Showing posts with label RichardIII. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RichardIII. Show all posts

Thursday, September 29, 2022

About Elizabeth II -- Reminiscence

 


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 Inevitable that several of us BWL authors will write about the death of Queen Elizabeth, so here's my contribution. I still can't quite believe she is gone, even after ten days of a most Royal sendoff. She's been The Queen for most of my life. I do remember George VI's death, however, as this was also big news at our house. My parents discussed how brave the king had been, during the war, staying in London with his people, throughout the nightly bombing. 

On the great stage of today's (apparently) endless train of planetary disasters, her death doesn't mean much beyond the UK and the remaining commonwealth nations, but how well I remember Elizabeth's coronation, which took place when I was eight. With an Anglophile Mom, I couldn't help hearing--and viewing (for a new wonder, a television had just arrived in our home) an English Coronation, full of glittering regalia and history. 


(Free Image from Pixabay)

The idea of showing this rite to the public had been much debated beforehand--such a break with tradition! Those grainy black-and-white images of a beautiful young Queen inside her fairy-tale golden carriage, riding through gray, battered, postwar London, now all decked out beautifully for the celebration. The procession to the Abbey was followed by film of the mystery taking place inside. This was ground-breaking, this showing of so much of an ancient ritual to the public, but it proved to be a huge hit with the viewing public all over the world.  From now on, television would give those who liked to "royal watch" a whole new tool with which to engage. 

Anticipating the event, The New York Times was suddenly full of articles on the British royal family and also on English history, a news glut on a single subject, from the time of the death of King George VI onward to the crowning of the new, young queen.   From this time, I'd date my ever-increasing, ever-expanding, sixty year passion for learning about human history. 


https://www.amazon.com/Roan-Rose-Juliet-Waldron/dp/149224158X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2R221JXX8BYFN&keywords=Roan+Rose+Waldron&qid=1664379252&qu=eyJxc2MiOiIwLjg0IiwicXNhIjoiMC4wMCIsInFzcCI6IjAuMDAifQ%3D%3D&sprefix=roan+rose+waldron%2Caps%2C59&sr=8-1

Certainly, at first, this history was of the WASP kind, as that was the brand on offer at my house. I had a scrapbook filled with articles clipped from Newsweek, the NYT, Look, and whatever magazine resources we had that dealt with current events. I was not a tidy kid, so this was a messy affair of white paste and missing bits of text, but I was thoroughly engaged while making it. 

When Mom took me to England after her divorce, I ended up in a country boarding school in Penzance. Here, I found myself regularly singing "God Save the Queen." My 5th form classmates were rather surprised to learn I already knew the words, but, with a Mom like mine, this had been inevitable. I had been taught that "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" so I adapted as fast as I could in all ways. 

I'd had no idea that a person could live on cabbage and potatoes and slices of brown bread and a single pat of butter, but that was what was on offer in boarding school, so I wolfed it down like everyone else. Post-war, even in the early sixties, things were tight and war-time frugality was still the order of the day. In winter, the school was kept at 45 F., and so our wool and flannel clothing was a necessity, not an affectation. We shared a once a week bath--3 girls bathed and washed their hair in the same tub. Therefore, the water was super hot to start, but I was often allowed that first bath by default, because no one else wanted to brave the temperature.

In London, while sightseeing, I saw huge open swathes of emptiness and broken bricks in some places, in others, like around St. Paul's Cathedral, there was an expansive green void on every side, where that huge ediface stood, white and shining, perfectly alone, a miracle of survival during the Blitz. 

.  

When Mom and I transferred ourselves to Barbardos, in what was then the British West Indies, we sang "God Save The Queen" there too. Barbados was part of the old British Commonwealth, and called Elizabeth II "Queen of Barbados," but I understand that this "Island in the Sun" has become a republic (as of November, 2021), and replaced the British Crowned head with a President, while remaining as part of the Commonwealth of Nations. English rule, begun in Barbados in 1627, has ended at last,  and with it, the days of Bajan schoolgirls singing "God Save the Queen."  



--Juliet Waldron



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Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Total Immersion Research



http://www.bookswelove.com/authors/waldron-juliet-historical-romance/




Why write historical fiction? This is a question that, for me, goes back a way. The 1980’s, when I first started writing, was a low point for the genre. I remember querying ever so many agents and getting replies which said “only a small market for historical fiction.” That was discouraging enough, but not so much that I stopped working on those novels, driven by the writing demons as I was.   

Like everyone else who will reply to this question, I started young reading historical fiction, following the books my mother took out of the library. She was a voracious reader of both history and science fiction, and I became one as well. I began early, and remember writing a short story about the Princes in the Tower back in 8th grade that got an “A.” (My story successfully creeped-out  the class, too, which was even better.)


https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/roan-rose/id1023558994?mt=11
http://www.bookswelove.com/authors/waldron-juliet-historical-romance/

I could say that my love of history happened because I’ve often lived in old houses—several with disturbances of the kind that are often labelled “ghost.” I could talk about the love of my important elders for history, their familiarity with the past, and the way the past was always present in discussions about politics, or about how trips were taken to view gravestones, battlefields, Indian mounds, and museums. 



I could dwell on the lit professor grandpa that I adored. His study fairly breathed old books, tweed, leather, pipe smoke and things past. A large oil painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims overlooked his desk, a beautiful obsidian spear point that had emerged during the spring plowing at the family farm in upstate NY sat beside his typewriter. All of these objects had stories, and he shared them with his children and grandchildren. At home, that wonderful quote of William Faulkner’s “The Past is never gone. It’s not even past,” was a reality. 

The truth is that I’ve never felt truly comfortable with the noisy, gasoline era into which I was born. Cars were something to get around in, but not by me, as a class of objects, beloved. Every time a tree falls in the creation of a road or a new development, I feel a terrible sense of loss.

I’ve often spoken of what I write as a kind of time travel, because for me that’s what it is—a way to be present in another place and time, to smell and taste that world, to deal with the hardships and the inevitable dirt and sweat, the blood and the loss, that is the genuine past.  The “romance” died quite early for me because I read and read and read, ever deeper into my chosen subjects. 

Living inside another time and place, and/or inside another culture, is truly an immersive experience; I love the scuba sense of diving in and swimming around inside the deep waters of history. Originally, I wrote from my own European-American perspective, and my books were set in 18th Century Europe or England or the colonial US.  The time shift alone caused me to change my perspective. I sometimes get nasty reviews because the 18th Century characters about whom I write do not behave up to the highest standards of the 21st Century. I always want to reply to these folks that I don't write these stories to make them comfortable. I write to show them as much as I can of what I've learned about what was--the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth--to the best of my ability.

Maybe I'd be richer if I sugar-coated, but taking the trip into the past and taking my readers along with me is always far more important than whatever is currently P.C. If you want to read about the 18th Century people, expect to meet  men who have "patriarchy" firmly entrenched in their heads and women who have no other recourse than to accept or attempt to circumvent whatever their menfolk, their churches and their society dish
out. Englishwomen, as every reader of Jane Austen ought to know, could not inherit property until quite recently.




http://bookswelove.net/authors/waldron-juliet/


In Genesee, and, later, to a far greater extent, in Fly Away Snow Goose, I had another experience. To write Snow Goose, I had to shed the Euro-based colonizer culture into which I was born so that I could inhabit (as far as I was able) a life-way with a totally different outlook. The Tlicho tribe in Fly Away Snow Goose were historically a nomadic, communal people, living in small groups that, for survival reasons, became even smaller in winter--who shared food with one another. They disapproved the kind of willful ignorance of their environment, the braggadocio and "me-first-ism" that is  rampant in the capital-driven European cultures which almost overwhelmed them. 





Instead of "conquerors of nature," the Tlicho strove to always to be in "right relationship" with the earth and her creatures, to eat and/or to make use of every piece of any animal they killed. They saw the spirits in the sky and in the earth and water all across the enormous terrain they traversed every year, as they followed the caribou migration. The land under their feet was holy. Everyone had to pull together, or the group would not survive the extreme winters where starvation was a very real threat. 

Telling this story, and the experience of immersion in the words and stories of my "subjects", has changed my outlook on the day-to-day world around me in a fundamental way.  This time, the research worked a sea-change. After studying the Tlicho, I've got on an entirely new pair of spectacles.  




https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/752162




~~Juliet Waldron
www.julietwaldron.com

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