by Henry Treece
HENRY TREECE was born in the West Midlands in December 1911. Educated at Wednesbury High School he won a scholarship to Birmingham University where he graduated in 1933. War-time service as an intelligence officer with R. A. F, Bomber Command interrupted a very fine teaching career. His literary career began as a poet; Messrs Faber published four volumes. Contact with George Orwell helped him enter the world of radio broadcasting of verse plays, short stories and schools programmes. In 1952 came Treece’s first historical novel, The Dark Island, and during the years until his death in June 1966 he wrote a succession of Celtic novels for adults, including The Great Captains, The Golden Strangers and Red Queen, White Queen, as well as the Greek novels Electra, Jason and Oedipus. The Green Man in 1966 was the last adult work. His work also included criticism and a number of co-edited anthologies War-Time Harvest, Transformation and others. Among the many historical novels for children are the Roman books Legions of the Eagle and The Eagles Have Flown; the trilogy Viking’s Dawn, The Road to Miklagard and Viking’s Sunset; Man with a Sword (Hereward the Wake); and the much praised posthumously published The Dream Time. Mary Treece, his widow, lives in Abingdon, in Oxfordshire.
Smoke hangs above the rune-scratched altars;
A mocking voice hisses among the leaves
Of the swaying groves. There it is always night,
A night of knives and smoke and half-heard warnings;
Always the pitch-black night of desolation,
The everlasting yearning night
Of a land that thirsts for blood
And drinks it in like rain.
What crops might such soil nourish?
Swords rise and fall, then rise again and fall,
Grim reapers; and the smiling prince,
Magnificent in bronze with hound at knee,
Falcon on fist and throat aflame with gold,
Will lie, a tumbled swathe tomorrow,
First-fruit of that awful harvesting.
And all the time, between the whispering leaves,
Sun smiles his golden smile Upon the golden folk,
Tempting their lips to make gay songs,
Their kings to make gay war;
Gay war in ribbons,
Festive harvest-home.
Introduction
By making living men of his historical characters Treece joined the small group of novelists who used the historical romance for moral and literary purposes of their own. His contemporaries included Graves and Duggan. In my view Treece outshines them by virtue of a deeper understanding of the pre-Christian mind and a less self-conscious style which allowed him to express a greater intensity of emotion — and a greater range, too. He was a committed Romantic, like Mervyn Peake (whom he knew) or Dylan Thomas (who was his friend) and refused to let any fashionable considerations distort his vision.
Since Treece, a number of writers — Gamer is the best known I suppose — have dealt with the Celtic spirit to the point where the ‘dark mind' is almost a cliché and, as I’ve said elsewhere, Herne the Hunter seems to have become an obligatory functionary in at least one scene in each book. But none of these newer writers — good though Garner, Sutcliffe and Cooper, say, can be — has been able to capture the sense of raw passion of adult men and women who are not always mystically inclined yet dwell in a world of mysticism; who are as practical in their daily desires and ambitions as any twentieth century people, yet who acknowledge a reality of symbols and supernatural forces which does not so much shape their lives as amplify and define them. There is little overt ‘magic’ in these tales, yet the magic — the mystery — permeates them. In a cruder sort of story (even one drawing on The Golden Bough as Treece’s surely does) the sorcery would be isolated — an event. In Treece it is as much part of life as the wild landscapes of Dark Age Britain, as the stones and hills, the forests and the seas, the fortified townships and isolated villages dwarfed by the great grey skies.
Treece was an aggressive and dedicated Romantic; a chief spokesman for the Apocalyptic Movement of the late 30s and the 40s, very much out of tempo with what might be called the Austerity Movement which found its voices in the work of social realists, reductionists of the belted-raincoat-and-cup-of-tea -in-a-Lyons-tea-shop brigade who derived their inspiration from the well-bred populism of Auden or Day Lewis. These Angry Younger Men mocked the creative imagination because, perhaps, they equated it with their limited experience of degenerate romanticism (Nazism and so on) and the threat of chaos represented by the A-Bomb, because they failed to understand that the real Romantic does not posture, he inhabits (as do Treece’s characters) a world which to them would be a world of madness, and he has to bring terrible disciplines to bear on himself and his work in order to control and shape his visions and communicate them:
In my definition, the writer who senses the chaos, the turbulence, the laughter and the tears, the order and the peace of the world in its entirety, is an Apocalyptic writer. His utterance will be prophetic, for he is observing things which less sensitive men have not yet come to notice; and his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical. At times, even, that music may take control and lead the writer from recording his vision almost to creating another vision… Throughout this book, my attempt has been to approach life and art (with particular reference to poetry) from as many angles as possible, attacking chaos on all sides in an effort to attain something like a unified vision. The impulse behind that attempt is a Romantic one… I attempt to prove some correlation between that Romanticism and the form of Anarchism laid down by Herbert Read…
(Foreword to How I See Apocalypse, 1946)
Those who know Treece’s historical novels — or possibly only his juvenile historical novels — often do not know that Treece was an important publicist, critic and anthologist for the Romantic movement which existed around the time of the second world war and with which Mervyn Peake was sometimes associated. It was a movement which tended to place a high value on being Celtic and produced, as a consequence, a legacy of sentimentalism tending later to discredit the original spirits of that movement, just as for a while the work of Yeats and Synge came to be similarly discredited in Ireland (unfortunately maudlin drunkards are much attracted to the more obvious aspects of such a movement). This Apocalyptic Movement found its first real expression in the anthology The White Horseman (1941) whose introduction (by G. S. Fraser) Treece quotes in his own collection of essays How I See Apocalypse:
The New Apocalypse, in a sense, derives from Surrealism, and one might even call it a dialectical development of it; the next stage forward. It embodies what is positive in Surrealism, ‘the effort,’ in Herbert Read’s phrase, ‘to realize some of the dimensions and characteristics of man’s submerged being’. It denies what is negative — Surrealism’s own denial of man’s right to exercise conscious control, either of his political and social destinies, or of the material offered to him, as an artist, by his subconscious mind. It recognises, that is, that the intellect and its activity in willed action is part of the living completeness of man, just as the formal element is part of the living completeness of art.
I think it is important to an appreciation of Treece’s work for the reader to understand how much of a conscious artist he was, how much he sought to achieve in his novels. Because a Romantic tends to shun classical forms of criticism or self-expression, people are inclined to believe that he is somehow an inspired naif. Mervyn Peake has suffered critically because of this view, often propagated by people who should know better. Nobody who knew Treece or read his criticism or his poetry could underestimate either his intellect, his talent or his powers of control. And perhaps it is this control, this ability to shape a genuinely mythic tragedy from his material, that
makes Treece one of the greatest of all historical novelists. He chose characters who like him existed in a world teeming with images charged with meaning, naive only in that they could not ‘read the signs’ in a sophisticated modern way (as Treece did). Mervyn Peake wrote in one of his poems ‘I am too rich already, for my eyes mint gold.. Only those who have experienced this wealth can have any understanding of what energies are involved in the ordering and spending of it. Most writers — even those working in a romantic idiom — grasp desperately for images and ideas, nurse them and make the absolute maximum use of them. Treece, like Peake, merely sought to describe and make coherent the wild, colourful and sensuously textured world in which, day to day, he lived. And that is why he chose, in the main, to write in the form of the historical novel, where his imagination would be allowed, as he saw it, a fuller stretch. In his day, it could be argued, it was one of the few ‘admissible’ forms in which the romantic imagination was allowed to flourish. One can only regret that he is not still alive and writing in a climate so much better suited to his temperament, for an audience so much better able to appreciate his virtues. As it is we are left with a large body of work (prose, poetry, criticism) which thoroughly deserves republication and I applaud with all my heart these new editions of his great Celtic tetralogy.
Michael Moorcock
Ladbroke Grove
August 1978
PREFACE
I do not pretend that this is a historical novel, in the sense that it is a closely documented and minutely factual account of what actually happened in A. D. 61 in Britain. Perhaps no one could write that novel, to satisfy the Omniscient Overlooker of All — for, in any case, the few records which remain are heavily biased and are written from one viewpoint only, that of the conqueror, the Roman invader. And such an account could be as untrue as, let us say, Hitler’s conception of the Battle of Britain.
I have, therefore, tried to ‘read between the lines’, to guess what sort of people these were, so that I might understand why they did this and that. And I have guessed that, in many respects, they were not greatly unlike us, for in the long scroll of history they are relatively close to us in time. I do not imagine that a dominant woman of Nero’s time was very different from a stubborn matron of today; or that the common soldier (if there is such a thing) has greatly changed his habits and outlook.
To convey a sense of the timelessness of the whole thing, I have adopted an ironical attitude to it and have used certain expressions which the characters might have used, had they lived now. My mockery indicates no disrespect to history, or to my characters; it is a form of sympathy, a stoic recognition that we are all involved in mankind, as Donne said. And my use of contemporary language I defend by saying that I am sure that till ages have their own slang; but because I do not know Camp Latin I am driven to use the argot of my own day to produce the impression I need.
This attitude can be justified, of course, only if it results in a credible story, if the characters can cause the reader to suspend his disbelief for a few hundred pages. I hope that my book may do this.
As an afterthought, I would mention that Boudicca killed some 70, 000 Romans and their ‘collaborators’ during her brief flare-up; and that wherever workmen dig within the City of London, they come upon a thick layer of ash—a curious reminder of the thoroughness with which the Queen reacted to Nero’s theft of her possessions. So, it seems ironical—almost an act of mockery-that she figures in a splendid chariot as a British heroine on the banks of that very Thames which once ran red with the result of her exertions.
Yes, surely one can only treat such a theme with a tender, and sometimes tearful irony!
HENRY TREECE
1: The Village
The village of Venta Icenorum, the tribal settlement of Boudicca, lay so near to the sea that the smell of seaweed was as familiar as that of bread.
It was a grey place, of round stone huts with their reed-thatched roofs, set in a little hollow and surrounded by groves of oak-trees. The men of that village were proud of its main street, made after the new Roman style. It was a short street, hardly more than a hundred paces long. To make it so, many of the older huts had had to be tom down. At first the men of the Iceni had not liked this, for their fathers and grandfathers had lived in those huts. Many of them had been buried beneath the cow-dung floors of the huts. Their bones were the gods of the houses.
But times change, and the Romans built straight streets. What the Romans could do, the Iceni could do, they thought. So they built a straight street through the village, pointing in the direction of the sea, so that travellers from the outer world might find the way easily, might bring trade and Roman wealth to the place.
At the seaward end of the street stood the Queen’s house. It was a great place, for it would shelter five families and had three long rooms, each with a fire-hearth and a chimney-hole in the reed-roof. Since the King’s death there had been no fires in the house, as a sign of lamentation. But the early Spring had been a warm one and no one felt the cold. Though, in any case, the Queen, Boudicca, was a kingly woman, one of the plump sort, who would not let her house-folk suffer too greatly in the cause of grief. She saw to it that though the fires were out, the ale flowed freely and the beds were well covered with sheepskin and deer hide.
She had said, in the hearing of any who were about, that though Prasutagus was dead now, there was no reason why anyone should suffer for that. The Druids had made their usual sacrifices in the oak groves, and that was the end of it. Now the villagers must look forward to a pleasant year.
She had even said that she thought Rome was not as black as she had been painted; that the Emperor Nero was a reasonable fellow, just another chieftain, like herself. She said that he would see her point of view, as a man who had a kingdom to rule himself, and would realise that one in authority had obligations to his own folk as well as liabilities to those higher up the scale.
So Boudicca consoled her people and went about her life. Since her villagers knew little of Nero, they did not question her—though, as was the Celtic fashion, all had a right to stop her in the street, to slap her on the broad back, if they must, and to talk to her without elaborate terms of rank, and so on. A woman was a woman, after all; you stroked them, then bedded them, then went out to shoot a deer to feed them while they fed the baby with the milk from their breasts. Boudicca was a woman, though the folk called her ‘Queen’.
Boudicca was interested in being alive. She liked to eat and drink, and she liked to go hunting in the oak forests that swirled about her village. She was not a good marksman, for the bows of her people were too unwieldy for use in the saddle; but she was a good horsewoman. And often she would tell her daughters that the horse was the only creature worth worshipping.
The two daughters of Boudicca were gay, laughing girls, almost as plump and as flaxen-haired as their mother; Gwynnedd and Siara, they were called. They often teased their mother, thinking that they knew a little more than she did—for she was over thirty now. They told her that the bull was the only creature a woman could respect.
‘Was our father like a bull, Mother Queen?’ they would say, laughing behind their hands.
In the saddle, Boudicca would strike out at them with her willow-withy whip, hoping to miss them.
‘I tell you, the horse is the thing,’ she would say, laughing.
The girls, Gwynnedd and Siara, would smile secretly and tell each other that there must be something about a bull, or the men of Crete would not have prayed to one for so long.
But all ended well, usually. In the old fashion, after Prasutagus had gone, the Queen slept with whoever pleased her, and left her daughters to do the same. Though they shared the long bedroom, the three women, they made a point of not seeing each other after sunset, though they passed so closely that their skirts almost touched The Queen and the two Princesses took life as it came, took strangers as they came, and did not offend each other.
No children were born in the royal house
of the Iceni in the year after the death of King Prasutagus. The new Roman god, Mithras, was to be praised for this, for, children were a burden at first. The old gods, those mentioned by the Druids, were less thoughtful. They filled the cottages with brats; but one must move with the times, with Rome.
Yet there was a night when things seemed different.
At first the villagers could not understand it. Later they understood it only too well.
Just before sundown a man strode into the place, his dark eyes burning, his Roman toga swinging in the sea-breeze.
‘That is the tax-collector,’ said Sian Crack-brain who lived in the end cottage. ‘He is up to no good.’
His wife skelped him away from the open window with a skillet-spoon. It was a bad thing to speak ill of Rome. Her brother had lost the thumb of each hand for less.
An hour later, five Companies of horse cantered into Venta Icenorum, their swords already at the high-port.
Sian said, ‘I do not dare to say that there is trouble brewing, dear one.’
He paused a while and blew into his broth dish.
Then he said, ‘But I do not like the look I saw in the eyes of those Romans.’
His wife stirred the porridge and clucked with slow impatience at the stupidity of the man she had been forced to marry.
In the morning, the villagers of Venta Icenorum were summoned by the chief Druid to go to the yard of the royal house. They went, protesting that the meat would burn, or the logs not be chopped.
But when they had got there, they were glad that they had been called.
Even the young women, who envied Boudicca her breasts, shrank back with horror at the ghastly red wounds across her back.
And the young men, who had prayed nightly for the bodies of her daughters, leapt forward in rage to see them so mauled, so tumbled, so wasted.
But of the man in the toga there was no sign And the horsemen had left before dawn.
