Reminiscing - by Rowena House

Between deadlines and family contingency planning for the covid-19 epidemic, my March blog about historical research is still languishing on the drawing board. Soz. Here instead is an article first published on March 18, 2018 on The History Girls’ blogsite just ahead of publication of my WW1 debut novel The Goose Road. It’s one that still means a lot me. Stay safe. 

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them

At the start of the centenary of the 1914-18 war I had a notion that we would by now, as a nation, have found some sort of collective closure on the individual suffering of the dead of the Great War, and be ready to move on, to toss their bones in the air as it were, and free the spirits of the fallen to join with our distant ancestors.

As a writer, I agreed with Pat Barker’s comment that World War I had “come to stand in for other wars … it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.” Our stories might be about that particular conflict, but the larger subject was war itself.

Researching and writing my own First World War novel, The Goose Road, dented that conviction. Wherever I looked, the power of individual suffering endured and the personal stories were endlessly shocking, intimate and enthralling.

I fell under their spell time and again while listening to the first-hand accounts of veterans of the Western Front, their scratchy voices forever locked in a sound archive, or when reading a collection of letters home, or interviews granted to earlier researchers. I’d suddenly be caught unawares by a moment of humanity or courage, or dark gallows’ humour.

Occasionally an old soldier would admit to cruelty. More often they shared memories of the drudgery of the trenches, punctuated by terror. To walk those trenches – or at least one of the few fragments that remain, in Beaumont Hamel, say, zig-zagging through a meadow – is to walk in a haunted place.

Near Verdun, there’s a hill called Mort Homme. The name isn’t connected to the 1914-18 war, although the WW1 artillery battles fought there between the French and the Germans were so fierce that engineers found afterward that meters of the entire hilltop had been blown off. Local farmers still aren’t allowed to plough its soil because of the human remains.

The French memorial to the fallen of Mort Homme: “They did not pass”

When researching closer to home I found that WW1 objects as well as places had the power to take my breath away. Once I was in the Royal Artillery Museum in Woolwich Arsenal, investigating a particular week in October 1916 and a specific section of the Western Front near the occupied French town of Peronne. The archivist bought me out a trolley laden with original material from that time and that place, on top of which was a small moleskin notebook, written in pencil by an English major, the pages still stained with the mud of the Somme. I sat and stared at it for ages, feeling as if the battle itself was within touching distance.

Just before I returned for the second of four research visits to France, my mother died unexpectedly. It was a release: she’d been ill for a long time. Among the heirlooms she left to me was a forget-me-not locket with a photograph of her father, Frederick Clarke, in his WW1 uniform. A stern old lady stares out of the locket’s other frame – my great-grandmother, Selena, I believe.

The memorial, cemetery and ossuary for the Battle of Verdun

Mum also left me a heart-shaped locket, which I think must have belonged to Selena as it contained the pictures of two uniformed soldiers, her sons. One is Frederick, who served in the 10^th (Irish) Division as a medical clerk and stretcher bearer in the Dardanelles in 1916 and later in Salonika. The other is Frederick’s older brother, Thomas Clarke, a private in the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment, killed in action on the Somme, on July 30^th, 1916.

Private Thomas Clarke, 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment

I’d never seen Thomas Clarke’s picture before I inherited this locket. Mum thought he’d died near Ypres, and as far as I know, until my husband tracked down his regiment’s military records, no one in the family knew the details of his last day. The official War Diary and Intelligence Summary of that engagement is chilling:

“29/7/16 battle position in the MALTZ HORN TRENCH.

30/7/16 BATTLE began. Zero hour 4.45 am. The Battalion reached its objective, but suffered heavy losses, and had to evacuate its position owing to no reinforcements. At 12 noon the roll call was 7 officers and 43 men.

Total casualties were: Lieutenant-Colonel G. Rollo wounded.

KILLED. [Six officers named]

WOUNDED. [One officer named.]

WOUNDED AND MISSING. [Three officers named.]

Total casualties in Other Ranks: 425, of which 76 were killed, 172 wounded, 177 missing.”

Barry Cuttell’s account of that morning in 148 Days on the Somme is more detailed: “Morning mist prevented communication by visual signals, and almost all underground cables had been damaged. The only way of relaying messages to divisional headquarters was by runner, which would be a dangerous task once the fog had lifted as the runners had to cross the open ground between Guillemont and Trone’s Wood, over which German machine guns … enjoyed an excellent field of fire.

“While waiting for zero hour, 19/King’s Liverpool were subject to High Explosives and gas (shelling) … The 19/King’s in the centre was also badly hit by enemy fire, only a few men reaching the road. A little further north, a company of the 19/King’s succeeded in getting forward towards the south-eastern entry to Guillemont.” But later that morning, “Under the impression they were cut off, the 19/King’s withdrew from the edge of Guillemont.”

Thus out of 486 soldiers of the 19^th King’s Liverpool Regiment who advanced at dawn on that summer’s morning, north and east from the Maltz Horn Trench towards the German artillery and machine guns, only fifty remained standing seven hours later. The rest were wounded, dead or “missing”, that is, their bodies were either too badly mutilated for individual identification or otherwise unrecoverable from the battlefield.

The rolling fields where Thomas Clarke fell were bronzed with ripening wheat when I saw them, flanked by the once devastated trees of Trone’s Wood. My husband, a former Royal Marine, returned there on July 30^th, 2016, to pay our respects, both on the battlefield and at his graveside in the Bernafay Wood cemetery. Perhaps his locket – the brother to the forget-me-not one I inherited – is buried there with him.

Website: rowenahouse.com

Twitter @HouseRowena

                               

Pages Of The Sea; Pages of Books by Sheena Wilkinson

Last month I was whingeing on expressing concern about how much travel I was doing. This month I want to share two lovely writerly experiences which happened within a few miles from my home.

my local area 

First, the local Community Association’s Book Group had chosen Star By Star  as their November book, and I was in the strange position of listening to local people, some of whom I knew, some of whom were strangers, tell me what they thought about my book. Luckily they seemed to like it, and their insights were fascinating. I had set the book locally, but changed names and a few topographical features to suit the story, and some people recognised Cuanbeg as Newcastle, whereas some were convinced it was in another county altogether. 

They were all adults, middle-aged and older, but weren’t put off by the fact that the book was primarily aimed at teenagers. Sometimes I answered questions, but on a couple of occasions I was able to sit back and let them argue a point – which was odd but delightful, like eavesdropping on gossip about your nearest and dearest  

As a writer working from home, and a single person in a very traditional, family-oriented rural community – to which I moved only 16 years ago, it’s easy to feel isolated from neighbours. This lovely meeting reminded me that there was no need for that. I have now joined the Book Group. 

This was a small-scale event. The second experience was nationwide, and yet also intensely local and intimate. Like many of this Blog’s readers I spent several hours of Sunday 11^thNovember on the beach at Danny Boyle’s Pages Of The Sea artwork, commissioned as part of the 14-18 Now commemorations. Sand portraits of participants in WW1 – mainly soldiers of course but also nurses, chaplains and others – were etched on the sand, and taken away by the tide.

Murlough beach just before the tide came in 

 My local beach is Murlough, County Down, under the shadow of the Mourne mountains. Star By Star and my earlier WW1 novel Name Upon Name are set wholly or partly in the area, and both of them explore the lives of local soldiers. When I was asked by the Nerve Centre, who co-ordinated the event at Murlough, to lead the crowd in reading Carol Ann Duffy’s searing poem ‘A Wound In Time’ I was immensely honoured. Out of all the opportunities my books have given me, this has to be the most moving.

I arrived at the beach in pouring rain at 8 a.m. The sand portrait of our chosen local solider, Rifleman John McCance, was already in place, and volunteers, including children, were raking the sand to form lines of silhouettes of more people. John McCance was born in Dundrum, less than a mile from the beach we stood on, and enlisted in nearby Downpatrick, where my own soldier grandfather was stationed twenty years later, before he too left these shores to fight in the Second World War. McCance died at Passchendaele and like so many others has no known grave. He is commemorated on the Tyne Cot memorial, along with 35,000 others. I visited Tyne Cot in 2004 and was overwhelmed by the scale of it. 

My own, much less impressive picture of the portrait

Pages of the Sea was also on a huge scale, with events taking place all round the coastline of these islands, and yet it was very personal and local too. Relatives of John McCance attended.  For me, it was a ten-minute drive on country roads, but many people had made long early-morning journeys. A choir sang local traditional songs, and then I led the reading of the poem. I hadn’t expected people to join in but everyone did. By then the rain had stopped and the morning was calm. Against the swish and roll of the incoming tide we read Duffy’s powerful words. And when we dispersed, to go about out normal Sundays, John McCance’s portrait had gone, taken by the sea much more gently than lives were taken at Passchendaele.

Book Two, the long view - Rowena House

Book Two isn’t so much gestating as morphing, like some alien creature of an unknown species, uncontainable in time or space except for its broadest “on brand” parameters: World War II and France.

If it does turn out to be the love story that so far I’ve imagined, then I know the lovers’ names. I thought I knew what she wanted and needed, too, but lately his story has come into sharper focus than hers, so I’m going to start over again, experimenting with a dual point-of-view and third person (past tense), breaking out of my comfort zone of first person present.

When I have the time, that is.

 

Which is now far, far scarcer than it was. Which means I won’t need to plan another launch party any time soon. Which is sad, but there you go: needs must and advances everywhere are low.

I am researching facts. Facts are good. Knowledge is addictive, as I remembered when looking back at past ABBA blogs, and finding one about a New Scientist article that described how the brain’s reward centres light up when we discover something new.

My bedside table is piled high with WW2 non-fiction and fiction, each book teeming with light bulb moments. That’s not procrastinating, right? It’s just being thorough.

Recently I finished Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, a beautifully written, inter-linked series of stories set in the earliest years of the war and the German Occupation of northern and western France. I’d taken it with me to Paris in late August to read slowly and deliciously in Marais cafes, the Palais Royal and the gardens of the Tuileries.

The stories remain unfinished as Ms Nemirovsky was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942. I wonder if she would have published her first two suites in their original form, depicting some Germans so tenderly, had she survived.

As a researcher, and human being, I’d like to find an answer to that question.

 

As a writer, however, it is enough to have glimpsed her world, devoid of hindsight, to read about the raw fear of her characters, and the psychology of those with an inclination towards collaboration, and the pettiness of a time when all were ignorant of the horrors to come.

Such an avoidance of hindsight is, for me, one of the greatest challenges of writing historical fiction. As creators of credible characters, I believe we have to believe in our characters’ expectations of the future, even if they’re almost certainly wrong. Granting them clairvoyance seems to me to be fundamentally dishonest; we serve today's readers far better by rejecting self-serving mythologies and lazy nostalgia.

 

For my debut novel, The Goose Road, isolating a peasant girl from any false knowledge of the significance of her times was relatively easy: 1916 was a pivotal year in the First World War, and therefore containable, especially after my editor asked me not to dwell on subsequent, and consequent events – the Spanish influenza pandemics of 1918 and 1919. 

 

World War II feels different somehow, perhaps because it is closer in time and there are still survivors. The facts remain contested, too, as well as the simple duality of Us Good, Them Bad. Research has opened my eyes to the full contribution of the Red Army, which was blurred in my youth by the Cold War and lack of access to Soviet archives.

 

In Paris last month, I  stumbled across etched marble memorial panels to the dead Jewish children of the Marais, public expressions of remorse and responsibility for the deportation of Jews by the French authorities which weren't there in the late 1980s when I lived in that district.

 

Seeing these memorials made me rethink the reasons why I had decided to set Book Two in the Marais. Familiarity didn't seem enough any more, since any character living there would surely have known what was going on, and would therefore have to bear some responsibility, as witnesses if nothing else. But I've no intention of writing about the Holocaust; the death camps aren’t places I’m willing to enter as a fiction writer.

That led me deeper into questions about whose story I do want to write - and why - which inevitably raised issues of cultural appropriation. My protagonist in The Goose Road is also French, a 14 year old peasant. It didn’t worry me when writing her story that I am none of these things. Why, then, should telling the love story of Manon Lecoeur be different?

I discussed this briefly with a charming bookseller in the Hotel de Sully’s bookshop, which specialises in the history of Paris. He said I was welcome to write about a Parisian girl in 1944. His city belonged to the world to reimagine, he said. I thanked him most sincerely, and accepted that as permission to go ahead.

Which only left the small matters of a plot,  POVs, settings, tone, voice etc. etc.

Presumably they will come, given enough time and effort, enough patience and determination, plus the money for more research, and the gift of good sense to recognise moments of clarity,  and the willpower to keep going and going and going...

 

Gosh, wouldn't a bit of clairvoyance be nice to know if any of it will be worthwhile in the end?

Website: rowenahouse.com

Twitter: @houserowena

Instagram: @rowena.houseauthor or @rowenahouse

Books: my emotional stepping stones to the past – by Rowena House

Before I could begin the story that became The Goose Road I had to give myself permission to write about a subject as shocking & sad as the First World War.

 

Now, after years of research, that seems odd. Today I feel on firm mental ground in WW1, eager in fact to return. But back then I felt presumptuous. Almost guilty. How could I possibly begin to imagine what it was like?

 

Yes, I did a ton of research in books and online, in lecture halls and museums. I had to get the facts right out of respect for the dead. But that wasn’t enough. I needed a deeper, more visceral connection. With hindsight, two types of research were critical to building that emotional bridge to the past.

 

 

First was place, by which I mean being there physically, walking through the cemetery-strewn fields of the Somme and the rolling hillsides of Verdun, or standing in a zigzag trench at Beaumont Hamel, or paying my respects to the broken & greying skulls of French and German soldiers, laid to rest together.

 

Second came a few, critical books.

 

Out of everything I’ve read about World War One, fiction and non-fiction, I now believe it was just five books that led me to a sufficient level of understanding that I finally felt I had the right to trespass into – and then to inhabit – the world of the Great War. They were stepping stones, and I’ll always treasure them.

 

 

The first, chronologically, was a venerable copy of The Complete Works of Wilfred Owen which I took with me to Étaples, the Channel port where I knew my story had to end. Owen (pictured above) himself spent time in this place. Like all British Empire infantrymen & officers, he passed through the huge reinforcement and hospital camp, which dominated Étaples’ old town, on his way to the Western Front. I’d been deeply upset by his war poems when we studied them at school. And here I was, a grown woman, weeping over them again.

 

 

The second book, The Price of Glory – Verdun 1916, is a brilliant piece of narrative non-fiction by Alistair Horne. First published in 1962, he resurrects the dramatic personae of that gruelling battle with dexterity and detail, populating the horrific statistics of slaughter with living, breathing men.

 

 

The third book that opened unexpected doors in my mind was Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, a German officer who survived the war. Dedicated to The Fallen, Jung gives an alternative perspective to the ‘pity of war’ that is deeply embedded in the British tradition of remembrance, thanks in part to the anti-war poets such as Owen. I brought Jung’s unapologetic account of courage and comradeship under fire in the bookshop at Thiepval, the Commonwealth war memorial to the missing of the Somme – that is, to soldiers whose bodies were so torn apart (evaporated even) by artillery bombardments that they were beyond identification as individual men.

 

 

The fourth & fifth books which stand out in my memory are both by Pat Baker, being the first and last in her Regeneration trilogy. If anyone asked me which single WW1 novel they should read, I would say The Ghost Road, the finale, every time. It may be that Owen is important here too, since he is a character in these stories, and his death vividly told. His fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon – at the time far better known than Owen – is central to the narrative as well. But I think it is the complexity of Dr Rivers that makes these novels so compelling, and the depth of the irony that, as a military psychiatrist, his job is to make officers who are suffering the most awful mental torment as a result of what they’ve seen and done in battle, well enough to go back to fight and kill and quite probably die, like millions upon millions of others.

 

Dear God, never again.

 

 

 

 

 

My own contribution to the stories inspired by this ‘war to end all wars’, The Goose Road, is a coming-of-age quest set in France in 1916. It will be published by Walker Books on April 5 and is available to pre-order on Amazon and from local bookshops now.

@houserowena (Twitter) @rowenahouse (Instagram)