Untold Tales

I can’t believe that it is 11 months since I wrote my last blog. They were only ever meant to be intermittent, but that delay is ridiculous! I can’t really blame the lockdowns but rather that I didn’t have anything much to say until now.

In May,2020, two interesting things did happen:

1. I got a dog and much of my time now seems to be taken up with walking her, which I love doing as I live in the countryside and I do a lot of my “writing” whilst I am walking.
2. I managed to get a literary agent (Camilla Shestopal) for “The Teller of Tales,” the first book of a historical trilogy I am writing. As of now (February 2021) she hasn’t managed to find a publisher but she is still trying. She has received some very positive rejections and I am still very hopeful that she will find someone. One of the problems seems to be that the early 1820s is not a popular period unless the book is a Regency Romp, which mine most definitely isn’t.

Having handed my baby over to Camilla last May, I started on the second book in the trilogy, called “Untold Tales,” which I have just sent to Camilla. It is set in the 1880s and covers similar themes to the first book, being the silencing of women who have herstories to tell but no-one wants to hear them. In “A Teller of Tales,” a book of fairy tales is written by Lizzy (one of them I shared with you in the previous post), and this book is passed onto her granddaughter, Harriet, who is the protagonist of “Untold Tales.” The themes covered are those that predominated Victorian Society: female education, the rights of women, the fate of unmarried mothers, the silencing of women, sex, marriage and love. Harriet also adds her own fairy tales to the book, which she tries to get published, one of which I have included below.

Once I have finished helping to home-school my 6 year-old granddaughter (hopefully it will end March 8th) , I will start on the third book, potential title being “The Tale Collector.” It will be set in the early 1900s but that’s all I’m saying at the moment.

The following fairy tale is Harriet’s response when she learns about vivisection, which was much debated at the time:

There was once a very clever scientist who wanted more than anything to heal all man’s ills – a very noble cause I think you will all agree. He didn’t, however, fully understand enough about how the body worked or what the body could endure. Being an honourable man, he refused to experiment on humans but saw no reason not to use animals, for they don’t have a soul, do they? And surely, God put them on this Earth for our benefit, didn’t He? To begin with the scientist just used dead animals and opened them up to see what was inside. Then he used live animals, rabbits, cats, dogs; there are far too many of them, aren’t there? He wondered how long they would survive if he boiled them, set them alight, hung them upside down; the list of ways was limitless. And it was all in the name of science, wasn’t it? He carefully recorded the results of all his experiments and he won great acclaim for the articles he wrote. Over time he felt he needed to do more extreme experiments with more extreme animals and he started to wonder, what if….. What if I put the head of a tiger on the body of a kangaroo? Would it act like a tiger or a kangaroo? What if I replaced the front legs with flippers and the tail with that of a shark? What an amazing animal it would be! How famous I’d be!

     So he went to the London Zoo and persuaded them to give him a tiger, a kangaroo, a seal and a shark. He decapitated both land animals and put the tiger’s head on the body of the kangaroo. He then cut off the kangaroo’s arms and replaced them with the seal’s flippers, which he ripped off, leaving the poor seal screaming in agony for days. Last, but by no means least, our intrepid scientist replaced the kangaroo’s long tail with that of a shark. What a strange creature he had made! It roared like a tiger, but didn’t eat meat; it could jump with its powerful hind legs but it kept falling over because it didn’t have its tail to balance and support it; it could swim for short distances but then sank. The scientist kindly donated the animal back to the London Zoo, where it was a great attraction. Thousands of people thronged to see this man-made creature, which the scientist very cleverly called an Ethikass, being an anagram of the first two letters of each animal it was made from. The poor Ethikass was in a lot of pain because the scientist had not been careful when he had sewed on the different pieces and it hated being laughed at all day, every day.

     The scientist became even more famous, although when he sat in the dark, drinking his whiskey, he acknowledged to himself that he hadn’t actually healed any of man’s ills with his experiments and he hadn’t learned anything new about the human or animal body. But he had become rich and famous and that’s all that mattered, isn’t it?

     One day, the scientist went to see the Ethikass. The poor thing was tired and in pain. It recognised the scientist, who was standing on the other side of a high fence, holding the hand of his little son. The Ethikass, driven by pain, humiliation and despair, was suddenly filled with hatred and anger and using its seal’s flippers and shark’s tail it swam across the wide moat that surrounded his little island; it used its kangaroo legs to leap over the high fence that surrounded the moat and it used its tiger’s teeth to bite the head off the little boy. It didn’t eat it though; after all it was a herbivore.

     A zoo warden shot the Ethikass, for which it was very grateful.

     The scientist never did any more experiments and drank himself to death.