James Day is a minor young Hollywood star who has just made a dog of a movie and got the daughter of the Mafia boss pregnant. He just has to leave the country until everything is sorted out or calms down, even though this might jeopardise his chances of getting the plum role of Robin Hood that he has been competing for against his arch-rival Errol Flynn. Although completely Americanised, he is the son of 'Lady Day', an aristocratic Englishwoman who brought him to Los Angeles as a baby and raised him there. So he decides to 'go home' to England (where he has never been) and lie low. He ends up (after being mugged) abandoned in mid-Dorsetshire in February, penniless, where neither the people of the village nor of the Manor have ever heard of 'Lady Day'. He realises that his history is a product of his mother's lies and Hollywood myth-building. But was his mother really an aristocratic widow? Or simply a serving-girl that was sent away when she got pregnant by the Lord of the Manor? Are his relatives nobles or village trash? The community is so rural that they've never heard of him. The Twentieth Century has scarcely impinged upon this valley. Public transport is non-existent. And radios don't get reception because of the hills. Few of them know what an American accent is. They think he is insane...