The History Girls

It’s the writer’s equivalent of the dress you can’t quite fit into - but, if you lose a few pounds, then maybe . . . Every author has that back-of-the-wardrobe box of unwritten stories; the ones you can’t quite bear to throw away. But we’re always being urged to de-junk our lives, aren’t we?

So let’s accept this is one historical novel I will never write - I would have called it The Valois Bride. Good title, do we think? A bit old fashioned, maybe?

Elisabeth de Valois

In December 1559, the 14 year old Elizabeth de Valois arrived on the Spanish frontier to marry King Philip II of Spain – a man twenty years her senior, and twice a widower already. We all know a version of the story from Verdi’s opera Don Carlos, itself based on Schiller’s play - though some of us (forgive me) remember it better from Jilly Cooper’s novel Score!. That set Cooper’s trademark Rutshire rumpy-pumpy against the shooting of a film version of the opera; and its trick of making the Spanish royals into Britain’s present day royal family - and the Inquisition into the tabloid press - worked rather well, actually.

There is no historical truth in Verdi’s fantasy of Philip’s son Don Carlos’ spying out the wedding party on their way to Spain, and there falling in love with the French princess destined to become not his bride, but his stepmother. Of Elizabeth choosing duty over love to make peace between their countries . . . Though she would called Isabel ‘de la Paz’, actually. And it’s true Elizabeth had originally been destined for the son rather than the father but, hey, that was tame, by the standards of the royal marriages of the sixteenth century.

Verdi's Don Carlos

But the real Elizabeth seemed more than content with a husband who was after all in a worldly sense the catch of the century, while Philip’s son and heir would soon be spiralling downwards into his brutal madness. The teenage bride awoke a response in her dour husband, and the extravagant chit who never worse the same dress twice was nonetheless allowed, just six years later, to represent Spain in official negotiations with her own formidable mother, Catherine de Medici.

Philip goes down in English history as a dutiful but essentially uncaring husband to his previous wife Mary Tudor, but when Elizabeth was giving birth, he sat by her bed clutching her hand through every pain. When Don Carlos died in 1568, incarcerated and insane, Elizabeth wept for two days, but ten weeks later she herself was dead from another childbearing, still only 23.

She was survived not only by Philip, but by two other women whose voices I might have used to tell her story. One of them was the Italian painter Sofonisba Anguissola, invited to Spain by Philip and given rank as a lady of Elizabeth’s court. The other was the Princess of Eboli, with her beauty and her patch over one eye. In Verdi’s version, she is Philip’s mistress and an arch manipulator. In real life she was a schemer indeed - widow to Philip’s first great minister, Ruy Gomez (more than twenty years older than she), whose intrigues only mounted after his death - but one who loved and mourned Elizabeth sincerely. Her involvement in a scandalous political murder saw her spending the last ten years of her life under house arrest in one of her castles from where, looking back (yes, cue a time-honoured writer’s device here!), she had no doubt her memories.

Sofonisba Anguissola self-portrait

So why won’t I ever write it? One reason is, I don’t know enough. My limited experience of writing historical fiction (and my far larger experience of writing historical fact) has shown me that the former is more demanding, in many ways. You don’t just need to know the great political events against which the character is placed - you need to know what someone of that age and rank, in that day, would have done when they go out of bed each morning. The sixteenth century court equivalent of switching off the radio and shoving a piece of bread in the toaster . . . And I don’t, for sixteenth century Spain, quite simply.

Could I research it? Maybe - though factual information on that kind of detail can be quite hard to come by. And the trouble is that with Spain, I don’t even have a gut feeling for the rhythm of the seasons or the way the light falls on the landscape - the things that don’t change through the centuries. Research might hack it, for a story set in England, or any country I know well. But I suspect the research would lie dead on the page if I were to write about a place still truly foreign to me.

The other reason is that I know too much. The real Elizabeth is making a very minor - but her mother Catherine de Medici a major - appearance in the non-fiction I’m currently writing: Game of Queens, about the chains of women and power running, from mother to daughter through the sixteenth century.

Catherine de' Medici

So I know about the stream of self-revelatory letters Catherine sent across the border to and about her daughter in Spain: I know that the last of them, a maternal warning as to what should be done about her daughter’s increasing weight, arrived only after Elizabeth’s death. I know that when the two met for that summit meeting, as queen regent of France and queen consort of Spain, Elizabeth would have felt the tug of loyalties known to so many a princess, between her natal and her marital country. ‘How Spanish you have become, my daughter’, said Catherine to Elizabeth, coldly.

I know that as a child in France, Elizabeth was set to sleep in the same room as that other little girl newly arrived at court - her future sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots. I’ve read the letters Mary wrote after Elizabeth’s death - distraught not just by the death of her old playfellow, but by the loss of a possible ally, who might have persuaded King Philip to help the Scots queen in her long English captivity.

Of course I’d love to explore these things further - but I’m not sure fiction is the way, for me. Of course anyone who were writing a Valois Bride would have read up on all this and much, much more - but I’m not sure I’d be able to get past the huge rock of facts I’m still discovering, to let the fiction fly free.

Though mind you, the madness of the historical Don Carlos did in the end lead him to an obsessive crush on his step-mother . . . Hmm. Maybe I was a bit quick to jettison this one, actually.

Thanks to Sarah Gristwood for this post. Carol Drinkwater will be back on 26th September.

This month I offer readers tips on how to get fit, ready for all that calorie-burning reading of history books that you plan to do this autumn. At the end of August you are tired from your holidays. You need to get your mind and body ready, but slowly and gently. Back in the 1980s Jane Fonda put us all to shame with her 'Feel the Burn' exercises. Now, with my patent Hampton History Hammock system, we can all stay fit, practice history and keep cool.

This Swedish lady by artist Anders Leonhard Zorn fell asleep in 1882 .
Will she wake in time for her History Exercise?

The hammock is a historic device, designed for people of all ages, shapes and temperaments. A hammock cradles and supports the back, neck and especially the brain. Hammocks help to relieve stress brought on by computers, stacking dishwashers and taking holidays.

Choosing the right hammock is crucial: it must be long enough to lie straight out in, and wide enough not to fall over the edge. Cotton hammocks are better than netting, which allows bits of your body to bulge through, leaving strange patterns on exposed areas. If the cotton is organic you will also feel smug, which probably increases your intelligence too.

Attach your hammock to one or two strong trees. It should hang no more than 4 inches above the ground at the lowest point, when you are in it. This ensures that should it collapse, you don’t have far to fall. If you don’t have any trees, do not attach to a wall without a full survey – walls are inclined to bury people alive.

Always lie in the hammock in the direction that gives the best view. This should be away from guilt-inducing objects like the washing line, the shed with the lawn mower or your study with that half-read book waiting in it.

Before you start, place beside your hammock:
A book, quite a heavy one with very long words printed in small type.
A glass of iced water.
Optional bowl of strawberries.

Now for some action: Sit in hammock with legs together outside. Lift legs up and into hammock, and out again, keeping legs together. Do this once or twice, ending with both legs in the hammock. Try and remember the date of the Norman Invasion. Don't try too hard. And, rest.

This lady in a hammock painted by James Tissot in 1879 had the right idea.
She is in the middle of the first exercise. Image courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library.

Warm up exercise: Lie down and feel every bit of your body go floppy. Think beautiful thoughts as you watch the clouds. Can you see an old man emerging? Does this remind you of the date of Napoleon's death? And, rest.

Oblique tummy stretch and underarm flattener: Keeping your legs straight, lean forward and touch your toes. If you can’t reach your toes, just wave at them, and say 'Hello'. Lift your arms up straight, and move them back over your head.
Do this a few times quite slowly. Or just do it once. Think of a number. Is it the same number as Henry VIII had wives? And, rest.

Knee and bottom toner: Lift one bent leg and then the other leg up slowly. Pull back towards your head. Stop the moment it might hurt. Imagine you are a horse accompanying a Crusader. And, rest.

Waist curl trimmer: Pull knees up, and rock them from side to side. Roughly when was canned food first eaten? And, rest.

Groin and inner thigh strengthener: Bend knees. Pull legs up together, and then flop them apart. Wave your knees apart and together very slowly. Who first used chloroform during childbirth? And, rest.

This young lady has not read the instructions –
the Hampton History Hammock system
must always be carried out on your own. No man may help you.

Beating gravity with triceps stretch: Lift arms in the air and try to pull yourself up by grabbing the air with your hands. Admire the pretty patterns that the leaves make in the tree above you. What year was an aeroplane first flown solo across the Atlantic? And, rest.

Nutritional exercise for energy boost: Without moving your body, allow arms to flop out of hammock. Wave them about until you make contact with the strawberries. Lift bowl of strawberries up and place on stomach. Now exercise your fingers: lift one strawberry at a time and place in mouth. Work those jaw muscles hard until the strawberry has disappeared. Repeat until bowl is empty. Think about the date when South American strawberries were first eaten in Europe. And, digest.

This Wife of a British Colonial Officer should not have made these men carry her while she exercises. She should remain in one place, with her hammock attached to two trees.

Improved toner control for hamstring and bottom: Raise your legs in the air, and over your head, and touch the hammock behind you with your toes. Do this backwards and forward, very slowly. Or don't do it at all. Think of a year when Brazil won the World Cup. Just one will do. And, rest.

Warm-down exercise or biceps curl: Now lean out of the hammock and pick up your book. With bent arms, lift the book above your head and close your eyes. How many books are in the British Library? Lower your arms, and open your eyes. Lean out of the hammock, and place book on the ground. And, rest. And rest again.

Advanced cool-down exercise: Swing legs out of hammock and place feet either side of glass of water. Grasp glass firmly with both feet and lift back into hammock, tip glass towards face. Which year did Captain Scott reach the Antarctic? And, rest.

Final exercise to boost your will power: Get out of hammock, and return indoors. This requires considerable determination and commitment. It may take at least an hour to achieve and become more difficult with each Hampton History Hammock session.

In case of rain – do all exercises in your swimming costume.

Only do each exercise for as long as you feel like, and do not exceed 30 seconds. All these exercises require a positive attitude. Be persistent and you will succeed, possibly in time for the autumn.

To ensure success, make a graph showing how relaxed you have become. You can waste even more time by keeping a diary about your time spent in the hammock. Then, in 100 years your great grand-daughters can publish it.

This luscious lady in pink by Irish painter John Lavery certainly knows how to relax.
She may even be learning some history at the same time.

Answer to questions: 1832; 8; 1810; Queen Victoria; 1927; 1714; 1958,1962, 1970, 1994 & 2002; 150 million; 1912.

Janie Hampton will demonstrate the Hampton History Hammock system of exercises on alternate Mondays, by appointment.

Sometimes when I am asked what I write I say: ‘I write about people who get themselves into difficult situations and, by and large, get themselves out of them again.’ That usually gets a positive reaction. If, however, I say ‘I write social history about the Second World War and especially women on the Home Front’ people’s eyes tend to glaze over and they move to another part of the room. Same books, different packaging.

So today I thought I would share a little bit of what I do and why. I write because I love it. I can’t think of anything else I would rather be than a writer. I’ve always wanted to write, ever since I was a little girl. I used to make up stories and tell them to my toys and later to my friends. I even used to write stories for my boyfriend in airmail letters when I was living in Vienna and he in London. We’ve now been married for 29 years, so the stories can’t have been too bad.

However, in the end I wanted to write about real people, not ones I had made up in my head. I find that the lives people lead are fascinating. There is no such thing as a typical person or a ‘normal’ reaction and that is what began to interest me. I was working in the art world but found myself more drawn to the artists themselves than to their work. I wanted to know what made them tick. I remember interviewing the sculptor Anthony Caro and his wife, the painter Sheila Girling, about their lives together as artists. Tony told me that it was Sheila who chose the colours for his early sculptures because she had a better eye for colour than he did. I was tickled pink by that, especially as no one had ever interviewed them together before, so the question was not one he had been asked. I like titbits like that. They are just a little quirky.

Anthony Caro's Early One Morning 1962

When I am interviewing people for my non-fiction books I don’t use any type of recording device because that can be off-putting. I just ask questions and take notes. The interviews generally last about 45 minutes to an hour and in that time I get perhaps three or four sentences I can use, but those are usually gems. For example, I was talking to a lady called Jean Hammond whose story is told in Stranger in the House. Her father was in a German POW camp and when he came home, she told me, they never ate a meal indoors. They sat in the garden or, when it was raining or snowing, under the porch wrapped in blankets. She said it in a matter-of-fact way as if that was perfectly normal. But it was a new one on me. I asked her why and she said she never knew. She imagined it had something to do with his POW experience but as she was a child when he came back she just accepted it.

Jean Hammond with her two grandmothers c. 1940

In researching and writing Jambusters I constantly found women replying to my request for interviews with ‘oh, I won’t have anything interesting to tell you.’ When someone says that my ears prick up and I think: ‘oh, you don’t, do you? Well I think you’re wrong…’ And more often than not they tell me some glorious detail. A woman in an Oxfordshire WI remembered her father coming into the kitchen where members of the Produce Group were making vast quantities of jam. One of the ladies was complaining that she was wasting precious jam as she could not get every last drop from the bottom. So he took a wooden spoon outside to his tool shed and half an hour later returned with a spoon that had a flat side and a sharp point. This was ideal for scraping the jam off the bottom of the pan and everyone was delighted with the design. Needless to say it was copied. I find other gems in diaries, memoirs and in odd collections of notes in the Imperial War Museum archives. It was there that I found Mr Fagg, who worked in the Board of Trade in the war, supervising coupons and taking responsibility for the width of the gusset of women’s knickers, the amount of metal in over-sized corsets and the length of men’s socks. You literally couldn’t make it up. He is one of the key players in Fashion on the Ration.

William Buller Fagg in his Home Guard uniform

I also found one of my favourite facts of all time at the IWM. Lord Nuffield, the great car maker and generous philanthropist, supplied all the women’s services with sanitary towels for the entire Second World War. These things were new-fangled and very expensive and he knew the young women in the services would not be able to afford them or indeed get guaranteed supplies. It was an act of immense generosity and far-sightedness on his part and no one knows about it. Except you do now! They were known as Nuffield’s Nifties. Writing women’s history is not always easy. There are a few of us who do it: Jane Robinson, Janie Hampton and Midge Gilles to name three I know well. We sometimes find it hard to get taken seriously by male historians who write about grave matters like tanks and planes and battles and generals with handlebar moustaches. In a list of the top 50 historians published last year there were just four women and of those I was the only one who writes about women.

Women are at the heart of my next book, too, but this one contains explosions and secret codes, radio operators and stealth. I wonder how that will be received?

Our August guest is Fay Bound Alberti, who with join us next year as a History Girl, posting on the 15th of the month, alternating with Marie-Louise Jensen after Y.S. Lee leaves us in November.

About Fay

Dr Fay Bound Alberti is a writer and historian specializing in Britain and Europe, 1500-1950. She has published widely on the histories of medicine and science, gender, the body and emotions. Dr Bound Alberti co-founded the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary College, University of Londonwhere she remains Honorary Senior Research Fellow. Other areas of interest include early modern illness and disease, the history and ethics of cosmetic surgery, the relationship between mind and body and gender politics – now and in the past. Fay’s most recent book is This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016)

I’ve always been interested in the body, and how we talk about it. When I was eight my mother explained to my brother how they had been connected in her womb through their combined umbilical cords: ‘mine attached to yours’, she said, which didn’t sound quite right to me. I could sense the determination in her words though, the sense of ownership involved in explaining their physical bond. At secondary school my sex education lessons, brutally indifferent to feelings, resolved that physical conundrum, but not the sense of wonder by which we – wriggling in embarrassment on high wooden stools – tried to imagine what lurked beneath our skin. At university, I learned how long men and women had been trying to understand the human body; to account for the gift of life as well as the those ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ (Hamlet, III, I, 1755) To this end Shakespeare was our ‘contemporary,’ at least according to Jan Kott; his characters experiencing their physical and emotional worlds as dramatically as we do.

18^th century allegorical depictions of the temperaments formed by the four humours: melancholicus. By: J. D. Nessenthaler. Credit: Wellcome Library.

But there’s the rub. We experience the world differently from Hamlet. Our bodies are not viewed the same today as they were in Shakespeare’s time. Across seventeenth-century Europe came the arrival of tools like the microscope by which people could know the workings of the body through the only sense that came to matter: sight. The four humours that had explained health, disease and even personality for thousands of years fell from grace, though humoral treatments like ‘bleeding’ continued into the nineteenth century. The ‘mortal coil’ described by Hamlet, the political and social world we inhabit, was also transformed – the rise of democracy and secularism in the West and the end of the ‘great chain of being’ (a hierarchy that kept us all in check) giving rise to individualism and the modern, introspective self. Today it is the brain, not the heart, that is the centre of our feelings, memories and identities, though the symbolism of the heart survives.

Valentine Card, 1928. Credit: Wellcome Library.

How did the brain come to dominate? Here as elsewhere, philosophical change accompanied technological and scientific change. The French philosopher René Descartes moved the soul from the heart, which had recently been confirmed as a pump by the English physician William Harvey, to the pineal gland, located behind the eyebrows. Mind and body were torn asunder; in time, ‘mind’ (which once described soul), simply meant brain. From the nineteenth century, scientific medicine gave rise to new ways of viewing the body through measurement and comparison. New norms were created. Gender and racial differences were etched into the fabric of our bodies – into the shape of our skulls, the structure of our skeletons, the thickness of our skins. Scientific medicine provided new rules to follow, new versions of the truth that were not driven by the imagination, folklore or symbols. But like any other narrative, it was a product of its time, creating stories that rationalised racism and sexism.

Descartes: The Nervous System. Diagram of the brain and the pineal gland. From De Homine (1662). Credit: Wellcome Library.

Through a series of case studies into the history and meanings of the skin, fatness, the female breasts and genitals, the tongue and the skeleton, This Mortal Coil considers how we have invested each of our body parts with meanings that reveal the needs of culture, politics and society. Thus seventeenth-century women’s tongues were so dangerous in an age of political uncertainty that the ‘scold’s bridle’ was needed to keep them in check. From the nineteenth century, when the industrial age privileged efficiency, being ‘fat’ represented waste and inefficiency, heaping moral outrage on the (increasingly lower-class) obese. In the 1950s the possession of small breasts was redefined as a psychiatric problem, easily fixed by a new type of medical practitioner: the cosmetic surgeon. Today the threat of the female genitals, a source of terrifying power for Shakespeare as for Freud, is contained by language: how much safer is it to see the vagina as a ‘birth canal’ rather than a source of untamed physical pleasure?

Belgian Iron bridle that fitted over the head of a woman sentenced for being a ‘scold’.

Portrait of Leicester jail keeper Daniel Lambert, (1770 –1809), once the fattest man in Britain and celebrated (not shamed) for his size. Credit: Wellcome Library.

Transparent, jelly-filled breast implant. Credit: Wellcome Library.

Metaphors matter because they shape our worlds, whether depicting the brain as a computer or the pubic hair as a lady garden. Illness is a battle we fight against invaders: we win or we lose, we live or we die. In conventional medicine we are divisible into separate systems and organs. There is no soul or immaterial essence. Yet many of us still believe in one. The heart might be a pump that beats 120,000 times a day, sending blood, nutrients and oxygen around the body. But some people maintain heart transplants move more than an organ, transferring the personality, habits and memoriesof the donors. Today the separation of mind and body suggests we can take control of our physical shell, disciplining it through exercise or cosmetic surgery in search of that perfect ideal. We regard our bodies objectively, as though distinct from the self that lives in our brains. Yet the incidence of mental illness is increasing. As is the demand for whole-body treatment. We are arguably more dis-eased about our bodies than ever before.

Ultimately, This Mortal Coil explores the stories we tell about the body. It does not demonise modern medicine. Nor does it suggest that we were all better off when we lived, like my mother, in a pre-modern world of imagination where we could each lay claim to our bodies without the intervention of science. But this book does ask whether the decline of holistic views of the body, that saw our minds, bodies and emotional worlds as part of a functioning, social whole, has done us a disservice. For surely we are more than the sum of our parts.

Fay Bound Alberti This Mortal Coil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

My chosen item for the cabinet of curiosities is perhaps not such an usual choice for a writer as it is a book, in this case a 1933 edition of the Arthur Rackham Fairy Book. It probably ranks as my prize possession and the first thing I would grab if we ever got hit by a fire - or more likely a flood given I live in Glasgow.

Arthur Rackham Fairy Book

Firstly apologies for the photograph: the copy has been well-loved and its once white cover and gold lettering have faded badly; it also bears more than one set of grubby fingerprints. I'm glad of that - it is clearly no museum-piece and I hope it passed through many happy hands before landing, very recently, in mine.

Arthur Rackham was the leading illustrator in what was known as the 'Golden Age' of British book illustration which ran from roughly 1890-1914. He is particularly known for his fairy drawings with his most famous works including Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1908) and the posthumous Wind in the Willows (1940). He began his illustrating career in 1893 and was widely exhibited and bought in his lifetime. After 1918 the market for lavishly-illustrated books collapsed in Britain but Rackham's work is once again in vogue and editions of his work are highly collectible (and frighteningly expensive).

Titania

I first came across his work when I was an impoverished student taking my over-active imagination and empty purse fantasy shopping in antique book shops. I fell in love with his fairies: they were mischievous, wicked and strong - no soppy Victorian fluff here. I was no artist (I learnt to appreciate his technique, which combined woodcut-style work with advances in colour-printing, much later) but I was entranced by the mix of pen and ink drawings, watercolours and line sketches he sprinkled liberally through the stories. I also loved his women - I once played Mustard Seed (as a silver-clad scouse punk, as you do) in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream and the director took his inspiration for Titania from the Rackham depiction of her striding away, chaos in her wake. It's still one of my favourite pictures and hangs in my study.

Signature

So why is this edition special? It is hard to get complete original editions of Rackham's work anymore - most of them seem to have been dissected to feed the antique stalls in Portobello Market - so owning a copy of one at all is pretty good. But this is no ordinary edition, it has been signed by the great man himself. There is something about a signed copy of a book that makes it intensely personal. As a writer, being asked to sign your novel is incredibly flattering - a real rock star moment. To be honest, I'm at the stage where I'll sign them whether people ask me to or not. So to own a book signed by someone whose work I've loved for years is thrilling and, with a book that has clearly been so well-loved, it is hard not to weave stories round it. There is a pink smudge across the signature which I rather hope belongs to the Pamela Taylor who this edition was presented to in 1935. It looks suspiciously like lipstick and I want to imagine she was so excited, she kissed it. Which, I'm not ashamed to say, was what I did - I was probably meant to kiss the husband who was responsible for the gift, but he didn't seem to mind.

Self-portrait

The stories are wonderful, a mixture of traditional English and French fairy tales and the Arabian Nights, but it is the illustrations that make me go back to this book over and over again. They are witty and beautiful with just the right amount of edginess, the perfect Rackham mix and extend even to his 'self-portrait'. I love the work but I am also increasingly intrigued by the man. A little like our own Glasgow artistic hero, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret MacDonald, it seems marriage had quite an influence on Rackham's work. In 1903 he married the portrait painter Edyth Starkie who he apparently regarded as his most stimulating, if severest, critic. I fell in love with her most famous painting (The Spotted Dress) in the Musee D'Orsay without having any clue about their relationship until very recently. When you know the link, it's hard not to see a connection between their work and it's certainly something I hope to explore at some point in far more detail. My cabinet choice continues to feed my curiosity - now I've just got to find a way to pay for what could prove a costly addiction...

To win a copy of Fay Bound Alberti's book This Mortal Coil, just answer the following question in the comments and then send a copy of your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

"Do you have a soul? If so, where is it?"

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I'm a sucker for palaces. And castles. Forts, fortresses, towers, anything with crenellations, machicolations, battlements, arrow-slits, moats and portcullises. It's one of the great advantages of being a European that you don't have to travel very far without being in reach of one of these edifices.

As it happens, I was holidaying on the island of Rhodes this summer, so I course, I had to visit the Palace of the Grand Master in Rhodes Old Town. It was the second time I had been there but it was still a shock to be reminded just how big it is and how massive its walls.

Credit: Bernard Gagnon, Creative Commons

Rhodes Old Town is a medieval walled city and the Palace takes up about a third of it. In that respect, it's a bit like Carcassonne in the Languedoc, with its chateau comtal at the heart of it. It resembles it in one other aspect: the repairs done to it over the years, particularly the most recent one in the late 1930s when the palace became a holiday home first for King Victor Emmanuel lll of Italy and then the Dictator Benito Mussolini.

Much as I love castles, there is a line which is easily crossed into Disneyfication and what Eugène Viollet-le-Duc did to Carcassonne in the mid nineteenth century teeters awkwardly on it. But Vittorio Mesturini, the Italian architect who worked on the Palace of the Grand Master, didn't go too far.

Credit: Sailko, Creative Commons

Here is the massy entrance, the towers exhibiting both crenellations AND machicolations! The palace was first built in the late 7th century, as a Byzantine citadel.(The city had been there since four centuries before Christ). It's in the north-west of the city, overlooking the little harbour of Mandraki, with its ship-building yards that endured till the end of the 20th century.

Five hundred years after it was built, the Knights Hospitaller took over Rhodes and some other Greek Islands and wasn't long before they decided that the citadel of Rhodes would make an ideal headquarters (and who could blame them?).

Photo: author's own

It's built on the highest point of the island's north west region and makes an excellent fortified fastness. Then, as now, the area south of the citadel and between it and the outer walls was full of winding, narrow streets, where goods of all kind were sold. There were also gardens, workshops, warehouses, taverns and a market square. Orthodox and Catholic churches were scattered throughout the town.

The Knights Hospitallers captured the island in 1309 and remained in charge till Rhodes fell to the Ottomans (Turks) in 1522. They were the knights of Saint John of Jerusalem. They were the seemingly oxymoronic "religious-military Order" that had been going for about two hundred years before they became dominant in the Dodecanese.

It seems to have been founded by a man called Pierre Gerard in Jerusalem and named for John the Baptist. At the beginning, they were just Hospitallers and it was his successor, Raymond de Puys, who organised it into a miitary body. (They are not to be confused with the Knights Templar, beloved of Dan Brown and his followers - 377K of them on Twitter).

The Order was divided into three: knights, who were nobles; chaplains, who were priests and sergeants, who were the sons of free men. Grand Masters were always chosen from among the knights; he held the post for life.

Credit: Piotrus, Creative Commons

The vast palace is arranged in a rectangle around a courtyard. Then were ten silos of grain sunk into the courtyard. Three are left, with well heads on top of them. The upper storey of the building bears no relation to anything that was there before 1937. This is what the Great Hall looks like inside Now:

Credit: Szilas, Creative Commons

And this is one of the fabulous mosaic floors, with the head of the Medusa, from Kos:

Credit: Wimpearl, Creative Commons

And a lovely leopard:

Credit: Sailko, Creative Commons

Do tell us your favourite castle or palace in the Comments.

On a recent rummage through one of my research notebooks post-publication – looking for material for blog posts that a publicist needed me to write – my curiosity was aroused by the pieces of information that I had decided ultimately to reject while I was writing my new novel, The Revelations of Carey Ravine. There are so many discoveries that appear plump with potential as the writing process gets under way – Yes! How fascinating! I can really use this charming factoid! – but, of course, the remorselessly directional nature of a plot forces you to discard a good number of these historical gems.

It interests me though that one of the skills of being a historical novelist, a particular skill, in fact, lies in learning to negotiate forests of research. It is all too easy to stray from the trail – and yet, also, you know that sometimes you ought to stray. We’ve all wandered spontaneously into shady avenues of investigation that have ended in unexpectedly rich pickings, the kind that make a story shine; but it’s really such an art, I think, to know when to respond to a come-hither historical fact, some alluring little footnote in an unpublished thesis, say, and when to walk on by.

It’s not difficult when the research is essential to the topic. When I was writing long sequences of action aboard a smuggler’s cutter in my previous novel, Turning the Stones, I needed to know everything about that kind of vessel. There was hardly a detail that was not relevant. The same was true of the novel's descriptions of a family of kelp-makers in 18th-century Ireland.

Gathering kelp in Connemara. Photograph Philip G. Hunt c.1910

When the mise-en-scene is very particular, it is not hard to maintain focus in terms of research, but when I’m working on a broader canvas, that’s when I often find myself spoiled for choice and the what-if nuggets of historical info cause me to vacillate.

The 4th Earl of Sandwich in Istanbul.
Joseph Highmore c.1740

Take the Divan Club in St James’s Street (1744-46), for instance, a dining club founded by the Earl of Sandwich for gentlemen inclined to the exotic. It caught my attention, while I was on my way to an understanding of the rules of hazard – which are damnably confusing, I can tell you. But look, hazard be hanged, someone has written a fascinating article about the Divan Club. Perhaps a great deal of hazard was played there, in which case it would hardly be a diversion at all for me to look into it. But should I go there? Is the Divan a dead end – or could it turn out to be a productive lead? A valuable scene-enhancer? I admit I lingered there, on its silken couches, for far too long.

Most of the time, on a first draft, at least, I don’t know if I am about to plunge into a rabbit hole or a goldmine when an Interesting Fact pops up its winsome head in the course of research. (I don't mean a rabbit hole in the Carrollian sense – I speak of Google and its portals to distraction, or any bibliography or tasty-sounding citation.) I remember one day in the British Library falling under the spell of a lengthy 18th-century pamphlet on managing pests in filberts, and the nut gall mite in particular. As I read through this text, which was set in a squint-inducing broken font, it seemed to make increasing sense to me to abandon the idea I had been researching – that of a Huguenot market garden in Bethnal Green – and devise something completely different. A country house in Suffolk, perhaps. Sans Huguenots. With a grove of horribly compromised filberts lurking in its grounds. I went filbert-mad for at least twenty-four hours, before coming to my senses and returning to my original perfectly sound market garden in Bethnal Green. But not before investing way too much time on something that I really did not need to know.

Here are a few of the captivating possibilities that I did manage to resist, despite having introduced them to my notebooks with rafts of urgent underlining. They had little to do with what I was writing, but they so easily could have…

Protective Signs

I was poking around Rainham Hall in Essex a couple of years ago, when I came across a protective sign – a witch’s sign, they are sometimes called – on the wall of the back stairs that were once used by the Hall's servants. It is a device of raised plaster, so placed that you almost cannot avoid touching it as you put a hand on the wall just beside the door jamb to steady yourself, before mounting the narrow stairs.

The vestibule of Rainham Hall, Essex.
Built in 1729 for Capt. John Harle

It was too dark in that space to make out the
details of the sign, save that it was circular. Perhaps it was a 'daisywheel', a symbol sometimes carved or plastered in out-of-the-way places like rafters or door lintels as a general protection against ill-fortune or supernatural forces. Had I descended into the world of protective symbols and spirit traps in ancient houses, I would have ended up writing an entirely different novel.

Shorthand

During the mid-18th century, Eliza Fay, an adventurer, businesswoman, correspondent and disappointed wife, taught herself shorthand. She was a woman of great intelligence and very limited means who was obliged by the deficiencies of her feckless husband to find ways to make a living. There were a variety of shorthand types in 18th-century England, all of which were arduous to learn. I liked the way Eliza applied herself to the task. She could see the potential to act as a recorder and it occurred to me that shorthand might be an advantageous accomplishment to add to the skills of a character who might veer between the occupations of stenographer and spy... in another novel on another day...

John Wesley's writing in John Byrom's shorthand system, 1744

Nine sopping summers in a row

There was no end to the rain between 1763 and 1772 – and this in an age when the British held in disdain the effetely French habit of sheltering under an umbrella. Rain badly marred the summers in England and Wales, especially during 1763, when the Thames Valley was inundated.

The Sopping Thursday. Edward Gorey, 1970

The following year, summer thunderstorms destroyed churches and naval ships. The winters were a nasty piece of work, too, in those years, with bitter frosts and heavy snowfalls. In 1768, summer brought record deluges to England and Wales, beginning in June, with rain bucketing down for 36 days without cease. Swathes of the south of England flooded in autumn and early winter of that year and the London-Exeter coach was carried away, when the Thames burst its banks near Staines, with the loss of all six passengers and four horses. In 1770 it snowed in London during May – and the floods went on. Weather, especially historically accurate weather, is such a fruitful reinforcer of mood and usefully complicating factor in a narrative, that I considered altering the time frame of Carey Ravine in order to take advantage of these endlessly wet summers and the endlessly damp laundry. Alas, they did not fit with the political events I also wished to include...

The “disease” of nostalgia

In the very late 18th century, Thomas Trotter, medical writer and physician to the fleet, designated “scorbutic Nostalgia” a cause of scurvy, as well as a psychological disorder proceeding from melancholy on board ship that afflicted slaves and sailors pining for their homes. But incidents have been recorded of pilgrims, too, suffering from scurvy. In his Voyages and Travels in the Levant, an 18th-century naturalist named Fredrik Hasselquist, reported cases of scurvy at a monastery in Bethlehem, where pilgrims stayed. Were these wanderers also afflicted with nostalgia for home? In a Sanitary Commission Report from the American Civil War, published in 1862, nostalgia was considered a factor in the depression that was a symptom of scurvy in soldiers. I was very attracted to the idea of a wasting disease caused by wandering, and the idea of nostalgia as a source of torment, and thought to weave it into the Indian section of Carey Ravine, but it seemed a pity to treat it only tangentially. That rabbit hole has remained unroamed, at least for the present.

Printing women

I’m drawn to accounts of the roles historical women played in trades, especially if they have anything to do with machinery. My father was a car mechanic and I grew up knowing my way around an engine. (The very first heroine I wrote, in a short film called Universal Drive, worked at a panel-and-paint garage as a spray-painter.) But, before I began to write, I worked as an assistant film editor in Soho and at Lee Studios on thundering old moviolas. It drove me crazy that despite my constant applications to join the film union (ACCT), I was always rejected because it was a closed shop. And yet the male assistant editors all around me seemed to get their tickets without any problem. I feel that those women in the printing trade in early modern England are kindred spirits.

Treadwell's wooden-frame power press, 1822

Mercurius Somniosus. Printed by Jane Coe, London 1644

Of course, women did the drudge work – training schools existed in the 18th century that taught women how to set type – but there were women who printed books under their own signs. The rise of printers’ unions in the 19th century, however, was a blow to women's participation in the trade. Craft unions were closed shops, a boys' club, despite the socialist politics. But that's another story...

Sorting through my mother’s bookcases, I came across this interesting little booklet published for the War Office and the Air Ministry, by the Ministry of Information in 1943. It’s all about the ‘static air defence’ of Britain, and is an account of Britain’s anti-aircraft (‘ack-ack’ in popular slang) defences from 1939 to 1942. As the War still had two years to run, besides supplying information the booklet would also of course have been intended to raise morale. The Foreword states that –

This book supplements and continues the story of how the R.A.F. defeated the attack of the German Air Force during the autumn of 1940. Much of the air fighting has already been described in “The Battle of Britain”. But the fighter squadrons never constituted the whole of our defensive system. It has therefore been thought worthwhile to tell the story of the static defences – A.A. guns, searchlights, balloons and the Royal Observer Corps... Though their story is not dull, the life and the work of the men and women of the static defences very often contains every degree of exasperation. They have had to fight the canker of armies, monotony – often in isolated stations far from their own homes and from anybody’s home.

Continuing, ‘It isn’t easy to shoot down a plane', and reminding readers of the weighty responsibility of the gun crews in determining whether an aircraft was in fact hostile or not, the book provides some statistics: 'During the first two years [of the war] just on 600 planes were shot down by A.A. fire over this country', from stations ranging from Dundee to Dover, from the Isle of Dogs in London to the Shetlands Isles.

Women played a vital part in these ‘static’ anti-aircraft operations. As members of mixed batteries, women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) operated searchlights, tracked enemy aircraft and controlled the direction of the guns. Though the official line remainedthat they did not fire them – ‘Women man everything except the guns themselves in Heavy A.A. units, and man them extremely well,’ declares the booklet – it seems highly likely that in actual fact they sometimes did. An officer commanding the first mixed battery to bring down an enemy plane is quoted thus: ‘The girls cannot be beaten in action and in my opinion they are definitely better than the men on the instruments they are manning. Beyond a little natural excitement which only shows itself in rather humorous and quaint remarks, they are quite as steady if not steadier than the men. They are amazingly keen at going into action, and although they are not supposed to learn to use the rifle they are as keen as anything to do so.’

The tone of the booklet is hilariously defensive about the involvement of women in this kind of active service. Someone in the War Office must have had the pragmatism and imagination to get it all going, but they clearly had to defeat a lot of scepticism. The need was felt, for example, to reassure readers that 'special regard' was being paid to 'the women's need for 'fresh fruit, salads and milk foods; and a balance was found between this and the spotted dog and cheese and pickles beloved of the old soldier'. Huh? Anyhow:

The first battery started training in spring, 1940. The A.T.S. members were picked from volunteers, and the men were newly joined recruits, the point being that men who had known no other army life would not find the atmosphere of a mixed battery so hysterically unorthodox. There was considerable anxiety as to how men and women would work together, but there need not have been. They took each other very much for granted; there was none of the musical-comedy-chorus atmosphere which had been anticipated, partly, no doubt, because such men and women had been working side by side in civilian life for years.

If your eyebrows rose as much as mine did on reading those words, maybe you, like me, will reflect on how much women still had to prove – how unusual it still was for men and women to do the same work – and to admire the common sense of those who, in charge of what was obviously seen as a daring experiment, took care that the men and women involved started on an equal footing of inexperience. It worked.

The idea of men and women marching, eating, drilling and working together – all this under the auspices of the British army – was not without a certain revolutionary tinge. In a mixed battery, women drive and service the trucks, act as sentries and despatch riders, and, in fact, do everything but fire the guns... far from resenting the A.T.S., the men in the mixed batteries show a very real pride in the girls’ work and are the first to defend them against their critics...

It wasn’t only in the A.T.S. that women served in the anti-aircraft defences. In 1941 the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force – the W.A.A.F.s. – began to take over the deployment of barrage balloons. These were used to protect targets such as ports, factories and convoys from dive bombers and low-flying aircraft, driving enemy planes to heights from which accurate targeting – especially at night – would be difficult or impossible. Balloons were therefore often themselves targeted, and hauling them up and down was a physically arduous business.

In the middle of January 1941, the Air Officer Commanding, Balloon Command, was asked to consider a suggestion that the flying of balloons could be completely carried out by the W.A.A.F. At first, this suggestion was received with dismay. ... The manning of balloons for 24 hours a day, frequently in the most appalling weather conditions, required physical strength not usually possessed by women...

Once again, given the chance, the women proved the doubters wrong. By May 1941 the first batch of volunteers had gone through ten weeks of intensive training, and – says the booklet –

Every week since then the W.A.A.F. have taken over more and more balloon sites. They will continue to do so until a very large proportion of the Balloon Barrages in the British Isles will be manned by airwomen. ... The Balloon Operators of the W.A.A.F. will still have to endure the weather as well as attack from the air, but they have already shown that they can take it. Theirs is undoubtedly one of the hardest jobs undertaken by women in the war, but they have tackled it and succeeded at it.

My sister flagged up this video to me, because our grandfather came to Canada from Donaghadee (a small place not far from Belfast) about 10 years after this scene was filmed. I looked out for him in case he was in Belfast that day (he had a pronounced limp because one leg was substantially shorter than the other, from a badly set break as a boy, so he would have been spot-able) but no luck.

This was filmed from the top of a horse-drawn tram by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, on a fine sunny day in May, 1901. The end product, an "animated photo"*, was shown in the Usher Hall, Belfast and you can see perambulating billboards advertising the performance at 1:28 and 2:20.

It's riveting, isn't it? The casual way people stroll into the street - the weight and swish of the women's skirts - I feel as if I've learned a lot, seeing the clothes in motion, instead of just in static drawings or still photographs - the different lengths of skirts for different ages - those enormous hats on those little girls!

I keep seeing more each time I watch it -
at 0:07 - the barefoot boy
at 1:10 - the extremely pregnant woman carrying a baby and holding the hand of a bouncy little girl in white and a big hat -
at 1:31 and 1:36 and 1:41 - the way women with more of a bustle would grab the back of their skirts with one hand
at 2:55 - the little boy in his sailor suit, standing out in the street
at 3:05 - the country woman in a shawl and apron

I can't help noticing the sad condition of some of the animals, then, right at the end, two perky dogs trot by. Our grandfather loved dogs. He would have approved.

*"Film" and "movie" hadn't yet consolidated their places as the accepted terms for moving pictures.

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

Today I have a guest. Alma Alexander is a US fantasy writer. She has a deep and abiding love of history. I thought it might be interesting to have a conversation with her instead of the regular kind of post.

Alma Alexander, from her author page

Gillian: I've been working on how writers use history in their fiction recently. In your new novel, Empress, you use your historical knowledge in quite a particular way. Maybe we could start off our discussion with what you do and how you do it.

Alma: There is alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. While the first two are obviously fantasy, you might argue that "straight" historical fiction, the kind that literally takes an event or an era that actually TRANSPIRED in our real-life timeline, is the "true" one out of that pack of otherwise gilded lies.

But is it?

Isn't history always told from the point of view of the victors, isn't it always remembered from what has been told, isn't there a dark and dusty back room where the untold stories go to molder into ashes in silence and solitude? And if you tell THOSE stories - even if you're telling an otherwise absolutely "straight" historical narrative...aren't you already wading into fantasy?

So let's split this into "living memory" and "ancient tales".

With things that might have happened in living memory, you're telling a story which will be remembered by people who were there. Or by their children to whom the stories were told. There are histories that people hide from outsiders simply because the pain is still – will ALWAYS be - too close, too real, too much to share. Should a story be banned, then?

What if it is too important to hide?

I hit a wall similar to this with Embers of Heaven, a novel that takes place some 400 years after its predecessor, Secrets of Jin-shei. That first book was based on an Imperial China, but Embers... took place during the equivalent what we knew as the Cultural Revolution. And one of the characters in my fantasy tale was at the heart of that 'real-world' revolution. I treated that book of living memory history gently. I took the characters whose story I was telling and I focused on them. Without coming out with things that rationalized or justified anything that was ever done by anyone during that time, I had to find a way to tell the story. Tell it straight. Find a way to simply be the messenger, and to let the recent history take care of itself.

And then there's a book like Empress, a story based on a glittering moment in the Byzantine Empire. There was a real love story to end all love stories out there - Emperor Justinian, and his love and soulmate, the Empress Theodora. I grew up with these stories, I cut my teeth on tales of Theodora.

But I didn't want the "historical" Theodora. I wanted the woman underneath the history. And I did not want to tell the straight "historical" story because Justinian was a bookish little clerk who wasn't romantic or manly, nothing like the emperor I called Maxentius. He was all mine. My creation. Someone I wrought so lovingly – flaws and all - that I fell a little in love with him myself. Heh.

My version of the Empress Callidora was likewise grown in the story oyster from the piece of grit that was the historical Theodora. Some of the things Theodora did my girl did too. Other things she did without much input by me. She always knew her own mind.

The world my Maxentius and my Callidora inhabit is NOT the historical Byzantium. It is a place called Visant, which shares some of the same historical touchstones. But my absolute joy in writing these fat historical fantasies is that I can take those touchstones and make them mean something else in my world. I can write the stories I want to write, even those dusty abandoned ones from the forgotten back rooms.

This is what historical fantasy does - it frees me to look at history from above, a high-flying goddess on golden wings, and create a world that is both utterly real and historically grounded, and something rich and strange that I alone had the weaving of.

Gillian: For me, as someone who looks into how writers use history, it seems that you're putting up three categories so that you can argue about inner truth. We can talk about the categories of alternative history, historical fantasy, and historical fiction, however, they're not at the heart of what you're arguing. This is an excellent opening to the sort of fiction you write. Describing people in terms of their relationship to historical counterparts shows the depth of emotion you bring to your fiction and to the history behind it. For me, however, fiction can't actually show us the person behind the story. What it can do (brilliantly) is lead us into different stories from different approaches. It can expand our understanding about the world around us and give us more narratives about history. Most of the time, story is story, and the path you follow to create your characters was purely your path: history in fiction is always a construction by the writer, for the writer and the reader. It's always shaped by our narratives.

Stories are at the core of novels for me, not reality. However, I'm a historian (always and ever) and I always need a bridge from what I see and argue as a historian and the stories I tell as a fiction writer. This is why, in my fiction, I always have one character who sees the story. This is clearest in Langue[dot]doc 1305 and in Illuminations, where I have characters who argue the way historians argue. Artemisia and Rose are both concerned with what's happening in their lives (and, in Illuminations, in the manuscript Rose has found) and their doubts mean that if there's a reader like me, who sees history as narratives we construct to understand our past and ourselves, that reader has something to hang onto. In my other novels, these characters are less obvious. I always give them a moment, however, and they look at what's happening and say "This can't be real" and often explain why. One of those moments for Ms Cellophane has been quoted by a few people: a character points out that they can't be in a horror novel, and gives reasons. Readers often ask me which character am I in my fiction. I'm none of them. That moment of clarity about narrative, however, that's me peeking in and saying "Boo!" to the reader.

Alma: I remember talking about the writing of battles with someone and what took shape is simply that you cannot WRITE A BATTLE if you've got a POV character in the middle of one. That's because the POV character in question is simply not in a position of knowing what the battle is doing. (S)he isn't IN the whole battle. The only concern of such a character is what is going on *right around them* in the heat of the moment. Their concern - their story - is their own survival. If a battle is won or lost - well, that is a larger question, and one that is decided cumulatively, and not by any single moment. But while a straightforward history might describe such a battle from the perspective of hindsight and of God, looking at it from a dizzy height and discerning tactics (if any) and the shape of the whole battle... if you're in the thick of it you don't see any of that. You're living the battle, not observing it. And it is so with a story, too.

A character can tell their own story - a story that might be nested inside a larger one, to be sure, as all personal stories in the end are because we all live in a shared larger world. But it is the individual story that we can see through the prism of any individual person's life, and it is through their eyes that the bigger story is seen, and shaped, and told.

I don't think enough is ever said about the very real fact that we are all, right now, LIVING IN HISTORY. It just hasn't become history yet, but with every passing moment it is closer to the past than it is to our present or to the future. Minute by minute our own stories drip off the ends of our lives and merge into that larger, shared, historical background that is the tapestry of human existence.

And writing a historical tale (they're all pretty much historical, except proudly futuristic science fiction) is essentially the distilled art of fiction. You're weaving a single golden thread in and out of a larger picture, and making that single thread meaningful within the context of a wider and more encompassing history...

Gillian: My inner historian argues that , using that approach, you can never write a battle. We see different things from the scrum to those we see from a nearby mountainside or from a chronicle written afterwards, but each of the things we see contains inherent bias. We bring ourselves to our writing and colour the scene with our thoughts. The difference between historical non-fiction and historical fiction include the boundaries (things like how far we may colour, what we may colour, which colours we have at our disposal) and whether or not the reader expects to be able to critically evaluate the text by retracing the research that went into it (scholarly apparatus).

As a reader, I expect to be drawn into the story if it's fiction and to be able to critically evaluate it if it's a historical study, but there is significant overlap and our humanity shows in every word we write.

Alma: You can write *A*battle, with any battle you choose to write. But could you write *THE*battle, something specific, something that pertains directly and in-tight-focus to a particular combatant within that battle? You correctly say that our humanity shows in every word we write - how could it be otherwise? We put so much of ourselves into everything we do, every story we tell, or at least we should, and it's the mark of the very best storytelling that the humanity of the writer has to shine through somehow (without being pedantic and preachy about anything, of course). And when fiction touches history it's so easy to slide into the accepted history pageant and forget (as always) the humanity of the under-history, the one never written, the one lived by the "losers" in any given conflict. And telling the untold story... isn't that what every writer dreams of doing...?

I try to do it, at least, with every tale that I tell. I like to think of fiction as a light, something that chases away the shadows from the dark places of the world, and I never forget the power and the privilege of being the hand that wields the torch...

Gillian: And on that note, I will leave Alma to her torch and me to my rather different light. I love it that there are so many choices for narratives and that we can all have valid views. It adds a richness to fiction, not knowing how far that we are going to agree or disagree as readers with the story that unrolls before us.

Of course I should have brought binoculars. Vast though it was - this panoramic wooden sculpture of London’s mid-seventeenth-century skyline, rising from a flat barge in the middle of the Thames - it looked worryingly far away. And there was a boat in the way.

As you can see, Sunday was a dull, grey afternoon. We had pitched up absurdly early, friends and family, hoping to find a good spot on the riverbank, which we did. Armed with a small picnic and some wine, we leaned against the very comfortable wall in front of the Sea Containers Building, watched the world and the water go by, and caught up on life. It was almost three hours before the burning was due to begin. But I’m a committed queue-er. I'm used to sitting for hours by the river outside the Globe theatre to secure my favourite stage-side groundling view and conversation and good cheer always make the minutes slip by with amazing speed. Our previous experience of Artichoke public art events had convinced us it would be well worth the wait.

The finale of the 350^thanniversary commemorations of the Great Fire of London - previewed in part here by fellow History Girl Imogen Robertson – was promised to be spectacular. Hundreds of young Londoners - schoolchildren and young people 'not in education, employment or training' - had collaborated over months to bring to life American ‘burn artist’ David Best’s vision of the Restoration capital.

London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

The crowds gathered behind us…we got talking to a few strangers…and joyous anticipation flickered and caught hold. Even the security guard who had to run along the sandy shoreline below us in pursuit of a few triumphantly stray spectators was kind and good-humoured as he retrieved them. Free public art brings peculiar health-and-safety headaches and London 1666 was ambitious: fire and water on top of unpredictable audience numbers. The Great Fire 350website certainly suggested a slight anxiety about overcrowding with its insistence that the best views would be online. That seemed unlikely.

As darkness fell, we saw the dome of St Paul’s begin to move, washed with smoke and colour and finally flames: the beginning of ‘Fires Ancient’, a projection by Martin Firrell.

From Martin Firrell's website.

Out on the river, pinpricks of torchlight moved about the framework of the small city, only to vanish. Last checks, we assumed, and worried a bit about getaways. A few pleasure craft seemed to be cutting it fine. On the dot of half-past eight, the first spark appeared, right at the heart of the sculpture.

From the other side of the river...as it started.
London 1666, David Best, London's Burning,
a festival of arts and ideas for Great Fire 350.
Produced by Artichoke.
Photo by Matthew Andrews.

Just as it had in the city itself 350 years earlier, fire soon took hold and slowly spread. Little by little, the exquisite intricacy of the sculpture’s latticework construction stood out ever more blackly against the flames, perfectly visible.

London's Burning, as above, photo by Oliver Rudkin

A brief, southerly gust of wind, and we felt the heat of it on our faces. At first I thought I’d imagined its warmth, but then it came again, and it was even warmer.Building after building caught light, spire after spire. The crackling intensified. It had begun like the sound of rain pattering on a hard roof – the kind of summer shower you don’t notice until you look outside and run outside to gather in washing. Soon it sounded vengeful. The entire barge was alight.

As above.

The clouds of smoke rushing upwards and eastwards developed an alarming but enchanting underbelly of embers, an abundance of golden sparks.

The fire-fighting boat which had been hovering nearby moved swiftly in to direct a cooling jet of spray at the danger.

I no longer wanted binoculars. It felt pointless even to take photographs, yet also impossible not to make an attempt, at least from time to time. No image, moving or still, could possibly convey the complete experience of a performance like this – sounds, smells, sights and that invigorating sense of mass pleasure all combining to provide a extended magical moment, the more magnificent for being shared with so many. There were gasps as the larger structures collapsed, one after another, spires folding and beams breaking. At one point somebody tried and failed to set off round-singing - "London's burning, London's burning..." Mostly people stood mesmerised, from time to time confiding their wonder in low voices. This was wonder laced with horror. The spectacle - a visual oxymoron, perhaps - lasted for almost three-quarters of an hour. It was the ultimate in twenty-first-century urban sublime.

Yesterday morning I was working nearby and couldn’t resist stealing away along the Embankment to see what, if anything, remained.

Nothing. The barge had vanished, leaving thoughts and memories.

Something I learned this year was that on September 6^th1666, London was a city of refugees: 80 per cent of the City had lost their homes. The rich rebuilt, but the destitute had to survive for years in shanty-towns on the outskirts of London. There will be events today in central London to commemorate this aspect of the Great Fire, and think about contemporary resonances.

I’m also left remembering my very first introduction to the Great Fire – a lit-up scale model made for the old London Museum (originally housed in Kensington Palace) - and the memorable awe this always inspired when I went to see it as a young child. As I got older, I noticed its flaws – the cotton wool smoke, the boy caught implausibly running through a flame. But when Imogen wrote last month that she felt sorry for people born in London, as they could never have the pleasure of visiting the capital for the first time, it made me laugh. We're happy with that! I’m a Londoner, a proud Londoner, and brought up by several generations of Londoners too. The whole city was my playground, as it is now my children’s, and I was always blessed with older relatives who had long delighted in being Londoners. They shared its secret spots and stories with me and my siblings and cousins, and untiringly took us up the Monument and St Paul's and on the river and in and out of the City's churches, squares, museums and parks. I’m thanking my family now.

Photo by Oliver Ruskin, details above.

PS. Some children's fiction thoughts for the Fire of London: Two of my sons were particularly gripped by Pippa Goodheart's Raven Boy. My daughter read and re-read Mary Hooper's At the sign of the Sugared Plum and its sequel Petals in the Ashes to the point of obsession. Any other suggestions?

www.lydiasyson.com

The Cotswolds are a region which more than any other exemplifies what foreigners, especially Americans, think of as England. Who can blame them, really? It's an extraordinarily beautiful part of the world, dotted with picturesque villages, glorious rolling countryside, houses made from golden stone, and in August, full of the scent of summer's last roses, and with many magnificent trees showing a touch of the coming autumn in their foliage.

A few days ago I came back from a short visit to this part of the world. We visited Hidcote, and Painswick Rococo Garden and Westonbirt Arboretum, but one of the highlights was a visit on a Saturday afternoon to Chipping Campden. We'd gone to see an antiques and crafts supermarket and enjoyed walking up and down the fine main street of the town, admiring the houses.

I bought a Carnival glass bowl at a knock down price because I love Carnival glass.

And then, we went to visit the Church of St James.

On our way into the town, we'd passed the magnificent gateway below, and my friend Philippa (I'd been at school with her so have known her for about 60 years and know she's very clued up about history) told me the story of the wonderfully named Baptist Hicks, who built a grand house here in the 17th century, and who, during the English Civil War, fled to the West Country. His house was burned to the ground, and only a few parts of it remain. Below is the restored gateway.

Very near the remains of Baptist Hicks' house is the church of St James. The earliest church on this site dates from the 12th Century when Henry II visited Campden to confirm its first charter. St James' stands on a knoll outside the town and is visible from whichever direction you approach it. This was a wool town in the 14th and 15th Centuries and the prosperity enjoyed during that time led to the great expansion and beautification of the church.

We were allowed to go in even though the church was about to close. We admired the effigies of Baptist Hicks and his wife, and marvelled at the stained glass windows. There's something about a church in the early evening which is very soothing. The setting is not as grand as that of a cathedral, but the smaller scale is comforting.

The kind woman who let us come in even though it was late told us about the present day activities of the church. For instance, there are concerts by local performers and even a music festival which brings in players and singers from further away and which is very much supported by the community.

After the church closed, we went out to the graveyard. The souls buried here have an enviable spot from which to contemplate eternity. If you are of the opinion that eternity is a ridiculous concept, this might seem a strange statement. I don't believe in an afterlife of any kind myself but still, the fact that so many bodies lie here and have lain here for hundreds of years is paradoxically uplifting. I'm not sure why that should be, but I like the idea of the dead becoming part of the landscape, especially when the landscape is as beautiful as it is here. I gave a thought to the men and women and children who had lived here once and now are in a way represented by the trees above their graves and the stones which stand as their memorial.

Nao Victoria circumnavigating the world

When I was child I loved to read my father's collection of books about the adventures of Thor Heyerdahl and others who recreated old ships and retraced ancient voyages. One of the exciting things for me was when the modern day adventurers discovered that some detail of the ship, for example, the tether on the Egyptian papyrus reed boat, which they had left out as unimportant, in fact served a vital function in enabling the ship's stern to remain high and flexible in rough seas.

Today, I never pass up an opportunity to explore the reconstruction of an old ship, because as a novelist simply clambering around it helps me to feel the size of the ship; see where I would have had to duck my head and how dark it must have been under the ship's castle, all of which helps me to imagine how my characters spent their days on board.

A couple of weeks ago, I went aboard the replica of the 16th century Nao Victoria, or Vittoria, when it docked at Plymouth. On 10th August 1519, five naos, crewed by 243 men, set sail from Seville, commanded by Ferdinand Megellan. Financed by the Spanish King, their mission was to discover a western route to the Moluccas in Indonesia, known as the spice islands. These brave men set sail into the unknown, at a time when sailors still brought back tales of islands where dragons fought elephants and rocks that crashed together to crush ships.

Ferdinand Magellan

The Magellanic Penguin is named after him.

Sailing some across some of the roughest seas in the world, and despite starvation and mutiny, they travelled down the coast of south America, discovering the Strait of Magellan, then across the vast Pacific Ocean passing unknown islands until they finally reached the Moluccas. Magellan was killed during the battle of Mactan in the Philippines in 1521. Only the smallest ship, the Nao Victoria, captained by Juan Sebastian Elcano, and 18 men out of the original 243 survived. This single ship crossed the Indian Ocean, sailed round the horn of Africa and eventually reached home three years after they first set sail on the 8th September 1522. (494 years ago today.)

In 2004, the replica ship set off with a crew of 20 to circumnavigate the world, and learn a little of what that first crew endured. Although they were compelled to take radios and modern navigational aids as back-up, it was still a tough experience.

When you climb aboard the Nao Victoria, it seems as small and fragile as an eggshell with sloping castle decks at either end, making it appear as if a giant hand had squashed it. Ocean-going naos were built according to the ratio of "one, two, three". So a nao that was 30 ft across, (1) would have keel of 60 ft (2) would be 90 ft (3) long. This strict ratio allowed the builders to vary the size of the boat, but always ensure that it didn't ride too high in the water causing it to capsize, or too low making it slow and hard to manoeuvre.

The replica of the Nao Victoria docked at Plymouth

The ship's wheel hadn't been invented then, so the rudder was moved by long beam fixed vertically into a wooden ball on the deck, which could be moved rather like the metal bar and rubber ball joint used to flush those modern chemical toilets they use at open air festivals. (Nothing new!)

I was struck by the great hole at back of the stern which the tiller poked through, which had to be wide enough to allow it to be swung from side to side. It was immensely draughty even in port, imagine how cold and wet the helmsmen and any nearby crew would have been with raging waves lashing through that day and night.

The hole in the stern for the tiller bar

The second thing I was reminded of was the nightmare of fire. The ship was wooden, coated with tar and caulked with flammable oakum and pitch. The crew slept on mattresses they'd daily rub with tallow and grease so that they would act as life rafts, so a single stray spark from the ship's cooking fire spelt danger. No wonder the cook's fire was shielded with metal sheets and stood on bricks and a tray of sand.

The third thing that struck me was that crew must have had to spent much of their scrambling around barrels of food, wine and water, for they had no idea where or when they be able to take on fresh supplies. A typical daily ration per man for a Spanish ship, while supplies lasted, was - a pound and half of bread, chick peas, cheese, 1 lb salted meat per man or 1 salted cod shared between 4 men, depending on whether or not it was Catholic Fast day. Each man also received a daily ration of 3 pints of water (two for drinking and the third for washing) and 2 pints of strong wine, which doesn't seem a lot of liquid compared to the 8 pints of beer allowed to the English sailors in 1578.

Poles were inserted in the holes

to winch up the anchor

The crows nest - not a place to

be in storm

If the Nao Victoria stops off at a port near you, do go and visit it if you get the chance. You will come away with your imagination racing. By the way, the Nao Victoria now has a woman captain - I wonder what the crew back in 1519 would have made of that!

A few days ago, a fan of my Roman Mysteries books emailed to ask which places I would recommend for a visit to the nation’s capital. It’s a good question. London has been almost continuously occupied since the paleolithic period and is crammed with history including a myriad of goodies from the four centuries of Roman occupation. There is history everywhere, especially in the City of London, the square mile that is now the financial district but once housed the Roman fort and port. These are my top half dozen Roman-related sites. Incidentally, they are all free of charge!

1. The British Museum
If you only have time for one stop, make it this one. I use it as a kind of club to meet overseas visitors. I go there at least once a month and take fans to the Roman Life Room (69) and also room 70. If you have time, check out the Roman Britain room (49) & the Enlightenment Gallery, where you can touch an exact replica of the Rosetta Stone.
Tip: Go in the back way, via Montague Place; they are now doing bag searches and you will avoid the worst queues.
Related blog: The Riddle of the Roman Vase

2. Museum of London
London’s other great museum will soon be moving to Old Smithfields Market and might have a train passing through it. At the time of writing it is near St Paul’s tube station in the Barbican. There is a wonderful section devoted to Roman London.
Tip: Look out for bits of London’s Roman wall outside and indeed, all over the City of London.
Related blog: Visualising Roman London

3. The Victorian & Albert
Did you know you can see Trajan’s column in London? It’s a plaster cast, but still gives you a good view and lovely detail. Go up to the viewing gallery while they are refurbishing the cast gallery. Michelangelo’s David is also there. Yes, it’s Renaissance not Roman, but still worth visiting.
Tip: Visit the tea rooms across the courtyard and marvel at their beauty.
Related blog: Trajans Column at the V&A

4. Petrie Museum
Not far from the British Museum in the maze of UCL (University College London) is this delightful gem of a museum. Egypt was important in Roman times and you can see many Roman era artefacts on display. Look out for ancient fabric, palm leaf sandals, charms for turning away evil and portraits of some Romans who lived there. It is open from 1-5 on Tuesdays through Saturdays.
Tip: combine this with a visit to the British Museum nearby.
Related blog: Roman Egypt at the Petrie

5. The Thames Foreshore
If you are brave, descend steep steps on the north side of the Thames beside the Millennium Bridge. Wear Wellingtons or sturdy boots and gloves. Go at low tide and you will be amazed at the artefacts literally covering the foreshore, including lots of Roman brick. If you are very lucky you might find a Roman hairpin, votive figurine or coin. You can keep anything you see on the surface. This is called ‘Mudlarking’
Tip: Don’t touch anything you pick up with bare hands until you’ve washed it.
Related blog: Mudlarks on the Foreshore

6. The Roman Amphitheatre
Like most of Roman London, the amphitheatre is underground, below street level. Access is free via a lift in London’s Guildhall Gallery. If you look across the guildhall courtyard you can see the location of the amphitheatre marked out in different coloured paving stones, like an intentional urban crop mark. Down below, only a few fragments remain of the stone amphitheatre that replaced the wooden one, but there is a stylised indication of seating and competitors.
Tip: Plan your visit to coincide with the next re-enactment of Roman games.
Related blog: Gladiator Fun Facts

P.S. A new restaurant serving ancient Roman food is due to open later this month near Fenchurch Street. I hope to report on Roma’s ambience and cuisine on 9 October 2016.

If YOU have a fave London site with a Roman or Classical association, please leave it in the comments section below...

Caroline Lawrence’s book The Roman Quests: Escape from Rome, is partly set in Roman London, AKA Londinium.

Among my long wanderings in the quacklands of feminine health, finding this apparatus was a highlight.

Until the early 20th century, of course, there was no legislation in place to limit the grandiosity of advertisers to the truth. So The Health Jolting Chair Company of New York deployed all the pseudo-science of the age to persuade women that its product constituted ‘the most important Health Mechanism ever produced’.

The Health Jolting Chair was a kind of aggravated spring-enabled rocker, nothing more, nothing less. But it was sold as something far more magnificent.

Advertising in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly, in the 1880s, the manufacturers claimed that 'The Health Jolting Chair' could solve the problems of the ‘cripples, paralytics … the corpulent, the insane, the blind etc’, as well as being ‘indispensable to the health and happiness of millions of human beings who may be living sedentary lives through choice or necessity.’

On a more practical level, it was claimed that the motion of the chair would dissolve ‘female congestion’, which may have signified anything from constipation or an unwanted foetus.

Applying classic quack formulas and cadences, the advertising lurched between enticing and reproving to the point of threatening, massaging the phobic pressure points of status anxiety and the shame of poor hygiene:

‘In the upper ranks of society, and especially of fashionable society, the fairer sex are particularly prone to neglect the taking of proper exercise …It is a requisition that cannot be dispensed with. It is a part of the constituted condition of existence, emphasized in holy writ …Nature has no use for the incorrigibly slothful. Many persons are too lazy to live; and they do not live. Their lives are shortened — disease fastening upon their ill-nourished bodies, sweeping them from mundane existence. The exercise of the most important parts of the body — the internal nutritive organs, comprising the heart, lungs, stomach, liver, etc. — naturally should receive the first consideration in hygienic living; yet these are the parts that are usually most neglected by the class of fair beings mentioned, as well as by most persons of sedentary habits and occupations.’

The consequences are of course dire: ‘a deficient amount of excretion of the worn-out nutritive elements, which collect in the general system, producing, head, nausea, sick, creepy sensations, pain in the bones, bad breath …’ and all the usual litany of quackable disorders.

Of course the true target of the marketing, as shown by the illustrations, was the female who wished to have a taut posterior but was unable to find any decent way to exercise that part of her body if she did not have a horse.

For her, The Health Jolting Chair promised ‘THE MOST HIGHLY PRIZED Feminine Attractions … A Beautiful Rich Complexion; Bright, Sparkling eyes; A Sweet, Pure Breath; a Graceful, Well-Developed Figure; Vigorous Mental Action; and a Vivacious Manner.’

Some writers have commented on the erotic potential of the Health Jolting Chair, suggesting that it might provide the same stimulation that horse riding may offer to the erogenous zones.

Looking closely at the mechanism, one sees a handle beneath the seat. It looks as if the user would wind it up and release the motion, rather like a music box. To me, the two side-struts appear as gratuitous as the advertising copy, but perhaps they regulated the violence of the jolts in some way. After all, the manufacturers claim, ‘It can be regulated so as to give it any degree of severity desired.’

To help achieve the most effective rhythm, the manufacturers suggested a musical accompaniment … the Jolting Chair Gavotte, as advertised here.

The concept behind the chair has not died, as this video of Ellen Degeneres shows.

Various websites devoted to the history of medicine have featured the chair, to much acclaim.

But my favourite comment is this one: ‘I'm not buying one, it doesn't wash the dishes at the same time.’

Michelle Lovric’s website

This is the plaque that greets you when you reach Top Withens. Thousands of tourists make the steep climb from Howarth to see the ruins that supposedly inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. I feel sorry for the ones that turn up with their expensive Nikons and Thermos flasks, buffeted and muddied, to find that this isn’t the ‘real’ Wuthering Heights at all. Brontë scholars tend to agree that there’s no such thing. So why has the legend become attached to this tumbledown farmhouse on the moors?

The first definite association with Top Withens appears in a nineteenth century edition of the Brontës' work. In 1872 publisher George Smith commissioned an artist to illustrate a new anthology. He wrote to Ellen Nussey, a close friend of Charlotte’s, asking if she know the names and locations of the ‘places so vividly described’ in the sisters’ work. Frustratingly, we have no record of Nussey’s reply but Smith certainly wrote to thank her for her help. When the edition appeared, Wuthering Heights included a drawing of the Sladen valley, with three isolated farmhouses in view: Near, Middle and Top Withens.

I’ve visited several times myself, in different seasons and different weathers, while researching a work in progress that’s set in the area. Depending on which path you take it is possible to find yourself completely alone, with no human habitation in sight and nothing but a vast sky, the call of curlew and the whistle of the ever-present wind to spark the imagination. It feels wild and remote. As poet, Ted Hughes put it:

Moors …

Are a stage for the performance of heaven.

Any audience is incidental.

Top Withens, March 2015

We have a tendency, these days, to romanticise these moors. The Brontë sisters would not have experienced them as we do, with our waterproofs and wellies, a place to be visited before retreating to the safety of Howarth for a cream tea or a pint in The Black Bull. In the past the moors were seen, rightly, as dangerous places, savage and deadly, the blanket bog a path straight down to Hell.

But Emily Brontë loved the moors. They were a playground and an escape. As an adult she walked them regularly, alone or with her sisters and they feature heavily in her writing. Her fictional interpretation of the landscape has become one of the reasons for our own romantic view, but she would have been well aware of the hardship and danger for the people who lived and worked there.

The first recorded owner of ‘Wythens’ (later to become Withens or Withins) was George Bentley, a clothier who bought the land from Thomas Crawshaye in 1567. Of the Crawshayes and those that came before, we have no record. On his death, George bequeathed his estate to his grandson William and in 1591 the land was divided between William’s three sons, as detailed in his will. Three farmhouses were allocated to the three men: Near, Middle and Top Withens. You can still find the ruins of all three.

The next recorded owner of Top Withens doesn’t appear until 1813; a John Crabtree who, in turn, leased it to Jonas Sunderland. Jonas, his wife Ann and their descendants lived at Top Withens until the end of the nineteenth century. It’s likely the family would have known the Brontë siblings, at least by sight. By the time the house passed to Ann Sharpe (née Sunderland) and her husband, Samuel in 1888, the area had already been dubbed ‘Brontë Country’ (the term first appears in a guidebook of that year).

The Sunderlands at Top Withens

By 1895, Ann Sharpe was dead, leaving Samuel to bring up their young daughter, Mary, alone. It must have proved too hard a life for Samuel – a year later they had moved to a valley farm named Sheep Holes and the house was abandoned.

As far as we know it stayed that way until the early 1920’s when an invalided ex-soldier named Ernest Roddie took up residency. The Yorkshire Evening Post ran a series of articles about him and even sent a reporter to interview the mysterious Ernest, who lived alone with just his dogs and chickens for company. Following his first winter he said:

‘I think Top Withens is the place for me all right. We have some rough weather up here … It’s been fearful cold since Christmas and there are days when the snow’s been so thick I couldn’t get the cart down to Stanbury.’ But, he said ominously, ‘a man can’t be lonely at Wuthering Heights.’

How much of this is poetic license on the part of the journalist we’ll never know, but by 1926, the harsh lifestyle had beaten Ernest too and he moved back down to Haworth, leaving the house to the elements.

Top Withens circa 1930

The crumbling ruins have been a source of scholarly conflict ever since. A grade II listing in the 1950s was revoked in 1991 and clumsy concrete repairs do little to retain any historical authenticity. The Brontë Society famously repudiated the link with Wuthering Heights, as the firmly worded plaque suggests, but Brontë fans still come from all over the world to pay homage.

Emily would have known Top Withens as a working farm inhabited by the Sunderland family. It’s situation at the top of the valley on the edge of the windswept moor may bring to mind the setting of the Heights, but the building itself is not the house described in her novel.

Several other houses that Emily would have known have been put forward as prototypes, including Ponden Hall (also mooted as the model for Thrushcross Grange) and High Sunderland Hall, now sadly demolished. Although perhaps too grand for a farmhouse, my money is on the latter. But I expect it’s not that simple. My current project is similarly set on an isolated working farm on the West Yorkshire moors. I’ve used elements from several local houses to create a fictional one. I suspect that's exactly what Emily did too.

High Sunderland Hall

Perhaps the association with Top Withens is just a romantic myth but when you stand by the ruins, look out over the desolate moorland and think of the people that made a life here, it’s hard not to be swept up by the atmosphere. I’ll leave the description to someone who knew it better than I ever will…

"Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr Heathcliff's dwelling. `Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed; one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

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Writers love a maxim. Twitter is full of them – little pods of wisdom that are supposed to help guide and inspire. Some are trite, some are tosh and a few are useful. “Get black on white,” said Guy de Maupassant; and there’s no arguing with that as a basis for a writing life.

But the quote that I return to again, and again, in the research and writing of my books is by Donald Rumsfeld. So he was US defence secretary at the time, and did not technically realise that he was providing writing advice to historical fiction authors – but maxims create their own currency once coined: Here’s what he said.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

He was much abused at the time for stating the obvious; as if the obvious is not sometimes worth stating well. He would, I’m sure, be delighted to know that I find it a hugely useful way of thinking about my work. (For him, unless he’s a History Girls fan, this will, alas, remain an unknown unknown.)

"Antonia who?"

Historical fiction writers operate on their own, special plane – where history and story-telling collide. Most of us take our responsibilities to both seriously. I would never insert a known lie in place of a known known.

The unknown unknowns are haunting. There are just so many of them. Or are there? I don’t know. How many mistakes have I unwittingly written? How many false steps have I taken?

It is, however, the known unknowns that are the most important part of what the historical novelist does. This is the central mystery of our art. Historians come up against a known unknown and, rightly, back away. We jump in where the footnoters fear to tread. Into the sticky morass of thoughts, and emotions and motives that make stories sing; as well as the more pedantic matters of bodily functions and fluids.

Here is an example, picked from thousands. I was on the ferry to Iona to research my second book, The Winter Isles. Set in twelfth century Scotland, it follows the story of the first Lord of the Isles.

The ferry is a short hop. The day was glorious; a Hebridean joy of blue sky and turquoise sea. In the Sound of Iona is a small, rocky island, which I noticed and looked up on my OS map. The map identified it as Eilean nam Ban.

Eilean Nam Ban: seen from Mull

On Iona, I was happily mooching around ruins, clambering up dunes. Gazing, awed at the stone crosses that spoke of a Celtic Christian tradition I was learning more about at the time. Then, in the official guide to the place, I came across a reference to Eilean nam Ban. The Island of Women.

First, a little on the man himself, the founding father of Iona, whose presence is in every carved stone….

St Columba came to Scotland from Ireland in the sixth century AD from Ireland, to proselytise to the Picts. This is as known as a known gets in the Medieval Gael lands. He established an abbey on Iona, which subsequently became the heart of Celtic Christianity. He inspired hymns and folktales, legends and stories.

Here is one: Columba heard a voice telling him that he would not succeed in building his abbey, unless a living man was buried in its foundations. His friend Oran nobly volunteered to sacrifice himself. Columba ordered that his friend’s face should remain uncovered, so that he could bid his friend farewell. On bending close to the dying man, who was being buried under tonnes of masonry, the saint-in-waiting found that Oran was blaspheming terribly about the existence - or otherwise - of the afterlife. Columba withdrew in horror, and ordered the face hole filled in with earth...

Oran: "There is no Hell as you suppose, nor heaven that people talk about."
Columba: "Jesus. Shh, will you? Oi, builder! More earth over here."

Columba liked a maxim. One of his most famous was: “where there’s a cow, there’s a woman and where there is a woman there is mischief.” Nice.

Women? Bah.

There is a tradition, then, that Columba banished women from Iona. And in the harbour is the Island of Women: Eilean nam Ban. The tradition further states that Eilean nam Ban was where the women associated with Iona had to live, while their menfolk were on the holy isle communing with God.

Such tales are catnip to any writer with an interest in women’s unsung roles in the past. Within seconds of reading about Eilean nam Ban, an entire plot came into my head. My heroine would be trapped there, forced to live a small life. The first time we meet Eimhear, she is living there.

“I looked behind to the hall. Dimly lit, a star-prick against the cavernous horizon. I felt the familiar press of hill and sea and sky, and thought that this time – this time – I would be crushed.
I found a hollow in the hill, curling myself into it, out of the wind. And I let myself think of Somerled, and when we were young.”

I rushed home to my books, and the journals, and the accumulated historical writings I was using for my research and found… nothing.

Not a single scrap of evidence about Eilean nam Ban. In fact, the only concrete fact I found was an archaeological probe that found no evidence, at all, of anyone – male or female – living on the island during the ascendency of Iona.

I thought I had a known known – and I had a known unknown.

This is where the fiction comes in. But where the fiction touches the history, I believe that we have a duty to make up stuff that is as truthful as possible. To deduce the probable based on the facts. There are sufficient unknown unknowns in our work without introducing known fallacies.

So a test. If I followed the tradition, and made Eilean nam Ban an island of banished women in the twelfth century – some 600 years after the arrival of Columba on Ionan shores – how misleading would that be, based on the known knowns about social tropes of the period?

I decided it was a justified leap. This was a gendered society. Much was expected of women – these were not the genteel misses of later, urban societies. But it is entirely feasible that on a Holy island like Iona, a celtic tradition which venerated isolated holy men – culdees – would prohibit women from its shores.

There is the remains of a nunnery on Iona – but it was built in the thirteenth century (my hero Somerled’s daughter Bethoc was its first prioress). This was in a period of decline for Iona. In addition, it was a time of increasing pressure on Celtic Christianity from the European traditions favoured by the Norman-centric Scottish Kings – which included the growth of convents.

The name of the island itself, the tradition surrounding it and the known mores of the period all allowed me to push the history to fit the fiction.

With thanks to Donald Rumsfeld.

Antonia Senior's novel, The Winter Isles is published by Corvus. It is £1.99 on Kindle this month, which makes it 0.002p a word. Antonia was once paid £1 a word to write about pensions, and can't work out which sum is more peculiar.

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Acclaimed historical biographer, Linda Porter, has turned to the children of Charles I and the English Civil Wars for her latest book.

An ambitious project with daunting scope Royal Renegades shines a light on a royal family swept away by political forces ultimately beyond their control. The combination of Porter's impeccable research, sharp sense of irony and fluent writing style transforms a period of history renowned for its dryness and impenetrability. The political and martial narrative is cast in a new light when set against the intimacy of the family story, which takes us out into parallel events in France and the Netherlands, allowing us to understand the wider European impact of the conflict.

Both fascinating and, at times, deeply poignant, Royal Renegades will have you in its thrall until the final page.

Interview with the author:

EF: As with your previous book Crown of Thistles, the scope of Royal Renegades is vast, covering not only the period running up to the English Civil Wars, the wars themselves and the protectorate that followed, but also parallel events in both France and the Netherlands. Do you enjoy the challenge of depicting the ‘big picture’?

LP: Yes, I do. I think it is important to convey the wider backdrop of the story. Events in Europe had a significant impact on the lives of the Stuart royal children, especially after their father’s execution. It is also important to remember that their mother was French – their Bourbon inheritance is often overlooked. I also wanted to convey something of the complexity of the period, both within Charles I’s three kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland, and beyond. It is a wonderful period to write about, perhaps the richest in our history. I would have liked to write more about the eleven years of the English republic but it was beyond the scope of this book. However, I felt it necessary to include a chapter on the background to the restoration of Charles II because I had never really understood what happened in England after the death of Oliver Cromwell. I now feel that I do and hopefully readers of my book will as well.

EF: With your focus on the Royal children you manage to make the political highly personal and very poignant. What inspired you to approach this period of history in such a way?

LP: I think because it is very much an untold story. Most people I have spoken to about the book are unaware of the fact that Charles I had six children living at the time of his death, and know nothing about their fates, beyond the fact that Charles II was restored in 1660. It is also a story that mirrors that of many families during the Civil Wars – of dislocation and loss, of a world turned upside down. I don’t think even I had realized quite how sad it was before I began to work on it.

EF: I have the impression that you didn’t warm to Queen Henrietta. I wonder if you could explain why this is and whether you developed particular favourites from your cast of characters.

LP: You are right, I don’t care much for Henrietta Maria. This may be a little harsh. She has had a bad press – then and subsequently – but she is not an easy woman to like, though her husband came to adore her after a very rocky start to their marriage. In portraits of her in her twenties you can see something of the youthful charm that won him over. But she had no political sense at all, was always, at heart, contemptuous of the English and she was a very difficult mother. Her treatment of Prince Henry, her youngest son, was utterly deplorable. She was, however, a loyal wife and her many years in exile were stoically born.

EF: The Civil Wars are notorious for their complexity, yet you have managed to write about them in a way that is so clear. What were the particular challenges of achieving this?

LP: The main challenge was to digest a great mass of material without getting sucked into years of research. When I first had the idea for ‘Royal Renegades’ I thought it would be an easier topic than my previous book, ‘Crown of Thistles’, which was on the rivalry between the Tudors and the Stewarts in the previous century. After all, a book about six royal children should be relatively straightforward, or so I thought. This was naïve, to say the least. Nothing about the Civil Wars is straightforward. And I had not worked on the 17th century since I was an undergraduate, when I did my long essay (a seemingly quaint term these days for something that was actually not really the same as an undergraduate dissertation) on the Civil Wars. Scholarship on the period has changed beyond recognition in the years since then, and I like to reflect the latest scholarship in my books. I think it is something I owe to the reader.

EF: I have the sense that people are turning from the Tudors to the Stuarts. As someone who has written acclaimed works about Tudor figures would you agree with this and why do you think it is the case?

photo: Russell Harper

LP: Yes, I think there is a change. I certainly hope so. Charles Spencer has written about Prince Rupert and about the regicides to great effect. Anna Keay’s biography of the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, has led the way on reviving interest in the 17th century among women writers. It has previously been very much a male preserve. Leanda de Lisle, Anna Whitelock and Jessie Childs are also moving away from the Tudors. I think that we have just about reached saturation point with Tudormania though it may take a while before the media and even the general public catch on to this. The effect of Tudormania has been to give a very Anglocentric view of our history but the truth of the matter is that England was not a major player on the international stage in Tudor times and the compulsive fascination of Henry VIII and his six wives has skewed our understanding of our past. Having said that, I’ve just been working as historical consultant on Lucy Worsley’s upcoming BBC I series on Henry and his wives and it has quite a novel approach to the topic, which is what you would expect from Lucy, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the end product.

EF: What’s next for you as a writer?

LP: I’m starting work on a companion volume to ‘Royal Renegades’ with the working title of ‘Godly People: the family and friends of Oliver Cromwell.’ And you haven’t asked, but, yes, I am at heart, a supporter of the other side. This is my chance to give them their due.

Royal Renegadeswill be published on 6th October by Macmillan and is available for pre-order.

Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is out now.

General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas by Olivier Pichat c1790s

I know I've written about this chap before. Alex Dumas, born in San Domingue, now Haiti in 1762. He rose to be the highest ranking soldier in a western army for over two hundred years. Pretty impressive. But I do have an excuse, because he features as a walk on in my new book Blade and Bone out early next month.

His full name - his father was a Marquis, his mother Marie-Cessette Dumas was a slave - was Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie. He was abandoned by his father (who sold his Mother and Alex's siblings back into slavery when he left San Domingue - classy guy!) when he returned to France after failing to make his fortune as a planter.

Back in the crumbling family pile the Marquis suffered a change of heart and sent for Alex, sending the boy to the top military school in Paris to learn classical philosophy as well as the arts of war, where his tutor in swordsmanship was the celebrated musician, horseman, and fencer, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Chevalier Saint-George by Mather c1787

Alex, unsurprisingly, jettisoned his father's name and used his mothers' slave name and he soon became as well known as his tutor for his skills on a horse and with a sword. In fact there were stories about Dumas' prodigious strength, speed and skill, including one which related his ability to lift a horse of the ground with the strength of his thighs.

During the revolution a regiment of black soldiers was formed by Saint-George, it was called the American regiment, (also known as La Legion Noire) although most of the soldiers were from the Caribbean, blacks were known, generically in France at this time as American. Dumas joined as a private aged 24, and by 31 was General in Chief of the Army of the Alps. Dumas served under Napoleon who was jealous of his height and his prowess on the battlefield. Indeed during the Wars in Egypt, the locals assumed Dumas was the French leader. Clashes with Napoleon led to Dumas' return to France from Egypt in 1799, on a rather dodgy vessel, and when this ship ran aground the King of Sicily took Dumas prisoner. Then Dumas languished in a dungeon for two years. On Dumas' release, Napoleon still refused him his rightful pension and Dumas and his young family struggled in poverty.

But really, apart from Dumas' astonishing rise through the French military, his amazing achievements, what is most interesting to me is Dumas' own son.

Of course you know the name. Alexandre Dumas, best selling writer - still in print close to two hundred years later.

Alexandre didn't know his father long, Thomas died when the boy was just 4 years old. But Alexandre heard all the tales, and he wove them into his own, brand new stories, so well loved they are all still in print and consistently on our screens whether as films or TV; The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, to name a few.

Blade and Bone is a romp, a homage to The Count of Monte Cristo and to The Three Musketeers. It was a chance to write Ezra and Loveday again, two characters who wouldn't let me forget them after Sawbones. It was also a homage to those swashbuckling adventures with fabulous costumes I loved from Sunday afternoons on the telly when I was a kid. And a book for me aged 12 who wished someone like me might show up in those shows.