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Kate Mosse’s new book is a love-song to West Sussex, part of a series designed to bring out its authors’ personal connections to a home landscape. It began last year, with Michael Morpurgo welcoming spring in Devon, where he has lived – at the farm that inspired War Horse – for over 50 years; and then Val McDermid celebrating winter in Scotland, where she grew up and still lives. Bernardine Evaristo will explore summer soon – but, meanwhile, we have Mosse, also deeply and endearingly rooted in her chosen patch.
Mosse grew up in the village of Fishbourne. She now lives in Chichester, where she got to know her husband when they revised for A-levels in the shadow of the Bishop’s Palace, and held hands when she turned 17 on the day of the city’s annual Sloe Fair. Twenty-three years later, they celebrated her 40th there, with their children. Today, they live with his 90-something mother Granny Rosie – also “Sussex to her bones” – who remembers watching cattle herded in fields where a supermarket now stands.
In Granny Rosie’s youth, “the link between tradition and the natural world was present in every part of everyday life”, and that connection is the real focus of Mosse’s book. She has spent nearly all of her 65 years in Sussex. Her Languedoc trilogy was inspired by her time in the Aude city of Carcassonne, but it was Sussex that gave her a taste for the combination of landscape, history and storytelling that drives her books. The county’s folklore and countryside informed her gothic thriller The Taxidermist’s Daughter, and it was the backdrop for her memoir about family care-giving, An Extra Pair of Hands.
Autumn gives us more of it. Walking under oak trees, Mosse pictures far off days when oaks were the only road signs. In her garden, she tells us that the Romans called wild cyclamen “earth truffle”, “believing that ill spells were ineffective where they were found”. If there is, at times, a touch of the guide-book in her telling, she wins your heart by the sheer joy she takes in the details.
Mosse sets out what Sussex gave other writers, too. William Blake drafted Jerusalem in Felpham, then threw a drunk soldier out of his garden and was tried in Chichester for sedition (all because the soldier claimed he insulted the king). He was acquitted, but “never set foot in Sussex again”. John Keats was inspired by Chichester’s architecture to write The Eve of St Agnes; Hilaire Belloc became Sussex’s unofficial poet laureate; and James Joyce lived in Bognor Regis while writing Finnegans Wake.
Above all, there is “the great Sussex writer”, Rudyard Kipling. I love imagining how that phrase will be read in India; but, in fact, Kipling wrote Kim while living in Sussex (where he moved to in the late 1800s). Just So Stories came immediately after, and in 1906 he made the village of Burwash the setting for Puck of Pook’s Hill.
In the manner of Kipling, Mosse takes infectious delight in weaving her memories through bronze age camps, iron age forts, wetlands, the downs and the Devil’s Dyke, composing a hymn to Sussex’s countryside and braiding rambly byways of fact and legend with personal memories.
She loves the place so much that you feel she would have written as joyfully about it at any time of year. But she takes autumn seriously as a season of transition, beginning with her first day at school. There she is, 60 years ago, on 1 September: “Four, rising five.” Her mother is waving goodbye and her world is about to expand. Then, she takes us through the ghosts of Halloween, Bonfire Night in Lewes and Harvest festival.
By the time she gets to the last day of November, Autumn itself feels like a kind of harvest. Mosse sees it as a thank you for “the gift of home”. For the luxury of enjoying, intensely, the land where grandparents, children and grandchildren still gather; and for sun-dappled village Englishness. “I take a deep breath to try and capture my pleasure at simply being here.”
