Profile | British author Horatio Clare on his nervous breakdown, BBC days working with people like David Lynch, his books, and growing up in the Welsh wilderness
- After moving with his mother from London to a farm in Wales, Clare worked with brilliant minds at the BBC and became an accomplished writer
- A breakdown, which saw him sent to a psychiatric hospital for compulsory treatment, and subsequent recovery informs his latest book, Heavy Light
I was born on September 5, 1973, in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, in London. My parents were journalists – dad was on The Times and mum was the assistant literary editor of the Evening Standard – and we had a basement flat in Holland Park, in west London, which is now an incredibly desirable area but was then £7 a week.
I had a nanny because journalists were well paid then and my first years were happy.
My mother bought a hill farm in Wales with 83 acres and hundreds of fairly wild sheep and she fell in love with the mountain and farming. Her marriage to my father became increasingly unsuccessful – he worried very much about the money, which was suicidally hopeless.
My mother didn’t, she was happy to live a very primitive life. My brother was born in 1975 and by 1978 my parents had split and we moved with her to this primitive hill farm, it was a real adventure.
Wild and free
The view from the Black Mountains, where the farm is, to the Brecon Beacons is like something out of Africa, it is beautiful. In the summer it was paradise and in the winter we got properly snowed in. Although we had no money, there was extraordinary freedom and we read books. We became subsistence sheep farmers and it was healthy, wild and free.
I went to a Welsh primary school and then got an assisted place – I’m one of Thatcher’s children – at private school, Malvern College. I was expelled from there aged 16. My responsibilities lifted as I got older – I was no longer my mother’s right-hand man, no longer a little husband to her and father to my brother – and a lot of that bottled up anxiety and trauma expressed itself in wild 20-something misbehaviour.
I went to the University of York and studied English, I was good at it but I was lazy. I learned to make my way on the back of one or two really good teachers and on a childhood of reading.
Alcoholism, madness, divorce, death
After York, I joined the Daily Mirror training scheme in Newcastle. As much as I admired the skills of tabloid journalism, I did not admire the ethics. At the end of that course I lived and worked for seven months in a London pub, the Chelsea Potter. That was my education in life, I learned more in those seven months than I did in the previous three years – it was like being the crew of a pirate ship on the King’s Road.
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I’d go across the road to the Waterstones (bookshop) and open a writer’s biography and see where they were at 25. They all promised the same thing – alcoholism, madness, divorce, death. None of that was off-putting to me, if anything it seemed to say, “You might be one of us.”
Running for the hills
I got a job as a researcher at the BBC in the radio arts unit. There were all these brilliant journalists in the same room every morning – Mohit Bakaya, Rob Ketteridge, Lawrence Pollard – it was a bear pit of brilliant brains and senses of humour working out what we were going to do that evening, I just loved it.
When I got a publisher for my first book, Running for the Hills (2006), about growing up on a sheep farm in Wales, I resigned from the Beeb. I write to find out and what I found out was that the narrative that I had, that my mum had been abandoned by my dad, wasn’t actually true. If anything it was the other way around and my mum had fallen in love with the mountain and out of love with him.
A single swallow
I went to Sicily and edited an anthology of writers’ lives there, and then Running came out and it was a hit. Then I wrote a very poor book, in my opinion, called Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope (2007) about drugs in the 1990s. I’ve had a recurring relationship with cannabis and if I’d taken the advice of that book, which was to stay away from it, I wouldn’t have been in the position I found myself in three years ago.
Then I had an idea about swallows and decided to follow migrating swallows from South Africa back to Wales (resulting in the 2009 book A Single Swallow) – and that got me labelled as a travel writer, which is an honour, and that became my vocation.
Different kinds of love
At the end of the swallow journey I met my now ex-partner Rebecca and we moved to Rochdale [in northwest England], where she lived, and then to Verona, Italy, for five years and my son was born there in 2013. Rebecca’s son, her ex-husband and his new partner all moved out to the same block of flats as us, so we don’t do things in a very conventional way. In fact, I’m in the process of buying the house next door (in Yorkshire) to where Rebecca is going to live, so she and I are going to continue as partners in parenting and raising our little boy.
It’s very simple for children if they can see that adults love them and get on, we don’t have to be trapped in that ghastly old narrative of either happily ever after or miserable entrapment in a failing relationship or break-up. I don’t like any of that language. Ours is a recognition that there are different kinds of love and that sexual love can change or fail and that deep pragmatic love can endure.
Hope, strength and determination
Although in my books I explore harsh environments, like seafaring, or migrants or ice-breaking or more latterly in a mental hospital, what I tend to bring back is what I find there, which is hope, strength and determination. The thrust of my work tends to be optimistic and hopeful. I’ve won prizes for memoir, travel and children’s books, so I’ve got range. And those things matter because it can be an insecure profession and sometimes you wonder if you are any good at it.
Three years ago I had a breakdown. I was writing for magazines and newspapers, was publishing two books, launching a course at Manchester University and trying to get back to the house in Yorkshire to do an impression of a decent father and partner, and the whole thing became too much. I was fuelling myself with light touches of cannabis and less light touches of whisky and went from hypomania – which is flights of ideas, optimism, incautious spending – to mania, which involves delusion, and then into psychosis, where I was wholly in another world.
Heavy light
After a long battle of me trying to stay free, and Rebecca trying to get me help, I was sectioned (committed compulsorily for mental health treatment) and taken to hospital in West Yorkshire for three weeks. After two doses of a very strong antipsychotic I was sane again, the people outside the window suddenly weren’t MI6, they were just builders.
I figured as a writer it was an opportunity, so I started keeping a diary. When I came out I saw psychiatrists who were useless in that they didn’t ask me questions, they just told me I needed to be on medication for the rest of my life. So I went to psychotherapy, where an entire world was revealed, and worked on resolving the trauma that I’d suffered when my parents split up.
I changed my diet, my sleep patterns, my relationship with the truth and my willingness to say no to things when I’m beginning to push myself too hard, addressing fundamental things like perfectionism and a tendency to push myself to burnout.
I’ve been well for three years, in defiance of psychiatric science, and I wrote a book about it – Heavy Light (2021) – that involved a lengthy investigation into mental health. Every day I get a message from a reader saying that they, or someone close to them, are suffering and the system we have is not working for them, they’ve read the book and they know there are other systems out there that do work.
As part of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival, Horatio Clare will give a talk on Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing on Thursday November 11 at Asia Society, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, 8.30pm to 9.30pm. For details, go to festival.org.hk.
