Horatio Clare: Biography of a divorce

Susceptible booksellers should hang on to their hearts for the arrival of Horatio Clare, whose memoir Running for the Hills is published by John Murray in March. The book offers a deeply personal story related in graceful and sensitive prose, while the writer's good looks and charm are unlikely to damage his chances of making an impact with his first publication. In time-honoured fashion, a photograph showing Clare as an angelic-looking child (in this instance, clutching a bale of hay in an idyllic rural setting) is to be seen on the book jacket.

It was before Clare was even born that his parents--two London journalists, she vivacious and strong-willed, he more reserved and taciturn--embarked on their great adventure together. In the late 1960s, the couple fell fiercely in love with a hill farm in South Wales--not some easy, comfy weekend retreat, but a beautiful, impossibly remote sheep farm that inspired their spirits, sapped their energy and used up their scant financial resources.

Then when Clare was seven, his parents split up. His mother stayed on at the farm, bringing up young Horatio and his brother on her own, coping with the vicissitudes of sheep farming, and surviving perilously close to the breadline. Clare's father, meanwhile, returned to his former life as a journalist in London.

Clare's reasons for writing his memoir were very personal, he explains. "I wanted to write a biography of my parents' divorce for my own reasons. If you think about the time just before you were born, how your parents were then--that was a sort of golden summer, a myth for me. I wanted to find out how true that was and what had happened to it."

His parents, though "alarmed" at the thought of his book, individually took the suprisingly trusting step of lending him their diaries. What he found as he explored them was that, "I started off with one narrative and ended up with a completely different one. I thought my father the rationalist had been pulled back to real life, and my mother the romantic had been pulled into some fantasy. But it wasn't like that. He loved the farm just as much as she did and really threw himself into it. But they didn't have any money and it became in his eyes unaffordable."

Clare grew up with the hills, the sheep and the birds for company, an experience which including the true "blood and guts" of sheep-farming, with casualties at lambing time and regular departures for the abbatoir.

"My mother used to say, 'I don't think you can get better than a country childhood.' And it was beautiful. It's a treasure for all of us, the time we spent there. But I think it made us boys a bit strange.

"When we came down from the mountain, we'd missed out on a lot--we didn't know anything about television, or pop music, or clothes. We'd spent our lives in isolation, apart from school, dominated by a single strong woman. And that takes some readjusting to as well."

He describes writing Running for the Hills as being in some ways a "selfish" endeavour. "At the worst moments when I was writing it, I thought, 'You're selling your parents' lives, this is an extremely intrusive thing to do.'

"In the end they liked it: they think it's a forgiving book. And the best thing that's come out of it is that they've talked to my brother about the book and about what happened, so my family's communicating about it in a way they hadn't before.

"We were always brought up with the idea that it was my father who had left, who'd gone. But I discovered that, in just as many ways, my mother left him--and that was crucial to understand to redress the balance."