Epping Forest, a 2,400-hectare woodland straddling the border of London and Essex, has been home to hermits, hunters and highwaymen. Its shaded groves have sheltered children skiving off school and gay men seeking encounters. Babies have been born beside its twisted trees and bodies buried under them. It is both haven and hazard, its secrets known by criminals and preachers alike.
Luke Turner, the 40-year-old author of a bold new memoir, Out of the Woods, which details his complicated relationship with the forest and his own troubled past, understands all this. The Epping Forest he depicts is not “some twee fetishised place” but rather an ever-changing landscape, by turns nurturing and terrifying, in which it is as easy to fall apart as to be saved.
“Epping Forest is where London goes to bury its dead and its secrets,” he says of the landscape which has dominated his imagination since childhood. “Part of the excitement about it is that it has this city energy – it’s a place where you can hear planes coming in to land or motorbikes or the sirens on the M25 – but when you’ve gone across the threshold, you are somewhere that’s incredibly primal and I love that about it. It has a very odd energy that I think a rural woodland doesn’t necessarily have.”
It’s also, on a crisp January morning, eerily beautiful, its twisted trees casting strange shadows on the paths as we walk, talking about how Turner, the co-founder of cult music website The Quietus, saw this sprawling place where the wild and the ordered meet “as the one constant” of a peripatetic childhood.
His father’s job as a Methodist minister meant that the family moved around, but both his parents grew up on the forest border and climbed its trees as children, and his aunt and uncle still live in nearby Theydon Bois. Although Turner spent his adolescence in “hateful” St Albans, the family regularly spent days out in the forest. It became an almost talismanic place, the repository of some of Turner’s fondest early memories.
Out of the Woods details some of this, while delving deep into Turner’s bisexuality, his depression after the collapse of a long-term relationship and the way in which residual shame from abusive sexual encounters in his early teens shaped his adult desires. Honest and often beautifully written, it is shot through with dry humour. In its pages is an understanding that, while nature cannot save you from yourself, it can offer even the most lost a kind of freedom – “provided you take your litter home”.
Small wonder, then, that it has been hailed as the latest in a growing number of highly personal accounts, such as Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, which use nature to grapple with deeper issues. “For me it’s not a book about nature’s redemptive power but almost the opposite,” says Turner. “I get very frustrated with the idea that just being in nature will make you feel better, because for a long time I hated coming up here but couldn’t seem to stop returning, almost out of a grim compulsion.”
The desperation Turner felt both here and in the city, where he was homeless after the end of a relationship and sleeping on friends’ sofas and spare beds, only receded once he faced the demons of his adolescence head on. “I realised that I wanted to write about things – like bisexuality – that are hidden away in contemporary conversations and so the book [which was originally conceived as a straightforward history of the forest] began to be more about my own personal experience. I wanted to say you don’t have to split yourself in half. The truth can be found in the grey areas and the accepting of people’s contradictions.”
The book consistently confounds expectations. Turner describes it as being about “religion and compulsion and shame”. Yet some of the best sections are those in which he writes about his family, their faith and the close-knit world in which he was raised. “What’s funny is that when I was writing it, I was very conscious I might be bashing religion, but then people have read it and joked that it’s a right God-bothery book,” he says, laughing. “But, to be honest, the positives I got from being brought up in a religious family, particularly a Methodist family, and the love and community I got from that, have shaped everything I’ve ever done.”
That said, he’s not convinced his parents, loving as they are, should read it. “Honestly, I’m still terrified about the idea that they might. It’s difficult because I wanted to write what I had to write and they’re amazing people but I’m still not sure whether they will, even though it’s dedicated to them.”
The bleakest sections of the book deal with his teenage encounters with predatory older men. “I’m not saying everyone’s experiences were like this – you can have these encounters and have them be lovely and positive – but the stuff I went through as a 14-year-old with men in their 60s in coercive situations really wasn’t,” he says. “When I was older, I had some more outré experiences that were actually really wonderful, but they were always accompanied by that addictive adrenaline rush and sense of shame.”
That constant tension between guilt and exhilaration would come to have a huge impact on Turner’s mental health. “I felt as though I was losing my mind with the breakdown of my relationship and the realisation that I couldn’t seem to make any relationship work and the way I dealt with that was by having these complicated sexual encounters. It was a chaotic period. I would come up here trying to make sense of how I felt but, instead, everything just swirled around and all my problems were still present.”
He is dismissive, however, of the notion that nature by itself can mend the broken – “the forest doesn’t care how you feel. It doesn’t want to help you” – but acknowledges his own state of mind improved once he started working with the Epping Forest Conservation Volunteers. “It was partially because it was a form of physical exercise that I was able to enjoy, which I’d never had before because physical exercise had always reminded me of school and bullying and the horror of PE lessons, but also that I loved the way you can go off and be as isolated as you like, clearing saplings and holly, and then meet up and have a nice lunch and chat. It’s a brilliant mixture of the individual and the communal.”
Turner is co-curating a project about the Epping Forest landscape as part of Waltham Forest’s London Borough of Culture 2019 celebrations and admits his relationship with the forest is now less complicated. “Now that I’m in a much better place, I can come up here and it’s beautiful and I feel a connection to it.” He pauses and smiles. “I know that sounds really trite – ‘oh I cleared the forest and let light in and that helped me let light into myself’. But, unfortunately, that to an extent is true. That’s how it worked.”
Out of the Woodsis published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson on 24 January, £16.99
The new nature writers
H is for Hawk, Helen MacDdonald, Vintage
Macdonald’s haunting story of grief, loneliness and hawk training won both the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the YearAward.
Under the Rock, Ben Myers, Elliot & Thompson
The versatile Myers, winner of last year’s Walter Scott award, moves into nature writing with this lyrical look at the imposing Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire.
The Outrun, Amy Liptrot, Canongate
There are memoirs of drinking and then there is Liptrot’s searing account of her reckoning with both her alcoholism and the Orkney islands where she was raised.
Hidden Nature, Alys Fowler, Hodder & Stoughton
Fowler’s moving memoir charts her coming out as a gay woman, alongside her journey through Birmingham’s canal networks mapping both the waterways and the travails of her heart.
To The River, Olivia Laing, Canongate
Laing’s first book, a meandering walk along the River Ouse in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf is a meditative delight.
The Wild Remedy, Emma Mitchell, Michael O’Mara Books
Illustrator Mitchell’s newly published book is a diary of her walks through the Cambridgeshire fens and how they helped her manage depression.
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison, Faber & Faber
Harrison’s smart, poetic book examines the English obsession with the weather through four seasonal walks in four very different parts of the countryside.
A Sweet, Wild Note, Richard Smyth, Elliott & Thompson
Smyth’s witty book puts examines everything from the Western front to the Nightingale’s song to find the music in bird song.
The Last Wilderness, Neil Ansell, Tinder Press
Ansell’s beautiful memoir of his walks through the Scottish wilderness makes the case for being truly a part of nature rather than outside of it.
Underland, Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton, out in May 2019
The king of the new nature writers returns with one of the year’s most anticipated books “a journey to the worlds underneath our feet”.
