WE APPROACHED OUR fates by different routes, Thomas Hardy and I. When he set out for Lyonnesse it was impossibly early in the morning and he had to change trains more times than he changed cousins to get from Bockhampton to Launceston – ‘a sort of cross jump-journey, like a chess-knight’s move,’ as Emma Gifford put it in her recollections – before driving the final sixteen miles over the dreary poetical hills in a hired trap, via Halworthy, Otterham, and Tresparret Posts, as the world well knows. I sped to my destiny with much less mythological ado at the time, and, as I expect, much less publicity in the future, arriving at Bodmin Road from Paddington direct and completing the journey in a taxi. Nonetheless, the places from which we returned with magic in our eyes (not that I’ve returned yet) were scarcely more than a couple of miles apart. His was a touch more inland than mine, that was all. Emma Gifford was up at the rectory, listening in to the silence, waiting for the head man from Crickmay’s of Weymouth (Hardy, altering her recollections after her death, changed ‘head man’ to ‘assistant architect’) to come and start work on the restoration of the old church tower; whereas Camilla Marteline was out at sea, with the fishermen, not waiting for anybody. Why should she have been? I hadn’t told her I was coming. Drop in if you are ever passing, she had written on the bottom of the invoice she had sent me for her monographs, and as I happened to be passing I dropped in. The keynote was informality. The three suitcases were not significant. I simply didn’t own a rucksack.