This blog outlines my life, seen through the lens of the books I have read.
As mentioned before, my memories of the books below include some plot details.
RF Delderfield is another historical novelist whose stories I enjoyed. I discovered him after I left school and have since realised that he is most famous for early twentieth century family sagas, but he definitely caught my imagination with ‘Seven Men of Gascony’, a story about seven soldiers in Napoleon’s victorious army. The tale begins with news of Napoleon’s death in 1821. This makes old soldier Gabriel reminisce about his life. He remembers his comrades and their journey by looking at the drawings he made of them. We join his memories as seven comrades, and Nicolette, a sutler, march from Austria to Spain, then travel to England as prisoners of war. They escape to join Napoleon’s campaign to conquer Russia and are involved in his later Central European campaigns. Gabriel, and old Jean, are present at Waterloo. At the end of the tale, Gabriel imagines he sees his friends ahead of him, on a road in Nico’s wagon. They call to him and he runs to catch them up. They laugh and haul him up to sit beside them. The priest who gave Gabriel the news of Napoleon finds him dead by his hearth the next morning.
I read another Delderfield Napoleonic story called ‘Too Few for Drums’, in which a young lieutenant in Wellington’s peninsular army becomes the leader of a rag-tag group lost behind enemy lines. I remember this story for the scene where the young man makes love to the Welsh camp follower. This acknowledgement of life and maturity was necessary to the plot to get him to cope with his responsibility. Also, at the end the lieutenant is despondent because he has lost everybody except the woman and a child. The woman tells him not to feel like a failure, he has rescued the weakest of the group who couldn’t have survived without him.
I remember chatting to the mum of two girls who were in the same Baptist Church youth group as me. I had gone to their house to collect them for an event and I discovered that the mum had read ‘Avalon’, by Anya Seton, which I had also just read. We had a great chat about the book, which I thought was intensely atmospheric and emotive. It’s a love story stretching across the whole of the northwest edge of Europe and over the entire lives of Rumon, a minor aristocrat from Brittany, and Merewyn a maid at the Saxon king’s court. Rumon is initially oblivious of Merewyn’s hero worship of him. It’s not until she is captured by Vikings that he realises that she means something to him. So he tries to find her – for years. He ends up as a priest but retains his passion. They only meet again on his deathbed.
“The standard costume piece or historical romance needs very little research. It is sufficient to pick a congenial period, then read a couple of books in order to properly clothe and feed the characters, who are invented by the author. And since love and conflict are common to all ages, the historical background can be negligible. My own works are very, very different in approach. I have a passion for facts, for dates, for places. I love to recreate the past and to do so with all the accuracy possible. This means an enormous amount of research, which is no hardship because I love it." A quote from Anya Seton, in an article by Margaret Moser, in the Austin Chronicle, 2006.
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