I’m a proud exponent of the rural romp in all its rolling-in-the-hay, weeping-into-the-dog’s-neck candour. From Elizabeth Bennet clapping eyes on Pemberley, through Mellors brooding at Lady Chatterley from the potting shed, to Taggie blushing damson at a flirty Rupert in breeches, there’s nothing like a gulp of country air for stirring the page-turning blood.
Fiona Walker
When I wrote my early novels, I was an archetypal town and country girl – footloose and fancy free, I partied like mad in London until the cash ran out, before retreating to the shires to rest up with family, horses and dogs to fictionalise it all. My heroines inevitably followed me there, escaping complicated city lives to get loved-up in cottage boltholes, flirt at house parties and enjoy lost weekends in country house hotels during which secrets came tumbling out and lust burned as bright as roaring log fires.
After book four or five, I dispensed with the city stress altogether and gave every novel a dawn chorus, plenty of rustling foliage and minimum light pollution. The characters and settings are no less contemporary – my shires are thoroughly modern ones – but there’s a joyful freedom in a countryside setting that urban grime simply cannot match.
First and foremost there’s the heroes. I’ve written many a metrosexual man, edgy urbanite, razor sharp City boy and slacker, but it’s the born and bred rustic warrior we all seem to love. Bursting out of his Le Chameaus and corduroy with unreconstructed testosterone, wild of hair and wide of shoulder, he’s as practical as he is ruggedly romantic: he’ll calve a breech Dexter, fix your Mini’s clutch, share your claw-foot bath and pleasure you with the broad-fingered skills of a virtuoso pianist, all before the cock crows. There’s an edge of Heathcliff in all the best heroes, and he’s not in the suburbs.
Modern romance can still have heroines on horses, protagonists on windswept dog walks, busybodies popping out of the shrubbery, and of course all manner of animals. Dogs, cats, horses and even reptiles and poultry crowd through my novels in a barking, foot-stamping, leg-circling cavalcade.
Passion-killer gadgetry is also gloriously unreliable away from the city sprawl. Mobile phones lose signal, rural broadband can still be glacially slow – round here it grinds to halt if more than one village teenager’s trying to stream Game of Thrones - and there’s not a lot of point to Tinder is your closest match is fifty miles away with no public transport. Why scroll down timelines when you can stroll along leafy lanes and meet your hero fresh from the calving barn?
With a novel, you own a slice of the countryside in all its racy, romantic splendour no matter where you are. There’s a guilty pleasure in stealing hours of dandelion clock time, immersed in a green and pleasant world your imagination owns. If you find yourself sitting on a crowded train with a secret smile, pulling imaginary hay from your hair, you’re not alone.
