Worcester News, Worcester Sport, Worcester Leisure - From The Worcester News

WORCESTER: Author takes a walk through the shadows of our history

From the Worcester News, first published Thursday 8th Feb 2007.

THE sights and sounds of modern Sidbury may be a far cry from the days of the 1600s, but the visitor would be greatly mistaken in thinking that this had once been a place of tranquillity, that the noise and fumes of modern traffic were disturbing the peace of centuries.

For this ancient quarter of Worcester, lying between Friar Street and Fort Royal, once ran red with the blood of slain soldiers.

And if the slaughter inside the old city walls on September 3, 1651, was appalling, then it was merely the climax to nine years of fighting that had ravaged Worcestershire, setting brother against brother and father against son.

Worcestershire has the dubious distinction of book-ending the English Civil Wars. It was here the opening shots were fired, at Powick Hams in 1642, and the decisive battle was eventually won here by Cromwell's disciplined Ironsides on that late summer's day, somewhere between the Commandery and the end of Friar Street, Worcester.

Armed with just a little knowledge, it is possible to walk side-by-side with the past - and this is exactly what author Celia Boyd has done with her latest work, a fictional memoir of Thomas Fletcher, a young surgeon from Worcester.

There have been many books devoted to this period, but First Dry Rattle is unusual in that it has been written in the style of the language of those days.

Spoken and written English during the 17th Century was much more ornamented and flowery than it is today and Ms Boyd has opted for this manner of speech to give immediacy to her prose.

Fixed within this framework, the book is free from overdone artificial expressions and language.

Now writing full time, she says: "I have been working on First Dry Rattle for some years. My interest in the English Civil Wars was fostered originally by the chance find of an absorbing book by Charles Carlton, Going To The Wars, which, drawing on contemporary records, vividly presents the world of our ancestors during this desperate era.

"There has been little fiction of note set in this time, possibly because our civil wars happened everywhere at the same time, and it can be a difficult task to present all the conflicting ideas and disputes simultaneously.

"In studying Alan Turton's The Chief Strength Of The Army, I read that the surgeon at Edgehill, for Bazil Lord Fielding's troop, was a man named Thomas Fletcher. Slowly, a somewhat pedantic but sharp-witted young man of this name took shape in my head and became the butcher's son from Worcester, who trained as a doctor there for three years before the first clash of the war happened at Powick Bridge.

"The style in which I write is derived from the prose in Shakepeare's comedies, and from the daily speech of the Black Country, where I was working when I retired.

"The legacy of the English Civil War is still with us," she adds. "As a nation we rarely discuss politics, religion or sex with acquaintances, unlike other Europeans, but save such exchanges for tried and trusted friends.

"England during the 1640s was a country beset with uncertainty, hesitation and the occasional, incredible violence of the battlefield."

Hero and narrator Thomas Fletcher is aged 19 at the outbreak of war in 1642. He is a trained physician, naïve, snobbish and rich, but blessed with a good sense of humour, intelligence and the professional questing desire to understand and cure the ills of the human body.

This is the first of his memoirs and the Civil War both exercises and frustrates his progress. But he gains spiritual and professional maturity and this process is shown to the reader rather than told, through the traumas he endures and by the terrible bloodshed that he witnesses.

"The hero begins to doubt the divine right of kings, claimed by Charles I, in that the king clearly cannot assume the role of father to his people," says Celia. "Thomas' own father is hanged in error by the Earl of Essex, the Lord General of Parliament, in the Worcester marketplace.

"Thomas begins to see that neither side can hold the moral high ground and that the loyalty that ends in violence against one's fellows is flawed."

The book's title is taken from Rudyard Kipling's description of the sound of swords being drawn at Edgehill, the site of the first major set-piece battle in neighbouring Warwickshire.

First Dry Rattle is a compulsive page-turning read and also a faithful record of practical everyday life. It contains descriptions of surgical and medical treatments, but also focuses on the problems faced by the non-partisan citizen of the 1640s. Thomas tries throughout to comprehend why and how the ideas held by the two main factions could lead to the bloodshed and tragedy of the civil wars.

Somehow, walking down Sidbury will never be the same again.

MEET THE AUTHOR

CELIA Boyd was born in Derby, and has lived variously at Madley, near Hereford, and at Malvern from 1971-75. As well as working for West Midlands probation service, she has also worked in higher education at Worcester. She currently lives at Hay-on-Wye. She has a grown-up son living in Cheltenham. Her other works include Young Ravens, a novel for children set in the Midlands during the Second World War, and First Fashionings, Social Conditioning in Georgian Children's Fiction. She has contributed to The Cambridge Guide To Children's Books and is now a full-time writer. First Dry Rattle is published by Graficas Books of Glasbury-on-Wye, Herefordshire. Call 01497 847894 or e-mail books@graficas.co.uk

Archive Home