Extinct!

I was reading the newspaper today and came across an article about a landowner in Somerset who was so fed up of beavers eating his trees that he was offering a reward to anyone who got rid of them. This surprised me as I knew beavers had been extinct in the UK for hundreds of years and had only been re-introduced recently into a few places. I assumed that they would be a protected species but that's not the case. So those beavers need to keep their heads down.

Every so often I’m reading a historical novel and a wolf stalks across the historical landscape, or a red kite swoops down in the streets of London and carries off a kitten. Fascinating background colour, but it does get me wondering about extinction dates for various species in the UK because nothing will pull me out of a book faster than a bear chasing someone (unless of course it's an escaped dancing bear!)

So here’s a round up of a few extinction dates for species in Britain, although some of these are in dispute.

The Lynx - 400AD

As recently as 2005 it was believed that the lynx had died out in the UK about 4000 BC when the

climate turned cooler and wetter. Then animal bones were discovered in a cave in Yorkshire that were carbon dated to about 400 – 500 AD. Just as I love to think that the Scottish Wild Cat still prowls the glens, so the thought of a lynx adds a perfect touch of mystery to a book set in the Dark Ages. The 

Brown Bear – Circa 1000 AD

Bears are thought to have died out in Britain shortly before the medieval period due to heavy deforestation and hunting by humans. Bones and skulls have been found scattered in many parts of the Scottish Highlands while bears are often depicted on Pictish stones. This is pretty amazing to me. Despite having seen bears in the French Pyrenees I just can’t get my head around the thought that shortly before the Norman Conquest you could have been wandering around a forest somewhere in the UK and bump into a bear.

The Wolf – Circa 1740 AD (unless it’s a werewolf, of course)

  

I love Scotland and sometimes when I’m standing in the forest listening to the silence I imagine what it would be like to hear the night split by a wolf’s unearthly howl. The wolf was exterminated in Britain after centuries of persecution. The last wolves were in the Scottish Highlands and the last one was reputed killed in 1740. I think it would be pretty cool to feature a wolf in a book set in the Highlands in the 18th century.

As someone who has walked with wolves at the Wolf Trust, I admit to a huge admiration for these fabulous animals. The one licking my face in the photograph was 6 months old and a big cub.

The Wild Boar – Circa 1300AD

The extinction of the Wild Boar in the UK is complicated by the fact that it was re-introduced several times, notably in the 17th century. The re-introductions were not successful as many people saw the boar as a threat to agriculture and hunted it. Wild boar farming in England began in the 1970s and 1980s and since then populations of escapees have established themselves in the wild. On the basis of this evidence I think it would be quite credible to have a wild boar featuring in a Regency-set book!

The Beaver – Circa 1300 AD

For many years I believed that beavers were still around in the early 19th century because of all the curly-brimmed beaver hats that featured in Regency romances. In fact the beaver was hunted to extinction many years before, for its fur and the pain-relieving properties of its anal gland secretions. The beaver hats of the Regency were made from imported American beaver fur.

Red Kite

The Red Kite was never completely eradicated in the UK. Whilst you wouldn’t see many kites in a

city these days a remnant of the population survived in Wales and it was recently re-introduced into the Chilterns and has spread very successfully across parts of the south of the UK. Indeed it was reported in 2006 that a Red Kite had been seen over London after an absence of 150 years and when I was on the train a few weeks ago I saw them flying over Reading.

The streets of Shakespeare’s capital were full of red kites. He referred to it as “The city of kites and crows.” The birds were scavengers, never short of a meal at a time when people threw their rubbish in the street. They also stole washing off lines for their nests. But gradually improving public hygiene and waste-disposal robbed the red kite of its niche in the London ecosystem, and by the end of the 18th century it was extinct as a breeding bird. The last sighting on the streets of the capital was in 1859.

We've all come across some anachronistic flora and fauna mentioned in historical novels sometimes and perhaps it doesn't matter but it's interesting to know which animals and birds were actually around when!  

Indian or British? An intimate look into pre-war India.

I was inspired to write Regency books because I read Georgette Heyer as a teenager and later read Jane Austen's wonderful books. In latter years I watched the many Jane Austen adaptations that appeared on television and this spurred me on to write my own Jane Austen variations, as well as over thirty Regency stories.

However, when I found my mother's journal about the time she spent in India with her father, my grandfather, I decided to write a historical family saga using her memoirs for authentic background and detail. I was astonished at the luxury of wealth of my grandfather's family and am sure that living for two years in what was virtually a palace (albeit a Victorian one) changed my mother, and not for the better. The disparity between the wealthy Brahmins and the lower castes was even more pronounced in the 1930s than it is today. The Untouchables – the ones who emptied the chamber pots and did all the other unpleasant tasks – were reviled and ignored by everyone. My mother caused a major upset by sitting on the doorstep of her apartment to have a cigarette first thing in the morning.This meant the man designated to empty pots and clean bathrooms couldn't do so as he wasn't allowed to be seen by the family. The first part of Victoria's War, Shadows, uses a lot of my mother's actual descriptions of the India where she lived for two years between 1937 and 1939. I also made the decision to get her memoirs typed and transferred to my PC and then to publish them on Amazon.

The electronic version has been live since last month and the paperback version is now live with Create Space. I shall make a colossal loss on this project, but writers don't do everything in order to earn royalties – sometimes we write and publish books because they are important to us. Victoria's War :Shadows http://amzn.to/1HvkEP (.uk) http://amzn.to/1KZdmCD (.com) Indian or British? Fenella J Miller

De-junking One’s Life

I’m a great believer in periodically de-junking one’s life. I do try not to hoard things but I’m not a natural minimalist and clutter keeps creeping in. I enjoy having ornaments around which friends have given me. I like buying unusual earrings and necklaces in foreign street markets. And, above all, I love collecting books.

However, I realized that enough was enough when I found myself blowing dust off all those little ornaments rather than dusting them properly. There were just too many. I’m asthmatic and the result was Not Good. Time for a change. I gave them a proper wash, put a few aside to keep, and said good-bye to the rest before taking them down to Oxfam.
I’ve also learnt to be more ruthless about my wardrobe and chuck things I don’t wear. These days it’s strictly buy something new and something old has to go. It doesn’t always work but I’m a lot better than I used to be.

Then there are the books. I have over two thousand. There are bookcases in almost every room and on the landings, and most of the alcoves have shelving for books as well. I was getting to the stage where they were beginning to pile up in the corners of rooms. Well, if I’m honest, there have been piles of books on the floor for years but I hadn’t seen them. Now I did.

So, this week, I’ve been tackling the books. A number of academic books from my M.A. course went – they are out of date now. I re-read those novels I wasn’t sure about and was surprised how many I was happy to let go. I’d loved them once but now they no longer appealed in the same way. Then there were books which I’d been given but didn’t really want. I’d thanked the donors nicely and now the books could go. The charity shop would get some money, I’d get some space.

The real problem is with the thousand or so books which comprise my research library - and I'm sure my fellow novelists know the problem. As a Historical novelist, we need to check on not only the obvious things like housing, costume, travel, food, wages and so on, but also more obscure information. I have books on smuggling in Cornwall in the early 19th century; theatrical lighting (candles, paraffin lamps and, later, gas) in the mid 19th century; an entire shelf on Wellington’s army in Spain during the Peninsular War; how refugees fleeing the French Revolution managed to support themselves in London, and a host of other out of the way subjects. It’s much more difficult to prune books here.

Nevertheless, this week, in six separate visits, I managed to take over one hundred books to the new Oxfam Book Shop in Islington. So, can I now report that my bookshelves are inspiringly freed up? Not quite. But I can see a lot more of my floor! What’s more, I feel incredibly virtuous.

And it’s a lot cheaper than therapy.

Photos: top: novels in the sitting-room
            bottom: books on the landing: top shelf: 19th century Highlands, lower shelf:
            Napoleonic wars.

Elizabeth Hawksley