Hard Hero Hengest

When Wimbledon schoolboy Jamie goes on holiday to Ramsgate in Kent, the last thing he expects is to meet up again with the dishevelled old man Grimm who had told him the tale of the Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf.
They meet up again just as a group of Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts lay a wreath at the replica longship 'Huggin' to commemorate the landing of Hengest, the man who founded the first of the English kingdoms in England.
Grimm tells the boy the rather complex and bloody reasons why Hengest had needed to leave his homeland and come to Britain with three ships full of warriors. Although the old man is unable to continue when he becomes 'indisposed', the pair meet later at a village in Kent. There, despite the interruptions of two talkative starlings, a Hooden Horse and a side of Morris Men, Grimm tells how Hengest wrested Kent from the Welsh through both battle and treachery. As before, Grimm claims to not only have been there at the time, but to have influenced events as they had happened.
Although Grimm's version of who Hengest was and what he did is not quite the same as that told in the Chronicles or the poems, he claims that his version is all true, well almost true.