Nov 21 2023

Remembering the Two Jacks: CS Lewis and John F Kennedy

Posted on November 21, 2023 by admin

REMEMBERING THE TWO JACKS: CS LEWIS AND JOHN F KENNEDY

My diary is usually a blank since Covid and becoming a Carer, apart from the inspiring reminders to ‘Put bins out’ or ‘Do food order’. But that wasn’t the case on 22 November 2013.

It was the fiftieth anniversary of the deaths of author and Professor C S Lewis and author and President John F Kennedy. All Lewis fans know that he died on the same day as the terrible assassination of Kennedy, and so the fact didn’t get much publicity at the time as a result.

That any of these events should have had an effect on my diary entries for 2013 seems increasingly strange as the years go by. But it caused an unlikely clash: I was supposed to be in two places at once.

Firstly, I was invited to be part of the celebration of C S Lewis’ life at the inclusion of a memorial to him in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey in London. This was later to be published as:

Secondly, I was invited to the celebration of the life of President Kennedy being held on the same day at the memorial to Kennedy at Runnymede in Surrey.

The Kennedy Memorial Trust

Back in 1984 I had been awarded a scholarship to Harvard by the Kennedy Memorial Trust, and it was this Trust that had been set up in 1965 to acknowledge the British people’s huge outpouring of grief at the President’s death. The two parts were to be a “memorial in landscape and stone” at Runnymede and a ”living memorial” in the form of the Scholarship programme for around ten postgraduates a year to go from the UK to Harvard or MIT. There are now over five hundred of us. [1]

Runnymede near Windsor was the scene of the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, the ‘Great Charter of Liberty’ extracted by the barons from King John, which meant even the king was to be subject to the law. In a sense it was the beginning of parliamentary government and the inspiration for ideas of political liberty around the world, and it was here the official memorial stone to the President was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 1965. The ceremony was attended by members of the Kennedy family, and the land that holds the memorial was granted to the American people in perpetuity. The event was largely organised in 1965 by David Ormsby-Gore, Lord Harlech. He had been one of Kennedy’s best friends and British Ambassador to America (and who, strangely enough, was to interview and then award me the Kennedy Scholarship in 1985 on the very day he too was to die tragically, in a car crash on the way home).

There is a video of the moving ceremony at Runnymede and the surrounding countryside: the walk through a wicket gate and then a wood and then the path to the seven ton block of Portland stone, which were all part of the memorial and designed to be like ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ for the visitor.

It reminded me of Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College Oxford where Lewis had his spiritual breakthrough in his talk with Tolkien and Dyson.

The two memorial stones are similar in some ways, including quotes from the men themselves, though on a different scale:

Lewis at Westminster Abbey

Of course I wanted to be at both events in 2013. But since I’d been asked to be part of a panel discussing Lewis’s influence today, but would only have been a spectator at the Kennedy event, then it certainly made sense to be at Westminster Abbey.

Plus the fact that Lewis had influenced my spiritual and academic life to a far greater extent than Kennedy, although the scholarship to Harvard was fantastic and led me to spend four years in America as a result.

I tend to be reading books by or about CS Lewis most of the time, but by sheer coincidence I’ve just finished a different book that instead involved Kennedy, as it was the biography of his ‘forgotten’ sister Kathleen, known as ‘Kick’ [1]

Kick and Jack

When Kick was born in 1920, Jack was already two and a half. They were to become best friends in a family of nine children and remained so throughout life, although Kick’s was to be cut short by tragedy even before her brother. At her untimely death in a plane crash in 1948 she was already a widow. She had married William ‘Billie’ Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, the son of the Duke of Devonshire, but Billie had been killed in heroic circumstances in the Second World War. She really could have wandered around the magnificent Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and whispered ‘Of all this I might have been mistress’, like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

It was partly through her social success with the English upper classes, backed up by their father being the American ambassador to Britain, that mean Jack Kennedy had access to the rich and powerful in the UK. I was interested to read how pro-British he was, especially in his admiration of Churchill, for example, studying his speeches.

Irish Roots

Of course Kennedy was also keen to explore his Irish roots in several Irish counties. The fact that his sister had married into the Devonshires also meant that they had invitations to their Irish property, Lismore Castle in County Waterford, which also would have belonged to Kick’s husband, had not tragedy intervened. The extent to which the Kennedys had woven themselves into British life before the War really surprised me. It also made me think more about CS Lewis’ Irish roots in Belfast and the ‘pull’ that Ireland has for the many millions who have ancestry there, including my own via a grandmother and her family, the MacNabs. For both CSL and JFK, Ireland was ‘home’.

The Devonshires and Chatsworth

I now realise that this makes sense of a photo I once saw. It was of President Kennedy’s Inaugural parade in January 1961, and there right on the front row was Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, right next to the President. The photo is in a book of Debo’s letters [2].

At the time everyone wondered who on earth this woman was. But she, as Debo Mitford, had been great friends with Kick Kennedy when Kick had dated Billie, the Marquess of Hartington, and Debo had dated his younger brother Andrew, so they hung out as a foursome before the War. When Billie was killed in 1944, Andrew inherited the title and therefore became the next Duke, and owner of Chatsworth and numerous other stunning properties. If death hadn’t intervened for Kick in 1948, aged only 28, she would have been the ‘new’ Duchess, so in a sense Debo was a substitute for Kick at the Inauguration.

JFK had been so upset at the death of his sister that he only visited her grave at Edensor near Chatsworth years later, just months before his own death.

The Two Jacks as Young Readers

But one of the things that surprised me the most was how similar the two Jacks had been in childhood and early youth, in the sense that both had been loners much of the time and voracious readers, and of course it was this that was to give them the edge in their subsequent careers, forming their main interests and pursuits. I already knew about CSL’s reading habits, but was amazed at how frequently JFK had been ill and in hospital or bed bound whilst growing up and had therefore read so deeply. Both had been deeply influenced by their boyhood reading on the history of Chivalry, for example. And later on JFK’s father’s appointment as Ambassador to the Court of St James, and the political and aristocratic contacts that this provided in the UK, meant that Kennedy could as a young man meet the political and cultural heroes he had only encountered in his reading.

Christmas at Chatsworth

At Christmas I usually re-post my blogs about the wonderful Narnian ‘Christmas at Chatsworth’ event I also attended in 2013. Of course the main focus of this is from the creative imagination of Jack Lewis, as each room at the stately home was magnificently decorated with characters and themes from the ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’.

But this year, as I look again at these Christmas photos, I will definitely be thinking of the Kennedy connection as well, of Kathleen and her younger brother Jack, who also wandered around Chatsworth in awe. I will remember the future President, and Kick his sister who should have been a Duchess, and the events that forever link the two globally famous Irish Jacks, the Professor and the President.

NOTES

[1] For Kennedy Memorial Trust, see https://www.kennedytrust.org.uk/

[2] Paula Byrne, Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth (HarperCollins, 2016)

[3] For Debo & JFK, see https://themitfordsociety.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/debo-jfk/

and (ed.) Charlotte Mosley, In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray, 2008) re Inauguration.

For the short film about the Kennedy Memorial, see

https://www.kennedytrust.org.uk/display.aspx?id=1870&pid=0&tabId=230

For the Westminster Abbey Institute Symposium from 21 November 2013, see

Feb 26 2022

Ngaio Marsh: ‘Enter a Murderer’

Posted on February 26, 2022 by admin

It was a shock to re-read ‘Enter a Murderer’ (1935) by Ngaio Marsh after 15 years and find that I didn’t like Roderick Alleyn.

Obviously I hugely admire Marsh’s body of work and I suppose I’m now so used to the wonderful Patrick Malahide version of the Chief Inspector on TV, that I have superimposed him on any of these stories that I now read. This can work with the later, more mature stories. But ‘Enter a Murderer’ is only the second in the series. I also decided to re-read the first one, ‘A Man Lay Dead’ (1934), to get started again on the series, and I was definitely in for an unpleasant surprise.

The earliest Albert Campion I adore. The earliest Lord Peter Wimsey likewise. In fact I probably prefer them to their later more adult and responsible selves. I love their craziness and ‘joie de vivre’, their gabbiness and self-confidence. But Roderick Alleyn in his early incarnation – eek! I found myself almost embarrassed for the poor chap. He seemed fey instead of charming, condescending instead of self-confident, even slightly bullying and manipulative at times towards his minions, and as for his interaction with women – double eek! I felt like searching out his future spouse Agatha Troy in the pages of books yet to come and saying ‘Run! Run like the wind!’

It was doubly unfortunate that I was re-reading this book for our Classic Crime Club (at Bromley House Library in Nottingham) just after we’d discussed ‘Swan Song’ by Edmund Crispin. I’d also read that one before but I can read Crispin any time and get a kick out of it. The settings were similar – Crispin’s with opera singers at an Oxford theatre, Marsh’s with actors in a London theatre. The fact that Marsh called this ‘the Unicorn case’ in the Foreword gave me hope that this might prove magical and exciting. But of course it was only because the setting was to be the Unicorn Theatre! Well, perhaps that disappointment reflected what was to come. Crispin’s story was silly but sparkling. In comparison it was very easy to get rather bored and bogged down in Marsh.

Plot

The background is dripping with hatred and blackmail. I won’t go into any detail. One problem with reading Classic Crime fiction is that we are so familiar with all the main methods of murder in the many subsequent novels that stories from the Thirties can look not just clichéd, but like a wrinkly cliché with long grey whiskers supporting itself on a walking frame. We now know that the moment someone steps onto a stage that a heavy object from above will fall on them (usually a chandelier) and that any prop knife or gun will turn out out to be real. Enough said.

Setting

I got a bit fed up of all the back-stage specialist knowledge, although I do appreciate that Marsh was writing this partly out of nostalgia for the theatre when she was back in New Zealand caring for her father after her mother’s death. The difference in her level of skill between the early rather clunking descriptions of England and the English and her later stories, especially those featuring New Zealand, is obvious.

Characters

When the main suspects are actors you never know whether they’re telling the truth or acting their butts off – handy for the author but increasingly tedious for the reader. Every time the Inspector interviews yet another flighty/drunk/egocentric narcissist, you think ‘Here we go again, they’re lying throughout their highly-polished teeth.’

I was amazed to realise that most of the main characters are in their mid-20s. Several sounded like raddled old roués! And what was Stephanie thinking in her dalliance with the repellent Surbonadier? A problem all murder mystery writers have is that when a murder victim has got to be so unpleasant that at least one person would risk hanging to kill him or her, the victim has also had to be nice and attractive enough in the past for people to have wanted to hang out with them, have affairs with them, etc, in the first place.

And don’t talk to me about Nigel Bathgate the journalist. The poor sap was bad enough in the first book. And here he is again, in an even more unlikely role as Alleyn’s right hand man until, thank goodness, DS Fox takes over in later books (despite Alleyn calling him ‘Foxkin’ ). The cigar-chomping impresario Jacob Saint was sufficiently terrifying (even if he does have a footman called ‘Mincing’!!) . There’s old Susan Max the actress, Felix Gardener the star, the men and women behind the scenes – no shortage of suspects. Could Surbonadier even have committed suicide and framed his main rival?

Roderick Alleyn

Alleyn’s appearance – his face is described as “winged”, ie. mouth, nostrils, eyes all slanting upwards – not bad for a 41 year old. Although that could sound as though he’s had several sessions with an over-enthusiastic plastic surgeon. (Perhaps there’s a tiny version of RA walking around made out of the excess skin, like in the famous Joan Rivers’ joke?)

Everyone says Alleyn has a marvellous memory at the beginning, but then later on he says his memory is “filthy”. Is this Marsh reflecting her father’s character in the Inspector? She says in her autobiography that his memory was notoriously bad and gives striking examples of it. Her father was an ex-public schoolboy from Dulwich College in England, where the old boys were called Alleynians, after Edward Alleyn the Elizabethan actor who founded the place, thus the Inspector’s name. And Marsh tells us that it is pronounced ‘Allen’, not ‘Allain’, in her article on Alleyn’s origins. Perhaps Alleyn’s early rather alarming playfulness is a direct reflection of her late Victorian father? The fact that Alleyn asks Bathgate if he can do shorthand, when Bathgate took shorthand notes for him in the previous novel, is perhaps proof of his “filthy” memory. (Another proof might be that he twice refers to the name of the murderer in the first book – does he not care about spoilers?!) He is supposed to be good at mimicking people, and in this story imitates several accents. He even gave one of his “rare laughs”. He prefers a pipe to cigarettes. Startlingly, he says he doesn’t “understand law”. Er, what job do you do, again?

And then there’s the ‘romance’ – Alleyn’s B-movie dialogue and canoodling with an actress/suspect, despite the fact that he calls all actors “a bit thick”. He holds Stephanie, the glamorous, in his arms:

“ ‘What’s this?’ he said roughly. ‘I know you’re everything I most deplore – and yet – look at this. Shall I kiss you?’ “

He returns to this later:

“ ‘I would say I hated myself when I held you in my arms. It would only be half true. My thoughts were a mixture of grovel and glory.’ “

There is also the strange way he does a body search of another actress, almost in a mystical trance!

But I am grateful for one phrase of Alleyn’s that could prove useful. Instead of getting the “heebie-jeebies” as we might say, he gets the “ooble-boobles”. That’s great! I might adopt that.

So, yes, I do normally love Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, and think Ngaio Marsh was astonishingly talented, but in this reading of ‘Enter a Murderer’ her creation has given me a touch of the ooble-boobles. I stand by my advice:

‘Run, Troy, run!’

I’ve included some more problems with the plot in the NOTES below, which contain Spoilers.

And if you’d like to see a preview of my last book, here is a link:

NOTES

I’ve already read Ngaio Marsh’s ‘Enter a Murderer’ twice so I certainly don’t want to read it a third time to find out whether I’m right about what was wrong! So forgive me if this is mere nit-picking or forgetful speculation on my part, but, as far as I could tell, these seem to be loopholes and/or gaffes in the plot:

1] It’s possible, but not at all necessary, that Felix Gardener would not bother looking at the hanging figure and therefore spot it was only a dummy. Alleyn was taking a heck of a gamble. And it was highly likely who the body was supposed to be, by a process of elimination, so why couldn’t Gardener have made a correct guess and acted out his role accordingly?

2] The “threatening letter” that was typed on stage – wouldn’t someone have been able to see that Felix wasn’t merely typing ‘Q’ over and over? Plus there would have been the typewriter ribbon with the letter on it available to the police from the word go. Why didn’t they check it? Gardener wiped the keys clean but didn’t bother about the fact that he’d left evidence of an incriminating letter behind.

3] As several people in our reading group pointed out, why on earth did the murderer choose a night when a police inspector was at the front of the audience? Oh well, at least Alleyn had a “busman’s holiday” with a free ticket paid for by the murderer, as he himself concludes!

Jan 30 2022

Patricia Wentworth: ‘Grey Mask’

Posted on January 30, 2022 by admin

Patricia Wentworth: ‘Grey Mask’

‘Grey Mask’ (1928) is the first of Patricia Wentworth’s novels to feature Miss Maud Silver as the detective. There were to be 31 more. I have written about Wentworth (the pseudonym for Dora Amy Elles, 1878-1961) in another blog and the fact that her ‘spinster sleuth’ creation Miss Silver predates that of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in novel form [1]. I first read Wentworth’s ‘Grey Mask’ because of the title and my interest in anything to do with masks when I was researching my own novel ‘Night and Mr Knightley’ back in 2016 which features a masked ball. I particularly wanted to avoid reproducing any plot device concerning masks from the Golden Age of Crime Fiction unintentionally. I also wanted to revisit the first appearance of Miss Silver.

Had I been impressed with her at our first encounter? I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t particularly, but having now read other outings of hers I am interested to go back and relive that first meeting and see if she makes more of an impression this time.

But perhaps, since the essence of these ‘old lady’ detectives is their very unimpressiveness at first sight, then it’s hardly surprising that Miss Silver didn’t exactly blow me away in this first book. The fact that now, on better acquaintance, I could read her cases all day is testament to Wentworth’s skill in developing her sleuth and her own evolution as a writer over the years.

‘Grey Mask’: the Story

Charles Moray has been away from his ancestral home for four years following a break up with his fiancée Margaret Langton. On his return he is amazed to find the door of his home unlocked and a strange meeting going on in one of the rooms. He is able to observe this from a childhood hiding place. And what he sees terrifies him. Not only is there a gang who are known only by numbers but one of them is his former fiancée! They are planning a kidnap and the story will revolve around a missing marriage certificate and an inheritance. And the main leader wears a scary grey rubber mask with square holes cut for the eyes.

But Charles can’t risk calling in the police with his former love involved, so he very much needs a private alternative. And it doesn’t get more private and alternative than Miss Maud Silver.

From the word go, Miss Silver faces sexist and ageist assumptions that could jeopardise her acquiring any potential job. It is Charlie’s friend Archie who advises him to get a trained sleuth to track down the criminals who invaded his house and find Margaret. Charlie expects to be put on to “a good man”. But Archie recommends:

“ ‘A sleuthess…. A perfect wonder – has old Sherlock boiled.’

Charles frowned.

‘A woman?’

‘Well, a sleuthess. She’s not exactly what you’d call a little bit of fluff, you know.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Maud Silver.’

‘Mrs or Miss?’…

‘Single as a Michaelmas daisy,’ said Archie.”

Charles wonders why bring in a ‘sleuthess’ when there are lots of perfectly good sleuths. Archie has only met her once (“and she didn’t make my heart beat faster”) but she did succeed in retrieving his cousin’s jewels – “little Maudie got them back.” His cousin then told all her friends and she resolved their problems too. So Charlie takes down her address. “If she specialised in getting silly women out of messes, she would just about suit his book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sexist, ageist and patronising introduction for a major detective! Charles and Archie seem to judge Miss Silver initially by her sexual attractiveness and availability. And their opinion of the ‘silly women’ that she has helped is no better. But then one needs to remember that these are not real men and that a woman is creating them for the page. Are these attitudes reflecting ones that Wentworth herself had encountered? Or, ironically, is Wentworth being sexist and patronising about men?!

A First Look at Miss Silver

We have to wait till Chapter 11 to actually meet Miss Silver. Charles is now in her waiting room and can hear female voices coming from her office. Charles being a charlie, he assumes they must be “discussing millinery”! When he finally enters her office he is struck by its simplicity. There is a large desk with piles of exercise books, two chairs, one of which is occupied by Miss Silver.

This is the first proper description of her:

“She was a little person of no features, no complexion, and a great deal of mouse-coloured hair done in a large bun at the back of her head. She inclined her head slightly, but did not offer to shake hands.”

Her voice is quiet and hesitating and “without tone”. She notes down his details in a brown copy-book. Even though what Wentworth describes could be the stereotypical governess or school teacher or librarian, we are not told anything in this book about her former career. But when she smiles! “The smile had the most extraordinary effect upon her face; it was just as if an expressionless mask had been lifted and a friendly, pleasant face had looked out from behind it.”

So it not just the ‘baddie’ who wears a mask. Ladies like Miss Silver have also learned the usefulness of ‘masks’, to hide themselves behind a neutral appearance, as those who view them without prior knowledge cannot be trusted to treat them without prejudice.

She is ruthless about the need for trust. She needs Charles to tell her everything. She insists: “Trust me in all, or not at all” is my motto. Tennyson is out of fashion, but I admire him very much, and that is my motto”. Charles concludes to himself “What a Victorian little person!” and notices that she has a half-knitted stocking on her lap. She now begins to knit, “holding the needles in the German way”, and somehow Charles finds himself telling her everything.

His next encounter with Miss Silver takes him by surprise too. He is leaving a cinema and suddenly an old lady in a black cloak with an old-fashioned bonnet and umbrella touches him on the arm. He finds himself looking into Miss Silver’s “nondescript eyes” as she points out the man he hired her to trace.

Apparently Miss Silver has already come across the work of Grey Mask in small ways in the last 5 or 6 years – “one man behind a number of co-ordinated criminal enterprises.” He works by blackmail, demanding service rather than money. Did he have some hold over Margaret that made her jilt Charles?

Rescuing Margaret will involve Miss Silver… not exactly braking and entering a building but being part of a similar enterprise. She enlists the dubious help of Archie and turns up at the end in a “drab raincoat and old-fashioned turban toque”, and armed with her “old-fashioned reticule” in which to secrete clues. Even with the help of a young man it is she who notices the bullet hole in the wall with her “small grey eyes”.

She may cough before being assertive but any nerves or reticence don’t stop her dissing the intelligence of men in favour of that of women: “Miss Langton must be a highly intelligent person, even for a woman.” Not in spite of being a woman, note, which Archie and Charlie might have been tempted to say (egged on by Wentworth, of course!)

Conclusion

The criminal is not the only one wearing a grey mask in this story.

Maud’s ‘greyness’ is like her very own grey mask which she has developed over the years. It enables her to walk unseen, to detect and observe in plain sight with no one noticing that their nemesis is upon them, that a brilliant deductive mind lies behind the bland grey eyes, or that a blazing leonine courage lurks beneath the mousey exterior.

Miss Silver’s ‘Victorian-ness’ is also part of her disguise but also allows the author to draw on the strong moral code of the previous century that would have been recognised immediately by her readers. Agatha Christie does the same thing in her first short story about Miss Marple [2]. Just as King Arthur is supposed to return and rescue England in its hour of greatest need, so these dear ‘victorian’ spinster ladies are back to rescue the lost post-First World War generation from its moral decay and murderous corruption.

St Paul said to his emissary Timothy: “Let no one despise you because you are young.” Perhaps he would have said to Miss Silver: “Let no one despise you because you’re getting on a bit!”

And anyway, Miss Silver, you’ve got another 31 adventures coming up!

To see the latest book by Jeanette Sears, here is the link:

NOTES

[1] My blog entitled ‘Patricia Wentworth: ‘Miss Silver Comes to Stay’.

[2] Agatha Christie’s short story ‘The Tuesday Club’ (1927).

Oct 17 2021

Emma-Jane Austin and a Regency Ball

Posted on October 17, 2021 by admin

HIGHFIELD HALL

The Joy of Creation

One of the joys of writing fiction is that you can create your own versions of real places.

And you can give your characters the abilities, relationships and possessions that you would rather like yourself. Just as Dorothy L Sayers admitted that she gave her creation Lord Peter Wimsey the car and carpets that she couldn’t afford when she was an embryonic author, I have also delighted in giving my fictional characters the adventures and acquisitions that are beyond me. Like Sayers I too have created my own Oxford colleges and lordly piles for my characters to inhabit. I suspect it’s more fun than owning the real things – you have a lot of the enjoyment with none of the responsibility. As I face the reality of cleaning and repairs in my own little house, it’s fantastic to be able to conjure up my own equivalents of Sayers’ Shrewsbury College in Oxford or Duke’s Denver in the Fens.

But here I want to introduce you to more about this process of fictive creation, with the specific example of how I went about ‘building’ the ancient mansion and estate of Highfield Hall in north Nottinghamshire for Emma-Jane Austin and her book club to visit in ‘Night and Mr Knightley’. Her reading group, called the Rotics (Ro-man-tics without the ‘man’!), needed to enjoy a glamorous regency ball and I needed a luxurious location that was suitably grade-listed and gothic for the main murder of the story to take place.

I like to use real places wherever possible in my Oxford and Nottingham murder mysteries. But sometimes for the murder itself it can be less stressful to create one’s own setting, either because the murder has specific requirements that aren’t easily available in reality, or because as an author you don’t want the owners or managers of a real place on your case! I did check with the librarians at Bromley House Library in Nottingham that it was OK to have a body in their august library for ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’, the first Rotic Club mystery. But ideally I wanted a large stately home in Nottinghamshire in which to stage the first death in the sequel.

Thoresby Hall

I searched the web for Nottinghamshire stately homes and the most suitable for my purposes seemed to be Thoresby Hall in Budby, near Ollerton. It won on both Location and History. I changed to name to ‘Highfield Hall’, taken from the eighteenth century Highfields House in Beeston which is now part of the University of Nottingham campus, but which was too small and in the wrong location for my purposes. But I had a sentimental attachment to the name, as “going on Highfields” when I was a child meant a trip to the beautiful park that surrounds the university buildings – playing in the Lido or taking a boat out on the lake and feeding the ducks, surrounded by swaying trees and rhododendrons in every possible colour.

But back to Thoresby Hall.

As with most stately homes in the UK, Thoresby Hall has had many incarnations over the centuries. The current building was built in 1864-71 by Anthony Salvin for Sydney Pierrepont, third Earl Manvers. It’s in the area of north Nottinghamsire known as ‘the Dukeries’ as it’s one of four grade-listed mansions all owned at some point by Dukes. The first member of the Pierrepont family to own the Thoresby lands was Robert, first Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull back in 1633, but he died in the Civil War in the 1640s. His son the second Earl built a large house around 1670 and the park was created by enclosing land from Sherwood Forest.

As with many stately homes, it was destroyed by fire, this time in 1746. The new build was about twenty five years later and the park was landscaped by no less than Humphrey Repton.

But some people are never satisfied. The third Earl Manvers tore this house down and paid Salvin to build the new one in Elizabethan Revival style, slightly to the north of the original.

And in this story of a typical English stately home, the inevitable happened when the sixth Earl died without a male heir and the title became extinct in 1955, and the house became a hotel. It is now owned by Warner Leisure and has 200 rooms and a spa.

I was immediately attracted by some photos online of the house lit up at night, which made me think of Halloween, the night of the regency ball in my novel. It gave me the idea of having eerie green, orange and purple lighting with black spiders’ webs projected onto the front of the building to greet the guests as they arrived.

I also liked the idea of a balcony or minstrels’ gallery in the ballroom and a patio with steps onto the lawns at the back with french window leading into the ballroom – all ready for a zombie invasion at midnight!

Research

Using a website like www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk means that you can learn a lot of architectural terms referring to your chosen building. For example, Thoresby Hall has decorative iron cresting, a chamfered plinth, and quoins with chamfered rustication, mullioned casements, gabled dormers, obelisk finials, and corner cupolas. You don’t have to include these in your story, as it’s unlikely Emma-Jane or one of her friends would suddenly exclaim: ‘Wow, look at that chamfered plinth!’ But it’s nice to know. Apparently the Hall also has a “deep frieze”, but obviously not the sort in which you can store a body!

Making a Map

There was a useful map of the grounds of Thoresby Hall on its website. But I needed to landscape my own grounds, with appropriate maze and woods and summer houses, for the murder plot to work. So I drew a rough map of the grounds around my version of the hall with handy reminders, such as where I wanted the security cameras situated.

I decided to call the various rooms that the guests would be using after the names of colours, eg. the Purple Room, the Blue Breakfast Room, etc. This was before I read Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Red Masque’ in which he does the same thing, although his are arguably more scary! In my story, the grand house has already been converted by the mega-wealthy Fairford family into a hotel-cum-spa, apart from their own private apartments of course. A pity that the ‘Curse of the Fairfords’ means they might not enjoy it for long…

Conclusion

Using a real building and its grounds as my inspiration certainly gave me confidence in setting out the basic description and boundaries of my own design. It meant I had something ‘concrete’ in my mind all the time (even though Thoresby Hall is made from “rock-faced ashlar” – finely dressed stone), and there was a sense of realism as I had my characters moving around the place and having their adventures. It was particularly useful for keeping the timeline of the murder on track and all the alibis as I could look at my map of Highfield Hall and visualise very easily where everyone was supposed to be at any particular moment. I would definitely recommend drawing your own map even if you are using a real building or place with no alterations, as you can add your own details and timings to it that can easily get forgotten or confused as you write your book over several months. There were crucial details over the location of bushes and security cameras for ‘Night and Mr Knightley’ that would have been disastrous if I had muddled them up!

So I hope the original architects of Thoresby Hall don’t mind me borrowing details from their beautiful building. I really enjoyed adding my own fountains and statues and flowerbeds and spending time at my very own regency masked ball, even if I also then had to invent the murder that made the Halloween theme become a bit too real for Emma-Jane and her Mr Knightley…

To explore Highfield Hall with Emma-Jane Austin and the Rotic Club, you can go to:

Apr 24 2021

The Honjin Murders

Posted on April 24, 2021 by admin

THE HONJIN MURDERS

“From the moment I heard the first whispers about the case, I was fascinated… This was no ordinary murder. The perpetrator had planned the whole ghastly deed. What’s more, it was worthy of the label “Locked Room Murder Mystery”… a genre that any self-respecting detective novelist will attempt at some point in his or her career.” (Seishi Yokomizo, The Honjin Murders, 1946).

I’m a member of the Classic Crime Club, a monthly reading group at the historic Bromley House Library in Nottingham.

Of course we’ve been meeting on Zoom this last year, saying hello to each other from our own homes. But that hasn’t stopped us going further afield in our reading. We usually limit ourselves to UK crime fiction from the Golden Age of approximately 1920 to 1950. But sometimes we’ve delved into fiction from an earlier period or a non-UK setting. This has included Simenon from France and Rex Stout from the USA, for example.

But probably our furthest global reach so far has been The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo. This story was originally serialised in Japan in 1946 but only recently translated into English and published in 2019. The whole group found this book fascinating, especially the extent to which the writer used the classic tropes of British Locked Room mysteries.

Author

Seishi Yokomizo (1902-81) won the first ever Mystery Writers of Japan Award in 1948 for this book.

He went on to create seventy seven mysteries featuring the same detective, although sadly only two of them have been translated into English – The Honjin Murders and The Inugami Curse (Pushkin Vertigo, 2020).

Plot

A newly married couple are killed on their wedding night in the annexe of a family mansion. A Japanese sword is found embedded in the ground outside, surrounded by snow but no footprints. Inside the bedroom there is a lot of blood plus bloody fingerprints. Is it anything to do with a mysterious stranger with only three fingers on one hand who has been seen in the area, or is the reason for the deaths a deeper, darker family secret?

The first person narration was enjoyable, as if Dr Watson is telling us directly about a case of Sherlock Holmes’. Indeed, the narrator is supposed to be a writer of crime fiction, this time researching ‘true crime’.

Yokomizo is particularly upfront about his favourite British, American and French authors and their influence on him, such as John Dickson Carr. Having one character, Saburo, with an obsession with Western crime fiction means that discussion of methods of murder from these sources can be easily included in the text.

Japanese Context

As with many Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels in or around the Second World War, one is not immediately presented with wartime conditions. I was astounded by a throwaway remark about a character being unlucky to be in Hiroshima on the wrong day – this surely gives a new definition to ‘bad luck’!! The murders themselves are supposed to take place in the 1930s.

I was engaged by the story throughout and found the details of Japanese life very interesting. The references to Japanese clothes and shoes and various rituals as part of the story were a huge plus, even if it extended to the use of ‘seppuku’, often known as ‘hara-kiri’, the form of suicide by disembowellment. A different culture certainly provides different methods of grisly death for the use of the GAD writer!

Japanese music is also featured heavily, especially the creepy use of ‘koto’ music and the wire and plectrums used with that particular stringed instrument. This made me watch some koto music online, which was intriguing and beautiful.

Plot and Motive

There was a major misdirection from the word go, plus several satisfying twists in the plot. However the motivation of the killer might be rather hard for the modern Western reader to stomach (no pun intended)! However, I do like a story where practically every sentence could include a clue.

Characters

There are many likeable characters and fortunately there is a very useful Character List at the beginning, in case you get your Ichiyanagis muddled up with your Kubos, the two main families concerned. I particularly liked Ginzo, the bride’s uncle and patron of Kosuke. The most irritating character was possibly Suzoku – was she rather stereotyped by the author or was this ground-breaking characterisation at the time?

The Detectives

As with many GAD stories, the official police are a rather negligible presence compared to the private investigator who is often an outsider or eccentric in some way. This is certainly the case with the young Kosuke Kindaichi, the brilliant private investigator who gets all the glory.

I was expecting an older detective who would perhaps have people’s respect, so the young Kosuke with his stammering and constant head-scratching was a definite surprise. He was very much the scruffy but hyper-intelligent student-type.

I really liked him by the end of the book, despite his mannerisms, and wanted to read more. The character Kosuko Kindaichi has since starred in many films and is now embodied in the form of a statuette awarded to a new unpublished mystery novel each year, like the Edgar in the US.

Conclusion

The Japanese setting gave a new zest to the usual GAD tropes and the author was very endearing to be so upfront about the Western influences on his fiction. I would gladly read more of Kosuke’s cases, if only there were more in translation – just one more is not enough!

Mar 31 2021

Children and Masks in Literature

Posted on March 31, 2021 by admin

CHILDREN AND MASKS IN LITERATURE

The subject of home-schooling and the wearing of masks for children has been unavoidable recently. It reminded me of the experience of the Brontë children, when being raised by their clergyman father Patrick.

When his wife died in 1821, he suddenly became a single parent of six small children. He had to ask the same questions as many parents today. How to teach these small people and prepare them for the future? How to inculcate moral values and encourage healthy relationships? How to get to know them better – to know what they’re really like?

Lessons from Patrick Brontë

Patrick tells us of an idea he came up with in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. Many years later, was wanting to write the biography of her friend and Patrick’s oldest surviving daughter, Charlotte:

“When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the oldest was about ten years of age, and the youngest about four, thinking that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I told them all to stand and speak boldly from under cover of the mask.” [1]

This startled me when I first read it a few years ago. Why would wearing a mask make the children more honest and forthcoming? We tend to associate masks with hiding and disguising. Would this actually work in drawing the children out? Judge for yourself. Patrick continues:

“I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, ‘Age and experience.’ I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell), what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, ‘Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.’ I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman; he answered, ‘By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.’ I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered, ‘The Bible.’ And what was the next best; she answered, ‘The Book of Nature.’ I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, ‘That which would make her rule her house well.’ Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered, ‘By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.’ I may not have given precisely their words, but I have nearly done so, as they made a deep and lasting impression on my memory. The substance, however, was exactly what I have stated.” [2]

Perhaps to us these answers from young children sound more like some weird catechism than the free-flowing thoughts of children. Were they just saying what they thought their clergyman father wanted to hear? Of course we can’t possibly tell, even if we had been there at the time. And of course there is the added fact that the Brontë children were in all probability child geniuses, three of whom would go on to write some of the greatest novels in the English language. Even with our more ‘enlightened’ views in some respects, we might not be quite in their league! But there is the reminder in the names included in brackets after the girl’s names that they would later feel compelled to write under male names in order to get an audience, in other words, by wearing a masculine mask.

But I was also intrigued by Patrick having a mask lying about the house. Where was this from? Had he gone to a masked ball with his young wife in happier days? It was researching the subject of masked balls for my latest novel Night and Mr Knightley that made me look into the subject in the first place. What sort of a mask was it – an ordinary black domino mask, or a tribal wooden carving? Its appearance – and how scary it was – might well have an effect on how confident the children would feel in making their replies. I was also surprised at the idea of a mask being used to help children become more up front about their real selves. Was that a realistic expectation? They would still be looking into their father’s eyes. They would still have to live with him and their siblings the moment the mask was removed, still be in an adult’s power.

Mrs Gaskell concluded that it was a “curious education which was made by the circumstances surrounding the Brontës. They knew no other children. They knew no other modes of thought than what were suggested to them by the fragments of clerical conversation which they overheard in the parlour, or the subjects of village and local interest which they heard discussed in the kitchen. Each had their own strong characteristic flavour. They took a vivid interest in the public characters, and the local and the foreign as well as home politics discussed in the newspapers. Long before Maria Brontë died, at the age of eleven, her father used to say he could converse with her on any of the leading topics of the day with as much freedom and pleasure as with any grown-up person…. Wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds, were hidden under an enforced propriety and regularity of demeanour and expression, just as their faces had been concealed by their father, under his stiff, unchanging mask.” [3]

Perhaps a good exam question might be: ‘Illustrate the pros and cons of home education for children using the example of the Brontës’! Gaskell obviously interprets the use of the mask as a symbol of repression. More useful for them was the overhearing of adult conversation in the home, both of professional clergy and servants, all steeped in local life. The reading aloud of books and newspapers and family discussion of the issues of the day made for mental stimulation and broadening of outlook. But just that phrase “they knew no other children” chills our hearts. Yet look what they became! Gaskell reminds us of their “wild, strong hearts, and powerful minds” that emerged from this strange process.

A later reference to Charlotte and masks is from her adult experience in Belgium when she is taken to a Carnival, marking the beginning of Lent. There were masked characters and she was singularly unimpressed:

“The Carnival was nothing but masking and mummery. M. Héger took me and one of the pupils into the town to see the masks. It was animating to see the immense crowds, and the general gaiety, but the masks were nothing.” [4]

Hopefully not too traumatised by childhood experience then! I used Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre as a basis for my first Rotic Club murder mystery Murder and Mr Rochester, which of course reflects her great love for the Monsieur Héger who took her to see this parade of masks.

My second Rotic Club novel uses Jane Austen’s novel Emma as a starting point but it is in this one that I make use of the theme of mask-wearing and deception at a masked ball, a trope so loved by Golden Age mystery writers. You can see this reflected in the number of masks on the cover of Night and Mr Knightley!

Warnings from C S Lewis

Almost a hundred years later another Irish writer was making use of the concept of masks in the education of children.

But the way C S Lewis utilised the wearing of a mask in his first novel Pilgrim’s Regress, a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, is very different to the more sanguine and hopeful attitude of Patrick Brontë. In this allegory, the little boy John is taken from playing in the fields and put into ugly uncomfortable clothes to visit the Steward (clergyman). He is the local representative of the Landlord (God). John has to sit still and be very good in the Steward’s big dark stone house. His parents seem very grave and intimidated there, but at first the old Steward seems jolly and friendly. He talks to the little boy about fishing and bicycles to the extent that John almost feels normal with him and relaxes.

“But just as the talk was at its best, the Steward got up and cleared his throat. He then took down a mask from the wall with a long white beard attached to it and suddenly clapped it on his face, so that his appearance was awful.” [5}

The Steward then speaks to John in a sing-song hypnotic voice about how good the Landlord is to let them live on his land. He gives the little boy a card with lots of rules written in small print: “half of the rules seemed to forbid things he had never heard of, and the other half forbade things he was doing every day and could not imagine not doing…” There were also far too many to remember. But just when John is despairing, the Steward whips the mask off “and looked at John with his real face” and advised him to lie about it all anyway. He then “popped the mask on his face all in a flash” and threatens John with ending up in a black hole full of snakes and lobsters if he disobeys any of the rules and emphasises the goodness of the Landlord again. John of course is terrified and doesn’t understand anything else the Steward says, apart from as he leaves when the Steward again takes off the mask and tells him not to bother about it all.

Lewis is here of course reflecting the very mixed messages and awkward teaching that he received as a child at church. In this allegory, the parents abdicate responsibility for teaching their child about God themselves and instead leave him to the ambiguous moral advice and complex theological teaching of local clergy. John is later given a little mask to wear at what is effectively the death of his “disreputable Uncle George”, who trembles so much before his eviction (death) that a mask will not stay on him and everyone “had to see his face as it was” which was too dreadful for them and they all looked away.

Later in the story, John as an adult meets Mr Halfways who has a long flowing beard and looks rather like the Steward but John is pleased to see that he doesn’t need a mask because “his face is really like that.” A caricature of the Steward’s mask is later used by characters who want to mock their religious upbringing.

Lewis went on to use the idea of masks and veils in his final novel Till We Have Faces, in which religious leaders also use masks to hide who they really are to gain power over others, or as a way of transcending the self. Apparently the original title favoured by Lewis for this book was Bareface, but the final title came from Orual asking near the end of the story concerning the gods: “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” [6] To be our real selves and speak the truth is the only way we can truly relate to God and others and have meaningful relationships.

Sadly we are living in a time when masks are necessary to protect our health, but it does seem particularly poignant when it is forced on children who are still in the early stages of forming their characters and relationships. We certainly seem to be ambivalent about mask-wearing, judging from the way they are used in literature, either literally or metaphorically. Both Patrick Brontë and C S Lewis would have known from their classical and Biblical studies that a mask-wearer is ‘hypokrites’, an actor who wears a mask,

who pretends in public to be someone they aren’t and that Jesus was particularly stern in his warnings to religious and political leaders to avoid this sin against God, the self, and others.

A Cry from Paul Laurence Dunbar

And just as mask-wearing has become compulsory for so many, it is still psychological necessity for those who feel oppressed, who feel the need to hide their true selves from others behind a false public persona because of their gender, race or class.

This has rarely been expressed more powerfully than by the American Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar at the end of the nineteenth century, in words that tell an uncomfortable truth for children and adults alike:

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!” [7]

Conclusion

At a time of global mask-wearing, Patrick Bronte’s desire that his children should learn to “speak with less timidity” so that he could get to know them better, C S Lewis’ goal that we should not need masks in order to look good because our faces are “really like that”, so that God and others can “meet us face to face” in reality, and Dunbar’s cry for relief to Christ from the pain of the need for a false outer self for protection – all of these are sentiments and stances that we can own today for our children and ourselves, even if we use different methods. We all long for the one who truly sees us, who calls us forth, who won’t harm us in our vulnerability when we are “barefaced”, but who will meet us with love.

“Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” (I John 3:2)

Till the Time Without Masks then, Till We Have Faces…

[For more on Jeanette Sears’ latest books, see the WELCOME page on this website or go straight to her Amazon page]

NOTES

[1] Elisabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, 1857.

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid., quoting a letter from Charlotte Bronte, dated March 6, 1843.

[5] C S Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933.

[6] C S Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 1956.

[7] Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘We Wear the Mask’ from Lyrics of a Lowly Life, 1896.

Feb 28 2021

PATRICIA WENTWORTH: ‘MISS SILVER COMES TO STAY’

Posted on February 28, 2021 by admin

“ ‘How can a poor policeman compete? You can take the village lid off and see how the wheels are going round. Gladys and Allan are people to you. You know their relations to the ninth and tenth degree, where I don’t even know they exist!’ “

This is Chief Constable Randal March speaking to an elderly lady who knits and asks questions and observes and deduces and solves murder mysteries before the police. Is it Miss Marple? No. It’s Miss Maud Silver in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver Comes to Stay (1951), the third of the 32 Miss Silver novels.

It’s easy to get tied up in comparing Marple and Silver, but thankfully several other people have already done this, so that’s one less thing on the To Do list [1]. To put it briefly, the two characters appeared almost simultaneously in the late 1920s, with Marple just pipping the post in a short story of 1927 [2] but Silver beating her to novel form in 1928 [3]. Presumably this means that Wentworth’s creation may predate Christie’s in terms of the actual writing.

The Author

Like so many Golden Age authors of detective fiction, the name ’Patricia Wentworth’ was of course a pseudonym. The ‘Wentworth’ came from the middle name of a stepson who had been killed in the First World War. In real life, Dora Amy Elles was born in 1877 in Missourie, India, to a British military family – her father was a General and her mother a Lady.

As with many empire children, she was sent back to England to be educated. She married twice, both times to Lt Colonels called George. She had one daughter of her own as well as the stepsons. After her first husband’s death in 1906 she moved to Camberley in Surrey, won a prize for her first novel in 1910 (an astonishing 250 guineas) for a romance of the French Revolution called A Marriage under Terror.

But we have to wait till 1928 for the first book with Miss Silver. That was Grey Mask, then came a long gap while she experimented with other characters.

It was almost 10 years before The Case is Closed was published (1937), followed more closely by Lonesome Road (1939).

But it was during the Second World War that we see her Miss Silver production rocket, often more than one book a year, so most belong to the 1940s and 50s. The final one The Girl in the Cellar was published in 1961, the year of Wentworth’s death at the age of 82.

Miss Maud Silver

Miss Maud Silver is a former governess and teacher who runs her own solo detective agency. She is a reassuring figure from the past who likes to knit and quote Tennyson. She has her own flat and office, uses business cards and charges fees for her work – a real professional. She is particularly good at helping the relatively wealthy middle class, injured by lost love, war, theft, or some form of abuse, and sorting out their broken lives. The books read like an Elizabeth Goudge novel with detection, or an Ethel Lina White story of a woman in jeopardy – but this time people get a spinster knitter to the rescue!

The Plot

Miss Silver Comes to Stay is the sixteenth book in the series. Miss Silver has planned an innocent trip to see an old school friend in the country, but of course this not how things turn out. The main character, an attractive middle-aged woman called Rietta Cray, first spots Miss Silver in the local village store. “She looked less like a detective than anyone Rietta could have imagined… the little lady who looked like a governess…” – probably because Miss Silver had indeed enjoyed twenty years “in the scholastic profession” [4]. Inevitably Miss Silver is drawn into solving the mystery of the murder of James Lessiter which is shortly to take place, even though its roots go back twenty five years. He has inherited Melling House from his mother who previously let distant relative Catherine Welby live in the gate house of the manor and gave her some furniture and precious items – or did she only lend them? James intends to find out and get them back, which means Catherine is now in financial trouble. And does Rietta’s nephew, Carr Robertson, have a very good reason to hate James? And have servants or their offspring also been stealing from him? When James goes to the family solicitor for help in sorting it all out, he might get more than he bargained for.

There are lots of clues spread around in these complicated relationships, plus in the steadily revealed timetable of who visited James on that last night and for what reason. I found it easy to get involved and start rooting for the characters as Wentworth describes them like intimate friends. The setting is also so very well realised. I’m glad to say that I was so involved that I didn’t notice who ‘did’ it, as in fact it was very well hidden. I got the feel of “this hard post-war world” [5] and felt invested in the fate of the characters. One sub-plot was particularly interesting – the revived romance between Carr and Elizabeth Moore. This in particular reminded me of an Elizabeth Goudge novel. After years apart, involving war and other relationships with the wrong people, they were together at last:

‘Elizabeth’s world had come back to normal again…. She got up and began to make tea, fetching the kettle from the kitchen, moving about the small domestic tasks as if they were the whole of love and service. It was perhaps the happiest hour she had ever known. To receive back all you have lost, all that you have not even hoped for, to be allowed to give again what you have kept unspent, is joy beyond words.” [6]

That could sum up the situation for several key characters – the ones who survive the revenge and bloodletting.

Conclusion

This Patricia Wentworth mystery is not just about restoring the moral order of the universe by punishing evil and rewarding good. It is also about the restoring of relationship. Right Order also includes Right Relationship and that’s where the romance fits in. It’s not just important that the right person is punished for the crime, it’s extremely important that the right people end up together. Just as the various murders have been about the catastrophic absence of love, the romance is about the restoration of love. We’ve seen what happens, in the fate of James Lessiter and others, when human relationships go wrong, but we now need to see the counter-balance of human relationships going well and flourishing, and the restoring of community and meaning that goes along with it. The love that is now possible between the survivors suffuses everything in a moment with meaning, even the most mundane of pastimes.

Surely this is another similarity between Patricia Wentworth and Agatha Christie – they are both as concerned as Jane Austen that their women end up with the right man! But crucially this is more than counter-balanced by the role of the heroine spinster who enables all this to come about with an almost God-like role in exposing sin, bringing about right judgment and justice, and the restoration of right relationship. Miss Silver may have only come to stay for a while, but in that space of time she helps put right what is wrong and leaves everything the better for her presence, however temporary. Her knitting (that often is completed at the end of a case) is not just a pastime for a ‘silly old woman’, a mistake made at their peril by biased observers. Miss Silver, like Miss Marple, is more like one of the Fates of mythology, the goddesses in the form of three elderly women who spin, measure, and then cut the thread of human life.

Even if the characters don’t realise it – and they usually don’t until it is too late – their fates are in her hands.

[For the latest news of Jeanette Sears’ books, please see the WELCOME page of this website, or go straight to her Amazon page]

NOTES

[1] Eg. Carol Westron’s blog ‘Miss Marple and Miss Silver – a comparison’ (13 Oct 2014) at www.promotingcrime.blogspot.com. She also has a great little scenario imagining the two ladies meeting in a teashop.

[2] Agatha Christie, The Tuesday Night Club (1927).

[3] Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask, 1928. I refer to this book in my previous blogpost ‘Masks and Murder’.

[4] Patricia Wentworth, Miss Silver Comes to Stay, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1951, p50f.

[5} ibid., p107.

[6] ibid., p104f.

Jan 30 2021

MASKS AND MURDER

Posted on January 30, 2021 by admin

A Golden Age for Masks?

Back in 2015 when I began planning my contemporary crime novel Night and Mr Knightley, I considered using a masked ball as the setting for a murder. I was using Jane Austen’s Emma as the basis for the plot and so a regency ball seemed appropriate and the use of masks ideal for the schemes of a murderer.

But a masked ball? Yes, it had been used extensively in Golden Age Detective fiction (GAD), but that in itself made it seem rather passé. Would people now think that the wearing of masks could be at all believable?

The story itself was to take place in the autumn of 2016.

But then, at that precise moment, the world seemed to go a bit mad – in masks! There were huge marches of protesters wearing stylised Guy Fawkes masks in the November of that year – the Million Mask March.

There were gangs of clowns wearing make-up like a mask attacking people (I kid you not) especially in my home city of Nottingham where my stories are set. The combo of Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night had a lot to answer for!

Also there were protests in Europe about whether Muslim women should be allowed to cover their faces in public with only their eyes showing in case they were concealing explosive packages and couldn’t be identified.

And on a more local level, I had planned on referring to one of our theatres, Nottingham Playhouse, as part of the story – they then staged Thomas Middleton’s ‘Revenger’s Tragedy’ in November 2016, which I soon discovered was a jacobean gore-fest featuring mass murder at a masked ball ! It couldn’t have been more appropriate so I decided to feature it as a major theme in my story.

But becoming a Carer for my dear Mum in the last three years has meant something of a delay in my speed of book production. The publication of Night and Mr Knightley would have to be delayed to 2020. Would the subject of the wearing of masks be considered passé by then? Er, well…

There are far too many GAD stories featuring masks and masked balls for me to mention them all. But here is a taste of a few of them that I either read for research or refer to directly in my novel, hopefully without any spoilers.

The Masks Themselves

Masks come in many colours and materials. I began with reading Patricia Wentworth’s Grey Mask of 1928 which features a full-face mask of grey rubber. A bank robber in John Dickson Carr’s Colonel March story Hot Money (made for TV in 1952) also wears a full-cover rubber face mask as a robbery and a murder are committed. In White Face by Edgar Wallace (1931) the villain wears a white cloth cut with two eye holes.

Then more colourfully there was Behind the Green Mask by Ralph Trevor (1940), Greenmask by J Jefferson Farjeon (1944),

and the classic short story The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe (1842).

Frequently, though, the masks were simple black eye masks such as that worn by E W Hornung’s Raffles (1901)

or The Count of Monte Christo by Dumas (1844)

or Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders (1928).

(I originally had a black eye mask featured on the cover of my book but the designer turned it a striking pink – which I rather like!)

Party!

Just this list shows that masks were useful for individuals committing crime, sometimes skulking on their own down dark streets, but often in plain sight in public because everyone was at a party and disguised by masks as well.

JJ Connington’s detective Sir Clinton Driffield is annoyed in Tragedy at Ravensthorpe (1927) that his friends have chosen fancy dress for their large country house party – masks make it too easy for a criminal:

“ ‘I’m not altogether easy in my mind over this masked ball of Joan’s. Speaking as a Chief Constable responsible for the good behaviour of the district, Cecil, it seems to me that you are running some risks over it. A dance is all very well. You know all your guests by headmark [sic] and no one can get in on false pretences. But once you start masks, it’s a different state of affairs altogether.’ “

So true.

This was certainly the case in Agatha Christie’s The Affair at the Victory Ball (1923).

But Dorothy L Sayers of course reverses this in her Murder Must Advertise (1933), since disguising himself as a harlequin with a mask enables the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey to deceive and mislead the criminals.

There is also her short story The Queen’s Square (1932) featuring a fancy dress ball (Lord Peter is dressed as the Jack of Diamonds) but I couldn’t see any references to masks even though one would have expected them to feature. Sayers also refers to the American pulp fiction Black Mask magazine “that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction”, featuring it as a clue (or an anti-clue?) in Unnatural Death (1927) which Inspector Parker refers to disparagingly as “light reading for the masses”.

When looking at the subject of masks online I came across a lot of items on what has been labelled ‘The Party of the Century’. This was Truman Capote’s bash in New York in 1966, ostensibly in honour of the Washington Post’s publisher Katherine Graham, and Everyone who was Anyone was there. It took the form of a black-and-white masked ball.

I used this in my novel as Prisha Chatterjee’s inspiration for the masked ball that she is helping to arrange for the fictional Nottingham Knights Entertainment Company. The dresses of 1966, for example Mia Farrow’s, look almost regency, though somewhat shorter!

Edgar Allan Poe’s party in The Masque of the Red Death, however, is predictably more scary and apparently now has something of a cult following in America at Halloween. It concerns a wealthy Prince who invites all his friends to his castle to join him at a non-stop lock-down party so they can avoid a plague that is ravaging the land. The plague is called the Red Death. It is a masquerade with music, food and entertainment, whilst the poor are left outside the castle walls to suffer (sounding familiar?). Then a mysterious and ominous figure all in red, including a red mask, appears at the party uninvited… I’ll leave you to guess the rest. Just like the classic image of the executioner in a black hood to hide his face, masks can be worn to protect the identity of those who are a form of Nemesis, who implement appropriate revenge for wrongdoers and enemies.

Conclusion

In GAD masks were frequently worn around the eyes, not the mouth. But usually if someone was in a mask it meant they were about to rob you at the very least but quite possibly kill you. Here and now in January 2021 someone with a mask around their mouth and nose is more frequently trying to save your life.

As part of this general trend, there have been many literary-themed fabric masks produced, several featuring Jane Austen or quotes from her work. The ‘social distancing’ of regency life has also meant lots of photoshop opportunities utilising her stories.

And representations of Jane herself have not escaped the mask message.

In 2016 masks were being worn by those protesting the curtailing of our freedom. This can also be true now, but more often the opposite is the case – people refusing to wear masks because they feel it curtails their freedom. On the news it has just been reported that a third of police in the UK have had people without masks spitting at them or coughing on them, now a potentially murderous act. There have been ‘COVID-deniers’ without masks invading hospitals and endangering the staff and patients’ lives.

So regardless of the time gap between now and the Golden Age of crime fiction, all this shows that masks are still a matter of life and death, although our perception of how they function has been turned upside down.

But I must leave you now. A man in a black mask has just come to my door – delivering something nice from Amazon.

[For more on Night and Mr Knightley by Jeanette Sears, see the WELCOME page or go straight to Amazon Kindle]

Jul 29 2017

The Incredible Crime

Posted on July 29, 2017 by admin

A Review of The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh

‘The Incredible Crime’ by Lois Austen-Leigh

As if I didn’t already love Golden Age murder mysteries enough, this one came with the added incentive of an author related to Jane Austen (1). Who could resist?

The Incredible Crime came out in 1931 and was penned by JA’s great-great niece – or should I say ‘neice’ as JA herself always misspelled it – Lois Austen-Leigh (1883 -1968). Apparently she wrote her books on Jane Austen’s desk, later donated by her ‘neice‘ to the British Library. (Mm, pity I don’t have any nieces, they’re starting to sound extremely useful.)

I was also attracted by the academic environment of much of the story. The Cambridge University setting is beautifully realised, as indeed it should be by someone who in real life was the neice, sorry, niece of the Provost of King’s College, Augustus Austen-Leigh and his wife Florence Lefroy Austen-Leigh (2). In case all of these Austens weren’t enough, there are even a couple of cheeky references to JA herself and Northanger Abbey.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the heroine of the novel, Prudence Pinsent, is the spinster daughter of the Master of the fictional Prince’s College (I particularly enjoyed this as I made up my own Oxford College for my first murder mystery) (3). Prudence herself is well over 30 but doesn’t look it, and although a clergy daughter and generally dignified, will swear like a trooper when provoked. Her main ambition in life at first seems to be gaining as many months as possible in the countryside for fox-hunting.

One definitely is fed the inside scoop over port in the ‘Senior Combination Room’ and the cosiness of afternoon tea and college gossip at a don’s fireside. Reminiscences of the eccentricities of past academics and students add authenticity and spice to the atmosphere. For example, join me in a Professor’s rooms:

“His man came in with a bright copper kettle which he put on the fire; it started to sing at once. He then drew the curtains and brought in an ample tea, putting a plate of hot cakes in the fender. Nothing more comfortable could be imagined.” (4)

‘The Nine Tailors’ by Dorothy L Sayers

The other very authentic aspect of the setting is the author’s descriptions of the Fenland country around Cambridge and Ely and stretching towards the east coast, which was very reminiscent of Dorothy Leigh Sayers’ 1934 mystery The Nine Tailors. Austen-Leigh writes:

“They turned into the flat fen country and drove at a reasonable pace. On a bridge over a broadish bit of water they pulled up for a moment. ‘This is very fascinating,’ said Prudence, ‘is it a ‘drain’, the Ouse, or the Cam, I wonder?’ ‘I think,’ said Thomas, ‘that this is what you might call a drain – it’s the New Bedford Cut. It was made I don’t know how long ago by some Duke of Bedford, and cuts off a long bend in the Ouse; we shall pass the depleted bit of river farther on.’ ‘Is this how you get from Cambridge by water to the sea?’ ‘No, you do that by going down the Cam into the Ouse by Ely, by Denver Sluice into the Wash.’ (5) (I chose that quote because I thought Sayers’ fans would enjoy talk of Dukes and Denver!)

The descriptions of the Suffolk coast are also splendid, as are the wonderful meals and rooms enjoyed by Prudence stopping off at Ipswich at the ‘Great White Horse’ Inn (1518 with a Georgian facade). It was also used by Dickens and by his creation Pickwick, and it made me want to go there immediately. How disappointing to look it up online and find that it closed as an inn in 2008, is now part-Starbucks and is to be made into a business centre by the local council. Apparently the 16th century builders failed to take into account the 21st century desire for en suite.

As with many of the books of this period, it can be hard to visualise the characters accurately as to their age – everyone is so tweedy and old fogeyish and smokes a pipe if male. And one doesn’t necessarily pick up on the hints about the women from their appearance and habits either. I was continually astounded that everyone was about 20 years younger that I had first assumed. The way an “independent” woman is described is very different to how we would describe a single woman today, much of which we might find laughable. This also applies to the attempt at ‘romance’ in the story – if you’re a single woman who values her independence, be prepared to choke at the ending! Again, I can’t help but compare this to Dorothy L Sayers’ far superior attempt at romance in a detective novel set in the academic world in the glorious Gaudy Night.

If I am taking my time getting round to the plot itself, perhaps it is because this was the least compelling part of the book for me. Suspected drug smuggling and chemical experiments at the university are the substance, but unfortunately much of the searching for smugglers in underground tunnels reminded me of Famous Five novels, no doubt unfairly as Austen-Leigh’s book preceded Enid Blyton’s by about ten years. (I think it was the unscrewing of a window seat to discover a tunnel that really did it, although no doubt such things existed aplenty in ancient coastal country houses!)

Crime Novel Reviews of Dorothy L Sayers

In view of the many reminders of Sayers’ work that this book sparked off in me, I thought I would consult the new collection of Sayers’ crime reviews from the early thirties (6) to see if she had anything definitive to say on her contemporary and part-namesake. But sadly neither this book nor the other three by Lois Austen-Leigh were among them. However, I did open the book at another review (7) to see that I had underlined Dorothy’s succinct criticism of what apparently had already become a cliché by 1933: “rather too much secret passage and dopery”. I couldn’t have put it better, Dorothy! I, for one, will now be forever wary of what people are really up to at night when they claim to have been out “duck-shooting”.

But I can’t resist finishing by returning to the Jane Austen references. A tobacco-smoking don in Cambridge is horrified at the thought of possible drug-smuggling at the university and has to go to a service at King’s College Chapel to “take the nasty taste out of my mouth and make me feel clean again.” I am pleased to report that after listening to Scripture and the singing of hymns “he left the place feeling like a different man.” (8) And he was the one who felt he had the courage to quote Jane Austen at a CID officer, using the words of Henry Tilney to Catherine Moreland in Northanger Abbey:

“If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to… Consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.” (9)

I would give The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh 5/5 for Setting, 4/5 for Characters, and 3.5/5 for Plot.

For my latest novel Murder and Mr Rochester, see: www.jeanettesears.com/wp/?p_id=789

My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

NOTES

(1) Lois Austen-Leigh, The Incredible Crime, British Library, London, 2017, edited by Martin Edwards. A reprint of the 1931 edition published by Herbert Jenkins. Available from Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=lois+austen-leigh

(2) See Introduction to the novel by Prof Kirsten T Saxton.

(3) Jeanette Sears, A Murder in Michaelmas, Piquant Editions, Carlisle, 2012. See www.jeanettesears.com/wp/?page_id=27

(4)Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 65%, loc.1979 of 3092 in e-version.

(5) Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 10%, loc.294 of 3092 in e-version.

(6) Martin Edwards (ed), Taking Detective Stories Seriously: the Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L Sayers, Tippermuir Books, Perth, 2017.

(7) ibid., p108, in her review of Watch the Wall by Laurence W Meynell (1933).

(8) Lois Austen-Leigh, op.cit., 54%, loc.1646 of 3092 in e-version.

(9) ibid., 53%, loc.1620 of 3092 in e-version.

May 14 2017

Charlotte Brontë and the Strange Companion

Posted on May 14, 2017 by admin

Charlotte Brontë and the Strange Companion

Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Shirley’

In ‘Shirley’ (1849), Charlotte Bronte describes a Mr Yorke who is devoid of imagination and empathy. Chapter Four begins: “A Yorkshire gentleman he was, par excellence, in every point.” (1), which in itself perhaps shows a lack of imagination on Bronte’s part in choosing his name!

Apparently Mr Yorke lacks the “organ of Veneration” and can’t look up to anybody, even God. “He believed in God and heaven; but his God and heaven were those of a man in whom awe, imagination, and tenderness lack.” (2). She then goes on to list so many other inadequacies of his personality that one starts to think ‘Why should I care about this character at all?’ There are several pages of Brontë telling us about Mr Yorke rather than showing us what he’s like, acceptable in a novel written in the 1840s but which wouldn’t get past an editor today. But this does allow her to speak about the importance of the imagination as a “gift of the mind” and the error of those who dismiss it:

“…who cares for imagination? Who does not think it a rather dangerous, senseless attribute – akin to weakness – perhaps partaking of frenzy – a disease rather than a gift of the mind?”

It’s very easy for me as a writer at the beginning of the twenty first century to look back to the beginning of the nineteenth and to imagine that it was a period when writers and those living by the products of their imagination were in a privileged position compared to my own time. What would it be like to be an artist or poet in the Romantic era, or a novelist in the glory days of the Brontës, Gaskell, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot?

But this section of Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Shirley’ makes me think that it was just as hard then to be taken seriously if one took the imagination seriously and viewed it as an essential of life. She states that probably all people think the imagination is more of a disadvantage in life or even more like a “disease”, unless you actually possess it. Those who think they have strong imaginations speak very differently about it:

“To hear them speak you would imagine that their hearts would be cold if that elixir did not flow about them; that their eyes would be dim if that flame did not refine their vision; that they would be lonely if this strange companion abandoned them. You would suppose that it imparted some glad hope to spring, some fine charm to summer, some tranquil joy to autumn, some consolation to winter, which you do not feel.” (3)

Here Brontë seems to be claiming some sort of aristocracy of the Imaginative, and is depicting how the claims of the Imaginative can look like a superiority complex to others. She gives Mr Yorke’s view: “An illusion, of course; but the fanatics cling to their dream, and would not give it up for gold.” (4). Mr Yorke, we are told, did not consider a poetic imagination a necessity of life. He could “tolerate” the results of it as works of art in the form of a good picture or music, but could not tolerate all the talk of the struggles of a quiet poet, who “might have lived despised, and died scorned, under the eyes of Hiram Yorke.” (5).

Bronte then gives a fascinating description of the character of the imaginative artist, “the true poet”, who has to somehow survive the fact that “there are many Hiram Yorkes in this world”:

“… it is well that the true poet, quiet externally though he may be, had often a truculent spirit under his placidity, and is full of shrewdness in his meekness, and can measure the whole stature of those who look down on him, and correctly ascertain the weight and value of the pursuits they disdain him for not having followed. It is happy that he can have his own bliss, his own society with his great friend and goddess, Nature, quite independent of those who find little pleasure in him and in whom he finds no pleasure at all. It is just that while the world and circumstances often turn a dark, cold, careless side to them – he should be able to maintain a festal brightness and cherishing glow in his bosom, which makes all bright and genial for him; while strangers, perhaps, deem his existence a Polar winter never gladdened by a sun. The true poet is not one whit to be pitied; and he is apt to laugh in his sleeve, when any misguided sympathizer whines over his wrongs. Even when utilitarians sit in judgement on him, and pronounce him and his art useless, he hears the sentence with such a hard derision, such a broad, deep, comprehensive, and merciless contempt of the unhappy Pharisees who pronounce it, that he is rather to be chidden than consoled with.”

Perhaps Charlotte realises she is getting a bit carried away here and so comes back with: “These, however, are not Mr Yorke’s reflections; and it is with Mr Yorke we have at present to do.” (6).

Charlotte Brontë

But perhaps these words do stand as a rebuke to all those who mainly emphasise the outward “bleakness” of the Brontës’ lives and don’t look further into these glowing recesses of inner creativity and hope. Bronte’s own images for the imagination here – comparing it to an elixir, a flame, a refiner of vision, an imparter of hope and charm, joy and consolation, bliss, a festal brightness and cherishing glow that can make all things bright and genial – these images inspire our imaginations too. And we are convinced by her conviction that true imagination is utterly necessary for tenderness and awe and veneration to exist in us, even for a truer appreciation of God and heaven. Who wouldn’t want more of imagination by her definition, this “strange companion” ?

To enjoy more of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination in the form of her most famous novel ‘Jane Eyre’, you can read my latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ which intertwines a contemporary murder mystery with the experience of a reading group studying her great classic.

My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

You can buy this at Amazon UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears

Or at Amazon US:

https://www.amazon.com/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1478345205&sr=1-1&keywords=jeanette+sears

NOTES

(1) Charlotte Brontë, ‘Shirley’, Penguin Classics edition, London, 1994, p44.

(2) ibid., p45.

(3) ibid., p46.

(4) ibid.

(5) ibid., p47.

(6) ibid.

Dec 31 2016

Emma-Jane Austin and the Brontë Birthplace

Posted on December 31, 2016 by admin

Emma-Jane Austin and the Brontë Birthplace

In my novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’, Emma-Jane Austin visits the birthplace of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë in Thornton, West Yorkshire. She is really keen to take photos for an exhibition at her place of work, Bromley House Library. But it is also the weekend of Mother’s Day. And the other members of her reading group, the Rotic Club, are keen to see Thornton too, since it is 200 years since the birth of Charlotte Brontë in 1816 and they are studying her masterpiece ‘Jane Eyre’ together. So a quiet contemplative solo trip turns into a more social pilgrimage and a celebration for Emma’s mother and grandmothers who swell the numbers – and the fun!

Their journey begins at Nottingham train station with a disagreement over changes to the architecture of the victorian building

Nottingham train station

eg. have the lovely old art nouveau features been sufficiently enhanced in the recent refurbishment?

Art nouveau detail on station gates

Fortunately the train is on time and on the way to Bradford the women share some of the Brontë memorabilia and objects of interest to begin their study day. A taxi takes them through thick snow to Thornton and their rented cottage on Market Street, the same street where the younger Brontës were born.

Brontë birthplace plaque

You can see more at www.bronte-country.com/thornton.html . But the highlight was having lunch at ‘Emily’s’, the lovely bistro that is now situated in the Brontës’ former home,

‘Emily’s’ bistro and Brontë birthplace

‘Emily’s’ bistro, Thornton

and that still has the original fireplace and some of the furniture from their time. You can see this, plus a map of a walking tour of Thornton called ‘Brontëland’, at www.delucaboutique.co.uk/about-us3.html.

‘Emily’s’

Fireplace at ‘Emily’s’

Over their meal, the women compare photos of Charlotte B from various biographies. Of course there is the portrait of the three sisters by Branwell

Brontë sisters

and the photo on the cover of Lyndall Gordon’s excellent biography.

At ‘Emily’s’ cafe the women also enjoy looking at drawings of the Brontë family growing up as imagined by Joan Hassall in ‘The Brontë Story’ by Margaret Lane.

Margaret Lane’s biography of the Brontës

They also hand round a copy of ‘Charlotte in Love’ by Brian Wilks and have quite a lot to say about Charlotte’s own romance and marriage.

Charlotte’s love life by Brian Wilks

This means that they are not just delighted at being in the Brontës’ birthplace but also wonder about a trip to Haworth Parsonage together, where the sisters and their brother grew up and practised their art. The parsonage has become a place of pilgrimage for Brontë fans even more than Thornton, and Emma’s mother and grandmothers have some surprises for the younger women in the form of catalogues and guidebooks from their own visits to Haworth in the 1980s. One of Emma’s grandmas has a 1967 guide to Haworth bought there in 1981.

1980s guide

And Emma’s mother produces a booklet called ‘Sixty Treasures’ from 1988, which shows 60 items kept at the Parsonage. The women exclaim over the photos of everyday household items and artistic materials used by the family, and particularly Charlotte’s tiny dress and boots and her wedding veil.

1980s guide

Rosanna, one of Emma’s reading group, gives them some very useful web addresses for keeping up with Brontë news and fandom, such as www.eyreguide.awardspace.co.uk and www.bronteblog.blogspot.com and www.bronteparsonage.blogspot.co.uk .

She also shows a picture of her favourite painting of the character Jane Eyre by Sigismond De Ivanowski from 1907.

Jane Eyre by De Ivanowski

One of Emma’s closest friends, Nattie, talks about reading the famous novel by Jean Rhys which imagines life for Rochester with his wife before they come to England and Bertha Mason descends into madness. Nattie has also enjoyed the Persephone edition of Frances Towers’ collection of short stories ‘Tea with Mr Rochester’ from 1949.

Tea with Mr Rochester

The Persephone books are plain grey on the outside but all have beautiful endpapers inside and matching bookmarks that fit in with the era of the story.

Persephone pattern

To everyone’s amazement, even Emma’s grandmother ‘Grambo’, who has been less than enthusiastic about the trip and its theme so far, produces a memento from a visit to the Brontës’ home from many years before – an old toffee tin!

1980s souvenir tin

She had even filled it again with toffees for their journey home! The tin is rather lovely – very Puginesque – with victorian photos of the main Brontë sites on each side.

Side of tin

The only member of Emma’s reading group who cannot be with them on the trip is Maria, the German teacher. Instead she sends them something of interest to read that is referred to in ‘Jane Eyre’ and comes from her own culture. This is an extract from Friedrich Schiller’s ‘Die Rauber’ or ‘The Robbers’ from 1782. Not everyone appreciates having to read this! (You can find it at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6782 )

Schiller’s ‘The Robbers’

Instead Emma suggests they read ‘Henry Brocken: his Travels and Adventures’ by Walter de la Mare from 1904, a fascinating story imagining visiting fictional characters as if they were real – for example Henry Brocken goes to see Rochester and Jane and their dog Pilot in their small house in a dark wood after their marriage. (You can read this at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15432 )

This shows that re-imagining the characters from ‘Jane Eyre’ and writing new stories about them is nothing new. My own novel, ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ is in this category in a sense, as Emma-Jane Austin not only discusses Charlotte Brontë’s characters with her friends and family but feels she is meeting with them again in some form in her own life as she struggles to solve a murder mystery. I am sure the Brontës would be amazed, and hopefully gratified, to know that we have still felt compelled to revisit their novels and even their birthplaces and homes in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

You can read all about Emma-Jane and her friends in ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ as an ebook on Kindle at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears

Oct 28 2016

Emma-Jane Austin’s Library

Posted on October 28, 2016 by admin

Emma-Jane Austin’s Library

The main character in my novel Murder and Mr Rochester works at Bromley House Library in the centre of Nottingham. Although Emma-Jane Austin is fictional, the library most definitely is not. It is a Regency gem on Angel Row, next to the Council House and the main Market Square. 2016 has been the library’s 200th birthday.

Nottingham Council House and Market Square

Here are some photos so you can appreciate more fully the beauty of the building where E-J is privileged to work, and also see the setting for the terrible crime that takes place there in the story. (There are some hints here to help you solve the murder too!)

In Murder and Mr Rochester I mention that many people do not even know of the library’s existence. All you can see at first is a mysterious doorway in between the usual sort of city centre shops. The entrance sits discretely between Barnardo’s and a newsagent’s. But if you ignore the traffic, erase the shops and look up you can begin to imagine the size and grandeur of the house itself.

Bromley House Library on busy Angel Row

Once inside, you are in a hallway that leads either to the back of the house

Doorway to garden

and a walled garden

View of garden from upstairs window

or up the stairs to the main desk and reading room.

Librarians in regency costume at main desk for 200th anniversary

Of course, the most intriguing feature that strikes you as you enter the main part of the library is the spiral staircase.

Spiral staircase from side

It was not part of the original structure of the house when it was built for George Smith of the famous banking family in 1752 but was added along with the gallery.

Gallery above main reading room

Let’s follow Emma-Jane on her journey on that terrible afternoon of the (fictional) murder in the Library…

She is in the George Green Room sorting out books for the library’s Charlotte Brontë exhibition. (The room is named after the Nottingham mill owner and pioneering mathematician.)

Door of George Green Room

After switching off the lights, she walks towards the gallery that runs around the main reading room.

Left hand side of gallery

She turns to the right and walks along the middle section of the gallery,

View of right hand side of gallery

but then witnesses the ghastly ‘accident’ on the stairs to her left.

View of stairs from right side of gallery

Here is a close-up of the brown wooden stairs (the colour is significant!)

Wooden stairs

and the stone hearth around the fireplace. (The modern radiators in the library are necessary to control the heat and humidity more accurately than a gas or real fire.)

Fireplace hearth with stone edging

There is a gap between the bottom of the spiral staircase and the fireplace that will be of significance…

Bottom of stairs and hearth

Here is the longcase clock that chimes loudly early one morning and scares Emma-Jane when she is in the library on her own, trying to solve the mystery.

Longcase clock

Bromley House Library really did have a display of Charlotte Brontë’s books in the Spring of 2016 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of her birth, which is featured in the novel.

Display of Charlotte Bronte books

And for the 200th birthday of the library itself in April 2016, which in the story Emma-Jane is looking forward to, the real librarians held a birthday party in regency costume!

Librarians in regency costume for 200th anniversary

You can be a member of the library even if you don’t live in Nottingham – a ‘Country Member’ pays half the usual subscription fee.

Do have a look at the Bromley House website at www.bromleyhouse.com. It has more photos and some short films that really give you a feel of the place. There are many more beautiful rooms, old and new, to explore.

No wonder Emma-Jane Austin in my story feels very lucky to work there – apart from the murder, of course!

My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

You can buy Murder and Mr Rochester by Jeanette Sears on Kindle at www.amazon.co.uk or www.amazon.com.

Oct 28 2016

Emma-Jane Austin and The Tunnel

Posted on October 28, 2016 by admin

Emma-Jane Austin and the Tunnel

In my novel Murder and Mr Rochester, the heroine Emma-Jane Austin discovers a shortcut in the centre of Nottingham called ‘The Tunnel’. It is one of the most interesting architectural features of Nottingham but is now largely hidden from view.

Access to hidden Tunnel

It is tends to just be called The Tunnel, or if one wishes to be more helpful and accurate, The Park Tunnel.

The Tunnel in Nottingham

It echoes the days when Victorian engineers were blasting great big holes through anything that stood in the way of modern transport. This time it was in 1855 and was a way to gain a shortcut from Derby Road in the centre of Nottingham through to the new residential Park Estate owned by the fifth Duke of Newcastle.

It provides another fascinating revelation of the huge area of sandstone rock and caves that form the foundation of the centre of the city.

Tree and the sandstone Castle Rock

The Dukes of Newcastle were no strangers to this geological formation as their castle stood on the highest section of sandstone which was pockmarked with entrances to strange tunnels and caves beneath.

Nottingham Castle on Castle Rock

The job of designing the man-made tunnel and much of the new estate was given to the fifth Duke’s surveyor, Thomas Chambers Hine (1813-1899).

Thomas Chambers Hine

He also designed the layout of the roads and many of the magnificent houses, as well as having approval of other intended house plans in order to maintain the estate’s architectural integrity. Unfortunately the Tunnel was obsolete almost as soon as it was built. The gradient was slightly too difficult for horse-drawn carriages. Also other roads were built at around the same time that meant the Tunnel was no longer necessary.

Steps in central part of Tunnel

But it remains an eccentric and hidden part of Nottingham’s history. And, despite electric lighting and an opening for natural light in the middle,

Artificial and natural light in the Tunnel

it can still be scary at night, as Emma-Jane Austin finds out in my murder mystery novel Murder and Mr Rochester. Not a place where you want to bump into strangers in the dark…

My novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

Oct 8 2016

Welcome to Emma-Jane Austin’s home!

Posted on October 8, 2016 by admin

Welcome to Emma-Jane Austin’s Home!

The heroine of my murder mystery, Emma-Jane Austin, gets to live in her dream house. It is the beautiful Regency building that she has loved since childhood, that she used to call the Big Doll’s House. And you can see why.

Regency House

It is a perfect example of a Regency style house right in the middle of Nottingham city centre, Grade II listed and standing at Canning Circus since 1820 on the outer perimeter of the very grand Park Estate. This was land that used to be owned by the mega-wealthy Dukes of Newcastle when it was indeed just grassy parkland for the Dukes’ deer. Now called the ‘Beverly Hills of Nottingham’, the area is full of stunning Regency and Neo-Gothic homes in a gated community (although, fortunately for the rest of us, most of the gates are left open so we can explore).

Welcome to Park Estate

One of the unusual things about the Park Estate is that it still has gas lighting.

Gas light on Park Estate

Until 2015, a man in a vintage car used to light the lamps each evening, but now it is done automatically by an electronic trigger in each lamp.

Gas lamp on Park estate

But every two weeks or so a man has to come and reset the automatic triggers – not quite as romantic, but great that they are still gas lamps as in their Victorian heyday.

Resetting timer on gas lamp (Credit: Mike Hallam)

The light they give is whiter and paler than modern neon lights and doesn’t radiate as far, which does mean the Park can look rather Dickensian and creepy at night – though ideal for murder mysteries!

Park estate gas lamp at night (Credit: Mike Hallam)

I too loved this house when I was a child, which I could see out of the bus window on the way into town each week.

Regency house at Canning Circus

Even though it was a dirty cream colour then and looked rather run down, it still stood out from the grottier modern buildings around it on a historic street called The Ropewalk. Now the house is a cool pale green with gold relief work on the plaster angels and wreath on the central pediment and is divided into flats. I have given Emma-Jane a room at the top on the left hand side at the back of the building.

Back of Regency House from road below

Below her room is a large stone-flagged terrace above two garages where she and her flatmates can sit outside in sunny weather.

Patio

From her bedroom window she can see across the Park to Nottingham Castle on its sandstone rock.

Nottingham Castle

In my novel the flat covers the top three floors on the right of the building and is owned by Penelope Galthorpe-Brown, who owns several florist shops throughout the Midlands. Another tenant is Jennifer Wright who owns a restaurant in town and is a successful chocolatier.

Top flat

The flat provides a beautiful and cosy backdrop for the meetings of Emma-Jane’s reading group, especially as this architectural gem contains many of its original features, including a functioning fireplace in the main drawing room. In ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ they are of course studying Charlotte Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ together.

My novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

In future books they will be delving into the works of Jane Austen, for which this stunning Regency house will be even more appropriate. But of course the novel is not just about women reading classic romantic novels together. The fact that Emma-Jane’s house was also next to a (very small) police station (before it closed in April 2016) is going to become somewhat appropriate as well…

Canning Circus police station

Police station sign

Sep 17 2016

The Kilns – What Was and Could Have Been

Posted on September 17, 2016 by admin

The Kilns – What Was and Could Have Been

As a fan of C S Lewis, I love it when bits of Narnia or other elements from the life of Lewis weave their way into my everyday life.

Recently a friend gave me a special treat. It was a lunch out in the countryside nearby to celebrate finishing the final draft of my latest novel. It was to be at the Bottle Kiln in West Hallam, an unexpectedly beautiful place in a small Derbyshire village [1].

The Bottle Kiln

It was also unexpectedly crowded. No doubt the school holidays contributed to some extent, but in retrospect I can see that the quality of the place drew people like the proverbial magnet and we were lucky to get the last parking space at lunch time. Plus the weather couldn’t have been more gorgeous or the sky more blue.

Bottle Kiln and garden

This meant that my first view of the old kiln was doubly delightful as it rose above the surrounding brick buildings that now house a café and the sort of shops that translate me into retail heaven.

But, of course, the kiln itself was bound to remind me of C S Lewis’ home, the Kilns, in Oxfordshire, so I was hoping to find interesting resonances. At the Bottle Kiln there is an intimate garden at the back where people can eat their food and chat to friends but that is also quiet enough for contemplation.

It is called a Japanese tea garden and I was immediately struck by the effort taken to make a tranquil space that was both friendly but that encouraged people to just stop and be quiet for a while.

Bottle Kiln Garden

We certainly couldn’t ignore the fact that this kiln had once produced bricks. They were everywhere, not just in the construction of the kiln itself and the outbuildings but also beautifully laid out in systematic patterns for paths. Even the tabletops in the restaurant were made of bricks and mortar. The whole place has been rescued and renovated with very creative and artistic touches.

Garden tiles

The various chambers around the central kiln are now four selling areas for Gifts, Home and Accessories, Handmade items, and the Card Room, with the restaurant on the other side.

Central chamber of kiln

The design motif throughout was one of my favourites – Orla Kiely’s iconic leaf pattern. The predominant colour of green blended well with the brickwork and reflects the green ethos of so many organic and recycled items on sale, all of which were laid out with the precision and good taste of a magazine shoot.

Orla Kiely wallpaper

My friend knew I would love this, and I did!

Contemporary pots on sale

It was also interesting to stand in the middle of the building and look up – to see right through to the sky above through the narrow outlet of the kiln’s original chimney.

Bottle Kiln Chimney

It formed such a contrast to the vibrant life and colour all around me. For the brick flue was huge, dark, bleak and silent with the longest cobwebs I’ve ever seen draped from the top, like a spider’s dusty version of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Looking up at the sky, I felt as though I was in a tunnel again – the feeling I’d had for the last few months while writing my novel – head down, prioritising work, not seeing people, utterly concentrated and largely isolated. That’s not to say it’s been a negative experience – I’m an introvert and I love it! But one can’t do everything in life, and when I’m concentrating on a book, other parts of my life (like going out to restaurants with friends) just tend not to happen (like my blogging too, for that matter)!

The Tunnel in Nottingham

This time there’s the added factor that a massive tunnel in the centre of Nottingham – just called ‘The Tunnel’ – features at the beginning and end of my novel (which is called ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’ in case you were beginning to wonder). The Nottingham Tunnel is a huge Victorian construction blasted out of sandstone. This has often been in my mind as an image for the writing process – one enters the darkness of the imagination to construct an alternative reality in prose, which can feel like blasting one’s way through rock to find what’s on the other side. Then one day it’s all over and you emerge blinking into the daylight of normal life again. And friends take you out to lunch…

The light at the end of the Bottle Kiln’s towering chimney reminded me of this – I’m at least out of the tunnel of the final draft of my novel at any rate. I couldn’t help remarking to my friend how marvellous it would have been if the Kilns that used to be next to C S Lewis’ house of the same name had survived and could have been refurbished just like the Bottle Kiln here.

Original plan of Bottle Kiln

The home that Lewis bought with his brother and Mrs Moore in 1930 that is now a study centre would be enhanced by such a development next door, especially if still surrounded by the fields and wild countryside that so attracted the Lewis brothers. The original kilns in Headington in Oxfordshire could have become a similar visitor centre with beautiful shops, a café (or pub!), and a garden next to the lake and part of the nature reserve that’s still there. What a ‘go to’ spot that would have been for visitors to the area, and an even greater pull for The Kilns’ and the C S Lewis Foundation’s attempt to stimulate further interest in this great author and teacher. Instead of a small house in the middle of a modern housing estate, my mind’s eye could now see a much larger enterprise, with the chimneys of the old kilns visible for miles, like a sign, like the towers of a cathedral calling out to visitors to come and find.

Original Bottle Kiln

I can imagine Lewis would have approved of a refurbished set of Kilns in the countryside next to his house where people could come and eat and drink with friends, talk about art and literature, contemplate nature, de-stress, and generally have good fellowship together or mediate on their own in God’s good creation. That was exactly what I was able to do with my friend. I could just imagine the Inklings having a drink and a meal here together, discussing their latest work in the restaurant or garden, as we were able to do.

Bottle Kiln restaurant

Even the retail side of my experience was a blessing. I was delighted to find the very things I needed to buy – some kilner storage jars for the kitchen (plus they were about half the price of shops in the centre of town)!

Glassware

But to go back to the very centre of the building, not only did the opening at the top of the kiln itself remind me of a tunnel, it brought to mind the experience of Jill Pole in C S Lewis’ ‘The Silver Chair’ when she and Puddleglum and Eustace have been in the dark Underland for what seems like ages. Then at last Jill sees a glimpse of light up above and can now emerge, with the help of friends pulling her out, into the heart of Narnia again. Then, what should I see in the restaurant at the Bottle Kiln after our meal, but a little bit of Narnia in the form of a children’s book on the newspaper and magazine stand. There, along with the Tatler and the Times, were a couple of picture books on the bottom shelf within the reach of children. I must admit I hadn’t seen this version of a Narnia story before, but there on the cover were none other than Puddleglum and Jill Pole in a version of part of Lewis’ The Silver Chair! [2]

Version of ‘The Silver Chair’

I love it when this sort of Lewisian synchronicity/serendipity happens. It seemed to affirm my experience of the light at the end of my own personal tunnel-cum-kiln.

And this linking of tunnels and kilns is not as fanciful as it might sound. Yesterday I looked at kilns on the web to see if there was anything else of interest. Well, there is even a ‘Tunnel Kiln’, apparently! And both the kilns next to Lewis’ house and the Bottle Kiln I visited this week were both built in the 1920s. There were two brick kilns and a brick drying barn about 100 yards away from Lewis’ house which was built in 1922. The area used to be known as the Clay Hills when the brick industry flourished there in the late 19th century.

But a glance at the Ashmolean Museum’s website revealed a much more ancient heritage for this area of Oxfordshire in its Archaeology section. Here we’re told that “large numbers of pottery kilns have been excavated in south and east Oxford. The numbers have suggested to some archaeologists an “industrial zone”, coincidentally but interestingly centred on the modern industrial zone around Cowley, but also stretching to Headington, Rose Hill, Littlemore, Sandford and as far south as Betinsfield. The kilns cluster around the Roman road…’ [3]. These were developed in the early 2nd century AD to provide good quality domestic ware, mostly for dining and kitchen storage, using the pure white clay of Shotover Hill.

However, these early kilns fell into disuse when the Romans withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century and it was only in the Victorian era that serious pottery and brick production began in this area again. But we can still see some of that early Roman homeware from the Oxford Potteries in the Rome gallery on the ground floor of the Ashmolean Museum.

Roman pots in the Ashmolean

Did Lewis ever look at any of these old pots and reflect that they could have been made just a few yards from his home 1600 years before? And how interesting that Lewis is buried at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry – named after the stone quarry there that provided some of the stone for the building of the Oxford colleges.

So, two of the main places most associated with C S Lewis are named, not after any high-flown literary or romantic themes, but after two of Oxfordshire’s oldest and most down to earth industries – the Kilns and a Quarry.

Model of bottle kiln

Perhaps my own envisionings of the imaginative process of writing as hewing through rock, or journeying through a dark tunnel, or trying to find the sky through a dusty and cobwebby chimney of clay bricks, are also sufficiently down to earth images and experience on which to build a creative literary life. The kiln can become a model for how I think of my work.

Inside model of bottle kiln

And if that’s whetted your appetite to read the novel I’ve been mentioning – yes, it’s published now and you can find it on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Mr-Rochester-Jeanette-Sears-ebook/dp/B01M28IXFD/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1477392333&sr=1-3&keywords=jeanette+sears

My latest novel ‘Murder and Mr Rochester’

NOTES

1] You can see more at www.bottlekiln.co.uk.

2] Hiawyn Oram, The Giant Surprise: a Narnia Story (HarperCollins, London, 2005) based on C S Lewis, The Silver Chair (Geoffrey Bles, London, 1953).

3] From www.ashmolean.org/ash/britarch/roman-oxon/oxon-pottery.html, written by Susan Walker, 15 Dec 2011.

Sep 6 2015

Donna Fletcher Crow interviews Jeanette Sears

Posted on September 6, 2015 by admin

I was delighted to be interviewed recently by the well-known American novelist Donna Fletcher Crow for the International Christian Fiction Writers website. Here are the text and pictures:

A Murder in Michaelmas: Jeanette Sears Interview by Donna Fletcher Crow for ICFW

Jeanette Sears

Donna: Jeanette, welcome to International Christian Fiction Writers! We are so privileged to have an internationally known C. S. Lewis scholar visit us. Before we get to talking about your last novel tell us about your contribution to Women and C. S. Lewis.

Jeanette: Thank you so much, Donna, for inviting me. It’s great to speak with you, and thank you for asking about my non-fiction as well as fiction. Yes, I was asked by one of the editors of Women and C S Lewis, the wonderful Carolyn Curtis, if I would write a short opinion-piece for this Lion Hudson book which has been published in the UK and USA this summer. The aim was for around 30 contributors who regularly research and write on Lewis to say what influence he has had on them, particularly in the area of Lewis and women. Did Lewis have a bad attitude to women? Has his teaching had a negative impact on them? That was the sort of question we were to address in our response. Well-known writers such as Alister McGrath, Michael Ward, Colin Duriez, Crystal Hurd, Monika Hilder, Randy Alcorn, Malcolm Guite, Holly Ordway, David C Downing, Don King and others all chipped in to reassert Lewis’ reputation and standing in this area. I suspect the piece that’s most critical of Lewis is probably mine! I take him to task on the subject of women priests. But basically we’re all fans who are very grateful to him for his influence on our lives and we hope that this book on a popular level will be interesting for fans and critics alike.

New book ‘Women and C S Lewis’

Donna: And you also published a guide to C. S. Lewis’ Oxford, didn’t you?

Jeanette: Yes, I’m glad to say that The Oxford of J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis has sold around 7,000 copies and is in Blackwell’s and the main tourist shops in Oxford. I had been taking people on Inklings tours of Oxford and approached Oxford Heritage Trails who had published walking tours on different themes for many years. I’m glad to say it’s become their best seller, even beating the one on Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland!

‘The Oxford of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis’

Donna: Now, tell us about A Murder in Michaelmas. Of course, I loved it because it’s set in Oxford, revolves around Arthurian legends and has an American heroine— subjects all dear to my heart. It must have been quite a challenge weaving all those strands together.

My novel ‘A Murder in Michaelmas’

Jeanette: I thought you might like it! I’ve just enjoyed reading your A Newly Crimsoned Reliquary, so I suspect we have a lot of interests in common! I lived in Oxford for 10 years – as an ordinand at theological college, a curate, a student chaplain, and a Summer School Director for a college – so I got to know the life there from the inside. I found myself using it as a setting for a murder mystery very naturally, as of course have many before us. Oxford seems to bring murder out in people, in literature at any rate! (By the way, I used to live on Fairacres Road in Iffley, as did your heroine for a while.)

Donna: Have you always had a love of things Arthurian?

Jeanette: Not particularly. No more so than any other Brit – perhaps it’s in our DNA. But I wanted to have a plot that reflected the medieval setting of Oxford and that could easily include the theme of witchcraft and the occult. I had been to the Oxford Arthurian Society (which sadly no longer exists) and so made up my own Lancelot and Guinevere Society. I thought this could be a re-enactment group where students dress up as characters from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the nastier characters as well as the good guys. Was the murder a re-enactment that went horribly wrong, or did the victim’s death have some other cause? You may have noticed that I also love the Preraphaelites, and often quote them at the beginning of chapters. Well, they loved Tennyson and the Arthurian legends, and so I suppose I love Arthur because I love them. Of course, C S Lewis rather liked them as well – I really love That Hideous Strength in which he draws on these medieval stories.

Donna: Why did you choose to work with an American heroine?

Jeanette: My heroine, Eve Merry, was originally written as British, but then it occurred to me that her being American would work better, especially as a contrast to the English upper-class hero and fellow student Crispin Martin de Beauchamp-Massey. She’s studying Theology, he’s reading English Literature. She’s from a poor background, he’s rich. She’s a Christian (although struggling after her father’s death), while Martin is a bit of a cynic. So I thought to have them as different nationalities would add to the conflict and interest. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, for 4 years in the 1980s so I thought I could have Eve heralding from there, plus Oxford is blessed with many keen and enthusiastic American students, so I figured that would fit well too.

Donna: Eve and Martin are such interesting characters. Will we be seeing more of them? Do you envision this book as being the first in a series?

Jeanette: Oh, thank you. Yes, I hope this will be a series. I’ve started writing the second ‘Merry and Massey Mystery’ – it’s called Death of a Sluggard. The first mystery had the theme of Christianity versus the occult; this one has the debate between Religion and Science as the ideological background which the murder throws up. Eve and her friend Charlie Boscombe, who is a Biochemistry student, will be tackling the so-called New Atheists, with eccentric help from the irrepressible Martin of course.

Donna: Your website says you’ve been a church minister, a university lecturer, a London bookseller and a writer. What a wonderful variety of experience. Do you find all this background helping you in writing your novels?

Jeanette: Definitely. I’m sure you find that as a writer now you have to also be a public speaker, event planner, book seller, sales and marketing expert, teacher, pastoral counsellor, etc etc, as well! So it all comes in handy, whether it’s plotting the books, talking about them in public, or getting people to buy them. My children’s novel (although really it’s for everybody) called Pig’s Progress began as stories I told to live audiences at church and school.

‘Pig’s Progress’

Donna: You also lecture on Dorothy L. Sayers— another of my favorites. How has a love of Sayers influenced your writing?

Jeanette: She’s my heroine. I first read her Clouds of Witness when I was 10 and immediately wanted to be a writer. I include talking about her on my Inklings tours of Oxford, even though she wasn’t officially an Inkling. As a theologian and a writer of murder mysteries, she’s got to be my patron saint. If I can reflect any of her intelligence, style, faith and imagination in my writing, who could ask for more?

Donna: You have so much to keep up with it must be hard to keep all your hats in a row. What’s next for you?

Jeanette: Mmm, you’re right, it can be tricky combining everything. At the moment I have a lull in speaking events so there’s more time to concentrate on the writing. I’ve been finishing a comic literary novel called The Last Romantic. Then I’ll be writing the first of (I hope) a series of murder mysteries set in my home town of Nottingham. Oh, and finishing Death of a Sluggard, and working on more non-fiction on C S Lewis and Dorothy L Sayers.

Donna: Jeanette, thank you so much for taking time in your busy life to be with us today. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Jeanette: It’s been my pleasure. The next publication is my contribution to C S Lewis at Poet’s Corner (Wipf and Stock) which should be out fairly soon. One of the highlights of recent years was being able to be part of the events surrounding the inclusion of Lewis in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, and this is the written form of those events, plus lectures and blogs it inspired.

Donna: And where can we find you and your books on the web?

Jeanette: My web address is www.jeanettesears.com and my books can be accessed on Amazon from there. Donna, many thanks again, and may God bless you and yours. (Perhaps we’ll get to meet in Oxford sometime?!)

[You can find the original of this interview at:
http://internationalchristianfictionwriters.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-murder-in-michaelmas-jeanette-sears.html and Donna at www.donnafletchercrow.com]

Jul 30 2015

The Dragon-defeating Saint of Sark

Posted on July 30, 2015 by admin

The Dragon-defeating Saint of Sark

On a walk round the island of Sark last week I saw a dragon.

This was most unexpected. It was red and huge, as opposed to great and green (Tolkien fans will know what I mean) and made of metal and was standing, rather incongruously, outside a bicycle repair shop. Of course I had to take its photo.

Sark Dragon

What was it doing there? Was the bicycle repair man a Tolkien fan or was there some other reason for its presence?

Perhaps I should be used to meeting dragons on my holidays by now. Last year it was seeing the Tatzelwurm at Aare Gorge in Switzerland and the story of St Beatus defeating the dragon at Interlaken that took me by surprise (see my blog ‘In Tolkien’s Footsteps in Switzerland’ for the details and pictures). This year I was touring the Channel Islands off the coast of France. After exploring Jersey and Guernsey I was now to spend a day on the tiny island of Sark which I had longed to see for years.

Arriving on Sark

Its otherworldly reputation – a feudal society with no cars or planes allowed – had made it fascinating to me. Plus there had been the TV series called ‘An Island Parish’ about the churches on Sark, that showed the small tight-knit community there all year round, which seemed quaint and charming, and to have preserved traditions and a neighbourliness that we have lost on the mainland.

Sark Methodist church

It all seemed to promise a trip back in time. So I was perhaps expecting saints, but not dragons.

A few minutes in the tiny building housing the Societe Sercquaise put me right.

La Societe Sercquaise Heritage Centre

Here was a pamphlet with a dragon on the cover – a dragon with a bearded monk standing next to it who was holding it on a leash made from his priest’s stole, embellished with a cross. Apparently this was Saint Magloire, none other than the patron saint of Sark. Like England’s St George, he too had slain a dragon, though in his role as a monk rather than a knight. And as with St George, the legends about him are varied and historically confused, but exciting. According to this short history by Martin Remphry [1], Saint Magloire (or Maglorius) came to Sark around 565 AD to establish a Christian monastic community. He had been given half of the island by Loyesco of Neutstrie in Brittany, in return for curing him from leprosy. The half of the island belonging to the saint was so blessed in the fertility of its crops and fishing and animal life that it began to cause trouble with the natives on the other half of the island who were not so blessed! Magloire, who may have been Welsh or Breton, seems to have that closeness to the natural world typical of the Celtic saints, and is even called a nephew of King Arthur. He performed many miracles, such as healings and saving people from drowning. He began schools for the islanders and became the Bishop of Dol.

But where does the dragon come in? Cue a photo of the dragon from another angle, looking almost cute next to a matching basket of flowers…

Sark dragon again

Apparently Magliore had already slain a dragon on Jersey before he even came to Sark! The locals were so pleased they gave him land (he seems to have had a way with real estate) and he established an oratory there. Remphry says there there are few details but speculates that Magliore might have used the same method of dragon-slaying as another Breton saint – St Paul Aurelian. He defeated a 60 foot serpent on the island of Batz by tying his stole round its neck and luring it off a cliff and into the sea. And Magliore’s cousin, St Sampson, did the same thing in Cornwall.

A section of the medieval monastery on Sark still exists next to the Seigneurie, the home of the ruler of Sark. Unfortunately I did not get to see this as collapsing over an ice-cold lemonade in the 90 degree heat in the cafe there took precedence instead.

Seigneurie gardens cafe

Taken around the island on the back of a horse-drawn cart under a blazing sun

Transport on Sark

is probably the hottest and most sunburnt I’ve ever been, and the nearest I got to meeting a fire-breathing dragon. Probably a good thing, as I didn’t have my stole on me at the time…

NOTES

[1] Martin Remphry, ‘Saint Magliore, Patron Saint of Sark’, La Societe Sercquaise, Sark, 2010.

Jun 30 2015

C S Lewis, Brideshead, and the Earls of Beauchamp

Posted on June 30, 2015 by admin

C S Lewis, Brideshead, and the Earls of Beauchamp

‘Madresfield: the Real Brideshead’ by Jane Mulvagh

My breakfast time reading for the last few days has been Madresfield: the Real Brideshead by Jane Mulvagh [1]. It is an account of the history of the Lygon family and their country home, told via a series of objects found in and around the house (eg. The Nursery, The Ditch, The Portrait, the Red Heels, The Tuning Fork, The Tree of Life). As with any aristocratic British family whose ancestors ‘go back’ to the Norman Invasion, the family was active and involved in most of the major events of our island’s history and politics and frequently pioneers in the arts and exploration.

But why take a special interest in this family and their country pile rather than another? The clue is in the title of the book – Brideshead. Even though Castle Howard in Yorkshire was used to represent the Brideshead revisited in the TV and film versions of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of 1945, it was really Madresfield Court in Worcestershire owned by the Lygon family that was the beautiful old house in Waugh’s mind as he wrote.

Madresfield Court

And it was the (beautiful? you judge) son of the house, Hugh Lygon (1904-36), who was a model for the beautiful and doomed Sebastian Flyte.

Hugh Lygon

The first chapter of Mulvagh’s book on ‘The Nursery‘ is actually about Waugh as it was in the nursery of Madresfield where Waugh wrote on his frequent visits.

Evelyn Waugh with two Lygon sisters and a friend

And what does all this have to do with C S Lewis? I certainly didn’t begin to read this book with Lewis in mind, but as always seems to happen, there were connections that seemed to jump out of the pages. Lygon (pronounced ‘Liggon’) is the family name of the Earls of Beauchamp (pronounced ‘Beecham’) who own Madresfield and it is the sixth Earl of Beauchamp who was the main founder and financial supporter of both Malvern College where Lewis went to school (for one year in 1913/14)

Malvern College

and Keble College Oxford where Lewis received his military training before going to fight in France in 1917.

Keble College Oxford

As I read more about the sixth Earl and his family, there were unavoidable resonances between his emotional history and spirituality (which expressed itself in architecture, literature, and good works) and Lewis the writer and Christian apologist.

The sixth Earl Beauchamp

Frederick Lygon, 6th Earl Beauchamp

The chapter of ‘Madresfield’ that concerns Frederick, the sixth Earl, is entitled ‘The Breviary’. This is because he was a “highminded High Churchman” who was fascinated by liturgy and wrote a much-researched book of prayers and services now in Madresfield’s library [2]. Frederick had been a younger brother in the family who was not expecting to inherit the title – in fact, early on he looked more likely to ‘go over to’ Rome and become a priest. The young Frederick’s mother had died when he was only five and his father withdrew emotionally, so the small boy was largely raised by a stern anglo-catholic governess, with chapel at the beginning and end of every day and church seven times on Sunday [3]. Even as a schoolboy at Eton, Frederick Lygon began collecting medieval religious texts. He went on to read Greats at Christ Church Oxford and became a follower there of Edward Pusey, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, a Tractarian or ‘ritualist’. Frederick even made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1856 in order to decide once and for all between the Anglican Church and the Roman but, after a severe struggle, remained Anglican, although praying for the reunion someday of the Anglican and Roman branches of the Church.

According to Mulvagh, “his Christian mission continued in his political career” [4] and he had considerable success in various government posts. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, E. W. Benson, described him as “a very smart, bright man, a little chimerical, gaily dressed and brushed, and beneath a most loving son of the church.” [5] In the House of Commons he earned himself the nickname “the Ecclesiastical Layman” and wrote all of Disraeli’s speeches on religious matters [6].

Meanwhile at Madresfield, Frederick’s older brother Henry Lygon, the fifth Earl, was transforming the house from a medium-sized squire’s manor house into a 160-roomed Victorian neo-gothic stately home [7].

Madresfield Court

But in 1866 Henry died of TB and Frederick succeeded to the title and the task of finishing the building works. This had happy results, as Mulvagh points out:

“Frederick’s devotion to God was bound up in the Gothic rebuild. Though in ecclesiastical matters he was nit-picking and academic, his architectural instincts were sentimental and idealized. The Gothic was the Tractarians’ preferred architectural style. Their romantic imagination associated it with the medieval: the chivalric knight, the medieval monk, the artisan. Inspired by nostalgia, these modern crusaders turned their backs on classicism, a style they associated with the decadence of Ancient Rome, the godlessness of Georgian England and, worst of all, the barbarity of French Republicanism. Gothic Revivalism – conveniently rinsed of all its violent associations – suggested to them high-minded poetry, an undivided and true church, Plantagenet nationalism and, for those so inclined, ancient lineage.” [8]

Malvern College

Frederick built almshouses, estate workers’ houses, several gothic churches, and donated to the restoration of the Priory at Great Malvern [9]. As a substantial landowner in Worcestershire, he helped found Malvern College and a nearby girls’ school. I picked up a copy of A History of Malvern College 1865-1965 by Ralph Blumenau [10] for only a £1 at my favourite shop in Oxford (‘Arcadia’ on St Michael’s Street – oh, another coincidence: the first chapter of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited about being an undergrad at Oxford is called ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, I should imagine the source of the name of the shop). Frederick Lygon became the Chairman of the College Council, built the headmaster’s house, and was one of the main investors in the Building Company which was formed to develop the school. He was the biggest sharehloder, along with John Wheeley Lea, and Blumenau concludes: “it is no exaggeration to think of these two men as the principal founding benefactors of Malvern College.” [11] Frederick’s heir, William, the seventh Earl Beauchamp, was only a minor when Frederick died but in turn also became Chairman of Malvern College’s Council in 1905.

William, 7th Earl Beauchamp

While still just a member of the Coucil, the seventh Earl was instrumental in getting one of his old masters from Eton, S R James, to be Malvern’s headmaster. S R James was headmaster from 1897 to 1914 and therefore during the time Lewis and his brother attended the school (the college called ‘Wyvern’ in Lewis’ autobiography Surprised by Joy). Blumenau makes several references to C S Lewis in his history of Malvern College, noting some of his positive and negative reactions to the teaching and regime there (I’ll deal with this in a later blog).

Keble College

John Keble himself died in 1866 and his supporters were determined to build an Oxford college in his memory (as well as to “counteract Rugby and Balliol” in spirituality) [12]. It was to be High Anglican, frugal, and for those training for ordination in the Church of England. Donors included Gladstone, Samuel Wilberforce the Bishop of Oxford, and of course Frederick Lygon who gave £5,000 at first and more anonymously later. William Butterfield, a neo-gothic architect, was chosen as designer. The foundation stone was laid on 25 April, Keble’s birthday. “Not surprisingly, in its Gothic style, Keble bore a remarkable resemblance to the rebuilt Madresfield and some rooms in college were named after the Earls Beauchamp.” [13]

Coincidences

So it was to be the architectural preference of the 6th Earl of Beauchamp and the deep spirituality that it sought to express that was to be the backdrop for some of the formative years of C S Lewis at school and university. Both lost their mothers at a young age, had fathers who withdrew from them emotionally, and had formative training by a nanny/governess. Ironically, even though Lewis pretty much hated his time at Malvern and his military training at Keble, he grew up to share the deepest aesthetic and spiritual interests and instincts of Frederick Lygon’s heart – the medieval romantic imagination, nostalgia for the chivalric knight and medieval monk, a hatred of the idolatry of Reason, and a desire for the universal Church to be united once more.

Any other serendipitous connections? Well, while I’ve been writing this blog everything’s come full circle. I’ve been listening to the TV music of composer Geoffrey Burgon, a CD which just happens to start with Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,

Geoffrey Burgon CD

continues with Testament of Youth about young people at Oxford affected by the First World War, and which ends with – you’ve guessed it – the mellifluous beauty of Brideshead Revisited.

Lygon family at Madresfield Court

NOTES

[1] Jane Mulvagh, Madresfield: the Real Brideshead, Black Swan, London, 2008.

[2] Day Hours of the Church of England, 1858 – it was actually a translation of the Roman Breviary and the Earl published it anonymously.

[3] Mulvagh, ibid., p199.

[4] ibid., p203.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid., p206.

[8] ibid.

[9] ibid., p213.

[10] Ralph Blumenau, A History of Malvern College 1865-1965, Macmillan, London, 1965.

[11] ibid., p10.

[12] Mulvagh, op.cit., p215.

[13] ibid., p217.

Apr 26 2015

C S Lewis on Truth and Originality

Posted on April 26, 2015 by admin

C S Lewis on Truth and Originality

[A version of this article first appeared in the Christian Writer magazine for Spring 2015]

C S Lewis article in ‘Christian Writer’ magazine

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” (C S Lewis, Mere Christianity, IV, 11)

This is very good advice for anyone seeking to write, perhaps particularly on C S Lewis. There are so many books about him and his thought already in existence and new ones being created all the time, that it can feel foolhardy to attempt to say anything new about him or his circle, the Inklings. However, since this is true about virtually all subjects, what is the writer to do, particularly the writer committed to non-fiction?

Lewis (1898-1963) revelled in being a “dinosaur” in his field, one of the last surviving examples of Old Western Man who read medieval and renaissance texts as if they were native to him, as he declared in his inaugural address as Professor at Cambridge University in 1954. He had already parodied those who tried to be original and up-to-date for its own sake in Pilgrim’s Regress, his first novel of 1933. Here he portrayed the fashionable modernists of the time who pedalled godless philosophies for financial gain and a privileged status in society as the intelligentsia. Lewis showed how Freudianism, Marxism, and most other contemporary ‘-isms’ were frequently illogical and ridiculous if taken to their logical conclusions and were more effective in oppressing individuals rather than in liberating the true self. Once Lewis became a Christian he particularly disliked attempts by liberal theologians to import worldly philosophies into Christianity, resulting in a pseudo-form of the faith, even though he himself was quite happy with some forms of biblical criticism and evolutionary theory.

But for Lewis it was the task of re-educating his fellow citizens on the forgotten core beliefs of the Christian faith that was really crucial. In the Second World War he was to get the chance to do this, not just via the written word but via the most up-to-date technology available, the wireless. In these Broadcast Talks the last thing he wanted to be was original. Arresting, interesting, engaging, yes – in the way he put across the basics of the faith. But the main elements of Christian belief were not his to tinker with and he had found salvation for his soul and meaning for his life by submitting to the classic Christian creeds. He got into a spat with the liberal theologian Norman Pittenger in 1958 on this very issue. Pittenger, who taught Theology at a seminary in New York, accused Lewis, in effect, of dumbing down the faith. Lewis was perfectly aware that he was not a professional theologian and that he was bound to be essentially a populariser in this field, more a translator of the work of orthodox theologians that had gone before him than an innovator. And in his gift for making the distant and complex exciting and accessible lay his strength. In his rejoinder, Lewis rightly defends the necessity of this task:

“One thing at least is sure. If the real theologians had tackled this laborious work of translation about a hundred years ago, when they began to lose touch with the people (for whom Christ died), there would have been no place for me.”[1]

So for Lewis, writing about the Christian faith was much more than an academic exercise, it was an act of “translation” of what already existed, in a way suitable to communicate with a contemporary audience who desperately needed to hear it. More than that, he was obeying the Lord’s command to speak His truth to all people, not just playing around with concepts and ideologies with the intellectual elite. Lewis was not interested in the kind of fame that came from being ‘original’, especially as he was so well-versed in the philosophies and literary styles of the past that he knew how often these tended to just repeat themselves and be anything but ‘new’.

He was also not averse to repeating himself, for example on the topic of truth and originality: in Membership he wrote: “No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.” [2] And in a letter from 1942 he wrote against the need for so-called originality in poetry, not just in content but also in style, concluding “The pother about ‘originality’ all comes from the people who have nothing to say: if they had they’d be original without noticing it.” [3]

God is more concerned with making us new people: “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation…”, “…be transformed by the renewal of your mind…”, and God is the one who says: “Behold, I make all things new…”. [4] God has made each one of us unique and so the uniqueness of our writing will come from us being true to our real selves as God has made us, not by trying to be something else. In fact trying to be ‘original’ and different and therefore something other than what we are could be seen as an affront to God’s own creativity. We reflect back the divine glory because of who we become in Christ, not in spite of it. Becoming our true selves and achieving self-realisation, which is the story arc of practically every Hollywood story and TV drama, is a free gift to the Christian. We become truly authentic as individuals and therefore as writers when we give ourselves up to Christ and let Him lead us into new life by His Spirit. Then we will truly blossom and achieve what Carl Jung called ‘individuation’. Then, if we are speaking or writing authentically we will be original and different by definition, for no one else can speak as the real you or write as the real you, other than… you.

Lewis ended his broadcast talks during the war on this very point: that “our real selves are, so to speak, all waiting for us in Him…. the very first step towards getting a real self is to forget about the self. It will come only as you are looking for something else.” And that ‘something else’ is of course the Lord Jesus. Lewis then emphasises that the same principle applies in literature, art and all of life – you make a much better impression when you have forgotten about yourself and making a good impression. It is the divine principle of losing your life, one painful bit at a time if necessary, in order to gain true spiritual life. To try and gain a self for yourself and by yourself will bring you only to despair and ruin.

I can’t think of a better way of ending than to be entirely unoriginal and use Lewis’ own ending to his radio talks: “But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in” [5]… including originality.

NOTES

[1] Lewis in ‘Rejoinder to Dr Pittenger’ in Undeceptions: Essays in Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (Geoffrey Bless, London, 1971, p183).

[2] Available in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses, edited by Walter Hooper (Macmillan, New York, 1980).

[3] Letter of 23 April 1942 to Martyn Skinner about his poem Sir Elfadore and Mabyna. Lewis was here particularly citing the style of Alexander Pope as one that was still valid, even though held in contempt by many of their contemporaries (Collected Letters of C S Lewis, vol 2, ed. Walter Hooper, HarperCollins, London).

[4] 2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 12:2; Rev. 21:5.

[5] Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, London, 1952, Book 4, ch 11).

Mar 28 2015

The Jackdaw Richard the Third

Posted on March 28, 2015 by admin

The Jackdaw Richard III

1970 orange and purple Scrapbbook and Josephine Tey novel

When all the fuss about the discovery of Richard III’s body erupted recently, one of my first thoughts was: “Oh, if only I still had my Jackdaw folder about him!” Then last year when clearing out old boxes from my parents’ garage, I found it again, albeit in the form of a scrapbook from 1970 containing pared down papers from the Jackdaw that I’d carefully trimmed to fit the pages and sellotaped into the album when I was eleven years old. Why do children love scrapbooks so much? What’s so appealing about cutting out pictures and sticking them in albums? I certainly had several scrapbooks when I was growing up, usually devoted to my favourite pop stars. But when I was eleven I developed this much more unlikely craze for a dead king, prompted by reading the classic detective story ‘The Daughter of Time’ by Josephine Tey.

It featured her main detective Inspector Grant who was holed up in hospital with a broken leg and was itching to do some detecting regardless. A friend suggests one of the great mysteries of history and so he settles on who murdered the Princes in the Tower – was it their “evil uncle” King Richard the Third, or his successor Henry the Seventh, the first of the Tudors? The evidence presented in this brilliantly told reconstruction of the crime convinced me forever of Richard’s innocence and Henry’s guilt. I then read everything about Richard I could lay my hands on back in 1970, including this wonderful Jackdaw folder.

Jackdaw 24: Richard III and the Princes in the Tower

It was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1965 but my copy is by from the Paragon Press in 1970. It was edited and compiled by J. Langdon-Davies, an interesting character in himself. I can still remember the metal carousel in W H Smith’s that contained the Jackdaw folders and the feeling of adventure that they generated as I span it round – which person or event from history shall I find out about next? These Jackdaw folders were bulging with fascimiles of historical documents to fascinate schoolchildren with the feel of handling primary sources. There were reproductions of oil paintings, family trees, the stories of famous people, and beautiful calligraphy in bold black Latin on thick brown paper. It really did make you feel like a detective handling original documents in the excitement of solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time. Plus there was the Justice angle – my eleven year old heart swelled with indignation at the thought of this poor wounded king who had been so maligned by history. I became a (no doubt very annoying) apologist for King Richard to anyone who would listen, wrote a long essay on him for school (which never got marked – it was so long it was overdue and handed in too late) and carried on collecting for my scrapbook, now entitled ‘HISTORY and other things eg. books, News-paper cuttings, Drawings etc. Jeanette Sears VOLUME ONE’. I can also see from my copy of ‘The Daughter of Time’ that this coincided with being given a Dymo label writer for Christmas which meant I labelled all my possessions with my name embossed on red plastic tape. It’s also evident that the fashionable colours for 1970 were orange and purple, judging from the cover of the novel and my scrapbook. I seem to remember my bedroom was painted orange then purple too (or was it purple then orange?)

Since the reburying of King Richard III this week in Leicester Cathedral has generated so much interest worldwide, I thought I would share the contents of my old Jackdaw folder for any of you interested who now can’t get hold of a copy easily. As I said, I cut up the papers it contained and stuck them in a scrapbook with sellotape that’s now brown with age, so they won’t look pristine but I think still of interest. It begins with the well-known portrait of Ricardus III Ang. Rex. by an unknown artist and a fascimile of part of Thomas More’s ‘History of Richard III’ [not shown here] written in 1557.

Rous Roll and portrait of Richard III

I can still remember the fury of Josephine Tey’s detective every time he came across the ‘backstairs’ gossip’ of More’s account in any so-called ‘evidence’. Above are also drawings of Richard and his wife and son with their coats of arms from the Rous Roll.

‘Richard through contemporary eyes’ and ‘Richard Crookback’

On large sheets of pink paper there are accounts of ‘Richard through contemporary eyes’ and ‘Richard ‘Crookback’’, featuring the notorious performance of Shakespeare’s play by Laurence Olivier and how the Tudors attacked Richard’s reputation and physical image. This sheet ends with: “One of the most exciting uncertainties of Richard’s reign is the story of the little princes, supposed to have been murdered by their wicked uncle in the Tower of London. Today historians admit that they do not know who the criminal was – it is not even certain that there was a crime. There is no certain evidence on which a jury would convict Richard; it would even be possible to make out some sort of a case that the real criminal, if there was one, was Henry VII.”

‘Did Richard murder the primes?’ and an account of his acts as king

Then on orange paper an article entitled ‘Did Richard murder the princes in the Tower?’, containing a brief review of the evidence and concluding that we only hear about Richard’s guilt from his enemies whose accounts can’t be trusted. On the contrary Richard seemed like a good and just king from his other actions and no court could convict him of the crime on the evidence available. Opposite on pink paper is ‘What do we know of Richard’s acts?’ asking “Was Richard a hypocrite or was he sincere?” when he passed good laws, was merciful to his subjects, etc. There is a list of just and righteous actions done by the king that make him sound the ideal Christian monarch. The conclusion is: “In short, as far as we can see from the documents which have been preserved, Richard’s rule was just and progressive. Indeed, there is a possibility that his unpopularity with some of the rich and aristocratic classes was due to a tendency to stand up for the underdog and undermine some of their privileges.” Reading through these actions of Richard again, I must say it is a very convincing case that he helped the poor and oppressed wherever possible and deprived the fat cats of their unjust gain. Did his spine condition give him an empathy for the oppressed and downtrodden? It makes Philippa Gregory’s description of him as “the People’s Plantagenet” seem very appropriate. It does look as though, when we lost Richard, we lost a very good king. There is even evidence of kindness to his rivals and enemies that makes it look very unlikely that he would have killed his nephews.

Facsimile document and pamphlet on the Battle of Bosworth

On the next pages lie a fascimile, on thick brown paper, of an extract from the Act of Parliament Rolls for the first year of Richard’s reign with a typed transliteration (almost as hard to read as the original but giving even a youngster a feel of medieval English).

Typed transliteration of medieval document

There is an account of the Battle of Bosworth of 1485 where Richard lost his crown.

Next is a copy of a letter from Richard to the keeper of his wardrobe, Piers Curteys, from 31 August 1483.

Richard’s letter to Master of Wardrobe

He is requesting clothes such as “one doublet of tawney sattayn lyned with Holand cloth and enterlyned with Buske”, as well as banners and “trumpet bands of sarcenet”. The transcription underneath meant that it was possible even for an 11 year old in 1970 to read the handwriting of 1483. The accompanying notes say that even experts on medieval costume don’t know what “spurves” and “guynysans” were!

The pamphlet ‘Edward V and Richard Duke of York: the Princes in the Tower of London’ gives photos of the Tower areas where the princes were kept and possibly buried, plus diagrams and rather gruesome photos of skeletons of children from the period.

Leaflet on Princes in the Tower

The next page has a copy of a letter from Richard to his Lord Chancellor from 12 October 1483 with a transcription on the opposite page. I think the handwriting round the edge is Richard’s own.

Richard’s letter to Lord Chancellor with own handwriting round the edge

The guide to the Jackdaw documents assures children that “with a little patience… you will become quite an expert in reading fifteenth century handwriting” !!

I was then intrigued to see that I had a leaflet for a performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ at Nottingham Playhouse from Oct-Dec 1971, starring the comic actor Leonard Rossiter.

Nottingham Playhouse producing Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ in 1971

This amazed me as I had completely forgotten this. It is described in the leaflet as “a vividly macabre performance”. Since Robert Lindsay has also played Richard, there must have been a trend for a while of having him played by comedians. And gosh, the prices of tickets – 50p for the stalls, 25p for the balcony, and travel subsidies were available if you were coming from elsewhere in the Midlands! They were certainly keen to get people into the theatres in those days and more willing to subsidise it with public money.

The next page shows ‘How Richard became King’.

‘How Richard became King’

In my scrapbook this is juxtaposed with Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.

This is because the only other Jackdaw folder I owned was about him. I also have a hard time not saying “Boo!” after his name, as it was his propagandised account of Richard which Shakespeare used for his play. As an all-or-nothing 11 year old, to me this made Thomas More a baddie.

There was a general introductory booklet to the Jackdaw folder which for some reason I pasted at the end of my display rather than the beginning. It gives a run down of all the ‘Exhibits’ and questions for you to ‘Think for Yourself’, which begins: “This ‘Jackdaw’ shows how the story of Richard III may have been distorted by later historians to make a better case for the kingship of the Tudors. Can you think of any other well-known instances of history being rewritten?” Another question is “What do you think would have happened if Richard had won the Battle of Bosworth?”, then “How would you persuade anyone living in about 1500 that a crippled body does not necessarily mean a wicked soul?”, and lastly “Suppose the little princes were alive in 1485, what do you imagine they thought about it all? Perhaps we never heard of them again because they thought “Anything for a quiet life” and preferred to remain “lost”?” Hmm – rather a loaded question. There is then a list of ‘Books to Read’, including Josephine Tey’s novel of 1954 and the biography of Richard by Paul Murray Kendall (1955) which I can remember devouring in the school library on rainy lunchtimes.

I had then cut out the photos from a paperback on the Plantagenets by John Harvey (1967).

Portrait of Richard III

The portrait of Richard has him looking worried and placing a ring on his own finger (was this a symbol of usurping the throne?) as with the more well-known picture. He still looked preferable in my childish eyes to Henry VII who reminded me of a weasel.

Next to this in my scrapbook was a surprise. I had completely forgotten about the magazine version of Winston Churchill’s ‘History of the English Speaking People’ and that I owned No. 30 of the 112 issues (which apparently came out every Thursday) and was edited by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Hugh Trevor-Roper and A J P Taylor (BPC Publishing 1970).

Magazine cover: ‘The Princes in the Tower’

The cover shows the portrait of the Princes in the Tower by the Victorian artist Millais, the boys looking very much like Bubbles dressed as Hamlet.

Contributors to the magazine

It contains articles by H M Colvin, A R Myers, John Gillingham, and G D Ramsay, most of whom were Oxford dons.

Winston Churchill on Richard III

Churchill’s own account follows Thomas More’s and so was anathema to me as a stout little Ricardian. There was also an article on the Tower of London plans of the Battle of Bosworth

Battle lines at Bosworth

and a taste of the arguments against Richard as the murderer of the princes, but this is pretty half-hearted. Perhaps no one felt they could come out too strongly against Churchill’s view when the whole magazine was supposed to be honouring his version of history.

Image of ‘evil’ Richard III and the princes

I am intrigued now as to why I was such a ‘fan’ of King Richard III at such a young age. I think it was the injustice done to a young king that touched me, plus the fact that it was wrapped in one of the greatest mysteries in history. The Jackdaw folder gave me a ‘hands on’ experience in learning about it and the feeling that I was in touch with the historical characters concerned. The Josephine Tey novel brought the story to life in a way that completely gripped my imagination. It has only just occurred to me as I write this blog that the first murder mystery that I have written concerns students who like re-enacting scenes from the late fifteenth century from Malory’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’ – exactly Richard III’s lifetime. Perhaps I have Richard III to thank for my own first murder mystery!

My novel ‘A Murder in Michaelmas’

I also think that it is no coincidence that shortly after my fascination with Kind Richard as an 11 year old I became a Christian – it was possible to also see Jesus of Nazareth of the first century as a young King who had had great evil and injustice done to him, who had suffered a cruel death and whose truth needed to be defended. From the wounded king of medieval chivalry to the wounded King on a cross wasn’t too great a leap. Now that we know more of King Richard’s own Christian faith and his desire to live as a chivalric Christian knight, this is perhaps not surprising. I was particularly struck by this aspect of Richard’s life when hearing Philippa Langley speak in 2013, the amazing woman who led the discovery of Richard’s body in the Leicester car park.

Meeting Philippa Langley in Southwell Library, Nov 2013

I was determined to shake her hand and thank her, as I believe many have done this week. It was also very moving to see a young girl putting the crown on Richard’s coffin during the reinterment service at Leicester Cathedral, a girl about the same as as me when I ‘discovered’ him, in a sense reinstating him as a good Christian king. Who would have thought that the supposed ‘evil child-killer’ King Richard III would have become a type of Christ for me as a young child?

Little girl ‘re-crowning’ Richard III in Leicester Cathedral in March 2015

Feb 28 2015

Before Blogging: the Journals and Papers of Major Christian Leaders

Posted on February 28, 2015 by admin

Before Blogging: the Journals and Papers of Major Christian Leaders

Manchester’s great Victorian library

As bloggers and users of the internet, we are sometimes faced with the unpleasant fact that much of what we write in a digital format may well be lost for ever while older written sources ironically may survive. So if you were the Victorian vicar the Reverend Joseph Bloggs, your communications with your people and the world beyond your church in your sermons and letters might still be around in two hundred years while this blog might not. Even the Revd Bloggs’ self-communication via a journal or a diary might well last longer, especially if you were deemed worthy of being made Bishop and then Lord Bloggs of Blogginton Wells – all your most private and delicate thoughts on paper will probably continue to be diligently preserved over the years by rabidly-dedicated librarians, whether you wanted them to be or not.

Recently I was having to clear out old books I’d had for 30 yrs and never read. Some of these were lists of archival sources and bibliographies that one needed as a researcher before the internet. One of these was Papers of British Churchmen, 1780 – 1940, produced by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and published, no doubt to a panting and impatient audience, in 1987. It was one of their Guides to Sources for British History, and probably back in the 1980s I thought I ought to know where to get my hands on the letters of John Nelson Darby, amongst others, as my PhD research featured him quite strongly (they were in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which is fortunately where I had begun my research).

John Rylands Library, Manchester

This grey-covered boring-looking book – in fact, the most boring-looking book I have ever owned, so boring I hadn’t even been able to open it in 30 years – seemed like an obvious one to cast aside into the Tesco bag marked ‘THEOLOGY – Give away, to a College’. But, as usually happens when I allow myself a few seconds to open any book, I soon found myself fascinated and was reminded of the old truism to not judge a book by its cover.

It turned out to be a long list of famous and forgotten names, of men once able to charm thousands from the pulpit, who could help decide the fate of churches and nations, lift up the poor, write poetry more famous than any of their sermons, pen hymns sung by millions, cause scandals and give prophetic warnings that made the front of the daily newspapers, and encourage queens and kings. Just the names were fascinating for a start. In alphabetical order, they run from:

“ACTON, Charles Januarius (1803-1847), Cardinal 1842”,

through to:

“ZOUCH, Thomas (1737-1815), Rector of Wycliffe 1770-93, of Scravingham 1793-5; prebendary of Durham 1805-15.”

How appropriate that the first one should be named after January, the first month! And a reminder of how Latin was second-nature to the educated men of that era (although perhaps later as a Cardinal he would know that it was also the name of the patron saint of Naples – I looked that up on the internet). Pity Thomas Zouch’s parents hadn’t felt it necessary to call their son ‘Decemberius’ to finish off the alphabetical list neatly, although to be fair, perhaps he wasn’t born in December and it would have just confused everyone as Decemberius doesn’t seem to be a name (at least I couldn’t find any on the web).

The fact that the book listed ‘Churchmen’ of course had not escaped my notice but I genuinely expected not to find any women in there anyway, as I assumed it was mainly clergy. But then my eye fell on:

“SOUTHCOTT, Joanna (1750-1814) Religious fanatic.”

Ah. Not too good for the women, then.

Joanna Southcott

I certainly remembered Joanna Southcott as there had been a veritable obsession with her in the circles of my research just prior to my PhD. She was the latest thing for people interested in Adventism and Millenarianism and… the decidedly delusional. She had claimed to be a prophetess, calling herself the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12. And what papers of hers remain? We can rest easy knowing that her correspondence and accounts of her visions, scrolls, seals, and poems, are neatly divided between the Blockley Antiquarian Society and the University of Texas. But her most important papers were said to be in a mysterious box that should only be opened in the presence of the assembled bishops of the Church of England and at a time of great crisis for the country. Some people clamoured for this to happen in the Crimean War and the First World War apparently. Probably it wasn’t deemed an ideal item for the agenda of General Synod whilst debating women bishops, however.

But what of the famous churchmen?

Archbp Frederick Temple

Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury 1896-1902 and father of William, another Archbishop of Canterbury back when it ran in the family – the usual letters and family stuff, but also his “diary of self-examination 1843-9 (1 vol)”. Wouldn’t mind reading that! Confessions of feeling fed up with Queen Victoria? The young William being a pain? Then again, only one volume for 6 yrs implies either a very large volume or not much self-examination. And did he know it would one day be made public? That could cramp one’s style.

Archbp William Temple

The next entry relates to his son William Temple – the usual church and family and business letters and the vital ‘Notes for Lent and Garter Day Addresses 1942’, but, alas, no diary of self-examination.

And one great name I could hardly ignore:

“WESLEY, John.”

John Wesley

My PhD supervisor, Dr Henry Rack, was and is the world expert on Wesley but because he was on sabbatical at the crucial time, I never did the relevant course with him as an undergraduate and so had a shamefully sketchy knowledge of the great leader’s life, despite being converted by Methodists back in 1971. Here there’s the usual list of letters and sermon notes and diaries, plus Holy Club Notes, kept at the “Methodist Archives in Manchester”. This made my researcher’s nose twitch again. Hmm. Must look it up on the internet. Ah, and there they are, digital reproductions in Wesley’s own handwriting, kept by – guess who – the John Rylands Library.

Perhaps, then, it’s best to hedge your bets and keep your blogs and diaries and sermons in hard copy as well as digital – just in case you get famous and the JRL starts to take an interest…

The John Rylands Library, Manchester

Jan 31 2015

When is a Blog not a Blog?

Posted on January 31, 2015 by admin

When is a Blog not a Blog?

I think I enjoy blogging. I often have blog-like thoughts. But a couple of years ago it seemed inconceivable that I would have my own. I had read quite a few other people’s blogs, sometimes enjoyed them, sometimes not, but none had looked like the sort of thing I might write. I had no desire to generate debate over anything. I had nothing I wanted to confess. I didn’t see why the general public might be interested in the minutiae of my life. I didn’t particularly want to share recipes, gardening tips (I didn’t have any, other than – Get a Gardener), and was worried that anything other than DIY ‘How To…’ articles would look like narcissistic rambling.

Patrick Campbell’s ‘Life in Thin Slices’

But now I get these blog-like ideas, at least one a day, and have to write them down. And one of the reasons is finding – well, if not a role model, then at least an inspiration. And that inspiration is the Irish comic writer and stammering raconteur Patrick Campbell (1913-1980). I picked up a second-hand copy of a book of his entitled Life in Thin Slices, mainly because it was illustrated by the superb Ronald Searle who is a hero of mine and I buy his books whenever I see them at a reasonable price [1]. I also remembered Patrick Campbell from seeing the TV show Call My Bluff when I was growing up – the intense Patrick leading his team in outstaring and outwitting and out-lying Frank Muir’s lot over the meaning of words. There was always a slight tension in wondering whether Patrick would be able to get the words out and that the audience didn’t always know whether to laugh or not. But his sheer chutzpah was often part of the joke and he obviously had a great deal of respect as a media personality. I had no idea that he was primarily a writer. Nor did I know that he was by that time Sir Patrick, the third Baron Glenavy.

The book consists of short ‘slice-of-life’ articles he wrote for various newspapers in the 1940s. If it weren’t for Searle’s crazy drawings for each section one wouldn’t necessarily know beforehand that they were funny or indeed what they were supposed to be about. There are no headings as such. And Campbell didn’t even seem to want to call it a book. He begins:

“Author’s Opening Announcement: The first part of this work is divided into chapters, in a similar way to the system used in books.”

That in itself made me laugh with the very first sentence. Of course he was referring to the fact that these disparate writings had begun as articles in newspapers which had now been artificially gathered together to pass themselves off as a proper book. But I can’t help thinking he enjoyed beginning a book by implying it wasn’t a book, despite the fact that you, the reader, are holding his book in your hands at that very moment! But what a great way to describe the essence of blogging – the title of Campbell’s book Life in Thin Slices. That’s exactly what most blogging is. And I could relate to that.

He obviously had little desire to write anything of a more substantial length. He gives an amusing account of how two rival publishers (‘Publisher A’ and ‘Publisher B’) were vying to get him to write a book for them. They happened to collide at his club:

“I introduced Publisher A to Publisher B, and it was at that moment the plan occurred to me by which all three of us could extricate ourselves from a situation which up till then had clearly been without solution. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘let us lay our cards, face upwards, on the table. We know, all of us, that I am quite incapable of writing a book. Books are too long. But there is a faint – a microscopic – chance that I might just be able to record a sequence of events which would run to 50,000 words.’ At this point I put my hands on their shoulders. ‘It is not,’ I told them, ‘a possibility we can afford to overlook. But – and this is the vital point – I can only do it once, like the great grey parrot of the Congo Basin, which, in captivity, lays one egg, and then falls back spent, barren for evermore. Now, here is my proposition. I will take £50, in single, untaxable, notes, as an advance from both of you, and in exchange provide a promise, in duplicate, signed by myself and witnessed by a justice of the peace, that I will not write a book for the other.’ ‘You mean,’ said Publisher A, after a short pause, ‘that you will not write a book at all?’ ‘And receive,’ said Publisher B, ‘£100 for what we must regard as a minimal effort?’ ‘That, gentlemen, is my proposition.’ And that…, although it’s taken rather a long time to get round to it, is why I have now decided to write a play. It seems to me the only other method of earning a living, in the literary field, by doing absolutely nothing.” [2] Campbell then goes on to show how easy it could be to write something resembling a play, if you were particularly unscrupulous.

The P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell

Two of the funniest sections of the book concern him being unable to speak at will. Firstly, his therapy sessions in Harley Street about his stammer – but of course being unable to speak to the therapist to discuss it. Then a dinner party where he and another person with a speech impediment had been ordered not to speak under any circumstances by the rather unfeeling hostess. But then the conversation lagged among the guests, silence fell, and Patrick and his fellow sufferer felt compelled to fill it, with predictable consequences. Patrick made a glorious eccentric achievement out of his disability. The mighty publisher Penguin in 1965 called their anthology of his work The P-P-Penguin Patrick Campbell and had it illustrated by Quentin Blake. Is this the only time a stammer has been included in the title of a book? Surely a triumph of Campbell’s self-deprecating wit and probably unthinkable in our more ‘pc’ age. (Although speech impediments are still used now as part of comedy. Think of the character Kripke in TV’s massively popular ‘The Big Bang Theory’.)

Patrick Campbell

It is possible of course that Campbell’s difficulties in speech made him concentrate on being a brilliant communicator via prose. I think Patrick, who often couldn’t speak in public at all, helped me find my writing voice. That’s not to say I write the same sort of thing as him but his stance as comic commentator on life was one I enjoyed immensely and wished I could emulate. He could make any subject funny. And he had the courage to write on everything, no matter how mundane. The subjects themselves – commuting, buying a house, throwing a dinner party, learning to ride a bike – were hardly earth-shattering. But his joyous humour and intelligence rendered it all interesting and transformed the boring events in life into an amusing game. He made the ordinary extraordinary by virtue of his observation and imagination. He was a Charlie Chaplin of slapstick in prose, a P G Wodehouse in the elegant wit of his language as he described catching chickens or cleaning a stove. It made me ask myself: what will you notice next time you take a train or stand in a queue? And could you write it in such a way as to entertain thousands and make a living out of it? The content and style are very close to stand-up comedy but drawn out into longer anecdotal pieces that are more like short stories with the author as the hero. In fact, it’s as if Patrick Campbell was a blogger before his time. What should we call the short pieces he wrote so beautifully? Articles, essays, short stories, craic, anecdotes, belles lettres? Belles blogs perhaps? I learned recently that my fourth-ever blog post is going to be published in a book (assuming Publisher A doesn’t change his mind) – does that mean it won’t be a blog anymore? Has it become a different genre? When is a blog not a blog?

I’m a writer. I like to write down what I’m thinking and offer it to other people. Cogito, ergo scribo – I think, therefore I write. I think, therefore I blog (cogito, ergo blogo?). I can have the courage to write for the public in the first person, my ‘life in thin slices’, and assume others will find it interesting. It’s the courage every blogger needs. Thank you, Patrick.

NOTES

[1] Patrick Campbell, Life in Thin Slices, Falcon Press, London, 1951.

[2] ibid., p146.

Dec 31 2014

Dante and C S Lewis on Heaven as an Acquired Taste

Posted on December 31, 2014 by admin

Dante and C S Lewis on Heaven as an Acquired Taste

Botticelli’s Dante and Beatrice

I’ve been so close for so long to finally finishing John Sinclair’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (it’s only taken me thirty years to get this far) that I thought to aim to finish at the end of 2014 might be an incentive. So I’ve been reading a couple of Cantos a day to try and get it done. I’d read Dorothy L Sayers’ translation in my twenties and loved it, then started on this version, in the (forlorn) hope that I’d learn Italian at the same time, as Sinclair’s translation lies next to the original text. I whizzed through the Inferno, then went a bit more slowly through the Purgatorio, and then ground to a halt on the Paradiso around 1992. No doubt life on this earth took over. I can remember going to a display of Botticelli’s illustrations of The Divine Comedy at, I think, the Royal Academy in the late 90s. The first room was full of luridly coloured drawings of Hell and its inhabitants and the room itself was hot and heaving with people. There were about half the number of people in the next room, devoted to the drawings of Purgatory. These illustrations were less highly coloured and more unfinished than those in the previous room. We then battled our way to the room devoted to Paradise to find that it was cool and serene with hardly anyone there – a very useful sermon or blog illustration in itself.

That of course was not Dante’s experience. In his story there were continual challenges to his vocabulary to describe just how many saved souls and angels he was seeing at the final stage, how many living examples of those kept alive by God’s grace – if he had known the word “gazzillions” he would probably have used it, since he was so fond of the vernacular. He is also finding it hard to describe the increasing beauty and holiness of the sights and sounds and is frequently blinded by the light as he gets closer to God. For many years I had a poster from the exhibition above my desks at home and at work – of Botticelli’s drawing of Dante next to Beatrice in mid-air, surrounded by the flames of the apostles and saints, with God just out of sight at the top of the picture. Dante has his hand up to his eyes as if he can’t take any more, even though Beatrice, his love, is pointing higher. Dante, even now, needs healing and his eyes strengthening if he is to see more.

Today I was as far as Canto XXX of the XXXIII. And it’s happened again! Dante again is overwhelmed by what he’s seeing: “Like sudden lightening that scatters the visual spirits and deprives the eye of the action of the clearest objects, a vivid light shone round about me and left me so swathed in the veil of its effulgence that nothing was visible to me.” [1]. Dante is using the language of St Paul’s experience of the divine light on the road to Damascus that left him blinded for 3 days [2]. But for Dante help is virtually instant: “…I was conscious of rising beyond my own powers, and such new vision was kindled in me that there is no light so bright my eyes would not have borne it. And I saw light in the form of a river pouring in its splendour between two banks…”

He sees angels like “living sparks” and the saved souls as jewel-like flowers set in gold that kept plunging into the water, as if drunk with wonderful smells, and laughing. Dante is instructed to drink of this water too so that he can see what’s actually going on, and when he does he no longer sees mere sparks and flowers but these changed into “a greater festival, so that I saw both the courts of heaven made plain.” [3].

This whole process of needing to be acclimatized before one can receive the beatific vision reminded me of the end of C S Lewis’ children’s novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is probably what Lewis intended. How great, to sneak Dante into a kid’s book! As Lucy, Edmund, Eustace, King Caspian, Reepicheep and the others are at the final point of sailing to the end of the known Narnian world, they too need to drink the now sweet water in order to be acclimatized to the staggeringly intense light that is the prelude to meeting with Aslan at the edge of the world and the beginning of Aslan’s own country. They too are about to see their hearts’ desire and need to be made strong enough to bear it.

Reepicheep is the first to hurl himself overboard and drink the water, which he says is like “drinkable light”:

“And one by one everybody on board drank. And for a long time they were silent. They felt almost too well and too strong to bear it…” [4].

They now notice that they are reacting differently to the light which had been getting stronger around them everyday since Ramandu’s Island. “Now, the light grew no less – if anything, it increased – but they could bear it. They could look straight up at the sun without blinking. They could see more light than they had ever seen before…” [5]. The sweet water of “that last sea” makes the older ones on the voyage feel younger and fills everyone with joy and excitement and… stillness. It even enables them to see past the sun, beyond the End of the World and into Aslan’s Country – sights and smells and sounds that would break your heart with longing [6]. We know this because of one of the most extraordinary things in the whole of the Narnia Chronicles, that is, that Lucy herself spoke to C S Lewis and told him about it! He must have been curious, we assume, at her saying this most wonderful sight could break your heart. “ “Why,” said I, “was it so sad?” “Sad!! No,” said Lucy.”[7] But she does not elaborate further, and neither does Lewis, with the obvious implication that the experience is beyond words and we are in the realm of the apophatic. We are often treated to Lewis speaking to us as the author in his children’s stories but this is the only place where he tells us one of the characters has spoken to him and he is giving us their first-hand account, as if Lucy is a real person. It is as if Lucy (whose name means ‘light’) is Lewis’ Beatrice, telling him the glories of the heaven that he has not yet seen, the communicator of the ultimate sehnsucht.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one to be reminded of Lewis by this Canto of Dante. John Sinclair back in 1939, before the Narnia Chronicles were written, wrote in the commentary on his translation of Canto XXX:

“From such vision springs the love of true good, and from such love joy surpassing every sweetness. (The suggestion of Mr. C. S. Lewis, made in another connection, is relevant here: ‘The joys of heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, an acquired taste.’)” [8].

Once Dante’s sight is strengthened, everything changes from mere “shadowy forecasts” to “their truth”. And Sinclair quotes Aquinas to support this, that “grace and glory are the same in kind, since grace is nothing but a certain beginning of glory in us.” Wow!! That God’s grace working in us now is the same ‘thing’ as his glory revealed to and in us later – what an amazing thought! And Sinclair adds that this section is Dante’s version of what is referred to in the 36th Psalm: ‘Thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light we shall see light.”

What a great end to Dante’s great work – and my own year – anticipating the soul’s final enlightenment. And huge thanks too to Lewis for writing about this in a form children can understand – who, like me, might take another thirty or more years to get round to Dante – his characters literally acquiring the taste for heaven.

Come to think of it, my eyes have been very sore recently and sensitive to light. Mmm, now where is that sweet water…?

NOTES

[1] John Sinclair (trans.), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, with translation and Commentary by John D Sinclair, III, Paradiso, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1939/1961, Canto XXX, lines 46-51.

[2] Acts 9:9.

[3] ibid., lines 94-96.

[4] C S Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, HarperCollins, London, 2002 edn, p174.

[5] ibid., p175.

[6] ibid., p185.

[7] ibid.

[8] Sinclair, ibid., p442. This is a quote from Lewis’ 1940 book The Problem of Pain, so presumably Sinclair added this quote in the later edition of his translation.

Sep 28 2014

Carey’s Oxford: Encounters with the Inklings

Posted on September 28, 2014 by admin

The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books by John Carey (Faber and Faber, 2014)

Professor John Carey

My holiday reading last week took an unexpected turn – it turned out to be yet another bout of Inklings Studies instead of a holiday. Not that I’m complaining. It was a fantastic surprise to find Prof John Carey’s new autobiography on the shelf in a friend’s loo and to see it contained accounts of encounters with C S Lewis, J R R Tolkien, Hugo Dyson, Neville Coghill, Helen Gardner, Lord David Cecil, and Austin and Katherine Farrer. True, they don’t all come out of it very well, but I’m as fascinated as the next fan of the Inklings by first hand reports of them and their friends. We all want to know ‘What was it like to meet Lewis or Tolkien? What did they look and sound like? How did they smile, laugh? Did they have any odd habits we don’t know about? And what was it like to study with them or be their college colleague?’ Carey, Emeritus Professor of English at Merton College, gives us some fascinating glimpses as he tells of his own experience in the Oxford of the 1950s onwards.

With it being an autobiography, obviously Carey tells us a great deal about his own life and background which is fascinating in itself. He was born in London in 1934 and can remember the Silver Jubilee celebrations for King George V in 1935 (an elephant in a street parade in particular) and the fiery glare in the sky of the destruction of the Crystal Palace in 1936. I was particularly interested in the time he spent as a boy in Nottingham, my own home town, where he was evacuated in the Second World War for safety. But I will confine myself to Oxford and the Inklings…

Winning a scholarship to study at Oxford meant that Carey experienced the English Faculty there in the 1950s. He is scathing about the archaic nature of the syllabus (“a scandal or a joke, depending on your sense of humour”) which of course Lewis and Tolkien had helped to design. It stopped at 1832, seeming to assume that everyone would read Victorian literature for pleasure anyway and that modern stuff wasn’t worth studying, or at the very least, the jury was out. The syllabus had been heavily weighted towards Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English (pre-1300), “on the grounds, I suppose, that since no one could conceivably read them for pleasure they suited the rigorous demands of an academic discipline.” [1] Carey was a fan of the Modernists and found delving back into Anglo-Saxon a great chore: “Apart from Beowulf only three or four poems are worth reading…” [2] But it was a tremendous luxury to be able to read all day and Carey loved the Oxford tutorial system with its one-on-one time each week with some of the greatest experts on the planet. Lectures, he found, were sometimes a waste of time. “J. R. R. Tolkien, lecturing on Beowulf was mostly inaudible and, when audible, incomprehensible. He seemed immemorially aged, and green mildew grew on his gown, as if he had recently emerged from a wood.” [3]

Despite these seeming setbacks to his enjoyment, Carey achieved a First in his degree and set about applying for scholarships for postgraduate study. His interview at Merton for a Harmsworth Senior Scholarship was with Hugo Dyson, who had already examined him as an undergraduate: “…Dyson, an Oxford ‘character’, known for his wit. I always found him alarming. He was like a hyperactive gnome, and stumped around on a walking-stick which, when he was seized by one of his paroxysms of laughter, he would beat up and down as if trying to drive it through the floor. It brought to mind Rumpelstiltskin driving his leg into the ground in the fairy tale.” [4] Carey acknowledges that Dyson was one of the famous Inklings and had had a role with Tolkien in bringing C S Lewis to the Christian faith: “So he was, at least in part, responsible for the Narnia books.” [5] But Carey never asked him about it. He does quote the famous story, however, of Dyson cutting off the reading of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien at the Inklings with his protest: “Oh, not another ******* elf!” [6] But Carey was certainly impressed with Dyson’s humour: “On a good day he was the funniest man I ever met…”, second only to Peter Ustinov who could do mimicry as well, although he always seemed more ‘rehearsed’, “whereas Dyson was famous for his spontaneity. It was said that, one evening in Merton when there was duck on the menu, and the bird served was not duck but pheasant, he remarked, ‘Ah, le mallard imaginaire.” [7]

But on the day of Carey’s interview for the scholarship at Merton he had the surprise of finding that, not only was he introduced to all the Fellows, he was expected to play bowls (called ‘woods’) with them on the lawn of the Fellows’ Quad after dinner, amongst whom was Prof Tolkien. (I too have a Tolkien-related memory of having dinner with the Fellows at Merton when I was a Curate at St Aldate’s church, unfortunately when the Professor himself was long gone. It was around 1994 and we had wandered on the Fellows’ Quad and seen the ruin of the many irises lining the medieval wall, apparently caused by the visit the day before of President Clinton whose helicopter landing in the field next door had whipped off all the flowers, spoiling what should have been a beautiful show. I then had post-prandial drinks in a Fellow’s rooms who casually mentioned that they were the rooms occupied by Tolkien. There was not much there other than bookshelves and a desk and my main memory is of everything painted white. In those days I didn’t have a camera on me, so that was that. The Merton Fellow seemed as nonchalant about it as all in Oxford are who are used to that sort of thing.)

One intriguing detail of what it was like to be a postgrad in English in the Oxford of the 1950s is that Carey had to take two introductory courses in order to specialise in 17th century literature – how to decipher 17th century handwriting, and how to set up a page of type and print on an old handpress in the Bodleian Library, just like a 17th century compositor. Apparently those on the course made authentic-looking 17th century Christmas cards that year!

The other major part of a postgrad’s life is of course Supervision. Carey is critical of the standard of supervision in Oxford in those days. He refers to Kingsley Amis’ description in his Memoirs of Lord David Cecil’s non-cooperation and unavailability for him. But he particularly singles out Dyson for his lackadaisical approach to his postgrads: “…Dyson would slam down a fistful of coin on the mantelpiece, explain derisively that this was all the university paid him for the supervision, and suggest he and [the student] go off and ‘drink it’ in a pub.” [8] (I’m sure there are a lot of us who would pay good money for the chance of a drink in a pub with Dyson, but anyway…)

Carey feels he was lucky to have Helen Gardner as his supervisor. She may have been scary at times, reducing some students to tears, and have knitted during supervisions, but she was brilliant and helpful. Most people at the time, apparently, thought she should have been given the Merton Professorship of English that went to Neville Coghill. Carey writes: “I met Coghill, a tall, twitchy, gentle man with a face full of care.” Coghill was so nervous about giving his inaugural address as Professor that he asked Carey to second for him and read his lecture in case on the day he couldn’t go through with it. Fortunately Coghill managed.

Carey doesn’t seem to have come across C S Lewis much apart from one main encounter at Keble College. The new Warden of Keble in 1960 was the philosopher and theologian Austin Farrer who had just moved there with his wife Katherine, the detective novelist. Carey had managed to get a job there and moved into the same building as the Farrers at the same time. He was hugely impressed with Farrer: “He was lean, quick and witty, and seemed to me – though he was well into middle age – like one of Jane Austen’s clergymen – Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, say. His wife Kay was tiny, sharp and so neurotic you imagined she’d emit a shower of sparks if placed in a dark room… [She] talked in a series of rapid squeaks that were hard to interpret…. Farrer was the nearest thing to a saint I have met, but he was capable of asperity, as saints no doubt need to be.” [9] Farrer was always very considerate to the Careys and invited them one day to lunch to meet Lewis. Both Carey and his wife had Firsts in English and were in awe of Lewis’ “prodigiously learned” The Allegory of Love, “besides, he had a ferocious reputation as a tutor and was famed for having challenged an undergraduate who failed to share his passion for Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum to a sword-fight. However, he was not at all intimidating that day. He had walked down across the University Parks from his home in Headington Quarry, and strode into the room, rubicund and tweedy, with a knapsack slung over his shoulder, like a farmer on holiday.” [10] There were only the Farrers, the Careys and Lewis at lunch that day in “mahoghany-and-damask splendour”, eating stuffed onions served by a housekeeper.

They spoke on literature, as one would expect, and Lewis quoted a line from a poem, “It was a little budding rose”, but couldn’t remember where it was from. Carey reports his ambivalence at saying the source in such august company and showing up their ignorance, as he just happened to have read the Emily Bronte poem that contained the line that week. But he needn’t have worried, as “both Lewis and Farrer were obviously delighted to be enlightened, and showed not the least trace of pique, so in character-test terms they won by an enormous margin….” [11]

Carey had been raised in a Christian context but had lapsed from the faith. However, he seems to have remained fascinated by faith in others, especially the devotional poets of the 17th century. He was also impressed by Farrer’s preaching at Keble chapel. “In the pulpit… Farrer’s personality changed. He would start very quietly, almost in a whisper, and gradually work himself up into a soaring climax, as if the Holy Spirit had entered him, as perhaps it had. I was not a regular chapel-goer but I tried not to miss his sermons because I was interested in the histrionics.” [12]

Another of Carey’s jobs in Oxford was that of Fellow at St John’s College in 1965, teaching medieval literature alongside Tom Shippey who was later to become such an authority on Tolkien. At this point Carey identifies Shippey as “a science fiction fanatic” [13]. Carey is now Emeritus Merton Professor of English, aged 80, having retired in 2011 after a distinguished career at his alma mater and as a writer and critic.

It is sad that he always felt like he was studying the Christian faith from the outside rather than entering into it. “…I came to feel that studying seventeenth century English Literature was really the same as studying Christianity. That was all they seriously cared about, and they cared enough, at a pinch, to kill or to be killed for their own particular brand of it. I was excited by this. As a lapsed Christian I felt I could imagine – just – how it would be to believe as they believed. At heart I knew this was a delusion. I was simply substituting aesthetic admiration for belief, and a real believer would probably tell me there was a special department in hell reserved for people who did that. All the same, it was the nearest I could get. When I read Henry Vaughan, for example, describing his experience of God:

“O joys! Infinite sweetness! With what flowers

And shoots of glory my soul breaks and buds!”

“It seemed to me that no one in the post-God era ever feels joy like that. The death of God has meant the death of joy – if joy means absolute certainty of eternal life. If a modern poet wrote those lines they would be about having sex, which doesn’t seem a very adequate substitute.” [14]

What a shame a man with such an opportunity of quizzing the Inklings and co didn’t discover the open secret of their inner life of joy for himself.

NOTES

[1] John Carey, The Unexpected Professor, p102.

[2] ibid., p103.

[3] ibid., p122.

[4] ibid., p135.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid., p136.

[8] ibid., p142f.

[9] ibid., p178.

[10] ibid.

[11] ibid.

[13] ibid., p239.

[14] ibid., p123f.

Jun 29 2014

In Tolkien’s Footsteps in Switzerland

Posted on June 29, 2014 by admin

“… I journeyed on foot with a heavy pack through much of Switzerland…”

So the elderly J R R Tolkien wrote to Joyce Reeves on 4 November 1961 [1], recalling his journey of fifty years earlier when he was a mere nineteen years old and just about to go to Oxford. He points out that he was with a mixed group of about the same size as that which accompanied Bilbo in The Hobbit and experienced many of the same dangers and deprivations.

Tolkien’s 1911 group in Switzerland

Along with a later letter to his son Michael [2], we know some of difficult yet exhilarating conditions of their journey – the sleeping rough (the men of the group at any rate), snow, dangerous walks along mountain ledges, more snow, precipices, thunderstorms, fast flowing rivers and torrents of water, an avalanche with falling rocks, and walks through mysterious woods, even having to get rid of horrible spiders.

One gets the impression that Tolkien really enjoyed reminiscing about his death-defying journey as a young man and conjures up a vivid impression of his experiences in the 1967 letter to his son who has just been on a similar trip. Tolkien begins “I am delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me” [3].

View from Reichenbach Falls

I was thrilled when I realised that my holiday in Switzerland a few weeks ago was going to cover much of the same area as Tolkien and his party. I was alerted to this by Alex Lewis’ article in Amon Hen 244, the Tolkien Society bulletin (November 2013) about his Alpenwild tour and so I read the relevant letters by Tolkien and any other material I could find in biographies and on the web. My tour was with Great Rail Journeys, so there was much less walking involved, apart from dashing between platforms at stations to get the next connecting train!

View from hotel window

Tolkien writes that his group went first from Interlaken on mountain paths to Lauterbrunnen. It was fascinating to read Alex Lewis’ and others’ accounts of the story of St Beatus at Interlaken – the Irish monk who drove a treasure-guarding fire-breathing dragon out of the mountain over the main lake there.

Interlaken

It’s hard not to see this as Smaug and Laketown. I was particularly pleased that our boat on the lake was actually called ‘St Beatus’

St Beatus boat

and had the city’s coat of arms on the side which depicted the monk with a sword defeating the dragon.

St Beatus and Dragon

As the boat drew away from the shore I had a great view of this misty mountain where it all happened and where the saint is buried.

Grave of St Beatus

St Beatus of Lungern is known as the Apostle to the Swiss because of his role in bringing the gospel there, sent from Britain to evangelise the Helvetii. His dates are somewhere between the 6th and 9th centuries. His grave is there in the caves at Beatenburg (Interlaken) and the Augustinian monastery built over it could be the model for the Last Homely House in Rivendell. I can imagine that the highly religious young Tolkien would have been delighted and moved to find a story here from Christian Europe that was so similar to the ones he loved in Norse mythology, especially involving dragons!

St Beatus monastery at Interlaken

Then Tolkien’s party, which included his brother Hilary and his Aunt Jane Neave, went east over the mountains to Grindelwald, as did we. Of course ‘wald’ means ‘wood’ but does ‘Grindel’ have any relationship to ‘Grendel’ and therefore a reminder for Tolkien of Beowulf?

Tolkien’s party then reached Meiringen. This is where my party was based and we stayed at the Park Hotel du Sauvage. It is possible that Tolkien stayed here as it was the place where the English tended to stop when visiting.

Park Hotel du Sauvage

It is a beautiful art nouveau building and was called the Englischer Hof by Conan Doyle for his classic Sherlock Holmes story about Holmes’ struggle at the Reichenbach Falls in ‘The Final Problem’.

Hotel where Conan Doyle stayed in 1893

It would seem likely that at least some of Tolkien’s party would have been interested in the Holmes and Moriarty connection as here as they had to take the path past the Falls where the supposed death of Sherlock took place.

Reichenbach Falls 2014

From Meiringen we too explored the gorge of the Aare river with its massive cliffs and terrifying steep plunges towards gushing torrents of water. It seems it was difficult to escape dragons even here as the Worm (der Tatzelwurm) that used to guard this place was portrayed on a plaque at the entrance to the rocky gorge.

Der Tatzelwurm at Aare Gorge

My first view of Lauterbrunnental was from one of several trains that eventually took us up the Jungfrau. There was one moment in particular where the view of the valley looked like Tolkien’s drawing of Rivendell.

Tolkien’s Rivendell

Tolkien gave the name Bruinen (Loudwater) to the river flowing through Rivendell. This is the Swiss valley of loud water running through the valley with the towns of Murren and Wengen on cliffs on either side.

Lauterbrunnental

Climbing the Jungfrau – we were able to get to the highest train station in Europe, the Jungfraujoch, but Tolkien’s party would have stopped at the second level as the final stage of blasting through the rock and building the railway was only completed in 1912. The views were stunning. Tolkien wrote: “I left the view of the Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.”

Through a window at Jungfraujoch

Tolkien’s group ended their Swiss journey by crossing the Grimsell Pass, playing a game pretending they were beavers by building a dam, climbing up to the Aletsch glacier where they endured an avalanche, on to Valais, and then to Zermatt and the stunning view of the Matterhorn.

Tolkien concludes in his letter to his son Michael: “I do not suppose all this is very interesting now. But it was a remarkable experience for me at nineteen, after a poor boy’s childhood. I went up to Oxford that autumn…” [4]. Oh, and if you do come across any spiders on your travels there, Tolkien recommends to Michael the dropping of hot fat from your candle onto their fat bodies!! Not an option for Bilbo and Co of course. I’m glad to say I didn’t meet any either in the woods or my hotel room.

NOTES

[1] In Letter 232 in Humphrey Carpernter (ed.), The Letters of J R R Tolkien, George Allen and Unwin, London, p308f.

[2] In Letter 306 from 25 August 1967 to Michael Tolkien, in ibid., p391f.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid., p393.

May 5 2014

In Switzerland with Sherlock Holmes – Part Two

Posted on May 5, 2014 by admin

Statue of Sherlock Holmes in Meiringen

Of course, Sherlock isn’t dead! Conan Doyle was forced to ‘resurrect’ him in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ when it became clear that the public were not happy doing without their hero. I’m sure you know the story. Holmes comes again to Watson after three years’ absence in the Spring of 1894 and the tough ex-military doctor faints with the shock. When he recovers, he exclaims, “‘Holmes!… Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?’” He even grips Holmes’ arm to check that he is not a spirit. It is described almost like one of the resurrection appearances of Christ. Holmes then explains all about how he escaped Moriarty at the Reichenbach Fall. And as well as a joyful reunion, Holmes and Watson are now also able to solve the case of the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair and capture the crack shot who has been stalking Sherlock. Watson is thrilled to be with his great friend again and be in an adventure: “it was indeed like old times.”

It would seem that we too are not willing to let Sherlock Holmes die, or to just be a character on the page or TV. And the good people of Meiringen in Switzerland have been doing their bit to keep the character alive, with the help of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. And the Sherlock Holmes Society of Switzerland is actually called ‘the Reichenbach Irregulars’, founded in 1989.

In Meiringen, as I found on my trip this week, it is impossible to avoid the influence and ‘presence’ of Conan Doyle’s creation. There is a wonderful life-size brass statue in the centre of the town

Conan Doyle Place in Meiringen

in the aptly named Conan Doyle Place

The back of the Park Hotel du Sauvage

outside the hotel where Conan Doyle (and Holmes and Watson) stayed,

Sherlock pub in Meiringen

there are pubs named after Sherlock,

Sherlock Holmes Hotel, Meiringen

and a Sherlock Holmes Hotel and restaurant, where we had a coffee and a fantastic view

View from the Sherlock Holmes Hotel

of one of the many mountains surrounding Meiringen in brilliant sunshine.

Sherlock chocolates!

There were Sherlock chocolates in the town’s many sweet and cake shops (although no Sherlock-themed meringues that I saw, even though Meiringen is supposed to be where meringues originate).

Sitting outside the Sherlock Holmes Museum

The main joy was the wonderful Sherlock Homes Museum, with a much better than expected range of artifacts and displays, including police uniforms from both the London and the Meiringen police forces of the 1890s.

The interior of the English Church

Sadly it is in what was the English Church, now unused as such, although one can still enjoy it as a piece of neo-gothic architecture from 1891.

A large part of the joyful atmosphere created at the Museum is due to the wonderful Marlyse Dettmar who has been looking after the collection for around 15 years and is now in her eighties, I believe, and is full of a bubbling enthusiasm and kindness, as well as speaking perfect English, of course.

1st May Opening Day at the Sherlock Holmes Museum

She and her team are volunteers and were so kind as to open up the museum especially for our group on our arrival, so we could visit it on the same day as seeing the Reichenbach Falls. We were also there for the official 1st of May opening day of the season.

In the original story, Mrs Hudson the landlady understandably had “violent hysterics” at the re-appearance of Holmes. And Sherlock found that his brother Mycroft “had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been.”

Reconstruction of the living room of Sherlock Holmes

I was extremely impressed with the re-creation of Holmes’ living room at 221B Baker Street in the basement of the museum. It did seem astoundingly authentic and is based on every detail from the Conan Doyle stories that could be culled. It felt to me as if Holmes and Watson had just stepped out for a moment, with the violin and newspapers left lying around and the fire burning, the lamps lit, and the intriguing corners full of Holmes’ experiments and notebooks. When watching the Jeremy Brett TV series, I had never felt that the living room was really Sherlock’s – I kept thinking “I’m sure he wouldn’t have chosen those curtains – was it Mrs Hudson’s taste?’ etc. But in this museum’s re-creation everything felt right straightaway: “the old landmarks were all in their place.”

Foot of Sherlock Holmes statue

Later in the week, I noticed that the feet of the main statue of Sherlock in the town were shining in the rain, the brass looking like the foot of the statue of St Peter in the Vatican that is touched and kissed by pilgrims. Is this how Sherlock’s feet have been worn to a shine??!! Hopefully the fans’ devotion is not that extreme!

But the main surprise came on the first night. At dinner some of our fellow guests at the hotel began to peer out of one of the windows in the corner of the room as it got dark. When asked why, it turned out that there was an image of Sherlock Holmes being beamed onto the side of the mountain near the Reichenbach Falls. I could hardly believe my eyes – it was like a Bat signal over Gotham City! It was a small circular image that changed every minute or so, alternating between two different profiles of Holmes with his trademark deerstalker and pipe. It turns out I could also see this from my room, although my camera failed to capture it properly – it just looks like a pinprick of light in the centre of the picture, although one can see how large it is compared to the lights of the town below.

Sherlock image over Meiringen at night (the pinprick of light in the middle!)

It was rather strange, to have that image watching over us, like a beneficent presence. If any proof were needed that Meiringen had taken Sherlock Holmes to its heart, this was it. I began to wonder what the town would actually be like without this added literary aspect. It is certainly a beautiful place and the hotel and food and Swiss trains were fantastic, our guide charming and delightful, and our fellow travellers fascinating and super-friendly, so I think we would have had a marvellous holiday regardless. But there’s no doubt that Sherlock and his adventures at the Reichenbach Falls do give the town of Meiringen an edge over its competitors it wouldn’t otherwise have, and I am delighted that not just the Swiss but people from all over the world can enjoy what Conan Doyle obviously saw in the dramatic beauty and story potential of this historic place.

But of course Conan Doyle’s short story ends with Holmes and Watson now based back in England again, as am I: “once again Mr Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examining those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.”

It’s been a privilege to be able to follow in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes on such a wonderful holiday. Hopefully there will have been plenty of inspiration for my own future writing of murder mysteries in this great tradition.

Outside the English Church with Sherlock Homes statue

May 4 2014

In Switzerland with Sherlock Holmes – Part One

Posted on May 4, 2014 by admin

Portrait of Conan Doyle at Sherlock Holmes Museum, Meiringen (with my camera in reflection!)

I have loved Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories for years, since student days when my friends and I would read them out loud to each other and relish the marvellous language, laugh at the unintentional humour, and of course enjoy the wide-ranging adventures. We also were great fans of the Jeremy Brett TV series, who became ‘our’ Sherlock, just as much as Basil Rathbone was for an earlier generation and Benedict Cumberbatch is for today’s. And as a murder mystery writer myself, it’s easy to view Sherlock as a kind of patron saint of fictional detectives.

So when I was given the chance to go to Switzerland, in the very footsteps of Sherlock and his faithful Watson (and of course, before them, Conan Doyle himself in 1893), I decided to make the most of it and compare my own ‘adventure’ with the original stories. This begins with “Adventure XI – The Final Problem”. Watson was writing this after “that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill.” Moriarty’s brother has been bad-mouthing Sherlock in public and so Watson feels he has no choice but to defend the honour of his great friend by writing a true account of the events of third and fourth of May 1891 in Meiringen, Switzerland. “It lies with me to tell for the first time what happened between Professor Moriarty and Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

Holmes had come to Watson’s consulting room on the evening of the twenty fourth of April, in an unusually nervous state, having been in a fight and concerned that someone is out to kill him. Watson knows him well enough to take this seriously when Holmes proposes that the doctor should “come away with me for a week to the Continent”. They then have a attempted secret, fraught and complex journey that ends at the Reichenbach Fall at Meiringen in Switzerland with the seeming death of Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty, today, the fourth of May.

I have just returned from my week on the Continent, a journey that included 30 separate train journeys and felt almost as fraught at times as Sherlock and Watson’s! We weren’t being pursued by murderous maniacs but it could feel scary climbing up snowy mountain passes and overlooking gorges thousands of feet deep as we explored the same terrain in Switzerland. Apparently it was “not in Holmes’ nature to take an aimless holiday”, nor is it in mine, and I am delighted to be able to share with you some of the amazing scenery and historic sights that form the backdrop to this most famous detective story.

On that April night, Holmes gives to Watson a detailed description as to how he is to get to Victoria station in London where they are to meet up on the train: “the second first-class carriage from the front will be reserved for us.” On our trip last week, we too had to take the equivalent of Watson’s brougham (a taxi) to the station but were to travel instead with ‘Great Rail Journeys’ and leave from St Pancras International on the Eurostar to Brussels, however it was usually the first class carriage at the front of the various trains that were reserved for us as we shot across the continent.

Eventually.

We arrived at Eurostar to find they had mysteriously voided our tickets (our wonderful and unflappable guide said this had never happened before in her experience!) and we had to wait half an hour to be re-instated. But Watson’s relief that “my luggage was waiting for me, and I had no difficulty in finding the carriage” I’m glad to say was usually our experience after that wobbly start. S and W get off the train at Canterbury as they are being followed, meaning to go to Newhaven to cross to Dieppe, fooling Moriarty with luggage labelled for Paris. The intention is to “make our way at leisure into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle.” This was exactly our route, although “at leisure” is hardly the way to describe our one-night stay. Again, there were no master criminals on our trail to stop us, only several thousand students demonstrating in Luxembourg at an unearthly hour of the morning (for students), blocking our way to the train station (just across the road). There were several occasions when I could sympathise with Watson at this point in the story, “looking rather ruefully after the rapidly disappearing luggage-van which contained my wardrobe…”. There was also the same problem as when to snatch snacks at the various stations and stopping points. Sherlock is well-known for always interrupting Watson with the promise of adventure when he is just about to eat. Watson must have groaned inwardly when Sherlock declares: “The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach the buffet…” You and me both, Watson.

Instead they too make their way to Brussels, then on to Strasburg and Geneva. Holmes tells Watson to return to London, as Moriarty now has nothing to lose and is a desperate man. But “it was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an old campaigner as well as an old friend.” Watson is determined to be faithful and not let Holmes go on alone, whatever the cost.

Tiny spring alpine flowers

They have a “charming” week wandering in the Rhone Valley, going through the snow of the Gemmi Pass by way of Interlaken to Meiringen. “It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring below, the virgin white of the winter above…”

Interlaken

But of course Holmes cannot forget that they are hunted men. Near the Daubensee a large rock is dislodged and falls down next to them from the ridge above. Holmes is not depressed by this, however, but seems to exalt in this ultimate competition of two great intellects and strategists. “Again and again he recurred to the fact that if he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.”

“It was on the 3d of May that we reached the little village of Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof…” in 1891.

Park Hotel du Sauvage

This is where we also stayed – now called the Park Hotel du Sauvage,

Furniture at hotel

and still with many of the period details of the time.

Hotel where Conan Doyle stayed in 1893

And the plaque to prove it…

View from hotel window

We had large rooms with stunning views of the mountains. My room looked out on the Reichenbach Fall area itself.

Reception at the Park Hotel du Sauvage

Like Watson and Holmes, we found that all the Swiss running and serving in the hotel spoke excellent English. Watson wrote that at the advice of the owner of the hotel “on the after noon of the 4th we set off together, with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui.” (I was amused to be given ‘Rosenlaui’ as the codeword for the day to use the wifi at a local institution).

Watson continues, “We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about half-way up the hill, without making a small detour to see them.” This week we were very glad of a mini-bus to take us up the hill as we knew it was an hour and a half to make the steep walk back down again.

Reichenbach Falls 2014

Conan Doyle’s description of it as “a fearful place” was true as to the rock formations – basically when you looked down – but when you looked up at the falls itself, instead of a “torrent, swollen by the melting snow”, we only saw a small rivulet of water (someone unkindly described it as “the Reichenbach Trickle”). We were wondering whether Conan Doyle had seen it later on in the year when more snow had melted, but no, he seems very precise about it being on the fourth of May. So this is rather a mystery in itself, unless global warming is to blame.

Beneath the Reichenbach Falls

There was “an immense chasm” underneath but the rock did not look particularly “coal-black”, nor was there a “boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip.” The waters did look green, but there wasn’t a curtain of hissing spray that with the swirling water could “turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour.”

Restaurant at Reichenbach Falls

If we did go giddy it was due to less oxygen than usual at that height, plus the need for tea or coffee at the local restaurant, fortunately situated on the path back.

View from Reichenbach Falls

Of course, Holmes and Watson are ‘tricked’ by a fake message about someone who needs the doctor’s help back at the hotel and so Watson writes: “As I turned away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last I was ever destined to see of him in this world.”

Or so he thinks…

Swiss Flag at Reichenbach Falls

Part Two will look at the impact of Sherlock Holmes on Meiringen and the amazing way that this small Swiss town has taken him to their hearts.

Mar 29 2014

Chesterton Chuckling

Posted on March 29, 2014 by admin

Chesterton Chuckling

G K Chesterton

I have a memory of hearing G K Chesterton’s laugh – a deep, rich, infectious chuckle, bursting out of him almost uncontrollably, as if he can’t keep it in. My memory of this is from a short clip – no more than a minute long – which I heard on YouTube a few years ago. I now can’t find this, only another sample of his laugh at an event in honour of Rudyard Kipling in Canada [1], but it’s not the clip I remember. Was I imagining it?! Perhaps someone will find it for me, meanwhile I’ll have to make do with this other sample. It’s also frustrating to know that there was a film made of a literary breakfast before the First World War attended by GKC and Rupert Brooke, amongst others, that’s now lost. What I’d give to see that! Could it be gathering the proverbial dust in someone’s attic somewhere and they don’t even know?

Listening to Chesterton’s speech at the event honouring Rudyard Kipling, all of GK’s wit and intelligence and self-deprecating humour is on display and it’s obvious from the laughter of the audience that this is appreciated. His voice has the posh clipped tones that one hears in old British movies and news reports and has the slow deliberateness of someone used to projecting their voice without amplification. But every so often towards the end of the speech he can’t resist laughing at his own jokes. And that’s what I really love! It’s as though a gush of boyish joy bursts through and punctures the pomposity of the public event, as though we get a glimpse of the real Gilbert, his essence. This is certainly the impression he made on others – that of an irrepressible joie-de-vivre and enthusiasm, of someone enjoying life to the full, as if he had a private spring of gurgling joy that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, repress.

Here’s a first-hand impression from Holbrook Jackson’s description of him in 1908:

“Best is it to see him in his favourite habitat of Bohemian Soho. There in a certain obscure yet excellent French restaurant, with Hilaire Belloc and other writers and talkers, he may be seen, sitting behind a tall tankard of lager or a flagon of chianti, eternally unravelling the mysterious tangle of living ideas; now rising mountainously on his feet to overshadow the company with weighty argument, anon brandishing a wine-bottle as he insists upon defending some controversial point until ‘we break the furniture’; and always chuckling at his own wit and the sallies of others, as he fights the battle of ideas with indefatigable and unconquerable good-humour.” [2]

At first this doesn’t seem to have much in common with his much quieter creation, Father Brown. But one quality they seem to me to have in common is a mountainous confidence in God as the Creator of a good world that we are required to enjoy, and confidence in a universal church as the joyous servant and instrument of God in the world. Father Brown seems to see the world as his parish and everyone he comes across as his responsibility. He speaks the truth to them before God and hears their awful truth in confession. His God has a global reach and it’s actually quite silly of people not to believe. It reminds me of the astonished response of ‘Bridie’ in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Brideshead Revisited’ that Charles Ryder is not a believer. How strange! It’s so different to the feeling of marginalisation that one has as a Christian now most of the time. God and His Church are the central truths and it’s the rest of the world that’s odd and out of kilter. Now, I know this theologically, but how often do I feel it ? I remember when re-reading the Father Brown stories several years ago being so impressed with this confidence that Father Brown has as a priest that I had a ‘Father Brown moment’ at the hairdresser’s. My hairdresser, who was not a believer, was saying how worried she was about her fiance who was serving in the army in Iraq – there were only two weeks left before he could come home and they were to be married. With all of Father Brown’s confidence in my mind I said, “I’ll pray that he returns safely and you can get married.” Normally I think I might have said I would pray for her peace of mind in this difficult situation. But the Father Brown (or Chesterton) effect raised my confidence levels and suddenly this stranger was my pastoral responsibility and it seemed obvious that God would hear me – He was Master of all these events in the world. Needless to say I had to return to the hairdresser’s two weeks later to find out what had happened, the confidence level generated by Father Brown having worn off a bit by then. What if her fiance had been injured or killed in that time and my offer to pray now sounded like a facile mockery? Well, I’m glad to be able to say that the hairdresser’s fiance had indeed returned home safely and they were reunited as planned. I suppose I shouldn’t have doubted that the Lord would respond to a heightened level of faith, that was His gift after all. And I’m sure GK would be thrilled at another example of his stories still inspiring people’s confidence in God and the Christian worldview.

And that’s what I hear in Chesterton’s chuckle – a whole worldview and a massive faith in God is communicated in that outburst of fun and joy. Life is so good, he can’t help himself! Let non-believers keep their doom and gloom – Christians have this world and eternal life to be delighted about and a loving Lord who cares and intervenes for good. How fantastic, to be able to communicate the gospel just by how you laugh! Here Chesterton reflects the same view as the great victorian novelist and preacher, George MacDonald. GK loved MacDonald and was influenced by his writing and on this subject they could agree, as MacDonald wrote:

“I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God’s name; who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to His children. The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart.” [3]

And it certainly wasn’t because MacDonald or Chesterton had easy lives. It wasn’t a laughter generated by having no troubles. When I was thinking how to describe Chesterton’s laugh, I certainly did not want to use the phrase ‘holy laughter’ as that now seems to have such negative connotations – a laugh that’s held back, puritanical, anally-retentive, anondyne – the opposite of Chesterton’s happy gurgling or stupendous roar. Where are the well-known Christian comedians (apart from Milton Jones – God bless him)? Sometimes stand-up comedians are the only ones speaking the truth about the world in our media. We need to listen to MacDonald again:

“It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.” [4]

When this world order is over, I’m looking forward to having a good long chuckle with Chesterton.

Meanwhile I think I need some more ‘WWFrBD’ moments…

NOTES

1] YouTube clip of G K Chesterton at Rudyard Kipling event in Canada, the third excerpt of GKC speaking, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJjtJrvo87I

2] Holbrook Jackson, ‘G K Chesterton’, 1908, quoted in A Booklover’s Companion, The Folio Society, London, 2006, p74.

3] George MacDonald, The Miracles of our Lord, Strahan and Co., London, 1870, p23.

4] George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, J M Dent and Sons, London, 1911, p152.

Feb 3 2014

Do Poets need their own Corner?

Posted on February 3, 2014 by admin

Do Poets need their own Corner?

Memorial of C S Lewis in Poet’s Corner

Far from being confined to the events of last November, a high level of interest in C S Lewis and his inclusion in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey continues. The lectures by Alister McGrath and Malcolm Guite and the discussion of the Symposium panel, of which I was a member, are now available on the web in audio and soon as a film on YouTube. It certainly does seem to have been “the Lewis event of the century” – at least so far! [1]

Just after the event itself I was very amused to read a poem by Wendy Cope on why there should be a Poet’s Corner at all. I don’t think anyone else has referred to it in connection with Lewis, so I thought you might like to see some of it. It’s from her first volume of poetry, entitled Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis [2] and is a comic response to an Engineer who had written to a newspaper complaining that there is a Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey to honour our nation’s greats in that field but not an ‘Engineer’s Corner’ or equivalent for those in different professions (presumably ignoring the many political and military ‘saviours’ who tend to get their statues scattered around sacred spaces willy-nilly the rest of the time).

The poet Wendy Cope

So in ‘Engineer’s Corner’, Cope’s ironic consolation begins:

“We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –

That’s why so many poets end up rich,

While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.

Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?”

Of course life is easy for a poet, she continues. There’s a daily demand for their work as people eagerly devour at least a poem a day whereas, Cope sarcastically sympathises, desperate engineers have to take a second job to make ends meet and can’t have a social life if they’re to get any work done at all, the poor things.

“While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,

You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,

With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,

With no hope, even, of a modest bust.”

And of course small boys prefer poems to engines! Anyone can see that the massive popular embrace of poetry is why the country is going to the dogs.

I wish I could quote her poem in full but no doubt copyright forbids. The comic impact is much greater in her succinct sarcastic rhyme. But Cope’s main point here seems to be that poets deserve the attention they get in Westminster Abbey in order to raise their profile and do something to make up for the neglect and poverty they suffered in life. Engineers and the like, you already have your reward. She is not tackling the question of whether there might be something peculiarly appropriate about poets and other artists of the word having a place of civic honour in a place of worship, that those whose work is most likely to exalt our souls to access the spiritual should be privileged in this way. Do artists of the word have more chance of leading us to consider the Word Himself than the mechanics of the material? Perhaps it’s an argument that will always exist between the poetic and musical Hrossa and the mechanical and crafts-oriented Pfiffltriggi (to put it in terms of Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet).

But as soon as we start to analyse this distinction in supposed worthiness for Abbey inclusion, there emerge some notable gaps. If we are to have a biblical emphasis on helping the poor and the sick, why is there not a Doctors/Nurses/Healers’ Corner? Or a Police and Social Workers’ Corner for those who rescue children from abuse and women from domestic violence? I could go on. In fact, the more one tries to analyse the need for a specifically Poets’ Corner, the more the argument falls down. This special Corner can’t just be to somehow ‘make it up’ to those we’ve treated rather shabbily here and feel a bit ashamed about, like children who give a special present to the teacher at the end of the year that they’ve given the hardest time to. And I wouldn’t have thought that the aim of a Poet’s Corner was to get every member of the populace writing poetry for themselves, an interesting world though that would be.

Sir Philip Sydney

On a purely superficial level it seems appropriate that poets and writers should have their own corner to hide in – introverted observers rather than participators in life, who were able to view life from one step removed and so write to shape our vision of it more effectively. But straightaway I think of how many of our greatest poets were also men of action, for example those who were soldiers too – Sir Philip Sydney, Lord Byron, the War Poets themselves, and of course C S Lewis whose first published poem was ‘Death in Battle’ in John Galsworthy’s journal for war poets Reveille in 1919. Perhaps one thing those in Poets’ Corner have in common is that they were writers who burst out into the world in action and word and vision on a national and international level, and we finally caught on enough to honour them, whether hundreds of years later, or in Lewis’ case only fifty.

And all this talk of ‘great men’ – there are women in Poet’s Corner too. Wendy Cope herself is already an OBE and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, despite writing hugely enjoyable comic verse that appeals to a wide audience, so… who knows what will happen in the future, Abbey-wise? Rowan Williams, who preached at the Lewis memorial service at the Abbey, has called her the wittiest of contemporary English poets. She has almost been Poet Laureate twice and when she wanted to downsize to move house she sold her huge archive of material to the British Library. (This makes me very jealous as I’m currently downsizing and about to move house, but I think contacting the BL might be a bit premature in my case…)

In thinking about about how we honour our fellow human beings after death in public life, it’s easy to forget the real point – that everyone who does the will of God faithfully in this life will on the Great Day hear the words “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” from the Lord Himself and receive gracious reward from Him. What more does anyone need? C S Lewis gave a brilliant imagined portrayal of how human beings will be honoured or otherwise after death in his novel The Great Divorce of 1945. One character everyone remembers from this book is that glorious bright lady whom ‘Lewis‘ mistakes for the Virgin Mary herself, but is told by the MacDonald character: “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.” When reviewing this book in 1946, The New Yorker said: “If wit and wisdom, style and scholarship are requisites to pass through the pearly gates, Mr Lewis will be among the angels.” [3] I’m sure Lewis would have counted a true wisdom as the only one of those qualities to really count in that regard. Anyway, I’m here concerned with the far more earthly issue of who passes into the corner of the poets in Westminster Abbey. I think I would conclude that a special corner for poets is probably indefensible, but the fact is it’s there, and since it is there, and in view of what it’s become over the centuries, then Lewis should be there too. His inclusion is certainly miraculous considering his early lack of faith and other struggles. When His father Albert was discussing his son’s atheism with his eldest son Warren, he was obviously worried but still clung on to hope, writing “…I do think that if Oxford does not spoil him… he may write something that men will not willingly let die.” [4]

Notes

[1] I’m glad to say that my blog on the C S Lewis Memorial Service has been shared by hundreds on Facebook and included on lists of the most useful resources about that event, eg. by William O’Flaherty, and Sarah Clarkson at http://www.thoroughlyalive.com/2013/12/c-s-lewis-at-westminster-abbey-a-roundup-of-links

[2] Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Faber and Faber, 1986.

[3] Quoted in Walter Hooper (ed.), C S Lewis: A Companion and Guide, HarperCollins, London, 1996, p289.

[4] ibid., p142.

Jan 15 2014

Nutrition for a New Year

Posted on January 15, 2014 by admin

Nutrition for a New Year

Living Food

So many friends and their loved ones seem to have been affected by cancer and other serious illnesses recently. On the news yesterday it said that there are more people in the UK with cancer than ever before. And yet our knowledge of the condition and its treatment, and what we need to do for a healthier lifestyle, is also greater than ever before. I believe in spiritual healing through prayer, but I have also taken an interest in what people have written about their recoveries from cancer through good nutrition and positive psychological attitudes. This reminded me of something I wrote to a friend a few years ago who had cancer (I’m glad to say she recovered) that was, I hope, a helpful summary of the best books from the most experienced people in this field. I’ve sent it to quite a few people since. Do feel free to make use of it for your friends and loved ones. And yourself! The New Year seems a good time to be thinking of healthier living and, after all, the old truism is still true: ‘Prevention is better than cure’.

I’ll let the letter speak for itself:

“My dear friend,

Thank you so much for your email, it’s lovely to hear from you. Thank you for sparing the time. Of course you are constantly in my thoughts and prayers. I am more than willing to help on the nutrition front, although I always feel rather a hypocrite – it’s often more a case of ‘Do as I say, rather than as I do’!

The first book to start off with is probably Leslie Kenton (who wrote for the top women’s mags on nutrition, beauty, etc). Her main book is Raw Energy – it has a lot of the scientific evidence for a ‘living foods’ diet, presented in a very accessible, readable way, as well as her own recommendations for detoxing and meal plans at the end. On the whole, all the raw/living food books say pretty much the same thing. You get the impression that lots of people have discovered that we were meant to live in the Garden of Eden and just pluck the fruit off the trees and pull veggies out the ground. Animals that eat raw food all the time in the wild don’t get the so-called ‘diseases of civilisation’, but as soon as we domesticate animals and give them highly processed cooked food, lo and behold, they start to get arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and so on, just like us. Anyway, there’s tons of scientific evidence right back to the 19th century, but particularly from the 1930s onwards, to support living foods. The medical establishment, on the whole, has been very slow to recognise it, and has even been aggressively against it (perhaps cos it would do them out of a job??!!).

Most of the therapeutic approaches with raw food and juices go back to Dr Max Gerson, a German researcher who had to escape the Nazis in the 30s and went to America. Ironically, he was just about to present his findings to a big conference that could have made his name just as he had to flee for his life. He had had migraines for years – he experimented by giving up smoked and processed food and eating as much fresh and raw as possible, and his headaches disappeared. He then found the same diet worked with lupus and skin TB, and then arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and MS – basically the idea is to detox the body, massively strengthen the immune system, and the body heals itself. We are meant to be a self-healing system.

Two fantastic ‘testimonies’ from women who have used the Gerson therapy and healed themselves of cancer are Beata Bishop (Time to Heal) and Brenda Bohan (The Choice). Beata Bishop in the 1980s was only ‘given’ 6 months to live because of lymphoma but is still thriving 30 years later – on the Gerson therapy her body built a calcium wall an inch thick around her cancers so they couldn’t spread and she had them harmlessly removed years later. This happens to a lot of people on the Gerson therapy. What is more difficult is when people have had radio- or chemotherapy which can damage the immune system first and means it’s much harder work for the body to recover. Some people do both chemo and living foods at the same time, of course. There are several websites on the Gerson therapy, easy to find.

The main idea behind living food is that heating food to over 125 degrees Fahrenheit destroys its living enzymes and nutrients. ‘You are what you eat’ – so eating ‘dead’ food doesn’t make sense! We only have a certain number of enzymes that we’re born with with which to digest food and make it useful for the body – like having money in a bank account. The more dead food we eat, the more of our own enzymes (which in a sense give us life) we have to use up, depleting our health. But food that has its own live enzymes contributes to ours instead of depleting them, literally leaving us more ‘alive’ (see Raw Enzyme Nutrition by Howells). Changing from cooked to raw takes a few weeks, usually replacing a few cooked items at a time with their raw equivalents. When you’re strong enough then regular fasting on juices can come in to play. Centrifugal juicers (the cheaper ones!) tend to destroy enzymes and nutrients because of the heat generated – the best juicers are more expensive and are ‘masticating’, ie. imitate how humans take in food. The best are the Champion (about £350) or Green Power. I also have a dehydrator, that is a simple way of making biscuits, pastry, etc, that doesn’t heat above 125 degrees, meaning things are still live. And you can tell!

The latest thing is Green Smoothies – where you have a smoothie made of green leaves and fruit – seems to have astonishing healing effects and is easy to digest and is delicious, and is raw of course – see anything by Victoria Boutenko. There are other books too and all have pages of wonderful testimonies at the back of people who have recovered from cancer, diabetes, etc, on green smoothies every day. There are cheap smoothie makers which are fine – the best one though is by Vita-Mix and is about £400 but can cope with green stalks better. I would say green smoothies are the easiest way to start as they have immediate good effects and are easy to prepare.

Sorry to go on at such length – the last book for now is more on the psychological/personality side of disease and is superb. Bernie Siegel: Love, Medicine and Miracles – he was a surgeon at Yale Univ Hospital, Jewish background, found that certain ‘types’ of people with the same sort of attitudes tended to recover from cancer and others didn’t. He has had many years’ experience, and is great on the psychosomatic side of how unexpressed anger, grief, etc, has a part in making us ill.

I could have phoned, but I thought it would be handier for you to have the details written down (sorry it’s so long!). Do tell me if you’re up to talking on the phone, otherwise I will leave you in peace. Whatever you need to do, that’s fine. If you want a ‘buddy’ to help you with this side of things I am willing, as I think I need encouragement to do it too! When I have juiced and eaten a lot of raw stuff I’ve felt fantastic. Hmmmm, why don’t I do it all the time… must be human nature…

Lots of love and prayers, Jeanette.”

Jeanette Sears

Writer and Speaker

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