chelseagirl

Posted by V E H Masters

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-streets-of-st-andrews-by-veh-masters.html

 St Andrews in Scotland is known worldwide as the home of golf as well as for its famous university where Prince William met Catherine – but it's also a town with a lot of history.

My first historical novel, The Castilians, closely follows the long and dramatic siege of St Andrews Castle in 1546-7. Since St Andrews is my home town, I had a very clear picture of the streets my characters walked and the destruction wrought by the siege, since some of it is still visible almost five hundred years later.

Pictured above are the remains of Blackfriars Chapel damaged by the castilians – which is what the men who took the castle, killed its cardinal and held it for the next fourteen months called themselves – and hence the title of my book. Blackfriars sits in the grounds of my old school and I walked by it every day without a second glance.

St Andrews is so named because bones purporting to be from the apostle Saint Andrew once rested here. The town was a centre of pilgrimage from the 1100s with pilgrims coming from as far away as Russia, whose patron saint the apostle was.

A certificate of pilgrimage to St Andrews was found in France a few years ago. This particular pilgrim had been required to undertake the journey as a penance for killing someone, as well as making recompense to the man's family. 

Pilgrims travelled in groups for safety. They arrived by sea, usually further down the Fife coast and walked the last twenty or so miles to St Andrews. The townsfolk were understandably fearful of pilgrims bringing the plague so pilgrims were held in quarantine outside the city boundaries and permitted entry through a controlled pilgrim's gate.

The cathedral, once the largest in Scotland, was built in the 1100s. God was said not to have looked favourably upon this over grand edifice when the west end was blown down in a storm in 1270 and the building partly destroyed by fire in 1378.

St Andrews is a very early example of town planning built with its main streets fanning out from the cathedral, as pictured below in the Geddy Map of 1580 (with permission of the National Library of Scotland). Those streets, wide and straight, were laid out to facilitate the processions for the many holy days of the Catholic calendar. These would include carrying the reliquary containing the bones of Saint Andrew, presumably on Saint Andrew's Day 30th November and performances of the mystery plays. 

When Mary of Guise, mother to Mary Queen of Scots, arrived from France her first meeting with her new husband, James V, was in St Andrews. Forty days of jousting, plays and street pageants followed which must have been hugely exciting for the folk of the town.

The siege of the castle took place only eight years later. James V was already dead and Mary Queen of Scots, aged four in 1546, was now queen. The siege was ostensibly because Cardinal Beaton, Scotland's most powerful man, had the Protestant preacher George Wishart burnt at the stake outside the castle while he, and the people of the town, watched. A few months later a group of disaffected Protestant  lairds crept into the castle disguised as stone masons. They killed the cardinal and hung his naked body from the parapet so the townsfolk were in no doubt who now controlled the castle.

Inevitably the siege was not only about religious differences. Henry VIII of England was funding them as one amid many tactics to force agreement to the marriage of wee Queen Mary to his son Edward. The castilians expected Henry to send a relief force to rescue them but he did not, although he did send funds and supplies by sea.

The government troops tried to break the siege by tunnelling in but the castilians were wise to siege warfare and they mined out to meet them. The purpose of the tunnel was to set explosives and undermine the curtain wall which the troops were prevented from doing. Both sides were tunnelling through rock which is why one of the best preserved mine and counter mines to be found in Europe can still be visited in St Andrews.

Eventually Scotland's auld alliance with France was called upon. The French galleys bombarded the castle from the sea unsuccessfully however they had among them a master tactician in Leon Strozzi, Catherine de Medici's cousin. He ordered the dismantling of St Salvator's (pictured below) then wooden spire and had cannon hauled up to the top of its tower and one of the cathedral towers. The resulting bombardment quickly ended the siege.

In 1559 John Knox was preaching in St Andrews and incited the congregation to such a pitch that they destroyed all the imagery in the church, smashed the stained glass windows, toppled the saints from their pedestals and continued on to the cathedral, which they looted. Other towns followed and Scotland became a Protestant country. St Andrews, which had been Scotland's ecclesiastical centre as well as home to the country's first university, gradually fell into decline. Rubbish piled high in the streets and the town became so rundown there was even a proposal that the university be re-sited to Perth.

Both castle and cathedral soon fell into ruin and were systematically quarried for several hundred years. The good citizens of the town used the stone to build and repair houses and to replace the wooden piers at the harbour with stone.

Eventually St Andrews was re-purposed as the home of golf. Golf had been banned by James II in 1457 because he observed the young men were playing it rather than practising archery. James IV was a keen golfer and re-instated the game and his granddaughter Mary Queen of Scots played golf too.

V.E.H Masters is the award winning author of the best selling Seton Chronicles. The first book in series The Castilians tells the story of the siege of St Andrews Castle in 1546. You can find out more at her website https://vehmasters.com/where there are three short stories available for free to download.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-streets-of-st-andrews-by-veh-masters.html

Posted by Carol Drinkwater

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2025/06/born-out-of-wedlock-by-carol-drinkwater.html

A broad synopsis of what the novel is about: a British couple, Celia and Dominic, are living on a vineyard in the south of France. A vineyard that was inherited by Celia when her father died a decade earlier. Celia has decided to throw a huge summer party to celebrate the growing success she and her husband are making of their wine production. A few days before the big August bank holiday weekend when the party will be in full swing, Celia receives a forwarded letter from a man, David Hawksmith, who claims to be her son; the son she gave up at birth in 1977. David's existence is the outcome of a traumatic incident from Celia's past that she has never spoken about, not even to Dominic. Celia invites David to the party. Dominic graciously welcomes him (and David's unexpected and rather curious travelling companion) even though he has his doubts about the veracity of David's claims.

The book has elements of mystery but, ultimately, it is a story of  Betrayal and Belonging set against a backdrop of all the glorious ingredients - food, sunshine, scents etc - of living along the Mediterranean coast in the south of France. 

The Irish Times, in a recent Q and A, asked me whether the fact that I don't have children of my own had been the seed, the inspiration, for the novel. Giving up a child born out of wedlock is a very big issue in Ireland. Only two weeks ago, a dig began in search of the bodies of babies whose mothers were obliged to give up their "illegitimate" offspring during the last century.

https://news.sky.com/story/opening-the-pit-dig-for-remains-of-800-infants-at-former-mother-and-baby-home-in-ireland-begins-13384111?fbclid=IwY2xjawK8yglleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETB5RzI4SXF3eFBab042VmNyAR7960m6fL8n0J55ru2FjHnpkPSRQPp9TKphdWrgRFnD2zV0qQ8HeqYtXUjj6A_aem__xN9uAsQA5bsM7CkprKizA

I have written a little about this subject before in one of my earlier History Girls blogs. Via the link below you will read that Ireland's right to abortion was not made legal until 2018.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/search?q=carol+Drinkwater+Irish+childhood

Abortion was made legal in Britain on 27th October 1967, and came into effect on 27th April 1968. In theory, this means that Celia, the leading character in ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE, could have legitimately terminated her pregnancy, but, for reasons  revealed in the novel, she did not.

The choices for young pregnant women before the late sixties in Britain were: a termination of the pregnancy (frequently a risky abortion, a backstreet illegal business), a hasty marriage, for some a shotgun wedding, or give up the child at birth for adoption.

In my novel, the young Celia gives birth to her son and, four days later, the child is taken from her for adoption. All she knows about the boy is the Christian name she has chosen for him, David.

Ghosts from the past. 

I am fascinated by secrets that step out of the shadows of our own lives and others' lives. The lives of those close to us. My mother was expecting me when she married my father in October 1947. I often joke about the fact that I was with them on their honeymoon in Devon. However, this was a fact I only discovered, by accident, when I was about ten or eleven. I found a stash of their honeymoon pics and calculated the dates! The subject had never been spoken about and when I confronted my parents with the question, they (both Catholics) were a little sheepish, but did not deny the fact. Why should they? I have, since that discovery, perceived my conception as one fired by love and passion. Would they have married if Mummy had not been pregnant with me? I believe they would, but who can say? The choice they made was to keep the baby, marry and start a family.

I love to be by the sea - I live overlooking the Mediterranean. I crave its rhythms and I have asked myself whether this has anything to do with the fact that my parents were happy on their honeymoon. A happiness that was tested in a relationship that was tumultuous even though they stayed together all their lives and my mother was deeply committed to her marriage. She loved my father loyally till the day he died, forty-six years later. Her face and her demeanour at his deathbed I will never forget. 

Now that both my parents are gone, I deeply regret all the questions I never asked. How did Mummy feel the moment she discovered she was pregnant; was she frightened, elated, guilty? What were the circumstances when she discussed her situation with Daddy? What was his response: "Let's get married, Phil" ... Was his willingness to tie the knot instantaneous? I know that they had been expecting a boy and had decided to Christian me Charles!

The morning the newly-weds, my parents, were boarding the luxurious Devon Belle train at Waterloo station heading to Ilfracombe in north Devon for their honeymoon, my father discovered that he had won the Football Pools. His win was the staggering sum of almost one hundred pounds. It was a fair fortune in those years of austerity after WWII. Mummy told me some years later that it felt as though their marriage had been blessed. It was all their wedding presents rolled into one. As an Irish country girl who had relocated to London during WWII to train as a nurse, she was far from home and her family. The wedding was a very quiet affair with only my father's brother and my mother's younger sister in attendance, as far as I am aware. 

The Devon Belle was a luxury passenger train which only began service in June 1947 so my parents would have been early travellers. I wonder, before his pools win, how my father, so soon home from life in the RAF entertaining the wartime troops in Africa, could have afforded to splash out on such a treat. But it does seem to suggest that he was celebrating their union, that he wanted to give my mother, pregnant with their first child, the best that was on offer. A luxurious and memorable debut to the life ahead of them together in post-war London.

Last week I was in London recording ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE for audio. Reading the novel as an actress is quite another eye to when I am working on the text as a writer. This time, as I read, a period from my own teenage years came flooding back to me. Bromley in Kent, in England in the early 60s, a little earlier than my principal character, Celia's teenage years in a small provincial town outside Bristol. Without realising it, subconsciously, I must have taken from my own experiences of this era and interwoven it into Celia's story in the novel. 

When I was a late teenage girl, the battle to legalise abortion was underway. David Steel, Liberal MP, later leader of the Liberal Party, was responsible for introducing as a Private member's bill, the Abortion Act 1967. Fortunately, I had no need of the liberating results of this act once passed. Even so, as a teenage girl growing up, educated at a rather strict Irish convent, the waves of such a progressive bill would have been in the news and in debates all around me. As well, I must have had some awareness of the trials and terrors for young unmarried women who found themselves "in trouble" in the days before abortion was an available choice for them.

The episode that came flooding back to me as I was recording my novel last week was of a completely forgotten incident. It was the case of R., a girl in my class at the convent. We both would have been about fifteen at the time. R. discovered that she was pregnant. In our middle-class, Catholic-educated circles, this was completely unheard of and very shocking. How did R. deal with her situation? She said nothing, packed a bag and just disappeared. It was a scandal. Her parents, of course, were fraught with worry. I have a clear image of her mother and father paying a visit to our house one evening after school. We were all gathered in the sitting room, which in itself was rare. The white and gold-flecked three-piece suite was usually covered in dust sheets to keep it clean and protected from the light. The room was rarely used. Mummy kept it immaculate for "special occasions". Well, this must have been deemed a special occasion. I sat in a corner. Our guests remained standing. R.'s exceedingly tall mother was chain-smoking. (Smoking in Mummy's pristine sitting room!) She was clutching a small ashtray shaped like a shell in the palm of one hand. The reason for the gathering was information. "We need to hear what Carol knows about R. Her movements, her companions, before she fled." 

Or had she been kidnapped, abducted, murdered? Were any of these scenarios ever considered? I don't remember. Certainly the police had been called in and a search for R. had been set in motion. It wasn't known at this stage that R. had gone of her own volition nor that she was pregnant. I had no information to share with the grieving adults towering over me. R. had not confided in me - we weren't that close - and I had not overheard any chatter in the classrooms. I could shed no light on the crisis. R's mother was in tears as they exited our house. I felt so bad about their situation that I was almost inclined to run after them, invent a tale, but I knew better than to create false leads. 

It was at least another three weeks before R. was eventually tracked down, It was then her parents discovered that their daughter was pregnant. This was two or three years before David Steel's Abortion bill. R. was sent away somewhere unknown to me to give birth to the child who was then immediately handed over for adoption. My classmate never returned to the convent. She became a girl from our childhood whose story was not spoken aloud. Her parents split up, as I remember. Tragedy had befallen the family.

R. was a young woman shamed. From there on she and the "unsavoury business" was only spoken of in whispers.

What happened to R.'s child, her son? Did she and he ever make contact, did they find one another at some point later in their lives? I have no idea. I sincerely hope that there was some kind of happy ending to the tale.

In ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE, Celia's son, David, contacts her out of the blue. A forty-seven-year-old man claiming to be the son she gave up at birth comes knocking, or rather, sends a letter requesting a meeting ... How does a mother respond? Invite the stranger into your life, welcome him as long lost kin ... Or deny his existence? Refuse to see him?

Earlier this year, I was honoured to be one of the two judges for the very prestigious Listowel Literary Festival's 'Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award.'  Settling on our overall winner was very tough; the standard of fiction being published by Irish writers right now is mesmerisingly good. The prize went to Niall William's, Time of the Child. Williams' story is set during the season of Advent in the year of 1962 in a small (fictional) village over on the west coast of Ireland. An abandoned baby is found in the churchyard and taken in by the local doctor and his unmarried youngest daughter ... The prose is luminous and the story, compassionate and heart-wrenching.

Coincidentally, having read fifty novels for the Kerry Prize, I am now reading another Irish novel, also delicately crafted. The Boy From the Sea from debut novelist, Garrett Carr. It is 1973. A baby is found in a barrel off the shore of a small coastal Atlantic town in Ireland. A local family adopts the boy ... Beautifully written, full of wry humour.

Every conception offers up the possibility of an untold story; a world of choices, of future bondings or terminations. Of aspirations and dreams dashed or built, of love washed up on unexpected shores. 

I beg to be forgiven for placing my novel on the same page as the very fine works of Williams and Carr. These are three very different stories. What they have in common is that each centres on the ripples and (tidal) waves caused by the arrival of a boy born out of wedlock. Interestingly, the other two are both written by male authors.

I hope you will enjoy ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE. It is receiving some splendid feed back. It is a LoveReading Book of the Month for July. Available at all good bookstores and on Amazon etc. If you are outside the UK, Blackwells will have it in stock and they ship worldwide for free. Here is the link:

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/One-Summer-in-Provence-by-Carol-Drinkwater/9781805462767

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2025/06/born-out-of-wedlock-by-carol-drinkwater.html