Finding Paradise

A FlipSide headliner, author Lucy Hughes-Hallett talks to Catherine Larner about writing fiction and living in the creative county

- Catherine Larner

GROWING up in the grounds of a stately home brought many privileges. There were games of tennis, swimming in the pool and acres of manicured parkland to explore. So when Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s parents decided they needed to find a house of their own, she felt she had been “expelled from paradise”.

“My father worked as a land agent of the estate and we lived just outside the deer park of the big house. The owners were an elderly couple who had no children, so they were very indulgent to me and my brothers. But when they died, my father got another job and we moved away. It meant that I could never go back to my childhood home.”

The memories of that time and place have inspired Lucy in writing an ambitious and celebrated novel called Peculiar Ground. The great house is called Wychwood and the novel begins in the 17th century, with a wall being built around the ornamental lakes and grand avenues of trees. It’s a world of secrets after decades of civil war. Migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.