AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT Love on a Branch Line

Full length autograph working manuscript spread over 22 exercise books, paginated by Hadfield to page 1162. Textually distinct from the published version, Hadfield writes with a blue fountain pen, double-spaced, correcting extensively as he worked with frequent swirling crossings-out.

There are two quite distinct openings to the novel, the earlier one discarded at the beginning of the booklet that Hadfield then reused for Chapter III. At this point in the compositional process the hero who would later be named ‘Jasper’ was referred to as ‘Arnold’ throughout.

John Hadfield (1907-1999) was a writer and publisher who moved to Norfolk then Suffolk after traumatic wartime experiences and just before the closure of the Mid Suffolk Light Railway Line - supposedly the inspiration for his classic comic novel. Hadfield tells the story of Jasper (nee Arnold) Pye who himself is sent to East Anglia to close a government department headquartered on a country estate, a plan derailed by his growing affection - indeed seduction - by the people and places he encounters, notably the daughters of the local aristocrat, Lord Flamborough. The novel was adapted into an enormously successful 1994 BBC television series starring Michael Maloney as Pye and Leslie Phillips as Lord Flamborough, filmed at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk and on the North Norfolk Railway. An inscribed second impression of the published novel accompanies the manuscript.