… Ive never seen a storm like it. They said on the television that it would pass over without damage, but they couldnt have been more wrong. You should have been out here Colleen where it gets really dark. The howling of the wind was so loud it was like a voice. And so many trees down. It hurts me to see the woods so broken …

… Theyre selling the big house at Fiddlers Mill. Its going to be a retreat for the rich can you believe it? Men and women who want to get out of the city and be in the green but don’t understand why, so they wear dressing gowns and get massarges …

Heather put the letters down and pulled her laptop from her bag. There was, unsurprisingly, no wi-fi in the café so she piggybacked off her phone again. A quick bit of googling told her several things: that a big stretch of land known as Fiddler’s Mill had indeed been the location of a commune in the 1970s, outstaying its welcome slightly but still supposedly dedicated to the ideals of peace, free love, and copious drug use. Now the big house known as Fiddler’s Mill was partly home to a fancy spa complex, which had been in existence since the early ’90s. The land and the spa were partly owned by an environmental charity called Oak Leaf, and indeed the emphasis was on the environment, healthy living, detoxes, and other things Heather was naturally repelled by. It looked, to a woman recently booted out of a modest salaried journalism job, mind-bogglingly expensive.

She opened a new page and delved a little deeper into the old Fiddler’s Mill, the one that existed before the fancy spa. Very quickly she found herself down a rabbit hole crammed with erratically written blogs and ugly webpages awkwardly chucked together by people too old to be comfortable online but too keen to share their memories to give up. At first it seemed fairly innocuous, with most recalling a lot of music, a lot of drink, a lot of young people having a good time. There were a few photographs scattered about, showing people with long hair and a relaxed attitude to grooming, more acoustic guitars than Heather thought was healthy, and a lot of food being cooked outdoors. There was the central building, a reasonably impressive eighteenth-century house and its grounds, and a number of tents and caravans, a few temporary shed-like things thrown up, and lots of cars.

There was an edge to it all, though. Perhaps it was because they had left the ’60s behind and were ensconced in the grottiness of the ’70s, but in the photographs Heather saw a lot of hard eyes, a lot of people who were thinner than they should have been. She saw one photo of a pregnant woman sitting by a campfire, one hand resting on her distended belly; far from glowing with maternal satisfaction, her face was hard and distant, as if carved from flint. Heather wondered, looking at the photographs, if weed was the only drug of choice at Fiddler’s Mill—she doubted it. And in the blogs and diaries and articles, she unearthed a line of discontent that spoke of poor facilities, abuse, and even fraud.