Like many mothers, I look back at having young children as the best part of my life. My two daughters were both born in the mid-1970s and they grew up in a small, remote village in Northamptonshire, midway between Banbury and Daventry. The garden opposite my cottage was owned by a ninety-year-old widowed lady. It hadn’t been tended for over twenty years. It was a thicket of brambles, overgrown hedges, conifers and, of course, weeds.
This bothered some of the villagers, although it didn’t bother me and I was her