Authors' Spaces: Roger Garfitt

Continuing Booktrust's series on authors and where they write. Today, the author of memoir The Horseman's Word... Roger Garfitt...

My cottage in the Shropshire Hills sits just under a Stone Age Ridgeway and every morning, weather permitting and sometimes even when it doesn’t permit, I walk up onto the Ridgeway before I start work. Just enough of a steep slope to get the cardiovascular system going, just enough of a path ahead to awaken the hunter-gatherer instinct. And then, as the ground falls away on either side and the eye lifts to the ridges beyond, whaleback after whaleback in a school of hills, the back of the head starts to open.

I come back down to a small stone room, one of two bedrooms in the old half of the house that goes back to 1700. I look out of a north-facing window and there’s second dormer window that faces east so that the light is always clear. The weather comes in from the west and I look up to see shoals of rain sweeping down the valley or the first dustings of blue. We live by the air as other people live by the sea.

I work at an old kitchen table, big enough to give me some elbow room in front of the keyboard, room to push the keyboard back and jot down phrases in the notebook if I’m starting from cold – though more and more, to my great surprise, I find myself writing straight onto the screen. Behind me sit two Little Owls in a glass case, a birthday present from the poet Frances Horovitz and her son Adam many years ago. Up on the ledge of the dormer window is a model of one of the indomitable buses that ride the back roads of Colombia, a chicken perched among the sacks of maize and the hands of bananas on the roof-rack. But once I start work, I am blind to the stacks of poetry books tottering above me and the piles of old magazines on the floor, a disorder so deep that my wife Margaret, who redecorated the room while I was away at UEA and furnished it with Billy bookshelves in the hope of reforming me, has forbidden any photo.

Photo by Geoff Aldridge