The Curiously Specific Book Club

In Part Two of our Buchan-based adventure we switch from Scotland to the Kent coast. We’re in search of the eponymous 39 steps. But first we need to locate Trafalgar House where German secret agents are hiding out. We end up at North Foreland, between the homes of a German-hating lord and a German-loving marquess. And, yes, we did find some steps!

It’s an iconic moment in British literature – John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay running across a moor with police, secret agents and an airplane all trying to hunt him down. But is it based on any kind of reality? We head for the Scottish Lowlands to find out, taking in abandoned train lines, the site of a car crash and a very remote farmhouse.

We return to Ramsgate in Kent with Margot Bennett’s brilliant thriller THE WIDOW OF BATH as our only guide. The book was published in 1952, the same year as rock and roll had its birthday. We’re looking for a hat shop and a suspicous employment agency and we’re pretty confident we’ve found both.We date the book’s action to 1951 with some of our usual close reading, before visiting our final location. The house of the deceased, Judge Bath, is described by Bennett as being five miles from the location of the book, on a clifftop looking over a bay. If you go five miles north from Ramsgate, you find yourself at North Foreland. And here there is something else extraordinary: another house, in which a writer completed his own chase thriller 40 years before Bennett’s. And in front of that house is a set of steps that go down to the sea.But that’s another story. For now, we leave you with one plea: read Margot Bennett. She deserves to be far better known than she is.

A young man with a questionable background is sitting in a small hotel by an unnamed harbour in England. He is ostensibly writing a review. Behind him he hears a party of unseen people come into the hotel restaurant. He knows their voices. They are people from his past. One of them, he had a love affair with. She is now married to a judge. The judge’s name is Bath.So begins Margot Bennett’s perfectly calibrated 1952 thriller THE WIDOW OF BATH. But where is this strange hotel? All Bennett tells us directly is that this is ‘not Bournemouth.’ Thankfully, there are other clues – more than enough for us to get our teeth into.And so we take you to Ramsgate on the Kent coast, our candidate for the book’s location. We discover a past filled with suspicious waiters, terrible food, and eternal controversies about immigration. When it comes to immigration, we find nothing much has changed. 

We take the classic 1939 thriller out for ride, starting precisely where the book’s hard-boiled narrator makes land in London at Hurlingham. We track down his hotel off the Cromwell Road and then re-enact a tense chase around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Holborn, ending in a (fictional) death at a defunct London Underground station.

It’s the second part of our adventure with AA Milne’s astonishingly popular book of verse for children, WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG. And, like Milne himself often was, we’re back on a golf course – or at least, we’re in where an Addington golf course used to be, and we’re wondering if Milne played there. We also visit somewhere rather special – Decoy Cottage in Sussex, where Christopher Robin spent his first handful of summers, and where there was a swan on the pond called Pooh. All of which is guiding us towards the inevitable – the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh, Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, where we inevitably leave our car in the Pooh Car Park, throw sticks off the Pooh sticks bridge, and mourn the unlikely death of a global rock superstar in the same garden where Christopher Robin played.

AA Milne’s book of poetry for children, WHEN WE VERY YOUNG, was stupefyingly successful – it may be the most successful volume of poetry ever published. In the first part of our adventure, we discover bears everywhere: waiting for us to step on cracks in the pavement outside the Chelsea home where AA Milne lived with his wife Daphne and, of course, his son Christopher Robin; bearskins on guards outside Buckingham Palace; and Winnie the bear herself, a Canadian visitor to London Zoo, whose name inspired a smaller, more fictional bear. We end the episode by asking, quite seriously: when Mother went down to the end of the town, where on earth did she go?

In Part Two of our adventures along the River Dart, we wonder whether the poet Alice Oswald genuinely walked the whole of the river from source to sea, thus producing her magnificent 2002 work ‘Dart’. We definitely believe she sat by the Totnes weir and probably saw seals on the Mew Stone. But did she really note down the names of all those boats in the many mooring sites along the way?