My country memories: Jeffrey Archer

'As a young man I loved going to the beach; you could always get a game of cricket down there. I was brought up in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare, and spent my first 18 years a stone's throw away from the shores of the Bristol Channel. We lived between the two piers - the old Birnbeck Pier and the newer Grand Pier. I met my first girlfriend on the old one and, ironically, my then wife-to-be used to work on the end of the other, selling ice creams.

'We didn't have a lot of money as a family. My father died when I was young, leaving debts behind, and my mother struggled, so we didn't have holidays as such. Instead I spent a lot of time in our home county - and a tremendous amount of that on the beach.

'Keen to start earning my own money, I began working on the sands when I was about ten years old. I was in charge of the donkey rides, but my biggest responsibility was selling deckchairs. They were priced at four pennies each and I worked out that if you took the deckchairs to people, rather than waiting for them to come to you, they were very pleased and much happier to pay up. Unfortunately, what seemed like a good business idea backfired when I was sacked for leaving my post. Undeterred, I got a job working at the local council tennis tournament, selling tickets for half a crown, five shillings and ten shillings for the very best seats. However, I was sacked from that job, too, for doubling the prices of tickets without consulting anyone - even though I made the council an extra £30.

'True to my love of a good cricket match, I then took a job working at nearby Clarence Park during the cricket festival. The tea was always at 4.20pm, so towards the end of the last over I would have 20 cups of tea freshly poured out and 20 slabs of sponge cake cut and ready to serve. That way I could get on and prepare the next lot as quickly as possible. I was promptly sacked from that position for not following union rules. Embarrassingly, my mother was chairperson of the arts committee on the local council at the time. The beach and the cricket matches were all under her command, so effectively she was the boss of all three of my failed jobs. Back then, there were two small villages marking each end of Weston-super-Mare, one called Kewstoke and the other called Uphill. The road into Kewstoke is through a forest, and I used to run up there, under the shade of the trees, over the undulating countryside. In those days we only ever ran on grass. It was a lovely place to train; I felt I had the best of every world, running along the hillside tracks and having the sea so close below.

'Although I fear I'm a townsperson at heart, I do love to escape to the country when I can. I live in Cambridge now, at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester (Rupert Brooke's former home). We are fortunate enough to have several acres of land, from which I derive a lot of pleasure. We have a lake in the garden with over 100 koi carp, and I can spend hours watching the fish and studying their markings. It is a true privilege to be born in the countryside. I have always thought the great cities of this country are not the easiest of places to grow up in. When I'm abroad, where I do a lot of my writing, I miss it terrifically. I can't wait to return to it once the clocks change in spring and the nights start to get lighter. I often go back to the West Country with my family and visit Uphill, where my mother is now buried. When we walk down to the beach, I like to make everyone stand on the Grand Pier and remember what it was like when I was a child. Of course, that was before it tragically caught fire last year. It evoked such great sadness to see something that holds so many years of memories for me destroyed in a matter of hours.

'Although Somerset, and indeed the whole of England, is full of beautiful places, despite my love for them, I think my first instinct on returning to the UK would be to visit Lord's cricket ground!'

Jeffrey Archer is the bestselling author of 'Kane & Abel', 'Honour Among Thieves', 'First Among Equals', 'As the Crow Flies' and 'A Prisoner of Birth'. His latest novel, 'Paths of Glory', is out now in hardback (Macmillan, £18.99).

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