My Favourite Room - Peter Wells

I’ve always loved this house because my grandmother lived along the road and I used to come past all the time. It’s such a big, simple house and there’s something quite endearing about that. It came on the market and my partner Douglas Lloyd Jenkins and I bought it while we were still living in Auckland.
The house was in three flats and this room was one of them.

Before I moved down, I used to look at the room and think it would be the perfect writer’s space – it has two big windows and a view of the garden – so I snaffled it quickly. I like to be able to lift my eye off the computer and look out. There is something restorative about gardens. My furniture fitted in rather nicely so in a way it’s a combination of a sitting room and a study. It gets the sun in the afternoon absolutely brilliantly – it just pours in.

I like my workroom to be peaceful and quiet and I think this room has those qualities, although it’s a bit amusing because there’s a lane outside with about ten houses down it and people drift by. If they look in, they can see me working away – “writer at work”. They probably think I’m an accountant, actually.
I have a set and quite boring pattern of writing. I get up and come in here after breakfast as if it was my job. In the morning I write creatively and after lunch I revise my work. It’s very much a nine to five existence in a funny way. I found early on that a routine made writing easier; it’s not a case of waiting for genius to visit.

I’ve got all my favourite little bits and pieces and pictures around me. Some I inherited from my brother Russell and that funny stuffed dog I bought in an auction – he’s rather endearing and forlorn. My latest book is about a returned serviceman and, when I’m writing, objects become magnetic, such as my father’s regimental number. The chaise longue was my brother’s. The rug is just a tatty old rug that I like. My furniture and I are like a sailor and his ship: we keep each other moored. Madam was a stray cat, dying of starvation, who adopted me one Christmas a couple of years ago.     

Peter Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2006 for services to literature and film. His latest book, Lucky Bastard (Random House NZ, $27.99) is set in the aftermath of World War II, it tells of a family trying to understand their ailing father’s experiences, first as a Japanese prisoner then as a war crimes investigator in conquered Japan.