CONVOY weaves together the stories of the men who risked desperate odds to get supplies through to Malta during the Second World War, and of their families back at home. It’s a vivid and moving series of accounts. But I wasn’t sure why Caroline had chosen to write it. After all, the War was history before she was born. There was only one way to find out, so I asked her.

 Caroline – Even as a child I was aware that my taid (my grandfather), was involved with the supply of Malta by sea during the war.  Although I didn’t know any of the details I took it for granted that everyone else must be aware of how important the defence of the island was. (Me – Malta was a vital strategic base for British forces.) I can remember being shocked that other people seemed to know about the Blitz and the Battle of Britain but not the Malta convoys. A large part of my motivation for writing this book was to reclaim that forgotten history.

 Me – Are all the poems based on real events and real people, or are any of them fiction?

Caroline – In many of the poems there is a mixture. Where there is a man’s name in the heading, be it Captain Thomas Horn, or PB ‘Laddie’ Lucas, or Tom Neil then the events and the people are real but what I’ve had to imagine was how they felt about what was unfolding around them.  A number of the poems are complete works of my imagination especially the ones written in a child’s voice, that of my mother. Overseas Posting is based on a single remark by one pilot about how he coped with others being posted missing so the name in that poem is fictitious.

Me – Have you had any responses from people who were involved?

Caroline – The majority of them are no longer alive to respond and those who were in their twenties during the war will now be into their nineties. There are two poems in the book which are based on an incident in Tom Neil’s Onward to Malta. He is very much alive and well and so after some hesitation I did send him the poems to read. He was utterly charming about them whilst protesting that he hadn’t done anything special during the war.

There’s more about Tom Neil on Caroline’s blog, here:

http://advancingpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/thomas-francis-neil-dfc-afc-ae.html

I’ve mostly had contact with people who like me, are the children or grandchildren of those involved. Paul Lazell whose Dad, Bill, was with the Royal Artillery sent me his father’s diary to read and that provided the basis for one of the found poems in the book.

Me -As someone who usually has at least 100,000 words to play with, I’m impressed by the way the poetry weaves together many stories with few words. With such a large number of ships and a complex series of events, how did you choose what to put in and what to leave out? Did you end up cutting much of what you’d written?

Caroline – I suspect I probably should have cut more than I did despite all the good advice from my main critical reader, Katy Evans-Bush. The choice of what to leave in was largely governed by deciding to follow individual men, like Roger Hill who was involved in the Operation Pedestal convoy – the attempt to get fifteen merchant ships to Malta. At one point I did have ambitions to follow the fate of every single ship but as my publisher Jan kept reminding me I wasn’t writing a comprehensive maritime history.

One of my men only has six lines in Operation Pedestal. During the editing process I decided these could be cut, only to dream that night of a seaman trying to reach a life-raft which is getting further and further away from him. Needless to say he was reinstated into the poem the next morning.

Me – Were there any stories that you’d like to have put in but which didn’t fit?

Caroline – Plenty. There were various people involved with the RAF; Group Captain Woodhall who was the fighter controller on the island and George Beurling, one of the fighter pilots who shot down twenty seven planes in fourteen days about whom there were many stories.

My focus however was on what was happened out at sea on board the ships. In this regard I would have liked to have included a incident involving Captain David MacFarlane, master of the Melbourne Star during the Pedestal convoy. She kept being left behind or in the words of her captain “we were nobody’s baby”. A merchant ship on its own without any protection from naval vessels was much more vulnerable. Every time MacFarlane steered to take position astern (i.e. behind) one of the destroyers, their hoped for escort would zigzag and pull away.   Finally he is given permission to take up station on one of the warships when the Ashanti comes alongside and tells him to turn around as the main body of the convoy is astern of them. McFarlane says that he is quite happy where he is and back comes the stern reply ‘I am the Admiral’.

Me – One of the book’s strengths is the restrained nature of the language – the events are narrated with emotion but without sentimentality. Was that a deliberate choice, or does it echo the tone of the accounts you read?

Caroline – At the back of my mind whilst writing the poems was the idea that they had to sound as if the men themselves were telling the stories.  In their accounts and interviews they definitely understate the dangers involved and there’s plenty of black humour. One of my critical readers did suggest that perhaps in places it was a little too impersonal and I did have to work on getting more emotion into the poems.

Me – What surprised you most during the research?

Caroline – There were two aspects that surprised me. The first was how attached I became to many of the men and of course I couldn’t have written any of it without them. The other thing was how difficult emotionally it was at times to write, especially about the Operation Pedestal convoy in which so many ships were lost. In the end the only way I got that written was to go off to North Wales for a week’s writing retreat and just make myself finish it.

Me – I’ve heard it said when people are talking about the Second World War that we have become softer nowadays, and that ‘you couldn’t get people to do that now.’ You have a foot in both camps, so to speak – do you think it’s true?

Caroline – People are still the same underneath though, aren’t they? I don’t think the current generation of young people is that different from the young men and women at the end of the 1930s and if called upon to make the kinds of sacrifices that had to be made during the war I know they would rise to the challenge.

——————-

I’m grateful to Caroline for taking the time to answer, and for agreeing to let me put up a couple of the poems on the blog. I asked for the first one especially, because I love the bleak humour.

Extract from Operation Pedestal

 From a pilot on board H.M.S. Furious

Sir, why are the armourers

taking the ammo out of my Spitfire?

Looks like cigarettes they’re putting in?

That’s right.

Someone was worried about weight

preventing us taking off.

Fags don’t weigh much I suppose.

Indeed. Malta is short of smokes

as well as everything else.

It’ll do morale a power of good.

That’s kind of us, Sir.

I hope the Germans

and Italians don’t know.

What if they do? You couldn’t hit them

even if you had ammunition.

I would like to be able to try, Sir.

——————-

Christmas 1941

After three months of dodging the bombing

the Ajax is moored upstream

at the head of Marsa creek.

The bombs still come every day.

Her crew take shelter in the caves.

One watch on board.

She’s hit on Christmas Eve.

The bomb passes clean through her bow.

No explosion. Just bubbles of water.

The Chinese greaser first back on board.

No matter how hard he searches

he can’t find what he seeks.


No sign of the crate. Not a single feather.

A lingering rank chicken smell from the corner

where they’d been fed. Given water.

A hole in the ship’s side instead of

the New Year’s dinner. He takes it personally,

this intervention of the Luftwaffe.

On their unmarried mothers, sons and daughters

he calls down curses. Until this moment

he hadn’t fully seen the point of this war.

CONVOY is available from

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/convoy/

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/caroline+davies/convoy/9587810/

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/convoy/

With luck we’ll have a couple of the poems right here on the blog.

I’ve been saving this one for now because it wouldn’t do to post two exhibitions at once, even though we did rush from one to the other on the same day. The British Library isn’t far from the British Museum, so we hurried up there to have a look at their Murder in the Library display, an A-Z of crime fiction which runs until 12 May. Below are some heavily-edited highlights.

S is for Sherlock Holmes.

This manuscript of a Holmes story suggests that Conan Doyle was a much neater and more decisive writer than some of us. To be fair it wasn’t clear whether this was the only draft or a final fair copy, but it does raise the question of whether our patterns of thinking have been changed by working with endlessly-tweakable text on screen.

MS of “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” published in 1927

Incidentally, I’ve just finished reading Peter Guttridge’s “The Belgian and the Beekeeper,” where a detective not unlike Hercule Poirot meets Sherlock Holmes, now a retired recluse who keeps bees. The newcomer suggests the Great Detective may have been somewhat naive about Doctor Watson’s intentions – why is Holmes now living in poverty while Watson is wealthy?  Exactly how many wives DID Watson have, and what happened to them? Peter Guttridge exploits some of the inconsistencies in the Holmes stories to joyous effect.

T is for True Crime

These are a couple of early books about the Road Hill House Murder, which continues to fascinate modern readers in  Kate Summerscale’s “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.”

The penny pamphlet on the left is written by “A disciple of Edgar Poe”, who clearly had a keen sense of marketing. I’m considering issuing my next book as “a disciple of J K Rowling.”

G is for the Golden Age

The time where everyone looked like this, or wanted to:

J is for jigsaw mysteries

Do the jigsaw, solve the mystery. These aren’t unknown today, or at least they weren’t when a friend bought me something similar in a charity shop.

N is for Nordic Noir

…which goes back further than some of us realise: Maj Sjöwall and Per Wallöö were publishing their Martin Beck novels in the 1960′s.

O is for Oxford

…where  M is for Morse, who gets a whole display cabinet to himself. Here are three famous faces. Not shown is Colin Dexter, but I’m told he appears somewhere in every episode, which means I can no longer do the ironing during repeats as I have to see where.

Z is not for Aurelio Zen, but for Zodiac mysteries, but let’s end with this:

The quote from Raymond Chandler sounds much like an essay question. I will add one word. “The detective story is a tragedy with a happy ending.” Discuss.

Never mind: there’s still 18 hours for inspiration to strike.

Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed by the same volcano AD 79, in but in different ways, so that different kinds of things survived in the buried wreckage. Now the British Museum has cleverly put items from the two together to give a vivid picture of Roman life in these towns, which were  unusual only in the horrifying way in which they died.

Husband and I have been to both sites in the past but most of what we saw yesterday was new to us, largely because the Herculaneum museum was closed when we were there and the Pompeii material is housed in Naples. Naples is not the place to venture if you have naively booked a hire car, you only have a long weekend and you have never driven in Italy before. We’ve seen photos, of course. I’ve read books. You can walk through both towns on Google Street View. So while I expected to admire and enjoy, I didn’t expect to be terribly surprised.

Well, silly me.

The first surprise was the social mobility. We all know that Roman slaves could be, and often were, freed. They could build up wealth of their own and their children would become freeborn Roman citizens in their own right. What I hadn’t realised was how often it happened. On the engraved list of  male citizens in Herculaneum (there would have been about 500, from a population of 4-5000), over half of them are freed slaves. On the right is one of them: Lucius Mammius Maximus. He became a wealthy benefactor of the city and this statue was put up in the theatre.

Until now it hadn’t occurred to me that the faded figures in the background of some of the frescoes (yes, there are whole walls on display!) were not faded by time and volcanic action, but because they were painted that way. They are of course the slaves, waiting in case the main subjects need assistance with whatever they’re doing, which is sometimes private in the extreme. Where slaves have to appear in the foreground (serving dinner, for example) they’re often disproportionately small.  Playing ‘spot the slave’ is a good game. And interestingly, much use of the written word in both towns is in contexts where only slaves would see it. The labelling on amphorae, for example. They might be slaves, but they were not ignorant.

While we’re on social mobility – how cheering it is to see evidence of women running businesses and owning wealth in their own right. Makers of ancient-world movies where young women are incapable even of doing their own clothes up, please take note.

Apologies for the dearth of pictures from now on. Photography is not allowed in the exhibition itself. So you’ll have to imagine what’s inside here…

The second surprise was the Stuff. So much of it. So ornate. Roman society was, as curator Dr Paul Roberts pointed out, all about power, and display of wealth and status. That’s why you would have your strongbox displayed in a prominent place in the house, not cunningly hidden from burglars. Harry Enfield’s ‘look at my wad!’ character would have fitted in very nicely. That’s why you would have beautiful silverware on display, and lovely fountains playing to help you and your guests relax in the garden. Meanwhile, back in the tiny, stuffy kitchen, the slaves would be fetching water with buckets,  and the toilet, used for dumping all sorts of waste, was right next to the cooking-hearth.

The third surprise was about that well-known painting of a man selling the loaves of bread that are stacked up around him. I’ve always wondered why he seemed to be sitting cross-legged on a kind of platform, and handing the bread down, instead of moving about behind a counter like a normal shopkeeper. Apparently he isn’t a normal shopkeeper. According to the blurb, there’s an election approaching, and he is handing out bread to the citizens. It’s not an illustration of everyday life at all. It’s a campaign poster. Now it makes sense!

Beyond the surprises, there was an accumulation of cheering details. When you write historical fiction you spend many fruitless hours pondering the practical ways in which people used to live.  It’s long been obvious to me, and surely to anyone who thinks about it, that normal Romans would not be gadding off to the baths every time they needed a wash. And they weren’t. To my relief, the kind of washing-bowls that I’m sure I must have written into the books (or implied, at least) did exist. There was one on display. Ditto chamberpots (one with two natty extensions on the rim for comfort). There was a useful-looking cooking pan with six little dips in that might have held poached eggs or cakes, and the mystery of what stoppers were made of is finally solved. Amphorae could be sealed with plaster but what of bottles that had to be regularly opened and closed? Wood, fibre or cloth, apparently. Phew. It’s unlikely to appear in a book but it’s nice to know.

Oh, and dormice. I know every fictional Roman banquet has to include dormice, but they really did eat them. You could even keep them in a special pot with built-in feeding bowls while you fattened them up.

The most thought-provoking exhibits, though, were not – for me – the famous plaster casts of the dead. They are shocking, but I have seen them before. What really brought the disaster home to me were the collections of once-useful items that the victims had chosen to take with them, and which were rendered irrelevant in the face of the catastrophe. A soldier died on the beach at Herculaneum wearing his military belt, his sword and his dagger. Many people had grabbed jewellery and coins. One girl had a collection of good-luck charms. People took keys to doors that ceased to exist when they did. Most moving of all, I found, was the set of surgeon’s instruments that had been neatly stored in a protective case, so that the owner would be ready to help someone when needed.

Seeing for yourself:

The British Museum site has the info and there’s a promise of an iphone/Android app coming soon. Meanwhile if you’re thinking of going – do book.  It was packed. There are other events happening in conjunction with the display, so check out the events page for a chance to see Robert Harris and/or Lindsey Davis, amongst others.

For those in the UK who can’t get there, the Museum are doing a live event screening in cinemas around the country on 18 June. If you can’t get to that… well, you could drop some very large hints to your loved ones that the catalogue would make a fine present…

Having seen what they look like, you’ll be pleased to hear they won’t be dropping by to collect. Instead authors Ben Kane, Anthony Riches and Russell Whitfield will be walking the length of Hadrian’s Wall this April (yes, dressed like that) and they’re on the hunt for sponsors*.

All the money they raise will go to two excellent causes -  Combat Stress and Medecins Sans Frontieres.   If you want to join in without getting the blisters,  here’s where you do it.

*UPDATE, 9 April – offers of sponsorship for the walk are now heading towards £9,000!

]]> http://rsdownie.co.uk/2013/03/18/these-men-are-after-your-money/feed/ 5 ruthdownie Image Image http://rsdownie.co.uk/2013/03/11/ilfracombe-library/ http://rsdownie.co.uk/2013/03/11/ilfracombe-library/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:51:50 +0000 Ruth http://rsdownie.co.uk/?p=3080 ]]> Huge thanks to everyone who came to Ilfracombe Library on Thursday to enjoy drinks and nibbles and witness the strange sight of an author draped in pseudo-Roman clothes (well, it was World Book Day, when you are allowed to dress up). Ilfracombe’s library is perched on a hill overlooking a dramatic rocky beach and must have  the best views of any library in the country.

This is not one of them:

Obviously it would have been better to have some shots of the audience (they were there, honestly) but by the time we had the camera sorted out, most of them had escaped.  Many thanks to Colin, without whose batteries there would have been no photographic evidence at all, and to Jonathan, who did the pressing of buttons.

Thanks also to the staff at the Library and everyone who helped to spread the word, including the lovely Paul at The Voice radio in Barnstaple, whose soothing influence hopefully helped me produce something akin to coherent sentences on air.

Strange how the thought of speaking to invisible listeners is terrifying for someone who’s quite prepared to stand in front of 30 people in fancy dress.

To find out, join us at 6.30 pm. Tickets are £2 and you can get them from the Library.

Still, if Deary’s comments re-ignite the debate about public libraries, it won’t be a bad thing. We need to continue that debate while there is still a service to discuss. What we’re currently suffering is a haphazard dismantling of a fragmented service as small local battles are fought – and often lost – all over the country.

I worked in a public library for twelve years. I’ve seen the good that libraries do. If you can afford to buy all your books and have internet access, maybe you don’t need to go to one, but for goodness’ sake, why wouldn’t you? Libraries have far more books than most of us could ever afford, they’re (usually) warm, they’re friendly and safe, and they’re full of people who love to read! What’s not to like? (And yes, I know bookshops used to offer most of this. If you still have one that does, you’re very lucky.)

Conversely if you have no money of your own to buy reading material – and many people, especially children, haven’t – where else can you go? Even 50p at a charity shop is beyond some budgets. “The Internet!” is not an answer if you’re six years old, you have several brothers and sisters and everybody wants the computer at once.

Nobody’s saying the Library service doesn’t need to change in the light of the current upheaval in the book trade. But we only got to where we are by a long struggle. Abandoning all that hard-won ground now would be a dreadful mistake.

A while ago I did some digging around to find out the story of just one local library in my area. Some of the arguments may sound familiar:

1850

The Public Libraries Act gives boroughs the power to open free public libraries

1893

(No rush, as you see) –  a letter in the local paper gives twenty reasons why a library would be a Good Thing, including, “Because for young people of both sexes a Public Library affords some place to which they can go, instead of loitering aimlessly about the public streets.”

1899

The Council vote against a Public Library, despite popular support which claims that, “The poor people here are very fond of reading,” and, “The people of this town… have been unfairly handicapped in the pursuit of knowledge by the absence of such an institution.”

The local papers are divided:

“The speeches of the members proved… that many of them know nothing at all about the question.”

“The decision was a wise one… while there were so many costly necessities, in the shape of loans for drainage, water supply and street improvements looming.”

“The public will always clamour for anything they can see a chance of getting for nothing.”

1905

Mr Carnegie (founder of the Carnegie Trust) offers £3000 towards the cost of a library. This sparks a public meeting, at which -

“Mr Pile said they should put every opportunity of improvement in the way of the young men of the town.”

(Cheers)

“Mr Dadds said that public libraries were a failure nearly everywhere.”

“Hear, Hear!”

“What did they read in these libraries?”

“Rubbish!” came the reply.

(There may be something in this. For a fee, the local subscription libraries were offering titles like, “Miranda of the Balcony,” “Maid with the Goggles,” “Further Adventures of Captain Kettle,” “Iris the Avenger,” and “Mrs Erricker’s Reputation”.)

1914-18

The Great War interrupts everything,

1925

There is a hold-up acquiring the land. The Carnegie Trustees want to see some action.

1933

A local campaigner points out that “no one with a leaning towards culture would oppose a free library” and finally…

1934

Hooray! The Library opens, after forty-one years of campaigning.

It’s still open now.

Long may it remain.

Mosaic from Nimes

 ”Say the word and he’ll produce a fish out of a sow’s belly, a pigeon out of the lard, a turtle dove out of the ham, and a fowl out of the knuckle.”*

In the light of Trimalchio’s boast about his cook, I’ve been consulting one or two ancient sources to see if the entrepreneurs who’ve sold us horsemeat masquerading as beef might find inspiration for some new offerings.

It’s fairly well known that a trip back to the classical world yields some unusual birds for the table -  ostrich, crane, flamingo, peacock… but there aren’t really enough of these in western  Europe to do anything on an industrial scale. The substitution of bear steaks for wild boar doesn’t work for similar reasons, even though they allegedly taste the same.

I don’t think we want to talk about eating dormice, or flower bulbs, or electric rays, even when deep-fried with chips, but snails might be a bulk option. They must be relatively easy to collect and fatten up in milk. Transport costs would be minimal because, thanks to the Romans, we already have the right variety living here. I’m not sure how they could be disguised as something with universal appeal – they certainly don’t appeal to me – but doubtless somebody out there can fix it.

Fermentation, Roman-style

While we’re on the subject of reducing costs, owners of vineyards near the coast might like to add some seawater while making the wine. Lovely. And of course if it’s too dry, they can sweeten it with a little grape must, boiled up in lead pans.

Nowhere in Apicius’s famous cookbook did I find any mention of eating horses, but I did find evidence for the ongoing struggle between producers and consumers. Along with handy tips on how to restore fish sauce which is smelling even worse than usual**, how to clear cloudy wine and how to produce something that “everybody will think is Liburnican oil” is a tip for rescuing tainted honey. Apparently if you mix one part of tainted honey with two parts of good, you will make it “good for sale.” And how do you know whether you have tainted honey? Put a wick in it and light it. If it burns, all well and good. If it doesn’t… well, you know what to do.

All of which calls to mind the menu at one of our local restaurants, which proudly offered an exotic-sounding dish followed by the words,  “Enjoy it first – then ask how it is made.”

* The Satyricon, Book XV, 70

**Hard to imagine, as it was made from fermented fish-guts.