The summer after writing Sea of Lost Love I was sitting in our garden in Hampshire. I’m fortunate to have never really left home! Although I live in London during the week, I spend weekends and holidays in our cottage on my parents’ farm where I grew up with my brother and sister. My brother also has a cottage and our children (six between us) spend idyllic days playing in the woods, growing vegetables and flowers, catching butterflies and snails and feeding the birds. They relish the countryside and all the magic they find there. Anyway, I was sitting in our garden watching all six children clambering aboard the tractor that Simon, the gardener, was using the cut the lawns. They were roaring with laughter and Simon was driving on as if they weren’t there. I reflected on the sunflower seeds they had just planted with him in the greenhouse and the caterpillars he had helped our daughter find in the herbaceous border. I then thought of my parents, usually so busy with their own lives, grow inspired together as they wandered around the gardens discussing the things they could do with Simon now that they had a gardener. You see, Peter, the old gardener, had died years before and they hadn’t hired anyone to replace him. They had cut back the vegetable gardens and made things easier for themselves. I know my mother had dreamed of creating wonderful things, but couldn’t carry them out on her own. Then Simon came looking to rent one of the cottages. He was a game keeper and gardener. My parents asked him to do a few mornings for them. Mornings turned into days and soon he was working full time for all of us. It was fascinating to watch our focus move into the gardens and as our children grew older, to watch them follow in our footsteps and find all our old haunts to build camps in.
Simon gave me the idea for The French Gardener and our children inspired me to write about the simple pleasures of Nature as their DVDs and Nintendo’s gathered dust, replaced by a more wholesome desire to play outside.
I gave a talk at a literary lunch and afterwards a woman put up her hand and asked me if I would ever consider writing about something other than love. I found that question rather extraordinary. What else is there? Love is what Life is all about. Love is what motivates us. Love is what makes us all better human beings. Love inspires us to greatness. When faced with death no one thinks of anything else but the people they love. So, the answer is no. Love will always be at the very centre of my stories as it is at the very centre of my life.
