A field
of nodding poppies - a familiar summer sight and lasting
symbol of North Norfolk. |
When
newspaper critic Clement Scott's editor sent him to look at
the lure of 19th century Cromer, it was to change two lives
irrevocably and give birth to Poppyland, writes Deborah Partridge.
When Clement
Scott stepped off the train in Cromer love was the last thing
on his mind.
The town
was hot, crowded and (he thought) rather vulgar. There were
swarms of visitors on the beach and nowhere to stay. Discouraged,
he strode off along the cliffs towards Overstrand.
The woman
he was about to meet would change his life forever. Nineteen-year-old
Louie Jermy was in the garden of the mill house in Sidestrand
when he first saw her.
Miller's
daughter Louie Jermy |
Young and
fresh-faced rather than beautiful, she was the daughter of the
miller. He asked for accommodation, she invited him in. Scott
was married, but this relationship would become one of the most
important in his life.
"Louie had
little education, but she loved books and had a quick brain,
but almost certainly it was her innocence and the romance of
the situation that also appealed to him, " says Rochelle Mortimer
Massingham, from Cromer Museum.
Later Scott
would describe the journey to her doorstep as "a blue sky without
a cloud across it; a sea sparkling under a haze of heat; wild
flowers in profusion around me, poppies pre-dominating everywhere,
the hedgerows full of blackberry blossom and fringed with meadow-sweet".
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| 
Deborah Partridge reports (real 
