Of the one or two questions in life that I prefer to duck, perhaps the most frequent comes from the daunting and amiable creature, the Bloomsbury enthusiast. What was she like? they ask.In an essay on Dr Johnson's friend Mrs Hester Thrale -one of the last things she wrote -Virginia says "The more we know of people, the less we can sum them up. Just as we think we hold the bird in our hand, the bird flutters off". You won't be surprised when I tell you that it never crossed my mind, all those years ago, that one day I should have to stand up in front of an illustrious audience, some of them 'Woolf specialists', and add my two cents worth to the Niagara of words about those pivotal members of Bloomsbury, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. I wonder if, by an effort of imagination, we can go back mentally nearly seventy years to the late 1930s, the eve of the Second World War. Let us visit the small Sussex village of Rodmell where Leonard and Virginia had their country house. Most of the village consists of The Street, as it is called, which runs off the main Lewes-Newhaven road. On either side, The Street is lined with flint garden walls, behind which are cottages, most of which are inhabited by farm workers. This is a time before Rodmell, like so many such villages, became gentrified dormitories, whose residents commute daily to London. Then it had a Post Office, a general store, a blacksmiths and a pub. Only the pub has survived. After a few minutes' walk we reach a long, two-storey clapboard house on the right which lies a few yards back from the road. Pushing open the garden gate of Monks House is the signal for what seems like a pack of furiously barking dogs to descend upon us. A brick path leads past the end of the house to a huge garden and orchard. The garden is a kind of patchwork quilt of trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables, fruit, roses and crocus merging into cabbages and gooseberry bushes. Here and there are fish ponds and peeping from the undergrowth are garden statues. From one of the several greenhouses my uncle emerges to welcome us. He is delighted to see us. Knowing what children are like, on arrival, he fumbles in a capacious pocket and produces a bag of his favourite mint humbugs.Leonard is in his sixties, tall, lean, tanned and with a shock of silver hair. His eyes are grey, deep-set under bushy eyebrows and his face is deeply lined. His head, which juts forward, is chiselled, long and spare: he has the rugged profile of an Old Testament prophet smoking a pipe. He is wearing ancient corduroy trousers and a poacher jacket of coarse tweed. His shoes are heavy and made of good leather, like Mr Ramsay's, and one notices that round his woollen tie is an opal ring. His voice is very tremulous -the voice of a man perhaps twenty years older. I almost forgot to tell you that on his shoulder is perched a tiny monkey, a marmoset called Mitzi. I grew very fond of Mitzi.He takes one round, proudly showing his Worcester Permains, Cox's Orange Pippins, his prize marrows, the extensive collection of succulents, the p...
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