Guest post by ajlr
Footsteps
Somewhere around the age of ten, I started reading the books of Rosemary Sutcliff. Well – ‘reading’ is one way of putting it. In fact the process was closer to absorption into each story and felt overwhelming. At that age I had no idea that she was an award-winning writer. To me, her writing was (and is) just wonderful; well-researched, atmospheric, and with a power to engage one in the times and places in which she set her stories, and to care about her characters. This, below, is a description of the (real) lighthouse that was a part of the Roman fort at Rutupiae (now Richborough), in Kent, where one of her characters lands on his posting to Britain and the legion with which he will serve as a surgeon:
“The thing was no match for the Pharos at Alexandria, but seen at close quarters it was vast enough to stop one’s breath, all the same. In the centre of the open space rose a plinth of solid masonry four or five times the height of a man, and long as an eighty-oar galley, from the midst of which a tower of the same grey stonework soared heavenward, bearing on its high crest the iron beacon brazier that seemed to Justin, staring giddily up at it, almost to touch the drifting November skies. The gulls rose and fell about it on white wings, and he heard their thin, remote crying above the busy sounds of the fortress;”
(from THE SILVER BRANCH, first published in 1957)
Richborough, with its Roman fort, is about 20 miles from where I live and I have walked around the fortress site both on grey November days and on hot, blue, summer mornings. I have always found it very atmospheric, with the knowledge that I’m walking over the ground where the Romans and their successors lived and worked, as well as that ground being somewhere Justin, the surgeon, took his first steps on British soil. Not to mention, of course, that Rosemary Sutcliff herself is likely to have mused over that same piece of land as she lived near there for a while. Those same towering flint, brick and tile walls that I’ve looked at, and from which I’ve felt the warmth of the reflected sun, are the same ones that the Romans, their successors, and Sutcliff have also used for shelter and shade.
Three of the (more than 40) books written by Sutcliff are often referred to as her ‘Eagle of the Ninth’ trilogy, although they are all works that can and do stand alone. THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH, THE SILVER BRANCH, and THE LANTERN BEARERS are linked through characters in a family line of Romans and Romano-British who pass down through that line a dolphin-engraved emerald signet ring. Possession of the ring comes to the central character in each story. Some three or four other of the books set in later times also involve this same family line to some degree and their places in the changing world of Britain, first as a Roman province and then with the incoming of the tribes across the North Sea after the legions left. To me, encountering the books for the first time in my early teens and at a time when my love of history was unfurling, they were almost unbearably engaging. I won’t describe the stories in detail – I’m sure that many people here will already have read them and I wouldn’t spoil it for those who have yet to discover them – but I found their sense of place to be such that after immersion in almost any one of the books I could (and still do) find that my returning perception of the world I live in comes almost with a jolt.
The passage below comes from the THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH (first published in 1954), towards the end of the book, when two friends – an invalided-out Roman centurion and his friend, a freed-man of the Brigantes tribe, have succeeded in recovering the lost Ninth Legion’s Eagle standard from Pictish territory at risk of their lives and brought it back, hidden in a woollen cloak, to their home under the South Downs and the Roman authorities there:
“’So the rumour was a true one,’ the Legate said.
Marcus nodded and began to undo the shapeless mass. He turned back the last fold, and there, amid the tumble of tattered violet cloth, the lost Eagle stood, squat and undignified, but oddly powerful, on its splayed legs. The empty wing sockets were very black in the lamplight which kindled its gilded feathers to the strong yellow of gorse flowers. There was a furious pride about the upreared head. Wingless it might be, fallen from its old estate, but it was an Eagle still; and out of its twelve-year captivity, it had returned to its own people.”
That still gives me a shiver down the spine, many years after first reading it. Such strong, descriptive writing, with its evocation of a society and values, creates for me a powerful link to the people who lived here in that time. I have no way of knowing if their feelings and loyalties were anything like those portrayed in Sutcliff’s writing, but it seems not impossible that they should be.
This next passage is from THE LANTERN BEARERS (first published in 1959), where the central character, Aquila, a junior officer in the legions with charge of a troop of auxiliary cavalry, is home on leave at the family farm on the high and chalky South Downs:
“Because he was seeing his home again for the first time in almost a year, he was piercingly aware of it, and the things it stood for, and aware also how easily it might be lost. Old Tiberias’ farm, not many miles farther seaward, had been burned by the Saxon raiders last year. When you thought about it, you realised that you were living in a world that might fall to pieces at any moment; but Aquila seldom thought about it much. He had lived in that world all his life, and so had at least three generations of his kind before him, and it hadn’t fallen to pieces yet, and it didn’t seem likely that it would do so on this rich and ripening day with the powdery whiteness of July lying over the countryside.”
Aquila lives at the time of the last legions’ withdrawal from British shores in the 5th century, when they were pulled back to defend Rome itself against the tribes threatening it. At the last possible moment, he finds that his loyalties lie with his country of Britain (and his family) and deserts from the legion and his chosen way of life despite his upbringing as the son of a military family. Shortly after this passage, which for me has something of the feeling of a tall and powerful wave, about to crash down in turmoil on the shore, everything changes and he has to find a way to exist with any meaning in a world where nearly all that he values has been destroyed.
Many of Sutcliff’s books deal with a similar theme – enormous change and the ways in which people either fight, adapt to, or try and ignore what is happening around them. They appeal to all ages, so far as I know, despite their ostensible target of the children’s book market, and the inspired pairing of her writing with her very talented illustrator, Charles Keeping, is one which has provided me with countless hours of enjoyable reading over very many years. I commend them to you.
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