Talking Location With author Pamela Holmes – Somerset

4th October 2018

#TalkingLocationWith.. .Pamela Holmes, author of Wyld Dreamers set around Somerset and the Brendon Hills

The author

I first saw the Somerset hills from the back of my boyfriend’s BSA 650cc motorbike. Or would have, if my head had not been buried into his soaking wet and slightly smelly biker jacket in an attempt to escape the relentless rain.  But next day was different. The cloud had lifted and it was bright as we stood on a high ridge and the land spread out below us in patchwork colours of ochre and red, saffron and aubergine. The hedges were like fat green serpents wending their way between fields and woods. The blue-grey of the Bristol Channel hummed in the distance and beyond it, South Wales was just visible.

We were on the Brendon Hills. To many people, the ‘Brendons’ are barely glimpsed as they whizz past on the drive towards Exmoor. Visitors do not notice the plunging combes or the tree-topped stone walls that stand like sentries guarding the land. They don’t see the ancient oak woods, the streams or the hidden hamlets; they are in a hurry to reach the moor. So this part of Somerset remains largely undiscovered.

I lived there in the 1970s for almost three years. A group of young people fresh from school and university settled on a farm in an isolated valley below the Brendon Hills. Working for food and board, we aimed to grow everything we ate and to make everything we drank. Hippies is what the locals called us, and I suppose we were in that we rejected what our parents thought we ought to be doing (getting jobs) and seeking ways to expand our consciousness (smoking dope). Put another way, we were having fun and Somerset was a wonderful place to do that.

With little money, no access to television and rarely getting out to buy a newspaper, one easily and quickly lost touch with the world. It suited me well enough; I needed an escape. My mother had died the previous year and I’d not found the space or opportunity to grieve her death. In Somerset, I lived close to nature and the yearly cycle of waxing and waning, birth and death, I found helpful.  Most of my time was spent in and around the isolated farmhouse; gardening, baking bread, brewing beer, milking the house cow, raising chickens for eggs and feeding up a pig for the table. I thought we would live there forever. Things did not work out that way.

In retrospect, that was a good thing. We all went back out into the world and pursued careers and lives. But at the time, it was a shock.

They say a writer writes best about what they know, and I have followed this dictum in my first part of my novel, Wyld Dreamers. It’s about a group of young people who live and work on a farm, who dream of dropping out but eventually are kicked off and have to return to more conventional lives. The second section jumps forward to 1997 when the characters are brought together again in Somerset in unexpected circumstances. In a series of flashbacks, secrets are revealed and lies exposed and the reader comes to understand how the characters and their dreams are changed.  Events which seemed disastrous, with distance take on a different meaning and significance. At the end of the book, in a final twist, everything changes again.

It was returning to Somerset in 2016 that inspired me to write Wyld Dreamers. Strolling in the sunshine on Blue Anchor’s sandy beach, walking down the damp cathedral-dark lanes and climbing up Lype Hill, the highest point on the ‘Brendons’, the need to write about the place became compelling. The characters in my book are fictitious but their experiences and responses to the landscape, in particular, draw on my own. One of the characters becomes obsessed with growing things, an interest which started for me when I lived in there and which I still have. Another character discovers an appreciation of abstract natural form to which previously he’d been indifferent.

I also wanted to explore the meaning that ‘place’ holds.  When we say we ‘love’ a part of countryside or a particular view, what do we mean? It is not the same as loving a person who can make us laugh or hug us or who we can talk to. Intense reactions to places that evoke feelings of happiness or melancholy, bring back memories or that we simply consider beautiful, are experiences we need, even crave for sanity and soul.

This summer, I walked some of the Coleridge Way, a trail that meanders the hollow ways, steep-sided hills and open pasture between Nether Stowey and Porlock. It is said the poet Coleridge wandered here with his friend William Wordsworth and was inspired by the landscape to write Kubla Khan. I share his love of the place.

Thank you to Pamela for setting the scene for her new novel, Wyld Dreamers.Do connect with her on Twitter

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