ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY
After seven years of living overseas, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I started to write a novel, it was about my roots — almost literally. The Forest of Dean is a bit like the drummer in the band; hidden behind its louder, better-known mates — like nearby Cheltenham, the Cotswolds, the Welsh Valleys — and favoured by a select, contrary few. It’s 42sq miles of ancient mixed woodland and one of the most beautiful landscapes in the country, containing limestone cliffs, sweeping river views, and magical forest paths that twist and turn through moss-covered trees. As Dennis Potter, the Forest’s most famous son, put it: “It’s a strange and beautiful place, with a people who were as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.” Storytellers have long seen the possibilities of this secret landscape; as well as Potter’s works, it’s credited with being the inspiration for Middle Earth in JRR Tolkien’s books, and has featured in everything from Doctor Who to Star Wars, as well the Harry Potter books.
I wanted to take my seven years of latent homesickness and bring them home, to write a novel about what it’s like to live somewhere where your world view is shuttered by the trees that surround you, while your cosmic insignificance is writ large by these same trees. But I wasn’t brave enough (yet) to write about the now, so I moved my emotions back 70 years, to the Second World War. And though I no longer live there, I took myself back to the Forest of Dean, to imagine what it would’ve been like to be so far from conflict but in so many ways, central to it.