“Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.”
~ Daphne Du Maurier

(And I bet you thought her best line was “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”)

Children’s author (Which Witch) Eva Ibbotson recalls her adopted local library, peaceful moments in a childhood marked by Nazism:

I came across a building with an open door. I went inside. The room was very quiet and full of books. At a desk sat a woman with fair hair and I waited for her to tell me to go away. But she only smiled at me. Then she said: ‘Would you like to join the library?’
My English was still poor but I understood her. In particular, I understood the word ‘join’ which seemed to me to be a word of unsurpassed beauty.

Lovely story. Read on here.

…Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

– From Philip Larkin’s High Windows, 1974.

I love Stephen Fry.
Having been Oscar Wilde, sorted out poetry with The Ode Less Travelled, directed movies, saved pandas or sloths or some such thing, he’s now made his mark on history.
Here’s his marvellous speech launching the History Matters campaign, on which I grandstanded a few days ago (or maybe it was more a soapbox):

We haven’t arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are. This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.
In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. … Knowing is not enough…
History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even – if we dare, and we should dare – a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m getting heartily sick of pirates.
Not my pirates, mind you.
But if I see another “True Story of Blackbeard” documentary or another dull buccaneers book, I’ll make someone walk the plank. Everywhere I look there are pirates. Cliched pirates in red coats and back hats. Grinning pirates. Caribbean pirates.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not the pirates’ fault. And I’m sure it’s good for book sales, even if it’s all a marvellous coincidence – although it does mean there are an awful lot of pirate books about.
But really. These people were horrible. They were truly amongst the most appalling creatures ever to sail the seas. Colourful, yes. But revolting. And all they did was sail about the tropics (hardly a chore, except during a hurricane) and blow one another up.
Give me the Mediterranean any day.
I haven’t gone off the nautical life altogether – far from it. I’m having a bachelor’s weekend, and recovering from flu, so on Friday I watched two episodes of Hornblower on DVD and then got so interested I sat on the couch all day yesterday and read three Hornblower books one after another. Endlessly fascinating, even on the second, or third, or perhaps it’s fifth reading. Even when he ventures near the Caribbean.
Here you have the great powers of Europe in turmoil, shifting and changing. The early books (and indeed my books) are set against one of most interesting periods of history, when the world seemed to be changing shape before people’s eyes. Revolution, republicanism, feminism, nationalism; the clear flame of Enlightenment giving way to the dash and drama of Romanticism; astonishing men and women and one man – Bonaparte – like no other; great empires like Spain, Holland and Portugal crumbling; Britain ruling the waves and much of the planet; France ruling Europe and on the road to Moscow; mass emigration to upstart colonies like America; the great Rebellion in Ireland; new plants, new ideas, new worlds. Intrigue, espionage, great battles. Honour, duty, drama.
All much more interesting than a pack of drunken retrobates with bad teeth and no dress sense.
Anyway, speaking of pirates, today I’m proof-reading the galleys of Swashbuckler book 2, before it goes off to the printer – this week we got final artwork for books 2 & 3 covers, and gorgeous things they are too.
I just hope everyone else doesn’t get sick of pirates in the meantime.

(I haven’t yet seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie, as I’m saving it to watch with my nephew in Melbourne next week. I will make an exception for that.)

The Guardian last week ran a fascinating profile of Shirley Hazzard, the vaguely Australian writer who for decades has lived mostly in New York and Capri. She is, like the heroines of her books, “good with words”:

Mal Peet has won the UK’s prestigious Carnegie Medal for Tamar, a “fictionalised exploration of history and its impact on the present which focuses on the untold story of the resistance movement in Holland towards the end of World War Two.”
In his acceptance statement, Mr Peet said:

“Tamar was a story I particularly wanted to tell. I believe it’s so important for young people to grasp the connections between their own lives and the past. Our understanding of history is in danger of becoming hopelessly partial and fragmented; the sense of continuity, cause and effect, is in danger of getting lost. If young people don’t make those connections, what hope is there for us to learn from our mistakes rather than repeat them!”

Hoorah!
The judges reckon he nailed it:

“Tamar is a powerful and moving story that cleverly connects the present with the past. Peet’s is a broad canvas; his writing is beautifully controlled as he unravels the complex historical and personal aspects of the story of sixty years ago and today. He has an assured lightness of touch and his book is rich with imagery, simile and strong characterisation, all of which are the hallmarks of quality in writing for children and young people. Dark and moving, it is a compelling read that ultimately offers a sense of optimism.”

And again we cry, hoorah!
And it’s only his second book, too. He was so sure he wouldn’t win, he didn’t attend the awards. I don’t suppose you would, either. He was on the shortlist with David Almond, Frank Cottrell Boyce (last year’s winner), Jan Mark (twice a winner), and Geraldine McCaughrean.
Emily Gravett took out the Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK’s oldest and most prestigious award for children’s book illustration, for her first book, Wolves.

Flu. Or something. Too ill to …

The organisation English Heritage has launched a new campaign called History Matters, which aims to find out whether or not – and why – people in the UK care about history.
Setting aside critical questions of Britishness, the campaign has drummed up an impressive line-up of celebrities and historians (and some who are both) to support its aims, and get debate underway. The not-too-subtle message behind the campaign, of course, is that history matters very much, but that it’s important to understand why.
Good question.
The campaign’s declaration reads:

We believe that history matters. A society out of touch with its past cannot have confidence in its future. History defines, educates and inspires us. It lives on in our historic environment.
As custodians of our past, we will be judged by generations to come. We must value it, nurture it and pass it on.

Value it, nurture it, pass it on intact and explored by all means. Search it out. Protect and illuminate it.
But the definition of us by our history is a much more complex matter. Who does history define? How? Does British history define its recent immigrants? No. Does English history define the Scots? Try having that argument in a pub in Edinburgh. Does military history define its survivors? Possibly, but each is marked in his or her own way.
Of course there’s also the much recycled position of Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It’s true, and also not true enough.
“History is what makes us human,” suggests campaign supporter Dr David Starkey (Tudor and general monarchy expert). “It is collective memory and the country that has lost its sense of history has ceased to be itself.”
Another campaign supporter, actor Gryff Rhys-Jones appeals to the heart: “History matters because of the emotions it evokes. You just can’t measure the importance of how history makes us feel.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. History matters a great deal to me. I read about it all the time, write about it, even dream about it.
But here’s the thing: in the UK, or here in NZ or in Australia, and almost everywhere there are many histories. There’s your top-level kings and queens and chiefs and battles and dates history. There’s military history and economic history and oral history and imagined history and colonial history and anti-colonist history, the stories of the dispossessed, the stories of the unheard, the children and the women and the paupers and cut-throats and sailors and legionaries and firemen and warriors. History is a mongrel.
I’m a mongrel. What’s my history, then? In my family, we can only trace back about a hundred years. Two at the most. Even that’s mongrel. Australian now. But before that Irish, English, Scots, and nobody knows what else. A mixture of faiths, trades, deaths, births and marriages – not necessarily in the correct order. Marks in spidery ink in the pawn shop register (Hegarty, one linen tablecloth, one shilling, redeemed two weeks later, pawned again the next month). A few lines in the Captain’s log. A dusty certificate. Ship registers. News clippings.
Sometimes people say to me – or the limitation is implied in funding criteria or book awards – we must write about our own history, our own landscapes. We shouldn’t write about the history of places on the other side of the world.
But mongrels can be promiscuous, undefined. Should we be limited by geography, by some definition of our cultural ownership or particular histories? Should anyone? And when do we cross the line into appropriation?
Australia’s convict past, for example, is fascinating, but is it more my history than the London or Dublin from which they were sent? No.
Bushrangers? No more than highwaymen or pirates. Possibly the potato famine – but then, that happened in a country on the other side of the world I’ve never visited (yet). It affected my ancestors – does that make it mine?
Maybe one day I will write about my own history: about the wharf, and Port Melbourne, the strike. Maybe one day I will write about my great aunt Madge, the smallest suffragette. Or a stretcher bearer in the Boer War.
Or dancing on the bar in a Sydney pub in the crazy days before the world was affected by AIDS. Before we all grew up.
But the history in my blood is such a mixture that it seems just as right to write instead about pirates in the sea off Malta, or printers in Amsterdam, or the London Blitz. Or dinosaurs. Or football. Or Siberia.
History isn’t just history, after all. It’s also imagination. And that’s partly why it matters.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
~ Herodotus (The “father of history”)

What the hell kind of country is this, with no live tennis coverage on TV?
You can watch netball in prime time and dog trials at the weekends but not the Tour de France. You can watch two full hours of Coronation Street, but only ten seconds of the women’s final on the news – if you’re lucky.
(Of course, you can pay for it by subscribing to Sky Sport, but then you’d be forking out for year-round rugby union replays interspersed with the odd other sport every so often, when there’s a break in the rugby. Instead, this household subscribes to Sky movies, so that we can watch silly Will Smith movies all afternoon purely out of resentment that there’s no BLOODY TENNIS.)
At least we get the FIFA World Cup.
But I never realised until last weekend’s quarterfinals (at 6am) that there aren’t any ads on TVNZ on Sunday mornings – that’s so Presbyterian. I didn’t realise because I never watch it and you can guess why without me resorting to any more unseemly capital letters.
So if there ever was such as thing as free to air coverage of the world’s greatest sporting events, we wouldn’t miss a second of it.