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Cabinet of Curiosities - the First Dinosaur Fossils by Charlotte Wightwick

January 29, 2017, 4:30 pm
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For today’s Cabinet of Curiosities we’re heading to the Natural History Museum in London. There are many, many objects there which I could quite happily add to the Cabinet, but I have chosen two small, unprepossessing brown fossils. Both are still half-embedded in light-coloured stone (‘matrix’); one is slightly curved, the other has defined grooves. They are both pretty obviously, even to the untrained observer, teeth.

What makes these teeth special is the fact that they were among the very first fossils to be identified as belonging to a previously-unknown race of large, land-dwelling reptiles: the creatures we now know as dinosaurs.

The iguanodon teeth found by Mary-Ann and/or Gideon Mantell. 
Now in the Natural History Museum, London. (Photo: Charlotte 
Wightwick)
Like many children, I was enthralled by the idea of a race of gigantic monsters inhabiting the earth millions of years before humans existed. But I never really thought much about how we originally found out about the dinosaurs.

My curiosity as an adult was piqued when I moved to Crystal Palace in south-east London. Walking in the local park one freezing-cold January day 12 years ago, I came across a small lake with an island at its centre, and on the island were various statues of prehistoric creatures, looming out of the wintry gloom. I was at once fascinated. Many of the models were clearly meant to be dinosaurs, but they looked nothing like the reconstructions I had been brought up with, even less like the newer depictions of the feathered, bird-like lizards we’re all starting to get our heads around.

How had they come to be there? Why did they look as they did? Above all, who were the people, what were the stories, which lay behind them?


Three of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, seen from Dino Island, 
Nov 2016 (photo: Charlotte Wightwick). The differing colours
of the statues are a result of modern restoration work; the
Grade I listed statues are currently being repaired (e.g. you can 
see the damaged tail of the not-yet restored dinosaur in the 
foreground in comparison with the bright green and white 
of ‘Iggy’ the iguanodon at the back.)
These questions led me to the Natural History Museum and to the two small brown fossils with which I started this post.

The dinosaurs by the lake were created as part of the overall complex – some might say early ‘theme park’ – of the south London Crystal Palace. They were sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse in the early 1850s, but their scientific accuracy (for they were extremely accurate, reflecting cutting-edge discoveries, no matter how odd they look to us now) was overseen by Professor Richard Owen. Today, Owen is largely unknown to the public imagination, but he was one of the leading scientific figures of his day. When he is remembered, it is chiefly for three things: for coining the term ‘dinosaur’, for disagreeing with Darwin (although for more complex reasons than is often assumed: he was no purely religious sceptic) and as the first head of the Natural History Museum. So he is one thread which takes us to South Kensington.

The statue of Richard Owen in the Natural 
History Museum (photo: Charlotte Wightwick)

But there is another thing which links the Crystal Palace dinosaurs to the iguanodon teeth. Owen, despite his undoubted expertise, was not the first choice for the job of superintending the creation of the Crystal Palace models.

Instead that honour went to an obscure GP, originally from Sussex, now living in near-poverty in Pimlico. Gideon Mantell had been fascinated by geology and fossil-collecting from childhood. Like Owen, he too had studied medicine in the capital as a young man but, failing to find a position there, returned to Lewes to take up a job as a GP, where he continued to work on his passion in his spare time.

In the early 1820s Gideon, (or more likely his wife Mary-Ann; there are conflicting accounts) found two small brown fossils.

Gideon realised that the teeth were something unusual and believed they were those of a large, unknown herbivorous reptile. He determined that the teeth most closely resembled those of a modern iguana and as such decided to call his new lizard ‘Iguanodon’ (literally ‘iguana-toothed’). Mantell spent several years trying to persuade the scientific community that he had discovered something new. Initially, he was met with widespread scepticism but his tenacity eventually paid off. Gideon went on to discover several more species of dinosaur and was recognised as one of the leading experts in this new and exciting field.

But Mantell’s life work came with a price. His obsession with fossils led to the disintegration of his marriage and financial ruin; a carriage accident followed by years of acrimonious dispute with a certain Professor Richard Owen took their toll on his health. As such he was too ill to oversee the creation of the Crystal Palace models. He died shortly before they – including his very own Iguanodon – were completed.

Portraits of Gideon and Mary-Ann Mantell reflected in the case 
of another of Gideon’s discoveries (the ‘Mantellisaurus’) at the 
Natural History Museum London. (Photo: Charlotte Wightwick)
Some years before his death, Mantell was forced through poverty to sell his extensive collection of fossils to the British Museum. When, more than forty years later, Richard Owen succeeded in splitting off the Natural History Museum, Mantell’s collection, including the teeth, went with him. There they remain on display still – two tiny, unremarkable-seeming fossils.

These iguanodon teeth are anything but insignificant, however. They are the objects which originally sparked our collective fascination with the dinosaurs and symbols of a world which had been lost and now could be uncovered by science. As importantly for me, they stand also for two complex and difficult men, Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen, who made it possible for me, and you, and all of us to wonder, in museums and in parks, about that long-lost world.

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January competition

January 30, 2017, 4:01 pm
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To win a copy of Stef Penney's new novel, answer the following question in the Comments section below. Then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that I can contact you for your land address.

"Flora’s sexual awakening is an important theme of the book. Which characters in other literary works have been changed by their sexual experience?"

Closing date 7th February

We are sorry that our competitions are open only to UK Followers.

Good luck!
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What if it had been Princess Georgiana? by Mary Hoffman

January 31, 2017, 4:01 pm
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The Librarian at my old Secondary School - James Allen's Girls' School - got in touch recently via my website, because she had found a photo:


Now, since this school play dates from 1963, it qualifies as history in itself, but you can see it was not dealing with contemporary issues, except indirectly. It was The Firstborn, by Christopher Fry. I (on the left) was playing the part of Anath-Bithiah, the sister of Pharaoh Seti l; his firstborn son, Rameses, was Pamela Dowling (on the right).

Poor Christopher Fry, who lived to be 97, is known today mainly as the author of a play whose title was turned into a joke by Margaret Thatcher's scriptwriters and delivered so ponderously - The Lady is not for Burning. But this play, premièred in 1946, is about the Plagues of Egypt and the tenth, worst, plague of all - the death of the firstborn. Note that Exodus says the firstborn son, "from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well."

So a case of primogeniture not working out too well for the favoured oldest son. And Fry is not writing an accurate history. Moses realises that Rameses, who sympathises with the captive Israelites, will be subject to the last plague but he can't save him and he dies. In reality, Rameses ll lived to be ninety.

But it got me thinking about primogeniture and how British history would have been different if we had not had the convention of the throne passing to the oldest son, rather than the oldest child. (This version is called "male preference primogeniture and lasted in Britian from the Norman Conquest until the law on Royal Succession was changed in 2011).

How far back shall we go? Let's try Henry the Eighth. Not his quest for a legitimate male heir, which is well known, but his siblings. The oldest, Arthur, was expected to be king after his father Henry the Seventh but famously died young in 1502. But there was no question of the throne passing to the next child down, who was Margaret Tudor. Of course, their father was still alive in 1502 and a year later, Margaret made the first of her three marriages. (She was the grandmother of both of James l and Vl's parents).

Margaret Tudor
Ah yes, James the First of England. Same situation: oldest child, a son, Prince Henry, dies in his teens and next child down is a girl, the princess Elizabeth. But she marries Frederick of Hanover, and becomes the Winter Queen, while the English throne eventually passes to Charles the First. Hmn.

Charles the Second, the monarch restored in 1660 after his father's execution and the period of the Commonwealth, despite having numerous illegitimate children of both sexes, has no heir by his wife, Catherine of Braganza so the throne passes to his brother, James l and Vll, because that is the way male preference primogeniture works.

So far, without it, we would have had a Queen Margaret in the 16th and a Queen Elizabeth ll in the 17th Century. James 1 was also rich in illegitimate offspring but the legitimate surviving ones were both girls - Mary and Anne.

At fifteen, Mary was married to William, Prince of Orange, her first cousin.

Mary, as Princess of Orange, by Peter Lely
Mary was heir to the throne and James was making people very anxious by becoming a Catholic. Her husband, William was a Protestant and had his eye on the throne of England. And then James's second wife, Mary of Modena,  produced a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, known to history as the Old Pretender.

But rather than elbowing Mary out of the way, this infant precipitated the crisis that forced her father off the throne and put her firmly on it. Doubts were cast over the baby's legitimacy and there were rumours that the real baby had died and a tiny substitute James had been smuggled into the room in a warming pan. Big James produced forty witnesses of the birth to confirm that his son really was his son. Forty! Poor Queen Mary, to have had such a crowd around her childbed.

But back to Princess Mary. The more powerful Protestant faction, fearing that the  new baby would be raised as a Catholic by his mother, pushed the royal couple and their son into exile in France and invited William of Orange to invade.

In this "Glorious Revolution," James was deposed and Mary declared queen. But she was not temperamentally suited to be a monarch, as she freely admitted, and William was clearly not going to accept being a consort. So they ruled jointly, being crowned in 1689, the year after the birth of little James Francis Edward.
Mary of Modena with her son James
 WilliamandMary (as 1066 and all That called them) had no children and when Mary died in 1694, of smallpox, William reigned as sole monarch until his death in 1702 and was succeeded by Mary's younger sister Anne.

Poor Queen Anne!  She had seventeen pregnancies in as many years during her marriage to George of Denmark but after many miscarriages and still births and infant deaths, the last one, a son, died at the age of eleven, before Anne came to the throne.

So, on her death in 1714, the succession had petered out and Great Britain and Ireland, as it now was, had to look further afield. Remember that earlier Queen Elizabeth the Second that never was/? The one who was Charles the First's older sister? Her grandson, George, was the nearest male relative and thus began the reign of the four Georges.

The torrent of Georges was halted only in 1830 by the death of the fourth of that name. His only legitimate child, Princess Charlotte, had died thirteen years earlier from complications after delivering a stillborn son. So the British throne went to William the Fourth, George the Third's third son.
William lV
It was the fourth son, the Duke of Kent, who was the father of the next British queen, Victoria. So although George the Third was so well-equipped with legitimate sons and his brother with illegitimate ones, the rule of male preference primogeniture could produce no better-qualified heir than this eighteen-year-old girl.

Victoria and Albert's first child was, Victoria, the Princess Royal, but she was soon followed by her brother, who would be Edward Vll.

For the most part, kings and queens of England, later Great Britain, have obligingly produced male offspring in first position, often adding at least one "spare" to the heir.

Fast forward to the Abdication of Edward Vlll in 1936, which left the second son to reign as George Vl. He had two daughters and although his younger brother had two sons born later, Princess Elizabeth became Heir Presumptive and indeed queen in 1952.

Obligingly, she had a firstborn son and he had two. Then the law changed and, if the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had had a daughter in 2013 - the one I'm calling Princess Georgiana - would have been third in line to the throne, as indeed the real Prince George is. If only they had had a girl first! As it is , I shall not live to see the end of male preference primogeniture put into practice.


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Two Jews, Three Opinions – by Gillian Polack

February 1, 2017, 6:43 pm
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This post is addresses difficult current issues. It shows one of the ways in which the history we love is bound to the present we live in. It may not be comfortable for all readers.

Sometimes, small events come together in surprising ways. My academic side has been looking at what makes us draw history in fiction in the way we do, as writers. One of the side topics is where writers get those interpretations from. When we write about outsiders and minorities and people who are just a bit different to us, we draw upon our own background and also upon how we describe these others.

While I was thinking about that, my friend, Rivqa and some of her friends began a writing project. In her words “Problem Daughters will amplify the voices of women who are sometimes excluded from mainstream feminism. It will be an anthology of beautiful, thoughtful, unconventional speculative fiction and poetry around the theme of intersectional feminism, focusing on the lives and experiences of marginalized women, such as those who are of color, QUILTBAG, disabled, sex workers, and all intersections of these. Edited by Nicolette Barischoff, Rivqa Rafael and Djibril al-Ayad, the anthology will be published by Futurefire.net Publishing and is currently being crowdfunded. “

It struck me that this project is an opportunity for us, as readers of history and historical fiction, to ask our own questions. In historical fiction, it’s important to get beneath simple descriptions and to add just a bit more depth to how we see those historical figures we love. One of the reasons fiction is so powerful is because it, more than formal academic history, can make people come alive in all their complexity. Done well, it’s a wonderful thing. Doing it well is hard.

The first time this Australian government menorah was lit was in Parliament House, Canberra in 2016. It was only the second time politicians had formally come together to celebrate the festival... ever. Yet Australia has had a Jewish population since the arrival of the First Fleet.


In my most recent novel, I looked at Australian Jewish women’s history, and how it’s different to the standard ways Jews are seen and interpreted historically. Rivqa and I both come from that background. We decided to have a long chat and to find out what we share and what we don’t share and why some language works to describe us and why some doesn’t.

This kind of discussion gives me a solid standard for reading fiction.  If the characters aren’t as complex and interesting as we are, then they don’t feel real to me. This is important, and so I’m sharing the whole conversation. Just to make it clear, Rivqa led it.

I hope you enjoy it!

Rivqa: Hi Gillian, it's so great to talk to you as always! I hope summer and novel writing are treating you well.

You and I are both Jewish people living in Australia, but that doesn't mean our cultures are the same; I'm still tickled by how you signed my copy of your most recent novel, The Wizardry of Jewish Women -- ‘please don't throw this book against the wall’ for this exact reason.

But I'm getting sidetracked, because I first wanted to ask you about the use of the term ‘Jew’, as compared with ‘Jewish people’, which I tend to reach for first. I'm particularly wary of non-Jewish people using ‘Jew’; I've had it thrown at me as an insult enough times to make me jumpy when I hear it, even though it's usually said with complete cluelessness to the sensitivity. What do you think?

Gillian: My personal preference is simply ‘Jewish’ for that keeps me out of the firing line that some people save for anything that makes them think of Israel or global conspiracies and for some reason 'Jewish people' is one such description. We both are and we aren't a people, so 'Jewish' is easier from that direction, as well.

I used to react to 'of the Jewish persuasion' the way you react to 'Jew'. I've seen it so often in so many contexts and it's always been faintly pejorative. In recent years, however, 'Jew' has overtaken it in terms of negatives. It's much harder to address, too. If someone says 'you're of the Jewish persuasion', I can ask them 'which persuasion is yours?' or 'does this mean you're of the Catholic persuasion?" Because those constructs are so very dated, they sound a bit daft and can be used to push people to instantly reconsider their language.  

The symbolic distance between this flag at Parliament House and when those candles were lit inside the building is telling.


'Jew' is much harder to address. I have to slow myself down when I hear 'Jew' and try not to react, because it can be being used as an insult or a faint pejorative, but it can also be a perfectly standard description.

The one I will argue with always (as well as from things like 'dirty Jew', obviously) is ‘people of the Jewish faith’. It suggests that Judaism is constructed in the same way that Christianity and Islam are. Judaism is quite different. Faith is an element of religious Judaism, but we do not have a faith-based religion in that way. Unlike Christianity and Islam (the two most well-known faith-based religions) a simple statement of faith will not convert someone to Judaism. This is the technical definition of the term, and is a very handy standard, so I stick to it. The people who want to argue with it, are actually arguing that Judaism is something quite different to its reality and those differences usually include elements that bigots ascribe to us but that we don't actually have. Once a friend laughed at me for my pedantry in saying this, which showed me some surprising limitations at her end. Or maybe it just demonstrated that I have problems with people who only accept Judaism if it complies with their biases concerning it.

The bottom line with all these terms is that we're seldom allowed self-definition. Most other people assume they can tell us who we are and how we act and think and believe. This is why the word 'Jew' is becoming so very uncomfortable: it is not guaranteed to allow us our understanding of ourselves. This has happened before. It's often well-intended, which rubs salt into the wound. It relates to some cultures and religions and races being verbally related to a place slightly apart. I'd rather be joined with Indigenous Australians through all the cool things we share than through both of us having to deal with this demeaning form of light bigotry.

Rivqa: I feel that denial of self-definition so strongly. Without the relevant education, the average white Australian (in my experience) seems to think that Judaism is more or less analogous to Christianity, minus Jesus (minus Christmas has genuinely not occurred to many I’ve spoken to). And although I’m largely not-practising now, I find I need to over-emphasise what I do practise for people to register me as Jewish at all. It’s a weird, liminal space to occupy.

More on the world stage, the obsession with whether Ashkenazim are white is equally tiresome; particularly when it involves leftists and Nazis arguing over our heads about it. For many reasons that I won’t go into (at least just yet), I identify as white. More or less. But it’d be nice to be able to make that decision for myself, even as I consider the social structures that inform that identity. And those assumptions about political alignment based on religion! Please stop. It’s exhausting. I don’t need to justify my existence to white Australians, especially those who are suspiciously quiet on refugees.


And yes, definitely; I like ‘Jewish people’, not ‘the Jewish people’, which implies a monoculture when we are not one. The two of us had very different Jewish Australian experiences -- again, and I still chuckle when I think about that book inscription I mentioned earlier! Because you signed it at your wonderful Rosh Hashana dinner, where so many of your traditions were just different enough from mine to make me wonder if I’d stepped into an alternate dimension. So, if we can get a bit reductionist, let’s talk about that for a bit.

The dinner Rivqa talked about.



I grew up in the Chabad community in Melbourne. Chabad is an interesting Hassidic sect, especially for women; there’s much less expectation to be demure, my high school in particular prized secular education, and my constant arguing with rabbis at my Modern Orthodox yeshiva (post-high school) horrified some of my peers (but not the rabbis; that’s the Talmudic way, after all). There were no restrictions on my reading.

Yet as far as Jewish law and custom went, I was taught one way to do things. I won’t go into a detailed history of the Chabad movement, but many customs, rooted as they are in Jewish mysticism, are at odds with other European Jewish practices. As much as I now believe in pluralities of Judaism and Jewishness, it’s hard to shake that ingrained feeling that others are (and, indeed, I am) ‘doing it wrong’ … even though that ‘right way’ is at odds with my personal beliefs. Jacob wrestling with the angel; tension; internal struggle… it might seem like a negative way to describe how I relate to my culture, but for the most part, for me, it’s positive. Complicated, but positive.

Gillian: I identified as fully white and solidly privileged, until I discovered that Jews historically in Australia are far more frequently ambivalently white: near white, honorary white, or, as I like to call it, off-white.

I started to feel the disadvantages of this before I started comparing notes with people who don't have full white privilege. It was a shock to discover how much life experience we had in common. How many setbacks, how many knockbacks, how much discounting, how many people who said 'you people' and left us off lists.

I've developed ways of identifying some of these shared experiences, to help me deal with this change in my self-perception. Let me give you an example. When we talk about walking into a room of strangers, you can tell those whose differences make them unsafe. There's a shared note of masked caution in the body language and in the words. It’s not always safe to walk into a room full of strangers, so we manifest caution.

There has never been any guarantee that strangers won't hate me for being Jewish. I might be argued with by the tolerant, or walked out on by the ‘I can't deal’ or told various things I really don't want to hear by others, but the moment strangers know I'm Jewish I'm almost guaranteed a reaction. There's always a strong likelihood of a room not being friendly.  Knowing that I share this with others is a bridge we build. I'd rather the bridge were built on liking roses or enjoying walking in the rain, but how we enter a room is important and that particular bridge has helped me talk openly with many people with similar experiences. It also helps me not open myself to people who have no idea, until I'm sure they're safe.

‘Don't tell them you're Jewish’ is the usual recommendation. I've always thought, though, that if those who pass all hide, then racism festers. Not everyone can hide. If I don't address problems, some of my friends, who have to deal with racism based on skin colour, or bigotry based on being in a wheelchair, will have far harder everyday lives.

Every time someone walks out of a conversation or looks at me in a certain way, I wish I were less combative. Prejudice isn't about me, though, or the person doing the hating: it's about the society we live in. We all contribute to society and we all make choices as to what our contributions are. I choose to be open about my background. I choose to not 'pass.' Why?

Because Australian Jews mostly pass as white, some of the negatives don't happen at all and others don't happen as often as they do to those who don't pass. And because we (my family, the Jews I grew up with) have a culture of public silence about hate, it took me a very long time to identify that what I was seeing ranged from intolerance to hate. Hate, to me, was the Shoah. Anything else was just a natural part of society. For some reason, by being exposed to Shoah since I was so very young (I saw photos of the liberation from the camps and those giant piles of bodies when I was six) I'd normalised it.

Except it wasn't. It's never been a natural part of society. It should never be normalised.

When we accept hate, we're condoning hate crimes.

This mikvah (in Montpellier) was lost for centuries. Persecution has a vast cultural cost, historically.


These aspects of prejudice, and the idea that we all have choices and we should make them thoughtfully, are how I was taught to interpret tikkun olam (a part of Jewish philosophy that boils down to making the world a better place). This brings me to how I was taught such things.

I come from an Australian Orthodox family. Not Chabad. Quite, quite different from Chabad. My mother taught us most things, in the home. We had a Hebrew teacher (Israeli, which is why my accent is always unexpected for someone who has Hebrew-for-praying). We kept strictly kosher, for Mum, but Dad worked on Saturday mornings.

We were a blended family. Mum's father was from Bialystock and Mum's mother was born when the family was fleeing the Kishinev pogroms. Dad's culture was so much from his mother that I only know a little of his father's culture. It was terribly, terribly Anglo-Australian. I can’t imagine being unable to make scones. Chops or sausages and three veg and a salad and maybe a pudding was our weeknight food, with a roast on Friday.  All the sets of dishes. All the trials of Pesach in the days when orders had to be made way in advance to get the kosher food over to Australia in time. And we went to state schools, because, on Dad's side, we were quite left wing. We went to shul, but we also learned musical instruments. I was in Girl Guides for years, supported by Dad for he was in Scouts for even more years.

The older members of two sides of the family didn't get on that well much of the time because they were so very, very different, so for me being Jewish is about sitting next to people who won't talk to each other and making them comfortable. It's about afternoon tea and fine china and silver teapots and committee meetings and musical afternoons. We could read Hebrew and music, for both were important. And tikkun olam was came from both sides - some things are universally Jewish.

We were expected to be strong women as well, but in quite a different way. Mum taught us our Judaism. Both parents educated us on other ways. All the books! All the time! It was a wonderful thing as a child to have no books that were off limits. We weren't expected to be loud, however.

I was taught Jewish law in a very traditional way. We were taught to ask questions, but that if we wanted to answer back we had to be able to argue and give proof. My sisters and I only studied the first six days of Bereshit (the opening sequence of the Torah). It took us six months, because we studied the commentary as well, as we learned how to work out which comments were backed up by the text and which weren't.

This led me so naturally into studying history that it was a seamless transition. I knew that my life was going to include history and analysis of some kind when I was still in primary school. I dream of palaeontology and museum curating and everything in between until I reached university, when I discovered historiography.

Historiography is like Torah study - you can't turn your brain off, ever. The moment I discovered this, I was hooked. I tried to be fair to rabbis and my background and I listened to a vast range of rabbis, from all branches of Judaism I could find. So many arguments they made were emotive or ill-conceived. So many of the approaches they suggested lacked the cultural context to demonstrate validity. I stopped studying Torah and started arguing with all the texts, all the time. It was wonderful. It still is.

I totally missed out on Jewish mysticism until much later. It's just not part of my immediate family background. My family cares more about the scientific than the numinous. This explains the basic conflict within my novel, doesn't it? I didn't explore it much, but I wanted the fact that both approaches are very Jewish to be acknowledged. That we have mysticism and we have scientific method, both.

Digging beneath stereotypes changes how we read history. Not all Aussie women look like this, after all. Photo by Y. Green.


Rivqa: Off-white is just perfect. We (as Ashkenazim, it bears repeating) might be able to hide, sort of, most of the time, but as you say, it’s not in anyone’s best interest, long-term, for us to do so (barring instances where safety is a concern, of course). Time and again we’ve seen antisemitic techniques deployed by Islamophobes and vice versa, just to name one example, and we need to break that cycle. An uncomfortable part of passing privilege is being all the more likely to hear some of the more casual racism, the ‘jokes’ from people who think they’re not racist because it’s ‘just a joke’ and they’d never abuse a person of colour to their face. Calling out that sort of thing is never easy, but hopefully it makes some small difference sometimes. Often, I think of myself as an interface, a conduit -- it’s that liminal experience again, but it’s basically constant, and these small acts of social justice are an important part of that.

I love hearing about your upbringing, and how it informed your career choices as well as your world view. For me, studying Jewish law might not have directly influenced my study of science, but understanding the internal logic of a system certainly did. Arguing with text is just such a Jewish thing to do. Yelling at God! I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in yelling at God; it’s about protesting injustice and advocating for kindness.

Agricultural Jewish law (for example, shmita, the concept of letting the land lie fallow once every seven years) and laws around charity (pe’a, leaving a portion of a harvest for the poor) had such a strong influence on my world view. Equally, the image of the Jewish mystic slipping away to the forest to meditate had a profound impact. The idea of everyone and everything being connected is not unique to our people, but I think it’s important to mark that journey, honour it, and continue to work for those core values that, for me, have not actually changed as much as one might think.

More about Rivqa:
Rivqa Rafael is a queer Jewish writer and editor based in Sydney. She started writing speculative fiction well before earning degrees in science and writing, although they have probably helped. Her previous gig as subeditor and reviews editor for Cosmos magazine likewise fueled her imagination. Her short stories have appeared in Hear Me Roar (Ticonderoga Publications), The Never Never Land (CSFG Publishing), and Defying Doomsday (Twelfth Planet Press). In 2016, she won the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. When she’s not working, she’s most likely child-wrangling, playing video games, or practising her Brazilian Jiujitsu moves. She can be found at rivqa.net and on Twitter as @enoughsnark.

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February 2, 2017, 4:35 am
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Beneath the Divan: A Family Album by Debra Daley

February 2, 2017, 5:00 pm
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The oldest, the most historical item that I own is a photograph album that was probably made sometime between 1865 and the 1880s. It’s an object that is significant to me, not only as a family keepsake, but because it has served in a way as an ongoing history lesson ever since it came into my hands when I was a child. It has prompted me to ask questions about provenance and image-making and to undertake research to answer those questions. It represents my first conscious encounter with the past.

My maternal grandparents lived in a small, two-bedroom house in a suburb of Auckland, where they had managed to raise five children on a factory-worker’s wages. A dark mood tended to prevail in my own home, where scarcity and trouble ruled the roost, but my grandparents were social and talkative and encouraging. I loved coming to stay with them in the school holidays. Even the situation of their house, at the top of a rise – and the name of the street itself, Jubilee Avenue – struck me as cheerful. In their sitting room (flowered carpet, three chairs shoved together pretending to be a sofa, industrial-sized heater, bookcase bursting with Dennis Wheatley and Hammond Innes, and a mighty votive TV set overlooking all) there was a built-in divan, on which I slept.


One day, my grandfather opened up a storage well beneath the divan to unearth an encyclopedia that might answer some inquiry I had for a school project. To my surprise, a trove of handsome old-timey volumes lay within, their brittle, spotted pages infested by silverfish. They were Fancy Books. I recall there was a volume of poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Actual poems. In a book. By a lord. And, oddly, Proceedings of the New Zealand Legislative Council. Then, I caught a lovely shimmer of mother of pearl and iridescent pāua shell. They formed the cover, it turned out, of a handsome photograph album comprising twenty, thick gilt-edged pages. I was captivated by it at once.


Photograph album bound in brown leather, with part of a metal clasp
and covers inlaid with pāua (abalone) shell, tortoise shell and mother of pearl.

The attraction lay not only in my curiosity about family photographs, but the sense of culture that emanated from this showy object. Culture, in the form of books and art and creativity in general (as opposed to living in a state of ongoing economic emergency), was something that I yearned for, although I couldn’t name the impulse until I was much older.

My grandfather mentioned that the contents of the divan had belonged to his grandfather, but seemed disinclined to offer any more about the man. (William Kelly, I found out later, who emigrated to New Zealand from Ireland with his bride, Frances, in 1863.) I gathered from my grandfather’s reticence about his antecedents that there had been a falling-out somewhere down the line, which perhaps accounted for the careless way the patriarch’s books and other objects had been stored.


By the time I was old enough to realise the historical worth of the divan’s hoard of books, it had disappeared, except for a copy of Hogarth’s Works in folio format, circa 1870. The Hogarth volume was worn through at the extremities and torn at the spine joints, but as I pored over it, turning the pages gingerly, I marvelled at the world within. Rakes and harlots – whatever they were. Marriage à la Mode (The Boudoir of the Countess). Gin Lane. The Midnight Conversation. This book was to prove the entrée ­– when my understanding of its contents improved – to the amazing new land of 18th-century London and, as it turned out, influenced my choice of study at university as well as much of my writing life.



But, that was later. On a first look through the Kellys’ album, I was excited by the subjects. Among them, tattooed Māori women in flounced gowns, a grizzly militia man playing a banjo and two contortionists. And three darkish photographs of Māori that seemed to be printed on metal. 

Contortionist, Wheeler & Son, Christchurch (active 1864-80)

Photograph albums, as far as I knew, were repositories of family experiences. Did I come from people who could count contortionists among their acquaintance? For a very ordinary suburban girl like me, living on the edge of the world, this was a dizzying possibility.


Unidentified Māori women (left), Hemus & Hanna, Auckland (active 1875-85)
and (right), wearing a korowai in cameo vignette, Batt & Richards,
Wellington (active 1867-1874).

Who were these Māori – most in European dress, but others wearing korowai (tag cloaks)? My grandparents could offer no clue. Only one of the photographs was captioned. A soldier wearing an ill-made uniform with sergeant’s stripes was identified as ‘T. Palethorpe 1 WR’. But, who Sergeant Palethorpe was no one could say. Each time I visited my grandparents, I would sit down with the album and stare at the faces it contained, and the detail of their dress, trying to imagine their lives and their state of mind. I attempted to date the photographs according to the style of the women’s gowns, until I worked out how pointless that was given how far fashions in colonial New Zealand lagged behind the times. But I see now that this exercise of looking for clues in the historical record was a sort of primitive early training that I came to put to use researching fiction.

Eventually, when I was in high school, my grandparents gave me the photograph album to keep. As I grew older, I gained new insights into the meaning of its images. That obscure ‘1 WR’, for instance, written on the photograph of T. Palethorpe – it had bothered me for years. Then a school librarian revealed that it stood for ‘1st Waikato Regiment of Militia’ and that led me to read about the New Zealand Wars (or the Māori Wars, as they were known, one-sidedly, when I was in school), a subject that was not included in our history syllabus at that time. I knew more about the battle of Culloden than I did about the battle of Gate Pā. 

Thomas Palethorpe, colour sergeant, 1st Waikato Regiment,
c1864-1870. Photographer unknown.


As I scrutinised these images for clues, I began to wonder about the studios and these early New Zealand photographers.






These two photographs of Māori women with moko [tattooes] were taken by Samuel Carnell (active 1870-1905) in his Napier studio and those below in the Wellington studio of Batt & Richards (active 1867-1874). 






I was amazed to find how numerous photographers were in colonial New Zealand. In 1857 the Lyttleton Times in Christchurch reported the following: 





But it wasn't easy to find out about these things in the days before search engines. I need a bigger library – and when I went to university, I found one. That’s when I discovered that this was not a family album at all – at least, not in my conception of one. It was a collection of cartes de visite – which meant that all these people were strangers.

I knew about calling cards, because people in Victorian novels were always leaving them with butlers, but I had not known that they had played a part in a photography revolution. Technological advances – cameras with multiple lenses, glass negatives – made it possible for images to be mass-produced in the format of a carte de visite. The carte de visite photograph was usually a portrait, printed on paper stuck to uniformly-sized card. It was perfect for mailing off to family and friends in far away places or slipped into a cartouche, a cut-out oval window, in an album. They were made by the millions worldwide until the cabinet format eclipsed them at the end of the century.  


But what about those shiny metallic photographs in the middle of the Kelly album? They were tintypes, or ferrotypes, I discovered, an image exposed on a thin sheet of iron. I also found that in the late 1860s they had largely fallen out of use, which meant I could approximately date the three tintypes in the album.


Māori girl wearing korowai (tag cloak) c. 1865. Unsigned tintype. 

Paperprints had a more natural appearance than the black-base of the tintype and their relative cheapness made them available to a wider range of people. Exchanging cartes de visite with friends and relatives and collecting images of celebrities, notables and curious personages in albums became wildly popular from the 1860s until the last decade of the century.

A New Zealand newspaper columnist observed in 1862, ‘Wherever in our fashionable streets we see a crowd congregated before a shop window, there for certain a number of notabilities are staring back at the crowd in the shape of cartes de visite … A wholesale trade has sprung up with amazing rapidity, and to obtain a good sitter and his permission to sell his carte de visite is in itself an annuity to a man…’


Cartes de visite were a lucrative business opportunity for enterprising photographers, but a small country like New Zealand lacked a deep pool of celebrity subjects. It did have, however, a picturesque indigenous population, an attractive ‘other’ culture of Māori whose tattooes, native dress and proud demeanour made them ideal examples of the kind of exotica that was sought after by CDV collectors. After their defeat in the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872, Māori, like Native Americans, came to be considered a ‘vanishing race’. Documenting a culture that was believed to be on the verge of extinction provided a source of income for photographers trying to make a living in New Zealand. Portraits of Māori became highly marketable, not only to individual consumers, but also as an element of the government's burgeoning tourism strategy. George Pullman, who had opened a studio in Auckland in 1867 specialising in ‘Māori Heads’, sold his negatives to the government in the 1870s. Prints were made from them for display at the New Zealand exhibition at the first official world’s fair at Philadelphia in 1876, and continued to be copied over and again in the twentieth century.

Over the years I have discovered that there is more lodged in the photographs in my great-great-grandparents’ album than at first meets the eye. Now when I look at them, I see other things ­– not least being the irony that William Kelly, who eventually became chair of the New Zealand government’s Native Affairs Committee, because he ‘knew natives well’, and my school-teacher great-great-aunt, who encouraged Māori children to learn English, flourished by farming on confiscated land. Of course they too were links in a chain of dispossession that began in Ireland. Life goes up and down like the grass, and sure enough, all the Kellys’ holdings came to be lost, too, one way or another as the twentieth century staggered from war into a depression. Now, there seems to be nothing left of William Kelly and his achievements but this album, and that battered Hogarth. And his descendants.
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Elizabethan Hero - Katherine Langrish

February 4, 2017, 8:14 am
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A long time ago when I was a student and reading a lot of 16thcentury literature, a friend and I got talking about heroes. Her 16thcentury hero was Sir (or Saint) Thomas More, the man for all seasons, the man who stood up to Henry VIII and paid the price with his head. Sir/SaintThomas for some reason has never really appealed to me, and my own 16th century pin-up was that very perfect knight, Elizabethan golden boy, courtier, soldier, poet and all-round Renaissance man, Sir Philip Sidney. Here he is, looking a bit stern perhaps – but he seems to have charmed nearly everyone he met. He’s still a favourite of mine because not only did he write the elaborate prose 'Arcadia' for his sister the Countess of Pembroke, in which the simple phrase 'It was spring' is delightfully embroidered into: 

It was in the time that the earth begins to put on her new apparel against the approach of her lover, the sun, and that the sun, running a most even course, becomes an indifferent arbiter between the night and the day...

 – but because he also delighted in the kind of simple old tale 'that holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner’. He wrote of popular ballads, 'I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.'

The last two quotes come from his famous ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ which is a defence of invention: an argument against those Elizabethans who felt, uneasily, that it was somehow wrong and childish to concern themselves with something ‘untrue’. (Plato was the early and probably the founder example of the type, which still exists today, vide Richard Dawkins.)In fact, as Sidney recognised, the perceived gulf between fiction and non-fiction is more mirage than fact. Sidney wrote:

I think truly, that of all writers under the sun the poet is the least liar… for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes. 

Isn’t that great?  'No circles about your imagination'. If you knowthat you are reading pure invention with no claims to be either history or fact, you don’t have to worry about belief. You are left free to apprehend the truth of the poet's imagination. Sidney goes on to point out that – surely? – only a fool would describe Aesop's fables as lies, or mistake a play for something 'real': 

None so simple would say that Aesop lied in his tales of the beasts; for whoso thinks that Aesop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name catalogued among the beasts he writeth of. What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?

Aesop's fictions are not really about animals, they present succinct points about human morals and behaviour. To miss that would indeed be to miss the entire point.


Sidney’s argument is still valid today. On 5th June 2014 Richard Dawkins wrote in The Guardian: ‘I actually think there might be a positive benefit in fairy tales for a child's critical thinking ... Do frogs turn into princes? No they don't. But an ordinary fiction story could well be true ... So a child can learn from fairy stories how to judge plausibility.’ I find this argument unconvincing. Where Dawkins suggests that ‘an ordinary fiction story could well be true’, Sidney would say boldly that while every kind of fiction is of its nature untrue, it is the ‘ordinary fiction story’ which is the most likely to deceive: it might seem convincingly plausible while containing many factual errors. 

Sidney goes on to claim that poetry (invention) teaches truth of another sort:

No learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue, and none can better both teach and move thereto than Poetry.

By ‘virtue’, I think  Sidney means correct behaviour: courage, courtesy, gallantry, truthfulness. To this very day, there is an ongoing argument about what effect, if any, books, films, computer games and virtual reality have upon human behavior. Invented realities do affect us: the modern response is usually yes but not that much. Sidney takes fiction far more seriously. He argues that it can teach us nobility. He’s perfectly well aware that it can do the opposite – pornography was alive and kicking in Elizabethan pamphlets – but still defended it, writing:‘granted that not only love but lust, but vanity, but scurrility, possesseth many leaves of the poets’ books; yet [say not] that Poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth Poetry.’  Invention, Sidney acknowledges, is a two-edged blade, and it’s up to us how we use it. Further on in the Apologie he writes:

Poetry is the companion of the camps. I dare undertake, Orlando Furioso, or honest King Arthur, will never displease a soldier... Homer, a Greek, flourished before Greece flourished. And ... as by him their learned men took almost their first light of knowledge, so their active men received their first motions of courage ...  Alexander left his schoolmaster, living Aristotle, behind him, but took dead Homer with him ... [and] found he took more bravery of mind by the pattern of Achilles than by hearing the definition of fortitude. 

If so, famously Philip Sidney learned the same lessons and put them into practice at his own death. There’s a story, repeated in the Notable Names Database, that while fighting for the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, ‘He owed his death to a quixotic impulse. Sir William Pelham happening to set out for the fight without greaves [the armour which protects the thigh] Sidney also cast off his leg-armour.’ He was struck by a bullet which smashed his thigh, and died twenty-five days later at Arnheim, 17th October 1586. Quixotic is the word. If it’s true, Sidney deliberately exposed himself to danger because honour – the chivalric, heroic code – would not permit him to venture into battle better-protected than his friend. What a waste, what folly. Yet what about his famous saintly deed, when he refused a cup of water in favour of a dying soldier?  Sidney's friend Fulke Greville, who wrote his 'Life', tells how,

Thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

I now know this story may not be true. The writer and historian Kevin Pask explains that 'the interest of Greville's narrative is grounded at least as much in heroic as religious life-narrative' and claims that 'Greville most likely borrowed the story, which is mentioned nowhere else in the early accounts of Sidney's death, from Plutarch's Life of Alexander.' If I recall this story correctly, Alexander is marching his army through the desert. All are suffering from terrible thirst, but two of his soldiers find a tiny spring and bring him a little water cupped in a helmet. Since there is not enough for anyone else, Alexander refuses to drink it and heroically pours the water into the sand.

How interesting that Alexander appears again here, the very example Sidney cites of the active man inspired by poetry. And was Alexander a hero? Hardly in modern terms, though sure, he was brave.

It’s easy to forget that such far-off wars, for us still hung with the picture-book trappings of chivalry, were just as terrible as modern wars to the individuals concerned – and with far fewer resources for treating casualties. Sidney died horribly of gangrene. It wasn't his poetry or his martial skill, but a possibly fictional gesture of generous, yes, even heroic compassion which earned him his place as a storybook hero in the sort of Books for Boys which were read, along with Homer, by the generation which died at the Somme. This is a hero who fought and died for his country. This is how you should behave.

Fiction is powerful. Heroes are troubling. 
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The Lighthouse Stevensons - a review by Joan Lennon

February 4, 2017, 5:30 pm
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"Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents." Truer words were never written.  And in The Lighthouse Stevensons, Bella Bathurst tells the tale of what the Stevenson family, over four generations, decided to do about it.

"For several long centuries," she writes, "lives lost at sea were seen by much of Europe as so much natural wastage.  Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwales while one of their colleagues drowned.  Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim."

But challenge it the Stevensons did.  Starting with the Bell Rock, a killer reef of rock only clear of the sea at low tide but just a few feet below the waves at high tide, they began to build lighthouses.  If they didn't know how something was to be done, they experimented.  If a tool for a job didn't exist, they invented it.  Lenses and reflectors, dovetailing and cement mixtures, studies of wave patterns and how to drill through sea rock - it was all, as the family's most famous son Robert Louis Stevenson later wrote, a "field that was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature ... [and] undertake works that were at once inventions and adventures."

Chronicling the lives and works of four generations of the Stevenson family, with their penchant for re-cycling first names, was always going to be a challenge, and I found it hard to care for some members as much as for others.  But as well as the fascinating historical details of lighthouse building in the 18th and 19th centuries, Bathurst also presents an intriguing series of complicated relationships between fathers and sons (including a repeating, worrying tendency of the younger generation to commit poetry) with sympathy and insight.  The final victim to literature was Robert Louis Stevenson, who tried his best to be an engineer, and then a lawyer, before the ultimate rebellion into writing.  But he never rated himself against the achievements of his fore-fathers.  "Whenever I smell salt water," he wrote in 1880, "I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors." And in 1886, "all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name ... I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it to the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward."

Bella Bathurst has done an excellent job of lighting that obscurity.    





J.M.W. Turner's Bell Rock Lighthouse (1819)

I was keen on lighthouses before I read this book.  Now you can forget keen.  Obsessed is much more the word.  Have a read of Bella Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons, and you may very well join me.


P.S.  I don't always notice the newest books.  And The Lighthouse Stevensons has been around since 1999, so hardly hot off the griddle.  But that had no effect on the enjoyment! 

P.P.S. The 1823 instructions for the Bell Rock Light-keepers also makes for interesting reading, and you can have a look at it here.

P.P.P.S. And if you fancy a little youtube experience of lighthouses and big waves, try here. Ever so slightly heart-stoppingly magnificent, wouldn't you say?



Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.
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The Books That Make History Girls -- and other kinds of girls

February 5, 2017, 8:00 pm
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Since becoming a History Girl I have thought a lot about what made me so interested in history, and have indulged readers’ patience with memories of school, family and ephemera. But as in so much else the real culprit was of course – reading!

As a very young reader I often didn’t know the difference between historical and contemporary fiction. Not because I was stupid but because, as a child reader in the seventies, I was usually reading books published much earlier, whenever they were set. I didn’t think to check publication dates; I accepted that book-land was a strange foreign space. When characters pressed button A to make a phone call, or did School Cert or Matric, I thought this might just be how things were in England. I didn’t know if it was the story or the book that was old-fashioned. I didn’t care; I just loved the stories.


I adored the Chalet School, with their bright Armada dust wrappers, and it was only when I found a 1920s hardback that I realised how old the early stories actually were. Later, I got wiser, and devoured Flambards and Little House on the Prairieunderstanding that they looked back at an earlier era; and knew that Little Women wasn’t just about the 1860s, but actually written then.

I wouldn’t have grown up to write historical fiction if I hadn’t loved reading it, and I asked some other writers and bookish folk about their own memories of reading historical fiction. Which led, as these things often do, to healthy debate.

I loved Carrie’s War– it was so spooky, but Keren David remembers hating it. ‘I think it was because there was vomiting,’ Keren says. ‘I couldn't even read about vomiting at that age.’ (I, who once got into trouble at school for describing her plague victims too graphically, had no such scruples.) Bryony Pearce, like me, loved it, and cites it as one of the books, along with Eagle Of The Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe ‘that inspired me so much as a young teen.’


Emma Pass and Eve Ainsworth loved that other evacuation classic, Goodnight Mister Tom,though everyone who mentioned that book recalled how traumatic it was. ‘Goodnight Mr Tom upset me so much I couldn't sleep for weeks. I would never recommend that book to a child - it's SO upsetting,’ Ruth Warburton says. 

World War Two has been the setting for many children’s classics. Rae Earl and Emma Pass remember Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners. ‘When I was in Year 6, I remember my teacher, Miss Burnett, reading it out loud to us - a chapter every day,’ Emma says. ‘I was utterly captivated; the story brought WW2 to life for me in a way nothing else had up to that point.’ Hilary Freeman loved The Silver Sword by Ian Seraillier. This was a favourite of mine too: the scene I always remember is the little school the children established in the ruins. I was a great player-of-schools and reader of school stories, and this captivated me more than the adventurous parts of the story. I have to admit, when writing my 1916-set Name Upon Name, the school scenes were the ones I found easiest. 


Jo Nadin loved Frenchman's Creek by Daphne du Maurier: ‘I read it far too young probably - hocked it off my grandma's bookshelf in Cornwall one wet winter - but became obsessed by the idea of being a lonely but daring aristocrat in a remote Cornish mansion, falling in love with a French pirate.’

 

Keren David’s favourite was Masha by Mara Kay. ‘The story of a 19th century Russian girl sent to boarding school in St Petersburg for nine years. Every detail and character felt real. Later I found out how accurate it was down to the characters. It gave me an enduring love of Russian history and when I visited Moscow two years ago I saw so much that brought Masha and her world to life. Still my favourite book.’ It’s Luisa Plaja’s favourite too.



 

Sophia Bennett loved The Children of the New Forest, as did Hilary Freeman: ‘I remember being on the side of the Cavaliers, but I think that's just because I liked their hairstyles.’

Eve Harvey mentions Katherine by Anya Seton. ‘My favourite book of all time, which I reread at least once a year because I will never tire of it. Utterly epic and totally swoonworthy!’ Leila Rasheed also liked Anya Seton, especially  Derwentwater but thinks her favourite historical novel growing up was ‘the ghostly and gorgeous A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley.’

Rhian Ivory’s‘favourite when younger was Jean Plaidy. The Lady in the Tower was probably the first historical fiction title I ever read and I reread it until it fell apart and had to be mended with tape. This was the start of my obsessive relationship with Anne Boleyn, which led me to study C16th History so I have Jean Plaidy to thank for that.’ Keren David and Emma Pass also loved Plaidy. 


 

Laura Wilkins loved anything by Mary Renault, ‘though The King Must Die is the more YA suitable one. She's still one of my most beloved reads. They're all set in Ancient Greece and are so beautifully written, as well as being fairly tragic and sexy.’ This takes me back to where I started: my own reading. There’s a wonderful scene in Antonia Forest’s The Cricket Term where Nicola Marlow gets into trouble for reading Renault’s The Mask Of Apollo, which the school authorities deemed unsuitable for the fourth form. And of course, in The Cricket Term, Forest references the events in the Marlows' past which inspired her own historical novels, The Player's Boy and The Players and the Rebels. 



I'd love other History Girls and readers of this blog to share the historical novels they grew up with. 




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The David Parr House. by Adèle Geras

February 6, 2017, 5:30 pm
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In November, 2106, I was invited by my old school friend, Carolyn Ferguson, who's an expert on historical textiles and quilting in particular, to join a small party of friends who were going to look around the David Parr House  (http://davidparrhouse.org)  We were shown round by Tamsin Wimhurst, who was previously education officer at the Museum of Cambridge. She is in large part responsible for bringing this amazing place to the attention of the proper authorities. Thanks to her, her committee and others like Sheila Crane (who lived in Gwydir Street and knew David Parr's granddaughter, Elsie Palmer) the house has received a grant from the National Lottery which will ensure its restoration as a place of enormous fascination for students of 19th century art and craft. 

 The photos accompanying this piece are of the postcards I bought on that day and they do not do the house justice. There was a very good piece  about it by Michael Hall, which appeared  in Country Life magazine of January 4th, 2017  and that may well be on the Country Life website, but (and I'm not sure how they did it) the photographs are very light and saturated with colour. This was not my impression of the house, when I saw it last year on a dreary, damp day, quite unlike what Cambridge days usually  are: bright and light and blowy.



To sum up in brief, David Parr was a painter/workman for the painting and decorating firm of Frederick Leach, which did a lot of work in the city and indeed all over the country. 
Parr began working in the firm when he was no more than a boy. He moved into 186 Gwydir Street in 1887. In the 1920s, after the death of his wife, his granddaughter, Elsie Palmer, moved into the house to look after him and stayed there till 2012, when she moved into an old people's home. 




This above is Elsie's bedroom, which was once the dining room. She turned out to be the perfect person to live in the house,  because throughout her long life, she was careful to preserve the   work her grandfather had created in the property.



What  he did was cover almost every single surface with most beautiful patterns,  painted by hand and often by candlelight. These were the William Morris-style designs that he'd been painting on the walls and ceilings of college chapels, big houses and other grand edifices during the working day. 186 Gwydir Street is tiny: a standard two- bedroom terrace. The house is very near Cambridge Station and Elsie's husband worked on the Railway. His coat is still hanging in the house, and looks as warm as it ever was: thick, navy blue wool.


When we visited,  we sat in the front parlour (the first picture, above).  There were six of us in the room and it was a bit of a squash. It was also very dark indeed. We peered at the beautiful painting on the walls and ceiling, and I was ...there is no other word for it....gobsmacked. When I tried to compute the hours that David Parr must have put in, I felt quite exhausted. Fortunately for us, and for future visitors to the house who'll be able to come and look around it when it's restored and made safe for visitors, David Parr was a tidy and organised person who kept a record of everything, so that you can read how long it took him to paint particular bits of each room. He listed paints and materials and his tool box is still there, for anyone to see.  It's clear from some of the decorations that he'd picked up bits and pieces from the sites he worked on during the day and brought them home to add a bit of luxury to the rooms.  The window, below, might have been made by others in Frederick Leach's firm.


Another touching and fascinating thing about the house is the layer of 1950s décor that speaks of Elsie and her husband's life in 186, Gwydir Street. She preserved her grandfather's work brilliantly, only covering up bits of it and not ripping out a single thing. If you look closely, the top three pictures show family photographs in frames on the wall or on the mantelpiece. There are also pictures in frames hanging on  the painted walls, which Elsie and her husband must have been fond of. 

The little parlour we sat in while we listened to Tamsin Wimhurst telling us David Parr's story was dark and shadowy. The blinds were down in order to preserve the colours of the paint but even so it was clear to us that the painted walls are most beautiful. They will be even lovelier when they're cleaned up, and restored to their original glory. I can't wait to visit this place again. It's truly magical. The traces left by David Parr and Elsie Palmer bring us very close to knowing and understanding this fascinating bit of the past.  I have every intention of revisiting this place in a novel one of these days....
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'Caterpillars, Cowslips and Candlemas Bells' by Karen Maitland

February 7, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Snowdrops in Lothersdale Churchyard
Photographer: Tim Green
February is traditionally the month in which the first flowers would have blossomed in an English medieval ‘Mary Garden.’ These were snowdrops, believed to have been introduced to Britain by Italian monks. Snowdrops were also known as Candlemas Bells or Purification Flowers, because an old medieval custom was to remove any statue or image of Virgin Mary from the churches or private chapels on Candlemas, the Feast of the Purification (2nd February) and scatter snowdrops in the space where the statues had stood.

There are many different types of medieval gardens, but I always think the ‘Mary Gardens’ or ‘Our Lady’s Gardens’ must have been some of the loveliest, and would have provided flowers nearly all year round. Many medieval religious houses and manors included a special secluded garden, set apart from the others, which was stocked only with the plants dedicated to the Virgin Mary. These would include cowslips which were known as Our Lady’s Keys; Woodruff– Our Lady’s Lace; Violets– Our Lady’s Modesty; and Lily-of-the-Valley– Our Lady’s tears.
Madonna of the Rose Garden. c1435


The Mary Garden would have a number of different white flowering plants which were associated with the Virgin as the symbol of purity, but it would also include sweet-smelling herbs such as rosemary because its flowers were said to have turned as blue as Mary’s cloak when she hung it on the bush to dry. Pennyroyal and thyme would also be in the garden because the shepherds were said to have perfumed the stable in which Mary lay with these herbs, and the Christmas rose which according to medieval legends either turned from black to white when Mary gave birth or sprang from the tears of a girl who wept because she had no gift to offer the baby. So even in winter, a Mary Garden, must have been a tranquil delight for the all the senses, as well as the haven for birds and insects.

In religious houses, Mary Gardens were made by monks or nuns assisted by lay servants, but in manor houses or wealthy households, this was often the garden that the lady of the house and her daughters would tend. They obviously wouldn’t do the hard labour of digging or fertilising, but they were taught how to plan the garden, give instructions to servants on when and what to plant and to do some of the day to day maintenance such as dead heading, pruning, collecting and drying seeds for next year’s planting.

Cowslips  at Waylands Smithy on  the Ridgeway
Photographer: James Broadbent
In Paris 1393, a young wife was advised to ‘plant wet and sow dry,’ in her garden, a saying I remember my great aunt teaching me as a child. Male farmers and gardeners were advised to walk on dug or ploughed land. If it ‘cried or made any kind of noise under foot’, it was too wet to sow, but if it made no noise ‘you should sow in the name of God.’ Another test for male gardeners was sit ‘bare-arsed’ on the soil to feel if it was warm enough to sow.

Seeds were often dressed with mixtures of urine, lime and even sulphur to discourage mice. Seeds were carefully collected, dried and stored, not only for use in the garden the following year, but the women understood that swapping seeds to produce a healthy garden was also vital.
'One seed for another to make an exchange
With fellowly neighbour seemeth not strange.'
But even in a garden dedicated to the Virgin Mary, Satan’s little imps were bound to make mischief and the servants would have been instructed to keep garden pests under control. A lady didn’t want her cut flowers or strewing herbs crawling with ants or caterpillars. So, sawdust was sprinkled round ants’ nests to discourage them, or to protect individual trees and bushes, a mixture or red earth and tar was used to ring the trunks to prevents ants climbing up. But in West Country at least, the servants wouldn’t have destroyed the nests. That was thought unlucky as ants were believed to be the souls of unbaptised babies. In Cornwall, ants were muryans or faery folk who went through a number of transformations, each time becoming smaller and smaller, the ant being their final form before they vanished from this world.
Christmas Rose, Black Hellebore
Photographer: Wildfeur

But the medieval gardener seldom wasted anything even if it was a pest, so in monasteries and nunneries which also had fish ponds and chickens, the servants would hang dead fish in the tree, and when they were covered with ants, take them down and toss them to the hens to feast on. In turn, these chickens not only provided fertiliser for the garden in the form of droppings, but also assisted with another vital form of fertiliser too, because the monks were bled for their health, usually four times a year, and blood taken from the monks was then put on the garden to feed the roses and fruit trees. To help them recover from the bleeding it was recommended they should be fed salted sage, parsley and chicken eggs. And during the three days’ rest after blood-letting, the monks were encouraged to sit in the gardens to recover their strength, especially in the Mary Garden, where the flowers and herbs would sooth their spirits and bodies.

To get prevent caterpillars from destroying plants in the wealthy houses, the servants would boil up a mixture of olive oil, bitumen and sulphur to paint the stems of the plants. In monasteries where labour was plentiful and free, boys would be sent out to pick caterpillars off at first light, or to shake the plants once the sun had gone down, so that the caterpillars fell off and being too cold to move would either die or be eaten.
Fly, Caterpillar, Pear and Centipede
c1591-1596

Slugs and snails could also be hand-picked. But ash and ground-up shells, both of which were often used as soil dressing, also discouraged slugs and snails, and olive oil could be used on stems, if you could afford it. But there were probably far fewer of these pests in the medieval garden, because of the much higher number of birds, voles and shrews, encouraged in part by that wonderful mixture of herbs and flowers in Our Lady’s Garden. Maybe our medieval forbears, knew better than us how to keep nature in balance.













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Five Latin Love Poems by Caroline Lawrence

February 8, 2017, 5:30 pm
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Cupids play music with Apollos instruments
As an excuse to do a bit of Latin translation I thought I’d post five Latin love poems in the run-up to Valentine’s Day. 

The first Latin poem I ever fell in love with is one of the simplest and one of the most famous. It is by Gaius Valerius Catullus who lived in the first century BCE. He’s the one who famously asked Lesbia to give him a thousand kisses and then a thousand more in order to confound the old men. And he wrote about the sparrow. But the poem I fell in love with is this one. In twelve words he sums up a certain type of love affair that every one of us has probably experienced. 

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, nescio. Sed fieri sentior et excrucior. 

I love you and I hate you. 
Why I do this, I have no idea. 
But I feel it happening and I’m in agony. 
[Catullus 85]

Bust of Virgil from his so-called tomb in Naples
My favourite Latin author is Virgil. I especially love his use of colour, sound and movement. Publius Vergilius Maro lived in the late first century BCE but if he were alive today, he’d be making movies. Here’s a bit of love poetry from his masterpiece, the Aeneid. This is the famous scene where beautiful Queen Dido and the handsome Trojan refugee Aeneas are out hunting when a sudden hailstorm drives them to shelter in a cave. As they consummate their relationship the thunder crashes and the nymphs cry out in a tableau that makes me think of the famous scene in From Here to Eternity where Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kiss in the crashing surf. 

Like the others this is a fairly free translation:

Speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem
deveniunt. Prima et Tellus et pronuba Iuno
dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscious Aether
conubiis, summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae. 

Dido and the Trojan leader come together
In the same cave. First Earth and then Juno the goddess of marriage
Give permission. Heaven watches the act of love
And illuminates the scene with lightning
And from the highest peak the Nymphs shriek. 
[Virgil Aeneid IV. 165-168]

Fresco from Lake Albano, Italy
Publius Ovidius Naso brings us into the first century CE. Born a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar, he lived during the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. When he was about fifty, that emperor sent him into exile. Some people think a love poem was what got him in trouble. Or it may have been an adulterous love affair. Or perhaps both. All his surviving poetry is sublime but I chose these first lines of a poem addressed to his friend Atticus because of a wonderful fresco I once saw in a modern palazzo on the shores of Lake Albano near Rome. 

Militat omnis amans, et habet sua castra Cupido: 
Attice, crede mihi, militat omnis amans. 

Every lover does battle, Cupid has his own camp
Believe me, Atticus, every lover does battle.
[Ovid, Amores I.9]

My friend Matt dressed as a Roman
The Latin author I love to hate (and most enjoy reading) is Marcus Valerius Martialis. Martial was writing in the late first century CE, during the reign of Domitian. Many of his poems put me in mind of Sex in the City, Roman-style. He was a loathsome anti-Semitic misogynist, but he could also be funny, perceptive and sensitive. The thing I love most about him is his attention to detail. Nobody else describes the concrete world of ancient Rome as well as he does, certainly not that old sourpuss Juvenal. Many of Martial’s poems are X-rated, but this one is beautiful. It reminds us that at this period of Roman history it was normal for men to desire boys as well as women.

Quod spirat tenera malum mordente puella,
Quod de Corycio quae venit aura croco; 
Vinea quod primis floret cum cana racemis,
Gramina quod redolent quae modo carpsit ovis; 
Quod myrtis, quod messor Arabs, quod sucina trita, 
Pallidus Eoo ture quod ignis olet; 
Gleba quod aestivo leviter cum spargitur imbre,
Quod madidas nardo passa corona comas: 
Hoc tua, saeve puer Diadumene, basia fragrant.
Quid si tota dares illa sine invidia?

Like an apple when a tender girl bites into it, 
Like the perfume that wafts from saffron crocus, 
Or a bright vineyard flowering with new clusters,
Like grass newly nibbled by a lamb,
Like crushed myrtle or the fingers of an Arabian spice collector, 
Like rubbed amber or flaming frankincense,
Like light summer rain on earth
Or a garland resting on hair dripping with nard…
Your kisses, cruel boy, smell of all these. 
Just imagine what they would be like if you gave them without holding back. 
[Martial III.65]

bedroom of the Hotel Europeo, Naples
Finally, I want to end with a couple of rare lines written by a female poet. We know of two Roman poetesses named Sulpicia. The later one lived during the reign of Domitian at the end of the first century CE. She was praised by her contemporary Martial as a model Roman wife: sensual but chaste. Two tentatively restored lines survive, here freely translated by me. 

Si me cadurci restitutis fasciis
nudam Caleno concubantem proferat

If you were to untangle the sheets of my marriage bed
You would find me lying nude with my husband Calenus…

And on that sensual but chaste note of conjugal love I wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day!

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The Apothecary as melting pot - Michelle Lovric

February 9, 2017, 5:00 pm
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Many modern chemist shops, as typified by Boots, are large, impersonal places.

They could not be more different from their antecedents in Venice.

The old Venetian chemist, known as the Apothecary or Speziale,  ran a highly personal business, often trading on the cult of his own personality and the special patent remedies he produced. His shop had its own logotype – often an animal, mythical eminence, religious figure or human virtue - which was reproduced on his handbills. More than that, each Apothecary shop, or Spezier, was a fertile ‘contact zone’ between classes, races, professions and the sexes.

Signor Speziale probably came from the citizen class, but he mixed with noblemen, merchants, scientists, doctors, priests, writers, performers, ambassadors and – spies.

His skills and cultural knowledge gave him respectability and social permeability – and so did his establishment, as seen in this painting by Pietro Longhi, 1752.

It shows an apothecary in his elegant shop, examining the throat of a young female singer, while an apprentice takes notes and other patients wait their turn. They include a friar and a nobleman.

For Signor Speziale’s premises were no mere dispensary. His shop was luxuriously appointed with carved wood panelling, furnished not just with the picturesque tools of his trade, including enormous mortars & pestles, duck-billed alembics, painted glass and majolica pots and talismanic objects, but also with exotic plants, perfumed oils, books, ledgers and religious paintings, because medicine was a holy art in Venice.

Like art, Venetian medicine underwent a distinct humanist Renaissance. So in Signor Speziale’s shop you would find the curious mixture of theatre and science, modernity and antiquity, that characterized Venetian medicine.

Our Signor Speziale might have the traditional crocodile hanging from his ceiling, a private collection of wonders from the natural world.

Above is the studio of a Neapolitan collector and apothecary, Ferrante Imperato, who imported some drugs from Venice. Imperato’s Venetian counterpart would have adopted some of this intellectually provoking interior design. The Golden Ostrich, for example, had a narvalus horn to entertain its visitors.

 Notice the chatterers, admirers and strollers here … Prices of medicines were fixed by the state, so Venetian apothecaries had to compete for attention and allure clients in other ways. So Signor Speziale’s shop was a place where men might drop in after work – or instead of work. It was clean and smelled delightful, unlike the streets of Venice. The goldsmith Alessandro Caravia observed in 1542 that only paradise could smell better than a Venetian pharmacy.
This pleasant place was therefore a site for socialising, gossip, political discussion and even gambling. People came to play chess, to network socially. There was a convivial atmosphere, as in a coffee shop. Apothecaries offered mail-drop services and could even print for clients.
Our Signor Speziale was often a bit of a newsmonger and a newshound. In 1755, Carlo Goldoni, Venice’s Shakespeare, produced a musical comedy called Lo Speziale, in which the apothecary Sempronio is obsessed with the news cycle. The ‘avvisi’ or news bulletins are delivered throughout the day to his premises. In this picture you see him avidly reading one.


At the times of the wars against the Ottoman Turks, people would gather at the great pharmacies to hear the latest. And as well as disseminating news of battles, pirates and politics, selling medicines, and having learned or philosophical discussions, Signor Speziale might well be working on a book of remedies of his own for publication, to solidify his immortality. Giorgio Melichio at Lo Struzzo was particularly prolific, as were his heirs in business Alberto Stecchini and Antonio de Sgobbis.


The humanism of the Renaissance also positively contaminated Signor Speziale’s profession. He would know Latin, and ancient Greek. Venice being the heartland of Italian printing, he would have read the works of Avicenna and Serapion, and particularly Galen and Hippocrates.

The apothecaries of Venice were obsessed with recovering the ancient herbal remedies of the past, particularly those of Dioscorides, promoted by the Venetian physician Pietro Matteoli as well as the materia medica of the chemistry kit of course. So a director of one of the great botanical gardens on the mainland might visit our Signor Speziale with samples of medicinal herbs. Apothecaries from other towns in Italy might also come calling, hoping to hear about Venetian novelties and marketing techniques.

Doctors and physicians would of course come to Signor Speziale both to dispense prescriptions and on the hunt for patients. Scipione Mercurio, planning to start a medical practice in Venice, was told by a local physician that he needed only two things to be a success in Venice:

1. to know how to get a woman pregnant and
2. to have a good relationship with the speziali
Doctors issued their prescriptions in person at Signor Speziale’s premises. The doctor might suggest a substitute ingredient if something was not in stock. Physicians often had favourite apothecary shops, but they were not allowed to have a financial interest in them. This did not stop Signor Speziale making handsome gifts – especially of expensive drugs – to the doctors who brought them work.
As well as from the medical professionals, Signor Speziale would receive visits from servants coming to get discreet feminine remedies for their noble mistresses, like Polvere di Hannover– a popular prophylactic against fainting. Or those mistresses might come themselves, sure of a pleasant, entertaining and even educational time.
And finally, given all this activity, Our Signor Speziale might be a conscious or an unwitting host to spies and informers from foreign states or cities, plus the spies and informers of the Inquisition and the Holy Office, watching the spies and the informers of foreign states.
Not surprisingly, some apothecaries were accused of heresy by the Holy Office – the Moor, the Angel and the Falcon were denounced in 1551, along with their apprentices. The Inquisitors (from 1539) kept an eye on the apothecaries because of the books they collected, which often associated healing with magic or ancient pagan wisdom.
 

Moreover, such dangerous ideas were freely discussed in the sociable environment of Signor Speziale’s shop. In 1611, Angelo Cerutti of the Sun at Arsenale was spied on by the Inquisition. He was arrested in 1612 and tortured probably by the strappado, a rope that tied his hands behind him and lifted him up until his arms broke. On the basis of his confession a Spanish conspiracy was uncovered. Cerruti was exiled.
In 1620 the Golden Lion at San Marco and the Castle in Castello were accused of hosting dissident religious discussions. In 1622 Bartolomeo di Marostica at the Charity was denounced for blasphemy. And later, after the Venetians’ revolution against the Austrians in 1848, a Venetian Speziale partisan was deported to Bohemia. His name was Bernardo Baldisseroto … and he was the father of Giovanni Baldisseroto the pharmacist of I do San Marchi, which can still be seen today as its interior has been rehomed at the Ca’ Rezzonico museum.

All in all, there was more than crushed millipedes fermenting in the ‘front room’ of our Signor Speziale’s shop.

 I never fail to think about that when I am waiting in a queue in Boots.

Michelle Lovric
An essay by Michelle Lovric is included in this new publication, Stories of Inspiration: Historical Fiction Edition, Volume 1: Historical Fiction Writers Trace Their Journeys from Starting Point to Finished Work, edited by Suzanne Fox.









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Jackie Review by Katherine Clements

February 10, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy

Just one week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963, his widow invited Life Magazine journalist, Theodore H. White, to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port. She had a story to tell.

In the resulting piece (which you can read here) White focuses on Jackie Kennedy's hazy memories of that horrific day in Dallas, but at its core is a determined fixation on one idea: the idealisation of something lost. She says:

“At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack like to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were: Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
Life Magazine 6 December 1963

Jackie Kennedy was the first to link her husband’s curtailed presidency with the Arthurian myth – the idea of the Kennedy era as a glorious golden age that would never be repeated; an enduring association that entered, and has remained, part of the American political narrative.

The media has long been fascinated with the glamorous Kennedy family and conspiracy theories surrounding JFK's assassination. Numerous films and TV biopics have added layers to the story. The latest of these is Jackie, written by Noah Oppenheim, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Natalie Portman as the enigmatic woman who was such a crucial part of the myth she helped to create.

But this is not really a biopic. The interview with White (played with alternating sympathy and frustration by Billy Crudup) serves as a looking glass through which we watch the assassination itself, the aftermath and JFK’s funeral, all told in flashback through Jackie’s eyes. We are given a snapshot – a momentary insight into a woman who fascinated the public for decades.


Larraín claims that he refused to shoot the film without Portman and it’s easy to see why. Portman’s Oscar-nominated performance is utterly compelling, the similarity almost eerie. She’s worked hard to capture Jackie’s physicality – the formality, the stiff, awkward mannerisms and flat Transatlantic accent that make uncomfortable opposition with moments of intense emotion. The camera seems captivated by her. Lots of close ups leave Portman nowhere to hide - hammering home the intensity of the character’s distress and the painful scrutiny of the media. She knows the eyes of the world are watching.

And this contradiction is at the film’s heart. Portman presents a portrait of a woman teetering on the edge of sanity; one moment trembling and crying, or wandering, drunk and hopeless, around a deserted White House, the next exhibiting extraordinary strength and perception, and a steely determination to get what she wants. Portman portrays Jackie as complex and conflicted. This is not just the story of a grieving wife falling apart or an inspirational demonstration of fortitude, but both, and all the stronger and more human for it.

We get insights in Jackie’s ‘true’ feelings in moving scenes with an unnamed priest (played by John Hurt, in the last film released before his death). As she expresses doubts about her Catholic faith, we sense not just a spiritual crisis but her increasingly tenuous grasp on reality: ‘‘I lost track somewhere. What was real. What was performance.” And we see that her actions are not entirely altruistic.

The extraordinary soundtrack, composed by Mica Levi, serves as a powerful reflection of Jackie’s precarious state of mind. Sweeping strings seem to tilt and slide, lending a feeling of queasy instability. It’s ethereal and otherworldly, with an ominous edge. The film would have been a very different experience without it.

But this is more than just a character study. It asks questions about history – who writes it and who decides what to present as truth. As Jackie astutely says, "When something is written down, does that make it true?" Surely, a question for our times.

So, should we read Jackie as fact or fiction?

Jackie Kennedy, 1957, by Tony Frissell

The real Jackie was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, into a privileged Catholic family. She attended boarding school in Connecticut and Vassar College in New York. By the time she met John F. Kennedy in 1951, she was a promising young journalist working for the Washington Times-Herald. Well read, cultured and stylish, she was, on paper, a perfect politician’s wife. They married in 1953. JFK became President in 1961 when Jackie was just 31. As First Lady, Jackie undertook a vast restoration project in the White House, buying and returning original furniture and many prized historical artefacts. She championed the arts and established the White House as a centre of cultural activity, hosting lavish parties, dinners and concerts. When CBS broadcast a televised tour of the newly restored White House, eighty million Americans tuned in.

Clips from that documentary and other archive footage are used seamlessly throughout - a constant and effective reminder that much of what we’re watching really happened. By 1963, Jackie was already familiar with tragedy. She had suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth before her first surviving child, Caroline, was born in 1957. A son, Patrick, survived only two days, passing in August 1963, only three months before his father’s assassination.

We get a glimpse behind the scenes of the Kennedy presidency too. Peter Sarsgaard puts in a solid performance as Bobby Kennedy, lamenting missed opportunities and railing against the family’s destiny to be remembered as nothing more than ‘the beautiful people’. In reality, JFK’s presidency was marred by Cold War tensions and the Cuban Missile Crisis. His progressive attempts to expand civil rights for African-Americans were limited by his opponents. Some historians have argued that he doesn’t deserve the accolades and that his successor, Lyndon Johnson, led a much more effective administration. But that’s the point here: Jackie knew this and set out to change the story. She understood how her actions in the aftermath of the tragedy would echo long through history. Her real life involvement in JFK’s funeral arrangements, which she modelled after those of President Lincoln, could not have been a more strident statement. It was indeed ‘a spectacle’ fit for royalty.

The family leaves the Capitol after JFK's funeral service.

Ultimately, that’s the genius of this film. It gives us a compelling, moving picture of grief, while simultaneously deconstructing the myth it purports to celebrate. It challenges the narrative while showing us how that narrative was spun. Somehow, it manages to do this sensitively, with respect.

Jackie gives us another interpretation of the JFK story, another version of the truth, another layer to the myth, but a valuable one. After watching, I found myself reading up, wanting to know more about Jackie and her ill-fated husband. And that, to me, is a mark of successfully dramatised history, whether on page or screen. After all, as Jackie observes:  “Sometimes, the characters we read about on the page end up being more real that the men who stand beside us”.

www.katherineclements.co.uk
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@KL_Clements


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DINNER.

February 11, 2017, 9:00 pm
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by Antonia Senior

I am a glutton  foodie. I like eating, cooking and reading about food, although the gourmet spirit in me is somewhat crushed these days by the fishfinger-and-bakedbeans carousel of having fussy children.

In all the periods I have written about or researched, one of the most joyful parts has been thinking about the food. My excitement was feverish last term when my eight year old had to prepare food for a Roman feast at school. I reached for my books, lectured her on Apicius and the mis-labelling by history of the Epicureans.

'Can we just make some honeycakes from the internet, Mum?'
'No! What about a stuffed pigeon? Or olive and celery pate? Or smoked fish in vine leaves? Or...'
'Um. Can we just make some honeycakes from the internet?'
'Garum! Let's make garum!'

So we experimented with anchovies and a grape juice reduction, using a recipe from this brilliant book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Roman-Cookery-Ancient-Recipes-Kitchens-Mark-Grant/1897959605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486827589&sr=8-1&keywords=mark+grant+roman+cookery

The garums was, you will be astonished to hear, utterly grim. We sent it into school (with some honeycakes, of course). The teacher let some of the revolted children try it. One of them knocked it over, and it fell on the carpet, drenching the floor in a pungent fishy mess.

The teacher assures me that the classroom still smells of fish when the radiators are fierce - she is remarkably nice about it.

Alongside the disastrous garum, I have had a few successes - the 17th century meat stuffed cabbage in blackberry sauce thing was lush. The braised cucumber from Rome was surprisingly delicious.

Given my interest, then, I was seriously excited to find myself at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner for my wedding anniversary this month. Dinner serves dishes (at eye-watering prices) which draw on England's rich culinary past. (By the way, Victorians are to blame for the perceived blandness of English food - pre-Victorian cookbooks are absolutely full of interesting recipes and exotic spice.)

Each item on the menu at Dinner comes with the date and source of the recipe that inspired it. I stuck mainly to the seventeenth century - my new book, The Tyrant's Shadow, is set in 1650s London, and I felt I should be loyal.

I started with the Savoury Porridge, with frog's legs, parsley and fennel, from 1660. The source is The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected by William Rabisha.

My rubbish camera phone makes this look a little pond-like. But it was vibrant, and fresh, and unctuous all at the same time. The little froggy bonbons were worth the cover price on their own. The whole thing was a delight - and tasted of hope and joy. It made me think of the date - of 1660. Too much to read into a bowl of porridge, perhaps, but I thought of the wave of joy that year as the King returned. It made me think of the contradictions of the Restoration - of Charles 2 himself, with his lush side and his scientific mind and his ability to balance different factions by always seeming to agree with everyone.

My husband, who was very tolerant about me snapping the food with my phone for this blog and wittering on about the tenuous links between Frog Porridge and the Restoration (I married him for a reason*!), had Salamagundy. This was an eighteenth century concoction of Chicken Oysters, salsify, marrowbones, horseraddish cream and pickled walnuts from The Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary by John Nott. I'd love to tell you what it tasted of, but I did not get a chance as he had snaffled it all while I was still working myself into a metaphorical frenzy over the frogs.

This, however, is what it looked like:

The main courses were not quite as mind-blowing - but still amazing. I had Chicken cooked with lettuces from 1670 - the source was The Queen Like Closet by Hannah Wolley.


Crisp-skinned chicken sitting on spiced celeriac, with braised lettuce and extra little shards of chicken skin - and other stuff I couldn't identify but was all delicious. The sauce was an onion emulsion. Reader -  Nandos it was not.

For pudding, I abandoned the 17th century and its Taffety Tart, for the brown bread ice cream with salted caramel, pear and malted yeast (1830, A new system of domestic cookery, by Maria Eliza Rundell). My dedication to my period has its limits, and frankly, for a bit of salted caramel I'd write about the economic detail of the industrial revolution. I don't have a picture - my spoon was at its work before the waiter had left the table...

I would highly recommend Dinner to anyone with a historical interest and a futuristic bank balance...
And if you are in the market for historical foody fiction: The new Blake and Avery thriller from MJ Carter, The Devil's Feast is set in the mythically sumptuous kitchens of the Reform club in 1842. It's wonderful mix of food and murder.

Martine Bailey has written two fabulous books which combine gothic horror with culinary delights - the latest is The Penny Heart.

But the best, richest, most unctuous and glorious writing about food I know is in Philip Kazan's Appetite. Set in fifteenth century Florence, it follows the fortunes of Nino - a chef of rare talent. Atmospheric, macabre, sensuous. If you can't be bothered to get all Heston in the kitchen here is my recipe for the absolutely perfect night in when it's sleety and rainy and cold outside.

Take 1 fire. Stoke into warmth and flame.
Take 1 glass of wine. Must be red. Must be dark. Must be the type to make you a bit trembly and sorrowful tomorrow.
Take 1 plate of very pungent cheeses.
Take Appetite by Philip Kazan.
Muffle children. Banish spouse. Euthenise pets.

Mix. and off you go.....


*Ps. This was our 12th wedding anniversary. At our very first meeting, at a karaoke night in a curry house, I reenacted the battle of Thermopylae with the mango chutney and the mint raita. He knew what he was getting into.....
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Elizabeth Fremantle discusses the poet Aemilia Lanyer

February 12, 2017, 10:00 pm
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I’ve always been interested in early modern female writers. Katherine Parr, the heroine of of my first novel, Queen’s Gambit, was one such writer; Parr wrote two devotional and political texts, which were widely read and hugely successful. At the time it was considered controversial for a woman to write, particularly to write secular works and even more so to seek to publish, and Parr put herself at great personal risk promoting her politics through her work.

An early modern woman was required to be meek, silent and obedient, her domain was the domestic and publishing placed her in the public, male, realm. However as the sixteenth century wore on an increasing number of aristocratic women, like the Countess of Pembroke, who turned Wilton House into a ‘paradise for poets’, were producing secular poetry and dramas for private circulation.

For me one late Elizabethan woman writer always stood out though, as she wasn’t aristocratic and also because she was the first English woman who could be called a professional poet. Yet Aemilia Lanyer is almost unknown outside of academic circles. It is for this reason that I wanted to depict her in my novel The Girl in the Glass Tower alongside Arbella Stuart, to whom she dedicated one of her poems.

Aemilia Lanyer was born in 1569 to a family of renowned court musicians the Bassanos. There is circumstantial evidence that they were of Jewish heritage but Aemilia was baptised as a Christian. After the death of her father she was taken under the aegis of the Countess of Kent, who ensured that she received a humanist education, learning Latin. She also spent time in the household of the Countess of Cumberland as a tutor to her daughter, the diarist, Anne Clifford.

As a young woman she became the mistress of Henry Hunsdon, the first cousin of Elizabeth I, who was some forty-five years her senior. Hunsdon was a great patron of the theatre, and so Aemilia would almost certainly have been familiar with Shakespeare’s circle. Indeed, there has been much speculation that she was the ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, though any evidence for this is at best sketchy. On becoming pregnant, most probably with Hunsdon’s child, she was married to her relative the musician, Alfonso Lanyer.

In 1611 she published her book containing several short poems dedicated to prominent women,including Arbella Stuart, alongside the very fine Description of Cooke-ham, the first country house poem published in English, an accolade that is usually given to Ben Johnson’s exceedingly more famous To Penshurst, which was not published until 1616. Dominating the collection is the long poem, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum, a work, satirical in tone and proto-feminist in spirit, which seeks to redeem the vilified women of the Bible, and particularly Eve.

I take up Lanyer’s story in my novel four years later, after she has been widowed and left penniless by her husband’s reckless spending. I imagine her coming across a manuscript written by Arbella Stuart when she was imprisoned at the Tower of London, telling of her life. Aemilia (or Ami, as she is known in the novel) is forced to reconcile herself with the tragic consequences of the time when her own past coincided with Arbella’s. Almost nothing is known about Aemilia Lanyer during this time and these events are the product of my imagination for the purposes of my novel. But what we do know about Aemilia Lanyer’s later life is that she fulfilled her ambition to set up a school near Covent Garden, though it was not without its problems. She finally died in 1645, aged seventy-six but her legacy as an author lives on.

Ref: Woods Susanne, Ed. (1993) The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer & (1999) Lanyer, A Renaissance Woman Poet, Oxford UP

For more information about Elizabeth Fremantle's novels you can find her website on Elizabethfremantle.com. The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin

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Love, Sex and Romance in Old Japan - Valentine’s Day Special by Lesley Downer

February 13, 2017, 4:01 pm
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Until the late nineteenth century, there was no word for ‘love’ in Japanese, no equivalent to the western concept of pure, ennobling, platonic love, the courtly love of chivalry. Love was the forbidden fruit. 

Tayu courtesan in Shimabara, Kyoto.
The Japanese acknowledged the strength of love, its power to subvert the existing order, and did all they could to tamp it down. Falling in love was seen as a madness that swept you off your feet, made you go off with someone totally unsuitable. Such folly could only lead to tragedy. Far from expecting to fall in love, as we do, men and women had marriages arranged by their families.

One of Japan’s most emblematic love stories is that of Tokubei and Ohatsu. Tokubei was a clerk, Ohatsu a famous and beautiful courtesan. Tokubei was far too poor to be able to spend a night with Ohatsu, let alone buy her out of servitude. And, as a courtesan, it was Ohatsu’s job to make men fall in love with her but never, never to fall in love herself.

Nevertheless Ohatsu fell for this poor clerk.

Somehow Tokubei managed to beg, borrow or steal the money to pay her ransom. But then he was swindled out of his savings. Realising they could never be together the two decided to run away to Sonezaki Shrine in the wood of Tenjin and kill themselves so they could be together in death. There he stabbed first her, then himself, in the throat.
Cherry blossom time in the
Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.
Utagawa Hiroshige. Los Angeles County Fund

The event caused a sensation. Their story was immortalised by the great playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). The play was first performed in the bunraku puppet theatre in 1703, the year of their deaths. The lines that the chorus sings as they walk into the forest are some of the most famous and moving in all of Japanese literature:

‘Farewell to this world and to the night farewell.
We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened?
To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard,
Vanishing with each step we take ahead:
How sad is this dream of a dream!’

Gravestone of Ohatsu and Tokubei.

The play inspired a spate of copycat suicides and to this day ‘love suicide’ a la Romeo and Juliet is still considered the ultimate romantic act.  

But this was not courtly love. Tokubei was in love with a real woman, not some distant idealised figure, and Ohatsu was equally in love with him.

Geisha, Pontocho, Kyoto
As I said, at the time there was no word in Japanese for pure idealised ‘love’ which has nothing to do with sex. The word koshoku meant both love and lust and everything in between. There was no distinction between the two. Love was not something you felt for your wife. That would have been disrespectful. Respectable married women were taught not to make themselves attractive - not to ‘tart themselves up’, if you like.

Then in the late nineteenth century western literature entered Japan. Translators came across the word and the concept of ‘love’ and realised that it referred to something different from ‘lust’, some pure, noble emotion which didn’t require physical gratification. To begin with they used the English word ‘love’, phonetically transliterated as rabu, and eventually coined a new word - ren’ai.

The Kiss by Auguste Rodin
 at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen, photographer 
Yair Haklai 2010.

There was also no word for ‘kiss’. When Oda Jun’ichiro translated Edward Bowler Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers into Japanese in 1878, he was stumped by the phrase, ‘I should sleep well if I could get one kiss from those coral lips.’ He finally came up with, ‘if I could get one lick of your red lips’, which Japanese of the time found extremely amusing.

A woman named Sugimoto Inagaki Etsu records in her 1926 memoir, A Daughter of the Samurai, that when she set off for America in 1898, her mother warned her, “I have heard, my daughter, that it is the custom of foreign people to lick each other as dogs do.”

But all this does not mean that love and kissing did not exist in old Japan. They did; but as we have seen they had a different place in the order of things.

Geisha provided an outlet for romantic feelings - though, while a man might have strong feelings for a geisha, he was well aware that she was being paid. Kissing was part of a geisha’s repertoire of exotic sexual techniques. It was not something that decent women did.

Eventually the word ‘kiss’ was transliterated as kissu, the only Japanese word for ‘kiss’ used to this day. When Rodin’s statue The Kiss was erected in Tokyo in the 1930s, it caused a sensation. The kissing heads had to be wrapped in a scarf. There was no problem with the naked bodies.

So, as we have seen, in old Japan love and marriage did not go together ‘like a horse and carriage’. They had very little to do with each other.

Love belonged on the wrong side of the tracks - which made it all the more alluring. The system which the Tokugawa shoguns established and which lasted for more than 250 years, from 1603 to 1868, put a premium on order above all. There was a place for everything and everything in its place. The place for love was the pleasure quarters, where it would not pollute the decent world of work, wife and children.

The most famous of these was the Yoshiwara, a good way outside Edo (now Tokyo), across the marshes. It was a city devoted to pleasure - the pleasure of men. There was every human emotion there - pain and tragedy, romance and love - and everything was heightened and intense. It was a place reserved for all the emotional side of life, so that outside it people could get on with the serious business like having a family and working. It was Las Vegas, it was Hollywood - a glamorous world of fun and fantasy, where whatever a man did had no consequences.

There, if he could afford it, a man might spend night after night with a beautiful courtesan. She no doubt told him she loved and desired him - as she told plenty of other men - and he might well be completely in love with her. It would suit her purposes if he was. In the morning as he left the pleasure quarters he would turn at the Looking Back Willow to take a long last look as she stood waving, wiping away a tear if she was a particularly consummate actress.

But it would be the pinnacle of folly for her to fall in love with him or anyone else - unless she too wanted to walk the road of death along with Tokubei and Ohatsu.

Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, http://www.lesleydowner.com/

http://bit.ly/TheShogunsQueen

https://www.facebook.com/AuthorLesleyDowner/

@LesleyDowner
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Arts and Crafts in Walthamstow - William Morris and Feminism by Fay Bound Alberti

February 14, 2017, 4:00 pm
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My youngest is studying the Arts and Crafts movement at secondary, so I took him to visit the William Morris Gallery.  The Gallery is housed in a gorgeous Georgian house, built in the 1740s and set in Lloyd Park in Walthamstow, north-east London.  This was William Morris' family home from 1848 to 1856, when he lived with his widowed mother and eight brothers and sisters from the age of 14 to 22 years old. The Gallery is the only public space devoted to the work of William Morris.




The Arts and Crafts movement brought together politics, life and art in a way that seems so relevant to today's challenging political climate. William Morris (1834-1896) was a designer, craftsman, writer, conservationist and socialist. He is probably best known as a designer and artists, designing simple yet beautiful furniture and fabrics. His hand-printed textile designs in the 1880s revived the old and difficult indigo print method. Against the backdrop of industrialising Britain embedded in chintz, Morris favoured nature dyes and patterns found in nature, creating patterns that are instantly recognisable today.





William Morris was also a radical poet, thinker and socialist, seeing art as essential to a fulfilling life and not merely a decorative pursuit for the elite. Like other socialists of his time he was angered by the poverty, pollution and working conditions of the factory movement, and sought to recapture the beauty and satisfaction of traditional crafts. He believed that there was 'no square mile of earth's inhabitable surface that is no beautiful in its own way, if we men will only abstain from wilfully destroying that beauty.' The William Morris Gallery brings together these connected aspects of William Morris' life, his art and his political views, with different sections focusing on art, design and politics.

Although Morris came to socialism quite late in his life, the William Morris Gallery holds selections of his political pamphlets and books as well as editions of the Socialist League paper Commonweal. Morris led the Arts and Crafts movement, a group of like-minded artists who saw traditional skills as an alternative to the mass production, consumerism and division of the pride of labour - as discussed by Karl Marx - by industrial production. Some of these artists are also represented at the William Morris Gallery, including paintings by Edward Coley Burne-Jones and stained glass panels by William de Morgan. For kids, hands-on activities included reproducing the techniques of the Arts and Crafts movement in brass rubbing, weaving and architectural planning.






The lack of feminist credentials of much socialist activity in Morris' time is well known. Debates about the role of women (the 'Woman question') were rife in the 1880s. Ideals of the male breadwinner wage norm and codes of femininity and masculinity meant that women were often excluded from debates about equality. Feminism is curiously absent from the William Morris Gallery, but Morris' News From Nowhere offered some response to socialist-feminist debates, projecting the value of sexual equality and exploring the historical nature of male and female roles. In News From Nowhere, a near perfect economic, social and environmental world is envisaged, in which household structures are flexible but overwhelmingly heterosexual. Women are implicitly given sexual power over men, but the book is ultimately rather conventional in terms of gender roles.

What then of the lack of discussion of female artists as part of the Arts and Crafts movement? The Arts and Crafts movement peaked between 1880 and 1910 in Western Europe and the United States, spreading to Japan in the 1920s. We know far less about the position of women workers in the movement; although there were many female artisans like Frances and Margaret MacDonald, their artwork remains under-recognised by contrast with their male peers. This largely reflects the lack of political and economic freedom and power given to women in the Victorian period, even within most socialist utopias.


One of the impacts of the factory movement was to deskill women; tasks which were traditionally undertaken by women, like spinning, entered factories as mechanised and male activities. Women were encouraged to participate in the Arts and Crafts movement. After all, it employed traditional female skills around domesticity and home making - all in keeping with the 'Angel of the Home' ideal. But, women's work was largely recognised because they were considered executors of male designs in the main, rather than talented creators. And two influential Arts and Crafts guilds, Guild of Handicraft and Art Workers' Guild, excluded women from membership. Paradoxically, the Arts and Crafts movement, like socialism, was both dependent on female involvement and hostile towards their work.

When my son and I visited the William Morris Gallery, there was an excellent temporary exhibition given over to political demonstrations and imagery through history. Here, the rhetoric of 1980s socialism was set against posters from all around the world decrying inequality and oppression and injustice. I was interested in how these two different perspectives on economic and political equality - the history of posters and the history of the Arts and Crafts movement - had a hidden truth at their core: gender inequality remains overlooked. The History curriculum in 2016 is apparently no more concerned by this absence than the founders of the Arts and Craft movement and early socialism had been.

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A Message From The Past - by Sue Purkiss

February 15, 2017, 6:00 pm
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I recently visited Canterbury Cathedral for the first time. It's a beautiful building; my favourite is still Wells, but then it is the one I know best, so I suppose I might be biased. (The Chapter House isn't a patch on the one at Wells - but then that has to be one of the most stunning rooms in the world!)

What Canterbury does have is an incredibly powerful story - which is soaked into its very stones. It's the story of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170: specifically, it's the story of his murder.

Becket came from a moderately well-to-do Norman family. As he was beginning to make his way in the world, his father suffered some kind of financial setback, and Thomas had to take a position as a clerk to pay his way. However, he did well: working to start off with for a relative, but later moving to the household of Theobald of Bec, the Archbishop of Canterbury - then, as now, this archbishopric was the foremost one in the English church. Becket did well, and was entrusted with several missions to Rome as well as being sent to France to study canon law. In 1154 he became Archdeacon of Canterbury and was also given various other posts in the church.

In fact, he did so well that Theobald recommended him to the King, Henry 11, to become Lord Chancellor - a position of considerable power and renown. Henry was engaged in a struggle with the church, because he felt it had too much power: for instance, a priest could only be tried in a church court, no matter what his alleged crime was. He believed that Becket was on his side - that he was ideally placed, with one foot in the church camp and one in the secular camp, to help him to shift the balance of power in the direction of the King.

All went well at first. Becket helped Henry to extract money both from the church and from secular landowners; the two men got on well, with Henry even sending his son to live in Becket's household.

Then Theobald died, and Henry had a brilliant idea: he would make his friend archbishop, and then power over the church - with all its possessions and riches - and state would reside firmly in Henry's hands.

But it didn't work out like that. Thomas took his new position and responsibilities extremely seriously. He saw it as his duty, not to do what Henry wanted, but to defend the church - if necessary, to the death. Henry was astonished. How dare this man defy him? Wounded and furious at this perceived betrayal (is this reminding you of anyone?), he exiled him. The Pope eventually brokered a kind of peace, and Becket returned: but still he defied the King. Eventually, in what might possibly be called a tantrum, Henry turned on his courtiers and demanded to know why none of them would sort Becket out for him. (The exact words are not known, but he is commonly said to have railed at them: 'Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?') And four knights took him at his word.

This is where Thomas was killed. The two swords, and their shadows, represent the four knights who killed him.

They went to Canterbury, and inside the church, in a small space where one staircase led to the crypt, another up to the altar, and a door led to the cloisters, they cut him down.

Who knows if this was really what Henry meant to happen? Afterwards, he came to the cathedral and did humble and apparently sincere penance. But the four knights, though they eventually had to go into exile, were not arrested and their lands were not confiscated.

Very quickly, Becket's tomb inside the cathedral became a place of sanctity and pilgrimage - a place to come and be healed. Becket was quickly declared a saint. Fifty years later, his remains were moved upstairs to the new eastern part of the cathedral, beyond the altar - into a tomb richly decorated with gold and jewels. In the sixteenth century, Erasmus, the famous Dutch humanist, priest and theologian, saw the tomb and was astonished by it; he said that the gold was the least of its riches, compared to the wealth of huge jewels which had been given by kings and nobles in homage to the martyr.

A few years later, Henry VIII ransacked the tomb and stole the gold and the jewels. But it wasn't just about the money. It was about the story. He had to do everything he could to obliterate the cult of Thomas Becket; because, even more so than Henry II, he couldn't bear the thought that a commoner should defy the king; that a man's conscience should be more important to him than his allegiance to the crown. But it didn't work. Thomas, and what he stood far - a determination to act according to his conscience - was not forgotten, despite the best efforts first of one king, then of another, far more brutal one.

I'm not a believer, but I think that's quite an encouraging message from the stones of Canterbury Cathedral. Especially at the moment. Those who are close to political leaders, take note: your allegiance to what is right takes precedence over your allegiance to your boss. That's the message that resounds down the centuries from Thomas Becket.

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Singalong with the Sterkarms by Susan Price

February 16, 2017, 4:00 pm
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A Sterkarm Tryst by Susan Price

Tryst: (Old French) an appointed station in hunting. An appointed meeting place, often of lovers. To engage to meet a person or persons. A cattle market, e.g. 'The Falkirk Tryst.'

 

A Sterkarm Tryst: an appointed meeting place of which only one side is aware: an ambush. 

 

The third Sterkarm book, A Sterkarm Tryst, was finally published at the end of last month, and Penny Dolan (who wrote the wonderful A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E) has kindly allowed me to post about it here, on what would usually be her HG day.

'Tryst' is the third in the series. The first two, after being out of print for some years, have been republished by Open Road. They are The Sterkarm Handshake and A Sterkarm Kiss.

The Sterkarm Handshake by Susan Price
A Sterkarm Kiss by Susan Price




















The books were inspired by the reivers of the Scottish Borders though Handshake only came to life for me when I thought of sending workers for a 21st Century company through a time machine to the 16th Century Border 'Marches' where they hope to mine the coal, oil and gas. The 16th Century 'natives,' the Sterkarms, suppose them to be Elves. After all, the strange clothes of the 21st Century people give them an eldritch appearance and their carts which move without horses demonstrate their supernatural powers.

The Sterkarms, the local Riding or Raiding* Family, welcome the Elves at first, for their magical wee white pills which take away pain (aspirin). The welcome doesn't last. The Border men were notoriously 'ill to tame,' as a contemporary put it, and the Sterkarms don't relish being told what they can and cannot do, even by Elves.
*The word 'raid' is from the Scandinavian or Scottish form of the Old English 'rade', which meant 'road.' Our word 'road'is from the same Old English word, which also gave us 'ridan' or 'ride'. A road was where  you rode. A track over a moor or through a wood is still called 'a ride.'
     Raiding was often what you were doing when you rode down a road or ride. So a 'Riding Family' and a 'Raiding Family' were the same thing. Ride, road and raid all stem from the same word.
     And 'reivers', as in Scottish Border reivers, comes from the same root as 'bereave,' which survives to the present almost exclusively in the sense of bereavement by death. 'To reave' originally meant to rob, to take, to forcibly deprive.
     I just thought you might like to know that.
Looking back over the books, I realise that the words and music of old ballads run through all of them. (I hear the music, anyway.) The 21st-Century heroine, Andrea, is 'embedded' (in more ways than one) with the 16th-Century Sterkarms and learns many songs from them. She finds that the songs often give her the words to understand the Sterkarms and her own situation.

The higher on the wing it climbs
The sweeter sings the lark,
And the sweeter that a young man speaks
The falser is his heart.
He'll kiss thee and embrace thee
Until he has thee won,
Then he'll turn him round and leave thee
All for some other one.

Then there's the ballad which gives the Sterkarms their rallying cry and boast:

The 'Sterkarm Handshake': their badge
My hob is swift-footed and sure,
My sword hangs down at my knee, 
I never held back from a fight:
Come who dares and meddle with me! 

A 'hob' was the breed of small, strong, intelligent horse which the reivers rode (down roads on raids). This ballad was historically associated with the Elliot familyrather than the Armstrongs on whom the Sterkarms are very, very loosely based. ('Sterkarm' means 'strong arm.) 
Child's Ballads

These old songs fitted themselves naturally into the story as I wrote. I'd known many of them by heart for decades before I had any idea of writing the Sterkarm books. I never had to hunt for a quote. The scene I was working on would set a particular song playing in my head.

I knew the songs because, while still a young teenager, my love of folklore led me to Child's Ballads. I was already familiar with the lyrics before I discovered recordings of them by various folk-groups and singers.

I was a deep-dyed folkie, me. I was having none of your long-haired sensitive types strumming acoustic guitars while they intoned modern protest songs. If it wasn't at least 200 years old, I didn't want to hear it. I wanted elbow-pipes, Shetland fiddles and bodhrans. I wanted people with closed eyes singing unaccompanied with one hand over an ear. "As I walked out one midsummer morning..."

It was the stories, of course, that attracted me. I wanted to hear about the Billy Blind starting up at the bed's foot  and the loathly worm toddling about the tree. And the Broomfield Hill. And Twa Corbies.

I often listen to music while writing and, for me, the music has to be fitted to the book I'm working on. It creates the atmosphere. For the Sterkarms, it had to be traditional folk, especially the Border Ballads. The music and words of the ballads were as much a part of setting the Sterkarm scene as details of their food, clothing, furniture and buildings.

I wasn't too purist, though. In A Sterkarm Handshake, Per Sterkarm is hurrying through the alleys of the tower, on his way to Andrea's 'bower' (which always sounds so romantic, but just means 'private room,''bedroom' or 'sleeping place.') Per thinks he's on a promise. The song that runs through his mind is:

Oh, pleasant thoughts come to my mind
As I turn back smooth sheets so fine,
And her two white breasts are standing so
Like sweet pink roses that bloom in snow.


The second book, A Sterkarm Kiss ends with the lines:


For there's sweeter rest
On a true-love's breast
Than any other where.

 Neither of these quotes come from the Border ballads, although folk-song is, by its very nature, hard to date or pin down to a specific place. The first verse, as far as I know, comes from 'The Factory Maid.'

I'm a hand-loom weaver by my trade,
But I'm in love with a factory-maid,
And could I but her favour win,
I'd break my looms and weave with steam.
Mayhew's ballad seller

     This dates it, roughly, to the late 18th or 19th century and means that this version is likely to have been a 'broadside ballad.'
These were lyrics, printed on the long sheets of paper which gave them their name. Often written about hot topics of the day, such as industrialisation, they were sold in market-places. There was no music but the name of some well-known tune would be given. 'To be sung to the tune of...'

The lines about the true-love's breast come from a song with a beautiful tune, which I know as 'Searching for Lambs.' (This being what 'the loveliest maid that e'er I saw' was doing when her lover walked out one midsummer morning.) It's very hard to guess at a date for the lovely maid and her ewes, but the song doesn't have that robust mix of extreme vengeful violence and the supernatural that typifies the Border ballads, so it's probably later.

The date for my Sterkarms is about 1520 (though there were reivers long before and after this date. It wasn't until James I of England and Scotland took the English throne in 1603 that concerted action was taken to bring peace to the Borders.) Some of the songs I quote are certainly later than the 1500s and can be roughly dated to the late 1700s, but this doesn't mean that the Sterkarms wouldn't know something close to these lyrics and tunes. I justify my inclusion of them by the way that elements of folk-tales and ballads 'migrate,' from song to song and tale to tale over long periods of time.

The songs and stories were spread by word of mouth. If a singer or story-teller couldn't remember a detail, they invented their own. Or inserted a verse they could remember from another song. They might also take a verse from one song and put it into another simply because they liked it. They might change an ending to make it happier (see Johnny of Briedesley below) or change the relationships within a song, for example, having the hero murdered by his mother instead of his lover.

The same applies to the music. If they couldn't remember a tune, then they set the words to another or made up a variation. Other lyrics and tunes were updated. These tried-and-tested old tales can go on for centuries. Some researchers think some folk-tales go back to the Bronze Age.

There are old songs which almost seem to be compilations of verses:

Oh had I wist, when first I kissed
That Love had been so ill to win,
I'd have shut my heart in a silver cage
And pinned it with a silver pin.

The men of the forest, they asked it of me,
How many sweet strawberries grow in the salt sea?
I answered them well, with a tear in my e'e;
'As many fish swim in the forest.'

When cockle-shells turn silver bells
When fishes swim from tree to tree
When ice and snow turn fire to burn
It's then, my love, that I'll love thee.

The writers of broadside ballads certainly drew on these old songs too, re-using verses to save time as they tried to make a living. So because a verse about a factory maid was published in a broadsheet ballad in, say 1810, it doesn't mean that something very like it wouldn't have been known very much earlier and sung about a dairy maid.

And just because a gentle love song doesn't mention treachery, incest, fratricide, infanticide or any of the other -cides so popular in the Border ballads, it doesn't mean it wasn't known on the Borders. Even there, they had their quieter moments.

I thought it a pity that my readers couldn't hear the songs that are quoted so frequently throughout the Sterkarm books - and then realised that there was a way for me to share them. If you have a Facebook or Spotify account, here's a link (below) to my playlist for the Sterkarm books.


The songs here are the best versions I could find on Spotify of the ballads I quote, but they aren't definitive. For instance, in the linked Johnny of Breadiesley, sung by Ewan McColl, Johnny kills seven enemies and rides away triumphant. In other versions, he is killed: His good grey hounds are sleeping,/ His good grey hawk has flown,/ A grass green turf is at his head,/ And his hunting all is done. The verse quoted above,from January, [The higher on the wing it climbs...] alsohas slightly different words in the recording by June Tabor.

If you like songs about murder, revenge killings and executions - plus the occasional love-song - and if you like deep-dyed folk - this is for you.


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