BEN Hollingworth was 22 years old, a handsome lad with an engaging grin, a country boy, a gamekeeper on Lord Peel's estate in Swaledale. One day he drove his Land Rover up onto the moors and shot himself.

There'd been no warning, no clue, nothing to indicate his state of mind.

That was six years ago. And ever since, his mother Kathleen has been trying to make sense of it all and has now written a book, "trying to find a way through the pain and a meaning to life again."

She knows she's lucky - she has two other fine sons, Adam and Thomas, a smashing husband, Dave, and a home high up in Arkengarthdale which on a sunny day in early summer is as close to heaven as you can get.

"But for the first two years many times I felt I was on the verge of madness," she says. "If I didn't hold on tightly, I felt I would go screaming over the edge into a bottomless black hole."

Her family - all struggling too with the same burden of grief - kept her going and her "wonderful friends" who listened to her outpourings. She went straight back to her job as secretary at Arkengarthdale School - which is where Ben and his brothers had gone.

And she looked for Ben.

"I walked miles over the moors looking for him... I even went beating for the shoot - something I'd never done before - because I thought that was Ben's world and I would find him there."

Dave had dug his son's grave in St Mary's churchyard. Tom and his friend John Sunter built a stone man at Lemon Gill, the spot where Ben died. Adam planted a circle of daffodils around it. "An oasis of colour and hope in the wildness of the moor," says his mum. And Kathleen wrote...

"I was trying to make sense of something senseless, trying to put it in order."

In fact, the inquest into Ben's death recorded an open verdict rather than suicide, but Kathleen is neither convinced nor comforted. "He was a gamekeeper. Guns were his everyday tool. He knew what he was doing."

At first Kathleen's words tumbled onto the page, raw with grief, "incoherent scribblings". So when she saw a creative writing course advertised at Wensleydale School, she thought she would try it.

"It was intended, I think, for farmers who'd been affected by foot-and-mouth, a way of helping them cope. But it was just what I needed. The tutor, Allan Tuningley was first class."

Gradually, Kathleen was able to sort her thoughts and her writing into some sort of order. "It helped, it really did."

She attended a second course and the idea of actually putting her writings together into a book came to her.

"I had joined Compassionate Friends, an organisation of parents whose children have died and I'd found it very helpful. Reading from their library and seeing how other parents felt made me realise that what I was going through - that idea of madness - was really absolutely normal. Other people had felt just the same way and, impossible though it seemed, they'd come through it."

The book, a collection of short pieces, contains many of her own poems and writings, from the early bleakness to more recent, calmer reflections. There are also poems by AE Housman, Siegfried Sassoon, C Day Lewis, some wonderful illustrations by Andy Beck that capture perfectly Ben's world, that feeling and freedom of the moors.

There are also desperately poignant family snaps and some down-to-earth reminiscences by Ben's friends. "People tell me I would have my memories to comfort me, but my head was filled with too much pain," says Kathleen. "There was no room for happy memories."

The book was designed by Graham White and published by the Arkengarthdale Millennium Project. And now Kathleen too has come through to some extent. She smiles as her youngest son comes home with a cheerful shout.

"I'm very proud of the way my sons have coped. I couldn't have got through without them and my husband, but they were suffering just as much," she says. "I have a wonderful loving family, a good base of strength and love that helped us all."

Kathleen is calmer now. "We will never know why Ben did it, but I have come to accept that we all have our time to go and that was just Ben's time.

"I will never not grieve. My grief is now part of me, as Ben was and is. But now I can think of the future, think that there might even be one, even look forward to it. Six years ago that seemed impossible.

"If my book helps anyone else, gives them some hope, then that would be a wonderful memorial to Ben."

*A Blond Boy with Buttercups by Kathleen Hollingworth, is published by the Arkengarthdale Millennium Project at £7.95. It is available from Ottakars in Darlington; Castle Hill Books, Richmond; Reeth Post Office; the Hazel Smith Gallery in Reeth and by post tel: 01748 884534. Profits from the sales go to some of Ben Hollingworth's favourite charities - the RSPCA, NSPCC, WSPA and to The Compassionate Friends.