Charleston Farmhouse

Recently, on a journey from Somerset to Rye, in Sussex (a very LONG journey, beset by a great deal of traffic, since you ask), we stopped off at Charleston Farmhouse. Charleston, tucked under the Sussex Downs, was the home of Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, on-and-off from 1916; she, her sort-of partner Duncan Grant and his friend and lover David Garnett, together with her two sons by her husband Clive Bell,  Julian and Quentin, and Henry the dog, moved into the house so that Duncan and Clive, who were conscientious objectors, could work on a nearby farm as a substitute for fighting.

Vanessa Bell

It was a rambling farmhouse which had recently been used as a boarding house. There was no running water and it was very cold. Over the years, Vanessa and Duncan, both painters, together with friends who often came down to stay, decorated the house in their own charming and very individual way. One of them designed an adaptation to the fireplaces, constructing a sort of platform of large bricks which helped to retain and reflect heat out into the rooms. Vanessa painted patterns onto the fireplace surrounds in chalky pastel colours: figures, vases of flowers, abstract patterns. She bought cheap wardrobes and decorated those too, with bold yellow circles and a border in a contrasting dark red. Basically, if it didn't move, and it wasn't made of polished wood, she or one of the others painted it - doors, shutters, bedheads - even box files! Someone else made lightshades out of colanders, the dining room walls were stencilled, and everywhere there were paintings, by Vanessa and Duncan and various friends: portraits of each other and other members of the Bloomsbury Group - including, of course, Virginia; copies - not exact: more like tributes - of classical paintings; pottery made by Quentin Bell, Vanessa's son; fabrics designed by Duncan Grant.

It's a lovely house. A little shabby, but comfortable: so easy to imagine evenings by the fire with interesting conversation and ideas being bounced from one to another; summer days spent in the garden with its beds of luxuriant flowers - like the house, tended but relaxed. But the room I found the most moving was the one they call the Garden Room. This became Vanessa's bedroom in later years. As the name suggests, it has a beautiful view out into the garden. There is a narrow single bed - you can imagine Vanessa waking up in the morning, propping herself up on her pillows, gazing out at the garden, and thinking about the people she has loved and lost. Above the bed is a portrait of her son, Julian, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. How anguished she must have been, when, after she and her friends had been so determinedly anti-war, to hear him say that he was going off to fight; and then how desolate when she heard of his death.

Of course, the Bloomsbury Group are known for their tangled web of relationships. As we went round the house on a guided tour (you can't wander round on your own) there were lots of knitted brows and constant queries - "What, so she was married to him, but then...?" and "But I thought her father was...?" You do have to concentrate, especially when it comes to the bit where Angelica, Vanessa's daughter by Duncan Grant, grows up to marry David Garnett, her father's lover. It was Angelica who in 1980 helped to form the Charleston Trust, which now looks after the house.

I was an early visitor when it opened to the public over thirty years ago. There were lots of articles in magazines about the house and its inhabitants, and Laura Ashley produced a range of fabrics inspired by the house. I made curtains out of some of them, and very lovely they were; and, a little like Vanessa, for quite a long spell I decorated chairs and cupboards and walls, albeit in a much simpler way - I stippled and sponged and picked out details until our poor house begged for mercy.

So it was lovely to go back and see the house again. I'd hoped to buy a little something from the shop, but everything was much too expensive - a stunning lampshade was well over £100 (ironic, considering that the house was originally decorated on something of a shoestring), so I had to be satisfied with a few postcards. And my apologies for the lack of pictures in this post: photographs were not allowed, and there's a very stern warning on the website about using pictures from there without permission. But here's the link to the website, where you can see the house in all its loveliness.

The last room you visit is the studio where Duncan Grant worked pretty much up to his death in 1978. It's full of the everyday detritus of an artist's life: there's his easel, his chair, and on the overflowing mantelpiece, a soda siphon, a whisky bottle and a glass. It's as if he's just left the room for a moment, perhaps to go out into the garden.

A picture I took in the garden - not a very good one, I'm afraid: it was a dull and miserable day.

SISTERS by Adèle Geras

Note: When I wrote this post, I  hadn't read Christina Konig's excellent post about LIFE IN SQUARES. I do hope readers of this blog will excuse a slight overdose of the Bloomsbury Group. My post is sufficiently different from Christina's I hope, for this to be excused. 

The whole world, it seems,  is Bloomsbury Mad. Actually, ever since Vanessa and Virginia Stephen moved to 46 Gordon Square in 1904, the lives of these two sisters and their friends have fascinated biographers, critics and anyone interested in a story of highly intelligent people and their doings: literary, artistic and sexual. Perhaps it's their sexual shenanigans which have kept the interest alive and the recent BBC drama, LIFE IN SQUARES, did concentrate on that aspect of their lives perhaps rather too much. The drama was quite well done, I thought, though Virginia I felt, was woefully miscast and Rupert Penry-Jones, much as I admire him, didn't appear to be much older than James Norton, playing the older Duncan Grant. I saw no good reason why the same actor couldn't have been used for both old and young, but there you are. The series certainly looked wonderful and Eve Best as Vanessa has made me resolve to wear my string of amber beads round the house, as she did. Most importantly, the drama suffered, I though from only being three episodes long. There was far too much happening in all these lives to cram into such a short time frame. If it had been longer, the characters could have been much more fully developed and the situations, and complicated relationships of the Group could have been explained to those of the viewing public who didn't know the intricate stories of these lives. As well as that, more episodes would have been able to convey the artistic and literary importance of these two women, who, in the time allowed, were just beautiful people who swanned around, with occasional bouts of grief and thwarted love to interrupt the apparent idyll.

This (above) is Charleston House, Vanessa's home for most of her life.  You are not allowed to photograph the interior, where Vanessa and Duncan Grant and other artists decorated every available surface. You saw the rooms in the TV series, and they are most beautiful. The scale of the house is very small. It's really a farmer's cottage and feels like it: rough, as well as beautiful. The furniture comes from the Omega Workshop, where Vanessa Bell produced wonderful (unsigned) designs for furniture. Duncan Grant's  work is everywhere. He was the love of Vanessa's life and more than that, her closest friend in the world, except for her sister, Virginia. Anyone who missed the tv series and who is interested has only to put Charleston House into Google to see what it looks like. They will also find many of Vanessa's works reproduced.

Many people can't stand the Bloomsbury group.  Snobbish, they say. Elitist. Spoilt. Anti-semitic. And on and on. This may very well be true but also, clever, ground - breaking artistically, and leaders of the intellectual life of their day, whose lives are still fascinating to many, including me. I can say exactly why I am drawn to them. It's because of the relationship between the sisters. I'm an only child and I suppose I romanticise the bond that can exist between sisters, because I've always wished I had one of my own. In February, I read a novel which I can't recommend too highly. It's called 'VANESSA AND HER SISTER,' by Priya Parmar, and it's published in paperback by, of course, Bloomsbury.  It is completely gripping and deals with a period of their lives when they were young. After reading that, I'm now reading an excellent joint biography by Jane Dunn called 'A VERY CLOSE CONSPIRACY.' That is brilliant and shows one thing very clearly.  No matter what was going on in their love life, or in their intellectual lives, each sister was emotionally the centre of the other sister's world. They were close, and loving and Vanessa never stopped being the chief looker-after of Virginia. We know about Virginia suicide, and that death is, horribly, part of the drama of their lives and their story. But what is clear from what I've read is that Virginia, for many reasons, was always in a state of precarious mental health.  Vanessa was her mainstay. Leonard Woolf also looked after her, but it was her sister to whom she was most attached.

Both sisters  had to be constantly creating.  Virginia fell ill when she couldn't write for some reason, and Vanessa, together with other denizens of Charleston, used their artistic talent to transform everything. Both sisters made beautiful gardens, and the mosaic above shows that every corner of Charleston was worked on: painted, decorated with beautiful pictures and patterns and enhanced by the artist's hand and eye.

Virginia and her husband Leonard took a house just a few miles fro Charleston, in the village of Rodmell. The house is called Monk's House and it's a National Trust property. There is no café and therefore none of the lovely NT scones but it's a wonderful place to visit. The photo above shows Virginia as painted by Vanessa and below, there's a screen painted by Angelica Bell, Vanessa's daughter by Duncan Grant, which looks like something from a stage set. That seems remarkably appropriate. The conversations and situations both at Charleson and in Monk's House were indeed very dramatic. I also think it's very beautiful.

Vanessa's bedroom at  Charleston looks out on to the garden. So does Virginia's at Monk's House. They are beautiful rooms, characterised also by very narrow beds. Below is Virginia's, which is the size of the bunks on overnight trains. This is a single bed if ever there was one. 

And in another part of the same room, at the foot of Virginia's bed, is a bookshelf which I found the saddest and most moving thing in the whole house. It's full of Shakespeare Plays, each covered in paper from the endpapers printed by the Hogarth Press. Virginia covered the volumes during one of the times when she was ill. I took a photo of 'ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL,' which struck me as ironic. But here we are, still thinking about the sisters, still reading the novels and looking at the pictures and discussing the lives. That's ending well, in many ways.