Putting the individual into big history

This week we had a guest speaker at Havant and District Writers' Circle.  We invited Charlie Cochrane, author of the Cambridge Fellows Mysteries, to talk to us about historical writing, doing historical research, and about writing gay fiction.

Charlie is enormously knowledgeable about every historical period, but she has a particular interest in the Edwardian period and the World War eras.  She brought along with her copies of old newspapers from several different periods.  We could read about the sinking of the Titanic, look at pictures of the VE Day celebrations in London, or delve back into the late 1800s.

I went to school in an era where learning about history consisted of learning a list of the dates and names of the kings and queens of England.  It bored me silly, and I didn't gain any appreciation of our history from those studies.  I'm interested in how ordinary people lived, and what the cultural norms were for that period.  Where did people live?  What did they eat and drink?  I'm interested in the personal stories that underlie the grand history.

Through TV programmes like Time Team, Mary Beard exploring Roman life, Dan Snow explaining the mechanics of the battle of Waterloo, history has been brought alive for me.  And it's surprising how often key events turn on one person's  rash decision, or are decided with a large dollop of luck for the victor.

Charlie got us all to choose a newspaper article and write a piece of flash fiction around it.  I chose to write about the VE Day celebrations in London, but from the point of view of a soldier's wife who hated them.  She'd learned that her husband had been killed mere days ago, and she had nothing to celebrate.  I wanted to get the contrast between her grief and suffering and the joy that was going on all around her.  This is the sort of history that draws me in, the personal account that brings history alive.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com