Book of the Book - Celia Rees

Every time I plan a new book, one of the first things I do, once the idea has gelled, once I know it will be a book, is to buy the Book of the Book. The one above is the Book of the book I'm writing now.

Book of Sovay

Book of The Fool's Girl

These are two I made earlier...

I have a weakness for notebooks, as many writers do. This is the perfect excuse to indulge my vice. The Book of the Book is special, to me anyway, so it deserves to be handsome and expensive. Once I have the book, the right book (selection is important, too) them I'm ready. 

The Book begins with the starting point, first ideas. Something I saw, remembered, a place I visited, even an object which ignited an idea that I knew would be a book. I collect things, postcards, flyers, programmes, photographs, it's part of what I do, so usually, I have some record of that first spark.  

First page for Sovay

First page for The Fool's Girl (originally titled Illyria)

From here, the ideas begin to accrue. Not all of them will be used. Some will be discarded but all signify something. To embark on a large project, I need to be excited. Collecting, visiting places, taking photographs, going to museums and art galleries, finding pictures of people who could be reference to characters, images of objects from the period, helps me to tap into the initial rush that having the idea gave me in the first place. It fuels the spark.     

Initial ideas for Sovay

Fool's Girl - walk along the South Bank

I may, or may not, have started writing at this point. Maybe I'm working on something else, maybe I just don't feel ready, but once I begin to write, the Book tracks the book's growth and progress. The Book is a record, not just of what the book is about, you can read it for that, but of the writing of the book, with all the wrong directions taken, dead ends and frustrations encountered, as well as the pure joy of making new discoveries, finding the thing that will fire that initial excitement again,  help me find the right path. 

The Book follows the patterns and rhythms of my writing. Each entry is dated (mostly) so it gives a rough history. It is also a record of the places that I visited, the research I undertook as I went along, so a page might have a coaster from a coffee shop, a restaurant card, a café bill, an entry ticket. 

Not everything finds its way onto the page and, if it does, it might just be a line or two. Sometimes, I can't even remember why I found this, or that so fascinating, but the pages work as snapshots of what was going through my mind at the time I was writing; they also work like time capsules, taking me back to a particular stage of the writing. The pages show how I constructed a scene, a setting, a character, out of all sorts of bits and pieces, not just what I needed to know but what I found interesting, the detail needed to breathe life and veracity into a particular passage. 

The Book tracks the life of the book from first beginnings to the end of the writing. On the last page is the date the book was finished and sent off and the cover. I could not have imagined either thing  when I had that first idea.

www.celiarees.com

What Country, Friends, is This? - Celia Rees

What country, friends, is this?

Viola asks at the beginning of Twelfth Night. What country indeed? This is Illyria, Lady the Captain answers her. Illyria is a fantasy world, created from Shakespeare's imagination, but what if it was a real place? What would it be like? Where would it be? That thought occurred to me as I settled down to watch a performance of Twelfth Night in Stratford. Not in the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre but on an open air stage set up by the river on a very hot day in June. My presence was purely serendipitous. I live near Stratford. I go there some Saturdays to the Farmer’s Market. As mundane and ordinary as that. A student theatre company were giving an outdoor performance, barking up their play, giving out flyers. The stage was made from boards set up on poles, the amphitheatre was a natural dell with the Avon as the backdrop. The changing rooms were a couple of bushes. It was only a hundred yards from the RSC, but nearer by far to the original Elizabethan touring companies than that grand theatre could ever be. 

Twelfth Night is my favourite Shakespearean comedy. It is short, actually funny and impossibly romantic, but it is the element of disguise that I’ve always loved. The heroine, Viola, is a girl who is really a boy who is pretending to be a girl who is pretending to be a boy. This ambiguity gives the play all the sexual charge and  frisson of the Blur song, Girls and Boys.

Liam Brennan and Samuel Barnett

Imogen Stubbs and Helena Bonham Carter in Trevor Nunn's 1996 film adaptation of Twelfth Night

As the play progressed, I began to think: what happens next? What happens after the end of the play? The play walks a knife edge between tragedy and comedy. It is perfectly balanced, but one false move and it could all go horribly wrong. The play ends, as all comedies should, with disguises removed, couples united, but I’ve always had the feeling that they are left slightly uncomfortable with each other. Not only that, but characters stomp off swearing revenge, are sent away and banished so as not to disrupt the happiness and harmony. What if the couples are not entirely satisfied with each other? What if the troublesome characters come back? And what if Illyria was a real place?

We know where it is supposed to be  - on the Dalmatian Coast.

Map showing the Roman state of Illyria

 

Medieval Dubrovnik

Orsino’s coastal dukedom would be very like the city of Dubrovnik, Italianate in style, a mirror of the city states across the Adriatic. A small maritime country, grown rich on trade,   but a glance at the map reveals its vulnerability  That very wealth would attract the greedy eyes of pirates, not to mention the attentions of its infinitely more powerful neighbours, the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Venice would be keen to annex such a strategic port to protect its Adriatic trade routes; the Ottomans would be more than happy to secure a foothold on the Adriatic. This vulnerability would inevitably affect what happened next. If the state disintegrated because of the internal tensions revealed but not explored in the play, then Orsino's dukedom would be up for grabs. 
My mind was busy while the actors ran on and off the stage and changed behind bushes. By the time they joined hands for their final bow, my thoughts had linked together and I knew I had an idea for a book.

Page from my notebook

I decided to begin my book some time after Shakespeare ends his play and I immediately broke two of my own rules: not to write about real historical characters (especially not famous ones); not to set a book in Elizabethan England. Rules are made to be broken, so I decided that Shakespeare would be a character in the book. There are hundreds of books written about him, thousands, whole libraries, but there are surprisingly few indisputable facts. This gave me a way into the man and his life. He would be Will Shakespeare from Warwickshire (my own county, so I feel a kind of kinship): actor, playmaker, theatre manager; not the impossibly famous William Shakespeare, Bard, Swan of Avon, whose home is a heritage centre 400 years later, his town a mecca for tourists from all over the world. He would be Shakespeare before he knew he was Shakespeare. If he ever did. I wanted to make him real, sexy, more Shakespeare in Love, more Joseph Fiennes than the baldy bloke in the Droeshout engraving from the First Folio.

Joseph Fiennes  - Shakespeare in Love

Droeshout Engraving, First Folio

He would be a jobbing writer with inky fingers, trying to make a living, juggling his life in London with his life at home in Stratford, trying to survive, keep his nose clean in the dangerous, violent, difficult and volatile world at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Hard at work, trying to keep his Company going, writing and re-writing, always on the look out for stories to keep up with the need for plays and more plays. When he happens upon two street performers, a Fool and his beautiful young girl assistant, he finds one. He meets Feste the clown and Viola’s daughter, Violetta, survivors from the wreck of Illyria, but they bring with them more than just their story and Will Shakespeare’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Fool's Girl is published by Bloomsbury Children's Books.

The Road Goes Ever On... Celia Rees

So begins The Walking Song, composed by Bilbo Baggins and sung in J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit and sometimes in the Lord of the Rings. They do a lot of walking in both, so a walking song must have come in handy. Both books are quests and quests often involve a lot of journeying, often on foot, sometimes on horseback. Quests never seem slow moving, although the characters might move slowly. That is because being on the move allows things to happen. Journeying allows the characters to have new experiences; to learn more about the world and about themselves. 

Quests and journeying are most often associated with fantasy but they are the mainstay of all kinds of fiction. If you want things to happen, send your main character on a journey, voluntarily, or not. If they don't want to go, have them kidnapped.

I often take my characters on journeys. It gets them out of the house, out of their comfort zone, puts them on their mettle, presents them with new challenges, new places to see and new characters with whom they can fight or fall in love. In Witch Child, Mary goes to America and then off into the wilderness in Sorceress,. In Pirates! Nancy leaves Bristol for the West Indies and in the company of her friend Minerva, she sails the seven seas. In Sovay, the eponymous heroine journeys first to London and then to Paris.  In The Fool's Girl, Violetta travels from Illyria to London. I don't write about stay at home kind of girls.

Sending your heroines (or heroes) on journeys demands a certain kind of research: modes of travel (beyond shanks's pony), travel times - how long to x from y using z transport, where to stop on the way.  This, in turn, leads the writer to a certain kind of writing, in particular travel journals. It is always best to read a contemporary account of the kind of journey that you want your character to make if said account is available, particularly if it is written by an excellent writer, as these accounts often are. Daniel Defoe's  A Tour Thro' The Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies , for example, or Through England on a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, Being the Diary of Celia Fiennes

Memorial to Celia Fiennes

Even if the intrepid traveler is not an exact contemporary of your fictional character, I always reason that, until quite recently, travel didn't change markedly for quite long periods of time. Fifty years here or there doesn't make a whole lot of difference. The detail and insights such writers provide are far more important than a slavish adherence to dates.

Research has introduced me to a whole new area of literature and one I have come to thoroughly enjoy, especially since I don't have to stir from chair or study to have the most fantastic adventures, visit places, landscapes, cityscapes, even countries that are not there any more. Books like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her account of her travels in Yogoslavia before the Second World War, or Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water where he describes his journey on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, allow us to time travel, which is what the writer of historical fiction wants to do most of all.

 Books like these, or Robert McFarlane's The Old Ways make me want to pack an old knapsack like Bilbo Baggins and be on my way, off to find my own adventures, but if that's not possible,  and it rarely is, then reading about someone else doing it is the next best thing. The other best thing is writing about it: taking the journey in your own head, with someone like Patrick Leigh Fermor or Celia Fiennes guiding your every step.

Does anyone else have favourite travelling companions of a literary kind?



Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Maps and Chaps - Celia Rees

When I was at school, this was how one of my teachers defined Geography and History. Of course, the scope of both subjects expands far beyond this narrow definition (what about Chapesses?) and neither are they mutually exclusive. I don't know about other History Girls, but I spend an enormous amount of time poring over maps. I have them in my notebooks, pinned to my noticeboard. They allow me to track my characters' journeys and to get to know the places where they are living. 

In Sovay, the journey was from the English Midlands (it was possible to us a modern map for this - avoiding the M40) to 18th Century London and then to Revolutionary Paris. 

Just looking at the maps is exciting, an adventure in itself. The lettering, the illustration, the way the maps are set out, give a feeling for the time when they were created. The maps differ from period to period, just as countries and counties change and cities grow and develop. The 18th Century maps I referred to for Sovay, are very different from those that I looked at for The Fool's Girl, set two hundred years earlier.

Vissher Panorama

Agas map

The Agas map gives a unique bird's eye view of the Elizabethan city and the Vissher Panorama is just that, a panorama in almost photographic detail. A magnifying glass reveals tiny, accurate  visual details, not just of landmarks but of the everyday life of the people going about their business, where they would be going, what they would have seen and witnessed, all this is a priceless resource to the writer.


Useful as maps are, there is really no substitute for visiting a place, following the streets and alleyways of the old cities makes it much easier to imagine your character there, to bring the place and the period to life. Much of what was marked on the historical map will have been swept away by the intervening centuries, by fire, war, continuous and continuing development, but some things remain. When I'm walking a town or a city, or travelling though a landscape, I remember fellow History Girl, Adele Geras' advice to write about what is still there, rather than what has disappeared. It is always possible to find an old building, a cobbled courtyard, a narrow alleyway that holds something of the period that you are hoping to discover.

In Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, he describes a continuity of use that can stretch back for many centuries. A walk along modern Bankside won't show much that is left from Shakespeare's day but there are pubs, theatres, restaurants, street performers and beggars, the vibrant life of the river, different vessels on the choppy waters, the rubble strewn foreshore, a cormorant drying its wings. Much has gone, but some things are still there.

A page from The Fool's Girl Notebook

Celia Rees
www.celiarees.com

The Spirit of the Times - Celia Rees

Last weekend, I was at the Cropredy Folk Festival, Fairport Convention's annual August gathering, deep in the Oxfordshie countryside. I'm coming out here. I admit it. I'm a Folk Fan and have been for more years than I care to count. I know I'm not alone in this. There are other Folkies among the History Girls - Katherine Langrish for one.

Fairport have a special place in my heart. I first heard their music at a party in 1968. It was one of those arresting moments when you demand, 'Who's this?' and have to know. I've been a fan ever since. That song was Meet on the Ledge. It was not traditional, it was written by Richard Thompson. Their first albums were a mixture of their own compositions and songs written by other people, they contained only a smattering of traditional music. Then came Liege and Leaf. All the tracks were traditional but Sandy Denny's voice, the drums, the electric guitars and violin brought them right up to date. Made them now.  I fell in love with the music and have loved it ever since.

Folk songs are the poetry of the people. Frequently their only written record. They tell stories which are often vivid little capsules, vignettes of unknown lives. They contain folklore and history. A song like Tam Lin on Liege and Leaf is a treasure trove of faerie lore, an important source, but it is far more than that. It tells the story of a spirited young woman who defies her father, her father's court and the terrifying Faerie Queen herself to save her 'elfin grey' and turn him back into an 'earthly knight'.

These songs express complex emotions: joy, anguish, fear, horror, love, loss and sorrow which are often specific to that song, but also universal. In this, they are like all great poetry but these writers are anonymous. Nobody knows who wrote the original words or the music but these songs were learnt, sung, passed on from one person to another, changed and added to, so they provide a direct channel from the present to the present.  We are indebted to collectors, like Cecil Sharpe, who recognised their  worth and gave them new life. They evoke and conjure the very texture and spirit of the past. These are the hardest things for a writer to discover but they are vital if one is to write historical fiction that is more than a rag bag of yawn making research. Songs act like magical time machines allowing us to step back into the past. They also contain details that are as true now as they were then, and so prove that people don't change all that much. For example the song, Little Matty Groves  contains the lines:

And a servant who was standing by and hearing what was said,
He swore Lord Donald he would know before the sun would set.

And in his hurry to carry the news, he bent his breast and ran,
And when he came to the broad mill stream, he took off his shoes and swam.

We've all known people who'd do exactly the same thing, carry the tale in a blink of an eye.  

Folk songs inform much of my historical writing because they encapsulate the spirit of their times and that's what I am striving to do. Sometimes, the influence is obvious and direct. The eponymous Sovay came from the ballad of... Sovay. I first heard this sung by Pentangle on their Sweet Child album, many years before I even thought about being a writer but it stuck in my mind.

Sovay, Sovay, all on a day

She dressed herself in man's array

With a brace of pistols all by her side

To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away she'd ride

A girl dressed as a highwayman. What's not to like? But what I really liked about Sovay was the role reversal. She robs the boy, takes his watch, his gold, and demands one thing more

 That diamond ring  that I see you wear
Hand it over, hand it over and your life I'll spare. 

He refuses to hand over the ring because it's a present from his sweetheart. Sovay lets him go and the next day, in the garden green ... he spied his watch hanging from her clothes, which made him blush lads, which made him blush lads like any rose.  I love that fine detail. You can actually see them - and his blushes. With the last verse, comes the pay off. 

I only did it for to know

If you would be a man or no

If you'd given me that ring she said

I'd have pulled the trigger, pulled the trigger and shot you dead

And you know that she would - she's that kind of girl. Shocking behaviour. Even now. I've had e mails berating me for writing about a girl who would even think of shooting her boyfriend. But Sovay is exactly the kind of girl I want to write about. I'm glad she's still in my head from all those years ago. 

I used ballads less directly, but no less heavily when I was writing Pirates! I used ballads to give the titles to each section of the novel, to conjure my characters, the creak and roll of a sailing ship, the very smell of the sea. I called my lovers Nancy and William, the names most commonly used in the songs.  One of my favourite sea ballads is one of separation, loss and longing: The Dark Eyed Sailor, sung by Steeleye Span. I love the scene setting and the point of view:

 As I roved out one evening fair 

It being the summertime to take the air 
I spied a sailor and a lady gay 
And I stood to listen 
And I stood to listen to hear what they would say. 

The nameless bystander witnesses a confrontation between two lovers separated for seven years by the sea. The young woman thinks her William is drowned, although he is standing in front of her.  To test her devotion, the sailor suggests that she will find another because,

Love turns aside and soon cold does grow 
Like the winter's morning 
Like the winter's morning, the hills all white with 
Snow

And that is pure poetry. Of course, they are re-united and it all ends happily.

And there is a cottage by yonder lea 
This couple's married and does agree 
So maids be loyal when your love's at sea 
For a cloudy morning 
For a cloudy morning brings in a sunny day.

Poetry again. Incidentally, traditional songs like this perfectly illustrate the old Creative Writing saw of 'show and tell'. Anyone puzzling over what that actually means should go to the ballads. They illuminate a told story with vivid bursts of finely observed detail which infuse the narrative with light and colour.

While I was writing Pirates!, I didn't just listen to songs about love and longing. I was also listening to all the ballads about Female Sailors Bold. transgressive young women who broke all the rules. 

For The Fool's Girl, I turned to the dances, jigs and street ballads of Elizabethan England. One of my favourite dance tunes is called Parson's Farewell. It was a popular tune in the 16th Century, so Shakespeare would certainly have heard it. My favourite version of it is by Bellowhead. Absolutely 21st Century, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have enjoyed it immensely.

So,

Come all ye rolling minstrels
And together, we will try
To rouse the spirit of the earth
And move the rolling sky

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

1940's Knickers and Ruby Slippers - Celia Rees

I recently visited the Hollywood Costume Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum*.  It was very popular. I went with my daughter and we were reduced to a shuffle as we wound round the different areas of the exhibition but that didn't matter. The slow progress gave us more time to look. I have to admit to being as star struck as anyone and standing in awe in front of the most iconic outfits: Scarlett  O'Hara's dress made from curtains, Marlene Dietrich's top hat and tails and Audrey Hepburn's Breakfast at Tiffany's Little Black Dress.

'Look!' We whispered to each other. 'That's it. The real one!' 

It put one back in touch with favourite stars, favourite films, favourite film scenes. It was also sobering to think that many of the stars who wore these costumes were dead while the clothes they wore lived on.  

For me (once I'd got past the boggling stage) the most interesting aspect of the whole exhibition was the research process that the designers went through to create these costumes, their painstaking attention to detail. The History Girls routinely post about costume. Marie Louise Jensen did a piece about Men's Clothing in the 1700's just this week. When you are writing historical fiction, it is important to know what your characters would be wearing. Finding out is often uppermost in our minds, that is why we blog about it. We look at different sources, just as the film designers do. Museums, like the V & A, with specialist departments can be very helpful, and then there are books on costume. There is also, of course, the internet. Sometimes helpful. Sometimes not. An internet search for '1940's knickers', for example, can take you to some very strange places. The garments featured under 'retro' bear little resemblance to my granny's pink bloomers or to the rubber roll ons I remember women struggling into in the Fifties. But one has to persist. it is important to know what one's character would be wearing, right down to their underwear.

As I shuffled round the exhibition, I realised that there was another dimension to this. It is not just important to know what a man or woman would be wearing in 1789, for example, but it is important to know what your character would be wearing. We have to know who our character is before we can decide what clothes he or she would put on in the morning. It is important to get the period right but clothes tell us a great deal about personality as well as position and status in life. I'd always instinctively known this, but here it was spelt out for me. One whole area was devoted to just this: Deconstruction.

'On every film, the clothes are half the battle in creating the character. I have a great deal of opinion about how my people are presented. We show a great deal by what we put on our bodies' 

Meryl Streep

One is always attracted to areas of special interest and one of mine just happens to be pirates. When I first saw Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, I immediately thought of Blackbeard. The pigtails and plaited beard, the stance. But the designers also channeled Keith Richards for both his 'look' and his personality. That was interesting. With care, one can improvise. An insight like that can make a character a whole lot more than a historical clothes horse. 

I was also halted at another point on my shuffle round. In front of the costumes for Shakespeare in Love, there was a quotation from Joseph Fiennes who played Shakespeare. When contemplating the part he looked for:

'[The] human element - all things [one] wouldn't associate with being a genius... I put aside all reverence and adopted the attitude that as soon as I put on those tights I was Will Shakespeare.'

Even though I had no idea that was how Joseph Fiennes found his way into the part, I immediately identified. When I was writing The Fool's Girl, I had to discover my own way round Shakespeare the genius. I did so by finding my Will Shakespeare in Mr Fiennes. When you see something like that, it is a good feeling, as though your insight is vindicated.

I found much to think about as I went round this exhibition. Just as it is on the screen, so it should be on the page.  Nothing is accidental. Everything is there by design and clothing should suit the character, not just by being right for the period but right for the person. 

Once in a while, costume and clothing can do something more.  One of the last exhibits is Judy Garland's costume from The Wizard of Oz. It is worth the long, slow shuffle. The power and magic of L. Frank Baum's fantasy is eloquently expressed in the contrast between Dorothy's faded, dusty blue gingham dress and the dazzling brilliance of the ruby slippers. It is all there in the costume. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

*The Exhibition is on until 27th January, so you still have time to catch it if you are quick.

Ideas and a cream tea. The National Trust and me - Celia Rees

I have belonged to the National Trust for nearly thirty years now. I joined while visiting Moreton Hall in Cheshire. I was with a group from Birmingham University. We were doing a tour of Alan Garner Country. This was long before I thought of writing myself and while I was signing up I had no idea how important membership would be for me. Since then, I have visited houses and gardens again and again, all over the country.

Sometimes, these visits are just for a nose round the house and a wander in the gardens - and the tea, of course, but sometimes the visit has a direct bearing on my writing. I choose particular houses for particular periods, particular characters. It is a quick, shorthand way of getting into their lives.

When I was writing Sovay, I decided that Farnborough Hall, near Banbury in Warwickshire, would be the ideal home for her. A beautiful 18th Century house, not too big, not too small, built in the distinctive local honey coloured limestone with extensive gardens, long walks for restless wanderings and handy follies for clandestine lovers' meetings. Perfect. I could position her here. Near enough (at a stretch) for her father to attend meetings of the Lunar Men in Birmingham, near to one of the great north south routes from the Midlands to London, ideal for a highway woman, and near enough for me to visit with my National Trust card as often as I needed to build a picture of her life and to layer up the descriptions which would be my opening chapter.

Another house that I visited while writing Sovay was Berrington Hall, near Leominster, Herefordshire. It is a 18th Century house, so again, it could provide extra detail for Sovay's home, but that is not why I went there. It houses the National Trust's costume collection. Only a small selection is on display, but I was lucky enough to talk my way behind the scenes and to be shown the kinds of clothes that Sovay and her contemporaries would have been wearing.

Boxes were opened for me, acid free tissue paper folded back to reveal dresses, waistcoats, top coats, shirts and breeches. The garments did not appear old and faded. They looked as if their wearers had just stepped out of them. The colours on the cottons were still fresh and bright, the silks and brocades rich and shining, the embroidery intricately worked with silver and gold thread, jet and glass beading catching the light. Alongside the boxes of clothes stood racks of footwear: polished boots, creased to the wearer's foot, elegant shoes with neat little heels, very kittenish, shiny steel and silver buckles. These clothes belonged to real people. It wasn't just the colours, but the textures: the glaze on the cotton, the shimmer of watered silk, the twill of the breeches, the smoothness of finely woven wool. You could hear the creak of leather, the rustle of fabric. The whole period came alive. It was as though the portraits on the wall in Farnborough Hall, here in Berrington, and in the other houses I'd visited, were suddenly animated, as if the sitters had stepped out of them and were walking around.

This wonderful collection is called the Wade Collection, named after Charles Wade who spent a lifetime collecting all manner of things, not just clothes. His house, Snowshill Manor, is another National Trust property. I've visited there often, not for the kind of reference I'd be looking for at a house like Farnborough, but for more general inspiration. The eclectic nature of his collection seethes with potential. In room after room in Snowshill, something of Wade's restless curiosity and relentless obsession lingers still.

I haven't used Snowshill directly, but I did set a ghost story at nearby Chastleton and Baddersley Clinton makes an appearance in The Fool's Girl.

It is not just the National Trust's heritage collections that offer inspiration. The Installation Artist, Alfreda McHale's works http://alfredamchale.com brightened and enlivened an otherwise drab Charlcote Park this winter.

Her 'Runcible' spoons, knives, forks, cutlery whorled and frilled the borders like metal flowers, while her 'Trolley' line tipping over the Ha Ha brought a smile (the Nat Trust can be a bit short on laughs). 'Seeking Pearls' in the Brew House gave people something to do out of the cold, something to talk about and I have never seen so many enthusiastic comments from the under twelves. She also gave me an idea for a workshop.

Ideas and cream teas. What's not to like?