I suspect I am not alone in needing to have a small room or cave all to myself, somewhere where dust can accumulate like tumbleweed and papers can stack up around me with no concession to either logic or the ‘paperless office’. Some writers have sheds, some convert spare bedrooms. My cave was originally a game larder and has the vital ingredient of having windows knocked through three of its walls. Without compulsory daylight there would always be the temptation to opt for hibernation during the bleakest months of winter.
I dare say this primal need for privacy and dominion over a small space started in the womb, was fed by an only-childhood with parents who pretty much left me to my own devices in my bedroom as long as I didn’t do anything to actually damage the fabric of the house, and came to fruition at my public school where our small studies were actually known as ‘pits’.
I recently visited one of the few remaining monasteries in England, the spires of which I could once see from the windows of the game larder (the garden has since grown up to screen them), and was shocked by how much I was reminded of school by the monks’ cold and spartan cells.
It was in that school pit, which can’t have been more than six foot by six foot, that I hid myself away behind a locked door with an upright typewriter in order to bash out my first novel when I should have been studying for A levels. Although that book was never published (no surprises there), I was unknowingly taking the first step on a career path that has lasted ever since.
Recently my adult pit became so cluttered and grubby that my wife launched a pre-emptive strike. I had flown down to the Uganda/Rwanda border for a long weekend of interviewing so she knew I was safely out of the house. She went in like a one-woman television makeover team, replacing stained and ragged carpeting with polished wooden flooring, crumbling cardboard boxes with elegant rows of files. The children stood and watched her labours as she assembled new office furniture late into the night and issued dire warnings about how displeased I would be when I returned to find my sanctuary invaded in this way.
Returning to find my private world transformed was indeed disorienting (especially after a long overnight journey back from the heart of Africa), but at the same time liberating. I felt like I had finally been promoted into an adult world. I gloried in the newly created order and cleanliness despite an illogical nervousness that I would not be able to find vital pieces of paper at moments of importance (I would never have been able to find them anyway in the previous chaos).
Gradually, however, to my shame, I have to confess that the clutter and the dust have returned to cover the clean and polished surfaces, reverting it to a state no different to how it was when I was 16 and avoiding the real world in my pit at school.