I saw a picture somewhere on social media posted by an author who is writing their first vampire book. I can’t find it now, but it showed a couple (presumably vampires) in a dance hold.
It will be fun if someone else produces a vampire tale featuring dancers with, let’s say, specialist dietary requirements, but I hope, dear readers, that you won’t forget that you saw it here first. My ‘Galbraith & Pole’ series (three so far, but there will be more) started with Something Wicked which features murder, mystery and tango.
They say you should write about what you know and I’m putting together this blog post between Monday night’s tango and Wednesday night’s tango with a couple more evenings of tango planned for the weekend. It’s fair to say that the references to tango in the book are well researched.
The idea of tango-dancing vampires came on one of my many visits to Buenos Aires, a city almost as famous for its spectacular cemeteries as for the celebrated dance. You seem to see so many more people after dark then are around in the day and, first thing in the morning, it’s easy to believe that the weary, somnambulant creatures propping themselves up on public transport are related to the Undead.
Buenos Aires street scene. Note that the dancers stay in the shadows
Chief Inspector Pole is not your typical vampire. He’s urbane and sophisticated and has been known to cook with garlic just to make a point. But mess with him and you can see a more ruthless side to his character. Fortunately, he uses his powers for good – mostly.
If you haven’t read my Urban Fantasy books before, give Something Wicked a go. It’s just £2.99 on Kindle.
Amazon reviews
Here are some of the things people have said about it on Amazon:
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then Something Wicked is definitely for you.
Cleverly-conceived, well-written and excellently plotted
I shall never look at Brompton Cemetery in quite the same way again!
A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!
Some of us who show people round Marble Hill House took a busman’s holiday this week and went to visit Pope’s Grotto.
Marble Hill House
Alexander Pope is important to the story of Marble Hill because he was a great friend of the first owner of the house, Henrietta Howard. Henrietta probably moved here partly because Pope owned house a little way further up the Thames just beyond Twickenham. He was very interested in gardening and his garden was, at the time, quite well known. Unfortunately for him, most of it was on the other side of the road from his house which had a lawn stretching down to the river but little space for the elaborate garden design he wanted. So, this being the 18th century and Pope being quite well off, he built a tunnel under the road to access the rest of the garden. The tunnel was built out from the cellars of the house and the whole underground work was decorated as a grotto, which expanded to have side passages and even an underground waterfall. It was probably the inspiration for the grotto that Henrietta had built at Marble Hill, but his was much larger and more elaborate.
Grotto at Marble Hill
Unfortunately, in the course of 300 years It deteriorated quite badly. His house was demolished and a new building constructed over the grotto. People I know who saw it when we first moved to Twickenham said it was little more than a gloomy cellar with some rocks stuck on the wall. Fortunately, if 18th century grottoes are your thing, over the last few years it has been opened up and substantially restored. Although it was originally decorated with bits of mirror and glass to make a sort of shiny pretty space, Pope later developed an interest in geology and decided to make the whole thing into a sort of mystical mine decorated with different kinds of stones and minerals. We have descriptions of it from the time allowing us to replace many of the rocks that have been lost. The effect is simultaneously gloomy (it’s quite dark down there) and rather pretty. You can definitely feel transported back to Georgian times.
More on grottoes
Coincidentally, Deborah Swift has just written about grotto’s in her newsletter. Here’s the LINK. They are very different to Pope’s and Henrietta’s!
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We’re still working the last of summer for all it’s worth. This week we went to Burghley to see the house started in 1555 by William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth. He was the most important politician in the country and built Burghley as his legacy, something that would be handed down through his family, a constant reminder of his power and influence. Not that he had much time to spend there as it is buried away near Peterborough, 90-odd miles from the court in London.
It worked out pretty much as he had planned.
Although the exterior would be recognisable to William Cecil, inside it has been substantially gutted and rebuilt. Only the splendid Tudor kitchens remain largely unchanged.
The rest of the house was remodelled by the 5th Earl of Exeter in the 17th century and then again by the 9th Earl in the 18th. The great long galleries were broken up into smaller (but still enormous) rooms, mainly, it seems, to provide extra wall space to display a ridiculous number of paintings. The family still lives in the house, which must at times feel like camping out in an art gallery.
The 9th Earl commissioned Capability Brown to landscape his grounds. Brown also made changes to the house, including demolishing an entire wing that was obstructing the view!
The design of the rooms features a lot of dark wood and vast paintings of wars and ancestors. Perhaps surprisingly for the English aristocracy, there is little overlap between the two. The Cecils were not a particularly martial family but were better known as collectors. Besides their paintings, they bought porcelain (especially from Japan) and fine furniture. (There are some wonderful marquetry cabinets.) The overall effect is rather overwhelming and surprisingly unphotogenic, hence the absence of photos on this blog. The design works by just being so very, very big. It’s too large to capture well in a picture. It’s also notable for a distinct absence of lightness of touch or humour. It’s about impressing you guests (there have been visits from Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II) not about welcoming them with tea and cake.
We were there for hours and I know of a lot more about Japanese porcelain than I did when we arrived. It’s arguably the finest Elizabethan House in England and well worth a visit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to live there.
The grounds are beautiful. There’s an ice house for regular readers of this blog who have seen photos of the others I’ve collected. It’s the first one I’ve visited outside West London, although there are examples all round the country.
There’s a sculpture garden too, which displays some interesting works. I was relieved to discover that the 21st century family have exactly the lightness of touch in their choice of sculptures that seems to have escaped previous generations of collectors. It’s not every sculpture collection that includes a mouse on a surfboard.
If you’re visiting, make sure you leave time to look round the nearby town of Stamford, which is lovely.
There has been a lot of talk lately about how people in Britain don’t know anything about the history of the British Empire. The ‘Empire Project’, people say, should be looked at afresh. The British should face up to the reality of the things that the country did in the past.
The problem is that it’s an uncomfortable thing to do. Partly because from a 21st century liberal perspective much of the Empire Project was morally objectionable, but also because it means questioning some of the same 21st century liberal thinking about heroes of the liberation struggle.
My book, Cawnpore, was first published in 2011, long before the recent resurgence of interest in Empire. It’s set in 1857 and we are immediately mired in controversy.
I refer to the events of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny because my ‘Empire’ stories are written in the first person and that’s what people called the fighting in India then. (For the same reason, I write about Cawnpore rather than call it by its modern name of Kanpur.) Indians tend to refer to the same conflict as the First Indian War of Independence. The Indian name is slightly more accurate but both are misleading. It was definitely not a mutiny, but nor was it a war of Indians vs Europeans. In today’s terminology, it was probably best described as an insurgency.
If there is controversy about the name of the place the book is set and what to call the events at the heart of the story, that’s nothing to the differences in the way that the people in the story are viewed. (Except for my fictional narrator, almost everybody in the book is a real person.)
The story of Cawnpore, whoever tells it, is a tragedy. British forces, surrendering after a long siege, were massacred. The Indian commanders attempted to save many of the women and children who had been trapped in the siege. Later, though, all the women and children were massacred in their turn.
It was, by any standards, utterly appalling. It was used by the British to justify reprisals all across India, with the mass murder of men, most of whom were nowhere near Cawnpore and many of whom were not involved in any rebellion.
The Memorial Well on the site of the massacre, photographed in 1860
Both Indians and Europeans have much to be ashamed off. Yet until late in the 20th century, Cawnpore was taught in British history books as a story of native savagery. There was little discussion of why British troops were in India in the first place and nothing about the horrific reprisals against civilians. Now the pendulum has swung. The memorial on the site of the massacre has been removed and the park where it was has been renamed after the man responsible for the killings, Nana Sahib. He has been hailed as a hero of the liberation struggle. His image has even appeared on postage stamps.
The trouble with discussions of the rights and (multiple) wrongs of the Empire Project is that the issues are seldom as ethically clear-cut as modern commentators would like and the details of particular events have often been lost or lack context. In many ways, works of fiction can raise these issues more easily than history books. In my case, Cawnpore describes the events of 1857 as seen by a European who was there but who was horrified by the actions of both sides. The reader sees things as my fictional narrator saw them and then has to draw their own conclusions as to where their sympathies lie.
On my blog last week, I mentioned my vampire policeman, Chief Inspector Pole. Most of you know me (if you know me at all) as a writer of historical fiction, but I also write Urban Fantasy. My Galbraith & Pole stories feature a vampire who works for the Metropolitan police.
As you will have realised, Chief Inspector Pole is not you average vampire. For this series, I tried to come up with a more 21st century take on vampires.
The ultimate vampire, of course, is Dracula and the classic book about him is Bram Stoker’s novel. But if you want to write about vampires nowadays, you need to take a long, hard look at the myth. Can vampires really turn themselves into wolves or bats? Do the laws of physics not apply, so they throw no reflections and cannot be photographed? The vampires of the 19th century were truly supernatural beings, but nowadays there is so much that is almost magical about science that it seems better to make our vampires something that can at least partly be explained rationally.
My vampires like to fit in unnoticed around humans. They do, it’s true, avoid daylight – but many people nowadays live much of their lives in the dark With the aid of sunglasses and high factor sunscreen, vampires can get by. Many of them don’t like garlic, but who can blame them? Garlic certainly won’t kill them. Neither will most things, though a stake through the heart really is fatal – but so is a bullet.
My vampires like to hang out round Brompton Cemetery with its baroque sepulchres. Some even live there, but most prefer the comfort of regular houses. With money carefully invested over centuries, many can afford apartments in the nicer parts of Chelsea.
Brompton Cemetery
The whole ‘drinking blood’ thing can be problematic, but as illegal highs go, blood is quite easy to get hold of and it isn’t as if they don’t enjoy a good meal or a fine Scotch. They enjoy a lot of the finer things in life: if you have hundreds of years to develop your taste, you can become quite a connoisseur.
There are murderous vampires, of course, just as there are murderous humans. Given that Something Wicked is a twist on the police procedural genre, there has to be a murderous vampire or there wouldn’t be a story. But there are vampire policemen too, tidying up after the renegades.
If vampires were living among us, you’d think that somebody would have noticed something odd. And people do. But the government colludes with the vampires to cover things up. It’s convenient for governments to be owed favours by immortal beings who have been forced to learn how to move silently and undetected through the night and who can, when necessary, kill before vanishing away without trace.
What would happen if one of these vampires met a down-to-earth human policeman who was less than happy to keep their secret? How does a policeman solve a case when the chief suspect is a creature that no-one can know exists?
Pole and his human colleague, Galbraith, have three adventures so far. They’ve tracked down murderous vampires in Brompton Cemetery, hunted a werewolf in Westminster, and even ventured out into the wilds of mid-Wales (well outside their comfort zone) when something strange is going on on the hillsides.
If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, then ‘Something Wicked’ is definitely for you.
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about ice houses. English Heritage had just restored the ice house at Marble Hill, which is very close to where I live. They claimed that the ice house at Marble Hill was particularly important as ice houses are rare. This made me think about ice houses locally and I wrote about four of them, which suggested to me that they weren’t really rare at all. Then last week, I spent a day at Kew Gardens, so now I’ve updated my old post to add a fifth.
In the days before refrigeration, the only way of providing ice was to store natural ice in an ice house. Ice houses were basically insulated pits. Ice was put into the pit (which had an outlet at the bottom for meltwater to drain through) and covered with straw to provide some insulation. A pit full of ice would last well into summer.
Ice houses were only used by the very rich, so to that extent they were rare. But many grand houses in the country had an ice house.
Marble Hill
Marble Hill House was built in the early 18th century for Lady Henrietta Howard.
One good source of ice would be the Thames, back when it froze, so Marble Hill, set on the banks of the river may well have got its ice from there. Marble Hill’s ice house is conveniently near the house, but nestles in the shade of the trees. It’s a solid brick structure with a door for the ice to be taken in or out. Most of the brickwork, though, is hidden under a mound of soil that insulates the building.
English Heritage have planted ferns and small shrubs over the building. It may well have looked like this when it was built. It wasn’t just functional: it was a status symbol and Lady Henrietta Howard (who had it built) would have wanted it to look attractive. It’s possible that there was some sort of statue at the rear of the building to enhance its appearance from the back.
The ice house was lost for years when that area of the park was allowed to become overgrown. English Heritage have every reason to be proud of their efforts, but it’s hardly “rare”.
Ham House
Marble Hill House is built almost directly opposite the Jacobean Ham House on the other side of the Thames. Ham House has its own ice house built as part of the service area that supplied the kitchens. It’s near the dairy and buttery which sit between the house and the kitchen gardens.
The design is very different from that at Marble Hill, but it works in exactly the same way. At Ham House you can see into the empty pit to get an idea of the scale of the operation.
Hampton Court
Further up the river, we come to Hampton Court Palace. The splendid ice house there is near an artificial lake but some distance from the palace itself. Maybe they galloped the ice to the kitchens on horseback.
Isleworth
I was beginning to think English Heritage was rather exaggerating the rarity of ice houses in the area when our explorations during lockdown took us to a small public park in Isleworth about two miles from Marble Hill. Here there was once a grand house called Silver Hall. It was demolished in the 1950s, but one part of the structure remains. Can you guess what it is yet?
Yes, it’s lost its earth covering that would have provided insulation, but it’s definitely an ice house.
Kew
So to my latest local ice house discovery. It’s in Kew Gardens and was built for the royal palace at Kew — little known, but well worth a visit.
It’s a short walk from the house in well shaded area. (Kew Gardens isn’t short of trees.) It’s notable for having quite a long entrance tunnel, keeping the actual ice pit well away from the outside warmth.
It was a very hot day when I visited and the tunnel was blissfully cool.
The domed chamber at the end is large and suitably impressive for a royal ice house. The ice itself, and the straw that helped insulate it, would have been in the pit below the current ground level.
And there’s more…
There are more ice houses waiting for me to find them. There’s a list on this website: Ice Wells & Ice Houses (london-footprints.co.uk). If my pictures of local ice houses have caught your interest, you might well enjoy the link.
A Word From Our Sponsor
These ice houses were all built before we first met James Burke fighting in the West Indies (in Burke in the Land of Silver). As he climbed the social scale (he was definitely a social climber) he will have often enjoyed sorbets at posh dinner parties and he will have been familiar with the idea of ice houses.
If you are interested in the world of the Long 18th Century (yes. historians really call it that), you might well enjoy James Burke. Why not give him a go?
