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