Vaulted Ceilings and Well-Stocked Stacks

I could have sworn it was snowing the evening I arrived at Gladstone’s Library. Looking back at the photo I took as I came up the path, I can see that wasn’t the case – but it was bitterly cold, and after a journey that approximated that of Eliot’s magi in both climate and complexity (five changes, three of them unscheduled: diolch, Transport for Wales [1]) my first sight of the building, windows spilling light over the lawn, chimneys silhouetted under a Plough as bright as I had ever seen it, did feel like stumbling upon a place of sanctuary.




“A ‘last homely house’,” my husband said, when I called home – referencing the passage in The Fellowship of the Ring when Tolkien describes Frodo as safe at Rivendell: “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.”

Which, minus the singing, is exactly it. Like many – all? – writers, I’m capable of deluding myself I would be supremely productive if only conditions were right. I’ve tried retreats at home (children too demanding), with the children away (too much laundry/DIY/Netflix to distract); in a cabin at the foot of Snowdon, with no phone signal, wi-fi or evidence of human company (too likely to be murdered/eaten by sheep).

It turns out the ideal, for me at least, isn’t a room of one’s own: it’s a room of one’s own in a residential library and also a desk in said library’s nineteenth-century reading room, surrounded by others engaged in their own quiet industry, with vaulted ceilings and well-stocked stacks to gaze at while you think and no distractions save the occasional creak of a chair or sound of a page being turned. A cloistered existence, minus the cloisters.

See also: not having to think about meals, because at the end of the corridor is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Grounds, and a pretty village, to wander if you need to stretch your legs. If a change of scene is needed, tea and cake on a sofa in front of a fire, with something to read. The collegiate atmosphere.

The people: from Alison in Food for Thought, who remembered my name and seemingly everyone else’s, to Andrea, newly in post as the warden, who took time after morning chapel to circulate the dining room and ask after the guests. Sharing a table for afternoon coffee, I got talking to Patrick, and began a conversation we continued, with Andrea, that evening, and then at breakfast the following day.

(If, like me, you’re a committed introvert, the idea of making small talk with strangers will have you running for the hills – but I’m here to tell you it’s okay. At Gladstone’s LIbrary, you don’t have to. You can take a book to dinner and sit at your own table and nobody will bat an eyelid, probably because they’re engrossed in their own reading.)

My favourite part of each day came after breakfast, when – having pushed open the heavy door, climbed one of the winding staircases to the History Room gallery, chosen a desk and arranged laptop, notes and pencil case – I took a moment to luxuriate in that rarest of things: the time and space to write. Beautiful as that space was (when, on my second morning, I tweeted a photo of the view from my desk, the response was such that I had to switch off notifications or risk losing the rest of my stay to explaining several thousand times that no, I was not at Hogwarts), it was time that mattered most.

I don’t know a writer who doesn’t crave more of it. Especially if they’re also a parent, and especially a parent who works, and most especially of all – generalisation alert, but I think it’s a fair one – a working mother. (The fact it’s taken me more than six months to write this blog speaks for itself.)

For four days I wrote frantically and blissfully (which is not the oxymoron it sounds), determined to finish the draft before I set off home. “And did you manage it?” Andrea asked, as I waited for the taxi to Wrexham.[2] I told her I had, with minutes to spare. “Well, let us know how it goes. And come back soon!”

Which I fully intend to – although next time I might drive.

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[1] Later –‘You bought a ticket to Hawarden?’ – I learnt almost everyone takes a taxi from Wrexham.

[2] Fool me once, TfW.

A blog from writer Laura Evans. All photographs supplied by Laura.