Sat Nav -- 1908-style by Sheena Wilkinson

My iPhone map app updated today and now contains singularly useless – to me – information about transport in Japan.  I find no charm in this unasked for, space-hogging data.  

But I find a great deal of charm in this little book.

I found it, appropriately enough, in a National Trust bookshop – Contour Road Book of Ireland 1908. The Edwardian equivalent of a sat-nav, I suppose. Pocket-sized, designed primarily for the cyclist though inevitably of interest to the early motorist, its 250 pages contain lists of routes with details of each road’s gradients, surface and notes on anything of interest along the way.

It’s cute, with its gilt-edged tissue-thin India paper and cross-sections of 2,000 hills, but it’s also fascinating and revelatory, about much more than the state of the roads.   The Preface explains why this volume took ‘eight years to prepare’: ‘Great difficulties have been encountered … as the Maps of Ireland, when the work was started, were hopelessly misleading.’ (Interested readers might seek out Brian Friel’s play Translations for more on that subject.)

Some of the entries read like found poems:

LONDONDERRY TO LETTERKENNY

Description: Class II.

The road has excellent surface,

though with a tendency to be bumpy

for the first 3m;

after that it is better.

The road commands some fine views

of the Donegal mountains.

Irish milestones.

Irish milestones? Ah yes, ‘Some of these are Irish Miles and some English, but these are nearly all noted in the book. The tourist will find that Counties Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Antrim and Armagh use English; the other counties either have both, or only one or two roads have Irish M.S.’ One Irish mile was one-and-a-half English miles. It’s not thatdifferent from today, I suppose, when I drive across the border and exchange the Northern Irish signs in miles for the Republic’s signs in kilometres.

And let’s not forget that in 1908, ‘Irish time is 25 minutes later than Greenwich time, but in cross-channel telegrams the latter is used.’

What about the people? ‘No Englishman or Scotsman can ever understand the feelings that sway an Irishman.’ Ireland in 1908, after all, with Home Rule gathering momentum, was a no less complex than Northern Ireland today: ‘a nation fighting out its own destiny in its own way, handicapped by the very powers that make it loveable.’

The characters in my work-in progress, set in1918, will be travelling some of these roads, climbing some of these hills and wrestling with some of these issues of national destiny. I’m often asked how I do research – I’m sure all History Girls are; and the answer is, in many different ways. But this, the stumbling across little gems which tell us so much more than they meant to, is one of my favourites. There are Contour Road Books of England and Scotland too – I may have to start collecting them.

Maps by Imogen Robertson

In a fit of post-Brexit, 'let's try and do something useful' at the end of last month, my husband and I repainted the living room. It was at least distracting. It also involved moving round great piles of books which lead to all sorts of rediscoveries. We live in a small flat which means book space is at a premium, so I felt slightly guilty when I rediscovered this.

Not that you can tell from the picture, but it's a big beast of a coffee table book, heavily illustrated, thick glossy pages - you know the sort of thing.

I was trying to be brutal and set aside as many books as possible for the charity shop, but I couldn't bear to part with it. It has no real research value, I've read it, I wouldn't use it in teaching and it wasn't written by a friend so it should have gone, but there is just something particularly inspiring about maps.

There are all sorts of maps in our house. I have an old print of the county map of Durham above my desk, just in case I suddenly forget where I am from. I have notebooks printed with early 20th century maps on the cover to scribble in, we have two atlases in the living room (one historical, one just geographical), and then I have the ones I've used for my research. I must have spent hours hunched over Rocque's 1745 map of London writing the Crowther & Westerman series.

Then I have a folder filled with plans of Paris showing the expanding waters of the 1910 floods, and Edwardian tourist maps of the city showing approved restaurants and hotels. There are hundreds more filed away in the computer, some with character routes drawn on, or set in folders with photographs or drawings that show particular buildings or corners.

The Maritime Maps, like the atlas are in the inspiration category, nothing stimulates the imagination more, I think, than reading unfamiliar place names and travelling across the oceans with your fingertips. The research materials I found vital to give me a real sense of knowing a place. They organised my materials, stimulated my memory when I had managed to get to the places concerned for the research, and, I hope gave me the confidence and authority to convince readers that I knew these places, and could navigate them like a native of the time and place.

Then there are the imaginary maps. I have one in Circle of Shadows showing my fictional 18th century statelet of Maulberg in the Holy Roman Empire. Looking at it now, it reminds me of the treasure maps I used to make as a child, a mixture of the real and the imaged - here is the campsite (real), here is the edge of the wood (real), here is the fairy ring with the treasure buried under the turf in the centre (who knows?)

I was talking to a friend who has just begun to write their first novel last week. They sent me an opening scene, and though the writing was pretty good, there was something a bit fuzzy about it and the village they were describing. 'Have you drawn a map?' I asked. The answer was something like 'I want to be a writer not a cartographer', but I realised almost as I was speaking how important that putative map was.

To write convincingly you need to know the world of your characters, you need to know their place in the world, in their community and that's true even if that community is entirely fictional. To draw a map of the village in question, my writer friend needed to make all sorts of decisions or discoveries about how the place and people were organised. Was the church in the middle of the village, or on the outskirts for the convenience of the local lord? Where were the good houses and the bad, the pub and the market place. Was it surrounded by woods or arable land? What did the characters see when they looked out of their windows? Who lives next door to your character? Is there a school? Where does the road lead to? Where do they get their water?

My friend began to latch on to the idea, and I could almost hear the village appearing in their mind as they spoke about where things might be. They began placing scenes and characters within it, and I realised they were doing imaginatively what I often do with my research, feeling out the edges and opportunities of their fictional world and inhabiting it as a writer.

The next draft read like clear water. Fuzziness gone and characters real and alive.

I feel less guilty about keeping the map book now.

www.imogenrobertson.com

OCEANS AWAY AND OAKUM by Penny Dolan

The story I’m working on needs a character removed for a good while. Death is not possible, as I need an eventual re-union.  So I introduced a nasty planting of stolen goods, and that was that. She was off to her temporary destination.

Idly, I’d imagined a bit of “transportation” - she’s a sturdy, determined individual – but then came a big awkward fact. 

During the time of my novel, transportation was no longer happening. The colonies were no longer willing to accept Britain’s inconvenient criminals. Please note that I don’t take the subject of transportation lightly – just the plotting pieces.

So I was stuck. What can happen to my character? I don’t want to keep that part of the plot “floating” any longer, yet I couldn’t picture what would happen. She wouldn’t be stowed in a hulk. I didn’t see her, somehow, in the solitary of  a Panopticon prison like Millbank. I needed to be able to imagine these small scenes and make them part of the story building.

So today I visited Ripon’s Liberty Prison Museum - above - , and feel she’s in for much oakum-picking. She will have the hard task of unravelling old, tarry rope into “corkscrews”, then rolling the rope across her thighs until it unravels, then pulling it against the iron hook at her waist until it becomes soft enough to be used to caulk the seams and boards of wooden sailing ships.

The ex-policeman at the desk also clarified the local sentencing process so I can now sort out a couple of swift scenes, and i have the name of someone to go to if I need to check more details.  Today's visit helped me un-knot my own knotty problem, although I’ll still keep checking on the facts.

Writers often go to much greater lengths to stand fiction on fact, to create a realistic world. 

For example, I’ve just read Lindsay Davis’s first two novels about Falco’s adopted daughter, Flavia Albia, complete with maps of ancient Rome so that readers and historians can trace the locations.  Or were the maps as much for the writer herself? Mapping a location – real or imaginary - is a useful writing technique.

Then tonight I’ll be finishing Christopher Fowler’s “A Full Dark House”, which is a quirky, many-bodied crime thriller, with Bryant and May, detectives with the Peculiar Crimes Unit. The novel's strength, so far, has been the darkly powerful view of the London of the Blitz, especially the Palace Theatre, and a host of other details. 

Bryant, observing St Paul's ruined dome and the fiery sky beyond, mentions there's another model of St Paul's elsewhere in London. Do you know where it is? I’m delighted - so far - to find this book is the start of a long series. I feel as if this is a man who is having fun with his research.

 

 I know there are many more novels that offer places from the past to writers and to readers. I wonder what setting you’ve enjoyed writing? Or what novels have offered you the best-realised settings?

Penny Dolan

Scouting locations by Eve Edwards

One of the joys of being a writer is that you have a job that includes all the best roles in film making.  The script writing part is obvious.  As director, you plan the story, the look of your concept, set the tone for the whole.  You cast your movie without having to worry about including the latest flavour-of-the-month hottie even if he is not suited to the part.  The only fly in the ointment preventing this being a one person show are the equivalent of the studio producers and distributors: the publishers and the shops. But, hey, I suppose us authors have to be kept in check somehow, don't we?

In the gallery at the Globe

One of the jobs I enjoy most is location scout.  Sometimes this is straightforward: I have an idea and go and seek out the places that I know I am going to use.  For example, when writing about Tudor London, I took the decision to include the first theatre - helpfully known as The Theatre - in the third book of the series.  I had the star-crossed lovers idea at the heart of the book.  The heroine was to be a daughter of an early English Puritan household so her opposite is, naturally, one of the players.  In this era, Puritans denounced the stage as the work of the devil and blamed them for all social ills and the earthquake of 1580 with which I start the book (The Rogue's Princess).  The Tudor theatre is not hard to find thanks to Sam Wanamaker's Globe.  Although located north of the river, The Theatre was the same structure that was dismantled and reassembled as the Globe (see a brilliant account of this in James Shapiro's 1599), so a trip to the South Bank was obvious.

Chocks away!

Some research trips take a little more planning.  I'm now writing a two part series for the anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  The first part, called Dusk (out Summer 2013), entailed a trip to the Somme area.  If you are interested in this period, I can't recommend too highly the museum at Peronne. As well as a clear narrative, they have full kit for different kinds of soldier, officers and men, laid out as if for inspection and lots of very personal items that bring the individuals into focus.

 For the second part Dawn (which I'm in the process of researching at the moment) I intend to use some of the experiences of the early aviators.  Well, naturally, there was only one thing for it: find out what it was like to fly in an open cockpit.  I went up in a Tiger Moth in June - designed in the Twenties so fairly close to the planes my characters would use.  I hope you like the full Amy Johnson look.  And to prove that, yes, I really did go up, here's a shot from the air.  It may look as if I'm the pilot but in fact I'm in the observer's seat - the pilot sits behind in these two-seaters.  Alex, my guide for the day, entered into the spirit of the thing as we looked for 'Jerry' over the Cotswolds.

These were planned locations but very often the chance-met location inspires the story that follows.  We are fortunate in the UK to live in a country seeded liberally with little historic gems.  The manor at Snowshill owned by the National Trust provided me with unexpected inspiration when I went there with my family on an Easter egg hunt.  It suggested what life in the ranks below the highest would have been for Tudor gentlemen.  It wasn't the manor itself but the hidden corners that spoke to me about the texture of this life - here the studded nails and horse shoes.  This set the tone for my inner director and was used in The Other Countess.

Perhaps you have a favourite location.  If so, do tell me about it.