Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some historical research. I’ve never been much of a history buff, mainly as school curriculums centre on politics and war, and my history-loving friend’s bookcases are lined with hardbacks on Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, which didn’t do much to change my perception. Politics and war are significant, obviously, but I’ve realised I’m more interested in social and cultural history.
When Bake Off was on BBC1, my favourite part was when they interviewed food historians. My first reaction was food historian? That’s a thing? I was amazed that someone’s entire career could centre on the origin of puddings or cheese, and further amazed to learn, for example, that Cornish pasties were designed for farmers, fishermen and tin miners to transport lunch in an edible package, and the thick wavy crest meant they could hold and eat it without poisoning themselves with tin or copper dust (or coat it in cow dung or fish slime, I’m guessing).
Channel 4 didn’t include the food history sections when they took over, which is one reason I stopped watching (I also liked Mary Berry, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins; the new presenters, not so much).
The reason for my foray into history is that the children’s book I’ve been writing over the last few months has a time travel theme. I say “writing” but I’ve only been reading and researching these last few months; I started writing a week ago, and it’s due in on Friday (it’s a short one so it’s not as bad/impressive as it sounds.
My characters go back to the site of their London school in the 1820s, so in December, I bought London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd and spent the winter break reading about underground tunnels, fog, the Thames, hangings (8am every morning; families often pulled their loved-ones’ feet so it would be over for them quicker), waste matter (cesspits – I’ll spare you the details) and lighting (oil lamps being replaced by the first gas lamps meant prostitutes struggled to find dark enough corners to work in).
It’s fascinating but I couldn’t help thinking that I would have written the book very differently, with more juicy details especially about women.
As my commute takes me over the Thames every day, I now try to imagine it filled with ships, masts and sails, dockers, wharves, wherries and ferries. And because my characters are time-travelling Jewish kids, I’ve been looking into the long history of Jews in London.
Ackroyd notes that refugees from a Rouen pogrom arrived in 1096 and London’s first Jewish quarter developed in 1128. Prohibited from engaging in “ordinary commerce”, and as Christian merchants weren’t allowed to, Jews lent money and became hated for the “very trade imposed upon them by the civic authorities”.
Edward I banished Jews from England in 1290 but they returned a few centuries later. In 1656, Sephardi Jews fleeing the ongoing Spanish Inquisition established a synagogue in Moses Athias’s house on Creechurch Lane (which became Bevis Marks) and a burial ground in a former Mile End orchard. Approximately 1000 Jews lived in outlying areas like Hampstead by the end of the 17th century, some diamond traders and bankers.
By the mid-1800s, there was a Sephardic orphanage, a girls’ school and a hospital. Ashkenazi arrivals established the first Great Synagogue in Aldgate in around 1690, which was destroyed in the Blitz, and Dutch, Czech and German Jews, including a banker called Rothschild, made London their home and place of business. Attacks on Jews went on for hundreds of years. It’s quite sobering reading.
None of this will go into my story. There isn’t the space, and although Ariella does give away her batmitzvah necklace and Yosef sees Jews out and about in 1820s London, the story isn’t about being Jewish.
My kids think it’s hilarious that I’m writing about time-travelling Jewish kids but I figure they don’t often get to have wizard ancestry, solve crimes or time travel. I’ve enjoyed journeying into London’s past so much, I wish the word count allowed me to go into more detail. I feel a longer history book brewing. And I’m pretty sure it’ll have to involve food.
