This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
This month, the Historical Writers Forum are running #HistFicXmas on Twitter. Today's prompt asks whether writers prefer writing about summer or winter, so I thought I'd take that as this week's #HistFicThursdays blog post!
As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I love winter. Yes, it is brutal and difficult, but there is nothing more beautiful than hoar frost on trees and spiders' webs, nor is there anything more exciting than a thick covering of snow. But to write about? I actually fell in love with writing about fog. I remember, some 14 years ago, when I first realised how enthralling the effects of fog were, how you hear things long before you see them, and how all your other senses - and there are a lot more than five - band together to compensate for that one missing sense. So, in terms of weather, fog gets my vote!
One of my most enduring literary refences to fog is in A Christmas Carol, and so I always link city fog to Christmas. I'm sure there's plenty of fog at other times of the year but this line is engrained in me:
...he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.
There is little surprise, then, that it is Christmas time in one of my stories when fog is encountered in the same city - although not so elegantly as Mr Dickens!
He left Gordon asleep, stepping out of their room, through the building and out into the foggy air. The smoke of industry was interweaving with the mist, being pushed back to earth by the watery atmosphere. Toby coughed as he breathed it in. It brought back a hundred memories shared with a dozen people who were almost all gone now. He stood on the quayside and closed his eyes, remembering all the ports he had sailed from and into, and all the places he had seen.
But fog is only part of the picture! Because of the nature of the books I write, the long dark nights suit the narrative far more than summer sun. Living in the middle of nowhere, you come to realise that there is not such thing as pitch black nights. Without fail, your eyes adjust so that, even if it is only for tiny stretches, you see things. But what does happen is that all colour drains away, leaving a landscape of black and white. One phrase I've been particularly proud of on this topic, comes from Poisoned Pilgrimage:
It was growing dark outside, the sun having set behind the house and now the subdued colours of night, dominated by shades of grey which the daytime world never knew, were stretching before him.
Of course, there's beauty in summer too, and plenty of adventure to be had. Summer evenings are as magical as dark winter nights. But for me, the side of the year from November to March are the most evocative in both language and memory, the two things which drive my writing.
Comments
Post a Comment