History and Time (1989)
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sutcliff_spaceA paper Sutcliff presented at Travellers in Time, a conference on the theme of time in children's fiction, held by Children's Literature New England at Newnham College, Cambridge in August 1989. The conference proceedings were printed in Travelers in Time: Past, Present and To Come (1990), which you can read on Internet Archive. The essay was also reprinted in Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past (2001), edited by Fiona M. Collins and Judith Graham.
At 5800 words this is the longest by quite a bit of Sutcliff's essays that we've read, and there are many interesting things in it. Some of them may remind you of her 1971 conference paper "History is People". I am always amused to see that she has slightly misremembered the name of her own main character Alexios from Frontier Wolf. The Roman soldier Barates is to be found on his wife Regina's tombstone (RIB 1065), but I don't know who Catherine from medieval London is. If anyone is familiar with her, please enlighten me!
HISTORY AND TIME
I suppose we all know that if we go back to the earliest people – lacking all known history, all written records, any kind of calendar, any fixed points to hang memory on – awareness of time must have been so vague that they had definite need to spill blood into the earth at seed time to bring about the harvest, light great fires at the dark of the year to give strength to the sun and bring life to the world, because they had no guarantee that without their help any of these would happen. That would be the state of things until, as a few thousand years went by, wise men took to looking at the skies, and the first calendars – Stonehenge may have been one of them, though not nearly the earliest – came into being. Then of course the whole thing became gradually more formalised and, if not brought under control, at any rate brought to a state where it was possible to think about it, both forward and backward, visualise it and give it symbolic shapes.
According to the theologian O. Culmann in his book Christ and Time the symbol of time for primitive Christianity as well as for Biblical Judaism is the upward sloping line, while for Hellenism it is the circle. (In many ancient faiths the snake swallowing its own tail is the symbol of Eternity.)
This belief in the cyclical nature of the Universe was based on the concept of the Great Year, which has two distinct interpretations: on one hand it is simply the period needed for sun, moon and planets to get back to exactly the same relative positions as they had held before, in some specific earlier point in time. On the other hand it signified the whole life span of the world from its formation to its destruction and rebirth. The two interpretations were combined in late antiquity by the Stoics, who believed that when the heavenly bodies returned at fixed intervals of time to the positions they had held at the beginning of the world, everything would return to being exactly as it was in the beginning, and the entire cycle would repeat itself again in every detail. Nemesius, a fourth-century Bishop of Emasa, put it later:
I think he must have been writing about this as someone else’s belief, not as his own, unless of course he was some kind of heretic. Around five hundred years earlier, Virgil said the same thing, but more poetically: ‘Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew… a second Typhis shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry heroes; and again shall great Achilles be sent to Troy.’
Which brings us rather nicely to Homer and the historians and storytellers. Though Homer dealt with allegedly historical subjects, his history was of the ‘aristocratic’ kind, which is in fact hero myth with maybe a seed of history somewhere in the midst of it. It involves no chronology, no real sense of the passage of time. Despite Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, neither he nor Penelope seem any older when he finally gets home. Only poor Argos, the dog. The Apple of Discord, which starts the Trojan war, is thrown down among the guests at the wedding feast of Achilles’ parents; the judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen and the outbreak of the war all follow each other without pause, but by the time the black ships sail for Troy, Achilles, who according to our ideas of time-lapse can’t have been much more than a twinkle in his father’s eye, is a grown warrior. And to confuse the issue still further, seems, before the end of the ten-year siege, to have sons also of fighting age. (I speak of this from bitter experience, being in the midst of trying to produce a retelling of the Siege of Troy for eight to ten-year-olds). For Homer it clearly made no difference that year follows year.
By the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, history had ceased to be a matter of isolated episodes covering the lives and deeds of heroes, and began to depend on continuity of events, institutions, laws. The passage of time had become more relevant. But even so, Herodotus still had much of the minstrel about him and can always be relied on to abandon fact in favour of a good story or even a juicy piece of gossip, whereas Thucydides, a perfectionist with a dry historian’s mind, aware of the smoky splendours and general vagueness behind him if he looked back, considered that serious history could be concerned only with the present or the most immediate past, because anything beyond that was in the very nature of things thoroughly unreliable.
But to go back to the Christians and the straight ascending line. For the early Christians the Crucifixion was a unique event. It was not subject to repetition, and so for them time had to be linear and not cyclic. This essentially historical view of time with its emphasis on ‘Once and for Always’ is the very essence of Christianity, and this is brought out clearly in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews:
The end of the world was not of course quite so near as St. Paul and the early Christian Church expected. But for men who believed what was in that Epistle there could be no way but straight ahead; and for us, following that teaching, time has been a straight line leading from way behind us to way in front, never back.
Nevertheless, one of the greatest historical philosophers in the eighteenth century, Giovanibattista Vico, professor of rhetoric in the University of Naples, believed in historic cycles. He interpreted the concept in a more sophisticated way than previous believers had done. He maintained that certain periods of history had a general basic nature which reappeared in certain other periods, so that it was possible to argue from analogy from one such period to another. He drew a parallel between the barbarism of the Christian early Middle Ages in Western Europe and the barbarism of the Homeric Age, pointing out certain common features, such as rule by a warrior aristocracy, a ballad literature (our own Celtic, Bronze and Iron Ages fit in with that), and he called such periods ‘Heroic’. He did not think that history is strictly circular, because new things are always being created, and therefore the whole process must move slowly forward. As R. G. Collingwood puts it: “Not a circle but a spiral; for history never repeats itself, but comes round in each new phase in a form made different by what has gone before.” The barbarism of the Western Middle Ages is different from that of Homeric Greece through the influence of Christianity, (an influence which doesn’t seem to have gentled it much, actually, when one thinks of the brutalities of the Crusades.) Vico thought, however, that similar periods tended to reappear in the same order; a Heroic period always followed by what he called a Classical Period, in which thought prevailed over imagination, prose over poetry . . . I know this works for Homeric Greece. I’m not so sure about the Middle Ages. I can’t find a classical period for them until the eighteenth century, which seems to leave rather a lot between.
Vico also believed that “man is a being who can only be understood historically”. In other words, knowledge of our past is vital to our understanding of ourselves – which makes him a man after my own heart.
Many years ago, when I was sure of myself as only someone scarcely out of their apprenticeship can be, I was talking to an audience of school teachers in the Midlands that are sodden and unkind, when a County Inspector of Education stood up and asked me what was my justification for writing historical novels, which he clearly considered a bastard form, instead of leaving the job to legitimate historians who knew what they were talking about. I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Historians and teachers, you and your kind, can produce the bare bones, all in their right order, but still bare bones; I and my kind can breathe life into them. And history is not bare bones alone, it’s a living process.” Looking back I’m rather shaken at my hardihood, but I still think I was right.
There are of course two views of history, the Man’s-eye view and the God’s-eye view. It is because history books for the young must of necessity take the God’s eye view that they can so often and so easily become dull; that, and because they so often break their subject up into small static pictures, each as it were separately framed by the reigns of successive monarchs, instead of treating it as a living and continuous process of which we are part, and of which our descendants, always supposing that we have not blown the world up or destroyed the ozone layer by then, will be a part also. It is enormously important that the young should be given this sense of continuity, of their roots behind them. Because to know and really understand something of where we came from, as Giovanibattista Vico would have agreed, can play a big part in helping us to understand and cope with where we are now and where we are going. All of us, in our own particular stretch of history, stand too close up to be able to follow the whole pattern, and we never know how the story ends, and this is especially true of us today, because we seem to have come to one of Vico’s patches which, the last time-round, covered the end of the Roman Empire and, if he was right, then the next stage should be the Dark Ages. You couldn’t really call St. Dunstan and the glories of Wessex “The Dark”, but the Romans could not know about that. We can hope that we are not going irrevocably into the Dark, but we can’t know. We can’t know if there is a St. Dunstan or a Wessex for us; we are in exactly the same boat as the Romans sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago.
That is why children can surely get a truer picture of the past if something the breathes life into the bare bones is given to them over and above the factual side of history. The need the Man’s-eye view as well as the God’s-eye view of the past; and that means us, the tellers of tales, the historical novelist. Not, I hasten to say, the dealers in Historical Romance, which is quite another matter.
The young have a strong feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life. That is why myths and legends certainly not meant for children in the first place have been largely taken over by them. It is one reason why children enjoy Westerns, even in these days of science fiction; one reason, come to that, why I enjoy them too. I used to think that there was something shameful in enjoying Westerns once one was past the age of running around with two fingers stuck out, shouting, “Bang, bang, you’re dead!” But then it dawned on me that they are or were the Hero Myths of the Middle West. They seem to come from an earlier, rougher and more splendid time – Homer might not have scorned them – they have all the elements of Heroic Myth; outsize characters, big basic themes – love and hate, comradeship between men, loyalty and divided loyalty, treachery, revenge for slain kinsfolk, the age-old struggle between light and dark, in which the Hero, standing for light, though sometimes of a rather murky kind, always wins, but sometimes at the cost of his own life; the deep sense of ritual, especially the ritual of death. We all know High Noon and all those other walks through empty towns, footsteps echoing in heat-drenched silence, or doom-laden pulse beat of accompanying music as tension mounts; the hands held carefully away from the six-shooter still in its holster, the Goodies wearing white hats and the Baddies black – that bit of ritual almost as rigidly adhered to as the fact that in Pantomime the Demon King always enters from the left of the stage and the Fairy Godmother from the right.
Myths and Legends, Westerns, my own sort of historical novel, are all alike in dealing with these big basic themes, though in somewhat different ways. As I said, the instinct for this is strong in children. In most adults it has been pushed down, sometimes only a little way, sometimes almost entirely, into the subconscious. But it’s always there, in the same place as the Australian Aboriginal keeps his dream time, in tribal memory and race memory; and it still needs feeding and watering, because without it the soul of man is not quite complete.
So – there is my right to tell my own kind of historical stories. I can’t play with time, making intricate patterns of it; I can’t handle time-slips; I could never have written Red Shift or A Traveller in Time or Tom’s Midnight Garden. For me, writing a historical novel entails a one-way trip backwards into some particular point in time and space, and once there bringing it to life as convincingly as possible. The question then arises, “How is it done?” I can’t do it from the outside, looking backward, only by making the trip myself, and a very lonely trip it can be, and soaking myself in time and place so that I can tell the story from the inside looking out, through the eyes of people who don’t know the outcome of the battle being fought at Hastings over the Downs this afternoon. This is what makes a child write and say, “It makes me feel as though I was there.”
At one time when I was doing quite a lot of talking for schools, I used to start off by saying to my audience, “Now I want you to shut your eyes and do some strong imagining for me.
“Those of you who want to be a boy: you are a young Roman soldier on sentry duty on Hadrian’s Wall. You’re marching slowly up and down the rampart walk, keeping a sharp eye open to the north, because it’s always from the north that trouble comes. It came last week – cattle raiders. That was your first taste of action, and you have a gash in your sword-arm to show for it; it’s half-healed now, and it itches in the way that healing cuts very often do. The mizzle rain blows in your face, and the watch seems a very long one but you’re going to a cockfight in the fortress ditch later on tonight, and that cheers you up.
“Those of you who want to be a girl needn’t go so far back, only as far as London in the Middle Ages. You’re a merchant’s daughter, and twelve or thirteen years old, and your father has arranged for you to marry another merchant, maybe ten years older than you are. He has gone abroad on business, and you have just had a letter from him and you’re excited and pleased because, although your father chose him for you, you do rather like him. You’re reading your letter in a patch of sunlight in a room over the warehouse – people mostly lived over the shop or the business in those days – and there’s a clove pink in a Venetian glass on the table, its shadow falling across the page, and outside a man wheeling a handcart piled with cabbages pulls to one side while a company of men-at-arms goes jingling by.”
Then after a suitable pause, “All right, come back to here and now.
Those two were real people. The soldier was a Syrian by birth, he served many years in Britain, married a British girl and settled down, and we have his name, Barates, on a tombstone. The merchant’s daughter was called Catherine, and the letter still exists. It’s nice letter, gentle, humorous, one can almost see the young merchant smiling to himself as he writes it in an inn chamber by candlelight: ‘Grow up as quickly as you can, so that we can be married. Go to my horse and ask him for three of his years, and I will pay them back to him again from my own, with a horse-cake by way of interest, when I come home.’”
That usually got the audience tuned in, and in a state of mind to listen to me without too much shuffling.
I do much the same kind of thing on my own account when finding my way into the book of the moment. But of course in that case there are a good few other things to be dealt with first, because it’s no good doing too much soaking oneself in time and place without first making reasonably sure that one has got time and place right – well, as right as one can. And that means research, and a lot of it.
But let me make one thing clear: I never start off with the research; I mean I never decide in cool blood that it would be interesting to set the next book in a particular time and place and then start to read up about it. First has to come the Basic Idea, and it is no good my going in search of the Idea, it has to come looking for me. Sometimes it comes from outside, from something read or seen or experienced, once from a little privately published handbook on the Lake District turned out by a friend in spring cleaning his attic, once from seeing in an Athens museum a dagger with lily flowers inlaid on the blade. Sometimes it comes from inside, like the thought out of nowhere which I had one morning while making toast. “Yes, but when the Romans were withdrawn from Britain they had been here four hundred years. They had settled and intermarried. Some of them would be virtually British, others would have at the very least a British grandmother. Some of them must have gone wilfully missing to remain in Britain when the galleys sailed.” It was a really dazzling thought, and while its further possibilities were dawning on me I burned the toast; but it resulted in The Lantern Bearers.
From the Basic Idea springs the theme; not yet the plot. I’m not terribly good at plots anyway, and tend to have themes instead. At this point I buy a large red exercise book – it has to be red, that’s a kind of personal ritual of my own – and start on research. First of all the historical background. At this stage I am dealing with the history of facts, or supposed facts. Theme and plot, if any, often develop with the history in a process somewhat like weaving; and by this stage I am beginning to feel my way into time and place and get the feel of it, the smell of it.
There are two kinds of Truth, the Truth of Fact and the Truth of the Spirit; and it is possible to be meticulous about fact and yet catch no atmosphere of the period at all. Sometimes there’s a gap in known facts which can only be filled by the Truth of the Spirit. This of course is dangerous because it can become only invention, and the only possible test is “Does it smell right?” If it does, then it’s probably the best one can do. Into the red exercise book also go details of daily life. What houses do people live in, what food do they eat, what weapons do they carry, what songs do they sing? How do they make their marriages? How do they bury their dead?
Details of place, too; the actual lie of the land, flora and fauna, weather and atmospherics, marks of human occupation, taking care that nothing from a later period than the story gets in by mistake.
Details of the people of the story, both historical and fictional, who are now beginning to emerge from the background, their looks and characters and previous history, anything and everything that can help to conjure them into real people with back views as well as front ones, not just cardboard cut-outs wearing Olde World costumes.
Some people believe that human beings change fundamentally as time goes by. I don’t – or only on the surface. The men of the first Elizabeth’s reign thought no shame to cry in public if they felt like it; the men of my youth had been so trained to think it not done that by the time they were sixteen most of them couldn’t cry at all except with great pain and difficulty for, say, the death of a wife or a dog. But that doesn’t mean that the capacity for grief is any different. I have seen an Etruscan tomb with the figures of a man and a woman lying very calmly on top if it that makes nonsense of the idea that the Ancients did not know love between men and women in the way that we know it. One has to be careful about the samenesses and the differences, all the same.
Usually the book has become urgent and I have started to write it well before the research is finished; and it is at this point that my people and their world really start to develop. All their particulars in the red exercise book are really only blueprint, only theory. I know what somebody looks like; I know that he has blue eyes and speaks with a slight stammer, because I have decreed that he should, nothing to do with him at all. But once the writing starts, he begins to take on a life of his own, and he goes on doing it until the time comes when, if I make him do something out of character, I know it instantly as one knows it of a friend in whose company one has passed a good deal of time. ‘I don’t believe he would have done that, said that, reacted in that way.’ Then I have to set to work to discover how he would in fact have reacted, what choice he would have made. And if that doesn’t fit with the story, that’s just too bad, adjustments will have to be made. By this stage also of course there is the chance that he will do his own thing when really I wanted him to do something quite different.
By the time the book is finished, I have lived with the characters in it for maybe a year of my time, maybe a year or two or twenty years of theirs, and I feel oddly bereft. But with any luck the Basic Idea of the next book is already with me. If it isn’t, I am not at all happy until it arrives, not only for my next supply of bread-and-butter, but also because without a book on the stocks I suffer from a sense of being cut off from some kind of supply line; a sort of loneliness – or rather, aloneness.
At the risk of repeating myself: I spoke a while back of the importance of giving children a sense of continuity in time and history, and some awareness of their roots behind them, to help them understand where they came from and where they are going to. This I think was first given to me by the books my mother read to me when I was a child, and it has mattered deeply and potently to me ever since. And so in the natural way of things I have, over the years, woven a sort of web that here and there runs from one book to another, so that the continuity does not break between book and book. I don’t decide on these spider-threads in advance and drag them here and there in any arbitrary way; I simply allow them to grow naturally and surface where they will, and wherever and whenever they surface, I am pleased to see them as one is pleased to see a familiar face one had not particularly expected to see.
Continuity is a very comforting and reassuring thing, in a sense which goes beyond the personal, and far beyond our normal usage of those words – the sense in which the First World War poets must have been aware of it in the certainty that if they were blown up tomorrow Spring would still come back to the places that they loved, and there would, probably, be honey still for tea.
It’s the “Life Goes On” thing.
I hope you won’t think that I’m being egocentric and over-pleased with myself if I round all this off by reading you a couple of extracts from my own books at points where the spider’s threads surface and which give me pleasure as though I had had nothing to do with spinning them myself.
The first is in Frontier Wolf set in the mid-fourth century and centering on a Roman frontier post:
And then later in the story:
The book I have just finished, which is with Bodley Head now, is woven into The Gododdin, the seventh century epic of a kamikaze style raid by a company of post-Roman British warriors on a Saxon war host gathering at what is now Catterick Bridge. In the course of training for this raid three of them are holing up in the ruins of the same fort around two hundred and fifty years later, and it seemed obvious that there must be some mention of the stone which Alexion’s troopers had called the Lady. So:
One more, drawn from Knight’s Fee. Early Norman, sited in the Down country near my home; but it concerns also Warrior Scarlet, set in the same countryside but in the Bronze Age, and telling the story of a boy with a withered right arm. A few years after writing Warrior Scarlet, I came across the mention in an old book of a flint celt that had been dug up on my stretch of the Downs. A tool or weapon shaped something like an axehead to be held in the hand without any haft. They’re not uncommon, but this one was special, being shaped for use in the left hand. Obviously it was Drem’s, my Bronze Age boy’s. It was too late to give it to him in his own book, but I had to get it to him somehow; so I gave it to him in retrospect through Knight’s Fee which I was writing then.
Two boys, one Norman, one Saxon, up from the valley farm of Dean in the lambing season, to spend a night with the shepherd kind on the High Downs:
At 5800 words this is the longest by quite a bit of Sutcliff's essays that we've read, and there are many interesting things in it. Some of them may remind you of her 1971 conference paper "History is People". I am always amused to see that she has slightly misremembered the name of her own main character Alexios from Frontier Wolf. The Roman soldier Barates is to be found on his wife Regina's tombstone (RIB 1065), but I don't know who Catherine from medieval London is. If anyone is familiar with her, please enlighten me!
HISTORY AND TIME
I suppose we all know that if we go back to the earliest people – lacking all known history, all written records, any kind of calendar, any fixed points to hang memory on – awareness of time must have been so vague that they had definite need to spill blood into the earth at seed time to bring about the harvest, light great fires at the dark of the year to give strength to the sun and bring life to the world, because they had no guarantee that without their help any of these would happen. That would be the state of things until, as a few thousand years went by, wise men took to looking at the skies, and the first calendars – Stonehenge may have been one of them, though not nearly the earliest – came into being. Then of course the whole thing became gradually more formalised and, if not brought under control, at any rate brought to a state where it was possible to think about it, both forward and backward, visualise it and give it symbolic shapes.
According to the theologian O. Culmann in his book Christ and Time the symbol of time for primitive Christianity as well as for Biblical Judaism is the upward sloping line, while for Hellenism it is the circle. (In many ancient faiths the snake swallowing its own tail is the symbol of Eternity.)
This belief in the cyclical nature of the Universe was based on the concept of the Great Year, which has two distinct interpretations: on one hand it is simply the period needed for sun, moon and planets to get back to exactly the same relative positions as they had held before, in some specific earlier point in time. On the other hand it signified the whole life span of the world from its formation to its destruction and rebirth. The two interpretations were combined in late antiquity by the Stoics, who believed that when the heavenly bodies returned at fixed intervals of time to the positions they had held at the beginning of the world, everything would return to being exactly as it was in the beginning, and the entire cycle would repeat itself again in every detail. Nemesius, a fourth-century Bishop of Emasa, put it later:
Socrates and Plato and each individual man will live again with the same friends and fellow citizens. Every city and village and field will be restored just as it was, and this restoration of the universe takes place not once but over and over again. Indeed to eternity without end.
I think he must have been writing about this as someone else’s belief, not as his own, unless of course he was some kind of heretic. Around five hundred years earlier, Virgil said the same thing, but more poetically: ‘Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew… a second Typhis shall then arise, and a second Argo to carry heroes; and again shall great Achilles be sent to Troy.’
Which brings us rather nicely to Homer and the historians and storytellers. Though Homer dealt with allegedly historical subjects, his history was of the ‘aristocratic’ kind, which is in fact hero myth with maybe a seed of history somewhere in the midst of it. It involves no chronology, no real sense of the passage of time. Despite Odysseus’s twenty-year absence, neither he nor Penelope seem any older when he finally gets home. Only poor Argos, the dog. The Apple of Discord, which starts the Trojan war, is thrown down among the guests at the wedding feast of Achilles’ parents; the judgement of Paris, the abduction of Helen and the outbreak of the war all follow each other without pause, but by the time the black ships sail for Troy, Achilles, who according to our ideas of time-lapse can’t have been much more than a twinkle in his father’s eye, is a grown warrior. And to confuse the issue still further, seems, before the end of the ten-year siege, to have sons also of fighting age. (I speak of this from bitter experience, being in the midst of trying to produce a retelling of the Siege of Troy for eight to ten-year-olds). For Homer it clearly made no difference that year follows year.
By the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, history had ceased to be a matter of isolated episodes covering the lives and deeds of heroes, and began to depend on continuity of events, institutions, laws. The passage of time had become more relevant. But even so, Herodotus still had much of the minstrel about him and can always be relied on to abandon fact in favour of a good story or even a juicy piece of gossip, whereas Thucydides, a perfectionist with a dry historian’s mind, aware of the smoky splendours and general vagueness behind him if he looked back, considered that serious history could be concerned only with the present or the most immediate past, because anything beyond that was in the very nature of things thoroughly unreliable.
But to go back to the Christians and the straight ascending line. For the early Christians the Crucifixion was a unique event. It was not subject to repetition, and so for them time had to be linear and not cyclic. This essentially historical view of time with its emphasis on ‘Once and for Always’ is the very essence of Christianity, and this is brought out clearly in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews:
‘…nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the High Priest entereth into the Holy Place every year with the blood of others; for then he must often have suffered since the foundation of the world. But now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.’
The end of the world was not of course quite so near as St. Paul and the early Christian Church expected. But for men who believed what was in that Epistle there could be no way but straight ahead; and for us, following that teaching, time has been a straight line leading from way behind us to way in front, never back.
Nevertheless, one of the greatest historical philosophers in the eighteenth century, Giovanibattista Vico, professor of rhetoric in the University of Naples, believed in historic cycles. He interpreted the concept in a more sophisticated way than previous believers had done. He maintained that certain periods of history had a general basic nature which reappeared in certain other periods, so that it was possible to argue from analogy from one such period to another. He drew a parallel between the barbarism of the Christian early Middle Ages in Western Europe and the barbarism of the Homeric Age, pointing out certain common features, such as rule by a warrior aristocracy, a ballad literature (our own Celtic, Bronze and Iron Ages fit in with that), and he called such periods ‘Heroic’. He did not think that history is strictly circular, because new things are always being created, and therefore the whole process must move slowly forward. As R. G. Collingwood puts it: “Not a circle but a spiral; for history never repeats itself, but comes round in each new phase in a form made different by what has gone before.” The barbarism of the Western Middle Ages is different from that of Homeric Greece through the influence of Christianity, (an influence which doesn’t seem to have gentled it much, actually, when one thinks of the brutalities of the Crusades.) Vico thought, however, that similar periods tended to reappear in the same order; a Heroic period always followed by what he called a Classical Period, in which thought prevailed over imagination, prose over poetry . . . I know this works for Homeric Greece. I’m not so sure about the Middle Ages. I can’t find a classical period for them until the eighteenth century, which seems to leave rather a lot between.
Vico also believed that “man is a being who can only be understood historically”. In other words, knowledge of our past is vital to our understanding of ourselves – which makes him a man after my own heart.
Many years ago, when I was sure of myself as only someone scarcely out of their apprenticeship can be, I was talking to an audience of school teachers in the Midlands that are sodden and unkind, when a County Inspector of Education stood up and asked me what was my justification for writing historical novels, which he clearly considered a bastard form, instead of leaving the job to legitimate historians who knew what they were talking about. I looked him straight in the eye and said: “Historians and teachers, you and your kind, can produce the bare bones, all in their right order, but still bare bones; I and my kind can breathe life into them. And history is not bare bones alone, it’s a living process.” Looking back I’m rather shaken at my hardihood, but I still think I was right.
There are of course two views of history, the Man’s-eye view and the God’s-eye view. It is because history books for the young must of necessity take the God’s eye view that they can so often and so easily become dull; that, and because they so often break their subject up into small static pictures, each as it were separately framed by the reigns of successive monarchs, instead of treating it as a living and continuous process of which we are part, and of which our descendants, always supposing that we have not blown the world up or destroyed the ozone layer by then, will be a part also. It is enormously important that the young should be given this sense of continuity, of their roots behind them. Because to know and really understand something of where we came from, as Giovanibattista Vico would have agreed, can play a big part in helping us to understand and cope with where we are now and where we are going. All of us, in our own particular stretch of history, stand too close up to be able to follow the whole pattern, and we never know how the story ends, and this is especially true of us today, because we seem to have come to one of Vico’s patches which, the last time-round, covered the end of the Roman Empire and, if he was right, then the next stage should be the Dark Ages. You couldn’t really call St. Dunstan and the glories of Wessex “The Dark”, but the Romans could not know about that. We can hope that we are not going irrevocably into the Dark, but we can’t know. We can’t know if there is a St. Dunstan or a Wessex for us; we are in exactly the same boat as the Romans sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago.
That is why children can surely get a truer picture of the past if something the breathes life into the bare bones is given to them over and above the factual side of history. The need the Man’s-eye view as well as the God’s-eye view of the past; and that means us, the tellers of tales, the historical novelist. Not, I hasten to say, the dealers in Historical Romance, which is quite another matter.
The young have a strong feeling for the primitive and fundamental things of life. That is why myths and legends certainly not meant for children in the first place have been largely taken over by them. It is one reason why children enjoy Westerns, even in these days of science fiction; one reason, come to that, why I enjoy them too. I used to think that there was something shameful in enjoying Westerns once one was past the age of running around with two fingers stuck out, shouting, “Bang, bang, you’re dead!” But then it dawned on me that they are or were the Hero Myths of the Middle West. They seem to come from an earlier, rougher and more splendid time – Homer might not have scorned them – they have all the elements of Heroic Myth; outsize characters, big basic themes – love and hate, comradeship between men, loyalty and divided loyalty, treachery, revenge for slain kinsfolk, the age-old struggle between light and dark, in which the Hero, standing for light, though sometimes of a rather murky kind, always wins, but sometimes at the cost of his own life; the deep sense of ritual, especially the ritual of death. We all know High Noon and all those other walks through empty towns, footsteps echoing in heat-drenched silence, or doom-laden pulse beat of accompanying music as tension mounts; the hands held carefully away from the six-shooter still in its holster, the Goodies wearing white hats and the Baddies black – that bit of ritual almost as rigidly adhered to as the fact that in Pantomime the Demon King always enters from the left of the stage and the Fairy Godmother from the right.
Myths and Legends, Westerns, my own sort of historical novel, are all alike in dealing with these big basic themes, though in somewhat different ways. As I said, the instinct for this is strong in children. In most adults it has been pushed down, sometimes only a little way, sometimes almost entirely, into the subconscious. But it’s always there, in the same place as the Australian Aboriginal keeps his dream time, in tribal memory and race memory; and it still needs feeding and watering, because without it the soul of man is not quite complete.
So – there is my right to tell my own kind of historical stories. I can’t play with time, making intricate patterns of it; I can’t handle time-slips; I could never have written Red Shift or A Traveller in Time or Tom’s Midnight Garden. For me, writing a historical novel entails a one-way trip backwards into some particular point in time and space, and once there bringing it to life as convincingly as possible. The question then arises, “How is it done?” I can’t do it from the outside, looking backward, only by making the trip myself, and a very lonely trip it can be, and soaking myself in time and place so that I can tell the story from the inside looking out, through the eyes of people who don’t know the outcome of the battle being fought at Hastings over the Downs this afternoon. This is what makes a child write and say, “It makes me feel as though I was there.”
At one time when I was doing quite a lot of talking for schools, I used to start off by saying to my audience, “Now I want you to shut your eyes and do some strong imagining for me.
“Those of you who want to be a boy: you are a young Roman soldier on sentry duty on Hadrian’s Wall. You’re marching slowly up and down the rampart walk, keeping a sharp eye open to the north, because it’s always from the north that trouble comes. It came last week – cattle raiders. That was your first taste of action, and you have a gash in your sword-arm to show for it; it’s half-healed now, and it itches in the way that healing cuts very often do. The mizzle rain blows in your face, and the watch seems a very long one but you’re going to a cockfight in the fortress ditch later on tonight, and that cheers you up.
“Those of you who want to be a girl needn’t go so far back, only as far as London in the Middle Ages. You’re a merchant’s daughter, and twelve or thirteen years old, and your father has arranged for you to marry another merchant, maybe ten years older than you are. He has gone abroad on business, and you have just had a letter from him and you’re excited and pleased because, although your father chose him for you, you do rather like him. You’re reading your letter in a patch of sunlight in a room over the warehouse – people mostly lived over the shop or the business in those days – and there’s a clove pink in a Venetian glass on the table, its shadow falling across the page, and outside a man wheeling a handcart piled with cabbages pulls to one side while a company of men-at-arms goes jingling by.”
Then after a suitable pause, “All right, come back to here and now.
Those two were real people. The soldier was a Syrian by birth, he served many years in Britain, married a British girl and settled down, and we have his name, Barates, on a tombstone. The merchant’s daughter was called Catherine, and the letter still exists. It’s nice letter, gentle, humorous, one can almost see the young merchant smiling to himself as he writes it in an inn chamber by candlelight: ‘Grow up as quickly as you can, so that we can be married. Go to my horse and ask him for three of his years, and I will pay them back to him again from my own, with a horse-cake by way of interest, when I come home.’”
That usually got the audience tuned in, and in a state of mind to listen to me without too much shuffling.
I do much the same kind of thing on my own account when finding my way into the book of the moment. But of course in that case there are a good few other things to be dealt with first, because it’s no good doing too much soaking oneself in time and place without first making reasonably sure that one has got time and place right – well, as right as one can. And that means research, and a lot of it.
But let me make one thing clear: I never start off with the research; I mean I never decide in cool blood that it would be interesting to set the next book in a particular time and place and then start to read up about it. First has to come the Basic Idea, and it is no good my going in search of the Idea, it has to come looking for me. Sometimes it comes from outside, from something read or seen or experienced, once from a little privately published handbook on the Lake District turned out by a friend in spring cleaning his attic, once from seeing in an Athens museum a dagger with lily flowers inlaid on the blade. Sometimes it comes from inside, like the thought out of nowhere which I had one morning while making toast. “Yes, but when the Romans were withdrawn from Britain they had been here four hundred years. They had settled and intermarried. Some of them would be virtually British, others would have at the very least a British grandmother. Some of them must have gone wilfully missing to remain in Britain when the galleys sailed.” It was a really dazzling thought, and while its further possibilities were dawning on me I burned the toast; but it resulted in The Lantern Bearers.
From the Basic Idea springs the theme; not yet the plot. I’m not terribly good at plots anyway, and tend to have themes instead. At this point I buy a large red exercise book – it has to be red, that’s a kind of personal ritual of my own – and start on research. First of all the historical background. At this stage I am dealing with the history of facts, or supposed facts. Theme and plot, if any, often develop with the history in a process somewhat like weaving; and by this stage I am beginning to feel my way into time and place and get the feel of it, the smell of it.
There are two kinds of Truth, the Truth of Fact and the Truth of the Spirit; and it is possible to be meticulous about fact and yet catch no atmosphere of the period at all. Sometimes there’s a gap in known facts which can only be filled by the Truth of the Spirit. This of course is dangerous because it can become only invention, and the only possible test is “Does it smell right?” If it does, then it’s probably the best one can do. Into the red exercise book also go details of daily life. What houses do people live in, what food do they eat, what weapons do they carry, what songs do they sing? How do they make their marriages? How do they bury their dead?
Details of place, too; the actual lie of the land, flora and fauna, weather and atmospherics, marks of human occupation, taking care that nothing from a later period than the story gets in by mistake.
Details of the people of the story, both historical and fictional, who are now beginning to emerge from the background, their looks and characters and previous history, anything and everything that can help to conjure them into real people with back views as well as front ones, not just cardboard cut-outs wearing Olde World costumes.
Some people believe that human beings change fundamentally as time goes by. I don’t – or only on the surface. The men of the first Elizabeth’s reign thought no shame to cry in public if they felt like it; the men of my youth had been so trained to think it not done that by the time they were sixteen most of them couldn’t cry at all except with great pain and difficulty for, say, the death of a wife or a dog. But that doesn’t mean that the capacity for grief is any different. I have seen an Etruscan tomb with the figures of a man and a woman lying very calmly on top if it that makes nonsense of the idea that the Ancients did not know love between men and women in the way that we know it. One has to be careful about the samenesses and the differences, all the same.
Usually the book has become urgent and I have started to write it well before the research is finished; and it is at this point that my people and their world really start to develop. All their particulars in the red exercise book are really only blueprint, only theory. I know what somebody looks like; I know that he has blue eyes and speaks with a slight stammer, because I have decreed that he should, nothing to do with him at all. But once the writing starts, he begins to take on a life of his own, and he goes on doing it until the time comes when, if I make him do something out of character, I know it instantly as one knows it of a friend in whose company one has passed a good deal of time. ‘I don’t believe he would have done that, said that, reacted in that way.’ Then I have to set to work to discover how he would in fact have reacted, what choice he would have made. And if that doesn’t fit with the story, that’s just too bad, adjustments will have to be made. By this stage also of course there is the chance that he will do his own thing when really I wanted him to do something quite different.
By the time the book is finished, I have lived with the characters in it for maybe a year of my time, maybe a year or two or twenty years of theirs, and I feel oddly bereft. But with any luck the Basic Idea of the next book is already with me. If it isn’t, I am not at all happy until it arrives, not only for my next supply of bread-and-butter, but also because without a book on the stocks I suffer from a sense of being cut off from some kind of supply line; a sort of loneliness – or rather, aloneness.
At the risk of repeating myself: I spoke a while back of the importance of giving children a sense of continuity in time and history, and some awareness of their roots behind them, to help them understand where they came from and where they are going to. This I think was first given to me by the books my mother read to me when I was a child, and it has mattered deeply and potently to me ever since. And so in the natural way of things I have, over the years, woven a sort of web that here and there runs from one book to another, so that the continuity does not break between book and book. I don’t decide on these spider-threads in advance and drag them here and there in any arbitrary way; I simply allow them to grow naturally and surface where they will, and wherever and whenever they surface, I am pleased to see them as one is pleased to see a familiar face one had not particularly expected to see.
Continuity is a very comforting and reassuring thing, in a sense which goes beyond the personal, and far beyond our normal usage of those words – the sense in which the First World War poets must have been aware of it in the certainty that if they were blown up tomorrow Spring would still come back to the places that they loved, and there would, probably, be honey still for tea.
It’s the “Life Goes On” thing.
I hope you won’t think that I’m being egocentric and over-pleased with myself if I round all this off by reading you a couple of extracts from my own books at points where the spider’s threads surface and which give me pleasure as though I had had nothing to do with spinning them myself.
The first is in Frontier Wolf set in the mid-fourth century and centering on a Roman frontier post:
Just where the track dipped to the paved ford below the ponies’ watering pool a tall stone stood up, leaning a little, in the wayside grass. Dark, smooth, with somehow the look about it of having passed through fire; the look too of being very old, older than anything else in that countryside. As they trotted by, Gavrus leaned from his saddle and lightly touched the smooth-worn crest in passing; and Alexion [sic], glancing round for another view of the thing, saw the leader of the escort echo the gesture, and the men behind him… Another custom of the Pack, he supposed, and clearly one you did not ask about. Oh well, there’d be time for finding out about such things later. Too much time maybe. So much time that childish things became important because they helped to fill it up a little. A small cold shiver took him between the shoulders, the kind of shiver out of nowhere that makes men laugh and say that a grey goose is flying over their graves.
And then later in the story:
Alexion, reaching aside by long custom to touch the Lady in passing, felt the stone rain-wet and heart-cold and curiously empty, and knew, though he instantly denied the knowledge in himself, that the Romans would not come back.
The book I have just finished, which is with Bodley Head now, is woven into The Gododdin, the seventh century epic of a kamikaze style raid by a company of post-Roman British warriors on a Saxon war host gathering at what is now Catterick Bridge. In the course of training for this raid three of them are holing up in the ruins of the same fort around two hundred and fifty years later, and it seemed obvious that there must be some mention of the stone which Alexion’s troopers had called the Lady. So:
We went down to the burn that ran through its steep gorge below the western rampart, and drank and filled the leather bottle where the water ran clear and deep above the remains of a paved ford. There was an upright stone, I mind, marking the place where an old track from the fort must have entered the water, heading westward; a black stone, dappled with grey and golden lichen. I set my hand on its rounded poll, and got the odd uncanny feel that it was used to the touch of men’s hands in passing. But that must have been long and long ago.
One more, drawn from Knight’s Fee. Early Norman, sited in the Down country near my home; but it concerns also Warrior Scarlet, set in the same countryside but in the Bronze Age, and telling the story of a boy with a withered right arm. A few years after writing Warrior Scarlet, I came across the mention in an old book of a flint celt that had been dug up on my stretch of the Downs. A tool or weapon shaped something like an axehead to be held in the hand without any haft. They’re not uncommon, but this one was special, being shaped for use in the left hand. Obviously it was Drem’s, my Bronze Age boy’s. It was too late to give it to him in his own book, but I had to get it to him somehow; so I gave it to him in retrospect through Knight’s Fee which I was writing then.
Two boys, one Norman, one Saxon, up from the valley farm of Dean in the lambing season, to spend a night with the shepherd kind on the High Downs:
They huddled close, for the wind seeped through the hurdles for all the lacing of furze branches, Ship and White Eye and Joyeuse lying nose-on-paws among their feet. Randal sat with his hunched shoulder leaning against Bevis who leaned companionably back, and stared a little sleepily into the fire, where a red hollow like the gaping mouth of a dragon had opened under the crackling thorn branches, and listened to the soft hush of the wind under the thatch. “And all the time the wind blows over,” he thought, “Ancret’s people, and the Saxons, and Harold dead over yonder, and now the Normans; and all the while the wind blowing over the Downs, just the same.” Half asleep as he was, he was suddenly aware of the new life in the lambing pens, the constant watchful coming and going of shepherds and dogs and lanterns, as something not just happening now, but reaching back and back, and forward and forward, into the very roots of things that were beyond time.
Something of the same mood must have been upon Lewin also, for when he had brought out the meal bag and tipped barley meal into the birchwood bowl, thrusting away the dogs’ soft, expectant muzzles, he rose – but he could not stand upright in the little bothy – rooted in the willow basket hanging from the roof, in which he kept his few personal belongings, and brought out something wrapped in a rag of yellow cloth.
“I’ll show you a thing,” he said to Randal, “sitting here at nights I’ve had it in my heart to show you, a good while past. Showed it to the young master when he stood no higher than my belt.” And as Randal looked up expectantly from the fire, and Bevis watched with the interest alight in his thin eager face, he unfolded the yellow rag and put into the boy’s hand a thing like a double axehead made from flint, mealy grey and tawny with the outer weathering that flint gathers through the years. An axehead, but with no hole to take the haft, nor any flanges for binding it on.
Without quite knowing why he did so, for he was not left-handed, Randal put out his left hand for it, and felt his fingers close over it as something infinitely familiar. But he had never seen such an object before.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“What it is called, I do not know, but with such things it is in my mind that men fought the wolf-kind, and maybe each other, very long ago. I have seen others turned up on the Downs, but never one to equal that one. I found it up on the Long Down years ago, and kept it, because it was made for a left-handed man even as I.”
Randal shifted it to his right hand, and found that it was true. One could use it perfectly well with the right hand, but it did not lie there happily, as in the left hand.
“Left-handed, or one-handed.” He did not know what made him say that. He leaned forward, looking at it in the light of the fire – and then, maybe because of the strange mood he was in, maybe because he was half asleep, maybe because of that dark thread of the Old Blood that Ancret had recognized, running in his veins, an odd thing happened. Once, in the outer bailey of Arundel, he had watched spell-bound while a wonder-worker who made live pigeons come out of an empty basket, had made a striped pebble picked up from the dirt where the fowls were scratching, grow in his hand without any visible change, into a yellow iris flower. He could see now the shimmering silken fall of the petals, the dark hair-fine intricacy of the veining that sprang from the slender throat, the sheer singing strength of the colour. And as the pebble had become a flower, so the thing he held was suddenly warm as though fresh from the knapper’s hand, and the outer crust of the centuries all gone like a little dust, leaving the beautiful dark blue flint in all its newness. It was as though the thing flowered between his hands. He had an extraordinary sense of kinship with the unknown man who had first closed his fingers over that strange weapon, who had perhaps seen the wolves leaping about the lambing folds as he, Randal, had almost seen them for an instant tonight; an extraordinary feeling of oneness with Dean, of some living bond running back through the blue, living flint, making him part of other men and sheep and wolves, and they a part of him.
