Three writers’ pastoral years are beautifully observed in this group biography but seem little more than tangential to their work
On Easter Monday 1930, the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner was walking along a lane in East Chaldon, Dorset, when she arrived at an unappetising-looking cottage, its muddy stucco powerfully redolent – to most people, at least – of damp and disheartenment. She knew already it was for sale, and having borrowed a set of keys from a nearby pub, she went inside for a closer look. For her, if for no one else, its shabby severity was an essential part of its attraction. So what if it had no electricity or running water? If the surveyor would later describe it as undesirable? Such cons were her get-out clause; her exoneration from naughty “bourgeois cravings”. Unlike other down-from-London types, she wouldn’t pinch the best house from the locals. She would jump on the very worst house, and hope not to crash through any rotten floorboards as she did. Reader, she bought it, warts and all.
A lot of what Warner and her trouser-wearing tenant (later her lover), Valentine Ackland, got up to at Miss Green (the house was named after its last elderly owner) thereafter is perfectly admirable in its way: more thrift shop than Vinterior and Farrow & Ball, even if I don’t like the sound of the words “not a single upholstered chair”. But still, there’s something funny and Marie Antoinette-ish at play here, too. Warner’s aversion to middle-class luxury was so extreme, she threw a strop when a friend installed a bathroom at his country house. At Miss Green, she and Ackland bathed once a week in their kitchen, in a copper filled with rainwater – a bit of kit she had been taught to use by Mrs Keates, her London char. Later, she would write about this copper, and how it required the bather to adopt a posture reminiscent of “ancient British pit burials”. One gathers that she did not regard this as at all a bad thing.
