Perhaps the most beguiling theory comes from the poet Stesichorus, writing in Sicily in the 6th century BC, who suggests that she very sensibly sent a body-double to Troy and sat the entire conflict out in Egypt. Then there is Lord Dunsany's 1938 fantasy which places Helen in Hell, where a disapproving chorus interrogates her and demands sarcastically "were you pleased?" Helen responds by listing all the woes attributed to her, from the fall of Troy and the death of Priam's sons to the greatest conflict ever waged "Pleased?" she repeats. If there was a single Trojan war, rather than a series of fires, earthquakes and other calamities that destroyed the Bronze Age city, it certainly did not involve 1,000 ships. Nor is there much evidence for the actual existence of some of the best-known players in the drama, including the Trojan King Priam's second son, Paris, whose seduction, abduction or rape of the Spartan queen, Helen, was supposedly the cause of the conflict. This does not necessarily matter, for the idea of Helen has inspired so many writers and artists that there is a superabundance of material for an author to get her teeth into.
Apart from the most obvious source, Homer, Helen has attracted the attention of everyone from Athenian dramatists (Euripides' Helen, and a lost play by Sophocles entitled Helenes Apaitesis or The Request for Helen) to Rupert Brooke, whose anti-heroic poem "Menelaus and Helen" imagines the abducted queen back in the arms of her rightful husband, Menelaus, and the couple growing old miserably together in his palace at Mycenae.Such a weight of mythological misery has been heaped on Helen's shoulders that it is a relief to encounter anything that portrays her in an ironic light. It appears in Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, written more than 2,500 years after the Trojan war, if we assume that conflict to have been a real event. Historians date the war to around 1184BC, in a century in which the archaeological record reveals a series of disasters at the site of Troy in western Anatolia, which is now part of Turkey. This wider history may lack the intensity of the private story, but Simpson's reporter's eye invariably fixes on some telling detail to save it from banality in an unusual and thoughtful book.Tony Gould's latest book is 'Don't Fence Me In' (Bloomsbury). The most famous remark about Helen of Troy - that hers was "the face that launched a thousand ships" - does not come from the ancient world. The title reflects its artful structure, by which Simpson focuses on a single day in each year between 1943 (when his parents met and married, and he was conceived) and 1951 (when they split up and he had to choose between them).It is simultaneously a personal memoir and an impressionistic history of Britain at the point at which she lost an empire and much great-power status, though this would not become fully apparent for several years.
Simpson's account of how the First World War destroyed his great-uncle Harold is particularly poignant, but it is only one of many vivid vignettes and character studies of eccentric relatives. It cannot have helped that in the aftermath of the Second World War, Roy Simpson could get work only as an ill-paid door-to-door salesman. This was a big comedown, because his grandfather's firm had literally built most of the London suburb of Norwood. Eventually, Roy would make good, long after his marriage had failed.Days from a Different World contains a rich seam of family history, mainly on his father's side. All his mother ever seems to have said about him was that he was "impossible". He did have a half-brother and a half-sister as his mother, considerably older than his father, had been married before and widowed. But the children were rarely together and Johnny's early years were marked by loneliness, compounded by being kept out of school (illegally) until his father could afford to place him in a suitable, fee-paying school.It is never entirely clear why his parents were so incompatible, though at one point Simpson concedes that his father may have been bisexual.
