Heartsease

PREFACE

THIS is a story about an England where everyone thinks machines are wicked. The time is now, or soon; but you have to imagine that five years before the story starts people suddenly turned against tractors and buses and central heating and nuclear reactors and electric razors. Anybody who tried to use a machine was called a witch, and stoned or burned or drowned.

If you want to know why this happened, and how it ended, you will have to read The Weather monger. But, so as not to puzzle people who haven’t read that book and don’t want to, I’ve left out some of the things in it which don’t matter in this book (such as the weather-making and the Necromancer).

The countryside is the West Cotswolds, between Gloucester and Bristol. The only change I have made is to put a smaller village where Painswick really is, with about seven hundred people living there, including Margaret and Lucy and Jonathan. Otherwise everything is just as you would find it if you went there: the hills have the same shape; the rivers and roads wind as I've described them; and the Severn tide can rise, or fall, thirty feet in two hours.

P.D.

Painswick, Gloucester