Nature cures
A calming visit to my childhood home to speak to a group about my latest book
Having recently heard Richard Mabey speak about how nature helped him recover from depression, and Sir Norman Lamb’s forthcoming book, in which he points out how our disconnection from nature is damaging our mental health, I planned in time to walk round Bosmere Lake at Needham Market, for perhaps the first time in many years.
I was on my way to the town’s community centre, to talk to a local history group about my interest in, and book about, Suffolk writer George Ewart Evans.
It was in 1956 that George Ewart Evans and his family moved from Blaxhall to Needham Market, and 1961 when my family moved to a bungalow a couple of hundred yards from the Evans home on the High Street, opposite the church. Mrs Evans was headmistress at the primary school, where I remember her as a gentle, fair lady with her grey hair in a bun.
The venue for my talk was close to the now repurposed Victorian primary school, so I knew that this would be a particularly nostalgic book talk. I’ve visited the house where the Evans family lived, and wrote about it in my forthcoming book Down to Earth which comes out in July
But mindful that I’m only now emerging from a particularly dark couple of weeks, when the Churchillian black dog when not leave me alone, I bought a sandwich on my way across Suffolk, and stopped at Bosmere Lake, five minutes from my destination, to pause, walk round the lake. In my childhood, it had been a gravel pit, but is now a tranquil nature reserve with a lake that, so one of the men fishing there told me, is full of perch and other fish.
Refreshed and prepared, my talk went well, and the conversations afterwards fascinating. I also sold quite a few books, and met again a man whose grandfather had featured in one of the book George Ewart Evans wrote more than 60 years ago. My drive home, through undulating countryside and village streets lined with ancient houses, was another reminder that Suffolk is the place where I belong.