The Rain on My Face: A Book About North Norfolk - Quentin Quatermain

This book is a celebration of the English way of life and of the English dream - set in North Norfolk. It speaks for England. That is the atmosphere in the author's colourful account of a couple's first year in their dream house on the North Norfolk coast.

 Early in the 1990s they had settled there after years of travelling around the world and writing books on the Middle East and Africa. The author describes how the couple had opposed the decline of English society and the dengration of England. They decided to move to the English countryside, to live on the edge and to rediscover English values. They found a dream house in a coastal village - but bought it before they had sold their house in London. So the story is set against their struggle to survive, with non-paying tenants, squatters and threats of eviction.

The author writes of country pubs, coastal sailing, roasting woodcock, a flood, migrant birds, church music, village cricket and country auctions. He describes how the couple meet many strange but real characters - Zeus and Leda, Prospero, the Guardian, the Rhine Maiden, Justine, Moses, Jekyll 'n' Hyde, the VM and Hector. He tells of the tug-of-love for the beautiful Justine betwen a villager and the skipper of the Albatros, the old schooner trading between North Norfolk and the continent. The account of the couple's assimilation into village life is told to a background of graphic descriptions of the seasons, the landscapes and the sea.

The author claims that North Norfolk stopped in 1935 and that the region holds a secret known only to those living there - which the couple eventually discover for themselves. Finally the couple are invited to join a movement to create a community to restore the quality of English life. Indeed, throughout the book there are clues to another's account of an ideal society. The book ends on Christmas Eve with a superb climax extolling English history and values, when conflicting strains are reconciled. A passionate and warm-hearted book combining many adventures with poetry, cooking, eating, drinking and wit that eventually explains the secet that expresses the heart of North Norfolk life.