a gallimaufry

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?

shiny new books: Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s review & Q&A

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve written a review for Shiny New Books, and it’s now up!

The book I wrote about is Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba and it really is splendid. Sebba has done an enormous amount of research to put together a very detailed, year-by-year picture of life in Paris for women, and she’s written it in a way that is completely engrossing. If you are even slightly interested in the history of the Second World War or in how people navigate complex moral choices under a poisonous authoritarian régime, this is a fascinating book to read.

I was also able to do a Q&A with the author about the background to Les Parisiennes, which you can find here. Anne Sebba worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters before turning her hand to non-fiction and biographies, and has a website here if you are interested. I could have asked her about a billion more questions but I didn’t want to be too nosy...

shiny new books: A House in Flanders review

Souvenir Press have just published a new edition of A House in Flanders, Michael Jenkins’ memoir of a summer in northern France with a houseful of elderly ‘aunts’, and I have reviewed it for Shiny New Books here.

If your taste runs to slightly eccentric families, golden summers and a hint of nostalgia amply balanced by the reminders of two world wars, then you will enjoy this – needless to say, I did. I’m only sorry that Jenkins didn’t write more books as he has a real talent for character and atmosphere (and here’s an interesting fact: he was the nephew of Elizabeth Jenkins, author of The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth I etc.).

(César Pattein or Patteyn, Landscape in Flanders, oil on canvas, found here; no date is given for the painting but according to Christie’s Pattein was a French artist who lived 1850–1931, a little early for the summer of 1951 when Michael Jenkins was there but since the ‘aunts’ continued to live as they had done for decades it seems appropriate to the spirit of the book)

Neutral Moresnet: a vanished state

As part of my English lessons, I force my poor seventh-year students to make short presentations to the rest of the class – they may choose the subject. The other night one student talked about Neutral Moresnet. What is that, I hear you cry, and is it tasty and cheese-based? Well.

After Napoleon had been defeated in 1815 and bundled off to St Helena, the French-occupied territories of Europe were dismantled. Borders were redrawn, and many lands were handed back to their previous rulers. This was not always a straightforward process. On the borders of the Netherlands and Prussia was a small patch of country on which was a valuable zinc mine. Both the Netherlands and Prussia felt it should be theirs, and felt it so strongly that the only solution seemed to be to make it an independent territory until they could reach an agreement about it – and so in 1816 Neutral Moresnet was born.

(Postcard showing Neutral Moresnet with Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Dutch Queen Wihelmina and Leopold II of Belgium; found here)

Neutral Moresnet was triangular in shape and about twice the size of Monaco, consisting initially of a village of about fifty houses, a church, the mine and 256 people. Not having its own legal system or mint, it adopted the Code Napoléon and the French franc – though Belgian, Prussian and Dutch currencies were also in circulation. (Neutral Moresnet did start its own currency but this was always unofficial.) It was governed jointly by royal commissioners from Prussia and the Netherlands at first; in 1830 Belgium won its independence and so took over the Dutch rôle. The northern tip of the Moresnet triangle became thus the border of four nations. The commissioners handled matters of justice, sending in judges to sit on cases, but appointed a mayor to deal with the municipal administration. The mayor appointed ten councillors to help him. None of the inhabitants had a vote of any sort and there was no appeal against any of the mayor’s decisions. However, this was not at all off-putting – by the time Moresnet disappeared, its population had swelled to about 4500 inhabitants – and this was because living in Neutral Moresnet was clearly rip-roaring fun and worth being disenfranchised for.

(The Vielle Montagne Zinc Mine in Kelmis, 1843; found here)

The zinc mine was the principal employer and also established five schools, a hospital and a bank. The mine paid well and taxes were extremely low. There were lots and lots of bars and three gin distilleries. With no import tariffs or customs checkpoints, and thick woodland over much of its territory, Neutral Moresnet quickly became a haven for smugglers, mainly spiriting Moresnetian booze into the Netherlands. Escaped convicts found it an ideal home. Because the people of Moresnet had no voting rights, they were considered to be stateless and were thus exempt from conscription into military service. Unsurprisingly, this made it even more attractive to incomers, especially since Belgium and Prussia were both quite fighty during the nineteenth century. Alas, in the end both nations got wise to this and from 1854 and 1874 Belgium and Prussia started conscripting those of their citizens who had moved there, and their descendants.

It was a testosterone-heavy society; men outnumbered women substantially and there was a lot of sex, booze and brawling. A lantern by the door of a building indicated a bar. Some of these establishments were very rough, others had gambling dens and cabarets and dancers with not too many clothes on. Rooms could be hired by the hour, the week or the month. Working in the mines may have been quite well paid but it was also very dangerous; perhaps this fuelled some of this recklessness. In a bid to curb immorality, the singing of dirty songs was banned.

But actually Neutral Moresnet wasn’t rip-roaring fun for everyone. Widows received no pension, which made them financially very vulnerable. Another vulnerable group was children. Women with unwanted pregnancies travelled to Neutral Moresnet to deliver; their children automatically received Moresnet nationality and were adopted. But at the age of six, the adopted children were old enough to be sent down the mine, poor little things.

(Entrance to the zinc mine; found here)

In 1885 the zinc mine was exhausted and closed. What to do next? Moresnet chose the fun option. In 1903, the tiny state’s first casino opened in the Hotel Bergerhoff: Belgium had forced all of its own casinos to close and the cunning Moresnetters spotted an opportunity. Belgium wasn’t terribly pleased with this and insisted that only twenty people at a time could assemble to gamble – so Moresnet quickly opened a second casino.* Unfortunately, this made Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany very angry and he threatened Moresnet with annexation if the casinos weren’t closed down. So that was that.

Meanwhile, Dr Wilhelm Molly, who had been chief doctor at the mine, proposed that Neutral Moresnet become the first Esperanto-speaking state. It would be called Amikejo, ‘place of friendship’.  Supporters learnt the language and an anthem was composed. In 1908 the World Congress of Esperanto declared that Neutral Moresnet was the capital of Esperanto (I don’t suppose there was a lot of competition).

(Postcard showing the meeting point of the four lands with assorted men in uniforms; found here)

You will be unsurprised to learn that the First World War put paid to Neutral Moresnet. When the dust cleared and the invading Germans were thrown out, it and several other German-speaking areas were awarded to Belgium under the Treaty of Versailles. Neutral Moresnet was no more, having existed only a little over a century, raffish and boozy, on the edge of three countries, and what my student described as ‘the closest thing to the Wild West Europe has ever had’.

If you go to the place where Neutral Moresnet once was, you can still see the entrances to the zinc mines, now sealed. The company which once owned them (Vieille Montagne) still exists, now as VMZINC, part of Umicore. Of the sixty boundary markers, fifty are still in place around the old borders. If you are a stamp collector, you will now that the stamps of Neutral Moresnet, produced for only seventeen days, are extremely valuable. And amazingly, there is one inhabitant of Neutral Moresnet who is still alive: Catharina Meessen, born in 1914.

It is also the only place on earth where the yellow zinc violet grows (photograph from here).

If you are interested, there is a more detailed and properly sourced article here by Peter C. Earle; I have also supplemented what my student told us with Dutch Wikipedia and an article from historiek.net. My student was inspired by a book by Philip Dröge, Moresnet (Houten, NL: Spectrum, 2016, in Dutch).

* This is what my student told me but I have not found anything online to back it up.

shiny new victorian fairy tales

(‘Sipping their Cups of Dew’, ‘Acheta Domestica’, Episodes of Insect Life, Vol. II (London: Reeve and Benham, 1850); taken from Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: OUP, 2015))

I love holidays. I love not working and lounging about in the sunshine and reading lots and not getting dressed until lunchtime and playing with my daughter. I have never understood people who say they’d still work if they won the Lottery. I wouldn’t!  I remember on the teacher-training course I followed, all the trainers said sternly that if you wanted to be a teacher because of the lovely long holidays, you Wouldn’t Last Long in teaching. ‘Bother’, thought I, but three years down the line I’m still hanging in there and yes, enjoying the holidays; perhaps there are exceptions to that rule.

So, just in case you aren’t a teacher or don’t have a child at a Belgian school, I should tell you that the last two weeks have been Easter holidays and thus I have not really strayed near the computer. I am sure that you all know by now that the latest wallet-worrying edition of Shiny New Books is out and as usual stuffed to the gills with good things.

I have two reviews in there this time. The first is a new collection of Victorian fairy tales edited by Michael Newton. This was terrific fun and highly recommended: there are other similar collections but this one contains stories not in print anywhere else and a really good introduction by Newton. The other is Science in Wonderland, by Melanie Keene, an exploration of what happens when nineteenth-century enthusiasm for science meets fairy tales and produces some truly bizarre educational texts for children. The dreadful photograph at the beginning of this post is from there (taken by me, as are all the pictures in this post).

Melanie Keene mentions an album by two Victorian teenagers, Madalene and Louisa Pashley, pages from which were published in 1980. The album sounded so appealing I had to track down a copy, of course not much effort with the internet. Madalene and Louisa were enthusiastic entomologists, and their album, lavishly illustrated with their watercolours, outlines some of their adventures (bizarrely written in the personae of middle-aged spinsters). The sisters often shrink to insect size. Their adventures include ‘DARING NIGHT EXPEDITIONS’, lassoing glow worms, being outwitted by a grasshopper and capturing a dragonfly, all very dramatic. However, their lives are complicated by a succession of irritating governesses (‘none of them was interested in beetles and all of them persisted in setting us SUMS’), their ‘sour’ older sister Georgie whose mere presence causes it to rain, a staid drawing master and their admiral Papa, whose duties consist of ‘discussing repairs to ships of the line, and making arrangements for DINNER PARTIES and croquet matches’. Were I not a teacher with lots of holidays, I think I’d be an admiral, that’s a job I could manage. It all ends happily: ‘After that Papa decided that we were too old for governesses and too idle for drawing masters so we were able to entomologise as much as we liked with no one to bother us.’

(The book is The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa: Pages from the Album of L. and M.S. Pasley, Victorian Entomologists, introduced by Tim Jeal, London: William Collins, 1980, should you be interested.)

Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories, by Diane Purkiss

What do you think of when you think of fairies? A dead ancestor? A household help? Something tiny  in a sparkly pink skirt? Fairies have been all of these, and in this fascinating book Diane Purkiss traces their biography in British culture from their origins as child-eating demons right down to Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies and little girls’ fancy dresses.

‘Human nature’, writes Purkiss:

seems to abhor a blank space on a map. Where there are no human habitations, no towns, where villages dwindle into farms and farms into woods, mapping stops. Then the imagination rushes to fill the woods with something other than blank darkness: nymphs, satyrs, elves, gnomes, pixies, fairies.

But what exactly are fairies? To answer this, Purkiss advises us to look at what fairies do. Her conclusion is that:

A fairy is someone who appears at and governs one of the big crises of mortal life: birth, childhood and its transitions, adolescence, sexual awakening, pregnancy and childbirth, old age, death. She presides over the borders of our lives, the seams between one phase of life and another. […] She is a gatekeeper, and she guards the entrance to a new realm. Like all gatekeepers, she is Janus-faced, ambiguous: she has a lovely face, a face of promise, and a hideous face, a face of fear.

Broadly speaking, Purkiss’s thesis is that fairies are what we create to fill the dark places during times of transition, anxiety, uncertainty. They are identified with the Other: demons, ghosts, foreigners. And when people talk about fairies, it’s not necessarily because they believe in them but because they offer ways of speaking about the unspeakable.

The origins of fairies, Purkiss proposes, can be found in the ancient cultures of lands bordering the Mediterranean, to the nymphs, Lamiae and Gorgons of Greece, and even further back to Mesopotamian and Egyptian child-killing demons. These are the creatures of nightmare, the explanations for unnatural deaths. Many of them have died prematurely, or are infertile, and are compelled to visit their circumstances on others, slaying the young, sucking the life from babies even as they appear to suckle them. The fairies of mediaeval and early modern Europe continue to be associated with birth, sex and death, and prey on humans – handsome young men and babies especially. But they can offer occult knowledge or gold to those who dare to deal with them, and some fairies – hobs, brownies – will even clean your house if you leave out a dish of milk in payment. I’m still looking for those fairies.

Fairies provide ways of talking about and even justifying infanticide, incest, sexual deviance and sudden death. They also become associated with colonialism. Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream get the blame in Purkiss’s eyes for the beginnings of the tiny, ‘cute’ fairy, whose apogee is in the Victorian era. The threat of the fairy dwindles with its size: it becomes possessable rather than possessing, an object to be purchased, consumed. While the scary fairy is more or less squashed by the Enlightenment, the pretty little fairy scampers around the stage in tights and spangles, popping out of trap-doors and flying on wires as theatres embrace new technologies. No longer a seductive revenant dressed in black, the fairy becomes childlike and innocent and Purkiss shows it as contributing to changing ideas about childhood during the nineteenth century. Fairies are linked to nationalism and war at the beginning of the twentieth century and thereafter lose any remaining cultural resonance for the majority of the population. Now that our planet is mapped, Purkiss argues, ‘Aliens are our fairies’.

(Henry Fuseli, Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen, a scene from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, oil on canvas, c. 1788; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; found here)

As you can guess from this very crude outline, this book covers an enormous amount of ground and Diane Purkiss has done an admirable job in creating a clear, coherent ‘biography’ from masses and masses of information including a couple of thousand years of literature, court records including Scottish witch trials, newspapers, folkloric research and philosophy. Because of fairies’ association with the Other, their history becomes a history of attitudes to difference and objects of fear. It is also fun because, while I wouldn’t and couldn’t pick a fight with Purkiss over her scholarship, she is unafraid to reveal her biases and thus invite discussion of her interpretations. And that is an attitude I like, although her wit is often barbed. Cruelly she mocks teeny tiny sparkly fairies, the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley, middle-class mummies, Puck, the now-defunct chain of shops called ‘Past Times’, do-gooders, which is amusing if you’re not included in her scorn, perhaps less so if you are … And she doesn’t have much time for people who do actually believe in fairies. They might want to avoid reading this book.

My copy of Troublesome Things is second-hand. The book is still in print, but like its subject, since its beginnings it’s changed its name (a couple of times: At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Nymphs and Other Troublesome Things seems to be its US title and Fairies and Fairy Stories: A History is its current British title) and its appearance: the original cover illustration of a detail of Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Fella’s Master Stroke has been updated to something pink and Flowery Fairyish which I rather think Purkiss must loathe…