Great Chishill Windmill

When I visited Great Chishill Windmill in mid-May, cyclists, motorists and walkers were stopping to take pictures of the white weather-boarded mill on its green knoll overlooking the south Cambridgeshire countryside. Larks were singing, scudding clouds dotted the sky. Easy to imagine a time when every upland village had a mill and slowly turning sails would have been visible across the skyline.

There has been a windmill here since at least the 1500s, but the present structure dates from 1819. It has a nautical feel, and this must have been even more striking when canvas covered the four huge sails. The timbers which form the open post and trestle are rough and massive, much like the timbers of a sailing ship, and indeed some of the smaller beams inside the housing (the ‘buck’) were repurposed from shipwrecks, such wood being too valuable to discount even this far inland.

On alternate Sundays in the summer months, the windmill is open to visitors. A rustic outdoor staircase takes you to the cramped and shadowy meal floor, where a collection of ancient mostly wooden tools was abandoned in 1951 when the last owners locked up and walked away. The primitive but highly effective machinery is still in place, complete with wind shaft, clutch lever and chain sack hoist. The air smells as it must have done for centuries, of dust and grease and timber. And flour too, though plans to return Great Chishill to a working mill are yet to be fulfilled.

Most of the mill is built of un-planed oak, not least because metal would have increased the risk of fire from stray sparks. The ‘crown tree’ or beam on which the weight of the entire structure rests is a vast single oak which must have been centuries old when it was felled. The hammers and wedges used to lever apart the millstones for dressing were made of wood, the meal spout is wooden, most of the moving parts are made of oak or applewood.

The planking underfoot is uneven, the walls too. The mill must have been draughty even on warm days and freezing in winter. Gaps in the mechanism are plugged with knots of hessian, much as oakum was used to caulk ships in the age of sail. Hinges are simple and made of leather, iron nails are used instead of screws. There is a practical, makeshift air about the place. It is rough and ready, a prototype factory. The popular stereotype of the fat miller could not be further from the reality. The mechanism was constantly shaken loose and had to be hammered back into line using tools almost too heavy to lift. The miller would have toiled from dawn to dusk, though the fantail added in 1892 was a technological leap which enabled him to set up the mechanism without further adjustment even if the wind speed increased - a great improvement on days gone by.

From the meal floor you climb a near-vertical ladder to the even smaller stone floor with its cross beams and sets of huge stones. Here you learn about the simple but ingenious engineering which enabled generations of millers to harvest the wind in exactly the right way to grind wheat at optimal speed. The wind was also harnessed to hoist the sacks to the top floor, while sets of governors prevented the sails from moving the mechanisms too fast.

I am in the middle of writing a novel set in the English West Indies in 1704. The islands of Barbados and Antigua were dotted with stone windmills at that time, and when I visited Great Chishill I immediately thought of my story. The site is beautiful now, but when the mill was operational the plot on which it stands would have been messy and industrialised. The life of the miller and his boy would have been unrelentingly hard, perhaps in some respects as hard as that of the slaves who worked the sugar mills in the Caribbean. They depended for nails and other metal parts on the village blacksmith, but the forge was at the far end of the village where prevailing winds could carry off the smoke into the fields. When my tour guide Nigel Parslow described this, I pictured Great Chishill not quiet and green as it is today, but full of activity and noise. The rural economy then was based on hard physical graft and on a web of relationships between different occupations: miller and millwright, blacksmith and farmer.

The distinction between countryside and town is much clearer now than when agriculture co-existed with industry. Until the mid-twentieth century, woods would have rung with the sounds of axes and saws, and the air would have been thick with scents of sap and burning charcoal. Boatyards would have lined many riverbanks; lanes that are now peaceful would have been choked with waggons and with overladen hay wains. In my own village the green was once the site of both light and heavy industry: a substantial bakery stood there, and so did the forge and the wheelwright’s workshop. And for hundreds of years on the hill at Great Chishill the mill must have creaked in the gale like a three-masted ship, its trapdoors banging as an endless chain of grain sacks passed through them to the top, the huge stones scraping and rumbling all day long as the sails turned and flumped in the wind.

Keep on keeping on ...

Okay, the world seems a lot less shiny and promise-filled than it did even twenty years ago. It’s hard not to view Covid-19 as the inevitable result of our wilful abuse of nature, or to despair for our future and the future of the planet.

But it’s worth defending the achievements previous generations fought for long and hard, even if their benefits still fail to extend to everyone.

Here in the UK we are living though a pandemic in an era of:

• safe drinking water

• antibiotics and antivirals

• the NHS

• modern science, including virology and epidemiology

• the internet

• PPE (setting aside the issues affecting the NHS, most if not all of us can fashion a basic face-covering)

• access to soap and over-the-counter medicines including pain relief

Most of these are tangible things and we don’t tend to question the need to pay for them. But the same is true for

• public service broadcasting

• investigative journalism

Imagine living through a pandemic in previous centuries, or through this one if you were reliant for information on Trump’s Tweets, Fox News and The Sun newspaper. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year describes wave after wave of rumour and counter-rumour as late seventeenth-century London was ravaged by the plague. Of course we have rumours aplenty today, but we also have BBC Reality Check and brave journalists willing to challenge our leaders when they utter untruths. So pay your licence fee with pride. Take out a subscription to a quality newspaper. Don’t take your information on C-19 from social media or your friends.

Trust experts.

A House Through Time - A Dark Voyage

The new series of David Olusoga’s A House Through Time (BBC2 Tuesdays 9pm) is compelling viewing for anyone interested in the history of Bristol. The story begins in 1718, when a handsome three-storey house in Guinea Street, Redcliffe, was built by a sea-captain who made his fortune trafficking thousands of slaves from Africa’s West Coast to the West Indies. In episode one we learn that the house was initially leased to another sea-captain, Joseph Smith, whose story involved pirates, an Old Bailey trial, a foundling and a runaway Black slave. Later a Wesleyan chapel on the same street would enable early Abolitionists to preach against the slave trade; as Olusoga points out, this must have created tensions for the widow at No. 10 Guinea Street, whose wealth derived from her husband’s many slave voyages.

The parallels with my novel set in early eighteenth-century Bristol are striking: one of my characters in A Pair of Sharp Eyes decides to build a fine house in nearby Queen Square with the profits from his voyages to the Guinea Coast and his plantation in Jamaica. Like Captain Joseph Smith, the first tenant of the house featured in Olusoga’s series, James Tuffnell ‘owned’ a negro page-boy – such children (and adults too) were popular ‘fashion accessories’ for wealthy white English people in the eighteenth century (Olusoga’s resonant phrase). What I love is the emphasis here and in previous series of A House Through Time on the marginal figures in the stories of the houses featured. A foundling child, for example, left on the doorstep of 10 Guinea Street, but not in fact adopted by the wealthy couple who lived there; instead, Martha (who had no surname) was sent to the parish, and buried in a pauper’s grave aged only three. The TV camera shows us the grand drawing-room at No. 10, with its elaborate plasterwork, as well as the elegant dining-room, which has scarcely changed since Georgian times, but we also get to see the servants’ attic bedrooms, and the cavernous vaulted cellar, which was no doubt used for storing hogsheads of sugar and rum brought from the harbour just a stone’s-throw from Guinea Street (in my novel the cellar of Mr Tuffnell’s first house in Wine Street serves another, more sinister purpose). Perhaps Thomas, the Holbrook family’s runaway slave, was made to sleep in the cellar, and perhaps it was from there that he escaped and made his way to Bristol harbour – Thomas was never found, so it seems possible he took refuge on a ship. There were many Black men in the English merchant navy, and so long as they weren’t captured by pirates and sold into slavery, their chances were good.

I could watch and re-watch A Street Through Time (and have done), and never tire of the subtle insights it offers into past mores, or the connections it makes between a single house and the societies around it. But this first episode had special resonance for me. Since growing up in Bristol I have been fascinated by the city’s deep dark roots in the slave trade, and while I was researching A Pair of Sharp Eyes I returned to the work of the historians featured in the show: David Dabydeen, Madge Dresser, Olusoga himself. And now the programme has turned up all kinds of online resources I didn’t know about, and which will help me hugely with my next book, The Darkest Voyage. The Slave Voyages database; the wills index at the Bristol Archives; the Bristol parish registers on @AncestryUK; the University of Glasgow Runaway Slaves project at runaways.gla.ac.uk, to name a few. I can’t wait to start, nor can I wait for the second episode, due to broadcast on Tuesday June 2.

Historical fiction in the time of coronavirus

A peculiar thing happened to me at the start of lockdown. I’ve always read novels, sometimes classics, but more often contemporary fiction. I try to read the Booker shortlist, the novelists whose work is reviewed in The Guardian and on R4’s Front Row and Saturday Review, the novels recommended in Waterstone’s and by my local independent bookshops, Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden and the Book Nook in Ware. I try to buy new hardbacks where I can, to support those bookshops, and so I can kid myself I’m keeping up.

    All of a sudden, in the last week of March, with the pandemic raging across Europe, I couldn’t focus on any work of fiction set in the present day, by which I mean B.C., though I found I was okay if the story dealt with countries torn apart by war or some other cataclysm. I guess we’ve been relatively insulated from mass peril for a long time in the UK, because in the end, for me as a reader, it came down to whether the novel was set in a time and place without antibiotics. So I read and re-read Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, gripped by the proximity of death throughout, and feeling a jolt of recognition when I reached p. 409, and Cromwell’s opinions of the dangers of pilgrimage: ‘nothing comes of trailing from shire to shire to pray. You can pray at home. It costs you less, you don’t get robbed on the road, and you don’t spread diseases or carry them back to your native country.’ I shiver in sympathy whenever Cromwell thinks about his wife and daughters, victims of the sleeping-sickness, a disease which could kill in hours.

    I have to be grateful my own fiction is set in the early eighteenth century or I doubt I could concentrate on that, either. The barber-surgeon in the sequel to A Pair of Sharp Eyes is prone to prescribe Jesuit’s Bark (for most complaints) or administer a clyster (enema) when anyone succumbs to Yellow Fever. Good luck with that. When I started work on the book I was conscious of the risks faced by travellers in the age of sail. Now I feel a horrified kinship with my characters, and can understand much more why pre-twentieth-century fiction is so concerned with health and dying. I think I’d find it difficult to sustain a sense of engagement if my story was set in 2000, or 2019, or even January 2020. Those times are tinged with nostalgia, inevitably. What was the joke about the Victorian novel? Cough in Chapter One, dead by Chapter Three? It doesn’t seem so funny now, when most of us are like Mantel’s Henry VIII, terrified of catching the plague whenever someone sneezes. 

Distant yet close to hand

My devotional space, if that doesn’t sound too ridiculously pretentious, is a country lane round the corner from my house. I walk or run there every day, looking out for wildlife as I go, breathing the fresh air. Perfect antidote to desk work.

Some research was reported this week, confirming that people with regular access to nature are most likely to act in eco-friendly ways, by recycling, for example. I’m not surprised. I can’t bear to see ‘my’ lane despoiled by so much as a milk top. I come home with pockets full of litter.

I haven’t added to my blog in a while because I’ve been stuck at home over midwinter and haven’t encountered many survivals from the 1700s. No trips to the City of London, no museums. It strikes me today that the early eighteenth century has been hiding in plain sight, because the lane where I walk every day has hardly altered since that time. An ancient way, which existed as far back as the thirteenth century, leads off from it: nowadays a quiet footpath, once, presumably, full of traffic. Two of the half dozen houses on the lane were standing when my fictional heroine, Coronation Amesbury, was growing up in another southern English country (Wiltshire; I live in Essex). They are mostly thatched, cruck-built and plaster-rendered. A local historian dates one of them to the seventeenth century.

If Coronation had ever visited this remote part of north Essex in 1703 she could have walked out of the hamlet, now a small village, up the lane past houses that would have been old even then. The lane, neatly tarmacked today, was probably a rutted, flinty track - the village still has some of those, leading across the fields. The views have hardly changed: there were more and denser woods around here before the Second World War, but there are some still, and they were probably used for field sports then as now.

In the wake of Storm Brendan last night, the lane runs with water. The ditches are overflowing, and one or two small trees have been blown down. There were plenty of wet winters in early modern times, though 1704, when the sequel to my novel is set, was notable for the dryness of its summer. I think the biggest difference between then and now, and the most poignant, is the decimation of the wild bird population, much of it in the last thirty years. I’m lucky if I see a jay, a few blackbirds, blue tits and wrens on my daily walk. Corrie would have been surrounded by scores of thrushes, finches, game birds and wetland birds that we hardly see nowadays outside nature reserves and wilder stretches of the coast. The hedges would have been clamorous with birdsong. And then there’s the butterflies and insects, once so plentiful the air was dense with them … we have lived through a kind of holocaust and scarcely noticed it. If I could walk in Corrie’s shoes through a pre-industrial countryside for even an hour I think it would change my view of everything forever.

1703

I’m always on the lookout for the early 1700s. Sometimes it’s the thrill of spotting a view that can’t have changed much since the early eighteenth century, sometimes it’s coming across a building that was standing when my fictional heroine was baptised in 1689. In museums I’m drawn to objects from the past, because they help me so much with the process of imaginative reconstruction. A court cupboard in the museum at Saffron Walden, for example, once belonged to Sir Francis Weston, one of those accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn: seeing it made my skin prickle (this is what Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, make distant history as vivid as the sandwich you had for lunch). Okay, the cupboard is much earlier than the period my novel is set in, but superficially at least it’s not so different from the furniture well-to-do people owned in the early eighteenth century – heavy, glossy, elaborately carved, and designed to impress as well as be useful. I have a powerful urge to run my hands over it, but there are people around and I don’t want to set off the security alarm, besides which I’d look utterly weird.

    I’m back in Saffron Walden on Saturday for the annual sale at the Fry Art Gallery when I spot this blue plaque to the designer Henry Winstanley. Winstanley was the son of the steward at Audley End, the grand country house just outside the town, and he built the first Eddystone Lighthouse. Sadly, he was carrying out repairs to the building when the Great Storm of 1703 struck, destroying the lighthouse and Winstanley with it.

    The specificity of the date, 1703, is especially pleasing, since that’s the year my novel is set.  I reflect that it’s as though time loops and circles back on itself, like the hawks at the opening of Bring Up the Bodies, which show us how Thomas Cromwell’s past is likely to shape his future. I’ve been interested in the Great Storm for a long while, and it features heavily in my novel. Now it turns out one of its most famous victims lived a stone’s throw (a falcon’s swoop?) from where I was working when I wrote A Pair of Sharp Eyes. Three hundred and sixteen years suddenly don’t seem that many – three long lifetimes end to end, is all.

Memorial 2007

Back in October, thanks to an article by Afua Hirsch in The Guardian, I signed the online petition and donated to Memorial 2007, the campaign led by Oku Ekpenyon to erect a statue to Enslaved Africans and their Descendants in London’s Hyde Park. I was disturbed but not surprised to learn that successive British governments have refused to support this statue – in contrast, there are memorials to famous Abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, as well as to prominent slavers such as Edward Colston. There is the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, and Bristol’s M Shed includes an exhibition about the slave trade, but it is a scandal that no memorial exists in London where descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade can remember and pay tribute to their ancestors, and where all of us can acknowledge the unhealed scars of the past. 

    The British have been able to hide their heads in the sand since the very beginnings of the slave trade, since slavery itself was confined to the far-flung Caribbean and the US. Cultural landmarks such as the 1970s TV series Roots inadvertently perpetuated the convenient myth that slavery was more an issue for Americans than for us. As others have pointed out, it is a myth that suits our island story only too well.

    Tonight my local book club is discussing my novel, A Pair of Sharp Eyes, alongside Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I am not so vain as to imagine there is any comparison between my book, set in Bristol at the height of the slave trade, and Morrison’s ground-breaking masterpiece about the problems of selfhood for the enslaved. I can only hope that in Sharp Eyes I acknowledge Bristol’s central role in the early slave trade, and do not depict any of my white characters as champions of the Black people they encounter. My heroine, Corrie, is propelled by a strong sense of social justice, but she is young and naïve and brings her principles to bear with little forethought. She is also prone to congratulate herself uncritically on her kindness to others, as, for example, when she thinks of asking for a cross to be erected to mark a Black boy’s grave, never considering that the name he went by, ‘Abraham,’ was bestowed by a white ‘owner.’ At one point Corrie is even tempted to envy a Black manservant his place in service – she is out of work herself at this point, and fondly imagines that the Black servant enjoys an easy life.

    This misapprehension raises something difficult and important, however. Many white British people were treated little better than slaves in 1703. In arguing, as we should, for a national memorial to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, we should also remember how wretched were the lives of many poor British people in early modern times, and how hard-won were certain rights which most of us now take for granted: to safe working conditions, universal suffrage, a living wage, strike action, and, of course, basic freedoms of the kind denied to the victims of human trafficking today. 

    Acknowledging the unique horror and violence of the transatlantic slave trade is imperative. But slavery is the worst and most extreme consequence of unfettered capitalism now, just as it was three hundred years ago. The proposed memorial in Hyde Park will mainly be to the dead and their descendants. We must also remember and continue to fight for the living, among whom, appallingly, there are many enslaved people and others whose working lives are scarcely better than those of slaves.

Big change, no change at all

Big change, no change at all

My debut novel came out on Tuesday, and I’ve spent the week obsessively Googling it. I’ve an aversion to social media, but I’m back on Twitter, wondering how anyone writes books if they’re tweeting everything from the minutiae of their existence to their views on world affairs. Are people growing thicker-skinned? Some are, surely, to cope with the incessant abrasiveness of public discourse. No wonder my previous venture onto Twitter was confined to a diary of flowering plants.

    I haven’t had a launch party for my novel yet – I’ve moved to Essex recently and most of my writing pals are in the north of England. Even so, by the end of the week I’m shattered. Entering the public domain is scary – fiction is so personal, so revealing. Even a story like A Pair of Sharp Eyes, which isn’t remotely autobiographical, allows perfect strangers (and worse still, friends) to peer into the recesses of my brain. My heroine, Corrie, isn’t based on me or anyone I know. The murders she investigates are purely fictional. The places she goes exist solely in my imagination – yet the book is a distillation of all I’ve ever read and all I’ve ever done. It draws on the years I spent as an academic, researching the eighteenth century. It takes me back to Bristol, where I spent my childhood. Corrie is only fourteen, which returns me to adolescence, when I was probably at my most vulnerable. Most of all, if the novel fails to entertain I’ll be deeply ashamed. One reviewer this week just doesn’t like the book. I suppress a crazy urge to email and apologise for boring her.

    Thankfully, most people so far do like the book. Quite a few suggest they’re hoping for a sequel. After years trying, and failing, to get a previous novel published I can’t quite believe my luck. I hold my breath – I’ll be holding it for a while.

    On the morning of publication I email my editor to thank her for her support. Her reply is swift and brutal: ‘The hard graft starts here.’ She’s right, but it’s not just the work of publicising this book while starting on the next. You’ve achieved what you set out to do, yet you’re still faced with a blank page every day, and now you have real readers you need to please.     

    A.L. Kennedy warns unpublished writers that success isn’t necessarily the transformation they expect, and I’d agree with her. That said, would I go back to being unpublished? Of course not. Everything’s the same – and yet everything’s different. Before you wrote in isolation. Now you have all the joy and worry that comes with having friends.

The pictures are better on the radio ... →

We walked from Pill Creek in North Somerset along the Avon Trail to Bristol. It’s a pleasant route, past Ham Green Fishing Lake and through Leigh Woods to the Cumberland Basin. Halfway along we stopped and ate our sandwiches close to the railway, enjoying a spectacular view of Clifton Suspension Bridge from below.

    I’m researching a sequel to A Pair of Sharp Eyes, The Darkest Voyage, which begins with my heroine, Coronation, setting off from Bristol for the West Indies in the summer of 1704. First, she takes a longboat down the river to the Bristol Channel, where her ship is waiting for the trade winds to set sail.

    On our walk on Monday we saw herons and lapwings, fritillaries and a Common Blue butterfly. The information boards along the Trail were detailed and absorbing. It wasn’t too difficult to picture the river and the Avon Gorge in pre-industrial times, before the suspension bridge was built and the railway tunnel was cut through the rock below Leigh Woods, and when the air didn’t thrum with the sound of traffic rushing along the Portway towards Avonmouth.

    In 1704 the port of Bristol had not yet been overtaken by Liverpool. The river would have been busier than it is today. The water itself crowded with boats; the banks lined with boat-repairers, fishermen, sailmakers, ferrymen, barge-dwellers and mudlarks. The woods would definitely have been less dense; they must have been coppiced, and charcoal-burners and wood-turners would have lived there, as well as game-keepers and small-holders. The peregrine falcons currently nesting in the cliffs would surely have been persecuted in the eighteenth century, though a few individuals may have clung on, before the Victorians hunted them to near-extinction.

    Close your eyes and conjure the cries of pilots and shanties sung by on river-going boats, oarsmen groaning with effort as they row against the wind, ship’s bells tolling and gulls shrieking round the masts of boats sailing out to fishing grounds on the coast. The clanking and creaking of wooden cranes lifting cargo onto small ships might have carried on the wind down from the city’s quays. On a summer’s day children surely splashed and played on the muddy shores below Clifton and Hotwells. Horses would have stamped and whinnied at Bower Ashton, waiting for people to climb off the ferry and ride up Rownham Hill. Now, the river strictly demarcates the city from Abbots Leigh and Leigh Woods. Then, the west bank of the Avon may have been as populous as the east.

    The river current is strong, and a boat rowed vigorously would not take long to reach the Bristol Channel. We walked through Hotwells to catch the 4X bus back to Pill, leaving Corrie in her longboat, desperate to escape the city but fearful of the perils waiting for her at sea. Sitting on the bus I reflected that I wasn’t much older than Corrie when I left the UK to teach and study in San Francisco in 1991. I took two enormous suitcases, and $6000 in savings, and arranged for 200 books to be shipped out ahead of me, to be used in my research. Most crucially, I had a J-1 visa, which gave me permission to stay and work in the US.

    Corrie has no passport. She carries with her a bundle of linen, the clothes she stands up in, a small wooden box and enough money to support her for a few weeks at most. People who travel like that today are brave – and desperate.

The Avon Trail, near Ham Green, North Somerset

Book group invitation - Battersea September 17 2019

This week I received my first invitation to speak to a book group about my debut novel, A Pair of Sharp Eyes.

Exciting but terrifying. What will these readers want to know? Can I remember my own book well enough? Will the meeting feel like a viva, with ten examiners instead of two, and Pinot Grigio instead of tap water? What if I get the title wrong, as I’ve been known to do, and refer to my novel as A Sharp Pair of Eyes, misquoting the original source (Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals)? What the hell to wear?

I’ve talked about my writing before, plenty of times. I was in a book group myself for ten years. How hard can it be? For goodness’ sake, I used to be an English lecturer. If I could run a two-hour seminar on Hamlet, I can surely talk about my own novel for an hour. Can’t I?

As for what to wear, I’m there as a writer, and I’d be letting the side down if I didn’t look a bit pre-loved.

If all else fails, I can talk about my cat.* Here she is, enjoying me telling her all about my book. Let’s hope the readers of Battersea are equally enthralled by what I have to say …

*Copyright Freya Rathmill 2018

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