‘That was really good,’ said Mrs Johns. ‘I thought you said you weren’t used to dealing with children.’

‘Well, not with so many children at a time, but I had a lot of help from a friend and then I just pretended it was a storytime, like we used to do at the bookshop, and it seemed to work.’

‘Well done, dear! And you’re making arrangements for a writer to visit? Would that come out of our budget or yours?’

‘Yours if possible, the festival is operating on a shoestring.’

‘I’ll see what we can do,’ said Mrs Johns. ‘The story competition is excellent and it’s an excuse to read more stories in school.’

As she had known it would be, the interview with the local newspaper was easy. They were keen to support the festival and offered to fund an event and to print three of the winning stories in the paper. She found herself chatting away with ease, her answers flowing freely. Somehow it was so much easier when you were talking about something you felt committed to.

Just as she was leaving the journalist said, ‘Could you let us have author biogs and photos as soon as poss? We’d like to do an “appearing at” feature.’

Laura stopped and turned round. ‘Yes, of course. You do know our line-up isn’t finalised? Supposing you did a feature on an author and then they couldn’t come?’

‘Oh dear, that wouldn’t work!’ The journalist, possibly perfectly reasonably, didn’t want to spend a lot of time researching and writing an article about someone who wasn’t going to come within a hundred miles of the county.

Laura considered. ‘Tell you what, you give me a list of the authors you’d most like to feature and I’ll chase them up. If they think there’s a bit of guaranteed publicity it might help them decide to come.’

In the car she made some extra notes and then set off home, quietly excited at the prospect of talking to Dermot.

‘So how did you get on with the kids?’ was the first thing he said when he picked up the phone.

‘Oh, it was great! I took all your ideas and once I’d got going I found I loved it. Perhaps there is a performer in me after all.’

‘There’s something about children though, isn’t there? They don’t let you get away with anything.’

Discovering that Dermot Flynn, who shunned his public, refused to have anything to do with the literary world and worked hard on his image of a hard-drinking, womanising has-been, actually went into his local school regularly as a helper had come as a shock.

‘I don’t tell many people,’ he had explained. ‘It doesn’t go with the image.’