Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’