Aphra Behn, Writer and Spy

There's really not a lot concretely known about the life of Aphra Behn, who, in addition to being a spy, was a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator, and the first woman in English literature known to have made her living as a writer.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Trying. Today's podcast
is a request from many listeners once again, and they

(00:22):
include Georgia, Bree, Laura, Anna, Lauren, and Tabitha, who asked
for it after I had actually already started working on it,
and I'm sure many other people. It moved up to
the top of the list after sort of tangentially coming
up in our Irah Frederick Aldridge episode. Aldridge played a
character called Orinoco in The Revolt of Surinam, and that

(00:46):
was an adaptation of the play Orinoco by Thomas Southern,
And that was an adaptation of Orinocco, a short work
of fiction by today's subject afra Ben. There is really
not a lot that's conclusively known about the life of Afroban, who,
in addition to being a spy, was also a dramatist
and a poet, a novelist, a translator, and probably the

(01:10):
first woman in English literature known to have made a
living as a writer. Even though she was prolific in
her work, her gender meant that the sorts of institutions
that were mostly keeping up with the details of writers
and artists lives at the time did not really include her.
Since she wasn't an aristocrat, there was no official family history,

(01:31):
and she didn't really keep a diary or write a
memoir or or corresponding a lot of letters, at least
not many of that actually survived. And yet, even though
there is so little concrete information, she's the subject of
multiple biographies, and some of them are quite lengthy. Uh.
With so little actual documentation to go on, a lot
of these sort of pick up tiny pieces of the

(01:53):
historical record and then try to glean details of her
life from her written work. And this means that a
lot of my agraphies about her are very heavily subject
to interpretation. They tend to be influenced a lot by
the biographers focus and their interpretation of her body of work. Uh.
And in some cases, if you've read the words, probably
and may have, you read like a quarter of the

(02:15):
thing at least. So we're gonna do our best on
this one. I feel like you're describing some sort of
Afroban biographical mad libs kind of is. I mean, every
biography is influenced by the biographer, even if you're trying,
you know, even if the biographers trying really hard to

(02:35):
have a very objective stance. This is particularly true with
Afriban because there's so much that's like trying to piece
together a teeny little puzzle with aty bitty pieces to
make a whole life out of Yeah, with big gaps
in the puzzle. Uh So it won't surprise you having
listened to that introduction, that there is very very little
known about Afroban's early life, and most of what we

(02:58):
do know has been reconstructed did as Tracy just mentioned
by following the threads available, a lot of which are
other people's claims about her, and then the logical conclusions
are drawn from there. So it is generally agreed that
she was born sometime around sixteen forty, probably to a
family who lived in why A village in Kent, England.

(03:21):
Colonel Thomas Culpepper claimed that afra Ban's mother was his
wet nurse and her father was reported to be a barber,
so this makes the most likely candidates for her parents,
Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson. They had a daughter, e Free
spelled e A F. F r e y, and that
was one of the many many variations in spelling for

(03:41):
the name Afra at the time. This young e free
was baptized on December fourteenth of sixteen forty, although some
sources report that as the day of her birth. With
her mother as his wet nurse, Afra would have been
considered Thomas culpeppers foster sister, and the Culpeppers were a
prominent family in the area. This connection to the cold

(04:02):
Peppers would have given Afra access to far more educational
opportunities and a wider social circle than she would have
had as just the daughter of a wet nurse in
a barber Although we don't have a lot of details
about the specifics of her childhood and her adolescence, we
do know that Afra grew up during a period of
huge chaos and change. The English Civil Wars began when

(04:26):
she was still a toddler, and this is a series
of wars that obviously could be at least a whole
episode all by themselves, so very briefly, the English Civil
Wars also involved Scotland and Ireland, and they grew out
of a conflict between King Charles the First and Parliament
about who ultimately had control over the military. Following an
uprising in Ireland during the English Civil Wars, the Parliamentarians

(04:51):
faced off against the Royalists in a series of conflicts
that ultimately led to a victory for the Parliamentarians. The
execution of Charles the First in sixteen forty nine, the
exile of his son Charles the Second, and the political
rise of Oliver Cromwell, first Lord Protector of the Commonwealth
of England, Scotland and Ireland. The total death toll in

(05:12):
England was almost two hundred thousand. Obviously, that is as
like the tiniest possible description of the English Civil Wars.
During the interregnum years that followed from sixteen forty nine
to sixteen sixty, the nation was no longer actively at
war with itself, but it still had its fair share

(05:33):
of strife. Many of those in Parliament were Puritans, and
they started enforcing Puritans standards and views for the rest
of the nation. Cromwell himself had a reputation as a
radical and a fanatic, and his actions during the Civil
Wars had included, among other things, a massacre in Ireland.
Throughout the interregnum, Royalists continued to work toward the goal

(05:56):
of restoring the monarchy. There's some speculation and that toward
the end of the interregnum, Ben was already beginning her
career as a spy by secretly carrying messages for Royalist organizations.
She would have been connected to these organizations once again
through Thomas Culpepper. Oliver Cromwell died in sixteen fifty eight,

(06:17):
and by sixteen sixty one Charles the Second had been
returned to the throne. So by the time Aframan hit
her twenties, England had already been through a lot, and
with Charles the Second's return, English life dramatically changed once
again and a lot of circles. The restoration was met
with a huge, hedonistic, fairly drunken party, and it was

(06:39):
in this environment that afro Been really flourished a whole
lot more than during the more puritanical interregnum years. In
sixteen sixty three, when she was in her early twenties,
Been traveled to Surinam, and this would later become the
setting for her work of fiction Orinocco. Orinocco is often
discussed as part of Ben's earlier work because her visit

(07:02):
there would have happened, as we just said, when she
was in her early twenties, but in reality this piece
wasn't published until shortly before her death. Orinocco tells the
story of a prince from the Gold Coast and what
is now Ghana who's invited aboard a ship and then
enslaved before being sold in Surinam, and that's where he
meets the book's narrator. This narrator is an english woman

(07:24):
who had come to Surinam with her father, but he
died during the sea voyage. Some biographies actually take this
plot point from Orinoco and apply it to Ben's real
life father, although he had likely died by the early
mid sixteen sixties. It's completely unclear whether this aspect of
Orinoco is supposed to be autobiographical. There's also a debate

(07:45):
about whether the book's narrator is supposed to be a
stand in for Ben herself, and that part similarly foggy.
But since Orinocco does contain a lot of detail about
Surinam and people who really lived there in the sixties sixties,
it's easy to think of it as evidence that the
trip to Surinam really did happen. Regardless of whether the
story it tells is supposed to be autobiographical. Also, although

(08:09):
Ben's own views on slavery are pretty hard to tease
out from her writing, Orinoco itself was considered an abolitionist
work of fiction in both the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Yeah,
there are a lot of attempts to try to figure
out what her racial views were based on the content
of her writing, And the most logical conclusion is that

(08:31):
she had a lot of the prejudices that were sort
of ingrained in society, especially English society at the time. Um.
And it's like when you read Orinoco, and a lot
of it is very sympathetic to the people who are
enslaved in the book, but it's it's sort of a
most like proto abolitionist text, like it was definitely read

(08:55):
that way for a couple of centuries. But there's also
a lot of stuff in it that that is, you know,
obviously laced with implicit biases and racism because it was
written in the six century. Even though Orinocco itself as
a book didn't come out until much later. Afroman was

(09:17):
writing while in Surinam, including an early draft of a
play called The Young King or a Mistake. Like several
of Ben's other plays, it's a tragic comedy, and it
tells the story of a royal brother and sister brought
up in opposite roles because of a prophecy. The boy
is quote kept from his infancy and a castle on
a lake, ignorant of his quality and of all the world,

(09:39):
besides never having seen any humane things save only his
old tutor, while the girl is quote bred up in
war and designed to reign in place of her brother.
It plays around with gender and ideas of masculinity and femininity,
which is a hallmark of Ben's later work as well.

(10:00):
Then tripped to Surinam wasn't particularly long. She returned to
England in sixteen sixty four, and not long after she
was given an audience with King Charles the Second to
report on what she had witnessed there. It's not completely
clear whether the King saw this as part of her
spy career, but she definitely spied for him later, and
we're gonna start talking about that, but first we're gonna

(10:21):
pause and have a little bit of a sponsor break.
About the same time as she returned from Surinam in
sixteen sixty four, Afriban married a man whose name was
as you would conclude Ben or maybe being described as
quote a merchant of Dutch extraction. It might have been

(10:43):
the Great Plague of London which struck in sixteen sixty
five that killed Ben's husband. He was dead by sixteen
sixty six. On top of the plague, England was once
again at war. The Second Anglo Dutch War began on
March fourth of sixteen sixty five, and this part of
a series of four wars between England and the Dutch
Republic and their allies. The first three were largely trade wars,

(11:07):
but the fourth was in response to Dutch involvement in
the American Revolutionary War. Regardless of whether Ben had officially
been doing spy work during the interregnum or in Surinam,
she definitely was during the Second Anglo Dutch War, using
the code name Astraea. Ultimately reporting to the Secretary of State,
Lord Henry Bennett. She was assigned to travel to Antwerp,

(11:30):
which is now in Belgium but was then in Spanish Netherlands,
to meet with William Scott. Scott's father, Thomas, had been
the man who signed Charles the first death warrant for
which he was later executed, and Scott himself was essentially
acting as a double agent. He was gathering intelligence for
England while also informing on the English to the Dutch.

(11:53):
Armed with bribe, money and the promise of a pardon,
Ben's mission was to figure out whether Scott had worthwhile intelligence,
and if he did, to get that intelligence back to England.
Ben was likely chosen for this mission because she and
Scott had met in Surinam. They had a bit of
a flirtation there. In theory, this flirtation was nothing serious

(12:15):
enough to jeopardize Ben's judgment, but it was enough of
an existing connection to Scott to sort of soften him
up a little. She was given passage to Spanish Flanders
and enough money to take care of her own needs
during a short stay there. Her brother, who was in
the military, was temporary temporarily released from service to act
as her chaperone. Apparently, Lord Bennett wasn't wasn't aware that

(12:37):
she was a widow, which would have given her a
little more autonomy than an unmarried woman would have had.
She received her money and instructions in July of sixteen
sixty six and She was an Antwerp by August, but
her time as a spy was not very successful. She
flirted with Scott until he finally agreed to pass her information,
but then he got her to agree to leave Antwerp

(13:00):
and meet him in the Hague. And if she did that,
not only was she very likely to be captured, but
she was also sure to run out of her already
dwindling supply of money. And this started the pair of
them on a cycle of back and forth, with him
getting her to agree to leave Flanders, and then her
pulling back on that agreement and another hiccup. This back

(13:21):
and forth between Scott and Ben also got tangled up
with one William Corney, a merchant from Amsterdam who was
also passing intelligence back to Lord Bennett. Before long, the
three of them were just continually trying to undermine one another,
and this convoluted backstabby triangle, word of which spread to
London and started to threaten Ben's reputation. The idea that

(13:42):
Ben's previous flirtation with Scott wouldn't be a threat to
her also didn't really pan out, as Corney became a
greater threat to both of them. They started to rely
on and confide in each other in a way that
didn't really leave Ben a whole lot of power to
try to get the man to give her information. Eventually,
Scott fled Flanders out of fear that Corny was going

(14:04):
to kill him, and once he was gone, Corny focused
all his attention on Ben, tailing her and forging reports
in her name to discredit her. Scott wound up in prison,
and although he did keep writing to Ben, he couldn't
learn much while behind bars, and she had no way
to pay for a passage home. When Scott was released
from prison in sixteen sixty seven, he was also banished,

(14:28):
leaving Ben with no way of getting whatever intelligence he
still had. Throughout all of this, Ben was using ciphers
and codes to send information back to London, but very
little of this information was of actual value. She's often
reported as having passed on a warning of the Dutch
raid on Medway, which took place in June of sixteen

(14:48):
sixty seven. This raid was a devastating blow to the
British Navy, and while this is technically true, she did
send that information, other agents also delivered this aim information
and none of it was heated, not even when another
agent gave Lord Bennett a very specific warning about the
upcoming attack after Ben had already returned to London, and

(15:11):
getting back to London required Ben to beg for the
funds to do so. She'd been so low on money
that she'd handed over all her possessions to her innkeeper
as collateral so she wouldn't lose her lodgings along with
everything else. Although she was able to get a couple
of loans to pay off the worst of her debts,
it was only after numerous letters and lots of borrowing

(15:32):
that she was able to get someone to pay for
her passage. And it's unclear who that was, but it
wasn't the administration that had sent her to Antwerp in
the first place. Even though her spy life was not
very effective, but still was pretty crummy that she was
sent on this mission with no way of getting back
home out of hostile territory. According to most accounts, after

(15:56):
Afroban's returned to England in the spring of sixteen sixty seven,
she wound up in a debtor's prison. There's very little
detail on this. She had written multiple letters to the
people who had recruited her into the life of espionage
and to other contacts that she had, all in an
effort to pay off her debts. And it seems as
though she either eventually did get someone to loan her

(16:17):
enough money to get out of prison, or she made
arrangement arrangements to pay her debt off gradually as she
was able to earn enough money to do so. And
the way that she earned that money was by writing,
and we're going to talk about that after we once
again paused for a quick sponsor break. After she got

(16:39):
out of the debtor's prison, afro Ben was able to
make something of a fresh start for herself. By the
summer of sixteen sixty seven, London had recently been through
both the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and although
the raid on Medway had taken place at the mouth
of the Thames River and not up in the city,
it had destroyed much of the British naval fleet and

(17:00):
block hated the city, which left the already shaken people
living there feeling particularly defenseless. So in a fairly dispirited
and anxious city, Ben was able to quietly make a
space for herself, renting lodgings and working as a copyist,
probably copying the sorts of material people would want handled
with more discretion than a commercial printing press could allow.

(17:24):
While copying definitely would have helped her make ends meet,
it was not really enough to live comfortably, and soon
Ben was also writing and publishing poems. She adopted her
code name Austraya for a pseudonym for a lot of
her written work as it was published at the time.
Fortunately for Ben, King Charles the second loved the theater,

(17:44):
and he chartered to theater companies known as the King's
Company and the Duke's Company. The King's Company had the
rights to a lot of existing plays, including works by
Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. The Duke's Company didn't, meaning there
was a market for newly written plays. The plays themselves
were often Body and Blue, with women allowed on the

(18:05):
stage rather than having female roles played by men. It's
unclear exactly how Ben first got her foot in the
door as a playwright through her spy work. She did
no Thomas Killigrew, who was head of the King's Men
and later the Master of the Revels, but it was
the Duke's Company and not the King's where her work
first debuted. Of her first play to be staged. There

(18:27):
was The Forced Marriage or The Jealous Bridegroom, a tragic comedy,
which opened on September. Ben was much savvier about playwriting
as an occupation than she had been about her espionage career.
She wanted to make sure she kept the rights to
her plays, and she wanted them to be published, which
would give her an additional source of income. Most of

(18:48):
her plays were also published during her lifetime, although the
first printing of The Forced Marriage, which was probably rushed
to follow the plays performance and take advantage of that publicity,
was full of error, herosism, things printed and completely the
wrong order. It was kind of a mess. Her next
play to be staged opened just a few months later,

(19:11):
and it was named The Amorous Prince, and like its
name suggests, it's full of seductions and it plays around
a lot with gender and cross dressing in a way
that would become a frequent theme in Ben's works. Ben
would go on to write nineteen plays, including the two parts.
The Rover was seventeen of them stage during her lifetime.

(19:31):
She wasn't the first woman to write for the British stage,
but the idea of a woman playwright was still rare
enough that her position was relatively unique, and she got
a lot of criticism for the more risk ay content
of her work, which was full of innuendo and double entendres.
This was particularly true since in both her plays and
her novels, she seemed to blur the line between her

(19:54):
narrator and herself. Even so, she pointed to similarities in
the work of her contemporaries and predecessors as evidence that
it would not have been frowned upon if she were
a man. As the theater gradually fell a little bit
more out of favor in the sixteen eighties, Ben shifted
her focus to writing novels, and she penned sixteen works

(20:14):
of fiction, all of which have narrators who were either
obviously female or have no specified gender. She also continued
to write poetry throughout her career, and although some of
her poems were incorporated into her plays and fiction, many
of them were meant for a smaller audience. They often
contained inside references to what was going on in London

(20:34):
society and politics, sometimes with names changed but otherwise easily
recognizable to people in the no Some of her poems
were essentially social and political commentary, rendered in verse and
only really understandable if you knew the context of what
was going on around her. Much of Ben's work, especially
in poetry, was romantic and sensual and even erotic, with

(20:58):
both women and men as the sub jecks of her
love poems, some of which also played with themes of
androgyny and gender fluidity. The relationships depicted in her dramas
are all over the map in terms of gender and
sexual orientation. In terms of her personal life, her most
public relationship during her time as a writer was with
John Hoyle, whose own life with threat was threaded through

(21:21):
with lots and lots of scandal, including his relationships with
other men. As Ben's writing career became more lucrative, she
became increasingly more active in London society. She developed a
reputation for being witty and charismatic and of liking to drink.
She earned the nickname the Incomparable Australia, and in her

(21:41):
poetry people called her the successor to Sappho. After more
than twenty years making a living as a writer, Afroban
died on April sixteenth, eighty nine, at roughly fifty years old.
A few days later, a piece called an elegy upon
the death of Mrs A Ben, the incomparable Drea, written
by quote a young lady of quality, was published. It

(22:04):
read in part quote, let all our hopes to spare
and die our sex forever shall neglected. Lie. Aspiring man
has now regained this way to them, we've lost the
dismal day. The first biography of her came out in
sixteen ninety six, called Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Ben,

(22:26):
by a Gentlewoman of her acquaintance, and that was part
of her collected histories and novels. Although its author was
likely Charles Gilden, the first uh. This first biography is
definitely a mix of embellishment, absolute total fiction, and a
little bit of fact, and it was written in part
to try to sell the collection of her work with
which it was published. Even so, that and passages of

(22:49):
her fiction that seem autobiographical have been picked up and
repeated as fact over and over throughout the centuries. Although
today afro Ben is known as one of the seventeenth
century these most influential playwrights and a groundbreaking writer in
the genre of the novel, she fell sharply out of
favor after her death as the hedonism and licentiousness and

(23:11):
that general drunken party flare of the Restoration became socially unacceptable,
so did Afriban and her work. Critics decried her as
a woman of loose moral character, and they condemned her
work outright. That started to change though, in the early
twentieth century, when the English writers and artists known as
the Bloomsbury Group picked up her life and work as

(23:33):
part of feminist history. Poet and novelist Vita Sackville West
wrote Afraban The Incomparable Austraia, which was a biographical fiction
that seems to treat Ben's life as a missed opportunity.
Author Virginia Wolfe wrote of her quote, all women together
ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of afra Been,
for it was she who earned them the right to

(23:55):
speak their minds. It's kind of funny, they both seemed
to pray. It's her so highly for having made a
living as a writer. Uh and have an affinity for
some of the like same sex content or her poems
and some of which are read as uh like explicitly
lesbian love poems. But they have this theme, this sort

(24:16):
of undertone of like I wish she hadn't been writing
such garbage in terms of like all this very coarse
humor and body sexuality. Um. But you know, today I
think folks are a lot, a lot more accepting of
that part of it than they maybe were in the
nineteen hundreds. Do you also have some listener mail for us?

(24:38):
I sure do. Before I get to that, Afred's very
large book, Janet Todd's The Secret Life of Afra Ben
is one of the many resources of this It is
astonishingly hefty considering how little of her work is known about,
but it gets into a whole lot of um other
stuff that was going on in Britain in the time,

(25:00):
and analysis of her work, and lots and lots of
good stuff. So if you want to learn more, uh,
that is one place to go before we get to
listener mail. It is still March. March is still tripod month.
When podcaster talking about other podcasts that we listened to
and love, I really really enjoyed the Politically Reactive podcast

(25:23):
with W. Kmal Bell and Harrie Condabulu, which came out
in the weeks leading up to and just after the
presidential election, with really interesting interviews with lots of folks
about the political climate in the United States and uh
different issues relevant to the election. And Holly just let
me know that there's going to be a second season

(25:45):
and I'm so excited me too. That was like a
magical little gift in my podcast app this morning. Ha
was there little mini episode where they said that that
was going to happen. Yes, So I am very much
looking forward to that. So if you go on h
on Twitter looking at the hashtag tripod t r y

(26:05):
p o D, you will find lots of recommendations from
us and from other people. And now I will get
to uh some listener mail, and this is from Madeline.
Madeline says, Hi, they're Tracy and Holly. I have to
tell y'all that I had a bit of an odd
reaction when I saw the title of your newest episode
pop up in my phone's notifications yesterday. I was a
bit excited, in spite of the grizzly topic, because it

(26:27):
is a piece of history I know about and have
a distant familial connection to. Growing up, my nuclear family
typically visited my great grandparents, my mother's mother's parents, and Henderson,
Texas every Thanksgiving. Very occasionally in between. These great grandparents
both lived until I was a grown woman, so I
have fond memories of them and their home from childhood,
my teenage years, and into college. I specifically remember enjoying

(26:49):
looking at the photos and what we call the family
gallery at their house. I did this at my grandmother's
house to occasionally at my own childhood home. This tradition
of hanging all our family photos and one section of
wall in a hallway was continued in my own home. Now.
Generations of children in my family have used these galleries
to learn who all their people are, including my own child.
At my great grandparents house, there was one picture in

(27:11):
the gallery that I was always a bit puzzled by.
It was hard to remember who the young blonde girl
in the old black and white photo was and how
I was related to her. I was usually only told
something along the lines of that's grandmother's cousin who died
in the New London explosion, and that's it. At some
point someone told me her name Maxim and that the
explosion was at the school. I suspect a combination of

(27:32):
my own tender age and a general reluctance in Ruskue
County to talk about the tragedy had led to me
knowing very little about Maxim, but her photo was always
there in the family gallery. Before I listened to your
podcast about the explosion, I called my mom for more
of our family's information. Shouldn't have a whole lot to
add about ten year old Maxine and not knowing much
more than I do myself, but I should tell me

(27:53):
more about the explosion than I had heard before. Apparently,
being nearly nearly thirty years old, I am no longer
to ten or an age for these things. Her account
was that about three hundred people died and an explosion
at the school caused by a natural gas link in
the basement. She added that this one horrific day in
a small East Texas town as the reason natural gas
now has a smell, and she also mentioned that boards

(28:14):
were put down to help smooth out the path to
the rebel for trucks that were coming to help, only
later to realize that some of the dead had been
under those boards. And the other than these things my
mother referred to me, My mother referred me to her
mother for more. So I've emailed a link to your
show to my grandmother along with her request for more
information about the explosion. She was still an infant living
with her parents and Henderson at the time, but she

(28:36):
is an excellent family historian, so I hope for some
insight and that she will allow me to share it
with y'all. Before I finished up, I have a question
about a small detail in the episode. My mom mentioned
a basement at the school. I interrupted her to point
out the oddity of such an idea. I grew up
in Central Texas, where the idea of a basement is laughable.
The limestone is too close to the surface of the

(28:58):
soil for basements to be cost if I theyve in
most situations the state capital nonwithstanding, But having visited East
Texas so often throughout my life, the idea of a
basement in the school in New London seems odd too.
I've never heard of a basements in Rusk County before,
so I take a particular note when y'all said that
was the space below a hollow floor where the gas accumulated.

(29:18):
At the introduction of Your Texas Monthly source that interview
survivors also calls it a basement. Haven't looked through all
the show notes for the episode yet, but I'm wondering
why you did not call it a basement. Was it
an actual basement? Is was the basement a word used
by people in the region to describe something along the
lines of an enclosed crawl space, or wasn't something else?
Based on y'all's description, I'm picturing something that is essentially

(29:40):
the opposite of a drop ceiling. I hope it is
not as odd as what I mentioned. Uh. And then
she goes on to um say that she'll let us
know if her grandfather has any good tidbits. UM, and
thanks us both for the work we do on the podcast.
Thank you, Madeleine. Uh. I wanted to read that for
two reasons. One is the personal connection of the other
is the basement. The idea that the explosions started in

(30:02):
a basement is all over the place among survivor accounts,
But there is so much contradictory detail about what the
school's structure was actually like, uh, that I don't think
we can answer the question of whether there was really
a full basement. Like I think of a basement is
a thing you could walk down to on stairs that

(30:26):
has like an a full ceiling above your head. Right,
I'm gesturing versus like a crawl. Right, So it's even
in the more detailed descriptions of the school, the description
is like not necessarily that there was something that was

(30:46):
a full basement the entire length of the school. Like,
it's just very hard to pen down and confusing, and
possibly if I like went to Rest County and dug
through old blueprints of the school, that question could be
conclusively answered to be well. And it also gets into
the semantics of the word basement right right, like what

(31:06):
somebody would call a seller, or someone else might call
a basement, someone else might call across space. So literally
looked this up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Uh so, yeah,
it's unclear, and like there are a lot of things
in the survivor accounts that seem to have been picked
up and have become part of the collective memory, but

(31:29):
are definitely not what happened. Um, Like a news a
news station posted about the uh the anniversary of the tragedy,
and somebody tagged our podcast page, which is why I
even saw it. And there was some there were people
commenting that were like, yes, I was there that day.
I was in the gym with my mom because of
the gas smell, but there definitely was no gas smell.

(31:53):
So like we have this combination of the fact that
the building was completely obliterated and had been built almost
you know, more than eighty years ago at this point,
and the most of the folks alive today who still
remember it were small children at time, so I could
not tell you whether it was really a basement. UH.

(32:14):
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(32:35):
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(32:56):
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