Guess what - Sarah and Olivia arrived yesterday with some delicious bones and meaty spiral chews for me as well as a Birthday card and a new tug toy! Thanks for my presents!
I've had one of the meaty spiral chews already and it was delicious. In fact I'd more or less finished it by the time Sarah and Olivia got to the bottom of the road!
Lots of love,
Ruby xx
For some years, usually before going on holiday, I made it in my way to purchase a book or two which are guides to the area I would be visiting. Having spent a goodly number of years visiting Lindisfarne, over the years I have collected 21 booklets and 20 books on Lindisfarne. Of these “The Magic of Holy Island” is a first edition by Henry Tegner , and no longer available. “Lindisfarne” was the book published by Magnus Magnusson, and this is also a first edition, which is autographed by the Author.
Some years after purchasing these books, I put “Lindisfarne” into my computer search engine, and discovered a novel called “Dragon under the Hill” by the newscaster Gordon Honeycombe. The story is set on Lindisfarne and many of the places mentioned in the story can be quite easily recognised. Sadly this book is now out of print, but can still be obtained on E Bay and one or two other literary sources – in some cases the paperback version can be bought for as little as £1.00. If you want a really entertaining read it is well worth tracking the book down.
In 1972, former ITN newscaster Gordon Honeycombe published Dragon Under the Hill.
Gordon Honeycombe
It tells the story of a young historian, Edmund Wardlaw, who moves with his Norwegian wife and their son into a cottage on the island of Lindisfarne, site of St Cuthbert's pre-Norman priory and scene of possibly the first Viking raids on Britain when, in the eighth century, a Norse king was killed by a ruthless English nobleman, and the king's son swore revenge.
The supernatural is introduced very quietly, with the sight of an apparently one-eyed man with a walking-stick on the Wednesday after the family's arrival; and if I had remembered Wagner's Ring cycle, I would have known who he was well before little Erik drew him astride his eight-legged horse, accompanied by the ravens Hugin and Munin.
The boy's discovery of an ancient burial mound, and the haunted treasures within, coincides with increasingly odd behaviour and increasing dislike between Erik and his father, culminating in a terrifying visitation which Edmund does his best to dismiss as poltergeist phenomena.Edmund's heroic good looks, his self-centred, mercurial character and his inability to get along with his offspring conjure up echoes of King Arthur; a Merlin figure also appears, in the shape of an elderly academic who has discovered a fragment of an ancient chronicle mentioning the Norse king's death.
But for all his arcane knowledge of language and history, and his insight into the Wardlaw parents ("They had apparent faults of character - of self, of pride and possessiveness. But nothing seemed subconscious, all was known"), this Merlin is no magician; even when "all is known", the knowledge counts for very little as the ghastly ancient vendetta is played out through the Wardlaw family. Reflecting the interpenetration of ancient and modern, Honeycombe adroitly varies his style, moving between the matter-of-fact and the near-incantatory without any jolting transitions.
The novel is beautifully structured, without a wasted word or a superfluous detail. There are some highly effective supernatural signs, notably the drawing by Erik's mother which he alters in a particularly unsettling fashion; but one of the book's many virtues is the way perfectly ordinary details, which less subtle hands would have used as mere background or local colour, are made to serve as portents equally grim. Edmund's casual jokes about returning to his roots and coming into his rightful inheritance, his chafing at the restraints placed on him by civilised life (he seems to have become a historian as a substitute for making history), and even his eccentric fondness for pigs, all take on new meaning as the story unfolds, just as the hatreds and resentments of everyday domestic life take on ever deeper and more sinister significance.
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