:00:00. > :00:08.A great house with a great wall around it.
:00:09. > :00:11.We are in mid-17th century England at a time of religious strife
:00:12. > :00:19.when many lives are touched by danger and intrigue.
:00:20. > :00:22.Then we are in the same house three centuries later in the grip
:00:23. > :00:24.of the Cold War and living through the whole story
:00:25. > :00:26.of the Berlin Wall from start to finish.
:00:27. > :00:29.And Witchwood, the house, a stage where some of the dramas
:00:30. > :00:33.Peculiar Ground is a fiercely ambitious novel by Lucy
:00:34. > :00:35.Hughes-Hallett, stretching across centuries and telling
:00:36. > :00:37.the tale of tolerance and strife, imprisonment and the instinct
:00:38. > :01:02.The house, Witchwood, is in a way the central
:01:03. > :01:08.Did you have the idea of a place, an enclosed place,
:01:09. > :01:18.And, as you say, the house is, it's not perhaps the central character,
:01:19. > :01:21.but it's the character that holds all of the story together
:01:22. > :01:27.because although the Berlin Wall does play quite a large part in this
:01:28. > :01:30.novel, but very few of my characters are allowed to go to Berlin
:01:31. > :01:33.and I found as I was writing sometimes they needed to go off
:01:34. > :01:37.to London and to Germany and I had to keep bringing them back
:01:38. > :01:42.It had a technical purpose that was very useful.
:01:43. > :01:45.But it has also got a sort of moral purpose in a way
:01:46. > :01:48.because it is enclosed at the very beginning of the story.
:01:49. > :01:51.Mr Norris is laying out the landscape and the wall is being
:01:52. > :02:00.There is a moment in the book when Mr Norris,
:02:01. > :02:03.the landscape designer, is talking to his friend
:02:04. > :02:06.the architect and they ask each other, "Is this a paradise
:02:07. > :02:08.we are making here or is it a prison?"
:02:09. > :02:10.And I wrote that rather sort of off-the-cuff
:02:11. > :02:15.as you do in a long book, it's just one line.
:02:16. > :02:19.Afterwards I thought, yes, that is what it's about.
:02:20. > :02:24.It's about inclusion and of course it's about all sorts of other things
:02:25. > :02:27.like falling in love and having children and dying and doing
:02:28. > :02:30.all the things that humans do, but in so far as there is a theme
:02:31. > :02:33.that can be summed up in the sentence it is a book
:02:34. > :02:37.about walls and what happens when you try to wall
:02:38. > :02:40.yourself in and you may make a garden or you may find
:02:41. > :02:50.It's also a story about how we are doomed to repeat the awful
:02:51. > :02:53.experiences of humanity again and again down the centuries.
:02:54. > :02:58.I mean, there was a moment when I was writing the first draft,
:02:59. > :03:01.of actually the last section of the book in which people
:03:02. > :03:08.are walking out of London in 1665 to escape from the plague
:03:09. > :03:14.and the roads out of London are crammed with refugees, migrants.
:03:15. > :03:17.And as I was writing that section, the newspapers were full of pictures
:03:18. > :03:20.of roads crammed with migrants trying to walk their way into safety
:03:21. > :03:32.And I hadn't set out to write a book about the migration crisis but,
:03:33. > :03:37.History repeats itself in all kinds of ways because at the time
:03:38. > :03:41.when we first encounter the house, the grounds are being laid out,
:03:42. > :03:44.it is just before the restoration in the 1660s and it's a time
:03:45. > :03:51.of darkness, of a lot of espionage, of a lot of betrayal and violence.
:03:52. > :03:55.It was a much more turbulent time for individuals.
:03:56. > :03:57.I think when you look back at history people tend
:03:58. > :04:06.Absolutely, I think in the sort of popular imagination Charles II
:04:07. > :04:09.is the merry monarch and he comes back and the theatres reopen
:04:10. > :04:15.and they are tossing oranges around and everyone is having a lovely
:04:16. > :04:17.time, but one has to remember that all those people are living
:04:18. > :04:23.in the aftermath of a full generation of civil War.
:04:24. > :04:25.Everyone has got something to hide, everyone is suspicious
:04:26. > :04:35.So in the first and last sections of my novel,
:04:36. > :04:40.I wanted not to explicitly, but just to suggest that tension,
:04:41. > :04:42.that feeling of things going on behind closed
:04:43. > :04:48.You are dealing the whole time with what is unsaid,
:04:49. > :04:51.which is as important in the kinds of situations you are imagining
:04:52. > :04:54.here, as what is said and what is put on the table.
:04:55. > :05:03.The way I write is to write a draft and then go over and over and over
:05:04. > :05:10.So a lot of what might have been explicit in the first draft has
:05:11. > :05:20.And I think that in a way that is the rest of the iceberg
:05:21. > :05:26.But it's important to the finished product, I think, that at some point
:05:27. > :05:37.And that is what produces tension, it is what produces fear,
:05:38. > :05:48.it is what produces I suppose alarm and a feeling of threat.
:05:49. > :05:51.Yes, and in the 17th century, there is quite a lot of magic.
:05:52. > :05:54.I don't believe in the supernatural at all, everything has
:05:55. > :05:59.a rational explanation, but the supernatural of one era
:06:00. > :06:01.is simply the unexplained so that there are things
:06:02. > :06:04.going on which seem particularly alarming
:06:05. > :06:10.That might be because science has yet progressed far enough
:06:11. > :06:15.to explain, or it might be because indeed someone
:06:16. > :06:23.Or because in part we have an affection for the unknown
:06:24. > :06:26.and the need for the unknown, not simply giving a name
:06:27. > :06:30.to the inexplicable, but there is something attractive
:06:31. > :06:33.about the feeling that things are going on in a way
:06:34. > :06:39.Yes, I think one of the great things about fiction
:06:40. > :06:46.whether as a reader or a writer, it allows you to live a life
:06:47. > :06:48.that is slightly larger and more interesting than your own.
:06:49. > :06:57.Peculiar is a very interesting word to use about this house, a solid,
:06:58. > :07:02.a wonderful place to live with wonderful grounds
:07:03. > :07:05.as we see them being laid out at the beginning of the book,
:07:06. > :07:13."We are a garden wall around a sacred place, peculiar ground."
:07:14. > :07:16.And the word "peculiar" has changed its meaning over the three
:07:17. > :07:22.centuries covered in this story and it has always meant
:07:23. > :07:35.It has now become to mean odd and a bit weird,
:07:36. > :07:37.but in its original meaning it simply means reserved,
:07:38. > :07:43.enclosed, set apart from the rest of the world.
:07:44. > :07:46.So the house is peculiar, but it also contains in it
:07:47. > :07:48.everything about humanity that we recognise.
:07:49. > :07:52.The thing that holds us all together.
:07:53. > :07:55.Great country houses are very useful as a novelist or for film-makers
:07:56. > :07:58.or whatever for the same reason that pubs are.
:07:59. > :08:01.Everyone has to go to the pub an inordinate amount
:08:02. > :08:03.because if you can get your characters together under one roof
:08:04. > :08:07.then things can start to happen between them.
:08:08. > :08:13.And a great country house is of course a place for parties,
:08:14. > :08:15.a place in which a rich and glamorous life can be led,
:08:16. > :08:20.but it's also a business, it's a place where a of people can work.
:08:21. > :08:23.Far too many novels are just about who is going to bed with whom,
:08:24. > :08:26.a very interesting question, but we do actually spend our lives,
:08:27. > :08:32.most of us, most of the time, working and I like to show
:08:33. > :08:39.the gamekeepers gamekeeping and the foresters looking after the trees.
:08:40. > :08:44.We get to know the life of Witchwood very well indeed in Peculiar Ground.
:08:45. > :08:45.Lucy Hughes-Hallett, thank you very much.
:08:46. > :09:09.It has been a mixed day out there today. We had sunshine, scattered
:09:10. > :09:11.showers and more persistent rain. This area of low pressure has pushed
:09:12. > :09:12.into the south-east