My siblings and I spent most of the summer holidays at home because Dad needed to be there for the harvest. We didn’t want to be anywhere else. We were lucky enough to growup in a Hampshire farmhouse surrounded by fields of grain, ancient bluebell woods and a dairy herd whose milk we would drink from a ladle, straight from the container, while the cows were being milked.
We rode tractors and combines, built camps in the woods and made our own fires, where we toasted marshmallows and cooked sausages, and swung from a rope our father hung from a tree. Dad built us a raft out of disused containers found on the farm, and we rowed around the pond with the ducks and moorhens, pretending to fish with lines made from sticks and string. He constructed a treehouse in a massive beech tree where we played the Famous Five.
There was a deep chalk pit in one of the fields that we explored, clambering down among the nettles and ferns for lost treasure – usually a discarded tyre. We scaled the mountains of wheat in the barns, building tunnels out of hay bales and spying on the grown-ups (the farm workers made a fuss of us and laughed at our antics – they were like extended family).
We created rabbit costumes out of oldsacks to play Hartley Hare and we acted in our own dramas, performing them for our parents (and charging for the privilege). I can picture myself now, running up the drive with my young friends, the light a soft amber gold, to scamper round the barns like wildcats.
No adult knew where we were and no one worried. We didn’t have “helicopter parents” supervising our every move, and never felt fear or anxiety but lived in the moment, busy with our games. My mother sent us off after breakfast and didn’t expect to see us until lunch.
We weren’t allowed in the house when the weather was good and we were forbidden from watching television during daylight hours. So in the summer we disappeared into the woods and enjoyed a freedom that children nowadays rarely know.
The evenings were long and I don’t remember having a particular bedtime. No one came to find us on the farm – we’d wander back when we’d had enough, and Dad would read us Winnie-the-Pooh or Hans Christian Andersen outside on the lawn.
Mum would put us to bed and I’d sleep with the windows wide open, the sounds of the countryside at night my lullaby. It is thanks to the long summer holidays that I am the writer I am today. Without that time and freedom to create my own entertainment, my imagination would never have been allowed to flower.
But because I was left to my own devices, without electronic games and endless excursions, I had to look inwards, to the world I discovered inside my head, and outwards, to the wonderful English landscape around me.
Santa’s novel The beekeeper’s Daughter (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) is out now.