Treece or Trease?

As a child I was always confused by Geoffrey Trease and Henry Treece, perhaps because I never read any of their books. It was almost as if all historical fiction had to be written by people called Treece, however it was spelt, or maybe as if men called Treece were obliged to write historical fiction. Anyway, as a child I somehow missed out on their books, just as I missed out on Rosemary Sutcliff and many others. I made up for it later, and with Rosemary Sutcliff in particular I tracked down and read nearly everything she wrote, including her wonderful memoir, Blue Remembered Hills.

I read quite a bit of Henry Treece, too, especially his Viking quartet, but somehow Geoffrey Trease continued to elude me until I came across an old Puffin in a charity shop. I must admit that I bought The Red Towers of Granada mainly because of the fabulous Charles Keeping cover, but I was hooked from the first sentence. How could you not be?

'It is a strange and terrible thing to listen to one’s own funeral service.'

The Red Towers of Granada is a book which challenges prejudice, jealousy, greed and ignorance; but chiefly prejudice. And it manages to do this while the action drives relentlessly forward. The central character, Robin, is cast out of his village as a leper. The new village priest resents Robin because his predecessor had sent Robin to school at the minster, from where he had gone on to study at Oxford. When Robin, taking his ‘lonely, doomed way in the world,’ rescues a Jewish doctor from attackers in the forest, the doctor looks at the sores on his hands and asks: ‘What ignorant fool told you that you had leprosy?’

The following chapter begins with Robin, the first-person narrator, saying: ‘Before I went to Oxford, when I was a simple village boy, I would have been shocked if anyone had suggested that a priest could be an ignorant fool.’ Robin is a young man whose outlook has already been broadened by education. When Solomon of Stamford takes young Robin into his own family to protect him and heal his sores, Robin’s admiration for the old man grows: 

‘I liked to get Solomon talking in the evening, for he knew the world and his mind was stored with experience. It was an open mind, too. No argument shocked him. No subject was banned.

“No part of human knowledge lies outside the Jewish way,” he used to insist’

This is the year 1290, and Edward I is about to expel all Jews from England. Jews are forbidden to practice medicine, but that doesn’t stop the ailing Queen Eleanor from sending for Solomon to treat her. But she’s from Spain of course. Solomon and his family set out with Robin to find the Moorish pharmacist in Andalucia who alone can make the elixir that can save the queen. 

So, an insular, inward-looking England is contrasted with a European continent criss-crossed by a network of intellectual and scientific enlightenment. What could be more modern? And through the continent of Europe goes Robin, eyes open, learning all the time, trying to make a new life after being thrown out by his own community, and trying to protect Solomon and his family from the villains who are under the misapprehension that what Solomon is seeking is not a simple medicine but ‘the elixir of life.’

It’s a terrific read, and now I have to track down some of the 112 other books that Geoffrey Trease wrote, most of which are out of print. I’m planning to start with the Black Banner series after reading about its genesis on Wikipedia. Trease had given a talk at Millom in west Cumbria:

Two schoolgirls buttonholed me afterwards. ‘Do you ever write school stories?’ ‘No’ I said. ‘Haven’t you got enough already? All those midnight feasts in the dorm, those secret passages and hooded figures -’ They cut me off with grave courtesy, ‘They didn’t mean that stuff. Why didn’t I write true-to-life stories, about real boys and girls, going to day-schools as nearly everybody did? No one seemed to write that sort.’ Out of that five-minute conversation came, a year or two later, No Boats on Bannermere and eventually its four sequels, three hundred thousand words, the writing spread intermittently over nine years, I was glad I had been to Millom.

They sound good to me!

There is a Charles Keeping exhibition opening on 29^th February at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner. It runs until 31^st May and it’s bound to be worth the effort of a journey on the Metropolitan Line.

Another Charles Keeping cover

Paul May's website

The Red Towers of Granada is out of print and shouldn't be!