All quiet on the Orient Express - Magnus Mills

Innocence, experience and comedy in Cumbria

He's a bit of a handyman. Or, at least, so Mr Parker seems to think. No matter, he'll soon be on that train east to India from these wet lakeland fells. Just as soon as he's finished that little job Mr Parker asked him to do.

It wasn't much of a holiday anyway. As the tourists trickled away from the campsite, so did the sunshine, and the hot water, and the provisions at the local shop, and even the good beer. Still, there seemed to be plenty of work to take his mind off these minor disappintments - as much as he cared to do, in fact, even homework. And payment could be discussed later. Meanwhile, he was really beginning to fit in, to become one of the local fixtures, down the pub, on the farm, on the lake. Maybe that trip east could wait?

In this cautionary tale of labour and capital, of innocence and experience, Magnus Mills takes us back to the kind of terrain he patrolled so notably in The Restraint of Beasts - rural circuits where neither cash nor unemployment are much prized - and makes it conclusively his own turf.