Time and Boudica's Daughters - Katherine Roberts

Tomorrow, Templar will publish our very first History Girls anthology Daughters of Time, edited by Mary Hoffman, with short stories from authors of this blog who write for young readers:

My story is first in the book by virtue of being about the 'daughter' who comes first on the historical timeline - Boudica, warrior queen of the Iceni - so I'm sneaking in here a day before publication to write one of the first posts on the book's blog tour.

Boudica's story is a brutal one, containing material at first sight unsuitable for younger readers - both her daughters were reported to have been raped by the Romans, but rape is obviously not something I could include in a children's book, so my first challenge was to work out how to tell the story without losing its power.
 
This is not the first time I've written a short story about the queen of the Iceni. My first attempt "Empire of the Hare" was published in a small women's literary fiction magazine QWF in 1998, when it was also shortlisted for the Library of Avalon Geoffrey Ashe Prize.

In this version, which was published for an adult readership, I used the elder daughter to tell the story and had her fall in love with the Roman tax collector, meaning that she had already lost her virginity behind the stables with her Roman sweetheart before the rape scene. This was long before the days of ebooks, when Boudica was spelt Boudicca (and sometimes still Boadicea - the spelling in common use when I first came across the red-haired warrior queen at school, and therefore always the most romantic one in my mind). I also named her daughters differently, since this was pre-internet days and no popular names existed to confuse people... or if they did, I was not aware of them. Historically, of course, the girls' names are not recorded, and neither is the queen's childhood name - she received her popular name Boudica, which means 'Victory', when she led her people against the Romans.

statue of Queen Boudica in London

The young readership Templar proposed for Daughters of Time gave me the perfect opportunity to use Boudica's younger daughter to give the story a new slant. In "Tasca's Secret", my heroine Tasca is removed from the violence before it begins by her young Roman friend Marcus, who sneaks her into his father's camp when the soldiers attack Boudica's village. The younger daughter is therefore held as a hostage but not mistreated. Later, when the queen captures Marcus to take her revenge, Tasca defies her mother to save her friend.

If you know a young reader who has been inspired by Queen Boudica's story, I came across a wonderful illustrated poem about her over at History for Kids, which is written with the same age group in mind and uses humour to brighten up the history.

To me, this is one of the joys of writing historical fiction. There is always a new way into an old story - whether it is a different viewpoint, or a fictional character (such as the boy Marcus in "Tasca's Secret") who can be introduced to breathe new life into historical fact, or a different style that can be used to tell it. There is even a bit of leeway with well-known historical characters, especially if their ages are flexible, as with Boudica's daughters.

I know the other History Girls who contributed to this anthology have taken their own unique route into their chosen stories, which they'll be telling you more about at various stops on the blog tour. I, for one, am looking forward to reading all the stories when the anthology is published tomorrow!

~~~

Daughters of Time (edited by Mary Hoffman) includes stories by Penny Dolan, Adele Geras, Mary Hoffman, Diane Hoffmeyr, Marie-Louise Jensen, Catherine Johnson, Katherine Langrish, Joan Lennon, Sue Purkiss, Celia Rees, Katherine Roberts, Anne Rooney, and Leslie Wilson.

Katherine Roberts writes historical fantasy and legend for young readers. Her latest series Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is also available from Templar. More details at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

A Good German? by Eve Edwards

For me, part of being a historical novelist is challenging myself with the question: in this era, what kind of person would I have been?  On what side would I have fought?  Roundhead or cavalier? Whig or Tory or radical?  Mod or rocker?

Recently, thanks to a rummage through an Oxfam bookshop, I picked up Joseph Kanon's The Good German.  It is set in Berlin in 1945 and falls into the spy thriller category but also taps into some intriguing historical themes that go far beyond a good page-turner.  I can highly recommend it for its portrait of a ruined city and the early days of partition.  I was particularly fascinated because the Nazi round up raises one such difficult question for me. Had I had the misfortune to be born a Berliner in those years, what kind of German would I have been?  I hope that I would make all the right choices, but a good novel like Kanon's confronts me with the very real possibility that I would not.

It is easy to imagine everyone on the 'enemy' side was bad - it helps make the history books cleaner, more white hat/black hat as Hollywood prefers in its superhero movies.  But history isn't clean or simple.  Last week Deutsche Welt ran an article by Anne-Sophie Brandlin  - translated and reported in The Week under the strap line: Grow up, America - we aren't all Nazis.  The writer is tired of the lack of nuance with which the events of WWII are portrayed and argues that Berlin 'is packed with reminders of the past' whereas in Washington in the National Mall there is not a single memorial to non-American victims of the Vietnam War.  I don't know if that is true and the contexts are very different, but I get the point Brandlin is trying to make.  Most Germans are not slow to acknowledge their 20th century faults but they also need to be allowed to portray recent history in its full complexity without being accused of trying to bury ugly truths.

That was why it was intensely moving this week to read Clive James' essay on Sophie Scholl in his  Cultural Amnesia - an amazingly broad and erudite essays collection on 20th century thinkers.  If you thought he was only a TV critic, think again.

Sophie Scholl with brother Hans and Christoph Probst,
leaders of the White Rose resistance - photo from US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Back to Sophie.  Is her name familiar to you?  It wasn't to me, but she deserves to be up there with Anne Frank as one of our heroes.  She joined with her brother in the White Rose resistance movement - young Germans who knew the Nazis were evil and did what they could to register their protest.  She was executed at age 21 by the Gestapo in 1943, along with her brother and other members of the group.  The most remarkable aspect of her bravery was she was told she did not have to die - she could claim she was misled and be spared the guillotine. Instead she chose to stick by her principles and is reported by the chief executioner to have died more courageously than anyone else he had led to the block.  I'd like to declare her an unambiguous good German.

We are running a theme of cranky ladies this month on the blog but Sophie is too great to be saddled with that title. She was 'cranky' in the sense that word is often used to attack women: those who refuse to fit in, make themselves awkward for their society.  Good for you, Sophie. I can only hope I would display a fraction of your courage if ever I had to make such a difficult moral choice.

www.eve-edwards.co.uk