Meet Berlie Doherty

 
 
Region: Hope Valley
  

At home in the inspirational Peak District

 
Discover how the Peak District landscape inspires Berlie Doherty, the prolific award-wining author.
 
A picture of Berlie DohertyA picture of Berlie Doherty
 
Maybe you’re reading this because you’re fascinated by how writers work.  Or maybe you’re writing yourself and want a few tips.  Perhaps you already love Berlie’s work and want to know more about her.  Use our list of links below to find your way quickly to the subjects and questions you’re most interested in.
 
The interview took place on 26 June 2006 in Berlie Doherty’s writing room.  Berlie Doherty was interviewed for Peak Experience by Georgia Litherland.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

How did you come to be living in Edale?

 
I’ve always loved Edale, I’ve always loved Derbyshire, but particularly Edale.  And when my children were small I used to bring them out here camping, and … as I became more and more of a writer, I used to find myself, although I lived in Eccleshall, driving out to Derbyshire to write, sitting in my car … writing, or sitting on a rock or something.  I thought, this is really silly, why don’t I live there?
 
So 13 years ago, about, I did it and bought my house in Edale.
 
 

That’s really interesting.  Because that feeds in to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is how the landscape is woven into your daily life and also into your writing life.

 
Yes.  I think that I’ve always been very much aware of a sense of place in stories.  I think that’s really important. And when I wrote White Peak Farm, which later became Jeannie of White Peak Farm, I was actually living in Sheffield at the time, but I suppose living out my fantasy, childhood fantasies of living on a farm.  Now of course, I live next door to a farm.
 
So, coming out visiting Derbyshire, visiting the Hope Valley, in particular, really helped to set the scene for that particular book.  My earlier books had been set in the scenes of my childhood, which was over on the Wirral coast, in a little seaside town, but from then, ever since then, my sights have moved, my geographical sites have moved to South Yorkshire and Derbyshire. 
 
And I do find the landscape really inspiring.  I love to set books in places that I know, and even the books that appear to be fantasy books like Spellhorn are actually kind of up on Derwent Edge and places like that in Derbyshire.
 
So I know, I know where they are.  And I always feel if the writer knows where the story is set, then the reader does too.  The reader feels comfortable, familiar even if they’ve never been to the place.
 
 
Yes.  There’s that great bit at the beginning of Children of Winter when they’re all going on that walk and they set off on their walk and they’ve all got their backpacks and they go over some walls, and over some stiles and through the fields and there’s such a lovely authenticity about it.
 
Yes, because I’ve done that journey. I know exactly where they’re going.  So you can recreate it in the stories.
 

Is there somewhere where people can find that barn in Children of Winter?

 
There is, and apparently busloads of schoolchildren go to Eyam, hoping to find the barn and are directed in, sent off in various directions.  The actual barn isn’t in Eyam. But it is a real barn.  It’s Bowsen Barn, which is very near High Bradfield, just outside Sheffield.  I spent the day there with a group of children, and that particular barn inspired the story, but then, as you can do in stories, I moved it to just over Eyam.
 
 

I wanted to ask about ‘aha’ moments in the Peak District.   I don’t know how better to put it.  But, maybe, a new character, a breakthrough in a plot, maybe somewhere that you can reliably go if you get stuck, or for fresh inspiration or just places where they’ve crept up on you.

 
Right.  Well, it just happens so frequently, that it’s very hard to find a particular one.  There’s the moment in Dear Nobody, when Chris stands on Stanage Edge, when he thinks that Helen doesn’t want to have anything more to do with him, and he goes up there on his own.  And he goes to Stanage Edge, because that is what I would do when I lived in Sheffield, if I needed solace, that’s the place that I would go to, so that was a natural for me, to take Chris there. 
 
Another moment is for Deep Secret, which is, obviously, set in Ladybower, the story of the drowned villages, although I changed the names.  But there was a particular aha moment.
 
I’d already got the story in mind, and I’ve always been deeply moved and affected by the knowledge that there is a drowned village, actually two drowned villages, underneath that beautiful beautiful reservoir.  So the whole place works for me on two dimensions really.  It’s a physically very beautiful place, but it has the secret.
 
And I was kind of working my way into how I was going to write the novel, and who would be the central character, And I went on one of the many visits I made to the reservoir, stood looking down on it, and it was one of those perfectly still days, when the hills and the trees are reflected in the water.  You could turn it upside down and you wouldn’t know which was sky and which was water.  And that gave me the idea of writing about reflections and identity, and therefore about identical twins.  So that was a very very important moment, which really changed the nature of the whole book.  It no longer became a book simply about the drowning of the village.  But there was another much deeper secret to be told, which came from the moment.  
 
 

I noticed on your web site that you’ve said that you really enjoy working on several different things at once. And I wondered if you could tell us something about how that works for you, pragmatically and artistically. Pragmatically, as in, how you organize your days; and also what it’s like to have those ongoing relationships with several different works at the same time.

 
Right.  It’s not exactly the case at the moment because I’m working towards the end of a novel and it’s all I’m thinking about at the moment.  Although in the back of my mind, I know that I should be working on something else, so I suppose there’s a bit of an intrusion somehow, like, like, another channel on the television, radio, interruption now and then.
 
But sometimes I deliberately, and more often than not, I am deliberately working on two or three things at once. But they won’t all be the same sort of thing, by any means.
 
So it’s more likely to be a novel, which is an ongoing thing, which will take months, possibly years to write, and it needs its own time for its own development and its own intensity, so there are times when you can’t.  You’re just exhausted really, emotionally exhausted with what you’re working on and you need to withdraw.  Or you’re stuck. So if at that time I know that I’ve got something for younger children, sitting there to write, then I can feed that in quite easily, because it’s a change of direction, it’s a change of mood, a change of ideas, a change of characters, completely.  So, it’s not that I will say, I’ll spend an hour on this and an hour on that and an hour on … that’s not the way it works.  But it might be that I might take a month off the novel and go into the children’s book.
 
While also at the same time, there might be an ongoing play.  I love writing plays. I think this year is probably the first year in my writing, and actually we’re only half way through the year so … So far this year, it’s the first time in my writing career that I haven’t been writing a play, working on a play.  Usually, more often than not, whether they’re plays or the opera libretto that I wrote recently, they’re adaptations of my books or someone else’s book. So it’s technical rather than deeply creative.  Because I know the story.  The storyline’s there, the emotional content is there, and what I need to do is to make decisions, artistic decisions, about how to organize it into a play.  And so that is a great relief because I know, you know, it’s much more a logical procedure than writing a novel can ever be, so it’s great to move into that and quite readily I’ll move during the day from the novel to the play.  Getting on, getting on with the play.
 
But I’ve heard other, I mean some writers will say, I couldn’t possibly, they couldn’t possibly work on more than one thing at once.  And yet other… I know I heard Bridget  Riley, the painter being interviewed on the radio and she said she’s got to work on several canvases at the same time, she feels, you know, a bit frightened really if there’s only one canvas to work on.  She needs the comfort of knowing there’s other things to move across to. And I do understand that.
 
If you get stuck, it’s not like the awful writer’s block.  And also, you do come to realize, especially writing a novel, that there are times when you get stuck.  You just don’t, you literally don’t know what happens next, or how you’re going to get from one point in the story to the next point in the story.  And there’s no point in just filling loads of sheets of paper with ideas.  It’s much better to just push it away for a bit.  And the best way to push it away, of course, is to turn to a totally different kind of writing.  For me, anyway.
 
 

That’s interesting.  I was also wanting to ask you about what your relationship is with your works.  What’s it’s like?  Is it like knowing a person?  What is the relationship to the work, and do you ever get angry with your work or have those kind of breakdowns of relationship that people suffer?

 
Yes, all those things apply.  It’s very interesting, because it is like a love affair really.  And sometimes you really really fall out of love with what you’re writing.  And the involvement with, especially going back to the novels, is a very very profound one, very deep one.  And it is like a relationship with a person.  And it’s a developing relationship as well, because you really don’t know them very well to start with, but you come to know them very well indeed.
 
And I do get angry.  I get angry with myself.  I get frustrated.  I keep changing my mind about different aspects of the book, and therefore I’m … I blame the book.  But as you get, as I am at the moment in this stage of being deeply involved in it because it’s coming towards the end, everything’s coming together, it’s a very very powerful relationship and it takes over.  I can’t think about anything else really.
 
Then when I finish it and I post it off, you go through a kind of grieving process, it really is.  There’s kind of elation because it’s finished, because you’ve got there, but there is a grief and you’re saying goodbye to something and you’ll never know it in quite the same way again, because it belongs to other people.  It belongs to the editors or the producers or whatever, it belongs to the artists if it’s a picture book story and then it belongs to whoever reads it. So it is, very odd, very strange.
 
 

Do you have any rituals around beginning or ending books?

 
There’s rituals about the beginning of a book, because I carry an idea around in my head sometimes for months before I actually start writing it.  I’m thinking it through, I’m thinking it through and I can’t start writing it till I know how it’s going to finish.  Although often the ending’s actually different when I get to it.  But I’ve got to feel that I know that I can finish it, that there is an ending that I can handle.
 
And during that time I will be collecting bits of information, like going to visit Ladybower.  So I’m not doing full research, because I don’t do a full research until I’ve finished a book, because it’s only then that I know what I want to know.  But if I can collect any useful photographs, just … just to make me feel comfortable with the idea, then that’s a kind of ritual.
 
I then have to have what I call a pretty-book.  It’s got to be this format <an A4 lined bound book with an attractive cover>.  I won’t write on separate sheets of paper.  And I write on every other page and every other line in my pretty-book.  And I’ll fill about four of these pretty-books by the time I finish a novel.  And then I start to put it on to the computer.  And usually … no I’m writing in green ink there, which is very unusual.  Usually I would write in black ink, and then my changes as I’m going through it would be in different coloured inks.  And the one I’m writing at the moment is a two-voiced book, so each girl has been given a different coloured voice, a different coloured pen.  A black one for one child and a blue one for the other one.  So that’s a kind of ritual I suppose.
 
The most important thing, and Alan  <Alan Brown the children’s author, Berlie’s partner> is well aware of this, when I’m at the stage I want to write a book, if I can’t find the right book to write it in I’m in a terrible state.  I mean, you know, I might be on holiday somewhere and I think ‘I want to start writing, now’ and we trog round all these stationery shops until I find the right book.
It doesn’t have to be a picture, it can be a William Morris print or something, but that’s the big thing really, is finding the right book to start writing it in.
 
Is that subject-specific?  Not in a gross way, but could it be that a book that would do perfectly well for one of your works wouldn’t do at all for another one?  Or do you think it’s just how you feel on the day?
 
It’s how I feel on the day.  This one was probably the only one I could get hold of on the day.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter of the book.  But interestingly, the book that I’m working on at the moment, the only writing book I could get hold of at the time, is pink with candy stripes across it.  Not at all the sort of thing I’d usually use, but I’ve given it to one of my characters to write in.  So she has a pink candy-striped book that she’s writing in.  So that’s all right then.  I feel it’s appropriate.
 
 

Are you conscious of certain key themes that you return to?  Or certain characters who come back to you?  Maybe certain kinds of relationship or certain problematics?

 
Yes I am.  Although I resist it, but then I know, that perhaps I’ve left something in me that’s unresolved, or sometimes I want to explore it again in a different kind of way.  I’ve written a book about an adoption for instance, Snake-Stone, but the current book is also about an adoption, because I want to look at it from another angle.
 
I often write about the relationship between a child and the parents, whether it’s the fantasy, Daughter of the Sea, or whether it’s something like Dear Nobody, where the relationship’s between an unborn child and the parent – that’s very very important to me, and I theme that I do keep … Yes, Holly Starcross, a relationship with a vanished father and his return.  They’re all very very strong links for me.  Although they in no way reflect my own background or my current situation.  It’s just what I’m interested in, really, is the relationship between child and parent.
 
And I think really for a younger child, it is the most important thing in their life anyway.  That relationship, their role in the family, and … even a teenager who, a young adult, for whom their peer group appears to be more important than their family, it’s not absolutely true, because take a member of that family away and their rock starts to shake about.   So it is very essentially important.
 
 

When you are writing, you’re very good at the distance between people.  It’s not necessarily a loveless distance but it’s that distance.  And also that gap between what somebody experiences and what the others in the situation thought they were doing.

 
Yeah well I think, that’s life isn’t it?  That is real life.  But it also is what makes a novel work.  I mean, often girls say to me, for instance, or children say to me, in Dear Nobody, for instance:  ‘Why is Helen’s mother so aggressive to her?  Why is she so alien to her?’  Well, that’s what makes the story work.  You know, if her mother had been from the beginning totally supportive and they had this relationship, this confidential, this confiding relationship, then what happened in the middle of the story wouldn’t have happened.  So you need to set up that kind of relationship in order to make the novel work.  You need to have things go wrong in order for a novel to work.
 
And I think particularly in writing for young adults, there is a sense, a time of distancing between the child and the family.  A time when their self is becoming someone that their parents don’t know or recognize and in the same way as exploring that, I like to turn it about and make them realize that their parent has secrets or has a life, has their own emotions and needs which they haven’t up to that time been aware of.
 
I noticed also quite a lot about belonging and not belonging.  And that seems to be something that isn’t just about the young adult fiction, in terms of what you were writing about how Requiem came to be, and the way that you write about about that in your autobiographical piece.  And I wondered if you’d like to say more about that.
 
About the sense of belonging and not belonging?  I do think it’s something that every single one of us has to face at some time or another, whether it’s the first day at school, or whether it’s in a relationship where things are going wrong, or where the things within the family are not working out.  There’s always a time when you think, I’m not right, I don’t feel comfortable here at the moment.  And so that’s an interesting area, as a novelist, to explore, to think about.
 
And I think I do it in stories for very young children as well.  For instance, a picture book called Paddiwak and Cosy about two cats.  And the new cat is introduced to the house, so the old, the existing cat marches off in disgust, because his known area, his known territory is threatened.  And you can relate that to a child being introduced to a step-brother or sister, or a new baby in the family, or an adopted child, or whatever.  So that situation does occur all the time I think.
 
 

I find your work moving.  Characters are given emotions and given ownership of emotions where other writers might choose to put distance there or might choose to somehow undercut their characters’ emotional experience.  There isn’t a layer of cynicism or urbanity about it.  You use the phrase ‘emotional truth’ on your web site.  Could you say more about that?

 
I think it’s important to make all the characters three-dimensional, so that you don’t have any walk-on parts, they all, they’re all real people.  In our lives, we meet real people.  And I need to be able to make them laugh and cry; and to turn them around so you see the back of them as well as the front.  That’s important to me as a novelist, and that sometimes means … It’s a very good thing really because it means you can’t be judgemental about your characters.
 
Helen’s mother, for instance, again, in Dear Nobody, she might behave in a way that I can’t imagine behaving in myself, but I don’t judge her because what I try to do is to understand her in order to make the reader understand her, in order to make her into a real person.  And I think that’s probably what I meant by ‘emotional truth’.  That sort of trying to get inside the skin of everyone, so they don’t just behave irrationally.  They do have a rationale, but it’s a personal rationale, it’s kind of bound up.
 
But it also does mean that, yes, I probably do explore areas that other people mightn’t explore and they’re very painful areas sometimes.  And they sometimes make me cry.  And I’m just inventing them, you know.  Just getting to know the characters.
 
But I always try to think that, especially the young person who comes to read my book, whether it’s something like the The Snake-Stone, where I’m handling a boy who’s looking for his natural mother, an adopted boy looking for his natural mother, or something like Dear Nobody, unmarried pregnancy … or whatever… Or something like Danny in Granny Was a Buffer Girl, the brother who they know is going to die in his teens and does.  It’s a very very delicate, sensitive situation, all of those, and most of the things I seem to fling myself into, and I can’t afford to upset my reader.  I can’t leave them thinking, ‘Oh, that’s my situation’ and not finding a way of understanding it, at least.  Maybe you can’t resolve it, but at least try to understand it, try to feel secure in the knowledge that this awful thing, or troublesome thing, threatening thing, or whatever, is a natural part of life.  Of their life, and of other people’s lives.  So I think that’s why I tend to kind of wade in, quite a long way.  And just try to imagine what it would be like if it was happening to me.  And if I was any of those other people caught in that web, that family web maybe, and how it would apply to all of them.
 
But I have been accused of being too emotional.  One of the reviewers of Deep Secret, it was a very positive review, but he said, at times, I wonder if she’s being too emotional.
 
It seemed that you take things that are big and profound and are experienced as big and profound, and then often rationalized or distanced away from that, but you don’t do that.  You kind of honour it as big and profound and you let that teenager have that emotion, or you let that person feel that thing, or see their situation in that way.  And you don’t, as a writer, try to team up with the reader to say, ‘Oh, but of course they’re being a bit melodramatic’, or whatever it is, you honour it.
 
Yeah, you let them behave that way.  And I think that’s, that is a way of recognizing characters as possibly being real people.  But also trying to create a real person.
Maybe it’s similar to being an actor.  Maybe being a writer is a bit like being an actor who really tries to get inside the skin of their, of a character that they’re pretending to be.  But the writer is many actors, you know, all the actors in the play.  I’m trying to understand all those emotions, and make those emotions as powerful as they can be for the sake of that audience out there.
 
 

So as you’ve acted, or been acted through, these characters, are there any that have particularly, that you’ve particularly strongly identified with?  Maybe they’ve been a bit more under your skin than others when you’ve gone to bed, or that you’ve partly been them when you’ve been out to dinner, or …

 
I think that, whenever you’re towards the end particularly of a novel that central character is probably very much inside you.  It’s kind of, you’re a multi-layered person, part of you is this other character.  And sometimes it really does affect my mood.  The particular piece I’ve been writing… I might come up here <to the writing studio> really chirpy and cheerful and singing, having had a lovely time downstairs, and by the time I come down again, I can hardly talk because I’ve got myself in such an emotional state over that particular bit I’m writing.
 
Or vice versa, you know.  It might happen completely the other way round.  But I do get totally totally involved in what I’m writing and the character I’m writing about.  And yes, sometimes you’ve just got to drag yourself away from it.
 
But the one in particular that I identify with is Cecilia in Requiem.  Although she’s not me.  It’s not my family.  It’s not my situation.  But her Catholicism is my Catholicism.  Or her rejection of Catholicism is my rejection of Catholicism.  And everything she went through in order to achieve that are things that I understand, at least.
 
When you go downstairs, maybe carrying a lot of the story with you, are there things that you do?  Do you just take your time, or go out for a walk, or go and have a bath, or … things that you do to make that change and come away from the story back to your home life?
 
Sometimes life does it for you anyway, because outside other things are happening.
I would sometimes say, ‘I need to go for a walk.’  Or ‘Let’s go for a walk.’  Or ‘I need to go on my own.’
 
Last night, for instance, I came down in that state, particularly sensitive thing that I was writing about, and I’d found the way to do it, so I was there, you know.  And I came down, and we’d arranged to go for a drink with some friends and I said, ‘I don’t think I can go, I just can’t, I can’t get out of this.’  And then I thought, that’s silly, maybe it’s exactly what I need to do.  By the end of the evening, of course, I was joking and laughing, back to normal again.  So it was the best thing to do.
 
But you kind of feel you’re being a traitor in a way, to the character you’ve left locked up here, and the situation that you’ve left her in.  I’m saying, ‘You get on with that,’ you know, ‘I’ve got a life to get on…’
 
 

You’ve mentioned not working with walk-on parts… I’ve noticed that you tend to work with quite a small cast of characters.

 
Yes.  I do like the idea of having a little unit.  A little cosmos I suppose.  And just seeing what happens within it. Although, actually, a book like Streetchild has got a lot of parts, a lot of characters.
 

Deep Secret has got more…

 
Yes, but again, when I talk about Deep Secret, I talk about how I needed to focus in because it could have been two villages, but I focused in on one because it’s too clumsy.  And then you can’t write about 60 characters and give them all a part, so you focus in on a family.  And then you focus in on this central character, or as it happens, two central characters, and they’re really the focal point of the whole thing, and everything pivots on them, on their actions. And that’s manageable.  That kind of sense of being within a family within a community that might consist of 60 people within a valley, that was just about manageable when I handled it in that way.
 
But the small unit, the family, the three Children of Winter in their barn, that gives you great scope for actually playing with the different personalities and developing them and their interplay and interdependency.
 
 

Could you name a few other writers whose work you really like?

 
Right.  Well I love Thomas Hardy.  And there it is, well I suppose, the rural thing, the sense of people within a landscape that I always loved as a young reader, as a teenager when I first came across him.  So I suppose he might be my number one favourite writer.
 
I love writers like Helen Dunmore because she writes, she is a poet and a novelist and she uses her lyrical side and it never leaves her as a novelist. So I’m very very fond …
 
And Edna O’Brien in a similar sort of way has a very lyrical form of writing and that’s usually what I go for.  It’s the language in a book that appeals to me more than anything else.  I’m not really into plot-driven books, at all.  But character-driven, or language-driven I am, so they’re the sort of writers that I tend to go for.
 
So I love, the same way, poetry. Ted Hughes is my favourite poet of all time.  A wonderful poet.  Well Seamus Heaney, another one of course.
 
 

And is there any encouragement or practical advice that you would offer to other fledgling writers of any age?

 
What I always say is, first of all, experiment as much as possible.  Because you might think that you’re a poet, or short story writer, so take the same idea and develop it as a poem and as a short story and maybe as a play – open it out into dialogue – and all those things help each other.  No matter what you eventually become, what kind of writer you eventually become.  Because the poetry is going to help with the music of the language, and the play is going to help with the dialogue, the sense of real people really talking.  So I always tell people to do that. And I think it’s hard to launch straight into the novel.  Though some people do, and I admire them if they do, but I think it’s better to experiment first with these other forms.  And they’re going to help, they really help.
 
And to keep the writing muscles going.  And I just think it’s important to write a little bit of something every day, even if it’s only half an hour.  And even it’s your journal.  And when I’ve been stick, really stuck, and feel I can’t write creatively at all, and that happens, then I’ll sit and write about what’s out there in the field behind my house. And the movements of the pony in the field and the movements of the hens and everything, just to make me think, ‘Well, yeah, I can write.  You know, I can draw that picture with words.’   So that muscular control is important.  In the same way that you’d need to do exercises on the piano, do your scales. Just keep your fingers moving, keep the words moving.
 
And to write about things that you know, as well.  I think that that’s really important.  Especially for a new writer. Your life is so fertile.  Your own life is so fertile.  I don’t mean to write an autobiography.  But to use the things that have made you laugh or cry or be frightened or be worried and explore them.  And that’s going to really … and the characters in your life as well, people.  And they’re great starting points.
 
 

And, other than living here, do you have any involvement in the local community?

 
Living here is lovely because, apart from being an incredibly beautiful place, I’m outside the village.  So I can be in this remote little community of four houses, or I can go over the fields and see whoever’s hanging around the village.
 
I do feel that I very much belong to the community, that it’s a very strong lively community.  And I sing in the choir.  I play tennis.  I’m secretary of the tennis club.  I take part in the plays.  And I belong to the horticultural society, and various things like that.  And it’s like a big family.  You go to so many, sadly funerals, weddings, happy occasions, where practically the whole village is involved and that’s a wonderful wonderful thing to belong to.
 
You can go to something like Edale country day and move about from one person from the valley to another and talk to them and feel equally at ease with all of them.  And I love that sense of living in the valley.
 
People think that you live on your own, but you don’t.
 
 

Have you any favourite places in the Peak District?

 
So many.  Oh gosh.  I mean, I love where I live.  That’s absolutely fabulous and when you walk up Jacob’s Ladder to the bit that I call The Lookout, where you’re up and you’re looking down across the valley and I always say ‘This is my valley, this.’  I feel really proud of it.
 
I love Stanage Edge.  I love the Dales as well.  And I love Stanton Moor.  And Ladybower.  And Derwent Edge. Ringinglow, pretty.  Burbage.  And Monsaldale, absolutely gorgeous.  And there’s a little favourite walk that I love in Edale, which we call the dingly dell walk; which is not done by many people because they don’t know it.  So if we want to go for a walk and it’s a day, it’s Sunday, and there are lots of visitors in the valley, I’ll think, ‘I’m not going to walk up on the tops’, the dingly dell is a lovely quiet secretive place to walk.
 
What about the Ladybower area?  I’m aware from singing choral music as a child that when you sing a piece then that piece of text is in your mind for ever, isn’t it.  And it’s different, because you’ve sung it.  There’s a much more intimate connection.   Is it like that when you’ve written a place as well?
 
Yes.  Yes it is.  I can’t drive past Ladybower without thinking about Deep Secret, for instance.  And there are parts of Sheffield that I will always associate with Dear Nobody or with Granny Was a Buffer Girl, and of course there’s White Peak Farm.  But that’s a strange one, because I haven’t got a particular place that Jeannie of White Peak Farm is set in.  Now, of course, it’s here.  It’s the farm next door.  But it wasn’t then.  And I called it White Peak Farm, but it’s closer to the Dark Peak.  I think it’s kind of, it’s this end of the White Peak, certainly.  But there isn’t a particular farmhouse that I think of as, that’s White Peak Farm.