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igenlodeI was inspired to get out my copy of "A Parcel of Patterns" by Jill Paton Walsh (nowadays better known for writing 'approved continuation' Lord Peter Wimsey novels, which as a DLS fan I've never been able to bring myself to read) after hearing a recent dramatisation on the radio of the story of the Great Plague in the village of Eyam, "A Greater Love". As I had vaguely remembered, the two accounts differ in many ways, especially their treatment of the character of Emmot Sydall and her lover from outside the beleaguered village, Roland Torre. Although I've been to Eyam myself -- I walked through it on a youth-hostelling trip in Derbyshire on my way to Chatsworth -- I don't know any of the real-life history of the plague there beyond the vaguest of common folklore: the money left in vinegar in the hopes of disinfecting it, the outdoor sermons where people could stand far apart from their neighbours in an attempt to avoid infection.
I'm guessing with hindsight that the narrator of "A Parcel of Patterns" is probably fictional, and that she may have taken on parts of the history of the real-life Emmy Sydall. But I have to say that on the whole I suspect that Paton Walsh's version of events is the more accurate: that far from having Parson Stanley station men with guns on the roads out of the village to keep people inside, the inhabitants of Eyam found that their neighbours had taken defence into their own hands without trusting their vow to remain in quarantine, and that no shots were ever let off -- the worst anybody suffered was a beating at the hands of terrified outsiders.
Paton Walsh does a much better job of enabling us to understand the religious conflict, too, by writing it from the viewpoint of a girl who is on the (to us) less comprehensible side of the strict Puritans, to whom the new parson was weak and frivolous rather than gentle and scientifically-educated in his approach to the Plague -- and allowing us to form our modern-inflected perception of him *through the eyes* of someone who interprets facts in terms of different and nowadays quite alien beliefs. It's a very clever piece of double thinking: of a sympathetic character who tells us one thing in order that the author can show us another.
The book was published in Penguin's "Puffin Plus" imprint, which puts it under the umbrella of their children's literature range; I suppose nowadays it would be classified as a 'Young Adult' novel, as the protagonist is sixteen at the start of the main story. I would guess that it was based on some pretty detailed research into the village and its customs in the seventeenth century: sheep-herding, lead-mining, well-decorating, and other geographical and social details. Like all the best historical fiction it conjures up a different world, but from the viewpoint of someone who takes it absolutely for granted... and the twist at the end explains exactly why this story is being written, and what it is that we have supposedly just read.
It certainly doesn't read as a 'children's book', any more than, say, "The Hunger Games" does. The language used has a credible seventeeth-century flavour without sounding too 'forsooth' -- "Elizabeth her dress" rather than "Elizabeth's dress", for example -- and the subject matter, from a narrator who has been familiar from childhood with birth and death as an intimate part of village life, has a clear-eyed realism without ever seeming anachronistic in its handling.
This is a true story about a community that barely survived. It's also a powerful and intelligent piece of writing that evokes beauty amid tragedy, unbelievable horror and despair.
I'm guessing with hindsight that the narrator of "A Parcel of Patterns" is probably fictional, and that she may have taken on parts of the history of the real-life Emmy Sydall. But I have to say that on the whole I suspect that Paton Walsh's version of events is the more accurate: that far from having Parson Stanley station men with guns on the roads out of the village to keep people inside, the inhabitants of Eyam found that their neighbours had taken defence into their own hands without trusting their vow to remain in quarantine, and that no shots were ever let off -- the worst anybody suffered was a beating at the hands of terrified outsiders.
Paton Walsh does a much better job of enabling us to understand the religious conflict, too, by writing it from the viewpoint of a girl who is on the (to us) less comprehensible side of the strict Puritans, to whom the new parson was weak and frivolous rather than gentle and scientifically-educated in his approach to the Plague -- and allowing us to form our modern-inflected perception of him *through the eyes* of someone who interprets facts in terms of different and nowadays quite alien beliefs. It's a very clever piece of double thinking: of a sympathetic character who tells us one thing in order that the author can show us another.
The book was published in Penguin's "Puffin Plus" imprint, which puts it under the umbrella of their children's literature range; I suppose nowadays it would be classified as a 'Young Adult' novel, as the protagonist is sixteen at the start of the main story. I would guess that it was based on some pretty detailed research into the village and its customs in the seventeenth century: sheep-herding, lead-mining, well-decorating, and other geographical and social details. Like all the best historical fiction it conjures up a different world, but from the viewpoint of someone who takes it absolutely for granted... and the twist at the end explains exactly why this story is being written, and what it is that we have supposedly just read.
It certainly doesn't read as a 'children's book', any more than, say, "The Hunger Games" does. The language used has a credible seventeeth-century flavour without sounding too 'forsooth' -- "Elizabeth her dress" rather than "Elizabeth's dress", for example -- and the subject matter, from a narrator who has been familiar from childhood with birth and death as an intimate part of village life, has a clear-eyed realism without ever seeming anachronistic in its handling.
This is a true story about a community that barely survived. It's also a powerful and intelligent piece of writing that evokes beauty amid tragedy, unbelievable horror and despair.