Catching the Post by Catherine Randall

One of the things I used to associate with those quiet days after Christmas was having to write thank you letters. Before computers and smart phones, it was the only way to thank all the relatives and friends that I didn’t actually see at Christmas for the presents they’d kindly given me. Making a quick phone call to thank them was not an acceptable option in my family! Anyway, I quite enjoyed writing letters, which I suppose is not surprising given that I am now a writer. 

Of course, nowadays, most people will have expressed their thanks in an email or a text message. I wonder how many actual physical thank you letters are written and put in the post these days? 

One of the fun things about writing historical fiction is getting to discover how people did ordinary things in the past. In both my novel, The White Phoenix, and the novel I am currently working on, set in Victorian London, I’ve had to work out how my characters would communicate with each other without being able to pick up a phone, or send a text message or email. It got me thinking about how communicating has changed over the past 500 years.

To find out more, I visited the Postal Museum in London (on a rather windy day!)

From my research for The White Phoenix, I knew that the Royal Mail already existed in 1666, and that the General Letter Office in central London had burned down during the Great Fire with the loss of a huge number of letters. It was called the Royal Mail because it used the distribution system already in place for royal and government documents. This system had been put in place originally by Henry VIII (who else? He always gets involved!) and then in 1635 King Charles I made it legal to use the royal post to send private letters. The General Post Office, the state postal system, was formally and legally established in 1660 with post offices throughout the country connected by regular routes.

But, as I learnt at the Postal Museum, post in those days did not necessarily remain private. Staff at the General Letter Office would open letters to check that no one was plotting against the King or the government, so if you wanted to make sure your letter was truly private, you needed to find another way to send it.

Luckily, people could also send letters by the carriers who plied between towns, taking people and goods, or by giving it to a friend travelling to the right town, or – if you had money – you could use a private messenger. In The White Phoenix, letters are often sent by carrier.

When the Post Office was first established, the mail was distributed by post boys travelling on foot. But post boys were slow and sometimes unreliable, and – unluckily for them – they were also vulnerable to highwaymen and pressgangs trying to forcibly recruit men for the army and navy. In 1784 smart new mail coaches replaced the post boys along many major routes which really speeded up mail delivery.

A mail coach on display in the Postal Museum in London

The next great innovation came in 1840 with the introduction of the Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp. Until then, the cost of sending a letter depended on the number of sheets of paper included and the distance the letter had travelled and it was the recipient of the letter who paid for its delivery. You could choose not to pay, but then you didn’t receive the letter. I will never forget a story I once heard about two old and poverty-stricken friends who sent each other a blank sheet of paper every 6 months– they never accepted the ‘letter’ so they couldn’t pass on any news, but at least they knew that they were both still alive! 

 A Penny Black stamp, featuring the head of a young Queen Victoria

After the arrival of the Penny Black, it cost just one penny to send a letter weighing up to 14g (half an ounce) anywhere in the United Kingdom. This made the whole postal system cheaper to use and more efficient, and letter writing flourished. 

However, it wasn’t until 15 years later that post boxes were introduced - before that you had to take your letter to the nearest post office. The first post boxes were green, not the red we are used to today. 

An early post box at the Postal Museum

I was very happy to discover that post boxes began to appear on the streets of London at around the time my new novel is set – it made it so much easier for my main character to sneak out and post a letter! In a nice literary link, the famous Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope is credited with introducing the post box when he worked for the Post Office. The first post boxes in the UK were in the Channel Islands. 

Post boxes have changed in colour and size and design since the mid-nineteenth century, but they are still instantly recognisable, whatever their age. The post box where I live has been painted gold since 2012, in honour of Mo Farah’s gold medal at the 2012 Olympics. 

We might marvel at how much slower Victorian communications were than ours are today, but in Victorian London, you could expect to receive 12 deliveries of post a day – that’s one an hour! – and it was possible to send a letter by post and receive an answer the same day. Imagine that happening nowadays!

Of course, the fascinating displays in the Postal Museum cover the story of the Post Office right up to the present day, including such things as the introduction of the postcode, and the role post boxes played in the Second World War. If my next historical novel is set in the twentieth century, I will certainly be paying another visit, so that I can add authentic historical detail to my story. After all, people will always need to communicate with one another, and there’s nothing like an unexpected letter or a mysterious parcel to move a plot along!

Watch Catherine's YouTube video on Catching the Post by clicking here

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London, 1666. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, go to Catherine’s website: www.catherinerandall.com

Stories in maps by Catherine Randall

I’ve always loved books with maps in the front, so that you can really picture where the action takes place.

Some books don’t tell you in the text exactly how different places in the story relate to each other, so a map is an extra way into the story. I love the map in the front of the classic Winnie-the-Pooh, so I can see exactly where Pooh and Piglet live, and where Eeyore’s Gloomy Place is (‘rather boggy and sad’, as it says on the map). Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I have always found that maps really help me to visualise the world I am reading about.

The endpapers in my 1970 edition of Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A.Milne, published by Methuen

When I was a child, I was a bit obsessed with the Swallows and Amazons books by Arthur Ransome, about adventurous children having a wonderful time sailing and camping on an island in the middle of a lake, without any adults. The map at the front of Swallows and Amazons shows that the lake where these adventures take place bears a very strong resemblance to two lakes in the English Lake district. As well as showing me the geography of the stories, there was an extra thrill in this map as I tried to work out which bits of the fictional lake were taken from which bits of the real lakes, Coniston and Windermere.

 

The map in the front of my 1974 Puffin Books edition of
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

In the second book of the series, Swallowdale, the map in the front does not just show the setting for the story, it also shows exactly where some of the events in the book take place.

It is not very easy to read, partly because it is drawn as though by one of the characters themselves, but that adds to its charm.

The endpapers from my father’s 1943 copy of Swallowdale, published by Jonathan Cape

When I am writing a book, especially a book based on real events, I like to have a map in front of me so that I can see exactly where my characters are playing out the action of the story. Although the characters are fictional, the setting is not, and it is important to me to get things right.  When I was writing about the Great Fire of London in The White Phoenix, I spent a long time looking at maps showing how fast and how far the fire spread, so that I could work out where my characters needed to be and when, and also how quickly they would have been able to get from one place to another.

 

Part of a famous map drawn by Wencelaus Hollar in 1666,
showing the extent of the fire damage in London after the Great Fire.
You can see the shape of St Paul’s Cathedral just to the left of the centre

Maps can be just as helpful when you are writing about an imaginary place. Creating a map of your own can help you to write the story. Drawing a map – however basic – is a great way of getting to know your setting, and as you do that you might see where somebody needs to be, how the villain escaped, or where the treasure had to be hidden – important plot stuff. You may not be able to work out the whole story in a map, but it can certainly spark ideas, help you to solve plot problems, and put you with your characters right in the middle of the action.

 

Example of a map drawn to help work out the characters’ movements in a story

WRITING CHALLENGE

Imagine you are an explorer visiting a distant island, or a mysterious valley, or maybe an ancient forest - anywhere you think you might have an adventure. It could be a place that might really exist or a magical place with extraordinary creatures and strange beings. Using your imagination, draw a map of this place, including all the important features like mountains, rivers and caves and any houses, palaces or creepy castles that you find there.  Then write little labels on the map, showing where things happen in your story – where you first arrived, where you met that mysterious stranger, where you had to stay the night, where you ran away from whatever strange creature you come across in your adventures. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, although it is helpful if you can read the writing! If it grips your imagination, you might want to write it up afterwards as a written story, or maybe a comic strip.

Catherine Randall is the author of The White Phoenix an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London in 1666. The White Phoenix was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. Catherine is currently working on her second novel, an adventure set in Victorian London.

 

 

Letters from the Front - by Catherine Randall

For a writer of historical fiction, letters can be gold dust. 

Three years ago, I wrote a local community play, Letters from the Front, to mark the 100^th anniversary of the end of the First World War. The idea was to create a sense of continuity between the communities of 1918 and 2018 by dramatising stories of local people who had lived and died in the Great War.

I was extremely lucky that others had already done a great deal of research into the names on our town war memorial, so I had plenty of stories to work with, but the thing that really brought the past to life for us were the letters.

In those days, rather wonderfully, the local newspaper sometimes reprinted in full letters that had been written by the men who were away fighting, or in some cases letters from the nurses and other soldiers who had cared for them as they died. The result was that I was able to include the actual words written by ordinary people from our town over 100 years ago.

Teddington War Memorial

Private Fred Savage, for instance, wrote to the paper from the Gallipoli campaign (in what is now Turkey) in 1915. After describing his part in the fighting, his thoughts turned to home:

My best wishes to my old sporting chums in Teddington and district... I have just been thinking, but for this beastly war we should in all probability have been enjoying an all-day match at cricket in Bushy Park tomorrow, but it will be time for that sort of thing when this match is over.

Sadly, there was no time for ‘that sort of thing’ for Fred Savage. By the time they printed the letter, Fred was already dead, aged just 24.

Another poignant letter printed in the newspaper was all the more unusual because it was written by a German. Mr and Mrs Charles Mole had only learned in August 1918 that their 19-year-old son, also called Charles, had died while a Prisoner of War back in March, after being wounded in action. Generally, that would have been pretty much all the information they’d be given. However, they then received the most extraordinary letter. This was reprinted in the paper under the heading,  ‘A German Soldier’s Kind Action’:

Charles Mole's name on the school war memorial (middle column)

The following letter, written in a shell funnel on Good Friday, March 29, 1918 was recently received by Mrs Mole, 82 York Road, Teddington, whose son, Pte Charles Arthur Mole, died whilst a prisoner of war in Germany.

The article explains how the letter reached Mrs Mole, and goes on to print the letter in full. The letter is long, so I will just share with you a few extracts. The letter begins:

Dear Family Mole, - Love and a sense of duty compel me to communicate to you what will be of the greatest interest to you. I am a German soldier, whose name is H.Weingartner. When our forces were moving onwards over the battlefields, which had been evacuated by the English, some of my comrades hit upon three English soldiers, of whom two were dead already and one still alive.

Private Mole was the soldier still alive. The letter writer goes on to describe how they tried to help ‘our poor fellow soldier’ whose legs were badly wounded.

After we had bandaged him up and refreshed him a little by a cup of tea, we carried him on a tent bed to the main road... We attached a little flag to his bed to direct our sanitary soldiers’ attention to him when passing by…

H.Weingartner’s letter goes on to describe how he continued to visit Private Mole when he could over the next hours, taking tea to him, and saying prayers with him. Communication was difficult as Private Mole only spoke English, and Weingartner German, but it is clear that they managed to make themselves understood.  The tone of the letter is extremely compassionate. The next day Private Mole was removed to a field hospital, and the letter writer never saw him again. He concludes his letter:

This is all I can tell you about your son. I have asked God to keep and safeguard his young life and grant him a meeting again with you all. And my sincere and fervent wish is that this letter will safely reach you, especially in case your son should succumb to his wounds, and no news about him should ever reach you. …Should your son survive, which I do hope and pray for, I hope to hear from him later on. May the Lord soon grant us peace according to His everlasting mercy and grace.

Yours sincerely H.W.

We know that Private Mole didn’t survive but imagine the comfort that this letter must have given his poor parents, knowing that he had been kindly cared for in the last days of his life.

Charles Mole's name on the Hampton School war memorial. He was at school here from 1911-15.

Both these letters bring to life for us the soldiers of the First World War in a way that few other things can.

When writing historical novels, including letters as part of your story can create a sense of immediacy and help your reader get inside your characters’ heads. 

Today, letters have largely been replaced by emails, phone calls and the myriad of other ways we communicate with each other, but it’s important to remember that until thirty years ago, letters were an essential part of life. So not only can letters reveal character, you can also make them crucial to your plot.  

In my novel The White Phoenix, set in London in 1666, letters play an important role from the very first chapter. When Lizzie Hopper and her family arrive back at their family bookshop after the plague, expecting to find her father, the very first words uttered by Master Pedley, the bookbinder from next door, concern the letter he claims to have sent: 

‘Oh, Mistress Hopper, praise God you have come! Did you get my letter?’

Might things have been different if they had received his letter, if he’d written earlier?

Later, a letter that Master Pedley claims to have sent to the Hopper’s valued apprentice Kit also goes astray, but this time Lizzie takes matters into her own hands and writes to Kit herself. (This of course meant I had to research all about writing and sending letters in 1666, but luckily, as the novel is set in a bookseller’s, Lizzie’s letter writing was believable.)

Kit’s swift response to Lizzie’s letter is one of the first indications that Pedley may not be the helpful neighbour he is made out to be. In The White Phoenix, letters are a crucial part of the plot.

So, next time you are writing a story, don’t forget letters! Think about how you could use them, either as part of the plot or as a way of revealing more about your characters. Some authors have even written books entirely made up of letters! And remember how the letters I have shared above from the First World War create a strong sense of immediacy. This Remembrance Day, maybe you could take whatever you have learned about the First World War, and use it to write a soldier’s letter of your own.

Catherine Randall's debut novel, The White Phoenix, is a thrilling adventure story for 9-14 year olds set during the Great Fire of London. It has been shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. The White Phoenix is published by the Book Guild and is available from bookshops and online retailers including Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Amazon.

For more information visit www.catherinerandall.com.

Finding the story in old objects

Do you ever feel like writing a story, but don’t know where to start? Maybe you keep promising yourself you’re going to make time to write, but when you finally manage to sit down at the keyboard, or with a pen and paper, your mind suddenly goes as blank as the paper.

You need something to write about. But don’t worry, you don’t need to have a plot or a fully developed character to start writing. All you need is an object. And if you want to write historical fiction, then the most useful thing to start off with is an object from the past.

I have recently inherited some old things from my parents. My favourite is this little clockwork pig. 

 

When you wind up the key in its back, it starts to play its drum in a lovely rhythm – Ta Ta Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta Ta Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta – and turn round in a circle. As you can see from the photo, the pig’s clothes are badly in need of repair now, but that’s not surprising because he is nearly 100 years old. He belonged to my dad when he was a child, back in the 1930s. He must have been a very special toy because my father kept him safely all his life.

If you want to use the clockwork pig to inspire a story, you just start asking questions. Why was he so special? Who gave him to my dad? Imagine you were a child in the 1930s and the clockwork pig was yours. Where would you keep him? Would you keep him on display or would you hide him away because he was so precious? What if you took him to school and he got lost? Who would mend him if he was broken?

You could even write a story from the point of view of the clockwork pig. There’s a classic book by Russell Hoban called The Mouse and His Child, written from the point of view of a clockwork mouse, so you would be in good company if you decided to do this. 

The Mouse and his Child by Russall Hoban

 Another thing that my father left me is this model Spitfire.

 

This is a very special model because it is made from the same materials that were used to make real Spitfires. My grandpa worked in a Spitfire factory during World War II, and someone there must have made it for Dad. I imagine that this would also have been a very precious toy, maybe something that other children would have liked to own themselves. But the great thing is that you don’t need to know anything about my dad to use his model Spitfire to start building a story. You can completely make up the person it belonged to. How had they come by it? Why was it special to them? Maybe they had seen real Spitfires flying overhead? Maybe their dad was a pilot who flew Spitfires? Maybe their mum had an important job in an aircraft factory?

My mum also left me some treasures, including this box with her name on it. 

 

Inside the box I found some of her costume jewellery, but also this Victorian locket with a very old photograph in it. 

 

The sad thing is, I have no idea who it is! But this is another ideal starting point for a story. Who could this lady be? Why did a picture of her end up in Mum’s jewellery box? Of course, there could be a simple explanation, but as writers looking for a story we are not interested in simple explanations. She is quite hard to see, but if you look carefully you can see that she is very elegant and well dressed. I particularly like her hairstyle. Photographs were usually only taken on special occasions in those days, so I wonder what she is dressed up for?

So, this week’s writing challenge is simply to find an object – you can use either a real object or a picture of something – and start asking lots of questions about it. Before you know it, you will have the makings of a story. Don’t worry if the story turns out to be nothing to do with the original object – the point is to use it as inspiration and see where your imagination takes you.

And if you want to hear Dad’s clockwork pig drumming, go to the Time Tunnellers’ YouTube channel, where you can see him in action!

Catherine Randall's debut novel, The White Phoenix, is a thrilling adventure story set during the Great Fire of London for 9-12 year olds. It was shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021. The White Phoenix is published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers including Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Amazon.

For more information visit www.catherinerandall.com.

How the Great Fire of London sparked my debut book! - Catherine Randall reveals the inspiration behind The White Phoenix

355 years ago today, on 2 September 1666, Londoners woke to the news that a fire was raging in the southeast of the City and spreading rapidly. In an early draft of my children’s novel, The White Phoenix, set in a London bookshop in 1666, I had my characters living by St Paul’s Cathedral, and finding out about the fire when hordes of people started streaming past them through the narrow streets, pushing handcarts piled high with children and furniture.

Londoners flee the burning City in September 1666

Then I realised that it would be far more exciting to put my characters slap bang in the middle of the action, so in the final version, 13-year-old Lizzie Hopper and her family are staying with their uncle in Pudding Lane when the fire breaks out. They witness first-hand the efforts of the firefighters to put out the flames, becoming part of the human chain passing leather buckets up and down the lane from where someone had pierced the water pipes running below the streets. They hear the bells of St Magnus’s church ringing backwards – the equivalent of an emergency siren sounding today - and experience the fierce heat and falling embers blowing around in the wind. They also witness the failure of the one person who might possibly have been able to stop the fire at this early stage and prevent it becoming the Great Fire of London – the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth.

Seventeenth-century firefighters using buckets and firehooks to fight a fire in Tiverton, Devon

The firefighters wanted Bludworth’s permission to use firehooks to pull down some of the unburnt houses nearest the blaze, creating a firebreak. The Lord Mayor said that he couldn’t do this without the permission of the owners, but as most of the houses were rented, the owners were not around to ask. Bludworth then famously declared that the fire wasn’t that bad anyway: ‘A woman could piss it out,’ he said and went home. Later that day, he did start to pull down houses but by then the fire was burning out of control. Who knows what would have happened if he had been more decisive?

In The White Phoenix, my character Lizzie experiences what actually happened next. Like thousands of other Londoners, she and her family flee east to Tower Hill, then an open green space near the Tower of London, on the outskirts of the City. Many others fled north to Moorfields, another wide open field. Remarkably, according to contemporary accounts, all the refugees had gone within four days – some leaving the City for good, others returning to see what they could salvage from their burnt homes, or moving to stay with family and friends in untouched neighbourhoods.

Nevertheless, the Great Fire was a deeply traumatic experience for Londoners. Samuel Pepys records in his diary on 2 September how he wept to see the City burn. In my book, Lizzie and her brother Ralph have tears streaming down their faces as they watch St Paul’s Cathedral engulfed in flames.

Near the end of my story, Lizzie goes back into the burnt City. She finds it almost impossible to work out where the streets had been because there is so much rubble and fallen timber everywhere. The ground was too hot to walk on for several days after the fire died out.

Of course today barely anything remains of the City that Lizzie knew - many of the buildings rebuilt after the Fire were destroyed in the Blitz during World War II. The exception is some of the City churches, many of which were rebuilt after 1666 by Sir Christopher Wren, and rebuilt again after the Blitz. You can still visit St Magnus, for instance, at the south end of Pudding Lane, where the bells first rang out to warn of the Fire. The street names and the line of the streets also remain broadly the same, so it is possible to trace Lizzie’s footsteps through the City, both during and after the Fire. The sketch map below shows the extent of the Fire, as well as Tower Hill and Moorfields where Lizzie and the real refugees fled. It also shows the fictional site of the White Phoenix, the bookshop that Lizzie Hopper fights so hard to save in my novel.

Discussion points for teachers/parents :

The people who lost their homes in the Great Fire of London often did not travel far from the City, but they were still refugees, relying on the goodwill of others to feed and house them. What places can you think of in the world today where people have been forced to become refugees in their own countries because of natural disasters?

For what other reasons, besides natural disasters, might people have to flee their homes?

In 1666, lots of towns across England sent money to Londoners to help them rebuild their homes. Often, money was collected at Sunday church services. Other people opened their homes to the refugees while they rebuilt their homes and businesses. In what ways can we help refugees today?

What possessions would you save if you had to leave your home very quickly? Do you think they would be the same sort of things that fleeing Londoners took with them in 1666?

The White Phoenix by Catherine Randall is an historical novel for 9-12 year olds set in London in 1666, and is shortlisted for the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2021.

Published by the Book Guild, it is available from bookshops and online retailers.

For more information, see www.catherinerandall.com.