You know when you put a casual question into the search engine and before you know it, three hours have passed by and you’ve learned a whole lot of things. you didn’t really need to know and probably have already forgotten? This is the world of online historical research. There’s a lot of it when writing a time-travel novel, and luckily it’s something I really enjoy.
In this instance, I was curious about the drinking habits of mid-eighteenth-century colonial Americans. Not alcoholic drinks specifically; mostly, since I was drinking a cup of tea at the time, I was idly wondering how the North Carolinans might have taken their tea. Short answer: they didn’t.
At that time everybody and their dog drank alcohol in some form throughout the day. There being no safe water to drink, it was considered healthy to imbibe enormous amounts of ale, cider, wine gin and mead. And that’s just a very small selection. To say the settlers were inventive is an understatement. They were able to create strongly fermented drinks out of just about anything they could find growing, and for good reason – three was little else available. Tea was an expensive luxury item at this time, and coffee had not yet reached the colonies. Not everyone had access to milk and those that did often used it for butter and cheese. The water was frequently infected by mosquito larvae and disease, and besides, all the medical professions proclaimed that alcohol would cure all your ailments!
Thus everyone, children included, drank alcohol in some form all day. Maybe ale or cider for breakfast, beer with your lunch, white wine with hops to invigorate you. You drank it, bathed in it, cleaned with it. And so I began to wonder, as a non-drinking person, what on earth would a time-traveller do if dropped into this environment where they were required to keep enormous secrets and furtively escape, if they were living in a state of unaccustomed intoxication?
“Cider. Good and strong and apple-y, with a faintly burnt taste. I would have loved this, at home, sitting in my back garden on a cold autumn afternoon. But now? For breakfast? My mind belatedly caught up with itself and I forced myself to swallow instead of choking.”
Luna, The Time-Traveller’s Retrieval Service, Book 2
Well it might be hard to keep a secret, for one thing. For another, you might be more likely to make all sorts of rash decisions that take you entirely off your preplanned escape route.
Historical research will offer me a dozen enticing rabbit holes to lose myself down, and I can never predict what kinds of fascinating information I’m going to find down there. The one thing that’s certain is that I will come away with five extra things that I didn’t know I needed – like shopping for bread when you’re hungry and coming home with a packet of marshmallows, five tins of sardines and yesterday’s paper. And that is why I cannot plan my books in advance.