Books of Stuff, by K. M. Grant

Social networking is here to stay.  Yet neither blogs nor tweets can take the place of the old-fashioned commonplace book on whose pages the owner jotted down thoughts, observations and quotations that happened, at a particular moment, to seem important or interesting.  We still scribble down thoughts, observations and quotations:  they're the lifeblood of Facebook and Twitter.  But it's not the same.  For a start, electronic jottings are all typed, and one of the wonders of the real commonplace book was the handwriting, usually beautifully neat to begin with, then turning more and more scribbly as the entries proliferated amid cigar ash and spilled coffee.    This is George Lyttleton's handwriting, taken from his 'large, blue, hardback' commonplace book.

George Lyttleton's handwriting

Some people think that commonplace books are the same as scrap books:  I don't agree.  To me, scrapbooks are blank books into which you stuff things:  recipes torn from newspapers, cards from people you once knew, old letters not important enough to go into the special old letter box, old leaves picked up somewhere or other, old invitations, old almost anything flat and papery.  The blank leaves of a scrapbook are seldom written on:  they just serve as a binding for everything else.

Commonplace books are not bundles of stuff.  They bear the actual imprint of the owner.  And they're mis-named.  As George Lyttleton asked of his friend Rupert Hart-Davis, 'why is it called a commonplace book when practically nothing in it is commonplace?' (GWL, 2002).   In his own commonplace book, he noted the breeding habits of rabbits (p.29) and a Japanese student's interpretation of the instruction 'stand on your own feet' as 'I must float on my own bladder' (p.58).   Does anybody out there still keep a commonplace book?  I do hope so.

Another type of book long out of fashion is the visitors' book.  Our visitors' book is, after the husband, children, dogs and budgie (the budgie? who am I kidding) the thing I'd want to rescue from a fire.   My husband and I have kept it from the day we were married.  Nobody has to write a remark - I hate doing that myself - only a signature from each person - none of this signing for the whole family - and the dates of visitors' arrival and departure.  Apart from being a highly effective weapon when arguing over the last time we saw so and so, our book follows the trajectory of our lives through the signing of names:  my late parents-in-law and mother;  my father; nieces and nephews from faltering splodge to elegant scrawl; friends from afar; whole pages for christenings, weddings, funerals.  We also have three memorable pages from three memorable visits, filled with the outpourings of Russian pianist Alexander Kobrin. He came, alone, aged 17, to stay for the Scottish Piano Competition.  It was his first adult victory (he was the youngest competitor), and he went on to win a string of other competitions, culminating in the Van Cliburn.  I'm glad he ignored the 'name only' rule.  His pages brim with him.

Alexander Kobrin's entry in our visitors book

And what opportunities for raising danders visitors' books supply!  The rule in our house (as in my parents') has always been that once you marry, if you return to the parental home, you sign the visitors' book.  Our older daughter, married last year, didn't turn a hair.  Friends turned several hairs on her behalf.  'Bloody hell, Katie!  She has to sign to visitors' book in her own home?  That's awful!'  My rather weak protestation that she now has her own home did not placate.  In some eyes, I'm now an Officially Awful Mother.

People who stayed for Eliza's 21st

Anyhow, in our love-affair with electronic media, let's not forget the books in which we scribble.   Facebook and Twitter are all very well, but who wants their thoughts, observations or quotations archived in some impersonal whirring computer barn across the Atlantic rather than lodged in a bookcase, or even stuffed in a drawer?   And if you don't want to forget your visitors, get them signing.  We keep our visitors' book by the front door. If nothing else, it provides something amusing, moving and occasionally perplexing (who WERE those people?) to flick through whilst waiting for a taxi.




Lyttleton, G. (2002) The Commonplace Book of George Lyttleton, York, Stone Trough Books

Interesting Times, by K. M. Grant

Martin Amis has said that if September 11 2001 had to happen, he was not sorry it happened in his lifetime.   I'm sure I needn't press the point that he was not, in any way, suggesting that 9/11 was a good thing.  He was just saying that if it had to happen, this paradigmatic shift in the notions of war and peace, of safety and danger, of power and submission, then he wanted to see, to experience, to watch the unfolding aftermath in all its fascination and confusion.  In The Second Plane, a compilation of journalism and short stories, we can follow him following it.

There have been many paradigmatic shifts in history, some acknowledged at the time, some only recognised much later.  A later recognition was the Battle of Poitiers in 732, during which Charles Martel beat the army of the Umayyad Caliphate and halted the Muslim takeover of Europe.  Had Charles Martel lost, it's possible I wouldn't be writing this:  we might be living under a Taliban theocracy.  Closer to our own time, contemporaries knew the defeat of Hitler marked some kind of turning point.  I'm always sorry for those who died not knowing who'd won the war.  Such an important thing to know.  The tearing down of the Berlin Wall was another turning point.  High on the 'non-recognition at the time' list, however, must be the Norman Conquest.  'Not much happened this year' wrote one monk in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on the 1066 page, or words to that effect.  Well, he kens the noo, as Scots like to say.

For obvious reasons, historical novelists are drawn to 'interesting times'.  We place fictional characters amid the action of real events for the very good reason that people like to imagine, or have imagined for them, what it must have been like to be part of something huge.  Equally, the individual experience of the great event can bring the great event to life.  Reading historical novels also an easy, though untrustworthy, way of learning stuff.  And this brings me to a great book I almost missed because it's not on a 'books set around a great event' list.

If you have an iPod, can I recommend downloading E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, narrated by the author himself?   Many readers may know the book already.  If you don't and you care to read it or listen to it, you'll experience America at the turn of the 20th century as you've never experienced it before.   Through its interweaving of lives, both real and fictional, I know Harry Houdini and like him, though his mourning for his mother is vaguely unhinged.  I know J. P. Morgan - spookily dislikable, and Henry Ford.   But most of all, I understand 'the value of the duplicable event' to use Mr. Doctorow's description of the mechanisation of production, and how this changed our perception of everything.

Pace Martin Amis, after listening to Ragtime I'm with Logan Pearsall Smith:  'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading'.   Now that I'm so hooked on audio books I may never go anywhere again.

Calling up the cows - K.M.Grant

After GB’s Olympic triumph, I was going to write about dressage this month, a sport which commentators insist is mysterious and faintly peculiar. Horses doing ballet! Riders doing not much! Well, there you go!

Dressage is neither mysterious nor peculiar. It evolved through pretty straightforward considerations of life and death: your warhorse needed to be smart, obedient and pretty damned nifty to get you out of harm’s way. You needed to teach it to move sideways, backwards, upwards, the full spin, the half spin, and all this instantly and without hesitation. You get the picture. Since you can't teach tanks dressage, after horses fell by the wayside as far as war was concerned, these elegant lifesaving manoeuvres became a competitive equine discipline.

It’s harder than it looks. I was once given a lesson on a horse being trained for the Spanish Riding School. My legs said ‘trot’; it understood ‘half pass’; my legs said ‘medium canter’, it understood ‘wild gallop with motorbike corners’. I dismounted hot and humbled. ‘Serves you right,’ said my own horse primly. ‘Dressage is for real riders.’

Anyhow, my mind teaming with dressage moves and smart things to say, I then discovered something truly horrible. In the huge clearout last year, when we moved the kitchen in a domestic earthquake worthy of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, I seem to have mislaid (please please not discarded) all my dressage books. Indeed, I can find none of my horse books at all; no blue Pony Club Manual 1966, no Keeping Your Pony at Grass (whose cover was disconcertingly yellow – why not green?), no What the Farrier Does given to me, I think, by Father Christmas.

Nothing for it, I'm reduced to cows - the animal kind, not human. In a fit of mental abstraction (I wasn’t even pregnant) I once bought a book about cows – The Complete Cow, by Sara Rath. It’s a great book, a mine of historical and not so historical cow information. Did you know, for example, that ‘soldier’ in Sanskrit, means ‘one who fights about cows’? To my surprise, I’ve consulted this book quite often. Once you realise how important cows have been in the whole of man’s history, it begins to feel rude to gloss over them in a historical novel. Rude and historically negligent.

The cow is not just an animal. As William Dempster Hoard reminds us, ‘the cow is the foster mother of the human race. Form the day of the ancient Hindoo (sic) to this time have the thoughts of men turned to this kindly and beneficent creature as one of the chief forces of human life’ (Rath: 17). We have mythical cows like the Minotaur (I’m counting bulls as well); we have holy cows in India; we have beribboned cows in Liechtenstein (the ribbon goes to the winner of the summer cow beauty pageant) and we have human cows courtesy of the ancient Roman wedding where the woman says ‘You are the Bull, I am the Cow’.

Every family in every historical novel depends on the cow: cows are always a feature. But is a cow ever The Feature, even in a modern novel? I don’t think so. Cows are comic, as in Doreen Cronin’s Click Clack Moo (2000) or David Milgrim’s Cows Can’t Fly, or even subversive as in Munro Leaf’s 1936 story of Ferdinand the pacifist bull. But they’re never heroic. I think there’s a historica gap to be filled. My family had a cow, disconcertingly called Butterfly. Here’s a link to her picture. She was a prize cow, but no beauty, at least she doesn't seem a great beauty to me even bearing in mind that in 19th century portraits, cows always look like oxo cubes. Nevertheless, I think of her sometimes, and of all those family cows that, for centuries and centuries, stood between a child’s life and death: a bit like dressage after all, so it turns out.

Rath, S. (1998) The Complete Cow, MN, USA, Voyageur Press, Town Square Books.
Picture of cow from Fotosearch Stock Photograph RF (Royalty Free) 

Taking the Lives of Others, by K. M. Grant

One sentence in a work in progress can take hours of research.  My sentence reads: 'The executed don't pay for rope, more's the pity.'  Then panic.  In 1794, is this true?

In medieval times, the executed's family paid for the faggots for burning. I have seen one of the bills -   I think it was Thomas Cranmer's (1489-1556), he who was executed by Mary for 'refusing' the pope.  You'll remember that Cranmer had previously signed a recantation of his reforming ideals, and put the hand that signed those recantations into the flames first.  To burn properly, he required more faggots than the executioner had bargained for, so extra faggots were added to the pyre and the invoice.  In the illustrations, everybody seems to be sitting very close.  I hope the onlookers got at least a little bit singed.

But did anybody ever pay for rope?  And if so, did they still pay in 1794?  Dig dig dig goes the novelist.  Tick tick tick goes the clock.   One sentence, almost three days' work.  Well, I say work, but for me, research is real pleasure and writing is the work.  So, three days' pleasure investigating a truly horrible subject, the more fascinatingly horrible the more I read.  In an earlier blog, I wrote about the execution of my ancestor Francis Towneley, who was hung, drawn and quartered for his Jacobite support.  Physical horror.  I wasn't really prepared for the mental horror these new researches uncovered.  Yes, there's worse than a good clean evisceration and a head kept in a basket on the dining room table.

Executioners, so I learned from 'The Executioner:  His Place in English Society' (Robins, 1964) have always been reviled.  In England, you might be awarded damages for being mistaken for a hangman.  In Spain, the executioner's fee was thrown for fear of contamination through direct physical contact, and their house was painted red.  Not only that, after the garrotting (the Spanish method of choice - there were special machines called, unsurprisingly, 'garrots') the executioner was himself always arrested, tried and acquitted because he'd committed murder 'by virtue of my office'.  Weird how justice works.  But what about this.   Since being an executioner was seldom a career of choice, you could have your own capital sentence rescinded if you volunteered to hang others.  Thus, so Robin (p.235) tells us, 'in the seventeenth century a man named Derrick was sentenced to death but pardoned and employed to hang twenty-three others'.  Then there's this story, which really got to me:

'In the days of Charles !!, a father and his two sons were tried at Derby Assizes for horse-stealing.  All were found guilty, but the bench of judges offered to pardon any one of them who would consent to hang the other two.  The offer was first made to the father, who violently refused it.  The elder son was then asked if he would kill his father and brother to save himself, but he also declined.  The offer was, however, accepted by the younger brother, John, who apparently showed a certain aptitude for this work for he was eventually appointed to the post of hangman for Derby and a few neighbouring counties, holding this office to a very old age' (pp. 235-6).

Now, the father and older son may have been rotters.  As a form of final redemption, they may have begged the younger son to do the deed to save himself.  But to show an 'aptitude' and carrying on to a 'very old age'?  John!  For shame!

Executioners were a mixed crew:  some showed more than John's 'aptitude':  they enjoyed the work.  Take Mississippi's Jimmy Thompson, for example, who swapped the career of highway robber for that of state executioner, taking 'great delight in travelling about the state killing people in his portable electric chair at $100 a head'; or Richard Brandon, a London bigamist, who 'prepared for his calling at a young age by decapitating cats and dogs'.  Those not so keen often took to the bottle, though even without the bottle, no eighteenth century felon wanted to be topped by John Thrift, whose work, drunk or sober, was so 'sloppy and inefficient' that he often required 'two or three blows of the axe' to finish the job.

Enough!  And where's the answer to my initial question?  The answer is no, in 1794 the executed didn't pay for his or her own rope.  It's not absolutely clear who did pay, but I expect the executioner did out of his salary (£40 a year in the early 1700s).   He could then sell the rope as a souvenir or, for a small fee, display it in the pub.

At the end of my researches, I read the following, which gave me a jolt:  'In England today, according to evidence given before the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, the average fee paid [to] the hangman is £10' (p.239).  The piece was written in 1964 - that's after my birth.  Perhaps it was supposed to be comforting to learn that by this time the rope was burned immediately after the corpse was cut down, but somehow it wasn't.

See how one sentence can lead to a lot of hanging about in unsavoury company?  You're not alone in wondering why I don't just leave the beastly thing out.

Robin, Gerald D. (1964) The Executioner: His Place in English Society, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep 1964) pp 234-253