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sutcliff_space2020-02-16 07:44 am
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Combined Ops (1960)
Sutcliff's 1900-word essay about the development of The Lantern Bearers, written for the periodical The Junior Bookshelf in July 1960, presumably on the occasion of the novel's having won the Carnegie Medal. The essay was reprinted in the 1969 and 1980 editions of the anthology Only Connect, edited by Sheila Egoff, G.T. Stubbs, and L.F. Ashley; unfortunately I don't have a link to the book. Update: Internet Archive now hosts both the 1969 edition and the 1980 edition.
Spoilers for The Lantern Bearers, as you might imagine.
-----
COMBINED OPS
Once, and only once to date, my Daemon has completely taken over the making of a book for me, telling me what to write and how to write it, and presenting me with a set of ready-made characters who only required putting down on paper, as though they were people I had known and loved rather than creations of my own imagination. The result was The Eagle of the Ninth, for which I have had a very special affection ever since. All my other books, save for the very early ones which came lightly and with ease, have been laboriously spun out of my own being, like spider’s silk – but probably with considerably more effort and discomfort, stress and exasperation than any spider has to put up with. My Daemon, however, still decides what each book is to be about, which is to say that it is the subject which chooses me and not the other way round. No good for me, having finished one book, to look round anxiously for an idea for the next, even if I know the kind of idea I should like. (I have always wanted to write an eighteenth century story with smugglers in it, but my Daemon says No, and the thing turns to mere cloak-and-dagger in my hands.) I have to wait, keeping, as it were, my doors and windows open; and one day something comes along – a paragraph in a book of local history, a few lines of a poem, a stretch of country that catches my imagination, or simply an idea out of the blue with no apparent reason at all – and my Daemon says, small but unmistakable, ‘All right, this is It. Now let’s begin.’
The Lantern Bearers was one of these ideas out of the blue. Not even an idea really, just a thought drifting around and looking for somewhere to settle. I was making the toast and tea for breakfast one morning and thinking of nothing in particular, when it occurred to me (that is the undisciplined way my mind works) how very wide of the mark the usual history book accounts of the withdrawal of the Roman legions must be.
One leaves school with a vague idea that the Romans came, remained in Britain as a military occupation force – never becoming mingled with the native population – for approximately the same time as lies between the accession of the first Queen Elizabeth and the present day, and were then recalled to defend their native land against the Goths and Vandals. The truth is of course far otherwise. The Legionaries were forbidden to marry while still with the Eagles; but being far from home, with twenty years or so of military service in front of them, they overcame the difficulty by taking unofficial wives from the native population, and making honest women of them when they retired. They then settled in the land of their long service, and their sons joined the Legions after them. There was no marriage ban on the civilian officials, nor on officers above the rank of centurion, and they intermarried freely from the first. So by the time the empire fell to pieces and the order for withdrawal came in 410, the matter had become a far more complicated and tragic one than the mere withdrawing of an occupation force. Many of the men who now made up the three Legions in Britain were native born and bred, they had British mothers and grandmothers and anything up to four hundred years of British roots behind them. They were not being called home from occupied territory, they were being ordered to leave their own country to the Barbarians and go off and die in defence of a concept called Rome that no longer meant very much to them. For many of them there must have been a heartbreaking conflict of loyalties before the transports sailed; and suddenly, standing over the grill and waiting for the kettle to boil, I wondered how many of them went ‘wilful missing’ at the last moment.
With rising excitement I began to see the situation personified in one young soldier faced with that appalling choice. A boy bred (to make it as hard as possible for him) in the Service tradition of the type of family which in later years sent its sons for generation after generation into the Gurkha Rifles or an English County regiment. I began to wonder what he would feel like if he chose Britain, took the way of a deserter and let his comrades sail without him; and what would happen to him afterwards. While I was wondering, the kettle boiled over and the toast went up in flames.
I dealt with the crisis, and later consumed charred toast and marmalade with my mind in fifth-century Britain, my family wondering the while whether I was overcome with remorse for past sins, trying to remember the name of something, or had merely been taken worse with an idea.
I began by going through any books of my own that might provide a page or two on the end of the Roman era. Arthur Weigell’s Wanderings in Roman Britain and Wanderings in Anglo-Saxon Britain gave me a little; so did The Romans in Britain by Bertram Windle, Collingwood’s Roman Britain, and volume 1 of the Pelican History of England. Arthur Bryant’s The Makers of the Realm yielded only a few words, but they were written in fire. One of the first things I discovered was that although the last regular Legions were withdrawn in 410, the last Auxiliary troops did not follow them until about forty years later. That pushed the start of my story on to 449 and made my hero an Auxiliary and not a Legionary officer; for if there were imperial troops of any kind still in Britain after he made his choice, the story lost most of its force. It also opened up the tremendously exciting possibility that he might have come in contact with the historical hero who stood behind the legends of King Arthur; for it is, I think, generally accepted now that the fighting years of that hero, chieftain or war lord or whatever he was, lay in the second half of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth.
I turned to Gildas, Nennius, William of Malmesbury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. They made enchanting reading, save for Gildas who was too busy telling everybody what he thought of them to be pleasant, but they either didn’t mention Arthur at all or seemed too full of dragons to be really reliable.
After that I started on the county library. I wanted books about the Roman withdrawal, the coming of the Saxons, the Dark Ages in general, Arthur in particular. I didn’t know the names of any of the books I wanted, but that was what they had to be about. The county library, as always, rose nobly to the occasion and after a frustrating delay while they searched the rest of the United Kingdom on my behalf, produced, among other books, The Battle for Britain in the 5th Century and The Rise of Wessex, both by T. Dayrell Reed. These proved to be treasure trove. They provided a possible and coherent reconstruction of the years between the fall of Roman Britain and the rise of Saxon England – desperate and heroic years when the British people, far from lying down passively to be slaughtered, as was at one time believed, were fighting to the last ditch. Also, in the first volume the author had a great deal to say about the historical Arthur, even a theory to offer about who he might have been by birth. And the theory seemed to me a good one.
So gradually the background grew and took shape, and against this more or less fixed background my own particular young soldier, his character and his fortunes and his reactions to those fortunes, began to develop.
He was another descendant of Marcus’s, and therefore he had to be called by one of Marcus’s names or a name derived from one of them. I had already used Flavius for the hero of The Silver Branch, so he became Aquila and developed a character to suit his name. His home was the farm that Marcus had made below the South Downs three hundred years before, and Marcus’s signet ring with its flawed emerald was still in the family.
But if the story was to deal with the Romano-British resistance to the Saxons as well as with the fortunes of Aquila, that aspect of it, as well as Aquila’s private affairs, must be brought to a fit ending-off place; one of those places where history reaches a climax or pauses for breath. The only place for the ending of The Lantern Bearers (the name had already come) was the Battle of Wallop, where the Romano-British won the first of a series of resounding victories over the Saxon hordes. It was, for the time being, the turning of the tide. But it did not happen until 472. So if Aquila was nineteen, which seemed a likely age, at the start of the story, he was going to be forty-three by the end. Since it was supposed to be a children’s book, that meant a son to carry on the interest, and presumably a wife to produce the son. I gave him Ness and an ‘arranged’ marriage ripening slowly into something else; and I gave him Flavian, called after his father but commonly known as The Minnow because of one of those family jokes so small that viewed from outside the family they are almost invisible. I gave him the tragedy of his greatly loved sister because it was the kind of thing that must have happened so often; as Flavia herself says, ‘Isn’t it always so? The men fight, and after the fighting, the women fall to the Conquerors.’ And having done that, I knew (for I was beginning to understand him reasonably well by that time) what effect it would have on him: the hard defensive shell of bitterness and the fear of being hurt more than he could bear a second time that would maim his relationships with other people, especially anyone he loved, from that time forward; and it would take the rest of the book, and the help of most of the other characters in it, for him to work out his salvation.
At which point my Daemon, ignoring the existence already of a large red exercise book dropsical with notes, and a vast number of hieroglyphics on the back of envelopes, said ‘Enough! Now come down to earth and start writing.’
And so, on a clean new sheet of foolscap, The Lantern Bearers was begun.
Spoilers for The Lantern Bearers, as you might imagine.
-----
COMBINED OPS
Once, and only once to date, my Daemon has completely taken over the making of a book for me, telling me what to write and how to write it, and presenting me with a set of ready-made characters who only required putting down on paper, as though they were people I had known and loved rather than creations of my own imagination. The result was The Eagle of the Ninth, for which I have had a very special affection ever since. All my other books, save for the very early ones which came lightly and with ease, have been laboriously spun out of my own being, like spider’s silk – but probably with considerably more effort and discomfort, stress and exasperation than any spider has to put up with. My Daemon, however, still decides what each book is to be about, which is to say that it is the subject which chooses me and not the other way round. No good for me, having finished one book, to look round anxiously for an idea for the next, even if I know the kind of idea I should like. (I have always wanted to write an eighteenth century story with smugglers in it, but my Daemon says No, and the thing turns to mere cloak-and-dagger in my hands.) I have to wait, keeping, as it were, my doors and windows open; and one day something comes along – a paragraph in a book of local history, a few lines of a poem, a stretch of country that catches my imagination, or simply an idea out of the blue with no apparent reason at all – and my Daemon says, small but unmistakable, ‘All right, this is It. Now let’s begin.’
The Lantern Bearers was one of these ideas out of the blue. Not even an idea really, just a thought drifting around and looking for somewhere to settle. I was making the toast and tea for breakfast one morning and thinking of nothing in particular, when it occurred to me (that is the undisciplined way my mind works) how very wide of the mark the usual history book accounts of the withdrawal of the Roman legions must be.
One leaves school with a vague idea that the Romans came, remained in Britain as a military occupation force – never becoming mingled with the native population – for approximately the same time as lies between the accession of the first Queen Elizabeth and the present day, and were then recalled to defend their native land against the Goths and Vandals. The truth is of course far otherwise. The Legionaries were forbidden to marry while still with the Eagles; but being far from home, with twenty years or so of military service in front of them, they overcame the difficulty by taking unofficial wives from the native population, and making honest women of them when they retired. They then settled in the land of their long service, and their sons joined the Legions after them. There was no marriage ban on the civilian officials, nor on officers above the rank of centurion, and they intermarried freely from the first. So by the time the empire fell to pieces and the order for withdrawal came in 410, the matter had become a far more complicated and tragic one than the mere withdrawing of an occupation force. Many of the men who now made up the three Legions in Britain were native born and bred, they had British mothers and grandmothers and anything up to four hundred years of British roots behind them. They were not being called home from occupied territory, they were being ordered to leave their own country to the Barbarians and go off and die in defence of a concept called Rome that no longer meant very much to them. For many of them there must have been a heartbreaking conflict of loyalties before the transports sailed; and suddenly, standing over the grill and waiting for the kettle to boil, I wondered how many of them went ‘wilful missing’ at the last moment.
With rising excitement I began to see the situation personified in one young soldier faced with that appalling choice. A boy bred (to make it as hard as possible for him) in the Service tradition of the type of family which in later years sent its sons for generation after generation into the Gurkha Rifles or an English County regiment. I began to wonder what he would feel like if he chose Britain, took the way of a deserter and let his comrades sail without him; and what would happen to him afterwards. While I was wondering, the kettle boiled over and the toast went up in flames.
I dealt with the crisis, and later consumed charred toast and marmalade with my mind in fifth-century Britain, my family wondering the while whether I was overcome with remorse for past sins, trying to remember the name of something, or had merely been taken worse with an idea.
I began by going through any books of my own that might provide a page or two on the end of the Roman era. Arthur Weigell’s Wanderings in Roman Britain and Wanderings in Anglo-Saxon Britain gave me a little; so did The Romans in Britain by Bertram Windle, Collingwood’s Roman Britain, and volume 1 of the Pelican History of England. Arthur Bryant’s The Makers of the Realm yielded only a few words, but they were written in fire. One of the first things I discovered was that although the last regular Legions were withdrawn in 410, the last Auxiliary troops did not follow them until about forty years later. That pushed the start of my story on to 449 and made my hero an Auxiliary and not a Legionary officer; for if there were imperial troops of any kind still in Britain after he made his choice, the story lost most of its force. It also opened up the tremendously exciting possibility that he might have come in contact with the historical hero who stood behind the legends of King Arthur; for it is, I think, generally accepted now that the fighting years of that hero, chieftain or war lord or whatever he was, lay in the second half of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth.
I turned to Gildas, Nennius, William of Malmesbury, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. They made enchanting reading, save for Gildas who was too busy telling everybody what he thought of them to be pleasant, but they either didn’t mention Arthur at all or seemed too full of dragons to be really reliable.
After that I started on the county library. I wanted books about the Roman withdrawal, the coming of the Saxons, the Dark Ages in general, Arthur in particular. I didn’t know the names of any of the books I wanted, but that was what they had to be about. The county library, as always, rose nobly to the occasion and after a frustrating delay while they searched the rest of the United Kingdom on my behalf, produced, among other books, The Battle for Britain in the 5th Century and The Rise of Wessex, both by T. Dayrell Reed. These proved to be treasure trove. They provided a possible and coherent reconstruction of the years between the fall of Roman Britain and the rise of Saxon England – desperate and heroic years when the British people, far from lying down passively to be slaughtered, as was at one time believed, were fighting to the last ditch. Also, in the first volume the author had a great deal to say about the historical Arthur, even a theory to offer about who he might have been by birth. And the theory seemed to me a good one.
So gradually the background grew and took shape, and against this more or less fixed background my own particular young soldier, his character and his fortunes and his reactions to those fortunes, began to develop.
He was another descendant of Marcus’s, and therefore he had to be called by one of Marcus’s names or a name derived from one of them. I had already used Flavius for the hero of The Silver Branch, so he became Aquila and developed a character to suit his name. His home was the farm that Marcus had made below the South Downs three hundred years before, and Marcus’s signet ring with its flawed emerald was still in the family.
But if the story was to deal with the Romano-British resistance to the Saxons as well as with the fortunes of Aquila, that aspect of it, as well as Aquila’s private affairs, must be brought to a fit ending-off place; one of those places where history reaches a climax or pauses for breath. The only place for the ending of The Lantern Bearers (the name had already come) was the Battle of Wallop, where the Romano-British won the first of a series of resounding victories over the Saxon hordes. It was, for the time being, the turning of the tide. But it did not happen until 472. So if Aquila was nineteen, which seemed a likely age, at the start of the story, he was going to be forty-three by the end. Since it was supposed to be a children’s book, that meant a son to carry on the interest, and presumably a wife to produce the son. I gave him Ness and an ‘arranged’ marriage ripening slowly into something else; and I gave him Flavian, called after his father but commonly known as The Minnow because of one of those family jokes so small that viewed from outside the family they are almost invisible. I gave him the tragedy of his greatly loved sister because it was the kind of thing that must have happened so often; as Flavia herself says, ‘Isn’t it always so? The men fight, and after the fighting, the women fall to the Conquerors.’ And having done that, I knew (for I was beginning to understand him reasonably well by that time) what effect it would have on him: the hard defensive shell of bitterness and the fear of being hurt more than he could bear a second time that would maim his relationships with other people, especially anyone he loved, from that time forward; and it would take the rest of the book, and the help of most of the other characters in it, for him to work out his salvation.
At which point my Daemon, ignoring the existence already of a large red exercise book dropsical with notes, and a vast number of hieroglyphics on the back of envelopes, said ‘Enough! Now come down to earth and start writing.’
And so, on a clean new sheet of foolscap, The Lantern Bearers was begun.
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Thank you for posting this.
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The Lantern Bearers is one of my favourite Sutcliff novels and it's fascinating to see how the story idea came to her and how it was shaped by the initial research she did as well as her own gift for understanding character and story.
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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13558287-only-connect
2nd edition: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2556253.Only_Connect
The third edition does not appear to have that essay, judging from WorldCat.
One of my favorite essays! I first read it at age 19 in Only Connect, and it shaped me as a writer.
I also love her 1971 essay "History is People," which was reprinted in Virginia Haviland's Children and Literature: Views and Reviews.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4694006-children-and-literature
Here's an excerpt:
http://engl2011-childrensliterature.blogspot.com/2013/04/rosemary-sutcliff-1920-1992.html
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