We get a whole cohort of historical fiction writers here on Alderney but that’s usually during our world-famous Literary Festival. So it was a delight to have one to myself off-season, so to speak, to show off the island’s rich historical heritage.
Jacquie Rogers, author of the Quintus Valerius Mysteries, popped over for a few days’ exploring with her husband Peter, insisting that the first port of call should be the 4th Century Roman Fort just down the road from where I live.
Here’s Jacquie and myself on the beach with the fort in the background. Part of this collapsed onto the beach – no one knows when but it was a heck of a long time ago – and has lain intact (kind of) ever since as testament to the strength of Roman mortar. Obviously way better than the iffy RAAC concrete that has closed many UK schools.
Discussions were as deep and meaningful as the wine at The Georgian House, so I snatched the opportunity to ask Jacquie about books that had influenced her writing career. She knew where I was going with this and yes, I wanted her to be the latest in my series, The Book That Changed My Life.
She can talk, can this one, so I begged her to write it down and Hey Presto, here’s the result:
The Book that Changed my Life, by Jacquie Rogers
This is the moment I own up and thank my mother.
Yes, my mother — bless her! As well as nagging the ten-year-old me to make my bed rather than sitting on it reading till school-time, and insisting that I clean up after my dog in the garden, she also introduced me to the works of Rosemary Sutcliff. On my tenth birthday I unwrapped my first Rosemary Sutcliff, The Eagle of the Ninth.
At that time I was living in rural north Queensland, about as far from Roman Britain in terms of distance, time and climate as is possible. Nevertheless I was instantly captivated, finding myself sitting next to Marcus in the amphitheatre of the small Romano-British town of Calleva when he first meets Esca, the failed gladiator who becomes his sworn friend.
There is something magical about the story of the lost Eagle, indeed the account of the whole disappeared Ninth Hispana legion. What should be merely an anecdote in Roman military history, a side note in the Imperial archives, has slid and slipped sideways to insert itself into the mythology of Britain. The magnificent golden eagle rears its aquiline beak proudly in our national consciousness, alongside King Arthur, Tristan and Yseult, Alfred’s cakes and Robin Hood. All thanks to Rosemary Sutcliff.
The daughter of a naval officer, Sutcliff was born in 1920. At a very young age she was struck down by the wasting Stills’ disease, and spent most of her life in a wheelchair. Her education was interrupted and curtailed, and she never married, nor had children. None of the site visits and intensive field-walking her modern contemporaries regard as essential was available to her; no easy access to museums, archaeology reports, or the internet made her writing life easy. During her lifetime she was regarded as a children’s writer, though she said of her own work that she wrote for “children of all ages”. And yet it is this woman, with a life so limited, whose imagination has given English literature its most magnificent entree to the Britain of old, the country as she was under Rome.
The unique hybrid country of Roman Britain was further explored by Sutcliff, most fruitfully in the linked books following Eagle. They were The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers: a trilogy loosely joined by the device of an emerald ring passed down through Marcus’s family, who all live in the South Downs farmhouse built by Marcus, through all the generations of Roman Britain. In each of these books, Sutcliff explores themes of love, friendship, loyalty, family, honour, agency — chunky themes that one would imagine might burst the boundaries of children’s books. A later book, The Mark of the Horselord, (shamefully overlooked until recognised by the aptly-named Phoenix Award as the best children’s book not to win an award when originally published), presents the ultimate expression of honour, loyalty and self-identity in Phaedrus, the ex-gladiator.
Sutcliff’s world-building is so intensely immersive that I was quite taken aback when I moved to the UK, and first visited the remains of Calleva at Silchester to find so little remaining of Uncle Aquila’s hometown. The final of the three books - The Lantern Bearers - connects Sutcliff’s Roman world with the dawn of the Arthurian age. Many have written of Arthur, and indeed Sutcliff herself developed that theme with her adult book, Sword at Sunset. But for me, the most satisfying version is this one, in which the Roman qualities her heroes live and die by are picked up and amplified by the dux bellorum, Artos, our once and future king.
For a long time I was satisfied with Sutcliff’s version of Ninth Legion events: that the Eagle had been found in Caledonia, made its way south, and ended its days in Silchester. It was too iconic, too polished, too satisfying a story to need further embellishment. And anyway, I hadn’t the nerve to tackle the subject of the missing Ninth, even in fiction. But once modern archaeology revealed the Silchester bird not to be a legionary eagle after all, all bets were off.
Now my mother comes back into the tale; she also gave me my copy of The Mark of the Horse Lord. Suddenly I was swept away from Roman Britain, and dumped on the other side of the famous Wall separating the civilised from the barbaric. Again, Sutcliff’s genius built a whole new world. For the first time I wondered what it would have been like to see that wall from the north, to live within range of wholly different people who were once neighbours, to fight to retain one’s own culture against the Roman behemoth. At the end of the book, when Phaedrus (fully immersed in the role of Midir, rightful king of Dal Riada) sacrifices himself, I wept buckets.
I’d always intended to set a book of my Quintus Valerius series in Scotland. I, too, was keen to explore big themes: hybrid identity, genocide, trafficking, corruption, and yes, loyalty to long-gone figures such as the missing eagle. As I researched the book, I gradually built up the nerve to arrive at my own conclusion as to the whereabouts of the errant bird. At the same time I accepted the continuing influence of my childhood worship of Sutcliff and her books.
And why not? If The Loyal Centurion strikes a chord with a few of the millions who adore Rosemary Sutcliff, then I’m in very good company.
Thanks, Alistair, for your learned hospitality, and for sharing your special island of Alderney with us. A great privilege!