Chutney

Today, to channel my inner woman of 1910, I made chutney. I am absolutely certain that, had I been me in 1910, I would have made chutney. I might even have used the same recipe - I know it was around because my cookbook's author (Sally Butcher) inherited it from her grandmother. (On the other hand, until Sally released it to the world it was a fiercely defended family secret - so maybe I am channeling a very specific woman of 1910.)

Chutney, I have discovered, is basically vinegar and brown sugar boiled up with a little fruit, onion and spice. It is emphatically not wartime food - unless you saved your sugar ration for several months. (But then, the war hadn't started in 1910.) The rules say you have to make large quantities and give it to your entire family. This entails certain hazards. First, the huge volume of sticky goo tends to try and burn on the bottom of the pan so frequent stirring is needed. But it also boils very gloopily so that when you stick a spoon in to do the stirring, hot steam spurts out all over your hands.

While managing this dangerous mixture. you have to sterilise jam jars. This involves dipping them in boiling water. This should not, I have discovered, be done with pliers as the wire cutter part breaks the glass, leading you to have to steal more jars from your housemate. When all jars are sterilised, with only a few burns acquired, it's time to transfer the chutney into them...

I think if I'd been doing this a hundred years ago I'd have been more skilled and the kitchen would have ended up less sticky.

Tabloid inspiration

Last week I went to a workshop at the Poetry School with Carrie Etter, about beginnings and endings. This was all about poetry but everything we did, from playing with tabloid headlines to analysing what titles did for their poems, got me thinking about sideways ways into stories. Poetry is never direct: you very rarely say straight out what you mean. (In my case at the moment, I never say what I mean at all, unless there is something very deep underlying the chorus of washing machines in my writing.)

The First World War produced reams of poetry: there was so much to express. After even the little research I've done so far I feel surrounded by powerful characters, all with something to say. There are also hundreds of little connections to my world.

I feel the need for a sideways way to express it all. I wonder what the tabloids said during the First World War. Did they even have tabloids back then?

Sunday 11/11, 2010

Watched the ceremony at the Cenotaph today: sorrow and remembering, and camaraderie. Tried to imagine what the ceremony was like the first time. Didn't need to, there's footage in this clip:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/11734920

Letters from a lost generation

To correct my last post - it's not true that there is nothing amiss in these letters and diaries. There is detail, often shocking, of wounds and incidents, like Mairi Chisholm's description of looking in a man's coat pocket for his identity tag and finding someone else's brains. There are expressions of surprise that the writers have coped.

I have come back to Vera Brittain, in the letters between her, her brother and three of his friends, one her fiance (Letters from a Lost Generation, ed. Bishop and Bostridge 1998). Her letters are full of a pain so personal that, if I were feeling it, I could not write it, if I could write it I could not express it clearly, and if I could express it I would not be comfortable sharing it with the world.

She lets you very close, in a way that not everyone can, or wants to.

What they were humming before the War

I spent a lot of yesterday re-reading A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. It hadn't struck me before, but she gave that pair of lectures in 1928 - the same year women got the vote on an equal footing with men, and ten years after the end of the Great War.

What caught my attention was not her main argument, or her plea to young women to take up their pens and write - although we are a good way through the century of determined effort she describes, and I'm curious about how well she'd think we've done. What caught my attention was an allusion to the War, or to times before and after... to what people 'hummed' under their breath at dinner before and not after.

'My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose bows are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.'
Christina Rossetti 

Women stopped humming; men stopped humming; conversations were dulled by a lack of humming; nobody's heart was 'like a singing bird'. And this touches on something I was struggling with in reading wartime letters and diaries. In the words, there is little amiss. People write cheerfully. They get on with things. They do not weep into the paper - the diaries I've read are far less mournful than mine. Their writers - mostly women working in hospitals - relish having something constructive to do and often get great satisfaction from their work. The War was a mad, horrible interlude that had to be dealt with, got through. But afterwards?

There are too many stories in this archive

They are wrapped up in many ways, these stories. Some are in brown paper boxes; others red; others are in blue or brown folders, tied up like parcels with crisscrossed white tape.

There’s Mrs Winterbottom, who, when her husband is called to the Front, offers herself and her car to the War Office. She then spends six months driving officers to the front line and wounded soldiers back from it, often under fire or in a rain of shrapnel. Then there’s Mabel St Clair Stobart who founds a hospital in Serbia and then, as the Serbian army retreats, goes with it, taking the whole setup. Her description of the three month journey includes travelling on roads full not only of holes and rocks and mud, but dead animals; horses and oxen, and dead men.

There’s the story in a hundred or more newspaper cuttings of Miss Mairi Chisholm and Mrs Elsie Knocker, who on their own initiative set up a nursing station just behind the Belgian front line, so as to nurse soldiers as swiftly as possible after they are wounded.

There’s a large, flower covered album belonging to VAD nurse Miss Sybil Reeves, purchased in Italy and full of photographs, drawings, autographs, poems and mementos of her time there and of the people she knew. And there are the small things. Requests for soap to be sent from home. Slang. Top hole. Did people really say top hole?

Brown boxes of papers

I'm very excited about going to the Imperial War Museum Archive next week. I have asked to see the records of about twenty women who travelled abroad - usually as nurses - during the First World War.

Their stories are enticing. They went to Italy, Serbia, France, Egypt, Malta, Russia, Belgium, usually as nurses or VADs. There's even a pair of sisters who seem to have worked together through the War. One record mentions witnessing a shipwreck. There are letters to their families and from their brothers, often on the front line, and there are diaries and albums.

I really hope they come in brown boxes.

Putting it on the website makes it real

Today I put up a new page on my website. It's about a project that I'm about to start, investigating the First World War from a female perspective. It must be the fifteenth or twentieth project that I've turned over in my mind in the last two years - but it's the first to make it to the website.

I wonder how it will turn out. At the moment, it's two A6 pages of notes. But as every word of those notes is a name, and every person on the list wrote a diary or series of letters, there are a lot of different ways things could go.

I guess this is the official launch.