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00:00 [ Music ]
00:28 [ Music ]
00:56 The spirit of Edmund the Younger tells his story.
01:00 My name is Edmund the Younger. I watch from my desk there.
01:07 I fought with Harold, my patron and friend, at Hastings three years ago.
01:15 I'm dying of my injury.
01:18 My father Edmund loves his home for thirty years, for that matter.
01:26 He's at Brompton Manor helping Gita, the mother of Harold, to pack her shackles,
01:34 as she must flee from William of Normandy, William the Bastard.
01:39 After her defeat at the siege of Exeter, she escaped back to her lands on Exmoor,
01:50 and her manor and mill on the Pullum River.
01:55 I lie here helplessly. I cannot move. I watch and hope that all goes well.
02:07 Then Gita came with my father dear to let me know and hold and bid farewell,
02:19 and say that after death my roots will still be here.
02:24 So Pullum's mill is not yours to sell.
02:33 [Music]
02:48 [Music]
03:15 [Music]
03:16 For the summer time is coming, and the trees are sweetly blooming,
03:27 and the wild mountain thyme grows round the blooming heather.
03:41 Well here go, I see he go.
03:48 [Music]
04:17 [Music]
04:45 [Music]
05:14 [Music]
05:43 [Music]
05:50 I was chatting to Jessie at her gate. There was a rumbling under our feet,
05:57 a terrible feeling of insecurity. The ground and the buildings trembled,
06:04 a great monster breathing, sucking and pulling the air back to the ocean.
06:12 The sun blacked out. A great wall of water thirty feet high
06:18 raged towards me and broke off the cottages.
06:34 I was taken in this turmoil of water and of my mind, of ways to save my unborn child.
06:43 I was thrown towards Jessie's cottage and dumped against a fence which collapsed,
06:50 then into an eddy that washed me through the cottage door.
06:55 I caught the collapsing stairs. With an adrenaline surge I pulled myself
07:03 by the shuddering step-like chimney. The effort of climbing to the surviving roof
07:09 broke my waters. Exhausted, I sat astride the peak.
07:17 Nature took over. Birth was inevitable.
07:25 [Music]
07:54 [Music]
08:13 [Applause]
08:19 We move forward through the millennium to 1914.
08:24 The spirit of Frank Westphal, who at the age of 16 joined the Somerset Light Infantry.
08:34 They didn't go to the Western Front. They went to India to defend the borders of the British Empire.
08:44 Frank never got to India, but had adventure in the Mediterranean, in the Sunport Tunnel in Spain,
08:53 in the Spanish Pyrenees and in French Pyrenees. He fell in love with Heloise.
08:59 She fell pregnant with Francis in a cave in the Pyrenees, and they came back to live at Paul's Mill,
09:09 where Heloise and her son Francis lived until 1940.
09:16 When they returned to occupy France, Heloise worked for the resistance,
09:22 and Heloise's son accidentally shot his mother in the same cave where he was conceived.
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