But one day she handed me some more letters from people who had been researching fruitlessly through old newspapers hoping to find the real events. I remarked that it was sad they wasted so much time. Yes said Joan - and then absently but something did happen. Whether the something happened in the newspapers in some anecdote she has heard or in her imaginations interconnections with some other world or time I had no idea- and I knew better than to ask.

Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people but the artist as well into quite different realities.