ME ON MONDAY

Just Me.
(2010 - before I started wearing hats.)

I thought I might start a few posts on a Monday about things in general - just me musing about many things that are, hopefully, of interest to you. Most of the time I'll NOT be talking about my books, (although there might be the occasional mention, where appropriate.)

Yesterday morning, it being wet and horrible beyond my bedroom windows, I lay abed, reluctant to get up, thinking about things.

Why? I wondered, am I not too keen on the Victorian era? Why do I have only a passing interest in the English Civil Wars?

Richard III? Nope, not especially 'into' him, though I do enjoy a good novel about him. (I can heartily recommend Elizabeth St John's The Godmother's Secret,)

Alternatively, I'm fascinated by pre- and post-Roman Britain, the eleventh century (1066 and all that) and the early 1700s - the age of sail more than the pirates of the period. (Although the one does tend to go with the other.)

And as for the Tudors! (Shudder) Can't stand any of them, apart from a mild interest in Elizabeth I.

So why these almost polarised feelings of interest/disinterest? Personally, I think it has something to do with the DNA of Memory. 

We all have DNA, right? I read somewhere that the 'instructions' for breathing re DNA has been virtually unchanged for several hundred-thousand years. The way we breath now is exactly how our distant ancestors would have breathed. (Disregarding their possible poor health and us messing ourselves up by smoking etc.)

Hair, eyes, skin colour/tone is passed on via DNA, so why not memory? Except maybe, we've lost the skill needed to access it. (As many of us have lost the in-built skill of direction - how to get from A to B by instinct as birds and animals do. Apparently we do have the inbuilt instructions, but we no longer use them.)

My theory is, our mother's mothers' mothers were alive when Victoria was Queen, when Columbus 'discovered' America, (OK, moot point, he probably didn't, he already knew it was there, but no European had actually sailed to it before.) When Charles I was being executed... when Richard was being buried in what was to become a car park, when Caesar 'Came, Saw and Conquered'...  

This is fact - if our Mum's Mums hadn't been alive in these periods we wouldn't be here now, would we? 

So, in other words, we were alive, in a way, in the past. Were certain eras more meaningful than others, perhaps? Do we, who enjoy history, have particular 'feeling' for certain centuries or events because of lingering DNA memory - either good or bad?

I think we do.

An ancestor of mine MUST have had some connection with the year 1066 and the Battle of Hastings. I say 'must' and mean 'must' - for me to be here now, there was an ancestor of mine alive then. A woman who would have, in some way, large or small, had a connection with the tumultuous events of that year. Did she, perhaps, live near the battlefield, was her father/husband/son involved in the fighting, killed? Was she a woman of decent birth, or just a peasant lady, surviving from day to day? 

Of course, none of this I will ever know BUT I do know that my mother's mother's mother (fill in a few more 'mothers' here) was there, somewhere in England, in the year 1066.

And I feel certain that the goings-on of that year were, in some way, very, very important to her ... and to her daughter because otherwise, why am I so passionate about supporting King Harold Godwinson... and why do I so hate Duke William?

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Answers on a postcard, as they say on the radio - or feel free to leave a comment below, or email me on author@helenhollick.net  I'd love to know your thoghts!

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