On first becoming a writer

'I first became aware of my need for this twice-lived life at the age of 12 during my time at boarding school in Hertfordshire. I was dawdling back across the lovely hayfield that separated the tennis courts from the garden of the main school house when I was stopped in my tracks by the beauty of the June light on the field. I stood very still. I felt, in a memorably passionate way, that what I wanted was to possess the field, to capture it and my feelings about it in orderto recreate the totality of that lived moment at some future time on paper. You could say that I became a writer on that summer day in 1955.'

Rose Tremain in the Sunday Telegraph