Behind The Spine: Episode 21 Transcript

Mudlarking: Relics of the River Thames with Lara Maiklem

Hi, I’m Mark Heywood. And this is Behind the Spine, a podcast which deconstructs genre and narrative and finds learning opportunities for writers in the most unlikely of places.

“The river is a moving thing. It takes people’s troubles and worries away. The moment it falls into the river, it disappears. For them, it disappears. They don’t think about the tides, and the foreshore, and the mudlarks.”

Mark: If you’ve ever found yourself rifling through that old dusty box in your attic reminiscing of the artefacts inside, you’ll know that stories are made up of more than words. Holding that favourite toy, taking in the sights and smells, can spark a childhood memory. In that moment in time, that story paints itself like a picture in your mind, clear as day. The thing might be inanimate. Every object has life locked within it. Just like us, they have a past. They may have lived through momentous occasions. They may have seen unbelievable things.

We often assign human characteristics to objects, imagining a depth beyond what we know is reasonable. It’s why we can so easily understand unlikely relationships with objects, like the one Tom Hanks has with his ball Wilson in Castaway. It’s also why we connect so well with films like Toy Story. We care so much about the things that adorn our lives, we’re desperate to believe there’s more to them than meets the eye. And maybe, just maybe, we’re right to believe that. Our guest today is Lara Maiklem. She knows better than most that objects are storytellers. Her book, Mudlarking, paints a picture of the history of the River Thames through the items she’s recovered from its shores.

Chapter 1: The Great Time Capsule

Walking along the creaky floorboards of an old abandoned house, or traipsing through a graveyard on a dark misty night. It’s moments like these that convince us that places have their own souls. That they hold memories, and maybe even the spirits of the people who once called them home. And for Lara, the ghosts of the past are only ever a low tide away. But the history of the river isn’t the only thing that fascinates Lara. In her book, she delves into the intriguing history of her ancestors, who also happened to be river lovers.

Lara: The Maiklems are on my dad’s side and they’re definitely land people, because they’re all farmers for… incredibly boring, it goes back forever, and ever, and ever. It’s my mum’s side that were river people, and have always lived near rivers. My dad’s side was the miscreant who was held on the prison hulk that I discovered… that my mother thought was fantastic, because she doesn’t think a great deal of my dad’s side of the family!

Mark: You dived quite deep into the archives to dig up all the family past! Were you surprised by what you discovered?

Lara: I was, yes. Well, I mean, the prison hulks are fascinating places. I started reading about them, and I hadn’t realised that they were on the river fairly central. Woolwich was where they held them, because back then Woolwich was just marshes. If anyone escaped, there was nowhere for them to go. And so they had these prison hulks at Woolwich, and I was reading about them, and I thought, “I wonder if I’ve got any relatives.” The records that they get were so precise, incredible, down to the last freckle on their faces, and the height, and whether they had a low brow, and a cunning look.

And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I was actually related?” I could read about someone from the past who was related to me, and find out all this information about them. And I’ve got this strange name, Maiklem. I’m related to every… for better or worse, but to every Maiklem in the world somehow. So if I Google that name, I know that at some point I’ve been related to them or I am related to them.

And there was Robert Maiklem, sitting on the prison hulk and in 1840 in Woolwich waiting to be transported to Tasmania for fraud. He left his wife and two children up in Scotland, and he was sent off to Tasmania. And I managed to follow and track him to Tasmania. He survived the journey, which was hellish in itself. He survived the prison hulks, for a start. And he served out his sentence in Tasmania, and he married someone very young actually. I lost track. But then through my Facebook page, people from Tasmania have got in touch with me and said, “Did you know? We found out all this information about him, and apparently he went bankrupt three more times.”

He ended up having to go back in prison for another six months for debts, and he really didn’t make that much. I was very excited because I thought, “Oh, he served out his prison sentence. He got married. It was a happy ever after story.” And no, he was just a ne’er-do-well who ended up in prison again in Tasmania. And he didn’t have any children. There’s no one. There are Maiklems in Tasmania. There were some in Australia, I know that. But he didn’t manage to leave anyone behind. But yes, he was a ne’er-do-well.

Mark: I think every family has a Robert Maiklem in it, doesn’t it?

Lara: I think every family has got one, actually.

Mark: The book is extraordinary in the sense that it’s not just a book about objects that you have discovered. It’s a real history and geography lesson, and it has made me think about the river differently. In particular, the fact that there’s so much history buried under it, whether it be things that you yourself have found, or other mudlarks. But also things like not a six month period goes by without another unexploded World War II bomb being discovered somewhere. There’s treasure under the water, isn’t there? How did you first get into being a mudlark?

Lara: I was one of those children who was always looking down and picking… I was always in trouble for picking things up off the street. “Put it down! It’s dirty.” And I was always looking down. I was always sort of finding things and looking for things. I grew up in the countryside on a farm, and I spent a lot of time… I like my own company. I love my own company. I like solitude. But I also had a draw to the city. I wanted to go there and enjoy the bright lights of London. After university, I found myself in London searching for somewhere quiet to go. I was loving that busy side of it, but I needed to offset it with some peace and some solitude.

I went to the parks, and Hampstead Heath, and all the big parks. We’re very lucky we’ve got some great parks and great open spaces. But they just didn’t give me what I wanted. They weren’t wild enough. There were too many people there. One day I found myself down on the river, and I realised that actually people didn’t really go to the river. They go to a lot more now, but back then Bankside wasn’t developed, and people didn’t really go down to the river, and it was this kind of wild… I found this wild streak, this piece of nature running straight through the middle of the city that was just remarkable. So I started going back, and you can walk for miles along the river paths. And for years, that’s what I did. I went down there just to get away from everyone, and everybody, and everything, and to walk for miles along the river. One day I found myself at the top of this rickety set of river stairs, and it was low tide. It occurred to me that I could actually go down there. Because for some reason, people who live in London don’t really think about going down onto the foreshore. It’s a kind of forbidden space. You’re not allowed to, or it’s too dangerous, or some people don’t even realise it’s tidal and you can.

And I thought, “Well, there’s absolutely nothing stopping me from going down.” I went down, and I found a clay pipe stem. And I’d found this before in the fields after they ploughed them up, and in the garden beds near the house where people who’ve lived in the house have thrown out their rubbish, so I knew exactly what it was — and it made sense that there was more down there. And so I went back. And every time I went back, I found something different. And it gets addictive. And pretty soon I was going back regularly, and that’s really how it started. It was quite organic, my sort of discovery of the foreshore.

Mark: Reading the book makes you think about the city differently, and what the city used to be, what it is now. If you look at old photographs of the foreshore, it’s completely different, as you say. And sometimes you see a trailer from a film, and they’re on a boat and you go, “Oh my God. Look at that. It looks so different now. It’s so heavily built up.” But some of the spots along the river, I have a particular fondness for the Wapping chapter on the basis that that’s where I live.

The pubs that you reference drip with history, and you can imagine pirates, and bandits, and smugglers, and all kinds of ne’er-do-wells hunkering down over pints of ale. But the river was, and still is to a certain extent, a very busy working river that would take goods from all over the world. You get a real sense of that from reading the book. When you step onto the foreshore, is that something that you’re conscious of as you’re looking for objects that want to reveal themselves?

Lara: Very much so. I mean, London’s only there because of the river. Funnily enough, during lockdown it’s probably been quieter than it’s ever been. I mean, there was nothing on the river. And the whole reason for London being there was for trade, so it’s always been a really busy place. A lot of the foreshore is… when you’re standing on it, you realise you’re standing on manmade objects. It’s made up of human-made detritus. So there’s bricks, and roof tiles, and pottery, and glass. And when you look carefully, it’s all rubbish.

Once you’re standing on it, yes, you do. You hear the voices. It’s a very busy place. It gives off this kind of essence of history. If you could touch history, laying your hand on the foreshore would be touching history. It really does speak to you. It’s a magical place. It is quite hard to explain without actually going there, but I try my best in the book to describe it. And it’s a very, especially at night, you feel the ghosts rising up out of the foreshore. It’s not a lonely place at all, because there’s so much there. There’s so much energy left in the foreshore from all these thousands of years of activity.

Mark: It has been fascinating to watch the river be so empty. You’re absolutely right. And as a tidal river and a working river, there’s been hardly any freight, hardly any riverboat taxis for want of a better word, the cruises that go up and down, no pleasure cruises, no nothing. And it’s fascinating just to watch this river exist, probably for the first time in centuries, without anything being on it. It was quite a privilege, actually, to see it. I don’t think people realise how tidal the river actually is. Sometimes, the height of the river, the changes are extraordinary, aren’t they, in terms of how fast it moves, or when the tide is out. It’s probably somewhere in the region of, where we are here, anything between 10 and 20 feet of difference when the tide goes out. And when it does go out, it does reveal, as you say, this landscape that’s not normally visible. It’s fascinating. Do you obsessively check tidal timings so that you can rush down to the foreshore at any given moment?

Lara: I’m obsessed with tides. In fact, there’s a whole part of the book that’s dedicated to tides, because I had to learn about them. I didn’t know a great deal about them, but once you start to read about them, they’re fascinating. They change time every day. There’s usually two every 24 hours, sometimes there’s only one, and they vary. Sometimes they go way out — you’ve probably seen it — if there’s a good wind blowing it out to the east. So the weather changes as well, if it’s raining upstream, it won’t go out so far.

If it hasn’t been raining and it’s blowing a gale and it’s a very low, spring Equinox tide, they’re the ones you’re looking for because the tide will go out so far, to reveal parts of the foreshore that haven’t been searched for sometimes months, months. And so they’re really special tides, but people think about the river as that little wiggly bit that goes through central London, but it starts at Teddington in the west. And by the time it ends out at the estuary, it’s a completely different place. So the tides out in the estuary are much faster and much more frightening than the ones in town. So it is a beast of many parts, the river.

Mark: And you described it in the book as being, I think it’s something like almost one of the world’s largest archaeological sites, which sounds bizarre. I don’t think people would have necessarily thought of a river being an archaeological site in that way, but it is, isn’t it, from what you’ve discovered?

Lara: It is. I got into a little bit of trouble calling it the largest archaeological site, so I changed it to longest archaeological site. But yes, it is. There’s nowhere else in the world like the Thames. People say to me, “Oh, do people mudlark on the Seine, or the Danube, or the Tiber?” And I don’t really mudlark anywhere else. There are places where people go, but there’s nothing like the Thames, because in central London, there’s 2,000 years of intense human activity poured into the river there, and it’s got the tides. The Seine isn’t tidal. If it was tidal, you’d be finding the most incredible things, but you can’t get down onto it. So the beauty of the Thames is that it lets you down to search its foreshore.

Chapter 2: Part of a Stranger’s Story

When we speak about relics from the past, of digging through that old dusty cardboard box of mementos, we’re often only considering the happy memories attached to objects — but there are also many items in our lives that bring back painful memories, that have uncomfortable stories. And the chances are these aren’t the objects you’re choosing to tuck away for safekeeping. No, for those objects, the sunken depths of the riverbed can be a far better home. So alongside the charm of mudlarking, trips to the river can also be unsettling.

Lara: When you find something on the foreshore, you’re very aware that the moment you pick it up, you are interacting with its story, or you become part of its story. And you’re the first person to touch it since the original owner dropped it, or lost it. And so the moment you touch it, you’re almost breaking that stretch of time. And you’re then adding to its story, and it becomes very personal, and some things you pick up and they just feel like they have a past. And people go to the river, and they still do, they go to the river, and always have, to get rid of things they don’t want, whether it’s rubbish that they don’t want, or whether it’s things that are very personal and painful to them. So mudlarks find a lot of love tokens, and we find the bent sixpences from the 17th, 18th century that were fashionable then to give people, and rings and all sorts of things. And we find modern things as well.

People are still going down to the river, and it can feel very intrusive, sometimes, on a low tide, when you find maybe a torn-up photograph or a love letter or wedding rings and engagement rings. People throw their wedding rings, engagement rings in because the river’s a moving thing, it takes people’s troubles and worries away. The moment it falls into the river, it disappears. For them, it disappears. They don’t think about the tides and the foreshore and the mudlarks.

There was one thing in particular that I did find, and it was a wedding ring. It was a gold wedding ring, really, really simple. And it had a date and initials on the inside. And I think it was the date and the initials that made it so personal, and so painful, that I thought, “What am I going to do with it? I don’t need this ring. I’m not going to wear it.” And I couldn’t sell it. It was put in there for a reason; someone was very unhappy, and that’s where it belongs. And I threw it back in.

And there were other things. I found a box of human ashes, that was a very uncomfortable thing to find, it still had someone’s name on it. They hadn’t opened it up and scattered them. They’d thrown the whole thing in, and it had washed up. And so I have seized this great moral dilemma. What do I do? I can’t leave this person lying in the rubbish here, but it’s not for me to open it up and scatter them. Maybe the person who threw it in hated that person so much, they wanted them encased in plastic for all eternity. And so I eventually just dropped it back into the river and it floated off under Tower Bridge, but it will have washed up somewhere else. But you find the most incredible things. Messages in bottles. Sometimes they can be very, very personal as well. People seal their demons up inside these bottles and throw them into the river. So, yes, so it’s full of very personal things and, and they do, even the very old things do give off a very personal essence.

Mark: The message in a bottle statement is fascinating, because the traditional view that we have of those is that it’s a joy when one of those washes up somewhere on the other side of the world, and you realise it’s been in the ocean for 250 years, and some kid finds it and it becomes part of their history project. But typically those messages are, at least this is the narrative I understand, those messages are of hope or just wanting to see what happens to this particular bottle. But people will literally pour their inner demons in written form onto a message that they put into the bottle, and then almost, are they trying to then banish those demons by letting the bottle go? Is that what you get the sense they’re doing?

Lara: I think so. Most of the messages, and you do find quite a lot out in the estuary, that’s where they wash up, with all the other bottles. Most of them are written by children and they’re just a bit of fun, but I have found the odd couple that were really so personal. People in very unhappy relationships, someone had lost someone that they loved, and it was almost like a therapy for them, I suppose, to write it down and cast it off. I got that sense. So those ones, I put them back in and left them for the river, where they were meant to be.

Mark: Whenever there’s a construction project in the city, there are typically teams of archaeologists who will follow the construction work round, because they will always, inevitably, uncover some kind of either Roman burial mound or some kind of Neolithic… whatever it might be. Is there a group that does that for the river? Do mudlarks have a responsibility to report what they find to a particular authority, or is that fairly anonymous?

Lara: Well, you need a permit to mudlark, and the permit comes from the Port of London authority. Now, the Port of London authority, they administer all of the tidal Thames and they basically own the foreshore. So whatever you find in the foreshore belongs to them, it doesn’t belong to you. They’re very, very generous, and they let us keep most of our things.

Under the terms of our permit, we have to report anything of historic interest over 300 years old to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which is this amazing project run by the British Museum that is currently recording all the objects that are found in fields and beaches and rivers. And so many people are metal detecting now, it’s gone bananas. So they’re trying to record what’s being found, so there’s a record of it. And so you have to record anything of importance. If you find anything that qualifies as treasure, gold or silver over 300 years old, that’s very simply put, then you legally have to report it, and it goes through the coroner and that whole process.

So yes, apart from that, you have a moral responsibility to report what you’re finding. Like I say, it doesn’t belong to you. It’s private property, it belongs to someone else, and it’s a shared history. It needs to be recorded and it needs to be reported. So just to pick things up, stick them in your back pocket and put them on eBay, it’s so wrong. It’s so the wrong thing, as soon as it goes on eBay, it’s lost its provenance. It could come from anywhere, it’s meaningless. It’s a meaningless object. So yes, you have a legal responsibility, and you have a moral responsibility to report what’s found.

Mark: It’s fascinating. I’ve always been struck by the extent to which morals and ethics are so deeply personal and private. And they’re the kinds of things that we do when no one’s looking. The fact that there is almost an unwritten ethical code that goes with this is fascinating. You mentioned that you’re a very solitary person, you love your own company. Are mudlarks naturally drawn to each other? If you come across another mudlark on a particular stretch of the river, do you interact or do you stay a respectful, competitive distance away?

Lara: I suppose there is a sort of unwritten code that you give each other space. You say hello and you’re polite, but you give each other space because you have this limited window, you only have a few hours on the tide to search so you don’t want to waste time talking to people; you’re there to search. You’ll have a sort of quick chat with people and you’ll see people you know and wave to them. But in general, people tend to keep to themselves. Most people go down to the river for peace and solitude, it’s not really somewhere you go to meet up with people to chat because you’re there for another reason. So if you see someone mudlarking, you don’t go and stand next to them and mudlark on their spot either — that’s just an absolute no-no. You give them space and give them distance and leave them to their patch that they’re looking at.

Mark: There isn’t the Las Vegas lurker equivalent of somebody following you around the slot machines, waiting to pounce on the jackpot at any moment?

Lara: You do get people watching where you are, and I’ve been looking and you see people scooting in after you to have a look and see what you’ve been looking at, “What’s she missed? What’s she looking at?”

Mark: One of the things I was also conscious of is that you’re actually giving away a lot of information about mudlarking and about sites and where you found certain things. As I understand it, that hasn’t been altogether entirely popular with certain parts of the mudlark community, who have a perfect right to their opinion. But for some people, this is a deeply unpopular and unsatisfactory book. Is that fair?

Lara: Yes, it has been criticised by a very small handful of mudlarks that have been used to having the foreshore to themselves. As I say, it’s a shared history. I think most of the people who read my book, the majority of the people who read my book, will never go down onto the foreshore. They either live too far away, they’re physically unable to go down, or they don’t want to get muddy, so they’re quite happy mudlarking vicariously. For other people, yes, it has opened it up, but the development of Bankside opened it up because when I first started, there was nobody over there. Now you get, not at the moment, but on an average summer’s day, it’s absolutely rammed there, and they’ll see people down on the foreshore and go down and see what they’re doing and join in.

So I was seeing that happen more and more and I thought, “Well, if people are going to start mudlarking, then let’s give them the information so that they can do it responsibly, and so that they know what they’re doing, and so that they know that they should be reporting these objects, and they shouldn’t be digging and scraping in this area or mudlarking in that area.” And I’ve made all of that very, very clear in the book, all the regulations. The people who disagree with my book, as I say, are the people who have had the foreshore as their, pretty much, private playground for a long time and they are not happy about other people enjoying it now.

Mark: And that’s not a uniquely mudlarking phenomenon, is it? We have discussed things like magic, there can be a very similar set of reactions if you try and explain how a magic trick works, certain parts of the Magic Circle will not want that. I think maybe that’s a natural human reaction when you have something that’s relatively private that not many people necessarily know about. You don’t necessarily want it becoming a mainstream activity, because it perhaps then loses something for you as an individual.

I think it’s interesting to reflect on the reaction in two ways. One, I can understand where they’re coming from. But two, it’s such an inoffensive activity, that to provoke a reaction like that would seem to be out of kilter with what it is you’re actually trying to do. You’re simply trying to see what the river has produced for you to look at. And sometimes you can take that and do something with it, sometimes you put it back. You’re not damaging the river, you’re not damaging the past, you’re being respectful, you’re being safe. So for it to produce a reaction like that does seem to be quite odd.

Lara: It does. I’m not a metal detectorist, but I know metal detectorists, and I think there’s very much, if you’ve seen the television series The Detectorists, it is like that. I think that’s sort of the chance of finding treasure, the chance of finding this amazing object also brings something else out in people. So they feel that their toes are being trodden on, or that they somehow their chances are being limited of finding these objects. It’s almost like a sort of, I call it the Gollum syndrome. They want to be the ones to find it, they don’t want loads of other people down there finding. But most people who go down, who read my book, they’ll go down once or twice and they really won’t find much because it takes years of practice to start finding the good stuff. But they’ll have a great day out, and they’ll learn a bit about London history, and they’ll get to hands on touch these things. If you don’t pick these things up off the foreshore, very often they’re gone in the next tide. So they’re picking up things that would otherwise wash away.

Yes, I don’t know… people are funny, aren’t they? Human beings. All of these people who have criticised my book started mudlarking themselves once, didn’t they? How did they find out about it? How did they get the knowledge that they’ve got? It’s a bit like being impatient with a learner driver; everybody was there once. Let people enjoy it. Let people enjoy it. It’s harmless.

Chapter 3: Ordinary People

Unlike the flowing water of the Thames, time and space sit still on the river. When you visit its shores, you never know what you’re going to find, or what century it will be from. But you can be certain that the history the river tells us is a truthful one, unfiltered and real. Laura began her foray into mudlarking as a form of escapism. But through the items she’s seen and collected, she’s become entangled in so many people’s stories across the ages.

Lara: I used the river predominantly to get away from everyday life, to get away from my boring job and my failing relationships, and later on to get away from the screaming kids and deadlines. It was my go to place just to get away from all of that. I began a Facebook page in 2012 just to share, I really wanted to share what I was finding because I didn’t see the point in picking these things up and putting them in a drawer and forgetting about them. I wanted other people to see them and to share in this magical place. I didn’t expect it to become as popular as it did. I did it for four years, completely anonymously. I invented this name, London Mudlark, and I never posted a picture of myself, nobody knew who I was unless they knew me. So I was completely anonymous until I was contacted by an agent who asked if I was interested in writing a book.

Now, I work in publishing, and I know far too much about writing books, and the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into them. I was never a frustrated author, I was happy editing other people’s work, and I had to think very hard about whether I wanted to do that because it meant coming out, it meant sort of people finding out who I was. In the end, I agreed. I thought, “Okay, I’ll write a book. I’ll give it a go.” I wrote a proposal, and it was sent off to various publishers, and it was quite popular. So it meant I had to tell people who I was, and that was really hard actually because I enjoyed being anonymous. I really enjoyed the anonymity of it. I was the only person at the time posting mudlarking stuff online.

Now, there’s hundreds of people doing it, but I was the only person then. It was just really nice doing it. And it has changed all of that. I think I preferred how it was before, when it was just me posting anonymously. It’s got quite competitive now. I think people are out there trying to find something to put on the internet now, which it was never like that. In that respect it’s changed. But no, I could never have foreseen the way it’s… I thought I’d write a book and a few people might read it, I never thought it would be as popular as it has been.

Mark: And that is credit to you firstly, but also I think what you’ve tapped into is our innate desire to either find treasure or to reconnect with the past, or to just feel as if we are part of something that we weren’t half an hour before. And as you say, if you’d have come back half an hour later, that object may have gone forever and never been found. So I think there’s something in us all, and for the writers who listen, I think they’re going to get a huge amount from this, because it’s the connection of history and geography and weather and the past that just tells its own story. It’s as if these are objects that belong to characters we may never know anything about, and there’s something deeply personal with that. So I think if you’ve tapped into anything other than general interest in the subject matter, it’s for some reason we are innately curious as human beings, and we want to find things that we can have some form of connection with. Even if it may be, just as you said, an old bent penny or a George III shilling or something like that, that is part of our past, isn’t it?

Lara: It is. We’re living through strange times, and I think we have been for several years, and I think the book has possibly come along at just the right time, when people are maybe feeling a bit insecure. The past and history gives me great comfort, because people have been there, but everyone’s done this before. This is nothing new. People have lived through worse. And looking back on the past gives me great sense of hope and comfort.

And I don’t know whether other people feel that too, or whether this book is just a very simple… it’s very simple. It’s, “Go out and look around you.” There’s so much to see. It’s not just the pieces of the past, it’s the nature and it’s the weather and it’s the tides. And it’s, just take time out from this crazy, mad world that really is spinning out of control at the moment, just to be, just to exist in what’s here now. And maybe look back into the past for some kind of a reference, something that might help tie you down.

Mark: It was a Christmas present that my sister-in-law gave to me. And I’m sure she won’t mind me saying, but I’ve never seen her more excited at giving me anything, ever. She said, “I think you’re going to love this book.” And I did. And I knew exactly what she meant when I read it, and not just because of where I live, but just because of what it says about the world, and what we’re living through, and what we have lived through, and the fact that I’m a massive history fan. It’s my undergraduate degree.

The first time I got hooked on history was when a history teacher, way back when, said to me, “The thing about history, Mark, is that the further backwards you look, the further forwards you can see.” And as a kid, that blew my mind. I was like, “Oh, wow.” And I get that sense that you share that, because when you are looking at an object that could be centuries old — it could even be two years old, it doesn’t matter — but it’s connecting you with something that has gone forever and now only exists in the form of an object. Does that resonate with you?

Lara: Absolutely. I mean, the objects I find belong to long-forgotten London. It’s the people who made London, the real Londoners, not all these mainly men who ended up on statues and in books. These are just ordinary people and ordinary loved possessions that they had, they might have scratched their initials into. Maybe it got broken and they threw it away.

And so long as you know what that object is, you can make up anything about it. Nobody knows how it got there. Nobody knows who it once belonged to. You can make up anything, and every object has a hundred stories or more to tell. You’ll never know exactly how that bodkin got bent, who S.E., the person who wrote her initials on it, was. And it just conjures up all these incredible visions of the past.

And it is, like I say, the foreshore is the closest thing to a time machine. It is like reaching back, physically, with your hand, through the past and touching history. And it’s magical. I hated history at school. I really hated it, because for me it was all dates and battles and kings and queens. I wasn’t remotely interested in them. I grew to love history later in life, just through living. I lived in a very old farmhouse. And just touching the walls, you could feel the history, and you could feel all the lives that have been lived. And to me, that’s history, not the history that’s been written in the history books.

Mark: You get a very powerful sense of our senses through the book. Particularly, I love the touch of certain objects, but sometimes there’s a smell, isn’t there, about something, that you go, “Wow, I’m smelling the past here.” And as you make your way down through cobbled streets and narrow alleyways onto those half rotten or maybe fully rotten sets of wooden stairs that take you down, you can smell it. And I’ve not been there, but from reading the book I could smell that same scent. So when you walk through it, your senses are all heightened, aren’t they, as you come closer to the past.

Lara: You are, yes. I mean, the past does have a smell, doesn’t it? If you ask someone to describe the smell of the past, it would be that kind of… if it’s the smell of the river, it would be that kind of algae and the wet wood, and there’s some rotting bits of leaves. And the river is incredible because every time I go it smells different. It depends what’s gone into it, for a start. It depends on the weather. It smells according to what’s… it’s just a living creature, and it has smells. And the smells are so important. They’re so evocative.

Then the most recent smell I have discovered, is if you find the clay pipes and when you clean them out, and I discovered this years and years ago, when you clean them out, you find the bits of old tobacco at the bottom very often. And if you can collect together enough, you can actually burn it and you can smell 300-year-old tobacco. And that’s amazing to think that that was… so you can do all these weird and wonderful… I spend hours doing really stupid things like that, but all these weird and wonderful experiments and things. Finding a bottle and it’s still got something inside and you’re thinking, “Ooh, what is that? Is it dangerous? What could it be? What was it?” And there’s this sort of little bit of white sludge in the bottom.

Mark: Well, on that, very recently during lockdown, my wife was clearing out boxes, you know the sort of boxes that you only ever get to in lockdown. She opened a bunch of them and inside were two beautiful pewter hip flasks for female. And it was clear. She said, “Oh, I remember this, this belonged to my mum’s mum.” And I said, “Oh, open it.” And she opened it. She said, “Oh, there’s liquid in it.” And it was perhaps the most blissful afternoon of sipping this decades-old nectar of Scotch or whatever it was that was in it. And it was so interesting, because we sat and we talked about her, we talked about where she may have got this from. And that connection, I will never forget how good that thing tasted. So maybe 300-year-old tobacco would have been a great accompaniment to that! Lara Maiklem, thank you very much. The book is a triumph. Many congratulations and thanks for being such a great guest.

Lara: Thank you very much.

Conclusion

A massive thank you, then, to Lara Maiklem for joining me on the podcast. To recap, what have we learned?

Objects are storytellers. Think about how they can sit as characters in their own right, and how you can elevate their status in your story. Because the truth is, humans often love things and stuff just as much as we love other people, if not more. From engraved wedding rings to an urn containing human ashes, some of the items Lara has found have deeply personal and perhaps dark pasts. When she throws them back, imagine if your character would try to uncover that object’s history as the plot takes them on a dark and twisted journey of discovery.

And finally, in life, you’ll always have people who disagree with what you’ve done. And it may make you question whether you are correct to write what you did, but stick to your guns. The vocal minority is just that: a minority. And it shouldn’t dissuade you from writing what you feel needs to be heard.

Thanks for listening. I’m Mark Heywood. And if you’d like to get in touch, we’re on Twitter and Facebook as @BehindTheSpine. New episodes are released weekly. Please like us and review us on Apple Podcasts. It really does help.

Up next week, we’ll be in conversation with the lovely Debbie McGee.

“Magic is so complex. And so what the assistant is doing or where she’s looking is so important.”

Goodbye for now. Stay safe, and keep writing.

To listen to this episode of the podcast, visit the link below: www.behindthespine.podbean.com/e/lara-maiklem