This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."
Now if this doesn't give you a hint of what is to come in the novel, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, I don't know what will. It is quite possibly one of my favourite first lines.
When she says she is in the kitchen sink, she means her feet are, whilst she sits on the draining board. It isn't a comfortable place to sit. She can smell the rather horrible carbolic soap. Her feet occasionally get splashed when someone comes to use the sink. And it is away from the fire and therefore, cold. But it is here she sits to squeeze out the last drops of daylight in order to write in her journal.
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It is winter. Possibly the end of winter when one is impatient for the spring to begin. For an end to the darkness, the relentless rain. Cassandra uses words like "dank", "leaden" and 'boggy" in her descriptions. The beauty doesn't come from the landscape, which she can see from the kitchen window, but from the fireplace where her sister is ironing and her stepmother has come down the stairs to stoke the fire and gain some heat.
There are no leaves on the trees. The landscape may as well be in black and white. They live a bohemian life in a ruined castle. It is cold and draughty.
Can you imagine it? Brrr.
And then, this happens.
"Goodness, Topaz is actually putting eggs on to boil! No one told me the hens had yielded to prayer. Oh, excellent hens! I was only expecting bread and margarine for tea…" 
Hens, the traditional type, not the hybrid type created for continuous year-round eggs, stop laying in the wintertime. The more daylight they get, the more inclined they are to lay. Cassandra, seeing eggs for the first time this year, is extremely excited. Now they'd have hard-boiled eggs with the bread and margarine. After living on that for months this is indeed an exciting moment.
And it also means something else. It means spring is on its way. Hens know, you see.
I have 15 hens. Some the hybrid type that lay all the time, and some are the pure-breed type which stop laying over the winter. I was also incredibly excited when they started to lay again. Not because we had been living on bread and margarine, but because it meant spring was just around the corner.
And yes, we did have boiled egg sandwiches for tea.