Music to write by

Right now Brahms is on the CD player as I write this, but it could be Mozart or Shostakovich,  Delius or Prokofiev. I’m energised by the right music and there’s a wide selection on my shelves.

I grew up in the days when you were either a Beatlemaniac or a Stones fan, and I admit to having been a bit of both (typical Libra). But when university loomed and I shared lodgings with others, I had a bit of a conversion. I spent my first year glued to Radio Caroline as it bobbed illegally in the North Sea, with its constant plugging and adverts in Canadian accents for Russian-sounding watches, interspersed with Pentangle, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends LP, Jethro Tull and others, but in my second year I discovered Beethoven.

It was a fellow-student with a set of the piano concertos that started me off. Pop was fun, jazz was fun too, but classical seemed richer, deeper and wider, and from that time on I’ve mostly been exploring its main streets and byways.

Twelve years ago we moved house, and my vinyl went to Oxfam. In the years since, CDs and downloads have more than caught up with my old collection and expanded it into composers hardly acknowledged by us non-specialists before the CD revolution made them easily available.

Whatever music I write to has to be familiar—in other words, I must have played it a few times before I can settle to writing alongside it. The collection grows, however. In the last few weeks I’ve added Koechlin’s haunting piano suite Les Heures Persanes (a composer I knew nothing about until hearing an excerpt on the radio), the Brahms piano quartets that are playing now and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K.364, a piece which makes me want to cheer every time I hear it. The Mozart I had years ago but somehow never got around to replacing it until recently, and it returned to the fold like an old friend.

It doesn’t matter if it’s relaxing or bracing, so long as I’ve already heard it a few times. I’ve written while listening to Schubert, Schumann, Vaughan Williams, Bax and Elgar, to piano music by Villa-Lobos and Mompou, to Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc, to the symphonies of Martinu, to Philip Glass, to Beethoven’s string quartets and Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues. The music never loses its magic.

The only music I can’t write to is vocal, though I own and enjoy plenty of it otherwise. No opera, no songs. Something about the human voice takes too much attention away, so part of me has to stop writing to take account of the virtual human in the room. Sorry, but there it is.

Why write historicals?

I write mostly about two periods of history, ancient Greece and early medieval. One choice stems from a classics background at school and university and subsequent visits to Greece, but the other?

I spent a lot of time as a boy being taken around old buildings and archaeological sites, an interest I was happy to share with my parents. In Devon, where I was born, and Cornwall, where we spent several holidays, there is a lot of history both ancient and medieval: Bronze Age and Neolithic settlements, a Roman legionary HQ in Exeter, Cornish churches founded by early saints. I soaked it up and grew up hooked on history, so that is what I write.

I admit that my stuff is a hard sell and a bit of a minority taste. My characters are fairly down-to-earth rather than exceptional or famous. I don’t subscribe to either the old philosopher/artist/genius image of ancient Athens or the more recent bloodsoaked martial arts bashfest inspired by movies like 300. I don’t do vampires or werewolves either, though a ghost may occasionally drift past.

Diokles in A Pig in the Roses has no special skills except determination, decency, a tendency to jump in at the deep end and an unswerving loyalty to his family. He has no regular sidekick, though plenty of varied contacts: fellow-merchant, cavalryman, barber, courtesan, slave, potter. Ulf in my Anglo-Saxon short stories is no famous warrior, just a farmer seriously injured during  a Viking attack on his home, learning new skills at the forge of an ironsmith in the nearest town.

I sent MSS to publishers who couldn’t sell the period,  publishers who never replied and one who accepted (hooray!) and then went out of business—all the usual first steps. I self-publish now because I like it. It gives me control. I’m my own harshest critic, though I have another writer of historicals in the house and friends who will read my stories if I ask nicely, so I’m all set up with criticism before publication. I can use a spell-checker. My covers so far are my own work, using my own photographs (thank you Olympus, thank you Paintshop Pro).

And there are no deadlines, which is perfect. I spent years doing the nine-to-five on other people’s deadlines, so never again. Tonight, after a sunny Friday massacring bindweed and digging over the old strawberry patch outside, I’m writing this. Tomorrow I’ll do some more on the next Diokles story. Self-publishing suits me. 

Walter Murray's 'Copsford': a pleasure discovered

In a year when soft fruit blossom was blasted by early frost and the beans struggled up to find slugs and snails first in line, it’s a pleasure to wander into a charity bookshop and find an unexpected gem of a countryside book. Last week’s discovery, Walter Murray’s Copsford, has been out of print for a while and deserves not to be.

I’m a bit of a sucker for books like this but had never heard of Murray or his memoir of a year roughing it in a delapidated Sussex cottage, a beguiling mixture of the down-to-earth and the near-transcendental.

Murray went to Copsford in the 1940s (the publication date is 1948), chatted to the farmer, paid three shillings a week and moved in. The cottage was plain, going on grim, isolated, almost uninhabitable and infested with rats, but Murray – a journalist normally stuck in London at that time – claimed it for his own.

The project was to live by collecting herbs. Tansy, agrimony, eyebright and many others grew in masses in the countryside around Copsford, and the sale of these, dried and in sacks, was to cover the year’s living costs and keep the London landlord happy.

There were battles to win: the rats, rain through every crevice, cattle invading  the garden, horseflies, an uncertain chimney, bitter cold as winter arrives. The passages that stay in the mind, though, are the depictions of warm summer days spent herb-gathering, sometimes with the lady described only as ‘the music mistress’.

‘At first I was restless, miserable,’ he writes, ‘…But I slowly learned to stand and stare. The leaven was working. I not only stood and not only stared, but I began to see.’ In the intensity of its response to the outdoors, this book rather reminds me of  J. A. Baker’s classic, The Peregrine. For those who, like myself, have discovered and enjoyed books such as R. M. Lockley’s The Golden Year (a small farm in Wales) or the poet Andrew Young’s A Prospect of Flowers (both from around the same period as Murray's book), Copsford fits right in.

(Picture of wild flowers at Beacon Mill, Rottingdean, Sussex by Amanda Slater and sourced from Wikimedia Commons.)