The First Crusade
Cuando llegue la inspiración, que me encuentre trabajando.
(When inspiration comes, let it find me working.)
Pablo Picasso
Readers often ask writers where they get their ideas from. We all answer personally and we answer differently. But actually, the question is more about what constitutes inspiration. How a writer recognises inspiration. How a writer identifies useful thoughts as against those that will lead nowhere. Who – or what – a writer thanks for the ideas that continue to come.
For most writers, inspiration does not always identify itself at the time. Most of us squirrel things away, ready to bring them out when the time is right. Now, writing in my middle age, thoughts and events and people from all parts of my life, are taking shape in my mind. I was not aware that I had gathered material as I went. It's unconscious, not deliberate. But I'm discovering that memories jostle and vie for position. They want to be picked.
When you read, you should avoid the temptation to skip sections that appear 'irrelevant'! Because there should – should, you note – be nothing in a book that does not matter. Even the most tangential sentences or scenes could contain a clue that illuminates the author's entire purpose.
My grandfather – Charles Herbert Mosse - was the vicar of Aldwick from 1931 until his retirement in 1959, the first vicar of the new parish which was agreed in 1930s. He and his family provided some of the land and, to start with, he held services in a large tin hut in the next door village, Rose Green. Subject to diocesan approval, the design and construction of the new church was up to my grandfather. It still stands there today, now surrounded by houses, roads and shops. Then, the church was in the middle of fields and country house estates. Grandfather bought land intending to build a church hall next to St Richard's itself. In 1971, when I was nine and the year after Grandfather's death, I can remember a family event to open the Mosse Memorial Hall 1971. In the local newspaper cutting, I can see myself surrounded by adults. I had a muff and a cape (yes, really).
After, I think, a few speeches and anecdotes about Grandfather and smiles for the photographer, we crossed the road to the Vicarage. Tea for the grown-ups, I'm guessing. But I remember that I was allowed to munch my way through a whole Parma violet necklace. Sickly, white, mauve, yellow and purple disc-shaped sweets on a string, it was quite something to eat a whole necklace in one sitting. Did I, though? Am I putting a gloss of narrative on top of a memory that's less secure than I thought? Does it matter, whether it is absolutely true or whether – in attempting to capture the essence of the moment – I am bending and shaping memory to suit the story?
I've always assumed – possibly quite unfairly – that my grandfather did not do much vicaring beyond the demands of Sunday and other services. Because while he was there he researched and wrote up a full family tree in 1955, tracing the Mosse family back as far the mid-13th century. These were there days before the DIY online genealogy, before libraries had computers. It was all a matter of looking at parish registers. Writing to other Mosses who had an 'e' on the end of their name. I imagine beautiful thick notepaper, sweeping clear handwriting, the formality and courtesy of the entre deux guerres generation. Putting together a jigsaw that was, so far as it could be, accurate.
From these half-overheard family stories, three themes recurred most often:
First, that it was always claimed within our bit of the family, that the name Mosse derived from a village in northern France and that we had originally been 'de' Mosse. As in, of the village of Mosse …
Second, that in the Westmoreland Assize Roll of 1256, there was a record of John, son of William de Mosse, who was beheaded. The method of execution indicated that he was a gentleman, because if he'd been a commoner, he would have been hung …
And, third, that the family motto – as it appeared on our coat of arms and the thick, heavy gold signet ring my father never took off – translated as 'The Cross of Christ is Our Salvation' (Crux Christi Nobis Salus). There is a complex heraldic description of the coat of arms and a dry explanation of the joining of different family emblems to result in the coat of arms we still have today.
There is no explanation for the part of the story that interests me most – that the original right to bear arms was presented to a Phillip de Mosse by King Richard, Coeur de Lion, at the successful siege of Acre during the Third Crusade. It is true that the arms includes a griffin sitting on a tower.
These snatches of information – of family mythology - were constants and I understood, in some unarticulated way, that this told us something of who we thought we were. Shadows of ancestors, fading back through time, to a first point when the collective 'I' existed.
At various times during the past 25 years, I've looked at the book my grandfather compiled, but returned to it properly only as I started to research Labyrinth. I wanted to account for my interest in the crusades, identifying a potential explanation as being born out of a belief in the family mythology of my childhood. So, for the first time, I read the record as a researcher, hunting down clues and separating the Chinese whispers from the facts on the page.
What I discovered, of course, is that the stories were not quite how I remembered them. I can find no statement that the name comes from France. There's certainly no village on the map today that I can find called Mosse, although since village names come and go, the absence of proof means little. The beheaded ancestor is there, though, on page 1 of 'Early Beginnings'. His crime? Stealing sheep.
There is a rather emotionless and complicated description about the provenance of the Coat of Arms. There is nothing more than a hint – wishful thinking perhaps – of a link with Acre and the Third Crusade.
And of course, of everything, this is the one story that I do want to be mine. I feel a sense of ownership to a time of history that attracts me so much and, I suppose, I want a reason for feeling as I do.
I imagine I can taste the sand in the desert air, the smells of attack and otherness. I feel that these are experiences I can understand, despite having visited only Egypt and Tunisia, never the Holy Land itself. And when I am working on those sections of the novel set in the Holy Land, that touch on the crusades, I have in the most hidden part of my mind, a slither of fellow-feeling with this imagined possible ancestor of mine, long dead.
This is how stories are born. How the colours come to the dry old bones of an idea. A strange, winding journey, from a vicarage in Aldwick to the sands of Acre. But one well worth the waiting.
