The Kennedy story, oddly, has been with me all of my life, from very young memories of the assassination through reading picture magazine stories (possibly in Knowledge magazine) of JFK's brave rescue of his Navy crew and how he wrecked his back, through learning that his elder brother's airplane, a B24, blew itself apart with him in it about 20 north of where I live, over Blythborough. Incidentally, it was supposed to take off with a crew of just two. They were then supposed to switch it to remote control and parachute out over land, while the plane would be flown by remote from another aircraft straight into the mouths of the concealed U-boat pens at St Nazaire and other sites which were impregnable from above. It blew up as it was being switched over. A P51 pilot I used to know said that in his experience, "they blew up as soon as the bomb doors opened”although whether that was an electrical fault or flak will remain unknown now.

But I saw that lost America, 40 years ago. I drove over the Divide and stopped at a small abandoned wooden farmhouse somewhere on the plateau between the two ridges south of Buena Vista. Inside there was nothing except an old calendar dated 1961. It seemed to sum up both what happened to the farmer's family and the cultural ethos you write about here: something happened to these people. Nobody really knows what it was now or where they went. But they won't come back. They can't. And to quote The Go Between, 'The past is another country. They do things differently there.’