Remains of an Altar

Paterson – better than any of them at presenting the great man as a complex, mixed-up human being. (No one, however, seems to have quite pinned him down. Michael Kennedy, distinguished music critic and former Northern Editor of the Daily Telegraph, is quick to squash suggestions that Elgar was a liberal, claiming triumphantly that he went fox-hunting, while Jacob O’Callaghan points out that Elgar allied himself with the campaigns of his vegetarian friend George Bernard Shaw and told a journalist that he had developed ‘a horror of the slaughter of wildlife for “sport.”’)

Also The Malvern Hills, An Ancient Landscape by Mark Bowden with contributions by David Field and Helen Winton; The Malverns by Pamela Hurle; The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins; Alfred Watkins, A Herefordshire Man by Ron Shoesmith; The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood; the revised Who Dares Wins by Tony Geraghty; Bravo Two Zero and Immediate Action by Andy McNab; Freefall by Tom Read; The Music of the Spheres by Jamie James; Sacred Sounds by Ted Andrews; Ray Simpson’s Celtic Worship Through the Year; The Inner Teachings of the Golden Dawn by R.G. Torrens; and Not the Least (that’s the title), The Story of Little Malvern by Ronald Bryer.

Wychehill, by the way, is not the same place as either the Wyche or Lower Wyche areas of Malvern. However, an interesting ghost-road situation did arise a few years ago not too far away in the Herefordshire village of Stoke Lacy, scene of several unexplained road accidents. In this case, drivers said they felt as if something had taken over the steering. You couldn’t make it up; sometimes you don’t have to.

Thanks, as ever, to Krys and Geoff Boswell who preserve the website, www.philrickman.co.uk, against all kinds of negative forces, and Terry Smith who organises the T-shirts. In America, Rick and Claire Kleffel, Jani Sue Muhlestein, Marla Williams and Andy Ryan, Trudy Williams and Kevin Bowman, Jerry Handspicker and Rob Wilder.

And, on the publishing side: Anthony Cheetham, Nic Cheetham, Rosie de Courcy, Nick Austin and, of course, the lovely and phenomenal Carol who worked double shifts on this extremely taxing novel for about six weeks before we managed to pull it into shape.

Final note. Noctilucent clouds were visible in the northern sky over the Welsh border counties on at least one night towards the end of June, 2006. The aforementioned Paul Devereux (no relation to Preston – different spelling) explained what they were.

I’d seen them around midnight and wished I’d been at Whiteleafed Oak.