Most of the action in The Fog of War and The Quid Pro Quo takes place in Bradfield…it’s a fictionalised version of a small village on the Quantock Hills. The dead body at the beginning of the story is found in the duck pond on the village green.
When I talk about the village green, you probably see the same mental image I do…a green space in the centre of the village, with a big shady tree and a bench, maybe a pond. It’s used for cricket on Sunday afternoons, Maypole dancing, maybe a bonfire and fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night.
However the actual evolution of the village green is much more practical and it actually wasn’t always at the centre of the village. They served as places to graze or gather stock, with the pond to water them or to protect them against thieves or for market trading. The Inclosures Acts of the nineteenth century and finally the Commons Registration Acts of 1965 formalised what was left of English Common Lands into what we have today, including Village Greens. New areas can be designated Greens if they’re used for recreation for more than twenty years, but otherwise the pattern is static. You can read about it here.
I envisage the Green at Bradfield to be about the size of a football field. It’s bounded by lanes and by houses that have clustered around the edges—the church, the shop, the Post Office, the blacksmith and the Police House. Since the inception of regional police forces in the mid-nineteenth century, rural police forces had place constables in tied housing in country villages and they were very much a part of the community.
I think the English have always had—and continue to have—and idealised idea of their countryside. Here’s a piece of 1930’s footage of a drive through rural England. No poverty or damp housing to be seen.
Bradfield is a very rural community and my characters are mostly middle and upper class. I think that’s because I started off with an Agatha Christie but make it gay sort of vibe. Walter is from the East End of London and is working class. But his particular situation and the vagaries of the war have separated him from that. Simon is working class but has worked his way up in the police to a position of authority and relatively good wages—watch out for another blog post about the police service before too long.
If you want a realistic account of English rural village life between the two world wars, I recommend Laurie Lee’s autobiographical Cider with Rosie. It’s beautifully, bucolically written, a moving memoir that takes you back to Slad in Gloucestershire.
I leave you with a clip of haymaking in 1904. These days the hay is made into bales and stacked by machine…but it’s still hot, heavy work. I can remember playing in the drying hay like these Edwardian children.
This morning I want to talk a little bit about trans people in history. Transgender is a word that can only be traced back to 1974, but that didn’t mean trans people didn’t exist before that date! Walter, one of the main characters in The Quid Pro Quo is transgender—he’s caused me all sorts of plot issues, but has sent me off to do lots of really interesting reading, which I’m delighted to share here!
One of the things that gender studies academics all agree about is that it’s almost impossible to know how people in the past that we now see as trans would have seen themselves. The records are very sparse, often sensationalised and are usually other people’s view of the person rather than their own. Who wanted to put that sort of thing down in writing when it would get you prosecuted or put in a mental hospital? So it’s hard to tell whether past figures were transgender; or whether they were passing as a man or woman in order to access spaces and privilege they would be otherwise denied. This is particularly true of people who were assigned female at birth and lived the bulk of their lives as men.
The most famous of these cases is Dr James Barry, who after his death in the mid-nineteenth century was revealed to be AFAB (assigned female at birth). I won’t write much about him here because this is the article I would write and Rebecca Ortenberg has already done it better than I would. Suffice to say that after he began his medical education at Edinburgh, Barry never presented or referred to himself as female again. He was only discovered to be AFAB after the person laying his body out for burial spoke about him. In recent years he’s been absorbed by the ‘plucky girl breaking the glass ceiling by putting on breeches’ narrative, which I personally feel is wrong.
This article at the British Library about Transgender Identities in the Past is fascinating. It focuses on two people, Eliza Edwards, who on her death in 1833 was discovered to be AMAB. And in 1901, someone we’d now understand to be a trans man who at the age of sixty and after several marriages and a career as a cook on P&O liners was revealed to be AFAB. The newspaper article calls them by a woman’s name. It completely erases the life they lived. The article has audio clips of a 2018 discussion between E-J Scott, curator of the Museum of Transology; Dr Jay Stewart, the chief executive of Gendered Intelligence, and Annie Brown, an activist, artist and GI youth worker. It’s worth your time.
In The Flowers of Time, my story set in the late eighteenth century, Jones the non-binary character eventually decides to present as masculine because it makes their life with Edie easier. They fudge the record, more or less blackmail close family into accepting them and that’s that. However, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that as time went on, communication became quicker and easier and records of births and marriages became more common it became much more difficult to pass. British army records mention Phoebe Hassel, who was discharged in 1817 when she was flogged and discovered to be a man (bottom of page seven, you have to register, but it’s free). We don’t know whether she was a passing woman for financial or social reasons or whether she was what we’d understand today as trans. Her male name is not mentioned. However, she must have passed well enough or had enough support by her peers to have concealed her natal gender for some years.
However, The Quid Pro Quo is set a hundred and fifty years later than Phoebe’s flogging and The Flowers of Time. By the time Walter joined up in 1898, there were medicals for army recruits. This was such a sticking point for me that I bottled it and I honestly tried to write the book with him as cis. However, he just wouldn’t play…he’d been trans in my head as I was writing The Fog of War, right back as far the planning stage of the trilogy. But when I came to write it, I couldn’t make the story work with him as trans because of the army regulations; and I couldn’t make the story work with him as cis because he’s not cis.
I threw the question to some of my lovely friends at the Quiltbag Historicals facebook group (join us, we’re cool!) and they immediately began working out ways I could fudge the story. So Walter begins his army career as his twin brother and has a little help from the people around him to keep his origins concealed. And I reassured myself that if people are prepared to suspend disbelief about the paranormal aspects of my stories then they can allow me this tiny (enormous) stretch of possibility to get it off the ground!
I love Walter. He’s so very pragmatic about his life and his place in the universe. He’s just getting on and doing his thing. I wanted him to have a happy ending so badly all the time I was writing The Fog of War and I was very pleased to be able to give him one here in The Quid Pro Quo.
I like to think of my stories as realistically historical first and paranormal second. My characters are just getting on living their lives—which have greater or lesser levels of complexity—and the paranormal comes and whacks them round the back of the head with half a brick in a sock. I try and make the history as accurate and the paranormal as twisted as I can! I think I’ve done Walter justice, as he’s one of my favourite people. I hope you like him too.
Village nurse Walter Kennett is content with his makeshift found-family in tiny Bradfield. However one midsummer morning a body is found floating in the village duck pond, dead by magical means.
Detective Simon Frost arrives in Bradfield to investigate a inexplicable murder. The evidence seems to point to Lucille Hall-Bridges, who lives with doctor Sylvia Marks and nurse Walter Kennett at Courtfield House. Simon isn’t happy—he doesn’t believe Lucy is a murderer but he’s sure the three of them are hiding something. In the meantime, the draw he feels toward Walter takes him by surprise.
Walter is in a dilemma, concealing Sylvia and Lucy’s relationship and not knowing how much to tell Frost about the paranormal possibilities of the murder. He isn’t interested in going to bed with anyone—he’s got a complicated life and has to know someone really well before he falls between the sheets. He’s taken aback by his own attraction to Detective Frost and angry when Frost appears to twist the spark between them to something transactional in nature.
Will Walter be satisfied to stay on the periphery of Lucy and Sylvia’s love affair, a welcome friend but never quite included? Or is it time for him to strike out and embark on a relationship of his own?
This week, let’s once again talk about tea. If you’ve read any of my books, any at all, you know my characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking it. And in The Quid Pro Quo, Simon also spends a lot of time having sandwiches or steak and kidney pie at the ABC Tea Rooms. I haven’t written them into stories before–I’m usually a Lyons Corner House sort of historical writer!—but I thought why not ring the changes?
Tea rooms and cafes are such a banal part of our existence now…but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they were actually part of a quiet social revolution, because–shock! horror!–women could use them unaccompanied. Nice women avoided pubs, and restaurants were off limits-women without male companions would be turned away.
The ABC tearoom phenomena began in London in the 1880s. ABC stands for Aerated Bread Company. The business was founded in 1882. They made bread without yeast, using compressed carbon dioxide instead to make the bread rise (it sounds yukky). They rapidly expanded with bakeries selling to the general public all across London in the next couple of years and one day someone had the bright idea of also selling tea and snacks to the customers. The first Lyons was opened in 1894 and to keep their market share, ABC began selling home-cooked meals.
By 1923, ABC had 250 tea-shops all over the world and Lyons had 240 in the UK. They both sold light meals. Both establishments were popular with clerical workers at lunch time and theatre and cinema goers in the evenings. However, the really extraordinary thing about them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was their connection to the women’s suffrage movement.
It was a momentous thing for women at the time, to simply get out and meet each other over a cup of tea and not be harassed or accused of soliciting. And this new freedom of movement and opening up of public spaces they could access brought great strides to both their social existence and their political one. You can read more about the connection between the suffrage movement and tea-rooms here. There were many smaller, independent establishments as well as ABC and Lyons, but the point of a chain is that it’s familiar and comfortable. And that must have made those early women adventurers into the world of unsupervised public expeditions more confident when they ventured out.
The suffrage connection to the teashops must have also impacted the tea-shop staff, because there was obviously a sense of comradeship between them. ABC employees worked a sixty-two hour week and pay was low. Lyons women went on strike to protest their own low wages in 1895. This is newsreel footage of striking Lyons employees from the 1920s. They apparently went out in support of someone who was dismissed for wearing her union badge at work. (Look at the hats—this was obviously just before the advent of the cloche!)
The final thing I should mention is that the Lyons Corner House at Coventry Street, London, was a well-known meeting place for gay men during the first three decades of the twentieth century. (From Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London). The waitresses seated women and families away from The Lily Pond at the far end of the room.
So, remember, when you pop in to a tea-shop for a cuppa whilst you’re shopping–you’re actually visiting what began as a radical space!
The plot of The Quid Pro Quo features a Ouija Board session that causes stuff to happen. I thought I knew all about them, but when I came to do a bit of research into what my 1920s characters would have known and thought about them, it turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.
Ouija boards are an ancient way of contacting spirits, appropriated and twisted by the western world from another culture that uses them responsibly as part of their spiritual practice, right?
(Imagine a gong ringing here, if you would)
Wrong! Wrong in all the ways!
The roots of the Ouija Board lie in the mid-Western state of Ohio in the 1880s. Their use wasn’t at all incompatible with Christianity and grew out of the interest in Spiritualism that swept across the US after the Fox Sisters in New York State became a national sensation in the 1840s. After the Civil War, the US was in collective mourning for a long time. Having an easier way to talk to the spirits of loved ones rather than being dependent on a medium was presumably how the concept of a board and planchette arrangement originally came about.
In the 1890s the idea was picked up by a couple of smart businessmen, who set up the Kennard Novelty Company in Maryland to manufacture a ‘talking board’ as a parlour game. The name Ouija came from the sister-in-law of one of them, Helen Peters. She was a medium and the name came to her during a session with the ‘talking board’ itself. The spirit she was speaking with told her it meant ‘good luck’. However…at the time of the communication, Peters said she was wearing a locket with the picture and name of the novelist Ouida*. Make of that what you will!
So, at the time my story is set, talking to dead people and to a lesser extent communicating with spirits and angels and entities was a perfectly respectable occupation. Arthur Conan Doyle was a great believer in Spiritualism and Queen Victoria is said to have held several seances to attempt to contact Prince Albert. The Ouija Board even featured in this 1920 Norman Rockwell picture on the front of The Saturday Evening Post. The ladies in The Quid Pro Quo are divided between being fully invested in the process as a method of contacting their beloved dead; and finding it all rather inappropriate and ridiculous. But no-one is really worried about it in the sense that we are now, when we tend to associate Ouija Boards with demonic forces.
So…what changed? Well, in 1973, The Exorcist was released. It completely shifted the way the Ouija was perceived and they are now viewed in pop culture as something that can really harm people, either psychologically or by summoning evil spirits, depending on ones viewpoint.
One of the things I love about working with Callum Hale on my audiobooks is his ability to throw himself into pretty much any British accent and bring the character to life. To my British ear each of the people I’ve created sound exactly as I’ve envisaged them as he brings them off the page.
I asked him to make Rob, from Inheritance of Shadows ‘less ooh-arr’ and he toned the accent down so to me at least, Rob doesn’t sound so much like a heavy-handed son of the Somerset soil. And I wanted Will Grant in the 1920s London Trilogy to sound more like Lord Peter Wimsey. Callum obliged, perfectly. (These are my two favourite of all my characters, ever, incidentally).
The question I’m always asking myself about my writing though, is how right can I get it? I want the history in my books to be accurate, unless I’m deliberately twisting the universe out of true with magic. I think this is the same question historians have to ask themselves about looking at anything in the past. We are both looking at things through our own rose-tinted spectacles, coloured with our own experiences and social expectations. My characters in these books grew up in Victorian England. What did they really think about the Empire? What did they talk about in the pub? What did they really sound like? How did they really smell? We’re fudging it, the whole lot. Historians and archaeologists because of lack of data. And writers because of lack of data and because we don’t want our main characters to be unsympathetic to modern audiences.
Anyway…during one or other of my late-night sessions randomly browsing the web, I came across this programme about Edwardian accents. A regional English language specialist in Germany during the First World War, a real-life Professor Higgins, suddenly realised he had a huge pool of untapped research material in the German army’s British prisoners of war. In this documentary you can actually listen to their voices.
I was very interested in how the modern specialists in the programme say the regional accents of the past are broader in the recordings than they are now. It’s as if the rising tide of London-speak has swept the broad vowels of the regional accents back from the centre of the country, into the more remote west of England. So although to me, Rob sounds about right, a farm labourer from Somerset who’s self-educated and likes to read, to his contemporaries he’d probably have sounded out of place. You can listen to Callum’s reading of him here, in the first chapter of Inheritance of Shadows.
I think, listening to those long-ago voices in the programme, it’s important to remember these men were prisoners. That’s one of the filters we mustn’t discard. Were they doing this work in the language lab out of the kindness of their hearts? Because they were bored and wanted an occupation? Because they were threatened in to it? Because they were offered extra rations or privileges? Are these their actual accents? Or are they performative, a joke on the professor? They’re immensely touching, whatever their origin and I hope you enjoy it.
You can buy the 1920s London audiobooks at Authors Direct.
