My life in forests

 Today, the 21^st of March, is the day designated by the UN as International Day of Forests. I stumbled upon this piece of information this morning, while researching forest-related issues for a future blog post. A little more investigation of the UN calendar revealed that yesterday was International Day of Happiness, another fact that had hitherto escaped my notice. Now that I know about these important dates, I feel I should mark them – and how better than with a celebration of the happiness that forests have given me?

 

I am a huge fan of forests. They are, almost without doubt, my favourite place to hang out. Add some mountains (or at least hills), and a lake or river, and I couldn’t be happier. Growing up in Auckland, I was always keen to head west to the Waitakere Ranges for a day’s walking in the bush. Rolling down the car window to get the first smell of it, getting out and heading down the track, surrounded by a gorgeous abundance of trees, ferns, and mosses, a rich mixture of different shades of green, whatever the season. Or better still, leaving the track and heading up one of the many streams that cut their way through the ranges. Wading (or occasionally swimming) through deep pools in dark gorges and scrambling up beside waterfalls, grateful for the knobbly surface of the volcanic rock. Clambering over massive logjams left over from the days when nature was there to be conquered and no one thought twice about cutting down a five-hundred-year-old tree. And always the bush around us – the tall tree ferns, the graceful nikau palms, the straight, solid kauri. Bird song, friendly fantails flitting around our heads, the occasionally whirr of wings when a kereru, a fat wood pigeon, took flight.

 

At twenty-one I left all this behind me to spend a year in Berlin. Away from home for the first time, I threw myself in the city’s cultural life, going to art galleries, theatres, operas, and concerts. I loved it. And yet the happiest day of that entire year away was one spent at the other end of Germany, in the Black Forest. While visiting a friend in Freiburg I took myself up the hill nearest the town, armed with a sandwich and presumably some water, and then kept on walking. Deciduous forest gave way to dark conifers growing on steep slopes; the sun shone, but among the trees it was cool and quiet. I don’t think I saw another person all day. I didn’t really know where I was – I didn’t have a map, and this was years before smartphones and GPS systems – but it didn’t worry me too much. I ended up in a sparsely populated valley some distance away from Freiburg, found a bus stop, and was back in town by evening. A highly satisfactory adventure.

 

My positive experience of big city life in Berlin encouraged me to choose London for the next phase of my studies. Here, though, I quickly found myself disenchanted with urban life and craving contact with nature. My first year was spent in Mile End, where the nearest open space was the large and beautifully tended Victoria Park. It was pleasant enough, but it wasn’t wild. You can’t immerse yourself in nature in an urban park. Things improved when we moved east to Leytonstone, and I could begin to explore the southern reaches of Epping Forest – patches of woodland interspersed with meadows, not a pristine wilderness but definitely less civilized than Victoria Park. And then at some point I acquired a map and realized that a short trip by car or by Tube gave me access to the beautiful beech forest further north, and all of a sudden life in London became more tolerable.

 

Epping Forest was a lifesaver, particularly after the advent of our children. Living in a two-bedroom flat with four small but lively children, we were hugely grateful to be able to bundle them all into the car, drive to Jack’s Hill near Theydon Bois, and head into the woods. We would leave the main paths behind to ramble along narrow side tracks, or leave the paths altogether and just take off cross-country. With small children in tow, we never covered any large distances, but we didn’t have to go far to feel surrounded by nature. Not untouched nature, granted, but nature that had been left for many years to do its own thing. The splendid beech trees, once pollarded, then left to grow uncut – their trunks smooth and grey, their leaves glossy green in summer, brilliantly coloured in autumn, then falling and adding to the thick leaf litter covering the ground, a warm brown brightening the forest in winter. Gnarled roots, cushions of pale green moss. Little streams for the children to play in, fallen trees for them to climb on when they were big enough. The occasional thrill of spotting a deer. But mostly just trees, and space, and the restorative calm of nature.

 

And now? Living in Chelmsford, I’m still within reach of Epping Forest, but it’s a little far for regular excursions. The woods I have access to near here are not as wild as the Waitakeres, not as vast and lofty as the Black Forest, and not as ancient as Epping Forest, but they have their own appeal. To the east of Chelmsford there are attractive areas of woodland around Danbury and Little Baddow, mostly oak and hornbeam, with lovely displays of wood anemones and bluebells in spring, leafy green shade in summer, vivid colours and fascinating fungi in autumn. On the other side of Chelmsford is Writtle Forest, dominated by sweet chestnut, more oak and hornbeam, and large herds of deer. These are woods rather than forests, and they don’t always offer that truly immersive, uplifting forest experience, but they’re enough to sustain me for the time being.

 

So let’s raise a glass – or maybe a thermos flask – to forests. Let’s look after them, wherever they are, and make sure they’re there for us humans, and for all the creatures that live in them, for many hundreds of years to come.

 

 

Queen Charlotte

Artwork by Natalie Eldred

In my previous post on Bridgerton I commented on the anachronistic presence of black characters in British high society in 1813. This strikes me as a pleasing fantasy, slightly marred by the attempt to give it a rational explanation: that the marriage of the English king, George III, to a black woman, Charlotte, has brought about racial equality and harmony. Here I’d like to focus on the precise point in Bridgerton where history intersects with fantasy, the figure of Queen Charlotte.

Played by biracial British actress Golda Rosheuvel, Charlotte is clearly central to the vision of the show’s creators. Showrunner Chris van Dusen has been quoted as saying: “Queen Charlotte opened up an entirely new world for us. What really struck me with the books [the novels by Julia Quinn on which the series is based] from the beginning is that this was an opportunity to marry history and fantasy in a really exciting, interesting way. So in Queen Charlotte, that was the history.” What he doesn’t mention is that while many of the other black characters are reimaginings of white characters from the source novels, Queen Charlotte does not feature in the books at all. So why has she been introduced? Another comment by van Dusen sheds further light on this: “[…] working closely with historians, I learned this really fascinating fact that Queen Charlotte was England’s first queen of mixed race. That’s something that many historians believe there’s evidence for today.” 

Historically, this is highly questionable. The real Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was a fair-skinned German princess, born of a long line of German dukes. She was brought to England in 1761 at the age of seventeen, not speaking a word of English, to marry a man she had never met, the young king George III. The wedding contract was signed by her brother; history does not tell us what Charlotte thought about it. Fortunately the couple got on well and evidently led a contented domestic life for over twenty years, until the onset of George’s mental illness. They produced fifteen children, from whom the current royals are descended.

Where did the rumour of Charlotte’s African heritage come from? It was first raised in the 1940s, inspired by this portrait of Charlotte by Allan Ramsay, and a comment by one of Charlotte’s contemporaries that her nostrils and mouth were too wide. In the 1990s, Charlotte was the subject of an article written for American broadcaster PBS, part of a series looking at “blurred racial lines” in the genealogy of various figures in European history.  According to the author, Mario de Valdes y Cocom, his research had revealed that Charlotte was “directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House”. In a subsequent article Valdes is quoted as mentioning an even earlier possible ancestor, a black Moor called Ouruana (also known as Mandragana or Madragana), mistress of the thirteenth-century Portuguese king Afonso III.

Valdes’s assertions have been convincingly refuted in a number of online articles. See for example history writer Lisa Hilton, anthropologist Jill Sudbury, or this very detailed anonymous essay. The latter text actually examines and publishes some of Valdes’ purported sources. And it includes both formal portraits of Charlotte and contemporary caricatures, none of which give any suggestion of the “conspicuously negroid” features identified by Valdes. Surely such a striking aspect of her appearance would have been picked up and emphasized by the ruthless caricaturists of the time? As well as noting the silence of her contemporaries on this issue, most critiques of Valdes’s theory point out the lack of evidence for the ethnicity of the De Souza family. But ultimately the crucial point is that even if Valdes is right, these ancestors lived hundreds of years before Charlotte. So, to borrow a turn of phrase from Wikipedia, “it’s unlikely that [this] genetic inheritance would have been significant enough to have any noticeable effect on her appearance.”

The surprising thing here is that a sketchy idea put forward by one person in an online article has taken on such a life of its own. If you look up “Queen Charlotte” online, you are more than likely to come away with the impression that she was of African heritage. A Google search produces, as the second hit after Charlotte’s Wikipedia entry, a Guardian article from 2009 entitled “Was this Britain’s first black queen?”. Add “ancestry” as a search term and this moves to the top of the list. Numerous online articles state that “some historians” or even “many historians” believe Charlotte was mixed-race, biracial, or black.

The makers of Bridgerton have picked up this theory and run with it. It’s easy to see why: the notion that Charlotte was England’s “first black queen” or “first mix-raced monarch” fits nicely into their project of celebrating diversity. Is there any harm in this? On a certain level it can be regarded as harmless, perhaps even beneficial. For black viewers who seldom see themselves in Regency dramas, and for black actors who seldom secure leading roles in them, it’s a breakthrough. Golda Rosheuvel, who plays Charlotte, says “I'm biracial. I was brought up in England. My mother was crazy about period dramas, which made me crazy about them. I never thought that I'd be able to be in one. It was something that was far away. I couldn't touch it. Now we can rewrite that story for the little girl who's sitting at home.”

Is it not small-minded and ungenerous for a white viewer who hasn’t had that particular experience of invisibility to begrudge black viewers and actors this sense of euphoria at black visibility? Surely, in the name of diversity, equality, and/or poetic licence, the makers of televised fiction can do whatever they want with history? Caitlin Moran, in her witty review of Bridgerton, lampoons the hypocrisy of anyone complaining about the historical inaccuracy of including black characters in the nineteenth-century British aristocracy. Why, she wonders, does no one ever criticize costume dramas for showing characters with perfect, twenty-first-century teeth?

This seems, on the surface at least, a fair point. It is unreasonable to expect an escapist television show to offer a reliable history lesson. But does this mean that any attempt to criticize fictionalized depictions of history is fundamentally misguided? My feeling is that television has a strong influence on public discourses about all kinds of things, including history, and that this power brings a certain responsibility.

The problem is not so much Bridgerton itself as the way it interacts with the public discourse about Charlotte. Far from admitting that the depiction of the queen is essentially fictional, the show’s makers have perpetuated the idea that it is (probably) a historical truth. As mentioned above, Chris van Dusen has referred to Charlotte’s African ancestry as a “fascinating fact”, and stated that “many historians” believe there is evidence for it.

This is misleading. For most of us non-historians, depictions of historical figures on TV and in film may well be the only insight we have into who they were, what they did, and what they were like. Inevitably, historically inaccurate depictions of such figures leave us with inaccurate perceptions of history. And our perceptions of history – our beliefs about what has happened in the past – have a significant influence on the way we feel and act in the present. All over the world, countless modern-day conflicts are based on resentment about historical injustices.

By feeding into the notion that there really was a mixed-race woman on the British throne in the past, and that this has somehow been hushed up, Bridgerton confirms the idea of a whitewashing of history. I’m not suggesting that the history of black people in Britain and elsewhere hasn’t been suppressed, overlooked, or misrepresented. Undoubtedly it has, along with other aspects of history. But why base the right argument on the wrong evidence? Why not focus on true stories that have been concealed or forgotten? Or create fictional characters whose stories reflect the real historical background?

Frothy and frivolous as Bridgerton is, it raises some interesting questions.

Artwork by Natalie Eldred, https://natalieeldred.uk/