Almost every Friday of my early teen years I was a passenger in the back of my father’s car. Travelling up the A1 from junction 9 to junction 49 to my mother’s house for the weekend. There was nothing to do. Mobile phones did not exist. There was no reading, in case of carsickness. Sometimes we played a mixtape we had made, called “LOVE”.

The first 50 miles were fields, flat and with solitary oak trees, a dark scattering of birds. Then wind farms, which always cause a kind of breathlessness in me. And then real farms with their livestock. Certain landmarks contain my memories: the fast-food restaurant with the curved concrete roof, the mock-Tudor pub where we never stopped, but to which I drove myself when I was older, just to see it.

The countryside here is laced with telegraph poles and wires. The lanes move into three, then two and then one. We drove through Clumber Park, “Robin Hood country” – the reality so much smaller than the stories I had read. When the road crossed over tributaries and canals there were long boats. People lived like that, I saw.

Hours in traffic; I wondered who lived in the redbrick villages just over that hill, what did they do for fun? On the far hills, white caravans parked in uniform patterns, green and white. The further we got, the more the landscape dipped and rose. North was always just over the next roundabout. Clouds stretched like dinosaur spines overhead.

My sister had a way of counting time: the “hour cooling towers”, she called them, and then again, the “45-minute cooling towers”, the time until we arrived. I never learned what those huge chimneys were for, but I knew the way they seemed to rotate as we drove around them, as if they were moving and we were still. In autumn, I watched for their white smoke against the deep grey sky. How the light changed, and changed every view.

In the winter the whole journey was done in the dark, car lights traced cat’s eyes. Nothing to do but follow reflections’ pattern against glass. I learned to sit through it, and not to drink much water on the way.

I suppose these are some of the hours that might have made me a writer. Now, I can stay at my desk, and work and forget that I’m thirsty. At last came the turning on to the A19. The air always seemed clearer then. We were sure that when we arrived, no matter how late, the lights would be on in the brick and board house, on a new-build estate so like the one we had left. And she would be at the front door.

• Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young is published in paperback by Galley Beggar.