Happy Birthday to Us! By Mary Hoffman and various History Girls

Today is the fifth birthday of the History Girls blog and we want you to celebrate with us, so pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of virtual bubbles:

Grab a slice of virtual cake:

and join us in celebrating the highlights since 1st July 2011.

A few stats first:

We have recently passed the 2 million mark as far as pageviews go! Most of our page views are now from the US, followed by the UK, Germany, France, Russia ... But some are from Ukraine and China.


The most popular post ever has been Leslie Wilson's on Maria von Maltzen, in our second year, which has had an incredible more than 92K hits. I keep telling Leslie she should write a book about this German Resistance heroine.


The History Girls are a shifting group and we have retained only twelve of the original twenty-eight members. We have lost Linda Buckley-Archer, Eve Edwards, Nicky Matthews Browne, Katherine Roberts, Teresa Flavin, Barbara Mitchelhill, Mary Hooper, Harriet Castor, Mary Hooper, Theresa Breslin, Louise Berridge, Emma Darwin, Essie Fox, Eleanor Updale, Dianne Hofmeyr, Louisa Young and Katie Grant, all to the demands of their writing schedules.


In the last five years others have come and gone, like Manda Scott, Kate Lord Brown, Laurie Graham and Tanya Landman. For a current list, see the About Us page.


We have had a stellar list of Guests (always the 29th of the month): Tracy Chevalier (twice), Hilary Mantel, Alison Weir, Helen Castor, Frances Hardinge and a bunch of History Boys including Kevin Crossley-Holland (our first), John Guy, Ian Mortimer and Dan Jones.


We have produced one book, Daughters of Time (Templar 2014) and I've lost count of the number of grandchildren. I'm hoping to put together further collections of essays and publishing them at my new independent house, The Greystones Press.


To celebrate our anniversary, some of the HGs are going to talk about a recently read or favourite historical novel or history book. This is mine:

Not a favourite in the sense I think I'll ever read it again but An Instance of The Fingerpost by Iain Pears is a novel I read recently. It's a long book and saw me through a coach trip, a plane journey, several bedtimes, the return plane and bus and as many bedtimes as it took to finish it.

In a sense, it's a murder mystery. It's set in Oxford in 1663, or rather that is when the events of the plot take place but they are told in four different accounts some twenty years later. They concern the death by poisoning of a don, Robert Grove, the investigation of his murder and the subsequent conviction and execution of a suspect.

With each new account we learn that almost nothing is as we at first believed. It is a masterpiece or convoluted storytelling and erudition, with 17th century post Restoration Oxford perfectly conjured up.

I could say more but it's time to hand over to the next History Girl. When you read this I will be sunning myself on the Island of Rhodes. I may or may not have WiFi and access to the site but I'll certainly raise a glass or cup of something in honour of our fifth birthday.


Catherine Hokin talks about …. Legacy by Susan Kay

I recently rediscovered my copy of this wonderful book which came out in 1985 - it was and, following the re-read, remains one of my favourite historical novels and I don't think it has been surpassed for its characterisation of Elizabeth I. The novel tells the story of Elizabeth and her relationships with the Earls of Leicester and Essex and William Cecil - three men whose destinies, as Kay puts it, belonged to her. These relationships, particularly the one with Leicester, are brilliantly drawn but it is the psychological study of Elizabeth and the impact of her mother's death that really elevate the story into something both gripping and terribly poignant. If you haven't read it, I urge you to - it's one of those rich, multi-layered books that will stay with you for many years


Adele Geras says of Broderick's Report by Philippe Claudel (also well-known as a film director)

[It] is a most unusual novel and completely unputdownable. A stranger arrives in a village, some time after the end of the Second World War. The whole village unravels around him, revealing secrets, horrors committed during the War, dreadful things happening in families and in the world. The setting is deliberately vague and this lends the book some of the atmosphere of a fairy tale, or a myth. It's an unforgettable (and now quite a timely) novel and you will thank me for having drawn it to your attention. I hope it's still in print!

Carol Drinkwater suggests: Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea

It is a sweeping saga of love, betrayal slavery and politics set in New Orleans, the Caribbean.

Allende is captivating. Her breadth of research and story-writing skills are on top form here. I read it while staying on the island of La Réunion which remains a part of France and was once an island of sugar plantations and slavery. So, the location added to the very evocative story.


Michelle Lovric says...

This is not my usual period (which is 18th century Italy) but I was enchanted by the new Chris Cleave novel set in Blitz London and on Malta during World War II. It’s called Everyone Brave is Forgiven. Everything about this book reeks of authenticity – the characters, the conversations and the preoccupations. The emotional engagement is searing. It’s not trying to impose anything on the era but has the effect of pulling the reader into the breathless vortex of the nightly destruction of London and her citizens.


We hope you enjoy these and many more wonderful books and much more history with us over the next five years! Thank you to all our readers and contributors for making the blog what it is.  We'll leave the final word to some of our guests:

Happy 5th Birthday, History Girls! I hope you will have jelly and ice cream. Probably port jelly, and ice cream made using a sorbetière and a spaddle...  Best wishes, Frances Hardinge

 Congratulations to all of you and well done. Charles Palliser

Sending very happy birthday wishes to the History Girls' Blog on your fifth birthday. Five years of bringing history alive and making it rock! All the best for the next five years and more, Alison Weir.

A VISIT TO CASTLE RISING by Adèle Geras

 On a perfect April day, when the trees were "coming into leaf/like something almost being said," (Philip Larkin)

 I visited Castle Rising with Stephanie Nettell. The older readers of this blog will remember Stephanie as the Guardian's children's book reviews editor in the days when we had four foolscap pages of children's book reviews a year....those, as they say, were the days.

We'd had a lovely lunch and set off to this castle, which is very close to where Stephanie lives. I had, to my shame, never heard of it before, but I'm always up for visiting a castle - I like them  almost as much as I like  cathedrals and this one, as you will see from the picture below, is the most castle-y of castles...it looks like the kind of thing a child might draw.

It was built in the twelfth century by William d'Albini, to show how much he'd risen in the world on his marriage to the widow of Henry I, Alice of Louvain. I wonder whether that was the reason for the name RISING but I think that's a frivolous idea....in any case it's most beautiful.

 The walls are intact, although the roof no longer exists. Stephanie and I were each given a wonderful hand- held audio device which took us in order through all the rooms in the palace, pointing out fine details and letting us admire everything in  our own time. As a contributor to "DAUGHTERS OF TIME" the History Girls anthology of stories, I was impressed that they'd adopted a 'history girls' approach to the commentary and some of the information was given to us in the voice of a fictitious lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabella. She was the wife of Edward II. As  we  know  he was murdered in a most brutal way.   After his death, Isabella was imprisoned here for more than thirty years and was visited in her captivity by her son Edward III.

 After her death, it became a hunting lodge for the Black Prince and in 1544 passed to the Howard family, who still own it today. 

You can see much of the original fabric of the building and Stephanie and I wondered how the 12th Century folk got up and down those spiral stairs in a hurry and especially at night. They were vertiginous, even with a  rope to hang on to....how did ladies  manage it in long skirts?  Or at night? 

After we left the Castle, we went to see the lovely church of St Lawrence in the village of Castle Rising. It's an idyllic looking  place and the church stands surrounded by lovely houses and a most beautiful set of almshouses.

I liked particularly the font decorated with three cat faces .....

...and this kneeler, which shows the coat of arms of Castle Rising. I've only photographed one lion but the kneeler runs  all along the bottom of the altar rail....there is a long line  of little yellow lions, looking very friendly. 

I do urge anyone near King's Lynn to go and visit this delightful place.  It's quite close to where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be bringing up Prince George and his forthcoming sibling and the shop attached to the Castle is full of wooden swords and small t shirts printed in a  chain mail pattern: they'd like those, as would any child. 

  

Many thanks to Stephanie Nettell for taking me there. 

Maps and Chaps - Celia Rees

When I was at school, this was how one of my teachers defined Geography and History. Of course, the scope of both subjects expands far beyond this narrow definition (what about Chapesses?) and neither are they mutually exclusive. I don't know about other History Girls, but I spend an enormous amount of time poring over maps. I have them in my notebooks, pinned to my noticeboard. They allow me to track my characters' journeys and to get to know the places where they are living. 

In Sovay, the journey was from the English Midlands (it was possible to us a modern map for this - avoiding the M40) to 18th Century London and then to Revolutionary Paris. 

Just looking at the maps is exciting, an adventure in itself. The lettering, the illustration, the way the maps are set out, give a feeling for the time when they were created. The maps differ from period to period, just as countries and counties change and cities grow and develop. The 18th Century maps I referred to for Sovay, are very different from those that I looked at for The Fool's Girl, set two hundred years earlier.

Vissher Panorama

Agas map

The Agas map gives a unique bird's eye view of the Elizabethan city and the Vissher Panorama is just that, a panorama in almost photographic detail. A magnifying glass reveals tiny, accurate  visual details, not just of landmarks but of the everyday life of the people going about their business, where they would be going, what they would have seen and witnessed, all this is a priceless resource to the writer.


Useful as maps are, there is really no substitute for visiting a place, following the streets and alleyways of the old cities makes it much easier to imagine your character there, to bring the place and the period to life. Much of what was marked on the historical map will have been swept away by the intervening centuries, by fire, war, continuous and continuing development, but some things remain. When I'm walking a town or a city, or travelling though a landscape, I remember fellow History Girl, Adele Geras' advice to write about what is still there, rather than what has disappeared. It is always possible to find an old building, a cobbled courtyard, a narrow alleyway that holds something of the period that you are hoping to discover.

In Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, he describes a continuity of use that can stretch back for many centuries. A walk along modern Bankside won't show much that is left from Shakespeare's day but there are pubs, theatres, restaurants, street performers and beggars, the vibrant life of the river, different vessels on the choppy waters, the rubble strewn foreshore, a cormorant drying its wings. Much has gone, but some things are still there.

A page from The Fool's Girl Notebook

Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com

One night stand by Adèle Geras

It's not what you think. A one-night stand can also mean a performance that took place on one night only. That is the original meaning of the phrase. This is a post about me and Richard Burton and it tells the story of an evening at the beginning of 1968 when he and I and John Neville and Donald Houston appeared together on the stage of the Nottingham Playhouse, in a programme of readings and music. I was the music. I feel a bit of a fraud writing about it on the History Girls blog, where my co-bloggers are PROPERLY historical and not, as I am, anecdotal, but I feel justified by the imminent publication of Burton's own diaries and by the fact that 1968 definitely counts as History. It was, after all, even before the Moon Landings. Also, in my researches about this, I've found practically nothing on the internet. I wrote to Nottingham Playhouse who told me they had no archive that goes back that far (which I find most odd) and I feel that if I don't write about it, no one will and a tiny weeny piece of theatrical history will be lost. So, in the words of Dylan Thomas, " To begin at the beginning...."

Let me start with a quote from the Oxford Playhouse website: Returning to Oxford and his mentor Nevill Coghill, Richard Burton together with Elizabeth Taylor, famously appeared in the OUDS production of Dr Faustus in 1966. The couple's generosity initiated fundraising for the Playhouse workshop and The Burton Rooms - later to become the Burton Taylor studio theatre, which is an intimate space for student and professional drama, managed by the Playhouse.

I remember that production very well. I wasn't in it because this was the summer of my Finals but almost everyone I knew seemed to be involved with Burton and Taylor (or Richard and Liz, which is what they were called by anyone lucky enough to be in the show.) They were around in a big way. I think they stayed in a hotel in Woodstock. We saw their car. There was stuff in the papers. Liz was famously beautiful in the production http://www.dameelizabethtaylor.com/faustus_stage.html and Richard was...well, Richard. A handsome young American called Andreas Teuber (who now teaches philosophy at Brandeis University in the USA) played Mephistopheles and the whole thing was the talk of the town for ages. Later on, they made a movie of Dr Faustus and I've found a clip from Youtube which gives you some idea.http://www.youtube.com watch?v=QxaYNnvzC6Y

Time passed. I got married and moved to Manchester. I taught French at Fairfield High School for Girls in Droylsden and one day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from a friend of mine called Iwan Williams.[see footnote at the end of this post.] Iwan was now Musical Director at Nottingham Playhouse and he needed someone to come and provide some songs for an evening of readings in aid of charity. Who, Iwan thought, did he know who would come to Nottingham and sing some songs at the drop of a hat and for no money? The answer to that question was me. The gig was on a Sunday night. It would go on till all hours. I'd have to get the milk train out of Nottingham and that would mean a very late start for me at school on Monday morning. I'd get very little, if any, sleep, because there was sure to be a meal or some kind of get-together after the show. Would the Head give me permission to do this? She did and I set out for Nottingham on the Saturday ready to rehearse all day Sunday before the show in the evening.

Iwan and I had done many shows together and we had a repertoire. We decided on a few suitable songs. At one point, he said, what was needed was an unaccompanied, poignant sort of thing. Any ideas? I thought at once of a Hebrew lullaby which was sung to me as a child. I can't find a cover version of it on Youtube but here is a link to the words, which, as you'll see, is relevant to the story. http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=laylalayla

Richard and Liz breezed into the theatre after lunch. Liz was wearing a mink coat, if I remember rightly. I liked her at once because although she was, as everyone knew from images like this, wonderful to look at...

she was also short and far from thin. Richard called her, affectionately, 'Lumpy' and if that isn't grounds for divorce I don't know what is, but she clearly doted on him and they did seem very happy. He was also shorter than I expected, and very handsome but with pock-marked skin.

His face looked lived-in, but there was the magical voice which made you forget any physical imperfections. John Neville was very slim and elegant and Donald Houston I remember as being affable and charming. Liz disappeared after a while. I have no idea where she went. The men kind of rehearsed but that didn't take long. They were, after all, reading poems and the only thing they had to do was sit on a sofa or a chair and come to the front of the stage when it was their turn. My songs were to be interspersed throughout the proceedings.

Everything went well. The house was full. Then, about halfway through the show, Richard read out some poems written by survivors of the Aberfan Disaster.He read so movingly that the audience was silent when he finished. It was as though no one even dared to breathe. This was my cue to sing the unaccompanied lullaby. When that was over, the applause was deafening and when I went back to sit next to Richard Burton on the sofa we were sharing, he leaned over and whispered in my ear, "Do you know, I think they think you were singing in Welsh." Which, of course, was the reason for the tumultuous applause...the Hebrew lullaby seemed to be linked to those poor children who died at Aberfan and the poems they'd just heard.

We did go out that night and here is the only account of the evening I can find. It comes from a website called THIS IS NOTTINGHAM. com You will notice that I'm not mentioned, which is one of my reasons for writing this post. I was there. I danced with Richard Burton. I took the milk train out of Nottingham on no sleep and taught French for a full day. That's the sort of thing you can do when you're young. I couldn't do it now. Others who were there that night are dead, so mine is the only account. I wish Nottingham Playhouse had an archive. I wish I could have live-Tweeted the evening. In those days, we didn't even think of taking photos. This post is the next best thing.

A footnote: While I was composing this post, I wrote to David Wood, children's playwright and adaptor extraordinaire. David was a leading light in Oxford theatrical circles in our day and keeps a very nifty little archive himself. I asked him about Iwan and whether he knew anything about his time at Nottingham Playhouse. He didn't as it happened, but he sent me this message back,which I'm quoting in full. "The only thing of interest I can tell you is that he (Iwan) later became the musical director at the Newcastle Playhouse, and in the early 70’s was the md of ROCK NATIVITY, the musical I wrote with Tony Hatch. It was directed by Gareth Morgan (father, incidentally, of the television writer Abi Morgan), and the band featured a local teacher, who played the bass guitar. His name was Gordon Sumner. He – Sumner – fell in love with the actress playing Mary, Frances Tomelty. They married. She persuaded him to leave teaching and follow a musical career. He changed his name to Sting, and the rest is history!"

SUMMER AFTERNOON by Adèle Geras

Henry James thought that these two words, Summer Afternoon, were the most beautiful in the language and it was on a perfect August day that we visited Lamb House in Rye. This was Henry James's home from 1897 to 1916. He bought it after the failure of his play Guy Domville as a kind of refuge and there he entertained everyone who was anyone in literary life of the time. The front hall of the house is hung with small portraits of his visitors and it's quite a list: Max Beerbohm, Rupert Brooke, Ford Madox Ford, George Bernard Shaw, and many, many others. Edith Wharton was a friend of his. Mrs Humphry Ward, too, and on and on. They all came to see him in this warm and elegant place, with its most beautiful garden, and I wish it were possible somehow to overhear some of the conversations that went on in the oak-lined living room, or sitting among the roses.

James wrote many of his later novels here, in the Garden Room which was destroyed by bombing in 1940. There are examples of his handwriting displayed in Lamb House and it's illegible. Towards the end of his life, he employed a secretary to type his manuscripts and it was fun to read a laminated copy of his typed letter announcing the installation of the first telephone in Rye. His number was Rye 51.

James was a very handsome youth indeed and even in his later years, he was a good-looking chap, though one photograph shows him looking a little more like a nightclub bouncer than a famous writer. We weren't allowed to take photos inside the house but I took one of the writing room while standing in the garden and it shows something of what the interior is like.

The National Trust runs Lamb House now. There are tenants who live there and look after the house while allowing the public to visit it twice a week, during the afternoon. Rumer Godden was one such tenant, from 1968 to 1973 though there's no mention of her anywhere in the house. This is a great shame, I think, as she was a wonderful writer for both adults and children. On the day we visited, you could have a cream tea on the lawn and though we didn't do that, I photographed a table and tried to imagine Edith Wharton, dressed magnificently, discussing the latest plantings with The Master.

As Henry himself put it: "There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea." He and I are of one mind in this matter. He didn't know much about horticulture but he loved a garden. "I am densely ignorant," he wrote in 1898. "Only just barely know dahlias from mignonette." Still, the garden that was created at Lamb House is glorious. Here are two photographs which don't really do it justice.

E.F.Benson lived in the house for many years after James's death. Anyone who has read the Mapp and Lucia novels knows that they are set in Rye and that they offer a unique, hilarious, and sharply-written account of the eponymous heroines and their battle for the heart and minds of Tilling (Rye) in a series of books adored by their many fans. Perhaps these stories have fallen a little out of the mainstream but for their admirers (and I'm one of them) they shine like a good deed in a naughty world. Noel Coward loved them and so did W.H Auden and their author, even though he was quite acerbic about Rye and its citizenry, was Mayor of the town three times. He also wrote ghost stories, which I haven't read, but Mapp and Lucia are his best-known creations. He makes a world entire and when you're in the town and in particular in Lamb House (Mallard House in the novels) you step into it. We went up to the top of the tower of St Mary's church and it's true that you can see into the Lamb House garden. It's easy to pretend you're Mapp spying on Lucia doing her callisthenics. The tower, incidentally, provided a couple of Vertigo moments but the view from the top was well worth it.

We had tea in a delightful tearoom called Cobbles. Their coffee and walnut cake is wonderful, and they have an enviable dresser.

We had a perfect summer afternoon. Visiting Rye is in many ways like stepping into the past...the 1950s, say. Our friend Philip remarked that not a single brand name from the High Street has an outlet there, and that hadn't struck me but it's true. I loved the windows, both of shops and private houses and here, to end with, is a selection of some of them.

How to destroy the Doge’s Palace in one hour – Michelle Lovric

Recently  I booked the Secret Itinerary in English at the Doge’s Palace for my sister and nephew. The tour takes in the archives, the torture chamber, the Inquisitors’ room and the attic prisons known as the Leads, where Casanova was confined and from which he craftily escaped. I’d also heard about a really good young guide who recently gave this tour to some friends; they came back enthusiastic and wanting to know more. She’d been lively, friendly and brought the dark passageways and mysterious rooms to life.

It sounded like excellent displacement activity for someone with deadlines on two novels. It had been at least fifteen years since I’d done the Secret Itinerary myself, so I decided to go along myself, with the excuse that I wanted to make sure I could still personally recommend this tour to friends who come to Venice.

But sadly, this time I involuntarily inflicted on my family the worst specimen I have ever encountered in a long career of guided tours that takes in an excruciating camel journey through the desert by the pyramids with a compulsive bottom-pincher leering from the beast roped up to mine, a driving tour around Athens with a terrifying sociopath and, in New Zealand, four life-sapping hours with an unreconstructed racist who absolutely insisted on teaching us the life cycle of the kiwi fruit when we’d booked to hear about colonial architecture.

I knew that things were not going well the moment our Doge’s Palace guide arrived: an older woman with magenta hair and a toad-swallowing expression. Where was lively young girl my friends had enjoyed? I began to worry. Then the toad-swallower opened her mouth … and it all turned out worse than I could ever have imagined.

The beautiful, fascinating Doge’s Palace was described by Ruskin as 'the central building of the world'. This guide single-handedly turned it into an uncomfortable, irrelevant, hateful place for twenty-four people who were bright enough to find out about the special tour in the first place and get past the arcane booking system – and who were on those counts alone deserving of being treated as intelligent beings.  

After our guide had finished with us, we were running for the exit, not wanting to see the Doge’s Palace ever again. She was rude, boring, bullying, patronizing, officious and just plain nasty. Even her body language was more Prison Guard than Person Working in the Hospitality Industry. One female visitor became not unnaturally claustrophobic in Casanova’s cell and asked to stand near the door. Visibly trembling and pale, she was yelled at and harried until my sister and I intervened. Like all bullies, when confronted by opposition, the appalling guide slunk off to bully someone else.

The guide spent far more time warning us what we were not allowed to – petty and stupid things, endlessly repeated in an insulting, droning tone – than in delivering information. The only eye contact she made was in fierce glares, accompanied by the irritable clapping of her hands at anyone who was standing where, in her opinion, they should not be.

She made the classic writer’s mistake of telling us what she was going to tell us, before doing it. This was so pronounced that it began to seem that she was deliberately doing it in order to spoil the next stage of the tour.

Worst of all she made no effort to entertain or engage the interest of the group, aged ten to sixty, I’d say. She turned the whole experience into a punitive one for everyone, patronizing the adults as much as the children. Someone tried to ask a question in the archive room. It was a good question, but the response was so unpleasant that no one dared ask another. Questions were not welcome. Our job was to shuffle obediently in and out of rooms as fast as possible so she could discharge her superficial pellets of information as quickly she could and be free of our undesirable company.  

At one point, I lifted a notebook from my bag to write a domestic reminder to myself (being so intensely bored with what she was saying that I’d stopped listening). She shrieked ‘No notes!’ so loudly that I dropped my pencil. I thought of telling her ‘Non c'e' nulla di cio' che oggi ci ha detto che valga la pena di essere scritto.’ (You haven’t told us anything today that was worth writing down.) But it would have been lost on her.

The moral for historical fiction writers is clear – if you are guiding someone into the past, you must do so with empathy. You mustn’t patronize and you must attempt to engage with your audience. You are the bridge between the past and the present. Make the transit smooth and enjoyable. Take into account the fact that you have the duty, and the honour, of representing the past to your readers. Do not subject them to an experience that will turn them off your patch of history for ever. Share your pleasure, not your misanthropy.

There must plenty of other jobs where a pleasure in bullying and a hatred of the world could be usefully deployed: but let us have the great monuments of the world reanimated for us by people who love people!

Now, just to show that the mean guide did not really destroy the Doge’s Palace, here is a video of Mike Oldfield’s eponymous song from his 1999 album, The Millennium Bell.  

And you can also read about a wonderful guided tour enjoyed by Adèle Geras here

Has anyone else had any notable guiding experiences, good or bad? Do share.

Michelle Lovric’s website

 Illustration: William Harding Smith: Palazzo Ducale (Porta della carta)