It helped me to imagine the results. If I could summon an image of the garden, pruned, tidied, blooming, then it gave me an incentive to start. To visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half the work already done. This was a discovery, a step forward.
In the house, I concentrated on the downstairs room where I had been sleeping. This was a long, large room, running the depth of the house. At one end, a small window looked out towards the garden, hedge and lane at the front; at the other end, a much wider window gave a view of the back garden.
I worked hard, encouraging myself with my imaginative vision of how the room would be by the time I finished. I washed the walls and ceiling, repaired the crumbling plaster, scrubbed down the woodwork, and then applied two coats of the white emulsion Edwin and Marge had brought. When the woodwork was painted, the room was transformed. From a dingy, temporary hovel it had become a light, airy room in which one could live in style. I cleaned up the paint-splashes thoroughly, stained the floorboards and polished the windows.
On an impulse I went into Weohley and bought a large quantity of rush matting, which I spread across the floor.
What most excited me was the discovery that what I had imagined for the room had come to be. The conception of it had influenced its execution.
I sometimes stood or sat in that room for hours on end, relishing the cool tranquillity of it. With both windows opened a warm draught passed through, and at night the honeysuckle that grew beneath the window at the front released a fragrance that until then I had only been able to imagine from chemical imitations.
I thought of it as my white room, and it became central to nw life in the cottage.
With the room completed I returned to my introspective mood, but because I had had something to do for the last few days, I now found that my thoughts were more in focus. As I pottered about the garden, as I started the decoration of the other rooms, I contemplated what I was doing with my life, and what I had done with it in the past.
I perceived my past life as an unordered, uncontrolled bedlam of events.
Nothing made sense, nothing was consistent with anything else. It seemed to me important that I should try to impose some kind of order on my memories. It never occurred to me to question why I should do this. It was just extremely important.
One day I looked in the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the familiar face staring hack at me, but I could not identify it with anything I knew of myself. All I knew was that this sallow, unshaven face with dull eyes was myself, a product of nearly twenty-nine years of life, and it all seemed pointless.
I entered a period of self-questioning: how had I reached this state, this place, this attitude of mind? Was it just an accumulation of bad luck, as the ready excuse seemed to be, or was it the product of a deeper inadequacy? I began to brood.
At first, it was the actual chronology of memory that interested me.
I knew the order of my life, the sequence in which large or important events had taken place, because I had had the universal experience of growing up. Details, however, eluded me. Fragments of my past life--places I had visited, friends I had known, things I had accomplished--were all there in the chaos of my memories, but their precise place in the order of things had to be worked at.
I aimed initially at total recall, taking, for example, my first year at grammar school, and from that starting point trying to attach the many surrounding details: what I had been taught that year, my teachers' names, the names of other children in the school, where I had been living, where my father had been working, what books I might have read or films seen, friendships made or enmities formed.
I muttered to myself as I worked at the decorating, telling myself this inconsequential, rambling and incoherent narrative, as muddled then as the life itself must have been.
Then form became more important. It was not enough merely to establish the _order_ in which my life had progressed, but the relative significance of each event. I was the product of those events, that learning, and I had lost touch with who I was. I needed to rediscover them, perhaps relearn what I had lost.
I had become unfocused and diffuse. I could only regain my sense of identity through my memories.
It grew impossible to retain what I was discovering. I became confused by having to concentrate on remembering, then retaining it. I would clarify a particular period of my life, or so I thought, but then in moving on to another year or another place I would find that either there were distracting similarities, or I had made a mistake the first time.
At last I realized I should have to write it all down. The previous Christmas Felicity had given me a small portable typewriter, and one evening I retrieved it from my heap of possessions. I set up a table in the centre of my white room. I started work immediately, and almost at once I was discovering mysteries about myself.
3
I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need, and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I _became_ what I wrote.
It was not something I could understand. I felt it on an instinctive or emotional level.
It was a process that was exactly like the creation of my white room.
That had been first of all an idea, and later I made the idea real by painting the room as I imagined it. I discovered myself in the same way, but through the written word.
I began writing with no suspicion of the difficulties involved. I had the enthusiasm of a child given coloured pencils for the first time. I was undirected, uncontrolled and entirely lacking in selfconsciousness. All these were to change later, but on that first evening I worked with innocent energy, letting an undisciplined flow of words spread across the paper. I was deeply, mysteriously excited by what I was doing, and frequently read back over what I had written, scribbling corrections on the pages and noting second thoughts in the margins. I felt a sense of vague discontent, but this I ignored: the overwhelming sensation was one of release and satisfaction. To write myself into existence!
I worked late, and when eventually I crawled into my sleeping-bag, I slept badly. The next morning I returned to the work, letting the decoration stay unfinished. Still my creative energy was undiminished, and page after page slipped through the carriage of the typewriter as if there was nothing that could ever obstruct the flow. As I finished
