My life began as the carrier's cart dropped me at the cottage in the summer of the last year of the Great War at the age of three. I was lost amongst the June grass that towered poetically over me, swaying gently in the soft Cotswold zephyrs, and even my Mother was temporarily entranced by the bucolic idyll I am now trying o'er hard to recreate. The long days crowed and chirped as we gorged on berries and feasted on scraps of stoat and fox.

Peace was here, but I could tell no difference. The countryside still marched to the relentless, inexorable beat of the seasons and the cottage still flooded when the winter rains swept down off the wooded hillside, bringing with them blackened cabbages and the pagan flesh of rotting badgers that we fell upon with glee. In the ample night I lay close to Mother, until one day I found my place in her bed had been taken by my younger brother, Tony.

"Thee be a man now, me luvver," she said. "It be time for thee to share a bed with your 17 brothers and sisters."

I keened with Oedipal betrayal, hardening myself against the merciless rejection of women, and turned my gaze to the village where Jones's goat caused a commotion for months on end by breaking into Albert the Devil's parlour to devour a mountain of scrumped apples.

"You're stoppin' home no longer, Loll," my sister Marjorie laughed, sweeping me into her rustic apron. "It's time thee started school."

"Boo hoo," I cried, but to no avail and my days of lazy plenty were over. The school was a small, roofless barn some eight miles walk away and we strode out across the pitted, frozen lane before dawn.

"Sit here," the teacher said, patting the upturned carcass of a badger, while nuzzling me close to her warm, capacious bosoms. How those bosoms filled my Infant dreams for several years, before I was abruptly wrenched from her creamy embrace!

"You're now a grown boy," the headmistress Crabby B said, beating my frost-hardened back with a rusty ploughshare she kept under her gnarled oak desk, while watching a seemingly endless procession of unmarked coffins being carried to the windswept churchyard, as Nature exacted its cruel price on village life.

Death was never far away, for the Cotswold nights were as cold as Cotswold nights can be, yet we never complained or fussed o'er much. Death was part of the cycle in an existence raw and bloody and whether it was the discovery of Miss Flynn's body lying naked in the mill pond or the murder of a loud New Zealander, the village closed ranks. Life was given and life was taken away, and we were answerable only to ourselves.

I had never known my father. He had abandoned my bounteous mother after four happy years, leaving her with 19 children, so I was brought up almost entirely by women. When my mother was out trudging the 27 miles along the rutted tracks to gather the scrapings of mould from the bakery or to trap a diseased rat, Granny Trill or Granny Wallon would battle to drip-feed me their fermented turnips, hand-squeezed through their soiled muslin drawers.

Winter marched to its own beat. We would slide our bodies along the gleaming, frozen pond in almost sexual ecstasy, while around us everyone would die. First Granny Trill, then Granny Wallon in quick succession; then we heard my father had cranked his car into a wall in Morden and our mother faded away within minutes. It was like that in our valley; death took whom it pleased in a heartbeat.

I too had been a sickly child and many was the time my mother thought I was not long for this world. Diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, pneumonia, mad cow disease; there were few fatal illnesses that did not sink their predatory claws into my enfeebled body, yet each time I pulled through. Seventy-three of my brothers and sisters were not so lucky, for Death claimed many for itself in the russet countryside. Sometimes I wondered if they had died so that I might live, but at others I was content to frolic among the verdant pastures, snaring dogs with Cabbage-Stump Charlie and beating the local cripple with a stick.

The highlight of the village year was the Festival of the Burning Otter when we all went to the Squire's Hall, dressed up in polecat pelts, offset with fern fronds, to partake in a night of orgiastic frivolity in which strangers would ritually be robbed of half a crown. It was on one such night, as I lay drinking cider with Rosie under the hay wagon, that she pulled me down into her wide valley to rock unseen together in the subaqueous grass.

It was the dawn of my awakening, yet the end of an era. The coming of charabancs and the passing of the Squire meant an end to simple pleasures. Gone were the days of innocence, those bitter-cold winter days when we would roam the woody woods clubbing weasels, those hot, sultry endless days of summer when we would plan to rape the simpleton, Lizzie Berkeley.

All was changing. My sisters found husbands who wanted more than sex with man or beast, while my brothers left for the metropolis of Stroud. I was alone in my world of rotting squirrels and writing; a world that would give later generations lasting GCSE coursework



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