My first encounter with a shed would have been the rickety structure that stood like a crooked old man in the corner of my grandparents’ backyard. It was a place of intrigue for a four year old. Tainted with a musty smell that was the by-product of rusty old tins full of diesel oil, paint, turps, cobwebbed garden tools and thigh high fishing wellies harbouring enormous hairy spiders. It had a wavy asbestos roof which we did not associate with serious health risks back then.
My own parents didn’t have a shed and I don’t really recall having any further encounters with sheds until 2004. I was visiting the stunning Carmarthenshire market town of Laugharne with my now husband and we stumbled upon Dylan Thomas’s boat house – a simple white house standing proudly on stilts over the Taff estuary. Just alongside it, clinging to the soft grassy verges of the cliff was his wooden writing shed. The front and back ends and sills painted in a soft sage green. You could sit at his desk and spend hours getting lost in the scintillating of views of the estuary and sea beyond. No wonder Dylan Thomas managed to knock out so many literary showstoppers if this was his creative space.
I came away feeling that I too one day should like a shed of my own.
Whether the emotion that I now identify as “shed-envy” was triggered by Dylan Thomas’s shed or whether it came later, I cannot specifically recall, but is almost certainly struck again on a visit to Great Missenden several years later. This time on a visit to the museum of my most adored childhood authors – Roald Dahl. By total coincidence another Welshman. The standout artefact in his museum was his shed. The original shed in which he wrote his most famous of books still remains in the garden of the family home, just down the road from the museum. But the shell and contents of the shed were rehomed in a replica shed at the heart of the museum in 2011.
At the centre sits his rather uniquely designed wing-backed armchair. A section of the back cushion was thoughtfully carved out to house an abscess he had developed on his back following a crash landing he sustained as an RAF fighter pilot in the second world war. Dotted further around the shed are other curious artefacts that, pieced together, help to tell other stories of his life. A filing cabinet housing drafts of some of his greatest creations, the handle of which was his first hip replacement. Now serving a new purpose. Pinned to the walls were photographs of his children and grandchildren – a shrine to those he loved, albeit nobody was allowed to enter this place of sanctitude.
To some, this simple shed would be a place of nightmares. Cluttered, confused and ramshackled. To me, it was a place of wonderment. A national treasure for the joy and love of reading it has brought to so many families around the world today.
I was reminded of sheds again during a session I had with the excellent life coach, Caroline Storey during the first lockdown. We had once worked as graduates together on the Nestle graduate training programme. Having recently left the food industry, I was carefully assessing my life options as to what I should do next. By some fortuitous intervention, Caroline was looking for mentees as part of her transition into coaching and we were able to serve each other a welcome purpose. I recall one specific and for me, rather awkward exercise in which she encouraged me to close my eyes and visualise my happy place. I am not someone who warms to the idea of hypnosis and I felt myself wandering around uncomfortably and self-consciously in my messy mind. It wasn’t until a few months later that having mulled over the exercise on a number of occasions, I realised the place I was hunting for was a shed. A quiet space in which I could write and be creative.
It would take several more months and some life changing experiences to come up with the idea and purpose of what I would choose to write about in my shed. But I reflect gratefully now upon my chance meetings with sheds and my transformative conversations with Caroline – I have finally found my happy place in the form of The Memory Shed.
