Staying PutWhile the rest of the world has been playing musical chairs all around me, I have stayed put in the same house for more than half my life. It's not that I don't like to wander, but somehow I feel easier in my freewheeling knowing that this place is here, a fixed point. I am located by it, just as Donne's lovers are the twin points of compasses in his poemA Valediction, Forbidding Mourning: Thy firmness draws my circle just, And makes me end where I begun.The adventures of my mother's family, the Woods, all nine of them, were the stuff of my bedtime stories. My mother never seemed to read to me but recounted instead the many tales of the Wood tribe. I grew up in a strictly oral tradition of home-grown folklore peopled almost entirely by my mother's siblings. Welsh Grandma Jones, silver-haired Grandpa Wood, with his one left hand and a steel hook for his right, two dashing uncles and four aunts. My grandparents had upheld our sylvan traditions by christening two of them Ivy Wood and Violet Wood.

My mother was always thankful nobody had thought of Primrose.Wood family history is ingrained in me, just as memory and history are ingrained into the timbers of Walnut Tree Farm. Each post and beam has its own particular story and once grew free. If you take a cross-section of any beam, close study of the pattern of its annual rings by a dendrochronologist would reveal exactly when it grew up from the acorn or the coppice stool, and exactly when it was cut down.The house sits at a dizzy 174 feet above sea level, enough to keep my patch islanded when the promised flood comes. But I am part-islanded already by a moat and a round cattle pond that juts out into the common, one of twenty-four that are strung around it and connected by an ancient system of moats and drains. The jungled hedges that surround my four meadows comprise a necessary rampart to the winds that cut across the open wheat prairies beyond. They have vaulted the ditches, creating a secret leaf-mould world of ferny tunnels.

There's a little wood too, and an old droving road that flanks the land to the west.All of this lies on the shores of a great inland sea of rippling grasses that rises like a tide towards haymaking in July, obscuring my neighbour's farm on its far side. It stretches a mile to the west of this place, the biggest grazing common in Suffolk. So, although the sea is twenty-five miles due east at Walberswick, I can still enjoy some of the pleasures of living beside it: the big skies and wide, dramatic sunsets. In Suffolk we have daydream mountains too: the volcanic cumulus clouds of harvest time.Why have I stayed so long? Not because I was born here or have Suffolk roots, but because of all the hard work, and the accumulated history. I mean my own, mixed up with the people I love. For three years I taught English at the old grammar school in Diss, putting more roots down among the local students and families who became my friends.

There is no more intimate way of getting to know your neighbours than by teaching their children. Then there were the Barsham Fairs and theWaveney Clarion, the community newspaper of the Waveney Valley, which I helped write, plan and distribute, as a whole extended family of us quasi-hippies did, from Diss to Bungay to Beccles to Lowestoft. The rural culture we built together then during the 1970s and early 1980s, based firmly on the values of theWhole Earth Catalogue, Friends of the Earth, Cobbett'sCottage Economyand John Seymour'sThe Fat of the Land, flushed out all the pioneer immigrants busy settling in Suffolk - rough carpenters, dirt farmers, musicians, poets, ditchdiggers and drivers of timber-framed Morris Minor estate cars - and put us all to work together building what for a golden moment became a grand tradition of Suffolk fairs, ephemeral, dreamlike, gypsyish shanty capitals in fields full of folk. Again, it w.