On Refuge

When I was 18, I left home and moved to the big city. There’s nothing unusual in that. For me, though, there was no going back. That same year my father changed jobs. The whole family moved. It was four decades before I would see my childhood home again.

When I revisited it last spring it was to celebrate the British publication of my novel, which is set in and around a great country house in rural England, very like the one where my father worked as land-agent, or manager of the estate.  We lived just outside the deer-park. It was a remote, secluded place. The big house, Cornbury Park, was at the center of what remains of a forest that, in the middle ages, covered most of Oxfordshire. Nearly 2,000 acres of woodland is still standing, bisected by a four mile-long avenue of centuries-old beech trees.

There were other estate workers—foresters, game-keepers, gardeners, farm-laborers, grooms—living in cottages scattered through the woods, but