Heroes: Part deux (or possibly Trois)

(We’ll get to Alan Rickman later on…he is relevant, I promise…)

 Somewhere in the annals of this mixture of history, mystery and blatant self-promotion is a post about a hero – Captain Lawrence Oates, to be precise. I’d link to it but I still haven’t worked out how to do that. Elsewhere there’s a post about an early crush of mine, Marcus Aquila, hero of Rosemary Sutcliffe’s iconic novel, The Eagle of the Ninth.

I meant to write about more of my fictional and historical heroes and was all set to do a post about the most important one of all, when blow me down! They went and dug him up! Yup, along with hundreds of thousands of other people who read Josephine Tey’s (also iconic) detective story, The Daughter of Time, I fell in love with Richard III and have never been persuaded that he killed the princes. Don’t get me wrong, he was a general at the age of eighteen and I’m sure he killed lots of people, it was a bloodthirsty time, but Tey’s argument is that Richard was a sensible and practical man and that killing the boys would be contrary to his character – and not at all sensible.

 Anyhoo, I’m not here today to witter on about Richard, I have his picture on my landing and it’s been there for more than thirty years, so he knows whose side I’m on. No, today I’m going to write about a man who has been on the periphery of my hero worship, so to speak, for a long while and it’s time I took a look at him properly.

 I’m talking about Henry of Blois. There, you knew that, didn’t you? No, I hadn’t heard of him either until I began to read Ellis Peter’s famous series about Brother Cadfael, which is set in the English Civil War (that’s the first one; we’ve had two officially and lots more equally bloody ones that didn’t qualify for the official title).

 The thing about the Cadfael books is that they’re set in the 1130s-40s which is The Anarchy, so-called, ‘when God and His Saints slept’ and the Civil War raged across the land. Here’s the potted history: The problem was that when William the Conqueror’s son King Henry I died, his only heir was his daughter Matilda (sometimes known as Maud). Shock! Horror! A woman couldn’t possibly rule England, especially as it was less than seventy years since the Battle of Hastings and although the Normans had a firm grip on the country, it could still all go pear-shaped. And everyone knew women’s brains would boil if they had to think about anything serious. Step forward Stephen of Blois, nephew to King Henry, handsome hunk, all round good egg, and – most importantly – a chap. And right behind him was his younger brother Henry, the subject of this post. Henry of Blois, the Prince Bishop of Winchester, grandson of the Conqueror as was his brother the new king, and I suspect the one who inherited his grandpapa’s brains.

 Now, I wouldn’t want you to think I know anything at all about this, by the way, it’s all gleaned from the Cadfael books and Wikipedia, but all the evidence shows that Henry was intelligent, cunning and political – for a start he survived until he was in his early seventies, which was no mean feat in those days. This is what Wikipedia says about him: As Papal Legate (and Bishop of Winchester), Henry of Blois was the most powerful, and possibly the wealthiest, man in England when his brother was unavailable.Before and after his elevation to Bishop, Henry of Blois was an advisor to his brother Stephen and survived him. He engineered hundreds of projects, including villages and canals, abbeys and smaller churches. He was most proud of his contributions to the greatest developments at Glastonbury Abbey long before the destructive fire of 1185. Unlike most bishops of his age, Henry had a passion for architecture. He built the final additions to Winchester Cathedral and Wolvesey Castle in Winchester, including a tourist tunnel under the cathedral to make it easier for pilgrims to view relics. He also designed and built additions to many palaces and large houses including the castle of Farnham, Surrey^[5] and began the construction of the Hospital of St Cross at Winchester. In London he built Winchester Palace as a residence for the bishops of Winchester.

Are you keeping up? Not only was he a millionaire and a power in the land, he was a sensitive soul: Henry was also enamoured of books and their distribution. He wrote or sponsored several books including the Antiquities of Glastonbury, by William of Malmesbury, his close personal friend. He sponsored the Winchester Bible, the largest illustrated Bible ever produced. It is a huge folio edition standing nearly three feet in height. This Bible is still on display at Winchester, although it was never fully finished. His production of the Winchester Psalter, also known as the Blois Psalter, is preserved in the British Library and is considered a British National Treasure.

See? Definite hero material and modest with it, William of Malmesbury described him, saying, “Yet, in spite of his noble birth he blushes when praised.”

The reason I’m taking an interest in him is that I’ve recently had a poke around his Winchester home, Wolvesey Castle, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/wolvesey-castle-old-bishops-palace/  It’s free to wander about in and is close to the Cathedral and the heart of old Winchester, definitely worth a visit.

Henry blotted his copybook by going over to the other side but took against his cousin Matilda, considering her arrogant and greedy so he switched sides again – and seems to have got away with it, which argues considerable charm and cunning! (Incidentally, Matilda was ‘allowed’ to be queen for a short time, crowned in Henry’s own cathedral of Winchester but sadly she got above herself and started behaving like a ‘She-King’! The nerve of the woman! So they did a deal so that Stephen was back on the throne but at his death the crown would pass to Matilda’s son, Henry of Anjou, who became Henry II of England – read all about him in the Ariana Franklin novels featuring her female doctor, Adelia Aguilar. And find out about Matilda in the excellent tv series, http://www.amazon.co.uk/She-Wolves-Englands-Early-Queens-DVD/dp/B008OH0OFW)

Anyway, back to Prince Henry. Being incurably frivolous and flighty I can’t help seeing him as Alan Rickman’s  wily, charming and incredibly sexy Sheriff of Nottingham to King Stephen’s blond, beefcake and slightly thick Robin Hood aka Kevin Costner. And because you can never have enough pics of Rickman in his prime, here he is again:

And one small bit of promo – A Crowded Coffin is still on offer at the Amazon Kindle shop at the bargain price of 99p until 5th September. Tell your friends!

Eccentric oddballs as characters?

Why on earth have you written a book about older women?’ asked an acquaintance.  I boggled.  ‘Why not?’ sprang to mind, as did the fact that I’m no spring chicken myself.  I could have flannelled away about the ageing qualities of wine and whisky, but in the end I came out with the truth.  ‘Because they offered to publish the book and they paid me money.’   ‘Oh, all right, I suppose,’ she responded.  ‘But why not write a book about normal people?’

 Yes… well… that was more than eight years ago and while some things have changed, there are still plenty of points for discussion there as to whether women of middle-age and older are a strange sub-species. And I’m not going into that here because – believe me – I’ve spent the better part of the last decade arguing about that one!

 No, what concerns me today is that reviews of my books, while thankfully complimentary in the main, frequently refer to the ‘eccentric characters’ that populate them. Eccentric? Moi? I write as I find and if I introduced some people I know into my books you simply wouldn’t believe in them.

 Not long after the conversation chronicled above I did a talk in a local library. Nice bunch of people who had very kindly read ‘Scuba Dancing’ as one of their book club choices and had several points they wanted to raise. ‘How could I make jokes about senility and dementia?’ was one question. I’d expected that; one of my elderly crew of characters is clearly seriously dotty and becomes devastatingly more so, but I wrote about her daughter’s situation with sympathy and humour rather than gloom and doom. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t ignore the grinding misery of Margot’s daughter as she copes with her mother’s increasing frailty but I didn’t ignore the funny moments too.

 I know a lot about living with dotty old ladies and I know that my mother and I used to get the giggles at some of my grandmother’s eccentricities though mercifully she had all her marbles until near the end. One cherished moment was when a couple of young and eager Mormon missionaries knocked on the door and my mother, desperate for a few minutes’ respite, dragged them into Granny’s room on the ground floor. ‘Aha,’ cried Granny in an increasingly rare lucid moment. ‘It’s Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; bring us all some tea, Sheila, we’re going to talk about the Bible.’ They drank the tea, then had some cake, then had some more tea before she allowed them to leave – looking shell-shocked. We never did find out what she’d been saying but they practically vaulted over the front gate in their anxiety to get away.

 People find humour in difficult circumstances wherever they can – I’ve written about the British gallows humour – (9th Oct last year, still can’t do links. Duh!). Humour is what makes life bearable and every family has its oddballs. On another side of the family, my cousin’s great-uncle was a genuine eccentric and not keen on the human race at all. Unfortunately, his parents ran a guest house which meant he had to bump into people now and then. He had his own methods though – and stern measures had to be taken after a foul smell was tracked down to a kipper he had secreted under a guest’s mattress in an effort to make him leave.

My mother-in-law was the one in her family who got landed with keeping an eye on all the odd-bods in their declining years and used to giggle about Auntie Cissie, a formerly prim old maid, who used to declare loudly at visiting time in her residential home, ‘That mad bugger of a doctor tried to rape me again last night.’

 As for my other characters, what is eccentric, pray tell, in an old woman who talks to an angel? And a man who believes he is the rightful heir to the throne of England? Or, in my historical mysteries, a roaring bull of a clergyman who takes his gun into church with him, shoots magpies and regularly misses them, peppering instead anything that strays in his path? There are others, a man who proudly carries within him a musket ball, relic of an ancient battle; a man who loves funerals, and an old lady who is the proud owner of a pair of Waterloo teeth. (These belonged to her late husband and she wears them in his memory – what’s eccentric about that? ) I will admit, however, that some of the characters in my new book, The Dead Queen’s Garden, (Dec 2013) might qualify as barking mad, though that pillar of Victorian society, Florence Nightingale, does turn up to put a temporary damper on things.

 Going back to writing about ‘normal’ people, I was told by one member of a reading group that she – as a non-native – had visited many English villages and had never yet encountered anyone as unusual as the characters in Scuba Dancing. Why couldn’t I write about normal people? There it was again. I explained politely that a book about ordinary people doing ordinary things would be rather dull, and probably quite short – unless one happened to be Jane Austen.  I told her truthfully that I’ve never yet met anyone I’d describe as ‘normal’. Sadly, I think she took it personally, as she sat down looking rather affronted.

Thankfully there are plenty of readers who don’t find my characters too weird; here’s a nice new review for the Kindle version of Scuba Dancing:’It was different and left me thinking about all sorts of things raised in the novel . There are a lot of novels published that are not well written or are reruns of similar plots. This one stood out.’ (Short but succinct, thank you, SKWhittaker)

Now for the commercial!  The Collected Works of Nicola Slade – ahem – are now available from the Amazon Kindle shop among others. And A Crowded Coffin is still on offer at 99p until 5th September!