Inspiration

I grew up in a small village in Devon of barely a hundred people. The village was set on one side of a big wide valley, below a large forest. Across the valley the wild expanse of Dartmoor stretched away beyond the far horizon.

It was a beautiful place to grow up, and as a rather miserable teenager, awkward and suspicious - a typical budding writer - I couldn’t wait to escape. Allowed by my liberal father to leave school at sixteen, and having read through his library of mostly Russian novels, I left home.

Unqualified, I drifted, did many odd jobs, and through my twenties wrote hundreds of appalling poems. I was trying to engage with the here and now, and to make sense of my own dislocation in the world through portraits of down at heel young misfits floating through vague, complicated relationships, in unreal European urban landscapes.

The one thing I’d never considered writing about was where I grew up — the place I’d waltzed away from. Then one day when I was almost thirty I transposed a poem into a story, and set it in the Devon village I’d long left. The effect was liberating: it was as if I’d been walking through fascinating cities yet with my eyes on the ground. Now I returned to a tiny village but raised my eyes, allowing myself to look at everyone and everything. For the first time there was a background to the story — I could hear a donkey braying in a distant field, dogs barking, a mother calling her children home across a field. I could smell manure in the farmyard or the tarmac in the lane melting on a hot day.

I never wrote another poem, only many more stories, and the stories became, eventually, this novel. It’s about three generations of a farming family; the narrator is Alison Freeman, its youngest member. Her father has lost his memory — the farm is run by Alison’s grandfather and her two older brothers. The book includes many stories from the family mythology told to Alison by her eccentric grandma, and can be seen as the child’s claim of her own history.

What was really odd was that I was able to write much more about the real here and now than when attempting urban angst. The village became a microcosm of the wider society: there was nothing that couldn’t with some reshaping find form in the lives of the villagers. The novel explores how greed (for oneself) and heartlessness (towards others), which seemed to me to typify the era in which the main story takes place, the nineteen eighties, work through and infect family relationships.

With the passing of time, I can also see even more clearly than when I wrote it that the book’s an elegy for the lives of the owner-workers of small farms, a passing breed of heroic men and women: the rural freemen of England.

It’s curious, looking back, that the principal influences on this English elegy are Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marc Chagall’s paintings of the Russian Pale, Mikhail Sholokhov’s tales of Don Cossacks, and New Zealander Vincent Ward’s film Vigil.