History happened to people who did not know how it ended

Somebody wrote in to ask, politely, why my chapters keep opening at the market stall when the events everyone remembers were being decided in a room across town. Where are the treaties, the speeches, the maps with the arrows on them. Fair question. Here is my honest answer.

The people who lived through the decade did not know it was going to be a decade anyone remembered. They knew what a loaf cost that morning. They knew the queue at the baker's was longer than it had been in spring, and that the man three places ahead had started bringing a folding stool. They knew a rumour was going round about the price of coal, and that the rumour had reached them faster than any official word, and that it turned out, as rumours often do, to be half right in a way that mattered.

That is the texture I keep going back to, because that is the texture they actually stood in.

A treaty is a headline. A queue is a life.

When I read the room-across-town version, the one with the arrows, I always feel the same small dishonesty creeping in. It makes the outcome look inevitable. Of course it went that way, you think, look at the arrows. But nobody standing in the bread queue could see the arrows. They could see the weather, and the price, and the face of the person behind the counter, and they made their small decisions in the dark, the way we all do. The history that interests me is the history made by people who could not read the last page.

I have a long list of footnotes I am never going to use. Most of them are prices. What a cart cost to hire for a day. What you paid a boy to carry a message across a city before there was a faster way to send one. What a widow got for a week of sewing. None of it will fit in a chapter, and I cannot throw any of it away, because taken together it is the closest thing I have to standing in the street beside them.

People sometimes tell me this is the small stuff, and that the big stuff is elsewhere. I have come to think it is the other way round. The treaty is the small stuff. It is one afternoon, a few signatures, a decision by a handful of people who will be comfortable whatever happens next. The price of bread is the big stuff. It reaches into every kitchen in the country at once. It decides what a family eats and what they go without and what the children remember years later without quite knowing why.

So that is why the market, and not the palace. Not because the palace does not matter, but because the palace has enough biographers already. The queue has almost none. And when I read the queue closely enough, the palace tends to turn up anyway, a few pages later, usually in the form of a new tax nobody at the stall asked for.

Ask me what a century felt like and I will not describe the century. I will describe a Tuesday. It is the only honest scale I have.