Often you get a diary or a letter that doesn’t read like one, or if by some chance it does, flattens out the storytelling. Letters and diaries as a device in fiction tend to make me itchy (and novels about novelists normally bring me out in a rash): it’s just so difficult to get right. We learn that what we’re reading is the journal of 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, an aspiring novelist. There’s that famous first line of course, but more than that, the way she conveys the character and her milieu without it feeling stagey. Only 122 words and you have a character there, speaking in your ear: honest, funny, contradictory, alive. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn’t write any more of it.” And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring – I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. That is, my feet are in it the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. Then one day I found myself staying in a house without a book to read, saw a copy on the shelf and read the first page. I imagined something with a tinge of Enid Blyton, all pink cheeks, lashings of this and that and people being either absolute bricks or beastly. I knew Smith had written The Hundred and One Dalmatians, so there was another connection to childishness. I probably assumed it was historical and worthy, some sort of wholesome adventure book. I was in my early 30s and it was one of those books I had been dimly aware of as part of the reading landscape of other people’s childhoods, like Anne of Green Gables: a perfectly nice thing to read at the time, I thought, but not necessarily something to seek out in later life.

I don’t remember exactly what I thought Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle was about before I read it.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith