Rejecting Tonypandy

It’s not often that you can pinpoint the beginning of an obsession. My obsession with Richard III began in around 1978 in the library at Lalor North High School in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. I picked up a detective novel by an author I’d just discovered. But, this was no ordinary detective novel. This was The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Since then, I’ve read the book at least a dozen times, it’s become one of my favourite comfort reads. I’ve gone on to read many other books about Richard III, the Wars of the Roses & medieval history, both fiction & non fiction. I’ve joined the Richard III Society. All this because I read a slim book about a detective, stuck in a hospital bed after injuring his back chasing after a criminal, who relieves his boredom by investigating one of the greatest crimes in history – the murder of the Princes in the Tower.

Inspector Alan Grant features in most of Josephine Tey’s detective novels. He’s a detective in the style of Alleyn & Campion – urbane, civilised, handsome & intelligent. Lying in his hospital bed, bored with the pile of novels given to him by well-meaning friends, he’s visited by Marta Hallard, an actress who became a friend after Grant retrieved her emeralds from a thief.  She brings him a pile of prints, portraits of famous historical figures who were the principals in classic mysteries. Grant can’t do any physical detecting but why shouldn’t he exercise his brain on a classic historical mystery instead?

Grant has made a study of faces, becoming an expert at separating the villains from the good guys by the way they look. When he picks up a portrait of a man in 15th century dress, he thinks he must be a great judge or noble because of the expression of nobility & suffering in the man’s face. He is shocked to discover that this is a portrait of Richard III, the wicked uncle of horror stories. The man who not only murdered his nephews but old, mad Henry VI, Henry’s son Edward, poisoned his own wife & scandalously wanted to marry his niece. How could Grant have got it so wrong? He begins by getting hold of Nurse Darroll’s schoolbooks, then Marta gets him a copy of Thomas More's History of Richard III & his colleague, Sergeant Williams, brings him a stodgy history of England & a historical novel about Richard’s mother, the Rose of Raby. Thoroughly confused by now, Marta introduces Grant to Brent Carradine, a young American doing research at the British Museum as a way of staying in England to be with his girlfriend, an actress in Marta’s company. As Brent says when they start the investigation,

Look, Mr Grant, let’s you and I start at the very beginning of this thing. Without history books, or modern versions or anyone’s opinion about anything. Truth isn’t in accounts but in account books.

Brent goes back to the original sources & they discover that most of the stories told about Richard were written to please the Tudor dynasty after Henry Tudor defeated Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. History is written by the victors & Thomas More’s account of events he was too young to have witnessed influenced Shakespeare who wrote the play that has defined mainstream opinion of Richard as a traitorous hunchbacked murderer of innocents ever since. Grant & Carradine realise that much of the history they learnt at school is just wrong, manipulated by the victors & accepted as fact, which is where Tonypandy comes in.

Tonypandy is a village in Wales where government troops were said to have shot striking miners in 1910. The facts were quite different & Tonypandy becomes shorthand for every falsehood written down in history books & taught in school as gospel truth hundreds of years after the fact. The result of their research is that Grant & Brent conclude that Richard had nothing to do with the Princes’s deaths & that they probably survived him & were murdered by order of Henry VII. Josephine Tey paints such a heroic picture of Richard & such a dastardly one of Henry that thousands of readers have been convinced of Richard’s innocence on the strength of this one book. Many people cite the novel as the beginning of their fascination with Richard & it leads many to join the Richard III Society.

Of course, The Daughter of Time is fiction. It was published in 1952 & research has uncovered a lot more information about the period since then. Vital contemporary sources such as Dominic Mancini’s account of life in London at the crucial period when Richard assumed the throne weren’t discovered until after the book was published. The “white” version of Richard’s story promoted by early Ricardians to counteract the extremely “black” version of More & Shakespeare is just as biased. After reading The Daughter of Time, Richard was my hero. I believed that he was a noble, kind, wise, generous man who would never have killed his own nephews & who only took the throne because he believed he was the only legitimate heir.

Over the last 30 years, I’ve read dozens of books & articles about Richard & I lean more towards a “grey” version of the legend now. The 15th century was a brutal period when violence was often seen as a solution to a dispute & power was the ultimate goal. Richard was no different & probably no more scrupulous than any other prince of his time. I don’t believe there will ever be a definitive account of the death of the Princes now but the fact that they were never seen alive after about August 1483 (two months after Richard’s accession) is a damning fact that does not go away, no matter how many books I read that paint Richard as more sinned against than sinning.

However, the fact that my feelings about the historical Richard have changed can’t diminish my enjoyment of this wonderful novel. I still read it at least once a year, for the nostalgic picture of London in the 1950s, to read about the excitement of research & to visit Alan Grant in his comfortable hospital bed, eating rissoles & rhubarb, rewriting history in the most entertaining detective novel ever written.

NYRB Reading Week - November 7-13

Mrs B at The Literary Stew has come up with a great idea, the NYRB Reading Week. You can find all the details here. I try not to get involved in too many reading challenges as I find I have enough to do with my 19th century reading group & the occasional group read in my online reading group. I’ve also committed myself to Team Tolstoy at Dovegreyreader where we’re going to be reading War & Peace over the next year, & I enjoyed Persephone Reading Week very much. But, I’m a big fan of the NYRB imprint, & as I have three of their books on the tbr shelves, it won’t involve buying any more books. It's also relatively stress-free. Just read one or more NYRB books & review them on your blog. If you don't have a blog, you can send your review to Mrs B or Honey from Coffeespoons, who's co-hosting the challenge. You can see the three NYRB books I own above.

I think I’m going to read Anglo-Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson. I’ve never read any of his books but I’ve always loved the title (it’s a quote from Through the Looking Glass) & it’s been sitting on my shelves for a few years now. I need an excuse to take it down & read it. There was also a TV series made of the book with Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Spriggs & Dorothy Tutin that I vaguely remember. So, if I enjoy the book it may send me off to watch the series again as well. There’s a link to the NYRB website at The Literary Stew, so if you like what you see there or if you have unread NYRBs on your shelves, why not join us?

Portmahomack : monastery of the Picts - Martin Carver

Dark Age Scotland is even more impenetrable than the rest of Dark Age Britain.  So, the discovery of a Pictish monastery at Portmahomack on the north-east coast of Scotland was a very big deal indeed. I’ve been reading Martin Carver’s fascinating, accessible account of the dig. I knew of Martin Carver as the archaeologist who worked on the Sutton Hoo ship burial. I’d read his book about Sutton Hoo & knew that his writing is scholarly but also understandable by the general reader.

This book on Portmahomack is an account of the dig & its results. It’s an interim account; the full scholarly write-up with all the scientific results won’t be published for at least a decade. The book is divided into three sections. The first chapters describe how the expedition was designed. I found this fascinating. Archaeologists can’t just come across a likely field & start digging trenches. Portmahomack was identified as the likely site of a monastery and church by the many stone monuments that had been discovered there. There has also been a church at Portmahomack for centuries but no one knew how many churches had been on the site. The expedition was based around these questions.

However, there were many stakeholders who had to be consulted & every one of the groups involved seemed to have different expectations of what the dig would produce & what the outcomes should be. An incredible amount of work had to be done before the first trench was dug. All the historical accounts of the area were collated along with records of archaeological finds over the centuries. Preliminary work was done using non-invasive methods of exploration to determine the extent of the site. Local sensitivities & concerns had to be addressed as part of the site was a churchyard & people were not happy at the prospect of their family’s graves being disturbed. All this was done & a detailed plan was drawn up. Funding had to be obtained for the work to be done at all. A local historical society, the Tarbat Historic Trust, were involved in fundraising & also applying for funding from other bodies. The University of York took on the dig as a research project. Work finally began in 1996.

The story of Portmahomack began in the mid 6th century when a small monastery was built. The real flowering of the site took place about 100 years later when the monastery was greatly expanded & activities such as producing vellum for creating manuscripts & metal working took place. Then, a catastrophic raid took place in the late 8th- early 9th century that destroyed the monastery. In the following 200 years, some of the industrial processes like metal working continued but there was no monastery. The workers had new masters, maybe Norse or Moray raiders & their families. By the 12th century, farming had taken over from industry & a new parish church was built. The long history of Portmahomack as a parish began with several buildings being constructed & expanded on the same site right up to the present day.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the way that the archaeologists could take fragments of carved stone & speculate about the monument or stone cross it was once a part of. The stone monuments were very beautiful, with the Pictish elements of the decoration including strange animals & beautiful decorative scrolls & borders.  The different types of graves, from cist burials (the corpse is surrounded by stone slabs) to burials with stone slabs just around the head of the deceased, to burials without stone at all. The different types of burial & where the graves are located denotes the status of the person. The grave markers that were reused in rebuilding the church over the centuries. The interpretation of these clues can be argued over among the experts for years. The age & sex of the burials at different periods gives clues to the site. For instance, the predominance of middle-aged male burials dated to the 7th & 8th centuries point to the fact that this was a monastery. Later groups of burials with men, women & children point to a farming community.

Martin Carver ends his book with a look at the history of St Colman’s church (as it became in the 12th century) from the medieval period to the present. The archaeologists may have completed the dig but many questions remain about Portmahomack & its history. What kind of Christian rule did the monastery follow? Was the monastery founded by St Columba of Iona? Why is there so little evidence of trade with Europe when the site is on the North Sea? A dig like this can throw up as many questions as it answers. Here’s a link to the website of the Tarbat Discovery Program at the University of York where you can see more images from the dig.

My Brother Michael - Mary Stewart

Camilla Haven is sitting in a cafe in Athens writing to a friend. “Nothing ever happens to me” she complains. Famous last words for any heroine in a novel by one of the best writers of romantic suspense, Mary Stewart. Camilla is mistaken for a girl who has hired a car to take to Monsieur Simon in Delphi on “a matter of life & death”. She tries to discover who hired the car or where it was hired but when she’s unsuccessful, she decides to drive the car to Delphi herself. She wanted to visit the temple anyway & her money for bus fare is running low.  She also feels concerned about this Monsieur Simon & the peril he might be in. So, she sets off on a hair-raising drive on perilous roads to deliver the car to a stranger.

When she becomes stuck on a narrow village road, unable to reverse the car or go forward & surrounded by superior Greek men laughing at her predicament, who should come to her rescue but the very Monsieur Simon to whom she is delivering the car. To Camilla’s surprise, he’s English, a teacher on a pilgrimage to Greece to visit the place where his brother Michael died during the war. Simon knows nothing about the car or the girl who hired it but he takes over the driving & they set off for Delphi. Michael Lester worked for the British intelligence service during the war & was posted to Greece to help local resistance groups during the German occupation. He was living with a local family in a small village, Arachova, when he was discovered by soldiers. The son of the family was shot & Michael escaped to the hills to prevent anyone else suffering the same fate, even though he had been wounded. His family heard that he was missing & it wasn’t until some time later that they heard that he had been killed during his attempt to evade the Germans & was buried at Delphi.

Simon was much younger than Michael & he & his father were devastated by the news of his death. Now, fourteen years later, Simon’s father has died, &, among his papers, Simon has found Michael’s last letter among his papers, along with three gold sovereigns. The letter is full of excitement & Simon thinks Michael had discovered something important on Mt Parnassus, where he died. The letter is cautious, because of the tortuous path it will have to take to be delivered, but the ending makes it clear that Michael has found something,


...I’m seeing a man I can trust tomorrow, and I’ll tell him, come what may. And all being well, this’ll be over some day soon, and we’ll come back here together to the bright citadel, and I can show you then – and little brother Simon too. How is he? Give him my love. Till the day – and what a day it’ll be!

Simon & Camilla visit  Stephanos & his family in Arachova to find out where Michael died. Simon is shocked to discover that Michael wasn’t killed by the Germans but by a man who lived in the village, Angelos. He was a villain, working against his own people in the complicated political situation of resistance fighters & collaborators. Angelos disappeared not long after Michael’s death & is thought to have died in Yugoslavia. His cousin, Dimitrios, has returned to the village & claims to have seen Angelos – or his spirit – roaming the hills.  Simon is determined to find out why Michael was killed & what it was that he was so excited about just before his death.  

My Brother Michael is a terrific adventure story with lots of atmosphere & romance. Mary Stewart’s heroines are rarely passive & Camilla is a resourceful woman who feels an immediate connection with Simon & is drawn into his quest to find the truth about his brother’s death. Simon is a wonderful hero. Handsome, amusing, he treats Camilla as an equal, something her fiancé, Philip, never did. Camilla is searching for something too, a sense of herself, after a long engagement to a man who treated her like a doll. There’s a wonderful scene when they explore the ruins of the Temple at Delphi by moonlight & Simon quotes Ancient Greek verse from the stage of the amphitheatre.

Mary Stewart loved to set her books in exotic locations & you can feel the heat & dust of Greece on every page of this book. The references to the ancient world add to the atmosphere of danger & revenge but there are some very real, ugly villains in the book. The suspense as Simon & Camilla explore the mountain & find a cave & its hidden glory is very real. The dangers they face are real, too. I liked the fact that the romance is there from their first meeting but it never overwhelms the exciting, suspenseful story.

I read all of Mary Stewart’s books when I was a teenager, along with other favourite authors of the genre like Victoria Holt & Catherine Gaskin.  Chicago Review Press have recently reprinted some of Mary Stewart’s novels in the US & Hodder & Stoughton have many of her titles in print in the UK. I intend to revisit more of her books. There’s a sense of nostalgia because they were written mostly in the 50s & 60s & also because they remind me of my teenage years. But that wouldn’t be enough to make me want to reread them if they weren’t also suspenseful, romantic stories of adventure that keep me up until the small hours to read just one more chapter. Mary Stewart fans might want to have a look at this website & blog maintained by some avid fans of her work.

Gentlemen, Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature...

84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff is another of my favourite comfort reads. I’ve read it many times since I first discovered it over 20 years ago. It’s the story of the correspondence between Helene Hanff, a writer living in New York after WWII & Frank Doel, a bookseller working at Marks & Co, a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road in London. The correspondence begins in 1949,

Gentlemen:
Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase “antiquarian bookseller” scares me somewhat as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions... I enclose a list of my most pressing problems. If you have clean secondhand copies of any of the books on the list for no more than $5 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?
Very truly yours,
Helene Hanff

Helene Hanff’s taste in literature was formed by reading Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s lectures on English literature (a journey she describes in Q’s legacy). She had grown up in Philadelphia & moved to New York to be a playwright. She wrote plays, TV scripts & also worked as a script reader as well. She lived frugally in a one-bedroom apartment but her one luxury was books. She wanted to read essays by Robert Louis Stevenson, Leigh Hunt & Walter Savage Landor. She wanted to read John Donne’s Complete Sermons & George Bernard Shaw’s letters to Ellen Terry. She didn’t want to read fiction because, “ I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.” Helene is a sassy New Yorker, not shy in venting her wrath from 20,000 miles away,

WELL!!!
All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a bookshop = a BOOKSHOP – starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper... You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle & I don’t even know which war it was.
Then there was the incident of the Pepys’ Diary,

WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?
This is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot. I could just spit. Where is jan.12 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker? ... i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.

Frank is more reserved at first, but finally decides to drop the formality of Miss Hanff after three years of correspondence & she also received letters from the other staff at the bookshop & from Frank’s wife, Nora.

Helene found a kindred spirit in Frank Doel & the other employees at Marks & Co. She sent them food parcels when she discovered the meagre rations the British were surviving on after the war. They sent her a book of Elizabethan poetry & a beautifully embroidered linen tablecloth. They became friends even though they had never met. Helene’s plans to visit England for Elizabeth II’s coronation were foiled by her need to have a lot of very expensive dental work. By the time she was able to get there, in the 1970s, Frank had died & the shop was closed. Helene wrote about her trip to England, paid for by the book, in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, where she was amazed by the generosity of so many strangers who had read & loved 84 Charing Cross Road. The letters were written with no thought of publication but after Frank’s death, an editor who heard about the letters, encouraged her to make a book of them. The book was an immediate success, a Cult Book as Helene calls it, & has been made into a play & a film.

This is another example of a film being as good as the book. Anne Bancroft’s husband, Mel Brooks, bought her the film rights as a gift because he knew how much she loved it. Anne Bancroft & Anthony Hopkins are just perfect in the film along with a cast of wonderful actors in minor roles. Maurice Denham never fails to move me in his few brief scenes along with Ian McNeice & Judi Dench. I also have the audio book read by Juliet Stevenson & John Nettles.

The beautiful illustrations are from my Folio Society edition & are by Natacha Ledwidge. I love her work. She also illustrated the Folio Society editions of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books.

Helene’s enthusiasm & love for English literature is what makes this book so special. Her voice is so distinctive & her passion for books is so strong that book lovers everywhere can identify with her love of learning & her desire to read the great writers. Anglophiles everywhere love this book & I’m happy to be one of them.

All's well that ends with cake

Well, the great boiled fruit cake experiment seems to have been pretty successful. It only took 2 hours to bake not 3 as the manual recommended but I checked it after 2 hours & took it out. I probably could have left it in for a bit longer. When I cut it, it was a little crumbly as you can see, but I'm sure it will taste fine &, for my friends at work, that's the main thing.

Abby's Sunday morning

Spring Sunday mornings in Melbourne bring out the lawn mowers & the car washers. The clocks went forward last night & daylight saving has begun. Only six months until we turn them back again & say a grateful hello to autumn! I don't want to wish my life away but I don't enjoy summer. However, I could hardly complain about the weather at the moment. This morning was glorious & I was out washing the car bright & early, well supervised by Abby. Once she realised splashing water was involved, she left me to it & retreated to her favourite spot under the hebes where she could make sure I didn’t miss any dirty spots but not get wet. Then, I did a little weeding, feeding & tidying up overhanging branches around the garden & took a few more pictures of spring in the garden. 

This is one of the Don Alphonso tulips I planted in the autumn. They've just started blooming this weekend.

Red geranium in bright sunshine near the front fence.

I don't know what these flowers are. A friend gave me two beautiful blue pots when I moved in five years ago & these lovely bulbs blossom every spring.The photo's not very good but they're the most delicate pale blue.

Finally, this is the climber, Snowbell, just about ready to break out into lovely creamy blossoms near the back door.

I’m also trying out my new oven by baking a fruit cake. I’m very excited about the oven as I’ve never had a new one before, just whatever was in the houses I’ve lived in. It’s a gas stove & I’ve only had electric in the past. But, we had a gas oven in my parents’ house & I’ve always preferred cooking with gas, it’s so much easier to control the temperature for simmering. I’m still learning the finer points of simmering with this stove though as the fruit caught when I was boiling it for the cake & it took a lot of scrubbing to clean the saucepan. I’m also a bit worried about the cooking time & temperature recommended by the manual. It’s a fan assisted oven & the manual suggests 130 degrees for 3 hours. This seems too long & too low a temperature to me but I’ll give it a go, keep my fingers crossed & post a photo later if it works out. Maybe I’ll still post a photo even if it’s a disaster! 

I can’t resist posting one more photo of Abby just because she looks so lovely. I took this yesterday afternoon on the back step. I hope you’re enjoying your Sunday wherever you are.