When I was nine years old my family moved from Woodhouse Eaves in Leicestershire up to my grandmother's house, The Croft, at Lakeside, at the southern end of Lake Windermere. My father had been brought up there. He loved this place, and I came to love it too. His ashes are scattered in the clump of trees on the right. The buildings in front of it did not exist then.

The house was built for a pair of my father's great-aunts. The extension on the left replaces what used to be a glass potting shed. For the retirement of two old ladies it was a generous estate. Around the house and its gardens were about seventeen acres of woodland, bought so that nobody could encroach upon the house. It had three entrances, all on the road from Lakeside to Stott Park that runs up the west side of the lake. By the main entrance were stables for a coach and horses, replaced by a subsequent owner with a double garage, a greenhouse for tomatoes, and a way into an orchard, which we used as a hen-run. A drive, between rhododendron bushes and azaleas, led up to the house.

Surrounding house and gardens was woodland, bordered to the south by the Snake Path, as we called it, which wound through the woods from Lakeside to the fields behind the village of Finsthwaite. The picture was evidently taken from what used to be our woodland. The church, St Peter's, has in its cemetery the grave of Anna Maria Sobieska, wife of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who spent her remaining days of exile at Jolliver (i.e. July Flower) Tree farm, out of sight to the left of the picture. When my friend Jamal Nasrul Islam came to stay at the Croft he played Tagore tunes on the organ in the church.

My grandmother "downsized" to the northern half of the Tin Tabernacle, and her companion and maid (and my father's nursemaid) Ruth Danson to the southern. She was a remarkable character, with a special affinity for animals, cats in particular. Ruth had once been engaged to be married, but her fiance had been ordered to drown some kittens, an act which Ruth could not forgive. Ruth's voice had an extraordinary quality which I cannot describe and have never heard in another. She did not look on humankind with favour, our own family excepted.

There followed blissful years for me and my brother Joe. Less blissful for my father than he had planned, because his job was still in Leicester, so he had a long and tiring commute by car. He would stay in Leicester during the week and in the Croft at weekends. My mother loved the Croft, and got on well with her mother-in-law, and also with Mrs Ivy Jenkinson, a lady from Finsthwaite who came to help clean the house. Ivy was a brilliant cook, and she would sometimes bring an apple pastie she had just made. Mr Jenkinson was regarded as a scholar in the village; people would bring their letters to him to read. Her cousin, Mrs McDougal, was postmistress at Stott Park, just round the corner from the Croft.

My father bought us an old-fashioned sailing dinghy, which we kept in a boathouse which could only be accessed via a path through a neighbour's property. In the attic of the Croft we found an ingenious boat-hook, whose handle had a broad cobra-like flange at its business-end, so that if you dropped it in the water it would lie flat on the surface, easy to retrieve, instead of the heavy hook sinking. I never saw its like elsewhere. On the other side of the lake, at the foot of Gummer's How, lived Lady Gowan. Gummer's How was just over a thousand feet high, and so qualified as a mountain. Our house is concealed by trees in the centre of view from the top. We had a marvellous view of its evening colours from the Croft. When her children and grand-children came to stay, Lady Gowan would organize a picnic on Gummer's How, to which we were often invited. Wood was collected, fires lit, sausages cooked. All very Swallows and Amazons. She was good at organizing, as her husband had been a district judge in India, and she accompanied him on horseback when he toured his circuit. At the Lakeside Women's Institute bridge games she would have a small bell at hand, to call for silence so that she could retell her Indian adventures. My mother relished this. In fact Lady Gowan was extremely kind, and good company. She let me practice driving her little car before I passed the test. To be driven by her was a white-knuckle experience as she showed a lamentable lack of mechanical sympathy. She had a neighbour on her side of the lake called Colonel Sneed, with a daughter called Idonea.

My brother and I each had a bicycle. We kept them in the stables. Once Joe and I bicycled to Ulverston, about twelve miles away. My mother put me in charge of my younger brother, but this was a vain expectation because he was an independent soul, and he soon lost me in the back streets of Ulverston. Eventually, I just had to return without him, anxious about what my mother would say. In fact she was out, I forget where. I remember sitting in the hayloft of the stables trying to keep calm by regulating my breathing, as I had learned from a book on Hatha Yoga. Of course, Joe returned in his own time, and before my mother got back, much to my relief.

My mother did not drive ("temperamentally unsuited" according to her driving tester). Various vans came round once a week - a baker, a butcher, a grocer - which required careful economy by my mother. We had help with the garden from Harry Conway, a gentle giant of a man whose main job was to lead a road-mending gang for the council. He could do anything - dry stone walling, building, coppicing, lambing. My father gave him my grandmother's half of the Tin Tabernacle when she died.

The nearest bus service was at Newby Bridge, about two miles to the south, on the other side of Lakeside. I had permission from Mr Wren, who owned the farm at Newby Bridge, to leave my bicycle in one of his barns whenever I took the bus. Wren's farm lay on the river Leven. Tragically one of his children was found drowned there. She had slipped on a stone and concussed herself.

Lakeside had a railway station, a terminus of what had once been the Furness Railway. The station was also a terminus for the steamers that ran up the lake to Bowness and to Ambleside. When the railway was running passengers could get straight off the train onto a steamer, or perhaps go upstairs to the restaurant and throw tidbits to the gulls from its balcony. The steamers were the responsibility of Jones the Boat, who lived in Lakeside and owned a Morgan three-wheeler.

I remember vividly the smell of vegetation, like that of a rain forest, on the road from Newby Bridge to Lakeside. The westward side was thickly wooded. There were more open fields on the eastern side, and in them some old rusting "flying saucers" - farm machinery perhaps. I imagined that alien creatures had abandoned their vehicles and were now hiding in the woods, taking note of any human activity.

The local "poacher" had a beautiful spaniel called "Lady" and a high squeaky voice. The standard arrangement was that he would poach game at will, and leave a portion of his take with the landowner as payment. Thus we came to have rabbits and pheasants for supper sometimes. Never deer, however. The part of the wood nearest our orchard had masses of wild garlic, which stank horribly when it rotted. We once came across a fawn there, no doubt using the stink to hide its own scent from predators. We were careful not to approach it, lest its mother become confused.

We had a very healthy outdoor life, going for long walks, rain or shine, sailing on the lake, or bicycling. I knew every bush and tree in our own wood, and often in woods that were other people's property. I was even accomplished at running through the woods in the dark. I never sustained a scratch. Above Finsthwaite was an artificial lake called High Dam, and it was there that I once had an extraordinary experience while exploring by myself. There was a tree of great beauty and I was convinced that it had revealed something of itself to me. It was as if it were a gracious intelligent being, utterly uninterested in human matters. It sounds daft, and probably was, but I was thunderstruck by the experience. I felt grateful, and slightly scared. I could not tell anybody about it, of course.

I had another transcendent, wonderful experience. It was a fine day, with a cool breeze and little puffy clouds. I was by myself on my bicycle on the road out of Low Wood going toward Holker Hall. There was no other traffic. The grasshoppers in the grass verges were loud. The silver birches in the marshy ground of the estuary to my right seemed out of a silk-screen painting, and behind them were mountains in the distance. I realized that I was blissfully happy. My cup was running over. I felt a profound gratitude for my existence. I knew that this experience would always be with me, in some sense that I could not grasp. Later in my life, at university, I had other similar experiences which I felt were rooted in this one. I treated all of them gingerly, with reverence, determined to be both rational and open-minded. What else can one do?

As a child one hears one's parents talking about their own childhood, without, in my case, really understanding the relationships. Only later in my life did I appreciate my father's background. His mother had been brought up at Longlands, a beautiful estate outside Cartmel. Her mother, my father's grandmother, Louisa Augusta, was rather pious, and taught Sunday school at Cartmel Priory. The south window in the Priory was a gift of her family, the Barkers. Unfortunately my great-grandmother was also very puritan, and believed that enjoyment of any kind was wicked, so perhaps it is not surprising that her husband, John Barker, took to drink. A family joke is that he would ring the bell for his servant and then say in lordly tones Bring me all those things that I require. The Barkers had made their money from a gunpowder factory in Low Wood, charcoal being a substance produced in abundance by coppicing the woods in the locality. My father's father had doubtless been chosen as a suitable son-in-law by the Barkers because his father, George Henry Wraith, had been three times mayor of Spennymoor and once its member of Parliament, and had founded the Alderman Wraith Grammar School there. Alas, this respectability had concealed an unreliability with money, and after siring three children he was persuaded to decamp to South Africa with a pension, on condition he should not return. My father's sister, Maria, once showed me a drawing made by her mother of my grandfather expatiating on the virtues of Tiptree's marmalade. He swore it was the only marmalade he could eat, but unknown to him his wife had decanted a quite ordinary brand into a Tiptree's jar which she had put aside for that purpose.