Richard Shone on Leonard Woolf

The large garden at Monk’s House, Rodmell, in Sussex, bounded on one side by the village street, and on the other by gently sloping ground towards the River Ouse, was locally famous for its summer brilliance. In August — the month in which I paid my first visit — when most gardens have a moment of exhaustion, Leonard Woolf had contrived a quilt of dahlias, lilies, purple Jerusalem artichokes, gaillardias and fuchsias in the flowerbeds. A conservatory along the side of the house bristled with cacti. Woolf appeared from a distant corner, secateurs in hand, twine dangling from a jacket pocket, a dog fiercely kept to heel. I had been driven the few miles from Charleston by Duncan Grant, in his scarred green Morris Minor, to have tea with Leonard Woolf, on a hot afternoon in 1966. I was 17; the two gentlemen were sprightly octogenarians. Woolf’s greeting was a peremptory nod both to me whom he did not know and to Grant whom he had known for well over half a century. A slow stop-start tour of the garden was obligatory, Woolf and Grant walking ahead. I caught snatches of talk, the only one of which I remember is Woolf’s irritation at his not being able to find his copy of the catalogue to the great 1912 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, the show at the Grafton Galleries to which he had acted as secretary. As I knew from a characteristic jeremiad in his autobiography, it was the public’s animosity to the works on view that had confirmed his lamentable opinion of human nature.

Once inside the house we sat in the low, dark dining-room for tea. Duncan Grant had warned me that this meal would be spartan, unlike the luxuriant spread at Charleston. He was right: strong Indian tea and some rather hard rock-cakes.