‘Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall?’ asked Virginia Woolf. Undoubtedly it was because, as a child with her parents and seven siblings, she had spent thirteen blissful summers there, in the family holiday house. Talland House sits on a hill, in a rambling garden above the curving bay of St Ives. A distant lighthouse is visible across ‘the great plateful of blue water’. The click of the latch on its large wooden garden gate was as evocative for Virginia as madeleines were for Proust. It unleashed a ‘miscellaneous catalogue’ of the sights, sounds and smells of her childhood, with memories full of light and a sense of freedom.

More than fifty years later, in the depths of the Second World War, Virginia Woolf recorded a list of things that consoled her: the thwack of a ball struck by a cricket bat; the hum of bees in the garden; the murmur of adult voices from the terrace; the colours of the bay and the lights of the little town at night, a scent of apples in the orchard and the whiff of seaweed from the cove below the cliff. Simply saying the names of the places out loud made her feel better. The summers spent in Cornwall provided, she later said, ‘the best beginning to a life conceivable’. And as Virginia’s biographer Hermione Lee writes: ‘Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.’

Virginia’s father Leslie Stephen had found the house on one of his walking holidays in 1881. In an uncharacteristically spontaneous gesture, he decided it would do well as a holiday home for the family. At the time the family consisted of his eleven year old disabled daughter Laura by his first marriage to Minny Thackeray; the three children from his second wife Julia’s prior marriage to Herbert Duckworth, George, Stella and Gerald (then aged thirteen, twelve and eleven), and their two babies Vanessa aged two and Thoby, aged one. Julia was pregnant at the time with the third of their four children, Virginia, who would shortly be followed by Adrian. While in St Ives to secure the lease he wrote to Julia that although the garden was small,

…it is a dozen little gardens, each full of romance for the children – lawns surrounded by flowering hedges, and intricate thickets of gooseberries and currants…high banks down which you can slide…altogether a pocket-paradise with a sheltered cove of sand in easy reach just below.

The weeks the family spent here in summer lent a distinct pattern to their lives, in contrast to their restrictive existence in London, where the youngest Stephens spent much of their time crammed into dark, stuffy rooms, high up and a long way from nature (which I have described in this story). These places seemed so vastly discrepant to Virginia’s older sister Vanessa, that she once asked their father whether London and St Ives were two different worlds with separate skies.

Arriving

Virginia and Vanessa remembered the long journeys on the Cornish Express train from Paddington and their mounting excitement as they arrived at St Erth where they transferred to the branch line. On this final leg of the journey the railway tracks skirt Hayle Estuary and then curve around a bend where the sea bursts into view, with Godrevy Lighthouse in the distance. The Stephen party with Sophy the cook, Ellen the parlour maid, Shag the dog, and piles of luggage would finally arrive at St Ives around seven in the evening.

Virginia later described the town of St Ives as:

then much as it must have been in the sixteenth century, unknown, unvisited, a scramble of granite houses crusting the slope in the hollow under the Island….It was a windy, noisy, fishy, vociferous, narrow-H streeted town; the colour of a mussel or a limpet; like a bunch of rough shell fish clustered on a grey wall together.

Talland House

Talland House is big and white and square, ‘like a child’s drawing of a house, remarkable only for its flat roof and the crisscrossed railing that ran around the roof’. Its terrace beyond the French windows, the stone urns with their tumbling red geraniums, the beds of fuchsias and red-hot pokers made up a corner of Cornwall that for Virginia would remain forever ‘the loveliest place in the world.’

The house and its surroundings provided rich material for three of Virginia’s novels that became known as the St Ives Trilogy: Jacob’s Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931). It was a small house for such a large family and somewhat run down, as Virginia describes in To the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay

saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully shabby. Their entrails . . . were all over the floor; but then what was the point, she asked herself, of buying good chairs to let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house, with only one old woman to see to it, positively dripped with wet? . . . and there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and tables whose London life of service was done – they did well enough here; and a photograph or two, and books. . . . If they could be taught to wipe their feet and not bring the beach in with them . . . things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer.

Downstairs, was a large dining room with French windows looking out onto a garden described from the vantage point of the dining table in Jacob’s Room as ‘grey-green’,

and among the pear-shaped leaves of the escallonia fishing-boats seemed caught and suspended. A sailing ship slowly drew past the women’s backs. Two or three figures crossed the terrace hastily in the dusk. The door opened and shut. Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. Like oars rowing now this side, now that, were the sentences that came now here, now there, from either side of the table.

In these randomly furnished and crowded rooms, full of comings and goings and the sounds of the sea, the usual rules and conventions were relaxed and youthful spirits could soar. From their night nursery, the children would lower down a basket on a string to the open kitchen window below. If Sophy the cook was in a good mood, it would return full delicious food from the grown up’s dinner table. But if harrassed, Sophy would cut the string. The children witnessed the comings and goings of local tradespeople and heard their gossip. Mrs Latham would arrive with live blue lobsters which she plonked on the kitchen table and Mrs Curnow would haul away huge baskets of washing. Virginia remembered her mother in a white dressing gown, standing on the wrought iron balcony of the upstairs bedroom, surrounded by the passion flowers that climbed up the front of the house. And above her mother’s room, in one of the attic bedrooms, the sun poured in and lit up

bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing.

Family and friends (including the novelist Henry James) came in great waves to stay with them or nearby at the luxurious Tregenna Castle Hotel. From a spot in the garden they were able to see the arrival of the trains and would set off for the station just below the house to meet the newcomer. One arrival is recorded in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News (most of it written by Virginia who was ten years old when she wrote this piece):

Mr Fisher arrived at the ancient borough of St Ives on Saturday afternoon. The felicious family of Stephen were posed on a convenient bank awaiting the arrival of the locomotive. In due time it came. Paterfamilias, Materfamilias and family rushed down to meet their renowned relation. Oh ‘t was a happy sight to see! We leave the rest to the imagination’s vivid course as we are sure dear reader that you possess that faculty in it’s highest degree.

Some of Virginia’s most significant childhood memories, in which she first conceived a sense of herself, took place here. One early morning, when she was half asleep in bed, she became aware of her surroundings as a series of indistinguishable sights and sounds: sunlit, semi-transparent shapes of ‘pale yellow, silver and green’, the waves breaking against the rocks below, and

the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from falling from a great height but sharp and distinct. The quality of the air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil. The rooks cawing is part of the waves breaking one two, one two – and the splash as the wave drew back and then it gathered again, and I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.

And another time the sound of the waves and of the acorn at the end of the blind’s cord as it rhythmically trailed against the floor with the wind, took on a mystical significance for her. It became what she later called ‘a moment of being’, the foundation on which her life was balanced.

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory.

The children’s time at St Ives was filled with endless activity and pleasure: clambering over rocks and delving into rock pools; hunting for butterflies by day and moths by night; swimming in the sea, climbing trees and playing cricket on the lawn. (Virginia was known as a demon bowler). They used to hold funerals for a succession of mice and birds. In the evenings they would stand with their mother on the Lookout watching the boats come and go:

…the mackerel fleet, its lights dancing up and down; and the fleet returning, rounding the headland and suddenly dropping their sails.

On rainy days they would resort to billiards, album-making, family journals and plays. They had a craze for photography and would photograph every visitor to the house. While Virginia wrote articles for the Hyde Park Gate News, Vanessa worked on exercises from her copy of Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing, slowly and carefully filling rectangles with perfect cross-hatching. ‘Us four’ (the youngest Stephen children: Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian) as they called themselves, were self-sufficient. They preferred to play together and rarely had children to stay. In A Sketch of the Past (1939) Virginia remembered one unfortunate child called Elsie who was brought to the house, and how I ‘broomed her round the garden’. I remember scuffling her like a drift of dead leaves in front of me.’

On one occasion visitors asked them to join a fishing expedition, which Virginia duly covered for the 33rd edition of the Hyde Park Gate News (1892).

Mrs Hunt kindly invited the juveniles to go out fishing on Thursday morning at 7 A.M. with her son. The proposal was unanimously appreciated and punctually at 7 o’clock did the juveniles appear. Miss Street who had never seen the Ocean before and had much less been on it was to be one of the party and many guesses were currant as to how she would undergo the trials awaiting her. At about a quarter past seven she stepped into the boat with a calm face but in ten minuits she showed some of the expected signs and leaned over the boat as if in rediness for her fate. She looked pale and showed all the usual signs of sea-sickness. The giggling juveniles looked on at the first part of the scene but turned away from the second as Miss Street disgorged her contents much too liberally for the spectators. The rest of the party did not suffer in the same way but Mr Hilary Hunt said that it made a chap fell (sic) spewish to see her. On account of Miss Street the fishers returned home quickly the only thing caught was a gurnard the catcher being Mr Thoby Stephen.

Julia and Leslie Stephen

Julia and Leslie Stephen were receptive to the enjoyment of their children. Once, watching the joy on the face of her son Thoby, Julia Stephen said ‘He will never be so happy again’. Virginia used this utterance in To the Lighthouse. Mrs Ramsay is sure

They were happier now than they would ever be again…She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, as fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after breakfast, which they did every day of their lives was a positive event to them; and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish – something they had heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They had all their little treasures…And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.

The children were aware that their parents were deeply in love. This was a source of their happiness and sense of security but it also left them vulnerable, for their mother stretched herself thin.

Julia ran a household with seven servants and eight children and for a time the education of her four youngest children was her sole province. She also had a gift for nursing, and took every opportunity to visit the old, the sick, the poor. Even on holiday in St Ives she would walk down the steep road to town, dispensing food, comfort, clothing, anything she could spare for needy families. And, most exhausting of all, was the constant need for sympathy and consolation from her exacting, neurotic husband. She lived primarily for the man she married.

Leslie Stephen’s work on the Dictionary of National Biography, which he began in 1882, utterly sapped him. Virginia believed that she and Adrian had been crushed and cramped in the womb by these enormous volumes. In the middle of this life work Leslie also produced The Science of Ethics, in which he defined his career as a thinker. It was poorly received and he convinced himself he was a failure. He became an insomniac and for weeks on end would pace the lawn of Talland House, working himself into a state of near nervous collapse. Julia would listen to his worries about his work and reputation, as well as his irrational concerns over money. Everyone around him was walking on eggshells. If he felt Julia’s household expenses were too high, or felt she had accepted too many guests, he would explode in anger. He was prone to attacks of illness and what he called ‘fits of the horrors’, although he sometimes confessed to exaggerating his sufferings in order to extract an extra serving of his wife’s sympathy.

Virginia observed this neediness in her portrayal of her father as Mr Ramsay:

Mr. Ramsay repeated, never taking his eyes from her [Mrs. Ramsay’s] face, that he was a failure…he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all of the rooms of the house made full of life…

Julia became increasingly stressed and obsessed about time, of which there was never enough. Perpetually organising, ministering, protecting, she was always in a hurry, ever more anxious to do everything herself so that others should be spared. On 5 May 1895, following an attack of influenza, Julia suddenly died.

Virginia had been six months old when she was taken to Cornwall for her first summer and she had just turned thirteen for her last. After her mother’s death the family never went back, for Leslie felt it would be unbearable to revisit a place where they had once been so happy. The loss of Julia was catastrophic. Nothing was the same again. I have written about the impact of Julia’s death on the Stephen family here.

Returning

As an adult Virginia Woolf would feel compelled time and again to revisit this place ‘on the very toenail of England’, as her father called it, drawn to its light, fresh sea air and isolation. In a letter to Vanessa in 1909, Virginia explained how an impulsive desire to see Cornwall had landed her at Lelant station late one night, without her coat or glasses:

I went for a walk in Regents Park yesterday morning, and it suddenly struck me how absurd it was to stay in London, with Cornwall going on all the time.

She walked instead along the coast, agreeing with George Meredith that gorse bushes ‘smell of nuts’. She sheltered in a druid’s cave and remarked on the ‘singular beauty of leafless but budding trees against a deep blue sky.’ Her walks evoked the memory of her father at his best, tramping and shouting Tennyson, Meredith or Wordsworth into the wind. It was in St Ives that he’d instilled in her a lifelong love of walking, perhaps starting out along the path to Godrevy, or through the Celtic, windswept Penwith Coast to Trencorm Fort and Carn Galver or further west to Zennor and Gurnard’s Head.

Virginia discovered that she could both walk and write, a skill on which she elaborated in an essay published in The Guardian (December 1905), entitled ‘A Walk by Night’. She called it ‘street haunting’. In this act of sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the ‘champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets’, we leave the things that define us at home, and become ‘part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers’. Out, ostensibly to buy a pencil, Woolf is transformed by the quality of the light, of the air, of the road. She suggests that as we progress through the cityscape there comes a point when we are no longer just reacting: we are interacting, and created anew by this interaction.

Virginia came to understand a clear connection between walking and creativity. On a walk through Tavistock Square one afternoon she had the idea for To the Lighthouse. In a letter to Ethel Smyth in 1930 she wrote: ‘I cannot get my sense of unity and coherency and all that makes me wish to write the Lighthouse etc. unless I am perpetually stimulated’. This stimulation came from engaging with the world, from ‘plunging into London, between tea and dinner, and walking and walking’.

The most significant return to Cornwall for Virginia took place with her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian in the summer of 1905, when they were all in their twenties. Newly orphaned after the death of their father, and with the women now released from the stultifying atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate, they rented a house in Carbis Bay. It was two miles from Talland House, which they had not visited since the summer before their mother had died. In her diary Virginia wrote how, on the evening they arrived, they had walked up the hill to Talland House:

It was dusk when we came, so that there still seemed to be a film between us & the reality. We could fancy that we were but coming home along the high road after some long day’s outing, & that when we reached the gate at Talland House, we should thrust it open, & find ourselves among the familiar sights again. In the dark, indeed, we made bold to humour this fancy of ours further than we had a right to; we passed through the gate, groped stealthily but with sure feet up the carriage drive, mounted the little flight of rough steps, & peered through a chink in the escalonia [sic] hedge. There was the house, with its two lighted windows; there on the terrace were the stone urns, against the bank of tall flowers; all, so far as we could see was as though we had but left it in the morning. But yet, as we knew well, we could go no further; if we advanced the spell was broken. The lights were not our lights; the voices were the voices of strangers. We hung there like ghosts in the shade of the hedge, & at the sound of footsteps we turned away.

In a letter to her friend Violet Dickinson, Virginia wrote that this visit had been ‘a ghostly thing to do’. Hermione Lee observes how it had been her most symbolic return, one that corralled all her feelings about her childhood. And because of the drastic break that had taken place on the death of her mother, Talland House seemed to contain Virginia’s childhood ‘as in a bowl’, that existed as a separate, almost sacred part of her life.

Talland House later became further isolated in her mind because that ‘ghostly’ visit to St Ives had been the last time the siblings were together. A little more than a year later, Thoby died from typhoid and shortly after that, Vanessa was engaged to Clive Bell. It is likely that part of the reason Virginia clung on to her love for St Ives was because it became a substitution for their togetherness. Lee observes that ‘The desire to get back inside that bowl, to write not just about childhood but as if a child, is one of the most powerful impulses in her writing.’ The visit with her siblings and all its emotional weight would, twenty years later, provide the source for To the Lighthouse, arguably Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, and the novel that came from this house.

Music

‘In the Garden’, Max Richter

This is a piece from Max Richter’s The Three Worlds: Music from Woolf Works. It is part of an original score for a narrative dance piece based on three of Virginia Woolf’s novels: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves. You can read more about this work here.