On returning to a landscape of my past, and an extract from The Wild Other
I am back in cowboy country with my kids, and time feels like a concertina
I’m writing this from a very remote log cabin in Wyoming, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park. When we moved to America, I knew that I needed to see the west again. It’s a big trip out there from the east coast where we live, and getting all five kids there at the same time required a lot of planning. But bringing the kids here with me, to witness it too, was really important to me, and for the last two weeks we’ve been deep in cowboy country, moving between east Montana, and then down through the borders of Idaho and Wyoming. This is very much like the landscape of west Texas, where I ran to, in my twenties, after graduating from university (see pics of me in my cowboy days in the extract below).
I was trying to escape the spectre of the past, which was a massive riding accident my Mum had when I was 16. My childhood in rural England was as wild and idyllic as a country upbringing could be. Mum very consciously moved my sister Nell and me from Oxford, where I spent my earliest childhood, to a remote corner of north Wiltshire, because she wanted us to have the kind of freedom she’d experienced as a child. She brought ponies into our lives, and Nell and I spent most of those years on the back of our ponies, riding through wet, green, mystical England. That time formed me; and the time that followed, when I fled to America and took myself right into cowboy country, did too.