My miserable youth elapsed in small, dreary villages hidden in the sides of the Teign Valley, west of Exeter. Time passed languishing in hospital, parents divorced, adolescent despair held me in its grip. One thing was for sure: these villages and their inhabitants were stuck, and slipping into the past. Life, the future, lay elsewhere.

I left school at 16 and dossed about in a depressive state, alternating dead-end jobs with the dole. Yet also reading most of the Russian novels of the 19th and early 20th century that were translated into English, and inching towards an accommodation with this mortal existence.

I wandered around Europe, wrote desultory poems about superfluous young men in Munich, Paris, Rome; lived in Wales; moved to Oxford. Then one day in my late 20s I began to write a story. For some reason I set it in the Teign Valley. And in front of my eyes the villages of my adolescence burst into flame.

The boys and girls I’d known – scrappers, drinkers, dreamers, jokers – I realised I loved them all. The farmers, labourers, madwomen, priest, hedge-layer, impoverished aristocrat, army veteran who wished to be addressed by his rank: there they all were.

I knew this world in my bones. The sound of that donkey in the field below the church. The smell of tarmac in the sun. Stuart’s mum calling him in for tea, a small woman whose voice carried across canyons. The tiny sweetshop in an elderly brother and sister’s front room. The single Catholic family who walked to church in Chudleigh. The war memorial, commemorating those lost in the wars of 1914-1919 and 1939-1946. A lone heron that kept vigil over the flooded quarry.

I revisited the valley and discovered that the gloomy vale of childhood was, in reality, incredibly beautiful. The lovely River Teign flows between lush fields. Primroses abound. Haldon Forest rises on one side, Dartmoor on the other, up beyond the reservoirs.

So my first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, was born. The village became, in the writing, a microcosm of England in the 1980s, convulsed by Thatcherite greed and indifference to others. Characters either let themselves be swept along or stood firm, for community, nature, love.

Unable to leave Oxford and return to live in Devon, I wrote a further seven novels set in various times and places. Until a longing for the landscape and people I’m from drew me back, to write a trilogy of novels set 100 years ago in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall; about two childhood friends, a silent farm boy and an aristocratic horsewoman, and how their lives twist and turn. Once again, the West Country gave me more than any writer could ask for.

• The Redeemed by Tim Pears is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.