Fruitlands: the Alcott family and their search for Utopia by Richard Francis

I have *not* taken to Transcendentalism: this is for research purposes only.  Fruitlands was the short-lived commune set up by Bronson Alcott, Louisa M Alcott’s father, and his London-born associate Charles Lane. They had an interesting range of ideas, from the admirable, notably supporting Abolitionism and, to some extent, women’s rights, to the offensive – some of their ideas about producing a perfect new generation came unpleasantly close to eugenics – and all sorts of other things.  Opposing organised religion and political parties – wouldn’t life be so much more peaceful …?   Following a vegan diet. Trying to avoid cooking anything.  Opposing individual property ownership. Drinking nothing but water, not using artificial lighting, showering and bathing using only cold water, not using any form of animal labour, not using even natural fertilisers (they said that manure upset the weather), practising celibacy except as “necessary” to procreate; and one of them was into nudism because he thought that clothes stifled the spirit.

Some of it seems rather extreme; and their experiment didn’t last very long.  After only a few months, Lane and Alcott fell out, Lane joined the Shakers – everyone knows that Shakerism originated in Manchester and Bolton, yes 🙂 ?!  – , Mrs Alcott put her foot down, and Fruitlands was abandoned. But certain aspects of their theories and practices held some appeal at the time and afterwards, and do resonate in our own age of concern about environmental issues and religious and political extremism.  But, as so often happens, it wasn’t thought out properly – trying to live entirely off natural products on land that wasn’t really arable wasn’t the greatest of ideas – and those in charge were so repressive and dictatorial and determined to force their views on everyone else that they created more discord than harmony.  Louisa wasn’t impressed … and yet there are certainly some aspects of Fruitlands in Plumfield.

This is for research purposes, as I’ve said – it’s not really bedtime or holiday reading.  But there’s some interesting stuff in it – plenty of food for thought.

Transcendentalism’s usually said to be an offshoot of Romanticism, combined with religion, and then taken off in the direction of separating yourself from wordly things and sticking closely to nature. I get myself all tangled up with Romanticism. It’s a Lancastrian thing – we’re very proud of the Industrial Revolution, but we also want to keep the Lake District unspoilt so that we can wander about dreaming of hosts of golden daffodils!

I do not get tangled up with religion, but some of the Transcendentalists did – Eve eating the apple was apparently a bad thing because, although apples work with veganism, she was looking for knowledge instead of just looking for an apple. This is not my department. If someone says “The Fall”, I assume they mean the late, great, Mark E Smith & co. It had links to aspects of Unitarianism, and also to the Shakers – who’ve always interested me because of the local connection.  I’m so parochial!  It’s linked to Hinduism and Jainism as well, and I find those links easier to follow, because they don’t get everything mixed up with the creation story.  Anyway, this is not my department, as I’ve said: I’m just doing some research into the history of New England, and this particular area of it appealed because of the Alcott connection.

Louisa M Alcott’s own take on it was that the men did a lot of waffling whilst the women tried to keep body and soul together.  I feel so sorry for Abigail Alcott, Louisa’s mother. Some observers commented that the Transcendalists – like 17th century Puritans – thought that no-one should be allowed to be happy; and remarks made in Abigail’s letters and diaries suggest that that was how she felt. Bronson, like a lot of idealists, conveniently ignored the practicalities of real life, so they were always in debt. He also nearly ended up in prison for refusing to pay his tax so that he could distance himself from the state – a bit like that Australian couple who were in the news recently, for refusing to pay their property taxes because they said that their property actually belonged to the Good Lord. (Presumably they were quite happy to use all the public services paid for by everyone else’s taxes.)  And he didn’t want to get a job because he thought that being a wage slave was bondage, but he thought it was fine to tap friends and relatives for money because that was encouraging them to be charitable!  A very far cry from Jo March writing penny-dreadfuls in order to pay her way in life.

Abigail suffered from both physical and mental health problems, as well.  A vegan diet is obviously fine if you’re getting the proper nutrition, but they didn’t have the requisite knowledge about that and so she was existing on fruit, bread and water, and consequently felt ill for a lot of the time. And the ideas about producing perfect offspring meant that Bronson blamed her when they had a stillborn baby. Even the domestic postbox idea, which she introduced and which sounds like such good fun when Laurie introduces it in Little Women, came about not as a bit of fun but as a way of trying to relieve domestic tension – write your issues down instead of bottling them up or yelling at each other about them. I don’t wonder she had enough. It can’t have been very nice for either her or the children … although it’s interesting that the Bhaers’ Plumfield, which was supposed to be so wonderful, was probably named after Plum Tree Meadows, the previous name for the area where Fruitlands was situated.

On a more positive note, the Anglo-American links are fascinating. I always think that with 19th century movements. Considering that letters must have taken quite a while to cross the Atlantic, the amount of communication and sharing of ideas is fascinating. The nudist guy was British, incidentally.  There was even an Alcott House, predating Fruitlands, in Surrey, named after Bronson Alcott. He seems to have been obsessed with the idea that American women were better than British women, though! That probably explains the rather offensive way that Louisa portrays Kate Vaughn, which always annoys me. And their contacts, or at least Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane’s contacts, with some very well-known names on both sides of the Atlantic, are worth nothing – Carlyle, Hawthorne, Thoreau. Louisa M Alcott’s probably better known than any of them these days: I wonder what Bronson would have made of that!

If Bronson Alcott were around today, he’d probably be one of those people who, whilst some of his ideas would be too extreme for most people, would have many ideas which made a lot of sense, especially with all the current concerns about the environment … but who alienate others with their lecturing tone, their refusal to respect or even listen properly to other people’s views, their lack of humour, their failure to consider practicalities and their constant attempts to guilt-trip everyone.  I don’t know why it always seems to get like that.  It’s a great shame.

Also, as the author points out, they didn’t really get involved with the Abolitionist movement, and they didn’t seem very concerned about all the other social and political issues of the day.  Marmee and the girls taking their Christmas breakfast round to the Hummels (this is my comment, not the author’s!) might not have changed the world, but at least they tried to help people in need!

It seems very likely that Plumfield was Louisa’s attempt at showing a gentler side of it – one which might have worked.

There’s a lot of philosophy in this book, so it’s quite heavy-going, but the author’s done a very good job with the subject matter.  Some of the ideas are quite outlandish, and he’s very critical of how self-obsessed they were, but he doesn’t mock them – yet, at the same time, he shows the impracticability of Alcott and Lane’s particular experiment, and its negative impact on Abigail Alcott and others.  And he gets a few Little Women/Little Men references in there, whilst resisting what must have been a strong temptation (well, it would have been to me!) to include dozens of them in a book which isn’t actually about them.  I wouldn’t say that this was an entertaining book, but it was quite interesting.

And, whilst I’m certainly not suggesting that we all start running around starkers, or avoiding eating potatoes because they grown downwards rather than upwards, some of the ideas are certainly relevant to today.  Avoiding buying clothes or other items known to have been produced unethically.  Being careful when it comes to artificial substances getting into the food supply. Not being cruel to animals.  The Fruitland experiment just wasn’t viable, and I don’t think I’d have liked Bronson Alcott or Charles Lane very much, but, as I said, there’s some food for thought here!

Queen of the North by Anne O’Brien

I really like Anne O’Brien’s books.  She writes about historical periods which few other novelists cover, doesn’t mess about with the known facts, and gives plenty of historical detail without ever treating the reader as if they’re ignorant.  This particular book’s about Elizabeth Percy, nee Mortimer, wife of Henry “Hotspur”, aunt of the young Earl of March who was widely recognised as Richard II’s heir before Henry Bolingbroke’s coup, and sister of Sir Edmund Mortimer who allied with the Percys and Owen Glendower in the uprising of 1403 (defeated at the Battle of Shrewsbury, on the site of which there’s a very nice farm shop and cafe!).  It’s both very informative and very readable.

This is a period of history which is more familiar from Shakespeare than anywhere else.  It’s not generally taught in schools, and it wasn’t even taught when I was at university.   Yet the names are well-known – if only because Owen Glendower had a terrorist group named after him, and Henry Percy, because the Dukes of Northumberland owned land in Tottenham, has got a Premier League football club named after him!! Seriously, the Percys, Earls and later Dukes of Northumberland, are still going strong.  Often in the gossip columns, because the present duke’s children are pals with Princes William and Harry.  And still at Alnwick Castle – now also known as Hogwarts!  There aren’t all that many great homes and great noble names which go back so far.

The forgotten name’s that of Mortimer.  Well, you do hear it a lot at lovely Chirk Castle, one of my favourite National Trust properties; but the Mortimers could have been Kings of England, and, instead, the Duke of Lancaster deposed Richard II and became King Henry IV – an elusive figure despite the Shakespeare plays, and, like Henry VII, completely overshadowed by his more glamorous son – and the Mortimer line, with no male heirs after the deaths of Elizabeth’s Mortimer nephews, merged into the Yorkist line.

Richard II had no surviving royal brothers, no children by his first wife, and a second wife who was only a child.  So who was his heir?  Edmund Mortimer, descended from the second surviving son of Edward III but through the female line, and only a child, or Henry Bolingbroke, descended from the third surviving son, the Duke of Lancaster, through the male line?  Edward III’s supposed to have ruled out succession through the female line.  But England had never had the Salic Law – and Edward himself had claimed the throne of France through his mother.  And England’s not always that fussy about lines of descent anyway.  It shouldn’t have been relevant, because Richard would have expected to have children with his second wife eventually, but he fell out with Henry, and Henry deposed him, and … did he have him killed?  You’ve got to think so.  As with Peter III of Russia, it was all a bit too convenient that a recently deposed king just happened to die.

Shakespeare’s got Henry Hotspur, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, being a similar age to the future Henry V, the aforementioned glamour boy, but he was actually more of an age with Henry IV.  Henry IV really should have tried to keep the Percys, the so-called Kings of the North, on side, but he didn’t.  Hotspur and his brother-in-law Edmund Mortimer both fought for Henry against Owen Glendower, but Mortimer was captured and Henry refused to let the Percys ransom him.  Because he thought Mortimer was in league with Glendower?  If he wasn’t then, he was soon, and so were the Percys – planning to divide the country between them.  But the rebels were defeated, at Shrewsbury.  Hotspur was killed.  Elizabeth was pushed into a second marriage. Henry IV was duly succeeded by his son Henry V … and, if Henry V hadn’t died young, and his son Henry VI hadn’t suffered from mental health problems, the succession disputes would probably have ended there, but that’s another story.

So it’s quite a messy, complex period of history; and Elizabeth Percy, nee Mortimer, was closely connected to all the major figures involved.  This book suggests that she was always determined that her nephew was Richard II’s rightful successor, and that she.played a crucial role in her husband’s decision to join Mortimer and Glendower.  We can’t know for sure exactly what her role was, but it’s certainly not unlikely that she’d have been heavily involved in the decision-making, and there’s nothing in this book that couldn’t have happened.  The fact that it is about Elizabeth means that we don’t see or hear that much about the motives and actions of Richard II, Henry IV or Owen Glendower, but, to be fair, the book is not about them.  We see Elizabeth at court, though, and talking to her Mortimer nephews, and meeting Owen Glendower.  There’s also quite a bit of personal stuff about her relationship with her husband – we can’t know much about their marriage, but it rings true, and it works well in the context of the book.

It’s told from Elizabeth’s viewpoint, but it’s not really that sympathetic towards her, or towards anyone else involved.  Everyone – apart from the young Earl of March and his brother, who didn’t really seem that interested in the throne – was on their high horses about who was entitled to what and how badly they’d been treated, but no-one really behaved very well.  It must be far easier to write a book in which the protagonist is shown as being in the right, and in which the narrative takes one side or the other, than to write one like this.  And it’s probably also easier to write about a well-known figure like Anne Boleyn or Queen Victoria than to write about someone who was just a real as they were but of whom a lot of readers may never even have heard.

Probably quite tempting, as well.  Books about the Tudors and the Victorians always sell!  But I’m so grateful to the people who write about the more neglected periods of history – especially Jean Plaidy, who was the person who showed me that medieval history was absolutely fascinating and wasn’t all about motte and bailey castles and the daily lives of monks, which was much of what I’d been taught in the very brief time given to it at school!   And I also like the fact that Anne O’Brien focuses on women, who, unless they’re queens, and sometimes even then, are so often overlooked.

This is historical fiction for historians – there’s a lot of politics in it, and it helps to be familiar with the Plantagenet family tree, and it assumes that you know the basics.  I love that!  Not everyone will, but I do.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and will certainly be reading Anne O’Brien’s next book, part of which will overlap with this one, when it comes out later this year.

 

Rocketman

I thought this was great, although it didn’t make for easy watching despite the fun fantasy musical sequences.  I love the fact that a “fat boy from Pinner” became an international superstar, and continues to be one after all the years; but I’m so sorry that he’s had to go through so much.  Life can be very hard: we screw ourselves up, and other people screw us up.  I felt as if everyone should have jumped up and joined in with the “I’m Still Standing” happy ending … although, being a bit of an old romantic, I wish it’d jumped forward and finished with his wedding to David Furnish, rather than everyone dancing around on a beach 🙂 . I also feel really old: I’ve got Elton John albums on tape, and I remember when Dexter Fletcher, who directed this film, was in Press Gang!

It’s quite an unusual film, because you’ve got the big musical sequences – and it can’t be easy fitting songs into someone’s life story, rather than making a film like Mamma Mia! or Sunshine on Leith where the story’s written to fit in with the songs – and the flamboyant costumes, but you’ve also got a real human being’s real pain.  I hadn’t realised he’d suffered from eating disorders, but his issues with alcoholism and cocaine addiction are well-known.  They’re all played out on the screen, all tied in with his difficult relationships with his parents, and with his one-time manager and boyfriend John Reid.  I believe there’s been some criticism of the way Reid’s portrayed in the film, but we can’t know what went on behind closed doors so can’t really comment on that.

The film did seem to emphasise the lows rather than the highs.   As I’ve said, I’d like to have seen it show him finding him happiness with David Furnish.  And, come to that, I’d like to have seen a bit more about Watford!  What about them getting to the 1984 Cup Final?!   It started off with a group therapy session, which rather set the tone.  He’s achieved so much: he’s sung so many iconic songs, sold so many records.  I’d like to have seen a bit more emphasis on the positives.   But, having said that, the film’s showing us how he struggled behind the flamboyant act and the brilliant music, and anyone who’s ever had issues with self-hatred and addiction and eating disorders will feel for him.  Well, everyone will feel for him, I hope.   And maybe anyone who’s opposing the teaching of LGBT equality in schools will see how Elton John struggled with being expected to hide his true self, and think twice about their attitudes … although they probably won’t, because they probably won’t go to see the film.

There is a happy ending.  We’re told that he’s been sober for 28 years, and we’re shown pictures of the real Elton John – Sir Elton John, I should say! – with his husband and children and doing his charity work.  Not all life stories of celebs who’ve struggled with themselves and addiction turn out happily.  All too many have ended in tragedy.  I’m so pleased that things have worked out for him.  I’m sure he still has his moments – I’ve seen him in concert twice, and the first time he had a tantrum and walked off early, although the second time he was wonderful – but hopefully there aren’t too many of them any more.

And what a singer, and what a pianist.  The music’s great.  The music’s always great!   And, if you haven’t seen it already – I’m a bit late to the party because I’ve been busy with tennis and days out!! – this is definitely a film worth seeing.

How to be a Heroine; or, what I’ve learned from reading too much by Samantha Ellis

  I’d quite like to meet Samantha Ellis.  She, Lucy Mangan and I are all almost exactly the same age – does that signify something?  Anyone who gets Gone With The Wind and Chicken Licken (/Henny Penny) into the same book and asks neurologists if “brain fever” really exists definitely sounds like my sort of person.  Not to mention managing to group together Pride and Prejudice, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Riders in a single chapter.  The big questions – who were your book heroines when you were growing up, what did they teach you, and do they still seem like heroines to you now?  And then all sorts of questions about them.

Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw?  Jane, obviously.  The only good thing about Cathy is that Kate Bush sings about her.  Scarlett O’Hara or Melanie Hamilton?  Melanie’s the one who holds it all together, but can you really identify with someone so good?  Elizabeth Bennet?  Earlier this week, I told a really annoying person that they puzzled me exceedingly.  I actually use her lines: that’s how much I love Elizabeth.  Was Anne Shirley better before she became a Smug Married?  Definitely.  Should Jo have ended up with Laurie?  Could everyone just get past this, please?!   Should there be “a special place in hell” for Cousin Helen? That’s a bit harsh, but I can see where the author’s coming from.

There are some interesting comparisons which I’d never really thought of before – Anne Shirley being allowed to enjoy her puffed sleeves versus Meg March being made to feel guilty for wearing a fancy frock for one evening, and Scarlett O’Hara’s efforts at dressmaking with curtains versus Fraulein Maria’s.  Scarlett’s (or, more likely, Mammy’s) are better, but, to be fair, she had better curtains.  And, apparently, Lace is “a career woman’s handbook”.  I’ve never heard it called that before.  Mind you, it probably beats my own teenage theory that the path to career success is to try to conceal your total lack of self-confidence by turning up to interviews dressed like Alexis Colby.  Don’t try this: it really doesn’t work.

And, in amidst all this and more, there’s the author’s family history of fleeing the persecution of Jews in Iraq (the maternal side of her family, in particular, went through some horrific experiences and were mentally scarred for life as a result) and her experiences of growing up in London as part of a tiny and rather insular community of Jews with Iraqi heritage, whose culture and traditions are very different from those of most other British Jews.

She does a lot of criticising – I don’t think it’s very fair to expect heroines of Georgian or Victorian books to be feminist role models in the 21st century – but she makes some very thought-provoking points.

There are two main themes to the book. One, as with Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm, is the role which books played at different stages of the author’s growing-up. The other is whether or not the heroines of those books still stand up to her scrutiny now.

She says that the idea for the book came from a discussion with her best friend about Bronte heroines. She’d always idolised Cathy Earnshaw. Her friend persuaded her that Cathy was an annoying brat and that Jane Eyre was a much better heroine. I’m totally with the friend on this one: I admire Jane and I can’t stand Cathy.  But I’ve always felt like that.  With other people, though, my views aren’t quite the same as they used to be, and they certainly aren’t what their creators intended them to be.  Nor are Samantha’s.

The book starts with fairytale princesses – making the very good points that a) even before Disneyficiation, the versions of fairytales told to children bore no resemblance to the original stories and b) there should probably be more to a heroine than bagging a prince –  and goes through a wide range of different heroines from different books. I’m not going to write an epic essay about all of them.  I don’t even know some of them, TBH.  Conversely, there are people whom I’d have included but she doesn’t – there isn’t one school story heroine in here, unless you count Sara Crewe – but obviously we all have our own favourite books and our own ideas about them.

I do need (OK, want) to write about some of the heroines she mentions, though.  Starting with Scarlett O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton. She doesn’t mention them until the fourth chapter, but never mind.  Gone With The Wind is the greatest book of all time.  Yes, I know that it was written in very different times, and that the racial attitudes are unacceptable to modern eyes, but we’re just talking about the characters. The ending isn’t really about Scarlett vowing that she’ll get Rhett back because “Tomorrow is another day”. It’s about Scarlett realising that, all these years, she’s had it wrong about the important people in her life. It’s always been Rhett and Melanie who’ve had her back. They’ve always been there for her. And she’s always been too busy mooning over Ashley, the teenage crush she never got over, to see it. On top of that, she’s fallen out with all her other old acquaintances and got in with a crowd she now realises she doesn’t even like.   A lot of people will have been there – desperate to keep/get in with a friend or a crush or an in-crowd, or spending years wanting someone who isn’t even right for you, and only realising belatedly that they’re the wrong people and you’ve failed to appreciate the right people as much as you should have done.  We think of it as a historical novel, or as a romance, but it also says so much about life that’s valid in any era and for any person.

So, is Melanie the real heroine of the book? She also copes with everything, but, whereas Scarlett alienates the entire community, Melanie keeps their affection and respect. But … well, Melanie falls for the whole “Glorious Cause” thing, and Melanie’s so sweet and innocent that she can’t even see that her husband and best friend are lusting after each other. And Melanie is dependent on Ashley, who’s financially dependent on Scarlett, whereas Scarlett gets out there and sets up her own business and fights for her home and her family. I’m not nice enough to be Melanie or confident enough to be Scarlett, so I’d never claim either of them as role models, but … which of them is the real heroine? Very interesting question.  Samantha goes for Scarlett.  I think I do too.

I think I take both Scarlett and Melanie the way they were intended to be taken, but how about Katy Carr? Counsellors must love Katy and Cousin Helen. They both accept things and try to make the best of them. However, I’ve never known anyone have a good word to say about Helen and the vomit-inducing School of Pain/School of Love stuff.   And the supposedly sweet and lovely menage a trois with her, her ex-fiancé Alex and his wife Emma is just plain weird.  No-one is telling me that Emma was OK with it.

And Katy … the point at which she really starts to annoy me is when she’s wrongly accused of and punished for something she didn’t do, and prances around singing “Let It Go” “Live It Down”. She’s got a point, because being bitter about something doesn’t help. And I don’t like the nasty prank that Rose Red plays on the teacher involved in order to avenge her friends. But do we really want to accept that, if we’re the victim of an injustice, we should just let it go.   Sorry, but I’m not that saintly!   Anyway, doing that can be dangerous.  OK, Katy has been wrongly accused of writing a note to a boy, not wrongly named all over social media as the perpetrator of some horrific violent crime, but even so.

And who wants to belong to a school gang called “the Society for the Suppression of Unladylike Conduct”?  OK, I was never going to be cool enough to belong to the Pink Ladies (not that our school had any gangs like the Pink Ladies), but “the Society for the Suppression of Unladylike Conduct”?!  Seriously?!  I still love these books, but Katy is not my sort of heroine.  I just don’t see her like readers are meant to see her.  I think I used to.  But not now.

Anne Shirley, though, is different. I still love young Anne and how she imagines everything into being far more exciting and romantic than it really is. I still do that too much myself – I end up saying things I shouldn’t, because I’m trying to make things into a drama.  It’s quite a problem in the age of e-mail, when your melodramatic purple prose ends up on someone else’s computer or phone until or unless they delete it, but Anne didn’t have that problem!  So I was very pleased that the author says that she too still loves young Anne, and is grateful to Anne for showing her that being imaginative is a really good thing.  But, as she says, it’s hard to find much inspiration in adult Anne, who gives up her dreams of writing to become Mrs Dr Blythe and concentrate on “writing living epistles” (i.e. her children).  Although apparently Anne is quoted on religious blogs written by people who say that she’s a wonderful example of a woman who devotes herself to her husband and children.  I don’t think I want to think about that .

But I think it’s a bit unfair to criticise Anne, or Jo March, or, rather, their creators, over the fact that both characters give up their writing.  Times were different then.  They live in the world they were written in, not our world.  It does rather make you appreciate Jo Bettany (not mentioned in this book), though.  OK, as an adult she’s incredibly annoying, and she wouldn’t be able to carry on writing if she didn’t have two live-in domestic staff, but at least she doesn’t pack in her writing and just become Mrs Doctor Dear.

There’s also a reference to how preachy Little Women is, and how you might not realise that as a child but it hits you in the face as an adult.  I recently had the same experience with Heidi, re-reading it for the first time in years.  Don’t get me wrong, I love these books, but, bleurgh, are they preachy?!  Three cheers for young Laura Ingalls complaining that she hates Sundays!  And there’s a very interesting comparison between lovely Matthew making sure Anne gets her puffed sleeves and poor Meg March being made to feel that she’s committed the crime of the century for borrowing a friend’s sister’s pretty frock and having her hair done.

The author is really scathing about Little Women and Good Wives.  I think she goes overboard, really.  I don’t think we’re meant to see Beth as an ideal of womanhood.  I don’t think Laurie fell for Amy’s “womanly pain and patience” – I like to think that there was a big spark between them when she boldly told him to stop being such a pathetic idiot and get his act together. And  I don’t think Meg was “tamed” – she chose the man she wanted, and pretty much told Aunt March where to shove her comments.  And could we all just please get past the idea that Jo and Laurie should have married each other?!  Still, what Samantha says makes you sit up and think.

She’s a bit hard on most people, really.  She talks about how wonderful Elizabeth Bennet is – well, yes, I couldn’t agree more.  But then she even has a go at her, saying that she’s prissy for being disgusted by Lydia’s behaviour.   What??  Lydia makes a complete show herself at Mr Bingley’s party, then runs off with Mr Wickham and lives with him before they’re married.  How was Elizabeth supposed to feel?   About the only book that she doesn’t have a bad word to say about is Ballet Shoes.  She really waxes lyrical about that one, which surprises me a bit.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lovely book, despite the use of “Petrova” as a first name when it’s actually a surname and only a surname, but Sylvia annoys me.  Why doesn’t she try to get a job?  Elizabeth Bennet never annoys me.

Each chapter bears the name of a heroine, but actually covers several heroines … and (Judy Blume)’s Margaret Simon is in the Elizabeth Bennet chapter.  Sadly, though, she’s only mentioned briefly.  Margaret is a great heroine for teenage girls.  If Enid Blyton had written Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, domineering Nancy would have been the heroine.  As it is, we get all Margaret’s worries and insecurities.  Margaret is brilliant.  But she only gets three paragraphs, before the author moves on to Jilly Cooper.  Laura Ingalls Wilder, in a later chapter, also only gets three paragraphs.  They both get nothing but praise, though, which is good.  Laura is brilliant as well.

By this point, the author’s life story’s on to her teens.  Most bookish females read a lot of the same books as children – and a lot of these books have been around for years and years, and our mums and aunties and grandmas and great-aunts read them too.  With adult books, other than the “classics” and a few other legendary books – like Gone With The Wind – it’s different: people branch out.  So I didn’t know all the heroines of the books Samantha read when she moved on to “grown-up” books. They were mostly still older books, though.  No Barbara Taylor Bradford!   I’d definitely have had Emma Harte in there.  OK, Emma Harte first appeared in the late 1970s, but she was still pretty big in the late 1980s: I must have been about 13 when I first read A Woman of Substance.  I’d have had Fee from The Thorn Birds in there as well. Meggie’s the heroine of the story, but her mum Fee is the best character in it.  If you’re a melodramatic sixth former looking for lines to make your life sound like an epic novel instead of just sad and boring, The Thorn Birds is the place to go to.  Scarlett can try to win Rhett back, because tomorrow is another day.  Fee doesn’t realise that she really loves Paddy until he’s killed in a fire.  “It was like all of my life, too late.”  Whenever I’m feeling particularly melodramatic (which I’m afraid is quite often), that line comes out.

She does talk a lot about Lace, though.  I’ve never heard it described as a “career handbook” before.  Back in the day, if I wanted careers advice, I went to Dynasty – which was how I and my zero self-confidence level ended up going to my first few interviews in a bright red jacket with bright gold buttons and huge shoulder pads.  I got turned down right, left and centre, but, to be fair, it wasn’t the jacket’s fault.

But, from Lace, she goes on to the Brontes.  I know where I am with them.  As I’ve already said, I can’t stand Cathy.  And I have no idea why anyone thinks Heathcliff is a romantic hero.  He’s a thug.  I love Jane, though.  And I love Samantha’s theory that, if she’d taken more notice of Jane when she was younger, Jane might have taught her to value herself even though she wasn’t beautiful.  I never thought of that.  I just thought I was Charlotte Lucas instead of Elizabeth Bennet.  And, for a while, I even thought I was Bertha Rochester, because the managers at my first permanent job kept me hidden away from clients (seriously).  Maybe it’s because Jane is small and thin.  If she’d said “Because I am poor, obscure and fat” rather than “Because I am poor, obscure, plain and little”, I might have got the idea.  Charlotte isn’t fat either.  Book heroines are not fat.  Caroline Scott in the Sadler’s Wells books is a bit, but magically “sheds her puppy fat” in her teens.  And Bridget Jones constantly talks about being fat, but, FFS, she only weighs about 9 1/2 stone.    Anyway.  Jane is amazing.  But I don’t really get Samantha’s ideas about looking to the Brontes for relationship advice.  Stick to Jane Austen for that.

The penultimate chapter is about adult heroines who aren’t defined by their relationships with men.  The only really good one seems to be Mary Poppins, who isn’t the ideal role model unless you possess a flying umbrella.  Oh dear.  I really feel that Miss Annersley, Miss Grayling and Miss Theobald are needed here.  Then there’s a final chapter, which is presumably meant to be inspirational, about how the heroine we really need to be is Scheherezade, writing our own stories – but they need to be the stories of our own lives.

It sounds great, but it’s no good.  I need heroines from books.  The problem is that most of them are so young.  If the book does follow them past their twenties, they either fade into the background and become Mrs Dr Blythe or else become annoying because the story needs them to fade into the background and they don’t (Jo Bettany, I’m looking at you).  Even Emma Harte fades into the background as her granddaughter Paula becomes the centre of the story.  Ah, but hang on!  My melodramatic line – “It was like all of my life – too late”.  Towards the end of The Thorn Birds, both Fee and Meggie do the fading into the background thing, as vibrant twentysomething Justine takes centre stage, but Fee finds her voice and her personality.  Everyone realises how great she is, how intelligent she is, and how clever she is with words.  She was also good at saying things in just a few words, which I’m not – I go on and on and on, so I shall shut up now, and, if anyone has actually read all this waffling, well done and thank you!

Well, I’ll shut up about book heroines, anyway.  Just a bit about the author’s family history, which she keeps explaining has had a huge impact on her life, on her choice of reading matter, and on her relationship with fictional heroines.

I read quite a bit about Iraqi Jews a couple of years ago, when I was reading up on Shanghai (I know that sounds weird, but quite a lot of Iraqi Jews moved to Shanghai in the 19th century), but it’s not a well-known story.  She talks about how her mother and maternal grandparents – her father’s side of the family having left before things got as bad as they did later – were mentally scarred for life by being imprisoned, how they escaped with the help of the Kurdish community.  She also talks about how the Iraqi Jewish community in London was very insular, to the extent that arranged marriages were common when she was growing up, and she was expected to marry someone from the same background (which she didn’t).  The community put so much emphasis on girls bagging a suitable husband that, in the 1980s, families kept a layer of their daughters’ bat mitzvah cakes (just before anyone thinks I’ve got the wrong term, it’s Samantha herself who talks about a “bat mitzvah”, despite it being at an Orthodox synagogue … and involving making cheesecake which was then scoffed by some naughty boys from the bar mitzvah class), to be eaten at their weddings.

This isn’t a history book, but (in case anyone’s reading this!) I think it’s worth adding a few notes on the subject.  In 1941, due to the belief that Iraqi Jews had supported British forces against the pro-Nazi Iraqi government, there was a huge wave of violence in Baghdad, in which around 200 Jews, maybe more, were killed and 1,000 injured.  There was also widespread destruction of property.  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many Iraqi Jews were sacked from public sector jobs, there were boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, and many well-to-do Iraqi Jews had their property confiscated on trumped-up charges.  Things got worse during the 1960s.  From Wikipedia:

With the rise of the Ba’ath Party to power in 1963, restrictions were placed on the remaining Iraqi Jews. Sale of property was banned, and Jews had to carry yellow identity cards. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Jewish property was expropriated, bank accounts were frozen, Jews were dismissed from public posts, their businesses were closed, trading permits owned by Jews were cancelled, they were not allowed to use telephones, were placed under house arrest for extended periods of time, and were under constant surveillance and restricted to the cities. In late 1968, scores of Jews were jailed on charges of spying for Israel, culminating in the 1969 public hanging of 14 men, 9 of them Jews, who were falsely accused of spying for Israel. Other suspected spies for Israel died under torture. After Baghdad Radio invited Iraqi citizens to “come and enjoy the feast”, half a million people paraded and danced past the scaffolds where the men were hanged, which resulted in international criticism. An Iraqi Jew who later left wrote that the stress of persecution caused ulcers, heart attacks, and breakdowns to become increasingly prevalent in the Jewish community.

Here endeth the history lesson.  And here endeth this extremely long blog post.  I’m off to read yet another book …

 

Poldark and Abolitionism – Poldark (series 5), BBC 1

There seems to be an increasing trend for period dramas to address the social and political issues of the time in which they’re set. OK, Victoria didn’t do it very accurately; but it’s still extremely welcome.  Ballrooms and bedrooms are great to an extent, but getting some big historical talking points in there’s even better. And, in the first episode of the new – and, very sadly, last – series of Poldark, we saw several major characters attending an Abolitionist meeting.

Abolitionism was probably the first great popular movement. “Am I not a man and a brother?” – the famous Wedgwood image might not work today, but the sentiment does: certain people might do well to remind themselves of it. As the 19th century went on, there were so many more reform movements, and most of them did succeed. Some of them centred around just one brave person – think Elizabeth Fry and prison reform, or Josephine Butler and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Some were mass movements, notably the campaigns for universal suffrage. Some were organised by groups of leading figures with particular interests. Workers’ rights, children’s rights, women’s rights, health, education, housing, sanitation, the removal of religion bars …

A lot of the language and images may seem patronising now – the Wedgwood image is very much of its time, don’t get me started on the Earl of Shaftesbury’s attitude towards the industrial north, and I don’t think the temperance advocates understood the real reasons why so many people drank too much – but people tried. To paraphrase Dirty Dancing (rather incongruously, I know), they thought they could make the world better.

Yet the century kicked off with a virtual reign of terror, amid Establishment paranoia about revolution. Trying both to fight this, on behalf of his pal Ned Despard – who did really exist, and was very well-known at the time although he’s largely been forgotten now – and to help to promote the campaign for Abolition, we have, of course, got Ross Poldark. Debbie Horsfield from Eccles has come up with all this, because the books don’t cover this period, and I’m rather enjoying it! Come on, what a hero! Mr Darcy may have been a good landlord, but he never made impassioned speeches in Parliament or saved the king from assassination attempts, did he? Mr Rochester locked up his wife and tried to commit bigamy! Now, Ross – what a hero. Tricorne hat and all!  And, hopefully, he’s making us think.

It looks as if a fair bit of this series is going to revolve around Ross’s friendship with Ned Despard, who, as I’ve said above, was a real life figure. Ned, like Ross, fought in the British army during the American War of Independence. He was then appointed superintendent of the Bay of Honduras (Belize), which was technically under Spanish sovereignty but had come under the control of British settlers – who were cutting and exporting mahogany, using slave labour. Poldark’s nemesis, George Warleggan the baddie, is getting involved in the mahogany trade. Ned clashed with the wealthy landowners, partly because, when new settlers arrived, some of them white and some of them (former slaves) black, he gave equal rights to them all. He also married a black or mixed race woman, possibly a former slave, Catherine (Kitty).

Despard was recalled to London, spent some time in a debtors’ prison, and then got involved in radical politics. Exactly what went on isn’t entirely clear, but he was arrested and imprisoned on suspicion of involvement in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, before eventually being freed without charge, and then, in 1802, accused of leading the “Despard Plot”, an alleged conspiracy to assassinate the king and launch an uprising. Lord Nelson spoke on his behalf. But he was sentenced to death, and hanged and beheaded alongside six others – in front of a huge crowd.

Both he and Kitty, who’d mounted a very determined campaign for his release during his first period in jail and again in 1802, had become very well-known. Kitty had, additionally, spoken out about the appalling conditions in which prisoners were being kept – a cause taken up by the MP Francis Burdett. And this programme also showed her speaking at an Abolitionist meeting.

Was Despard guilty? If so, what exactly was he guilty of? Was he, after being a thorn in the Establishment’s side for years, framed? If he was guilty – and he almost certainly was guilty, of some sort of plotting – then did the way he’d been treated excuse him in any way? We kept getting that trailer with the voiceover about “when your own country betrays you”. What does the fact that he enjoyed a lot of popularity amongst the working-classes say about popular feeling?

Something to remember. Ned’s actions in the Bay of Honduras were correct in law. There was no discrimination on grounds of race in British law in the 1790s, any more than there is now. And there has never been any legal barrier in British(/English/Scottish) law against interracial marriage. That’s just worth remembering.

And something to think about. Reform not revolution, yes … but these were very, very difficult times. I think it’s meant to be 1800, so we’re 19 years before the Peterloo Massacre, which I know I tend to harp on about but which is getting a huge amount of local attention at the moment because we’re so close to the 200th anniversary. If you’ve got a state which will do that, where peaceful protesters will be mown down and stabbed by the cavalry … as the voiceover for the trailer kept saying, “to whom do you then owe loyalty”?

This is great stuff. Period dramas don’t always make you think. They should do! As I’ve said, ballrooms and bedrooms are fine, but let’s get everyone talking about big historical issues – and they don’t come much bigger than Abolitionism. Let’s not make it all about politics, obviously. We want the soapy stuff too. Oh, and if Ross could do the bare-chested scything thing again, it would be much appreciated. But let’s think, as well.

Maybe it was easier in the late 18th and the19th centuries. People, or at least middle-class people, involved in the reform movements had so much more time. However strongly you might feel about something, it’s difficult to do much when you’re stuck in work all day and then you’ve got housework and family responsibilities as well. I wonder about this sometimes. People who go around setting up camp outside fracking sites, or whatever – have they not got jobs? I’m not knocking anyone: I just genuinely don’t get it.

But, that aside, the point is that people like Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Butler and the others saw injustices and they tried to do something about them. At the moment, there just seems to be so much anger and hatred. Some of it’s utter rubbish about the most bizarre things, like claiming that the Wimbledon draw was fixed as part of a conspiracy by the British Establishment to give an advantage to a particular player (I am not making this up!!). Some of it is extremely serious – people yelling and screaming outside primary schools and threatening teachers, because schools have introduced “No Outsiders” programmes which explain to children that everyone deserves to be treated fairly and equally.  Then there are all the people who hurl abuse at you and accuse you of every manner of prejudices just because you happen to disagree with them about something.  And politicians hurl insults at each other instead of trying to get anything sorted.

Less yelling, more contemplating, more “am I not a man and a brother”, more thinking you can make the world better? It’s a nice thought …

Favourite Stories of Courageous Girls: inspiring heroines from classic children’s books

This is definitely an eclectic selection of heroines – 24 of them in all.  They include Enid Blyton’s much-discussed George Kirrin and rarely-discussed Margery Fenworthy, a range of characters from older Girls’ Own books, from Jo March and Anne Shirley to Pollyanna and Rebecca Randall, and from Bobbie Waterbury to Mary Lennox; fairytale characters such as Gerda from The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid and Kate Crackernuts; Proserpina/Persephone from the Greek myth, girls from fantasy-eque novels – Alice and Dorothy – and, bizarrely considering that the title says “children’s books”, the wonderful Jane Eyre and the horribly irritating Catherine Earnshaw.  (Full list below!)

Whilst I’d certainly class, say, Bobbie and Gerda as courageous, I’m not really convinced about some of the others – Mary Lennox isn’t really courageous, and Catherine Earnshaw just needs a good slap!  Some of the extracts chosen seem rather odd as well – even if it was her one beauty, was having her hair cut really the bravest thing that Jo March ever did?!  A lot of authors are featured twice, which seems rather unimaginative, and I think some of the books were chosen more for being famous than for anything else.   And it’s just really a collection of extracts, with no discussion about why they’ve been chosen, and very little background information for readers who aren’t familiar with particular characters.  However, the Kindle version was going for 99p, and for 99p it was worth a read.

Full list of “courageous girls”, FYI (if anyone’s reading this!). The order of these felt as if someone’d drawn them out of a hat.  Maybe the idea was to provide contrasts between one girl and the next, but surely it would have better to have arranged them by genre, or maybe by publication date?  Anyway.  Here we are:

1. Jo March from Little Women.  I’m OK with the choice of character, but not with the choice of extract,  Whilst I get that it was her one beauty and hair was a woman’s crowning glory, was Jo having her hair cut really braver than moving to New York on her own?
2.  Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – again, a poor choice of extract. Instead of a scene with the Wicked Witch, it was just a scene with Dorothy meeting the rest of the gang.
3. Gerda from The Snow Queen – rescuing Kay.  Go Gerda!  Although this story used to frighten me when it was serialised in Twinkle when I was about 6!
4.  Bobbie Waterbury from The Railway Children.  Stopping the train with red flannel petticoats.  Absolutely iconic scene!!
5. Jane Eyre.  Seeing as this is supposed to be about children’s books, they went for the Mr Brocklehurst bit.  I talk about this scene a lot, because I think it’s a brilliant example of how bullying religious Victorians could be.  Who’s the actual heroine of it – is it Jane or is it Helen Burns?   I think it’s probably both of them.
6. Kate Crackernuts.  I don’t think I’d heard this story before.  It’s a Scottish fairytale – and it’s great, because Kate saves her sister, who’s been put under a spell, and sits up with a sick prince, whom she later marries, rather than a prince rescuing a girl which is what usually happens.  Quite a contrast to have a fairytale straight after the Jane Eyre/Mr Brocklehurst episode!
7. Rebecca (Randall) of Sunnybrook Farm.  I’m not big on these preachy-type books, but Rebecca isn’t bad compared to the likes of Elsie Dinsmore and Cousin Helen Carr, and this is a nice scene in which she gets the better of a bully.
8. George Kirrin from Five on a Treasure Island.  I read this book when I was only about 5 or 6, and the word “ingots” fascinated me.  I have no idea why!  George can be really annoying, but she can be really brave as well.  And, let’s face it, compared to Anne, she definitely seems like a heroine!
9. White Chrysanthemum.  I didn’t know this one.  It’s a Japanese fairytale.  Kudos for the inclusion of stories from different cultures, but, as the heroine is rescued from bandits by her brother, I’m not sure why we’re meant to think she’s being courageous!
10. Understood Betsy.  Another one I didn’t know, but it involves Betsy rescuing a girl from a pit, so, yep, that classes as courageous!
11. Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  The Queen of Hearts/”Off with her head” scene.  I would never have picked Alice as an example of a “courageous girl”, but, when you think about it, she really is very brave in this scene.  Hmm.  That’s one to think about.
12. The Princess Who Loved Her Father Like Salt.  This is an Indian fairytale.  It’s a nice story, and, again, kudos for including stories from different cultures, but no-one really does anything very courageous.
13. Sara Crewe from A Little Princess.  Sharing buns with a “little ravening London savage”.  I do find this book a bit sick-making, but I do also acknowledge that Sara is brave in the way she copes with the situation in which she finds herself, so, OK, fair enough.
14.  The Phoenix and the Carpet.  Er, who is actually being brave here.  Is it Anthea?  No idea why this is in there!
15.  The Seven Ravens.  Nice little fairytale in which a girl rescues her brothers, but very short.
16. Pollyanna.  Again, I’m not big on preachy books, but I suppose she was brave to go to the home of scary-ish John Pendleton.  But would you really choose Pollyanna as an obvious example of a “courageous girl”?
17. Anne (Shirley) of Green Gables.  The bit where she saves the baby with croup.  I’d say that that was more about being bright and keeping her head than being courageous, but, on the other hand, it was pretty brave for a young girl to give medical assistance like that.  And I love Anne!
18. The Pomegranate Seeds – the Proserpina/Persephone story.  When I was 6, I had a nice shiny hardback book of Greek myths, and this one was my favourite!  But I’m not sure that Proserpina’s “brave” as such.  Still, I’ve always liked the story.
19. Wuthering Heights.  WTF?  If it’d been Cathy junior, coping with evil Hindley, OK, but what is courageous about Catherine Linton?  She needs a good slap, if you ask me.  I think this was just included because it’s a very famous book, and that’s a lazy/sloppy way of doing things.  Not impressed!  How can Catherine Linton be called courageous?  She’s a nasty little madam!
20. Emily of New Moon – in dispute with a nasty teacher.  I don’t mind Emily, but I’m not sure you’d say she was “courageous”.
21. The Wise Princess – a fairytale, but one written in modern times.  Girl drowns trying to rescue baby.  Moral of the story is that she learnt how to be happy.  Er, no, me neither!
22. Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden.  The bit where she meets Colin.  Like a lot of these girls, Mary has to learn to become a better person, but … I don’t know, is that “courageous”.  I suppose it is, in a way, but I’m not sure how meeting your cousin makes you an “inspiring heroine”.
23. Margery Fenworthy from The O’Sullivan Twins at St Clare’s, rescuing another girl from a fire.  I’d half-forgotten about this – probably because Margery isn’t one of the major characters in the series.  It’s actually one of the most dramatic scenes in any of Enid Blyton’s school stories, though.  Poor old Margery – no-one ever talks about her.  I’m quite glad she’s been included here!
24. The Little Mermaid.  Not the animated film!  The real story, in which she rescues a prince … although, weirdly, it didn’t include the actual ending, just said that she’d rescued him but he’d never know, and left it there.  That missed the whole point of the story!

In summary – it was a good idea for a book, but it just wasn’t very well-executed..  There’s been a big swing towards Disney princess stuff for young girls, and, whilst there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it’s important to have strong, courageous girls as role models as well.  But I think there are far better examples than some of these, and I’d have liked a bit more discussion and commentary on why these particular girls and these particular examples of their “courage” had been chosen.  Great idea.  Not such a great book.

 

 

Charles I: Downfall of a King – BBC 4

Apparently, the Civil War was caused by court masques, currants, Henrietta Maria’s make-up, people believing that the Lieutenant of the Tower of London was a cannibal, and the inability of Londoners to hold their drink (especially over the Christmas period). Some interesting theories there. Or else it was all due to a personal feud between Charles I and Pym the Puritan. Honestly, I thought we’d got past all this “revisionist” stuff about it being due to religion and short-term squabbles!  I was impressed that it made it clear that Pym & co were religious extremists, rather than just eulogising them as defenders of rights and liberties, though.  Also, it was history for grown-ups – no dressing up and no racing around – and it improved as it went on.  And Lisa Hilton (who writes “steamy” novels) uses some wonderful flowery language, although I find it rather annoying when Northerners speak in fake posh accents for TV.

However, I wish people wouldn’t keep trying to put a modern spin on historic events, though – talking about “populism”, “radicalisation”, “red lines”, “inclusivity”, “toxic masculinity”, “tabloid stings”, “fake news”, “tabloid sting” and “social media” in relation to the 1640s just sounds silly.   No-one actually used “alt-right” to describe the most extreme Puritans, but they certainly hinted at it … and that was good, because  I can’t stand the way the likes of Pym and Cromwell get idolised.  I also wish someone would write a book discussing how Henrietta Maria, Marie Antoinette and Alexandra Feodorovna all got the blame for their husbands’ stupidity, and was glad to see Henrietta Maria getting some sympathy here.

In summary – and there’s no arguing with this, even if I’d dispute the importance of the masques and the currants – we ended up with a complete mess made by a bunch of idiots and extremists … which is now widely recognised as being a crucial turning point in the spread of democracy across the western world.   History is great.  You couldn’t make it up!

I’m not a great fan of the revisionist theory that the causes of the Civil War were short-term, but, OK, I think we can all agree that it probably wouldn’t have happened if Charles I hadn’t been such an idiot. The focus of this three-part series was all on fifty days in late 1641 and early 1642, though, and there really needed to be more background information. The Personal Rule was barely mentioned, ship money wasn’t mentioned at all, and Scotland wasn’t mentioned until a long way into the first episode. And, without wishing to get too Victorian Whiggish about things, the “seeds of democracy” (Lisa’s expression) were sown well, well before the 1640s, thank you!!

Anyway.  Nice to have a historical docu-drama series with no dressing up or racing about, as I said – although Lisa did quite a bit of posing on staircases and gazing into the camera, not to mention gazing up at nude paintings. Oh, and Earl Spencer needs a haircut. I do wish the BBC would get over this obsession with trying to relate everything historical to the present day, though. But, if you want present day comparisons, then the contents of this programme made a few things very clear. Leaders need to stay in touch with the people and not live in a Westminster bubble. Extremists of any variety are bad news. Religion should be kept out of politics. London is out of step with the rest of the country. And anyone who’s running a country needs to understand that country’s history (let’s not even go there with Donald Trump saying that the Continental Army seized control of the airports).

Whilst I’m really not a fan of the revisionist short term causes theory, this did make everything sound rather dramatic.  You don’t often get such detailed coverage of this period, or indeed any period.  This was three hours of TV covering only fifty days.  And it did quite a convincing job of showing that war wasn’t inevitable – at least at that point. It all came across rather like a five set match at Wimbledon, with the momentum swinging first to one player and then to another! That’s actually quite a good analogy, seeing as they rather bizarrely made it sound as if only two people were involved and all the action took place in London. I don’t do revisionist views of the Civil War. Have I said that enough times now?!

It started off very strangely indeed, making it sound as if the whole country had turned Puritan (er, no) and everyone was narked with Charles I because he put on extravagant masques at court (had they got mixed up with the French Revolution?!). Yes, Charles I was unpopular. Yes, Henrietta Maria was unpopular because she was Catholic. But I think people were rather more concerned about the economic, political and religious issues than about masques at court!

Along came Pym’s Grand Remonstrance … and it was all made to sound like a populist battle, with Charles trying to win hearts and minds by staging grand parades and Pym trying to radicalise disaffected young men. Interesting point about the effect on voting in the Commons of MPs refusing to come to London because of plague. Later on, it was because of bad weather making travel difficult. Maybe that’s the way to deal with the House of Commons – hold votes when MPs can’t or won’t get to London! We didn’t hear that much about everything that was in the Grand Remonstrance, but currants were mentioned. Never mind ship money – apparently the issue with Charles I and his questionable tax-raising was that he was levying taxes on currants.

Then on to the Irish Rebellion – and this was interesting, because, for one reason and another, Cromwell’s massacres of Catholics in Ireland are widely known but the 1641 Portadown Massacre of Protestants in Ireland isn’t known nearly as well. It was horrific. And people were genuinely afraid. Was Pym exploiting people’s fears to his own ends by trying to end the king’s control over the militia? Whatever his reasons, Charles stupidly played right into his hands by turning to the bishops for support.

And, at this point, we got a lot of talk about John Lilburne – which was also interesting, because he’s normally mentioned more in connection with the rise of the Levellers in the mid-1640s, and his role earlier on tends to be overlooked. All so London-centric, though. The programme, I mean, not Lilburne!

Meanwhile, Pym had been banned from publishing the Grand Remonstrance, but he got round this by boring everyone. Seriously. One of his gang made a speech in the Commons that was so long and boring that a load of MPs got fed up and went home … whereupon a vote was held, which, with most of his opponents having left, Pym won. That’s actually a much better way of dealing with things than just keeping MPs away from London.

Henrietta Maria then got blamed for the Portadown Massacre: it was claimed that the rebels had had her authority to stage an uprising. At this point, I’d have really liked some discussion of how often queens get the blame for the stupidity of their husbands. Instead, we were told that her lady-in-waiting had taught her how to apply make-up. What?? Henrietta Maria’s unpopularity was due to the fact that she wore make-up? I don’t think so. Incidentally, who’s the great heroine of English Protestantism. Elizabeth I, who used to keep the Cabinet waiting until she’d got all her make-up on. I think we can discount the argument that the Civil War had anything to do with Henrietta Maria’s make-up.

Charles, getting rather stressed out about all this, decided to replace the incumbent Lieutenant of the Tower of London with an ally of his, one Thomas Lunsford. This was not a great idea, because Lunsford was very unpopular: people thought he was a cannibal. We definitely never heard about currants and cannibals when we “did” the Civil War at school! Then a load of radicalised Londoners had too much to drink over Christmas and started rioting. (Don’t ask me how getting drunk over Christmas was supposed to tie in with the idea that the country had gone really Puritanical.) Charles sacked Lunsford, but the drunken Londoners had got really stuck into the rioting by now. And the bishops were prevented from getting into the House of Lords to vote.

The bishops weren’t very pleased, which wasn’t unreasonable from their point of view, and protested, whereupon Pym’s gang decided that they should be impeached. Several bishops were arrested and locI often find myself wondering just how political leaders can be so bloody stupid. It’s something that doesn’t change from century to century. Lisa Hilton used the word “dim”. Charles had signed a bill which took away his power to dissolve Parliament – although it should be noted that it only applied to that particular Parliament, and that the power to dissolve Parliament in general (before the end of the five year fixed term we’re supposed to have now), or to prorogue Parliament, still lies with the sovereign – and then tried to get Pym on side by offering him the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Pym turned him down.

I was really glad, at this point, one of the historians pointed out that Pym was not some great hero.  We joke about Cromwell banning mince pies and all the rest of it, but there really wasn’t anything funny about Puritan extremism.  There still isn’t: it’s played a large part in the development of some very unpleasant attitudes amongst factions in both the United States and South Africa.  Pym even wanted to make Catholics wear distinctive clothing.  He never actually tried that, but he did try ordering the removal of Henrietta Maria’s household Catholic clergymen.  A very interesting point was made, which I must say I’ve never really thought of before, that Henrietta Maria had grown up in a France where Protestants were not persecuted.  I can reel off the dates of the passing and revocation of the Edict of Nantes without even thinking about them, but somehow I’d never really thought much about this being in between the two.

And, as if Henrietta Maria didn’t have enough problems, her friend and lady-in-waiting, Lucy Hay, was spying for Pym.  Was she Pym’s mistress?  The programme didn’t suggest that, but it’s been rumoured.  Nor did it mention that she was the Earl of Essex’s cousin.  Another person Charles and Henrietta Maria mistakenly trusted was George Digby, who at least wasn’t spying but who did make a complete mess of his task of denouncing Pym in the Lords, and just kind of wimped out.

I’m not keen on Henrietta Maria, but I do think she got a raw deal, and I think it’s very typical of how women so often get the blame for their powerful husbands’ stupidity.  And how people will attack a woman by impugning her virtue (very Victorian term there!).  I think she probably got involved with Henry Jermyn later on, when she was a widow, but I certainly don’t think she’d done so at this point –  but Pym was whipping up rumours that she had.  Everyone was turning against her.  She must have been terrified.  Nice to see the historians, especially the female historians, expressing sympathy for her.  And I rather like the tradition that she yelled at Charles and told him to stop being such a bloody wuss and go and do something about it.

We were into the third episode by this point, and this was by far the best of the three. Big drama!  The famous episode in which Charles barged into the House of Commons, only to find that the five MPs he was planning to arrest had done a bunk – tipped off by Lucy Hay, who was shown creeping around in a hooded cloak, looking rather like Madame in the Dogtanian cartoons.  I love the fact that the State Opening of Parliament still includes the door being slammed in Black Rod’s face, al because of this!  And it’s fascinating that Parliament, and also the people at the Guildhall, who refused to hand over Pym & co when Charles went there, had the authority nerve to stand up to him.  As one of the historians said, you can’t imagine that happening in Henry VIII’s time.  Charles believed in the divine right of monarchs … but there he was, calling out names with everyone refusing to tell him where the people he wanted were, like a hapless schoolteacher who couldn’t control the class.

What a prat, and what a mess.  As Earl Spencer said, anyone would have struggled to deal with all the political, social and religious troubles of the day (hooray – someone who wasn’t trying to make out that the causes of the Civil War were all short-term!), but Charles I didn’t have a clue.  Meanwhile, and rather scarily, radicals were joining the militia to get arms and training in how to use them.  And the Royal Family fled to Hampton Court Palace.

This was in early January, though, and the war didn’t actually kick off until August.  I’m not quite getting the idea of making a three-part series about fifty days in late 1641 and early 1642, with so little attention paid to what happened before and none to what happened after.  But it still made for interesting viewing.  Lisa proclaimed that, without the events of 1641/42, there would have been no American Revolution, no French Revolution and no democracy as we know it.  Yes.  I’ll go with that.  No Civil War, no Restoration Settlement, no Glorious Revolution, no Enlightenment  … no American Revolution, no French Revolution and no democracy as we know it.

Lisa finished off by asking the various historians she’d interviewed which side they’d have taken – and this bit was great, because she put it as it must have looked at the time.  We tie ourselves in knots over both the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution.  Social contracts, de facto and de jure, had Charles I betrayed his side of the bargain by refusing to play by the rules, had James II effectively abdicated by running off.  Leviathan was published in 1651 and Two Treatises of Government in 1689: none of this social contract stuff was going in 1642.  We need the Civil War to have happened, and we need Charles to have lost, because there was a danger that, otherwise, we’d have ended up with an absolute monarchy.  But we don’t really do rebellion and revolution.  So we try to justify it by thinking about ancient rights and liberties.  And it works to bad-mouth Henrietta Maria, because she was a foreigner.  But we don’t really do overthrowing the rightful government, any more than we do absolute monarchy.  So we tie ourselves in knots.

But, if you look at things as they’d have looked at the time, no-one could have seen what lay ahead.  There’d been loads of spats between kings and subjects.  Most people must have assumed that there’d be one battle, or maybe even just a confrontation, and it’d all have got sorted.  The rightful king or the defenders of ancient liberties?  Nah.  As Lisa said, it would have been a choice between a useless, unpopular king who wouldn’t play by the rules, or a bunch of radical extremists.  No-one seemed very enthusiastic either way.  And yet it really was one of the great turning points of history.   Sometimes, you just don’t know how things are going to turn out, do you?

 

Arabia with Levison Wood (second episode) – Discovery

This episode whipped up a bit of storm on social media, but, as far as I’m concerned, anything which draws attention to the war in Yemen, which has resulted in the worst cholera epidemic ever recorded and over 20 million people going short of food, is welcome.  However, as with the episode about Iraq, it was hard not to feel that a war zone was being used to create drama – it felt rather like an Indiana Jones film, with protection being sought from a Sultan and borders being suddenly closed by Saudis.  We heard next to nothing about the horrific effects of the war on the people of Yemen.  Instead, we got a close-up view of a toilet on a boat, which wasn’t really what I wanted to see. The first part of the programme, in Oman, was better, though, even if there was a lot about rocks and sand and not a lot about Bedouins or souks.  Still no falafels, either; but we got to see the “Empty Quarter” desert and dolphins in the Gulf of Oman, and to hear about the frankincense trade.  And there were lots of camels.

Oman looked beautiful, and I’d really like to have seen some of the stunning mosques and palaces in Muscat, and a bit more of the souks (I don’t usually like shopping, but I love souks!), but we saw very little of that before Levison was off climbing rocks, crossing the Empty Quarter desert (which, as the name suggests, was, well, empty!) and complaining about the way his local guide treated the camels.  I get that this is the Discovery channel and not the History channel, but there’s still only so much sand you can look at!

However, we did get to meet some of the local people, and to see the trees from which frankincense was extracted, so that was interesting … but it still felt far more like an action film than a documentary.  I suppose you can see Levison Wood as a Boys’ Own adventurer and think that it’s all very exciting, but I thought the idea of this series was to show viewers that there’s so much more to the Middle East than war and terrorism.  I didn’t really mean sand!

From Oman, he crossed into Yemen, and that was what caused the fuss on social media.  I have no idea how easy or difficult it is to get a visa to enter Yemen, but it didn’t look as if he’d even tried: he just said that it was impossible to get a visa because of the war, and there was then all this drama about how he was going to get across the border with help from a mysterious Somali contact.  Which he duly did. Critics have commented that it’s not appropriate for someone to enter a country illegally in order to make a TV programme, and have pointed out that there’d be an outcry if a Yemeni citizen were found to have entered the UK or another western country illegally.

I can see that point, but I think entering Yemen illegally would have been justified if he’d shown, or at least talked about, the horrors of the war.  The situation in Yemen is not being widely reported in the media here, and I think people need to know what’s going on.

Another criticism has been that he was trying to be a “white saviour”.  There seems to be an increasing trend for someone to scream “neo-colonialist” or “white saviour” every time a white person from a western country reports on or makes any comment about a country in another part of the world.  Donations to Comic Relief dropped right off after David Lammy’s criticism of Stacey Dooley, who has worked hard to draw attention to issues faced by women and children in developing countries.  How does that help anyone?  You even hear criticism of Bob Geldof for raising money for famine relief in Ethiopia in the 1980s – do people think it would have been better if he hadn’t?!  In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be such disparities in wealth between countries, so the issue of charity work in developing countries wouldn’t arise, but this is not an ideal world. And  David Cameron tried to raise the issue of LGBT rights in Commonwealth countries and got a load of grief in response.  Of course no-one’s saying that western countries should be telling other countries what to do, but human rights are human rights.  As far as this series is concerned, the situation in Yemen is very serious, and not getting anything like as much coverage as it should; and I don’t find it at all appropriate for Twitter trolls to be calling Levison Wood an “orientalist” or a “white saviour” for trying to highlight what’s going on there.  End of rant!!

Having had a good rant about all that … I was disappointed to find he didn’t actually say anything very much.  There was one short interview with some people who were being forced to live on the streets because they’d had to leave their home, but that was it.  To be fair, though, he didn’t get chance to see much more of the country, because the Saudis closed the border, the intelligence services were on to him, and he had to get out. There followed a load of Boys’ Own Adventure/Hard Man/Indiana Jones/Romancing the Stone/whatever stuff about going to Saudi Arabia in a flimsy boat through pirate-infested waters.  But this was after he’d got back to Oman, so why not just go from Oman to Saudi Arabia across the land border?!  And, having got back to Oman, he could have explained more about what was going on in Yemen.  It doesn’t all have to be action.  This is not a G A Henty or R M Ballantyne book: this is real life.

Sorry, I feel like I’m doing nothing but moaning, but I’m just finding this really frustrating.  There are very few TV programmes about the Middle East.  99 times out of 100, if the Middle East’s mentioned on TV it’s on the news, and it’s very rarely good news.  And, even then, it’s very rarely anything about Yemen.  There are bits of this programme which give us a tantalising glimpse of just how good it could be, like when he was talking to the Omani desert tribesmen about frankincense … but then it just reverts back to being like an action film.

Oh, and neither G A Henty nor R M Ballantyne would have described a toilet.   It’s not very heroic, is it?!

Oh well.  At least it did a bit to bring the Yemeni situation to public attention … even though I’m not sure how many people are watching the programme or reading about it.  But a bit more focus on the countries being visited and a bit less action film stuff would be extremely welcome.  I want to know about these places, their people, their cultures!    Please  ….

The Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope (Facebook group reading challenge)

This was generally a light, fun, easy read, aimed at fairly young children. There wasn’t much of a plot, and – impressively, for a book written in 1904 – there was no preaching and no moralising, but there were lots of scrapes and jolly japes and “merry days” with friends and family. There were a few talking points, though – the obsession that children’s authors seem to have with twins (and, for that matter, with sleepwalking), the amount of freedom that the children have, the fact that the series was written by a syndicate, the way in which (without writing an essay on Puritan history) Christmas is not really a religious thing in American children’s books, and, last but certainly not least, a very unpleasant racist scene involving separating black dolls from white dolls with a piece of cardboard.

It’s the first in a series of books about two sets of twins in one family – Bert and Nan, here aged eight, and Freddie and Flossie, here aged four – in what (given the mention of lakes and lots of snow) seems to be somewhere in the North Eastern United States. There’s lots of fun with sledging and cake-baking, a few scrapes involving being chased by a dog and one of the kids getting locked in a shop, some incidents with a local bully who eventually gets his come-uppance, and Christmas, Valentine’s Day (which was certainly never such a big thing when I was that age!) and a holiday on some relatives’ farm. As I said, not much of a plot, but mostly good fun with nothing too scary or dangerous. Early on, one of their friends nearly dies from over-exerting herself by jumping over a skipping rope (as you do), but that was out of kilter with the rest of it.

Why are children’s books so obsessed with twins? Obviously, there will be twins in any school or community, but not to the extent that there are in children’s books. Sometimes, as with Enid Blyton’s Connie and Ruth or Erich Kastner’s Lottie and Lisa, the fact that the characters are twins is central to the storyline, and I suppose it can work well to have siblings of the same age in a school story, so that they can be in the same class, but this story would have worked pretty much as well with four siblings of different ages.

What’s particularly strange is when the main characters are the parents, and the fact that they have twins seems intended to say something about them. Elsie J Oxenham and Elinor M Brent-Dyer take it to extremes, with characters having twins (or even triplets) right, left and centre – two sets of twins in a year, in one case. Characters seem to compete with each other to have more children than their friends, and multiple births is part of that. But, in other books, the twins are their parents’ only children – take Daisy and Demi, the children of Meg and John Brooke, or Tobi and Martali, the children of Heidi and Peter. So what’s it all about?! (ETA – oops, apologies for forgetting that Meg and John have another child, in Little Men!!)

Speaking of Heidi, sleepwalking is something else that seems to happen a lot more often in children’s books than in real life. That happens in this book too – and it’s very similar to the Heidi storyline, with people thinking they’ve seen a ghost. It happens more than once in the Chalet School books, as well. Just a point!

That’s one of the home-based storylines, but, most of the time, the children are out having fun. That’s one of the great pleasures of children’s books, certainly the ones that aren’t set in schools. Everyone’s out enjoying themselves all the time, and adult supervision isn’t considered necessary. It rarely seems to rain, and snow is an occasion for fun and games, rather than a hassle. I’m not sure that it’s an overly realistic view of childhood, but it makes for lovely reading!

Part of the fun is at Christmas – and, in the Christmas chapter, everyone exchanges presents, they all – parents, servants and children – have great fun opening them, and one of the kids says that he wishes every day could be Christmas so that they could keep getting presents. In a British book, in which a well-to-do family like this would probably be Church of England, the kid would probably have got a lecture about “the real meaning of Christmas”. I’m not going to start writing an essay about Puritan views of Christmas and so on, but it’s quite interesting how there is this cultural difference. Religion is not a factor in this book at all; but the March family in Little Women and the Ingalls family in the Little House books are very Christian, but the Christmas chapters in those books are about enjoying the holiday, not about religion. There are no rights or wrongs here – it’s just an interesting cultural difference.

Another point that struck me was that the books were written by a syndicate. There wasn’t a “Laura Lee Hope”: the books were written by different people. As a kid, I loved the Nancy Drew books, by “Carolyn Keene”. I assumed that they were all written by a woman called Carolyn Keene: it never occurred to me that they weren’t. Years later, I found out that “Carolyn Keene” didn’t exist, and the books were written by different people. It quite upset me. It didn’t make the books any less enjoyable, but I like to think of an author loving creating their characters and having a close personal relationship with them. I know it’s silly, but I really wish I’d never found that out, and that I could have gone on thinking that Carolyn Keene was a person, just like Enid Blyton or Elinor Brent-Dyer or Lorna Hill.

And, sorry to end on a bum note, but there is an issue with racism in the book. The books have been criticised over their portrayal of Sam and Dinah, the Bobbsey family’s black servants. As with many books of the time, the black characters are shown as speaking with a different accent, and their speech is written phonetically – “Dem” rather than “them”, “yoah” instead of “your”, etc. It does create a sense of black characters as “other”, and it’s also rather hard to read. However, the speech of a working-class white couple whom Bert and Nan meet – a farmer and his wife – is also shown as being with a different accent, and written phonetically, and I don’t think that Sam and Dinah were shown all that differently to how the author might have shown white servants.  They’re depicted as having a close and loving relationship with the Bobbseys but without being overly devoted or sycophantic in any way.  They also get landed with the crap jobs, and they live in rooms above the stables.  I wouldn’t really say that any of that was about race rather than about socio-economic class.

What I did find very unsettling, though, was that Flossie has five dolls, four white and one black, and she says that the “coloured” doll obviously wasn’t part of the doll family, and, when she puts them away, she separates the black doll from the white dolls with a piece of cardboard. The dolls aren’t even part of the plot. The scene isn’t relevant to anything else. It just seems to be in there purely to make this point that a four-year-old kid thinks that white people and black people have to be separated and (assuming that four-year-olds think that dolls have feelings? I still think dolls and teddies have feelings!) doesn’t even care how the black doll might feel. This isn’t even in the Deep South, where a child would see black and white people treated differently by law. It’s about attitudes that a child has picked up from her family and friends. And, as I said, it is not relevant to the wider storyline in any way: it’s just there for the sake of it. I think people can sometimes be oversensitive about racial and gender issues in children’s books from previous eras, but this really was unpleasant.

It was one scene and I don’t want to dwell on it too much, but it really wasn’t nice.  Other than that, it was a “merry romp” type book – and I understand that later editions of the books have been revised to address the issue of racism.  I’m not normally keen on revising books, but in this case, in a book aimed at very young children, I think it’s necessary.

I got a multipack of the books for 71p on Kindle, and I’ll probably read some of the others some time, but I don’t see them becoming part of my life in the way that a lot of children’s books are!

 

Knightfall (season 2) – History

Luke Skywalker’s taken charge of training the Templar initiates, the Grand Master’s stealing lines from Scarlett O’Hara, Ed Stoppard thinks he’s a cross between King Herod and the Exodus Pharoah, the unborn baby whom the Queen of France conceived in an affair with a monk has been stolen from her womb, we’re all about to get mixed up with a group of devil worshippers, no-one knows the words to Toto songs, Viscount Gillingham has taken to self-flagellation, and I think everyone’s forgotten that they’re meant to be looking for the Holy Grail.  Medieval history is not like this in Jean Plaidy books. I’m hoping it all gets sorted when Andrew Foyle/Charles Blake/the nice doctor from The Royal takes revenge on Carson the butler for persecuting Cathars: I’ve been rather keen on Cathars since reading up on them in my first year at university.  This has just got beyond bonkers, though.  What planet are the scriptwriters on?!  Maybe Luke Skywalker knows …

We’re supposed to be in early 14th century France, in the period leading up to the dissolution of the Knights Templar by Philip IV.  I was assuming it was meant to be 1305, when Philip’s queen, Joan of Navarre, died in childbirth (or, if you believe the alternative version, as a result of witchcraft, but I think we’ll go with the childbirth version of events).  Although Pope Boniface VIII, played by Jim Carter (Carson), was already dead by then, whereas he’s alive and well in this.  However, a preview thing said it that it was meant to be 1307.  Even though Joan’d only just died, and that was actually in 1305.  And Boniface died in 1303.  Right.  Whichever planet the scriptwriters are on, it definitely isn’t Planet Historical Accuracy.

Joan had just died, anyway.  However, in this crazy universe, she didn’t die in childbirth, or even by witchcraft, but was murdered by her husband, after he found out that her baby was fathered not by him but by Brother Landry – aka Viscount Gillingham (why are so many people from Downton Abbey in this?).  Landry removed the baby (well, he got one of his mates to perform a Caesarean on Joan’s corpse) and has hopefully hidden her away safely.

Meanwhile, he’d been booted out of the Templars, for having an affair with the queen – which TBH was not unreasonable, as it’s not really what monks are meant to do – but he was desperate to be allowed back in and hung around outside Templar HQ making such a fuss that the Grand Master eventually gave in – yelling “As God is our witness” in apparent (but rather feeble) imitation of Scarlett O’Hara in the garden at Twelve Oaks.  However, as punishment for being a naughty boy, Landry has got to start again at the bottom of the heap, and the monk in charge of trainees (sorry, initiates) is Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker.  I’ve never watched anything to do with Star Wars, but even I’ve heard of Luke Skywalker.

Landry then messed up during a fight with lots of swords and shields.  People kept shouting “Hold the line”. I was waiting for someone to say “Love is always on time” … but they didn’t.  Oh well.  It looked as if it might get a bit more interesting when he starting whipping himself, being rather upset after Luke Skywalker told him off.  I mean interesting from the point of view of exploring medieval religious attitudes towards sin and punishment, not in an S&M sense!  But from there we went on to a strange conference around Joan’s half-decayed corpse.  I didn’t really need to see that.

This was mad enough, but, from what I gather, it’s about to get worse.  Philip has sussed that Landry took the baby, having noticed that she’s gone missing from Joan’s corpse.  He’s now going to order that all babies in the area be murdered, to ensure that Joan and Landry’s baby dies.  I know this sort of thing happens in the Bible, but it didn’t happen in medieval France and I think it’s actually going way beyond the boundaries of good taste to include a storyline like that in something that’s supposed to be a historical drama, not a dystopian horror story.  And then a load of devil-worshippers are going to turn up, which I don’t mind per se … but they’re going to murder people in Satanic rituals. Don’t ask me what’s happened to the Holy Grail: everyone seems to be too busy murdering each other to think about it.

WTF is going on with this?  I know it doesn’t claim to be historically accurate, but the first series at least contained some sense, and actually made some very valid points.  I’m vaguely hoping this one might show us something about the Cathars, but I don’t actually think it will, because Catharism was pretty much a spent force by this time.  Mind you, given the extent of the historical accuracy so far, it wouldn’t surprise me if a load of Lutherans, Calvinists and Old Believers all turned up, never mind Cathars.

The previews are all full of people going on about “epic drama” and “complex characters”.  Well, sorry, but I just can’t take it seriously!  I suppose it isn’t any more bonkers than Vikings, and I’m still loving that and am sorry that the next series is going to be the last; but we don’t have that many historical sources for the Viking era, and a lot of what we do have is so mixed up with myth and legend that somehow it doesn’t seem such a problem for a TV series about that to make so much up.  With medieval France, we’ve got the real history – and this very definitely isn’t it!

On the other hand … maybe this is going to appeal to the sort of audience who wouldn’t watch a more traditional period drama series?  Is that a good thing, if it’s getting more people into history?  You could possibly argue that, but I think there’s a danger of ending up with a blurring of the lines between something like Game of Thrones, which is pure fiction/fantasy, and real history, and I think that’s pretty worrying.  This is entertaining, in a way, but I’m not really comfortable seeing the lives of real historical characters – kings, queens, popes, advisors, et al – distorted as much as this.  If you want to write pure fiction, maybe stick to purely fictitious characters?

Marks for being entertaining, though.  The swords and shields fight was quite dramatic.  Even if they didn’t seem to know the rest of the words to the Toto song.