Reluctantly, Pye agrees to take on the job and to leave the next day. The unit had been established in 1940 during the Battle of Britain when the ministry requisitioned the Earl's house, and has largely been ignored since the War. The unit, called the "Department of Output Statistics," is located on the border of Norfolk and Suffolk in a country house, Arcady Hall, owned by the Earl of Flamborough. Fairweather ignores Pye's wishes and asks if Pye would like a special job to visit and report on a remote division, and to recommend to close it. After exiting the tube, Pye walks to his office to meet his boss, Mark Fairweather, and announces his intention to resign. Whilst on the train, he recounts a party in Chelsea he attended the previous evening, where he overheard the woman he had been pursuing, Dierdre, say "yes I know Jasper is a bore." Pye explains that the remark has provoked him to resign his position in the Civil Service and move to Paris to paint. Jasper Pye, a civil servant for nine years in an unnamed ministry, takes the Piccadilly line from Barons Court to Green Park.
The action of the novel begins on Tuesday, 4 June 1957. It was adapted for a 1994 BBC television series, Love on a Branch Line, starring Michael Maloney as Jasper Pye and Leslie Phillips as Lord Flamborough. The book was critically acclaimed and sold very well. The setting is loosely based on the Mid-Suffolk Light Railway between Haughley and Laxfield, which closed in 1952, the year Hadfield moved to Suffolk. During the weekend he spends at the estate, he meets the people of the area and develops an affection for them and their home.
The novel tells the story of a diffident member of the British Civil Service, Jasper Pye, who is sent to East Anglia to close a government department headquartered at a country estate. Love on a Branch Line is a 1959 comic novel by John Hadfield.
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