Marchelle Farrell: Uprooting

Marchelle Farrell has travelled 6,943km to find a new home, from Trinidad to Bath. Melissa Blease her book Uprooting, which tells a story of belonging, and of searching for home, when the

Lots of people believe that the vast, esoteric stratum of space, time and energy called The Universe has got your back, making all the tools, resources, people, places and things that you need to live the life you’re destined to live available at every moment. Although consultant psychiatrist, psychotherapist and –of late – published writer Marchelle Farrell didn’t immediately implicate powerful arcane universal forces at work behind the scenes of her life, I couldn’t help suggesting that there’s a profoundly destiny-driven theme to her story. “Well yes,” she says. “Several opportunities occurred at once and then everything fell into place quite suddenly; it felt as though the universe had indeed lined up to point me in a particular direction.”

In 2019, Marchelle – who was born and bought up in Trinidad, but moved to the UK 20 years ago (“I fell in love while I was a medical student, so my husband’s to blame for everything!”, she says) – found herself making a home for her and her family in a

Marchelle quintessentially British village around three miles south of Bath... at the start of a worldwide pandemic. Scroll forward four years, and Marchelle’s first book Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside –Finding Home in an English Country Garden is published by Canongate Books.

“I didn't set off to tackle my garden with the intention of writing this book – it all evolved really organically,” Marchelle recalls. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to take A-levels in Literature, French and English so I suppose, unconsciously, writing appealed to me. But I was very academic too, so I was encouraged towards sciences. Of course, I’ve done a huge amount of report writing in my formal job – pulling together an assessment report or a discharge summary can feel like quite a creation! But up until the move I'd been intensely busy for a long, long time, and I'd started feeling that I wanted something different: I needed us to feel grounded. When you’re going through medical training you move every six months, it’s very unsettled; I needed to root somewhere and provide stability for my family, and for myself. I was going through a kind of self-examination process: where should home be, and what sort of a life did we really want? But had I ever believed that I was a writer? No!”

Even a brief recce of Marchelle’s Instagram posts (@afroliage) have me begging to differ; take this one, for example, from October 2022, in the middle of all ‘that’ madness:

“At first the rain seems like tears, the ones of grief and rage that bubble within me as I sit frozen, watching the mad spiral of the news, down, down into the death of everything sane and good. I walk past the houseplants and quietly note their still suffering. I know they will love the rain, looking greener and somehow perked up and more full of life after a natural drench. So, still in pyjamas and slippers, I move them one by one and two by two out into the autumn downpour. I get soaked in turn, and after the shock of the first few drops the rain is delicious on my skin. I welcome it. As I feel my cells swell and plump in its sweet benediction, the dry fires of rage cool inside me as a sweet, fresh wind blows in. These drops are not tears of mourning. They are deliquescent alchemy, melting the mad growth of summer. They are my reminder that everything must fall to the ground and rot for something new to emerge, hidden buds already formed. The sound of drops falling beats the reminder that to sit locked away from the earth is madness. This rain is a wave of the fresh start of autumn’s death.”

Despite her protestations, writing, it seems, is a huge part of what Marchelle is all about –even if Bath, four years ago, was unexplored territory. But why Bath?

“We chose to live in the south west to be near to family – my husband was born and bred in Bristol,” Marchelle explains. “We were only really familiar with Bath from a tourist perspective, so we wanted time to find our feet and get to know the area. But then the pandemic hit and I found myself having the time to think and make links in an analytical kind of way, and spending time in my garden proved to be a really helpful way of processing thoughts that I started writing down, as they came to me. The book evolved from there – and I still don’t really know how! But something really resonated, for me and for other people too, in the middle of that insane, unsettling time. We’d landed in this beautiful house with a beautiful garden and an incredible, thriving, cohesive community around us – so welcoming, and so loving. In the midst of all the craziness, it all felt very serendipitous”.

And there was yet more serendipity to come. Marchelle wasn’t necessarily looking for a publisher for her book (she didn’t, at the time know that she was writing a book) but she was introduced to an agent who loved her work and could see an evolving story. “I thought okay, let’s see where this is going,” says Marchelle. “And just as the point where I had a solid proposal, some decent sample material and several chapters, the deadline for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize [for underrepresented, unpublished nature writers] came up. But at exactly the same time, an opportunity for an NHS job in my speciality was presented to me – and the closing date for both the prize and the job application were on exactly the same day. I chose to take a leap of faith; I didn’t apply for the NHS job but I applied for the prize –which I won! Life has been very different since then...”

Marchelle, however, isn’t a stranger to adapting to change, though; that 6,943km difference between Trinidad and Bath, for example? “Actually, what fascinates me more is how many similarities there are!”, she says. “I was very lucky to have a childhood that felt mythical. I was outdoors a lot, playing around with the other kids and not having to get used to helicopter parents. You came home when you were hungry, and if you fell over and skinned your knees you always felt completely safe because you knew all of the adults around you. There was always a sense of freedom, built around a stronger sense of knowing that you were safe – I really wanted that for my kids, and their childhood right now is as similar to mine as is possible, without being back in Trinidad. But Bath is really special. I remember when we were first walking around the city and suddenly had this realisation that you can see greenery and the countryside from almost every street –that was really critical, for me.”

At long last, those streets have opened up again, and the ‘new normal’ has become –well, just ‘normal’, once more. What does normal day-to-day life, for Marchelle, entail?

“Life is quite a flurry at the moment, around the release of the book. But I love reading, I’m in the PTA, I run a gardening club, and I was a school governor for a while – I like doing things that foster a feeling of community, and supporting that community. I also love swimming and yoga – they’re my main me-time things. My children are six and eight now – they’re really proud of me, and they’ve started writing their own books, which is wonderful. I would very much like to get back into clinical therapeutic work one day, but then again, I do feel as though I have more to say, through writing. It’s not a thing I want to rush, and I have no idea what shape that would take. But do I hope that writing will remain part of my life? Very much yes, for sure.”

Put it out there, Marchelle; the universe is definitely listening. n

Marchelle Farrell is talking about her book Uprooting (£16.99) at Topping & Co. on 3 August at 7.30pm; toppingbooks.co.uk