes..'
(Rudyard Kipling, The way through the woods)

Flints paving an old road.

What you don't have is the danger. Recently we walked down Pack and Prime Lane, which leads to Henley from Rotherfield Greys; it was a haunt of footpads, and the packmen who used it had to pack their pistols with powder and prime their flints before they entered. Of course now, it's just beautiful woodland, heaven for dogs. But it was along those laborious, hazardous roads that Margaret tramped, fleeing the village that used to be her home, her thoughts travelling back to her mother's past, and her own.

'Rain and mud, and the road slithers under your feet, you stumble over the huge soft ruts… I wish it wasn't raining.. The people we meet talk about thieves, highway robbers, trying to frighten country bumpkins on the nove who are good for a laugh.'

Once, in the late eighties, I was driving on the A4 a friend at dawn; coming back from a night watch at Greenham Common, and over the Berkshire fields was a thick layer of mist. The picture stayed in my head for a few years, till it was time to use it for Malefice.

'That morning,' says Simon, the village drunk, 'the mist lay in the air like milk in water, can't get drunk on milk, here I am, poor rat-catcher, sober as the devil. Milk in water, and the trees stood out of it, under the trees you fumbled your way, but if you climbed a hill to look for the King's men, you could see the bare black branches fingering out of the whiteness.'

Day after day, when I've walked my dog in the w

inter, I've seen drops of melted frost on the sloe bushes, something Alice yearned for when she was shut up in a stinking seventeenth-century jail. 'She shut her eyes and tried to see blackthorn twigs like gnarly claws in the morning mist, each grasping a small clear bead of water.'

When I was writing Malefice, I was still able to pick up the phone and ask my mother-in-law about farming things; she's gone now. My mother-in-law had really made butter, and I needed to understand about it, because spoiling the butter was something witches did. She did me proud. 'Winter's the best time,' she told me, 'in summer, it just runs through your fingers.' I gave that line to Judith, whose butter the witch Alice supposedly spoiled.

'But what I should have done,' says Judith, 'I should have put the red hot poker in the cream, that day I knew the witch was spoiling the butter..'If you're here,' I should have said, 'have at your eye.' I might have blinded her.' I didn't know that was what you did, and to be sure, it did seem strange when I found out. Surely, the red hot poker wouldn't do the cream much good? But probably you only did that when the butter was already spoiled, and you wanted to get your revenge on the witch.

The Past is another country - and yet there are parts of it that I recognise. What that world of more than three and a half centuries ago shares with ours, still, is a whole lot of imagery, stories, that live in our heads still, even though we've overwritten them with a lot more information. But some of the imagery, I'm convinced, is to do with how the human brain works, and it's hard-wired into us.


witches giving babies to the Devil: Wellcome Trust

Think of the phenomenal success of films like The Exorcist. Possession by evil forces, people with supernatural powers to do harm, people who have an animal alter ego, still rampage through fantasy novels and films, and probably computer games, too, though I don't play them. Have you never looked in a mirror when you've been all alone in the house, and had a frightening fantasy that you might see something terrifying standing behind you?

What was going on in my head when, having done all the research and the reading, I sat down and wrote Malefice, hardly aware of what was going on, just kept typing, and then came out of something like a trance and read what I'd written? It wasn't just stuff from my personal subconscious and image-store that swam up and directed the story, that's for sure.

To get Malefice on Kindle, go to amazon.co.uk

I was very saddened the other day to read about the death of much loved, multi-million selling historical and fantasy novelist Roberta Gellis. You can read a brief obituary of this remarkable lady HERE. Roberta was a long-serving class act of the romantic historical genre and one of the major inspirations and influences on my early career. She was also kind enough to talk to me via e-mail on occasion and we had several detailed and interesting discussions about our mutual interest in the twelfth century, its characters and politics.

I first came across Roberta's work in my late teens. By that stage I had already embarked on my own (unpublished and a hobby at that time) historical writing. Having developed a passionate interest in the Middle Ages, I would haunt the library and devour whatever historical novels set in that period I could find. Being short of income at the time, the library was a godsend. The books that I wound up borrowing numerous times, I went out and bought when I had money from my Saturday job or was given book tokens for birthdays and Christmas.

Together with Cecelia Holland and Dorothy Dunnett, Roberta Gellis was one of my library discoveries and auto buys. I picked up her novel Bond of Blood and was immediately captivated by the struggles of a young twelfth century bride and the scarred warlord husband thrust upon her by society during the anarchy period of Stephen and Matilda.
Tortured heroes and Beauty and the Beast are stereotypical features in fiction of all categories but have a particularly entrenched home in historical romance where they can often be much of a muchness, but Gellis was an author who soared above the cliche. Her hero, the badly battle-scarred Cain had a club foot and his mother had died giving birth to him and his twin brother. His father, in grim bitterness had bestowed on him the biblical name of the man who had slain his own brother.
Leah comes from a family where she is only valued as breeding stock, and has learned to be very nimble with her wits when it comes to peace-keeping and making the best out of her circumstances. However, she is no Mary-Sue but a resourceful and quietly determined young woman. She and Cain are married by force of dynastic and political circumstance, and how they come to deal with each other's flaws and fears, and to appreciate the finer points amid all the political machinations, makes for a terrific story full of emotional triumph and pain as well as edge of the seat adventure and skulduggery. For me the reader it was a wonderful absorbing, believable read.
I enjoyed the more flighty historical romances I read, (I loved Kathleen Woodiwiss's way over the top epic historicals) but now I could clearly appreciate the difference between what felt like reality and what was more akin to getting out the dressing up box to flounce around in the costumes. Roberta Gellis made history live for me more than any other author had done up to that point. As a fledgling writer, she also taught me that it was possible to write romantic tales that were about people who were of their time. They thought like medieval people, they behaved like medieval people. They drew you into their world and made you believe in them and their dilemmas, all of which were utterly realistic. This was why I loved reading Gellis novels and this was what I wanted to write. Something that felt real to me.

I continued to devour Roberta Gellis's medieval novels at speed. Knight's Honour, The Sword and the Swan, the Dragon and the Rose (where she took a positive view of Henry VII).
But then, for me, Robert Gellis excelled her own already high standards and produced something rather special when she brought out her 4 book Roselynde Chronicle series - Roselynde, Alinor, Joanna and Gillian. In my opinion she hit the top of her game with these novels set in the time of King Richard, King John, and the early years of Henry III. Alinor, a wealthy young heiress who has been raised by her grandparents and given a somewhat enlightened education for a young woman, (although an education still of its time for the privileged) is given the middle-aged but vigorous and experienced knight Simon LeMagne as her guardian. What starts out in a certain amount of resentment, gradually blossoms into friendship, then love and marriage, but not without numerous trials and difficulties, including a journey on the third crusade where Alinor joins the household of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and Simon is attached to Richard's household.

The other books in the quartet follow the fortunes of Alinor and her loved ones through the ending reign of John and into the early 1230's. In the course of the story, Gellis brings to life one of the 'hottest' romantic historical heroes ever in the second book, Alinor, in the form of Ian de Vipont, Simon leMagne's squire and later lord in his own right. Any woman who has not encountered Ian de Vipont and gone weak at the knees is lying.

Gellis's skill lay in her ability to create a man who was drop dead gorgeous but at the same time the complete antithesis of the cardboard cutout he could so easily have become in less skilled hands. Ian de Vipont lives, breathes, walks off the page with all of his believable flaws and insecurities and sweeps the reader into his and Alinor's very real 12th century world. I read those books to shreds, especially Alinor.
When they were published in a special hardcover edition along with two more in the series, I saved up to buy the two new ones, Rhiannon and Sybelle, and made sure I had enough over to by myself a new copy of Alinor. I have to say that the covers do not particularly do the content justice. The latter always outshines the former.

Gellis was later asked to write more in this series, and completed one more - Desiree in 2000, but she said that she did not want to go further into the series really because that would mean having to write the death of Alinor and it was not something she was willing to do.

In her later career Roberta Gellis dabbled in the popular historical mystery genre and introduced readers to the wonderful new heroine Magdaelne la Batarde, high class brothel keeper of mid 12th century London. Just as her earlier medieval novels straddled the line between the romance and the straight historical, so her Magdalene novels - A Mortal Bane, A Personal Devil, Bone of Contention and Chains of Folly, were as much historicals as mysteries, with the same evocative sense of period and personalities.

I have yet to read Gellis's novels set in the world of Greek mythology and there are sundry medieval and other works that are still on my to read pile but it means I still have work m of hers that is new to me even though no more will be written - a poignant thought.

Roberta's website is still with us online and it gives a warm glimpse into the personality of this remarkable author, who, if she hadn't taken that particular career path, might have made her career as a bio-chemist. Do go along and take a look. ROBERTA GELLIS WEBSITE

I am so sorry that such a lovely, talented lady, who has given millions of readers so much pleasure for so many years has passed away, but what a legacy she has left behind, and I honour her now and extend to her my heartfelt thanks both as a reader and a writer.

(c. 1450 – 1516)

I’ve seen Bosch’s paintings in Vienna and Venice and have always found him a fascinating and mysterious figure, so when I heard that his birthplace in Holland was celebrating the 500th anniversary of his death with an exhibition I immediately booked. Just as well, because by the end of March the exhibition was completely sold out. The man who has been said to have had “the wildest imagination in the history of art” has a lot of devoted admirers all over the world and, as Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, “The Noordbrabants Museum has put on one of the most important exhibitions of our century.”

The exhibition itself is a remarkable achievement. Nine years ago Charles de Mooij, the director of this small museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch (also known as Den Bosch), decided to borrow every work by Bosch in the world. Amazingly, he managed to assemble twenty of the twenty-five surviving panels, including several reunited triptychs and panels that were scattered centuries ago, and nineteen of his twenty drawings. Most of Bosch’s work has disappeared and it would have included stained-glass windows, embroidery and glasswork. This exhibition, which has now moved to the Prado, will probably never be seen in one place again. Many of these paintings could only travel because the Getty Foundation paid for conservation work and also for a huge research project into Bosch. The Louvre in Paris, the Prado in Madrid, the Accademia in Venice, the Metropolitan in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington all agreed to lend their work to this provincial museum.

Before our eagerly awaited time slot we wandered around the sleepy Dutch town and visited St John’s Church, where Bosch would have worshipped and where his funeral took place although his body seems to have been lost, as the lady in the church shop apologetically told me. We know almost nothing about the life of Hieronymus Bosch, whose real name was Jeroen Van Aken. His grandfather, uncles and father were all painters in this provincial Brabant city, which was prosperous in the fifteenth century, and Bosch seems to have lived there all his life. He married, had a big house and studio on the market square and was a “sworn brother” of the local chapter of the Brotherhood of Our Lady, a religious confraternity. However conventional his outer life was it is clear that he had an extraordinary inner life and we are fortunate to be allowed to glimpse it.

I loved this exhibition, which is imaginatively displayed. His paintings are cinematic and the dark galleries are dramatically lit, with spots on each work and monitors which display high resolution images of the unfolding details of certain paintings; the seething, crazy, wonderful details. All fantasy comes from somewhere and when you look closely you see that all these monsters and bizarre inventions are based on images in our everyday world: owls, fish, lizards, trumpets, knives, funnels, all beautifully observed and drawn and then brilliantly reinvented. Somehow all these impossible figments convince us of their own reality. You feel that he lived in terrifying times (like us, like everyone,) and felt infinite compassion for the ingenious cruelties people inflict on each other. Here is his Ship of Fools, from the Louvre.

This illustrates a popular fifteenth century book with the same name: “Who takes his place on the ship of fools sails laughing and singing to hell.” It hangs directly above another panel , Gluttony and Lust, from Yale. These can now be confirmed as two halves of the same continuous vertical composition, reunited here for the first time in centuries.

This mix of the extraordinary and the mundane appears even more original when you compare Bosch’s work with that by members of his workshop. Whereas Bosch’s monsters are authentically horrible and frightening, those of his followers look merely kitsch. He was one of the first artists in the low countries to sign his work, so he wanted to be remembered. Here he is above his own signature, making fun of himself as a monster that is also a self portrait: an ascetic, gaunt, bespectacled man with the legs of a lizard and the wings of a bird.

St John of Patmos.

Even when he paints familiar religious scenes Bosch adds details which bring the hackneyed images to life. For example, in this small oak panel of Christ as a baby he imagines Jesus as a baby pushing along a fifteenth century walking frame and carrying a toy windmill in his right hand:

Bosch’s nightmare bestiary riots through the galleries and into our heads. I had always assumed, quite wrongly as it turns out, that Bosch’s paranoid and erotic visions would have been considered shocking and even insane in his own time. Early critics called him ‘the devil’s painter” and early art historians regarded him merely as "the inventor of monsters and chimeras" or "wondrous and strange fantasies ... often less pleasant than gruesome to look at".

However, recent scholars have come to view Bosch's vision as less fantastic, and think his art reflects the orthodox religious belief systems of his age. His depictions of sinful humanity and conceptions of Heaven and Hell are now seen as consistent with those of late medieval didactic literature and sermons. According to Dirk Bax, Bosch's paintings often represent visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns drawn from both biblical and folkloric sources. He may have been part of the Modern Devotion movement, which wanted to bring Christianity closer to the people by making Christian teaching accessible to all through texts in the vernacular instead of Latin, and by employing provocative images and jokes from popular culture to reinforce the message. Their aim was to encourage a direct personal relationship between the individual and God - in 1517, a year after Bosch died, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Some writers see Bosch as a medieval surrealist, and this is closer to my own view. As it says in the catalogue, Visions of Genius, “Bosch makes art personal, on different levels, and that makes him modern.” His private thoughts emerge in his drawings; only twenty survive in the entire world, and nineteen of them are in this exhibition. They show us the secret Bosch, with his imagination full of monsters. One drawing is called The Wood Has Ears, The Field Has Eyes– a saying inscribed on Goya’s Caprichos. Human ears hang from the trees, human eyes stare out of the ground and in this one, Beehive and Witches, who knows what is going on:

By the time of his death, Bosch was internationally celebrated as an eccentric painter of religious visions and his works were in the private collections of noble families of the Netherlands, Austria and Spain. Soon after his death. King Philip II of Spain became a serious collector of Bosch's work, and The Garden of Earthly Delights is said to have been hung in his bedroom. Bosch was imitated throughout the sixteenth century and his influence can be seen on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who also used folklore and proverbs to create a fantasy world. Later, Bosch’s work influenced Goya and the imagery of Surrealism and Jung called him “the discoverer of the unconscious.”

Caveau de la Huchette

Sidney Bechet in 1922

What is in a street?
It was my husband, Michel's, birthday last week. We were in Paris. I decided that aside from taking him for a delicious dinner it was time for us to stay up late and go to a jazz club. We haven't done that in a while. Instead of choosing one of the spots we have visited in the past I thought I would find somewhere unknown to us both and after trawling through the pages of Pariscope ( a Parisian equivalent of Time Out, sort of), I settled on the Caveau de la Huchette which promised good jazz and dancing. Because I was busy I did not take the time to find out the history of the place. I looked up the Californian clarinetist, Dan Levinson, who was billed to play, but nothing about the building itself, housed at 5, rue de la Huchette, a small cobbled street running westward from Rue St Jacques, and a very short walk from Shakespeare & Co. Quintessential Paris cinquième, steps from where Michel and I first lived when we began our love affair some years ago in Paris. (And where several chapters of THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER are set).

Rue de la Huchette, Paris 1900

The street itself is one of the oldest along the capital's Left Bank, running horizontal to the Seine and it claims some rather handsome buildings, once hotels. I did not know the meaning of the word huchette and neither did Michel. So, I looked it up in my four-volume Harrap's dictionary. The closest I found was huchet, a masculine noun meaning a hunting horn. I then read on Wikipedia that as early as the year 1200 the street was known as rue de Laas and ran adjacent to a vineyard which was sold off in the early thirteenth century for urban development. I have failed to find out anything further about the vineyard, or the wines grown there. If anyone reading this knows more, I would be fascinated to hear from you.

Rue de la Huchette, around 1900

When we lived around the corner from Rue de la Huchette, I have to admit I always hurried by this narrow street, avoiding it when possible, because I found it rather touristy, full of slightly tacky Greek restaurants touting for clients. I have never really taken to its ambience. I now discover that as early as the seventeenth century, the street was lively with taverns, hostelries, cabarets and rotisseries and that the cries and drunken shouts of laughter could be heard all over the quarter! It is claimed that Abbé Prévost (novelist and Benedictine monk) penned his short novel, Manon Lescaut, published in 1745, in one of these auberges. One wonders with such noise going on how he managed it!

The novel was a huge success and three operatic adaptations were made of the Abbé's oeuvre. The first, the least known, was Daniel Auber's published in 1856. In 1884, Massenet wrote his opera, Manon. Shortly after, Puccini adapted the book keeping the original title. This he wrote between 1890 and 1893.
There has also been at least one film adaptation of the book.

Théâtre de la Huchette

At number 23 stands the Théâtre de la Huchette. What is remarkable about this small theatre is that it has been staging the same two Eugène Ionesco plays, performed as a double bill, with the original production values and sets, since 1957: La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano) and La Leçon (The Lesson). This makes these two plays, as a double bill, the longest running show in the history of modern theatre. Also astounding is the fact that the theatre seats a modest 85 and yet over one and a half million spectators have seen the double bill. Now, a third play has been added to the repertoire, but this changes from time to time. Why, I asked myself, would the same two plays continue to be performed? This story is also fascinating. The theatre opened on the 26th April 1948, founded on a shoestring by Marcel Pinard and Georges Vitaly. In 1952, it was bought outright by Pinard who brought to its stage the works of Genet, Lorca, Ionesco, Turgenev amongst others. Some of whom, like Ionesco, were criticised, spurned by the mainstream theatrical community. When Pinard died in 1975, the theatre was threatened with closure, so the actors who were performing the two Ionesco plays formed a limited company in order that they could continue with the production and fight for the principle's that had been the life-blood of the theatre.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Paul Belmondo are but two of a long list of actors who made their first or early appearances there.

Outside Le Caveau de la Huchette 1949

Now to 5, Le Caveau de la Huchette. The jazz club exists in a sixteenth-century building, formerly a hotel, where the American journalist, and author, Elliot Paul, resided during the 20s and 30s. Paul left Paris in the thirties due to ill health and went to convalesce in Spain but moved back to Paris at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. When WWII was declared, he returned home to the States. Once back in America, he went to work in Hollywood. One of Paul's most notable co-screenwriting achievements is the classic Rhapsody in Blue. (Clifford Odets was another contributor to this screenplay though uncredited)

Original poster for Rhapsody in Blue

Released in New York on 26 June 1945 and nominated for one of the Grand Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in September 1946

Poster for the first Cannes Film Festival held in September 1946

Back to Rue de la Huchette. No 5 is built of stone with a cavernous dungeon-like interior with dangerously narrow winding stairways that lead to two seating areas. The largest 'room' is the underground dance floor and stage where Dan Levinson was playing.
Caveau de la Huchette started its life as a jazz club in 1946 and today is hailed as the Temple of Swing.

But looking back centuries earlier into the history of No. 5, I discovered that it was a meeting place for the secret brotherhood of the Rosicrucians and also for the Templars. The history is a little woolly after that, but it seems that in the early seventeenth century, the building was used by a Brotherhood of Freemasons. (Freemasonry was founded from "ecclesiastical associations of builders formed by bishops from the Middle Ages, especially the Benedictines, Cistercian and Templars" so perhaps the use of the space was passed down from the Templars?)
The lodge was composed of two basement rooms, one on top of the other, which served as the meeting rooms. From these rooms, two subterranean tunnels were excavated. One led to Châtelet and the other to the cloister of Saint-Severin.
(This is not as incredible as it sounds. Paris is built on old holes, quarries, catacombs and subterranean trails. As Victor Hugo wrote, "to plumb the depths of this ruin seems impossible".)

Georges Danton Lawyer and Politician 1759 - 1794

During the years of the French Revolution, No. 5 became an important gathering point for radical democrats seeking to dislodge the monarchy and create a republic. It hosted members of the Club of the Cordeliers. The upper room was transformed into a public house where such political luminaries as Danton, Marat and Robespierre came to drink and sing revolutionary songs, songs of La Liberté. Trials and executions took place in the lower room. A very deep well still exists there which is claimed to be where the corpses of those executed were thrown. Arms from that epoch still decorate the walls.

In 1946, Paris was a capital celebrating its freedom, a different liberty. The Germans had gone, the Occupation was at an end. The Americans were back. Everybody was in the mood to party. Jazz and its upbeat energy swept through Paris. The Caveau de la Huchette claims to be Paris' first jazz club but I would contest this because Sidney Bechet, to name just one, was playing with his own band in 1928 at the the chic nightclub, Bricktop's Club in Montmartre, owned by flaming red-haired, "one-hundred percent American negro", Ada 'Bricktop' Smith.
The Caveau certainly welcomed the GIs and with them came the beginning of France's passion for be-pop and swing. It was nicknamed the Temple of New Orleans jazz.
Sydney Bechet's jam sessions down in those cellars after his return to France in 1950 have become legendary.

Sidney Bechet 1897 - 1959

The club's reputation has never faded. Lionel Hampton performed there for the club's thirtieth birthday celebrations in May 1976.

Every night of the week there is live jazz, and, what was an eye opener to Michel and me, was the dancing. Be-pop and swing are alive and jumping in Paris. Dozens of couples, singles too, congregate there to dance. It was a remarkable sight to see and you cannot help feel energised and uplifted. Dan Levinson, in from California to play for two nights, said that it is one of his favourite clubs to perform anywhere in the world. No musician could claim that the reception was anything less than 'très chalereux'.

My new novel - the one I am at work on now - its title for the moment, though for a very different reason, is All that Jazz (though I am sure Penguin will have other suggestions!) It begins in Paris in 1947. I feel very tempted now to write a scene set at the Caveau de la Huchette.
Here, below, is the cover of THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER, also partially set in Paris, published a couple of months ago.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Now that I’m too old to have periods, I rely on writing my monthly History Blog to remind me of time passing. Because tomorrow is ‘World Menstrual Day’, that’s what I’m thinking about.
What’s the relevance of menstruation to history? Well, Queen Victoria had periods; as did Joan of Arc and Princess Diana. Yet this normal bodily function, that happens to half the world’s adults, is mentioned only rarely in the historical record.

Pliny the Elder

Beliefs

2,500 years ago the Greeks believed that if a girl’s menarche (first period) was late, then blood would accumulate around her heart, and her womb would wander aimlessly around her body. This produced erratic behaviour, violent swearing, and even suicidal depression. Right into the 20th century these symptoms were known as hysteria, after the Greek word for womb.
Pliny the Elder, a Roman who died in 79CE, warned that menstrual blood: “turns new wine sour; crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens dry up, the fruit falls off tress, steel edges blunt and the gleam of ivory is dulled; bees die in their hives, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.”
In mediaeval times if a penis touched menstrual blood, a man’s penis would burn up and any child conceived during menstruation would be devil-possessed, deformed, or even red-haired. Some Europeans thought that touching menstrual blood was the cause of leprosy, while others reckoned it cured the disease.
Despite herbal books referring to menstruation as ‘the flowers’, a more positive image of blossoming and growth, menstruating women carried nutmegs and nosegays to disguise their condition. Amenorrhea (lack of periods) could be cured with potions of herbs and wine, or vaginal pessaries made from mashed fruit and vegetables. To reduce a heavy flow, women were advised to bind the hair from an animal’s head onto a young tree. If this failed, they could drink comfrey or nettle tea, while reciting numerical formulae. Or find a toad, burn it dry, and put its ashes in a pocket near her vagina.

Two menstruating women dancing. Rock engraving from the Upper Yule River, Western Australia.

Religion and menstruation

Such attitudes reinforced the Christian Church’s suspicion towards women. Catholic doctrine argued that Eve was to blame for the eviction from Eden and Abbess Hildegard of Bingen [1098-1179] claimed that menstruation was God’s reminder of Eve’s Sin. even today it is still called ‘The Curse’ by many people.
Until 1916, Roman Catholic women were forbidden to receive communion while menstruating. In Eastern Orthodox churches women are still expected to refrain from receiving Communion, and to remain outside the building. Many other religions, such as Judaism’s Halakha laws and certain Muslim traditions, forbid menstruating women from sharing a bed with their husbands. Given this history of ignorant prejudice, it is pleasing to read the theologian Carmody Grey writing recently in The Tablet, ‘We could begin to answer Pope Francis’ call by pointing out that, quite literally, shedding blood for the life of humanity is just what women do.’

Carmody Grey

Mechanics

How did women in history manage their periods? There is actually little evidence, other than frequent repetition of stories such as that ancient Egyptian women used tampons made from softened papyrus, or the Greeks from lint wrapped around bits of wood.
Until the advent of contraception and bottle-feeding, women were either pregnant or breastfeeding for many more years and so had far fewer periods. Poor diet and hard work meant that for most girls the menarche was not until age 17 or 18. Though well-nourished healthy girls such as Lady Margaret Beaufort [1443-1509] gave birth to the future King Henry VII when she was just thirteen. It nearly killed her, and despite four husbands, she had no more children.
“Menstruous rags”, as the prophet Isaiah called them, or “clouts” as they were termed in 1600s England, were made from any absorbent fabric, or even grass, hemp or sphagnum moss. Elizabeth I of England [1558-1603] owned three black silk girdles to keep in place her linen “vallopes of fine holland cloth”.
In the 19th century the subject was so taboo, that historian Laura Klosterman Kidd found not one reference to menstrual-management in North American pioneer women’s diaries, letters or inventories of wagon-trains.
And the mediaeval myths continued unabated. Even the British Medical Journal claimed that menstruating women were unable to pickle meat or churn butter successfully. Female factory workers in France were forbidden to work in sugar refineries during their periods for fear they would spoil the food; and a Viennese scientist thought menstruating women stopped dough rising and beer fermenting.

The paediatrician Dr. Bela Schick [1877-1967] believed menstruating women released plant-destroying substances through their skin, which he named ‘menotoxins’. He ‘proved’ it by asking housemaids to arrange cut flowers: if they were menstruating, the flowers died sooner. This notion was even repeated in The Lancet in 1974, with the modern addition that a permanent wave would not ‘take’ to a woman’s hair during menstruation.
As recently as 1980 I was told by a farmer’s wife in Shropshire that if a menstruating woman touched meat it would go rancid, and hams wouldn’t cure. When I queried this she asked, ‘Have you ever seen a female butcher?’ It was true, I had not.
My grandmother used linen rags held on with string and washed by hand, until French nurses in the First World War, discovered wood-fibre field bandages worked much better, and burned them after use. Kotex disposable pads were soon on the market.

Kotex brought comfort and relief

An American osteopath called Dr Earle Haas invented the ‘catamenal device’ in 1929, using two cardboard tubes and a cotton-wool tampon. Four years later he sold the patent for US$32,000 to an industrious woman called Gertrude Tendrich who made them with a sewing machine and an air compressor. My mother started her periods in 1930 and was one of the first to use Tampax, but insisted that her daughters had to be married before we could use them. (Did we listen? No!)
In 1946 Walt Disney’s animated educational film The Story of Menstruation was shown to over 100 million American high school students. The first film ever to use the word 'vagina’, it nevertheless managed to avoid any mention of sex or reproduction. Despite the narrator, the actress Gloria Blondell [1910-86], encouraging girls to bathe, ride a horse, and dance during menstruation, the emphasis on sanitation reinforced the idea that menstruation was a hygienic crisis.

In 1969, the same year Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, a glue was finally invented which held sanitary pads into knickers and sanitary belts were consigned to history.
Judy Blume was reputedly the first novelist to mention the unmentionable, in ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ published in 1970. In keeping up with the times, her sanitary-towel belt has been deleted in recent editions of the book. It was not until 1985 that the word ‘period’ was used in a television commercial; and as recently as 2010, US TV networks banned a tampon commercial using the word ‘vagina’ or even ‘ down there’.
Only very recently has a method been invented by a woman – the menstrual cup. This revolutionary egg-cup-sized silicone device cannot be seen or felt, needs minimal water, leaves no rubbish and lasts for up to 10 years. It avoids the waste products of the 3,000 pads or tampons that each woman uses in her life.

Contemporary Social Beliefs

Menstruation has always been associated with lunar cycles and the moon remains central to myths and rituals across the world. 'Have you Gone to the Moon?' is said by boys to tease girls in Malawi, where the Chichewa word for menstruation also means 'Moon'.

Why do disposal bags feature a lady in a crinoline?

In Britain and USA girls are taught that a ‘normal’ menstrual cycle is 28 days – any shorter, longer or irregular is classed as ‘abnormal.’ At school, I associated ‘regular’ periods with tidy girls with neat straight hair who always did their homework on time. My own irregular periods were obviously a symptom of my lazy, untidy mind. I never knew how ‘abnormal’ I was because even among my closest friends it was taboo to discuss such matters.
Unfortunately millions of women and girls are still disabled every month by practical as well as cultural barriers to menstruation. In many parts of Africa, girls lose as many days from school due to menstruation as they do from malaria. A quarter of women in Africa have to stop work during their periods, which means less food and money for their families. Like our grandmothers, they simply don’t have the products to feel safe walking, digging or playing netball.

Women's co-operative in Malawi making washable pads
Menstruation is a complex mixture of the positive proof of womanhood and fertility, combined with shame. In recent years most women’s lives have improved economically, politically and socially. But even though we’re now more comfortable physically during menstruation, we’re still embarrassed to talk about this normal part of our lives.

Pad made by Girl Guides in Malawi

The 28 May was chosen by the U.N. in 2014 for Menstrual Hygiene Day because the average menstrual period lasts 5 days, and happens every 28 days. But why did the UN add the word ‘hygiene’? I think it was because even in the 21st century, this normal bodily function is considered ‘unclean’. I prefer to call it simply World Menstrual Day to celebrate this important function us women have in reproducing humans.

More from the Museum of Menstruation

Janie Hampton 2016

At the moment I and about six million fans of the ITV drama series, Home Fires, are locked in a battle-royal with the network. After just two seasons the show has been axed in order for ITV 'to be able to refresh their drama portfolio'. There has been an outpouring of grief, anger, consternation and disbelief on social media. Fans have been bombing ITV with pots of jam and a petition had reached 23,000 signatures after just one week. To no avail, I suspect. No chance of reconciliation and I suspect ITV will just brush it off as an annoyance.

Bridge on the River Kwai (C) Rod Beattie

That got me thinking about reconciliation and I promised last month I was going to tell a story of the most remarkable show of reconciliation I have ever come across. In August 1945 prisoners of the Japanese were released after three and a half years in captivity. The had been used as slaves by their captors, most famously on the Thailand Burma Railway, but also in mines, on roads and in quarries. Of the 60,000 men who were forced to work on the notorious Death Railway, over 12,000 never returned. It is said that the cost was a life for every sleeper laid along its 415 kilometer length. In addition to the Allied soldiers who died, a shocking 83,000 Malay, Burmese and Tamils also perished, mostly of disease as a result of starvation and squalid conditions. In other parts of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere the death toll was even higher. In all, 130,000 prisoners of war and the same number of civilians were held captive. The story of their plight is well documented in books, films, broadcasts and newspapers. Some of their tales are truly harrowing. Less often does one read about reconciliation between the former prisoners and the Japanese. However, today I was reminded of one man who, despite suffering appallingly, forgave his captors.

Captain Bill Drower c. 1940

I first met Bill Drower, or Captain William M. Drower to give him his full name, when I was researching the biography of my grandfather, Philip Toosey, which appeared in 2005 as The Colonel of Tamarkan: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai. I had been out in Thailand with my mother to see the bridge over the river Kwai, the camps where Toosey had been senior British officer and to talk to some of the prisoners who had been in captivity with him. When I got home there was an envelope on my desk with spidery writing. I opened it and read the first sentence which began: ‘My dear Miss Summers, My name is William Mortimer Drower and your grandfather was kind to me when I got into a spot of bother in the camp gaol…’ Bill was by then 87 and had served in the diplomatic service in Washington for many years.

I knew the story of Bill Drower’s imprisonment, of course I did. Anyone who has read about the railway knows that he fell out with one the guards in the officers’ camp in May 1945, only to be hauled up in front of the psychotic camp commander, Noguchi, and condemned to spend the rest of his life in a hole in the ground. For 77 days he lay in solitary confinement, quietly losing his mind, being fed on just one rice ball a day. Once he woke to find a rat gnawing at his foot. On 16 August 1945 the camp at Kanchanburi was liberated and Bill Drower was dragged out of his prison, more dead than alive. He was suffering from Blackwater fever and was delirious. Some ‘spot of bother’. Amazingly he recovered and the next time my grandfather saw him was in London six months later, when Bill was physically restored to his spectacular 6’3” frame.

This drawing was made from a photograph taken of Bill the day after he was released from his prison

Fifty years later Bill was invited to go on a reconciliation mission to Japan. He agreed on one condition: that he would be allowed to give a speech in Japanese. He had worked at the Japanese Embassy in London in the 1930s and spoke the formal, honorific form of the language. As a translator on the railway he was expected to speak informal Japanese, the language accorded to the lowest in society. His wish was granted and he gave a speech, in honorific Japanese, in Tokyo. It went down extremely well and he received a standing ovation. As a sign of respect and gratitude to this great and humble man, the Japanese hosts offered Bill a trip on the Bullet Train, which he accepted with enthusiasm. He was chatting to the guide and translator about the train and learned from them that the bullet train had been designed by one of their most famous railway engineers.
The guide continued:

‘This engineer designed a railway in Thailand in the Second World War.’

‘I know,’ replied Bill, ‘I helped him to build it.’

Bill at my book launch 2005

Bill Drower was one of the most impressive men I have had the privilege to meet in the whole of my life. I think of him often and with great affection. Shortly before he died I visited him with my youngest son who was 10. Bill's health was deteriorating and I knew he had not long to live. He offered to play chess with Sandy, who was at that stage a junior school team player and very able. Bill told him to set up the game on an old board and as he did so, Bill explained that this board had been dropped into the officers' camp at the end of the war by the RAF so the men had something to entertain them while they waited to be sent home. The officers had given Bill the board as a gift. As they started to play I could see that Bill was way ahead of Sandy and very soon the boy found himself at check mate. A fortnight later I heard that the great man had died. When I told Sandy he said: 'but now I'll never have the chance to beat Bill at chess.' When I related this story to Bill's daughter she wrote back: 'I am amazed. My father had not played chess since 1945.' What an astonishing, impressive and wonderful man he was.

The Colonel of Tamarkan was published in 2005

Photo credit: Sarah Lee

It seems strange to welcome Louisa Young as our June guest. Until very recently and from the beginning she has been a full time History Girls and has only recently stepped back a bit to the role of Reserve, so we shall hear from her again.

Louisa Young is the author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins), set between 1908 and 1919, a story of love, death and the origins of maxillo-facial reconstructive surgery in World War One. The sequel, The Heroes' Return, was published by Borough Press in 2014.She has also written The Book of the Heart (Flamingo), a cultural history of that most emblematic organ, and A Great Task of Happiness (republished 2012), a biography of her grandmother the sculptor Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Scott of the Antarctic.Her first novel, Babylove, was listed for the Orange Prize.
As half of Zizou Corder she has co-written five children's novels with her daughter, including the Lionboy trilogy, which is published in 36 languages.

She read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London, where she has written the second sequel to My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. Called Devotion, it deals with a long neglected aspect of WW2 in Italy and is another highly recommended read.

Welcome "back," Louisa!

A long long time ago I sat with an American friend of my dad’s, a photographer and art historian, who has lived in Rome since the late 1940s. When I was a child he lived in a house on the Tiber Island, which to me, then and now, was and is the most romantic place in the world. Now, it is all rather well-organised:

When I first went, it wasn’t quite like this:

with boats and mud, so that you could believe the legend of it being built on the bones of Tarquin the Superb, the tyrant whose body was thrown into the river in 510BC. The shape, boat-like, was first re-inforced in the First Century: slabs of marble gave it a prow and a stern, commemorating the boat which brought a statue of the healing god Aesculapius and one of his holy snakes from Greece, after an outbreak of plague in 293 BC. The snake apparently leapt off the boat and swam to the island, which was seen as a sign that this was the best place to build Aesculapius's temple, and after that came the hospitals which are still there. Of course an island is always a good place for a hospital, specially when diseases are infectious. A carving of the Aesculapian rod and snake are still visible on the rock at the prow.

The stairs in our friend’s house were made of white marble, and if you looked out the window at the back the river tumbled and rushed below. We ate fried artichokes, and the grownups drank gin and It (Italian vermouth i.e. martini) and we could nip and talk to the strange post with four heads on it, or try to climb into the hospital grounds so we could do a proper circumnavigation of the island. Alas he moved, later, to a flat in a palazzo in Sant’Angelo, known as Piazza Tartaruga, Piazza Turtle, because of the little turtles balanced on the bowl of its central fountain. But that was a lovely flat too.

Someone - my father? - pointed out to me in a neighbouring street - via della Reginella - how the building behind the palazzo, thought the same height, contained five floors, where the palazzo had three. The apartments in that building had lower ceilings, smaller windows, more occupants. This, I learned, was where the edge of the Jewish Ghetto had been. Big-roomed palazzo outside the gate; many-floored lodgings inside. It is too narrow a street to photograph this, but here is the street in 1944:

And here is the street now, four cobbles replaced and named in honour of Grazia di Segni, born 1889
Giuditta Spizzichino, born 1922, Ada Spizzichino born 1915, and Rossana Calò, who was two years old. They were all arrested on October 16 1943, deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

Our friend the photographer told me a story about a room in a flat just outside where the ghetto walls had been, a room with no windows, discovered by a new tenant in the 1960s. The tenant asked the landlord about it, what it was, and after some trouble and pursuit of the matter received the answer that ‘This was where the Jews hid during the Nazi occupation’. He was surprised, as he knew the family concerned had been devoted Fascists. Why would they have been hiding Jewish people?

‘Oh, they were hiding the Fascist Jews.’

Like many people, I have had a tendency to look at history from where I am, rather than from where people were at the time. 'Fascist Jews’, in the 21st century, seems a nonsense, impossible. But from 1920 there were Fascist Jews: immigrants from eastern Europe determined to prove their nationalistic loyalty to their new home country, communities in the west and the south who had been in Italy for hundreds of years but still felt it best in the interests of self-preservation to go along with the flow of public opinion, and in Rome a community which was there before Julius Caesar, before Christianity, before the split of Jewry into Sephardi and Ashkenazi even. It is the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora.

Remember what a mess Italy was after WW1? Remember the Russian Revolution, and how utterly terrifying that was? Remember D’Annunzio and his lances, and how useless the government was? Remember how Italy as a country was not yet fifty years old, and how the walls of the Roman Ghetto only came down in 1888 - not even thirty years earlier? Now, we know exactly why Mussolini was a terrible, terrible idea. Then, they didn’t know. And Jewish families had no special gift of seeing the future, and all the more historical reasons to be nervous.

Which all added up, for me, to the setting for a novel.

It’s called Devotion, and it’s out on June 2, published by Borough Press. It continues the story that started in WW1 in My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, moving things on to the next generation. Tom, the English boy, loves his Roman Jewish cousin Nenna. Nenna loves her father, Aldo. And Aldo loves Mussolini. The moral? Be careful what you devote yourself to.

When I look around my office I realise that I am a serial offender when it comes to curiosities. I can’t resist them. I have a shelf, as you can see, full of little objects that mean something to me.

A gold medal awarded to my great-great uncle for Classics at University College London. Amazing considering his father was illiterate; an origami butterfly made by my youngest son when he knew I was disappointed by a book proposal being turned down (haven’t we all been there?) and a note from my Dad when I stood up to speak impromptu.

The most curious object I used to have in my office, which is now in the collection of Merton College, Oxford, is a copper pressure kettle. It is a beautiful object in its own right – about 9” or 23cm high and sits on a frame under which a burner is placed to heat the water. It came back from 23,500 feet on Mount Everest in July 1924, just a few weeks after my great-grandfather had received the devastating news that his son had been lost somewhere close to the summit. He and his climbing partner, George Mallory, were last seen by Captain Noel Odell ‘going strong for the top’ at 1pm on 8^thJune. Although Odell made valiant efforts to find the two climbers he failed and the nature of their deaths was unknown for 75 years. The mystery of Mallory and Irvine, Sandy Irvine being my great-uncle, has fascinated generations of climbers and Everest-watchers ever since. There was something romantic in the heroic British failure and it was a full 29 years later that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally reached the top of the world from the south, rather than the north, side of Everest.

Sandy Irvine in his dark blue rowing blazer 1923

Did the two men reach the top? Was 22 year old Sandy Irvine the youngest Briton ever to stand on the billiard table sized summit? We will probably never know the answer. Even the discovery of Mallory’s frozen remains in 1999 did not provide an answer. If anything, it added more questions to the mystery. His watch and altimeter were broken in the removal of the artefacts from his body so we do not know how high they climbed nor at what time Mallory fell. For that much we do know. He was wearing a light weight walking rope around his waist, which means he was roped to Sandy Irvine. The rope was broken, probably on a rock, by the fall. He fell several hundred meters and broke his ankle and knocked himself out with a blow to his forehead. He probably died within half an hour and may never have regained consciousness. Sandy’s body has never been found and there is still speculation that if someone does come across his remains they might find the camera he was carrying and it might, just might, have a photograph of the summit. Or not. Even if they do find the camera and it does not have a photo of Mallory waving a flag, it does not mean they didn’t make it. The camera might have malfunctioned, Sandy might have been too hypoxic to take a picture. No, the only way we will ever know for certain that they did not reach the summit is if they find a note in Sandy’s pocket saying: ‘blow it, we didn’t make it’.

But why the pressure kettle? Sandy Irvine was practical and inventive. His role on the expedition was to look after the oxygen equipment. He redesigned the 1922 set in his room at Merton in the autumn of 1923 but Siebe Gorman ignored his suggestions and sent the 1922 design. When Sandy caught up with them in Calcutta he was disgusted and spent the whole of the trek across Tibet fashioning brand new sets in his tent-cum-workshop. They worked. They were 30% lighter and much more efficient and robust. The expedition leader was impressed when he, Mallory and Odell tried them out on rocks below Shekar Dzong. Sandy made a rope ladder to help the porters scale an ice-wall between camps 3 and 4 and the pressure kettle had been his attempt to design a device that would make water boil at a higher temperature than the normal 70°C on Everest. It was delivered by a Birmingham company the night before he left Liverpool for India on 29 February 1924.

When Odell had to go through Sandy’s possessions and discard what they could not carry back to Britain (they had a bonfire at base camp the morning they left) he kept the kettle as a reminder of Sandy Irvine’s brilliant practical mind and his sense of humour. The kettle has been in the family ever since and we are very proud of it. When I showed it to Chris Bonington last autumn he had tears in his eyes as he held it. He said he felt a powerful connection to Mallory and Irvine through it. A curious but wonderful object. The mystery endures and long may it last.

Fearless on Everest was first published in 2000. I was inspired to write the book having named my youngest son Sandy as, like his forbear, he had blond hair and blue eyes. We were living in California and I saw a picture of Mallory and Irvine in a bookshop window. I became interested in a story I had only ever heard as a child and about which I knew very little. Research led to a fascinating cache of letters, an album of family photographs and finally, a trunk in the attic. That was in 1999. On 4th May I woke up to hear Charlotte Green reading the seven o'clock news: 'Climbers on Mount Everest have found the frozen remains of ...' I nearly jumped out of my skin. I thought they had found Sandy, who I knew they were looking for. '...George Mallory.' For the climbers it was like looking for the treasure map and finding the treasure. But for our family it was relief that Sandy's mortal remains were still hidden on the mountain. There they remain and I, for one, hope with all my heart he is never found. The mystery is so much more romantic for remaining unsolved. And besides, I want to remember him as he looked: young, handsome and curious.

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Give an example of a little known fact you have come across in your reading about a well documented period or event or person. (Through history books or historical fiction)

Every now and again in a writer’s life there comes an experience that you have just exactly because you are a writer. You are doing your research and you stumble across something you didn’t know or someone tells you something unexpected. And this might lead to something amazing.

I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these, most of them in Italy, the land of my heart, but this post is specifically about two connected to Michelangelo.

The first happened in my first “Long Vacation” which is what they call the summer holidays at the University of Cambridge. It was a very long vacation indeed and my boyfriend had gone to India. I, on the other hand, had been given a bursary to spend a month in Florence, learning the language ay the British Institute.

Only in the mornings; the rest of the day was my own. It was not my first visit to Italy but it was my first to Florence. I arrived by train. My father was a railwayman and I never went anywhere you couldn’t get to by train.

I was staying in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, where there were three other students. The two men were also from Cambridge, a medical student and another reading English like me. Of the two women, one was reading English at Bristol and the other was an American of German origin on what we would now call a gap year.

Creative Commons: Saiiko

None of us was an art student and yet we all became passionate about art in that month, spending every afternoon exploring museums and galleries with our sketchbooks and meeting up for a cheap dinner every evening to share our discoveries.

One afternoon all five of us showed up at the Casa Buonarroti with our sketchbooks and 2B pencils but, alas, it was closed for renovation. “But we love Michelangelo!” we said. “And we are students here for only a short time.” We never actually claimed to be art students but our long faces did the trick and we were let in.

We saw Michelangelo’s two early marble relief panels: first The Madonna of the Stairs with the BVM represented as a strong peasant woman, who has just finished feeding her child. If she stood up, she would be a giantess. Then the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths in which the artist discovered what would be his main theme for the rest of his life: depicting the athletic forms of naked young men.

Crative Commons: Carulmare

The third object I remember was a painted wooden crucifix with an almost childlike Christ, the whole thing about three-quarters life size. At that time there was a dispute about whether it really was an authentic Michelangelo early work. We were all very moved by it and quite convinced that it was.

The experts later agreed and it was returned to the church of Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno, where it had originally hung as a thank you from Michelangelo to the Prior Bichiellini, who had let him dissect unclaimed corpses that had been brought there from the hospital.

Scroll forward many decades and I am again in Florence in April of this year after more visits than I can count – more than thirty at least. This time I am a woman on a mission. I have been writing the story, In the Footsteps of Giants, that forms the basis of the app being developed for Time Traveler Tours & Tales and I am there with Sarah Towle, the American publisher and writer who set the company up.

We are developing an app to be used on IOS and Android phones in the city so that families with older children can take a tour of Florence, using Michelangelo as their Renaissance guide.

Creative Commons: David Gaya

A little bit of history: Michelangelo was born into a Florentine family, the second of five boys, and as a young teenager was taken under the wing of the great patron of the arts, Lorenzo de’ Medici. He was brought up with Lorenzo’s sons and nephew, two of whom later became Pope, but after Lorenzo died, Michelangelo had a fraught relationship with the family.

There were times when he worked for the Republic which had expelled the Medici and times when he took artistic commissions from members of the Medici family. As an adult he lived more in Rome than in Florence, thought the city of his adolescence and young manhood still contains some of his greatest works of art.

In 1527 he was appointed to oversee the fortifications of his home city, which was about the come under siege …from the Medici! So when the members of that family, in collaboration with the Imperial Army, attacked Florence so hard that the city surrendered in the summer of 1530, Michelangelo was a wanted man.

The New Sacristy, tomb of the lesser Lorenzo de' Medici

He went into hiding, in a place he knew well – San Lorenzo church. He had been building a chapel there to house the tombs of his old patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici and his murdered brother Giuliano, and two lesser Medici dukes who confusingly had the same forenames. These tombs were to be housed in a New Sacristy, designed to balance the Old Sacristy, which had been built earlier by one of Michelangelo’s heroes – Filippo Brunelleschi.

Brunelleschi was the gifted engineer and architect who had worked out how to fit a dome on Florence’s great cathedral and he had designed the whole church of San Lorenzo which was the family church of the Medici.

What Michelangelo knew and the Imperial forces didn’t was that there was a secret chamber under the New Sacristy. His friend Prior Figiovanni sneaked him in there and there he stayed in hiding from August till October.

And while he was there he drew on the walls with charcoal.

The room wasn’t found again until 1976, ten years after the great flood that damaged so much art in Florence in 1966. Obviously a lot more important spaces had priority for restoration over the room under the New Sacristy, which had been used for years to store coal. It was only when the walls were being cleaned up that the charcoal drawings began to emerge.

Here was the clue to where Michelangelo had been hiding in those missing weeks as summer turned into autumn in 1530. He had whitewashed the walls to cover up his drawings, we assume that he didn’t want to get Prior Figiovanni to get into trouble for showing him the hiding place.

The tour of Florence app, In the Footsteps of Giants, was loosely inspired by my novel David (Bloomsbury 2011, Greystones Press revised edition 2016) in which I imagined who the model might have been who posed for Michelangelo’s most most famous statue.

And the story of sculpting the Giant, as he was known in the earlier years of the sixteenth century in Florence, is still there in the app. But we decided to make the sculptor himself the narrator of the story, as he hid under San Lorenzo, sketching a kind of spiritual diary on the walls, looking both backwards and forwards.

So it was really important for Sarah and me to get into that secret underground chamber. The only trouble was it is not open to the public.

Without revealing any names or details, I will only say that Sarah is a very determined woman! The result was that we did in fact spend a full hour in that chilly underground room where one of our heroes had hidden in fear of his life nearly five hundred years ago. It was an unforgettable experience.

We took lots of photographs, which I can’t show you yet, because of copyright negotiations. But if you put “stanza segreta San Lorenzo” into your search engine, you will find plenty of images to give you an idea of what an overwhelming experience it was.

There is a well in one corner though the water would not have been any more drinkable than any other in Florence in 1530. You could probably have washed with it but I doubt Michelangelo bothered. One of things we know about him is that he washed rarely, didn’t change his clothes for ages and slept in his boots.

Much more interesting are the drawings on the walls, including sketches for the monument to the younger Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours. You can tell it’s for that statue by the knees.

The funerary monuments in the New Sacristy were never completed, as Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome to work on the Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican. But he was pardoned by the Medici and his salary unfrozen, on condition he continued with the chapel. We don’t know for sure why he never returned to complete the plan.

What is certain is that visitors admired its extraordinary architecture and great sculptures for nearly four and a half centuries without knowing about that secret room under their feet, where the great man hid, not knowing if he’d ever be free to work on his art again.

(You can buy David: the Unauthorised Autobiography on this Amazon link (other booksellers are available)(

I went missing last month, for I was in hospital, recovering from a major operation. I thought “How cool it would be to write a potted history of heart operations for History Girls” but when it came to writing this, I found that my world is still too small and I’m still dealing with the emotional ramifications of the operations. You’re not, therefore, getting a medical post today, however interesting such a post would be. There are family reasons why such a post would be particularly interesting – maybe one day. When one’s father is a footnote’s footnote in the history of heart surgery, it’s worth exploring.

The thing with a personal event as large as this is it shrinks one’s universe and my universe is only just now beginning to grow again. In a few weeks’ time I’ll be doing normal work and next to no time (objectively) I’ll have more energy than I’ve had for years. But to reach this stage of health, I have to take small and cautious steps. I have to walk a slow trail in a small universe.

It struck me that there is a rather important equivalent to what’s happening emotionally to me right now. In the Middle Ages, 95% of people didn’t go more than 20 miles away from their homes. Some travelled a great deal, but more did not. When they travelled, their worlds grew. When they came home again, their worlds shrank in a very similar emotional way to mine. There was one particular type of travel that most Christians were likely to have undertaken, either to somewhere close to home or to somewhere excitingly distant.

The big voyage for many people was a pilgrimage. Those who could might chose the ultimate destination: Jersualem. Santiago de Compostella, St David’s in Wale, Rome were all more achievable. All of these pilgrimages were undertaken on foot (except when water had to be crossed, obviously) and some modern pilgrims follow these routes. A friend of mine did the last few hundred kilometres of the Santiago route just recently. The pilgrimage is different these days, but it still helps people grow their worlds and discover a new world.

This piece is not, however, about the nature of pilgrimages. There are so many books and studies and pictorial essays about going on pilgrimage. Growing one’s world and exploring new places is something we tend to talk about. We talk less about what happens when our worlds get smaller.

There is a moment in a pilgrimage that matches that moment in my lie when everything seemed confined and small. That shrinking of one’s life is what happens when one returns home. A good Christian soul has done their big journey to, say, Canterbury , and made offerings and achieved virtue for the afterlife and has taken the long trudge home. As they walk, they know the route for they have already travelled in the opposite direction. What was astonishing and new on the way out is familiar on the way back. It might feel smaller or might feel longer. It might be more tiring because instead of having a marvellous and strange and beautiful destination to look forward to, there is the cycle of work. Or it might be reassuring to return to everyday life and its demands.

How one undertakes that return journey depends on one’s personality. It’s documented far less than the outgoing journeys, for it’s less important in a religious sense. Less important in so many ways. One builds up to the pilgrim dictation and then the return walk is merely a gap between that event and everyday life. It’s dangerous. It’s no easier than the route out. But there are no religious rewards at the end, no special once-in-a-lifetime emotional joy. So how pleasant the journey home is depends on how the traveller loves the voyage itself and how much he or she wants to return to the safety and predictability of home.

This is just as important a voyage. Finding the small world again is critical to our happiness if we can’t live in the big world. Returning home has to be done in the right way. Otherwise we are, as Frodo and Bilbo were, unhappy and restless and fidgety and listening for sounds and people that have no part in our lives. As I turn to Tolkien for my example I wonder what type of stories pilgrims tell as they return home. Not at all the same kind of story s they tell on their way to their place of pilgrimage. And I wonder if they slot themselves into the agricultural year while they’re still on that journey, anticipating the tasks ahead and mentally preparing themselves so that they fit into their old lives.

We don’t have as many stories telling us how to safely return to smaller existences. Out fiction would rather tell us how to meet the challenges of the larger world. Yet we all have return journeys at some stage in our lives. Or we find ourselves living smaller lives while we handle health and personal problems. This is where history is stronger than fiction. There are far more novels about lives that grow than about lives that shrink. What our fiction doesn’t tell us, our history can. I suspect that my recent experiences will persuade me to write about coming home and discovering the small life, one day. And I suspect that my future will involve some research into return journeys, to fuel this story.

Sometimes I want my history brave. Dangerously brave. Also full of integrity, thoughtfulness, passion and poetry. That’s when I’m glad there are women like Svetlana Alexievich in the world.

When this Russian-speaking author won the Nobel Prize for Literature last autumn, for non-fiction writing exploring the pain in Soviet and post-Soviet history, from the Second World War to today, I had never read her work.

I knew I’d have to. I am a Russianist, after all. But when I first read the citation from the Stockholm judges for “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time” – her books are compilations of the individual testimonies of the thousands of people she has interviewed since 1980 – I'm afraid I had a mental picture of a sort of enormous choir of depressed people in nasty clothes shouting, in dirge-like unison, about how awful everything was. It made me feel tired in advance. I didn’t much want to try.

Until very recently, it would have been all but impossible, anyway, since it was a challenge even to find her work. In her home country of Belarus - to which she returned in 2013 after more than a decade away, in France and Germany, avoiding the Soviet-style rule of its strongman president - her books used to have to be smuggled in from more adventurous Russia. (Things have eased slightly since she went back to her two-bedroomed flat in Minsk). The five-volume Russian-language set is hard to get, even in London, a city stuffed with Russian émigrés; English translations have been done piecemeal by small presses.

But now, in the wake of her Nobel win, a coherent English-language canon is coming into existence at last. In April, Penguin brought out a new translation by Anna Gunn and Arch Tait of Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, Alexievich’s account of life near the nuclear power station whose fourth reactor blew up in 1986, 30 years ago. Penguin will have new translations this October of Boys in Zinc (about the Soviet war in Afghanistan) and War’s Unwomanly Face (Alexievich’s first book, on women in the Second World War) and finally – appearing for the first time in English – Last Witnesses (on the legacy of the Second World War), due in September 2017. Meanwhile, Second-hand Time, her most recent work – a searing examination of ordinary lives from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the chaotic Nineties and the rise of Putin after 2000 - got its first English-language publication in May with Fitzcarraldo Editions, in a translation by Bela Shayevich.

And so I’ve been catching up. And developing a big case of hero-worship.

Alexievich has been doing the authorial rounds in the UK in the past week or two, talking at Hay and Cambridge and giving interviews; a victory lap, marking her global recognition.

Having seen her at the Cambridge literary festival on Tuesday, I now know her to be a short, stocky woman of 68, with brave auburn hair, a composed manner and an orange scarf. She grew up in a Ukrainian village with few men (she cites the women’s stories as a model for her work). Her parents were schoolteachers; her father also served in the Red Army. She could never persuade him out of his Communist beliefs. She was of the perestroika generation, one of the kitchen liberals – she now calls them “romantics” – who longed for the Soviet demise before it happened, then wondered what was left. She raised her sister’s four-year-old after the sister died of cancer, as many Belarusians did after Chernobyl. That daughter now has a daughter of her own, living in Minsk too.

Both Alexievich’s low voice and her smile have sadness in (though she can be amusing). She was a journalist and is very frank; on winning, she was televised telling journalists that she loved “the good Russia” of civilization and culture, “but not the Russia of [Stalin secret police chief] Beria and Putin.”

Her subject is anything but funny - the horrors of the 20th century and the Soviet “Red empire”, “a history of how people wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth….In the end, all that remained was a sea of blood, millions of ruined human lives.”

She is influenced by the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, whose collective memoir of the 1941-44 siege of Leningrad was built, like her work, on multiple testimonies from ordinary people trying to survive. She quotes him as believing “that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is,” she explains.

It can be frightening, even nauseating, to read her true stories. The Red empire was a terrifying place, built on mass sacrifice and multiple acts of heroic self-sacrifice for the greater good. At the beginning of Second-Hand Time, Alexievich sets the stage: “People who’ve come out of socialism … have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: ‘shoot’, ‘execute’, ‘liquidate’”.

Her style is to go right beyond the news story and inside the hearts and minds of her individual interview subjects, offering intensely revealing stories from hundreds of people in each book which each shed a unique light on a big subject. She has called herself a “historian of the soul”.

Into these painful individual stories, every now and then, comes a glimpse of the big history you can always feel coming into existence just out of sight. Through an accumulation of small agonies, for instance, you come to understand how the Soviet authorities’ slapdash response to Chernobyl led to a new questioning of those authorities, and, five years later, to the collapse of the Soviet empire. For one engineer at a nearby synthetic-fibre factory, the first clue was the alarm of some visiting German experts. They demanded doctors and radiation meters. Then they left.

“And how did we view their behaviour? Oh, just look at those Germans, they’re hysterical! What clowns! Look at our men, they’re real men! That’s Russians for you! Daredevils! Battling the reactor! Not afraid for their own skin! (Becomes pensive). But that is a kind of barbarism too, the lack of a sense of self-preservation. We always say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. ‘We will show what Soviet heroism is!’ but then what about me? I don’t want to die either. I’m frightened. After Chernobyl, that happened automatically. We began learning to say ‘I’.”

I spent seven years after the Soviet collapse in 1991 living in Russia. Astonishing though her writing about that period is, in Second-Hand Time, the themes on the minds of the people she talks to in it are at least familiar. But I have never been to Chernobyl, and never been able to understand why some eccentric souls decided to go on living nearby after the nuclear plant’s reactor number 4 exploded in April 1986. I think I’d sweepingly, sneeringly assumed they must be village idiots or elderly simpletons who barely noticed that the land had emptied of all but odd-shaped animals. Alexievich took a more considered and humane view, from close up. Reading the book made me understand, from the heart as well as the head, and from many people’s points of view, and weep for them.

I almost never weep into books, especially not very large non-fiction books. This is my warmest possible recommendation. What she says is not just grandiose self-publicity - this woman really is a historian of the soul. You will be moved as well as informed. Read her books and see for yourself.

Interestingly, however, Russia’s literary establishment is horrified that Alexievich has won this international recognition.

The initial response from Moscow was vitriolic. ("Alexievich is a classic anti-Soviet ... a traitor," howled one critic in the cultural weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta; author Zakhar Prilepin wrote in Izvestiya that she had been chosen purely for opposing the Kremlin and was “not a writer”; President Putin kept quiet). This was not altogether surprising. Four times out of five in the million-dollar prize’s history, Nobels to Russians have been given to Kremlin enemies, from Ivan Bunin to Boris Pasternak to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Joseph Brodsky. Alexievich is not a woman to mince her words; one of her major themes is the abuse of power. Finally, even though she writes in Russian, she is not an insider on the Moscow literary scene, or even "properly" Russian, but a half-Belarusian, half-Ukrainian Slavic-little-sibling mashup. At a new low ebb for Russia’s relations with the West, after the outbreak of conflict around Ukraine, it was to be expected that Moscow would experience this award going to this woman at this time as a slap in the face.

She may agree. At the book event I attended, Alexievich was asked lots of questions about politics. She sidestepped them, kind of. She has said that the culture of the barricades is an intellectual distraction, and she must free herself of politics if she is to focus on her true calling, writing; yet a bit of her visibly enjoys the fight. She couldn’t quite stop phrases like “Putin’s craziness” dropping from her lips. I sensed that she was half-itching to roll up her sleeves and give battle.

There is a breed of these female intellectuals in the former Soviet world, ordinary-looking women strangely unafraid of telling truth to power. There is something in Alexievich of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist whose astonishing reports showed the human face of the war in Chechnya; Galina Starovoitova, the liberal politician of the Nineties; and the country’s doughty, unstoppable human rights activists, from Andrei Sakharov’s widow Yelena Bonner to Svetlana Gannushkina of Memorial. They don’t always make old bones. Politkovskaya was shot dead outside her front door in 2006, and Starovoitova in 1998. Their outspokenness is feared by many in their buttoned-down homeland. But they are also reverently respected, at least by a few.

I may be more of an armchair soldier myself, but that only makes me more reverent when I come across the truly heroic type. I hope Alexievich will make old bones. And I am eagerly awaiting her next book.

Vanora Bennett's website

I was having a bit of a discussion with my editor, Matrice, who is working on

A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

A Sterkarm Tryst.

She wanted to know what season of the year the book was set in, because my descriptions confused her. Sometimes she thought it sounded early in the year, and sometimes it sounded late.

It's set inlate summer, or early autumn, I said. Crops are almost ready for harvest but not quite yet. Some leaves are starting to turn, but there are still late flowers. Some berries are ripe, many still unripe.

This season was always a good time to fit in a bit of swift aggro. The fiercely cold winters of the 16th Century hadn't set in yet, and if you acted quickly, you could clobber your opponents during 'the hungry gap.'And perhaps be a little less hungry yourself.

The Hungry Gap fell around July or August and reminds us how seasonal life was in the past, and how much we've lost touch with that seasonality.

The harvest was gathered in roughly around the end of August and into September. Hay was made and grain was cut, threshed, stored. Fruit, nuts and mushrooms were gathered and stored. Throughout the summer, cows had been milked and the milk turned into butter and cheese for storing. Eggs were preserved.

It was expensive to keep animals alive through the winter - you had to shelter them and feed them. So most unwanted animals were sold earlier in the year, when they were young and, of the rest, only the best were kept alive. The rest were slaughtered around mid-October, and the meat smoked, salted or dried.

All the hard work was celebrated with a party - and most other big parties, such as weddings, were also held at this time of the year, because there was plenty of fresh food. You had a blow-out at Christmas, of course, to help everybody get through that cold, dark part of the year. And then you carefully tended what you had in store to get you through the rest of the year until the next harvest.

God bless the master of this house,

The mistress also.

And all the little childer that round the table goo -

God bless the house, the barn, the byre

The dog outside the door.

God bless what'er you have in store -

And give you ten times more!

The Soul-Cake Carol.

Smailholm Tower, wikipedia - click for credit

Households like the Bedesdale Tower in the Sterkarm books wouldn't have been small. 'Family' at the time was often understood to include servants as well as blood relatives, and the family living at the tower would have included men at arms, many maids, cattle men, kennel men, stable boys and so on. Most of them would have expected to be fed from the tower's stores as part of their wages. That's why the tower's yard is crowded with storehouses, the upper storeys of which serve as dormitories.

Every large farmhouse would have needed to feed a crowd every day, too. Imagine being the women who had to oversee those stores and manage them. That's why, from the Viking Age onwards, the sign of a woman in charge of a household was a large bunch of keys hanging at her waist - to keep those stores locked up!

The stores dwindled day by day with every meal served. That Christmas feast had to be planned. As the year turned into spring, the level of grain in the bins dropped. The cheeses and blocks of butter were eaten up. The barrels of salted meat and fish were emptied. The flitches of bacon were carved up.

By the time July was reached, there were far more empty barrels than full and people were heartily sick of dried, salted and smoked food - but nothing in the fields or hedges or woods was yet ripe.

People ate the first hawthorn leaves, calling them 'bread and cheese.'The harvest of fresh food must have been looked forward to so keenly.

Today, when we can nip out to the supermarket and buy fresh food regardless of the time of year, and keep bags of frozen (and almost fresh) food in our home-freezers, we have forgotten 'the hungry gap.' Imagine standing in a summer field - wheat or oats tall and waving, hedgerows thick with flowers and leaves, little garden brimming with greenery - and nothing ready to eat.

If the weather was poor and held back the harvest, then the wait was longer - and the food in store still went on dwindling, day by day. The gap in those years was wider and hungrier.

If you struck at your enemy at this time of year, burned and trampled the crops standing in their fields- burned or stole what they had left in store - burned their houses - then you ensured that they had a miserable, hungry winter ahead of them. 16th Century winters weren't like ours have been of late. At that time, the Thames was expected to freeze solid every year - and the Sterkarms live much further north, on the Scottish borders.

Matrice was not altogether convinced by my talk of the hungry gap - she's a good editor and it's her job to question. She said that her Irish ancestors didn't have a hungry gap because they planted relays of potatoes and other vegetables from early in the year, to take them through summer.

Yes, but the Sterkarms would never have seen a potato or heard of one. The historical parts of the books are set, roughly, about 1520. This is something like 200 years before potatos became a staple crop in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

And although improvements in technology and agriculture were being made, the developments that really changed things came later. The north country reivers didn't go in much for arable farming - they were, as their ancestors had been for centuries, practicers of 'transhumance.' That is, they were cattle-farmers who moved their animals between sheltered lowland pastures and higher meadows for summer grazing.

They grew oats for grain, because it was the only cereal that grew at all well so far north, and such fruit and vegetables as they had would have been much closer to the wild variety - or actually were the wild variety, gathered from woods, moors and hedgerows.

Some of my Scottish friends have doubted this since, for them, the 'Kingdom of Fife' is 'the UK's bread-basket' with its wide and beautiful fields of wheat. But Fife only became so productive of wheat after the agricultural revolution of the mid to late 1700s, when more intensive and scientific methods of farming were introduced, together with the development of hardier and/or more productive strains of wheat.

wikimedia: wild strawberry - click for credit

For instance, I have strawberries in my garden that ripen early in the
summer, and some that ripen in the autumn - but these are varieties that have been bred by intensive modern agriculture. The Sterkarms' strawberries would have been wild ones. They flower, fruit - and that's your lot until next year. Wild strawberries are doing it for themselves, not for us.

It reminds me of my beautiful dog-rose, which has a brief burst of flowers every year. They last about three weeks and then - no matter how much I dead-head - they're gone. Everything about life in the past must have had the same aching transience - Come and kiss me, Sweet and Twenty, Youth's a thing will not endure!

Their warm, light summers were brief and followed by a long, dark and grindingly cold winter, in dwellings which were hard to keep warm. How they must have longed, even more than us, for spring and summer, and how they must have tried to enjoy every warm day - every snowdrop, every violet, every hedge rose.

Wild rose, wikipedia - click for credit

For the Sterkarms, after the relief and joy of harvest, would have come October, November, December, January, February... with the weather becoming more flesh-nippingly cold all the time.

Then April, May - things are beginning to leaf and flower, but there's still nothing much you can eat.

Then June, July - it's warmer and lighter, but still nothing's ripe - and your stores are running very, very low. August must have been torture! Everything visibly ripening but still not quite there.

And this was in a good year. In the modern West, we don't know how lucky we are.

(Many thanks to Susan Price, one of our History Girls Reserves, for this post. Katherine Langrish will be back next month)

I would like to introduce a new category - Honorary (Dead) History Girls. And to start the ball rolling, I'd like to nominate four (I know, it's a bit greedy, but it's not as if we'll ever have to find chairs for them all) - four writers of historical fiction who have loomed large in my life and my understanding of and delight in the past. They are also writers I revisit and re-enjoy - that could be a criterion.

And here they are, my nominations for H(D)HG - in no particular order. (I'd thought to put them alphabetically, but with three of them sporting so many names, it just wasn't possible.)

1. Edith Pargeter aka Ellis Peters aka John Redfern aka Joylon Carr aka Peter Benedict (1913-1995)

(image from Mysterious Press site)

2. Barbara Mertz aka Elizabeth Peters aka Barbara Michaels (1927 - 2013)

(image from Amelia Peabody website)

3. Rosemary Sutcliff (1920 - 1992)

(image from Rosemary Sutcliff blog)

4. Eileen Mary Challans aka Mary Renault (1905 - 1983)

(image from Wikipedia site)

What do you think? Any seconders? And who would you nominate as Honorary (Dead) History Girl(s)?

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Regular readers of this blog will probably be familiar with Louise Michel, teacher, poet and revolutionary heroine of the 1871 Paris Commune, but she’s not exactly a well-known figure in the English-speaking world. Yet. If The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia, the new graphic biography by Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot, has anything like the success of their remarkable first collaboration, Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes – and it certainly deserves to – this could be about to change.

Michel is hardly obscure. In fact she’s legendary. She’s iconic. In France (and indeed New Caledonia) there have been schools and streets and squares named after her, not to mention two International Brigade battalions and a Metro station. She romanticised her own life in her memoirs, and has been mythologised ever since. She was a saint, but a trying one, as an imagined contemporary in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia admits. By embedding her biography within not one but two other narratives, the Talbots subtly acknowledge all this and simultaneously reframe Michel in an entirely new way. She emerges as an inspiring if imperfect visionary, whose utopian dreams and desires for a more perfect world might actually, by implication, be one day within our reach.

I won’t give away its surprising outer envelope, but the main story begins with Michel’s death, and the arrival of her coffin at the Gare de Lyon in Paris on January 22nd 1905. Michel’s formidable face is framed by a wreath of red carnations, but she’s not named, and the reader is left to work out why crowds are gathering, and red flags flying. As the cortège leaves the station, in a scene which manages to look both forwards and back to the proclamation of the Commune at the Hôtel de Ville on March 26th 1871, we see a young woman holding up a sign for Mrs Charlotte Perkins Gilman. America’s famous feminist is on a European lecture tour. Michel’s story will emerge in conversation between Gilman and Monique, the daughter of fellow revolutionary who stood on the barricades with Michel. A little later, the unnamed one-eyed Communarde joins them.

The double narrative hinges on an imagined meeting in London. As far as I’m aware, Gilman only once encountered Michel and her fellow anarchists, Kropotkin and Reclus (‘desperately earnest souls’), at the alternative meeting arranged in London 1896 after the anarchists had been banned from the International Socialist and Labour Congress. She was impatient with what she perceived as the weakness of the anarchists’ philosophy. In the Talbots’ version, Gilman, who will eventually write Herland, instead recalls a delightful evening spent with Michel around that time discussing their shared obsession with utopian novels. (‘She was full of fantastical ideas.’) Monique and Gilman reflect on fiction’s potential as ‘food for the mind’, and sci-fi becomes a creative lens through which The Red Virgin can view the life of a nineteenth-century political radical.

In an otherwise almost exclusively black-and-white visual narrative, splashes of red link flowers, flags, banners, scarves, pens, books, and a giant octopus. There are a few other significant shifts in colour. The sky turns rosy at the pivotal moment on March 18th when the French government sent the regular army soldiers to steal Montmartre’s canon from the city militia, the National Guard. Later, in two wordless images, a missile hits a cherry tree: chassepot on her shoulder, Michel looks up through an explosion of pink blossom. Here the Talbots exquisitely evoke the hope and destruction of the ‘temps des cerises’, and also Michel’s ‘curious aesthetic’ – a slightly disturbing capacity to see beauty in bombs, to be enchanted by revolutionary destruction.

red_virgin_mary_bryan_talbot_cape_02-628x716

The graphic format lends itself particularly well to interacting narratives: hard white frames seperate the Gilman/Monique conversation from the soft blurred edges of the story it narrates. But when it comes to the massacre in Paris that followed the invasion of the Versailles army – the paving stones ran with blood as the city burned – all borders vanish. The horror can’t be contained. A fog of ash descends like snow, and the flies gather over thousands of lime-sprinkled stinking corpses.

The Commune only lasted 72 days, and rightly takes up about half of this book. Naturally I’d hoped the rest would take in a little more of Michel’s life in London, including perhaps her school in Fitzrovia, and her houseful of cats, but tight selection is precisely the art of a biography like this. The sequence depicting Michel’s deportation to New Caledonia and her support of the indigenous Melanesians’ revolution more than compensates. It cleverly reveals the double-standards and blindspots not only of her fellow Communards-in-exile but also Charlotte Perkins Gilman, showing just how unusual Louise Michel was in her empathy for all the oppressed of this earth, regardless of race, class or gender. She was equally zealous in her attention to needy animals.

Published on the 400th anniversary of More’ Utopia, this book both simplifies and complicates the story of the Commune and its thinkers and activists; it does so beautifully, by putting the imagination centre stage, and looking at the past with an eye always on the future.

red_virgin_mary_bryan_talbot_cape_01-628x892

The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot was published by Jonathan Cape last month. This review was first published on my own website: www.lydiasyson.com. More Paris Commune reading recommendations here.

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