Sir Thomas More by Hals Holbein (Accessed via Wikipedia ) During lockdown, we had Time. Remember that? I was in my probationary year of teaching: almost certainly among the most exhausting years for any profession. All my time had been taken up with school work, and I regularly stayed at school until after 6pm, having arrived there at eight in the morning. Now, children, this is not sustainable and, very soon, I decided I didn’t like working where I was. Then I realised that I didn’t like teaching at all. But, in fact, neither was particularly true: I just needed to be true to myself and to say no, which would give me the ability to manage my work/life balance in a more appropriate way. What does this have to do with historical fiction, I hear you say? Well, during March 2020, we went into lockdown and suddenly I went from working ten-hour-days to ten-hour-weeks. I met up with my class on Google Meet, I put work up for them on a meticulously designed Google Classroom, but I just h...
As a child, there was no book scarier than the Weetabix history book's page about The Black Death. Forget horror or ghosts, plague was really scary! It took me a long time to realise that "plague" did not refer to a single event, too. One of the things which led me to this was trying to make sense of the much-loved book The Children of Green Knowe, in which the ghostly children died in the plague three-hundred years after I knew The Black Death had occurred.
I don't know at which point I became fascinated with the history of medicine but, around that time, I stopped being so scared of the plague. When, years later, I began writing Day's Dying Glory, one of the key characters just had to be a doctor. Doctor Fotherby became central to what grew into a family saga. Reluctant to let him go, he had a very long life before I conceded that I just could feasibly have him lasting much longer!
But Doctor Fotherby belonged to the 18th/19th Centuries, long after this song is set. Our image of plague doctors, with the long beak-like masks, came from the 17th Century. Incidentally, I have to mention here a fabulous graphic novel, The Plague and Doctor Caim by G.E. Gallas, which is a well-researched and accessible book, as well as being stunningly illustrated! But even this is not far enough back to reach this song...
While we were on holiday in Highland Perthshire a few years ago, we drove through Kirkmichael village. I'd heard of it before from a post someone had put up on Twitter about the plague burial ground within the kirkyard. I was intrigued. When my sister, a teacher at our local primary school, asked me to write a story set in the Middle Ages for her class, this was the perfect story.
A quick listen-through of the song tells you that the doctors in the middle ages didn't really have much of an idea about how to deal with the plague! And not only the doctors, but priests too. This was the case in Kirkmichael, with the Bishop of Dunkeld announcing that only sinners who refused to drink the consecrated water died of the plague. Sadly, this was not true. It was at the bishop's warning that the plague pit in Kirkmichael was established and remains untouched to this day.
Writing a doctor at this time was an interesting challenge and, true to the time and the spirit of children's literature, Moonlight Finn was not a doctor as we would recognise them today, but an alchemist. Delving into the teachings of the humours was incredible. It was fascinating how these early beliefs and procedures were so close to succeeding without knowing how or why. While this approach to medicine - largely unaltered from that of the Greeks - was primitive, it had its own strange logic based on genuine research and effectiveness. Moonlight Finn is no different... But no spoilers here! I hope to get it published at some point, and at least I have the reassurance that the children for whom it was written enjoyed it. And, because it's by me, it naturally has a twist!
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The plague is like an extra character in the book: a foreboding, mindless evil wielded as a weapon by some, while others attempt to defend against it. Each plague in history, and Covid too in modern day culture, lends itself to this. There's a very different sort of plague in my upcoming book The Strength of Caledon, but this follows the same rules.
Because this was one of my earliest fears within books, it's perhaps no surprise that, in all my historical stories, the real heroes are doctors, in their different guises.
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