From ‘Journal Of A Man Unknown’

Today I publish a second edited extract from Gillian Tindall’s novel Journal of a Man Unknown.

We still have a few places available on the guest list for the publication party at Hatchard’s in Piccadilly next Wednesday 19th November 6-8pm.

At 7pm Colin Thubron will speak and Alan Cox will read from the novel.

If you would like to attend please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com and let me know if you plan to bring any guests.

 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10

 

 

From Journal of a Man Unknown

 

When I was a very small boy, in the earliest time I can recall, I thought that I had myself been created out of the land around me: I mean that I thought that I had somehow been born out of that High Weald we customarily call ‘The Forest’, with its great hills of gorse and bracken and heather, its thick-wooded parts of oak and ash and beech and hazel, its meandering streams reddened by the iron washed from the clay banks, and indeed from the earth itself.

And making no distinction between the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air and my small self, I thought that they too had been created particularly out of that heavy, useful soil: the deer that still roamed most plentifully in those days, and also all the lesser beasts, the stoats and weasels, the foxes, the squirrels. And of course all the birds of the air, though I think it puzzled me somewhat that creatures of earth could fly so lightly. Perhaps they were indeed ‘of the air’ rather than being fashioned from the same clay as the animals and me? (And, come to that, grown men too have long speculated on just how birds come to fly, but that is another matter).

This may seem an odd fancy for a small boy to have. But, after all, it says in the Book, which I heard read aloud, that the Lord created all the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air in what sounded to be a busy and craftsman-like way. In just the same well-paced way I had seen my uncles and their occasional labourers build up the layers of the furnace for another bloom of iron, and also the charcoal-burners build their close-packed ovens simply from what was to hand around them.

As to rabbits (which we called conies) being clay I was not sure. They were everywhere, as now, but I was told that they had been brought in as a delicacy by the lords in olden time who hunted across the Weald and had banks of burrows specially built for them in sheltered places, and that was how the big wood near to my uncles’ furnace came to be called Broadstone Warren. And then there were, as still today, the small herds of grazing cattle, each beast of which belongs to someone and is marked accordingly, and for which the owners are allowed to cut litter for the wintering in barns. And then there were the swine – not quite so many now, since folk have taken to building sties – that rooted for acorns in the woods; they too, I was told, all belonged to someone or other though you wouldn’t think it from their air of owning the place.

I suppose it must have been Parson himself (when he began to teach me things out of his own natural inclination that way) who told me by and by that humankind were essentially different from the beasts of the field in that they had a special, different spirit breathed into them.

It was a time I now think of as full of change and meaning, the bridge between our old world and a new one. This may seem just my own idea, being that each man is absorbed in his own life so that his life-span comes to seem to him a hinge between past and future, full of special meaning. But I am sure enough now, from what I have seen and heard and experienced myself over the years, in London and then in the North Country far from here, that I am not deluded about this. I was fortunate to have been born when I was and so to live my prime of life in a world full of new possibilities, new ways of thinking and of doing.

 

CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10

 

 

Culminating a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, historian Gillian Tindall has written a novel as her final statement. In an astonishing feat of literary imagination, she projects herself back onto one of her forebears to conjure a compelling vision of 17th century England.

The protagonist is a Huguenot metal founder, an occupation that leads him from the Sussex Weald to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and beyond to the North Country. While in London, he lives above a coffee house in Brick Lane and the book conjures a vivid evocation of Spitalfields at the time of the Huguenots.

This is a hymn to those who pass through life not leaving a trace, except in the hearts of those into whose lives they have been cast.

‘Gillian Tindall’s JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN is a novel of rare distinction. Tindall’s voice is richly her own: tender but unsentimental and lit by intimate knowledge of her chosen world.’ Colin Thubron