When young Charles Benson arrives in Toftham, a sleepy Norfolk market town, on a miserable Sunday afternoon in January 1952, he has only the vaguest idea what Fate has in store for him. It is at the hands of the editor of the Toftham and Wettleford Journal, Mr Juby, that Charles is introduced to local reporting and Norfolk ways. Charles finds himself steering a perilous course through a minefield of WI meetings, funerals, fêtes, local dramatics, council shenanigans and point-to-points, floundering his way through a succession of debacles on his way to becoming a real journalist...and a real man of Norfolk.