In July 1930, Sylvia took an early train to Dorchester and a taxi to Chaldon to check on the progress of Miss Green. She found the garden ‘like the sluggard’s, so wildly met – grown, but full of flowers and fruits. Calico pink shoe-rose poppies, corn-cockles, pretty Fannies, red and pink roses, the garnet rose under the window, red-currant, sweet-currant and raspberry bushes, strawberries, very smooth and sweet, plums and apple-trees.’ Already, the plenteousness of her new environment – like Virginia’s at Asheham – was finding its way into her writing in the form of lists. To Valentine, who was in London for a few days, she wrote of her pleasure at the place: ‘Doesn’t the late Miss Green look charming with a wreath of flowers in her dishevelled hair? Have you found the strawberries? They are up at the back, delicious!’
Next, Sylvia began thinking about the cottage’s interior. In the sitting room, which was dingy even in daylight, she set about redesigning the fireplace, instructing a mason to lower the chimney breast and remove the grate to expose an oak beam – the agent ‘implied that if I wanted to let Miss Green mention might be made of Queen Elizabeth’ – and to build a hearth out of bricks. Afterwards, Mr Miller put up shelves, and painted the woodwork pink. Sylvia was pleased with the effect: ‘Brick, timber, and pink paint: a queer mixture but I think it should look well enough.’
As she set about designing the rooms, Sylvia was embarking upon an imaginative process of adaptation and improvement. She had a taste for old and unusual things, for second-hand furniture and objects recalling no specific historical period but which, arranged together, achieved playful juxtaposition. For the sitting room, she bought ‘a very romantic and rococo gilt mirror with sconces’ to hang near the doorway, its elaborate design striking a note of unexpected refinement against the cottage walls. ‘No woman who bought that mirror for a cottage could conceivably be thought efficient,’ she remarked to Valentine after buying it. ‘It is completely inappropriate, and will effectively destroy any cottage feeling: which is what I desire.’ In refusing to fill Miss Green with objects that matched their rustic setting, Sylvia was rejecting old-world cottage quaintness for a more subversive aesthetic, one that was charismatic and a little irreverent, and reflected her own sensibility. She liked the mirror – ‘partly to give more light, partly to gall our visitors’ – and so she bought things to go alongside it: a rosewood card-table, ‘large enough to feed two, and shutting up to half its span when not in use’, a Chippendale wash stand, and a cross-stitch picture of a horse. From her mother’s house, Sylvia had her eye on several things, including ‘a long narrow table wearing slender brass boots which would be fine to write poetry on’, a kitchen cupboard fashioned from an old bar counter, a standing mirror, and a small grandfather clock. ‘This place is overflowing with oddments in the way of furniture and crockery,’ she told Valentine, ‘so quite a lot could come from here and never be missed.’ The cottage was filling up nicely, and she was pleased: ‘Now except for the kitchen, I have got practically all the furniture, and all of it is rather comely.’ Queer and comely. At Miss Green, Sylvia was engaged in an aesthetic parody of heterosexual domestic life. Her efforts at home improvement, and her taste for interiors, would prove increasingly unconventional as she continued to build a home with a woman, rather than a husband. And yet, in the summer of 1930, it wasn’t yet clear where her sexual life would fit. Instead, the cottage began to reflect the different roles Sylvia would inhabit there: the writer, the homebody, but also a character – like Sukey Bond in The True Heart, perhaps – more light-hearted and childlike. In a letter, she described the two interconnecting bedrooms, the curtains in cotton lawns with crisp calico linings, the beds strewn with coverlets of Turkey chintz. The general effect, she told her new companion, was to remind them of waking in a nursery. Was she disguising the feelings for Valentine which were emerging? Certainly, she was being mischievous. The cottage, she felt, was to host a new and updated version of spinsterhood. As if detecting a trace left by its previous owner, she sensed it had a character of its own which appealed to her, a solitary female spirit, grown untidy and a little wild. She envisioned Miss Green as a place of total creative and domestic freedom. There, she and Valentine would break from their previous lives, joining the cottage’s female lineage, to live undisturbed and as they pleased.
In London, Sylvia succumbed to her new, acquisitive delight. For things of daily use and household gear, she went shopping, and was surprised at how much she enjoyed herself. ‘It is unexpected,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘but the Devil has but to bait his traps with an enamel sink-drainer and I walk in.’ She kept lists of everything she bought, including six pounds of soap, six stainless steel cheese-knives, and two enamel jugs. Valentine was charged with sourcing candlesticks – ‘old-fashioned brass ones, with large trays to catch the wax, and handles, like frying-pans,’ Sylvia stipulated – and a chopping block. ‘These are the sort of thing we can buy better in the country,’ she wrote. ‘May I leave them to you?’
As their plans for the cottage knitted together, the letters between the two women became homely and flirtatious. Sylvia teased Valentine about her moods – ‘I feel you need a nice weatherproof shed, tarred black, to be in keeping with your frame of mind’ – and admired her appearance, a jacket fitting ‘tighter than a moleskin’, and her ‘beautiful narrow hands’. When Valentine wrote to describe a satinwood bureau from the Ackland family’s home in Norfolk, Sylvia approved it for the smaller of the two bedrooms. ‘I should like to think you had something from Winterton,’ she told her, ‘just in case you wanted kind company one night when the fog blows in from the sea.’ She continued to visit Chaldon regularly, meeting Valentine at the cottage or at Powys’s house, a red-brick dwelling near High Chaldon, called Beth Car; and on the occasions Valentine was in London, she lamented her absence. Once, leaving the village hurriedly, Sylvia realised she had ‘never said goodbye’ to her new friend, ‘which was painful’.
A few weeks before she went down to Dorset with her things, Sylvia gave Valentine a snuff box – ‘a much needed talisman’, Valentine wrote to thank her – and the first of many gifts. In return, Valentine sent her a teacloth embroidered with sea creatures, which Sylvia added to her packing list. These were domestic tokens and acknowledgements of the home they were building, but they were also indications of an increasing tenderness, the nudging of friendship into deeper affection. Both women were restless. For Valentine, Miss Green would provide a stable home after a period of tumult and confusion; for Sylvia, their living arrangement would bring an end to the solitude into which she had slipped for so long.
On 23 September 1930, Sylvia left London. Valentine, who owned a car, picked her up from Inverness Terrace, and together they began the long drive to Dorset, the car made lively by ‘dog William’ and rattling with Sylvia’s possessions. They went via Guildford, lunching on cold chicken and pears in a copse. It was evening before they reached Chaldon, the clouds breaking into ‘a blue and yellow curd sky’ and Miss Green ‘in her pink and white, a geranium on her door-step and Mrs Moxon clattering a pail’. They were given gifts to celebrate their arrival: a marrow from Mrs Moxon, who lived opposite, and a bedspread from Mrs Way, who lived in the village and was newly employed as charwoman. On their first evening, they dined on fish and chips with Powys and his wife Violet at Beth Car, before going off separately to sleep – Sylvia at Mrs Way’s and Valentine at Florrie Legg’s, an arrangement that would last a week while they put the finishing touches to Miss Green. Over the next few days, they received deliveries of oil and coal and assembled the cooker, though Sylvia, while out walking William, was bitten on the wrist by a Great Dane from the vicarage. With her hand bandaged, she relied on Valentine to unpack boxes and light her cigarettes. ‘I lean more and more on her trousers,’ she wrote.
Finally, they moved in. ‘My first act was to have a bath,’ Sylvia wrote, before making up the beds, putting out soap, washing the crockery, and arranging the larder. In the evening, she and Valentine returned from a walk to find Mrs Moxon lighting the first fire, ‘with a gin-fuelled incantation of good-will upon us’. Miss Green was coming to life. ‘It burned merrily,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, ‘the room began to live, like a ship getting under way.’
But the next morning, Sylvia was confronted with the reality of sharing her home with another person. After living alone, she realised she must adjust to Valentine’s habits. Greeting her with a kiss, she felt Valentine’s body stiffen with embarrassment, and she was put out by her abstemious breakfast of a glass of water. She sensed Valentine’s reserve, and the extent to which she could pull away from the world. In their first days at Miss Green, they lived according to what she remembered later as a kind of ‘unintimate intimacy’, mitigating the suddenness of their proximity by preserving the decorum of near strangers. Ceremoniously, they established the routines which would provide the framework for their everyday lives. ‘From the first morning when Valentine in silk dressing-gown and green slippers laid and lit the fire, our parts were established, and we never contested them,’ Sylvia remembered later. From then on, Valentine cut firewood, shot rabbits with her rifle and drove the car, while Sylvia cooked and gardened. Mrs Way would occasionally ‘keep house’ (cleaning the cottage and laying out breakfast), and took away their laundry. But Sylvia and Valentine did most of the work themselves. Housekeeping, cleaning and tidying were domestic rituals; they had a performative, role-playing quality, but were also ways of feeling at home. Settling into her new life, Sylvia was pleased with the view of High Chaldon from her bed, the look of the candles in the mirror sconces, and her possessions placed carefully about. With Valentine, she had created a household that reflected her character. It was rustic but refined, coupling Chippendale with cross-stitch, Regency furniture with patchwork quilts. Her domestic aesthetic replicated the bric-a-brac atmosphere of her books, but it was also a statement of purpose, a style for living. Later, she remembered ‘conversing, not talking’ with Valentine during their first days at Miss Green, for the ‘formality of “conversing” matched the tall candlesticks, her Regency coffee-spoons, my egg-shell porcelain coffee cups, white outside, lined with sugar almond- pink. With these and the mirror we declared against the grated carrot, folk-pottery way of life.
Image © Art Institute of Chicago
Harriet Baker is shortlisted for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award. The winner will be announced on Tuesday 18th March, 2025.
