Waching daily Sep 4 2018

Hello everybody Here I am at the

Nottingham Council house on my home turf

with Catharine Arnold who is a prominent

writer and historian so it's lovely to

meet you today Catharine and obviously

thank you and obviously Catharine is

also the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Can we start by talking about your book

on the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, why

did you choose that subject? Um family

history really my own background because

my father's parents both died in the

Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and,

frustratingly, he would not speak about

it, it was obviously a formative time in

his life and it had repercussions for us

as it did for millions of others over

the years. And so I'd always been

intrigued by it, it had always been at

the back of my mind as something to

write about and then I was kind of going

through some ideas with my my agent and

we suddenly thought "hmmm

three years time 100th anniversary of

Spanish flu - yes that is something I'd

really like to write about!" Strictly

speaking it was a virus, but in those

days they didn't really know what a

virus wa, as opposed to a bacteria, but

it was global, yes it took out (we think

now) around about a hundred million people,

which is then about a third of the

population of the earth, so there wasn't

a single place that went untouched, from

the remotest parts of China and India to

Australia, New Zealand, Greenland, Russia

it was everywhere! And was that a

personal journey for you? It was more

that I could understand what his, his

family, his household, I could understand

what he had gone through in Leamington

where it happened, and I could then see

kinda like the waves rippling out, you

know, from one little boy losing his

parents in the West Midlands, to a

similar pattern echoing throughout the

country and then throughout the world. So

I was um reading, for instance, about an

American boy at school, gradually losing

his friends one by one and seeing the

nearby graveyard filling.

I could think "Oh yes - that's what

happened back in Leamington!" So

although it wasn't explicitly personal,

it was very, it would have been

impossible to write about it without it

being personal, so I'd say it's probably

the most personal of my books and it had

a considerable impact on me as a result.

Your books tend to focus on the darker

side of humanity; so what is it about

asylums and vice and the criminal

underworld that so fascinate and inspire

you to write? I think I've always been

interested in the dark side of life, I

grew up in a very spooky house and I

think early on I learnt that to stop

being frightened about something, it was

interesting to explore it, and I also

liked to to scare and be scared, I have

to admit, that there's... there's kind of

like a a frisson of telling my friends

a frightening story, or writing a ghost

story at school or something, it both

frightens us and it reassures us because

we're making it into a story, we're

making some sense of what could

otherwise be a meaningless existential

threat. And if you could choose any era

in history what is your favourite that

you're most inspired, by what era would

that be? I suppose really it would be the

Victorian era, I can remember my agent

speaking to somebody else and saying "Well

Catharine's a Victorian, really." And I

thought I'm not sure I like the sound of

that, but I think what he meant was that

I was interested in kind of an almost

steam-punk sensibility; this mixture of

fashionable, the new, the scientific and

the modern, and this consciousness of a

much older world and an older world

beyond that, of myths and legends; and

also the Victorians were great show-men

and show-women, I mean you think of

something like Dickens reading aloud to

his audiences, he'd love to act out all

the parts and to be an entertainer not

just a writer and that speaks to me as

well, kind of the performative aspect of

it, that's one way to describe the kind

of writing I do would be as a mash-up,

because while I'm attempting to pull

together lots of facts and ideas and

historical incidents and make them fresh

and new for a new generation and

for people who haven't read them before,

I'm also drawing on a whole existing

canon of writing, so for instance if I'm

writing about death in the Victorian era

then it would be impossible not to

mention Dickens and his descriptions of

graveyards, or other writers and their

descriptions of pauper funerals. I'm

very conscious that I'm not necessarily

doing something new or different, but I'm

working within a medium of stuff that

already exists, so when I say "mash-up",

perhaps sounds self-conscious, but it's a bit

like being a DJ, you're just pulling

together lots of different elements and

then putting them together in a slightly

new way which you hope people enjoy. And

is there a particular historical

character that most excites you? Quite

recently I became obsessed with the Ruth

Ellis case, as you know, she was the last

woman to be hanged and I was writing a

book about crime and capital punishment

and I spent the entire book writing

about the history of capital punishment

and how ghastly it is and how cruel and

barbaric, when I came to her case, I was

very, very intrigued by it, because from

from a legal point of view, it can be

said that she put the noose around her

neck herself, she walked right into it/

There was plenty of senior defence counsel

bending over backwards to get her off,

there wouldn't have been a great fuss

among the general public if she'd been

pardoned, or at least if her service

had been commuted to imprisonment.

There was immense public sympathy for

her and as it began to come out that

quite clearly she'd been brutally beaten

on a regular basis by her boyfriend,

there's not a surely, you would have

thought, a jury in the world that would

have convicted and yet she appeared to

want to die; it was almost as if, having

killed Blakely, she felt that she had to

die herself. It was tremendously

engrossing because it was an example of

a kind of twisted romanticism, and I was

also fascinated by the way Ruth was

portrayed in the media at the time, by

the fact that the famous crime writer,

the American crime writer Raymond

Chandler,

who really invented the concept of the

'femme fatale with a smoking gun', Raymond

Chandler pleaded for her to be spared, so yes,

I became completely obsessed by that

case and I think you do, I think it's a

bit like being a detective - you think

"Here all the facts of the case - is this

what really happened?" So you've written

about the greatest literary genius in

Shakespeare; what is it about him that so

inspires, and he's so relevant to today,

and has been through the ages? First

thing that intrigued me about

Shakespeare is he was coming of age as a

dramatist and an actor at the point

where British theatre suddenly kicked

off; so from people doing a few plays in

cloisters and on the back of carts, you

suddenly had purpose-built theatres and

suddenly a whole load of unemployed

graduates from Oxford and Cambridge hit

London trying to get into the media

scene

(nothing really changes) and they have the

the knowledge and the ability to

translate and write and put on plays and

at the same time there's a huge upswing

in the urban working-class, who wanted

entertainment, so they would pile into

these theatres, equally happy to watch

somebody from Oxford strutting around

quoting from Catullus (sorry) or,

you know, a good fight scene from a

history play; it's almost as if you could

compare the development of Elizabethan

theatre with gaming in this in our age

over the last 10 or 15 years; something

that came from absolutely out of nowhere and

suddenly became a million-dollar

industry overnight. The other side of

Shakespeare, what really fascinates me

him, what fascinates me about him as a

writer was his curiosity, his humanity,

his ability to get insight inside the

mind of almost anybody, from a jealous

guy like Iago - Desdemona - poor old

Lear, senile and mad on the heath with his

fool; to portray their their feelings and

their, their plight in language that is

understandable (okay, some people, there

are some words that you need

a modern translation for - that's fine)

but you get, you get what he's all about,

there's never any doubt that his heart

is in there; the other thing that got me

about Shakespeare was um starting to

write about him was terrifying because

it was a bit like this 'lovey' thing, you

think "Shakespeare - oh I can't do that,

it's just too much!" But anybody can write

about Shakespeare, but you have to overcome

that, but it's the sheer amount of books,

and I'd studied Shakespeare at

university, but I started off by going to

the UL at Cambridge and looking at all

the books about Shakespeare (thousands of

them!) and I felt "hHw am I going to do

this?" And then I realised that the reason

I write like I do, is it's my particular

take on things and I felt "I've read 'em

all and qualified to sort of comment."

But it's what Shakespeare means to me

and I thought about the summer I spent

reading all the Shakespeare plays,

because I felt I needed to, to get that

kind of under my belt, really to know

what he was really about. And then I'm

fascinated by the fact that we know very

little about him as a person; we've got a

few facts but where he lived and when he

died, but trying to get a grip on

Shakespeare, it's like looking through a

pair of opera glasses; they're the wrong

way around, so you can just about see

this little figure and you think he's

just coming into focus, I mean he's, he's

elusive but I think that's how a real

writer should be; that the work should

stand, not the person. And conversely to

that, you've also written about Bedlam or

Bethlem Hospital, which is the infamous

asylum; why did you choose to write about

that? Bedlam or Bethlem Hospital seemed

like a natural second after I'd written

about London and death in 'Necropolis' and

it's, again, it's something I'd always

wanted to write about because the

original Bethlem Hospital was the first

psychiatric hospital in Europe, and it

was a very ramshackle sort of small

affair to start off with, run by the

Church and then by the 17th century, it

had moved to an enormous sort of Palace

of Madness where Liverpool Street

Station now stands and could take 600

people

And I was interested by the concept of

mental illness as it had changed over

the ages and how people's response to

the Mad had changed, so in the medieval

period (and I use "mad" as a sort of

blanket turn without wishing to offend

anybody) ideas from mental illness and

mental debility were vague in those days,

so they're quite likely to lock up

people who we would now define as having

learning difficulties, they really

couldn't tell the difference, treatment

of mad people varied from cruel and the

callous, to a much more enlightened

regime under the Quakers, where they

talked about sort of "moral care" and they

believed that if people were mentally

ill, if you fed them properly and looked

after them,

perhaps gave them some opiates to calm

them down, then they probably get better

and quite often they did, and also had

the whole kind of scientific cannon to

go at there, because I got the emerging

enlightenment, interest in science and

scientific writing, so there's quite a

lot of material about different

attitudes towards mental health as an

aspect of Medicine; it's almost as if

there were different avatars of mental

illness, so 17th, 18th, 19th centuries,

you've got these huge mansions of

madness, not just Bethlem Hospital itself,

but hospitals like that up and down in

the country, throughout the world and

then as people became more enlightened

towards their, in their treatment of the

mentally ill, the hospitals shrank and

became more normal and more recognizably

'hospitals'. Obviously you're Sheriff of

Nottingham now and it seems quite

unusual that somebody who's such a

prominent historian and writer, should

take this role; what is it about the

Sheriff of Nottingham that attracted you

to it and does it influence your writing

in any way? I think it's early days yet

as to how it will affect my writing. I

was asked to do this because I've been a

Labour councillor for

eleven years and I've always tried to

run my writing alongside my duties as a

councillor. Then last year, I was asked if

I'd like to take on this enormous

responsibility; and there are various

reasons why that they asked people; that

can be seniority, it can be because

they're reliable,

it's because they're willing to give up

the time because it's very

time-consuming job, but I was fascinated

to do it because I see it as a way of

giving something back, it's... it's my last

year as a councillor and it's interesting

as a historian to see myself in a long

line of other sheriff's, stretching back

to anglo-saxon times and back to about

1446 when the first proper Sheriff

of Nottingham was inaugurated. Catharine,

it's been lovely meeting you today, thank

you so much for letting us come and talk

to you, the information has been

fascinating so thank you so much. Well

thank you, I've really enjoyed it.

And thank you for joining us we'll see

you next time.

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