Sam tells a story.

     I’m getting back into the novel I’m writing after some time away with my play and work kerfuffles and other things. To get back into it, I re-read what I had written and, at the same time, I’ve been reading a book about a Hertfordshire dragon-slaying legend and watching ‘Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ - so knights and such have been on my mind a little and I thought I’d share this little section.

    Previously, Sam and Nat have had an argument about Nat wearing his London frock to church. It’s Easter, a man called Mr Stevenson did the lecture and stones from the ceiling fell in, prompting a mass panic (this really did happen). That night, Nat wakes up and goes into Sam’s room for a chat. That’s this section. Sam tells a story, inspired by his own love of chivalric stories, it’s also his way of apologising to Nat for the argument earlier.

It seemed important to have a little scene where the brothers bond, especially as I am going to test their relationship later on. It’s pretty much a first draft but any comments would be welcome. 

Natty lay in bed and stared into the darkness. He started to jiggle his leg, rolled over a few times, slipped the blankets and coverpane aside, slid lightly onto the floor and pulled out the jordan from underneath his bed. He made water with strained eyes and utmost concentration in the dim light, scared of the shame from any loose drops, before he pushed the pot back under. 

Now he was standing, he looked towards the door. He lifted one leg to climb back into bed but instead of getting back to bed he took a big step forward, carefully feeling out the way ahead with his toes before letting his heels connect with the floorboards. He crept with exaggerated care, as if someone could see him towards the door. He opened it slowly, wincing as the creak grew louder and more musical. Lifting one leg up, he waited for the shout or the nifty clip round the ear and not hearing it, snuck across the corridor and stood in front of the door there. It was not closed properly and Natty put her ear against it to listen for the rhythmic breathing that signified sleep. Hearing nothing, he pushed his lips into the gap and whispered loudly.

“Sam, are you awake?” He paused and listened for an answer and looked back along the corridor to see if anyone else had heard him before puckering up against the semi-open door.

 “Sam!”

“What?”

“Are you awake?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

Another pause.

“I’m coming in anyway.”

Natty only opened the door enough to let him squeeze in and closed it completely afterwards. He crept to Sam’s bed even more carefully, the floor being strewn with items, in particular, piles of books from the shop that could fall with a crash at the slightest touch. Having navigated the scylla and charybdi of Samuel’s room, Natty reached his goal and clambered onto Sam’s bed, who moved up to make space and held the blankets up to allow Natty to crawl in.  

They lay next to each other for a while, looking through the darkness and listening to each other’s breathing.

“Do you want to hear a story?” Sam asked casually, as if uninterested in the answer.

“I do, I do!” Whispered Nat enthusiastically, bouncing on the bed.

“Settle down then.”

“Is this a book story, a Bible story or a Sam story?”

“It’s a Sam story, but I have naturally been inspired by stories I’ve read.”

“Are there dragons?” 

“You shall never know if you don’t let me tell it.”

“I hope it does. I love the ones with dragons.”

“Lay still and listen. Attend, oh ye little children who thirst for tales of adventure and exploits of bravery. Be ye ever so small or humble in station, ye may achieve great feats and accomplish great deeds. There was once a noble knight of diminutive stature, Nathaniel of Lichfield was his name.”

“Nathaniel, really?”

“Yes and he was a complete minnow, a squab, a very ant-like knight. His helmet was an acorn’s cup, his greaves were made from the bones of a cat and his shield was a shiny farthing.  It’s a surprise his feet even touched the floor, his legs were so short. He’d climb a ladder to mount the mastiff that was his steed.”

“I’m not that small.”

“You’re not, but Nathaniel of Lichfield was. You’d have been a giant to him. The only figure he’d have been a giant to was the famous Tom Thumb. However, as small as he was in body, he was great in courage, impudence and fame.”

“So, I’m brave?”

“Nathaniel of Lichfield was brave,” smiled Sam, digging Natty in the ribs with his thumb. “Nathaniel of Lichfield was so brave that when the villagers of Elford reported the existence of a terrible wyrm.”

“A terrible worm, was he really that short?”

“Not worm, wyrm.”

“Wirrum?”

“Wyrm.”

“You promised me a dragon.”

“I promised nothing. Besides, a wyrm is a dragon, only one with no legs.”

“A dragon with no legs? That’s silly.”

“On the contrary, it’s all the more terrifying. A wyrm slithers along like the hated serpent, his skin oozes foulness and poison which kill plants and gives the cattle murrain.”

“What’s murrain?”

“Oh it’s terrible. It means a sheep can’t bleat and turns a cow inside, out. From the wyrm’s lair springs a rot which seeps into land, water and air. The rot enters people’s homes and creeps up their walls, slides into their very souls where it sits, a cocoon of madness and evil.”

“And Elford had one of those?” Nat shivered.

“Yes, but this was long ago, in the reigns of good King Richard and bad King John. Robin Hood even tried to defeat the terrible wyrm, he used to practise his archery in the words nearby but his mighty arrows only bounced off the creature’s terrible scales. It was then they called Nathaniel of Lichfield.”

“Did I go?”

“I don’t know if you went, but Nathaniel of Lichfield immediately donned his armour and climbed upon his noble steed, a mastiff called Hermsprong. As he rode, the great dog ululated a song of glee and freedom until they reached Elford. When he got there, what do you think he saw?”

“The worm?”

“Yes, the wyrm, wrapped around the tower of St Peter’s Church, the mass of its great, stinking body resting on the roof. When the wyrm saw Nathaniel of Lichfield, he began to laugh. As he laughed his scales tensed up and great stones flew from the tower and roof, embedding themselves in the blessed ground surrounding it.”

“Was it like..?”

“Exactly so. The great beast mocked our hero, claiming that he would swallow him in one gulp, leaving him at the mercy of the monster’s bile and digestive juices.”

“That’s horrid! What did I do?”

“Nathaniel of Lichfield was not afraid, not he but he was also no fool, so he rode away and across the river.”

“How do you ride across a river?”

“He was on a dog and the humble canis is a natural swimmer. Nathaniel did this because he knew that wyrms can’t cross running water. He watched the wyrm uncoil itself from the church and slither down the lane to its lair. That’s when Nathaniel of Lichfield acted. He rode Hermsprong back across the river, dismounted and led him to a clump of shrubbery. Then he directed the dog to dig a hole large enough for him to crawl into. He then ushered the dog away and waited. He waited till his legs were saw and his feet were numb. He waited as long as Mr Stevenson speaks. Then he heard it, shlurp, schlurp… schlurp, schlurp.”

Natty looked at Sam confused.

“That’s how the worm moved,” Sam explained, wiggling and making the schlurp sound. Natty joined in and the two boys wiggled and schlurped for a short while.

“So the worm came schlurping onward and Nathaniel called out to it from his hole. The worm went closer to investigate. You know what wyrms like more than anything else?”

“Eating people?”

“They do love that, but more than eating, they enjoy gold and treasure, especially fairy treasure. That’s important to Nathaniel’s ruse. So Nathaniel called to the wyrm in a little fairy voice and the great beast responded, asking who was calling him. ‘I’m Lichwort,’ he said in his fairy voice, ‘a poor fairy lost from his fairy band. Could you help me carry all this fairy gold back to my fairy circle?’ The wyrm couldn’t resist temptation such as that, and being a creature full of greed, he agreed to help, even though he planned to do no such thing. The wyrm came closer to the hole.”

“Schlurp, schlurp, schlurp.”

“And as the creature’s huge head hovered over the hole, Nathaniel steeled himself and gripped his lance tightly. When he saw the huge, yellow eye hanging above him, Nathaniel thrust his lance deep into it. He kept pushing through the eye and into the brain. Brain effluvia poured down the spear and onto Nathaniel’s hands.

“What’s effluvia?”

“It’s like muck.”

“Ewww,” Nat giggled and pretended to wipe his hands.

“And with that, the Wyrm was dead and Sir Nathaniel of Lichfield was the hero to all. The citizens of Elford lifted him on their shoulders and the faithful hound, Hermsprong was given a nice, juicy bone.”

The two boys lay back on the pillow and shared the night’s silence.

“Did you see Mr Wakefield?” Sam asked.

“When he squeezed through the window?”

“I think he lost a shoe.”

They smiled into the dark at the memory. Then Sam started laughing, it was lower than his speaking voice, slow and loud like a baby hippopotamus. Nat started to laugh also, a trill over Sam’s base. When Sam stopped laughing, he took a deep breath.

“He was ‘of good courage, wasn’t he?” he said, starting to laugh again. The bed began to shake. “St Mary’s was a great house of defence.” Sam started to laugh again, Nat couldn’t help joining in, even as he was puzzled at the joke. 

There was a knock at the floor and both boys sat up, the laughter strangled in their throats. Nat slid out of the bed, hopping lightly on the chill floorboards and scampered silently to the door.

“I forgot one detail about the wyrm,” Sam said, “his name.”

“What was his name?”

“Samuel.” 

Nat slipped out the door, padded across the landing in his bare feet and back into to his cold bed. 

On the Obstructions of Learning

 Perhaps it’s the bookish element of my digital footprint, but I keep getting recommended videos and articles about the declining state of literacy in the world, even if what is usually meant by ‘the world’ is just the US. There’s a journalist called James Marriott who is banging that drum for British publications and predicting that we are entering a post-literate society and that democracy, stability and all the things we take as the bedrock of our current social and political lives will shortly wither away.

It’s often smart phones which are given the blame for this decline in literacy, along with ipad kids, streaming services and particularly tik-tok. The idea is, that human attention is a finite resource and adults and children alike are allowing theirs to frittered away on short form content and algorithmically generated slop. Then there’s all the kerfuffle about ‘AI’, that people can have articles and posts written for them without ever having to engage their brains at all.

I have to admit, I’m not thrilled about AI, and have seen a difference in the children I teach over the past (almost) twenty years. There are some children so stimulated by the online world that there seems to be absolutely nothing in the real world that interests, excites or engages them. It’s a dispiriting thing to see. Yet I don’t think we are in some terrible intellectual apocalypse and every new way of transmitting information has brought doom-spouting sandwich board men. There were outcries when televisions entered houses, when indexes were introduced to books and Socrates never used the new-fangled technology of writing because it impeded the memory. 

What’s more, people always have a sense that they haven’t learned as much as they would like, that they are inhibiting their mental potential. Samuel Johnson wrote his own article about this problem in the 2nd of February 1760, where he talks about how the young and eager are “diligent in the pursuit of knowledge; but the progress of life very often produces laxity and indifference.” He goes into reasons why this might be.

First, he looks at the idea that learning is never enough, that someone who begins to learn is quickly overwhelmed by how much more could be learned and so gives up. None of us will ever know everything about even a narrowly focused area of study, that there is always more to learn and that we just burn out from it. He thinks this is a poor argument. He sees learning as similar to virtue, that we never regret the learning we have had, even if we stop learning, we will always wish we had learned more.

He says that it’s more likely that people learn less as they get older because there are so many other things to do. Life has too many responsibilities to just sit and learn and every hour we meditate on something interesting is seen as an hour robbed from a more productive occupation or the company of friends and family. He also acknowledges that “sprightly and luxurious pleasures” are simply more appealing than quiet contemplation. This is the commonly spouted ‘dopamine argument’, that a few quick scrolls on a phone are a more accessible and immediate pleasure than wrestling with some big book, and that after the stresses and toils of a day at work are far easier to slip into.

His big obstruction to learning is, a little surprisingly, books. He says there are too many of them and that too many of them are merely okay or worse. Books quote other books, tell the same stories, use the same examples and that “few writers afford any novelty, or what little they add to the general stock of learning, is so buried in the mass of general notions, that like silver mingled with the ore of lead, it is too little to pay for the labour of separation”.

I’m reading a book like that at the moment. There are elements of silver, but there is so much lead ore around it, that the book has become a chore. One I am too stubborn to quit. So instead of putting the book down and picking one up I enjoy more, I do other things instead - which means I am yoked to this dull book even longer. Last night I went to bed an hour than I usually would, because I’d read the book for half an hour and simply couldn’t be bothered to read any more. As a result, I woke up an hour earlier than usual and threw my whole day out of whack.

There’s a comfort in reading Samuel Johnson talk about all the easier pleasures that distract us from the more wholesome stuff, it’s a common human experience and no different now than it was then. I think the James Marriotts of this world can relax a little, we’ve always been a little bit lazy with out pleasures - and there’s nothing terrible in that. 

 

Review: The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler

 I picked up Christopher Fowler’s The Book of Forgotten Authors as a good ‘dippy-inny’ book while I was backstage, performing in a play. The chapters were short and self contained and I didn’t need to keep any plot in my head as I went out on stage and performed the plot there. I was interested in the topic, and I have fond memories of Fowler as the writer of Roofworld and Calabash. 

Of the 99 authors listed, I’ve read 9 of them and own books by another 5. It was interesting reading about the authors I did know well because we have quite different views on them. In the section on Dino Buzzati, he never named The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Italy. His under appreciated pick for TH White was Goodbye Victoria, with Mistress Masham’s Repose getting only a little nod at the end. There were some authors I didn’t recognise I had read till he mentioned the book’s title, things like Mr Gay’s London, and Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day. 

Of the authors I hadn’t heard of (or had vaguely heard of) the entries were really interesting. There are all sorts of potted biographies in here of all sorts of intriguing lives. Some very good sounding people, some absolute horrors. I didn’t realise Pierre Boule wrote e Bridge over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes, nor did I know the man playing Private Godfrey was an author who’d fought in both world wars.

Many of the books and authors appealed to me but I made a note of the ones that jumped the highest. Alexander Baron seems a very interesting writer and I’ll be seeking out King Dido in particular. Then there’s John Collier’s His Monkey Wife: Or, I married a chimp, which wins on title alone. 

This is an entertaining book, featuring lots of peculiar potted histories and intriguing books. It’s a good read by itself and a finger pointing at interesting reads in the future.

Review: Dr Johnson's Lichfield by Mary Alden Hopkins

 My copy of Mary Alden Hopkins’s Dr Johnson’s Lichfield looks like a fairly sedate affair, possibly even a little bit dry, but perfect for getting myself back into eighteenth century Lichfield as I return to writing my novel in Samuel Johnson’s little brother (as I’ve had a little time off writing it). 

It starts fairly calmly, with a huge list of acknowledgements, with one of the first being to Percy Laithwaite, the man who wrote the surprisingly entertaining history of Lichfield’s Conduit Lands Trust - possibly the most entertaining book about a civil authority/charity that could be written. Then follows the gossipiest timeline I have ever seen in front of a historical book. Yes, there are entries for births and deaths, but most detail strange affairs, scandals and relationships and this timeline suggests the sudden turn the book will make after a few chapters.

For a while, it’s a book about Lichfield in the time of Samuel Johnson, beginning with a potted history of the city, a little about the social and economic make-up of the place, told with a visual eyes and a tendency to fantasise about the fantastic costumes everyone was probably wearing. However, it soon leaves Samuel Johnson as he leaves Lichfield and becomes a full-on soap opera about the lives of those in Lichfield’s Cathedral Close. Albert Square and Coronation Street have nothing on this sedate corner of ecclesiastical housing, and Hopkins loves every detail of it. 

The first mini-history of Lichfield was very interesting, especially its founding myth of the cathedral being built on the site of a huge Roman massacre of Christians. Johnson himself believed this myth, believing that the ‘Lich’ of Lichfield came from the same ‘lich’ in ‘lichgate’ and meant death.  Then there was the founding of the Cathedral by St Chad (a name to conjure with), the Maryan martyrs in the Market Square, the three attacks on the Cathedral Close during the English Civil War and the leader of the Parliamentarians being killed by a deaf-dumb sniper - and you get a real sense of the local stories and legend that the Johnson boys would have grown up in. 

There’s a lot of weight given to David Garrick and Samuel Johnson being invited to the Walmisleys  - how it was a singular honour for a town kid and a garrison kid to be invited to the close. Hopkins notes the apparent coldness in the Johnson home but doesn’t attribute it to lack of love. In comparing the noisy conviviality of the Garricks she says, “there may have been no more love in the Garrick family than the Johnson, but their love was more articulate.” She doesn’t have much to say about Nathaniel, nothing except to suggest that he may have been a “problem son”.

Hopkins is great about Tetty though. She really brings out how pretty Tetty must have been, with her baby soft hair and general soft features, of how she was witty and gave as good as she got, how she was a good listener. It’s very much the picture of Tetty I want to include in my book. She also points out that the Porters were related to Dr Hunter, and suggests Samuel Johnson’s relationship with him may have affected the family’s acceptance of him. Personally, I think it’s a stretch, but it’s something to bear in mind.

Then Samuel Johnson leaves the book until the last two chapters and Hopkins talks about what she really wanted to, Anna Seward, the younger Lichfield set and all the crazy love lives. When I went to the Dr Johnson Reading Circle’s discussion of Wits and Wives with Kate Chisholm, she said she specifically didn’t choose to write about Anna Seward because she found her annoying. Hopkins reveals and revels in how annoying she could be. Full of passion and self-belief, Anna Seward seems like a truly exhausting person, but someone who made things happen around her - and was reliably expected to blab to everyone else also.

There was Seward’s near miss with a man called Taylor. She was all set to marry him but her family cooled things down a bit and Taylor married another woman. However, Seward started receiving messages from Taylor’s new wife which showed that Taylor still loved Anna more, and what’s more, that his wife had a thing for Anna also. When Taylor died, she moved into Lichfield as a devoted follower of Anna. Then there was her thing for the Vicar Choral, Saville. Although they claimed a never-consummated love, it was enough to make his wife kick him out into a small house next door, where they mooned at each other for years and years.

There’s the story of John Andre and Honora Sneyd, a story known by “every schoolchild” according to Hopkins.. I hadn’t heard of it. He loved her, she tolerated him but the families never really came together, so he went to America, where he was hanged as a British spy and turned into a tragic figure by Anna Seward. Honora later married Richard Edgeworth, who first entered Lichfield on a self-designed one-wheeled carriage, where he’d come to visit Erasmus Darwin.

Other visitors to Erasmus Darwin was Thomas Day, who was a massive twat and I don’t wish to go more into him than that.

Even the bit players in the book, like Dr Vyse had crazy stories where he was engaged to Sophia Streatfield (the long-necked woman who caught Thrale’s eye) and engaged to marry her. The only thing was, he was married, so he engaged to marry her immediately after his wife died. When she did, he ditched her and married someone else.

To say this book on the history of eighteenth century Lichfield devolves into a gossipy series of crazy romances is true, but it is much more entertaining for it. I loved it.  

Review: Lives of Houses edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

 This book seems made for me right now. I am a (struggling) writer who spent the last year finding, buying and doing up the house that I hope will become my perfect little writer’s nest. I’ve visited many house museums over the years, spent ten years regularly visiting one (Dr Johnson’s House in Gough Square) and spent four years volunteering there. Houses have been on my mind.

This book started with a conference in 2017 entitled ‘The Lives of Houses’, which produced a number of contributions from all sorts of people. There are big name writers like Simon Armitage and Julian Barnes, fantastic biographers like Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee, and a general smorgasbord of interesting people pitching in - yet the book is never quite as interesting as it could be.

Many of the chapters were about the house of a particular famous individual, many writers, a few composers, the odd politician but many of these chapters didn’t give much more than a potted biography of their subject through their house. The chapter on Samuel Johnson used Bolt Court to show the domestic chaos he lived in, and contrasted that with the order of the Thrale’s, essentially telling the same story as According to Queeney. There was a little about Hester Thrale Piozzi’s memoirs relating to her domestic sphere and Boswell’s Life relating to his more public-facing Bolt Court lifestyle, but it wasn’t much developed. There wasn’t much about how Johnson never owned any of those houses, and how a house could be a dangerous drain on his mental health, being both solitary and idle. 

Similarly, though many of the other chapters included biographies of people I was less aware of, they didn’t do much more than present the biography through a slightly different lens. The chapter in Edward Lear’s houses chiefly felt like a slimmed down part of his biography, the WH Auden chapters revealed to me that his name was Wystan and he lived in a bizarre melange of order and chaos. I found it interesting that both Churchill and Disraeli bought houses that were out of their budget and made them beholden to others - Disraeli was bailed out by party donors, and Churchill’s house was managed by the National Trust while he was still living in it. 

The better chapters were the ones that skirted around the topic a little more. There was a chapter about a Roman house in Morocco, which shed interesting light on what it may have been like being at the edge of the Roman world as it was collapsing. One chapter is a recollection of her mother’s house and how it reflected the character of her mother - something many of the more famous-focused pieces didn’t quite do. I really liked Hermione Lee’s ‘House of Air’, about visiting where famous houses used to be, and how they still stand in the works of those writers even if they are not actually standing any more.

The chapter that followed the formula of biography-through-house that I found most successful was the one about Yeats’s damp, flooding tower. This building was a project of romance and whimsy that was never really a successful house, but was a successful symbol to the writer himself. There was an interesting one about the Sir John Soame’s Museum, which I’ve visited many times but didn’t realise what a peculiar institution it is, or its bizarre relationship with other museums in general.

There was a section about the unhoused. About a writer who lived in a tent for a while (and had no permanent home after that), a really good one about a man who lived in mental institutions but yearned for the hills of his old home. The chapter where Stuart Masters interviewed a number of people at a homeless charity was interesting but felt sort of undercooked. I got the sense with a lot of the entries, that this was the work of very good writers who were knocking off some B-grade material quickly, when it had the potential to be something more transcendent. The less said about the poems the better.

So, while the book is pretty good, and in writing this review I have remembered more that I enjoyed about it than I initially thought, it feels more like an interesting enough distraction than it does something vital.