Plans to film a mini-series based on Last Taxi to Kensington have rekindled questions about the identity of the author whose nom-de-plume was Helena O'Rall. The writer of three best-selling romance novels is known to have been intimately familiar with the Sussex Downs. Beyond that, nothing is certain.

"It is clear to me that Miss O'Rall was really a man," claims Nigel Hawkmorton, long-time lecturer in English literature. "The forceful narrative style, the sympathetic portrayals of the male characterss, especially Taxi's Arthur, and the regular use of masculine symbolic devices all point to that interpretation."

"Absolute rubbish," counters noted literary critic Eugenia Dowley. "Whoever she was, she was a woman. There can be no doubt of that. The question is, which woman? Could these books have been a bit of fun for Agatha Christie? There's something of  Virginia Woolfe about the style, but the timing of the works is not right for her to have been involved. She would have been dead, you see."

Puckering's own Lumpy Gaites, himself a writer of romances, believes the answer lies closer to home. "Reverend Banks' predecessor, the Reverend Nigel Woodstone, came to Puckering in 1937 as a newlywed. Who would have had a better take on the passion of the human experience than the vicar of the local church and his wife? I see the works as collaborative, a labour of love."