A chance encounter with Toby Litt the other day made me go back and take a look at his essay titled Against Historical Fiction. It is an oft-quoted and gently provocative piece that frequently puts the noses of historical fiction writers out of joint by calling their work ‘deeply bogus’ and suggesting the term historical fiction is an ‘oxymoron’. But, though Litt is clearly not a fan of historical fiction, it is easy to take what he says out of context.

He suggests historical fiction is created in ‘bad faith’. Though it is clearly a critical point it is not intended to be insulting or derogatory but to describe the function of fiction about the past and the contract between reader and writer. He takes the term ‘bad faith’, in a philosophical sense, from Sartre, as to mean the vacillation between what is known to be fact and what is purely speculative. He opposes this with history books, which he deems are ‘written in good faith’, meaning by this that they aspire to truthfulness.

It would be tempting to argue that even documented historical ‘fact’ can be subject to unreliability and misinterpretation. We know ‘the truth’ is a slippery concept and that the writers of history often have their own political agendas at play in their work, but it is Litt’s statement about it being only, as it were, ‘proper’ history that seeks, ‘in an honest way,’ to say something ‘useful or truthful about the past’ that interests me more.

What he seems to be saying is that the intentions of the ‘proper’ historical writer and the historical novelist are in opposition to one another. This is tricky territory as it lumps together the aims of all those who set their fiction in the past. Each novelist surely has a different, subjective, aim for his or her fiction. Some may indeed be simply be using history as an exotic screen on which to project stories with contemporary sensibilities, wilfully flouting known 'truths' for the sake of the aims of their particular narrative. Others, though, might be seeking to exploit the imaginative space between the known 'facts' of the past as a way to tell the untold stories, or as attempting to use historical parallels as a way to better understand the present.

Take, for example Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, a fiction which used the Salem witch-trials of the 1660s as a way to speak about the McCarthy investigations into un-American activities that swept through Hollywood during Miller’s time. The parallels of these two events, and Miller’s fictional account of the former, allowed those living through the McCarthy witch-hunts to scrutinise a contemporary event through the lens of a historical parallel.There are many such stories from the past, which could be used to shed light on the present. The recent US election brought to my mind the vilification and downfall of Anne Boleyn – a woman who paid the ultimate price for seeking to operate in a misogynist political arena. Hillary Clinton, like Boleyn, was labelled a ‘witch’, crooked, corrupt, unwomanly, unfit and even as having committed treason. This, for me, makes Anne Boleyn’s story potentially relevant as a feminist narrative. And it is fiction that would have the power and license to put it to work as a mirror to contemporary political misogyny. In this way fiction can be a means to access another, different kind of truth.

The late great Lisa Jardine discussed the role of fiction in history in Radio 4’s A Point of View (2014) in which she talks about her response to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, a fictional account of a meeting between two scientists who each played a role in the development of the atom bomb. She said, ‘Sometimes it takes something other than perfect fidelity to sharpen our senses, to focus our attention sympathetically, in order to give us emotional access to the past.’ So, where the ‘proper’ historical author might be seeking an empirical truth the fiction writer might in turn be seeking an emotional truth; but there is an inevitable blurring of the boundaries between these apparently opposing positions. Facts and events do not occur in a vacuum without a human response. It is the feelings that events inspire that many fiction writers aim to access.

Fiction is simply another mode through which we can understand history. Take Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell, which go against the prevailing historical narrative of Thomas More as a ‘good’ person and Cromwell as ‘bad.’ Mantel does what a biographer cannot, she depicts Cromwell (a man about whom relatively little is known, given the enormity of his legacy) as a rounded individual, a vengeful and ambitious man who oversaw despicable acts yet also was capable of fierce loyalty and tenderness, who loved his wife and children. She places him as an entire person in her fictional world, extrapolating his love for his daughter from a touching line in his will. This view is assumption – plausible, yet not fact.

But Mantel’s choice of Cromwell as protagonist in her fiction allows us to look at ideas about social mobility, both then and now. The authorial admiration for a man who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from obscurity to high office bubbles up through the text but it doesn't make it any less relevant or useful as a narrative describing both the past and the present. This is not history in the conventional sense but it shines a light into the dark crannies of history making a valid and interesting depiction of an inaccessible past.

We can’t help but regard the past through the prism of our own particular time. So the Cromwell of Robert Bolt’s mid 1960s play and film A Man For all Seasons is different to the Cromwell of Wolf Hall, more than forty years later, precisely because they are speaking to different generations. So when fiction is historical it is also necessarily contemporary. Fiction exists to ask questions and it is a valid enquiry to ask about how we regard the past and how the past impacts on the present.

Many writers now look to the past to tease out the stories of those who lacked a voice in, or were deemed insignificant by, mainstream history. Often the historical record is partial when it comes to such narratives so fiction serves to fill in the gaps. Previous generations have focused on women’s stories almost exclusively from a romantic perspective, as this upheld the prevailing narrative of the time that women were politically unimportant. You only have to look at the way the Victorians chose to see a figure like Katherine Parr as an obedient nursemaid to a tyrannical husband when contemporary narratives see her as a highly intelligent political activist and author. It is possible she was both of these things but we reject the story of obedience now, as it doesn’t fit with our view of how women should behave in the twenty-first century. We increasingly seek out women from the past who sought to define their own existence in a world that denied them that right, as this chimes with our prevailing ideals of feminism. Using fiction to look between the lines of history urges us to scrutinise our present attitudes and better understand them.

The invisible stories are important. The fact that Homosexuals (even the term is only a century old) and ethnic minority groups barely existed in the received western historical narrative doesn't mean they weren't there. And it becomes the role of fiction to imagine a plausible narrative and fill in the empty spaces as authors like Sarah Waters and Toni Morrison have done to great effect. At this moment in our cultural history we are preoccupied with issues about gender identity and multi-culturism so it seems natural that we might also look to the past even if only to see how far we have progressed but also to ensure we don’t return there.

If we are to learn from the past then we must first seek to understand it and fiction is another tool by which we can do this. Jardine quotes Michael Frayn, to make her point. ‘The great challenge is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions, The only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.’ For me this goes some way to demonstrate that though the term historical fiction may seem oxymoronic there is deception in history just as there is truth in fiction and both serve a useful purpose in helping us to understand the present.

References:

Litt, Toby – Against Historical Fiction – Irish Pages, Vol. 5, No 1. Language and Languages (2008), pp 111-115

Jardine, Lisa – A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact, BBC 2014

Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four novels set in the Tudor and Elizabethan period. For information about Elizabeth Fremantle's fiction see elizabethfremantle.com

Pablo Fanque and his trained Steed

This is another of those - why didn't I know that already? - posts. Pablo Fanque Victorian Impresario, Equestrian walker par exellence. He is massively famous, featuring in the Beatle's song - For The Benefit of Mr Kite - inspired by this poster John Lennon bought in an antique shop in Sevenoaks in the late sixties. And look at him on that fabulous horse! It is me in another body, one of my dreams come true. I never got as far as vaulting lessons sadly and now I think my body wouldn't could with the many many fallings off.

You all know the song Lennon wrote inspired by the poster, of course you do! If I type the first few lines no doubt you'll get the tune in your head....

For the benefit of Mr Kite
There will be a show tonight...

I just thought it was a tune. one of those late sixties faux Victorian psychedlicy nonsensey things like Maxwells' Silver Hammer or I am The Walrus....

But no, here's a man who was the best rider, a man who could make horses dance, who could breed as well as train and wh was the best circus rider of his day.

Pablo was born plain William Darby in Norwich in 1810, his father was a butler, and he was apprenticed to William Batty, who owned a small travelling circus aged 11.

He performed as Young Derby to begin with, eventually choosing the name Pablo Fanque and becoming renowned as a horseman. He didn't set up his own touring Circus until the 1840s, but he was also famous for horse breeding and training. His horses were known for their ability to dance and much prized.

The Illustrated London News said of his London debut in 1847;

Mr. Pablo Fanque is an artiste of colour, and his steed ... we have not only never seen surpassed, but never equalled ... Mr. Pablo Fanque was the hit of the evening. The steed in question was Beda, the black mare that Fanque had bought from Batty. That the horse attracted so much attention was testament to Fanque's extraordinary horse training skills.

Pablo Fanque's Circus toured all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, but his circus was especially popular in the North in Yorkshire and Lancashire. But a showman's life was always precarious and he endured bankruptcy and personal disaster too, when the arena in Leeds they were performing in collapsed, leading to the death of his first wife, Susannah.

In 1869 a near tragedy was avoided when the tightrope walker, Madame Caroline lost her footing on a high wire 60 foot in the air fell. She held onto the rope with her hands and the riggers managed to lower the rope a few feet, then Caroline jumped and was caught by the crowd.

Fanque died in 1871 in Stockport, and there was a procession with his favourite horse following the mourners and brass band.

I'd always known the song, but never about Pablo, a man who out dressaged most and was respected and massively successful, his circus being one of the top troupes of the arts' golden age.

After his death the Showmen's Guild chaplain said; "In the great brotherhood of the equestrian world there is no colour line, for although Pablo was of African extraction, he speedily made his way to the top of his profession. The camaraderie of the Ring has but one test, ability."

William Darby aka Pablo Fanque

Catherine's latest book is Blade and Bone published by Walker Books

Arushi Raina's potent debut novel, When Morning Comes, is a coming-of-age story set in apartheid-era South Africa. Told by four alternating first-person narrators - an angry revolutionary, an ambitious gangster, a son of extreme privilege, and a peaceful activist - it sets the narrators' personal stories against the backdrop of the Soweto Uprising of 1976.

Here's the official description:

Zanele is skipping school and secretly plotting against the apartheid government. The police can't know. Her mother and sister can't know.

Her best friend Thabo, schoolboy turned gang member, can tell she's up to something. But he has troubles of his own—a deal gone wrong and some powerful enemies.

Across the bridge, in the wealthy white suburbs, Jack plans to spend his last days in Johannesburg burning miles on his beat-up Mustang—until he meets a girl with an unforgettable face from the simmering black township—Soweto.

Working in her father's shop, Meena finds a packet of banned pamphlets. They lead to a mysterious black girl with a secret, a dangerous gangster with an expensive taste in clothes, and an engaging white boy who drives a battered red car.

A series of chance meetings changes everything.

A chain of events is set in motion—a failed plot, a murdered teacher, and a secret movement of students that has spread across the township.

And the students will rise.

When Morning Comes is a striking achievement. With four very distinct narrators who are often hostile to each other, it would be easy for the novel's structure to fracture or spin out of control. Instead, it coheres. Raina's handling of race and politics is both subtle and consistent. And her prose is by turns vivid and moving, striking and restrained - precisely the vehicle such a story demands. After finishing it, the novel haunted me for days. I'm so glad that Raina kindly agreed to answer some of my more persistent questions here.

YSL: I really admire the way you tell the story through four interlocking narratives. Each voice is incredibly distinct, the characters are frequently at odds with each other, and yet the novel holds together – an impressive technical accomplishment! Why did you choose to structure it in this way?

AR: I’m tempted to say that the book wrote itself that way—it’s a story about collisions, the personal, day to day collisions the characters have with eachother, against a backdrop of the larger collision of the Soweto Uprising of 1976. I needed to go to different parts of the city, to see things differently, to create the underlying tension in the story. But the truth is, I’ve been playing with different points of views for a while, I love how Zanele, Thabo, Jack and Meena all tell the story differently, and how the writer (me) and the reader has to come to terms with which, if any version they most relate to.

YSL: You were born in South Africa, but long after the novel’s action takes place. What inspired you to write about your earliest homeland and what kind of research did you do to establish a sense of time and place?

AR: For the longest time, I didn’t write about South Africa, partly because I didn’t feel I was able to, and partly because to write about home in North America made me feel like I was trying to pull some kind of exotic card out my bag of writer’s tricks. I was partly right about the first, wrong about the second. To write about something familiar from home may seem exotic to others, but may be the story you need to tell, which is less exotic to you, than, say writing about an epic slumber party in the heart of Jersey City (not that there is anything wrong with slumber parties or Jersey City). Like many, though, I finally felt inspired when was leaving Johannesburg to immigrate to Canada. And my doubts about being able to do the story justice, helped. I learned to tread carefully (but more on this later).

It was a tipping point, in many ways, but immigration is not super convenient for research. At high school, we’d spent a number of years studying apartheid history, and the Soweto Uprising in particular. This was a starting point, and a good one—I’d been a teenager then and remembered the experience of reading about it in a textbook. But it needed to be real. And for me, to make history breathe is to make it fiction.

After that, it was a lot of trawling through English and American libraries for the odd reference book on primary resources, and of course, the internet. And South Africans, too.

Arushi Raina, presently of Vancouver, B.C.

YSL: Inhabiting the minds of two black characters living under apartheid is a bold step. How could you feel confident that you were doing them justice? And what do you make of Lionel Shriver’s recent provocations on the subject of cultural appropriation?

AR: I think it is, and having grown up in Johannesburg, the complexities of the country and race relations are raw to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Being closer makes it harder to describe the context in large, defined brushstrokes. And the short answer to your question is no: I can never be fully confident that I’m doing them justice. I can only give my very best shot, I can tread carefully, questioning my assumptions at each step, pulling forward a universal humanity while not shying away from some of those differences. I can look at primary sources and read the words of the South African township youth (there are a number of speeches and records of letters available) - these words are sharper, more eloquent, than anything I could put to paper.

I think the attempt to reach and respectfully tell stories in other voices, marginalized voices is important, as much as the openness to further discussion and debate on my attempt, and depiction is important. I don’t want to be defensive, I want to try my best because it is an important story rarely told, and I want to hear all people’s views, least not South African teens. I think Lionel Shriver is contributing a specific point of view to the discussion, and she’s put forward a number of rather out-there examples. Living in post-apartheid South Africa, interacting with First Nations groups in Canada has made me aware that where there is pain, there is a need to tread carefully. But this does not lessen our responsibility to empathize and try telling difficult stories, always empowering these communities to either be involved or discuss/question what we do as storytellers. That’s really where our learning begins, or at least I hope it does.

YSL: Early in the novel, Thabo says, “it was stupid to put the one thing that mattered to you in a red dress for everyone to see”. And yet he does, repeatedly, because he doesn’t believe he has a choice. This is a powerful metaphor for a lot of things that happen in the novel. Is choice – or the lack thereof - largely an illusion for your characters?

AR: That’s a tricky one. I’d like to think that the characters, including Thabo, come face-to- face with a narrowing pool of difficult choices. And their resilience is in their ability to make and come to grips with these choices.

YSL: Each interracial relationship in the novel begins with antagonism, or at least guarded suspicion. This is logical enough and I imagine there’s a lot of historical evidence for interracial romances like Jack’s and Zanele’s. I’m curious about Zanele and Meena, too. How unusual was it to form platonic friendships across racial barriers?

AR: Pretty unusual. Talking to South Africans who lived through that time, you only did so if you really stuck your neck out. Your entire life wasn’t designed for you to do so. In the rare cases they did, it was through anti-apartheid activism, which, to Meena’s credit, she does get embroiled in.

YSL: Family bonds seem largely broken and/or ineffectual in your portrait of South African society. Jack’s parents value his academic achievements and whatever glory his bright future can reflect upon them; Zanele’s mother is trapped both by single parenthood and institutional racism; and Meena’s relationship with her father is dutiful but remote. This is surely not a coincidence! What connection do you see between a dehumanizing body politic and its subjects’ humanity?

AR: You know, I never really noticed this until you pointed it out! The parents sort of wrote themselves that way, inflected of course, through the point of views of their children. As you’ve pointed out, in many ways the apartheid institution wears at the very core of the family—in Zanele’s case, her family has been split apart by labour and group area act laws, breaking open all the cracks that may have lain underneath a family that didn’t suffer the same injustice. In Meena’s, she has to come to terms with the strange triaging of color, where Indians were treated marginally better to black people. To take advantage of this slight preferential treatment is a recipe for survival, and Meena’s father has already surrendered to it.

I also think that families can be a source of insulation from the threats of the wider world. In many cases, they were, in apartheid South Africa, from my friends’ parents’ accounts. For Meena, Zanele, Thabo and Jack to be who they end up being, they needed to have the insulation damaged, or ripped off.

YSL: Could you leave us with a quotation (or two) that really encapsulates the flavour of When Morning Comes?

AR:

“It’s the kind of storm that happens only on the Highveld, the thunder loud and rapid. She doesn’t speak. I need her to. Maybe she’s counting the people who’ve died since we first met.”

YSL: Thank so much, Arushi. While it's a cliché to call a novel timely, that is precisely the case here. I hope When Morning Comes is very widely read, especially at a time such as this.

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This post is my (Ying's) last as a regular History Girl. Thank you to everyone who read and commented over the past two years! If you'd like to keep in touch, please consider signing up for my sporadic author newsletter.

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Arushi Raina grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. So far, Arushi’s also lived in Egypt, Nigeria, India, the US, UK, and most recently, Canada. At Vassar College in New York, Arushi studied Economics and English, where she was able to put together the beginnings of When Morning Comes. Besides writing, Arushi enjoys travelling, arguments, and long car rides. As a day job, Arushi works as a consultant. One day she’ll explain what that means.

Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries (also called The Agency quartet in North America). She's presently writing a novel set in Southeast Asia during the Second World War.

Seven years ago, I went to a funeral in Wells. The cathedral was full, and I, like many others, watched on big screens outside on the green. Someone royal was there, and there were representatives from several European countries. It was all filmed and was later shown on the television news.

So whose funeral was it? That of a statesman or a politician? Or a famous actor, perhaps?

No, none of those. It was the funeral of an ordinary working man. No-one had heard of him until he was a hundred years old, when he finally broke his silence and began to speak about a war in which he had taken part as a young man: World War One. After that, he found fame as one of the last surviving Tommies; he travelled to France to take part in memorial services, he co-operated in the writing of a book about his life, he appeared in documentaries, speaking movingly about the pointlessness of war, he met the great and good. One by one, his contemporaries died, till finally he was the only one left: Harry Patch, the last fighting Tommy. He died when he was 112. I've written about him before - you can see those posts here and here.

Harry Patch on the

There are many ways through which we remember that war and others: through books, through film, through poetry. They all work, they all move us and make us think. But just over a year ago, I joined a choir. It's run by Issy Emeney, who not only writes and performs music, but is also a painter and a flatfoot/clog dancer. And she has written a song, called The Last Tommy, about Harry. Into just a few verses, she gets the pointlessness, the waste of war. The penultimate verse is sung as a solo, and every time I hear it, it catches me. You can listen to the song here, and I'm sure Issy won't mind me quoting that verse:

Look into an old man's eyes
And what do you see there?
Peace and reconciliation
For the wounds we all must bear:
There's hope in every sunrise,
Joy in every song I write;
But when England's very last Tommy died
I cried, I cried...
When the very last fighting Tommy died,
I cried.

And now to remember a musician and poet who died last week - Leonard Cohen. This is a reading he did recently of the famous poem written during the First World War by John Macrae, a Canadian doctor - so it's a sort of double remembering. Thanks to Alison Arlington for this, a friend who posted it on Facebook.

Last month, I wrote about seeing Kneehigh Theatre’s production of "946: The Amazing Adventure of Adolphus Tips" at the Globe theatre, down on London's Southbank.

On that occasion I was sharing the experience with a couple of pre-teens.

This month, I saw the show again, with a wonderful "grown-up" writing friend at a very different venue. the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

When this building - also known as the "WYP" - opened in March 1990, under its Artistic Director Jude Kelly, it was Britain’s largest new purpose-built theatre for 15 years. It was built on Leed's Quarry Hill, the site of the most notorious slums in 19^th Century Western Europe, and later, of their replacement, the infamous Quarry Hill flats, which were also torn down. The WYP considers itself to be “a vital theatre, a great artistic beacon for the North, rooted in our communities and creating exceptional art,” and I am a great admirer of the place.

The WYP's largest stage, named the Quarry, offers a modern, wide-open acting space which is almost the opposite of the Globe's pillared Elizabethan apron stage. Immediately, the small Kneehigh cast had more room to move and “play”. There was no conflict between the setting and the use of acoustic music, sound effects, lighting or Kneehigh's trademark glitter ball. There was no problem over the “non-Shakespearean” nature of the 946 play, an adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s children's novel about the Slapton Sands disaster, which I've written about more expansively here. In the Quarry, the dancers had room to dance, the musicians on the balcony were easily visible, and the shallow raked seating allowed easy movement from the stage into the audience. I really appreciated seeing the show working in this new “expanded” acting space.

Yet afterwards, musing on all that I’d seen, I felt that - compared with the seemingly smaller Globe - some of the scenes lost their intensity. In the Quarry, the tiniest puppet figures, so cleverly used in the production to change perspective and time, looked a little too tiny to have an impact on the back-rows, whether they were flock of sheep and sheep-dog, or the miniature German parachutist.

Additionally, when the cast hold up photographic portraits of the “German pilot’s family” and also those representing all the nationalities involved in “England’s War”, was the important and intentional variety of faces visible? The 750 seater Quarry is a space may be more suited to large scale projection than to hand held A4 sheets and display books.

As the larger stage gave room and time to separate out the scenes, it sometimes created a slightly different mood. At the Quarry, when Lily, the young heroine, daydreams about Hitler and Churchill ending the war by means of children’s games, there were just the three actors spread across the front of the set. Yet, on the Globe’s crowded stage, the moment was and had to be set within the cheering, crowded schoolroom. There the scene came across as young Lily storytelling to amuse her young friends, all sharing in the same fantasy, wishes and war worries. Both the Kneehigh performances were good but it was interesting to see the way the two theatre spaces shaded their own versions.

I felt the audience at the Quarry seemed warmer and keener than the crowds at the Globe, who must surely have included people seeing the show as part of their London tourist’s “history” experience, despite the programme’s lack of the Bard. The Leeds audience seemed to be welcoming the show for its own sake, and there was the room for a well-deserved standing ovation without any concerns over the tightness of the seating or the creakiness of a wooden theatre frame. There was also time to notice the elderly woman in the row in front of me, sobbing for her own childhood memories. All I can say is that both sizes of theatre experience had their own strengths and delights.

Even though I’m half-repeating my last post, I’m putting these thoughts up as my History Girls post here today, because November – especially this particular November – seems to be all about “acts” in bigger or smaller settings: huge triumphs and desperate disappointments, and with emotions stirred by other kinds of actor.

Despite the “inclusive” messages within Michael Morpurgo’s books and shows, and similar books by other authors, I feel concerned that this concentration of war anniversaries and the remembrance of the dead has not opened hearts and minds as they might have done.

I worry that these “bigger” celebrations may have led to an uncomfortable, boastful kind of nationalism, have fed a public mood that runs from newsreaders being trolled for not wearing a poppy promptly enough through to knowingly-edited photographs of party leaders at the Cenotaph being used by the press for political ends. Although the lessons being learned from these bigger celebrations of past conflicts has informed some, and honoured the many sacrifices, I wonder whether they have also led to an uncomfortable and illusory sense of “national greatness”.

I may be wrong in my pessimism but, this November, it fills me with sadness to know that I cannot see a St George’s flag nor Union Jack displayed without a certain kind of discomfort, despite all the sacrifices that my family has made in the past. In what is said to be a post-factual age, history is looming very large indeed. White poppies, rather than white feathers, perhaps.

Penny Dolan.
A Boy Called M.O.U.SE

Susan Price : A Sterkarm Tryst

I was having a bit of a discussion with my editor, Matrice, who is working on my book, A Sterkarm Tryst.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the hard work was celebrated with a party - and most other big parties, such as weddings, were also held at this time of the year, because there was plenty of fresh food. You had a blow-out at Christmas, of course, to help everybody get through that cold, dark part of the year. Bitterly cold, because this was the period when the Thames froze solid, so imagine what the weather was like further north. And very, very dark without any light except fire and candlelight - and every candle had taken time and effort to make, every piece of fuel had been gathered, dried and stored. Whatever food you had in store had to be carefully tended to get you through the rest of the year until the next harvest.

God bless the master of this house,

The mistress also.

And all the little childer that round the table goo -

God bless the house, the barn, the byre

The dog outside the door.

God bless what'er you have in store -

And give you ten times more!

The Soul-Cake Carol.

Smailholm Tower, wikipedia - click for credit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you struck at your enemy at this time of year, burned and trampled the crops standing in their fields- burned or stole what they had left in store - burned their houses - then you ensured that they had a miserable, hungry winter ahead of them.

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

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

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

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

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

wikimedia: wild strawberry - click for credit

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

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

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

Wild rose, wikipedia - click for credit

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

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

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

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

Susan Price is the Carnegie-winning author of The Ghost Drum.

Her latest book is The Drover's Dogs.

       "I don’t think those dogs ever mistook me for their master. They were good herd-dogs and I thinkthey knew exactly what I was — a little calf, lost from the herd. A lost little pup wandering loose. They knew that what they had to do was take me in charge, and herd me along, and watch over me, until they had brought me somewhere safe."

               It’s a long way home — from East to West
                    across Scotland’s mountains and lochs.

A Sterkarm Tryst - published January 2017
   Available for pre-order

Whenever I'm asked about my research process, I always say that I read as much that was written at time as I can. You simply can't beat hearing about something from the horse's mouth. Nobody knows what it was actually like to live through a particular historical event or era unless they actually did so, and, as a writer of historical fiction, I can pick up up valuable pointers on vocabulary, attitude and what was really important to those people, as well as an insight in to what actually happened.

There are some great collections of oral history around; the 'Voices' series are excellent, for example:

The local history section of a library is also often a treasure trove - the WI and other such groups will often have compiled, somewhere in their history, stories of their member's childhoods. I often write about rural village communities in the early twentieth century, and these seemingly 'small' stories of school days, hedge remedies, pocket money, do-it-yourself fun and favourite treats are endlessly fascinating to me.

Whenever I can, I try to find somebody to actually talk to who lived in the time and place I need to learn about - not always easy or possible, but so rewarding when it works out. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about my grandparents - how they met, in North Africa, just after the Second World War, how I first came to find out about their adventurous, romantic history, and the effect it had on me. You can read the article here (copy and paste link into browser) -

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/19/how-grandma-had-her-wicked-way-

- but the crux of the piece was that almost always, when we lose somebody, particularly an older family member, we find ourselves wishing we had known them better, and had asked them more about themselves and their lives, before it was too late.

This is especially true for anyone with an interest in history. The elderly are, of course, invaluable sources of knowledge. The generation who lived through the Second World War, the 1950s and swinging sixties, are gradually being lost to us. But on a personal level, I find the stories of those we know and love to be so much more compelling. And so, in the spirit of preservation, I decided to interview my beloved dad for this blog post:

John Alfred Webb, born in 1937

Dad turns 80 soon. 80! I can't quite believe it and neither can he. When I think that somebody so closely related to me remembers the Blitz, it gives me an odd feeling - as though it has become more real, when before it was just something that happened in the past to other people. It makes Dad seem like a time traveller of some kind. Which of course he is; we all are. Dad was born and grew up in Ilford, East London; he was too young to be evacuated, and so remained with his parents in London during the blitz. I interviewed him about his earliest memories, now so far in the past (sorry, Dad) and this is what he told me:

"My earliest memory, aged 3, is of seeing contrails in a blue sky, which must have been during the Battle of Britain, and not understanding my mother's explanation of aeroplanes with men in them... The first Christmas I remember, maybe when I was 4 or 5, was waking up to find presents on the foot of the bed, including a wooden lorry, painted in camouflage colours, complete with a load of miniature sandbags. I was also convinced that I had seen Father Christmas.

I remember my mother spending all day on a Monday doing the washing, with a copper and a mangle. Then later in the week she would spend all day ironing it, with two flat irons that she heated on the gas stove and used in rotation - it was all very Dickensian.

Dad, seated, with his older brother David and sister Margaret

My memories of the Blitz include being woken in the middle of the night, wrapped up in a blanket and carried in a rush to the shelter in the garden, but most of all the noise of the anti-aircraft battery in Barking Park (about a third of a mile from the house). Another vivid memory is my frustration at not being allowed out to see a burning German bomber on the way down, or the burning house across the road, which had been hit by an incendiary bomb.

At that young age the war was fragmented for me, and did not really figure again after the Blitz, until the advent of the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets. A V1 hit the school I subsequently went to, about to approximately a third of a mile away; and a V2 rocket hit Seven Kings Park, also a third of a mile from my primary school, during lunch playtime. I don’t remember feeling afraid, but I must have been, because the sudden noise of a siren being tested (they were used as fire alarms) opposite my workplace in 1955, caused my heart rate to go up to about 200 bpm - it had obviously touched my subconscious memory.

My favourite meal in earlier days was my mother’s steak and kidney pie – a highlight of the week after school lunches, which were somewhat unusual. My least favourite was anything containing cheese, a result of unhappy memories at primary school when food was in short supply during the war. (ed.: After 70 years of this cheese boycott, Dad has recently started eating mild cheeses like brie and feta. Go figure.)

My memories of school are mixed. I was quite daunted by grammar school at first - teachers in gowns and mortarboards, and initially a very strict disciplinary regime. Overall my memories are positive, but we were a small school and in the sixth form you had to take part in some activities, e.g. acting in house plays, which were not by choice, and I always dreaded. I think we were privileged to receive a very good education. Careers advice was in its infancy as was not very good – the headmaster was not really interested unless you were going on to university.

Dad with his father and sister Margaret, on holiday at Corfe Castle, Dorset; Dad aged eleven

Family holidays were few and far between due to the war and the lack of cash after it. My parents, sister and I went to Swanage in 1948 and Exmouth in 1952. We stayed at private houses on both occasions for the said financial reasons. My last family holiday was to Sandown, Isle of Wight, with my parents and my best friend Brian Johnson – the occasion of my first real encounter with the opposite sex. (ed.: I intend to find out more about this!)

I do not remember my father being very “hands on”. He was too busy being in the army during the war and working afterwards. We just did as we were told (most of the time). My sister and I fought like cats and dogs when we were young, with me always coming off worst. We drove my mother to despair.The first encounter with the doctor that I remember was when he visited my primary school after I had broken my leg in the playground. This came about at the age of 5 after a collision with a “huge” girl, who was 7 years old.

I do get annoyed when people, usually on tv, talk about the 1970s as though they were the Dark Ages of taste. There are so many comments, often from people who were not there, judging them by today’s thinking/standards. Today's tastes and opinions may be viewed very differently in the future. Certainly most practical aspects of life are better now, though, for example the standard of living, the quality of food and clothing, the ease of travel to virtually anywhere on the globe.

My mum, Alison, on the left; Mum's grandparents and Dad, right. (1970s fashions...history will decide! Ed.)

However, life was simpler and more sensible in many ways a few decades ago. We believed, rightly or wrongly that most politicians had the good of the country at heart and were not devious, “economical with the truth”, and looking after No.1. There are now too many career politicians who have never had experience of anything else in the commercial or professional world. At a more trivial level, we did not have “Health and Safety” or political correctness; and the country was not the blasted talking shop it has become. (Why else did the main character in “Life on Mars” jump off the roof to get back to the 1970s?) Car manuals definitely did not have 750 pages back then! I dislike the swearing that has become commonplace, particularly with comedians.

I never formally proposed to your mother. We had been together for over a year, and had been sharing a house with two friends under fairly basic conditions. Eventually, after Mum had dropped some fairly subtle hints, it just seemed a very good idea. Having decided, we were married two or three months later. I regret not having thanked my parents for all their efforts and support until I finally realised and appreciated it, by which time it was then too late." (ed.: potentially some kind of hint here?)

Mum and Dad on their wedding day, November 1971

There's something so poignant to me about the thought of my grandma using flat irons heated on her stove to do the family ironing. Surely the world has changed more in the past 100 years than at any other time in its history to date. But then, who nows what the next 100 years will bring!

Broughty Ferry is a former fishing village on the Tay estuary, four miles down river from Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. The fishing boats have gone now, together with the men who sailed them and who manned the whaling ships which made the perilous journeys to Arctic waters in the days when whale oil was a precious commodity. In the nineteenth century the ‘jute barons’ of Dundee began to build their handsome houses here, and ever since it has been a place for quiet homes, with nothing more disturbing than the cry of gulls and oyster-catchers, the river carrying little traffic, but providing a home for seals and dolphins. The last place you would imagine to have witnessed dragoons in pursuit of a fleeing Jacobite officer in the aftermath of a terrible battle. Yet it is the place where the Chevalier de Johnstone made his dramatic escape, thanks to the courage of some unlikely friends.

The harbour at Broughty still guarded by its medieval castle

James Johnstone, later known as the Chevalier de Johnstone, was born in Edinburgh on 25 July, 1719, and grew up in Scotlandand London. In 1738 he visited two uncles in Russia, evidence of an early taste for adventure which would shape the rest of his life. Almost immediately after Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, Johnstone joined the Jacobite army in Perth, and soon rose to the rank of captain. Throughout the 1745 rebellion, he participated in all the major battles, culminating in the massive defeat at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, when the Jacobite forces were scattered and then pursued ruthlessly throughout the Highlands by the Duke of Cumberland’s army. Most of those who were caught were hanged, while Prince Charles Stuart turned tail and fled, abandoning his followers and escaping to France. Writing later in his memoirs, Johnstone was severely critical of the prince, claiming that he could have rallied his forces instead of deserting them.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart

Most of the Jacobites who survived tried to go to ground in the mountains and glens of the Highlands. Some made their escape, like the prince, via the western isles and thence to France (always a supporter of the Scots against England). James Johnstone, however, made the perilous decision to head south, into the Lowlandswhich were held by the English army and by the Protestant Lowland Scots who remained loyal to the English crown and not to the half Polish, quarter Italian, French speaking Catholic Prince Charles.

And this is where Broughty Ferry enters the story of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

Johnstone managed to reach the estate of a Mr Graham at Duntrune, a man he had been told might be willing to provide help. Graham’s two sons had fought with the Jacobites, and his family had been involved in the 1715 rebellion, but he had stayed at home during the present troubles, and so was not suspect. Inspired by a particularly vivid dream, which was to prove accurate, Johnstone was trying to make his way south to Edinburgh, where he had old friends who (he hoped) might be able to smuggle him on board a ship for France. However, to reach Edinburgh he would have to cross the two great east coast rivers – the Tay and the Forth. Graham’s estate at Duntrune was some five miles to the north of the Tay, and the whole area between Duntrune and a possible crossing place at Broughty was alive with Cumberland’s dragoons.

Butcher Cumberland

Graham hid Johnstone in an enclosure on his estate, full of high bushes of broom, and provided food – eggs, butter, bread, and cheese for breakfast, washed down with a bottle of wine and a bottle of beer – Johnstone’s first decent meal for weeks. Afterwards, while the fugitive slept, Mr Graham devised a plan for him to reach Broughty, as it was known then (or ‘Brochtie’ in Scots, 'Bruach Tatha' in Gaelic), where he arranged for fishermen to row him across the river. He then returned to provide Johnstone a dinner of the best piece of beef he had ever tasted. Over an excellent bottle of claret, Graham explained the plan and the two men synchronised their watches. First, at five o’clock Johnstone must follow, at a discreet distance, one of Graham’s men as he walked some miles to a windmill carrying a sack of grain for his master. This Johnstone did, waiting in hiding for his next guide, an elderly woman who led him on until they reached the hill overlooking Broughty.

‘You must wait here,’ she said, ‘while I go into Broughty to see the fishermen.’

Johnstone hid himself behind the trees and undergrowth in a furrow on the edge of a ploughed field beside the road down into Broughty, more or less where our nineteenth century house stands today. On the other side of the road, on Fort Hill, stood the fort (or what remained of it) built two hundred years earlier by Henry VIII’s forces during the ‘Rough Wooing’, a campaign which was intended to bring about a marriage between the children Mary Queen of Scots and the future King Edward VI. (It failed.)

18th century dragoon

As Johnstone waited in considerable fear, a large troop of dragoons rode up the hill from Broughty, passing within feet of his hiding place, having searched every fisherman’s cottage, boat shed, and tavern in the village. They were closely followed by the old woman, in a state of panic. As it was drawing toward dusk, the dragoons rode away, having failed to find any of the Jacobites for whom they had been searching. The old woman, however, warned that the fishermen now refused to row Johnstone over the river, having been intimidated by the threats of the dragoons. She urged him to return to Duntrune.

This the Chevalier de Johnstone refused to do, and left his hiding place to hurry down the hill to the village where he had expected to be taken across the river on the next stage in his escape. He had no difficulty in finding the fishermen’s inn on the shore, and no difficulty in finding the fishermen. But the men continued to be terrified and flatly refused to take him across the river. Johnstone argued that, since the dragoons had just searched the whole village and found nothing, now was the safest time to make the journey. Still they refused.

The Ship Inn on the river front may stand on the same spot

The innwife, Mistress Burn, had two exceptionally beautiful daughters, Mally and Jenny. They taunted the men with their cowardice, but to no effect.

‘O Jenny,’ said the elder girl, ‘they are despicable cowards and poltroons. I would not for the world that this unfortunate gentleman were taken in our house. I pity his situation. Will you take an oar? I’ll take the other, and we will row him over ourselves, to the eternal shame of these pitiful and heartless cowards.’

[So the Chevalier de Johnstone reports her. She is very well spoken for a Broughty innwife’s daughter!]

The wide Tay at Broughty

At ten o’clock, Johnstone and the two girls ran the boat down the pebble beach to the river and got aboard. The Tay was then about two miles wide at this point, and it carries more water than any other river in Britain. To row across it, in the dark, in time of war, was no small undertaking, but the two girls took turn about on one oar, while the Chevalier de Johnstone took the other, and thus the fugitive officer was rowed safely across to Fife, reaching it around midnight. Once on shore the girls set him on the road to St Andrews. They refused any payment, but Johnstone managed to slip ten or twelve shillings into Mally’s pocket, before kissing them both soundly and continuing on his flight to Edinburgh. He was never to see them again, but he never forgot them.

After more adventures, the Chevalier de Johnstone reached Edinburgh and travelled thence to Rotterdam and Paris, disguised as a servant to Lady Jane Douglas, as foretold in his dream. He would continue to lead an exciting life for many years in Europe and Canada, eventually recorded in The Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

As for Broughty and the two girls, Mally and Jenny Burn? No doubt Broughty slipped quietly back into its life as a fishing village, and presumably the girls held their tongues, for there is no record of reprisals by Cumberland’s forces. Today a simple plaque stands as a memorial to their act of defiance and courage, in the face of the fishermen’s cowardice.

The plaque in Broughty commemorating the escape

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Attributed to Annibale Carracci (Bologna 1560-Rome 1609) A presumed self-portrait c. 1575-80

Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016

There are some definite perks to this blogging business, and for me this season one presented itself in the form of an invitation to The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace for a tour of their new exhibition, Portrait of the Artist. You can go too of course, and I recommend you do, until Monday, 17 Apr 2017, and the exhibition is open daily, 10:00-17:30 with last admission at 16:15. I got a bacon croissant though, because I’m special.

I’m not just saying this because they fed me - it really is a thought provoking and surprising exhibition and I thoroughly enjoyed it. All chosen from the Royal Collection the selection includes not just self-portraits, but images of artists, formal and informal, made by friends and colleagues. This slightly broader remit means that there are a number of unusual treasures in the exhibition and some thought provoking juxtapositions of private and public personas, performances and intimacies.

As you enter the first gallery you are met by a pair of delicate chalk self-portraits from the 16th century sharing a smaller partitioned space with a Hockney, made with an iPad apparently, and dark, haunted etching of Lucian Freud. You can’t help feeling you are under the eye of the artist yourself as you look at them, and the gaze is penetrating if not pitiless. A strange reversal it is, to walk into a gallery and find yourself under such close examination.

The images artists used to publicise themselves make for an enlightening contrast with those likenesses caught by friends or enemies. In Rubens’s portrait of Van Dyck, the latter is thoughtful, understated, a troubled observer rather than the flamboyant cavalier, and Bartolozzi attacks Maria Conway in caricature. When the exhibition moves onto artists at a work, Rowlandson’s Chamber of Genius is a garret packed with dogs, children and discomfort, while Samuel Drummond presents himself and his studio lit by a shaft of divine inspiration and scattered with military props to make him the recording angel of an imagined battlefield, or not field really, given his most famous painting was the Death of Nelson at which, in this image, he is at work.

The exhibition is full of small contemplative pleasures, such as the image of da Vinci by his student Melzi, and surprises such as Sarah Bernhardt’s Self-Portrait as a Chimera where the actress has transformed herself into a bat-winged monster and an inkstand at the same time, for which she deserves extra points, I think.

Artemisia Gentileschi (Rome 1593-Naples 1652)

Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) c.1638-9

Royal Collection Trust ©

I’m embarrassed to admit to say I didn’t know anything of the artist Artemisia Gentilesch until very recently, and I think the curators chose well when they made her ‘Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting’ their headline image for the exhibition. Her story is remarkable - there’s a great article about her here - and the painting itself is extraordinary. It has a sort of muscularity, and intent about it. The artist, focusing on what she is trying to capture on the bare canvas, seems to look round and beyond us whereas those early self-portraits stare you straight in the eye, and it has a vigour and power to it which is almost shockingly physical after those studied acts of self-promotion in the previous rooms.

Well worth the trip to the palace, even if you don’t get a bacon croissant, and for those who can’t make it, the accompanying book by Anna Reynolds, Lucy Peter and Martin Clayton is a thing of great beauty in itself - fascinating text, and superb reproductions.

www.imogenrobertson.com

In the midst of all the Halloween madness around crazed-clown sightings (surely a PR stunt for the forthcoming Stephen King movie) and poor-taste celebrity costumes, my eye was caught this year by a request from Historic England for help with searching out some rather specialist graffiti. The patterns they are looking for date from between the the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, can be found on both homes and churches and may be marks made by the builders or occupants to deter witches.

The Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

We are a superstitious lot when it comes to guarding home and hearth.These marks (known as apotropaic from the Greek word for turning evil spirits away) are part of a long tradition of charms and curses stretching across cultures and centuries designed to keep homes and places of religious significance safe. The Japanese ofuda, charms written on paper and blessed at a Shinto shrine, date back to at least the seventeenth century Edo period. A nazar, a blue and white teardrop-shaped amulet, is a common sight outside homes across Turkey and Greece and is a legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Chinese door gods, or menshen, have been displayed on the entrances to temples and homes since the pre-AD Han Dynasty and any self-respecting house in Ancient Egypt would be guarded by the goddess Bast, depicted as a black cat.

Daisy Wheels in Stratford, Nicholas Molyneau

Apotropaic witch marks seems to be an English phenomenon and Historic England's treasure hunt request is directed particularly at secular buildings: although witch marks have been discovered on homes, these have, to date, been far less catalogued than those discovered at churches. So where do you look and what are you looking for if you decide to try and wean the teenagers of hunting for Pokemon? Witch marks of the type Historic England are hoping to catalogue are usually concentrated around entrance points such as doors, fireplaces and windows which are deemed as vulnerable to malevolent incursions. Marks can be in the shape of pentacles (sometimes lying on top of demons), inter-twined Vs and Ms for the Virgin Mary or, most commonly, compass-drawn hexfoils or 'daisy-wheels'. Whatever the shape, they do appear to share the characteristic of being formed from endless lines: apparently demons follow the lines and then get trapped, a plot device which a lot of films seem to have over-looked. Sites where marks have been found include Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, in roof beams at the Tower of London and carved into the timbers of a room prepared for a visit by King James I (a man obsessed with witches to an unhealthy degree) at Knole House in Kent.

The scratchings are certainly intriguing although their association with deliberate attempts to ward off evil spirits is not a given: they could simply be marks made by masons to show how and where stones or timbers should be fitted or the product of apprentices learning the geometry needed for their craft. Perhaps, as with many superstitions, they started as one thing and became another. Whatever the truth of these marks, a belief has grown up around them that they exist as a protective measure, a belief it is not hard to understand in the context of communities living in genuine fear of witchcraft and in homes far darker than anything we can imagine in these days of instant light.

The urge to guard against danger or ill-luck is part of the fabric of our buildings and some superstitions of the past still linger. Few of us, for example, would raise an eyebrow at a horseshoe nailed above a door, even if we no longer believe iron has the power to repel witches. Niels Bohr, the Danish scientist who basically sorted out quantum physics for the rest of us, had one on his house and, when asked if he believed it brought luck allegedly replied: of course not but I have been reliably informed it will bring me luck whether I believe it or not. It's a line of thinking many are probably still happy to follow, although I imagine most would draw the line at a horseshoe rather than employing the full range of charms available to our ancestors.

Witch Bottle, Portable Antiquities Scheme

A fear of magic implies a belief in its power. While witch marks and horseshoes are visible signs that a house is protected, some of the other methods used were far more secretive, perhaps because they had 'magic' in their creation. Repelling a witch is one thing, to be accused of being one yourself in the doing would be rather unfortunate. The stoppered vessels known as witch bottles for example, which have been discovered bricked inside walls particularly in houses in East Anglia, could be classed as a form of magic fly trap. The bottles were intended to trap the witch who threatened the home-owner and contained mixtures of pins (to catch the evil), red wine (to drown it) and rosemary (to cleanse it away). If the identity of the witch was known, adding a personal touch, such as their urine or finger parings, made the magic doubly strong. Other, perhaps less dangerous, charms included fashioning the lintels over windows and doors from rowan wood and concealing shoes in the rafters and the hearth - this latter superstition apparently stemmed from the story of a priest in the thirteenth century who once trapped the devil in a boot. For the finishing touch, a mummified cat could be placed in the chimney breast - possibly an inversion of witchcraft as it uses the traditional witch's familiar to repel the danger.

Inverted name - Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

Protection is one thing but sometimes a stronger response to danger was required and charms gave way to curses. Examples of curses, essentially an inversion of magic/evil, have also been found in and around both church and domestic buildings. Curses which may be intended to direct the evil back at its perpetrator rather than merely block it do not need to be complex: witch marks have been discovered which are, apparently deliberately, incomplete, for example with a missing petal. Some curses, however, are very specifically directed: Roman-style curses in which the targeted person's name and the details of the damage to be inflicted have been found on church walls, including at Norwich Cathedral. The writing is corrupted, being inverted with the letters jumbled, hence the assumption that these are curses.

Many of us feel like we are currently living in dark days. Whatever the truth of these marks, and no matter how difficult it is to really 'read' their intentions, they offer a fascinating insight into a world where fear of external dangers was just as real and the need to guard against them perhaps no different to our gated communities and lives lived under the shadow of CCTV. If this has wetted your appetite, Matthew Champion's wonderful book Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England's Churches is a really good read.

Happy hunting...

Monument to deported Jews, Grunewald station Berlin.

Nazi-ruled Berlin, 1942: Jews were being 'deported' daily and taken off to the East, whence they never returned. Some went, if not obediently, at least hoping for the best, though their experience of what Germany under Nazism had become must have filled them with fear. Others were suspicious; perhaps they believed rumours they'd heard? In any case, the director of the Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, Liselotte Pereles, was concerned about one of the kindergarten workers, Eva Fleischmann. She wanted Eva to go 'underground' and live in hiding. She needed help, and the person she went to was a mild-looking, white-haired Quaker lady in her sixties. Elisabeth Abegg. She wasn't disappointed. The story that follows is taken from Liselotte Pereles's own words.

Elisabeth not only found a place for Eva to hide, but she also told Liselotte that she could come to her for help, if she needed it. Liselotte lived with a nine year-old niece, Susi Manasse, who was her ward; you might say she definitely needed help, but she was reluctant to take advantage of Elisabeth's 'simple and whole-hearted' offer of rescue. She didn't want to endanger her. However, one day, later in the year, Elisabeth called at Liselotte's house. Liselotte was at work, but little Susi was at home. Elisabeth said to Susi: 'It's time for you two to go underground. I'll be waiting for you.'

Liselotte still held out, but in the following February, when almost all her colleagues and all of the children had been taken away from the Jewish kindergarten, she heard about the great 'Action' which was meant to 'cleanse Berlin' of Jews, as a birthday present for Hitler. Worse, she was arrested and held in a Gestapo holding centre, but was able to get away. She rang Elisabeth from Charlottenburg station and let her know, using 'disguised words' that she'd gone underground. Presumably the words had been agreed in advance, because Elisabeth's reply was just as disguised. 'Say hello to my friend from the 'Ferdinand.'

That meant that Liselotte, with Susi, should go to the flat of a woman who was in hospital at the time, but had given permission for her home to be used. Liselotte hid there with another Jewish woman, Frau Collm, and a friend of Elisabeth's, Anita Schäfer, brought them food. Later, Elisabeth herself came 'always calm and kindly,' writes Liselotte, 'always only thinking of our welfare and our safety, fearless for herself.' They were moved round from hiding place to hiding place, sometimes staying in Elisabeth's own flat.


Snowdrops remind me of those brave, tough women

Elisabeth Abegg was an ex-teacher, but she had been dismissed from her post in 1940, denounced for political unreliability. She had grown up in Strassburg, and was first cousin to a well-known Social Democratic statesman; in her childhood, she was acquainted with Albert Schweitzer. At some stage in her life, almost certainly after World War 1, when Quaker feeding programmes in devastated Germany brought a small but significant number of Germans into the Quaker faith, she had joined the Society of Friends (Quakers). Thus she belonged to a religious grouping that had, and has, testimonies about equality simplicity of lifestyle, truthfulness, and peacemaking. It was a grouping that the Nazis suspected and loathed.

She lived, with her frail elderly mother and disabled sister Julie, in a block of flats where there were many active Nazis; some of them had denounced her for failing to put a flag out on special occasions, and she had even once been summoned for interrogation by the Gestapo. She was in many ways a marked woman, but that didn't frighten her into submission.


Memorial tablet to Elisabeth Abegg and her sister.	By OTFW, Berlin (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Elisabeth, (the real-life counterpart of the Quaker woman who helped Raf, Jenny and her mother in 'Saving Rafael,' and the anti-Nazis in 'Last Train from Kummersdorf ) had a wide network of helpers; Quakers, ex-pupils, a disabled pastor's wife, also her brother and sister-in-law. All of these were willing to hide Jews and other persecuted people, and in some cases to help them to leave Germany. Old Frau Abegg and Julie Abegg were enthusiastic and staunch helpers in the work. In addition, as the bombing got worse, two of Elisabeth's neighbours left Berlin for safer areas, and gave her the keys to their flats so she could keep an eye on them. She used the flats as hiding places.

Most of the time, the hidden Jews had to stay up in the flats during air-raids, which was a terrifying experience, but Julie Abegg sometimes took them into the shelter, where they sat face to face with Nazis. I suppose Julie said they were her visitors, which of course they were; but the Nazis had no idea what kind of visitors.

Every Friday the Abeggs entertained Jews to lunch at their home. Elisabeth cooked the meal. 'But', writes Liselotte, 'you gave us far more than bodily food. For two hours we could talk about the world of art and science, and we were able to forget that we couldn’t live like human beings any more.' Another hidden Jew, Herr Schäfer, said later: 'I couldn't have stood my time underground without the Friday lunches at the Abegg sisters' flat.' My mind boggles at the though of the Abegg sisters calmly, audaciously bringing these proscribed people into their flat for lunch. Maybe the active Nazis were all out? Elisabeth also kept a school at her flat for hidden Jewish children, and for half-Jewish children, who weren't allowed in the state schools.

Liselotte writes that there were particular difficulties about hiding children. They had to be taught to lie, and to tell consistent lies, however young they were. They had to learn false names and birth-dates, and to pretend to illnesses they hadn't had, to cover up the fact that they hadn't been at school at all (having been excluded by Nazi persecution).

The children had to keep changing their religion, to match the religion of whoever was hiding them, Lutherans, Catholics; and had to attend children's services. A five year-old called Evi had spent a year at a Jewish school, and so, put in a Lutheran kindergarten, she prayed in Hebrew when the children started to pray. She had to be moved at once.

The Quakers have a testimony, as I've said, about speaking the truth, but there are times when that testimony has to give way to wider truths; like the truth that every human being, of whatever ethnicity, deserves life. So Elisabeth cheerfully lied to the Gestapo, to her neighbours, to whoever needed to be kept in the dark. False identities, false documents, were to her only the instruments of Light against the darkness.

But what she offered, as Liselotte wrote, was not only safety and protection, or food, but kindness and reassurance, goodness of heart, and warmth. She must often have been intensely stressed, but she never let her protegés see it. Once her briefcase was stolen, on the Berlin S-Bahn. It was stuffed full of ration vouchers for the hidden people, and a transcript of a speech by Thomas Mann (émigré anti-Nazi and Nobel laureate) that she'd heard on the BBC, but worst of all, her ID card was in there. Luckily, when the police arrested the thief, he'd thrown a lot of stolen stuff in together, so it wasn't clear which belonged to whom. Then once a Jewish woman, Rita, was arrested at her hiding place in a pastor's house (The old pastor's wife was arrested, but her daughter offered herself as a hostage instead, and the Gestapo released the old lady). But Rita had left behind a notebook with the addresses of all Elisabeth's helpers. Elisabeth 'did everything to stave off the danger for the helpers, before the Gestapo found the book.'

I would love to know what that involved. Did Elisabeth just go to the house and get hold of the book, or did she go round to all her helpers and move the Jews out? Only where would she put them? Pereles's account doesn't specify and Abegg herself didn't apparently think her actions needed to be written about.

Clearly, Elisabeth wouldn't have been able to do what she did if she hadn't had that network of helpers. Not all the helpers stayed the course; sometimes they were bombed out of their homes, sometimes they couldn't stand the stress any longer. But they contributed, and did so with courage. Elisabeth gave them leadership, though, and probably courage and hope, even in the deepest political and social darkness.

As we face what for many of us looks like an oncoming dark tide of renewed hideous bigotry, both at home and abroad, I feel it is well worth it to reflect on Elisabeth Abegg. Could I do what she did? I don't know, and I do hope things don't get so bad in England. Where did her amazing strength come from? I'm sure her mother's and sister's support were crucial, as well as that of all those helpers, but also there was her Quaker faith, and the deep silence of Quaker worship. Perhaps she drew strength from these words of George Fox, one of the founders of Quakerism, words which are perhaps relevant to us today:

'The Lord is at work in this thick night of Darkness that may be felt; and Truth doth flourish as the rose, and the lilies do grow among the thorns, and the plants atop of the hills, and upon them the lambs doth skip and play. And never heed the temposts nor the storms, floods, nor rains, for the Seed Christ is over all and doth reign. And so, be of good faith and valiant for the Truth.'

If you want to look at a photograph of Elisabeth Abegg, you can find it by clicking this link to the photo archive at Yad Vashem, .

This account of Elisabeth Abegg's life is drawn from: 'Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen', (Unsung Heroes; Human beings in Germany's Dark Days), edited by Kurt R Grossmann, first published by Ullstein Verlag in 1961.

A few weeks ago I went to the V&A museum to see the Opus Anglicanum exhibition of medieval embroidery. Click here for the V&A's exhibition details It is utterly fabulous and well worth the £12 entrance fee. It's also a one off as many of the exhibits come from other storage facilities and museums round the world and the fragility of some of the items means they will rarely be on display, and certainly not in a gathering of similar pieces. So, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to see a collection of this wonderful English embroidery once world famous and coveted. A tip that was passed on to me and which I found invaluable, is to take a magnifying glass so that you can see the fine detail of the stitches.

If you are unable to get to the exhibition, Yale University Press has produced a superb book detailing the story of this style of embroidery and including full colour photographs and 'biographical' details of all the exhibits. It is not cheap at around £35-£40 but at the same time it's gorgeous, detailed and much more than a coffee table book (although it is big and heavy so you might need to rest it on a coffee table!).

Photography in the exhibition was not permitted, but the book has finely detailed images and the url above also displays some of the items on exhibit.

The themes are mostly religious, with the occasional moment of regal and baronial bling thrown in - such as fragments of horse trappings and seal bags bearing the lions of England. The ecclesiastical copes are just stunning. My particular favourite exhibit was the one on the way out and is a pall belonging to the guild of Fishmongers, made in the early 16th century and depicting a wonderful golden-haired mermaid holding up her mirror and with her reflection stitched inside it. I also rather liked some of the facial expression on the exhibits, especially the jolly, mischievous horses!

Although I couldn't take photographs at the exhibition, photography was permitted elsewhere in the museum and I took the opportunity to visit several galleries. As well as the European Medieval galleries which I often visit, I was particularly interested in Islamic Art of the Middle East this time around because my current work in progress, TEMPLAR SILKS, has deposited my hero William Marshal in the Middle East for two years of his life and there was so much cross culture in the region that he would have seen very similar items to those on display. Here is a selection of the pictures I took for my visual archive.

13th century Syrian glass lamp depicting a falconer

Rock crystal ewer 1000-1050 Egypt

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Rock crystal container 975-1050 Egypt

Incense burner 1250-1300 Egypt or Syria

writing box Egypt 1302

moulded earthenware water flask 1200-1400 Syria

Filter in the neck of a water jar to protect from impurities.

When I was eight I went with my family to Positano, on the coast just south of Naples. This was the beginning of my lifelong passion for Italy and certain intense memories have stayed with me: the sight of people living in caves in the mountainside; a vivid green lizard disappearing into a sunlit wall; luscious fragrant peaches that were so juicy you had to wash after you guzzled them. As an adult I came to know Italy well but didn’t return to that coast until last month when my husband and I spent a week in Amalfi. I always thought of that stunning coast as existing purely for tourism of the most indulgent kind but discovered, to my surprise, that Amalfi has a long and complex history.

Its origins are very vague; Amalfi was a beautiful nymph (who still apears on the town banner) and Hercules fell in love with her. Alternatively, in the fourth century, Roman nobles in five ships set out from the new city of Constantinople and, after many adventures, ended up at Scala, in the mountains above Amalfi. Huns, Vandals and Goths invaded but Scala and Amalfi were protected by their mountains. Before the rise of Venice Amalfi was a great maritime power, part of the Byzantine empire until the Normans invaded.

There were bishops and doges and each doge announced his accession to the Emperor in Constantinople. Although it was supposed to be a republic the doges were really absolute monarchs from the same family. It was a city of merchant adventurers with trading colonies as far away as Beirut and Cairo.

In 1073 Robert Guiscard seized and sacked Amalfi and added 'Duke of Amalfi' to his titles but Amalfi revolted and elected one last last doge. After that the Normans ruled Amalfi and it grew into a city of seventy thousand people with a flourishing cultural life and a big fleet. Trading connections brought the Amalfitani in contact very early with the process of paper making, which Arab merchants had first discovered in China in the early Middle Ages, and there is still a paper factory.

In 1343 a terrible earthquake struck the Bay of Naples. The tsunami that followed destroyed the lower town of Amalfi which fell into the sea. This tsunami was observed by the poet Petrarch, whose ship was forced to return to port, and he wrote about it in the fifth book of his Epistolae Familiares. So a great city was transformed into a village with a harbour and just a few thousand residents.Of course this kind of lost Atlantis story always has great imaginative appeal and you wonder what ruined palaces and churches you are swimming over.

The second of the fifteenth century Piccolomini Dukes of Amalfi, Alfonso, was married to Joanna of Aragon, who was Webster’s Duchess of Malfi.

When her husband died the Duchess fell in love with her steward, Antonio Bologna, and secretly married him. She gave birth to his child, Frederick, who was sent away to be brought up elsewhere and then they had a girl. One of her brothers, a Cardinal, became suspicious so Bologna escaped to Ancona with their children and the Duchess, pregnant with their third child, followed. She said to her household there, ‘I would rather live privately with my husband than remain duchess.’

When her brother the Cardinal heard this he had them banished from Ancona. Bologna fled to Siena and then to Padua where he was eventually killed. The Duchess with her children and maid was captured and imprisoned in Torre dello Ziro, a tower between Amalfi and Atrani (which is still there) where she is said to have been murdered by her brothers. Webster would have got this gory tale from Bandello’sNovelle(1554). Bandello had known the real Bologna in Milan before his assassination.

Amalfi never regained its earlier importance. Later, that area was ruled by Spain, then by Joseph Bonaparte, and in 1861 Francis 11, the last King of Naples, had his kingdom absorbed into the kingdom of Italy. Amalfi remained a quiet harbour town until the arrival of roads and tourism. Every four years there is still a regatta of the four ancient rival maritime republics: Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi. The boat rowed by the Amalfi team, beautifully painted and carved, can be seen in a courtyard near the sea.

Ravello, in the mountains just above Amalfi, is also supposed to have been founded by Roman fugitives. The Bishop of Ravello wasappointed directly from Rome and in the exquisite little Cathedral Hadrian IV, Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman ever to be made Pope, confirmed Norman William as King of Sicily.

In the 12th century Ravello had about twenty-five thousand inhabitants but now it is tiny. Its wonderful medieval palaces and gardens have attracted many artists, musicians, and writers including Boccaccio, Grieg, Escher, Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence. Wagner is thought to have found inspiration for Parsifal in the gardens of the Villa Ruffalo and until his death Gore Vidal lived in one of the medieval palaces. Every summer Ravello has a classical music festival.

A day or so ago I watched, for the first time in many years, Louis Malle's wonderful film, Lacombe, Lucien. I don't think I have seen it since it was first released in 1974, when I was a young actress living in London. I would have been audience at the Hampstead Everyman or that wonderful Academy 1 and 2 in Oxford Street. I cannot remember whether it was shown in French with English sub-titles or dubbed into English. Either way, I would not have appreciated the nuances of the regional accents particularly that of the young actor, Pierre Blaise, who played the titular role of Lucien, the seventeen-year-old farm boy. Blaise, who was picked from amongst amateurs by Malle, talks with a southern accent so strong that even now after thirty years of living in Provence I had some difficulty following lines of his dialogue. Think Geordie for foreigners.
Aurore Clement plays a young German Jewess hiding out with her father and grandmother in a remote rural corner of southern France. The family escaped from Germany to Paris. When the Germans marched in to the capital, they fled once more to the south where we find them in hiding. This well-trodden path in search of a safe base became the modus vivendi for many Jews who had originally arrived into Paris from Germany or Eastern Europe. Their safer tenures in the south were, for the majority, short-lived.

At my original viewing of the film, I was bowled over by the extraordinary beauty of Aurore Clement whose photograph was then pinned to the wall of my attic bedroom in my rambling old flat in Kentish Town, where it stayed, I think, until I moved on from that address. But I feel sure now that the groundbreaking subject matter of the film was probably almost entirely lost on me.

Aurore Clement as France Horn in Lacombe, Lucien

Aurore Clement is now 71 (still beautiful from the pics I found on the internet). Pierre Blaise who was both mesmeric and a fine young actor was killed in a car crash in 1975 at the age of 20, the year after the film was released.

In 1973, when Malle was preparing this film, he already had eight successful features to his name. As well, as a younger filmmaker he had worked as co-director with Jacques Cousteau on the Academy-Award winning documentary, The Silent World.

The reason I bought the DVD recently was because I wanted to look at the film from a couple of different aspects; no longer from the point of view of an actress but that of the writer, and also for the story's historical content. The film is a fascinating portrait of French collaboration, released at a time when the subject was taboo in France, who collaboration was denied.

De Gaulle himself when he returned home refuted the idea that France had ever been anything but the Republic, an oppressed republic. This later became known as the Gaullist Resistance Myth. It wasn't until the early 70s when writers, historians and artists began to speak out, that the myth started to crumble. Many who were not direct supporters of the collaboration were held to account because they did nothing. Because they did not resist. Historians began to claim that collaboration was not forced upon France; many chose it and others turned a blind eye. Apathy, if not downright collaboration, allowed the regime to flourish.
This is an important issue and one that is becoming relevant again today when one considers that almost fifty per cent of the United States voters did not go to the polls during this recent election.

Both Malle and his co-writer, Patrick Modiano, were haunted by the years of Nazi occupation in France. For different reasons. Malle, born in 1932, was a child during the war and always felt himself implicated in the moral issues that growing up in occupied France would have thrown up for any sensitive child. His later film, another masterpiece, Au Revoir Les Enfants, (1987), recounts the story of pupil, Julien Quentin, and how his life is changed when three Jewish boys are given refuge at his Catholic boarding school. Friendships are bonded and broken when the three boys and the priest who has accepted to hide the Jewish pupils are arrested and taken away by the Nazis. All die in camps. The film is autobiographical.

Louis Malle

Along with Louis Malle, Patrick Modiano is co-credited for the (terrific) screenplay of Lacombe, Lucien. Modiano, thirteen years Malle's junior, was born in the Paris suburbs in 1945 to a Jewish-Italian father and an actress mother. They met in occupied Paris and carried out a clandestine relationship. Soon after Patrick was born, they separated and Patrick was brought up by various people including his maternal grandparents. His father, Albert, refused to wear the obligatory Yellow Star. Nor did he declare himself to the authorities when they were rounding up the Jews. Albert was arrested in 1942 but managed, through the help of a friend, to avoid deportation. He worked as a black marketeer and with the French Gestapo during the war years. Albert Modiano never owned up to his son about his nefarious doings during those years.

The novels of Patrick Modiano, Nobel Laureate for Literature 2014, are frequently peopled by shady characters and collaborators, or those on the run. This is partly what makes Modiano's work so extraordinary. Conscience, the outsider, he who works by night, guilt, memory ... all haunt his work.

Patrick Modiano

Malle and Modiano were the perfect fit for the groundbreaking subject of Lacombe, Lucien.

The action of the film is set in 1944 in south-west France close to the Spanish border during the German Occupation. It tells the tale of a seventeen-year-old peasant boy, Lucien, an anti-hero, whose father is an imprisoned member of the Resistance. Lucien, who seems to delight in killing and hunting small creatures, wants to get away from home - his mother is having an affair with a local farmer - to follow in his father's footsteps, but he is not taken seriously. He is rejected by the local schoolmaster, also a member of the Resistance, because he is too young.
Quite by chance Lucien finds himself falling in with a nest of collaborators, French agents working for the Gestapo, whose headquarters are at a hotel, La Grotto. They take in the lad and give him a job with the 'Police Allemande' after he has proved himself by betraying the school teacher who refused him a place amongst the partisans.

One of the French collaborators, along with his actress girlfriend, befriends Lucien. He takes the boy to a tailor to have a suit made. The tailor, Horn, is a Jew who has fled Germany and then Paris. It is when Lucien sets eyes on Horn's daughter, France, that the complexities of the narrative really set in. Naive, uncouth, barely more than a virgin, Lucien becomes besotted with the young woman and by the end of the film he helps her and her grandmother - the tailor, Horn, has been arrested - escape. However, the stolen car gives up before they have crossed the border into Spain and they are forced to take refuge - a most unlikely threesome - in a remote, abandoned farmhouse.

Throughout the film, the question of Lucien's complicity is, laid out before the spectator. Malle has chosen a very attractive and rather charming young actor for the role so our sympathies are easily given to the character. Is he a cruel, unfeeling boy or is he misguided? If he had been offered a role within the Resistance would his life have turned out differently? Can he be held responsible?
The last frame sees him sleeping in a field while France bathes naked in a nearby stream. Lucien seems so perfectly relaxed, at peace for the first time, that for one fleeting moment, you ask yourself whether the three might find a way to survive, yet you know, because a lurking danger is gnawing at your spectator's guts, that for different reasons they cannot survive; they are all hunted. Lucien, for his blatant betrayal of his own people and France along with her grandmother because they are Jews. Superimposed over the last image of the film are the bald sentences:

Lucien Lacombe was arrested on October 12, 1944.
Tried by a military court of the Resistance, he was sentenced to death and executed.

When the film was over, I felt saddened for the boy, for his loss of life, for his stupidity and all that was not to be. Still, he chose that path. He was complicit. There are two very moving scenes when Lucien's mother comes looking for him and finds him at the Horns' apartment. She has brought with her a small black coffin with Lucien's name engraved on it. It has been left at her door. A warning to Lucien to give up his treachery. His mother's eyes beg him to come home, to quit the shaming role he has taken. He refuses, saying that he is fine where he is. She steps away, and you feel swamped by the depth of a mother's conflict and heartbreak.

The film has been restored and is available in Blu Ray. It is a masterpiece as relevant today as when it was first shot. Stunning photography, long close-ups on faces that take you to the characters' souls. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to find a copy.

Since I watched it, I have been asking myself over and over about where our world is going given the recent election results in the United States. We are witnessing the rise of Nationalism, white supremacy, racism, closed borders, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism. Nazism.
Our world is in danger of regression. Values and liberties our parents, grandparents, previous generations fought or voted for, put their lives at risk for, might soon be lost. There is no place for apathy. We stand up and are counted, or we become a silent vote that condones these very real dangers.

Works of art have the possibility of reminding us; they can nudge our collective memories and help us learn from the past. Lest we forget.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Earlier this month I attended a performance of the Royal Ballet’s extraordinary production ‘Anastasia’. In gorgeous and arresting dance and music, events were portrayed surrounding the young Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov.

Grand Duchess Anastasia and her sisters on board the yacht Standart with Princess Viktoria of Shaumburg-Lippe, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, sister of the German Emperor Wilhelm II, ('Kaiser Bill') and cousin of Tsar Nicholas II

In Act One we met Tsar Nicholas II and his family enjoying a holiday during the summer of 1914 on their grand yacht Standart. Anastasia, the youngest and most attractive of the four daughters, whizzed onto the stage on roller skates – quite obviously the love of both her family and the Russian sailors. Their shared happiness was interrupted when news of war against Germany arrived and the Tsar left to join his army.

Little Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov on board the imperial yacht with his carer the sailor Nagorny.

Act Two began with Anastasia’s coming-out ball. Amid much joyous dancing, Rasputin loomed menacingly, slithering between the Tsar and Tsarina. Vast chandeliers hung over the scene in a disconcerting un-perpendicular way, prompting the question – was what we were seeing real or imagined? Anastasia’s privileged life came to an abrupt end with the storming of the Winter Palace.
The music in these acts came from Tchaikovsky’s first and third symphonies, and the dance was classical in style.

Act Two of Anastasia , Royal Ballet, 2016. C 2016 ROH, photo by Tristram Kenton.

The third and final act provided a stark contrast and was if anything more enthralling. With modern dance set to electronic music and Martinů’s 1953 Symphony, the setting was now an austere mental hospital with a single bed and uniformed nurses. The story told was of a young woman fished out of a Berlin canal in 1920 whom many people believed to be Anastasia herself, the sole survivor of the massacre of the Romanovs in 1918. She had been found without any papers and was called simply Fraulein Unbekannt, or Miss Unknown. In the anguished title role, Natalia Osipova danced in a state of unsettling frenzy. When not sitting inert and motionless, staring at silent newsreels of her previous life, she threw herself around, light as a feather but taut as steel, wrenched by a juddering forces. Traditional ballet movements, such as a grande jeté (big leap) were subverted as she pushed against an invisible wall. Memories and nightmarish fantasy intermingled in her recall of surviving assassination and an attempted suicide. Writing in The Guardian, Judith Mackerel described ‘violent shards of dance evoking fragments of Romanov history and a mind boiling and buckling with insanity’.

Natalia Osipova as Anna Anderson in Anastasia. C ROH 2016, photo by Tristram Kenton.

It mattered little to her many devotees among the White Russians living in the West, that Miss Unknown spoke no Russian, English or French but only Polish and German; that she looked nothing like Anastasia; and had forgotten her table manners. A German law court spent thirty years weighing the evidence for the patient’s claim before deciding that ‘it could neither be established nor refuted’. After Miss Unknown became Anna Anderson and left the mental hospital, she married an American amateur historian called Jack Manahan and lived in an untidy house full of cats in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ten years after her death in 1984, DNA tests identified her as a Polish peasant, Franziska Schanzkowska, who had suffered severe trauma during the 1914-18 war and then been forgotten by her family. When the bones of all the Romanov family were eventually exhumed, their DNA was tested against HRH Prince Philip, the closest known living relative, and this confirmed that the Grand Duchess Anastasia’s death had indeed occurred in 1918.
MacMillan's wonderful reworking of this story is a must-see for History Girls, illustrating vividly the complex psychodrama of a woman’s memory and identity. Catch it at the Royal Opera House or in a cinema near you.

References:

Queen Alexandra's Christmas Gift Book -photographs from my camera, Daily Telegraph 1908.

Frances Welch, The False Grand Duchess Anastasia, Royal Ballet, 2016.

I have just spent a magical, exhausting but immensely rewarding week as a tutor on an Arvon Foundation non-fiction course. As I write I am sitting up in bed in what used to be John Osborne's study at the Hurst, his home for the last years of his life. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever spent time in though I have scarcely been beyond the front door. The study is large and sparsely furnished. The only true reminder of his presence is his leather topped writing desk at which I have sat every morning and evening reading work submitted by the students. While I am no believer in ghosts or spirits, it certainly feels slightly unreal and mystical to be inhabiting the same space as the great man. I suspect that much else in the room has changed since his day and I am sure there was no green Exit sign with a running man and an arrow on the wall... But I digress.

The Arvon Foundation was set up by two poets, John Moat and John Fairfax, and Antoinette Moat who helped buy the first Arvon property, Totleigh Barton in Devon. The original aim was to provide time and space away from school for young people to write poetry. Today residential courses take place in one of three houses situated in remote rural locations in Devon, Shropshire and Yorkshire. Over the last almost fifty years it has helped countless writers to spend time honing or developing new skills or simply learning to come to terms with how they wish to express themselves, whether through poetry, prose, drama or non-fiction. The recipe is simple: take up to sixteen people of mixed age, background, ability, ambition and sex. Shut them up in a remote house - in this case in the heart of Shropshire - with two tutors and plenty of food and see what happens. The structure of the course is up to the tutors but fits into a framework that has been well tried and tested: the mornings spent in a workshop and the afternoons writing or attending half hour tutorials with one or other of the tutors. It doesn't sound like hard work when written down but it is intense, let me tell you, especially from the tutor's point of view.

All meals are enjoyed together and the evening meal is prepared by the students, with washing up and table laying done in teams. Inevitably the table talk focuses on writing so in the event the only time you are not either thinking, talking about working on writing is when you are asleep. At least that was the case for me. Yet it was hugely enjoyable and something I would do again if I were asked. While it would be out of order to name names, we have been lucky enough this week to work with a dozen fabulous writers who each has a major project they want to bring to a wider audience. Stirring tales from family history were predominant and I have enjoyed learning about the author, Charles Lee, who wrote down the Cornish language; a trio of women connected with the Garden City movement and bawdy women in history to name but three.

There is something energising about being with a group of people who are wholly focused on writing historical non-fiction. It reminds me of the immense richness and variety of possibilities there are to focus on an aspect of real life and bring it out in written form. I admire writers of fiction for their ability to conjure up worlds in their heads but I am equally in awe of writers who can corral and tidy up the messiness of life and show it to us in ways that make some sense, drawing strings together to weave a story that does more than just lay down facts, dates and names. In one of our workshops we looked at the old chestnut: oral history. To write historical non-fiction is to some extent to be an eyewitness to history. Yet as anyone knows, to claim to have the only view on an historical event is to ignore the human mind's ability to process what it sees, hears, feels, smells and senses. I remember chairing a panel one this topic a few years ago at a literary festival and concluding that one person's view can differ so radically from another's that it is as if they had witnessed two different events.

We tried this out in a controlled experiment at Arvon this week. The results were nothing short of hilarious. On the evening prior to the exercise, so just over twelve hours earlier, four members of the group, including my fellow tutor, Ian Watt, had performed a reading-with-actions of a fourhanded play written by Charles Lee and first performed in 1913. The resulting accounts from both players and audience were so diverse as to make me wonder whether we had all been in the same room together. The only thing that convinced me that we had was the overwhelming sense of place and atmosphere. That is something that often links people's experiences and - if they are unfortunate to suffer a bad or dangerous one - can form lifelong and exclusive closeness. I suspect in the case of our experience any allusion to the Revered Becksmith will just raise a broad grin of recognition. I knew the experience of teaching on an Arvon course would be a good one but I had no idea beforehand just how rewarding it would be. I cannot remember enjoying the company of a dozen or so fellow writers as much as I have this week and I return to my desk and the second half of my book - now known thanks to my 'colleague' (as he always addressed me) Ian Watt as the Shitty First Draft. If you ever fancy an indulgent sojourn with fellow writers, I cannot recommend an Arvon course highly enough, either as a tutor or a student. The staff at the centres are wonderful, supportive and unflappable and make the whole experience easy to enjoy. But it is the writers who make it special and memorable. It has reminded me of the joys and pitfalls of writing historical non-fiction and how the joys win every time.

Our November Guest is Lesley Downer, who will become a regular History Girl next year.

Photo credit: Jill Shaw

Lesley Downer lived in Japan for many years. She tramped around Basho’s Narrow Road the Deep North, lived among geisha, interviewed sumo wrestlers and enjoyed the glitzy life of Tokyo. She is the author of many books on Japan, including Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World, Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha who Seduced the West and The Last Concubine, short listed for Romantic Novel of the Year. Her new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, takes place largely in the Women’s Palace.
Lesey is currently a visiting lecturer, teaching on the MA programme in Creative Writing (non-fiction ) at City University in London and lives in London with her husband, the author Arthur I. Miller.

www.lesleydowner.com

Unravelling the web of secrecy around The Shogun’s ‘Harem’

The shogun celebrating New Year's Day with his women (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912)

The heroine of The Shogun’s Queen really lived. In a way she was a bit like Princess Diana. She started life as a commoner, in fact very minor nobility, much like Diana, and grew up in relative freedom. Then, when she was 17, like Diana she was chosen to marry the ruler of the country - not the ruler-in-waiting, like Prince Charles, but the actual ruler, the shogun. Like Charles, this ruler didn’t actually wield much power at all. He had a whole government that did the ruling.

Traditionally the shogun would have been married to an imperial princess, a member of the emperor's family. (The emperor was a Pope-like figure who lived in seclusion in Kyoto while the shogun, who lived in Edo, now Tokyo, was the temporal ruler.) Imperial princesses were used to a life within walls. They were born and grew up in their palaces and never left, in the same way that our queen can’t just go to the shops like an ordinary person. It’s said that one emperor once climbed to the top of the topmost tower in his palace to take a look at the world outside.

When she married the shogun the imperial princess would have stepped into a palanquin and left her palace for the first time. She would have had her only glimpse of the big wide world through the slats of her window as she was carried the 450 kilometres to Edo.

Gate that led to the Women's Palace in Edo Castle, now the Imperial Palace Tokyo

But for commoners like my heroine, Atsu, life was quite different. In Japan in those days the lower you were on the social scale the freer you were. In the mid nineteenth century a peasant woman named Matsue Taseko, who happened to be a poet, informed her husband she was off to Kyoto and walked through the mountains alone. There she hung out with lords, ladies, poets and even the women of the Emperor’s court and wrote poetry. Later she went to Edo. Sometimes her husband went with her, sometimes not. He raised no objections to her independent lifestyle.

For Atsu it must have been thrilling beyond imagination to be taken to live in Edo Castle - but she would also have soon discovered that there was no way out. Once you were in, you didn’t come out.
Edo Castle was Japan’s Versailles. It was as magnificent and lavish as Kublai Khan’s fabled Xanadu. A vast complex of palaces and gardens a mile across and four miles in circumference, it was where the shogun lived and, with the help of an army of government officials, ruled the country. On maps its exact location was never marked. It was always hidden behind the coat of arms of the shoguns, the ruling Tokugawa family - three hollyhock leaves in a circle. It was a place of spectacular wealth and power and glitz and glory.

Gardens at Katsura Rikyu - akin to what the gardens in the Women’s Palace must have looked like

The holy of holies, the innermost sanctum within that complex, was the Women’s Palace, the ooku - Great Interior.

The white-walled buildings with their dove-grey tiled roofs were surrounded by landscaped pleasure gardens, threaded with streams and lakes where women glided in red-lacquered barges. There were moon-viewing pavilions, stages for Noh plays, tea ceremony huts and artificial hills, of which Momijiyama - Maple Mountain - was most renowned for its beauty.

Inside there was a labyrinth of chambers with sliding painted screens for walls, coffered ceilings glimmering with gold leaf and floors of fragrant rice straw tatami mats. The women had an endless supply of tasteful yet hugely expensive kimonos. The shogun’s wife changed five times a day. They were surrounded by gorgeous artefacts, perfumes and incense, lacquered chests and shelves, priceless tea ceremony ware and exquisite vases. They were constantly given gifts by petitioners hoping they might intercede with the shogun on their behalf. They were surrounded by beauty; and these treasures have been preserved and are in the Tokugawa museums so we can glimpse their lives from these.
In museum catalogues they are always presented solely as works of art, treasures, and sometimes it’s mentioned that they belonged to ‘the shogun’s household’.

Gilded screens at Nagoya Castle - akin to what the Women’s Palace must have looked like

What is not mentioned is that that household consisted entirely of women and that the shogun was the only man who could ever enter. In the Forbidden City in Peking and in the Topkapi Palace, the sultan’s harem in Istanbul, there were eunuchs. But the Japanese never had the custom of castration. Maybe they didn’t like the idea of doing something so traumatic to a man. In the Women’s Palace shaven-headed ‘companion priests’ - effectively nuns - took the place of eunuchs and were the only women allowed to cross between the men’s and the women’s palaces.

So the treasures remain. But as for the life that went on around them, there is very little information. For the palace was shrouded in secrecy. No westerner ever visited or heard the tiniest whisper of it or even knew it existed. The women took an oath never to tell of anything that went on there and even after the palace closed down for good in 1868 and they were thrown out into the cold very few ever revealed anything about their lives.

In the 1890s the son of one ex-lady-in-waiting published a book called Mother’s Stories of the Castle and scholars at Tokyo University interviewed two women who had served there. Recently a couple of scholarly works have been published in English, unearthing as much as can be found on life in the palace.

From their information the interviewers put together plans of the palace. There were the shogun’s apartments (known as the Little Sitting Room, though they were far from small), the wing where the shogun’s wife lived and another wing in a different part of the palace where his mother lived. Then there were offices where women officials carried out day-to-day administration, and - by far the largest area - the private chambers of the ladies and their maids. In all there were well over four hundred rooms. Only the highest-ranking ladies and the mothers of the shogun’s children had their own rooms. The rest shared. All the ladies slept surrounded by maids, ready to serve them when required. Only people of no consequence slept alone.

Ladies of the Women’s Palace (from the Chiyoda No Ooku triptych by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1838 - 1912)

There were also great halls, reception rooms, shrine rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and huge baths with areas for reclining. On the opposite side of the palace from the shogun’s entrance was a heavily-guarded gate which led to a bridge across the moat. Here the women came and went on the few occasions when they were allowed to go out and merchants brought silks, make up and other goods to sell.

It was a place of unimaginable luxury but also a place of great unhappiness. There was plotting, intrigue, jealousy, whispers behind hands, women ganging up on each other, even murders and - it was said - hauntings. Bodies were found down wells, boy babies were smothered at birth on the orders of women who wanted to ensure that their son, not someone else’s, became the next shogun. A striking number of boy children - most, in fact - died at birth or in infancy.

The shogun only chose a few girls as his concubines - Ienari had 53 children by 27 concubines - but all the rest had to remain virgins. Once in the 1840s the finance minister was trying to enforce austerity measures and asked the women to cut back on buying expensive kimonos. He was told in no uncertain terms by the formidable chief elder that the women suffered enough from their enforced celibacy and were entitled to as many gorgeous kimonos as they wanted in compensation.

All these women assumed life in the Castle would continue just the same for ever. Like us today, no one imagined that their world would come to an end. But in the 1860s the country erupted into civil war and in 1868 the palace was closed down and the women thrown out onto the streets. In the upheaval that followed people completely forgot that the Women’s Palace with all its luxury and beauty and backbiting and tragedy had ever existed. Edo Castle became the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and all that remains of the Women’s Palace is the vast lawn of the East Gardens there.

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"As a woman, in what period of history would you have most liked to live in Japan and why?"

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"Henry's the Eighth's jousting accident" and other things we think we know about

This is a post about the minutiae of historical research and how you can't take anything on trust.

One of the things we think we know is that Henry the Eighth had a very bad jousting accident on January 24th 1536. He lost consciousness for two hours and the news of his injury and possible imminent death, conveyed to his queen, Anne Boleyn none too gently by the Duke of Norfolk, caused her to miscarry a male child of 15 weeks.

From then on, his ulcerated legs, his weight gain and his irascible mood swings led to the executions of Anne and of wife number five, Catherine Howard and his divorce (or annulment) from wife number four, Anne of Cleves, the execution of his right hand man Thomas Cromwell etc. etc.

Here is a Documentary from 2014 called Inside the Body of Henry Vlll, which attempts to find out what his medical conditions and injuries might have been. The jousting episode is about 25 minutes in. Note the images of two heavily armed men hurtled towards each other with lances levelled.

Yes, we all know what a Tudor joust looked like - or think we do.

But there is no evidence that this is what happened. The only contemporary record of this accident is found in two letters.

One, from Katherine of Aragon's physician Doctor Ortiz to the Empress Isabella, wife of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, spent most of its length on how the late queen, who died on 9th January, comported herself in the face of death. But at the end he adds:

"The French King says that King of England had fallen from his horse and been for two hours without speaking. "La Ana" was so upset that she miscarried of a son. This is news to thank God for."
(Calendar of Letters & Papers Foreign & Domestic Henry Vlll 1887, Vol X no. 427)

Ortiz' source was "a letter from the ambassador in France, dated 15 Feb."

The other source is from Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, to his employer Charles V:

"On the same day that the Queen was buried this King's concubine miscarried of a child, who had the appearance of a male about three months and a half old, at which miscarriage the King has certainly shown great disappointment and sorrow. The concubine herself has since attempted to throw all the blame on the duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, pretending that her mishap was entirely owing to the shock she received when, six days before, he (the Duke) came to announce to her the King's fall from his horse. But the King knows very well that it was not that, for his accident was announced to her in a manner not to create alarm; besides which, when she heard of it, she seemed quite indifferent to it...."
(Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers Spanish vol 5ii Henry Vlll 1536-1538, 1888)

Even after the passage of nearly five hundred years, the partisanship is vivid. The divorced Katherine is "the queen"; the new Queen Anne is "the concubine" or "La Ana." Her loss of a child is something to give thanks to God for.

But on the accident, that's it. No opponent mentioned, no confirmation that Henry was actually jousting.

I was writing my latest YA novel, The Ravenmaster's Boy (forthcoming April 2017, The Greystones Press) when I wrote the scene and it was as normally imagined: two armed men thundering towards each other, lances in hand, the clash of bodies, armour, horses. It's dramatic, especially since it's followed by the grim-faced Duke of Norfolk brutally telling the pregnant queen how close to death her husband is.

In Hilary Mantel's Bring up the Bodies, the accident is described thus:
"Rafe says 'the contests had not begun, he was running at the ring, the point of his lance scooped the eye of the circle. Then the horse stumbled under him, man and rider down, horse rolling with a scream and Henry beneath it."

I had read that book twice and yet the old images were stronger. Maybe I was thinking of the play, also seen twice. Mike Poulton's excellent playscript has the accident happen offstage, after we have seen Henry arming for a joust. Rafe Sadler announces to Cromwell, "It's the King ... King Henry is dead.

At Cromwell's reaction ("Ah.") the curtain falls for the interval and our imagination does the rest.

I've changed the scene in The Ravenmaster's Boy. Once I'd been back and checked those original letters, I saw it as indifensible to have the King unhorsed by an opponent. Who would that opponent have been, after all? Just because we know Henry sustained an earlier jousting injury in a bout with Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, in 1524, that's not enough justification to put Brandon back in the lists.

In fact a recent PhD thesis by Emma Levitt, cleverly demonstrates, from the use of 16th century tournament score cards that Brandon was super careful never to defeat Henry, though he might have been the better jouster.

All this has made me wonder about the other historical "myths." I knew that Cnut wasn't trying to halt the waves, rather to demonstrate that he couldn't. I know that Marie Antoinette didn't say "let them eat cake!" But what are the others?

Here are some links:

The 20 Greatest Historical Myths ~ Write Spirit

www.writespirit.net/greatest-historical-myths/

The 20 Greatest Historical Myths. If more people knew the facts, a few of the great history-makers would be recognised (anyone heard of Ub Iwerks?), some ...

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Little Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov on board the imperial yacht with his carer the sailor Nagorny.

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