The writer on the meadows that inspired her love of nature and the eccentrics who taught her to live the life she wanted
I grew up in Camberley, a Victorian town on the A30 in Surrey. It was made of pine forests, golf courses, elderly army officers with parade ground voices, Conservative clubs and tea dances. In 1975 my parents had bought a little white house in Tekels Park, a private estate near the town centre. It was owned by the Theosophical Society. My parents were journalists and knew nothing of theosophy, but they loved the Park, and I did too. No place has so indelibly shaped my writing life. There were formal gardens, a wildflower meadow, vast rhododendrons and a walled garden where espalier pear trees grew against red bricks softened with age and patterned with the holes of miner bees. Brimming with life, the Park turned me into a child naturalist. After the stresses of school, I’d spend hours wandering its sandy paths, learning the seasonal shifts in the sounds of woodland and field. I filled diaries with sightings: moths and foxes, slow-worms, grass snakes, nightjars, owls. In my early teens I started making detailed watercolours of the things I found. Painting taught me a way of looking, a sustained attention to the precise details of the natural world.
Related: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald – review
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