Chapter 1 Scene 6

Chapter 1 Scene 6 (V1.0)

The Gentlemen Rankers leave Deolali by airship.I don't suppose that there can be a steampunk story without an airship. In this scene I have mine. In the previous scene Kitchener mentions looking at the German positions from a balloon and this has confused some readers. He did this in 1870 not in 1914. He was a volunteer medic with the French army at the time. These Victorians certainly got around.

I expect that steampunk balloons owe much to Jules Verne's Phineus Fogg, shown rather splendidly in this pic. Actually he never used a balloon in the novel only in films based on the novel. But these are engraved in everyone's memories.

I want to include a pic of David Niven here - an actor who would truly have enjoyed a steampunk movie and the only one, as fas as I know)  to portray a gentleman ranker. (In the Guns of Naverone).

Chapter 1 Scene 5

Back to the Gentlemen Rankers in Deolali for this scene. I've already posted my pics of Kitchener and the ones I have of Deolali itself are not too good.  Here they are anyway, following the link to Google Drive/

Chapter 1 Scene 5 (V1.0)

 I expect that the description of Deolali in my story may not be all that accurate but I haven't been there and, anyway, when it comes down to it I choose story over fact every time - not to the extent it looks obviously wrong but if the reader can be carried past an inaccuracy without noticing, I'm not too worried.

There is a, limit to that though that applies especially to steampunk stories. When you change history because of the steampunk milieu you have adopted; you can't confuse those elements with errors of fact you make because you are too lazy to check facts. That is cheating the reader. The reader has, once you have established your world, to be able to make reasonable predictions as to how it works. Without this your story is built on quicksand..

Aside from all that I was please to see that George MacDonald Fraser - my writing hero - was once based at Deolali - but what British soldier passing in or out of the subcontinent was not?

Gwendolyn Darling

My Gwendolyn is, of course, the grown up Wendy from Peter Pan. (Actually, I don't think Wendy was short for anything in the original. In fact, as it happens, I don't think the name 'Wendy' existed before that. Some people say it comes from 'fwendy' - yuck, huh?)

 But the whole point about Wendy is that she grows up. Here is Maggie Smith as Wendy in Spielberg's Hook. I thought the movie was awful on many levels but not while she was in it. For the first half hour or so it was magic.


In Peter Pan Wendy can come across as insipid. There only to scream and be rescued. But that is not how I see her.

Traditionally (but not originally, the same actor plays both her rather ineffectual father and also the villainously scary Captain Hook who she meets in Neverland. In my story Gwendolyn's father is described as both a merchant and a pirate. I see him as having picked up the tastier commercial pieces of the East India Company after it was dissolved.

My personal favourite Captain Hook - Danny Kaye

And a very authentic looking one -  Jeremy Isaacs.  I can't leave out Peter Pan himself - or HERself as the case most often is.  The original was Nina Boucicault - I sould love to have seen her. The Pan I actually did see as a child was Julia Lockwood daughter of Margaret perhaps the most famous of the Scala Pans.

















Another view of Wendy/ I don't know whose. Still not quite my idea of Gwendolyn.

And the Wendy from a recent film - again not quite my Gwendolyn.






Meanwhile Wendy's rivals are relevant to my story. Here they are:

Tiger Lily - what more can a boy want in a playmate than a Red Indian princess. Might Wendy not feel a little drab by comparison?










Or Inkerbell, clearly a magical companion.








Probably it is even worse when Tinkerbell is played by Julia Roberts. So Wendy is assigned the mother role. It is she that has to grow up. I sometimes wonder how well writers like JM Barrie really understand the psychology of what they write.

In Finding Neverland, Kate Winslett is Wendy and mother. She is well on the way to being my Gwendolyn in looks if bot in adventure. I could use a younger version. And so - as if by magic - what about Kate Winslett in Titanic?

TA DAH!!!!! Well I think Gwendolyn looks like that.

But given as how she is my 'action woman', I want to add a bit of Sharon Stone - thus











Now we are getting somewhere. But enough of Gwendolyn for a while. The next post will get on with the story.

Chapter 1 Scene 4.2

This is the second half of the scene I posted last.

It is here:

Chapter 1 Scene 4.2

Several thoughts come to mind as I think about this scene

Here is Kensington Gardens, I suppose on a day not unlike the one I describe. I used to play there when I was a child - little realising what traditions I was following.









A pair of Edwardian ladies. I like to think of mine dressed like this, Typically though women wore clothes more severe.

The statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens is famous. His shadow is cast over my story a little.












For anyone who happens to read this who is not a Londoner, Kensington Gore is a real place. It is also, as it happens, slang for the fake blood used in the theatre.

Here is Kensington Gore dividing The Royal Albert Hall from the Gardens.

The traffic then though was nearly all horse drawn. (This is actually Brompton Road, not far from where my scene is set.

I don't suppose the real Albert Hall actually have an observatory in its roof. It should have though.

Here is a still from 'Finding Neverland'. It is Kate Winslett on a picnic in Kensington Gardens. This made me think a bit about the appearance of my Wendy.

Something I shall post about another time.

Chapter 1 Scene 4,1

This is the scene in which I introduce the ladies of the Kensington Gore Croquet Club.  I really enjoy writing them and they seemed to muscle their way into the story and elbow their way to centre stage. The trouble is, of course, that the story may get unbalanced. Another problem for the re-write, I guess.

Here the first half of the scene is on Google Drive

Chapter 1 Scene 4.1


I have already gone on about some of the background for Alice Lutwidge. I'll post something about the other ladies later on. In the meantime here are two thoughts.

 Bicycles were important to me.  I wanted to get them into the story. It only grew in my mind as I wrote (what everyone else knew already) that bicycles were an important symbol of Edwardian / late Victorian women's liberation. I mean literally liberating. Women could get around unescorted. Moreover it was a technological innovation that caused it. Both these themes are important to the story I am trying to write so they seemed to flow naturally.

This next thought it going to be a bit harder to explain.  Here goes. All the while I was creating the four ladies of the Kensington Gore a line from 'The Usual Suspects' was going through my head, It was the one that Kevin Spacey, as Roger Kint) says - something like.
'What the New York cops didn't know, and what I know now, is that these men would never lie down, they'd never give in, they'd never bend over for anyone.'
And strangely, that is how I saw the Ladies of the Kensington Gore Croquet Club from the moment they all pushed their way into my head. So all I have to do is to get that down in the writing :).

More about how I see the ladies in later posts.

The Goddess Kali

Chapter 1 Sc 3.2 also features a statue of the Goddess Kali, She doesn;t have a big role in it but I rather like these pics

Gentlemen Rankers Chapter 1 Scene 3.2

This is the second half of the scene in which I earlier introduced my gentlemen rankers. I've posted a bit about them recently and earlier I posted about General Kitchener.  This scene also features Mortimer Angel who features  a lot in he story. By contrast to most of my characters he is neither real nor an established fictional character from the turn of the century.  I'll confess now that I always have Lee Van Cleef in my mind when I am writing him.

Anyway here is the scene

Gentlemen Rankers - Ch 1 Sc 3.2