‘For that moment, I was the CAPTAIN!’
The magical landscapes of her childhood are at the heart of author Kate Mosse’s writing
This picture was taken on an amazing trip on my own with my father. It was 1968 and I was six. My sisters were too young to go on a grown-up adventure. Not that we went anywhere. We may have been on a boat but we were moored at Dell Quay, near the Fishbourne Marshes in Chichester, where I grew up. I liked being outside and loved the idea of being daring, but I was actually quite cautious. Here I am, tiller in hand, my father’s cap on, taking my job very seriously. For that moment, I was the captain!
The Fishbourne Marshes was the landscape of my childhood. Every Sunday we’d feed the ducks at the millpond, then walk out on the marshes. It’s an incredible place as it’s always different, depending on whether the tide is up or down. We’d make up stories and my parents would play along, pretending we were marooned. When we were older, my sisters and I went out to make dens in the trees. It was our playground.
As an avid reader, I devoured The Famous Five books and Swallows and
‘A story always starts with the place for me’
Amazons – all of those adventure stories where children are on their own. That was not my life entirely, though. We did everything with my parents, but as teenagers, my sisters and
I would walk around there for ages, mournfully – as you do as a teenager.
My husband and I later moved away to France – another landscape I fell in love with, and my historical novels are a love letter to Carcassonne in the south. But when my father was dying I couldn’t travel much and I didn’t want to not be writing. I came back and wrote The Taxidermist’s Daughter, which is set on the marshes. My first major play of this novel will open the 60th anniversary of Chichester Festival Theatre – a theatre my parents loved. It’s so sad they won’t be there – my mother passed away in 2014 – but they would be so proud. It also feels very magical that people will come out of the theatre and be on the doorstep of the landscape they have just experienced.
Moving back to where I grew up with my family, and walking there with my children, is very special. I go there to think of my parents, who I miss, and it feels like a shared landscape. My parents read stories to us every night, but all my stories come from the environment. I call it the whispering in the landscape. I hear a character or see a story, but it always starts with the place for me.
My parents told us that we should have a go at whatever we wanted. I worked in publishing for a long time and founded the Women’s Prize for Fiction, but I came to writing quite late, at 45.
I am a writer of landscape and that must come from growing up where I did. But I became a writer because I moved to Carcassonne. I had to leave where I was from and fall in love with somewhere else. I could then come back and look at Sussex anew. It’s there that I experienced being a child, teenager, a parent and a person who had lost her parents. It was there long before I was born and it will be there long after I am gone – and that is where peace lies. We are here for a short time but the land will always be there.
✢ The City of Tears (Macmillan) is out now. The Taxidermist’s Daughter is on at Chichester Festival Theatre from 8-30 April. Book tickets at cft.org.uk