Neither Dorking nor the Abbey

A tender, imaginative elegy begins with a funeral procession carrying a great writer’s ashes toward a quiet village cemetery near Box Hill. While mourners debate the proper resting place for a national literary figure, the true farewell unfolds elsewhere—in the landscape he loved and among the unforgettable characters he created.

Inside the cottage, age falls away from the departed man, restoring his youthful strength, keen eyes, and irrepressible delight in the world. Welcomed by his fictional children, lovers, adventurers, and companions, he sets out across sunlit meadows and up the hill, accompanied by the dogs of his past and present. Blending affection, humor, literary knowledge, and vivid pastoral imagery, this brief work imagines death not as an ending but as a joyous reunion with the people and places born from a powerful imagination. It is both a celebration of a beloved writer and a graceful meditation on how art allows its creator to live on.