Why a Booktrail?
Destination: Departure Time: 2000s
A woman trying to build a new life in Cumbria after spending time in prison.
How to Measure a Cow
What you need to know before your trail
Tara Fraser wants to obliterate her past, so she leaves London and heads up north to a place she picks out of nowhere. Her past is certainly a dark one and she is keen to erase every last part of it. So she decides to become someone else entirely picking up a new identity a new way of walking talking so she is different in every way.
However it’s not as easy to hide as she thinks. For her neighbour Nancy is very intrigued with her new friend and is keen to get to know her. There are also three old friends who Tara just can’t seem to shake off despite them not really being there for when Tara needed them most.
But one of her new neighbours, Nancy, is intrigued by her. She wants to become her friend. Equally determined not to be discarded are three old friends who Tara feels let her down when she most needed them.
Tara fights to keep herself to herself, but can she do it? And how hard is it being two people but being no one at the same time?
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
From the isolation of a prison to the isolation of life on the outside as an outsider trying to hide their past. To pick a new life, all she has to do it to stick a pin in a map and head north. North to Cumbria and to the quiet town of Workington:
Workington
“Workington – a working town, honest, straightforward”
This is the place where she begins working in a factory and living in a shabby home. Both better than what she had however and both a chance to start again. Here her neighbours are locals who have lived on this land all their lives. Quite a nice ‘picture’ she paints actually:
“All the people she saw going in and out of these terraced houses were like those in Lowry paintings…”
It’s in one of these houses that Nancy lives, Nancy who used to be a widow and so bizarrely knows how to measure a cow amongst other things.
But Workington has history -no tidy graves in its cemetery where Amy whose house Tara moves into is buried. A town with a rich mining heritage. But for Tara this is a town miles from her past and a world where she is free and having to adapt to her new situation and her sense of feeling her way around a world that she herself abandoned. And all with a new identity.
The feeling of isolation, new identity, old versus new and always being the outsider are settings as much as Workington itself.
Where Next?
