Author: Julie Summers

Welcome to my eighth newsletter. Last time I wrote I mentioned that my chickens were scratching around my garden. Unfortunately our local fox put paid to that activity, killing all six in one night but the garden has benefited from their demise, even though we miss their clucking, not to speak of the delicious eggs.Contents

• Let’s get the show on the road
• Jam Tomorrow
• Oh what a wonderful war
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Let’s get the show on the road

When I left the Ashmolean Museum nearly ten years ago I did not imagine that I would get involved in the kind of projects that have come my way. This autumn’s lecture tour in theatres around the country is definitely a new and exciting departure. For five weeks I will be criss-crossing the country, from Inverness to Southend, Llandudno to Andover talking about Sandy Irvine in a lecture called ‘Everest Needs You, Mr Irvine’.

It is one of my favourite talks because although I cannot supply the answer to the question of whether Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1924, I can take people on a journey of discovery, after which they can form their own opinion. Since I first wrote the book I have discovered more photographs and, most excitingly, film footage of Sandy so that the talk brings him to life in a three-dimensional way. To see him walking out of the rowing club on Putney Embankment, just two doors down from where my son Simon has lived for the past two years, and climbing into the boat prior to the Boat Race is breathtaking and very moving.

If the show comes to a theatre near you I would love to see you. Please do encourage family and friends to come along too. The talk is fun as Sandy’s short but action-packed life was full of excitement and passion. I have an intensely moving clip from an interview with Peter Lunn, the last person alive today who knew Sandy. Peter was a 9-year-old boy living in Switzerland when Sandy went to Mürren to learn to ski and get some experience on ice. Sandy promised to write to him from Everest and he kept his word. The letters were lost in the Second World War but my great-grandfather had made copies and they appeared quite out of the blue in 2000. You can imagine how overwhelmed Peter was to see those letters again, more than 75 years after Sandy wrote them to him. Then there is some footage of Harry Abrahams, son of one of the famous photographer brothers from Keswick. He remembered Sandy talking to his father about the oxygen apparatus that he was preparing for Everest. Harry has now died but his interview is lovely and I’m glad to be able to include it in the talk.

Here are the dates and venues. Click the links below to book online or via telephone.

Date	City/Town	Venue
September
Friday 30th	INVERNESS	Eden Court
October
Monday 3rd	EASTBOURNE	Congress Theatre
Wednesday 5th	BUXTON	Arts Centre
Thursday 6th	LLANDUDNO	Venue Cymru
Friday 7th	BRECON	Theatr Brycheiniog
Sunday 9th	ILFRACOMBE	Landmark Theatre
Wednesday 12th	HALIFAX	Victoria Theatre
Friday 14th	DARLINGTON	Civic Hall
Tuesday 18th	STOCKPORT	Stockport Plaza
Thursday 20th	RADLETT	The Radlett Centre
Tuesday 25th	SOUTHEND	Pavilion Theatre
Wednesday 26th	DERBY	Guildhall Theatre
November
Thursday 3rd	ANDOVER	The Lights

Jam Tomorrow

Work on the WI book has continued over the summer and the book will be finished by the end of August, which gives me a month in September to edit, tweak and nudge it into shape. I’ve already written extensively about my research on this book in the last two newsletters so I will refrain from going on about it now, except to say that it keeps throwing up glorious snippets and wonderful surprises. I am learning more and more about what the WI got up to on so many different levels and my respect for the women who kept the villages running in wartime continues to grow.Oh what a wonderful warSecond World War board game owned by Mrs Joan Hale, Oxon.

I am involved in an exhibition entitled Children & War which opens at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock in October. The topic is wide-ranging and the real challenge is how to tell the story and explain the philosophy behind the exhibition in a room of limited size, without making it appear grossly overcrowded. Thank goodness for extended online exhibitions, is all I can say. When I started out on the project I imagined that it would be difficult to introduce any levity – my first thoughts ranged from the boy soldiers of the Great War to the innocent victims of the Second World War and subsequent conflicts. However, there is much to celebrate in the subject, believe it or not: children in Britain were involved in the war effort in all sorts of ways – from salvage collection and fruit picking to message delivery and undercover work. And it was not exclusively the boys either. Girl Guides were kept busy on all fronts in the Second World War and contributed an enormous amount to so many war-related activities.

For some children war generates excitement. Many people now in their seventies and eighties will attest to the thrill they felt when they saw an enemy aircraft shot down, or how they rushed to collect shrapnel and other trophies after air raids. Excitement mixed with fear, perhaps, but intoxicating stuff, nevertheless. Toys and war games add to the sense of excitement that war can have for children. It doesn’t sit comfortably with our twenty-first century sensitivities but it does perhaps explain why toy soldiers, Airfix models and war games are of such enduring interest. Today children play with War Hammer and enjoy shoot ’em up video games. It’s just a variation on a theme.

Patriotism is another topic we will be looking at. Tens of thousands of boys were prepared to lie about their age in order to take the King’s shilling during the First World War. Figures for the exact number of boys who signed up are notoriously hard to come by for the very reason that so many failed to tell the whole truth. However, a conservative figure appears to be in the region of 250,000, of whom over 10% lost their lives. Boy soldiers are nothing new. Regiments regularly recruited boys in uniform to play in regimental bands. Photographs in the collection of the Soldiers of Oxfordshire provide a wonderful visual record of some of these boys.

However, there is no getting away from the fact that war disrupts lives, whether for good or ill, and a major part of our exhibition is going to look at the impact of war on children’s lives, especially around the Second World War and as a result of evacuation, the Kindertransport and more recently refugees and asylum seekers. This ties in well with the research I did for When the Children Came Home and I will be using stories from the book to tell the story of evacuation. A surprising unintended consequence of the wartime evacuation in Britain was the effect it had on social mobility. This is a topic which I explored in the book and which several people have picked up on. Again, rather like admitting that war can be exciting, it is also provocative to point out that some children appear to have done better in terms of education and careers as a result of evacuation. Certainly Norman Andrews, who features in When the Children Came Home, put his academic success down to the fact that his foster father nurtured in him a love of literature and learning. It was not necessarily a class question either: Norman’s foster parents lived in a small house without electricity or running water, but Pop Lenton, who had left school at 14 and was self-taught, would read to Norman as they sat together in the hut at the level crossing on the Peterborough to Spalding line. He said, when I interviewed him: ‘I am very much the person I am because of Pop Lenton. I think for him I was the son he really wanted. A son who could pursue his intellectual interests.’

Perhaps the subtitle for the exhibition should be ‘how war changes lives’.Pen Thoughts

I’ve written before about design in connection with book covers, but I want to dwell for a moment on colour. If you have a look at this wonderful poster that Glenn Howard of Untitled has designed for our Children and War exhibition, your eyes will probably at first be drawn to the central image of the little evacuee children, prodded by the vicious red arrows that shove them inwards, shepherding them without ceremony towards an uncertain future. But look at the palette he has used (ignoring of course the obligatory but unsightly logos). Red, Cream and Blue. Not just any red, cream and blue, though, but war time colours. The cream of HM Stationery Office perhaps? The red that leaps out at one from the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. The reassuring blue of official forms and posters. I hope you will agree with me that it’s a very clever design.And Finally…

I’ve been out in my boat again. We competed at the Masters Rowing Championships in June in our quad. It could have been wetter at the National Water Sports Centre in Nottingham but only if Hollywood had been staging the downpour. We had over an inch of rain in five hours accompanied by gusty winds and March-like temperatures. In short, it was not weather conducive to a good day out. One veteran rower from Monmouth was bemoaning the conditions and the coach was overheard to say ‘yes, I know you could be at home watching the television, warm and dry. But you’re here to race.’ Race we did and we won gold in the Intermediate Quadruple Sculls. I then finished off with a win in my single scull at Richmond Regatta on the same day as my son Richard won in his double scull, so it has been a good season so far.

Julie Summers

August 2011, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.uk

Welcome to my seventh newsletter which I am writing on a glorious spring evening. The chickens are scratching around in the garden, ruining my borders to be sure, the birds are singing and the spires of Oxford are looking particularly dreamy.Contents

• The Evacuees are Launched
• A Play on Words
• Knowing Your Onions
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Norman Andrews (former evacuee), Barbara Southard, who appears on the front of the book with her arms around her little brother and sister, Sheila Shear (also a former evacuee) and Mike Jones, my editor at Simon & Schuster

When The Children Came Home Launch

Joan Risley, her daughter, Julia Batchelor and her husband, Edward RisleyThe Evacuees are Launched

When the Children Came Home was launched at the offices of Simon & Schuster in London on 3rd March. The publicity and editorial teams really made the most tremendous effort on our behalf and it could not have been a happier occasion. I say on ‘our’ behalf because really it felt like more of a family party than a book launch. Twenty-nine people whose stories featured in the book came along, as did others who had been closely involved and we were treated to sandwiches, cake, tea and coffee in the boardroom which was decorated in Union Jack bunting. Prior to that, two of the ladies – Sheila Shear and Jessie Nagel – and I had appeared on Woman’s Hour just after Sarah Brown. I’m glad to say that Jenni Murray did not give us as hard a time as she did Mrs B.

The book has had a most wonderful reception, far exceeding my expectations, and was topped by a review in the Mail On Sunday on 20 March by Craig Brown which gave it five stars and made it Book of the Week. As this book has been such a wonderful collaborative project with the people who have been generous enough to share their stories with me, I like to think that each of them feels just a little bit of a 5* person at the moment. Radio 4 got in touch and asked if they could interview one of the evacuees from the book whose experience I had written up in the Guardian Family section. Gordon Abbott, whose good news story about his evacuation to Cornwall has touched many people, will be appearing on Saturday Live on Saturday 2nd April at 10am. I’ll certainly be listening in.

But do not let me get carried away and have you believe that I am getting too big for my boots. When I went on tour to the North West I was invited to give a talk at Waterstones in Chester, fifteen miles from where I grew up. There, on a rainy Tuesday evening, I gave my talk on the book to eight people plus the bookshop manager. Eight is bad enough, but I was related to three of them, my sister and two uncles. Not my most glorious moment, but certainly a reality check.

In my last newsletter I wrote of my hope that reviewers would pick up on the good stories in When the Children Came Home and not just focus on the one chapter that deals with abuse. I’m glad to say that so far my wish has been fulfilled. Interestingly, what is also coming out strongly is the sympathy people feel for the plight of the mothers, both those whose children left home and the foster parents who were bereft when the children returned to the cities. The fact that the evacuation was codenamed Operation Pied Piper has not gone unobserved. No mother came up with that name, for sure.A Play on Words

When I was up in Chester enjoying my celebrity status at Waterstones I chanced to meet a theatre director called John Gorman. He had been trying to get in touch with me for several months and we had always failed to connect for some reason or another. We finally met in the Grosvenor Hotel where he regaled me with his fantastic plans for a major arts festival on the Wirral this summer. It sounds quite extraordinary, with a poetry prom, music, a huge outdoor art exhibition and a series of new plays. When he came to share his ideas for the plays he leaned forward and told me with ever greater enthusiasm about a play he was planning to direct about my grandfather, based on The Colonel of Tamarkan.Bridge over the River KwaiI had an inkling that this was what he had wanted to talk to me about, as he had hinted as much in his earlier emails. I leaned forward too. This was fascinating stuff. A monologue examining the thoughts and feelings Toosey had when he was commanding those camps along the railway. It would explore the story of the Kwai from a completely different angle:the psychological. How thrilling. I sat back. ‘Who is writing the play?’ I asked. John replied. ‘You are’. I nearly spat my drink across the table. I am not often wrong-footed but this one caught me completely unawares. I spluttered and protested and said I couldn’t and so forth. ‘Oh, shut up!’ he said, impatiently, ‘of course you can do it.’ So I am. Doing it, that is. It is a colossal challenge and one I’m going to have to work incredibly hard at as I have never written any drama before. But I have long wanted to. Radio plays have always appealed to me and I have occasionally day-dreamed about finding the perfect subject for a Radio 4 afternoon slot. But it has never been more than just a day-dream.

So I am now engaged in this wonderful project and finding it bewildering and terrifying as well as exhilarating and thrilling. I expect it will be ‘for one night only’ but so be it. I just hope that more than eight people turn out and that I do not find that I’m related to half of them.

I will be sharing my progress on the play with an audience at the Oxford Literary Festival next week. The event is sponsored by a whisky company, which has delighted Chris. I do the talk, he gets the whisky. No relatives are invited.

Knowing Your Onions

The WI book is proceeding apace and I am working, for the first time, with a researcher. I have never done this before, being terrified that if I employed someone to do research, they might miss the kind of details that I love to include in my books. However, I have no need to fear. I have found a man, Stephen, who really knows his onions. As I have been reading through Institute minute books I keep coming across references to the great onion shortage of the early 1940s. It was clearly something that bothered the government to the extent that the Ministry of Food asked the National Federation to urge local institutes to run an onion growing campaign. 25,000 onion sets were distributed to village institutes in 1942 but that year, certainly in the West Midlands, there was a bad attack of onion fly and whole crops were ruined.

Stephen and I discussed this onion problem and he went off and did a bit of digging around. He found that ‘Britain imported almost all of its onions from France and maybe Spain before 1939. Following the occupation of France this stopped, of course.’ Of course. Why hadn’t I worked that out for myself? He went on to explain that the other not so obvious problem is that onions do not grow very well in the UK. ‘The ones we grow today are largely the result of hybridisation, and known as short-day onions. That refers to the amount of daylight they require to grow. As any gardener will tell you, onions grow really slowly. The varieties available pre-war would not grow successfully in the UK – too cold, too wet, too dark in the early months of the year.’

The whole question of food imports is fascinating and I am going to need to devote quite a bit of time to working on this. According to press reports from October 1939, the twelve million eggs sent weekly to the UK from Holland were stopped, along with bacon and butter, the latter totalling 700 tons. No wonder there had to be rationing when that all ceased. Twelve million eggs. Some omelette, as Stephen observed. I thought you might also be interested to learn that the grouse shooting season in 1939 was a disaster with ‘even the best performers quite robbed of their normal skill: the state of Europe has shattered their powers of concentration.’ Oh woe that wretched war.The real Mont BlancPen Thoughts

My first idea about pen thoughts was to talk about an aspect of writing which would perhaps not occur to anyone not directly involved in producing books. But now I find myself compelled to write about what I really love, which is pens. I have a complete thing about them. I know exactly the weight in my hand of all my pens and I have certain pens to do certain things. For example, if I do the cross word, I just grab any old pen from the fifty or so in the jug on the side in the kitchen. But if I write a cheque then I like to do so with a fountain pen or a felt tip pen. The fountain pen I would use on those occasions would be a cheap Pilot disposable blue or black V-fountain pen. When I am writing a letter on beautiful paper (yes, that’s another of my weaknesses) I use my 10 year old Mont Blanc pen, which I bought when I finished Fearless on Everest. Occasionally it needs washing and cleaning out but by and large it has given very good service. It’s the slimline version of the Mont Blanc range. I don’t like the fat or thick-waisted version. It does not sit well in my hand and is too heavy. But my absolute favourite writing implement, above all others, is my Mont Blanc propelling pencil. It is slim, black, perfectly weighted, beautifully easy to use and lives in a very lovely red zipped pouch which I keep close to hand.

The striking thing about having a Mont Blanc pen fetish – and I acknowledge that it is terribly corny – is that it is an extremely easy chat up line. I was having a coffee in Oxford the other day and whipped out my propelling pencil to make a note of something in the black, leather-bound, cream- leaved A4 book I have kept for the WI project, only to be addressed by a Texan who was stuck, with his wife, in Oxford for two hours while they waited for their bus to take them on to Stratford. They were visiting Britain as part of a tour for her choir. I have a great affection for Texan men. One of my closest friends is married to one. So I chatted to this couple. Turns out he keeps a Mont Blanc (fat) fountain pen in the top pocket of his shirt whenever he is out on business. When he is wearing a jacket, he explained, he carries his Cross pen because that sat more snugly in his inside pocket. Well, we chatted on about pens for a bit, and then I suggested a quick two-hour itinerary of Oxford colleges for them. From Carfax down the hill to Christ Church then down Merton Street to Oriel, Corpus Christi and Merton itself (taking in the Sandy Irvine Memorial) and finally to Pens Plus on the High Street. We parted on the best of terms. Now, had I not been using my pencil that conversation might never have happened and I would not have been reminded of Ben, the lovely Texan husband of my friend Amanda.Falcon Rowing Club Women’s Eight rowing towards Barnes Bridge (and doing a spot of sightseeing en route) From bow: Ali, Anna, Emma, Caroline, Julie, Claire, Zena, Naomi and Lil (cox)
(Photo courtesy Iain Weir)Finally…

A few years ago Simon said to me that the only way I would ever really understand what it was like to row in the Boat Race, as Sandy Irvine had done, was to compete in an eight on the Tideway. In mid-March nine of us met up at Putney on a warm, sunny afternoon and rowed in the Women’s Head of the River Race. It was one of the most exhilarating and exhausting things I have ever done. 4 ½ miles of unrelenting pulling. I have more respect than ever I had before for those formidable crews who belt upstream from Putney to Mortlake for about 17 minutes. Downstream with the tide was hard enough. We finished a creditable 181st out of 300 crews, fully 60 places up on our start position.

Julie Summers

April 2011, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.ukForthcoming Events

• Sunday 3rd April 11:30am
  Oxford Literary Festival: Highland Park Keynotes Readings in the Festival Marquee at Christ Church The Colonel of Tamarkan – the true story of the Bridge on the River Kwai.
  www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com
• Monday 4th April 4:pm
  Oxford Literary Festival: Julie to interview Kitty Dimbleby about Daffodil Girls: Only They Know the Reality of Being an Army Wife: Meet the Women Behind Our Heroes
  www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com
• Tuesday 5th April 5:pm
  Oxford Literary Festival: When the Children Came Home
  www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com
• Saturday 16th April, 10am to 5pm
  From Everest to the EigerRewley House, Wellington Square, OxfordThis is a day of lectures by Julie Summers, Jerry Lovatt, John Porter and Peter Gillman, organised by Oxford University Continuing Education
  www.conted.ox.ac.uk
• Sunday 17th April, 3pm
  When the Children Came HomeIWM, North, The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Manchester M17 1TZhttp://north.iwm.org.uk

Welcome to my sixth newsletter and a very Happy New Year to you all. I have given up making New Year’s resolutions as I so seldom manage to keep to them. However, I would like to feel that 2011 is the year of the tidy office. I suspect that it won’t be, but it’s nice to think it could be.Contents

• Wordle Power
• Give me a minute…
• Mountain Madness
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Wordle Power

Within my family it is a standing joke that, although I spend more time in front of my computer than I allow my sons, I am the least computer-literate of all of us. I use my computer as a word processor, spread sheet producer, and of course I have access to the Internet and rely on Google to help me to track down snippets of information that I can then follow up in books or conversations. However, I admit to being temporarily fascinated by a Wordle. Chris showed me how to use it and I created one based on the entire contents of When the Children Came Home. Bear with me: this is more than just a gimmick. A Wordle, for those of you who, like me until yesterday, had never used one, is a program, available free on the Internet, that takes a piece of text and generates a ‘word cloud’. This gives prominence to words that occur most frequently in the source text.

The reason I wanted to run a Wordle on When the Children Came Home was to see what words occurred most frequently in the book and, in particular, whether the word I most dreaded appearing, abuse, would feature. How can I dread a word appearing when I wrote the book? Well, it’s simple. I had to address the issue but I fear the press will pick up on that one topic and get it out of proportion in the context of the rest of the book. Stories of the Second World War evacuation have been dominated in recent times by literature on the one hand and the media on the other, the latter focusing on the dark side. Think of Goodnight Mister Tom. It is a wonderful book, no doubt about it, and it has a happy ending, but its underlying theme is the physical and mental abuse, by an unstable mother, of an eleven-year-old evacuee boy. Think of the stories that make the press: children who had a miserable time as evacuees make much better copy than those who loved their foster families, fell in love with the countryside and returned home enriched by their experiences. Those who fall into the latter category often feel compelled to apologise for having had a ‘happy war’.

I became so concerned, when interviewing former evacuees, about the insistent apologies from those who wanted to tell me a good story with a happy outcome, that I began to do some rough statistics. Of the people whom I interviewed or whose stories I read for the book, over 85% felt that evacuation had been, for them, a positive experience. That is not to say that they were not at times homesick, nor does it mean that they found coming home as straightforward as they had hoped, but on balance they felt very fortunate. Many even claimed they had gained a second family, and certainly the number of children who were left legacies by their foster parents pays tribute to the long-lasting impact of those relationships formed in wartime.Ullswater, Cumbria.
My father spent his evacuation at the south end of this most lovely of lakes.

85% is of course not 100% and that leaves a large number – about a quarter of a million – who did not have a good experience. I have not shied away from writing about these children. Some suffered from chronic homesickness; others felt cut off from their families, others still felt abandoned in unfamiliar surroundings and turned in on themselves, shutting out the world. And some were indeed abused, both physically and sexually. But for many that I spoke to, it was the shock of coming home that was the real sadness for them. They had had, many of them, a good time in the countryside, but on returning to their families they felt out of kilter and some never adjusted to home life again. These children outnumbered those who spoke about outright abuse by 10 to 1.

My Wordle tells the story of When the Children Came Home in the most direct way I could conceive. Look at the words that dominate: ‘Children’ ‘home’ ‘ family’ ‘parents’ ‘mother’, as well as ‘evacuation’ ‘war’ ‘back’ ‘time’ and ‘school’. I do not want to read too much into it but I am heartened by the predominance of family oriented words. After all, these were children and they needed loving, caring for and looking after, and I believe that the majority of them benefited from exactly that. As Don Murdoch, one of my evacuees, said:

I am eternally grateful to those kindly couples who took me into their home, shared my joys and sorrows, and made me a temporary member of their families at a time my own family was under tremendous pressure. My subsequent life and career was, I believe, profoundly influenced for the better by my experiences as an evacuee. Perhaps one day the nation will acknowledge the thanks it owes to the many thousands of good-hearted ordinary country folk who, for scant reward, upset their domestic arrangements to accommodate children from the cities.I would not claim to have done anything more than record what I encountered but I am confident that Don Murdoch speaks for the very great majority of the former evacuee children I interviewed for When the Children Came Home.

The book is due out on 3 March this year and I am looking forward to its publication as I will be to meeting many of the ‘children’ whom I interviewed for the book, some of whom I know only from telephone conversations, although I have met others several times. One of the big surprises of the book launch we had for Stranger in the House was when people interviewed for the book met one another. They found common threads, often with no relation to the book per se, but some other link in their past. I found this very exciting and I anticipate similar coincidences this time.

Give me a minute…

When I began work on the book about the history of the Women’s Institute in the Second World War I had not really known what I should find in the archives of the national, county and local institutes. It is often regarded as something of a joke that the WI spent the war making jam while the men went out to fight. Put that stereotype right to the back of your mind and give the women who ran the WI from the top to the bottom a great deal more respect than that. True, they made jam. But it was not on some ad hoc basis. The Ministry of Agriculture asked them to pick up where they had left off after the Great War and take responsibility for helping to feed the country. As the food supplies coming in from the Empire were under threat and the country did not have sufficient supplies to feed itself, every scrap of extra food, every ripe plum, berry or hip, cherry, quince or apple could be bottled, pickled or canned. And it was done by the WI on such an industrial scale that during the first three years of the war they produced sufficient quantities of jam alone to feed the country for a year. Furthermore, they were up against the big jam-making factories who took, of course, the lion’s share of the farmed berries and fruits.

But they did a great deal more, and this is the excitement of pursuing research into archive records in detail. What I had not expected was such a wealth of detail and such minutiae about everyday life during the war. Every meeting was minuted, all accounts printed and audited, all resolutions recorded. The Women’s Institute is the most superb note-taker. Where the record books from the war are present there is almost nothing that cannot be divined from these impeccable sources. The minutes of the Women’s Institutes are a study in their own right. Today I read the executive minutes from 19th May 1945. Not a single word written about the end of the war but a sense of a cloud being lifted was somehow conveyed in those handwritten minutes and I found it very moving. Every set was laid out to a formula, and yet somehow they manage to convey something of the excitement and drama of the time.

One of the things that astounds me is the foresight that the women showed. As early as 1941 they were organising lectures on post-war reconstruction, reconciliation and education. They were in touch with international women’s groups and soon after the war Miss Deneke, from the Oxford Federation of Women’s Institutes, made a visit to Germany to meet representatives of their women’s groups. But they also took the long view on the war and the Oxfordshire Federation organised a competition in 1939 that was not judged until 1946: the best war record. This was won by Burford.

This is a wonderful project to be engaged on and I am greatly enjoying the thrill of finding material, most of which has not seen the light of day for well over half a century.Mountain Madness

The back end of last year was dominated by mountains. For most of November and the early part of December I was involved in a number of lectures, events, interviews and book reviews. The largest event, and the most thrilling, was Doug Scott’s First on Everest tour that was a fundraiser for his charity, Community Action Nepal. Doug decided he wanted to do a dry run of four talks in Oxford, which I was to compère, the day before our big event at the Royal Geographical Society. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but as November approached and we had only managed to get rid of about 125 of the 600 tickets for the town hall it all looked a bit dodgy. I was only really peripherally involved in getting the publicity going, but Phil Powell, a tireless campaigner and great enthusiast for both Nepal and mountaineering lectures, managed to drum up all sorts of support from schools, newspapers and colleges, and suddenly, with two days to go, the event was full. We were sold out. Also, with two days to go there was suddenly a call from Doug’s office to say that he needed accommodation for the guest speakers and could I put them up. So Chris, the boys and I ended up playing host to Tom Hornbein, the enormously distinguished octogenarian Everester from the 1963 West Ridge traverse and Peter Habeler, who climbed Everest without the use of supplemental oxygen with Reinhold Messner in 1978.Sandy Irvine’s sketch for the redesign of the oxygen apparatus for the 1924 Mount Everest expedition© Merton College, Oxford

What a treat. As a diversion during the afternoon before the talks, I took Tom, his lovely wife Kathy, and Peter Habeler to Merton College to see the Sandy Irvine archive, which has just recently been gifted outright to Merton by the Irvine Trust. We looked at Sandy’s diary from Everest, the oxygen drawings he made while he was still in Oxford prior to leaving on the 1924 expedition, and the photographs he took on the trek across Tibet. But it was watching Tom and Peter poring over the oxygen drawings that really made me and the librarian, Julia Walworth, pinch ourselves. They were clearly moved to be studying the originals in the library where Sandy had been a student. Not, I imagine, that he had spent very much time himself in that library.l-r: Tim McCartney Snape, Doug Scott, Peter Habeler and Tom Hornbein, climbed Mount Everest in 1984, 1975, 1978 and 1963 respectively.
Here they are discussing routes up Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak.

On our way out we visited the chapel and also had a tour of Mob Quad, where Sandy had rooms in 1923. Julia was explaining the history of the quad and telling us how, in the past, students had climbed out of the attic windows and on to the roof tops. Peter turned round, examined a crack between a tower and a corner wall, nudged Tom, who looked over eagerly to where he was pointing and said: ‘That would go’, indicating a vertical route up on to the roof. So, no chance of locking either Hornbein or Habeler in Mob Quad overnight. They would have escaped within minutes. Even today, I expect.

The events in Oxford and London were marvellous and they raised large amounts of money for Community Action Nepal, as well as enchanting audiences who were captivated by the talks given by these giants of the Mount Everest story.

For me it did not end there. The First on Everest show went on to Glasgow and Edinburgh whilst I headed to Kendal for my annual fill of mountain films and literature. This year I was the interviewer for the shortlisted authors for the Boardman Tasker Prize for mountaineering literature. As ever, it was a hugely enjoyable event and I had the privilege to meet four out of the five authors on the shortlist.

On Saturday afternoon Peter Habeler arrived in Kendal to give a lecture, which he did to a packed house, and after that I was bidden to drive him to Hesket Newmarket to have dinner with Doug Scott. This is where I took the photograph of the four men, all of whom have stood on the summit of the earth. Having spent nearly an hour discussing between themselves the attributes or otherwise of climbers who adjust to high altitude they turned their attention to routes. When I took the picture they were arguing over which route Doug had taken on Kanchenjunga.

As I said: what a treat.Pen Thoughts

Last year I wrote a piece in Pen Thoughts about the importance of book covers. I expressed the hope that the designer at Simon & Schuster would excel herself again with a cover for When the Children Came Home. I think you can judge that she has. It is absolutely lovely. I particularly like the way it looks on this website, which got me thinking about how important websites are. A good website needs to be kept fresh and up to date. This is probably more important for a commercial organisation than for an individual. Nevertheless, refreshing a website, even for a writer, is a task that cannot be left to the annual spring clean of the office. If that were the case mine would be stuck in 2007. I have a wonderful friend who does my website for me and I have to give him credit for making it so lively, quirky and cheerful. I am especially impressed that where I see beautifully placed images of just the right size or carefully moulded text that flows round an image, Andy sees lines of code of white on black. That he manages to produce such a sparkling end result is something I can only wonder at. Thank you, Andy.Richard, Simon, Sandy, Julie on the Isis, 30 December 2010And Finally…

The river in Oxford is a fast flowing, swirling, terrifying café au lait so we are confined to the indoor rowing machines at the moment but just before the New Year I did have the most wonderful Christmas present from my sons that I could ever have imagined. Howzat?

Julie Summers

January 2011, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.ukForthcoming Events

• Tuesday 1st February 7:30pm
  Everest Needs You, Mr IrvineKeswick Lecture Society in the Keswick Lecture Hall
  Keswick Lecture Society
• Thursday 3rd March
  Book Launch When the Children Came Home with book tour for the following two weeks (tour information will be posted February)Simon & Schuster
• Monday 4th April 4:pm
  Oxford Literary Festival: Julie to interview Kitty Dimbleby about Daffodil Girls: Only They Know the Reality of Being an Army Wife: Meet the Women Behind Our Heroes
  www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com
• Tuesday 5th April 5:pm
  Oxford Literary Festival: When the Children Came Home
  www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com
• Saturday 16th April, 10am to 5pm
  From Everest to the EigerRewley House, Wellington Square, OxfordThis is a day of lectures by Julie Summers, Jerry Lovatt, John Porter and Peter Gillman, organised by Oxford University Continuing Education
  www.conted.ox.ac.uk
• Sunday 17th April, 3pm
  When the Children Came HomeIWM, North, The Quays, Trafford Wharf Road, Manchester M17 1TZhttp://north.iwm.org.uk

Welcome to my fifth newsletter, which is a few weeks later than I had originally planned. I had a round birthday at the beginning of October so we had several joyous celebrations to mark it. Since then I have been working on the final edits and the picture selection for the evacuees’ book, which is now called When the Children Came Home. I thought I would make this newsletter a short one, for a change, and then prepare a longer one for the New Year.Contents

• Updates
• 90 Years On
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Updates

The most exciting thing that has happened this quarter is that the audio book of The Colonel of Tamarkan, read by Anton Lesser, was a runner-up in the Best Audio Book of the Year Award. The winning audio book was Doctor Who: Dead Air read by David Tennant. It took a staggering 40% of the national votes and was a runaway winner. Second place went to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson with 15% of the vote and then along came The Colonel with 12% which we thought was pretty good going. Audio books we pipped included The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr, Lenny Henry’s Othello and Animal Farm. Thank you so much to everyone who voted for The Colonel and congratulations to Catriona Oliphant for producing such a beautiful recording. She has just gone on to produce two gorgeous travel CDs – A Journey Through France and A Journey Through Italy, which I can highly recommend.

In September I took over the Chairmanship of the Mountain Heritage Trust and I am going to have my hands very full trying to put the Trust onto a firm financial footing so that we can work with our great heritage collections over the next few years. It’s a huge job and one that I think I will relish, but I have no illusions about the amount of work it is going to take to get us the funding we need. We will, however, be arranging some exciting events on the subject of Mountain Heritage, including an evening with Chris Bonington discussing the Eiger, in January 2012. We also hope to have a presence in the Our Sporting Life exhibitions which are scheduled to coincide with London 2012. I will write more about that project in the New Year but it is certainly one to watch out for both locally and nationally over the months and years ahead.90 Years OnResin monkey found in a grave at Pheasant Wood,
Fromelles, in 2009

The two books I published this year, Remembering Fromelles and British and Commonwealth War Cemeteries, both focused on the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It always sounds like a gloomy topic but actually writing both those books has been uplifting and at times great fun. I particularly enjoyed working with the experts from Oxford Archaeology, who were responsible for excavating the mass graves at Pheasant Wood, where 250 Australian and British soldiers had been buried by the Germans after the disastrous Battle of Fromelles in 1916. Kate Brady, the Finds Specialist, and I had a rewarding creative partnership and her essay in the book is fascinating, as well as beautifully illustrated. The project reminded us both that, although the Great War was about history, battles, statistics, weaponry, death and destruction, it was fought by individual men, each of whom had a family, a story, a history of his own. Amongst the finds that Kate wrote about were some unexplained but enchanting personal objects that left us both wishing we could have found out more about the men who had owned them. I have shown several objects in past newsletters but one of my favourites was a little resin monkey. What he was, we can only speculate -possibly a pipe stuffer, but his presence fascinated everyone who saw him.

This November is the ninetieth anniversary of the first Armistice Day Service. In November 1919 the 11th was marked simply but powerfully by a 2-minute silence. A reporter in Manchester captured the scene:

‘The first stroke of eleven produced a magical effect. The tram cars glided into stillness, motors ceased to cough and fume, and stopped dead, and the mighty-limbed dray horses hunched back upon their loads and stopped also, seeming to do it of their own volition.

‘Someone took off his hat, and with a nervous hesitancy the rest of the men bowed their heads also. Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of “attention”. An elderly woman, not far away, wiped her eyes, and the man beside her looked white and stern. Everyone stood very still … The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was a silence which was almost pain… And the spirit of memory brooded over it all.’

It was only twelve months later that a service that we would now recognise as following the format of the Remembrance Day Service came into being. It coincided with the return to Britain of the remains of the Unknown Soldier. He was brought back from France in state, travelling by ship and then by special train to London, from where he was transferred to a gun carriage and paraded through the capital, via the newly unveiled Cenotaph, to Westminster Abbey where he was laid to rest in front of 2000 widows and families of men who had fallen in the war. This was the making of modern Remembrance, built against the backdrop of the CWGC cemeteries and memorials. It is a subject I am going to be lecturing on several times this coming November. Nothing is static and the current move away from the deeply sombre to the lighter reflects something about the way we choose to remember those who die. I’m not quite sure what it is yet but I shall watch with interest as it develops and matures.Pen ThoughtsA bra made out of scout ties in Stanley internment camp
in the Second World War

Photo courtesy Barbara Anslow, whose sister,
Mabel, made it.

One of the jobs I have been doing this year is writing for the Our Sporting Life project. I have already promised more detail on this in January, but one of the things that fascinates me about it is the timeline. It is very easy to remember certain dates, single events, outstanding achievements. Putting them into the context of a timeline, however, is something that we do not do very often and it makes for some amusing as well as interesting juxtapositions. For example: in 1874 Thomas Hardy published Far from the Madding Crowd, Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister, the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris and Sam Weller Widdowson, a footballer for Nottingham Forest, wore shin pads for the first time. Forty years later we come to 1914. Overshadowed by the outbreak of the First World War, the company Speedo was founded under the name of McRae Hosiery Manufacturers. Shortened to Speedo, I assume, as the bathing trunks got so small the full name would not fit on. Joking apart, what this illustrated to me very powerfully was how easy it is to write history in two dimensions and to forget that everything happened within a context of a certain time. Understanding context avoids howlers such as that made by Jeffrey Archer when he had Mallory fumbling to undo Ruth’s bra on their wedding night a full twenty years before the first commercial brassiere had even been invented. Bras. Now there’s a subject. At a recent conference about Far Eastern Prisoners of War and Internees we saw a photograph of a bra manufactured by a woman in a civilian internment camp. She had made it out of scout neckerchiefs. The resourcefulness of women in civilian internment camps in the Second World War is a fascinating subject. Tens of thousands of them coped with ghastly privations and yet they managed, on the whole, to remain resolute and determined not only to survive but to survive with as much dignity intact as they could. A whole history encapsulated in one small garment. I wonder if anyone has written the history of the brassiere?And Finally…SB and Julie: Simon and Julie racing (and winning) the semi-final of the Elite Mixed Doubles at City of Oxford Regatta in August

(courtesy Birdman Photography).

For those of you who follow my rowing, I’ve had a very active summer being coached by our son, Simon. A wizard technician, he has succeeded in making a difference not only to his mother but also to the other members of our crew, so that we are heading back to the Tideway in November to race in our quadruple scull with high hopes of beating our time of last year and pushing ourselves up the order by several places. Simon and I even raced together at the City of Oxford Regatta, getting to the final of the mixed double sculls but being beaten by two members of the Colombian National Team. Ah well, their combined age was less than mine alone.

Julie Summers

October 2010, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.ukForthcoming Events

• Thursday 11 November 12:30
  The Making of Modern RemembranceNational Army Museum
  www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/whatsOn/lunchtimeLectures
• Tuesday 16 November 7:30pm
  First on Everest– Julie will chair an evening with Doug Scott, Tom Hornbein, Paul Braithwaite and Peter Habeler
  Oxford Town Hall www.canepal.org.uk/pages/doug-scott-lectures/tues-16-nov-2010
• Wednesday 17 November All Day Event
  First on EverestAn all day event with lectures by a range of climbers and historians of Everest
  Royal Geographical Society, London www.canepal.org.uk/pages/can-uk-events/first-on-everest-2010/event-programme.php
• Thursday 18 to Sunday 21 November 2010
  Kendal Mountain Festival 2010Julie will be interviewing several authors and mountaineers including Chris Bonington
  www.mountainfest.co.uk

Welcome to my fourth newsletter. One or two people have asked why I don’t produce a newsletter every month. There are two answers to this question. One is that I do not have the time, and the other is that my work does not move as quickly as all that, so that a monthly letter could be thin on information if I’m buried in writing, as I was in April and May. Looking at my diary for the latter month, when Relative Strangers was in its final stages, I had one visit to London and one meeting in Oxford. That was it. However, I can assure you that I had my nose firmly to the grindstone, and the book went in on time.Contents

• Updates
• More Moore
• A World of Snow and Ice
• The Red Pen
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Updates

One exciting piece of news for the summer is that the audio CD of The Colonel of Tamarkan has been chosen for a National Audiobook promotion which runs from early July for two months. I am so pleased for Catriona Oliphant at Chrome Audio as she richly deserves success after all the effort she puts into her audio books. She is currently working on a set of travel CDs that are already exciting considerable interest from critics and retailers. Her trick? Consistent high standards and excellent quality productions.

Both British and Commonwealth War Cemeteries (Shire Publications) and Remembering Fromelles (CWGC Publishing) appeared on 1 July 2010. The former is a short history of war cemeteries and I am really quite thrilled with the way it has turned out, with a selection of slightly quirky but interesting pictures to accompany some equally quirky facts. I had not realised when I started the book, for example, that the history of war cemeteries is one of just 95 years. The book could equally have been called From Crimea to Korea. We didn’t have war cemeteries before then and we don’t have them now -with the exception of the one at San Carlos on the Falkland Islands that holds the graves of 16 men who died during the Falklands Conflict. The second book, Remembering Fromelles, is about the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s brand new cemetery that is to be dedicated on 19 July at Fromelles in northern France. The commemorative publication, as it is known, is accompanied by an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London running from 1 July 2010 to 30 January 2011.

On 15 September I am doing a lecture at the Army & Navy Club in Piccadilly about the making of modern Remembrance. It is the most important event of the autumn for me and I am very flattered to have been asked. There are still tickets available (details at the bottom of the newsletter).More MooreHead and Shoulders 1927
LH 48
verde di Prato
height 45.7cm
photo: The Henry Moore Foundation archiveImage reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore FoundationShowcase in Remembering Fromelles at the IWM showing coins, leather matches case, pipe and phrase book, all found in the Fromelles area

This year Tate Britain organised a retrospective of Henry Moore’s work, focussing on the years 1920 to 1960 and particularly on his carvings. I found the show breathtaking and would strongly recommend anyone to visit the exhibition. And that comes from someone who has had her fair share of Moore exhibitions over the last 22 years. Overwhelming is the stoniness of the early carvings and I was left with a feeling of a tremendous latent energy in the pre-war work and of a deep, greedy, almost obsessive love of stone. Moore used a huge variety of stone – from the familiar British Portland and Ancaster stones to the exotic African Wonderstone (a tiny head) and the luxuriant Verde di Prato, an Italian stone of intense dark green with black, white and grey running through it. He quoted Michelangelo as his inspiration and it is not difficult to see why. Like the great Renaissance master, Moore knew how to release his figures from stone and from very early on in the exhibition one has the impression of his eagerness to let them out, to take shape, almost to live and breathe. I was also struck by the huge influence that African and Mexican primitive art had had on his early work, and so many of the sculptures from the 1930s have lines and shapes carved into the surface, so that the viewer is captivated at once by the organic shape and the linear surface detail.

Those of you who have known me for a very long time will remember that I once worked for the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, based next door to the home where Moore lived with his wife Irina from 1940. I have always kept in touch with my old colleagues, however it has been several years since I visited Perry Green and saw the lovely grounds, the studios with their tantalising glimpses of Moore’s working practice and wandered around the sculpture gardens that were my ‘home’ for nearly six years. I went back in mid-June to the launch of their new exhibition Henry Moore Deluxe: Books, Prints & Portfolios. Quite apart from it being a heavenly midsummer evening and therefore a joy to be in the sculpture gardens, it was also a great opportunity to catch up with old friends, many of whom still work at the Foundation. It was also a timely reminder, as I was about to install the Remembering Fromelles exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, of the secrets of good exhibition design.Henry Moore Deluxe: Books, Prints & Portfolios
exhibition on display at Perry Green, 2010photo: Suzanne Eustace

In particular, David Mitchinson, my old boss and Moore exhibition-meister par excellence, reminded me with his stunning display of graphics, sculptures and found objects, such as the head of an elephant given to Moore by Julian Huxley in the 1970s, of the importance of the spatial relationships between objects and two-dimensional works. Nothing is haphazard in a Mitchinson-designed exhibition. In fact, it’s precise and accurate. But there is always an airiness, a beautiful simplicity and a tantalising invitation to look, consider, make comparisons but not be spoon-fed. Can I do this with the strange selection of objets trouvés that will be on display in six little showcases in our exhibition at the IWM? I wonder. The risk is that the objects will look jewel-like and that is wholly inappropriate for things found on the battlefield, many probably having belonged to soldiers who did not survive the war. They have to be easily read for what they are – a pen, a lighter, a home-made identity tag, a phrase book – without looking exquisite. Quite a challenge, but then if David Mitchinson can make the elephant head look on the one hand like a bony, zoological exhibit and on the other hand like an individual, captivating object of study which enthralled and inspired Moore, then I ought, as his former pupil, to be able to make a cigarette-lighter look like a metal cylinder but at the same time a personal belonging with a history. Hmm. We’ll see.A World of Snow and IceSir Ernest Shackleton charming a group of ladies at a garden party after the Nimrod expedition.
Look at the effect of his magnetic personality and abundant charm on these ladies.

Eight years ago I worked on a huge picture book about the life and polar expeditions of Sir Ernest Shackleton. It was a glorious project to work on, as the quality of the photographs, particularly those taken by Frank Hurley of the ill-fated Endurance as she sank into the ice, was stunning. I’ve not touched the subject in at least six years and then suddenly, out of the blue, two different people asked me to give my Shackleton lecture.

This is a very over-crowded field, as Shackleton serves as an inspirational model for business talks by various speakers; he is used by explorers and adventurers, some of whom have followed in his footsteps, and there are, of course, a large number of his relatives still living as he came from an enormous family. So I have decided to focus on the man himself and what made him two such completely different people – the seafaring explorer full of boundless optimism and with an extraordinary ability to enthuse men from all walks of life, and the man uncomfortable on home soil. He seemed to yearn for travel when he was on dry land and for home when he was at sea. His biographer puts it down to his classless Anglo-Irish ancestry but I think he is more interesting and complex than that. It has been a fascinating journey to try to get to the roots of the man himself. I hope it will be an interesting talk. The photographs, at any rate, are stunning.The Red Pen

As I am about to enter the editing process of Relative Strangers, I thought I would write a little bit about my relationship with editors. I’m one of those authors who respond very well to being edited. I like the to and fro of discussing the shape of a chapter, a paragraph or even, sometimes, a sentence. Some writers are extremely possessive about their work being touched by an editor, but in my experience it is almost always a positive improvement and I, for one, am certainly not confident enough to believe that anything I write cannot be improved upon. However, and there always is a ‘however’, there have been occasions when I have insisted upon keeping a phrase or sentence in the teeth of fierce opposition. The classic was a discussion about ‘the English Rose’. I wrote a sentence in Remembered about the gardeners of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission realising that ‘the English rose grows in all but the harshest climes’. This was immediately red-penned and changed to ‘English roses grow in all but the harshest climates.’ It grated so hard that I yelped when I saw the alteration. No, no, this was not what I meant.

When I tried to explain that with the English Rose I wanted to evoke not only prickly stemmed plants with pretty flowers but the whole concept of the quiet beauty of a young girl, the heady scent of an English rose garden at dusk, the sensual velvet of rose petals against flesh – all that and more – that would adorn the graves of men who had, for the most part, died in the flush of youth, I met with incomprehension. This editor was clearly no gardener nor was she a romantic. But I won her round in the end.

My next battle was over the sentence that I used to open Stranger in the House ‘During the course of 1945 the Second World War ended.’ This was changed, not by my editor at Simon & Schuster, who understood what I was getting at, but by another editor who wanted to use extracts from the book for another project. She changed it to: ‘The Second World War ended in 1945.’ True. I can’t deny it. But the meaning is wholly altered and the sentence didn’t do what I wanted it to, which was to imply the drawn-out nature of the close of the most destructive war in history. It began to end, as it were, in spring 1945 but it dragged on for several months after the European war ended in May. It was not until the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Pacific War came to an end on 15 August. But the sentence, which encapsulates for me the whole theme of Stranger in the House, was about more than the war coming to an end. It was about men coming home, women coping with change, the country looking at the devastation wrought by six years of war, the world coming to terms with a new shape, new boundaries, new understandings of horror, after the dust of the A-bombs had settled. That was what I meant. So I stuck to my guns on that too.

There are also silly examples of misunderstandings which can also catch one out. One editor wanted me to describe the First World War as a ‘conflict’. Wow. That really wound me up until I realised that the point he was trying to make was that the First World War didn’t gain that name until the Second World War. It was The Great War. Fine, I agreed. But let’s not call it a conflict, please.

So, although I have, in the main, happy, productive and often fun relationships with editors, there are a very small number of occasions when I have to stab my pen on the manuscript and growl ‘no’.Pen Thoughts

One of the joys, or horrors, depending on your take on this, is giving talks and lectures about books. I love doing it as it gives me the opportunity to talk to people and get feedback as well as share my enthusiasm for my subject matter. Years ago, when I very first started writing, I was given a useful tip by a fellow biographer, Peter Gillman. He told me not to speak from notes but to use my slides as an aide mémoire. It worked and I have learned a trick or two since those first talks in how to turn the pictures into a narrative that not only acts as a prompt for dates and names but also gives the talk shape. It takes time to get a talk just how I want it and sometimes I have two or three goes at getting the images in the right order before I feel completely comfortable about it, but when it works, it gives me freedom to digress and tell the odd anecdote whilst keeping the thread firmly in my sights and on the screen – and so in the sights of my audience. Recently I spoke for the Scottish Royal Geographical Society and did five lectures in four days on Everest Needs You, Mr Irvine. I’m sure that had I been reading from a script it would have been difficult to keep the adrenalin flowing and the narrative lively. So thank you, Peter Gillman, for a very useful tip.Left to right: Julie, Jude, Lil, ZenaAnd Finally…

…I could not sign off without mentioning that we – that is the quadesses and I – have been belting up and down the river in our boat. On 13 June we competed at the British Masters Rowing Championships in Nottingham. It used to be called, rather more descriptively and accurately, the Veterans rowing championships. We competed in the novice quadruple sculls for our age group and to our surprise and delight we won a gold medal. Mine is now hanging from my bookshelf in my office. Lil, who was playing at the first night of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra Comique in Paris, wore her medal round her neck when she arrived for the performance. I suspect Zena and Jude sleep in theirs.

Julie Summers

July 2010, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.ukForthcoming Events

• Remembering Fromelles: a new cemetery for a new century
  1 July to 31 January 2010 at the Imperial War Museum, Lambeth
  Free entry; opening times onwww.iwm.org.uk
• Remembering Fromelles Eastbourne College
  7 August 2010
  For tickets go to www.rememberingfromelles.co.uk
• The Making of Modern Remembrance
  Army & Navy Club, Piccadilly, 15 September 2010
  For tickets contact Sharon Taylor on 020 7827 8023, fax 020 7930 9991 or email st@therag.co.uk

Welcome to my third newsletter. Last time there was a theme of rocks and snow (and a little bit about rowing) but recently my work has been all about the world wars and their impact on ordinary people.Contents

• Updates
• The Human Cost of War at Fromelles
• The Armed Forces Memorial
• Who to Leave Out
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming Events

Updates

I do not think I can remember a busier spring than 2010 and there is no sign of a slowdown until July. The tasks of lecturing, writing, organising exhibitions, editing and research all clashed during February and March and were fairly exhausting. I have now settled into a slightly more focused, if busy, phase of writing my evacuees book, Relative Strangers, and putting the final touches to the Fromelles exhibition. Meanwhile, The Colonel of Tamarkan (produced by Chrome Audio in 2008), read by Anton Lesser, is being broadcast on BBC Radio 7 from Monday 5th April over eight week days at 3pm under the title The Colonel of the Bridge on the River Kwai. In addition, by way of keeping me fit and sane, rowing has continued through the winter, and the spring has brought with it some glorious early mornings but fast streams.The Human Cost of War at Fromellesmen of a Graves Registration Unit in the early
1920s dig while officers check lists and mapsThis leather pouch containing a crucifix was one of the personal items found during excavations at Fromelles in 2009Return ticket from Fremantle to Perth. This really took my breath away, it was so poignant to find something so recognisable and obviously meant to be kept for reuse.At the beginning of March the Joint Identification Board, responsible for pronouncing on the findings of the archaeologists, forensic specialists and DNA experts of the Fromelles project, came up with the names of 75 men who they were able positively to identify. These men died in the Battle of Fromelles on 19th and 20th July 1916 and were buried in a mass grave by the Germans afterwards. Overlooked in the battlefield clearance in the 1920s they were found in 2008 after years of research, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was asked to oversee the task of exhuming the bodies, identifying them where possible and reburying them in a specially constructed new CWGC cemetery a few hundred yards from the place where they had been lying since 1916. My task has been to produce an exhibition and a book (opening & publication 1st July 2010) to mark the project, since it is the first new CWGC cemetery to be built in half a century. So, with the help of experts who worked on the dig, forensic scientists and the team responsible for the new cemetery, we have put together what I hope will be an interesting overview of an extraordinary undertaking.

From my point of view it has been fascinating to compare today’s techniques of exhumation and identification with those used in the 1920s. When the mass clearing of the battlefields took place after the Great War the men who were undertaking the work – and it was deeply unpleasant, let’s not gloss over that fact – had first-hand experience of the war as they were all ex-servicemen. They had unparalleled knowledge of what colour of khaki had been issued at any stage in the war and became detectives par excellence at latching on to the tiniest of clues. In those days it was entirely possible that they would have known personally, or at least known of, a man who was buried in a certain area. Men known to have fallen near to another already identified or to have had a particular feature such as a distinguishing tattoo or to have been especially tall or small, might just have given enough clues to the Graves Concentration Units to identify him.Archaeologists carefully examine the soil in
one of the graves at FromellesNow, ninety-three years on, archaeologists by and large had only bones to go on plus whatever scraps of uniform and other objects they could find on the bodies. They had modern techniques such as DNA to help with identification but that was only one part of the puzzle. All the other clues had to stack up, as they did in the 1920s, so a DNA match would be a strong indicator but was not enough on its own. They needed supporting evidence. Since the archaeologists had been told that the Germans had removed anything that might identify a man so that it could be sent back to the family, they were not expecting to find as much as they did – a staggering 6,200 objects. And what amazing little objects they were, too.This is a clean copy of the phrase book that
was handed out to soldiers arriving in France
during the First World War, fragments of which
were found in the mass gravesWhen speaking to the Finds’ specialist from Oxford Archaeology, Kate Brady, I learned that they divided them into six categories: Army issue; items issued in France (a French phrase book, for example); personal items; gifts from the French (a St Benedict medal, small crucifixes of French origin); coins or buttons exchanged with other soldiers and finally, items of trench art such as rings or bracelets. More than anything else these gave an insight into the very human side of this story: men carrying keepsakes, good luck charms, reminders of home-life. All these things point to the firm belief held by the men that they would go home, they would not be the ones to fall. A return train ticket from Fremantle to Perth was particularly poignant, as was the tiny French phrase book with translations for: ‘Do not shoot!’ and ‘Do you like omelettes?’

The saddest thing for me was that their families had been deprived of knowing where their boys were buried. So on a bitterly cold day in the middle of February I went out to Fromelles to attend some of the funeral services at the new CWGC cemetery. Each man was buried individually, as an unknown, but with military honours. Those who have now been identified will receive a named headstone in due course and the families will be able to attend dedication ceremonies if they wish. On that particular day the funerals were conducted in the snow in front of a crowd of two – me and a lady from Ypres. The burial parties were made up of three soldiers from the Australian Army and three soldiers from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers on either side of the coffin with the British padre burying on one side of the cemetery and the Australian padre on the other. One man at a time.Funeral at Fromelles taken by
Revd Cathie Inch-Ogden on 10 February 2010The young soldiers took their responsibilities seriously and one of them said to me during a break: ‘You see, these are our brothers. We all belong to the same family. I’d like to think that it will be my mates who carry my coffin if I die in conflict.’ Quite a sobering thought, as the British soldiers were off to Afghanistan two days after I returned from Fromelles.The Armed Forces Memorialsculptural group on the Armed Forces Memorial by Ian Rank-Broadley
(Photo © John Morris)Left to right:

• Meg Parkes at three years old. We met through research into Far Eastern Prisoners of War and have some great adventures together. Meg is no longer 3.
• Stephanie Hess features in Stranger in the House in the Granddaughter’s Tale. We found we had many interests in common and now keep in regular touch
  (Photo © Nicola Barranger)
• Amy Clifford, born in 1916, hit her husband over the head with a frying pan when he accused her of being a nag after the war. They were married for over 50 years. She also appeared in Stranger in the House in the Wife’s Tale. I admire her enormously
  (Photo © Nicola Barranger)

Which brings me to the Armed Forces Memorial in Staffordshire. But a word of explanation before I continue with that train of thought…

Quite often, after I have given a lecture, people ask me general questions as well as specific ones related to the subject I have spoken about. The two questions I get asked most often are: ‘Do you choose your own subjects? And ‘How do you choose which stories to put into a book?’ To the first question the answer is yes and no. Some books are commissioned – Shackleton, Remembered, Fromelles – and some are ones I have come up with myself: Everest, The Colonel of Tamarkan, Stranger in the House and Relative Strangers. I also get commissions to write articles or, most recently, a handbook to celebrate Our Sporting Life (www.oursportinglife.co.uk), which will culminate in a big London exhibition in 2012. One of the most rewarding smaller commissions was to write an essay about the sculpture on the Armed Forces Memorial at the Arboretum in Staffordshire. I first saw the sculptural groups about six months after they were unveiled. When I saw Ian Rank-Broadley’s sculptures I was taken aback by their immense power. They are truly extraordinary and deeply moving. I really wanted to write a commentary on them somewhere, somehow.

Having spent all my working life in the art world dealing with modern and, therefore, more or less abstract sculpture, it might come as a surprise to learn that I love figurative sculpture, especially the work that appeared at the beginning of the last century in response to the Great War. I felt that Ian Rank-Broadley’s work, eighty years on, captured that same mood of raw emotion as had Charles Sargeant Jagger, Gilbert Ledward and Francis Derwent Wood. So when Ian asked me, more or less out of the blue, to contribute an essay to the book he was publishing on the memorial sculptures I was delighted. I wanted to place his work in the context of the memorial sculptures of the early twentieth century and point out that the nobility and simplicity of the human form is the most effective memorial to the horrors (and stupidity) of war. If anyone has the time to take a detour to the Arboretum it will not be a wasted journey. The book is available on Amazon (ISBN 978-0956051707)Who to Leave Out?

The second question I am frequently asked is about whose stories to include and whose to leave out when I write a book such as Stranger in the House or, currently, Relative Strangers, which is about the evacuee children who came home after the Second World War. As much as anything else it starts with a hunch. When I go to interview somebody I am completely open-minded and expect nothing. The most successful interviews generally begin with the comment: ‘I’m not sure I’ve anything of interest to tell you . . .’ My ears prick up at that instant and I am seldom disappointed. What I am trying to find is the human side of any story. It does not necessarily have to be dramatic or heroic but if it illustrates a human emotion then it can be used in a book to shed light on other people’s experiences. One thing that many people who have read Stranger say to me is that they can see their own stories reflected in those of the women in the book. It may not mirror identically their own narrative but there will be sufficient points of coincidence to make them feel it refers to the kind of experience they had. Very much the same is happening with the book about the evacuee children. It will come as no surprise to you that the gamut of experiences is so rich and varied that it is almost impossible to corral them into one book. And corralling is exactly what it feels like at the moment. So what I have tried to do is to fit the stories I have been told around the historical narrative of the book and I hope there will be some surprises along the way. There are certainly some very amusing stories and those that are writ large in the book generally come from interviewees who have large personalities and lively tales to tell. So a follow-up question I get is: ‘Do you like everyone you interview?’ How hard is that to answer honestly? Of course the answer is no. I would not be human if I liked everyone I came across. But those I am not so keen on are few and far between and that does not mean I leave out their stories. They can be some of the most successful illustrations. The great joy of writing a book like Stranger in the House or Relative Strangers, is that I do get to know some wonderful people who I like to think become friends and that is something truly special.Pen Thoughts

Book covers matter. As do titles. My brother Tim has come up with a cracking title for my next book, which is about the Women’s Institute in the Second World War: Jambusters. Clever? Great fun too and I give him full credit. We had a hilarious hour of bouncing text messages back and forth until he came up with that. But I want to celebrate the art of cover design here, as I imagine few readers really ask themselves who comes up with a book cover or who pulls it together. I have been very lucky indeed with my covers and I have never had one that I was not happy with. I know other writers who are not so fortunate, so I hold my breath every time a new one is suggested. Although I love the cover for Fearless on Everest because it is both evocative and majestic, I think the jacket that Lizzie Gardiner at Simon & Schuster designed for Stranger in the House is the cleverest to date. It is actually a compilation of three images which she worked together into one very powerful and moving photograph that sums up exactly what the book is about. A young soldier has his arm around his ‘girl’ and he is smiling invitingly at her. She is looking straight ahead, calmly holding her shiny handbag, seeming to ignore his advances. They are walking towards what appears to be a village. Their bodies barely touch and his rifle separates his arm from the soft curve of her back. The war – it says to me – has come between them. That image is cropped from a photograph of the couple walking towards a train on a busy station. The background on the cover is a detail taken from a photograph of a cabbage farm in California in 1942 and the handwriting across the top is from a contemporary letter in which it is just possible to decipher the words ‘letter’, ‘today’, beautiful’ and ‘unknown’. All words that feature in Stranger. A really clever composition and beautiful too. And it fits with my interest, which is people and how they are affected by extremes, in this case war.

I will now get back to finishing Relative Strangers and wait to see what S&S suggest for the book cover.

Julie Summers

3 April 2010, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.ukForthcoming Events

• Thursday 29 April 12:30 National Army Museum Stranger in the House
  www.national-army-museum.ac.uk/whatsOn/lunchtimeLectures
• Wednesday 5 May at 8pm Epsom Playhouse Stranger in the House
  Epsom, Ewell & District Literary Society
  www.epsomplayhouse.co.uk
• Thursday 10 June 13:00 The Gateway, Shrewsbury Stranger in the House
  www.shrewsburysummer.co.uk
• On Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 October the third international Researching FEPOW History conference will be held at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Information at http://www.researchingfepowhistory.org.uk/

November 2009

Welcome to my second newsletter. There is a theme of ice, rocks, snow and water in everything but the updates. It was not intentional – it just happened that way. So wrap up warm and enjoy some extreme activities from the comfort of your chair.Contents

• Updates
• The Wildest Dream
• Fit for purpose
• Pen Thoughts

UpdatesSigns to cemeteries at Beaumont-Hamel Memorial Park on the Somme. Many of those 650 or so men buried here died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.The audio-CD of The Colonel of Tamarkan, which came out in the late summer, has enjoyed super reviews in the broadsheets. Meanwhile, I finished the draft of the book on war cemeteries for Shire Publications, which should come out some time next summer. It was poignant to be writing that book in the lead up to the first Armistice Day on which there were no more surviving veterans from the Great War. Although the first war cemeteries were built in the nineteenth century, it was really the unparalleled losses of the 1914-18 war that made the work of the then Imperial War Graves Commission both necessary and relevant, and it was the national outpouring of grief during and after that war that shaped our practice of remembrance today. Fittingly, the work I am now engaged upon, which is the publication for the Commission on its new cemetery at Fromelles, leads on from the war cemeteries book. Every find discovered at Fromelles is minutely examined. Some are personal, some generic but each is a potential clue to the identity of a man buried here.I have spent the past few weeks in conversation with archaeologists, DNA experts and photographers who have been involved in the recovery of the 250 sets of remains from mass graves dug by the Germans after the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916. There have been some surprising details and moving stories, many of which we will try to weave into the book and Imperial War Museum exhibition for July 2010.

I must not forget my evacuees, who also get plenty of attention on a daily basis. The interviews are complete and most of the reading I wanted to do for the book has been done, so now comes the job of turning a conflation of papers into a narrative. It is the part of the book I enjoy most, in some ways, but it is also difficult and requires plenty of quiet, and a clear space in my head.The Wildest Dream

Eighteen months ago I spent a very cold afternoon in a warehouse in North London being interviewed in front of a gigantic photographic reproduction of the North face of Mount Everest. I can no longer remember all the questions I was asked in the course of filming but I do recall being pushed to relate some of the more ‘exciting’ stories about my great uncle, Sandy Irvine, the subject under discussion. That all now seems a very long time ago. Occasionally over the ensuing months I received the odd update but it was only when I was sent an invitation to a private viewing in London that I realised this project had come to fruition.

My husband, Chris, and I went to the screening in Soho on a rainy afternoon in early November (Friday 13th to be precise). There were half a dozen people in a theatre with seats for perhaps twenty and we all sat, mesmerised by the awe-inspiring shots of Mount Everest taken in 2007 and blended with panoramic images from the 1920s. The film is a drama documentary-cum-reconstruction of the last climb of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine.Sandy Irvine, 1923The film focuses mostly on Mallory, the more famous of the two men, but Sandy gets plenty of puff and comes across as a serious athlete, a charismatic young man with energy and character bubbling over in equal measure and as just the man you would want on an expedition to fix your oxygen apparatus. So, an accurate portrayal.© Atlantic ProductionsA delightful surprise in the film is Leo Houlding, one of Britain’s most talented young climbers, who went to Everest in 2007 to take the part of Sandy in the reconstruction. Leo (left) and Conrad Anker as Mallory were to climb part of the way up the mountain in 1920s kit and, perhaps more importantly, they planned to climb the so-called Second Step, a 60ft rock cliff close to the summit pyramid, which climbers have long argued would have stretched Mallory, and certainly Sandy Irvine, to the limits. Leo, at 26, was just a little older than Sandy. What is compelling about his performance, which seems wholly genuine, is his delight at finding himself part of this remarkable story and about to climb the highest mountain on earth. The resonance between him and Sandy is so strong at times that I found I had to pinch myself.

There is something slightly unnerving about seeing yourself on a cinema screen and I had not realised how much detail you see in high definition film. Every wrinkle, every whisker of hair out of place. Chris tells me he was unable to take his eyes off the nicotine-stained teeth of one of the interviewees but I found it most uncomfortable when there were close-up shots of the reconstruction of Mallory’s frozen corpse.Leo Houlding (left) and Conrad Anker, dressed in replica 1924 clothing, created after careful study of the clothing.
© Leo Houlding

The film is due to be released in the States by National Geographic, who have also bought world-wide IMAX rights. I believe the UK and European rights are still under negotiation. Although National Geographic were relaxed about showing the corpse reconstruction, they balked at a tale I told of Sandy’s prowess. So here it is, published in full for the first time:Marjory SummersSandy Irvine had a brief but indiscreet love affair with Marjory Summers, the very much younger second wife of Harry Summers (my great grandfather). Marjory, who had been a chorus girl when she married Harry at the age of 19, found life married to her stout, balding, fifty-two year old husband quiet. Dull even. So she found her own forms of entertainment in Flintshire, where she and Harry lived from 1917. By the time she threw her hat at Sandy in 1923, when he was twenty-one and she twenty six, she had thrown caution to the winds as far as her marriage was concerned. In a move of the utmost audacity she followed Sandy to Norway when he went with the Merton College Arctic expedition to Spitsbergen in July 1923. This much is already known.Sandy in Spitsbergen outside his tentI found Sandy’s diary from the expedition in the library at Merton College, Oxford. He wrote that the ladies of the party had travelled in first class berths and that he and the other expedition members had been consigned to steerage. But on the last night that they were on board, before the party divided and the ladies went home, Sandy visited Marjory’s cabin at five o’clock in the morning and made love to her three times before breakfast. The ladies departed that morning and Sandy spent three hours asleep on a box of biscuits in the customs’ shed prior to leaving Tromso for the islands in the Norwegian archipelago.The Merton College Arctic expedition with ladies. Marjory seated top right next to Sandy in a flat cap smoking his pipe.When I discovered this sensational snippet I rang my father, who immediately said that he thought it inappropriate to publish such detail in my biography of Sandy. Being slightly in awe of my father and certainly respectful of his wishes I desisted and the story did not appear. A decision I have regretted ever since. Until now, that is. Now you all know. But what makes me laugh is that this information was too much for National Geographic as well. They demanded that Atlantic Productions cut the story from the film. Which they did. Bird pecked body parts yes, stories about sexual prowess no. Hmm. Let’s hope Sandy’s story makes it into the British version of the film.

Still, The Wildest Dream is certainly worth watching if you are interested in the Mallory and Irvine story and the reconstruction of the last climb is beautifully choreographed and filmed. You can almost believe they made it to the top of the world. A wild dream indeed.Fit for PurposeJulie in the 3 seat with Jude and Lil on the Isis,
October 2009I am often asked if I find writing difficult and how I shape my day in order to be disciplined enough to settle down to my work. The answer is that some weeks are more challenging than others. I find the only way to keep my eye in is to write something every single day. Chris jokes that if I don’t have anything to write at the time I make lists. Sadly, he’s not far wrong. One of the challenges of being an author and mother is keeping fit. Finding time to exercise is more difficult than finding time to write, but it has to be done because I know that when I am in good shape I am far more productive. I am sure we all are. So that is why I allowed myself to be talked into joining a group of women of a certain age who meet every Tuesday morning at a small club on the river Thames. We are known as the Falcon Mums but we see ourselves as Quadesses, such is the difference between perception and reality. And I don’t even write fiction. Our coach, a biochemist with a doctorate in neurobiology, who stepped back from academia to teach rowing and sculling full time, has pulled us together from a bunch of giggly beginners into a fighting fit crew, albeit a veteran ladies crew, who race.

I know. It’s insane. But it is the greatest possible fun. One of my fellow Quadesses was heard to gasp after a session: ‘How can anything so addictive be good for you?’ As I write this newsletter I am sitting up in bed at a friend’s house in Putney (she fed me the obligatory pre-race pasta dinner last night – thank you Rebecca) waiting to go and meet the crew. Today we are going to race in the Veterans’ Fours Head, a race of 6.84km (4½ miles) rowed with the tide from Mortlake to Putney. Sound familiar? Well, Sandy Irvine rowed it in 1923 in an eight, only in the other direction, when he sat in the three seat for the dark blues in the Boat Race. That year Oxford won by ¾ length. I am not so sure we will be winning today but the Quadess crew will be giving it everything we have. And tomorrow I shall be back at my desk writing about the architecture of the Great War.Pen Thoughts

‘Every picture tells a story’ is such an old cliché that I hesitate to use it here. However, when it comes to illustrating non-fiction, photographs can be extremely revealing. Well used and thoughtfully captioned photographs can enhance understanding of a topic but all too often books contain pictures that are either poor quality reproductions or badly explained, so that there is no rhyme or reason for them being included. I feel strongly that photographs have to earn their place in books and that the author then has a duty to ensure that they are appropriately captioned.

One of the most powerful photographs I have ever used is of The Endurance. On the face of it this picture is of Shackleton’s ship sinking into the ice of the Weddell Sea in November 1915.The original photograph of ‘The Endurance’ brought from Elephant Island to South Georgia by Sir Ernest ShackletonWhat is significant about the photograph, taken by Frank Hurley and developed and printed by him after the ship had gone down, was that Shackleton carried it with him in his pocket when he sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia to raise the rescue mission for the men left behind. Now here’s the critical thing as far as I am concerned. Frank Hurley took a photograph of a sinking ship. Fine. He developed the glass plate (approximately 12″ x 8”). Where? On the ice. In a tent. Then he made a little print for Shackleton. Not a big one, he couldn’t have fitted a big one into his pocket. Where? Presumably also in a tent on the ice. Moving ice at that. In fact we know that Hurley kept a selection of the photographs he had taken on the voyage, prior to The Endurance being swallowed by the ice, because it is recorded that he and Shackleton had to make the terrible decision to jettison the majority of the glass slides as they were so heavy. Still, Hurley managed, in those extreme circumstances, to keep with him sufficient equipment to photograph, develop and print pictures. And then Shackleton succeeded in making his extraordinary journey in a lifeboat, the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia, some 800 miles across some of the heaviest seas in the world. He carried the photograph with him in order to prove who he was and what had happened to his ship. It is only slightly more remarkable that the photograph still exists and, perhaps, that I managed to find it. Picture research is often underestimated but when we researchers find gems it is thrilling and they should be made the most of.

I realise this newsletter deals with a world of snow, ice, rock and water but actually it is the human beings who function in this world who I wish to celebrate here. I hope you have enjoyed reading about them. Especially Marjory.

Julie Summers

12 November, Oxford

julie@juilesummers.co.uk

And if I am permitted a brief post-script, the Quadesses triumphed on the Tideway finishing third in their division – far higher than anyone had expected. I have greater respect than ever for the oarsmen in my family.

News Update

This is just a quick update to say that I will be appearing on Excess Baggage on Radio 4 on Saturday 17th October at 10am to talk about my visit Thailand when I was preparing to write The Colonel of Tamarkan. My mother and I made the trip in 2003 and I have been back twice since then. The clash between the tourism that has sprung up around the Bridge on the River Kwai at Tamarakan and the history of the railway’s construction by prisoners of war and Asian labourers is stark but fascinating. There are some funny stories too about our adventures, which I hope might also come up during the programme. The other guest is Tom Carver, whose father was in Italy during the war. I should think he encountered similar contrasts there too.

Excess Baggage, BBC Radio 4, 10am on Saturday 17th October 2009Other Events in October/November

• Every Picture Tells a Story, Off the Shelf Festival of Writing & Reading Sheffield, 2pm on 17th October 2009 www.offtheshelf.org.uk
• Stranger in the House, Off the Shelf Festival of Writing & Reading Sheffield 2pm on 18th October www.offtheshelf.org.uk
• The Making of Modern Remembrance, Abingdon School (public evening lecture), Friday 6th November 2009 www.abingdonschool.org.uk

I’m always delighted to hear from anyone with feedback or general comments so do please get in touch if you wish.

julie@juilesummers.co.uk

Julie Summers

10 August, Oxford

First, thank you for subscribing and welcome to this, my first newsletter.Contents

• Update
• Worlds Out Loud
• Researching & Writing
• Pen Thoughts
• Forthcoming events for autumn 2009

Update– now out in paperbackStranger in the House, which was published in September 2008, came out in paperback last month and has recently received two good reviews in the Guardian and Sunday Times. I feel enormously lucky to have met so many remarkable men and women through my research for this book and I am fortunate that most have stayed in touch. Certainly the comments I receive when I give talks about Stranger convince me that it tapped into a previously untouched seam and it is lovely to hear that the stories in the book chime with people’s own experiences and bring back memories. I always felt with Stranger that it was a joint effort so renewed thanks and respect to all who contributed.Worlds Out LoudNew Audio CD

Chrome Audio, the company that produced the lovely audio-CD of Stranger in the House, which came out last autumn, is about to publish The Colonel of Tamarkan in abridged form. Being abridged felt to me rather like having my hair cut by Edward Scissorhands – unnerving but the result a lovely surprise. Neville Teller is an experienced abridger (he did Stranger too) and he has managed, I think very successfully, to keep the feeling of the book whilst reducing it to fit into three and a half hours of audio. The choice of Anton Lesser to read The Colonel was inspired and from the minute it was suggested I knew it was not only right but perfect.

The story of the Death Railway is at its most poignant when told first hand. During the course of researching The Colonel of Tamarkan I spoke to many former Far Eastern prisoners of war and I was always moved by their personal accounts.Phil Toosey in his study at Heathcote in the early 1970s at a time when he was recording his memoirs© Toosey Family CollectionMy grandfather died in 1975 so I never heard him speak of it but Anton brings colour and empathy to his experiences in a way that I had hardly dared to hope. Hearing the story come alive through Anton’s reading is one of the most exciting experiences I can recall. He succeeds in capturing Toosey’s humour, his mental toughness, his honesty but also his despair, when the camps were bombed by the RAF in 1944.

Anton was in the middle of rehearsing for Ibsen’s The Doll’s House and he took time on a precious day off to record the book. I was in Oxford watching the City Bumps in which Simon was rowing but I raced down to London for the lunch-break and to meet Anton at the little studio in Swiss Cottage. He emerged from the recording room with his glasses on a chain around his neck and looking slightly dazed, as I am sure anyone would after four solid hours of reading. It was a thrilling moment to meet this remarkable actor, whom I greatly admire, and to listen to him talking about how he interpreted the words and actions of my grandfather. He said it was easier than recording a Dickens novel as he only had to keep a dozen or so characters in his head rather than scores as he did when he read Great Expectations. He asked me how he thought he should read the last chapter of the book about my grandfather’s death and we decided he should read it straight and without emotion.Anton LesserAfter his sandwich he went back into the recording studio and I returned to Oxford to watch the final race in the bumps. Catriona, at Chrome, told me that when Anton read the last chapter she could not follow the script as her eyes were brimming with tears.

When it came to adding a bit of music to the audio she and I discussed what would be appropriate. In the end she decided to commission a whistling of the original 1914 Colonel Bogey march. To our astonishment the musician, Shannon Harris, had a strong link to the FEPOW story – his grandfather was imprisoned by the Japanese in a POW camp in Java. It is a truly wonderful recording and I hope you enjoy it. The audio-CD is out shortly. To pre-order a copy you can email office@chromeaudio.com.Researching & WritingMoreton-in-Marsh New Cemetery, GloucestershireOn the writing front I am being kept busy with a little book for Shire Publications on Commonwealth war cemeteries and a bigger book for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission about their new cemetery at Fromelles in France, which has been much in the news. The cemetery is being built to take the remains of upwards of 250 Australian and British soldiers who died in the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 and who were buried by the Germans in a mass grave, which was discovered by an Australian amateur historian after years of research. DNA tests are currently underway and they hope to identify up to 10% of the soldiers buried in the mass grave. Artefacts from the mass grave at FromellesThe book will commemorate the building of the first new CWGC war cemetery in half a century and there will be an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum from July 2010 in which we will be showing some of the artefacts that have been found in the mass grave, including a return train ticket from Fremantle to Perth, a leather purse with coins and a heart shaped leather pouch containing a solid gold cross. If you are at all interested in the Fromelles story then the CWGC website has excellent information, daily blogs, a photo gallery and much more. Follow www.cwgc.org/fromelles.Returning evacueesI am also working on another book for Simon & Schuster, this time about evacuee children and how their returns home affected their lives. So many books and films look at what happened when the children went away but little is known about what happened once they came back . The stories and experiences are as varied as you can imagine – some funny, some heartening and some, inevitably, tragic. I am over halfway through the research and will start writing in January.Pen Thoughts

One of the strange things I find about writing is that it is at once a lonely but also intensely social thing to do. Meeting archivists and librarians is one of the great pleasures for me and I thought I would just mention them here. They do an extraordinary job looking after papers, letters, documents, diaries, photographs and they do it day in, day out and often without any thanks. One archive I worked in four years ago was the Baring Archive at ING in central London. Not the place you would expect to find a treasure trove but I can promise you it is. The archivists have kept it in perfect order throughout stormy times, and the amount of detail and colour it brings to the life of a family owned bank in the early twentieth century is wonderful. I have just heard that the Baring Archive has been granted Designated status. It might not change your life but it means that a very important, if tiny, slice of our social history is secure. Bravo to archives and archivists.Forthcoming events for autumn 2009

• The Making of Modern Remembrance, The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, 2pm on Saturday 19th September 2009
• The Making of Modern Remembrance, Hereford Cathedral School, 16th October 2009
• Every Picture Tells a Story, Off the Shelf Festival of Writing & Reading Sheffield, 2pm on 17th October 2009 www.offtheshelf.org.uk
• Stranger in the House, Off the Shelf Festival of Writing & Reading Sheffield 2pm on 18th October www.offtheshelf.org.uk
• The Making of Modern Remembrance, Abingdon School (public evening lecture), Friday 6th November 2009 www.abingdonschool.org.uk

I’m always delighted to hear from anyone with feedback or general comments so do please get in touch if you wish, especially as this is a maiden voyage.

julie@juilesummers.co.uk

Julie Summers

18 August, Oxford