The idea of exploring the landscape in which it occurred was irresistible to him. For him – as for many postwar English schoolboys – Rogue Male had been a formative book that had buried itself in his imagination at an early age. Roger was 62 at the time, but his nature was that of an adventurous child, and he was excited. "Nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it," noted Household. The cutting was "a cart's width across" at its base, it was choked with "dead wood" and jungled by shoulder-high nettles, and its entrances were barred by "sentinel thorns". It was a "sandstone cutting" or holloway that ran over "the ridge of a half-moon of low, rabbit-cropped hills, the horns of which rested upon the sea". The pages included a description of the lane. The letter explained that the map showed the likely location of a deep lane in which Household's hero – pursued across Europe by Nazi assassins – goes to ground, and where the novel reaches its extraordinary climax. Through his letterbox the previous day had dropped an envelope containing a handwritten letter, a marked-up section of the 1:25000 OS map for south-west Dorset, and several pages photocopied from Geoffrey Household's cult 1939 thriller, Rogue Male. O ne spring evening in 2005, my friend Roger Deakin telephoned to propose an expedition.
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