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impediment. And I must also reflect, now, that it perhaps saved my life. If I had been a man I might well have died in the war.
    I know quite well why I became a historian. Quasi-historian, as one of my enemies put it, some desiccated don too frightened of the water to put a toe out of his Oxford college. It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: ‘Don’t argue, Claudia’, ‘Claudia, you must not answer back like that.’ Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested. I well remember the moment at which I discovered that history was not a matter of received opinion.
    I was thirteen. At Miss Lavenham’s Academy for Girls. In Lower Four B. Doing the Tudor Monarchs with Miss Lavenham herself. Miss Lavenham wrote names and dates on the board and we copied them down. We also, to her dictation, noted the principal characteristics of each reign. Henry VIII was condemned by his marital excesses, but was also no good as king. Queen Elizabeth was good; she fended off the Spaniards and ruled firmly. She also cut off the head of Mary Queen of Scots, who was a Catholic. Our pens scratched in the long summer afternoon. I put up my hand: ‘Please Miss Lavenham, did the Catholics think she was right to cut offMary’s head?’ ‘No, Claudia, I don’t expect they did.’ ‘Please, do Catholic people think so now?’ Miss Lavenham took a breath: ‘Well, Claudia,’ she said kindly, ‘I suppose some of them might not. People do sometimes disagree. But there is no need for you to worry about that. Just put down what is on the board. Make your headings nice and clear in red ink…’
    And suddenly for me the uniform grey pond of history is rent; it is fractured into a thousand contending waves; I hear the babble of voices. I put my pen down and ponder; my headings are not nice and clear in red ink; I get 38% (Fail) in the end of term exams.

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    ‘From the wrath of the Northmen, O Lord deliver us…’ Doesn’t that give you a twinge, reading there on your sofa, the light on, the door locked, the twentieth century tucked cosily around you? And of course He didn’t, or not always. He never does, but they weren’t to know. He delivered, merely, the words; the poor monk who wrote them probably got a chunk of Viking iron through the throat, or went up in flames with his church.
    When I was about nine I asked God to eliminate my brother Gordon. Painlessly but irreversibly. At Lindisfarne, as it happens, to which we had been taken not to reflect upon the Viking raids of which probably Mother had never heard but to walk out to the island along the causeway and have a picnic thereon. And Gordon and I raced across that spit of land, and Gordon being one year older and quite a bit faster was all set to win, of course. And I gasped up this prayer, in fury and passion, meaning it – oh, quite meaning it. Never again, I said, will I ask You for anything. Anything at all. Just grant this. Now. Instantly. It is interesting to note that I had to demand Gordon’s extinction, not that I should be made a faster runner. And of course God did nothing of the kind and I sulked throughout a glorious windswept sea-smelling afternoon and became an agnostic.
    Years later we went there again, Gordon and I. Not racingthis time. Soberly walking; discussing, I recall, the Third Reich and the coming war. And I remembered that monastic prayer and said that it was as though the Vikings were here again, the blood-red sails on the horizon, the tread of men heavy with weapons. And the sea-birds called and the turf on the cliffs was sponge-springy under our feet and full of wild flowers, as no doubt it was in the ninth century. We ate sandwiches and drank ginger beer amid the ruins and afterwards lay in the sun in a hollow. Jasper was unknown to us, and Lisa.