SAGAS. Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed withher children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different coloursand placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near RomneyMarsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are alreadyinscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Parisand Munich and the trenches of the Somme