Given that I know the author, would I feel inhibited about reviewing her new book critically, I asked myself. But other than meeting her once at a party for two minutes, I realised that I know Clover Stroud only through her raw, ravishing memoirs and – like the rest of her 37,000 Instagram followers – the intimate and honest way in which she documents her life.
Perhaps more than any other writer, Stroud has taken the elegant, elliptical memoir and forged it into the genre of life writing. She has lived a lot of life. The Wild Other documented her mother’s life-changing brain injury as a result of a riding accident when Stroud was 16. In My Wild and Sleepless Nights she tackled the tribulations of raising five children; and after the early death of her sister, the circus impresario Nell Gifford, she took on her own grief in The Red of My Blood – a book about loss which nevertheless crackled with kinetic energy.
I confess I did wonder what else there was she could mine for another book. But in The Giant on the Skyline, Stroud has produced something exceptional: a mystical meditation on what home means and what constitutes belonging.
What happens when life dictates that you have to leave the place you feel hefted to? For Stroud, this is the ancient Ridgeway and chalk hills near Uffington in Oxfordshire, a place she has known since infancy and where she has spent the past ten years creating the family home. She extends their white, ‘squat, odd-looking house’ in the lee of White Horse Hill and fills it with colour and joyful clutter, with the aim of imbuing her children with ‘a powerful sense of place’ that would ‘drench into their little souls’.
After several years of working in America, however, her husband Peter finally issues an ultimatum. (Stroud estimates they have spent just 13 consecutive nights together in five years.) Their life together will only work if they sell up and move the family to Washington DC. This is unthinkable. ‘Everything I know about… how to exist, is bound up with here, with England, with the landscape and countryside,’ Stroud laments. Her horror at the prospect of swapping wet fields and blackthorn for suburban grids and practices for school shooter lockdown propels her on a strange odyssey – to search for what it means to feel at home.
She criss-crosses the Ridgeway, the oldest road in Britain, revisiting the mysterious sites she has absorbed into her psyche, seeking answers among the burial mounds and forts, the standing stones at Avebury and the 3,000-year-old white horse carved into the chalk hill above their house.
Stroud hoped to imbue her children with ‘a powerful sense of place’ that would ‘drench into their little souls’
This is a landscape of myth and legend, of giants and dragons and King Alfred, born near by at Wantage. Stroud’s peregrinations take on a trippy quality. She wakes, to feel the presence of Neolithic people around her bed; a man walking his dog assumes the appearance of a fox; the ‘giant’ of the book’s title appears, disappears and reappears on a bridge, urging her to ‘look among the fields, the stones and the horses’. Is he a figment of her imagination, a god perhaps, or does he just work behind the Post Office counter at the Co-op in Stanford in the Vale?
All this could read like one of those stoned 5 a.m. conversations at Glastonbury while watching the sun rise, but it doesn’t. It is magical and haunting and profoundly moving. Stroud is exceptionally evocative when writing about nature and family. As she scrambles up White Horse Hill before dawn, the air has yet to acquire ‘that soupy feeling which makes August seem flat and unending’. When the children gather round the table for supper, conversation comes ‘in snatches of nonsense’, ‘as broken as a Beckett play’.
Through talking to friends and the many characters who populate the Ridgeway – among them her farrier, a druid, ravers, a man walking the ancient paths to ‘trace the vibrations of energy’ – Stroud comes to find that home may be as much about the bonds between people as a particular place. A compromise is reached with Peter: they will let the house, not sell it, and Stroud begins to untether herself from her ‘osmotic relationship’ with this landscape.
I should warn that the skylarks and rolling hills of this book may exercise a strange siren call. At quiet moments I have found myself going on to Rightmove and entering ‘Uffington’, ‘Stanford’ and ‘Wantage’ – because even grungy Wantage with its Greggs and charity shops sounds alluring the way Stroud describes it.
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