Home is where the library is - Lily Hyde

For years, like many people I suppose, visiting my parents has also been revisiting childhood landscapes, dreams, hopes – and books.

In one specific way, these are all the same thing. I grew up in Alan Garner country. From the field above our house you could see Shuttlingsloe, Shining Tor, Mow Cop. These were simultaneously the hills my parents dragged me to for boring walks (boring because I’d much rather have been at home reading books) and perilous places of terror and enchantment where the Morrigan rode and Roman legionaries went native far from home – all inside those same Garner books. 

These days I’d rather stomp over the hills than read even a fantastic book. But it’s a tradition that, when visiting my parents, I’ll follow a walk through those semi-mythical landscapes by curling up with the books of my childhood, which my parents have kept in a wonderful library collected over the years. Alongside Garner there’s Diana Wynne Jones, Rosemary Sutcliff, Peter Dickinson, Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Susan Cooper, Noel Streatfeild, Elizabeth Goudge, Robert Westall… It is partly a retreat into the voracious reading of childhood, when the world of the book is more real than the real world (Tom and Jan on Mow Cop in Red Shift more immediate and vital than any boring walk there with my parents), partly a salute to these authors who inspired me to start writing myself (when those walks ceased to be boring, as I dreamed up stories to fit the landscapes) and partly an investigation as a writer, always learning, always hoping, always marvelling at how the masters manage it.      

Now my parents are downsizing (isn’t everybody?). There isn’t room for everything, so I spent last week packing up the children’s library to send off to its new home with my brother, in a different county, far from the landscapes of childhood.

One box packed, ten to go...

I also sorted through a drawer of my own adolescent writings. Most of them are awful. I can read them now and identify, paragraph by paragraph, here is Rosemary Sutcliff, here is Diana Wynne Jones, here is Ursula le Guin, Sutcliff again, Peter Dickinson, again Sutcliff… 

But in among the styles and stories lifted wholesale from other authors and legends and fairytales and films, the one thing that rings at all true is the landscape. I knew from Garner that stories as deep as myth could be written about an everyday real place. I took Narnia and Dalemark and Camelot and transposed them to the field above our house, to the hills and moors you can see from there. And in the process, I think I started to find myself as a writer.

I moved away from my parents years ago, and I’ve never written about that landscape since. I don't know if I ever will; I can’t lay claim to Alderley Edge or Shuttlingsloe the way Alan Garner can; though I grew up with them, the roots go no further back. Yet the roots do run deep. I’ll miss the children’s library; in a way it was what made my parents’ house still home. But the landscape, informed as it is by that library, is even more important to me. Those fields and hills are full not only of the dreams and truths I read in The Moon of Gomrath or Red Shift, but of my own dreams of stories and hopes to be a writer.

www.lilyhyde.com

A sailor's life for me - Lily Hyde

Like Tamsyn Murray in her lovely post a couple of days ago, I wanted to live in the world of some books I read as a child. One such world was that of The Dark is Rising series, another was Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. 

I read Ransome’s sailing books over and over again. I knew my port from my starboard, my sheets from my stays, my luff from my reach… Another all-time favourite book was Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Armourer’s House, where along with the heroine Tamsyn I got excited about topgallant sails. When I wasn’t reading about them, I drew endless pictures of sloops and square riggers and schooners, I longed to live in that world and run away to sea.

And for the last three weeks, I finally have. I have let out sheets and hauled in stays, I’ve found out that you pronounce topgallant ‘t’gallant’, I’ve been out on the bowsprit hanking on the jib and getting dunked in the salt sea. It’s been just as exciting as my childhood self could have dreamed of (and not a little terrifying, when the spinnaker sail tears free and blasts off into the distance nearly taking a crew member with it). 

I’ve learned that reading books obsessively as a child and drawing pictures of sailing ships doesn’t really prepare you for the actuality of sailing. But it’s been wonderful to realise a childhood dream at long last. And quite a lot of the sailors I’ve met turn out to have been mad about those Swallows and Amazons books as children. Proof that reading really does have a scarily strong influence on who we grow up to be…?

www.lilyhyde.com         

It's not the end of the world - Lily Hyde

“Oh please recommend us some books to read!” a young avid reader and her mother fell over each other to ask me recently.

They sounded as desperate as if they had been living on a desert island in an information vacuum, instead of surrounded by the thousands of books being published and the millions of reviews and tweets and posts being published about them. Their problem was not with any shortage of books though. It was with the type of books.

“Something without the end of the world in it,” pleaded the mother. And “ANYTHING that isn’t a really, really depressing future dystopia,” begged the daughter.

I was delighted to oblige since there’s little I like better than recommending books. But their plea, especially from a bright and lovely fourteen-year-old with all her life ahead of her, made me wonder what the current vogue for YA ‘dyslit’ is doing for its intended readers. 

When I was little older than her, 1984 made an unforgettable impact on me, as did the post-apocalypse novel Riddley Walker. These books made me think about what humans do to the world and to each other. They taught me about society, politics and the environment from a perspective I could relate to. 1984 depressed the hell out of me; Riddley Walker scared and inspired me; each of them offered a convincingly bleak and strange but recognisable version of the future.

But each was only one version. I spent a good part of my teenage years convinced we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust. Yet looking back now, those years seem quite carefree. I didn’t have global warming hanging over me. I didn’t have economic meltdown and debt crisis and pandemics and increasing poverty and inequality looming from every side. Floods, refugees, disasters, gladiator games or zombie apocalypses didn’t feature in too many of the books I was reading; dystopia was not a recognised and highly fashionable YA genre.

The signs for the future are bad, if you believe the news and half the current novels and movies. I don’t envy today’s teenagers, growing up with it all. It’s a huge responsibility we have put on their shoulders and I sympathise with a girl who’s tired of reading stories about how bad things are going to get. 

That’s not to say that there are not some wonderful, important, thought-provoking examples of dyslit being published now. The best offer not only ideas how to survive, but also ways to change things.

The future, after all, is what we make it. What happened to dystopia’s maligned and unfashionable other side, utopia?

www.lilyhyde.com

Reading can save your life - Lily Hyde

My little niece poisoned herself last week. Many panicked questions (and a trip to the hospital) later, we found out she had been eating green arum (or lords-and-ladies) berries from the hedgerow. She thought they were peas. 

While everyone else started discussing forest school and the yawning distance between today’s children and their natural environment, my only question was “Why hasn’t anyone given her the Flower Fairy books?”

It seems to me now that I grew up doing nothing but read books, and usually ones that featured princesses, fairies and pretty dresses. I was hopelessly girly and bookish. But I bet I never ate arum berries by mistake, because Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairy books, as well as being as full of pretty dresses as any little girl could wish, are also botanically accurate and contain many useful footnotes on the names, properties and uses of plants.

The Lords-and-Ladies fairy (from Flower Fairies of the Autumn, By Cicely Mary Barker) 

Here is Barker on another poisonous plant, woody nightshade, which grows all around where my niece lives:

“Why should you think my berries poisoned things?

You fairies may look scared and fly away –

The children will believe me when I say

My fruit is food for kings!”

But all good fairies cry in anxious haste,

“O children, do not taste!”

 

Footnote: You must believe the good fairies…

 After Barker’s fairies Alison Uttley, Laura Ingalls Wilder, BB and T H White are other children’s authors from whom I learned about the natural world. I was a hopelessly bookish child, but I think I know more about the countryside than many people who never read books. I’m looking forward to sharing these books with my niece when she’s a bit older.

The Flower Fairy books are already in the post to her. And if she starts to believe for a while that tansy flowers are buttons for fairy jackets, I think that’s a small price to pay for her avoiding such hazards as nightshade and yew berries, and learning the good uses of blackberries, rowan, elderflowers, sloes…

Her grandmother also showed her some real peas growing in their pods after the arum berry incident. My niece’s first question was “Grandma, when will your peas be frozen?” Maybe now she’ll start thinking the fairies do the freezing.

www.lilyhyde.com 

  

  

Why art matters - Lily Hyde

They can’t put on plays in the evening in Donetsk, because of the curfew. They have had to hang a sign on the theatre entrance saying ‘Please don’t bring weapons with you’ – but not everyone obeys. The stage is not just their calling anymore; it is literally home. The actors are living in the playhouse, because their houses have been destroyed by shelling or are on the frontline. 

One recent Sunday afternoon they performed Chekhov. The sound of shelling roared from the suburbs, but inside the theatre a string quartet played Bach to the pre-performance crowd. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me down to lie in green pastures…  A frock-coated actor shepherded his flock into the darkened auditorium, leaving behind all the troubles and dread for two brief hours, two magical hours made of lighting and costume and make-believe – and words, words, Chekhov’s wry, witty, warmly humane war of words. That, to set against the real war outside.

Afterwards in the dressing rooms, where actors live now with their children in a world of mirrors and make-up, where jars of home-made gherkins jostle with tubes of facepaint, we drank to peace. And to art, to theatre and literature and music, all those hopelessly fragile, endlessly enduring things. 

         

 www.lilyhyde.com

 

Geopolitics: Lily Hyde

(Due to unforeseen circumstances, Lily was unable to post this month. So I've re-posted something she wrote in July. I've done this because I found this a very moving and resonant piece, and I'm glad to be able to give it another airing. Sue Purkiss)

This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow. 

They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either. 

I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains. 

The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it. 

There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway. 

Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string. 

This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to. 

This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries. 

That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.    

She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently. 

You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do? 

And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it. 

www.lilyhyde.com

                        

Grammar Nazis - Lily Hyde

A couple of weeks ago I was at the Lviv Publisher’s Forum, talking about the Ukrainian translation of my novel Dream Land. This annual forum in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv fills libraries, universities, coffee houses and theatres with a bewildering array of readings, discussions, concerts and lectures. Highlights for me were an all-night poetry slam, a Crimean Tatar-Ukrainian jazz fusion performance, meeting Lviv publishers Stary Lev, and a session with authors Oksana Zabuzhko from Ukraine and Katerina Tuckova from the Czech Republic held in a fabulous, faded Baroque theatre than could have been a Hammer horror film set. 

In-between, there was time to wander the cobbled streets with their glorious central-European architecture. Over the last hundred years Lviv has changed its name four times as it has belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. It’s seen its fair share of 20^th century horrors, and has a largely undeserved reputation for extreme nationalism. In fact, it feels like a city that is confident and at ease with its identity: consciously cultured; literary; tolerant; polyglot; central-European. 

This is a sign I noticed on a Lviv trolleybus window. Printed by the nationalist political party Svoboda, it is instructions in public transport etiquette: how to buy a ticket, ask the driver to stop and so on in polite, correct Ukrainian. “This may be a case when the term ‘grammar Nazi’ isn’t exactly an exaggeration,” a non-Ukrainian friend commented when he saw it. 

It made me think about the line between being proud of one’s language and heritage, and wanting to impose it on those from other heritages. Much of the publisher’s forum was about cultural exchange and translation, a celebration of how literature can bridge national divides. But this year, for the first time in 23 years, Russian publishers were not invited to attend.

The decision roused much furious debate and anxious soul-searching in literary circles. Russian and Russian-language books, publishers and bookshops have dominated the Ukrainian literary market for 23 years. A recent spate of openly anti-Ukrainian literature from mainstream Russian publishers undoubtedly influenced the forum decision. But when does pride and protectionism become chauvinism and censorship? Does wanting to protect one’s own language, and encouraging people to speak it correctly and beautifully, make someone a ‘Nazi’?

www.lilyhyde.com 

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Other people's lives - Lily Hyde

Other people’s lives are our business, as writers.

Tamsyn Murray wrote a lovely and important post a few days ago, about how vital empathy is for writers, readers, and the world. I agree with her entirely. When we stop imagining, and stop trying to understand the way other people (and cats!) think and feel and live, we start wars.

Here are some photographs I’ve come across in the last few months, from other people’s lives. A doorway to imagination, to empathy. What are the stories behind these pictures? Who and what did these people love, hate, fear, desire?

I know some of the stories. Others, I’ll never know. But if all of us can imagine, and do our best to empathise, maybe some of these stories will never be repeated.

Crimean Tatar girls in national costume, Crimea, 1930s

Ukrainian village women in national costume, central Ukraine, 1950s 

Crimean Tatars in exile. Those who managed to take a sewing machine with them when they were deported from Crimea could make a living. Uzbekistan, 1950s 

Photos retrieved by rescue workers from a residential building destroyed by shelling in Nikolaevka, East Ukraine, July 2014. Nearly two months later, no one has collected them from the grass outside

Dream Land, a novel about the Crimean Tatars

www.lilyhyde.com

  

Geopolitics - Lily Hyde

This time last year I wrote a cheerful ABBA post from high in the Carpathian mountains in west Ukraine. I’d been listening to sad and fascinating family stories that are not just stories, from the woman who is and is not Lesya, and thinking I should write them down somehow. 

They were not just stories, although they felt like it to me a year ago. This now is not exactly a story either. 

I went to the village market early, down by the bridge where the icy river rushes along its bed of pale pebbles. The bridge was still in the shade, the sun not yet clear of the pine-green, copper-green mountains. 

The woman who sells there glass jars of bilberries sat as always in her faded apron, her daughter at her side – and this morning the woman was weeping and wailing, her salty tears running down into the jars. The little girl fiddled with the apron strings with fingers berry-stained blue, and said sternly, stop crying, Mama. Stop it. 

There was no need to ask why she was crying. But in the Russian she learned at school, peppered with words from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian, the woman told me anyway. 

Yesterday she was out on the polyana, the high Carpathian mountain pasture where the village sheep flocks wander all summer. She looked up from the bilberry bushes and watched the animals feeding on the steep slopes, like a handful of white and brown beads scattering from a broken string. 

This was what her great-grandfather saw each summer, here on these same mountains, before he was taken off to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914 and never came back. This is what her grandfather saw, before he was mobilised in 1938 by the Czechoslovak army, and what, via Hungarian, German and Soviet armies, he at last came home to. 

This is what she grew up with, this woman I’ll call Lesya. Her husband grew up with it; their daughter will grow up with it, maybe, although this traditional way of life is dying out at last and anyway Lesya wants something better for their daughter: Europe, travel, civilization, not smelly sheep on high pastures and a hard struggle for existence that hasn’t changed for centuries. 

That doesn’t stop Lesya thinking it’s the most beautiful and precious thing in the world; it is her world, her country, these sheep strung out over the green mountainside, the crystal air flush with their bleating and their ringing collar bells.    

She watched the sheep, and then she turned back to picking bilberries because her husband’s pay as a mobilised soldier in the Ukrainian army isn’t much. As well as jar-fulls at the market she can sell berries by the kilo to traders, who haul them off in refrigerated lorries to far-away Kyiv, maybe even to where her husband is now in further-away east Ukraine, a world she’s never seen though it is part of her country too, apparently. 

You already know how the rest of this story goes. While Lesya was picking bilberries, her husband was killed yesterday in that far-off East Ukraine war. She came home in the evening down the familiar paths to the village, when the news was already old. Early this morning she walked to market to sell those berries she was picking at the time her husband died, because what else can she do? 

And I bought them, because what else could I do? I bought the glass jar they were in too, for much more money than it is worth. I hold it in my hands now, full of tears stained berry blue, as I listen to that stern little girl’s voice saying, stop crying, stop it. 

www.lilyhyde.com

                        

“More out of books than out of real life” - Lily Hyde

This quote, from Russian Menshevik Lydia Dan, is one of the epigraphs to my work in progress (one of them), a novel about Russian and Ukrainian revolutionaries.

Lydia Dan, a nice girl from a nice upper middle class family of Russian Jewish intellectuals, ended up touring Moscow factories agitating for workers rights among people she had barely a common language with, staying the night with prostitutes to avoid being picked up by the secret police, marrying not just one but two revolutionaries, losing her child, choosing the wrong side (Trotsky’s Mensheviks over Lenin’s Bolsheviks), and living long enough to see a revolution she dedicated her life to, turn distinctly sour and bitter.

“As people we were much more out of books than out of real life,” Dan says, in an extended interview with Leopold Haimson published in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries. She means that in her young days, she and her fellow idealists who sat up or walked the streets all night discussing the revolution to come, had seen nothing of ‘real life’. They got their world view from reading Marx and Chernyshevsky and Gorky; the first time Dan actually met a real-life prostitute all she could think about were scenes she had read in Maupassant. They were so busy theorizing about the revolution, and inhabiting its weird, underground, anti-social existence of ideas, that they did not know how to hold down a job, pay a bill, mend a coat, look after a baby…

For me, writing about such people a century later, the quote has a second meaning. Dan and her fellow revolutionaries seem to me like characters out of books: utterly recognisable in their loves and hates and idiocies and heroics, but larger than life, more vivid and interesting, coming from a complete and absorbing world that exists safely between the pages. In other words, fictional.

These last few months in Ukraine, I’ve met the contemporary reincarnation of Dan and her fellow revolutionaries. They are here in all their guises: the ones who make bombs and pick up guns, the ones who write heartfelt tracts or disseminate poisonously attractive lies, the ones who look after the poor and the dispossessed, the ones who spy and betray, the ones who are ready to die for ‘the people’ and the ones who kill, rob and torture people in the name of making a profit. 

Again and again, I keep coming across characters who are straight from 1917.

It’s all amazing, amazing material for my novel, of course. But I realise that maybe I am more like Dan than I thought. My ideas for that novel came more out of reading than from experience: I thought those revolutionaries were safely between the pages.

It is terrifying to realise that the people who are tearing a country I love to pieces, or trying desperately to hold it together, are in fact, much more out of real life than out of books. 

www.lilyhyde.com

Dream Land - A novel about the Crimean Tatars' deportation and return to Crimea

A letter to Morozko -Lily Hyde

In a shabby, tree-shaded playground on the outskirts of Simferopol, Crimea,  two three-year-old boys are playing on a see-saw.

“Ukraine!” shouts Sayid, as his side of the see-saw goes up.

“Russia!” shouts Sergey, as Sayid comes down and Sergey’s side goes up.

“Ukraine!”

“Russia!”

It’s a cute scene, and the mums in the playground are laughing. The two boys live in the same block of flats, and have known each other since they were born. For them, these names of countries are just another game, like the different-coloured flags they’ve both waved sitting on their dads’ shoulders at opposing demonstrations; like the plastic guns they point at each other.

But when Sayid shouts “Ukraine!” and “Down with Putin!” on the bus into town, his mum hushes him up hurriedly, because who knows how people will react, in this town that used to be part of Ukraine two months ago until armed men appeared everywhere and it apparently became part of Russia. She doesn’t want to expose her son to hostile attention. And whatever she thinks about current events, she doesn’t want to teach her child to hate.

But all over Ukraine and Crimea, children are listening to their parents talk about politics and conflict and this side versus that side. They are learning to shout slogans and wave flags. If this society is not very, very careful, they will learn how to hate.       

What has this got to do with children’s books? Everything. This last few months in Ukraine and Russia have shown the incredible power of words to persuade people to hate each other. The words come from the media and enter conversation in every home where children pick them up and imitate them, because that’s what children do.

But there has to be another side. Children’s authors have a incredible opportunity to use words and images to challenge stereotypes and encourage empathy and understanding in children like Sergey and Sayid. In children everywhere, because if the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems far away, Sunday’s Euro-parliament elections show that xenophobic and homophobic attitudes are gaining popularity a lot closer to home.

It’s a scary responsibility for authors, but a very positive one too.  

Here’s another cute scene: my Ukrainian friend’s daughter Sonya, five, watched a well-known Russian cartoon called Morozko recently. She loves writing, and decided to write the main characters a letter. 

She puts the letter in a envelope and asks “Where do they live?”

“In Russia.”

A long pause, while Sonya thinks. “Where the bad people live?”

My friend tries to explain that no, of course not; not all people in Russia are bad… But Sonya’s letter does not get sent.

That little story is a children’s book in itself. Maybe Sonya or Sonya’s mum will write it. In the book I hope the letter would be sent; maybe first we would see how sad Morozko and his friends are not to get their letter after all…   

Meanwhile, tired of the see-saw, Sergey and Sayid in Simferopol go off in search of a new game, hand-in-hand – for now.

www.lilyhyde.com

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Isolation - Lily Hyde

I’m not sure how to begin describing the IZOLYATSIA literature festival in Donetsk, which I participated in last week. Over three days in a former factory making isolation materials, now a fantastic arts and cultural centre, writers and philosophers from all over Ukraine met to discuss the topic ‘Language and Violence’ with residents of Donbas (the name of this region of East Ukraine).

 It felt isolated in some ways: as the Russian and Ukrainian media shouted more shrilly than ever about terrorism and fascism and civil war, as tortured bodies were found in nearby rivers and journalists were kidnapped - there we were, surrounded by abandoned industry and works of art, talking and reading and arguing.

 But the location and the subject of our discussions goes to the heart of what is happening in Ukraine. Years of abandoned industry and no jobs have driven people to desperation. And language is literally shaping their world now, as an information war drives them to take up arms over whether they speak Russian or Ukrainian, whether they live in Russia or Ukraine or an independent republic, whether their actions make them heroes or terrorists, patriots or separatists. 

It was a strange, wonderful, inspiring, occasionally surreal event. One of the more surreal moments was the reason I was there, to launch in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking heartland the Ukrainian translation of my book, Dream Land.    

A presentation of a British book translated into Ukrainian, about the Crimean Tatar campaign to regain their homeland of Crimea which has just become Russian-occupied territory; held in a city once called Yuzovka after Welshman John Hughes who founded it – now Donetsk, epicentre of an armed protest movement to declare an independent people’s republic and secede from Ukraine, while just over the border Russian troops are amassing perhaps to invade, as they have taken over Crimea…

Dream Land in Ukrainian and English - with journalist Konstantin Doroshenko and IZOLYATSIA director Paco de Blas 

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Dream Land by Lily Hyde - a novel about the Crimean Tatars' return to their homeland

Politics and Fairytales - Lily Hyde

 At the moment I’m in Crimea: occupied Ukrainian territory/annexed state/proud and permanent part of Russia (delete as your politics deem appropriate).

I’m witnessing Crimea become more and more polarised, closer to breakdown, as everything – food, money, language, family, friends, conscience – is informed by politics. Even children’s stories – perhaps stories first of all. Even fairytales.

Russian fairytales, someone told me today, are characterised by heroes who never do anything to help themselves. It’s all done for them. The stove they lie on gets up and carries them off to fame and fortune, and they win by virtue of being lazy.  

I’ve heard this before, and to a certain extent, in some tales, it’s true. As someone who’s quite lazy herself, maybe it’s one reason I’m very fond of Russian fairytales

And that’s the Russian character, this person went on to say. Always expecting something for nothing, unable to act or think for themselves, just thinking they’re entitled. Like all the Russians in Crimea who voted to become part of Russia last week, because they think they’ll get something for nothing, they think they’re entitled to higher pensions and better salaries without putting in any effort, they think they’re entitled to Crimea. Just like in 1944. Just like in 1783…

There is so much propaganda on all sides of this conflict now, no one can begin to see clearly anymore. Even fairytales are press-ganged into the service of politics. So in Crimea now we have the stupid Ukrainians of fairytales, the cunning dishonest Tatars, the lazy entitled Russians… all beginning to hate each other. 

I’m fascinated by the universality of fairytales, the way the same paradigms crop up in stories from Central America to the Middle East to Siberia. Desite the cultural differences they represent, I think they grew out of parallel imagination, from common human experience. Fairytales can cross borders and languages and bring people together.

Or they can be used to drive people further and further apart.

Dream Land by Lily Hyde - a novel about the Crimean Tatars

www.lilyhyde.com

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The comfort of storytelling - Lily Hyde

Last week, for anyone who knows or cares about Ukraine, was one where reality outstripped most scary stories or fairytales.

Any story that was being told, of a choice between the European Union and Russia; of ultra-nationalists versus a democratically elected government; of a gradual exchange of power from president to parliament; of things reverting to normal once all the homeless bums realised they couldn’t live in protest tents forever and went back to whatever gutter they’d crawled from – whatever the story was, however coherent and persuasive the narrative, it was utterly overtaken by events.

Who could make up police snipers shooting down unarmed protesters with live ammunition? Or charter flights of the wealthy and well-connected with their suitcases of cash queuing nose to tail to take off for Russia or the West? That the tanks and soldiers allegedly heading to Kiev would never arrive? That the president would sign an agreement to hold early elections and then disappear? That next day his country residence would be open to the public to wander around and gawp at his ostentatious and thoroughly kitsch display of stolen wealth?

Truth stranger and more fantastic than any fiction. I’ve been making stories out of Ukraine for several years, both as a journalist and as a fiction writer. This last week I’ve just stared in horror, astonishment, awe, sadness, cautious hope. I could never have guessed what would happen, let alone made all this up.

Barricades in central Kiev (photo by Max Bibik) 

In the face of all the confusion and upheaval, people continue to make up stories. It’s what makes us human. One Ukrainian city greeted riot police returning from Kiev as heroes; another made them walk down a ‘parade of shame’. The Russian press narrative is that the interim government is made of bandits and extremists; the West’s story is that it’s a triumph for democracy. Many protestors in Ukraine call it a sell-out. The proposed new prime minister has his own story: “this is the government of political suiciders! So welcome to hell.”


History will make its own story out of these events. We don’t know yet who will write that version. Who will evaluate it, embellish it, censor it, cross out and rewrite it, turn it into poetry, a children’s story, a romance, a tragedy – a happy ending…?

Memorial for those killed (photo by Max Bibik)

www.lilyhyde.com 

'Literature truly nourishes the hungry' - Lily Hyde

Last year wasn’t a great writing year for me. Nor a great reading year either.

I think I lost faith in literature. I started to wonder what was the point of putting all these words down on paper or a screen, sending them out into the world while the world seemed in so many ways to be falling apart. And if I couldn’t see the point of writing myself, why would I want to read other people’s words? Or, if I didn’t want to read other people, why would I bother to write myself?

I didn’t write, so I didn’t read. I didn’t read, so I didn’t write. The world continued to fall apart regardless.

For Christmas I got Burying the Typewriter, by Carmen Bugan, from someone who didn’t realise I’d pretty much given up reading.

In this memoir of Ceausescu’s Romania, Carmen Bugan's father bought two typewriters. One stayed on the living room table, and 12-year-old Carmen wrote poems on it. The other was a secret typewriter. Carmen’s parents dug it up and typed anti-Ceausescu protest leaflets on it all night. Every morning, they buried it again in the back garden.

Ion Bugan went to prison for five years because of that secret typewriter and the words he wrote on it. The rest of the family was starved, ostracised, spied on and relentlessly persecuted by the secret police. The only teacher who dared show Carmen any kindness at school was her literature teacher, Lucia, who secretly gave her salami sandwiches.

Carmen writes:

‘With time, she [Lucia] will become the reason I believe that literature truly nourishes the hungry. She will become the reason I love morphology and syntax, and she will suffer with me through my family’s nightmares and through my intense love of poetry, which often makes me confuse the worlds of reality and imagination. I will never, for the rest of my life, know or love a teacher more.’

 While I was reading these words, the British press was full of words about Romanians – words like job stealers, benefits scroungers. I wonder what Carmen Bugan, who knows what it is to starve, who has this astonishing faith in literature, thinks about those words; the power they have.

I’m back to writing again. And to reading. I felt humbled by Burying the Typewriter. And stupid too, to have doubted the relevance of literature. Literature, love of literature, belief in its importance, can be a salami sandwich when you’re starving. It can be a prison sentence. The difference between a closed door and an open one, into another country, to a better life.

www.lilyhyde.com