Month: April 2012

Rosemary Sutcliff’s garden and dovecote

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Rosemary Sutcliff’s diary has many references to her carefully-tended garden. Neighbours visit for tea, fans and other writers come to talk and be photographed with her, and housekeepers come and go. Last year photographer Stephen Walby wrote to this blog with a photo of the garden, which stretches out behind the room that was her study where she would work all day, and the sitting room with french windows where she spent the evenings.

We live in Rosemary’s old house in the lovely Sussex village of Walberton. Rosemary lived here until she died in 1992. She is very fondly remembered here, having been an active member of village life. Our next door neighbours daughter remembers coming to the house to help out and many other villagers have stories to tell, we have heard how Rosemary would welcome groups of children from the village school for talks.  

The cover photograph for Blue Remembered Hills was taken in the garden, last year we replaced the dovecote in her memory. The property includes a flint cottage which I think was once a barn/pigsty. In Rosemary’s day her housekeeper lived here.

In fact, as I noted at the time ” … her handyman-driver lived in the flint cottage … The housekeepers always lived in the house …  so there was someone around if Rosemary (who was severely disabled) needed help.”

Rosemary Sutcliff's garden in 2011 (She died in 1992)

My cherry trees are just breaking … and Lady’s smock in the hedge (Diary, 8/4/88)

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

April 8th Friday. Had a lovely run with Ray, on Dunton & along under the Downs via my cherry trees, which are just breaking, and home via Midhurst, the countryside suddenly veiled in green chifloss (?) , primroses &  celandine & Lady’s smock in the hedges. But at Dean, the storm wreckage as heartbreaking as ever.

© Anthony Lawton 2012

‘Had a lovely run’ refers to a drive out in the car – Rosemary did this most days, driven by whoever was being her driver-handyman-gardner at the time. That is why The Tifffy could not remain (earlier entries); she could not have a drunk driver. I am not sure of the transcription ‘chifloss’: not in the dictionary, what else might it be?

Why 29 Visitors from Afghanistan to the Rosemary Sutcliff blog yesterday?

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Why were there 29 visits to this blog about Rosemary Sutcliff from Afghanistan yesterday? Film The Eagle showing to the forces? Broadcast of recent BBC version of Brother Dusty Feet or The Eagle of the Ninth? Assignment at the American School (is there one?) or an ‘English’ one? If any of ‘you’ vist here again I am intrigued to know!

Michael Rosen drank in Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic The Eagle of the Ninth in two ways

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Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth Original UK Book Cover 1954 Michael Rosen (writer – for children mostly – poet, performer, broadcaster and university professor) commented last year in The Guardian newspaper about Rosemary Sutcliff and her classic historical novel for children and young people The Eagle of the Ninth:

Interesting that she was writing about the end of an empire at the end of …an empire. And does the search for the lost legion echo/refract (Joseph) Conrad’s Heart of Darkness?

Some of us drank in The Eagle of the Ninth two ways: once as a BBC Children’s Hour serial and second time as the book. I can remember hurrying to get home to hear it – moody, dangerous, mysterious – a quest for something real but long gone, a possible solution to an unsolved story…and somehow it had something to do with events that happened a long time ago just where you walked when we were on holiday: on moors, or on wet fields where we were camping. The book made a connection for me between a past and that particular present.

Source: Guardian newspaper editorial ‘In praise of’ Rosemary Sutcliff

Sword Song was a Rosemary Sutcliff title long before Bernard Cornwell used it too! Shame on him!

Anthony Lawton7 Comments

It has always annoyed me that Bernard Cornwell and his publishers considered it acceptable to call his 2008 novel of Saxon England ‘Sword Song’, when that had been the title Rosemary Sutcliff had chosen for her final historical novel ten years earlier! It shows a disappointing lack of respect by one writer of another in the same genre, historical fiction.

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword Song was  a novel set in Viking times. It was in handwritten manuscript form on her desk when she died. I recall transcribing it from her elphin-scrawl handwriting. It was intriguing painstakingly to follow the story of Bjarni as he was cast out of the Norse settlement in the Angles’ Land for an act of oath-breaking, to spend five years sailing the west coast of Scotland and witnessing the feuds of the clan chiefs living there.

I was pleased that in The Times newspaper, in August 1997, Sarah Johnson  called the opening of Sword Song a ‘stunner’: ‘beat that Melvin Burgess!’ she wrote. However she found the story ‘meandering’. But I loved that meandering, in and out of the Dublin slave market, for example.

…  Rosemary Sutcliff’s … posthumously published Dark Ages saga Sword Song is packed with precisely described Viking sea battles and sacrifices in a linguistic smorgasbord of thongs, thralls and fiery-bearded men. I was never a Sutcliff fan as a child, tiring too quickly of the sun glinting off the halberds of people with names that sound like Haggis Bogtrotterson, but the opening of Sword Song is a stunner: a sixteen-year-old boy is exiled from his settlement for the manslaughter of a monk who had kicked his dog. Beat that, Melvin Burgess.

Regrettably, the story quavers thereafter, meandering around the coast of Britain as young Bjarni sells his fighting skills to one fiery-beardy after another, but the dense historical detail and rich colours are all still there.

Source: The Times, August 23, 1997