Where is the Forest of Dean?
It’s still back there. It’s a sort of mythic Forest of Dean. There’s the real one (laughs), with the same signs and stresses as the real anywhere, and there’s the other one, the one I grew up as a small child in, and those rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape. Just accidentally a heart-shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from them, the rest of England and Wales on the far side, the other border … Do you look back and … I mean, a lot of people think that you see your childhood in … there are terrors in it, but it is some kind of place in England that was a particular period in the lives of a lot of people which was to do with a sense of community. Now, we’ve both been through that, and we know that things were wrong – awful and terrible and so on – but there’s a glow there. Is it a glow because you’re a middle-aged man looking back? Well, it’s partly that and it’s partly … it’s true the fact about childhood, which I tried to do in things like Blue Re
