Wrestling Vita

I have been wrestling with writing a piece on Vita Sackville - West for days and last night having discarded one piece and almost completed my second attempt , a mystery overtook my computer and the piece disappeared. I have been unable to retrieve it and confess to being slightly devastated as I had got to a point in the writing where I was feeling excited about what was to come next.

What compounds my irritation for not having the foresight to save said piece before disaster struck, is that my memory cannot recreate it and I had been having such a lovely time with the flow of my remembering the influence of Vita in my life.

She came to my attention as a gardening columnist when I was a youthful and eager gardener trying to convert almost half an acre of clay and stone on a steep slope, into a cottage garden. The site was adorned with enormous pine trees and I was searching for plantings that would survive under them when I discovered her writings gathered in a collected works.

I learnt of her connections to gardens at Knole, Long Barn and Sissinghurst Castle where she created with her husband Harold Nicholson, a famed White Garden. I loved the biography describing her life as a child growing up at Knole, moving as a young woman to the Long Barn and finally to Sissinghurst. Her writing room at Sissinghurst was housed in what seemed a Norman fragment of a building, separate to the main house. On the day I visited, the light was golden and it was possible to see the dust motes in the sun rays which fell across the comfortable chair and the small desk. It was a room with a view across the garden and I envied it.

I also learnt of her reputation as a " poet, aristocrat and a famous kind of cad.." ( Chanya Button , film maker ) an unconventional woman, and as an unconventional woman myself, I decided that were I to create an avatar, this would be the working brief.

Through a tempestuous romantic relationship with Virginia Wolfe, Vita is also linked to the young influencers of the time . Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, and EM Forster, all writers, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant, artists and Vanessa`s husband Clive, an art critic, as well as John Maynard Keynes ( to whom we owe modern economic theory ) , and Lytton Strachey, a biographer, were a fabulous group of of young intellectuals and creatives who at the turn of the 20th century, lived and worked in the Bloomsbury area of London and became known as the Bloomsbury Set.

Of course Bloomsbury is my favourite part of London. There is something about the spaces, a feeling of openness and a waft of gentler times which characterises this part of the city for me. Walking to work one weekend, through the broad streets, I came upon a regency sofa suspended from a tree just at sitting height. It was delightful. And comfortable. Bloomsbury to me is that arm chair and the waif`s museum hidden at the back of a nearby park which features the small scraps of cloth and ribbon mothers attached to the garments their infants were wearing when they were relinquished.

Vita has taken me places and I have thoroughly enjoyed the journey.