What clinched it was the daybed. This is how a writer lives, I thought, as I stood in Vita Sackville-West’s sanctum. I pictured myself scribbling mad, brilliant words, tucked away in a similar tower, before flopping on said daybed, creatively exhausted. Vita, I learnt, wrote in the mornings, then gardened in the afternoons. This was how to live: part-writer, part-gardener!
Of course, Vita had the advantage of owning an estate with an Elizabethan tower – Sissinghurst in Kent, now managed by the National Trust. But the principle was there. At an early age she told her mother she “would like to live alone in a tower with her books” and she made this dream come true.
Standing by her desk, I admired her determination to remove herself from the concerns of daily…
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The Simple Things (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2019