Call of the wild

My favourite novel, Rebecca, begins at the end with its protagonist exiled from the lush, green English countryside that she loves. She describes becoming obsessed with country diaries and articles from home, poring over them for that sense of hedgerows and the smell of meadows after the rain, for that connection to a place she has lost:

‘I am transported from this indifferent island to the realities of an English spring,’ she writes. ‘I read of chalk streams, of the mayfly, of sorrel growing in green meadows... The smell of wet earth comes to me from those thumbed and tattered pages, the sour tang of moorland peat, the feel of soggy moss spattered white in places by a heron’s droppings.’

The tangible longing in this description has always resonated with me. While my own exile from nature is for less dramatic reasons – work, friends, family and, most recently, coronavirus – sometimes, this desire for wild, green spaces overwhelms