The land was a teacher. And a judge. It remembered everything - your missteps, your loyalties, your name whispered through hedgerows. It repeated its lessons until you learned them, whether you wanted to or not. In the middle of all that, I grew up listening to things that didn’t speak, translating silence into meaning, letting the fields and ditches and shifting light tell me who I was long before I had language for it.

Maybe that’s why, even now, when I think of home, the first thing I remember is the quiet - how it was never empty, never passive, but watching, waiting, shaping.

I grew up in a place where silence wasn’t empty but thick, alive, and watchful. A place where the land didn’t just surround you; it absorbed you, named you, decided things about you long before you were old enough to decide anything for yourself.

People imagine the countryside as gentle, peaceful, a balm for the soul. But the truth is that it is both softer and sharper than anyone from the outside could understand. The quiet there is not just the absence of noise. It’s a presence all its own. It seeps into you, shapes you, sets the boundaries of who you think you’re allowed to be.

Our house sat on a narrow road where the grass grew confidently up the centre, as if it knew cars weren’t important here. The ditches flanked us like dark green ravines, deeper and wilder than they looked, holding secrets only local children were foolish or brave enough to disturb frogs, old bottles, the occasional thrown-away magazine someone’s father would never admit was missing. Every bend in the road looked the same, and yet we all knew exactly where we were by the angle of a hedgerow or the shape of a gate.

It was the kind of place where light behaved differently. Summers stretched so long you could almost hear the heat humming across the fields, and winters tightened everything - the roads, the breath in your chest, the distance between neighbours’ windows. At night, the dark settled onto the land like something with weight. Thick. Absolute. If you stepped outside, you could lose your bearings in seconds, swallowed by a sky unspoiled by streetlights.

People there knew the seasons like family. Silage season meant roaring tractors at all hours. Lambing meant early mornings and quiet worry. Winter meant watching the sky for snow not because it was beautiful, but because it could trap you, cut you off, make everything harder.

My father came from the land even if it had never belonged to him. He was one of twelve, raised on a farm where work began before the sun and never really ended at all. My granda believed in labour like he did Catholicism - devoutly, fiercely, without question. The fields were both cathedral and classroom. Every child was expected to contribute, hands small but capable, backs bending under tasks they didn’t yet understand the weight of.

By the time my dad was a man, work was carved into him like initials in bark.
His hands had their own geography - ridges, cracks, old cuts from machinery and plasterboard. His shoulders carried the ghost of every load he’d ever lifted. He became a plasterer, and he was good at it. Quietly good. Not the type to boast or even acknowledge the skill, but you could tell by the way he ran his palm across a finished wall, eyes narrowing with a craftsman’s calm satisfaction.

He was one of those men who read the weather like scripture.  “A good drying day,” he’d say, and washing would appear on the line. “Rain’s coming,” he’d mutter, hours before the first drop. He didn’t check forecasts. He didn’t need to. His body had been trained by the land and it never forgot.

My mother had her own kind of strength. Different. Quieter. But just as enduring. She had trained as a nurse once, long before I was born, long before life rerouted her into jobs she hadn’t planned for but somehow always excelled in. She worked more roles than I could keep track of - in offices, in shops, climbing into managerial positions without the vocabulary of ambition. She would simply see a problem, solve it, and suddenly find herself responsible for more than she wanted but never more than she could handle.

What amazes me now and what I never understood then is how much they protected me from. Not by pretending life was easy, but by refusing to let difficulty harden the world around me. They absorbed so much so I didn’t have to.

Our house was tidy. Warm, lived-in. A place where the kettle was always either boiling or about to be. Where neighbours arrived without knocking and left the same way. Where my dad’s work trousers always hung over the back of a radiator, drying for the next day, and where my mother somehow always knew exactly where everything was, even the things that were lost.

I didn’t know it then, but they were building a buffer around me - a soft ring of protection against the harsher truths of rural life: the gossip, the rigid masculinity, the lack of privacy, the categories people placed you in without permission.

And in that protected space, I grew - different, though I didn’t yet know the name for it.

The countryside has its own way of telling you who you are, long before you figure it out for yourself. You are your father’s son, they’d say. Your mother’s boy. A reflection of the people who made you. You were your family’s reputation. Your grandparents’ history.
Your surname, spoken in a tone that told others where to position you in their mental map of the village. People there didn’t ask what you wanted to be; they asked who you belonged to. The land held identity tightly. Too tightly for some.

For me. Even as a child, there was a softness in me that didn’t quite match my surroundings. I noticed things longer than the other boys did - a bird’s wings flickering against sky, the shape of someone’s smile, the exact moment when light changed in a room. Beauty tugged at me, though I didn’t yet understand why that felt dangerous.

I was gentle. Too gentle. And in a place like that, gentleness could be a liability. At school, I learned to adapt. In P.E., I ran harder than necessary, hoping effort could disguise inclination. On the pitch, I threw myself at the game with a ferocity I didn’t feel, because belonging had rules, and I was desperate to memorise them. Among boys, I laughed at jokes that unsettled me. Around girls, I pretended interest I didn’t possess.

I fitted myself into shapes that didn’t quite fit, smoothing down edges that felt too visible. But even the best performance can’t contain a truth that’s determined to grow. There were moments - small, fleeting, but impossible to forget - where something in me sparked: A knee brushing mine under a table. A boy’s hand on my shoulder lingering a second too long. A glance in the changing room that felt like a question and an answer tangled together.

I didn’t have a word for it. But I had a feeling. A pull. A recognition. And once you recognise something in yourself, you can’t unsee it.

Yet, even as I was becoming aware of myself, the village’s gaze grew heavier. Rural places don’t need to speak to communicate. A raised eyebrow. A pause in conversation when you enter a room. A comment said casually but meant precisely.

You learn, over time, to read silences with the same attentiveness other people reserve for spoken words. You become adept at interpreting the pauses, the glances, the small shifts in tone that convey more than entire conversations ever could. You learn to anticipate when you are being examined not through questions, but through the subtle tightening around someone’s eyes or the way a room goes slightly still when you enter it. And long before anyone asks you explicitly to shrink, you begin doing it instinctively, folding yourself inward to occupy a little less space, to keep suspicion at bay, to avoid drawing the kind of attention that makes your heart trip over itself.

Still, for all the loneliness that came with this quiet self-containment, I wasn’t truly alone in my differences - though the revelation of that would come much later, and not in any grand, cinematic way, but in a small, unexpected moment, when another boy, just as unsure and just as watchful as me, leaned in and kissed me.

It happened quickly, with an awkwardness so tender it startled me, the kind of clumsiness that comes only with firsts. He tasted faintly of grass and diesel, the scent of the pitch and the machinery that forever rumbled around our village, clinging to him as much as his nerves did. We were both trembling - partly from the cold, partly from fear of being seen, but mostly from the overwhelming rush of stumbling into something entirely new, something delicate and electric and terrifying and ours alone.

The entire moment lasted no more than ten seconds, but in those ten seconds a door swung open inside me, one I had been approaching for years without realising it had been there all along.. And when it closed again, nothing about the world looked quite the same.

Afterwards, we didn’t speak. Not to each other, not to anyone. We walked back to the group as if we had only stepped away to tie our laces or catch our breath, performing the same tired rituals we always had, pretending the ground beneath us hadn’t shifted.

But everything had changed. The field looked different - the grass too bright, the sky too wide, the floodlights too harsh. Every boy I passed in the corridor the next day felt like a threat and a possibility entwined, and every conversation carried an undercurrent of panic: Do they know? Could they tell? What happens if they do?

So I built silence around myself like armour. And while armour protects, it also isolates. It weighs you down. It restricts your movement, your breath, your sense of who you are beneath it. Carrying that silence into early adulthood became a kind of exile - not from my community, but from myself.

I kept learning the lessons the countryside had quietly been teaching me for years: how to hide the parts of myself that felt too visible, how to adapt quickly enough to escape scrutiny, how to quiet the pulse of longing whenever it grew too loud or too brave for the place that raised me. But longing has a gravitational pull all its own, and it tugs at you until you either yield to it or break under the strain. Eventually, the pull became stronger than the fear. It grew larger than the village that tried to contain it.

And so, without drama or announcement, I left.

Leaving home wasn’t some cinematic escape. There was no slammed door reverberating down a hall, no final confrontation, no declaration that I was done with the place that had shaped me. My departure was softer, quieter - the kind of leaving that feels less like an act of rebellion and more like an inevitable unfolding. At eighteen, I headed for Cardiff with a bag far too small for the life I hoped to build, packed more with yearning than belongings.

The moment I stepped off the plane, the air felt different. It moved differently - looser, lighter, carrying a sense of possibility that made my chest expand in a way it never had at home. The city felt bigger not just in size, but in spirit, as though the world had revealed an extra dimension I had somehow lived without until that moment.

Cardiff was loud in ways that overwhelmed me at first. Cars weaving through traffic.
People talking fast, walking faster. Music spilling from open doorways and windows.
Arguments and laughter and movement everywhere, a constant hum that made the countryside’s silence seem impossibly far away.

But the noise wasn’t what truly unsettled me - it was the anonymity. It was real freedom, and I hadn’t realised until then how tightly I’d been held by the expectations of the village.

Here, no one knew my surname. No one knew my parents or my grandparents or the stories tied to them. No one had already decided who I was allowed to be. I could move without every step being traced, without every gesture being interpreted, without the weight of being known too well.

And slowly, cautiously, I began to stretch into that freedom.

I learned how it felt to say the word “gay” out loud without choking on it. I learned there were places where men walked hand in hand without flinching. I learned that masculinity wasn’t singular, but varied and textured and deeply personal. I learned that softness - the very thing I had once tried to bury - was not a fault line, but a characteristic that drew people to me, that made others open up, that allowed connection in ways I’d been starved of before.

But the countryside never fully loosened its grip on me. Its habits lingered, stitched into my nervous system like old seams. Even in the city’s openness, I hesitated before speaking too personally, scanning rooms out of instinct, storing parts of myself away for safekeeping in case the wrong person, the wrong moment, the wrong tone made me revert to the boy who’d learned to survive through invisibility.

You don’t shed survival techniques just because you change your postcode.

Yet with each passing year, the influence of my childhood began to reveal itself in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I started to recognise that the silence I grew up with wasn’t just suffocation - it was also sensitivity. It taught me how to listen closely, how to catch the emotional temperature of a room before anyone spoke, how to pay attention to the truths that hide beneath the surface of things. The depth and attunement I carried weren’t weaknesses; they were the very tools that allowed me to navigate the world with compassion and precision.

My parents’ love, too, came into sharper focus. I had always mistaken its quietness for distance, but with time I saw that their love was not the dramatic, declarative kind - it was steady, practical, expressed through actions that asked for nothing in return. My dad ferrying me about without ever mentioning it. My mum packing food into containers I’d discover later in my bag. The two of them pretending not to worry about how I was doing, though their eyes betrayed them every time I came through the door.

They had given me room - room to grow, room to imagine, room to become someone they couldn’t yet picture but wholeheartedly hoped would thrive. They didn’t always understand me, but they supported me in the language they knew: effort, presence, consistency.

And as I moved further into adulthood, the land of my childhood - with all its restrictions, expectations, and beauty - began to soften in my memory. I no longer saw it solely as a place that confined me, but as one that shaped my resilience and sharpened my sensitivity. It was both the boundary I had to cross and the foundation I still stood on.

Now, when I return, I walk the same narrow roads, with my two children, and feel the strange, familiar ache of recognition. The area remains mostly unchanged, stubborn, unmoved by time, but I am different. I no longer see it as something I must escape, nor as something I must return to. Instead, I see it as part of me, a landscape I carry inside myself, one that I’ve grown around rather than against.

I don’t dream of moving back. But I no longer run from what it made me either.

Because this - the land, the silence, the people, the limits, the love - is where my story began. In the hush between fields. In the hands of parents who worked themselves into exhaustion to give me possibility. In the first trembling spark of truth that would, eventually, guide me far beyond the boundaries of the village.

This is the beginning - the first opening in the long corridor of becoming.

And every time I stand on that old road again, I feel something loosen in my chest, as though the land itself, in all its complexity, is whispering a quiet, almost-forgiving welcome.

It opens. It lets me in. It calls me home.

Photo: Mark Gunn

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