MY COUNTRYSIDE JOJO MOYES
The bestselling novelist talks about turning her bedroom into a stable and swapping urban living for a rural home
I bought a grooming brush before I had a horse to groom
All I wanted as a child was horses and greenery, but we lived in north-east London.
For one of my birthdays, I asked my mum to turn my bedroom into a stable, so she filled the room with hay. I remember going out with my dad one day and stopping off at a tack shop – I bought a grooming brush before I even had a horse to groom!
From an early age, I helped to look after horses near my home.
Then, when I was about 15, I finally got one of my own and kept it in stables behind Hackney Town Hall. I was practising to be a countrywoman even though I lived in the city.
Now I’m getting to live the life that I dreamt of as a child.
Our house is in the countryside with 22 acres and we have three horses, two dogs and two cats. I love having the space to keep animals – they’re one of the daily pleasures of my life. When you have pets, you realise they are just as much a part of the family as anyone else. There’s a pug in my new novel Still Me and people have commented that the animals are real characters in my books.
It’s so peaceful where I live on the Essex-suffolk border.
When people visit from London, they either love it or they get spooked by how quiet it is. We moved to live near my mother – we used to visit her when we had our first child and it got harder and harder to drive back down the motorway to London. The first house we moved to felt so safe that we would frequently forget to lock the door. Now I can’t sleep in London because I find it too noisy.
I had written eight books before
Me Before You and had never troubled the bestseller charts.
So I wrote that book for me. It was loosely inspired by a true story that wouldn’t leave my head. People responded to its humanity. It made me very proud of being a commercial fiction writer rather than mildly defensive, which is how I often end up feeling about what I do.
The biggest problem in my life at the moment is being too busy.
I would love to have time to explore the wonderful countryside around where we live as well as further afield – my husband [Jojo is married to journalist Charles Arthur] is a great climber and I think he’d like us to be outdoors more. We both love places such as Derbyshire, the Cotswolds and East Sussex – we have a flat in Hove, where I often write.
I walk or ride to get away from my desk.
My daughter’s horse is quite a handful, so when I ride her I’m focused on staying alive! Being preoccupied by that proves to be a good rest for the brain, so when I sit back down at my desk, I’ve got a clear view of what I need to write next. I like taking the dogs for a walk – it’s nice to head outside without worrying about what I look like.
We’ve always encouraged our children to jump in puddles and get mucky.
Living in the country has been brilliant for them. They’ve all had horses and dogs and we’ve often gone blackberry picking. It’s been really good for them to grow up away from the hothouse atmosphere that a lot of their London friends talk about. They all went to the local village school and so most of their friends are children they’ve known since they were really small.
Jojo Moyes’s latest novel Still Me, published by Penguin, is out now.