When
I was in school, in the 50s and 60s, subjects like history were
largely taught almost by rote. Lists of kings and wars and laws and
on and on.
When
my children were in school, in the 80s and 90s, history lessons were
a bit better, but covered a limited range of topics that didn't make a
lot of sense to me. The GCSE course covered medicine in the American
West and the Long March in China, amongst other things.
No
wonder people think history is boring and irrelevant!
My
grandson, who is 9, is reading the Horrible Histories books and
watching the TV series. There is a web site too. The facts they give are all true, but they pick out the horrible
bits, which kids love. The books are full of cartoons, and the TV
series is full of silly songs. The author of the books, Terry Deary,
says they are his revenge for boring history lessons when he was a
child.
There
are lots of things done today to make history more interesting. One
of the best is the re-enactors, groups of people who dress up and act
out daily life and battles from history. I even went to a history
chef presentation where we learned how to make medieval food, and it
tasted quite good.
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(explore gower.co.uk) |
One
day, I stood and looked up at ruins of Swansea Castle, which stand in
the city centre, and wondered what it was like when it was lived in.
My original idea was to write a time-travel fantasy where someone
went back in time in the castle. I went home and Googled it, and
became fascinated by stories from the medieval lords of Gower.
These
were real people with real problems. Some of them were clever, some
were hopeless, just like people today. I got drawn in to do more and
more research, and as I pieced together the story of William de Breos
and his son-in-law John de Mowbray, I discovered their story had not
yet been told. Using Alina, William's daughter and John's wife, I was
able to tie the story together.
I
figured if it fascinated me it may well fascinate others, and turned
it into a book, Alina, The White Lady of Oystermouth.
The White Lady is her ghost that haunts Oystermouth Castle, where the
family lived. The book has so far sold about 350 print copies, mostly
to locals and tourists, and a few copies in ebook form.
The
success of that book sent me back to my research and resulted in
Broken Reed: The Lords of Gower and King John,
which tells the story of Alina's ancestor who rose to great heights
as a confidant of King John, and then fell to utter ruin.
My aim through these books is to tell a
cracking good story in an accessible way, to make the history come
alive. I hope I've succeeded.
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