Bloomsbury in Sussex--Visiting the Homes and Haunts of the Bloomsbury Group, Lewes and Rodmell.
Lewes and Rodmell, Sussex
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Getting Ready for a Long Journey:
Amy and I set our alarms today as we had a long way to go and timed tickets for entry into our first port of call. We were headed to Sussex to experience a part of what is called 'Bloomsbury in Sussex'. This title derives from the fact that two of the most prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group--a posse of intellectual and creative people who congregated in each others' homes, in the early decades of the 20th century in Bloomsbury in London, rented homes in this part of the UK. Virginia Woolf, the novelist and writer, made her home at Monk's House, a small cottage in the village of Rodmell and her sister, Vanessa Bell rented a farm called Charleston Farmhouse in the larger town of Lewes, about a 25 minutes' car drive away. I had, of course, studied the works of the Bloomsbury Group as a college undergrad, but it was about 35 years ago that I taught one of Woolf's stories. It was set in Monk's House in Rodmell and I remember thinking then what utter fun it would be to actually visit the house. Well, I certainly had to wait half a lifetime...
I awoke early, as usual, at about 5.30 am and lost no time getting a shower and eating breakfast downstairs in the Thyme restaurant. I had a croissant with butter and asked for a hot chocolate today. I did follow this up with a Full English breakfast in order to fuel myself for the rest of the day. In fact, I was down in the restaurant at 6.30 pm, exactly when it opened. I told Amy that she should get ready by 7.00 am so that we could leave on time to arrive at Victoria Rail Station by 7.45 am. As it turned out, we were ahead of schedule, being there at 7.30 am. Amy got herself a croissant and a coffee while I headed to the Ticket Counter to buy us return tickets to Sussex. The tickets were pricey--37.50 pounds return for each of us! Wow! But this is not the place to which you go everyday--indeed, I have waited for what seems like a lifetime to get to Sussex on this literary excursion and I regretted not a bit of it.
Our train headed to Ohre was scheduled to leave at 7.54 am. We were to get off at Lewes, our first stop. It took us a little over an hour to get there on the Southern Railway. As might be expected, we did chat for a bit but were soon lulled to sleep by the rhythmic movement of the carriage. Both of us awoke when we were already in Sussex as was evident from the vast expanses of green English countryside outside our window. There were sheep and cows and horses in pasture not to mention views of the Sussex hills that put us completely in the mood for our day in the country.
When we arrived at Lewes, we headed straight for the taxi stand as, sadly, this is the only way to get to Charleston Farmhouse which was our first stop. There is no public transport, no buses of any kind to get there. Taxis are pricey, no doubt, which was why Amy and I were pleased to be together on this expensive excursion. We lucked out in finding a really well-informed taxi driver called Steve who turned out to be treasure trove of information about the Bloomsbury Group. He told us that he regularly drove one of the current members of the family from Lewes station to Charleston Farmhouse and that she often hired him to drive her from Lewes to her home in London. He could not remember her name but Amy and I rather think it was Nerissa, one of the daughters of Angelica Garnett, a daughter of Vanessa by her brief relationship with the homosexual Duncan Grant. More about the complicated genealogy of this family later.
The taxi ride took us about 20-25 minutes and we actually arrived at Charleston Farmhouse at 9.45 am. We had timed tickets for 10.00 am (20 pounds each) which made us two of the earliest entrants into the house today. I had deliberately bought tickets for early in the day as we needed to move on to Rodmell and I had no idea how far away all these spots were from one another.
Arrival at Charleston Farmhouse:
Vanessa Bell, daughter of Leslie Stevens, a Victorian philosopher who had a home in Bloomsbury, London, developed into an artist. She was the sister of the famous novelist, Virginia Stevens--later Virginia Woolf (following her marriage to diplomat-civil servant Leonard Woolf). Vanessa fell in love and married art critic, Clive Bell. When World War I broke out, as they were both conscientious objectors, they had to engage in some kind of productive activity (farming was one such) to avoid being sent to prison. Hence, they joined hands with the farmer who owned a large farm in Sussex called Charleston Farmhouse and found employment under him. During the war, they were fully engaged in farming as part of the war effort. After the war ended, having fallen in love with the country lifestyle, they rented Charleston Farmhouse and used it as a weekend retreat all year round. They also spent the entire summer for several years in this place and turned the house into their own personal studio. Apart from sitting at their canvases and painting all day, they poured their creativity into every inch of space surrounding them--walls, ceilings, floors, plus furniture (beds, tables, chairs, chest of drawers and cupboards)--all received the benefit of their creative attention as they decorated every available surface with their paints and palettes. As if this were not enough, they turned to pottery and created dozens of utilitarian objects (plates, mugs, even lamp-shades) in terracotta that they fired in a kiln at the back of their farm. And when they were not painting, they were gardening--the garden designs also received the benefit of their sensitivity to color so that it is clearly evident that a pink-mauve-purple-white color palette was selected in all the plantings.
Vanessa and Clive had two children--a son named Julian who was killed at the age of 29 while serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War in 1931 and another son named Quentin who survived them. When her relationship with Clive became rocky, Vanessa turned for solace to Duncan Grant, also a fellow-artist and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a homosexual but the brief liaison he had with Vanessa led to the conception of their daughter Angelica. However, she was never told that Grant was her biological father and she reached the age of 18 before she became aware that Clive Bell was not her father. Later in her own life, she married the writer David Garnett who had, for a while been the homosexual lover of Duncan Grant. In other words, she married her father's sometime lover! With Garnett, Angelica had four children, one of whom was Nerissa (of whom the taxi-driver spoke). Vanessa's brief relationship with Grant caused a rift in her marriage to Clive Bell but as they moved so much in the same circles, they remained friends. In fact, Bell who had moved out of Charleston Farmhouse when Grant moved in, returned to live in it and claimed three rooms at the top of the house from which he continued to paint. Later, the threesome, still closely connected as friends, built a large studio (which we visited) where they would paint in unison. Grant painted a picture of Vanessa still painting in the same studio at Charleston at the age of 81, a year before she passed away. In their creative passion, these occupants of Charleston created murals, frescoes, countless oil paintings, ceramics, fabric designs, rugs, pottery, etc. They regularly invited their friends to join them for the weekend--so that the home saw occupancy by leading economists such as John Maynard-Keynes, the novelist E.M Forster, the historian Lytton Strachy, the artist Dora Carrington and the art critic Roger Fry. The home was always buzzing with creative and intellectual energy.
Many of the members of the second and third generation, parented by Vanessa and Clive Bell, have become artists themselves, eg. Quentin. He was also keen on writing a biography of his Aunt Virginia Woolf and invited all members of the family who had ever corresponded with her to send him their letters written by her. These he archived with care so that they became a fine chronological account of the tangled relationships of these folks who respected each other enormously and waltzed in and out of intimate relationships without losing their friendship. Quentin's archive soared in value as the works of the members of this group grew in stature and fame. The letters were sold to a collector and the proceeds were used to buy Charleston Farmhouse which is now retained in exactly the same way it was when the Bells (and later Duncan Grant) lived in it.
Walking through the rooms, that have a guide in each one, is to receive a whole education in the life, lifestyle and works of some of Britain's most famous early 20th century public figures. There are paintings everywhere--portraits of each other and self-portraits, plus all manner of functional items used in daily life. These are simply too numerous to name and I am glad that we were allowed to take pictures everywhere because the pictures I took will allow me to peruse them at leisure and relive what has to have been one of the highlights of my travels in the UK on this visit. You start out in the kitchen and weave your way through all the public reception rooms on the ground floor including a living room-cum-library, a dining room, a withdrawing room where they had after-dinner coffee and a bunch of bedrooms on the top floor, many of which were guest rooms occupied by their weekend guests and then dedicated to them and, therefore, decorated in their style with their personal belongings. It was complicated indeed, the lives these folks led, but it fueled their creativity and provided inspiration for their endless output.
The Gardens at Charleston Farmhouse:
The gardens at Charleston Farmhouse were very much the domain of Vanessa and Clive Bell. Not only did they enjoy sitting outdoors and painting in situ, but they were avid gardeners themselves. Amy and I were very lucky to see the gardens in spring when lilacs and wisteria scented the pathways, irises in purple and white popped up everywhere, loads of blue forget-me-nots and stately foxgloves in the same pink-purple palette made for the most charming stroll. Every so often we would come across statuary, urns, etc. that added to the decorative value of the property. We took innumerable pictures within the walled garden and on the banks of an artificial pond that was filled with water-lilies. Outside, it is still a working farm and the smell of horse dung hung heavily in the air. In keeping with the scent, we saw horses and a farm dog clopper down the lane outside.
We had begun our tour of the house perusing a set of ceramic plates that had been commissioned to be created by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. They chose to portray Famous Women from history and these made a stunning display at the visitor reception area. Our tour ended with a visit to Vanessa's studio at the very top of the house, a space which has been recently refurbished. The widow overlooks the garden below and the Sussex countryside in the distance. All of these elements added to the fantastic ambience of the place. We did not leave before visiting the cafetaria, the loo and, quite by chance, another exhibition in a barn by Langley and Bell called 'Hidden Artists' that featured the interior of artists' studios through the centuries, the personal collection of an art dealer called Katrin Bellinger. Amy and I were most enchanted by it as we had a chance to see either paintings, drawings or photographs of the interiors of the studios of some of the greatest artists in the world from Picasso and Vanessa Bell to Henri Cartier-Berenson.
Onward to Monk's House in Rodmell:
We had made arrangements with our taxi-driver Steve to send a taxi for us at 12.15 pm to take us onward to Rodmell and he arrived on schedule. He told us that the drive would take us about 25 minutes which offered us the opportunity to survey the sprawling Sussex countryside as well as engage in lively banter with a cabbie. He was delighted that we were from the USA and told us that he had an "auntie" in Seatle but had never been to the States himself. He had, however, traveled extensively in Canada from the Rockies to Vancouver and we had a grand time discussing Canadian trails with him.
Arrival at Rodmell:
Amy and I had expected to have a light lunch in a cafe that we hoped would be run by the National Trust that manages the property called Monk's House. To be honest, I was looking forward to a nice cheese scone and a nice slice of coffee-walnut cake as those are my favorite things to eat in the National Trust tea rooms. Alas, there was no cafe at Monk's House which turned out to be a really small place. No wonder the entry fee was only 7.50 pounds each (as opposed to 20 pounds at Charleston). Anyway, in just a little while, both of us were starving as I had eaten a very early breakfast and Amy was surviving on a single croissant and coffee. Thankfully, she had a big bag of roasted, salted almonds in her bag and we ate those greedily before our tour began.
A Tour of Monk's House:
Now a word about the complicated life of the other sister, Virginia. She was an exceedingly talented writer and she gave the world the Stream-of-Consciousness Novel that records the internal monologue of her characters with barely any plot at all. Her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves are among the most well-known of English novels. Virginia was passionate about her craft and worked hard at her writing. She always resented the fact that, as woman, she and her sister Vanessa, were actually expected to devote some part of their day to running a home, unlike their brothers from whom there were no such expectations. Hence, she wrote her iconic essay, "A Room Of One's Own". And it was at Monk's House that she was able to create this!
So how did a married woman in the 1920s manage to have a room of her own? Well, because although she married Leonard Woolf, a respected diplomat who had spent long years in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), it was a well-acknowledged fact that Virginia was a lesbian and had no intimate physical relationship of any kind with her husband. In fact, she is known to have had a lesbian relationship with Vita Sackville-West, the Edwardian aristocrat who was born into a titled family but could not inherit her family estate at Knole House (which I have visited on a previous stay in the UK) in Kent. In fact, Vita married another diplomat, Harold Nicholson, and together they bought Sissinghurt Castle which they created into a family home around which they built the most gorgeous gardens (which I have also visited previously).
Vita and Virginia spent a lot of time together at Knole, which became the setting of Virginia's novel Orlando. It would appear that Nicholson accepted Vita's bi-sexual lifestyle as did Leonard Woolf, for both sets of couples remained married although, in the case of Virginia, she lived with Leonard as merely a room mate. Hence, Virginia had no children. She was wracked by mental ill-health all her life. Despite her vast ingenuity and amazing literary proficiency, she suffered frequent bouts of a form of depression that is now recognized as bipolar disorder. Not surprisingly, she took her own life by going swimming in the nearby River Ouse with her pockets weighed down with rocks. Subsequently, Leonard formed an intimate relationship with a Tracy Ritchie, also an artist, who moved into Monk's House where she painted and he gardened.
A Tour of Monk's House is also self-guided with a guide in every room. Only three rooms on the ground can be visited--the living room, the dining room and the kitchen. The rooms upstairs have been modernized, over the years, by the various tenants who rented it after Leonard passed away. It was only in recent years that the National Trust acquired the property and have lavished time and money trying to keep it up to snuff--however, they have kept the upper floor out of reach of visitors as the ambience is not of the 1930s and visitors are generally disappointed by the experience. However, you can see paintings done by either Vanessa or Duncan Grant and all manner of accessories that were made by artistic members of the Bloomsbury Group scattered all over the house. So, overall, this house offered much less to the visitor than Charleston did. But the gardens are just as lovely.
The tour winds its way, eventually, to Virginia's private bedroom where she had a bed, a desk and a wash-basin: a sort of contemporary bedsit. This is the Room of her Own for which she longed and where she did end up writing most of her best-known novels. It is bright and light-filled and overlooks the chirping birds alive outside with spring's new lease on life. I loved it.
The Gardens of Monk's House:
Leonard was an avid gardener and much of the garden at Monk's House is his handiwork. Here the color palette is different--a lot of yellow and a great deal of pink. Magnolia trees were in full bloom in these gardens and their huge, saucer-like flowers in pink and magenta, were stunning. There were also staggeringly beautiful yellow parrot tulips and the largest pink peonies I have ever seen. We also saw lilacs hanging low from their bushes in the deepest shade of royal purple--they were unbelievably fragrant. How marvelous it is to see cherry blossom on the trees here in the spring in England! There is a beautiful old church right in front of the house and it is not surprising that artist-visitors to Monk's House, painted it often as its spire is utterly picturesque. The best part of these gardens are that they overlook the South Downs Way, a national trail that goes from Winchester to Margate past the towering white chalk cliffs known as the Seven Sisters. These Stevens Sisters were great lovers of Nature as well as having a devotion to all manner of things creative.
When we were done perusing the house, we took a stroll through the quaint village of Rodmell as we had a few minutes' wait for our taxi that would take us back to London. It was not long before the cabbie did show up and off we went.
On the Train Back to London:
Since the small packet of almonds that Amy and I had shared simply did not cut it, we picked up cheese and pickle sandwiches at Lewes railway station with chocolate chip cookies and oat and raisin cookies before we boarded our train back to London. The rain had begun again and we felt so fortunate that we had missed it altogether and had been granted a truly impeccable day, weather-wise. In the train back, as we were both exhausted (we had walked for about 8-9 miles), we both fell asleep and awoke only as the train pulled into Victoria station.
As I had run out on juice on my phone (taking too many photos), we decided to go back to our hotel to charge my phone before the next item on our agenda: this was a visit to Sky Garden, a London attraction to which I had never been.
Visiting the Sky Garden:
Amy and I had acquired tickets to visit the Sky Garden which, I am told, is a rooftop atrium garden and one of London's newest attractions. Tickets here too are timed and ours were for 5.30 pm. We left our hotel at 4.30 pm confident that we would get there on time. However, the heavens had opened out viciously and there was such a heavy downpour that all buses seemed to have crawled to a halt. We stood at our bus stop for over half an hour before we realized that the buses we needed had been diverted and would not stop at our stop! Deeply frustrated, we changed bus stops and still were not sure of our route. I realized we would be very late indeed and wondered if our timed tickets would still be honored. They were not. Not willing to be daunted and with the rain stopping and the sun attempting valiantly to make an appearance, we decided to take a ride on Bus No. 15 to see Central London with all its monuments and buildings for free. I was not entirely sorry to have missed the Sky Garden today as clouds and mist would almost certainly have obscured our views. Furthrermore, Llew and I have tickets for the same attraction later next week--we know now not to be late as they will not permit late entrants!
On the See-London Bus:
And so we hopped into a bus that began at Mansion House (No. 15) and rode it all the way to Trafalgar Square from where we jumped into a No. 11. This would take us all the way to Chelsea and Fulham and Amy was excited to be in it. As expected, we passed by every major monuments as I kept up a running commentary. Amy was happy to see the Houses of Parliament again because, as an undergraduate, she had actually interned here for a whole year! I did not know this about Amy! During our long chats, I also discovered that her mother is a very talented artist. Amy showed me a bunch of paintings executed by her mother over the years. Some of them were so good that I felt sorely tempted to give her a commission.
Soon, we were sailing down the King's Road towards World's End when Amy suggested we hop off and have a nice dinner somewhere as we had been subsisting on mere snacks today.
Slap-Up Dinner at The Blue Bird in Chelsea:
And so that was what transpired. We got off at Beauford Street, crossed the street to The Blue Bird and, before we knew it, were seated in a really upscale restaurant which had long been on my Bucket List. This restaurant that was the brain child of Jasper Conran, Terence Conran's son, but it has been bought up by Des Gunawardena, the restaurant king in London. However, the ambience and the crowd were just amazing and as we settled down amidst the pillows of the sofa, we chose our drinks.
Amy decided to have a Pinto Grigio while I had a salted margarita. It was superb. Our order was equally simple but stunning: Burrata was one of our starters; the other was seared scallops. Both were outstanding. For our mains, we ordered Fussilli pasta with wild mushrooms and a fillet of Grilled Salmon that was done to perfection, served with extraordinarily tender asparagus and a lemony-cream sauce that was unforgettable. Amy and I looked back on our time together and shared many laughs and umpteen expressions of delight and awe as we sipped our drinks and enjoyed the happy camaraderie of two old friends who have known each other for a life time and are fully comfortable together. Tomorrow, Amy will join other friends in London and I will be left to my own devices. I shall be spending a lot of time at the British Library. It is time to return to some serious research again.
We felt fully sated with our meal--in fact, so sated that we had no room for dessert. Amy very generously insisted on treating me to the dinner--a way of saying Thank-you for inviting her to join me in London and for all the personal guidance I had provided through our rambles. I was absolutely delighted at the treat as eating at The Blue Bird had also been on my Bucket List for ages. So had Charleston and Monk's House! How marvelous that, one after the other, I was ticking items off it!
We caught the bus back to our hotel and simply threw ourselves on the bed. We will certainly have a long lie-in tomorrow as we have no program except for a visit to the Victorian and Albert Museum as Amy would like me to give her my Highlights Tour of the place.
Until tomorrow, cheerio...
