It was an enthralling, uplifting tale, laced with humour (“I’ve seen better ordered flowers on a roundabout in Newquay” was one visitor’s verdict on the garden). One of the most poignant discoveries was the wall on which the gardeners had signed their names before going off to the Great War Many of the names appear on the local war memorial. He met a man who’d just inherited a wilderness and went to investigate, machete in hand. He found a lost world: the gardens, decaying hot-houses, silted-up lakes and ponds of a once-great house. Rattling his way through before-and-after slides with machine-gun speed, he explained how he originally just wanted to find a piece of land to raise pigs on. Over in the Barn, Tim Smit regaled a packed house with the romantic story of the Lost Gardens of Heligan: from forgotten wilderness to one of Cornwall’s top attractions in a few years.
An emotional and absorbing debate led inevitably to detailed questioning from the audience, and the event ran over by half an hour, ending in a standing ovation.Hermione Lee had to endure less sensitive questioning after her lively lecture on Virginia Woolf: “Why did you think there needed to be yet another biography on VW, and what made you think you were the person to write it?” Lee’s robust defence of her subject sent Woolfophiles scurrying to buy.Not all events took place in the Great Hall. Clare took as his theme “the most regrettable sentence of the decade”: John Major’s statement that we should all understand a little less and condemn a little more. Weirdly enough, exactly the same thing had happened to him the previous night in Manchester …
Blake Morrison and Anthony Clare probed the Bulger case in front of a rapt and utterly sympathetic sell-out audience. Excitements on the first day inclu- ded a complete evacuation of the Great Hall during John Mortimer’s reading, when the fire alarm went off.
But with the likes of Jung Chang, Ben Okri and Alan Garner to enjoy, intellectual pursuits didn’t lose their allure – although there were a lot of people stretched out under the trees between events. Then came day after day of boiling, phew-what-a-scorcher, glorious Devon weather. The first few days were warm but sultry, with the clouds never quite deigning to clear over the lofty medieval roof of the hall. Stretching over nine days, with around 200 writers taking part, the sixth Ways Words literary jamboree at Dartington Hall was a festival of two halves. But the narrator picks up a copy of Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which suggests he might have lived his most promising years already Mark Cirino is only 26 This is a horrifyingly mature and beautiful debut.. The author’s inconsistency with his tenses is evocative of his narrator’s need both to come to terms with the past whilst putting it behind him so he can go forwards.The book’s ending is ambivalent There is hope.
