"The little town of Ilfracombe changed almost overnight. 'The little town of Ilfracombe changed almost overnight.' Thus ended our first experience of the war. As for us, in obedience to orders, thereafter we kept a stirrup pump and buckets of sand and water in the hall to deal with incendiary bombs. Nerves were taut, and off went the sirens. It later turned out that a lone aircraft was detected coming into Croydon airport (or ‘aerodrome’ as they were known then) bringing some French military people to London for a conference. The whole nation was on tenterhooks, and the authorities were too. It transpired that the sirens had sounded everywhere (we were all going to get bombed at the same time!). "Now, of course, it all seems ridiculous. Mother prayed with us for his safety, and with gas masks at the ready, we awaited a visit from the mighty Luftwaffe.
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"Father was a Sergeant in the local Special Constabulary and so donned his uniform replete with steel helmet, and went off on duty. Remember this was early September we obviously had not bought in the winter coal supply. "The day war was declared… all our plans were thwarted, for the air raid siren sounded shortly afterwards, and remembering Stanley Baldwin’s dictum that ' The bomber will always get through' we made our way down to what was then regarded as the safest place in the house - the coal cellar under the stairs. His book criticism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and the American Conservative. He writes regularly for the National, the Washington Post, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. Steve Donoghue was a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly.
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In remarkable Author's Note, Downie mentions that although the incredible original site of the temple is no longer suitable for bathing, it's still possible to take the same waters the Romans took: the hot springs feed nearby spas that are very much open for business – even if Gaius Ruso isn't around to sleuth any boiled murder victims. And both sides think I must be a spy.”ĭownie unfolds the investigation at her customary smooth, deliberate pace, filling her pages with well-realized characters … the least obtrusive of which is the hot spring itself, which was the center of the city long, long before Jane Austen came along and made the whole place famous all over again. Some of Tilla's relatives seem to think I'm personally responsible for it. The natives still can't understand why the military are building Hadrian's bloody great wall across their farms. “My former employers in the military want to know why I've gone native. It's a dichotomy Ruso himself ruefully sums up at the start of Memento Mori: In the first book in the series, he's a medicus attached to the legions, but his marriage to a Briton is only one of the many factors pulling him in the opposite direction. Right from the beginning of Downie's wonderfully fine-grained and well-researched series, Ruso has often felt like a living embodiment of those tensions between native and conqueror.
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Naturally, Ruso agrees to travel to Aquae Sulis and do what he can to comfort his friend and investigate the death.
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Ordinarily, townspeople contented themselves with throwing small metal tablets containing curses into the hot waters of the spring the discovery of a body would be a catastrophic scandal as well as a tragedy and a crime. The town priests and politicians had built the temple around the spring and, in an attempt to ease frictions between the English and their Roman conquerors, had given it a hybrid name intended to honor both the Roman goddess and the local deity.
Ruth downie series#
Tragedy strikes close to home in Ruth Downie's new novel Memento Mori, the eighth in her series featuring medicus (think one part medical man and nine parts very skilled butcher) Gaius Ruso and his wife Tilla: the wife of Gaius' best friend, Valens, has been found murdered in the allegedly healing waters of the sacred hot spring in the town Aquae Sulis – modern-day Bath.