įrom 1909 Sayers was educated at the Godolphin School, a boarding school in Salisbury. The nearby River Great Ouse and the Fens invite comparison with the book's vivid description of a massive flood around the village. She was inspired by her father's restoration of the Bluntisham church bells in 1910. The church graveyard next to the elegant Regency-style rectory features the surnames of several characters from her mystery The Nine Tailors. She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire after her father was given the living there as rector. When Sayers was six, her father started teaching her Latin.
Her father, originally from Littlehampton, West Sussex, was a chaplain of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School.
Her mother was a daughter of Frederick Leigh, a solicitor whose family roots were in the landed gentry in the Isle of Wight, and had herself been born at 'The Chestnuts', Millbrook, Hampshire. Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893, at the Headmaster's House, Brewer Street, Oxford, the daughter of Helen Mary Leigh and her husband, the Rev. Somerville College, Oxford, where Sayers studied and gained the inspiration for her novel Gaudy Night
