Isle of Portland By Heart: Tophill, Underhill & the Word You Don't Say

The island whose stone went into war memorials and headstones all over the world had to wait eight years for its own. The money ran short. Then Tophill and Underhill couldn't agree, because each half wanted a memorial of its own. In the end they put one high above Fortuneswell, looking down over Chesil, where both halves of the island could see it. A former private who had lost three brothers in the war pulled the flags off it on Armistice Day 1926. This 11 November it is a hundred years old. That's Portland. Two halves that argue, one island that turns out. A word you don't say. A name for anyone who wasn't born here. This book is all of it, written down for the people who know it best. Get Isle of Portland By Heart What's in it Tophill and Underhill. The line nobody drew and everybody knows. A hundred years at the top of the hill. The memorial's story from the first collection to the second set of tablets, including the raid in September 1940 when a bomb landed close enough to blacken it. The word you don't say. Why the quarrymen went home when they saw one, what they called them instead, and the year a film poster had to be changed. Kimberlins. Who counts, who doesn't, and how long it takes. Longer than you've got. More of Portland in London than in Portland. St Paul's, the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and the headstones. Chiswell and the sea. 1824, and the February in 1979 when the waves came over the top of the bank. The Bill, the Navy years and the breakwaters the convicts built. The Court Leet, still sitting after more than nine hundred years, and still beating the bounds every seventh year. Village by village. Fortuneswell, Castletown, Chiswell, Easton, Weston, Wakeham, Southwell and the Grove. Who it's for Portlanders, Tophill and Underhill, who will argue with half of it and enjoy every page. Everyone who left for the Navy, for work or for love and still says "the island" like there's only one. Quarry families and Navy families. Kimberlins who married in or moved in and are still being told they're not from here. What it isn't It isn't a walking guide and it isn't a history textbook. There are no opening times in it. It's the island the way the people who grew up on it talk about it, with the hard parts told straight: the quarry accidents, the floods, the names on the memorial. Who wrote it Lukas Wander's nan was an Easton girl. She married a sailor she met while he was stationed at Portland, followed him up to Kent and spent the rest of her life calling it "home" without ever saying which one she meant. She never once said the word. Lukas spent his Easter holidays at her cousin Joan's in Weston, got called a Kimberlin before he could spell it, and has been writing her stories down ever since. Joan is eighty-six and has put him right on more of them than he'd like to admit. Free updates Portland keeps changing. When it does, the book gets updated and you get the new edition free. Thinking about Christmas? This is for the one in your family who left Portland years ago and still checks the weather at the Bill before their own. Not for you? Email us within 30 days and we'll refund you in full, no questions. Buy now This is a digital ebook (PDF) by Lukas Wander, around 60 pages over 20 chapters. It arrives by email straight after you buy and opens on any phone, tablet or computer, or you can print it at home. Lukas Wander is a pen name, and some of the people in it are composites.