I think there were some early signs. When I was ten, I remember one Saturday night my father had killed a chicken for dinner the next day — this was the kind of life we led — and my mother was plucking it at the kitchen sink in a bucket of boiling water. I can remember the smell was dreadful, absolutely dreadful.
And the rain had pounded down outside for hours and soil, red soil, was being washed away down the hillside. And we’d been learning about erosion at school, about soil erosion. And I was passionate somehow. All of a sudden, I was passionate about soil erosion at the age of ten and I went into my room and wrote a book about soil erosion and the horrors of it and how sad and bad it was.
Stapled it, you know, put a little bit of sticky tape over the staples, put a front cover on it, went into the kitchen where my mother was plucking the hen and read it to her and she said, “That’s lovely, darling.” So I had delusions of grandeur really from the age of ten.
I’ve always enjoyed writing. I’ve really loved it. I lived in Africa and my cousins lived in Australia and I wrote a lot of letters backwards and forwards. I’ve always loved writing letters. Even in the age of e-mail, I write letters still because the joy of receiving a letter that’s four or five pages long is so wonderful that I can’t stop myself from doing that. I love writing them as well as receiving them.
