A Room of One's Own

or a hammock even...

Firstly, thank you so much for all your good wishes. I'm glad to say I'm recovered from covid and am relishing my new-found freedom. An inevitable consequence of illness is being cooped up indoors, feeling like a prisoner in the house. Or in my case, a captive in my writing room, a space I normally treasure and celebrate but which is looking a little ragged at the edges: empty water glasses, coffee cups, satsuma peel, tissues, a full waste-paper bin, scattered books, tubs of vitamins. It’s a mess, but the fact that I finally care and am about to do something to remedy the situation means I must be feeling better.

In her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously wrote, 'A woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.' In the essay she explores the conditions necessary for the creation of art, and why social expectations and a lack of opportunities have so disadvantaged women writers. And, I might add, still do. For a brilliantly informed and interesting discussion on the work, which moves beyond the 'minor point,' as Woolf called it, of the room, you might like to listen to this recent episode of In Our Time, with Melyvn Bragg and distinguished guests.

When I started to write I had a full-time job but no money (well not much) and no room of my own. At that time, I had two children just into their teens who were getting more expensive to keep by the hour and it took all of mine, and my partner John’s, resources to keep us afloat. Crucially however I was lucky enough to bag the only bit of space going begging in the house - the spare room. I found a cheap desk and an ancient computer from the loft, which my son helped me set up. I made it tolerable with the odd vase of tulips and got some bookshelves. I began to call it the ‘writing room.’ It caught on. Soon everyone in the house was referring to it as ‘the writing room,’ and I knew I’d cracked it when they started knocking on the door to come in! I wrote my first novel, The Sweet Track, in this room on cold winter nights, and balmy summer evenings, at weekends and holidays, while somehow managing to provide a taxi service for the kids, keep up with work and also look after things at home.  Far from considering it impossible, writing junkie that I had become, I loved every minute of it.

I'm fortunate that my writing room today is much more spacious and comfortable. There is no doubt having a dedicated space means the work calls to you. It's always there waiting, which can be both a good and a bad thing, but I think it means the work is more likely to get done.

Growing up, I didn’t know any woman who had a room of her own, certainly not one with books in it. My mother who was a tailoress and dressmaker, and who for some time made her living sewing at home, often complained about the lack of a room where she could leave her materials and her work in progress. With hindsight I’ve come to understand her complaint as I also understand her fierce contention that women should earn their own living and not depend on men. I remember the room in which she sewed better than any other in our house. It was the room we lived in and ate in. We called it the back room, and it was full of that ugly, brown, utilitarian furniture of the fifties. (The front room was only for best.)

The rooms of my childhood did not always feel as safe as they might, so although I do not need a safe space now, I still appreciate that feeling of having a room that is entirely mine, comforting, safe, where I am surrounded by books and paper and where good things happen.

I’ve inhabited many memorable, beautiful, even poignant rooms over the years, and it occurs to me that perhaps rooms are a way of measuring our lives and of marking our timelines. Before settling in the North East and having our family, when we were travelling we often stayed in a different room every day. Among them was a stunning room in the remote Tiracol Fort on the Goan coast with a window onto the Arabian Sea, from which we spotted dolphins. There was the posh room, with its round corner turret, that I rented when I first lived on my own age 21, and got thrown out of because the cleaner found a male friend in a sleeping bag on my living room floor. Strictly no men allowed! I quickly moved to an L-shaped bedsit room which was decidedly downmarket with its shared bathroom and loo, but had no nosey cleaners. There was the London room where the bed shook when the 177, double-decker pulled up at the bus stop outside. There was the room in the old hotel I stayed in on my first ever visit to Paris. There were the windowless rooms I inhabited when I worked in prison. There were the rooms in which I kept watch over my parents, one in hospital, one at home, before they died. More recently there was my beautiful room at the Casa Ana writing retreat in southern Spain.

Reading outside our room in Ko Samui many moons ago...hence rather fuzzy!

Writing about rooms - led me to the poet Charlotte Mew, a new discovery for me - and her beautiful poem...

Rooms

     I remember rooms that have had their part

     In the steady slowing down of the heart.

     The room in Paris, the room at Geneva

     The little damp room with the seaweed smell,

      And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide...

 read the whole HERE

I'll leave you with a few of the things that kept me company while I was ill. Books I enjoyed included, The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams, Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh, and currently The Sun Walks Down, Fiona MacFarlane. Particularly special was Ben Myers new novel Cuddy, I can’t recommend it enough, and it's a special treat for those of us who know Durham well. I watched a fair bit of catch up, including the Good Wife, on Channel 4. Among other things I listened to the Verb, The Intimacy of Names and The Secret Lives of Women, and I was particularly taken with Archive on Four’s, Writing Our Mothers.

See you next time - thanks for reading x