THERE IS STILL TIME TO HAVE YOUR SAY ...

And to have a chance of winning one of the first copies!
Designer Kate (also my daughter) is due to come and stay with us for a nice long visit bringing our new granddaughter for her first visit to the North Country Far. She will be doing all the design work on Bride of the Spear cover in exchange for some baby sitting!
Thank you to all who have commented so far: you have shown us that we are on the right track, but criticisms and suggestions have been noted too- especially about readability of the text. Here is the cover- front and back, in its newest incarnation (I can't desist from tinkering) - with cooler colours for the text- suggested by an earlier commentator!

LOVE IS NEVER LOST, NEVER WASTED, NEVER DIES

This post is for and about Kathleen- because she is with us, and not with us.

Remembering Kathleen as she was

Kathleen Herbert: 

Teacher, Writer, Friend

A teaching career of close on 40 years

When I mentioned Kathleen Herbert at my last Old Students' Reunion in June 2012, I was amazed and delighted by the warmth that I received on behalf of my friend- that unique and astonishing person Miss Kathleen May Herbert. She had touched so many lives, and changed them for the better, according to the many people who came to me and wanted to talk about how she had had a profound influence on them. She was a charismatic and caring teacher, a warm and witty friend and a subtle and moving writer. All that has gone, but what remains is a gentle, charming but slightly bewildered lady.

Some years before I got to know Kathleen really well, she nursed her mother through terminal cancer. Several years later, she did the same for her father. At this time I had returned to my school in East London to teach English and she was my Head of Department, but her father needed her and so she gave up the job in the school she loved, and went to work in a Catholic High School near her home. She is fondly remembered by pupils and staff from that institution too.

The writer emerges

Meanwhile, in 1982, she published her first novel, The Lady of the Fountain. In 1983, her second novel, Queen of the Lightning  won the Historical Novel Prize awarded annually in memory of Georgette Heyer. Bodley Head also published  the sequel, Ghost in the Sunlight in 1986. At around the same time, The Lady of the Fountain was republished as  Bride of the Spear. All three novels are set in Cumbria, Northumbria and the Borders of Scotland, during the period of upheaval and immigration following the withdrawal of Roman troops in the fifth century. This period is often referred to as The Dark Ages. Kathleen prefers the term Heroic Age.

The three books sold well and were translated into German and French. They were published in paperback by Corgi in 1989.

Following the success of the Cumbrian Trilogy, she concentrated on her scholarly research and produced several volumes on Anglo Saxon history and legend, which are still read and respected by a small but enthusiastic audience. Melvyn Bragg acknowledged one of them, Spellcraft, as a most helpful source in his Afterword to Credo, his historical novel about St Bega, set in Cumbria in the Heroic Age. (Spellcraft is still in print, now called English Heroic Legends, and available on Amazon and from the publisher Anglo Saxon Books, as are Peace-Weavers and Shield-Maidens and Looking for the Lost Gods of England)

She retired in 1984 at age 60 and was in her prime,  while her books were selling well. She devoted herself to studying, lecturing and writing. She learnt Welsh in order to read The Mabinogion and other early British epic tales, and she also studied Hungarian. I have the impression that the main reason she did this was because Hungarian is such a notoriously difficult language, and she relished the challenge!

She spent a great deal of time tramping the hills of her beloved North Country, particularly Cumbria, researching on foot the backgrounds for her novels.

Then in April 1994 she had a massive stroke. Her tenacity, strength and humour enabled her to rebuild her life and carry on for a while, but I didn't fully realise how much damage had been done until some years later.

My friendship with Kathleen has lasted for well over forty years. Like all friendships, it has changed, as I married and had children (to whom she became a much loved and affectionate "Auntie") and she became a well respected author. There were gaps, high points and low points. During the last few years there have been low points indeed, as the stroke started to take its toll, and she became prey to depression and delusion. During those dark years, we met rarely, and she allowed no-one into her house. She was often despairing and felt she was being watched. She bemoaned her own incapability- on good days with a joke, on bad days with tears. 

We had many long phone calls (I moved to Cumbria in 1980 while she stayed in London) and she frequently referred to her "Furness novel" and asked me if I could help her "sort it out". This was a fourth novel, completed in the late eighties or early nineties, which her publisher, Bodley Head, thought was her best, but in the economic climate of the time, they declined to publish it, as it was long, and not set in the South East! She said that a well meaning friend had offered to type it and that he or she had done a disastrous job of it. It sounded as if they had not just typed it badly, but lost some of it as well!

I often reiterated my offer to work on the book for her, and try to reconstruct it if I could, but although we tried to arrange meetings, something always happened to prevent it, and it wasn't until much later that I realized just how poorly she had become. She became more and more despairing and felt she was being watched. I reassured her as best I could, but she was reluctant to meet and I felt powerless. In 2009 she wrote to me, asking me if I could get the book published, and saying that it had got messed up when she was ill. At that point, I suggested she put it all into a box and send it to me, registered post. It took another year to persuade her to meet me and hand it over.

The lost book is found

Finally, in June 2010, gathering all her strength and all her pages, she managed to bundle the manuscript into two large carrier bags- "bags for life" - a lovely irony. And she gathered enough courage and energy to meet me outside Burnt Oak station with the bags. 

I hadn't seen her for several years and I hardly recognised her. A striking and lovely woman in her prime, with pale red-gold hair and a sense of the dramatic, Kathleen loved beautiful and exotic fabrics, rich colours and textures, and was always immaculately groomed.  Now she was thin and unkempt, with slightly grubby fingernails, and a stain or two down her coat. I said hello and touched her on the shoulder and we embraced briefly, but she didn't want me to see her: "I want you all to remember me as I was," she said. 

She had a week or two of great energy and optimism, when she rode on the wave that had buoyed her up to gather her book together but it was a very brief upturn in what proved to be a rapid decline in her health and spirits. She had been neglecting the physical world of eating, drinking and sleeping until she was found wandering, far from home with a dislocated shoulder, and taken to the nearest hospital. Although she is now physically comfortable, a second stroke, and the ravages of self- neglect and age mean that her mental capacity is declining. Her once powerful mind is now dark and clouded. It almost seems that every time I see her, a few more lights have gone out, and yet occasionally someone pulls the curtains open a crack and a beam of brightness strikes the back wall and I see her and hear her as she was. Sadly, these intervals are becoming more and more infrequent.

There seems to have been serious deterioration since that school reunion in June 2012. Immediately after the meeting I was able to tell her of how many people had said she changed their lives and how much she meant to them. That certainly got through and tears ran down her cheeks. I wept too for the loss of beauty, of intelligence, the sadness of humanity- sunt lacrimae rerum.

As a family, we find Kathleen's present state very hard to cope with, but we know that she is more comfortable now than she has been for several years; she is warm, well fed and free from pain. More than this, she is free from the despair and delusion which she suffered from for so many years. When my daughter Kate visited her last Kathleen said she was happy where she is now. After a life of such great creativity, energy and intensity, perhaps we should wish no more for her, than the peace she now has.

Trifolium Books 2011

I formed Trifolium Books UK in January 2011, and published Moon in Leo on 14th February 2011. The sorting of the manuscript and its eventual publication is another story, which you can read elswehere.

Moon in Leo is set in Northern England in Furness, on the southern edge of the Lake District, but encompasses the whole of Britain and Europe. The book has received excellent reviews, and is selling steadily. It is available from Amazon and The Book Depository worldwide, as an e-book from Amazon, and from any good bookshop.

I now have all Kathleen's notes and literary papers and am gradually working through them. I will be publishing some of her essays and lecture notes, to allow a wider public to benefit from her scholarship and wisdom. Her retelling of Guinevere's story is already available as an e-book: The Once and Future Queen.

In 2013, I intend to reissue the early novels as The Northern Kingdoms Trilogy, and Mike and I are hoping to publish an entirely new novel, Ghosts of Camelot, which we found, half written, and completely planned, amongst the many notebooks and boxes of papers which we rescued when Kathleen's house was sold. Although she was delighted at the publication of Moon in Leo, and still has a copy beside her bed,  Kathleen is now beyond understanding what needs to be done to bring this fifth novel to publication. I can do nothing for her now but make sure her work reaches the public as I believe she would have wished. 

A NEW PIECE BY KATHLEEN HERBERT

This is a little morsel- but a tasty one. A single, richly complex, chocolate; a perfectly formed truffle dish; a minute crystal glass of a rare ice-wine-

We are privileged to be the custodians of all Kathleen's literary papers, and are gradually trawling through to see what there is of general interest. This retelling of Guinevere's story is a little gem. Written at the end of the last century, you could say it embodies Kathleen's ideas about feminism, and the almost completely male perspectives handed down to us in legend and history.

 The Once and Future Queen is just a foretaste of riches yet to come.

Ironic cover image

The background image for the cover is based on this lovely pre-Raphaelite painting by John Collier: Queen Guinevere's maying.  Of course, what you will find inside is an altogether tougher Guinevere than this traditional image would suggest.

A Darker Place

"Not recommended as teenage reading"

I find that the concentration on the text necessary when publishing a book makes me like a Method actor: I eat, sleep and dream the book.

I have recently been moving between two worlds- early 7th Century Deira  as brought to life by Carla Nayland  in Paths of Exile, and 17th century Furness in Kathleen Herbert's Moon in Leo. Both books are published by Trifolium Press- or at least the latter is, and the former will be available within the next week or two. I look forward to offering this new and slightly expanded edition to the public.

Now I have moved to a darker place: further north and deeper into Britain's Dark Ages. In Bride of the Spear, Kathleen Herbert's first novel, we are very close in time to the real Arthur, a Brythonic warlord who briefly unified the warring kingdoms of Britain against the invading Anglians after the Romans had left. Many of the characters have counterparts in the Arthurian stories. It is a period which still has an almost mythic hold over us: we gaze down the telescope the wrong way at these small bright figures, and they are still powerful and draw us in.

This is what Kathleen says:

I have always liked the stories of Arthur, as most English-speaking people do. You meet them young and are caught by them. You later start to ask yourself why certain stories hold you, and I agree with Jung that the stories which catch you permanently do represent certain movements of one's own psychic development. They yield powerful themes and figures, such as the quest, the last stand, the various faces of woman, the exploration of heroism. These motifs arise again and again in every great story.

It is some time since I read Kathleen's first book, and then I read her first edition, published by Bran's Head in 1982. It was originally a very long book indeed, but when Bran's Head offered to publish it she found they had a problem: He thought that my book would fit within his image, but he said frankly he couldn't afford all that amount of paper, so could I cut it? I found this technically a fascinating exercise. I have spent much of my life criticizing other people's precis. This was the precis of all time because the manuscript was enormous. I cut it down to what he could afford, and it came out as The Lady of the Fountain.

When Queen of the Lightning won the Georgette Heyer Prize, Lady of the Fountain was republished as Bride of the Spear in various editions, British and American with more or less lurid covers. This is one of the the most misleading:

This cover illustration speaks nothing of the essentially savage world of Britain after the withdrawal of Rome, Britain after the death of Arthur, a Britain in which the hero Owain  has the cattle raiders he captures castrated or tied up in the Solway to drown. No wonder A Carson disapproved of the book in 2009:

Despite the packaging, this novel is not exactly historical romance, nor is it sword and sorcery. The author provides a glimpse into a little-seen corner of British/Celtic history, and the book is well-written. However, from the beginning the tone is harsh, and after an early scene of the young heroine being drugged and deflowered with a spear, the narrative moves on to other scenes of lurid violence. NOT recommended as teenage reading.

I have to confess that I had not remembered how dark this book is- in fact much of what Kathleen had to cut to get The Lady of the Fountain published, has been put back in. This makes it an altogether weightier and more serious book, a book that enthralls and appalls, yet has enough gleams of light  to keep you reading to the satisfyingly upbeat ending.

The quotations from Kathleen are from a fascinating interview she did with Richard H Thomson in 1991. The full text can be found here.