In some books, a reader can wander around in the writer’s mind. Montaigne’s Essays and Seneca’s Letters are like that. Sir Thomas Browne’s books are too.
I think Roger Deakin’s Notes from Walnut Tree Farm is going to be one of those books, although I’ve just started.
If you’re looking for narrative, you’ll be disappointed. The book is a series of notes, a bit like the collection you’re reading now.
Deakin begins one note with a remark about how towers are perceived as refuges for writers. Montaigne had one, and Deakin shared one for a while in the 1960s. He and some flatmates from London rented an old gamekeeper’s cottage near Beccles in Suffolk. They fled there on weekends.
They’d ride the train to Beccles. They collectively kept an old Austin Champ — Deakin claimed it looked like a military jeep and got 4 miles to the gallon — in the parking lot of the train station. The keys stayed in the switch.
The cottage had no electricity. Candles were essential. When you burned wood, you were expected to collect more than you used.
The paperback library was under the stairs. The novels of Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male in particular, were the prized.
The modest scale of the cottage, the large number of us and the informal proximity of beds and copious intoxicants created a dormitory atmosphere, and there was much talking after lights-out.
You get the picture. The tower was outside the cottage. You had to go out in the garden and up a spiral staircase. The people who rented the cottage were young and intoxicated by life — but some of them did some writing up there.
• Source: Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm; London: Penguin Books, 2009, p. 21.
For more on Deakin, see “The Overlooked genre of jottings,” Sept. 14, 2023, and “A jotter speaks of daydreaming,” Sept. 15, 2023.
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