Why didn't anyone stop Virginia?

Those of you who are fond of Virginia Woolf will know that she had a little writing hut at the bottom of her garden in Rodmell, Sussex. Some of you may even have been down there, as I have, to see it for yourselves. In which case you will have noticed its proximity to the little path that leads to the local school – I seem to remember her writing in her diary sometimes, about the pleasure of hearing the chatter of the children as they came and went from school. More gloomily, you will also have noticed her hut’s proximity to the fields beyond, and then to the River Ouse; in which, having filled her pockets with bricks one day, she took it into her head to drown herself.

I hadn’t meant to start on a melancholy note though, and should never have gone down that particular track! I have always been sorry that someone didn’t manage to step in at the time, and forestall the awful event. Leonard might have done it perhaps, if only he’d been looking hard enough in the right direction. Vita Sackville West always thought, afterwards, that she might have prevented it too - if only she’d known! Nobody did prevent it though. And so we are left with the sadness of knowing that anything which Virginia Woolf might have written later is lost to us – simply because Virginia herself wasn’t thinking straight that particular day, and nobody else was looking.

But that wasn’t to have been my point either. What I meant to start by saying was that I too am fortunate enough to have a little hut of my own at the bottom of the garden. Roald Dahl had one, I believe; and so, respectively, did Dylan Thomas and George Bernard Shaw. Shaw’s was mounted on some kind of turn-table, I believe, so as to be moved in any direction to catch the sun. But that would be an engineering feat beyond the range of anyone I know, and a luxury to which I have never thought of trying to aspire.

My little hut is painted green - I have thought of re-painting it heavenly blue. It has a wide bay in front, with four latticed windows, and a nice little latch on the door. Too pretty for a hut or a shed, really, so I more often call it the summerhouse instead. I have made pale green gingham blinds for the windows; they shade my laptop from the sun on summer mornings, and in winter help to keep me protected against the frost. Inside, I have heat and light, a table large enough to accommodate all the paraphernalia necessary to keep the creative effort going (dictionaries, that’s to say; thesauruses, and endless supplies of clean foolscap paper) - and all my favourite books on shelves upon the walls. I am obliged to share my hut with lawn-mower and garden chairs of course; and with an old fridge-freezer that was too good to throw out, and that is useful for storing fruit and vegetables, and all the extra food one somehow accumulates at Christmas, and other festive times.

But none of that seems to matter very much, when once I am down here and have switched my laptop on, in the mornings. The lawn-mower has become my companion indeed; and the humming of the fridge-freezer has a friendly sound - perfectly attuned, I find, to the functioning of the compositional process. Having a room of one’s own, Virginia called it. And in that at least she was absolutely right. For it is of all things the most inestimable in value, to anyone who tries to write.