I’ll take a bet that if you write vampire novels or fantasy or dystopia for young people, that’s not a question you get asked very often.  But credibility is important for all kinds of writing.  When it comes to historical fiction, it’s a must.  

There’s just one problem.  A huge part of the pull of writing about the past is delight in the extraordinary stories you find there. Take the eighteenth-century doctor who designed a live-turtle-dove-topped electrified bed which played music as its occupants made love - Dr James Graham also lectured the cream of London society on ice-cold post-coital bathing of the genitals and indulged in earth-bathing.  Or the peasant who was inspired by Robinson Crusoe to cross West Africa and the Sahara in disguise, and became the first European to enter Timbuktu and survive to tell the tale, only to be caught up in Anglo-French political rivalry and accused of theft and deception.  My latest YA novel, out in October, is inspired by  the incredible journeys made by airmen in the Polish Air Force to continue the fight ‘for their freedom and ours’, and the fighter planes which plunged 30 feet or more into the ground when they crashed during the Battle of Britain, whose pilots were buried with them.

In the case of A World Between Us, I thought particularly long and hard about Felix’s escape in Paris.  The woman who first got me interested in the Spanish Civil War convinced me that it could have happened: the funniest, cleverest and most committed of all the Mitford sisters, Jessica.  She’s long been a heroine to me.  Months after finishing writing my novel, I couldn’t have been more thrilled to  discover that her top Desert Island Disc choice was ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’, the song Kitty teaches Felix as they travel through Spain.

Jessica Mitford’s story is wonderfully told in her autobiography Hons and Rebels and it’s well known.  Barely a week after having met and fallen for her cousin Esmond Romilly (and the Spanish cause too), they ran away to Spain together.  She told her parents she was staying with friends in Dieppe. When I first read the book as a teenager, it established a gold standard for romantic elopement for me.  Clearly, politics didn’t get more passionate than in the Spanish Civil War.

But plenty of forgotten activists volunteered to fight or nurse for Spain with equal spontaneity.  The artist Felicia Browne was on a driving holiday through France and Spain with her friend Edith Bone when the military coup that started the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936.  By the 3^rd August she had joined a militia and was on her way to the front, the only British woman actually to fight in the war, and the first of over 500 British volunteers to die.  She was killed within three weeks, apparently shot dead while trying to help an injured Italian comrade during an ambushed attempt to blow up a rebel train.

An equally tragic and heroic figure is John Cornford, whose moving poem ‘Heart of the Heartless World’ is printed in A World Between Us.  A committed Cambridge communist, he arrived in Spain on August 8^th 1936 as a journalist, but quickly decided that as he didn’t speak a word of Spanish, he’d be rather more valuable fighting than writing news reports.

Felicia Browne had been heading for Barcelona for the alternative People’s Olympiad, planned as an alternative to the ‘Nazi’ Olympics in Berlin, but aborted at the outbreak of war.   Two Jewish garment workers from Stepney, Nat Cohen and Sam Masters, were cycling to Barcelona when they heard the news of the uprising, immediately joined the militia, and Nat Cohen became Esmond Romilly’s commander in the Tom Mann Centuria.  Another artist, Wogan Phillips, who was then married to writer Rosamund Lehmann (Invitation to the Waltz, Dusty Answer, The Echoing Grove….), was also on holiday in Spain when war broke out.  The Eton-educated son of a wealthy ship-owner, he immediately offered his services to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, bought a van, loaded it with medical supplies, and drove to the Jarama front.

Once the International Brigades had been formed, Paris became their organising centre and the city secretly began to throng with ‘volunteers for liberty’ from all over the world.  Scottish volunteer John Lochore was one of many to arrive on a weekend excursion ticket in the winter of 1936:

‘…we duly arrived in the French capital and on leaving the station, by presenting our secret address to the driver, we were whizzed through a maze of streets…I am sure the entire fleet of taxi drivers in Paris knew the address – a fact which was revealed by their casual confidence in conveying us to our “secret destination”.’

John Sommerfield, a young Communist novelist from Hampstead, was early to sign up at the Place du Combat.  Of the many stories grippingly told and quoted by Richard Baxell in his recent book Unlikely Warriors, Sommerfield’s is one of the most amusing:

‘We advanced to the table, said our piece, were handed forms, and went through complications of translations.  What was my job?  Author, perhaps?  The French word was écrevasse?  Something like that.  But no, it turned out to be écrivain. Ecrevasse was a lobster.  “Sommerfield, the celebrated English revolutionary lobster.”  It was a crack to last for weeks.’

Between leaving Glasgow and arriving in Paris. Steve Fullarton aged from eighteen to twenty-one.  He was one of the hundreds (former milkmen, maths lecturers, actors, sailors…) who risked arrest and endured a terrifying night climb of the snow-capped Pyrenees in rope-soled sandals, smuggled into Spain because volunteering had become illegal according to the terms of the Non-Intervention Policy.

As Baxell writes, some volunteers came by sea, jumping ship at Republican ports such as Barcelona and Valencia, facing torpedoes from Italian submarines in the Mediterranean.  A few travelled in style – Percy Ludwick was recruited in Moscow and flown into Spain, and nurse Patience Darton was also jetted in at speed.

Typically, medical staff had little notice.  Molly Murphy, whose letters feature in the multitouch iBook edition of A World Between Us , said the appeal for nurses ‘rang a bell in my heart‘.  She felt it would be ‘nauseating’ to continue the private nursing she was doing ‘when splendid young men were dying on the international battlefields of Spain because there were so few nurses and doctors to help keep them alive.’  But soon after being accepted, she was told that no more medical personnel were needed in Spain.  Then the telegram arrived:

Juggling the demands of pace, excitement and credibility is quite a challenge when you’re writing for a younger audience.  Of course, one of the great advantages of teenage heroes and heroines is that they are at just the age when risk-taking is the norm. Who hasn’t had a good few ‘Did-I-really-do-that?’ moments in their own teenage past?  But not many are likely to match the unbelievable spontaneity of so many of the volunteers who rallied to the cause of  Spain in the 1930s.

Find out more about the real volunteers who supported the Republican Government in Spain in the 1930s in Richard Baxell’s Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against Fascism, (shortlisted for the Political History Book of the Year, 2013). Angela Jackson’s British Women in the Spanish Civil War was an important source for me while writing A World Between Us.  Two more recent publications, Salud! British Volunteers in the Republican Medical Service During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Linda Palfreeman and ‘In Spain with Orwell’: George Orwell and the Independent Labour Party Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War by Christopher Hall, offer new insights on these particular groups of volunteers.

Tickets are available from June and likely to sell out fast.

She was probably about thirteen or fourteen when she came up with a plan which meant she could take a day off school whenever she liked.  She simply told her teacher that it was a Jewish holiday.  ”But none of the other girls will be away…” the bewildered mistress would say, to which Bertha replied, “Ah, that’s because they’re Ashkenazi. We’re Sephardi, you see.”  And off she would go, exploring.  Months passed, during which she discovered all sorts of nooks and crannies, and finally it came to at the end of year quiz. The subject was London.  She got every question right, and walked off with the prize.

My siblings and I loved it when Bertha came to babysit because she was the only person we knew who told us stories she had actually made up herself - bliss!  Then one unforgettable day she told us the most amazing story of all, which lasted all day and was set in seventeenth-century London.  As she told it, she took us to all the different places in the city where it happened, starting at St Bartholomew-the-Great in Smithfields, ending at the Houses of Parliament – and somehow contriving to pass by Tower Bridge on the way, just as it was opening.

I don’t think you could actually go up onto the bridge in those days, but now you can, and this afternoon I took my two youngest children up there to see the suitably nostalgic new exhibition This is London.  Miroslav Sasek‘s vibrant children’s guide to London and its ways was first published in 1958 and this display on the Tower Bridge walkway 43 metres above the Thames shows off his artwork in all its glory, highlighting continuity and change.

Down in the engineroom, once we’d admired the polish of the steam engines that used to drive the mechanism and got our heads round the meaning of the word ‘bascule’, we voted on our favourite of five works of London-inspired art produced by contemporary artists – this new exhibition, ‘Art at the Bridge‘, has been organised in collaboration with Southwark Arts Forum.

At the opposite end of Southwark, Artists’ Open House was in full swing – over 200 artists in and around Dulwich are opening their doorsthis weekend and next.

Here’s another view of the Shard from the window of Loraine Rutt in Honor Oak.  Loraine’s interpretations of London bring together cartography and ceramics, and my photographs really don’t do her work justice, but they’ll give you an idea.

Created in the red clay out of which and on which much of the city is built, this piece shows the geography of a London stripped bare of its buildings:

Other use the translucence of porcelain, lit from behind, to evoke the fragility of the land.

Lost rivers of London are rediscovered….

Incidentally, if you’re interested in lost rivers, you’ll probably enjoy a new book called Silt Road, by Charles Rangeley-Wilson.)

I particularly love Loraine’s (very affordable) ‘Peckham postcards’:

(Loraine is also a brilliant teacher of ceramics, as my twins and their groaning shelves of artwork will testify…after-school lessons take place in her studio just below Peckham Rye Station.  See her website for more information.)

‘Dr Graham’s ocular turn: a look at the origins of the Celestial Bed’

at

POLITENESS & PRURIENCE: SITUATING TRANSGRESSIVE SEXUALITIES IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

It’s an international and multidisciplinary conference hosted by the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh. Find out more at the conference website.

In Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, a documentary film at a political meeting is the deciding factor for the idealistic young volunteer David Carr. Earlier this month, as I watched Ivor Montagu’s astonishingly vivid documentary The Defence of Madrid earlier at a rare screening organised by the London Socialist Film Co-op at the Renoir cinema, I wondered whether the clips in Loach’s film might have come from Montagu’s.  I’ve just checked and they didn’t – Land and Freedom is, after all, subtitled ‘A story from the Spanish Revolution’ and quite rightly the archive footage used in it was clearly filmed in Barcelona.

My curiosity about this was pricked by the lively discussion which followed this screening (which was followed by Will the real terrorist please stand up?, a documentary on the relationship between the USA and Cuba).  The first speaker from the audience criticised The Defence of Madrid for its lack of revolutionary zeal (demonstrating a point made in my recent post on Homage to Catalonia about the relentless persistence of the idea that Franco won the war because of divisions on the left rather than the combined might of the Italian/German fascist war machine and the Non-Intervention policy spearheaded by Britain.)  Jim Jump of the International Brigade Memorial Trust gently pointed out how very different the situations in Barcelona and Madrid were in late 1936 when Montagu went to make the film.

The Spanish capital was then at the start of what became a three-year-long siege by Nationalist forces.  General Mola had just coined the term ‘fifth column’, declaring that while four columns of Nationalist soldiers were all too visibly approaching the capital, a ‘fifth’, made up of right-wing sympathisers within the city, was secretly making plans to ensure the invasion was effective. The shock for British audiences of seeing what was actually happening in the Spanish capital must have been intense.  Now that we are so horribly used to seeing images showing the effects of aerial bombardment on cities and towns, it’s hard to appreciate the impact news of the war in Spain had around the world.  It was the first in Europe in which more civilians than combatants were killed.  Last year, when I was interviewing a woman now in her late 80s about her memories of the second world war on Romney Marsh, she told me how horrified she had been as a child to see newsreels of Spanish bombing, and that she remembered turning to her mother in the cinema to say: “It couldn’t happen here, could it?”

The kind of scenes shown in Montagu’s film are considerably more detailed than any newreel, and of course they did indeed soon become familiar in Britain too.  You see houses ripped apart to reveal torn wallpaper, flapping curtains and fireplaces hanging several stories up; people buried under rubble; sandbags in the street; dead children in numbered rows.  People look up at the blurred planes crossing the skies above and ask, ‘Are they ours?’, a question echoed in the opening paragraphs of A World Between Us.  In a hospital, a wounded Moroccan solider refuses food because he’s been told by his Nationalist masters that the Republicans will try to poison him.

The film is impressionistic and urgent, clearly made in a hurry, under pressure.  It has none of the polish of the exquisitely crafted Ministry of Information propaganda films made by Humphrey Jennings to bolster morale on the British Home Front in the early 1940s.  The Defence of Madrid is strikingly non-polemical.  This is what’s happening, it simply seems to say.  What are you going to do about it?

In the audience at the Renoir was Hetty Bower, whom I first met at my grandfather’s funeral, when she told me that she thought his death made her the last surviving member of the Independent Labour Party’s Revolutionary Policy Committee.  As she explained at the screening, she knew Ivor Montagu when she was working for Kino Films, the progressive film distribution and production company responsible for arranging screenings of The Defence of Madrid, which was shown at Trade Union and political meetings up and down the country to raise funds for the Brigades and for Medical Aid for Spain, and to draw attention to the urgency of the cause.  Typical audiences were women’s co-operative groups and Labour and Communist Party branches.  The Edmonton Labour Party raised £72 at one screening, the Rochdale Clarion Cycling Club £38, said BFI curator Ros Cranston, introducing the film.

Ivor Montagu, who also edited and produced films with Hitchcock, was responsible for some of the most significant films to be made on the left in the 1930s.  The Progressive Film Institute, which he founded, subsequently made four more films about the Spanish Civil War: News from Spain (1937), Crime Against Madrid (1937), Spanish ABC (1938) and Modern Orphans of the Storm (1937).  ‘We did what we could’, Montagu said in later life, ‘but it was not enough.’  A circular from the Relief Committee for the Victims of Fascism, which commissioned The Defence of Madrid, announced that this ‘great film’ would be shown twice nightly, December 28th-29th, and that ‘in addition to the Film, the Spanish Situation will be dealt with by the following Speakers: D.N.Pritt, Isabel Brown, Leah Manning, Ivor Montagu’ one of whom was promised to appear at all four screenings. 1000 tickets were issued for each show, at sixpence each.

Films like this were clearly life-changing for some who saw them.  Even more so was the effect of living through this period in Madrid, as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda did.  As Jim Jump reminded us, it produced Neruda’s poem ‘Let me explain a few things’, recited by Harold Pinter in his 2005 Nobel lecture because he believed it to be the most ‘powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians’ in contemporary poetry.

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry                   speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

(The Defence of Madrid is in the BFI National Archive. You’ll find a list of all BFI Spanish Civil War holdings here.  The letter quoted comes from the University of Warwick Library’s magnificent resource, Trabajadores – learn more about this amazing archive at History Workshop Online.  Find out more about the context of The Defence of Madrid in Ian Aitken’s book Film and reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement, 1990)

Then either fill in this questionnaire online or email your response to the Department for Education and Skills to this address: NationalCurriculumReview.FEEDBACK@education.gsi.gov.uk   Completing the questionnaire in full is an interesting and useful exercise, but if you are short of time, you can concentrate your energies on responding to question 3, which deals with content.  You don’t have to answer all questions.

Many people have responded in public already, and most with great wisdom. In the New Statesman Richard Evans gave an excellent and disturbing account of the process by which the draft history curriculum has been produced.  I was also impressed by Martin Spafford’s piece for Hodder Education.  He writes that ‘Michael Gove is proposing a history curriculum that rests on an idea of who the British are or have ever been that is demonstrably false and possibly dangerous‘, concluding that ‘A journey through history that erases whole sections of our community and puts them outside the narrative is a journey towards darkness.’  On the Schools History Project website, Spafford explains why he feels Gove’s project is about ‘dumbing down’: ‘No other subject – not the sciences, not geography, not even English – has had its content savaged in the way History has. Scientists, geographers and readers of literature are – to some extent at least – still to be allowed to think. It seems that the selectivity of the attack on History reveals the ideological – rather than educational – base of the proposals.‘

I came across both these articles thanks to the ‘History Not Propaganda’ campaign, which  has launched a petition to keep history politically neutral.  You can sign it here.  Among other important points, the campaign’s website raises concerns about the implications of the proposals for Holocaust education, not least that

‘The nationalist bias behind the whole curriculum might mean that the Holocaust is presented in such a way as to bolster a complacent sense of evils done by ‘foreigners’ whom Britain fought and defeated, rather than a crime of man’s inhumanity to man, in which there was widespread collaboration by local populations across Europe, and in which Britain could easily have been involved had events taken a different course in 1940.  This prevents pupils from imbibing some of the deeper, more disturbing, but also more needful philosophical messages of the Holocaust.  It also comes perilously close to exploiting the Holocaust to advance a nationalist political agenda.’

The Curriculum for Cohesion has submitted an extremely detailed response to the draft curriculum – find out here why this body believes it to be both unteachable and unlearnable, and the likely effects of a complete absence of content about Islamic civilisation and its relationship to Britain.

Over supper this evening, I told my children about the government’s plans for Key Stage One history: we all tried to imagine teaching a class of thirty five-year-olds the concept of ‘nation’ and ‘civilisation’.  (Will the meaning of these words be prescribed, or might that actually be left to an individual teacher’s imagination?) “Has Gove ever met any children?” my daughter asked, in all seriousness.

I could spend the rest of the night detailing my own objections – I touched upon some of them in an interview published last week in the Camden New Journal - but I’ve promised my editor my revised manuscript of THAT BURNING SUMMER by Monday, so it’s back to 1940 for me now.

Many aspects of the proposals make me very angry.  What makes me very sad is that rather than giving children and young people the tools for a passionate engagement with history that could and should lead to a lifetime of continued learning and interest in the past – of Britain and the rest of the world – these reforms (if they go ahead) actually risk alienating vast numbers of children from the subject of history for the rest of their lives.

(If you’re also interested in responding to the Citizenship draft curriculum, you’ll probably find Amnesty’s webpages on the subject very helpful.)

Here’s the full 2013 Shortlist:

“Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about…It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists’ views that Japan did nothing wrong.”

Earlier this week I listened to Edmund de Waal talking about his grandmother’s posthumously published and distinctly autobiographical novel about returning to Austria as an exile after the Second World War.  He commented on the very different approaches taken now to the history of the same period in Austria and Germany. I was delighted to discover last month that ‘A World Between Us’ will be translated into German, and interested to see on my German publisher’s list – among a number of issue-based Young Adult novels about teenage alcoholism, bullying and anorexia – a story about a teenager’s difficulties in extricating himself from a far right youth group.  Now I wonder whether a book like that would find as ready an audience in Austria as in Germany.

The Anne Frank Trust travelling exhibition was hosted this term by Elmgreen School in South London – culminating in a visit by Holocaust survivor Herbert Levy, which I was invited to attend.  The message he left the students with – ‘Never again’ – rests on the assumption that only by talking and remembering the past can we prevent the repetition of atrocities.  When I went to talk to some of the same year 9s a few weeks later, they were surprised to hear what a very different approach Spain has until recently taken to the idea of ‘never again’.

This is a hasty post, as I’m off to two events on related subjects this afternoon – a seminar on Middle class recruits to Communism in 1930s Britain at Gresham College, followed by a discussion at LSE with Paul Preston, Daniel Beer, Helen Graham and Dan Stone: Franco’s Terror in a European Context.  Both should be available to view online in the next few weeks.  Two brilliant examples of the kind of high quality, accessible-to-all history events for which our higher education institutions should be celebrated.  Long may they last.

What do you feel got left out of your historical education when you were growing up?  And how have you filled the gaps since?

The Weight of Water by Sarah Crossan (Bloomsbury)

The Glass Collector by Anna Perera (Puffin)

Duty Calls: Battle of Britain by James Holland (Puffin)

Department 19 by Will Hill (Harpercollins)

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein (Electric Monkey)