The Stranger's Child

In the late summer of 1913 the aristocratic young poet Cecil Valance comes to stay at ‘Two Acres’ the home of his close Cambridge friend George Sawle. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for all the Sawles but it is on George’s 16-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact when Cecil writes her a poem which will become a touchstone for a generation an evocation of an England about to change for ever. Linking the Swale and Valance families irrevocably the shared intimacies of this weekend become legendary events in a larger story told and interpreted in different ways over the the coming century.