Books & Digital Picks
And The Beat Of Other Hearts
This month’s family history inspiration
GILLIAN TINDALL
Chatto & Windus, 288 pages, £16.99
This touching semi-memoir, which has already been serialised on Radio 4, surveys the fragile connections so easily lost and found in small histories. The book opens with the author leading us down a railway path remembering fragments of her childhood with the ashes of her dead brother in hand. However, it is not simply a family biography but an exploration of history in objects that have somehow survived the ravages of time. The pulse glass of the title is a piece of medical paraphernalia, a 30-second sandglass designed to help doctors measure a patient’s pulse. Tindall inherited it from her great great grandfather Arthur Jacob, an ophthalmologist.
Books, letters and statues figure prominently in the finding of these histories. In this case, Tindall’s grandparents were hoarders, which meant boxes of letters between them were passed down to her. Rescued and preserved in various states of decay, it is these things that tell us the stories of the past and on which Tindall reflects so eloquently.
While contemplating her own family connections, she explores items of other families who have become household names simply because of letters or items that have survived – the Pastons of 15th- century Norfolk, the Verneys of Claydon, the Stanley family of Cheshire, all living through tumultuous times of wars, uprisings and Catholic plots.
Tindall also delves into church edifices, statues and relics broken and restored, and explores how people reconstructed their towns and bridges after wars in order to reclaim their histories. As one historian poignantly remarked after the end of the First World War: “The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments.” It is these shattered pieces that Tindall pulls together.
Julie Peakman is a historian. Her latest book is Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires (Reaktion, 2019)