I was a bit nervous about reading Valerie Poore’s account of moving into an old barge that was little more than a shell and converting it into a floating home. Not only am I not that interested in memoirs, but I have no enthusiasm for blokey conversations about re-wiring and the joys of MDF boarding. I took the risk, though, because I have become a fan of Val Poore’s blog, Rivergirl (https://rivergirlrotterdam.blogspot.com/). She makes life on a barge sound fun, which, given that it’s too hot in summer, freezing cold in winter and your whole life has to fit into 30 square metres, is impressive.
It turns out that Val’s no more a fan of DIY than I am – or she certainly wasn’t when she bought her heritage barge, the Vereeniging. It was a literal museum piece and a thing of beauty, to a historic barge enthusiast at least.
Now I’m a big fan of museums, but would you really want to live in one? Val did. She was allowed to change the inside around, so long as she kept the barge looking like it should. That meant the first step was to strip everything out and start building her accommodation pretty much from scratch.
(Actually, the first step should have been to make sure that the hull was solid and keeping the water out. Still, we all learn from our mistakes, don’t we Val?)
Building her new home meant learning carpentry and then wiring and finally plumbing. And, of course, there was the engine to maintain. The Vereeniging isn’t a twee little houseboat. It’s a real schip that can (and does) pootle around the local canals. So basically, she has all the problems of living in a beautiful but old and run-down house, combined with the doubtful pleasures of maintaining an old car except that she’s doing all this on water and she hasn’t even got anywhere to go to the loo.
Here’s a picture of the Vereeniging from a recent post on Val’s blog
It should be miserable (every so often she allows herself a good cry) but the harbour she lives in is filled with a weird collection of friendly and supportive people and she learns as she goes along until slowly (oh so slowly) the Vereeniging turns into the home she always wanted. And on the way she learns Dutch (doing all this in a language she speaks fluently would take the fun out of it) and explores Rotterdam and beyond.
Harbour Ways is a vibrant and life-affirming book that can even make the details of plumbing a toilet into a boat surprisingly interesting. I found myself anxious to know what would go wrong next and how Val would overcome her problems. It read like a thriller: I just had to turn the page. Definitely recommended.
My home is very close to Marble Hill House in Twickenham, where Henrietta Howard lived. The house is owned by English Heritage and has recently undergone major work. English Heritage are restoring the place to how it was when Henrietta Howard lived there and this has meant a lot of discussion about who she was and the life she lived.
Tracy Borman’s book was written before this sudden flurry of interest in Henrietta, but it remains the standard book for people wanting to know more about her.
The instant summary of her life (as used to appear on posters advertising the house) is that she was the mistress of George II and she was given Marble Hill as a retirement gift on leaving the court.
Tracy Borman’s book shows that she was much more interesting than this (inaccurate) summary suggests.
Henrietta had an unfortunate life. Orphaned at an early age (her father was killed in a duel), she had made an unfortunate marriage in 1706 to a man who robbed her, beat her and essentially made her life hell. Reduced to living in lodgings in “an unsavoury part of the capital” and often skipping meals because her husband took all her money, Henrietta moved into a single room shared with her son and a husband she by now loathed, sold her furniture and saved whatever money she could from an allowance from her father’s will until she had gathered enough to pay to travel to Hanover. Her plan, almost incredibly bold, was to ingratiate herself with the Hanoverian court so that when Queen Anne died and the Hanoverians inherited the English throne, she would be well placed for a position in their London court. (I know it’s complicated but just trust me on this. We love to tell ourselves that the monarchy traces a single line back to Alfred the Great, but that line has an awful lot of kinks in it.)
Despite the fact that she arrived impoverished and with her drunken, loutish husband in tow, and that she was only on the very fringes of the English aristocracy, her desperate gamble succeeded. She made such a favourable impression on Sophia, the Hanoverian monarch who was tipped to inherit the English throne that Sophia promised that she would make her a Woman of the Bedchamber if she became Queen of England.
Queen Anne inconsiderately refused to die. Henrietta, though now a fixture in the Hanoverian court, had no official status. In 1714, Sophia was the first of the two royal ladies to shuffle off this mortal coil. Weeks later, Anne followed.
In the absence of his mother, George drew the lucky ticket that made him king of England. He took his time travelling to his new realm. (He never liked the country and almost resented being king.) Eventually, though, a date was fixed for his coronation and Henrietta and her husband returned to London ready to welcome their Hanoverian friends to their new home. It was a tense time. With Sophia dead, there were no firm promises of any position in George’s court.
Henrietta hitched her wagon to the rising star of George’s daughter-in-law, Caroline. Caroline’s husband (also George, because Hanoverians were unimaginative with names) would become king on his father’s death. Fortunately, Caroline had become very friendly with Henrietta in Hanover and honoured her mother-in-law’s promise that Mrs Howard should become a Woman of the Bedchamber.
Henrietta, then, was a professional courtier. Intelligent, charming and diplomatic, she naturally rose through the ranks of the court. By 1718, she had become George’s mistress, whilst continuing to serve with his wife, who she would spend hours with almost every day.
There is no suggestion that this was a grand passion. George was unfashionably devoted to his wife. In fact, one reason for taking a mistress may well have been to counter the impression, widely held in court, that it was Caroline who made all the decisions in their household. George was not a particularly sensuous man and his lovemaking took place to a strict timetable. A mistress was customary and convenient and Henrietta, subtle enough to serve both George and his wife, was ideally suited to the position.
She remained George’s mistress until 1734 by which time George was king. During that time her links with Caroline and George made her a key figure in the intrigues of the court, although she did her best not to become identified with the various factions. Eventually, though, she was inevitably drawn into politics and championed the Tory cause, to the intense irritation of Queen Caroline, who was a supporter of Walpole. The political divisions in court and her own fading charms (she was 45) led her to find life in royal circles increasingly difficult and she was relieved when the break with George was finally official.
She had known a break was coming for years and had prepared her house in Marble Hill as an escape from court life. She loved the place and spent as much time in it as possible. It’s not true that it was a retirement present from the king: she had bought it with her own money while she was still serving at court. However, the king did make her generous settlement when she left which enabled her to finish the building (work was constantly being delayed because of cost overruns) and live there comfortably.
Her appalling husband had died, leaving her free to marry again. She wed George Berkeley in 1735. She was too old to have children by then, but the couple were devoted to each other and she moved nieces and nephews into Marble Hill where they lived very happily as a family (albeit it one with a degree of coming and going among the younger family members).
Henrietta’s terrible experience of her first marriage and the helplessness of her position as a woman made her what we might well think of as an early feminist. She helped women friends and relatives to protect themselves against the predations of their menfolk and her will, when she finally died, tied up bequests to women in a way that ensured that they maintained control of their money in an age where most women were entirely dependent on husbands or fathers.
She had not only been involved in court and political life, but was the centre of an intellectual circle that included the playwright, Gay; the poet, Pope; and the novelist, Swift. Her private memoirs are regarded as one of the best guides to life in the early Georgian courts and the house at Marble Hill (the designing of which had been one of her main pleasures in her later years at court) still stands as one of the finest Palladian villas in England. (A quick Google search suggests several other contenders for this title but it is certainly a fine example.)
Even this whistle-stop tour of Henrietta’s life has run well past my usual word-count and Tracy Borman’s book is an impressive 350 pages. Sadly, though, she is distracted by the splendours of the Georgian court and the eccentricities of the courtiers and we can lose sight of Mrs Howard for extended periods. Pages are dedicated to details of the procession in which George I entered London, though Henrietta was not involved. There are rambling asides on Swift’s career and the social rituals of Bath (although, in fairness, these were rituals that Henrietta definitely joined in). But, although there is an awful lot about Marble Hill there are huge gaps in what we are told about the house. As it stands today, it is unliveable in. (There are, most obviously, no cooking facilities.) In fact, it has been described in the past as really just a ‘party house’ rather than a proper home. Borman makes it clear that it was definitely ‘a proper home’ and one which was lived in by young people as well as Henrietta who was in her mid-forties before she could spend much time there. I’m biased, knowing the place as I do, but a little more about the domestic arrangements would have been appreciated, given how much of the book is devoted to discussing the house.
Much the same is true of Hampton Court. A visit there makes it clear that the physical position of Mrs Howard’s rooms put her geographically close to the centre of power and this is important in understanding why she was (as Borman says) known as ‘the Swiss cantons’ (connected to everywhere but independent of all). This is not at all obvious from her account.
Sometimes Borman seems overwhelmed by the volume of material she has to hand. Why so much irrelevant discussion of details of the peccadillos of the young maids-in-waiting while Henrietta’s London house in Savile Street gets only a couple of pages? The Hanoverians were expert in distracting attention from things that mattered with glorious public displays (like the coronation, which is described at length) and riveting private feuds. Borman seems no less distracted than the citizenry of the time. There are also one or two occasions where I think some of her details is questionable. I would doubt, for example, if Twickenham is really only a couple of hours from London by river. (On a favourable tide and with a following wind, maybe, but other historians of the period would differ.)
Is it worth reading? Emphatically yes. Henrietta Howard is a fascinating figure and hers is a wonderful story to tell. Tracy Borman’s book is a good place to start, but I hope it is far from the last word we will read on this remarkable woman.
Six weeks in and our mood changes with the weather — which is fortunately very good. Even so, my beloved turns her Civil Servant’s mind to the way that government has handled things so far and to plans for the future and she is mightily unimpressed with what she sees.
Week 6 completed. I have been going through my calendar, obsessively, trying to keep track of a time in a world where workdays and week-ends have become mushed.
What do days look like now? We are finding our own, natural rhythms unencumbered by outside pressure. Young people have moved their days later. Mike mentioned going to bed at 3am. Not us. I’m now in bed by 10pm, barely listening to the news before sleep engulfs me. On Thursday (for example) I woke up at 7 am and spent 40 minutes coming to terms with the world, listening to the radio, cuddling, chatting, before getting out of bed. All that sense of urgency – places to be, things to do – has gone. It’s usually a leisurely breakfast around 8am and I’m seldom at my desk before 9am.
Once I’ve switched on the computer, work takes me along with it. Writing is calming, normal and once I get into the details I forget how irrelevant it is.
Lunch is dead on 1pm – the fixed point of the day, with the news, two slices of bread and a piece of fruit. Then back to work, and (usually) a long chat to J.
I tend to collapse around 4pm. The days I would keep going until 6pm have long passed. It’s as if the illusion of normal work involves a level of mental energy that can’t be sustained for more than 6 hours.
4pm to 6.30pm is the danger slot. Low energy levels. Feelings of uselessness. Hypochondria – am I really better? Is that cough hay fever? Do my eyes sting? Am I short of breath? Not helped by a recent interview with a lung consultant saying covid sufferers can have dangerously low levels of oxygen without realising it.
The temptation is to listen to the Daily Numbers, aka Daily Fantasy or Daily Pravda. This is a mistake. Guaranteed to exacerbate all feelings of uselessness and hypochondria, while adding anger into the mix, and leading to endless repetitive discussions with Tom about delays in counting deaths, the nature of a peak, what happens to people who die in ambulances (are they counted as dying in hospital) etc etc. We spend so much energy on these bloody figures, and the more you look at them the less reliable they become.
Much better to get outside. On Thursday Tom and I strolled to York House Gardens where we found a quiet bench where no-one goes and sat in the sun reading. Lovely. Mike said it was illegal – but who knows? No-one minded, mainly because the only people to see us in our nook, surrounded by hedges, were also motivated by a criminal intention to sit in the sun.
Then it’s time to cook. I haven’t tried clever stuff – or made pastry – or baked. But I do like chopping vegetables, and garlic, and ginger, and loading them into the pressure cooker to make stews. On Thursday my red cabbage/beans stew, blending bramleys (for sourness) with dried apricots (for sweetness). Served with couscous and sour cream – delicious.
After supper its tele time. We’ve now finished Tiger King, Spinning Out, I’m not OK with this and Belgravia. Thursday was Sabrina Season 3 and Friday was Quiz. Maybe a bit of colouring in while I wait for Tom to scroll through Twitter.
After tele we try to motivate each other to get off our arses and dance. We are now dancing really slow, moody stuff. On Thursday it was Summertime. Then a drink (I’m still on hot squash and archers) with a radio comedy. And so to bed.
In Friday, we finally got our bikes out and cycled to the Woodland Gardens in Bushy Park. Rhododendrons and azaleas were beginning to come out. The fauna seemed to have lost all fear. A rabbit with two babies munched its way through foliage without a care in the world. A curious young fox came up to us as we sat on a bench. Ducks and geese, but very few people. It felt like old times, when we used to visit stately homes and gardens. If we had been able to buy an ice cream at the (now closed) kiosk, it would have been completely BC. We felt optimistic and talked about the holidays we would have over the summer.
On Sunday I only left the house to buy a newspaper. Mike queried whether this was essential, within the meaning of the Coronavirus Regulations (Regulations I have studiously avoided looking at). I reasoned that if the Government allowed the Sunday Times to be printed, and the corner shop to be open to sell it, it would make no sense to forbid me from buying it.
A day of newspaper reading finally scotched the idea I had flirted with briefly, back in March, that Government was competent and guided by experts. Obviously, after 10 years of austerity we had failed to maintain our epidemic stocks. And when we last did an exercise in 2016, maybe Government could be forgiven for not seeing the recommendations as a priority. We had Brexit. And obviously we had other things to think about in 2017, 2018 and 2019 (Brexit). But by January 2020, the lack of an implemented Pandemic Plan should have been seen as a bit of a problem. Those five weeks of inaction don’t put the Government in a good light. Did junior civil servants fail to understand the extent of our under-preparedness? Did senior civil servants fail to pass on the message? Or did politicians ignore it? My money is on all three.
I had a long phone call with L about transport policy after the all this is over. Almost all transport providers are no longer solvent and completely depend on Government funding. The only good news is that Transport for London’s previous budget problems have disappeared into a gaping maw. “We will have to rethink land use”, L said. “City centres will never to be same again, as we work locally and from home. It’s no longer a question of just getting people from A to B.”
If this continues for more than a few months, Government funding will be less about just returning to the status quo ante – and more about deciding what we want for the future. There are lots of opportunities here to do things better, with a greener, more resilient economy with less reliance of private cars and attenuated supply chains. But also a huge worry about whether our current Government machine can deliver.
I published my second Urban Fantasy book just over a year ago. It was called Something Wicked. It introduced Chief Inspector Pole, who worked for Section S, a secretive police department hidden away in Counter Terrorism.
Pole is a vampire and he investigates crimes that involve a supernatural element. When a peer of the realm is found drained of blood in his own apartment, Pole is the obvious man (or reasonable approximation) to look into it. Unfortunately for him, old-school detective Chief Inspector Galbraith is already on the case and reluctant to hand over responsibility.
The two police officers investigate the crime together and Galbraith has to reassess his ideas about vampires, while Pole comes to the conclusion that humans may make better colleagues than he had expected.
The whole book was really just an excuse for me to write about a world where vampires live among us and dance tango. I got the idea in Buenos Aires with its frantic night-life populated by people that you simply never see by daylight. The elaborate graveyards filled with ‘streets’ of mausolea meant the idea that the tango sub-culture was mainly made up of vampires was an easy step to take.
Buenos Aires cemetery
I love tango, so it seemed natural to me that if you had eternity to perfect a skill, tango would be the obvious thing to go for.
Something Wicked isn’t a book that takes itself too seriously. I had enormous fun writing it. Slightly to my surprise, it seems that a lot of people had fun reading it (it’s had some lovely reviews) and there were suggestions that I should write another book featuring Galbraith and Pole. So I have.
Eat the Poor features a werewolf and Members of Parliament. After all, if vampires would naturally be attracted to tango, what could be a more obvious line of business for a werewolf than politics? It will be published in May.
All my books are written to stand alone, but there’s no doubt that Eat the Poor is more fun if you have already met Chief Inspector Pole and Section S. So next week (from Thursday) I’ll be selling Something Wicked at just 99p for a week. I do hope you enjoy it and will be tempted to buy Eat the Poor once it is released.
The second of two guest posts this week (three if you count Tammy’s regular journal entry on Thursday). This time it’s Anna Legat talking about one of the key issues in her new novel, Broken.
Father Joseph is one of the two main protagonists of my domestic noir thriller, Broken. He is a catholic priest who receives disturbing confessions from a psychopathic killer he nicknames the Prophet. There is very little contrition in the Prophet’s confessions. Instead of remorse, there is triumph and self-righteousness. The Prophet is boasting about murdering innocent women, safe in the knowledge that his deeds will forever remain between him, Father Joseph and God, because that’s what the seal of confession is all about.
This is sheer torture for Father Joseph. He is bound to protect a secret so vile that it makes him re-evaluate his faith and question his calling. But his moral dilemmas and internal demons aside, will he be able to act – to actually stop the killer? That could mean breaking the holy seal of confession.
The institution of confession is as old as the Catholic Church. Its principle is straightforward: you confess your sins to God (via your priest), you regret them with all your heart, you are given a penance and finally – the cherry on top – you receive an absolution. That means that the slate is wiped clean and you are free to go and sin again, or preferably show self-restraint and resist the temptation of sin.
In the sixteenth century, the Reformation rejected the idea of confession. Historically, confession has been a fantastic tool for the Church to gather intelligence about the shady dealings of kings and nobles, and to use that knowledge to gain influence and wealth. Knowing other people’s secrets can be very useful indeed when one is not afraid to exploit that knowledge for one’s own ends. The absolution of sins was also a very profitable proposition as it often came at a hefty price to the penitent. To prevent the misappropriation of the knowledge acquired through the confessional box, the clergy was bound by the seal of confession. Thus, no priest (if he wishes to remain ordained) can break that seal and tell a living soul what he hears in confession. Even if it is a preventable crime.
I would like to share a short extract from Broken to illustrate Father Joseph’s torment.
“I am not claustrophobic and am well accustomed to the confined space the confession box has to offer. It has been my second home for thirty-odd years. Sometimes I refer to it as my holiday home because I normally dwell here for hours on end in anticipation of holidays. Christmas and Easter are my high seasons. That’s when the penitents come to unburden themselves. They whisper their transgressions into my ear – God’s ear theoretically, but let’s not split hairs. I grant them absolution so that they can go out into the world with their consciences clear. They will sin again and be back to recite their wrongdoings in the privacy of my wooden box. I will be here for them and we will go the whole hog all over again: confession, contrition, absolution and a few Hail Marys for their penance. I will mumble my chant of absolution in Latin, as you do when you are a catholic priest. I will sing to them the melodious incantation of Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. It’s an uplifting moment – magical. It’s like the beating of the drums in the night. The penitents’ sins release their souls from darkness, and, so cleansed, my penitents walk away, light-hearted and hopeful, promising to be good, and meaning every word of it.
Except for that one man – the Prophet.
He doesn’t mean any of it.
I can’t absolve him without true remorse on his part, and he has none. He is proud of what he has done and what he will continue to do. He comes to me to brag about it. He knows I won’t give him absolution, but he keeps coming back. It isn’t absolution he is after. It’s something else. I fear his purpose is to torture me: to taint me with his insanity and seduce me to the side of evil. He has made me into his accomplice – a silent partner in crime. That’s because I cannot betray him. He knows he is protected by the seal of confession. I will sooner gag on what I know than speak of it to any living soul. It is between the monster and me. God is in on it too, I suppose. He is listening through me, and then He does nothing. I’d think it shouldn’t be hard for God to strike the man dead on the spot. But no. God chooses to love the man and lets him perpetuate his evil. Does God love the man’s victims less than He loves him? It’s a blasphemous idea and I banish it from my thoughts. I hope God knows something I don’t, and I submit to His will. We let the man walk away unscathed.
‘I’m only a humble tool in God’s hands, Father, doing His will.’ The man’s voice is no more than a low whisper, a tapping and hissing of consonants and only an intimation of vowels between them. He is careful not to raise his voice and give me an idea of his pitch and tone. He has bleached his speech free of accent. I may know him, but I wouldn’t recognise his voice if we spoke outside the confessional. He has made sure of that. His breath is infused with mint. He always chews gum so that I can’t smell his breath. He wears gloves and a beanie. It comes down to the bridge of his nose. I can’t see his eyes. His beard veils his lips. I don’t tell him this, but he doesn’t really have to go to such lengths to conceal his identity. I don’t want to know it. I am bound to secrecy and so I don’t wish to discover who he is. My resolve would be tested beyond endurance if I did.
‘I’ll be back,’ he says like he is the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger, an avenger of the innocent. He thinks he is. He definitely fancies himself a holy man. That is why I call him the Prophet. ‘You can sleep in peace, Father. Happy Easter.’ He crosses himself, pulls himself up to his feet and leaves.”
Broken was published by SpellBound Books on 15th April.
Anna Legat
Anna Legat is a Wiltshire-based author, best known for her DI Gillian Marsh murder mystery series. A globe-trotter and Jack-of-all-trades, Anna has been an attorney, legal adviser, a silver-service waitress, a school teacher and a librarian. She read law at the University of South Africa and Warsaw University, then gained teaching qualifications in New Zealand. She has lived in far-flung places all over the world where she delighted in people-watching and collecting precious life experiences for her stories. Anna writes, reads, lives and breathes books and can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction.
