:

And some catkins on the hazel tree

:

This was a self-planted sapling I brought up from Herefordshire years ago, which has grown into a fine tree, covered with catkins every year, but never a hazel nut in sight. I thought they were supposed to be self-fertile, but not this one. Our hazels in Herefordshire keep the local squirrels well fed, and occasionally there are a few left for us to pick up. When gathering them off the ground, I always think of that bit in Wordsworth’s Preluderecalling how as a boy he used to go nutting. Looking back with some shame he remembers how they hacked away at the trees, oblivious of the damage they were doing. I also found a clump of Hellebores, the ones sometimes called Easter roses:

It’s a pity that you can’t see their full beauty unless you crawl like an ant on the ground:

When will it be possible to start planting vegetables? I do have some broad beans in our unheated greenhouse, which I started last November. It took weeks and weeks for them to come through, but about half have done so at last. They’re quite hardy plants, but I daren’t plant them outside ye

t:

Yesterday we bought more seeds:

When I can face the freezing greenhouse, I’ll start off the courgettes, butternut squash and leeks, but the carrots, spinach and mangetout peas will have to wait until the soil is less hostile. It’s been the weather for hasty knitting up of warm accessories. Our Victorian house, with its large rooms and high ceilings, gives us plenty of space, but does not have central heating, so it’s freezing! (I hate to think what our fuel bills for extra electricity and gas fires will be like.) I finished the chunky wool jersey, which isn’t as fine as the yarn I normally use, but it was quick to knit and very warm:

I decided I needed another pair of fingerless mitts. My eldest daughter introduced me to these useful accessories a couple of years ago and I can read or work on the computer in them. These were made from some leftover wool in my stash:

As the cold always seems to get one round the neck, I knitted this cowl (made up the pattern as I went along). A cowl nowadays doesn’t mean a monk’s hood but a sort of joined-up scarf which can sometimes also be looped over the head.

This yarn is gorgeous, mostly alpaca, left over from when we were once lucky enough to have a French Phildar shop locally, now long gone. I love making things out of leftovers –something for nothing

!

Now I’ve made another cowl in a different style, also from remnants and adapted from a pattern in this book, Cowl Girls: The Neck’s Big Thing to Knit:

And in the snow and sleet, I’ve been wearing those three hats I made a little while ago:

On the writing front, I’ve been working on two books at once (slightly confusing), doing some further editing on The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez. At the same time I’m continuing my research for the new book, set in the East Anglian Fens in the seventeenth century. As a result my reading this month has been almost entirely non-fiction.

Free-Born John, by Pauline Griggs was wonderful. It is the definitive biography of John Lilburne, leader of the Levellers, and it really opened my eyes, as previously I had a rather simplistic and vague idea of what he, and they, were trying to achieve. It was their enemies who called them Levellers, accusing them of attacking property and trying to take all land and goods into common ownership. This was an absolute lie. (Though it did to some extent apply to a different group, the Diggers.) Lilburne wanted the reform of the monarchy and the episcopate (removing some of their powers to Parliament), so he was first prosecuted in the reign of Charles I. Then with the increasing powers of Parliament, its purging by Cromwell’s party, the seizure of power by Cromwell and the abolition by him of representative government, Lilburne saw his hoped-for reforms turn to ashes. He was repeatedly betrayed by Cromwell, who pretended to be his friend but ensured he was imprisoned and exiled, declaring that he wanted him dead. (Yet one more reason to hate the two-faced dictator Cromwell!) Lilburne was appallingly treated by the courts, though loved by the common people. One of his aims was increased manhood suffrage. Not universal (servants and employees were to be excluded) and not for women, but it was a reform not achieved until the nineteenth century. His wife was also a remarkable woman, supporting him through the most tremendous suffering, and being ill-treated and imprisoned herself.

Quite different, but equally intriguing, was The Rise and Fall of Merry England, by Ronald Hutton. This charts religious and secular popular festivities over the period from 1400 to 1700. It covers everything from the decoration of churches for Christmas and Easter and ‘church ales’ (a boozy equivalent of the church coffee morning, which raised funds for the parish) to Robin Hood plays, mummers, and morris dancers. And a lot more celebrations most of us have never heard of. During the fifteenth century these reached a joyous peak, but the sixteenth century saw repression and restoration, swerving from Catholicism to the break with Rome, to stern Protestantism under Edward VI, to restored Catholicism under Mary, to more liberal Anglicanism under Elizabeth (with the Puritans waiting in the wings). Come the Stuarts in the seventeenth century and there was quite a lot of jollity, but the Puritans gained a stronger voice, fulminating against both heathenish and papistical practices, which culminated in the severe repression under the Protectorate. After the Restoration of Charles II, quite a few festivities were also restored, but things were never going to be the same again. Reading this reminded me of a fascinating book I read when researching for my doctoral thesis:

The Feast of Fools by Harvey G Cox examines the festivals in which society is turned upside down, Boy Bishops appointed, masters exchanging place with servants, people cross-dressing – celebrations which go back to the Roman Saturnalia. I managed to track down a secondhand copy in the States, so I’m just waiting for it to arrive.

I couldn’t find an image for my next book, and again mine is a secondhand copy with no dust jacket, not worth photographing. The Family in the English Revolution by Christopher Durston explores the relationships within families before, during and after the English Civil War. There were the many tragic cases of families ‘By the sword divided’ – father against son, brother against brother. And there are the cases, as there are in any war, of children growing up without fathers or not recognising fathers who returned after years of absence. As also in war, women took on men’s roles, running businesses, gathering in the harvest, becoming the breadwinner. There were cases where a husband was reported dead, the wife remarried, and then the husband turned up again. All the sort of stories which emerged during the two World Wars in the twentieth century, but in a seventeenth century context.

It’s always interesting to read what other writers and well-respected literary critics have to say about the novel. James Wood is both and his short How Fiction Works is shrewd and insightful. He is concerned above all with the realist novel and in particular the way it has developed since Flaubert’s innovations. He addresses such matters as character, metaphor, dialogue, language and detail, but his focus is on realism. To what extent can fiction mirror reality? Can characters in a novel be perceived as real, when we know that they are mere constructs of words? For that matter, how can we know that we are ourselves ‘real’, except insofar as we relate to other people? His analysis ranges from Aristotle to Barthes, from Homer and the Bible to Graham Greene and John le Carré. He takes issue with the way Barthes dismisses fiction as a convention which can never convey anything real, and comes up with this perceptive argument: ‘The real reason for the French obsession with the fraudulence of realism – and with fictional narrative in general – has to do with the existence in French of the preterite, a past tense reserved exclusively for writing about the past, and not used in speech.’

Thus in French the very language of fiction is divorced from the language of life. Yes, that hadn’t occurred to me before, but I do agree.

As I said, very little fiction this month. (Reading academic tomes in bed – how sad is that?) However, I have read and immensely enjoyed Time’s Echo by Pamela Hartshorne. It opens powerfully with a bound woman being drowned as a witch in York in 1577, then switches to the protagonist, Grace, who nearly drowned in the Boxing Day tsunami. Grace, who sees herself as practical and footloose, has come to York to wind up the affairs of her godmother Lucy, whose heir she is and who has herself recently drowned in the same river. Grace begins to have unsettling experiences, strange perceptions of sight, sound and smell. What she thought was just a particularly vivid dream about the woman Hawise drowning turns into a repeated experience which is not a time-slip in the conventional literary sense. She does not return to the past as herself, but inhabits Hawise’s person and life. Hawise’s last agonised thoughts are of her young daughter, and this agony reaches out across the centuries to Grace, who has her own unresolved fears about the fate of a child. This is an hugely compelling novel and has lurked in my mind ever since I read it.

I have just begun Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, The Last Runaway, about an English Quaker woman caught up in the Underground Railway which helped black slaves from the southern United States escape to Canada in the nineteenth century. This will be interesting after Seeking Eden, with its slave-owning Quakers in the seventeenth century. I’m not far into it yet, and will report next month.

Ah, the sun has just burst out! Can it be that Spring will come after all?

Happy Easter to you all!

Ann

Early in the month we did have one family birthday party for a two-year-old Swinfen. I had made him this small bear:

And we also gave him a copy of Ophelia Redpath’s The Lemur’s Story, which I mentioned last month. He’s a bit young for the story yet, but was immediately engrossed in the pictures:

Though he did pause to blow out his candles:

Having had a much milder winter than most of the country, we suddenly had one day of heavy snow, waking up to several inches already lying.

It then snowed steadily for all the rest of the day.

I took these pictures quite early.

By the time the snow was really deep the sky was so overcast I thought nothing much would show up on a photograph.

Did you see the programme on ‘The King in the Carpark’ – an account of the discovery of the bones which have been established as those of Richard III? I found it disappointing. Too much sentimental reaction and too little fact. We had just the briefest glimpse of the reconstructed head while the camera lingered over emotional reactions. I do also wonder why these reconstructions always have large ears and noses and slightly crossed eyes! Though the nose wasn’t as large this time as some of those in the ‘Meet the Ancestors’ programmes.

I first read Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time when I was a student and have been convinced ever since that Richard Didn’t Do It. The title is taken from the old saying ‘Truth is the daughter of time’. In the novel, Inspector Grant, Tey’s detective, is laid up in hospital and to pass the time decides to investigate the mystery of the Princes in the Tower. He soon has friends scurrying about tracking down contemporary documents which make a compelling case for the murders in fact to have been carried out by Henry VII.

Richard had no need to kill the boys, because evidence, backed by a ruling in Parliament, established that his brother’s marriage was bigamous, so that his children were illegitimate and therefore could not inherit the crown. Henry had the act repealed and married the boys’ sister (now legitimate) to strengthen his very dubious claim. That’s a brief summary, but Tey had carried out meticulous research which she incorporated into a hugely readable novel, which I can’t recommend too highly.

As I write, I’m looking forward to a second programme tonight on the discovery of Richard’s remains, which promises to be more scientific. It is being said that the remains will be reburied in Leicester cathedral, but I do have a greater sympathy with York’s claim. He was Richard of York, and the city and county remained faithful to him even after his death, calling him their ‘dear lord’. I’ve always felt that the constant restlessness in Yorkshire and the North throughout the Tudor period had its roots not only in local Catholicism but also in an engrained loathing of Tudor usurpation of the crown.

So in this atmosphere of Ricardian revival, I’ve been rereading The Daughter of Time and, while searching for it amongst my disorganised and chaotic books, I also found Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, which has been one of my most beloved books since I read it first at about 14. It is a favourite of so many people – witty, shrewd, poignant, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious, and a moving story of the first experience of adult emotions. A truly memorable book.

I’ve also read the two further books in Ann Turnbull’s Quaker trilogy.

Forged in the Fire takes the story to the London of the Great Plague and the Fire, and likeNo Shame, No Fear, splits the narrative between two first-person point-of-view characters: Susanna at home in Shropshire and William trying to make his way in a London suffering these two terrible disasters. When Susanna loses touch with William, she sets out herself for London and the story carries on through to the Fire. Once again Turnbull explores unflinchingly both the persecution of the Quakers and the terrible suffering of the people of London, although the story ends on a positive note with the birth of Susanna and William’s first son, Josiah.

The third book in the trilogy, Seeking Eden (the title taken from the writings of William Penn), starts sixteen years later and is partly told from the point of view of Jos (Josiah), who is rebelling against his parents and to some extent Quakerism. However, the whole family has decided to escape persecution by emigrating to Penn’s new colony of Pennsylvania and set up their printing and bookselling business in the newly established town of Philadelphia. Here Jos has the opportunity to start again and find a reconciliation with his parents and his faith.

There is, however, another, darker strand to the story, developed through the second narrator, Tokpa, a young African who is captured by African slavers, sold on to European traders, and transported across the Atlantic to the West Indies, where his story becomes entangled with Jos’s, with profound consequences for both. Once again Turnbull does not mince her words in recounting Tokpa’s suffering. A powerful book, with some surprising revelations about Quakers and slavery.

I’ve also been reading with great delight Stephen Moss’s Wild Hares and Hummingbirds: The Natural History of an English Village. This is an enchanting book which takes the reader month by month through the year with Moss’s meticulous observations of the wildlife within one small parish in Somerset. I’ve learned so much from this! The book is also enhanced by wonderful scraperboard illustrations at the start of each month by Harry Brockway. Moss’s delightful descriptions of his local birds, both resident and migratory, sent me to my copy of Birdsong by Jonathan Elphick et al.

Do you know this amazing book? Well, it’s more than a book. Attached to the right-hand edge is an electronic device. You look up a bird – say the blackbird. There it is in stunning photography and detailed description. A number is also given for its song. Call up this number on the electronic device, press the button and you hear a recording of the song. Astonishing! For each of the 150 birds there is at least one song. Some also have separate calls and alarm cries. I adore this book. For a long time I have wanted some accurate recording of birdsong, as I find the attempts to express birdsong in words totally unhelpful. Here in one package is a beautiful collection of photographs and all this wonderful song.

At the same time I have been continuing my research into the seventeenth century and the Fens, including working my way conscientiously through Keith Lindley’s Fenland Riots and the English Revolution, a scholarly study which dissects in minute detail just what went on during the draining of the Fens and the enclosure of common lands there during the seventeenth century. One is left gasping at the cruelty and injustice of it all – the bribery and corruption, the packing of committees and the judiciary, the trampling underfoot of traditional rights enshrined in law, the denial of legal hearings and redress to the common people. In short the whole unsavoury scam. Plus ça change!

The bitter irony is that, after the traditional way of life had been destroyed for the local people, the drainage schemes were found to have totally failed by 1700, and it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that ‘successful’ drainage was achieved. Successful only so far, because the peaty moorlands dried out so much that the ground level dropped and dropped, yard after yard, so that today these areas lie far below the level of the rivers.

By contrast, Rex Sly’s From Punt to Plough takes a rather different line. A local farmer and historian, he sees the drainage as a good thing, as it produced more arable land which now provides much of the nation’s food. Well, he and his ancestors have benefited. He does concede that one must have ‘some sympathy’ for the indigenous people, whose livelihoods were destroyed. Quite.

On a lighter note I’ve been enjoying Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Old Stories, traditional tales from East Anglia and the Fens. What a talented, versatile man – novelist, poet, storyteller. Some of these tales are very familiar, such as ‘The Pedlar of Swaffam’, but Crossley-Holland enhances and elaborates them, so that they become all the richer. Others were completely unknown to me, like ‘Tiddy Mun’ and ‘The Green Mist’. The stories are interspersed with poems and snippets of information, the whole thing illustrated with what look like woodcuts by John Lawrence.

Then – Oh, joy of joys! – I found my copy of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels. A few months ago I searched everywhere but could not find it. (I really must get my books under control.) Then suddenly it turned up in a place where I knew I’d looked before. Do we have a boggart or a poltergeist in the house? Or was it the hand of destiny? Because of course it is set in Cambridge, on the edge of the Fens. (I’d been reading about some of the fenland rioters who tried to reclaim their land being imprisoned in Cambridge castle on bread and water.) If you know Fitzgerald’s work, you’ll know that she manages to compress an enormous amount into a small space.

You could read The Gate of Angels at a sitting, though I prefer to savour it slowly. Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow of St Angelicus college when a cycling accident brings him into (very close) contact with Daisy Saunders, a working class almost-nurse from London. His life will never be the same again. Nor will Angels (St Angelicus), a college so misogynistic that no female creature must cross the threshold, an inflexible rule since its foundation 500 years before. Even a female cat must be driven out. Until, that is, Daisy breaches its defences through the gate of Angels. I love the way Fitzgerald catches the atmosphere of this pre First World War male enclave, where the dinners are magnificent, but:

The college had never been thoroughly heated or dried out since its foundation, but Fred, who had been brought up in a rectory, one of the draughtiest places on earth, saw no reason to complain…Being too late for dinner in Hall, he took a knife and cottage loaf out of a cupboard and began to make himself toast…Out of a carved oak locker on the opposite side of the fire from the coal-scuttle, but distinct from the bread-cupboard (and breathing out a different smell of mould when opened), Fred took a few sheets of the college paper. He shook his fountain pen to see how much ink was left in it, and wrote: ‘Dear Miss Saunders’.

Those few sentences tell us so much about Fred, the college and the period. Such a wonderful writer and sadly missed. She was also very kind to me, sending my publisher marvellous comments about my books, which meant all the more to me because I admire her work so much.

Till next time,

Ann

Some years ago we inherited this seventeenth-century carved oak coffer. I’ve always loved it. In fact I love all old well-made furniture, because it brings us so close to the people who have used it in the past. Coffers were the all-purpose household containers for centuries until wardrobes, chests-of-drawers and built-in cupboards were invented. They held everything from clothes to books, from plate to dried goods. This is a small coffer, which has lost its original lock. The hinges have been replaced a long time ago. It is still useful for storing towels and bedding, but I often wonder what it has held in the past.

About a month ago, we discovered this much larger coffer in a local antiques centre. It dates from around 1680, has its original lock (but no key), and even its original hinges. These are of the type called ‘ring’ or ‘loop’ hinges, and are hardly more than hefty split pins. Inside, it retains its candle box.

The carving is very fine all the way round and the wood positively glows with centuries of loving polishing. The most amazing thing was the price. I was able to knock this down by 10%, which meant it cost less than some modern footstools. As you can probably tell, it is very large and must either have come from quite a grand house or else was a major piece in a more modest home. Who used it in the seventeenth century? The eighteenth? The nineteenth? The twentieth? What has been kept in it over those 333 years?

I remember as a child being required to write stories about ‘The Adventures of a Penny’ and suchlike, but no teacher ever offered us anything as evocative as this coffer.

Earlier this month we went to see the film of The Hobbit. Now there’s an evocative book, recalling childhood. When I heard that the plan was to make three (!) films from it, I’m afraid I reacted quite cynically. It was all very well making three films of The Lord of the Rings. That was written as a trilogy. But The Hobbit is a single tightly constructed book, and I couldn’t see any reason for violating its literary integrity except for the pure mercenary purpose of making more money out of it.

I’m afraid I’m still of that opinion.

We opted for the 2-D version of the film, as so many people had reported that the 3-D version was overwhelming and headache-inducing, and I can now see why. The scenes in the Shire and inside Bag End were very well done and kept quite close to the book. The singing of the dwarves in Bag End was one of the most moving in the whole film. But the film was stretched to breaking point by introducing scene after scene after scene of excessive violence, merely to pad out one third of the story to the required length. This is, after all, a children’s book, but the film is rated as unsuitable for under 12s. What? Well, of course, once you’ve sat through all that gratuitous violence, you understand why. Tolkien’s writing is much more subtle than this. The only scene in the latter part of the film which I felt was true to the spirit of the book was the one in the underground cave between Bilbo and Gollum. That was extremely well done and managed to catch that strange mixture of fear, horror and poignancy which is found in the book. The acting throughout was excellent, when the actors were allowed to get on with the story, instead of being chased around the screen by computer generated monsters.

I also have a personal niggle, dating from the first LOTR film. There, and subsequently, Lothlórien is depicted as terribly claustrophobic. From the novels I have always had a sense of sylvan peace, space and tranquillity. The precipitous gorge used in the films just doesn’t square with my impressions from the books. Rant over.

My reading this month has been very largely more seventeenth century research (nothing to do with buying the coffer, though perhaps it made me more susceptible to its beauty). I won’t bore you with some of the heavier tomes, but Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War: A People’s History is a joy. She has dug up all kinds of intriguing sources – letters, diaries, memoirs, pamphlets – which reveal personal experiences of the war from both sides and all classes. I have been savouring its 627 pages slowly. However, it does irritate me that she doesn’t cite her sources for individual passages. There is a good section on further reading at the end, but when I come across a particularly revealing quotation, I want to know where it comes from. Still, if you are interested in the period, this is a good place to start.

As well as the non-fiction reference books, I’ve been rereading some novels set in the period.

There’s Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt. I’ve never taken to the two central characters – one a violent bully, the other a sly manipulator – but she catches the public chaos and personal inner confusion of the time very well, when families were divided, class structures fell apart, religious faith was both questioned and asserted uncompromisingly.

Set soon after the war, Geraldine Brooks’s novel Year of Wonders deals with the plague of 1665/6, which was carried to the Derbyshire village of Eyam in a ‘parcel of patterns’ from London. With heroic self-sacrifice, the villagers decided to isolate themselves in order to stop the plague spreading, and many of them died. This is a true, painful and humbling story which Brooks recast as a novel, retelling it from the point of view of both real and fictional characters. Confronted by this terror, some find unexpected strength, others disintegrate, seeking out scapegoats on whom to vent their tragic anger.

Some interesting YA novels are set in the same century. Julie Hearn’s The Merrybegotmoves back and forth between the story of a cunning woman’s granddaughter in a village in the West Country in 1645 and the Salem witch trials of 1692/3, a world away and nearly half a century later, when one of the original characters ‘confesses’ what may or may not have been the truth.

No Shame, No Fear by Ann Turnbull has an unusual setting amongst the early Quakers (1662). The Quakers (or Friends of Truth, as they called themselves) were one of the many sects to arise during the Civil War, so at this time they were very new and much mistrusted, particularly after the Restoration, when the dissenting sects were experiencing fierce persecution. The Quakers’ habit of assuming all people were equal – to the extent that they would not remove their hats to show politeness – was regarded as politically dangerous, possibly even treasonous, while their belief that godliness was an inner light within everyone (no need for a priest or preacher) was shocking to traditionalists and Calvinists alike.

I must also reread An Instance of the Fingerpost by Ian Pears (for the umpteenth time), four different, conflicting accounts of a murder in Oxford shortly after the war (1663), brilliantly misdirecting the reader in four distinct voices.

What a century! Fascinating to study, but how thankful I am that I didn’t live then!

At the moment my sixteenth-century novel, The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez is ‘out there’, but no news to report as yet.

Another book I must mention has been written by the wonderful artist Ophelia Redpath, whose work I’ve mentioned before (I own several of her paintings). The book is The Lemur’s Tale, inspired by a painting by her grandfather of a couple with their pet lemur.

Ophelia is a hugely talented artist, original, quirky and humorous, and this children’s book (her first) is gloriously illustrated on every page as the baby lemur, captured in the jungle of Madagascar, escapes and tries to find somewhere safe to hide.

You can find Ophelia’s main website here:

http://www.opheliaredpath.co.uk/

There is a separate link for The Lemur’s Tale,

www.zhibit.org/opheliaredpath

where you can see the illustrations from this delightful book and order prints. When you click on the thumbnails of the prints, you need to use the password littleghost, but the website actually tells you this. I went rather overboard on these, and will need to save up in order to have them framed! At the moment they are available as large prints, but perhaps she will eventually issue them in smaller sizes, like the ones to be found on her main site. This is one of my favourites:

I promised some regular readers that this month I would include the recipe for ginger marmalade that I found amongst my mother-in-law’s cookbooks. It came from her Welsh mother, but may date back further. I prefer to call it Ginger Preserve, as it has no oranges in it.

Ginger Preserve

5 lb apples or crabapples, roughly chopped, including skins and cores

4 pints water

2 lb. sugar

1 lb. crystallised ginger, diced

1 teaspoon ground ginger

Method

Simmer the apples in the water until soft. Strain through a jelly bag. This will yield about 4 pints apple liquid. Put half the liquid in a pan (retain the other half). Bring to the boil, stir in the sugar until it is dissolved. Add the crystallised and ground ginger and boil about 15-20 minutes until setting point is reached. (This often sets very quickly, so keep an eye on it.) Pour into sterilised jars and seal in the usual way.

By using the same amounts of sugar and ginger again, the second half of the apple liquid will yield a second batch. (In fact, I usually just double the sugar and ginger and make a double batch in one go.)

N.B. The pints are British pints, i.e. 20 fluid ounces. American pints are smaller.)

We’ve been spared the heavy snow which afflicted most of the UK, but we did have a few days when one was glad to be inside, not out there in the snow. Our nineteenth-century rocking horse agrees.

A few small knitting projects. I finally finished this pair of socks (why is it so much more difficult to finish the second sock?).

I made David this very warm hat in a chunky yarn:

And made myself a pair of gloves in yarn left over from Christmas presents:

I was so pleased with how quickly the chunky yarn knitted up that I’m making myself a jersey in plain and Fair Isle effect yarns. At the same time I’m adapting the pattern (designed in the usual multiple pieces) to be knitted in the round, to avoid seams.

Till next time,

Ann

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful Christmas. Things were a bit disorganised here, so I didn’t go in for fancy icing of my Christmas cake, or any decorations beyond the tree and putting up the cards.

In the past I’ve done elaborate dressing of three fireplaces – drawing room, dining room and hall – swathed the banisters, put up another smaller tree in the hall, and so on, but this year there just didn’t seem to be the time. David was away for nine days in London, doing research in the British Library and the National Archives for his biography of Lord Moncreiff of Tullibole, only reaching home the night of the 21^st, so all those last minute preparations fell to me. Not to mention the usual frantic finishing of presents. You’d think I’d have learned by now.

One year, when the children were small, I made “Victorian” dolls for the two eldest girls, with cloth bodies and china heads, lower arms and legs. So far, so good. I then embarked on complete wardrobes for both – lace-trimmed underwear, several dresses, pinafores, nightgowns, bonnets, cloaks, straw hats . . . At three a.m. on Christmas morning I was just finishing. I never went to bed that night. It wasn’t quite that bad this year, but it was a close-run thing (see below!)

Something which consumes a great deal of time is running our in-house veterinary clinic. Our cocker spaniel, who is fourteen, and our male Maine Coon cat (same age), between them require 12 different forms of medication, some of which have to be administered twice a day, including the cat’s insulin injections. It costs a fortune, but at least they remain happy and lively. The girl cat, despite being much thinner, doesn’t seem to require any aids to health. It’s astonishing what veterinary medicine can achieve these days, and treatment is immediate. No delays, no waiting lists.

Apart from family visits, there hasn’t really been the time – or the weather – for outings this month, though we had a lovely dinner and evening with friends in Blairgowrie earlier in December. (For those of you not in the UK, Blairgowrie is about twenty-two miles north of here, in the Grampians.) There was a certain amount of excitement on the return journey. It had been cold earlier in the evening, but not severely. However, the roads had iced over during the subsequent hours. The journey home was a bit hair-raising. The roads in Blairgowrie were quite icy, but as we got on to the country roads, it grew worse. I began to be apprehensive about an awful hill leading up into the Sidlaws. I was right to worry. It was very icy and ungritted. About a quarter of the way up, a huge Eddie Stobart lorry was stranded, lights flashing. We managed to get past it, then a couple of yards further on, we lost traction completely. For about 10 minutes we simply slid crazily from side to side, till at last David managed to find a patch where he could get a grip.

We then inched forward at about 2mph, sliding all over the place. A couple of times I thought we were going to plunge off the side of the road, which drops away sharply into the valley below. At around the three-quarter mark up the hill, we met a stranded bus (heading towards Blairgowrie), pointing in the opposite direction. We crawled round this and eventually reached the top of the hill. Here it was just as icy, but flat, so we waltzed onwards, then down the other side. As we came nearer to Dundee, the ice and snow dwindled, and the last few miles were fine. Quite an adventure.

Since then the weather has been wet, wet, wet. If it were just slightly colder, we would be suffering blizzards of heavy snow, but instead it’s merely miserable, and no enticement to venturing out.

Owing to all the Christmas preparations, I’ve done little serious reading, apart from more 17^th century historical research, and have recently treated myself to a Folio edition of Liza Picard’s Restoration London. I already owned a paperback copy of this, but it’s wonderful to have the gorgeous Folio version.

For relaxation I’ve been working my way again through Donna Leon’s Venice series, and indulged myself by buying the DVD of Francesco’s  exploration of Venice, a city I’ve only visited once, many years ago. How I would love to see it not mobbed by tourists, but I suppose that’s impossible. The news on Italian politics and economy seems truly depressing, so sad in a country with its artistic and historic heritage.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I sent the first three chapters of my new novel off to my literary agent in mid November, but she still hadn’t got around to reading them before the Christmas break (much to my annoyance), so I’ll now need to wait until after the New Year for her reaction. Who would be a novelist, constantly dependent on the whims of the publishing industry?

However, to cheer me, the companion painting to the Alister Lindsay that I bought last month is now finished and just needs to be framed. It is called Snowthaw in Strathtay and once again catches the characteristic winter light we have around here. That is the Tay you can see in the background. We live about ten miles further down river, where it meets the sea. To your left as you look at the painting.

I was also bowled over by this mixed media work called Ocean by Robert Ryan. I had casually referred to it as a “painting” which of course it is not, and was gently corrected by Sandro Palladini, of Eduardo Alessandro Studios www.eastudios.com , thus: “For greatest accuracy his work would be described as mixed media on glass. Paint is involved but they are not paintings in the classic sense.

“Rob starts with a piece of clear float glass and applies a variety of materials, such as crushed stone, metal shavings, shell and paint to create a layered and ethereal base, upon which he adds punched copper shapes (often circles), and intricate designs involving delicately twisted wire. Rob is self taught and his work is unique and without obvious interpretation, but he accepts that much of his inspiration stems (often subconsciously) from the pacific coastlines and his time spent living in Australia, Bali and Thailand. He creates organically and lets his works grow naturally, unencumbered by structure or premeditated design. He once said to me that he didn’t have any wish to impose his thoughts on the viewer, instead he likes to think that their imagination will add a personal  narrative. A nicely unstuffy attitude I think.”

A photograph doesn’t do it justice (and I apologise for the white splodge of the camera flash), as all the glass, gem stones, polished metal and shells catch the light, so that it sparkles and glows. Simply stunning.

Apart from some sweaters, which are rather dull to show you, I’ve made some Christmas presents this year. A Santa dressing gown for an eighteen-month-old:

And a Santa hooded jacket for a not-quite-two-year-old:

And the pièce de résistance, the Alan Dart Owl and Pussycat for a five-year-old:

complete with guitar, honey, pea green boat, and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note. This was difficult to part with!

Very best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2013.

Ann

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I’ve just discovered this artist, whose work and palette remind me of the Dutch and Flemish artists like Brueghel. Think The Census at Bethlehem:

Or Hunters in the Snow:

I love the Alister Lindsay painting so much that I’m buying a companion piece, Snow Thaw in Strathtay, which isn’t even finished yet! More of that later, when it’s mine.

We always have a pre-Christmas trip out to House of Farnellhttp://houseoffarnell.moonfruit.com , which is north of here, about 6 miles west of Montrose. The business is owned by a Danish couple, Paula and Hans Nissen, who live in Farnell Castle, built before 1205:

About a dozen years ago they opened a Danish shop in the building which used to be the village school (rebuilt in 1600). The shop is only open at certain times of the year and sells the most amazing selection of Danish crafts. The following pictures will give you some idea of the colour and range:

And this:

And this:

And this:

There is also a lovely small restaurant, serving morning coffee, lunch and tea. They import their Danish pastries (uncooked) from Denmark, and the cinnamon ones in particular are to die for! As we walked up to the door this time we could smell cinnamon pastries baking. . . What is it about the smell of cinnamon? We bought three little Christmasy figures and some other ornaments. In the past we’ve found some very unusual toys for younger members of the family.

Earlier in 2012 I planned to try and read all of Dickens’s novels in this bicentenary year, but I’ve been rather sidetracked in recent months. Working chronologically, I’ve now started on Martin Chuzzlewit, but I’m not very far into it. I’ve only read it once before and found it rather slow – as I believe the first readers did. I think I read somewhere that sales of the serialisation fell away, so Dickens was obliged to send the hero off to America, to enliven matters. Apparently it worked, and sales picked up again as readers took delight in the savage satire on American culture.

I’ve been enjoying some indulgent reading, going back through Donna Leon’s Venice series. What an excellent portrayer of character and family relationships she is! That’s the main appeal of her books, I think. Not so much the crime and investigation as the interplay of the characters. And, of course, the wonderful evocation of Venice, tinged though it is with sadness over the pollution of the environment and the corruption in government departments. Reading what she was writing twenty years ago, it’s possible to detect the origins of Italy’s current financial disasters.

For the writers reading this, I’ve also enjoyed two books by Harry Bingham, How to Write:

And Getting Published:

(Not sure why those images have shrunk!) These are produced in association with The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, the long-established bible of the publishing world. Harry is an editor with an excellent reputation, who runs The Writers’ Workshophttp://www.writersworkshop.co.uk as well as being an author himself of both fiction and non-fiction. I found How to Write a refreshing read. Unlike most books in the genre, it is not full of the usual clichés about ‘write a biography of each character, including school, type of clothes, food likes and dislikes, etc.’ Oh, please! Harry talks about placement of the camera, about sentence rhythm and emphasis, about the musical qualities of prose, and many more matters which are the real concerns of serious writers. Getting Published is full of practical advice, some of it unexpected and useful. I particularly liked his assertion that one shouldn’t get too stressed about writing a synopsis (something I think we all hate). It’s the MS which matters, not the synopsis.

I’ve also read Alison Plowden’s Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War, which chronicles the amazing courage and resourcefulness of women on both sides, from Queen Henrietta Maria down to poor women digging defensive ditches, carrying supplies, acting as spies and even fighting alongside their men. The seventeenth century was an extraordinary period, when people who had never before been heard found a voice. A century which saw an orgy of witchcraft trials but also the founding of the Royal Society. A century which started with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, then produced Milton, Bunyan, Marvell and so many others. A century when London was laid low by the plague and the Great Fire. A century which brought forth extreme popular movements like the Diggers and the Levellers, saw Cromwell’s army leadership turn into a repressive dictatorship and the destruction of Parliament, then a restored monarchy subsiding into self-indulgence only brought to an end by the bloodless Glorious Revolution. Amazing to read about, but I’m so glad I didn’t live then!

Another book on the women of the period, which I’ve read a couple of times, is Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel, an ironic title which (like so much in the period) turns preconceptions upsidedown. Again, she chronicles the heroic exploits of women in the seventeenth century, but also has much to say about their social and material context.

My husband, David, is working on a biography of Lord Moncreiff of Tullibole, a nineteenth century lawyer and politician. As well as all the archival material, through one of his descendents (a colleague at the university) David has had access to Lord Moncreiff’s engaging unpublished memoir. Moncreiff was involved in some riveting causes célèbres of the period, all of which make for entertaining reading. The other day he went out to Tullibole Castle to give a first draft of the biography to the present Lord and Lady Moncreiff. It’s very characteristic of the small, traditional castles around here:

He’s off before Christmas to look at further material in the National Archives and the British Library in order to do the final research. Let’s hope there isn’t too much of it. Then the final editing  . . . and the hunt for a publisher.

Speaking of publishers, I thought I’d end with an extract from my current work-in-progress. This is the first half of the opening chapter, which starts in 1586:

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

I was washing alembics when he came. Often, in the months and years that followed, I wondered how things might have turned out, had I been away from home. My father had been summoned to one of his private patients and I had pleaded to go with him to the great man’s house, for I had never even stepped over the threshold of the mansion in the Strand, but the winter had been severe, we were short of many remedies, and I must stay at home and wash the alembics so that we might spend the evening distilling. I did not like being alone in the house, with the dark afternoon heavy in the sky outside, and chill draughts plucking at the back of my neck like the unforgiving fingers of the dead. The old timbers of the house swayed and creaked and moaned in the wind.

My father entrusted the delicate glass vessels, so costly to replace, to no one but me. His own hands had grown unsteady with age and our maid Joan could shatter an earthenware pitcher on the far side of the room merely by looking at it. So I had heated water over the fire until it was hot to the touch, but bearable, and poured it into the big basin which was used only for the instruments of our profession. From a pot on the windowsill I scooped out half a handful of the grey soap, the consistency of soft cheese, and stirred it into the steaming water.

It was cold in the kitchen, and for a moment I closed my eyes and enjoyed the warmth soothing my hands and the smell of the lavender and rosemary oils I mixed with the soap. Then I lowered the first alembic into the water and wiped it over with a rag, dipping and pouring until the tubes and nozzles were clean. Rinsed free of soap (for no foreign body must contaminate our remedies), it stood draining on the wooden table while I picked up the next one.

The row of four was drying on the table as I lifted the heavy basin across to where my father had contrived a drain to run out through the wall and empty into the street outside. The sudden rush of water sometimes gave passers-by a soaking. It was just as I poured the water away that I heard the running footsteps approaching our door. I glanced around fearfully. Joan was away at the market and my father would not return for an hour or more. There was nowhere to hide. The water pouring out of the house would have given away my presence. And I had lit a candle, the better to see my work, even though it was not yet dark outside. The room was illuminated like a play at one of the indoor playhouses, the candlelight reflected off the glass vessels, gleaming warmly on the dark oak of table and benches, chest and cupboard. I had no time to retreat to the inner parlour.

We do not readily open our doors to strangers, the people of my nation.

I saw a blur as someone ran past the window, then he was pounding on the door and crying out something incoherent.

So I must answer. On such trivial matters may a life turn, to follow a new road – to heaven or hell? Who knows? All I knew at the time was that I did not want to answer, and I wished my father were there.

When I opened the door, the boy blew in on a gust of bitter January air, bringing with him the blood-stench of Smithfield market round the corner and the piteous cries of the beasts awaiting slaughter in the Shambles. I had to lean my shoulder against the door to close it, for it was a poor thing of nailed boards that bellied in the wind like a ship’s sail. All the while I struggled with it, he was doubled up, gasping, his hand pressed against his side.

‘Poison!’ he cried at last.

I looked him up and down. He was flushed with running, a boy about the same age and height as I, but with a breadth in the shoulder that foretold he would grow taller, while I would not.

‘You are not poisoned,’ I said brusquely. ‘You have run too far and overtaxed your strength.’

He shook his head angrily. ‘Not me, you fool! I am sent to fetch Dr Alvarez to the Marshalsea where a prisoner is taken ill. The keeper says it must be poison, for he is one of those taken up for the Romish faith and they will contrive all sorts of remedies against torture and execution, even poison.’

I let him wait, for I did not take kindly to being called a fool.

‘My father is not here,’ I said.

‘Then you must fetch him.’

‘He has gone with Dr Nuñez to attend on Lord Burghley. He is not to be fetched away from the Lord Treasurer to some traitorous prisoner in the Marshalsea.’

He straightened up at last and looked at me somewhat piteously. His face was delicate, almost feminine, white now, and exhausted.

‘Have you run all the way from the Marshalsea?’ I asked curiously, wondering why he should care enough to do so. ‘Do you work at the prison?’

‘No!’ He reddened. There was real anger and pride in his eyes. ‘I am a player, in Master Burbage’s company. But the keeper’s sister rents the boarding house where I lodge, and she has been good to me. There was no one else to send.’

I placed him now. He was one of those boy players who act the women’s parts until their beards sprout and their voices deepen. His voice was still light and sweet, now that he had regained his breath; he would serve their turn yet awhile. Stepping aside, I picked up my leather satchel from the chest against the wall and began filling it with boxes and phials from the cupboard hanging above. The wind cutting in below the door sliced through my ankles as viciously as though I wore no hose, so I buttoned on my doublet of plain padded fustian and caught up my cloak from a peg in the wall.

The boy stared at me. ‘What are you about?’

‘I will come in my father’s stead.’

‘You’re nothing but a boy!’

‘I have watched and helped my father since childhood,’ I said coldly. ‘I have been his assistant physician at the Hospital of St Bartholomew for two years now.’

‘You! How old are you?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘The same as I am. They won’t thank me for fetching a boy to do a physician’s work.’

I shrugged, standing there with my cloak round my shoulders and my satchel dangling from my hand.

‘Do you want my help or not?’

He gave me a troubled look and then sighed. ‘You’d best come.’

When I opened the door it tore itself from my hand and crashed against the wall, setting the bottles in the cupboard jingling together like the bell’s on a jester’s suit. More fool I, I thought, as I strained to pull it shut again, to set off walking halfway across London to a poisoned prisoner in the Marshalsea, with the winter dusk gathering and more snow on the way. The boy saw how the door strained against me and turned to help. Together we managed to pull it shut, and I locked it with the key I wore on my belt.

‘You lock your houses in Duck Lane?’ His tone held a touch of contempt, understandably, here where the butchery stench filled our lungs and straw stained with blood and animal dung blew about our knees.

‘Some of our medicines are dangerous in the wrong hands. They must be kept safe from curious fingers.’

We turned away and began to make our way towards the river, leaning against the wind, the boy urging me along, though I would not run on the icy streets – frozen mud at first, cobbles slippery as eels when we reached Cheapside.

‘What is your name?’ he asked, as we neared London Bridge.

‘Christoval Alvarez.’ I did not ask his. We do not become intimate with strangers, we who are known as Strangers ourselves.

‘I am Simon Hetherington,’ he offered, as if wishing to make up for his earlier discourtesy. ‘You are Spanish?’

‘Portuguese.’

‘Ah.’ He slid his eyes sideways towards me. ‘A Portingall. I see.’

‘We are the best physicians in London,’ I said, unwisely, stung by his knowing tone. Then I ignored him.

Halfway across the Bridge he stopped suddenly, doubled up again with pain.

‘What ails you?’

‘I must have run too far, too fast. I feel as if someone were stabbing me in the guts with a knife.’

‘Perhaps you are poisoned too,’ I said unkindly. ‘Stop here, where there is a break in the houses. You can lean against the parapet. Where does it hurt?’

He did as he was told and pointed mutely at his right side, about the level of his waist. I took off my gloves and began to massage his side, reaching up under his doublet. After a while I felt the knotted muscles relax and heard him give a sigh of relief. Then I handed him a rolled pellet from my satchel.

‘What is this?’

‘Stellaria holostea.’

‘What?’

‘Stitchwort. It will ease the pain, though it is better steeped in hot liquid.’

He eyed it for a moment, then put it in his mouth and swallowed it with a grimace.

‘For all your sharp tongue, you have a kind touch in those fine hands of yours, Christoval.’

I turned aside and hastily pulled on my gloves, then I leaned on the parapet beside him.

‘Most people call me Kit. Christoval is a name for feast days and ceremony.’

‘Kit, then.’

We were facing down river, where the Tower rose fearfully on the left, behind the tangled masts and spars of great sea-going ships jostling for anchor room near the legal quays and the Customs House, where I sometimes went on errands for Dr Nuñez or Dr Lopez or my father, who all had an interest in the Portuguese spice trade as well as in medicine. There must have been fifty or sixty ships moored, even at this winter season. One high-pooped merchantman was just setting out on the evening tide, heading towards Gravesend and the open sea. Would she be making for my homeland? Or perhaps for the Low Countries, where our people had relatives living in Antwerp and Amsterdam? On the south side of the river, clustered fishing boats made towards the Deptford shipyards to unload their catch for the royal household at Greenwich. Against the slate sky, the ravening gulls sliced down towards the boats like white scimitars, their wings catching the last of the light from up river, so that they swung from dove grey to silver to white, and as the sun bled down below Westminster the scimitars were encarnadined as if with blood. I shivered. It seemed a bad omen.

We trudged on over the Bridge and under the rotting heads that decorated the spikes over the gateway. When we had first arrived in London, four years before, I refused to pass that fearsome place alone. I used to dream repeatedly that one of the heads toppled off and fell on me. I would wake screaming, sweating with fear, until my father held me and crooned me into quietness. Now I never looked up, but I will not say that I was unaware of them.

A short way along Bankside, near the church of St George, we came to the Marshalsea, a towering grey wall surrounding it, crowned with iron thorns, blackened with London’s sooty smoke, and somehow greasy, oozing a foul stench and dirt of its own, like some diseased and rotting body past hope of any cure. Hell in Epitome, it was called. I had never been inside, but Simon knocked confidently on a low-browed door in a kind of lodge bulging out from one of the corner towers like a carbuncle. He exchanged a few words with someone inside, and we were beckoned in.

It had been growing darker outside, but across the barren yard and within the arch of the prison doorway itself the darkness felt tangible, like a bag over the head, pressing against my face and robbing my lungs of air. I stopped. My palms were sweating. My feet refused to move forward over that fearful threshold. There was a stench of urine and faeces and rot and mould and sickness and despair. Outside, the prison had loomed up as a silent presence in this area of gaiety and entertainment. For all around were the noisy brothels and alehouses and bear-gardens, the shouts at the cock-fighting and laughter at the playhouses, while the Marshalsea stood frozen in its formidable silence. Once inside the thick walls, however, we could hear the real voice of the Marshalsea.