In April 1994, I reminded Rob Holdstock that I would very much like him to write a story for this volume of New Worlds.
He replied on June 11.
David Garnett
Dear David,
Thanks for your note and I’m sorry to have been so slow responding. Two reasons for my distraction: first, the story I’d planned to show you (‘Merlin’s Wood’) grew into a novel! And secondly, that business at Hockley Mere in Norfolk, I mentioned to you, has been taking some interesting twists and turns. I’ll be getting back into Science after twenty years! Real Soon Now ...
It occurs to me that the letters from the paleo-botanist who contacted me might be of interest, since they deal, as does the whole Hockley Mere ‘event’, with a subject close to the modem SF heart.
I enclose her side of the correspondence; see what you think. In any case, I’ll be in touch in July.
All the best
Rob
~ * ~
(Letters from Rebecca Knight of the Department of Botany, Cambridge University, 1992-1994)
~ * ~
August ‘92 (letter)
Dear Rob,
Thanks for the book, but especially thanks for your time and work with Phil and myself at Hockley Mere. As you’ve no doubt discovered, taking peat-samples from thinly wooded Norfolk Fenland is laborious, wet, tiring on the arms, and very, very dirty! Thank God for the Dancing Poachers pub, even if it is a gathering point for the metal-detector mafia, the bloody treasure hunters! Anyway, more to the point: our research project is not just one page further along, thanks to your efforts - it’s beginning to take a whole new direction! There was something very strange and very exciting in one of the samples we took that day. I’ll get to it in a moment.
For your information, since you’ve asked, the cores you took were two inches in diameter, went forty feet deep, reaching down through one hundred and fifty thousand years of time, more or less. We have some horrendous names for the feet and inches along that core which mark out the centuries: Alerod and Windermere Interstadial (those were the warm times); Older and Younger Dryas (the woody times); Devensian, Flandrian and Holocene ... it goes on!
So you have sampled oak and elm wildwood at a time when only boar, bears and beavers hunted the magic groves. Oh yes, there were beavers at work in Norfolk a hundred thousand years ago, same style of dams, same effect on shaping the woodland around the rivers as you get in Canada.
Anyway, your core was a fine sample, and an interesting one. A ‘good call’, as we Americans say. It has a charcoal line in the Older Dryas, followed by an inch of grassland pollen: this means that about a hundred thousand years ago the forest around Norwich burned down - a ferocious fire, by the looks of it, very localized, quite inexplicable. The area never recovered. The climate cooled, and a sort of cold savannah took over; an open grassland scattered with stands of beech and silver birch, patches of scrub-oak and wych elm, acting as shelters to ungulates, rodents and birds of prey. This was rich grassland, though, and would have been grazed by many species of creature, mostly now extinct.
But most interesting of all, we’ve found the pollen of an equally extinct tree, a shade-tolerant ecotype of Corylus avellana: yes, the famous and magical British hazel, the sacred Tree of Avalon, whose nuts carry wisdom and inspiration and whose twigs can find water and make rain!
We think the ecotype must have developed and spread from a single refugium (that’s the academic’s word for the first seeding-place), which was light-starved. In other words, this tree had stamina. Or to put it another way, it had a versatile gene pool.
No: I don’t intend to get into the debate about DNA and magic attributes! Save that for your novels!
At the risk of boring you with facts (I know you prefer your own facts to anyone else’s), let me take a moment to walk you through some ancient echoes, just outside Norwich.
At fifty thousand years Before the Present, primary oak and elm returns to what for millennia has been a rich grassland, so you can imagine the Fenland as now being a stifling, unbroken forest in three layers: a gloomy and dangerous underwood of scrub-hazel, juniper, crab-apple, maythom and holly - below a vast sprawling canopy of oak. elm and lime, a sea of foliage that is penetrated vertically by oaks of enormous size! Grandfather trees, as they would be called in the Amazon rainforests.
But these oaks must have been phenomenal - nearly two hundred feet of vertical trunk, and then a vast but compact head of twisting branches, gnarled bark, leaf mass, fungal extrusions, hollowings and hollows in the mass. Miniecosystems, in other words, hovering above a broken and restless landscape of canopy and nests. (Oh yes: did I mention that we find evidence that the upper canopy was used like a land surface, swarming with birds and lightboned mammals, running the leaf mass above the half-light of the wildwood below, where the big creatures hunted?)
The core-sample you took - so much work for eight hours, so many pints that evening! - shows that during the last hundred and fifty thousand years, Eastern England was covered four times by a massive wildwood. But each period of afforestation lasted no more than ten thousand years before giving way to tundra, or cold savannah.
I know you don’t agree with me, but the wildwood is only an occasional visitor to the Earth. Because it’s long-lived in human terms, and humans achieved consciousness during its last and latest visit, we think of it as the natural state, but the wildwood really is only one face of an Earth that is continually playing with its options. Savannah, in the heat, and tundra, in the cool, are the real landscape, the most cost-effective if you want to think of it in those terms. I know we all worry about the loss of forests - their beauty, their m biota, their diversity, and their function as refugia for human populations who have become of interest to anthropologists, if that’s something you can sanction. But the Earth itself seems to recognize that big forests are simply one extreme of the Life-Fluctuation norm - deserts being the other - and so what we should be concerned with is the concreting of the Earth. As long as we have fields of grass to dream in: No problem! When the fields go... Problem!
~ * ~
Dear Rob ... I’ve just been to a seminar on the whole Hockley Mere site, and here’s some information closer to the heart of a Celtophilic, nostalgic old archaeo-culture-vulture - your core, which reached down one hundred and fifty thousand years into the past, began its journey through a vertical cut of human time. In the top four feet you managed to pass through the site of a Civil War skirmish, then through one of King John’s camps (a small coin has been found); there are traces of a seventh-century settlement, possibly Efringdun, and a Celtic shrine, Icenian, probably associated with Boudicca or her husband, Prasitagus, and dedicated to Mabon. Below that, a Bronze Age cemetery with burnt offerings and obsidian beads; then a flint workshop, probably five thousand years Before Present, and finally a shell midden, almost certainly Mesolithic; a community of fisherfolk and hunters that had lived here when the coastline of Norfolk came a lot further inland - before Cromer, before Great Yarmouth!
It’s like a new excursion into Puck of Pook’s Hill, isn’t it? Downwards through time.
A foot below these echoes of Kipling’s journey, the wildwood, according to its pollen record, is strong and free, reaching to the edge of the ocean itself. But six inches below that there is nothing but the signs of ice and desolation - namely sterile clays and gravels. Then, ten feet down - about twenty five thousand years ago - we find not just the wildwood again, but fire and flint!
Dear God, we think of Ancient History as Stone Age, Stonehenge, Bronze Age, Romans, Trojans, King Arthur, Robin Hood - Abba! But here, before the Ice Age that shaped your country as you know it, someone lived, made tools, burned a clearing to construct a shelter, someone echoed the beaver, forgotten folk shaping the land by making their refuge out of the product of that land.
It makes me think of the question you posed to us that final night in the pub, before you left: what did they dream of? Where are their dreams now? How do we look at the land in the right way to see what they might have left for us? (I’m talking forgotten folk here, not Abba...)
~ * ~
November ‘92 (letter)
Rob ... really bad news: three evenings ago, the treasure hunters came, metal detectors in profusion. There were five of them, possibly more, since one kept talking into a mobile phone. Typical Nighthawks - leathermasks painted with bird features, army-surplus anoraks, ‘bovver boots’ and motorcycle chains. They smashed the last two cores we’d taken - the others, fortunately, had already gone to Cambridge - and burned our tents. They said we were trespassing on a ‘listed site’. When Phil pointed out that Hockley Mere was nothing of the sort, and he’d know because he’d done the routine search, as he did before sampling from any part of the land, he got two broken teeth and chain burn round his neck for his protest.
They waved a map of Britain at us - it was covered with circles, thousands of them. ‘Listed sites! Listed sites!’ the leader chanted.
Phil did absolutely nothing physical. He just kept arguing with them. This was a site of archaeological interest, he roared at the leader, as the recent coresampling would suggest. But it wasn’t yet a listed site, as they must well have known. If they’d found evidence of a settlement, they should report it to the British Museum and immediately stop all metal-detecting work at the site. The only thing their map showed was archaeological sites that had been tentatively identified from the air, or by bastards like them with metal detectors, none of which had yet been officially excavated, and which in most instances were probably not even known officially.
Then he called them ‘nothing more than thieves!’ ‘Pillagers!’ he shouted, ‘Don’t pretend differently.’
That’s when he got an old-fashioned police baton in the mouth, and four hundred pounds’ worth of dental work. He’s defiant though. This country’s heritage is being mined for gold and silver, while ‘dull’ things like clay plaques with scrawled writing on them, lifted from a Roman site, or boot buckles from a lost medieval village, get dumped in what the Nighthawks call Bad Find Pit.
From a stray comment heard before he was beaten up, Phil thinks Bad Find Pit is somewhere in the West York Moors, a deep ghyll of some sort, maybe even Gaping Ghyll itself. The ultimate votive-offering shaft! If that sounds flippant, I don’t feel flippant. I feel sick ...
~ * ~
February ‘93 (fax)
... Do you remember the pollen of Corylus we found? Curiouser and curiouser ...This ecotype of the magical hazel hasn’t been known for a hundred thousand years, but its DNA, in the pollen we extracted, was still intact and viable. It had been preserved in a sugar - trehalose, I think – which doesn’t crystallize but instead forms a sort of glass - it protects molecules, even complex ones, by forming hydrogen bonds with macromolecules in place of water. That’s how seeds, frogs, even some reptiles survive droughts in non-active metabolic states for decades... but one hundred thousand years!
Apparently there are stands of Corylus all over the world, seeded from a Hockley Mere sample taken ten years ago. (No: I’m afraid it wasn’t a new discovery after all.) It’s a fast-growing tree, unlike modem hazel, and secretes organic matter in the same sugar-glass, presumably to protect itself against insect parasites - rather like resin, I suppose, although it must also attract creatures, I’d have thought. Do you remember visiting Wytham Woods outside Oxford? We got permission to go into the wildwood refugium, the few acres where they’re leaving the wood unmanaged for the foreseeable future, and at one point we were both almost speechless with a sense of belonging, of beauty, of being almost in a New Age fever of closeness to nature. You wanted to hug the trees, you said. In fact you did, and got very sticky as a result.
Well, that was the Corylus refuge. I’ll try and find out more and let you know.
~ * ~
... I was talking with David Bellamy at a faculty supper. Apparently on the island of Tasmania there’s a swathe of forest that no lumberjack will touch, or even go near. These are hard-assed, hardwood-hating, moneyseeking, western, ‘exploitation-vegetation’ (as we call the logging companies). But they won’t access Gordon Valley for love, money, or even more money! And the place is riddled with archaic Corylus, seeded there in ‘82, and now widely spread. Each Corylus hazel seems to create a circle of protection among the native trees, which include mahogany and the so-called Dragon trees with their huge buttresses, a circle about four hundred yards in diameter. Bellamy said he’d heard these called Charisma Zones. To go into them was either frightening or awe-inspiring. He said he’d wanted to stay in the valley for ever and had to forcibly control what he called an emotional-overload in order to get out. But - loggers unwilling to cut the trees? Odd, to say the least.
At the same supper, listening to the same conversation, was Jack Cohen, an embryologist and science-fiction fan, I think. Do you know him? He apparently goes to sci-fi conventions and gives crazy, right-on lectures about alien biologies. He’d heard that the Corylus avellana seeded in Tasmania are transgenic, he’s not sure how, and will arrange for me to meet Crick’s assistant in the Botany department. They’re playing with all manner of genetic matchmaking, as they call it, of plants.
~ * ~
May ‘93 (letter)
...It’s human DNA! I can hardly believe it. The Corylus avellana archeotypes have been ‘infected’ with twenty gene-sequences selected from various human chromosomes (I was told which ones, but it didn’t mean a lot to me), complex sequences that between them contain some, though not all -but enough - of the coding that combines to create the chemical and behavioural attributes we call charisma; the effect that some people have when they walk into a room, or talk to you - you feel drawn to them, you feel in their shadow, but you’re content, it’s a form of nurture - you can’t touch, but they can hold you so close. They can elicit fear, or respect, but mostly well being - what Americans are increasingly calling the feelgood factor, as Hollywood’s own charisma cuts through the neural networks of the American psyche, leaving only sentimentality and redemption as the Theme of Life.
Charisma!
They ‘ ve apparently set up small intrusions of transgenic hazel wood in fifty forest locations, each with the Group-DNA-sequences from a different charismatic individual.
The way it works is to do with the trehalose sugar-glass. The hazel tree exudes the charisma factor, which is protected in fluid glass and contained in molecular tubes of Buckminsterfullerine, a complex of hexagonal and pentagonal carbon rings that form together like a football but which can also link to form incredibly resistant, single-molecular thickness tubes, theoretically with no limit to their length! Each breeze in the rainforest, or temperate woodland, carries millions of these charisma packages to the foliage of the native trees, where they’re absorbed through pores into the leaves, and disseminated through the sap system to individual cells. The ‘bucky-tubes’ seem able to enter the transport systems of each plant cell through the exits in the cell membrane from the reticular system, which accumulates and pumps out cell products. Everything is in reverse, then - the human genes, linked with Corylus avellana’s reverse transcriptase and a so-called ‘seek and find’ gene that targets the nuclear membrane, enters it, and allows for the stitching into the cells of the tropical hardwood (or whatever) of the viral DNA, thus allowing a gigantic and long-established hardwood to produce some of the thousands of human pheromones that can combine to create the aura of charisma.
By the way - you remember the refugium in Wycome Wood? When you hugged and kissed the trees, and called them ‘wonderful’ and ‘so, so precious’ and ‘my special luvvies’?
They were carrying the pooled DNA of five years of British Oscar winners!
~ * ~
September ‘93 (letter)
... It’s not easy getting details of the charismatic Corylus intrusions. The original requests for DNA were made surreptitiously, but the ‘Charisma Set’ got to hear of it, through the grapevine, in no time at all. There were thousands of applications to donate DNA - from politicians, actors, explorers, religious leaders, ex-hostages, painters, writers, newspaper moguls, athletes, comedians, TV presenters - it’s astonishing how these people define their own charisma. How many believe the fake charisma of public notoriety is somehow to do with them.
Of course, money talked in its own persuasive dialect, as has politics, which is to say ‘blackmail’.
But on the whole, the charisma - which of course is to be used to protect and preserve the woodlands - has been acquired by general agreement.
A notable success, for example, is the Clint Eastwood Corylus pinewood up in Montana. They call it Make-My-Day wood, and it’s flourishing - mainly because no one dares go near it.
The various GellerGroves - using Uri Geller’s DNA - are also having a remarkable effect. Although his spoonbending was probably a trick, his ability to stop wrist-watches seems to have been genuine. But inside a GellerGrove, time doesn’t just stop, its accumulated events vanish, facilitating peace meetings between enemy states that can be undertaken without the burden of history.
The hugely promoted Papwoods of Madonna have been successful too -they’re so tacky and forgettable, nobody bothers with them.
Not all the Corylus refugia are working as well as these. The so-called Ed Kennedy copses in New England have deteriorated into shallow lakes and marshes, now used by the locals to dump their old cars. And four hundred miles from Manaus, in the Caruari region of the Brazilian rainforest, the charismatic Corylus intrusion actually seemed to encourage the loggers and drug companies in the mindless exploitation of the local flora, causing much suffering. After several years of such abuse, however, the Corylus were suddenly found strangled with creeper; Thatcher wood has now been deemed a failure and will be cut down.
~ * ~
November ‘93 (scrawled letter)
... I can’t bear it. I’ve been hysterical with rage for a week. I should have written to you at once, but sometimes I’m not strong enough to face my own despair.
Phil is in hospital, very badly hurt. He went back to Hockley Mere to take a second core, to try to establish if the charcoal feature that was discovered when you were with us was the result of human clearance by a Sapiens group, closely related to Sapiens Neanderthalis, remains of which have recently been found in abundance in Spain; it’s a human group which might have spread over the fabled landbridge between Brittany and Dorset that we now know existed 80,000 years ago.
The Nighthawks must have been waiting for him, or perhaps he disturbed one of their digging operations. They threw him in the shallow mere, tied up with oiled motorcycle chains, and his skull cracked by a blow from a flint hammer, which they discarded. They’d stuck a red-kite’s carcase on an ash-pole by his unconscious body, carved with - can you believe it? - early Latin. The words meant ‘Finding is keeping. If you spy, you die.’
The arrogance, the confidence in this display of territoriality, seems to confirm what Phil always suspected - it’s the millionaire collectors, the black market, the art world that is behind the Nighthawks. And our government gets a nice little earner in tax to deny it’s happening, because questions aren’t asked, and objects don’t have to be catalogued, just so long as the monetary transaction in ‘sale of art’ appears on the simplest of tax forms. We’re so obsessed with the fine details of select committee reports, rulings, debates and decisions on our heritage, that we forget how easy it is to bribe the establishment to ignore the question of what is being traded, or exploited, by simply being honest about the amount of money its being traded for~
~ * ~
Late February ‘94 (fax)
... You remember the woods near Hockley Mere? Three sets of men’s clothes - leathers, underclothes, masks, boots, chains - plus metal detectors were found in a Corylus grove, strung to branches with ivy, just last week. No sign of bodies, or signs of a struggle. And it turns out it’s a Charisma wood too! But there’s a certain cageyness about exactly whose charisma. There are five ‘closed files’, according to Jack Cohen. Five woods, world-wide, that are ‘outside’ the main experiment. Cambridge is completely silent on the nature - even the location - of those five. Hockley Mere has ‘leaked’ - in part at least - but I hear already that the army is moving in.
What happened to the Nighthawks? Charisma can’t kill, can it? It can’t be the trees tying the clothes up... Can it? What happened to the bodies?
~ * ~
Later note by post:
I just found out Phil was down there at the time, went there after discharging himself from hospital. But he wasn’t around when the discovery of the discarded clothes was made, or at least no one saw him. He’s not been seen for several days, in fact. I’m seriously worried, now. I’m going down to Hockley Mere to take a look - I’ll call you tomorrow if all’s well.
~ * ~
March ‘94 (handwritten notes on lined paper)
...The whole area around Hockley Mere has been sealed off: lakes and woods, fields and farms, the army and police are everywhere, and rangers, and paramilitaries. It’s like a scene from a movie. Army trucks are in and out along the main road in a constant stream.
I caught up with Phil in the Dancing Poachers. He’s managed to dig in, at Hockley, a sort of hide, close enough to the woods to see the activity at closer hand, but it’s risky.
The main thing he’s observed is that a stretch-limo arrives every day, driving slowly into the cluster of lorries, portacabins and tents that have been erected at the lake-side perimeter of Hockley wood. Always a cluster of people around the limo, and much activity out of sight, moving towards the woods.
Who’s inside, Phil hasn’t seen or managed to find out yet.
Meanwhile, locals talk about the two lost kids, both in their teens, both keen on fishing in the scatter of ponds around the main lake itself. They’d gone missing three days before. Just their clothes found, neatly packaged at the woodland edge ...
~ * ~
March ‘94 (postcard)
Two army privates, who came into the Poachers for a drink, were talking about ‘missing’ friends. They were getting scared of the Hockley Mere duty, talking about asking for a transfer. They clammed up when Phil came and sat down nearby, but the landlady, an easy-going woman, got talking to them later. Five of their unit have gone missing, it seems, and the rest are badly affected by going anywhere near the trees - a dizzying sense of dislocation, void, emptiness, a feeling of being far flung, helplessly travelling towards a strong, guiding light.
~ * ~
March ‘94 (postcard, same post)
Out of body experiences? Or maybe that odd experience during near death when you seem to be going down a tunnel towards an ‘angelic’ light? Who knows? I can’t get close enough to find out. Rumour in the ‘scientific’ world, by the way, is that the charisma is Billy Graham’s, but I’m sure Praise-The-Lord wood (the trees wave their upper branches in unison) is in the USA somewhere.
~ * ~
Early April ‘94 (fax)
… Curiouser and curiouser: a constant stream of experts on what I hear is being called ‘Imaginative Time’ are being bussed in from around the world. Many of them stop off at the Poachers’. By all accounts they are as confused by the happenings at the Charisma wood as the locals.
You’ll probably know some of the writers among them: they’ve been brought in because of their expertise in the relationship between time and imagination: Aldiss to advise on the Jurassic; Priest on the Edwardian; Moorcock and Silverberg on the End of Time itself; Kushner and de Lint on time as it runs in the realm of Faerie; Tuttle on lost futures; Bear, Baxter, McAuley on Big Science. Several others. There are musicians - Birtwhistle, Chris Dench, Laurie Anderson, the younger Taverner, folk singers plus pipes and hurdy-gurdies, Aboriginal musicians plus flutes and drums, Hawkwind.
All of them go into Hockley wood, near the shallow lake, and sometimes you can hear music. On their return they are debriefed at length before being bussed to their hotel, exhausted and frightened, and sworn to secrecy.
~ * ~
April ‘94 (postcard)
Two of the writers have vanished: just their clothes found, oddly intertwined, plus a few frantically scribbled sentences from each, nothing coherent, although in the man’s case, startlingly enigmatic. They’ll be greatly missed by their fans.
~ * ~
Late April ‘94 (scrawled letter)
... A great deal of consternation. Rumour has it that something in the charisma of the wood is functioning in a way that was not expected. Each day, the stretch-limo brings the Charisma Source, the only man who can control his inadvertent creation. Master of the Id! In the Dancing Poachers, the talk is all of the stars ‘spinning and swirling above Hockley, like a heavenly whirlpool’ a phenomenon witnessed by several local - and sober - people, although the effect lasted for just a few seconds.
A friend in the department of paleontology at Cambridge, someone who’s always on the case in his quiet manner, has slipped me a note: new studies of bone fragments, collected in Victorian times from pits and excavations in the Hockley area that probably reached, during the digging, to levels representing fifty to one hundred thousand years Before Present, seem to be of modern man. Something about the teeth: lacunae in two molars show signs of having been produced by a metal drill! Sounds like one of those urban myths, doesn’t it? But there’s a real buzz of activity in the department. Someone’s taking it seriously.
By the way, I see you’ve been invited to participate, along with others on the new list. Let me know when you’re coming to Hockley.
~ * ~
May ‘94 (letter)
... It’s Hawking’s! The charisma DN A, I mean. The Cambridge mathematician who has visualized so much of the beginning of the universe. It’s Hawking himself who arrives each day in the stretch-limo. He’s trying to reverse the defensive field of the charisma trees at Hockley, to make them bring back the lives that have been set adrift in time!
It was so obvious, I suppose. Hawking’s charisma is substantially related to his imagination, and his total engagement with Imaginative Time, an expression that turns out to be his coinage. The hazelwood has formed a tunnel from the beginning to the end of the universe as it exists for the wood, and they use it, as do all the Corylus woods, to protect themselves, not understanding - how can they? They are not sentient - that they are destroying life.
~ * ~
May ‘94 (postcard)
One of the writers who disappeared three weeks ago has returned, grotesquely naked and dishevelled, aged by many years, his flesh hanging from him in fatty rags. He stumbled from the wood clutching a strange flower, and was hastened away to the interview rooms to tell his story. I hear that he is insisting on ‘going back’ - he’s met someone - but he will not say to where. Something has happened to him and he no longer belongs in his own time. But he has been through the tunnel and survived! I hear talk that it is the trees themselves that have brought him back and sent him as an envoy, an emissary, to communicate with Hawking about what must be done to protect human life, while the imagination is allowed to access the views of past and future inside the hazelwood. Perhaps sentience exists after all!
~ * ~
June ‘94 (scrawled letter on back of manuscript sheet)
Rob - This may be my last letter - not sure - Phil has found a way through the military fence. We’re going into Hockley wood tonight. It’s an opportunity that we have to take - I can’t explain it except to say it feels right. I’m drawn to Hockley. Charisma? Of course. But I don’t want to think too rationally at the moment, I just need to hold Phil’s hand and enter the flow of time. I know you’re coming up soon, but I really can’t wait for you. I have to go now into the flow.
By all the signs, that flow is backwards, and to that time of the intriguing forest fire, which I now think was probably started by the first unwilling travellers, the Nighthawks. I want to come back, of course, but... well, there’s no guaranteeing. How to communicate with you from so far in the past I haven’t a clue, unless I scratch a letter on ivory. I’m prompted to suggest this by something Phil heard from the Nighthawks, way back, when they tried to kill him. They’d been over the Hockley area pretty thoroughly, but mostly Bad Finds: and the Bad Finds included a stack of bones with what looked like writing on them, which they assumed were some ‘freak show’ and were disposed of.
If you ever locate Bad Find Pit, search among those bones for a letter from Rebecca.
I hope you don’t get asked for postage!
~ * ~
Rob Holdstock’s penultimate words to me were: ‘I’ll be in touch in July.’ I’m still waiting to hear from him.
Somehow or other.
David Garnett
Three Chimneys Ferring
September 1994