Once again we are driving around the
countryside looking for the location for the next book. So far it has
been whittled down to either north Cornwall or possibly Dartmoor.
Which will depend on where Marcia finds the creative juices are
flowing plus, in this case, the furtherance or otherwise of an idea
which she has been playing with but is far from settled.
Anyway, we drove over Dartmoor the
other day. To be more accurate Marcia drove as I am now waiting for
the eyes to settle down after the operation so that I can be have new
glasses. The, hopefully, I shall be behind the wheel again.
Our route took us over Holne Moor which
is one of my favourite places and then on to Holne itself.
Combestone Tor continues to look down
over ‘Foxhole’ - the fictional house in ‘Forgotten Laughter’.
Holne Moor: one of the most evocative
open stretches of moor on Dartmoor.
When we arrived we found, to our great
delight, that the village shop and tearoom is again open. It closed
about a year ago as it was just not making money but the community
has organised itself and found enough volunteers to staff it and
enough cash to buy the initial stock needed for such a venture. Many
congratulations and all the best wishes for the future.
The village of Holne
This took me back to 1984. Then (as
now) there was concern about declining rural services. Dorset Rural
Community Council had organised a Village Ventures competition to
encourage voluntary groups who were finding ways of retaining or
gaining services that would otherwise have been lost. In 1980 an
organisation called Rural Voice was started to provide a national
rural alliance and they took the idea forward to include most of the
counties in England. Shell International offered generous financial
support and this was matched by various government bodies. It was a
great success and Rural Voice wanted a small book written to
commemorate this success and, for a reason which now escapes me, I
was commissioned to write that book.
Thus it was that in 1984 Marcia and I
together with our two dogs set out to visit every county. Being us we
did this in an old Bedford camper van and, as you would expect, we
had a lot of fun. One memory that was not so amusing was driving
through Nottinghamshire. This was at the time of the miners’ strike
- a strike that seemed to be a personal battle between Margaret
Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. Seeing groups of angry miners and
police in riot gear confronting each other made a lasting impression
on me and has shaped my political beliefs. On both sides there were
perfectly honest and decent people enjoined in a bitter conflict and
there are mining communities suffering from the fall out to this day.
We were both quite upset and very happy to put that particular scene
behind us.
A moment of rest: we sit by the old
Bedford camper van. This was a terrible photo (obviously using a
timer) but is the only one I can find taken on those trips.
The book cover.
* * * * *
It really is odd – this business of
writing. Take Stripey Bunny as an example.
Marcia had just started writing The
Christmas Angel having spent a few months brooding and visiting the
locations for the book. I suppose this would have been some time in
September 2009. The book opens with Jakey, a four year old boy, and
his stalwart companion, Stripey Bunny. I’m not entirely sure what
image Marcia had of this person at that time but a few weeks later
the Christmas catalogues began to arrive.
One was a gift catalogue from a firm
neither of us had heard of and there, as Marcia was leafing through
it while we enjoyed our morning coffee break, was Stripey Bunny.
Within a couple of days he had arrived and was sitting on Marcia’s
desk to become the talisman for this book.
Marcia usually has a ‛book CD’: in
this case it was Joni Mitchell’s ‛Both Sids Now’. It is to be
hoped that Stripey Bunny enjoyed it – he had to listen to it rather
a lot. The following photograph shows SB in a dégagé
mood. I always felt he was closely related to Dillon in the Magic
Roundabout but I expect most of you reading this will be far too
young to remember him.
Time for bed, Zebedee.
* * * * *
Marcia was hanging up the washing,
glancing to the west from where we had been promised some good
weather, when she heard a ‘wooshing’ sound. It was very odd and
puzzling until we saw a hot air balloon quite low in the sky and not
that far away. We had seen this particular balloon before but even so
I decided I wanted to take a couple of photographs. As it happened it
was coming in to land three or four fields away – here are the
pictures.
Safe landing!
