How our shadows lengthen as the sun goes down

This photograph was taken in the summer of 1972 when I would have been seven. It marks the confluence of two worlds. On the far left of the picture is Bob Featherstone, a local odd-jobs-man who rode about the village of Coxwold on his little grey Ferguson tractor, his rough-haired terrier 'Lady' beside him. Divided, not just by a dog's nose and a cane, but by a whole world (and several centuries) stands Laurence Sterne (played by the actor Iain Cuthbertson) and his twentieth-century associate, my mother.

Shandy Hall, in whose garden this photo was taken, was still a year away from opening its restored-self to the public. Two years earlier, my parents (of whom my mother was, both literally and metaphorically, the driving force), had whisked their young family (along with my father's library of C18th Sterneana) from South Kensington to rural North Yorkshire to oversee completion of the restoration of what had, five years earlier, been an abject ruin of a house. As soon as there were habitable rooms, we moved in, and lived, and worked, happily, on the evolving building site.

By the time this unlikely trio was frozen by my father's shutter that sunny evening, the restoration was mostly complete. The BBC had decamped to Shandy to make a programme in which the novelist, Michael Frayn, described the double life Sterne lived as an eighteenth-century parson in Coxwold and celebrity abroad. I remember nothing of the programme, but much of its making. My brother and I were thrilled to find familiar rooms full of busy-ness, adults dressing-up, lights, and cameras. Better still was the acknowledgement of our juvenile world, when these exciting newcomers, in search of dust for 'Sterne' to blow from the pages of a long-unopened book, embraced my brother's suggestion that they use grey powder paint from our playroom.

Bob Featherstone, who I remember as a profoundly gentle man, came up to Shandy regularly to help repair the garden walls (he was an accomplished dry-stone wall builder) and to help my mother (who did much of the graft herself) to make some of the raised flower beds. One day, whilst they were working together, he mentioned a well-known villager, someone very much embedded in the local community. 'Ah' said Bob, dismissively 'he's from away'. On being pressed further, 'away' turned out to mean Kilburn, a village two miles distant. A gentle reminder, if one were needed, that Coxwold's invisible walls were pretty much indestructible.

Indestructible, or so they seemed then. When my mother first drove her family up the A1 in her overladen mini, we became one of the first families to arrive in the village from far 'away'. The other day, going through some stuff, I found a note she'd made of the number of cars owned by villagers at that time. There were five (excluding her own). The list of owners reads like a class-based roll-call straight from an Agatha Christie novel; Rev Harry Broughton, Admiral & Mrs Egerton, Brigadier & Mrs Maxwell, Major Lewis Geipel, and Mrs Snelling at the Shop. In addition to these, Bob Featherstone's son, Percy' Pop' Featherstone had a small coal lorry. That was it. Everyone in the village worked within its community; there were no commuters. I remember taking a friend from the village to see York City play when we were both ten. He'd never been to York before. The Monkmans may well have represented the first influx from 'away', but we were the first of many. Swiftly, the fabric of the old village, largely unchanged for generations, began to fray. Now, those long-embedded families have almost entirely disappeared.

One early casualty of that change was the village school which I attended aged five and which closed two years later. I walk past it regularly these days. It's now a house. Last week, I looked down into its quarry, which, before it became a suburban garden, was my old school playground. It struck me what a seismic shock it must have been for a five-year-old to be plucked from Montessori School and the paved pleasantries of middle-class South Kensington and deposited (without, I think, much parental awareness) into that tightly-knit, small, feral and profoundly rural community of village kids.

All of the school's children had known each other since birth, the majority of them were related; Bradley, Burn, Peckitt, Sergeant, were all names that were deeply interwoven into the fabric of the place. This was their village, their land, their community, even their language (they used words and phrases that were entirely foreign to me). Oddly, I have no recollection of being bullied (though I distinctly remember one fight with Robin Sergeant during which I broke his glasses), but I was always the outsider. I felt different, isolated and, quite literally, dis-located.

I suspect my juvenile confusion was amplified by knowing that, in my parents' projections, the village school was a stop-gap to be 'endured' before I could be sent away to Aysgarth (a boarding school near Bedale) to join my brother who, being three years older, had jumped straight from London prep-schools into this feeder school for Eton, Winchester and the like.

In September 1972, just months after 'Sterne' strode across the lawn with my mother and Bob, I left home, besuited, for this new world. The gap between Coxwold and the regimented Edwardian prep-school of Aysgarth, full of privileged middle-class kids, could not have been greater. It proved to be a gap that my seven-year-old head was incapable of bridging, and, after succumbing to a series of panic-attacks and profound morbid anxiety, I left along with an amplified sense of aloneness.

It's a sense that I've never been able to shake, and one that was deepened by my attempt to navigate a childhood clouded by 'mental illness' (as it would now be termed) whilst growing up within a rural comprehensive school. Never feeling fully at home or accepted, and fearing that any sign of my mental frailty would only compound my alienation, I instinctively hid any vulnerability. I remember digging my fingernails deep into my palms during school assemblies in the hope that the pain would override my fear; any amount of physical discomfort was preferable to the shame that my anxiety might be exposed. Otherwise, I found it relatively easy, I played football and ingratiated myself well, sought out commonalities and connections, I avoided conflicts. The price I paid for survival was self-exile. After first weeks, then months, then years of hiding how I felt, it ceased to be a choice. I became, in an emotional sense, the man I am now. Alone. Away.

Whatever I do to challenge myself in the coming years, it's a feeling I'll always associate with Coxwold. However much progress I make, however much I develop, I will always feel like an outsider here in this village, it will always be part of my complicated relationship with the place. But I've slowly become aware that a more reassuring version of 'away' is now at play too. There must be fewer than six people left in the village who can remember it as it was in 1970; a tightly-knit community with its own post office, shop, police house, school, and doctor's surgery. If the past is indeed 'a foreign country', it's a very long way away, and few of the current community ever lived there.

This thought, along with others from my distant past, prompted by sights along my daily route, has made me realise how embedded I am in this landscape. It contains so much of my story and, I suspect, the key to various levels of psychological release. My task is to figure out how to access it.

In some small way, walking this territory each day feels cathartic, as if I'm slowly coming to terms with myself and my relationship with this place.