All Fall Down (23 page)

Living is harder than dying. I think of Joan's baby, Sarah. I don't want to live in a house with a baby and not love it, but I can't love Sarah without remembering Edward, and I'm not sure that I'm brave enough to remember all the people I have to remember, and carry all the grief I have to bear.

“Maybe I'll come with you to the other abbey,” I say, to the blades of grass. “Maybe I'll be a nun instead. Nuns don't have to think, do they?”

“All the time,” says the monk. “All the time.” He stops in the hole and rubs at his forehead with his muddy hand. “Come,” he says. “You don't look like a coward to me.”

I hunch up my shoulders and crouch forward until my face is nearly touching the wet grass. I'm Isabel. I'm not a coward. But just for now I'm going to lie here and let my fingers soak up the droplets of water clinging to the underside of the grass and remember what it felt like to feel completely at home, and completely safe.

“What am I going to do?” I say to the grass and the little black ant which is climbing up a dandelion. It's an ant-mountain, that dandelion, but he's going to climb it anyway. I know what the answer is, and I'm not surprised when the monk gives it.

“You're going to live,” he says. “What else are you going to do?”

 

 

Richard is proud of his new land, and he wants to show it off. He holds Joan's hand as she clambers over the earth, baby Sarah in a length of cloth strung over her shoulder. Sarah is beginning to take an interest in the world. She holds her head up and her blue eyes watch everything. Her hair is beginning to grow: fine, coppery-red strands, like Ned's.

“I thought we'd have rye all along here,” Richard is saying. “And I want to try beans too – Father never had much luck with beans, but I think here—” Joan's face is cocked up to his, like Sarah's. She isn't at all interested in rye, but in the way his mouth twists as he speaks, the miracle of him being here, and happy, and alive.

The earth is hard with the winter cold. The sky above us is heavy and grey. Frost glitters on the weeds and the briar. It's going to take a lot of work to plant all this earth, and tend it, without the hired labour we could rely on in Ingleforn, but it's good work, purposeful work. Making something out of nothing – the best sort of work that there is. If I half-close my eyes, I can see what this field might look like, full of rye and beans and oats, and whatever else Richard thinks we should try.

“We could really make something here,” Richard is saying to Joan, his eyes bright and proud. And he's right. We really could.

 

He to whom God has given knowledge, and the gift of speaking eloquently, must not keep silent nor conceal the gift, but he must willingly display it.

The woman who wrote those words was an abbess and a poet, and the poems that she wrote are still read and sung a hundred years after she died. Emma the baker's wife is as good a baker as John ever was. She was still baking bread when we came back to Ingleforn, she and her daughter. She baked us three flat loaves with the end of last year's rye.

We didn't stay long in Ingleforn. At Lady Christina's, Richard heard, they were paying three or four pennies to anyone who would help with the ploughing and the sowing for the year ahead. We were just labourers, paid hands, but no one asked too many questions about where we'd come from, and we were paid as free men and women. Sir Edmund's heir is a boy from Duresme with no more idea of who his villeins are than I have of how to build a cathedral. Gilbert Reeve is dead, and no one has the heart to come chasing after us.

“So are we free then?” I ask Richard. He shrugs.

“As close as makes no difference. No one's ever going to make us work for them again, and that's all that matters.”

It's a fine thing to be free. At first, everything is so strange and grey and topsy-turvy that I can't make sense of what it is we have. But when winter comes, I look around and see that here we are, in our own little house, with our own land, and Joan's little girl crying by the hearth. And every day, Richard and Ned and I are out in the fields, learning the lie of the land and the depth of the soil and the places where good crops will grow almost without tending and those where poor crops struggle up even with all the care we can give them. Richard was right to move us. This is good land. It will reward all the work we can give it.

Soon spring will be here again. A new harvest. A new year.

“The world is getting bigger, Isabel!” Richard says. “Look at all these people, coming here, living as free men. Look at the land we have!” He chucks baby Sarah under the chin. “What sort of world are you going to live in, eh?”

Richard is already a richer man than Father ever was. He's talking about using Thomas's money to buy some of the animals that no one has a use for, to make some gold for us until I'm old enough to run a farm for myself. Sheep need fewer hands to rear than barley does.

Joan grumbles. “If you wanted to be a shepherd, why did you buy all this plough land?” But Ned likes the idea of tending sheep instead of working on the land.

It's a strange thing, surviving, living when so many of the people you love are dead. Not everyone here can stand it. There was a woman who hanged herself over the winter, and a man who went mad and started talking to the leaves on the trees, calling them by the names of his children. Mostly what I feel isn't so much sadness as a great tenderness, as though the smallest knock would bruise me, as though a careless word would destroy me.

But my monk in the monastery was right. When you have to work, you work. When you have to live, you live.

Once I thought that the whole world was going to drown, that no one would survive. But now the flood waters have passed and here we are, like Noah and Mrs Noah in the mystery play, standing on the top of a mountain, looking out at a new world and the land that is ours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Black Death was the single biggest catastrophe in historical memory. The exact number of casualties is unknown, but was probably somewhere between a third and a half of Europe. Certainly, the population of Europe halved between the beginning and the end of the fourteenth century. The Black Death was not responsible for all this destruction – the Great Famine of 1315-1316, the Hundred Years' War and the abysmal state of medieval medicine were all factors, but the Black Death was by far the largest. To put those figures into context, the First World War – the worst disaster Britain has suffered in living memory – killed around 1.55% of the British population. The most recent estimates put the victims of the Black Death at around 45%. The American government used records from the Black Death as a reference point when planning its response to a nuclear winter.

The Black Death – referred to at the time as the pestilence,
le morte bleu
or the Great Mortality – is believed to be a combination of three diseases: bubonic plague, pneumatic plague and septicaemic plague. Bubonic plague is the disease one imagines on hearing the word
plague
– black buboes in the groin and armpit, red markings, fever. Pneumatic plague is what happens when bubonic plague combines with pneumonia and the patient starts spitting blood – this form of plague is highly contagious. Septicaemic plague is perhaps the most frightening of the three – the patient appears perfectly healthy one minute, and is dead the next. In
All Fall Down
, Edward dies of bubonic plague, Simon of pneumatic and Robin of septicaemic.

Robin was right to wonder whether the pestilence had truly vanished. It would return to Britain in many incarnations over the next three hundred years, finally burning itself out in the Great Plague of London in 1666. Bubonic plague still exists today, although in a much less virulent form. Isabel would experience a second outbreak thirteen years after the events of
All Fall Down
, in which around 15% of the British population were killed, and again eight years later, in which around 10% died. Cruelly, the second incarnation mainly attacked children who had been born after the Black Death, and therefore did not have whatever genetic protection had enabled their parents to survive. It was known as the Children's Plague.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by apocalypse novels. I was born at the end of the Cold War, and – morbid child that I was – loved to read imaginings of nuclear holocaust, as well as depictions of plague, war and attacks by walking plants. I wanted to write about the Black Death because this was a very real apocalypse event. People living through it genuinely expected the world to end. And yet, in real life, this apocalypse behaved very differently to those in John Wyndham novels. Lack of food was not a problem for medieval peasants – in fact, many peasants had enough to eat for the first time in their lives. And society – although it was stretched to the very limits of endurance – survived. The dead were eventually buried. Orphans were eventually taken care of. The parish registers of 1348 and 1349 are full of neat lists of the dead. Wills and manor courts list the orderly succession of ownership as property passed from heir to heir – sometimes changing hands repeatedly in a matter of weeks.

Like the years after the First World War, the years after the Black Death were ones of great social change. Women like Emma Baker were allowed to take traditionally male professions for the first time, and many women thrived. Feudalism – the system under which Isabel's family were required to work for nothing on Sir Edmund's land – was severely weakened, as was the power of the church. Like Thomas, many medieval people were disinclined to blindly worship a God who had destroyed their entire family. Families like Isabel's went from a world where land was expensive and labour cheap to one where land was in abundant supply and labour hard to come by. Many – like Richard – grew very wealthy in the years that followed.

Today, we are so used to wealth and security that we forget the possibility of catastrophic suffering. Like the medieval English, we view disasters such as nuclear war or global warming as things which happen to foreigners, never to us. I wanted to write a book which showed that catastrophes have happened here, and could happen again. And I wanted to show that human beings have an astonishing ability to stand in the ruins of their world and to build it up again from the ashes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AGUE: Malaria. Common in marshy areas of medieval Britain.

ASSIZES: Courts administered by judges travelling through medieval England, trying all the criminals they encounter.

ASTROLABE: An instrument, consisting of a disc and a pointer, used to make astronomical measurements.

BUNTING: An affectionate name for a child, as in
Bye, baby bunting
.

CAMPBALL: An early version of football.

CORDWAINER: A shoemaker.

COTE: More properly called a cote-hardie, this is a close-fitting jacket with sleeves.

CROFT: The land surrounding a house. Like a garden, but used for agricultural purposes. Isabel's family grow herbs on their croft, and keep chickens. Her father also stores his ox-cart here.

DURESME: Durham.

FRANKLIN: A landowner of free but not noble birth.

FLUX: Diarrhoea, or any disease causing excessive flowing of blood.

HEARTH: A place for a fire, usually in the centre of a room and without a chimney. Isabel's family's hearth is a wrought-iron grate with a detachable hood. Thomas's hearth is a square of stone flags.

HERBS: A generic term for all vegetables. Medieval people believe that green vegetables are bad for you, and should be boiled thoroughly before eating.

HERIOT: A tax – usually a villein's best beast or most valuable possession – paid to the lord of the manor on his or her death.

HOOD: Medieval hoods are detachable. They cover the head and shoulders, and are often brightly coloured.

HOSE: Leggings worn by men instead of trousers and by women instead of stockings.

HUE AND CRY: The means by which the general alarm is raised to prevent a criminal escaping. Anyone hearing the hue and cry is required to stop whatever they are doing and assist in catching the fleeing criminal.

INFIRMARER: A monk in charge of the abbey's infirmary, or hospital.

JONGLEUR: A wandering entertainer, such as a minstrel or a juggler.

MANOR COURT: A court held several times a year to oversee the running of the manor. It deals with local crimes such as allowing animals to stray on to farmland or failing to turn up to work, and also records the transference of land. Fines and taxes are paid at the manor court.

MANTLE: A cloak.

MIASMA: A cloud of bad, pestilential air. Medieval people believe that diseases are carried in bad-smelling air, probably because some diseases – like the plague – cause the patient to smell, and because bad-smelling places such as cesspools are often unhealthy.

MUMMERS: A troupe of actors.

MURRAIN: A disease of cattle and sheep.

MYSTERY PLAY: Plays performed by the guilds, or mysteries, of a town at special occasions. Usually retellings of Biblical stories.

PALFREY: A horse, for riding.

PASTER NOSTER: Latin for Our Father, the Lord's Prayer.

POTTAGE: The staple food of the English peasantry. Most pottages contain oats, salt, meat stock and herbs, but – depending on what is in season – may also include peas, leeks, bacon, beans, cabbage, onions, garlic and other garden produce. Sweet pottages are also made from fruits such as cherries or blackcurrants.

QUINSY: A throat infection, still existing today.

REEVE: A lord's overseer on a manor. Usually one of the peasantry, a reeve has many responsibilities, including collecting rents, organizing the workers on the lord's fields and making sure that the villeins turn up for work.

SCRIPTORIUM: A room for writing.

SEXTON: A caretaker for a church and churchyard, often also a gravedigger and bell-ringer.

SOLAR: A room in a roof, an attic.

SPINDLE: A wooden spike, used for spinning wool. Spinning is woman's work in medieval England, as it can be done while minding a child, watching a pot or tending a fire.

Isabel uses a spindle and a distaff, a staff around which the unspun wool is wrapped while she spins.

STYCHE: A medieval disease, possibly a form of pneumonia.

TONSURE: Monks and priests in medieval England shave the top of their heads – or sometimes their entire head. This is called a tonsure.

TITHING BARN: Medieval law requires that one-tenth of a family's earnings are paid to the church in tithes. Since cash plays little part in a village economy, peasants literally hand over one-tenth of their eggs, corn, meat and other produce. These tithes are stored in a tithing barn.

TRISTAN AND ISEULT: A legend telling of the tragic love between Cornish knight Tristan and Irish princess Iseult. In some versions, Tristan is one of King Arthur's knights.

VIRGATE: Because all ploughs are pulled by great teams of oxen, all medieval fields are large – around seven to twelve hundred acres each. The fields are divided into strips, which are farmed by individual families. A virgate is around twenty to thirty acres of land, and for every virgate he owns a villager is required to contribute two oxen to the communal plough.

WATTLE: A wall or fence made from upright rods with twigs or sticks interlaced between them. Medieval fences are often made of wattle, and the walls of the houses in Isabel's village are wattle-and-daub – wattle daubed over with mud and left to dry. This means that peasant houses are very easy to build and to extend as families grow.