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Where does history begin, actually? Scattered reflections by Leslie Wilson

March 22, 2017, 5:30 pm
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Kendal Castle; tangible history in my childhood
The past begins as each second is left behind; indeed, the present moment is only a footstep between the past and the future. But where is the boundary between the past and history?
I've been thinking this rather a lot over the last while, as I have had the feeling of living through history, what with Brexit and Trump in America, and the way in which the UK seems to be morphing into a rather unpleasant place which isn't what I thought it was. Of course, nowadays, we access unrolling history, even across the Atlantic, as it happens. In the past, news  arrived as fast as the report could reach you; on foot, or horseback, by boat, and later by train. (There was also the semaphore in the eighteenth to nineteenth century, the earliest form of telegraph.) But reading old newspapers, you really notice this lag. It took six months, in the eighteen hundreds, to reach India, so news from the subcontinent would turn into history on the voyage, maybe. For the unlucky few, history came and found you. In the Thirty Years' War, some people only realised that there was a war when the soldiers arrived to rape, loot and pillage.

I remember Hilary Mantel saying, when we co-tutored an Arvon course, that lived history looked quite different from history written up in a book, because when you're living through events, they seem fluid. This came back to me when I wrote about the Kristallnacht pogrom in Saving Rafael. When some hooligans arrive and start to smash up your house, you have no idea that it's happening all over Berlin. It takes time for this to become apparent; which is why I sent my hero and heroine out onto the streets to find out. It is not yet Kristallnacht, it is a series of terrifying events that you can't get a handle on, that provoke raw, horrible emotions. The function of history is to analyse, to get a handle on these events. Maybe the function of the historical novelist is to take the handle off; the door swings wildly in a howling gale, and you have no idea where the wind is blowing from.
Berlin Wall art, East Side Gallery: Brezhnev and Honecker smash through the Wall.



















I suppose this question exercises me particularly because I'm a historical novelist. If I write a novel about the protest against the Iraq war (for example), is that historical? Or Berlin, when the Wall came down? If not, how far back does one have to go? Would Greenham Common be historical, for example? Dickens's novels, and George Eliot's, were usually set in the past, maybe twenty years ago, but would not regard themselves as historical unless they were dealing with events a good deal further back. Maybe it doesn't matter.

What do you think?
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Off to the Alderney Literature Festival.

March 23, 2017, 5:30 pm
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Well, I am writing this in haste this month so apologies for a short blog.

On the day this post is scheduled to go live,  I will be at the Alderney Festival of Historical Literature and preparing to give my talk on "Eleanor of Aquitaine: the fact behind the fiction and the fiction behind the fact."

I am also hoping to get in some walking around this small Channel Island, just three miles long and one and a half wide, situated  7 miles from the French coast and with a population of a little over 2,000 people. To get there from the UK mainland, one has to fly to Guernsey, and then take a a 20 minute 'island hopper' flight on an 18 seater light transport plane - outside of the summer months anyway.  Alderney a bird's eye view   I have never been to Alderney before but am very much looking forward to it.

The  Festival has been running since 2013 and this year's takes place from the 24th to the 26th of March and its theme is 'Perception versus Reality' a subject very close to my heart following my recent researches into Eleanor of Aquitaine where the perception and the reality are poles apart - inasmuch as we currently understand what that reality might be (she says with an eyebrow raised in irony).  The premise of the debate at the festival is that 'historical reality is in fact a fluid concept.' As well as my talk about Eleanor, I shall also be sitting on a panel with Imogen Robertson and Anna Mazzola asking how true to life the setting of a historical novel can be and what do historical novelists owe to the truth?  It's going to be a terrific discussion.

I am also very much looking forward to sitting in on a talk by Joyce Meader on 'Knitted comforts for the military from 1850 to the present day.' I am not a knitter - would love to be but I don't have the manual dexterity or the logic to follow patterns.  However I am still fascinated by the subject.

I shall report when I return.  And in the meanwhile, here's the website.  http://www.alderneyliterarytrust.com/festival






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Edward Lear by Miranda Miller

March 24, 2017, 6:00 pm
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   I’ve been reading Edward Lear’s wonderful nonsense poems to my little grandsons and have just noticed that there is a plaque to him near where I live. The site is now a seedy mews off the Holloway Road in north London but when he was born in 1812, the youngest to survive of twenty-one children, it was a middle class family house in the village on Holloway, near Highgate.

   When Lear was four his father, Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker, was imprisoned in the King’s Bench for debt. The family was scattered and Edward's eldest sister, Ann, who was twenty years older than him, looked after him. They lived together until she died, when Edward was almost fifty. Lear was a delicate child and an epileptic, at a time when the illness was considered shameful. He referred to it as “the Demon” and throughout his life he also suffered from acute bouts of depression. He had very little formal education and later wrote, “I am always thanking God that I was never educated;” in spite of this he taught himself six languages and became an accomplished composer as well as a poet and artist. He played the accordion, flute, guitar and  piano.

   As he and his sister had no money he had to earn his own living from an early age: “ I began to draw for bread and cheese about 1827, but only did uncommon queer shop-sketches – selling them for prices varying from ninepence to four shillings.” Audubon’s great work, The Birds of North America, was first published in the 1820s and started a fashion for big, lavishly illustrated books about exotic birds and plants. In his late teens Lear visited the Zoological Gardens to study parrots:

"...for the last 12 months I have so moved – thought – looked at, – & existed among Parrots – that should any transmigration take place at my decease I am sure my soul would be very uncomfortable in anything but one of the Psittacidae.”

  The Psittacidae (1832) established Lear as a celebrated illustrator. In 1846 the young Queen Victoria invited him to Osborne to teach her drawing.


   In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a very successful volume of limericks, and in 1867 his most famous poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby.

   Although Lear's nonsense books were popular during his lifetime a rumour circulated that "Edward Lear" was a pseudonym, and that the books' true author was the man to whom Lear had dedicated the works, his patron the Earl of Derby. Supporters of this rumour offered as evidence the facts that both men were named Edward, and that "Lear" is an anagram of "Earl". Perhaps this is yet another example of British snobbery, like the insistence of many scholars thatShakespeare couldn’t have written his own plays because he didn’t have enough education.

   Lear's delightful inventions, such as The Quangle Wangle and The Pobble Who Has No Toes, were brilliant jokes that came out of his profound knowledge of natural history. He adored children, although he never had any, and travelled all over Europe. He had many friends:




How pleasant to know Mr.Lear!

Who has written such volumes of stuff!

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few think him pleasant enough.




His mind is concrete and fastidious,

His nose is remarkably big;

His visage is more or less hideous,

His beard it resembles a wig.



   Lear was constantly worried about money and his letters are full of this. In 1863 he begged an aristocratic friend to “ write to Lord Palmerston to ask him to ask the Queen to ask the King of Greece” to create a job for him as “Lord High Bosh and Nonsense Producer...with permission to wear a fool’s cap(or mitre)....three pounds of butter yearly and a little pig, - and a small donkey to ride on.” He fantasized about selling his illustrations to Tennyson’s poems for £18,000 and buying a “chocolate coloured carriage speckled with gold, driven by a coachman in green vestments and silver spectacles wherein sitting on a lofty cushion composed of muffins and volumes of the Apocrypha.”


Lear fell unrequitedly in love with several men and proposed marriage (unsuccessfully) to a woman 46 years younger than him. He died in 1888 - just a few months after his famous cat, Old Foss - in San Remo on the Italian Riviera, where he had lived for eighteen years with his Albanian servant. I hope his solitary life gave him pleasure and that he sometimes, like the Owl and the Pussycat, found someone to dance with:






'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.





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South of France Magic and Make-Believe, by Carol Drinkwater

March 25, 2017, 5:01 pm
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Quite by chance, while internet browsing, I came across an article in Variety magazine – almost a film industry bible – announcing a new film studio complex converted from warehouses to be opened on the outskirts of Marseille. This is exciting news.
France’s Mediterranean coastline from Marseille all the way to Monaco and onwards to Menton and the borders of Italy has always been popular as a backdrop to cinema.
Cannes to Monte Carlo, for example, was glitteringly captured in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
Much of the glamour of the French Riviera has been built on its twentieth-century film history including, of course, its renowned Cannes Film Festival which I wrote about for the HistoryGirls here:
http://the-history-girls.blogspot.fr/2015/05/celebrating-film-by-carol-drinkwater.html

I mentioned in my January blog that several chapters of my new novel, THE LOST GIRL, are set in Nice, post WWII, including at the iconic La Victorine Studios.

Most people when they think of filmmaking hubs tend to cite Hollywood or Bollywood or perhaps some of the old British studies such as Elstree. France is known for its thriving film industry, one that is very well supported by the State, but I think on the whole the average filmgoer would consider Paris as France's cinema centre. There are indeed several studios in and around Paris that have been producing films for well over a century now (late 1890s), but there is also the South of France. It was, and still is to a lesser degree, the Hollywood of France mainly due to its fabulous locations, but not solely for that reason.


                                                                Marcel Pagnol 1931

Marcel Pagnol, the Provençal novelist, playwright and filmmaker became, in 1946, the first cineaste to be elected to the Académie Française. Although he died in 1974 he remains internationally known  for his marvellously evocative novels such as Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. All set in and around the countryside of his birthplace, Aubagne near Marseille.  However, Pagnol's legacy goes a great deal further than his literature. Marius, an early play of Pagnol's, was directed for the cinema in 1931 by Alexander Korda and became one of the earliest French-language talking films to find success outside France. On the strength of this, Pagnol founded his own film studios on the outskirts of Marseille. He played all roles in the business of filmmaking from director to editor, financier, screenwriter and script coach. He was fluent in English and his native Provençal tongue as well as French. His studios produced some masterpieces. He worked with many great actors and regularly employed local talent so that the sing-song Provençal accent and the local traditions of life were also celebrated and gained an international reputation.



Here below, for your amusement, is a link to The Baker's Wife directed and adapted by Pagnol from the novel, Blue Boy, written by another masterly Provençal voice, Jean Giono. In 1940, this film won the New York Critic's Circle prize for Best Foreign Film. (Pagnol had won this same award in 1939 for Harvest and triumphed again in 1950 for Jofroi).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXLKbRJV65c


Harvest (in French, Regain) was also based on a Jean Giono novel, Second Harvest
It stars one of France's greatest screen comedians, Fernandel, who came up through vaudeville. He was also a Provençal, born in Marseille.

Further along the coast in Nice lies the Victorine Studios. The history of this studio goes back to when its doors were first opened in 1919, before Pagnol's studios in Marseille were founded and close to three decades before the early sections of my novel, The Lost Girl, are set.


                                                                     Anouk Aimée

The Victorine Studios, today operating as the Riviera Studios, has been the home of film production since before the earliest days of Hollywood. Nice was a cinema hub from 1910 onwards. In 1913 the French film pioneer Léon Gaumont founded the original Victorine studios in a white villa that stood in its own ten acres of grounds. Like so many of the great artists of the day who were living and working there at this time, Gaumont was drawn to this coast for its abundance of natural, soft light. Unfortunately, he never followed through on his original plans.
In 1919, Serge Sandberg with his business partner Louis Nalpas set up the Ciné Studio at the Victorine. Both were film producers. Louis Nalpas (1884 - 1948) was born in the Greek community of Smyrna, modern-day Turkey. Nalpas had arrived in Paris 1909. He soon made his mark when as early as 1912 he produced La Dames aux Camélias with Sarah Bernhardt. Russian-born Serge Sandberg  (1879 -1981)  was the financial investor for the venture. Their intention was to create not only Le Hollywood Français on the Victorine site, but to establish a film centre on the Riviera which would return French filmmaking to its pre- first world war glory.  They invested aplenty, building four studios, workshops, an open-air theatre ... Unfortunately, their partnership grew strained when they ran out of money, even before they had produced one single picture.

In 1924 the charismatic Irishman, Rex Ingram, lauded by Eric von Stroheim as the world's greatest movie director, leased the Victorine. With funds from Louis B. Mayer's MGM in Hollywood and with the blessing of Marcus Loew, Ingram renovated the site, creating one of the most state-of-the-art studios of its time.
He was married to the American actress Alice Terry who starred in many of his films.



The shooting of his extraordinary film Mare Nostrum (1926) with Alice in the leading role as the spy Freya took fifteen months and went way over budget.  Louis B. Mayer was not happy and was refusing to finance any further European escapades. Nonetheless, with the same team around him Rex Ingram went on to make The Magician adapted from Somerset Maugham's original novel.  He continued with two or three more silent pictures at the Victorine but his key team players, his cinematographer and editor, had left and by 1928 he had split with MGM.
With or without Ingram's brilliance at the helm, by the mid twenties the Victorine was the dominant Riviera studio. Throughout the twenties many silent films were shot there and from 1930 onwards, the lots were busy producing "talkies".
In the 1930s Fernandel performed in a series of comedies made there. 


                                          Rex Ingram with his wife, American actress Alice Terry.

There is a enchanting story about the shooting of Les Enfants du Paradis filmed at the Victorine during WWII (1943) with a very restricted budget. Many local residents were hired as extras. It is claimed that before the camera crew could shoot the food prepared for the film, the locals stole and ate the lot.

After WWII, the Victorine was the only studio still surviving in Nice yet filmmakers were flocking to the south to make their pictures. Jean Cocteau was attempting to raise funds to get another studio built in Mougins but this, alas, never materialised. Still, this period, between 1946 up to the 70s became the golden age of Riviera cinema. Many masterpieces came out of this time. I almost had the good fortune to work there myself with François Truffaut. I met him for the main role in La Nuit Americaine, Day for Night. Unfortunately, he judged my French imperfect (rightly so back then) and the role was awarded to the very lovely Jacqueline Bisset.

Truffaut and Bisset

Graham Greene who lived in nearby Antibes and was apparently a huge admirer of Truffaut makes a cameo appearance as an insurance company representative. In the credits he is billed as Henry Graham. Truffaut only discovered later the true identity of the small part actor.


Jacqueline Bisset

For many movie-makers, Nice and the Côte d'Azur promised not only year-long sunshine but spectacular vistas of sea and mountains. There were pretty ochre-toned villages with cobbled streets, palm trees, grand belle époque hotels and villas ... Everyone wanted to work there. Life was sweet along the coast; the war was a memory and the rich were anchoring their yachts. A community of filmmakers, technicians, hungry actors was burgeoning. The Americans were flying in and out, staying for long periods at the Hotels Negresco, Ruhl in Nice; the Carlton in Cannes.

In my new novel The Lost Girl, one of the two principal female characters is Marguerite. During the post-war sections of the book, she is an eighteen-year-old girl from Reims - a baker's daughter - who fantasises about becoming a star, an actress on the silver screen. She has run away from home to Paris, begs a ride on the famous blue train from the capital to the south in the hope of winning the leading role in a film that is to be shot at the Victorine Studios. Of course, the journey to stardom is pitted with many falls and real life does not run as smoothly for Marguerite as in her daydreams. Magic and make-believe can come at a cost ...



The Lost Girl will be published by Penguin on 29th June. Here is a link to pre-order if you would like to.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lost-Girl-Carol-Drinkwater/dp/071818310X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1490360033&sr=1-1









www.caroldrinkwater.com
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Pamela Gibson of Bletchley Park by Janie Hampton

March 26, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Pamela Gibson is the oldest surviving person to have worked at Bletchley Park decoding centre during the Second World war. ‘But Bletchley was not my whole life,’ she says in her strong, velvety voice. ‘I’ve had other careers too.’ She also holds the world record for the longest ‘rest’ between jobs as an actor, proving that it’s quite possible to restart a career after 60 years.
Pamela was born in her grandmother’s drawing room in Knightsbridge in 1917, during a zeppelin raid. ‘I was almost called Zeppelina,’ she told me. Her favourite subjects at boarding school were elocution and horse-riding. ‘When the hunt came past, we all dropped our books and followed.’ Her father had been an opera singer and when she left school he sent her to Paris. There she was taught French by Yvette Guilbert, the Moulin Rouge singer portrayed by Toulouse Lautrec. After a few months improving her German in Munich, she attended the Webber Douglas Drama School. One of her first professional parts was opposite Cyril Cusack in The Playboy of the Western World. Then she went into rep; and when war broke out, into ENSA.
‘In 1941 an interfering godmother told me I was wasted on the stage and there was interesting work to be done if I applied to the Admiralty.’ Pamela was interviewed, and offered a secret job. ‘I was torn because my brother Patrick had just been captured in Libya, and was missing, so I wanted to be useful. But on the other hand, I had just been offered my first part in the West End, which was rather thrilling. I asked the man at the Admiralty who’d interviewed me, what he thought. “The stage can wait, but the war can’t,” said the man.’ So she accepted.
‘I thought it would be exciting and I’d be dropped into France as a spy. But I was sent to this big cold house called Bletchley. I suppose I was recruited because of my well to-do background. They thought that if they took in girls from families they knew something about, they were less likely to be German spies. I was very disappointed when I learned that my job was copying words onto index cards. The codes came in broken up and then we had to cross-reference them. There was a separate card for each battle ship, another for the port it was leaving, another for where it was arriving. Some days it was incredibly exciting but mostly it was quite dull, with messages about onions or something.’ Having lived on her own since she left school six years earlier, Pamela refused to live in a stuffy billet or share a room, so she rented a caravan in a field.
Bletchley Park Mansion, Buckinghamshire
By 1944 three quarters of the 9,000 workers at Bletchley Park were women. They were paid half what the men were, and only given temporary contracts. Pamela must have been outstanding as she was one of the few women who was promoted. As Head of the Index, she was in charge of 50 women in Naval Intelligence. ‘I was only promoted because I couldn’t type and at 24 I was quite old,’ she says modestly. ‘Although I was pretty fluent in German and French.’
Naval Intelligence hut, Bletchley Park.  Photo  by Toby Oxborrow.  
The tedium of long shifts was balanced with amateur dramatics, much improved by professional actors such as Pamela, and scripts written by Oxbridge graduates, such as the charming and gifted Wing Commander Jim Rose. ‘The best thing about Bletchley, was meeting Jim.’ At 32, Rose was considered too old to fly, so was put in charge of Air Intelligence at Bletchley Park. He had to decide which de-coded messages to hold back from the Air Force in case their actions then revealed to the Germans that Britain had broken the codes. On their first date, Jim took Pamela to dine at the Savoy. ‘It was very difficult to get a table, so he posed as an Irish peer whom he knew was not in London. Later we discovered that one of his friends had done the same thing, at the same place.’
They were married in 1946, a perfect match: both were cultured, generous and keen to make the post-war world a better place. They moved into a bomb-damaged square in Kensington, a few doors down from my family. When I was born, my parents asked Pamela to be my godmother. She was an unusually thoughtful one: my christening present included not only a silver mug (battered but still loved) but also a Swiss nanny for six months. Apparently Sister Klarli looked after not just me, but also my parents and my three older siblings; and was there for the arrival of my younger sister. Instead of toys for birthdays, Pamela paid for my piano lessons – a present that goes on giving. After the Roses children, Alan and Harriet, arrived, they moved to Zurich where Jim Rose was founder-director of the International Press Institute, an important global force for the freedom of the press.
For ten years after their return to London, Pamela was the school counsellor of North Paddington Comprehensive, caring for pupils who had recently arrived from the Caribbean. When she was 60 she had to retire, but didn’t give up. ‘I had to do something, so I became the vice-chair of the NSPCC,’ she said as if it was as simple as buying the weekly fish. After Jim died in 1999, Pamela, then aged 84, went back to her first career and renewed her membership of Equity, the actor's union. A few acting lessons later, she was cast as Lady Jedburgh in Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by Peter Hall at the Haymarket Theatre. She also understudied for Googie Withers, then just 83. After only three nights, Googie Withers fell ill and Pamela was called upon to play The Duchess of Berwick. With several more parts over the next five years, she has maintained her position as the actor with the longest period of ‘resting’ between jobs. ‘It was wonderful to get back on the stage after 60 years. Acting helped me get over losing Jim. The fear of going on stage is the best defence against grief.’
Churchill described Bletchley Park as ‘the goose that laid the golden egg but never cackled’. Everyone there had signed the Official Secrets Act and until recently Pamela never spoke of her war-time career. Not even that she had known the computer scientist Alan Turing, though she insists not well. ‘He was polite and intelligent, but he really preferred the company of men.’ Even when the film Enigma about Bletchley Park was released in 2001, she only commented to a few friends, ‘We never wore hats like that.’ When The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, came out in 2014 she changed her mind. ‘I realised that everyone else was talking about it, so why shouldn’t I?’ she told me. Suddenly she was in the limelight with appearances in books and on television, and even Desert Island Discs. ‘But we don’t need to be glorified. We were all well protected and properly fed.’
The cast of The Marraige of Figaro,  Bletchley, 1943
Pamela will be 100 years young in November and remains as beautiful and chic as ever. She still entertains friends and grandchildren in the elegant Georgian house in Kensington that has changed little since she moved there 71 years ago. ‘I’ve had a lucky life,’ she says. Nonsense, I’d say it wasn’t luck, but resilience, determination and chutzpah.
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What a Difference A Day Makes by Julie Summers

March 27, 2017, 10:22 pm
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Tomorrow, Wednesday 29 March 2017, is the most significant day in the life of the United Kingdom this century and possibly even of the last forty years. Some go as far as to say it is the most momentous decision taken by this country since the end of the Second World War. Whatever side you are on in the question about whether it is a good or bad thing that Britain is going to leave the European Union, it cannot be denied that invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty is a noteworthy event. The Britain of today will look different in two, five, twenty years time. The anxiety must be what that Britain will look like and how will the changes affect all our futures.

The idyllic Suffolk village of Long Melford, a corner of Old England
As a historian I find momentous and noteworthy events both alarming and exciting. As such I turned back to history to give me some lead on the whole development of the idea of a united Europe and examine what its forefathers had in mind in the immediate aftermath of 1939-45 for the future of a war torn continent. There are many significant players who had a finger in the early version of the European pie but one of the most fascinating from my perspective was a man who had spent the pinnacle of his career training volunteers to enter Nazi occupied Europe and cause mayhem, murder and sabotage. His name was Sir Colin McVean Gubbins. His name may not be familiar to British or American readers but in France, Belgium, Poland, Czech Republic, Norway and the Netherlands he is recognized as a great hero. 

Sir Colin McVean Gubbins KCMG
Born in Tokyo in 1896 he was sent, aged seven, to live with his maternal grandparents on the Isle of Mull. He did not see his father or mother for five years but he described his childhood as blissfully happy. After school he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and in the summer of 1914 he was in Heidelberg learning German. In August had to make a frantic dash back to Britain to avoid arrest. He succeeded by disguising himself as a child and later wrote: ‘My escape from being imprisoned in Germany was entirely due to the kindness of the Englishman, a complete stranger, who lent me £1 on Cologne platform.’ Gubbins was at Ypres for the first and second battles, then on the Somme where he won his Military Cross for conspicuous gallantry. He was shot in the neck on the Somme in October and was in hospital for eleven days; he was gassed in 1917 and suffered from trench fever in April 1918 but was fit enough to join General Ironside, later commander-in-chief of the Home Forces, as ADC on the autumn mission to Archangel in Russia to prepare a winter campaign. After the war, then aged twenty-three, Gubbins was sent to Ireland where he was given a three day course in guerrilla warfare and observed the methods used by the nationalists at first-hand. In 1923 he learned Russian and then went to India to learn Urdu.

Promoted to major in February 1934, he was posted to the War Office and appointed GS02 in a new section of MTI (Military Training Instruction), which was the policy making arm of the Military Training Directorate. In this role he was sent in 1938 to Czechoslovakia to oversee the withdrawal of Czech forces from the Sudetenland. It was something that he found exceptionally repugnant and it remained a matter of lasting shame to him for the rest of his life. It also gave him a first-hand view of the brutal force of Nazi expansion.

In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, the invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Gubbins was put in charge of training stay-behind parties of men who would work locally to sabotage Germans stores, blow up bridges and generally slow down their advance parties. When the threat of invasion lessened he was transferred to a new section called Special Operations Executive, known by its nickname Baker Street which was the London HQ. Its aim was to train foreign fighters who would be sent back to their own countries to carry out secret missions.

Arisaig House, HQ of  SOE Special Training Schools
He moved to the Highlands to set up Special Training Schools where agents from occupied countries could be trained in the brutal arts of guerrilla or, as Churchill called it, ungentlemanly warfare. Men and women were turned into silent killers, explosives experts, radio operators and sabotage agents who were parachuted into France, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and so on to carry out their secret and often deadly work. Gubbins worked with SOE for the whole war and clocked up some notable successes in Norway, France and, most spectacularly, in the Czech Republic when two agents trained in the Highlands carried out the successful assassination of Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. The reprisals for the murder of Germans was hideous but the heads of the various governments-in-exile in London thought the boost to a country’s morale and the confirmation that they had not been forgotten was a price worth paying.

Jozef Gabcik (left) and Jan Kubis who were responsible
for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942

At the end of the war Gubbins’ department was shut down. His biographer wrote of him:
Britain was spared the shame and misery of enemy occupation; without this experience it is difficult to appreciate the part played by clandestine resistance both in restoring national self-respect and in permitting courageous individuals to escape from the ignominy of their situation. . . It was as a resistance leader that he came to fashion Special Operations Executive, and to write his own page in the history of almost every country occupied by the enemy in the Second World War.
So respected was he in the countries that had been occupied by the Nazis that the government had to waive the rule that an officer could receive only four foreign honours for services in the war. Eventually he received more fourteen awards including the highest from Norway, Denmark, Greece, France, Poland, Belgium and the United States of America. Gubbins received a knighthood in 1946 and began the second half of his life’s work, which was to promote European Unity. Despite the fact he had spent five years trying to devise every possible lethal means of undermining the Germans, he realized that the only way of securing a lasting peace in Europe was to work together.

In 1946 an old Polish friend, Josef Retinger, asked him to help set up the Independent League for Economic Cooperation in Brussels. This was merged with various others in 1947 to become the International Committee of the Movement for European Unity with Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys as chairman. In 1954 he was asked to represent Britain as a founder member of the Bilderberg Group, an organisation set up to promote a strengthening of US-European relations and preventing another world war. When asked what he considered to be his greatest achievement he said the role he had been most honoured to play was in helping to prevent a further war.

Gubbins died in 1976 at the age of eighty, by which time Britain had been a full member of the European Union for three years. I wonder what he would think of the step his country is about to take on 29 March 2017.

Gubbins' story will be told in full in my next book Behind Closed Doors. It will be published in spring 2018.
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March Guest Post - Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones

March 28, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Georgia Hunter, photo credit: Andrea Carson
When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she learned that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Here she speaks to Charlotte Wightwick about her quest to uncover her family’s staggering history and how she turned this into her debut novel We Were the Lucky Ones.

Tell us a bit about We Were the Lucky Ones
My novel tracks my grandfather, his parents, and his siblings—a family of Polish Jews—as they scatter at the start of the Second World War, doing everything in their power to survive and to reunite.

The characters in the novel are based on your own family, but you didn’t know about this part of your family history until you were a teenager. Can you tell us about how it made you feel to discover what happened to them?

It was mind-blowing! Growing up, I knew my grandfather not as Addy Kurc, but as Eddy Courts, and I assumed he’d been born in the States. I learned that he came from a town called Radom, Poland, and about his Holocaust-era past a year after he died, when a high school English teacher assigned our class a project in looking back at our ancestral roots. I sat down with my grandmother, Caroline, and it was in that interview that I discovered I was a quarter Jewish, and that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. It was a shocking revelation, of course—one that sparked an endless array of questions, the first of which was why was I just learning this now?

How did you go about researching everything that happened to them?


I began researching We Were the Lucky Ones nine years ago, when I flew to Paris to interview two relatives—Felicia, who was a year old at the start of the war, and Anna, who’s mother Halina is also a main character in my story. From there I travelled to Brazil and across the States, meeting with cousins and friends—anyone with a story to share…Where there were gaps in my timeline, I looked to outside resources—to archives, museums, ministries, and magistrates around the world, in hopes of tracking down relevant information. Over time, I collected details from organisations near and far, including a nine-page statement that had been hand-written by my grandfather’s older brother, extensive military records for others, and (in perhaps my most treasured find) the first-hand accounts of three relatives who had since passed, captured on video by the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.


Given the amount of research you did, and the accuracy with which you sought to portray your family, why did you choose a novel rather than writing a biography?
My goal, first and foremost, was to write a book that did my family’s story justice. It was important to me to tell it as truthfully as possibly. It was also important to me, however, that the story read less like a history lesson, and more like a novel: visceral and immersive. I wanted readers to understand, through the eyes of the Kurcs, what it meant to be Jewish and on the run during the Second World War… I wanted my ancestors to come across as human. And so, I allowed myself the creative license to dive deep into my settings and my characters’ psyches… In taking this route, it’s my hope that I was able, in the end, to bring the story even closer to the truth.

We Were the Lucky Ones is an amazing story of survival amongst unimaginable horror. Was there anything that you found out in the course of your research that you just couldn’t believe?

One of the first statistics I came across in my research that I found particularly shocking was that fewer than 300 of the 30,000 Jews from my family’s hometown of Radom, Poland, lived to see the end of the war. Knowing that the Kurcs made up a significant percentage of that 300 was an impossible truth to digest at first—we were, it seemed, a statistical anomaly.

It was also hard for me at times to wrap my head around the means by which my relatives were able to skirt death, over and over again.

One of the things that struck me in the novel was how quickly you portray things going from a normal, comfortable middle-class life to the ghetto, or to living outside the law. How do you think it was possible for things to change so quickly?

I, too, was struck by how quickly things changed for the Kurcs…I chose to open the book in the spring of 1939 for this exact reason—so I could depict what life was like before their worlds, like the worlds of so many other European Jews, were turned upside-down.

It’s hard to say how it was possible for things to change so quickly and drastically—I think that’s part of what makes the Holocaust so horrifying. I had to keep reminding myself as I wrote that, at the time, no one could foresee the atrocities that would unfold over the course of the war; that the Kurcs didn’t have the perspective we have now; that they were simply trying to survive from day to day, with no real concept of what was to come.

The other part of the book which I found fascinating, perhaps because I know relatively little about it, was what happened to the family after the war - their and so many others’ journeys to try and start better, safer lives. Can you say a bit about this?

It’s true that you don’t hear as many stories of how families and individuals, most of whom were left with nothing, were forced to start over after the war. I was somewhat surprised in my research to learn that my family’s narrative didn’t end on VE Day. The war was over, Allied victory had been declared, but the family remained scattered, with several relatives unaccounted for. Anti-Semitism was still rampant. Their lives were still at risk. They were homeless. And even when the Kurcs did finally find a safe haven in the States and in Brazil, life was far from easy… It would be years before they were able to put down roots. I talk about some of this in the “Since Then” section at the very end of the book.

Is there anything about the story that you don’t know, and which you wish you did?

I wish I could have asked my grandfather why he didn’t share this piece of his history with me when I was a kid. I don’t fault him for not telling me—I understand wanting to put this chapter of his past behind him—but I often wonder what reason, exactly, he’d offer. Would he tell me the period was too traumatic for him to relive? That he was trying to protect me? That he’d seen what being Polish and Jewish could have (should have, if left to the odds) done for his family and he didn’t want to subject his family to a similar risk? Or that he was far more consumed with looking ahead and ensuring a successful life for himself and his family than with rehashing the past? I’ll never know for sure, but I imagine his answer would have been some combination of all of the above.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is published by Allison & Busby at £12.99; you can find out more at http://georgiahunterauthor.com/

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Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - Murano Glass

March 29, 2017, 4:30 pm
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This January, I went to Venice for the first time. I have had a fascination with the city since I was a very young child and family friends returned with a Murano glass paperweight for my parents and a small replica Venetian mask for me.

I loved my mask the way that only a small girl can: it seemed to me to be the very epitome of elegance and I could only think that the place it came from must be similarly beautiful. But I found myself fascinated by my parents’ paperweight too, its smooth roundness pleasing in the hand, and the intricate flowers inside a mystery I could not fathom (how had they got there?)

Through school, university and years of novel-writing-research, my love of the Italian Renaissance grew, and with it a desire to see Italy for myself, yet in recent years I have prioritised visits to other cities: Florence, Rome, Milan.

Eventually, I had to take the plunge: would I love Venice as much as I had dreamed as a child?

The answer, you may be glad to know, is yes: like thousands before me, I fell immediately and entirely in love with La Serenissima. The sense of wonder John Julius Norwich describes in the introduction to his History of Venice was very much with me as I explored the city from the canals and bridges, or wandered its tiny, winding streets.
The Grand Canal, Venice 2017
In Venice, more than anywhere else, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. However majestic the churches, however magnificent the palazzi, however dazzling the pictures, the ultimate masterpiece remains Venice itself.
Murano, Janury 2017




Which brings me to this month’s item in the Cabinet of Curiosities. Sadly, the Venetian mask of my childhood is long gone, lost to who-knows-what Marie Kondo-style cull, and I suspect my parents wouldn’t be too keen on my stealing their paperweight. So, I just had to buy my very own piece of Murano glass. This proved surprisingly difficult.

Murano, one of the islands in the Venetian lagoon, has been a world-renowned centre of glass-making for centuries. All of Venice’s glass-blowers were relocated there in the thirteenth century, initially as a protection for the rest of the city against fire, an occupational hazard when dealing with molten sand. When the Murano craftsmen discovered the secret of making first clear glass, and later some of the best quality mirrors available in Europe, this segregation allowed the notoriously controlling Venetian government to maintain a monopoly on both the items and the men, punishing runaway glass-makers severely.

Today, Murano glass remains world-famous, although much of the glass available to tourists is reportedly imported cheaply from China. This, however, was not my biggest problem when it came to buying my very own piece of Venetian history.
 
Murano glassware, photo credit Daniel Ventura

Nor was the problem merely one of price (although I did have to put down the 700-euro wine-glass I was happily waving at my friend and revise my plan of buying six of them…) It was more fundamental than that. Like Jan Morris, I think

that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous…

Eventually, I found what I was looking for: a necklace (within my price range!) that would be a memory of a beautiful city, a personal symbol to me of my own past and of my love of history, and a thing of beauty in its own right.



My necklace! I think its pretty....


Sources:
  • Jan Morris, Venice, Faber & Faber (1960, revised 1993)
  • John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (1977, reissued 2003)
  • Il Museo del Vetro (Glass Museum, Murano) http://museovetro.visitmuve.it/

Photo credits:
  • Charlotte Wightwick unless otherwise stated

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March Competition

March 30, 2017, 4:30 pm
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To win a copy of Georgia Hunter's novel We Were the Lucky Ones, 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.





"Halina is the most rebellious of the five Kurc siblings and follows only one set of rules: her own.  Can you think of another woman in history with similar character traits?”

Closing date 7th April

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

Good luck!
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April Fool's Day - Celia Rees

March 31, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Today, I'm Mary Hoffman and that's no April Fool. We've swapped days for this month. My day is the 18th, the kind of day when nothing much ever happened, but 1st April is April Fools' or All Fools' Day. Now, there's something to blog about...

Traditionally, pranks or hoaxes are played until midday and after that the joke rebounds on the hoaxer. Anyone been caught yet? A time in the calendar when fooling is allowed and tricks can be played is common in many parts of the world, although why our date should be the 1st April is shrouded in mystery. Every theory is disputed. One common idea is that April 1st marked the beginning of the year until the Gregorian Calendar was introduced and January Ist became New Year’s Day. People who still celebrated on April 1st were mocked as ‘April Fools’ but this has always seemed thin to me. Some theories point to the date's proximity to the vernal equinox – a time of celebration since ancient times. Other theories suggest that the custom can be traced back to the Romans. Although one explanation, put forward by one Joseph Boskin, a Professor of History at Boston University (that bit is true), asserting that the practice began in the reign of the Emperor Constantine turned out to be itself a hoax. 

Spaghetti Harvest

Over the years, there have been memorable hoax news stories reported in the newspapers and on TV.  On April Fool's Day, 1957, the BBC had a three minute report on Panorama showing a family in Switzerland harvesting spaghetti. 

Spaghetti Tree

After the broadcast, a number of viewers contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti. Since most people's acquaintance with spaghetti in 1957 would have been via a Heinz tin, maybe that was understandable. 

In 2008, the BBC carried out another elaborate hoax when ex Python Terry Jones reported on a colony of flying penguins. I don't know how many people believed it, but I'd have thought the presenter might have given a clue.  

Flying Penguins
On April 1st, newspapers traditionally carry at least one hoax story often on the front page. On April Fools' Day, 1977, The Guardian published a seven page supplement featuring the fictional mid-ocean state of San Serriffe and in 2010 The Daily Telegraph would have had us believe that Virgin Media were using ferrets to lay their cable "due to their strong nesting instinct, their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, and for their ability to get down holes." 

The internet has been quick to get in on the act. Google is well known for running annual April Fool's jokes and in 2007, a designer of illusions for magicians posted an image of a dead fairy on his web site. He later sold it on eBay for £280. The internet and social media have made hoaxing a whole lot easier. 

Dead Fairy

I wonder what the news media have in store for us today? Although in these days of false news and alt news who needs hoax stories? With Brexit triggered and Trump in the White House, spaghetti trees and flying penguins seem to belong to more innocent times.

Happy All Fools' Day!

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Denying the doldrums through history, food, and favourite cookbooks - by Gillian Polack

April 1, 2017, 5:15 pm
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I’m having a bad day. Not a day when big things go wrong and the world is a walking disaster. Just one of the those days that don’t feel quite right. 

Normally, to fix bad days, I cook. I can’t do that today, because I’ve had a lot of bad days recently, and my refrigerator is full. If anyone wants mango pasta with berry sauce, or homemade bread or a number of other delectable foodstuffs, I’m your person. However, I still have a way out of the badness of the day. You’re going to help me: I’m going to introduce you two a couple of historical (food-related) books. It would cheer me up even more if we talked about historical food in the comments!



Nicholas Stavroulakis’ The Cookbook of the Jews of Greece is one of the best cookbooks I own. So many amazing recipes. So much history. What interests me today is the history, for the recipes are among those I cooked last week.

The Jews of Greece have a complex and fascinating past. Thre is not one simple Jewish culture or group in Greece, but several, so they don’t have just one cuisine. Stravroulakis gives us recipes from Jews who come from the Greece of Classical times, and from later Sephardi arrivals. Just the two. The Sephardi dishes aren’t the same (although there are overlaps) as Sephardi dishes from elsewhere. And the Romaniot (the ancient Jews of Greec) are purely Greek in their cooking, but Jewish. Some of the names of recipes are in Ladino (a cousin of Spanish) and others are in in Greek. And they’re all related to the Jewish dishes I have from my very different set of backgrounds. 

Every now and again I open the book at random and cook from it, because cooking from it gives me more of the history and reminds me of the people. Each dish contains history. 

I was going to talk about one or two recipes with you, but they’re all so lovely. I think I shall make this the type of food I eat for Passover this year. I have no Greek ancestry, but I’m an 1/8 Sephardi, so that will do. Either way, I shall celebrate one of the finest cuisines I’ve encountered.

Passover is an eight day festival that has very specific cooking. No observant Jews eat leavening, Askenazis don’t eat some legumes. It can be complicated. Just for today (for Passover is over a week away) I shall skip the complications and head straight for the special recipes for the festival itself. My family has a chicken soup, and something we call “matzah brie” (its name doesn’t rhyme with the name of the cheese) and we eat a lot of pickles. This is very much the Australian version of Eastern and Central European Jewish food.

This year I shall be adding haminados (an egg dish) to that, along with a chicken soup and bourekia, both made without leavening. 

This cookbook also gives some of the history of the festival. Stravroulakis talks about the picnic that Greek Jews have on the last day of the festival, for instance, and the ovens some localities had that were specifically used for the unleavened bread we eat throughout the eight days. 

History and food are so tightly linked that it’s impossible to separate them. The world likes to assume that Jewish history is simple and that Jews are all the same. Our food reminds us that the world is wrong. We eat our favourite foods to keep our identities straight. We’ve done this for a very long time, so it helps keep our history straight, too. This is one of the critical reasons why food and history are so tightly linked. It’s also a reason why concentration camp victims sometime wrote cookbooks while being starved. We can retain joy in our food-culture even when there is no joy left in the world.

This is my theory, anyhow. Stravroulakis supports my theory (without knowing it) by giving five recipes for charoset. Charoest is a symbolic dish – it’s to remind Jews of the mortar used when we were forced to build for others in Ancient Egypt. It’s the history and the food tightly bound
Add different recipes for different regions and groups within the region and even families, and it’s possible to explain how Jewish cultural integrity works, historically, just by eating. The Greek charoseth recipes have dates and raisins and currants. My family’s recipe has almonds and apple and cinnamon. All our recipes have wine.




The other cookbook is the polar opposite in history terms. It’s someone saying “Look at me!” Not “We shall remember who we are and celebrate survival” but “I am important enough to write my own cookbook.”

I don’t use this volume very often, but I look at it a lot. It reminds me that some people are shiny and get a lot of attention in their time, but are forgotten very soon after. In this case, Mrs Mary Eales is remembered only through her cookbook. 

Eales claims in her book that she was the confectioner to Queen Anne. Shiny. Someone who pushed her own importance during her lifetime and was probably given great respect for it, but whose star waned and who is now largely forgotten. This is important to me now because of the number of people who push and say “Look how important I am.”

We can judge Eales by her recipes and her cuisine. We no longer get the glamour. Some historical figures retain glamour – Richard I, for instance, or Madame de Pompadour. In everyday life, these aren’t the people we would think are shiny if we were around them. They wouldn’t move in our circles, or even at the edge of our circles. We’d focus on those closer to home and talk about how special they are. Some of them would genuinely be special and some of them would be hollow with only the shine making them worthy of attention. 

The fact that Eales wrote down her recipes and that someone published them after her death means that she was one of these shiny people. Not so many people published in the early eighteenth century, so this small cookbook says a lot about how she was seen. It enabled her to continue to be seen, too, for the book was published and republished, and republished again. Mrs Mary Eales was very shiny for a while. This is certain. Her shine faded later in the century and her book went out of print. 

The book is a careful listing of the types of sweets one can make with a set range of ingredients. The recipes are mostly not very original. They’re very much of their time, which is the early eighteenth century. She wasn’t testing herself by creating the limited range: those were the ingredients available just then. 

Those ingredients reflect the trade routes and the local farms. They show us a lot about the society Mrs Eales lived in. They also show us a careful woman who didn’t just buy ingredients and cook with them. She thought about preservation and making sure there was food across the null seasons. Angelica was dried, green apricots were preserved, cherries were turned into jam, currants were transformed into clear-cakes. 

Mrs Eales gives a complete guide for making sure that the fruit and even some of the nuts and vegetables of one season could be available for cooking all year round. Then she gives the recipes using both fresh and preserved fruit.

It’s very much the food of the south of England. So much cream! Clouted Cream and Spanish Butter and “all sorts of Fruit-Cream” and, for the first time in any English language cookbook, ice cream.
It’s a household manual as much as a cookbook, but it’s at the luxury end. How to make the food that enriches the day and widens the waistline and makes many people much happier. Given how even writing about it makes me happier, I’d say that the woman who carefully worked all this out and made all these recipes (which I have tested for deliciousness, but which I don’t make any more because of the sheer abundance of cream and because some of the ingredients are not easy to find or even safe) is a woman of substance. Not just shiny. 

These recipes make history sexier. So do those of the Jews of Greece. They do so, however, in entirely different ways.


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Naming by Debra Daley

April 2, 2017, 5:30 pm
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I’ve only ever bestowed names on two actual human beings (my children), but as a fiction writer I am obliged to name hosts of characters – and sometimes it can be tricky. Historical fiction requires you to invent names that are appropriate to their times and location as well as those that reflect something of a character’s identity, but for me there are other conditioning factors. I feel I can’t use names that belong to friends and family. Even if I think it unlikely that Uncle Anton is going to read anything I’ve written, I want to forestall even the possibility of his eye falling on a page penned by me, which features “a sinister-looking thug, in spite of his age and receded hairline. Anton, I learned, was his name”. If I were writing a Japanese character, I would love to endow her with what I consider to be one of the most romantic given names I’ve come across – Chikage, which means One Thousand Shadows. But, this name belongs to a longtime friend in Japan and I couldn’t possibly appropriate it.

Names can be quite the minefield. I don't like to give characters names that are currently popular in print or on screen. Or names with ambiguous pronunciation, like Featherstonehaugh/Fanshaw, Beaulieu/Bewley, Ralph/Rafe – or names that stray into Pychonesque absurdity, like Mike Fallopian and Herbert Stencil. They have to look and sound and be right by belonging to their correct region or rank – but I would like to write a character someday with a statement name, like El Elegante or La Païva (the 19th-century celebrity prostitute) or a clan title like The O’Neill.


I’m no expert on anthroponomastics (which, as I’m sure every Jon, Rick and Barry knows, means the study of names of persons), but I’ve always been fascinated by personal names. From an early age, I would list in a notebook striking names carried by real people I encountered. Xeno Captain, Dr Hazard, Pam Pumphrey, I remember you still. And how could I forget the rejection letter I once received that began, Dear Miss Dalek? There is no end either to the list or to my delight in it. Probably the first name that I found listworthy was one that belonged to a girl in my street, with whom I became friendly. She was called Teeny Bus. Actually, she had another name, a proper Dutch name, but “Teeny Bus” was the alternative her immigrant parents had come up with, believing it to sound more Anglo.


A convent education caused me to be early intrigued by the concept of hidden names. We were terribly curious about the nuns and speculated about their unknown birth names. Wild rumours passed through the corridors. Sister Ignatius was really called Maureen – and someone else heard from a relative in Rotorua that Sister Zita, who was Maori, was once named Hinemoa. Oh, the mystery of it. But I properly came across naming taboos when I read the Japanese masterpiece Tale of Genji, written by Lady Murasaki early in the eleventh century. The characters in this proto-novel are referred to by their functions or attributes (The Lady of the Paulownia-Courtyard Chamber, the Minister of the Left). To mention a person’s given name explicitly was disrespectful and a breach of Heian-era court manners.


 Tosa Mitsuki, Murasaki Shikibu writing, from his series The Tale of Genji 17th century.

 

This cultural taboo had migrated to Japan from China, where speaking or writing the given names of exalted persons, or of the deceased, was a severe transgression. Historically in China, given names consisted of a family name, a first name (or “true name”) and a familiar name/nickname. Calling a man by his true name was considered insolent, at the very least, unless you were his parent, lord or sovereign, and fatal when it came to the true name of the emperor. The taboo against using the emperor’s given name, and those of his ancestors, was proscribed by law, with a death penalty attached. There was a work-around for the bothersome business of the emperor’s name, though. You were permitted to write it, only in some laudatory context, of course, as long as you omitted the last stroke of its characters. That little swoosh of the brush made all the difference between life and death – as an unfortunate scholar named Wang Xihou discovered in 1777.

The Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799). His deadly given name was Aisin Giro Hongli.

 

The 18th-century Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty was inclined to genocides (Tibet, Mongolia) and literary inquistions. When his inquisitors came calling on suspect intellectuals, they left no inkstone unturned, no scroll unrolled. The Emperor’s literary police were nothing if not thorough. Every text in the house was scrutinised sentence by sentence. Wang Xihou was found to have criticised the content of a dictionary authorised by the Qianlong Emperor’s grandfather. More heinous still, the scholar had written the emperor’s name without leaving off the characters’ final strokes. As punishment for this insult to the imperial name, Wang Xihou was beheaded, along with all of his relatives in a ghastly guilt-by-association judgment.

A secret name is difficult enough, but when a multiplicity of monikers attaches to an individual, historical research can become complicated and, frankly, maddening. Take the custom which allows artists and artisans in Japan to possess numerous names for different purposes – the 19th-century netsuke master Kokusai, for example, was born Ozaki Sōzō in Edo (Tōkyō) and also went by the name Iseya Risuke. He took the art name Kokusai, although occasionally signing himself Takeda Kokusai, Takeda Minamoto and Takeda Yasugorō – suggesting a connection with the 16th-century lord Takeda Shingen of the Minamoto lineage. He also styled himself as Iseya Sōzō. And finally, after his death (from eating a toxic puffer fish), he came in receipt of one last name, Hōjuin Reitoku Nichiyū Shinshi, in the traditional Buddhist naming ceremony that is a part of Japanese funeral rites.

Yagō, meaning “house name” is the term for names passed down within a Japanese guild or studio. Kabuki actors famously are known by their guild names. Onoe Kikugorō V, one of the most celebrated actors of the Meiji period, bore the guild name of Otowaya. He was at various times, and in different contexts, also known as Ichimura Kakitsu IV, Ichimura Uzaemon XIII,  Ichimura Kurōemon, Onoe Baikō V and Onoe Kurōemon I, and used Baikō and Kakitsu as his poetry names. (I don't have a poetry name, but my mood name is definitely Summer Cloud.) 

Multi-named kabuki actor Onoe Kikugorō V.
I apply a version of house names to my characters too, in the interim, employing terms like Heroine, Boss, Benefactor, Informer and Victim. Like Apache children, and children of the Warlpiri people in central Australia, who go unnamed from birth until judged strong enough to survive (usually at around two or three years of age), my characters remain nameless until I have done the hard work of dredging the psyche and figuring out who they are. Unfortunately for them, there is no naming ceremony overseen by a wise elder – there’s just me stalking around the house saying the names over and again in my head until I feel they are alive.  




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Personal Names in Historical Fiction - Katherine Langrish

April 3, 2017, 10:30 pm
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'Fair Rosamund' by John William Waterhouse

Here, in the imagination of John Waterhouse, is the Fair Rosamund, leaning out of a rose-bedecked tower window, longing for her lover King Henry II while her cruel rival and soon-to-be-murderer Queen Eleanor peers at her from behind the arras. Most of this is pure fiction. The reason I'm depicting her here is that back in the 12th century 'Rosamund' was an extremely unusual given name. It was possibly unique to this particular woman and was rare throughout the entire medieval period, probably because rosa munda (pure rose) and rosa mundi (rose of the world) were epithets reserved for the Virgin Mary.

One of my pet bug-bears about historical novels set in ‘medieval times' is when authors call their characters by names which are unhistorical for the century in which the story is set: after all, the term 'medieval' covers about half of a millenium during which an awful lot of changes in fashion occurred. Fantasies (I'm sorry to say) are some of the worst offenders, perhaps because a vague medieval ambiance is all the author really wants. This is fine if the story is set in some fantasy-land or fairyland in which dragons dwell, where wicked knights in black plate-armour inhabit grim stone castles at one end of the village, fair damsels live in rose-smothered cottages at the other, honest peasants toil in the fields somewhere in the middle, and the whole is surrounded by darksome woods. But – but! – if you start telling me the wicked knights are Normans and the peasants and the heroine are Saxons, and if you set the story ‘just after the Norman Conquest’, then I feel you, the author, ought to get a grip and do your best to present me with a reasonably accurate picture of the time.

The period of active Saxon rebellion against the Norman invaders lasted till about 1070: after that, any widespread popular resentment, if indeed it existed, was probably short-lived. True, the Normans displaced or eliminated most of the Saxon nobility, but for the peasants, free or unfree, life did not change very much. So in a novel set during the century after 1066, the wicked knight will be wearing chain-mail, not plate armour. Unless he is very important indeed he will live not in a stone castle but in a wooden fort on a mound surrounded by a stockade (as the Montgomery lords did at Hen Gomen, not building their stone castle until 1223). And though the peasants will certainly still be toiling in the fields, the fair damsel’s cottage will have no red roses around the door, since cultivated roses would have been a hugely expensive rarity. Moreover, if she’s a Saxon she ought to be called something like Aelfthryth or Eadburh or Edith – not Mary or Alison, names which won't appear for about another two hundred years. If the heroine is a Norman lady you may name her Rose so long as you spell it Roheis, Rothais or Roesia: but be aware that after the 12th century the name goes out of use for about seven hundred years. 

Here, for the benefit of all of us, is a masterclass from Lord Raglan (1885-1964) in nomenclature for the early medieval period. “Let us start with the Saxons,” he begins,

and note without surprise that they were called by Saxon names. Examples of such names may be found in any history – Godwin, Stigand, Siward, Leofric.  The Saxons were not called William, Walter or Robert, because these were Norman-French names which were introduced into England by the Normans. A pre-Conquest Saxon would be no more likely to be called by a Norman-French name than a modern Englishman to be called Marcel or Gaston.

So much for the Christian names of the Saxons; now to surnames. The Saxons had no surnames. A Godric might be referred to as ‘the timberer’ or ‘the son of Guthlac’, but these were not his names; whether he was earl or churl he had one name, and one name only. This single name was never a place name. Like the Scandinavians, Irish and Welsh, the Saxons never used place-names as personal names. It is clear then that when a Saxon ‘ancestor’ is claimed to have been called Bertram Ashburnham or William Pewse, he must be a fake, since no Saxon was ever called Bertram or Ashburnham or William or Pewse. 

The case of the Normans is different. During their residence in France the Normans had almost completely dropped their Norse names, and had adopted such Frankish names as Richard, Hugh and Baldwin. William [the Conqueror’s] army contained many Frenchmen and Flemings, as well as Normans, but their names were much the same. There was also a contingent of Bretons, who had some names of their own. Of these, Alan was the commonest, though the ancestor of the FitzAlans ... did not come over till the next century. 

In that century [the 12th] a few Biblical names began to creep in, probably under the influence of the Crusades [the First Crusade began in 1095]; previously such names as John and Thomas are not found among either Normans or Saxons.

Unlike the Saxons, the Normans had surnames, but before about 1150 these were personal and not hereditary. William, son of Hugh and lord of Dinard, would be called William FitzHugh and William de Dinard, or both. His son would be called Richard FitzWilliam, and would be called Richard de Dinard only if he owned it. If we find Robert de Dinard succeeding Richard de Dinard, it by no means follows that they were relatives; Richard might have sold, or died without heirs, or been dispossessed.

About 1400 place-names began to be borne as surnames without ‘de’ or ‘of’ before them, and it was then, and not till then, that it became possible for men to be called Bertram Ashburnham or William Pewse. 

From ‘The Hero’ by Lord Raglam, 1936, Ch 2

And what about women? Well, ‘the most popular names’ for the 12thcentury look quite unusual to us now. They include (see this list) Edith, Aethelflaete, Alfgyth, Burwenna, Botilda, Annora, Rikilda, Cecily, Godeva, Ingrid... all much more common than ‘Rosamond’ or ‘Rosmunda’ which turns up only three times between 1206 and 1282. Of course there were unusual names in every century. I really adore the wonderful Dayluue or ‘Daylove’ [OE *Dæglufu], which also turns up three times.

In the 13th century (see here) Matilda comes top of the list, followed by Alice, Agnes or Agneta, Edith, Emma, Margaret, Mabel, Alviva, Isabella or Ysabel, Christiana and Juliana. Most of these are still common in the 14th and 15th centuries, but Joan or Johana now joins the list, as do Katherine and Elizabeth. 

By the 16th century (see here) Elizabeth seems most popular, along – in diminishing order – with Margaret, Jane, Agnes, Isabel, Anne, Alice, Katherine, Jennet, Elinor, Margery, Mary, Dorothy, Ellen, Barbara and Susanna. 
 
Returning briefly to the Fair Rosamund: she was born circa 1148 at Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, became Henry II's mistress probably around 1166, and died in 1176, not yet thirty. Her wikipedia entry calls her Rosamond Clifford, but as Raglan points out, that wouldn't have been how she was known during her life. She was Rosamund, daughter of Walter FitzRichard (aka Walter de Clifford). Her mother was Margaret. And she had two sisters, Lucy and Amice. 

Rosamund, Lucy and Amice: Pure Rose, Light, and Friendship... I wonder which parent it was who chose such fancy names for their three beautiful daughters? 





Picture credits

Fair Rosamund by Waterhouse, Wikimedia Commons 
Fair Rosamund by Dante Gabriel  Rossetti, Wikimedia Commons
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Spring by Joan Lennon

April 4, 2017, 5:00 pm
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One of my sons is living in Indonesia now, and though he is very happy about it, there are a few things that he misses.  (One is IrnBru, but we won't dwell on that.)  In a country where lushness is a steady, year-round phenomenon, he is finding that he misses the changing seasons he grew up with in Scotland.  Which made me think how much I too appreciate the way the year is punctuated by change.  Which sent me on a gentle stroll through wikicommons to look at historical paintings of spring.  Which now I share with you.  (Click on the images to make them bigger.)    





The Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Paul and Johan) 
Tres Riches Heures du duc de Berry: April (circa 1412-1416)





 Sandro Botticelli Primavera (1482)




Pieter Breughel the Younger (1564-1638) 
The Four Seasons: Spring




Vincent van Gogh 
The Pink Peach Tree (1888)


These will be old friends to many of you, but I'd like to add one more that was a) new to me and b) still sneaks in under the "historical" wire, by the Polish artist Leon Wyczolkowski -




Spring (1933)

If you have a favourite historical painting of spring which you would like to add to the gallery, pop a link to it into the comments below.
  


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.
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Wild Irish Girls Sheena Wilkinson

April 5, 2017, 8:00 pm
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I don’t remember where I picked up my copy of Angela Brazil’s The New Girl At St Chad’s. It’s a shabby 1920s reprint, falling to bits now. To Winifred from Mother it says in careful cursive on the flyleaf. I don’t know who Winifred was. I wonder if the book bore only her mother’s name because her father had died in the Great War – given the book’s age, this is not unlikely. Or did her father disapprove of school stories, and refuse to join his wife in gifting something so frivolous to their child? Perhaps he thought Winifred was too old for school stories. Perhaps Winifred longed to go to boarding school and he resented being unable to afford it. Because – yes! He was disabled after his war service and couldn’t earn much… 

You can see why I am a novelist rather than a historian.

My house is full of ratty old school stories. My excuse is that they were my PhD subject. But really, I just like them. Nowadays I seldom reread them – only The Chalet School, the Abbey series and occasionally Dimsie. Oh, and Josephine Elder, of course. But the books themselves are so pretty. Even this cheap 1920s reprint of The New Girl At St Chad’sis reassuringly fat and solid, with clear, if tiny print, and illustrations of no small charm.



In case you are unfamiliar with the story, let me tell you that the eponymous New Girl is one Honor Fitzgerald, from County Kerry, sent to be tamed at an English boarding school after one too many Wild Irish Girl exploits – involving buying a horse without permission. (Horses are never far away from Wild Irish Girls.) An ardent Home Ruler, she objects to wearing the orange hat band that St Chad’s demands. She is Wild and Rebellious and full of Passion. But she is made of sterling stuff deep down, and Makes Good. And so on.

cherchez le cheval! 


In my 2015 novel Name Upon Name, set in 1916 Belfast, I desperately wanted my heroine, Helen, to read The New Girl At St Chad’s. Belfast-born Helen is, like me, from a dual Nationalist/Unionist heritage, which leads her to question her identity and sense of belonging, as I had always done growing up:  ‘I don’t know if I feel British or Irish – I think I’m both, but I don’t suppose that’s even allowed.’ (It would be many years before the Good Friday Agreement would enshrine Helen’s (and my) right to identify as both British and Irish. You can see why I wanted it: Helen wondered why all Irish girls in English school stories had to be wild and rebellious. She wasn’t wild at all – but perhaps that was because she wasn’t a proper Irish girl. Having only ever seen Winifred’s old 1920s copy, I had no idea when the book was published. I hoped it was before 1916. Luckily it was first published in 1912, so there was no problem with Helen reading it, though she would have read an earlier edition than Winifred’s.



When I go to schools to talk about writing books set a hundred years ago, I often bring old Angela Brazil books with me and tell the children that these were the Harry Potters of their time. I don’t know if they quite believe me. They are so decorative, so old-fashioned, so unchildish. But I do hope, as I pass them round, that they give someone the same little thrill they give me, and Helen, and Winifred. Someone a bit geeky, and history-loving, and odd. Someone like me. Someone who might weave stories and grow up to be a History Girl. 










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THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER by Beth Underdown. An interview with the author by Adèle Geras

April 6, 2017, 5:00 pm
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Some time ago,  I downloaded this book to my Kindle because I'd read a favourable review of it in the Times. Full disclosure: I love books to do with witchcraft and I've written on this blog about just such a one by my friend Livi Michael. That was about the Pendle Witches and this novel speaks in the voice of a sister of the infamous Witchfinder, Matthew Hopkins. At the back of the book there's a piece by Underdown in which we discover that Hopkins had siblings but that little is known about them. This gap in the history gives the writer the space to create Alice, elder stepsister of the man who spread terror and destruction in the Tendring Hundreds of Essex and Suffolk during the 1640s. Many women were hanged and before that, subjected to terrible tests to discover whether or not they were witches.

Alice is a wonderful fictional creation who writes with a voice that is clear, unsensational and intelligent and which seems to reach us through the centuries with the power of someone speaking directly to us. It's a voice that carries weight. It is full of emotional understanding. It describes everything in a way that is plain but deep; full of emotion but also unhysterical. The real events that unfold are known to anyone interested in the period, but Alice, speaking about her brother, provides a context and a background that is  most persuasive. Why does a man become a Witchfinder? What impels him? Are there psychological reasons for his dreadful fixation for rooting out  women with supposed supernatural powers? And what of Alice? Why is she returning to Manningtree after the death of her husband in London? 
Others play a part in the disclosures that follow: Alice's mother-in-law, Bridget, whose life has been entwined with that of Matthew's late mother;  Rebecca, one of the accused women; men of varying degrees of stupidity and greed; many others in  the community.

The witches Hopkins brought to their horrific ends are seen to be everything we suspected they might have been: slightly deranged, or eccentric, or strange looking, or gifted in the matter of using herbs and natural remedies for this or that,  but with no more supernatural powers than a chicken. Still (and this is one of the best things about this novel) there is also the unexplained. There is such a thing as ill-wishing: people do sometimes want bad things to happen to their neighbours and their enemies. Above all, there is childbirth and the changes that it can wreak on even the most balanced of minds. Now we call such behaviour 'hormonal'and we know about post-natal depression but that's a very modern concept. It wasn't even properly talked about and understood as late as the 1970s.

Beth Underdown has woven a story of  grief, anxiety, depression, longing, and the love of a sister for her brother together with an account of a febrile time of religious wars and desperately wild and frightening superstition.

The tone of the telling is compelling throughout. You are entirely  in Alice's head, apart from several quotations from historical accounts.  I am not going to spoil anyone's pleasure by leaking the surprise in the narrative, but there is one. Read this book and find out what it is...you won't regret it. 

I asked Beth some questions via email and I reproduce her answers below. The photographs are also Beth's, taken in the Manningtree area.




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'The Bishop of Butterflies' by Karen Maitland

April 7, 2017, 4:30 pm
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King Arthur, 13th Century Illustration
Recently, I stumbled across a delightful legend recorded in the chronicles of Lanercost Priory, Cumberland written around 1216. It tells how Bishop Peter of Rochester was hunting in a forest, but became separated from the huntsman. Lost, weary and hungry, he was relieved when he stumbled upon a palace in the forest and was offered food and shelter. He discovered that his mysterious host was none other than the immortal King Arthur.

Awe-struck, the bishop told the great king that no one would ever believe him if he said that he had seen and talked with King Arthur. Arthur told him to close his right hand and then open it. When the bishop did so, a beautiful butterfly flew from his palm. Arthur told Peter that as a remembrance of their meeting, whenever the bishop wanted to see a butterfly he only had to close and then open his right hand, and one would appear. The bishop returned to his duties and fame of this miracle soon spread, so that whenever men or women knelt before the bishop to ask for his blessing, they’d also ask for a butterfly, and the bishop would open his hand to release another butterfly into the world. Bishop Peter became known as the Bishop of the Butterflies.

1503-1508, by Jean Bourdichon
Page from the beginning of
St. John's Gospel. 'In the beginning...'
It is just a fable, of course, but these legends can be wonderful insights into medieval mind. And I love the idea that a blessing could take the form of a butterfly. Many ancient cultures saw the transformation of the earth-bound caterpillar into a chrysalid of death then its rebirth as the aerial butterfly, as a symbol of death and resurrection, or of the transformation of the spirit. Butterfly wings were said to resemble the flickering of firelight. 

The Celts likened the soul of a baby waiting to enter woman to be born, to a butterfly hovering around her. Although, we should not assume that they thought butterflies really were souls. In the same way, during the medieval period, the spirits of the departed were likened to butterflies, but that does not mean that the majority of people believed butterflies were spirits. Nevertheless, this did later solidify into a superstition in some country areas that it was unlucky to kill a butterfly, because they were the spirits of the recently dead who had not yet entered purgatory and were hovering close to the living, unwilling to depart this earth, or that they were the souls unbaptised infants who could enter neither heaven nor hell.
1410, by Jean Malouel. Madonna and angels
with butterflies hovering above.

In places such as Somerset, the first butterfly of the year was hunted and killed to prevent it ‘coming again’, in other words returning to ‘haunt’ the living. And this perhaps is linked to the idea that the souls of dead children could re-enter a woman’s womb over and over again, preventing her from giving birth to a living child. In Lincolnshire, butterflies were said to symbolise the enemies who were planning to harm you, both known and unknown, and so the first butterfly you saw, you killed and crushed to powder, so that your enemies would be defeated for the rest of the year.
14th century. Children playing and catching butterflies.


One of the minor frustrations of writing novels set before the 17th century, is that our medieval forbears were far more pragmatic than we are. Naming plants and fungi was essential to survival, because they had to be able to identify different plants for healing, food and poisons, and in many cases the name they gave the plant, such as lungwort, told you exactly what its use was for man. But there was no practical function in being able to distinguish one type of butterfly from another, so there was no reason to invent different names for them.

Labels such Red Admiral and Tortoiseshellbutterfly only came into use once people started to collect butterflies for scientific interest. So, unlike mentioning flowers in the novel where the medieval novelist can easily find and use the old names of the period, if we want to specify a type of butterfly in the story we can only refer to its colour. But maybe that’s no bad thing. It reminds us that classifications and names are man-made, and encourage a human-centric outlook on the world. And occasionally, we should stop and enjoy the blessings of a creature just for the beautiful thing that it is.

Thistles and Butterflies
by Otto Maseus Van Schrieck. (1660's)














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The Gem of Your Heart's Desire by Caroline Lawrence

April 9, 2017, 12:01 am
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One of my motives in writing historical fiction is to take the reader back in time. A powerful way of making that world seem real is to fill it with artefacts of the day. An ancient object can tell us volumes about daily life in past times, especially about the different ways people saw the world. 

Children in primary school (my readership) particular love objects they can see, hold, taste, smell and hear. Whenever I go for a walk to the park with my grandsons, they pounce on dropped items such as a used scrunchy, a broken key ring and even an unusual twig. Then they will compare, boast and squabble over these treasures like magpies. 

When I use Roman artefacts to detail a different historical period, I try not to just plonk them in. I try to make them significant and memorable. So I ask myself ‘How does this object illustrate the different sensibilities and/or mind-set of the time? How can this artefact be used to define a character?’ And finally, ‘How could I make this artefact a matter or life or death?’ 

Signet ring
In the very first chapter of my first Roman Mystery, The Thieves of Ostia, a Roman girl named Flavia Gemina discovers her gift for being a detective when her father’s signet ring goes missing in an ancient take on the ‘locked room’ trope: the ‘locked villa mystery’. 

How does this object illustrate aspects of the ancient world? 
It speaks of literacy, identity and bureaucracy. 
How can it be used to define a character? 
The intaglio (carving in a ring) shows the divine twins Castor and Pollux and hints at the cognomen of the owner, Marcus Flavius Geminus. 
It also showcases his daughter Flavia’s gift for sleuthing.
How could it be a matter of life or death? 
Flavia finds the signet ring in a magpie’s nest along with a gold and emerald earring which she sells to the goldsmith. Later, she uses the gold he gives her to buy a dark-skinned slave-girl in order to save her from a dire fate. Nubia will be come her best friend.

Oil-lamp
One of the most basic Roman artefacts is an oil-lamp. A hollow clay vessel, it had a hole for oil and a hole for the wick and almost always some kind of decoration. Mention of oil-lamps remind my younger readers that ancient Romans had no electricity. 

I use an oil-lamp to help define Flavia’s character in Trimalchio’s Feast and other Mini-mysteries. In a Roman Mystery short story called The Case of the Citruswood Table I have her examine the scene of a crime. She deduces from a greasy handprint on the wall that the crime was been committed at night: the perpetrator had been holding a clay oil-lamp that ‘sweats’ oil.
How could I make this article a matter of life or death? 
Simple. Have a breeze extinguish the flame or let the oil run out at a crucial moment in order to plunge the hero into darkness. 

Wax tablet 
Romans used to take notes and make wills on wooden tablets with beeswax. You would use a stylus to write on it. An ancient Roman could sign it with a firm press of their signet ring into its layer of wax. 
In my first Roman mystery, I introduce a feral child whose tongue has been cut out because he witnessed a crime. By book 2, Lupus is learning to read and write. The wax tablet will become his main method of communication and often a matter of life and death. 

Bronze Mirror 
‘Through a glass darkly’, the famous phrase from the Bible, should be translated ‘in a metal disk vaguely’ as this replica bronze mirror demonstrates. 

We see ourselves all the time. In mirrors, shop windows, family photographs and a thousand selfies. From examining a replica mirror like this one I got the idea that identical twins separated at a young age might not have had a clear idea of their appearance. What if one twin grew up in Britannia in an iron-age round house? His only chance to see himself would have been in the blade of a sword or in the reflection of a pond. So he might not recognise his twin even face to face. If one twin were Roman and the other a Briton they might even fight each other! 

Beaker for breast milk 
A clay beaker like this one from the British Museum is a startling reminder that there were no sterilised baby bottles in ancient times. One end was placed against the nipple so milk could be expressed. The other is nozzle shaped; the baby would suck on this end. The grinning actor’s mask on it is apotropaic; it turns away evil and keeps the milk from curdling. Once full, the holes would have been plugged up, probably with beeswax. Or the beaker would have been set on a table or shelf in the baby’s room. Archaeologists think that these beakers would have been dangerous because they couldn’t be sterilised and might have harboured germs.


In my first Roman Quest, Escape from Rome, 12-year-old Juba flees Rome with his siblings – including his baby sister – in the middle of the night. His mother tells him to buy a slave-girl to be a wet-nurse once he gets to Ostia. In the meantime he has a clay beaker full of milk in case the baby wakes at night. But when their pursuers are almost upon them and Juba most needs the beaker to quiet his crying sister, he discovers that his other sister has fed the milk to a stray kitten she found by the Circus Maximus. Life or death!

Sardonyx cameo
My brother-in-law Stephen Pollock-Hill is a glass maker with a passion for cameo glass and cameo jewels. One day a few years ago he showed me (online) this stunning sardonyx cameo of Minerva from the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. It had just been sold at a Christie’s auction for $60,000. 
‘Why don’t you use this in one of your books?’ he asked. 
So I did. 
I made the so-called Minerva Gem one of the most important elements in Juba’s flight from Rome. It is becomes a kind of talisman first for Juba and later, in Britannia, for a red-haired girl who befriends him.

When I teach a simple but powerful story structure to 8-year-olds, I always talk about step 2, the Desire, which is often the engine of the story, the thing that drives the protagonist. Screenwriters often use a concrete object to symbolise the hero’s desire. For example, in the 2014 film Paddington, the eponymous bear’s desire is to find a new home. But you can’t ‘see’ finding a new home, so the screenwriters give us a brief visual symbol. A snow-globe of Big Ben succinctly illustrates Paddington’s desire to travel to London and seek a new home there. 

Gem of Your Heart’s Desire
This month (April 2017) I’m been struggling to finish the first draft of my fourth and final Roman Quest book, Return to Rome. The protagonist of this book is Bouda, the 13-year-old British girl who was raised as a cutpurse in the back streets of Londinium. She has been taught that ‘Gold and gems and pearls are the only thing that will keep you happy in this world.’ So she naturally wants gold and gems and pearls. Most of all, she wants the Minerva Gem. 

But what really drives her? What is her desire? And what concrete object can I use to symbolise it? I closed my eyes and asked my subconscious to find the answer. It came almost at once, a signet ring. Then I sat on my meditation couch and went into my intuitive right brain to write a possible passage that would show (not tell) the reader about Bouda’s driving force. 

She felt him take her hands and when she turned to look at him, he held her gaze. ‘Bouda. My father was the richest gem merchant in Rome. He had gold and gems and pearls. But those things didn’t keep him safe. Or my mother.’ She saw his jaw clench as he tried to control his emotions. ‘The gold and gems and pearls are not the end. They are the means.’
‘The means?’ 
‘They are the means to get what you want.’ He took a breath. ‘Bouda. What do you want?’
‘Safety!’ she replied. ‘To be safe. To not always be on the run.’ She felt her eyes filling with tears. 
‘No!’ he said. ‘That’s negative. That’s what you don’t want. What do you want? What does your heart desire?’ He had been holding her hands and now he lifted the two fingers with the signet rings on them: the Capricorn and the thunderbolt. ‘You didn’t choose either of these rings. But what if you could? If you could carve your heart’s desire on a gem, what would the picture be? What do you really want in this life?’ 

In Roman times, the design on an intaglio hinted at the owner’s name, career or favourite deity. But what is more appealing than a gem in a gold setting with an image that symbolises your life’s desire or passion? 


Last week I met two young fans for tea at the British Museum. Anna and Naomi are about the same age as my protagonist Bouda. Afterwards I showed them some of the objects that inspire my writing and told them about my idea of using a ring to show a character’s desire. I asked what picture carved on a gem would symbolise their heart’s desire. Anna replied a heart (for love) and children (for family). Naomi replied a heart (for love) and animals. I was able to tell them that in Roman times a Cupid often stood for higher love and the dolphin sometimes represented the soul. 

What image carved on a gem would symbolise your heart’s desire? 

Caroline Lawrence is author of The Roman Mysteries and The Roman Quests. The fourth and final Roman Quest, Return to Rome, will be published early in 2018.  

images © RomanBaths, © 2008 The Little Entertainment Group, © Christies, © BritishMuseum
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When Dr Seuss Went Wrong – Michelle Lovric

April 9, 2017, 4:30 pm
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I don’t even want to imagine a childhood without The Cat in the Hat or Yertle the Turtle. I can still recite the first ten pages of The Sleep Book and all of Green Eggs and Ham. As far as I’m concerned, the only person who ever beat Dr Seuss for perfect rhyme is the singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer. (The two of them were obvious soul-mates.)

Dr Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) knew only one failure in his brilliant career as an illustrator/writer, and it was The Seven Lady Godivas.

I would never have known about this book if it hadn’t been discovered by my father, who brought me and my siblings up on a rich diet of Seuss and Lehrer. He drew my attention to The Seven Lady Godivas while I was writing my own book about seven long-haired sisters, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, a historical novel published by Bloomsbury in 2014.
the original cover

So I tracked down a copy of Seuss’s book, and found myself mightily surprised.

The Seven Lady Godivas, subtitled The True Facts Concerning History's Barest Family, was published in 1939, two years after his first book for children, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street.

Genre? Sort-of-historical-fan-fic-graphic-novel-gift-book-novelty-item. Like the books we all know and love, it featured Seuss’s unmistakable black-line cartoons with colour infils, and it was published in a children’s bookish format: eighty pages, hardcover, 8.5 x 11 inches.

But the protagonists are seven well-developed young women to whom that loathsome phrase ‘scantily clad’ can actually be applied. All they wear is their hair. Although all nipples and vaginas are artfully concealed, breasts and buttocks are not: the scantiness of the cladding serves only to emphasise the nudity underneath. The phallic symbolism is extremely ... well, intrusive. Visually, this book is not for children, many of whom, would be embarrassed by the illustrations, I suspect. Nor are there any of Seuss’s irresistible anapestic or trochaic tetrameter. It’s relentlessly prosy.


 Meanwhile, strangely, the storyline has the children’s book incantatory repetitive questy thing going on. The sisters’ names are straight out of child fiction: Clementina, Mitzi, Lulu, Hedwig, Gussie, Arabella and Dorcas.

The Godivas, who live in the 11th century, are committed nudists, even when it snows, because ‘they were simply themselves and chose not to disguise it’. Their father, Lord Godiva, sets off for the Battle of Hastings on horseback but is thrown from the horse and dies. This sets an obstacle in the way of the sisters marrying their suitors, the seven Peeping brothers. Before she can settle down, each sister must undertake a quest for a scientific "horse truth" that will contribute something to the greater knowledge of mankind.

What do the Godivas discover?
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Don’t put the cart before the horse.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
Never change horses in the middle of the stream.
Horseshoes are lucky.
That something can be a horse of another colour.
Don’t lock the barn door after the horse has been stolen.

As a plot, it doesn’t make the heart race, or set the finger quivering with anticipation at the top of the next page, does it?

So what went wrong?

Little as one likes to think it, Dr Seuss did have an adult life. His Godivas were created at time when he was still pursuing his initial career as a writer, illustrator and cartoonist for various American magazines such as Vanity Fair. He also drew advertising illustrations for major American brands and would soon become active as a political cartoonist during World War II.


Appearing as it did, just before the war, the mixed messages and general frivolity of The Seven Lady Godivas met with little enthusiasm. There was no reprint after the first 10,000 copies. The sales were something between 50 and 2500 copies. The book was remaindered, making only one other appearance of which I know … a reprint in 1987, with a different jacket, to celebrate a retrospective exhibit of his work. I could not detect any mention of it in Random House’s Seussville site.
the reprint jacket


 Dr Seuss himself knew that The Seven Lady Godivas was not his finest hour. He regarded it as his greatest failure as a writer and thought it should never have seen the light of day. He was frank in his embarrassment about it. He pilloried his over-indulgent publisher on the endpapers of the book: if you look in one of the upper branches of the tree in his illustration (below) you will see a small bucket of sap, which is labelled ‘Bennett Cerf’, the name of his publisher. (I know it's too tiny to see here).

Nor was Seuss satisfied with the artwork he produced for the Godivas. When interviewed, he said of this book that ‘it was all full of naked women, and I can't draw convincing naked women. I put their knees in the wrong places.’

I'd say that was fair.

And it seems that we can be grateful to Godiva debacle, because it appears to have hustled Seuss away from any thoughts of writing for adults, advertising or any such grown-up pursuits, and back where he belonged: writing for children. He was frequently quoted as saying, ‘Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them.’

(That didn’t mean that Seuss couldn’t write some of the most sophisticated tracts I know in defence of the environment or against racism – he just managed to do it in rhyme, with pictures, in The Lorax and The Sneetches.)

While researching this post, I came across one of those facts you think you should have known: how The Cat in the Hat came to be. Back in 1954, when American was in a junior literacy crisis, the then director of Houghton Mifflin’s education division compiled a list of 348 words that he considered crucial for first-graders to know. He commissioned Dr Seuss to trim that to 250 words and then to write a book using only them.

This brilliant writer achieved The Cat in the Hat with only 236.

For an amusing insight into his early career, including his contribution to wartime propaganda, see this You-tube video– which claims that Green Eggs and Ham arose from a bet with Mr Cerf that Seuss could not produce a book using just 50 words.

Michelle Lovric



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Ten Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Branwell Brontë by Katherine Clements

April 10, 2017, 4:30 pm
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Branwell Brontë, self portrait

This year marks the centenary of Branwell Brontë's birth. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is celebrating with a fantastic new exhibition dedicated to ‘the forgotten Brontë’, curated by Simon Armitage. With this, the recent BBC biopic To Walk Invisible, which focuses heavily on Branwell (read my review here), it seems much is being done to rehabilitate Haworth’s failed literary bad boy. While his reputation as dissolute alcoholic, opium addict and failed artist might hold truth, his place in the Brontë legacy remains fascinating and crucial. Here are ten nuggets I’ve recently learned about him:

1. He was ambidextrous. It’s said that Branwell could write equally well with either hand and could even write two different letters at the same time.

2. He was a Freemason. Championed by family friend John Brown, Branwell was inducted into the Three Graces Lodge on 29th February 1836. He was young – not yet nineteen – but with John Brown’s recommendation he thrived, rising to Master Mason and becoming Secretary in 1837.

3. He was a member of the Haworth Temperance Society. His father, Patrick, was key in establishing the Haworth branch and acted as president from 1834. Branwell became secretary for a time and would have signed the pledge, ‘We agree to abstain from Distilled Spirits, except for Medicinal Purposes and to discountenance the Causes and Practice of Intemperance.’

4. As a child, he collaborated with all three sisters on their writing, spending many hours in the creation of the Angrian and Gondal sagas. Some have argued that Branwell was the key creative force in the household. Scholars have identified clear threads in the Brontë novels that link back to their childhood stories (in fact, they never really stopped inhabiting the fantasy worlds that they created as children), leaving us to wonder if the sisters would have become the writers they did if it hadn’t been for their brilliant, imaginative brother.

5. Branwell hoped to become a painter and planned to study at The Royal Academy. A note, found among his papers, reads: ‘Sir, Having an earnest desire to enter as a probationary student in the Royal Academy, but not being possessed of information as to the means of obtaining my desire, I presume to request from you, As Secretary to the Institution, an answer to the questions – Where am I to present my drawing? At what time? And especially, Can I do it in August or September.’ We don’t know if a final draft of this letter was ever sent, though both Charlotte and Patrick mentioned the plan in other correspondence. It’s not clear whether Branwell ever made the trip to ‘present his drawings’ – there are no letters on the subject in the archives of The Royal Academy.

6. He did, however, give us the only surviving portrait of his sisters – the now famous image that hangs in The National Portrait Gallery, as well as the fragment (usually said to be Emily) that hangs beside it. Originally a portrait of all four siblings, painted sometime around 1834, Branwell subsequently replaced himself with a pillar. No one knows why.

Branwell's portrait, with his own image painted out © National Portrait Gallery

7. In 1837 he wrote to the poet, William Wordsworth. After an unsuccessful stint as a professional portraitist in Bradford, Branwell transferred his ambitions to poetry. Wordsworth never replied to the lengthy epistle, though he did mention it to fellow poet Southey (to whom Charlotte had similarly written for advice), expressing disgust at Branwell’s audacity and saying that the letter contained ‘gross flattery and plenty of abuse of other poets.’ The letter survived and is currently on display at the Parsonage, on loan from the Wordsworth Trust.

8. Branwell is said to have read part of an embryonic draft of Wuthering Heights aloud, as his own work, in a pub near Haworth. Local poet, William Dearden, recalled the event many years later and the story was corroborated by a mutual acquaintance. Both claimed that Branwell’s tale was so similar that when Wuthering Heights was published they recognised it immediately. There are several theories as to how this could have happened but, as Daphne Du Maurier points out in her biography of Branwell, the seeds of Heathcliff can be traced back to the Angrian stories and the siblings often borrowed from each other’s work. As Charlotte put it, Wuthering Heights was ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials.’ Could it have been based on Emily’s collaborations with Branwell?

9. He couldn’t hold down a job. He left a position as tutor for the Postlethwaithe family of Broughton House under a cloud, was dismissed from his post as station master at Luddenden Foot over discrepancies in the accounts and was sacked from a position as tutor for the Robinsons at Thorpe Green where, it's often claimed, he had an affair with the mistress. Branwell’s mental downfall is often attributed to this last doomed romantic entanglement, but whether it really happened, or was a figment of his imagination, has never been proven.

10. He probably never knew of his sisters' publishing success. By the time his three sisters had their first novels published in 1847, Branwell was already seriously ill, suffering from alcohol and opium addiction, and increasingly mentally unstable. The sisters famously kept their identities secret, even within their close circle, and may have decided that it was best to keep Branwell in the dark, for fear of a volatile reaction. Though hard to believe, there is no evidence that he ever knew. It is a sad demonstration of the chasm that had opened between Branwell and his sisters as their stars ascended and his health declined.

A drawing by Branwell, of death at his bedside.

The cause of death on Branwell’s death certificate is ‘chronic bronchitis and marasmus’ (wasting of the body). It’s likely he was suffering from tuberculosis – the same illness that was soon to take both Emily and Anne. Branwell last left the Parsonage on 22nd September 1848. He was found in the lane between the church and the Parsonage, unable to walk home. He was put into the bed he shared with his father and died two days later. 

Charlotte said of her brother 'I seemed to receive an oppressive revelation of the feebleness of humanity; of the inadequacy of even genius to lead to true greatness if unaided by religion and principle. When the struggle was over … all his errors, all his vices, seemed nothing to me in that moment … he is at rest, and that comforts us all. Long before he quitted this world, life had no happiness for him.'

Mansions in the Sky is on at the Bronte Parsonage Museum until 1st January 2018.


www.katherineclements.co.uk
www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks
@KL_Clements
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