He told her that her mother was dead, ‘The wolf took her, Punzel.’ Installed at die Hütte, the next blow came after a bad storm, ‘The rest of the world has gone.’ he says, and puts her passport on the fire. On the journey James had delivered a killer blow to Peggy, who had decided she wanted to be called Rapunzel.
It’s now summer, so they can set about fixing the hut and putting all those bushcraft skills to good use. They set off on a long journey to the heart of the German forest where a dilapidated hut will be their home for the next nine years. One night James and Oliver row and the next day James tells Peggy they are going to die Hütte and that Ute will meet them there. Then Oliver arrives to move in and they abandon camp. ‘Our very own little cabin, with wooden walls, and wooden floors, and wooden shutters at the windows. ‘A magical, secret place in the forest,’ my father said with a catch in his voice. They survived off the land and no one ever told them what to do.’
‘Long ago, in a land called Hampshire,’ he said, ‘there was a family who lived together in die Hütte. Her father tells her stories around the campfire:
They spend their days hunting and cooking squirrels and watching the day go by in the cemetery at the bottom of the garden. Egged on by group leader Oliver, an American, James becomes obsessed by it.īack in 1976, when Ute goes off on a concert tour, James and Peggy take to living in a tent in the garden. James is a member of the North London Retreaters – a small group of men who believe the end of the world is coming and that they will survive.
Her German mother, Ute, is a concert pianist of some renown who met her father when he stepped in as her replacement page-turner. When seventeen year old Peggy finds an old photograph of her family and Oliver, the American friend of her father’s who lived with them for a while around nine years ago, she misses her father and cuts out his face to put it close to her heart – the question is does her father deserve such devotion? They say that every picture tells a story – or sometimes more.
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