White Ladies

 

In my book, 'Dark Angels' (US title 'The Shadow Hunt'), the 11th century castle of La Motte Rouge, placed in a fictitious part of the Welsh Marches, is haunted by a mournful White Lady who wanders the courtyard on dark and misty nights, wringing her hands and moaning softly.  She's creepy but harmless, she's forgotten her own name, and in my recent short story 'By Fynnon Ddu', published in the Sussex Folklore Centre's journal GRAMARYE, I was able to confirm my long-held suspicion that she is the diminished pagan spirit of the spring which feeds the castle's cistern - and is older, much older, than the castle in which she is now contained.  The various (Christian) inhabitants now regard her with attitudes ranging from fear to pity.  In this shortened extract my young hero, Wolf, encounters her late one night:

In the faint moonlight Wolf could see the yard - an expanse of greyish mud. He hurried across, and was about to slip around the corner of the Hall, where the huddled buildings made a darkness as intense as ink - when instinct made him pause, and a woman stepped around the corner from the opposite direction.   She was wrapped in flimsy clothing for this time of night: fluttering white garments with a light veil pulled across her face. She must be a lady of the household, one of Lady Agnes' women, though he hadn't noticed anyone like her at supper. Mist blew around her as she swayed towards him and murmured [something] in a melancholy, musical voice.

...'What's your name, lady?' he asked gently.  But the question seemed to distress her.'I can't remember', she moaned, swaying in a sort of absent-minded dance. 'Gwae fi! I can't remember!'

...Wolf stared at her feet.  She had crossed that dirty yard right behind him. His own shoes were clotted with mud. Yet there wasn't a single stain on her little white slippers.  

White Ladies are a bit different from other ghosts. In an article called The White Lady of Britain and Ireland, by Jane C Beck (Folklore, Vol 81, 1970), Beck argues that “the modern day ghost known as the White Lady … is …a creature with a heritage reaching back to the darkest recesses of time.  Although her most usual form today is that of a gliding spectre, some of the acts she performs recall her earlier condition as a deity.”

Ghost stories often come complete with ‘explanations’ for the apparition - explanations which usually feel contrived.  Frequently they involve some sort of crime: the ghost is unable to rest because it is either the victim or the perpetrator.  White ladies are often described as murdered brides or sweethearts, or else girls who have drowned themselves for love. They are frequently associated with water. A story from Yorkshire, reported in 1823, tells how a lovely maiden robed in white is to be seen on Hallowe’en at the spot where the rivers Hodge and Dove meet, standing with her golden hair streaming and her arm around the neck of a white doe. From Somerset, Ruth Tongue describes an apparition called the White Lady of Wellow,

… who haunts St Julian’s Well, now in a cottage garden.  She played the part of a banshee to the Lords of Hungerford, but she seems to have been a well spirit rather than a ghost.  The Lake Lady of Orchardleigh is another white lady who is rather a fairy than a ghost.  But the most fairy-like of the three is the White Rider of Corfe, who…gallops along the road on a white horse, turns clean aside by a field gate and into the middle of a meadow, where she vanishes.  I was told about her by some old-age pensioners in the Blackdown Hills in 1946.  One of them said. “She shone like a dewdrop,” and another of them, “T’was like liddle bells all a-chime.”

In Wales there are apparently two types of white ladies, the Dynes Mewn Gwyn or lady in white, and the ladi wen: the first is a true ghost; the second is an apparition which haunts the place where someone has died a violent death. Not all White Ladies are harmless.  Jane Beck tells of one which appeared at Ogmore Castle near Bridgend, Glamorgan, where she was believed to guard a treasure under the tower floor.  One man was brave enough to speak to her; she gave permission to take half the treasure and showed him where it lay, but when he was so greedy as to return for the rest:

The White Lady then set upon him, and to his dismay, he found she had claws instead of fingers, and with these she nearly tore him to pieces. 

Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology, talks of the White Lady as someone who

… appears in many houses when a member of the family is about to die, and …is thought to be the ancestress of the race.  She is sometimes seen at night tending and nursing the children… She wears a white robe, or is clad half in white, half in black; her feet are concealed by yellow or green shoes.  In her hand she usually carries a bunch of keys or a golden spinning wheel.

I’m strongly reminded of Princess Irene’s great-great (ever-so-many-greats) grandmother in George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’, a beautiful woman with long white hair who can seem both old and young, who inhabits the top floor of the castle tower, and sits spinning her magical moony wheel.  When Irene climbs the tower steps and taps at the door:

“Come in, Irene,” said the sweet voice.

The princess opened the door and entered.  There was the moonlight streaming in at the window, and in the middle of the moonlight sat the old lady in her black dress with the white lace, and her silvery hair mingling with the moonlight, so that you could not have told which was which.

And is the Lady of the Lake, in the Morte D’Arthur, a White Lady?  She is seen by Arthur and Merlin ‘going upon the lake,’ and although it is not actually her arm ‘clothed in white samite’, which brandishes the sword Excalibur above the water, she does tell Arthur that the sword belongs to her. Whose is the arm, then?  We never find out.

In John Masefield’s wonderful wintry book “The Box of Delights’, there’s a passage which well combines the ambiguous mystery and dread of the White Lady.  Kay Harker is out on the Roman Road on a night ‘as black as a pocket’ and sees something white moving towards him:

He remembered, that Cook had said, there was a White Lady who “walked” out Duke’s Brook way.  This thing that was coming was a White Lady… but supposing it was a White Wolf, standing on its hind legs and ready to pounce.  It looked like a wolf; its teeth were gleaming. Then the moon shone out again; he saw that it was a White Lady who held her hand in a peculiar way, so that he could see a large ring, with a glittering ‘longways cross’ on it.

“Come Kay,” she said, “you must not stay here; the Wolves are running: listen.”

Significantly the White Lady (who in this case is wholly benevolent) is still believed by Cook to haunt a water course: Duke’s Brook.  John Masefield’s fiction is full of folklore, in which he clearly took great delight: his White Lady runs true to type.

Before the Romans came to Britain, the British appear to have worshipped the deities – many or mainly female – of rivers, streams, springs and pools. Most of their names, like that of my White Lady, must have been forgotten, but we still know Sabrina of the River Severn, and Sulis, who gave her name to Aquae Sulis, the hot springs at Bath. To the waters of these springs, pools and rivers, the British made offerings – just as we still throw coins into fountains – and many is the bronze or iron age sword which has been recovered from river beds and marshlands.  How many Bediveres have thrown precious weapons to the Lady of the Lake?  And what did they hope to receive in return? Health?  Wealth? Victory?  
 

I like White Ladies – beautiful, eerie creatures draped in moonlight, trailing clouds of grief and longing for those far-away ages when they still had the power to bless and to curse.




Picture credits:

The Somnambulist, by John Everett Millais
The Woman in White, by Frederick Walker, image courtesy of The Victorian Web
Irene's Grandmother, by Arthur Hughes; illustration from The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald
Sulis Minerva in the Museum of Bath by Akalvin at Wikimedia Commons. Original uploader was Akalvin at de.wikipedia

White Ladies

In my book ‘Dark Angels’ (US title ‘The Shadow Hunt’) the castle of La Motte Rouge, which shelters below the hill called Devil’s Edge, is haunted by a mournful White Lady who wanders the courtyard on dark and misty nights, wringing her hands and moaning softly.  She’s creepy but harmless, she's  forgotten her own name; she may be the diminished pagan spirit of the spring which feeds the castle’s cistern, and is regarded by the various inhabitants with attitudes ranging from fear to  pity. In this passage the saintly old priest Howell intercepts her as she peers in at the door of the castle’s chapel:

Billows of mist floated across the yard, and the pale lady was still moaning and wringing her hands at the chapel door. 

“Hush now, hush!” the old man called in a soothing voice.  The lady turned to him like a frightened child.

“I can’t remember.  I can't remember my name…”

“Dear, dear. …But that’s all right, because you see, we have a name for you.  Dame Blanche, our White Lady, our sweet Ladi Wen.”  He dropped into musical Welsh, and the lady listened very attentively.  When he had finished she bowed her head and walked smoothly away. The mist followed her.  Her feet moved a fraction above the ground, and when she reached the dark corner of the building, Wolf wasn’t sure if she went around it, or just vanished. 

You can catch a glimpse of her here.

White Ladies are a bit different from other ghosts. In an article called The White Lady of Britain and Ireland, by Jane C Beck (Folklore, Vol 81, 1970), Beck argues that “the modern day ghost known as the White Lady … is …a creature with a heritage reaching back to the darkest recesses of time.  Although her most usual form today is that of a gliding spectre, some of the acts she performs recall her earlier condition as a deity.”

Ghost stories often come complete with ‘explanations’ for the apparition - explanations which usually feel contrived.  Frequently they involve some sort of crime: the ghost is unable to rest because it is either the victim or the perpetrator.  White ladies are often described as murdered brides or sweethearts, or else girls who have drowned themselves for love. They are frequently associated with water. A story from Yorkshire, reported in 1823, tells how a lovely maiden robed in white is to be seen on Hallowe’en at the spot where the rivers Hodge and Dove meet, standing with her golden hair streaming and her arm around the neck of a white doe. From Somerset, Ruth Tongue describes an apparition called the White Lady of Wellow,

… who haunts St Julian’s Well, now in a cottage garden.  She played the part of a banshee to the Lords of Hungerford, but she seems to have been a well spirit rather than a ghost.  The Lake Lady of Orchardleigh is another white lady who is rather a fairy than a ghost.  But the most fairy-like of the three is the White Rider of Corfe, who…gallops along the road on a white horse, turns clean aside by a field gate and into the middle of a meadow, where she vanishes.  I was told about her by some old-age pensioners in the Blackdown Hills in 1946.  One of them said. “She shone like a dewdrop,” and another of them, “T’was like liddle bells all a-chime.”

In Wales there are apparently two types of white ladies, the Dynes Mewn Gwyn or lady in white, and the ladi wen: the first is a true ghost; the second is an apparition which haunts the place where someone has died a violent death. Not all White Ladies are harmless.  Jane Beck tells of one which appeared at Ogmore Castle near Bridgend, Glamorgan, where she was believed to guard a treasure under the tower floor.  One man was brave enough to speak to her; she gave permission to take half the treasure and showed him where it lay, but when he was so greedy as to return for the rest:

The White Lady then set upon him, and to his dismay, he found she had claws instead of fingers, and with these she nearly tore him to pieces.

Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology, talks of the White Lady as someone who

… appears in many houses when a member of the family is about to die, and …is thought to be the ancestress of the race.  She is sometimes seen at night tending and nursing the children… She wears a white robe, or is clad half in white, half in black; her feet are concealed buy yellow or green shoes.  In her hand she usually carries a bunch of keys or a golden spinning wheel.

I’m strongly reminded of Princess Irene’s great-great (ever-so-many-greats) grandmother in George MacDonald’s ‘The Princess and the Goblin’, a beautiful woman with long white hair who can seem both old and young, who inhabits the top floor of the castle tower, and sits spinning her magical moony wheel.  When Irene climbs the tower steps and taps at the door:

“Come in, Irene,” said the sweet voice.

The princess opened the door and entered.  There was the moonlight streaming in at the window, and in the middle of the moonlight sat the old lady in her black dress with the white lace, and her silvery hair mingling with the moonlight, so that you could not have told which was which.

And is the Lady of the Lake, in the Morte D’Arthur, a White Lady?  She is seen by Arthur and Merlin ‘going upon the lake,’ and although it is not actually her arm ‘clothed in white samite’, which brandishes the sword Excalibur above the water, she does tell Arthur that the sword belongs to her. Whose is the arm, then?  We never find out.

In John Masefield’s wonderful wintry book “The Box of Delights’, there’s a passage which well combines the ambiguous mystery and dread of the White Lady.  Kay Harker is out on the Roman Road on a night ‘as black as a pocket’ and sees something white moving towards him:

He remembered, that Cook had said, there was a White Lady who “walked” out Duke’s Brook way.  This thing that was coming was a White Lady… but supposing it was a White Wolf, standing on its hind legs and ready to pounce.  It looked like a wolf; its teeth were gleaming. Then the moon shone out again; he saw that it was a White Lady who held her hand in a peculiar way, so that he could see a large ring, with a glittering ‘longways cross’ on it.

“Come Kay,” she said, “you must not stay here; the Wolves are running: listen.”

Significantly the White Lady (who in this case is wholly benevolent) is still believed by Cook to haunt a water course: Duke’s Brook.  Masefield’s fiction is full of folklore, in which he clearly took great delight: his White Lady runs true to type.

Before the Romans came to Britain, the British appear to have worshipped the deities – many or mainly female – of rivers, streams, springs and pools. Most of their names, like that of my White Lady, must have been forgotten, but we still know Sabrina of the River Severn, and Sulis, who gave her name to Aquae Sulis, the hot springs at Bath. To the waters of these springs, pools and rivers, the British made offerings – just as we still throw coins into fountains – and many is the bronze or iron age sword which has been recovered from river beds and marshlands.  How many Bediveres have thrown precious weapons to the Lady of the Lake?  And what did they hope to receive in return? Health?  Wealth? Victory? 

I like White Ladies – beautiful, eerie creatures draped in moonlight, trailing clouds of grief and longing for those far-away ages when they still had the power to bless and to curse.




Picture credits:

The Woman in White by Frederick Walker, image courtesy of The Victorian Web
Irene's Grandmother, by Arthur Hughes; illustration from The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald
Sulis Minerva in the Museum of Bath by Akalvin at Wikimedia Commons. Original uploader was Akalvin at de.wikipedia

Dark Angels - Competition and Book Trailer

Please excuse my excitement.  (And the interruption to Fairytale Reflections, which will be back next week.) 

The fact is I’m jumping up and down, because my home-made booktrailer for my fourth book, ‘Dark Angels’ (US title ‘The Shadow Hunt’) went up on Youtube yesterday.  To celebrate, I’m launching a COMPETITION to win three signed copies of ‘Dark Angels’.  All you have to do to enter, is view the trailer and leave a comment about it either on Youtube or here on the blog.  Look out also for a parallel competition on twitter. Both will run until next Friday, August 12^th, when there’ll be a draw for the winners. 

. 

The book is set on and around the sinister, atmospheric Shropshire hill which in real life is called ‘Stiperstones’(and is pictured at the top of my blog).  In my book I renamed it ‘Devil’s Edge.’  The real hill has a formation of rocks on the crest known as The Devil’s Chair: the legend goes that the Devil comes to sit in it when the mist descends on the hill (so you’d better beware); and if anyone else sits in it, an immediate thunderstorm will break out.  I took the liberty of changing this slightly:

Wolf took another glance at the ridge.  Up on the very top, he had heard there was a road.  A road leading nowhere, a road no one used.  For if anyone was so bold as to walk along it, especially at night, he’d hear the clamour of hounds and the blowing of horns, the cracking of whips and the rumbling of a cart.  And out of the dark would burst the Devil’s own dog pack, dashing beside a black wagon drawn by goats with fiery eyes, crammed full of screaming souls bound for the pits of hell.

So off I went to Shropshire with a notebook and camera.  We stayed, in case anyone is interested, in the quaint little market town of Bishop’s Castle, and we tramped over Stiperstones in rain, in mist, and in sweeping wind.  We visited a wolf sanctuary set in a narrow little valley – it began to snow as we descended the steep track, and I’ll never forget the snow falling precipitously past the dark serried ranks of fir trees, and the wolves howling in the winter landscape.  We climbed the grassy mound which is all that’s left of the 11th century Montgomery stronghold of Hen Domen – the motte and bailey castle replaced by the stone fortress at Montgomery.  Neither were right for the filming: in the end we chose the oldest parts of nearby Stokesay Castle. 

And on a later trip, courtesy of a Shropshire mining and caving club, we crawled into the tight dark passages of an abandoned Roman copper mine, which became the entrance to elfland in my book.  It was very narrow and low: we went in on hands and knees: at one point you had to lie down. I’m not good in narrow spaces, so this shows what I will do in the interests of research. I wanted the underground sequences in my book to be truly authentic: I wanted the reader to feel as pinched and constrained as I was. The cave is called Ogof Llanymynech and may go as far back as the Bronze Age.  A hoard of Roman coins was found there in 1965. (I love the sense of deep time in the British landscape.)

So the landscape of my story is a patchwork of real locations pieced together, recognisable as the Welsh Marches, but renamed and reshaped so that I had the freedom of fiction as well as – I hope – a sense of real history and place. 

Writing the script for the trailer was almost like composing a poem: distilling the essence of a 65,000 word book into 100 words.  In fact the whole process was very like making poetry, trying to combine evocative words, imagery and sound. Anyway, here you can see all the elements I wove together in the book.  The stark skyline of ‘Devil’s Edge’, the rough moorland, the lonely castle, the claustrophobic darkness of the mine. Listen carefully and you may even hear wolves.

My thanks to Richard Hughes of the band We Are Goose, who composed and performed the haunting music, and edited and assembled the film.  

Now is the month of Maying...

We drove up to Yorkshire last weekend, partly to take my daughter back to university, partly to visit old friends in the Dales.  My mother came along with us, and was exclaiming all the way up the M1 about the masses of hawthorn blossoming everywhere.  I love hawthorn – its curds-and-cream, compact, sweet-scented flowers are like ornate jewellery when you get up close.  The blackthorn which comes out earlier in the year is whiter, more delicate and elfin, more poetic.  But hawthorn is as sturdy and lavish and sure of itself as a Tudor rose. 

When I was writing ‘Dark Angels’ (‘The Shadow Hunt’, if you are in the US), which is set in the 12th century, I wanted to get in some of that feeling for spring, that explosion of joyful delight in the beginning of the warm months and the escape from the dearth and pain of winter, which is so obvious in medieval lyrics like ‘Lenten is come with love to town’, or  ‘Bitwene Merch and Averil/when spray beginneth to spring’, or simply ‘Sumer is i-cumen in’.  If you know you might easily not survive winter, the phrase glad to be alive means so much more…

Since one of the main characters in the book, Hugo, is a troubadour knight (with a tragic past) I tried my hand at some faux-medieval verse for him.  First of all, though, I looked at some genuine troubadour songs (written, naturally, in early French).  Here is one – the poet is anonymous, which is by no means always the case – with my own somewhat approximate translation beneath each verse: 

Voulez vous que je vous chante
Un son d’amours avenant?
Vilain nel fist mie,
Ainz le fist un chevalier
Sous l’ombre d’un olivier
Entre les bras s’amie.

Would you like me to sing you
A fine song of love?
By no peasant was it made:
But a gentle knight who lay
With his true love in his arms
In an olive tree’s shade.

Chemisete avoit de lin
Et blanc peliçon hermin
Et bliaut de soie
Chauces ot de jaglolai
Et solers de flours de mai
Estroitement chauçade

Her chemise was of linen
And her white pelisse of ermine
Of silk was her dress.
Her stockings were of iris leaves
And her slippers of mayflowers
Her feet to caress.

Ceinturete avoit de feuille
Que verdist quant li tens meuille,
D’or est boutonade
L’aumosniere estoit d’amour
Li pendant furent de flours
Par amours fu donade.

Her belt was of leaves
Which grow green when it rains,
Her buttons of gold so fine.
Her purse was a gift of love,
And it hung from flowery chains
As it were a lovers’ shrine.

Et chevauchoit une mule
D’argent ert la ferruere
La sele ert dorade;
Sus la croupe par derriers
Avoit plante trois rosiers
Pour faire li ombrage.

And she rode on a mule
The saddle was of gold,
All silver were its shoes:
Behind her on the crupper
To provide her with shade
Three rose bushes grew.

Si s’en va aval la pree
Chevaliers l’ont encontree
Beau l’on saluade:
“Belle, dont estes vous nee?”
“De France sui la louee,
De plus haut parage.”

As she passed through the fields
She met gentle knights
Who demanded courteously:
“Fair one, where were you born?”
“From France am I come,
And of high family.

“Li rossignol est mon pere
Qui chant sor la ramee
El plus haut boscage.
La seraine est mon mere
Qui chante en la mer sale
Li plus haut rivage.”

“The nightingale is my father
Who sings from the branches
Of the forest’s highest tree.
The mermaid is my mother
Who sings her sweet chant
On the banks of the salt sea.”

“Belle, bon fussiez vous nee!
Bien estes emparentee
Et de haut parage.
Pleüst á Dieu nostre pere
Que vous ne fussiez donee
A femme esposade.”

“Fair one, well were you born!
Well fathered, well mothered,
And of high family.
If God would only grant
That you might be given
In marriage to me!”


You can hear it sung here:

I just love that – I love the almost physical delight in the natural world, the celebration of springtime, and of the lady as a kind of fairy queen both of whose parents are the sweetest possible singers: the nightingale, and the ‘sirene’ or mermaid. 

Here is the song I made for Hugo, whose wife is dead:

When all the spring is breaking and blossoming
And the hedge is white with blossom like a breaking wave,
That’s when my heart is bursting with love-longing
For the girl who pierced it, for that sweet wound she gave.

And I hear the nightingale singing in the forest,
Singing for love in the forest, ‘Come to me, I am alone –’
Better to suffer love’s pain for a single kiss
Than live for a hundred years with a heart of stone.

And just to show that the subject of spring, hawthorn blossoms, and heartache isn’t restricted to the Middle Ages, here’s another lovely poem, from Edward Marsh’s anthology ‘Georgian Poetry 1916-1917’ : it’s by John Drinkwater, and it’s called ‘Birthright’.


Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed
Because a summer evening passed;
And little Ariadne cried
That summer fancy fell at last
To dust; and young Verona died
When beauty’s hour was overcast.

Theirs was the bitterness we know
Because the clouds of hawthorn keep
So short a state, and kisses go
To tombs unfathomably deep,
While Rameses and Romeo
And little Ariadne sleep.





Picture credits: Hawthorn copyright http://www.strickley.co.uk/flowers.htm

The Shadow Hunt

Will you all excuse me today if I  indulge in a little fanfare?  Because this is the publication day in America of my book 'The Shadow Hunt' - and you can see the cover, to the right of this post. 'The Shadow Hunt' is what I would describe as a children's historical fantasy based on Celtic and medieval legends, and it took over most of my life for one and a half years.

Ta-ran-tara, ta-ran-tara!

Writing a book is such darned hard work, and frankly such a lonely occupation, that a publication day is genuinely a time to rejoice.  As I've explained, I gave this blog its name because writing is very much like crossing seven miles of hill on fire and seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea. 

When you begin writing a new book - as I'm doing now - it feels impossible.  IM-possible.  I have these ideas, and these characters, and a situation, and I feel I don't know half enough about them, and I set out on a long journey of discovery, all the time with the fear that I'll never get there.  But gradually, at a snail-like pace, the pages stack up till there are twenty... fifty... a hundred... (I print out and revise as I go: it may well take me months to write a hundred pages) ...till I find myself in the middle of the book, in the middle of this long stretch of work that's been going on seemingly forever, and will go on seemingly forever.  And at this point, I sleep, eat, dream the book.  I go to bed at night with my mind running the characters like a computer simulation, and I wake in the small hours and in the mornings thinking about them and understanding a little bit more and a little bit more.  It's exhausting, exhilarating, terrifying, and highly anti-social. 

My life is subsumed into the writing process.  I read, but only books which will help with the research, the background, the symbolism, or the actions of the characters.  I go for walks or drives, so that I can think and think about the book.  I shut myself up to go over and over the pages already written, to rewrite, to shred, to revise, to - as far as lies within me - to perfect.

The tipping point comes.  A day arrives when I recognise that the book WILL BE WRITTEN: that enough has been done to give the story a life of its own.  Like an unborn child, it's viable.  Life gets a little easier then.  And at last the final chapter, the final pages get written in a rush of euphoria.

It's done!  I've finished!  Free at last of the awful tyranny of the powerful god or daemon of creation.  Free for a while to do ordinary things, think ordinary thoughts, dig the garden, go shopping. The editing and all that - that's just work, to be enjoyed or grumbled through in an everyday way.  It's not to be compared with the sucking-you-down-into-the-deeps, never-letting-you-get-a-breath, octopus-grip of the creation-god.

So here's to publication day, along with a couple of starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and the very pleasant news that 'The Shadow Hunt' has been chosen by the Junior Library Guild, to be reviewed in its July edition.  You can find out more about it on my website.

If you think the book sounds like something you might like, please give it a go!

Hearing Voices - the Do's and Don'ts of Dialogue

First posted at the Awfully Big Blog Adventure which can be found here, these are some thoughts about writing dialogue.

If hearing voices is a form of saintliness or madness, all authors are mad saints. Creating characters means knowing them from the inside out and being able to ‘hear’ how they think and how they talk. An out-going, confident character will reflect that in his or her speech. A nervous character will sound diffident, hesitant, or perhaps more formal. The goal is to create a distinctive voice for each of the main characters. They should not all sound alike.

This is important even if you are writing in the first person. First person narratives can be in danger of sounding anonymous and samey. I’ve read a few first person teen novels which, apart from the names, you could be forgiven for assuming were all about the same heroine, a sort of generic ‘15/16 year old modern girl’. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s an expert at work:

You know that old film they always show on the telly at Christmas, the Wizard of Oz? I love it, especially the Wicked Witch of the West, with her cackle and her green face and all her special flying monkeys. I’d give anything to have a wicked winged monkey as an evil little pet. It could whiz through the sky, flapping its wings and sniffing the air for that awful stale instant-coffee-and-talcum powder teacher smell and then it would s-w-o-o-p straight onto Mrs Vomit Bagley and carry her away screaming.
(“The Dare Game”, Jacqueline Wilson, 2000)

And we know this girl. She’s exuberant, imaginative, funny, a rebel – Jacqueline Wilson’s ‘Tracy Beaker’. It looks easy, but it’s not. It would be VERY easy to write something similar but far less engaging:

There’s an old film they often show on the telly at Christmas, the Wizard of Oz. I’ve always loved it, and my favourite character is the Wicked Witch of the West. I like the way she cackles, and her green face, and all her special flying monkeys. I’ve always wished I could have a wicked winged monkey for a pet…

This has lost all its energy and sounds written down, not spoken.

Then there’s the pitfall of dialects and regional accents. Here, a little goes a very long way. Unless you yourself are steeped in a dialect or accent, it’s easy to get it wrong and sound phony. Avoid “begorrah’s” and “eeh, by gum’s”; avoid too many dropped ‘h’s’ and rhyming slang. Of course, if you are really at home with an accent, it can add enormously to your writing. In this extract, an eighteenth century Yorkshire drummer boy walks out of a hill – and out of his own time:

“I wasn’t so long,” said the drummer. “But I niver found nowt. I isn’t t’first in yon spot; sithee, I found yon candle. Now I’s thruff yon angle, and it hasn’t taken so long, them bells is still dinging. It’s a moy night getting. But come on, or they’ll have the gate fast against us and we’ll not get our piggin of ale.”
“Who are you?” said Keith.
“I thought thou would ken that,” said the boy. “But mebbe thou isn’t t’fellow thou looks in t’dark.”

“Earthfasts” William Mayne, 1966


If you’re not this confident (and most of us aren’t), be sparing in your use of dialect words. The reader will be able to use a few subtle pointers to ‘fill in’ the accent from his or her own experience, and that’s better than getting it wrong. Slight changes to grammar will sometimes help. A nineteenth century servant girl might be likely to say, “What was you thinking of, talking to the missus like that?” rather than, “What were you thinking of?” Be consistent, though. If she starts out talking like this, she has to keep it up.

If you are writing historical fiction, it’s better for your dialogue to sound timelessly modern, than to wallow in a sea of what Robert Louis Stevenson used to call ‘tushery’: peppering your dialogue with phony “forsooth’s”, “tush-tushes” and “by my halidom’s”. Modern writers are less likely to make this mistake, but note that ‘timelessly’ means you cannot use modern colloquialisms. Cavaliers and Victorians cannot convincingly use 20th century idioms like ‘OK’. Check the Oxford Dictionary if you’re not sure. There are always surprises. ‘Kid’ for ‘child’ goes right back to the eighteenth century.

Then there’s a disease to which fantasy writers in particular are terribly prone. I call it ‘Wizard’s Waffle’, and it involves using grammatical inversions and a stilted, archaic vocabulary in an attempt to make your character sound wise (and sometimes to conceal the fact that neither you nor he actually have very much to say.) It’s partly Tolkien’s influence: he uses deliberately ‘high’ or heroic language when he wants to emphasise the importance of an event. At the end of “The Return of the King”, characters sound positively Biblical. Aragorn, accepting the crown of Gondor, says:

“By the labour and valour of many I have come into my inheritance. In token of this I would have the Ring-bearer bring the crown to me, and let Mithrandir set it upon my head…for he has been the mover of all that has been accomplished, and this is his victory.”

It’s grand, but it’s dull: Aragorn’s character is completely submerged by the style. If he talked like this all the time, we would soon lose interest in him: fortunately, for most of the book, he doesn’t. But at least Tolkien, a Professor of Philology, knew how to handle archaic grammar and cadences. Many modern writers don’t – so if you are irresistibly tempted towards the ‘what-say-the-elves-on-this-matter’ type of dialogue, get the grammar right. The verb ‘to be’ used to be conjugated thus:

I am
Thou art (familiar singular)
Ye be/you are (polite singular)
He/she/it is
We are
You are (plural)
They are

This, of course, is why the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ with its thee’s and thou’s is actually the familiar way of speaking to God – not, as I used to think when I was little, a special dressed-up sort of way.


Two more often-misused verbs:

I have
Thou hast (familiar singular) 
You have (polite singular)
He/she/ it hath
We have 
You have (plural)
They have



I do
Thou dost (familiar singular)
You do (polite singular)
He/she/it doth
We do (plural)
You do (plural)
They do


Commit all this to memory and you will be preserved from Monty Pythonesque dialogue along the lines of, “Fair knight, I prithee tell me if ye art Sir Lancelot? For the omens doth foretell that only he canst save me.”

Mind you, in the right hands, all these rules can be creatively bent, twisted and broken. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld characters frequently say things like ‘OK’ and it doesn’t matter a bit, because Discworld is really our own world in a carnival mask – and Pratchett has wise and wonderful things to say about it.

When I was writing the Troll series, set in a Viking-Scandinavia-that-never-was, I tried my best to make the characters sound fresh without being too obviously modern. Vocabulary was one way. It may sound obvious, but you can’t have ‘battleship grey’ at a time before there are any grey battleships, for example. Angry people may ‘shout’, but should not ‘explode’, centuries before any grenades or bombs. At one point I thought very hard before allowing myself to use the verb ‘corkscrewed’ to describe a twisting underground passage. Clearly, Vikings didn’t have corkscrews. But I decided that, in context, no image of an actual corkscrew would spring incongruously to mind. I don’t mind the occasional anachronism – so long as I know it’s there…

In my latest book “Dark Angels” (“The Shadow Hunt” in the USA), set in the 12th century, there’s one character who sounds more modern than the others. His name is Halewyn, and he is – or masquerades as – a wandering jongleur, a sort of intinerant juggler-cum-minstrel. The boy, Wolf, is angry because Halewyn has brought an unguarded flame into the stables where the mysterious elf-girl is kept.

Halewyn stood in the glimmering drizzle, hanging his head so extravagantly that the donkey-ears on his cap drooped.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He pounded his thin chest. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Anything you’d like me to do in penance? Turn a somersault? Do three cartwheels across the yard, dodging the puddles? Sing a song standing on my head?”
Wolf couldn’t help laughing. “No, it’s all right. Just remember, flames are dangerous in stables and barns.”
“Oh, I will. I’ll be very, very careful.” Halewyn perked up. “At least I saw her,” he said buoyantly. “And now, take me to your leader.”

‘Take me to your leader.’ Why would I put such an iconic modern phrase into the mouth of a 12th century character? And the answer is: Because Halewyn isn’t quite what he seems. He is  – well, I'd better not say, but he’s immortal – and being immortal, I think he can transcend time and speak ‘out of turn’ and out of his century.

Shining a light into the dark

If you are a writer, have you ever kept a diary?  I'm guessing you have. I started one when I was nine. “Mrs Butler’s school,” runs the first entry, “went to Stump Cross Caverns. We went down a long flight of steps and it was quite dark. Some tunnels were borded [sic] up. It felt strange being so far below the ground. There were many stalactites.”
 

Not very descriptive, but although the entry is pretty laconic, I reckon I was impressed. Impressed enough to want to record it. Anyway, I’ve been going underground in fiction ever since – in ‘Troll Fell’ and ‘Troll Mill’, and in my latest book 'Dark Angels' ('The Shadow Hunt' in the States).  I’m actually rather claustrophobic, but I do find caves fascinating. Each time I write about them I head off underground to collect first-hand impressions: for Dark Angels this meant a crawl - literally - down a Roman lead-mine in Shropshire: the entrance tunnel was approximately two feet high. It was wet, stony, uncomfortable, and of course unlit; and I wasn’t at all sure I could do it. But I did. I sat there in the dark and wrote (on a notebook I couldn't see) scrawled and broken sentences about what I could feel and smell and hear.  And I swore to myself that there would be no cheating this time – no writing about magical lights or mysterious phosphorescence. Unless they took candles along with them, my characters would be in the dark.

It’s interesting (to me at least) that this fascination with caves started so long ago. I’ve kept a diary on and off ever since, and in my early twenties recorded a number of conversations with a guy I worked with, who belonged to the Cave Rescue. He was for ever being hauled out of bed at 2 am to go down pot-holes and drag out people who had got stuck. Sometimes they were alive, sometimes they most definitely weren’t. One night the team was called out to rescue an eighteen-year old girl from a university club who’d fallen down a ninety foot pitch. 

“When we looked at her” (he told me) “we could see that if we moved her we were going to kill her, so we stayed with her till the medics came down with oxygen. But even then we were still going to kill her if we moved her, and she died down there about half an hour after we reached her.

“It was pretty wet. Luckily she wasn’t very big, so it was easier getting her out – you know, it’s a pretty tight passage.” He paused. “She didn’t look very good when most people saw her. When we got to her she wasn’t so bad, because the water had washed her clean.” He paused again. “It’s going to be an awful shock for her mother.”

Strong and terse: he was shaken and emotional. I felt the emotion too, but also I was trying to learn how to write dialogue. I would go home and scribble down what I remembered. I wasn't being callous, but this is what writers do. I’m still moved by what he said - even more, if possible, now I have daughters that age myself - but I'd have forgotten about it years ago if I hadn’t written it down.

There's times when it’s handy to turn up an old diary and find something to jog the mind into action. Weather writing, for example. Me and my brother walking on the moors in the heavy winter snow of 1979:

In places the snow looked just like the surface of a clean new mushroom, white and peeling a little all over. Later, coming down the tarn road, shadows on the snow were a luminous, pale violet. 

We all think we can remember just how it felt to be young. But a diary is there as a sort of reality check. I said and wrote some things which now seem outrageous - and I'm sure, without the diary there to prove it, I'd have edited them out of my memory.  You could say that going back into old diaries is another sort of caving - delving into the past, sometimes crawling into uncomfortable places.  


When I was just sixteen I moved to a new school, and one day during an English lesson some of my new friends discovered that I wrote poetry.   For fun. I had never thought writing poetry was at all odd; but they were utterly baffled by it; and then I became baffled by their bafflement... we gaped at one another like goldfish in separate bowls.  The teacher, who was not more ten years older than us, took advantage of the moment and asked if any of the other girls in the class had ever kept diaries.  Several had.  She went on gently to suggest that writing a poem might be - in some ways - similar to keeping a diary.  A poem might distil an experience, an emotion, a feeling, in the same way that writing a diary entry could preserve a moment of the past.  Comprehension dawned on my new friends' faces, and I too had learned something.  In some odd way, one of the reasons I write is to preserve life, to create life, to shine light into the dark.  


Original Photo from North Wales Caving Club