Thoughts

I’ve always had a love of history that has run along with my love of writing. I adore combining the two, and right now one of the series I am working on is set in Hollywood in the 1920s.

I’ve also had a fascination with the lost memories, the forgotten experiences of the past. Like everyone else I enjoy tales of royalty, and grand battles that changed the face of the world.

Yet, I am also intrigued by the tiny, everyday details of history too. How ordinary people lived, what they did, and those mundane things of their everyday life. I even know exactly where the fascination for the past began.

One of my earliest memories if of my Nana and the tales she liked to tell me. She’d led an interesting life; the child of a gentleman farmer, her life had been forever changed when he died, and the family’s circumstances changed.

I hung on her stories of her childhood with servants who trimmed the hedges, and ponies purchased for her entertainment. Her later life she talked less about, and that was where the wondering and speculation began.

Then there was this older lady who came into the fabric shop I worked in right out of college. She was always impeccably dressed in black satin and lace, complete with long, matching gloves, and a fabulous wide-brimmed hat. She was well into her nineties, and loved to talk to those that had a moment. I recall how she spoke of the changes in Wellington, from telegraphs and horse drawn wagons, to cars and street lighting. I imagined all the things she had seen and done in that time.

So working with history for me, is the only way to try and inhabit that time. I like to think of it as my very own TARDIS, and like the Doctor’s time machine, it is definitely bigger on the inside.

You see, once you dive into research, it can be a deep, deep pool.

I started with buying books on Old Hollywood, particularly ones with old pictures. There is something about one picture of a place that can spark the imagination so much more than any number of pages of a book. It’s hard to believe in Hollywood today, but it was a tiny, farming ares before the movie people shifted out West for the better light. Flicking through images, and decades you can see the changes like it is indeed a movie.

So once I have the big picture, I want to know how life was for people.  That’s when I start wading into the deep water, and started reading the magazines (periodicals in librarian speak) of the age. That is where all the minuate of life contained in gossip can be found.

How would life have been for a young woman heading to Hollywood in the 1920s? What would she have heard on the street when she got off the bus? What smells she had encountered? How would she have made her living before breaking into the movies? Where would she have stayed so far from her family?

People these days tend to think of the time before their own life as conservative with everyone in their neat little boxes—but humans then are like humans now. There is a huge range of people who don’t accept what society tells them.

So plenty of adventurous women broke the bonds of what people expected, and headed to Hollywood. I can’t tell the tales of the real people—those memories are lost forever like the people that had them—but can capture some small echo of them, and maybe make people aware of something outside their own timeline.

I’ll leave you with this particularly interesting story, just to point out the more things change the more they stay the same

…In 1935 Barbara Leonard was a bit part actress trying to make a living in Hollywood and get someone to notice her. All changed when her husband found her semi-conscious in the bathtub with the words ‘Last Warning’ written in reverse on her back.

Barbara had previously told the police about two men who had pounced on her, gagged her, and stolen $500 from her. That time, she and her husband got guns and headlines like ‘Gun Warns Gangsters’. Her face was in the papers, she had attention.

The ‘Last Warning’ incident was when the men came back. She said they told her to stop talking. Police never found any motive, since Barbara wasn’t rich, and nor could they figure out why these thugs would write backwards.

Yep, you guessed it. Experts are now pretty sure Barbara wrote the words on her own back, probably with a ruler and an eyeliner pencil. Still it made an interesting photograph. In the end though, it didn’t really give her career the boost she wanted…but it was a good try…

Amazing what people will do—even ordinary people—and that’s a goldmine for writers.