Author Peter’s memories of a novel life

11:08am Monday 28th July 2008

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Peter Inson suddenly stopped the interview.

“I must tell you before I forget,” he said. “It’s something which is a little different. When I was 20, I took 12 racehorses by boat to South America.”

I let the words sink in. Racehorses? South America? Where had that come from? We had been talking about teaching English literature and how this had taken him from Essex to Lancaster and back. There had been, up to this point, no mention of horses or South America.

“What?” I asked.

“Christmas, 1967,” he declared, as if that explained everything.

“I was asked to go with the racehorses to Venezuela because the owners wanted someone with a farming background who would know how to look after livestock during the journey.”

Farming background?

“I had only just left Writtle Agricultural College and was on the books of a farming agency, so the job was offered to me. It was fun – and when I returned I went via Trinidad in the West Indies. So, yes, it was quite an experience.”

Peter Inson and his wife, Jean, live in a house overlooking the estuary at East Mersea. It’s a lovely spot, a place you would associate with someone who just wants to take it easy.

But Mr Inson has never taken it easy. Venezuela apart, his career has taken in pigs, Switzerland, bees, rugby, novel writing and a stint as a member of what was, in the 1970s, Maldon Liberal Party. Oh, and teaching.

In fact, he has never really got out of the habit of trying to keep teenagers on the straight and narrow. It’s what one of his novels, Dunno, is all about. Next month he will be in Waterstone’s in Colchester signing copies of the book and hopes to meet teenagers who have to deal with difficult adults and adults who don’t know what to do with awkward youngsters.

“I really do believe that a lot of the problems with young men stem from lack of real physical work,” he insisted. “If they had to carry out farmwork as part of the school curriculum, it would give a sense of purpose and lead them away from crime.”

He should know. He fell in love with farming when he was seven. He had gone to stay at his great-uncle’s farm in Wiltshire and, until he was in his teens, spent all his summer holidays on that farm.

“I spent my days cutting grass and digging,” he said. “By the time I was 14, I could drive a tractor. I couldn’t get enough.”

He was now at Wanstead Grammar School – then in Essex, today in the borough of Redbridge – but didn’t let this very urban setting put him off farming.

“Anything to do with agriculture, and I was interested,” he said.

“I left school at 16 and worked for two years on a farm which carried out contract milking and pig rearing. I had already worked with pigs. I remember when I was a schoolkid earning 2s 6d (12½p) a day for helping to clean out the pigs.”

In 1966 he spent two years at Writtle Agricultural College, near Chelmsford, came away with the National Diploma in Agriculture and went to work on a farm in South Woodham Ferrers.

But the writing was on the wall. A couple of years later he met the future Mrs Inson at the Essex Intervarsity Club – a club for young, professional people – and, in 1973, he began to take a long, hard look at his future.

Jean Inson, then a primary school teacher, remembers those first few dates.

“The one thing which always sticks in my mind is the smell he gave off,” she smiled. “It was either pigs or Jeyes fluid.”

That smell was soon to disappear for good. Mr Inson came to the conclusion that the only way to make a career, and money, in agriculture was through a farming background.

“And I didn’t have a farming background, not really, so I spent the whole of one Saturday sitting in Essex County Reference Library, and narrowed down my options to two – law or teaching.

“I went for teaching, even though I had not been remotely interested in my lessons. I used to sit at the back of classes reading Farmers Weekly, especially during Latin.”

He enjoyed reading and wanted to teach English literature, even though he had failed what was then his O-level. So, he took a teaching course at Brentwood College of Education and, at 26, sat his English literature O-level for the second time. He passed.

Mr Inson later got a BA in English and an MA in philosophy, worked at schools in Hornchurch, Barking, Dagenham, Lancaster, West Acton and Gstaad in Switzerland, and, with his wife, brought up two children, Nicola, now 32, and Jeremy, 30.

It was Lancaster where he began one of his great passions, bees. At the bottom of the garden, with the estuary just about in view, he keeps his three hives of honey bees.

From here, there was no reason to ask why the couple have made their final home in East Mersea.

It’s just so rural.

• Peter Inson will be signing copies of Dunno at Waterstone’s, in Culver Square, Colchester, on Saturday, August 16.