Spirit of Place

Far Horizons

The other day, on my Thames Path Walk, I stopped briefly at Kelmscott Manor, the summer home for many years of William Morris and his entourage. 

Kelmscott Manor

It is a peaceful place, its old stones and leaded windows giving it a dignity that is then gently upheld by the unpretentious gardens.

In keeping with the charitable aim of my walk, I remember the visit here in 2013 that I made with my wife, Amanda.

Amanda was fond of the designs that Morris, Burne-Jones, Webb and Rossetti produced under the general umbrella of the Arts and Crafts movement.  

But perhaps I was more interested in the collective efforts, the dynamic of such groups of people who shared ideas and thoughts and inspired art that was essentially something to be lived with..... 

Red House, Bexley heath

I may be wrong [You often are.... Ed] but I have found visiting the homes of writers and artists (too many to mention, but for example, W B Yeats's Thoor Ballylee, Dylan Thomas's Boat House, Hardy's Cottage, Shaw's Corner and Henry Moore's Perry Green, T E Lawrence's Clouds Hill and New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon..... As well places abroad such as Thomas Mann's Buddenbrookhaus in Lübeck or Leopardi's House in Recanati.... [As you said, too many to mention.... Ed].....  Yes, I have found that visiting the homes of artists, writers and musicians (Elgar's, Britten's, Palestrina's.... I could go on [You do.  Ed]) gives me more of an idea of their lives and inspiration that any amount of academic research, [Lightweight!  Ed].

Kelmscott House, Hammersmith

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow

But this, however, is/was merely a preamble to the recent trip we made to Sussex, to follow up an exhibition of the work of Lee Miller at The Tate....

My point is, perhaps [You don't know?  Ed] that open communities of people with similar interests can be very fertile ground for developing ideas.  It is true that some artists and writers work best in isolation (and need much undisturbed time to get to grips with their creations) but, I think, it is rare that such people don't also enjoy conversation and socialisation and contact with others.  An example might be Joyce in Paris, where he would work scrupulously through the mornings, but then frequent Les Deux Magots, or such haunts, for white wine (which he called electricity) and company later in the day.

However, before we track down Lee Miller at Farleys, we visit Charleston, which in 1916 became the home of Vanessa Bell with her friend and lover Duncan Grant (and his partner David Garnett), who, as conscientious objectors, sought farm work and a place out of London.

Charleston in Firle, East Sussex

They never bought the 16th century farmhouse, but rented it continuously until Grant's death in 1978 (Vanessa Bell died in 1961).  In between the wars they returned to London, but used it as a retreat and holiday home.  At the start of the Second World War they returned here permanently.

The Bloomsbury Group, which included Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, as well as the artist Roger Fry, frequently met here and it would have been buzzing with experimental thinking and alternative ideas. My late friend, the novelist Simon Mawer, was fascinated by the life of the place and was working on a novel set here when he died prematurely last year.

Right from the start, Bell and Grant decorated every room with their art work - not just paintings, but also textiles, ceramics and furniture.  Now preserved by the Charleston Trust it is today a place where visitors may appreciate the ambience as it was but may also enjoy exhibitions or take part in a year-round calendar of festivals and events.

The studio is especially interesting - though it was an add-on and is in need of repair now. It has a real sense of being lived in and used, and it is almost as if it is only temporarily without a practising artist.....

Outside, the gardens are another work of art, with a naturalness that goes well with the informality of the house.

Anyway, after a breath of air and some wonderful views from nearby 217 metre high Firle Beacon:

Looking north from Firle Beacon - Charleston is off to the right

The horizon stretches beyond our vision, teasing the imagination, befuddling the focus - we head to Farleys Farm.....

Farleys House, Muddles Green, Chiidingly, East Sussex

As the website for Farleys House & Gallery (Home of the Surrealists) says, The exterior of Farleys House gives no hint of the visual excitements to be discovered within. You will find brightly coloured walls, rambling corridors and generously proportioned oddly asymmetric rooms filled with a remarkable and eclectic collection of artworks, all of which provides the visitor with a glimpse into the remarkable lives of its former occupants Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.

Farleys House, Muddles Green, East Sussex

All of the above is true, though you can only visit the ground floor, and photography is prohibited, so I cannot share with you the variety of exhibits nor the range of rooms, from Lee Miller's custom-built kitchen (towards the end of her life she became a cordon bleu chef) to her own book-lined study, but, thanks to the Farleys Team, this is the Dining Room, a part of the original farmhouse,

Fireplace, Farleys House, East Sussex, England by Tony Tree (j13a)

Tony Tree © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

and this is a corner of the sitting room:

Sitting Room Farleys House, East Sussex, England by Jim Holden (JH 0278)

Jim Holden © Lee Miller Archives, England 2026. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

The tour is fascinating - but the legacies of Lee Miller, one of the twentieth century's most remarkable photographers (she was, among many other things, a brilliant fashion photographer in New York but then also an extraordinarily tenacious and risk-taking war photographer in the Second World War, capturing the fall of Hitler's Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden, and being amongst the first to enter the concentration camp at Dachau) and that of her husband Roland Penrose, an artist in his own right, but also founder of the ICA and biographer of Picasso..... These are closely guarded and, with reason, so are the art works within the house.

And the gardens, including Lee's own herb garden, are a treat.....

And within sight of the Long Man of Wilmington on the northern slope of Windover Hill, there are some interesting exhibits which I was allowed to photograph....

Including this Sea Creature, the creation of Antony Penrose, the son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, who is still resident at the Farm.

Sea Creature, 2000, Oak and Lead, Antony Penrose

It was a delight to meet Antony, whose books about his mother include The Lives of Lee Miller:

  Lee Miller's War:

and Lee Miller: Photographs:

Antony was charming and welcoming and clearly loves the interest people are taking in his family and his home.  I am very grateful to him for granting me permission to use these snapshots:

Antony Penrose

I don't think I am misrepresenting history by saying that the relationship between Lee and her son could have been better during his childhood, but then not everyone's mother can be described as: Photojournalist, war correspondent, model and Surrealist muse.... one of the most important women photographers of the twentieth century.....  And not only that, when you read about her life, particularly during the war and immediately afterwards, it is exhausting just to read about it!  Imagine what it must have been like to live it? Not many could have stood that pace, that stress, that pressure. And then to marry and have a child?  Settling down can not have been straightforward.

Tony was born in London in 1947, but in 1949 they all moved to Farleys, where he grew up largely supervised by Patsy Murray, the daughter of Lee and Roland's housekeeper and cook. While the house was often alive with famous guests (Picasso visited twice, but friends and connections included a Who's Who of contemporary artists) it wasn't until he was an adolescent that he grew to know Lee better. In the sixties, as he describes in The Lives of Lee Miller, things began to improve: he had escaped from school and home early and after some years in engineering found he missed the cows and the land too much, so began to study farming. Absence from from home for long periods while he worked on other people's farms  helped heal the breaches. Gradually he and Lee became more tolerant of each other.  Whenever he brought friends home, Lee was as welcoming and hospitable to them as she was to her own guests.....

Antony Penrose

Then, in 1971, Tony embarked on a three year round-the-world trip, returning in late 1974 with his New Zealand born wife, Suzanna, and setting up home and starting his own family nearby. Sadly, however, despite the new-found closeness, Lee was diagnosed with cancer, and she died on July 21st, 1977.

*****

Ours was an inspiring trip, in a lovely part of this world.  I feel I understand Lee Miller a little better for the visit, and, when subsequently we called in at the 18th century Six Bells Pub in Chiddingly, where Lee had taken Vogue models  as well as guests such as Picasso, Man Ray and Max Ernst, I felt even more as if she was still around. The pub is a friendly delight and really has not changed much over the years. It was almost as though time had paused, and something rare was in the air.....

The weather was perfect, and afterwards we walked on the South Downs Way, near the Seven Sisters, with the land, sea and sky all distinct but interacting, each an important part of the view, contributing to something both awe-inspiring and at the same time harmonious.  It was not hard to imagine how it was once, and how it may be again.....  My horizons have been extended, I think.....

I like the phrase Spirit of Place (genius loci) - which Lawrence Durrell used as a title for some essays and letters about places he loved in Greece and the Aegean. It refers to the character of a location and melds the physical features of a place with its cultural aspects and human connections. Here, at Charleston and then at Farleys, though I cannot pretend to know much about the people who came and went through these spaces (John Maynard Keynes? OK, I should know, but it's all a blank.....) I feel the frisson of an imaginative world, and come away feeling somehow the better for it......

*****

For more details about Charleston please see:

https://www.charleston.org.uk/house/

and for more about Farleys this is the link:

https://www.farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk/farleys-house/

And should you like this and would like to know  more about William Morris, please see my earlier piece at:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2013/06/feeling-william-morr-ish.html

*****

With very many thanks to my autista and compagna.

*****

What a Wonderful World

Consider the Lilies.....

 

I was in Hastings, and I witnessed a strange thing. I was walking along the front, near the fishermen’s shacks and the miniature railway when a juvenile Herring Gull smashed into the top of a metal flag pole. The bird plummeted awkwardly to the ground, stunned - at least. And then, within seconds, the air was filled with the sound of concerned adults – gulls which either knew the youth or recognised it as one of them – and they were clearly concerned. Their cries were a mixture of, Get up, little one, get up, and What happened here?  Is he/she all right?  Fifty or more gulls all wheeling in the air crying, watching, disturbed, concerned.

 

Very slowly, and dazedly the little one raised its head, looking uncomfortable as it regained consciousness - but it was alive. The crowd dispersed, leaving only a few (close relatives, perhaps?) to watch how the story would end.

 

Later that day, I was in Winchelsea, where my uncle Peter (one of my godfathers) and my aunt used to live.  My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, died in 2014, and is buried in the graveyard of the church of St Thomas the Martyr, Winchelsea, just yards from their former home.  Peter and his wife, Theresa, had five children, and we were all gathering to celebrate the life of my aunt, who died in November 2022.  A service in the church was to be followed by the interment of her ashes in her husband’s grave.

 

And so they came. From Australia, from Spain, from France, London and the Midlands, etc. melding as a family to remember their lives together and to celebrate their parents.  

 

Not exactly like Herring Gulls, but I couldn’t help but feel the uniting power of family as we gathered.....  It is surely a common feature of life that caring is important, and that the closer you may be related the more you care. This may not be universal, and there will be exceptions.  But family is so important.

The family, August 2013

 

I have sixteen first cousins (though sadly they haven’t all survived) and these relationships have been a sustaining element of my life.  Of course, we do not/cannot meet that often, but one of the distinct features of family is that even after years of separation you can pick up on the threads of past encounters. We have known each other all our lives, give or take, and our parents were the natural coefficient that brought us together.

Theresa, Anna and Peter, Winchelsea, April 2012

 

My mother, Anna, had two brothers and one sister. Her younger brother, Peter, met and married Theresa in a flurry of love in 1963.  I remember well their first visit to our family home.  Theresa was light and frothy, a Saumur amongst red wines, and her tinkling, descending-scale laughter was etched on my mind from the very start.

Peter and Theresa's Golden Wedding, August 2013

 

I will confess that I never knew her as well as I felt I knew my uncle, but throughout the years, visiting her and the family in places from Weybridge to Tarvin to holidays in Lowland Scotland to retirement in Winchelsea, she always made us welcome, however inconvenient we may have been.  

Anna, Peter, Theresa, Eve, August 2013

 

When Peter was in hospital toward the end of his life, I met with Theresa and we shared something of the unhappiness of things unravelling. And then, when Peter was no longer there, I visited her in their home in Winchelsea with Amanda, who was already suffering from her particular dementia. We took tea and she smiled sweetly.  I have no hesitation in saying that, with the possible exception of my wife, Amanda, Theresa was the gentlest, sweetest person I ever knew.  If only more had her qualities....

 

Then the end game. And the end. We don’t need to rehearse details. The ending is not what we want to remember. We must hold the positives. The good times. The shared meals, the walks, the sunshine in the garden, the flowers, the strutting cats, the freshly laundered bed linen that says, You are welcome, and the tea, by the fire.....

Yew Tree Platt, Winchelsea

 

It isn’t the same for Herring Gulls.  Wild life is wild, and, beautiful, and we have come away from that. We care for each other, but, generally, not by flying round in circles, squealing. We take our place in church pews and shed sad salty tears and then turn to each other and smile, in remembrance. 

 

But, in fine, it remains the same. We are, essentially, close to our friends and family, and we feel love for our kind.  I love my family, and every loss, every memory, matters.

  

 

Thank you, Theresa, for being a part of our lives.

 

 

Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

 

Luke 12:27 KJV

 

After the memorial. After the reception. When the family had departed. I went back up to the church, and stood under scudding clouds, in brisk air, to view the grave where now aunt and uncle were together again, 

to stand outside the house where we had all stayed at times, to wander back down across the fields where once we had walked and talked.

The sun was slipping away, deepening the colour in the sky, but every darkening is a lightening somewhere else.  The dying day is also the beginning of a new one.

 

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

 

As that extraordinary Zen master, William Shakespeare, put it:

 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 

Macbeth

Act V scene 5

 

 

Consider the lilies.....

 

 

 

 

 

 In Memoriam

 

Theresa McMullin

 

February 1st 1938 - November 21st 2022