A History Lesson

As you will have gathered from the books I write, I have an interest in history. It comes from my father and one teacher. Other teachers taught that the Romans left Britain in 410, about Magna Carta, about Mary Queen of Scots and Robert Bruce, not mentioning he was really a Norman with sworn allegiance to Edward of England, the Hammer of the Scots. I had no empathy with Mary because Kings and Queens lived in a culture where they plotted against each other, sent people to the tower and chopped off heads at a whim. It was when that one teacher asked the girls how they would have felt if their father had come and told them that, while Henry Eighth had chopped off his wife’s head, he wanted to come courting and Dad thought it was a good idea. Their reactions varied from a confident, I’d have so enchanted him, he wouldn’t have done that to me, to wide eyed horror, to a disinterested, I’ve never even seen a king and he’s dead now anyway. What it did for me was to turn history into the story of people, people who didn’t like spinach, who got tired working in the fields, who fell asleep in church, people who felt. Those are the people I write about.
Sullatober