Grace went down to Charleston one month after she started working for the Bells, in August 1920. This was to be her home, on and off, for the next fifty years. The farmhouse lies at the end of a deeply rutted pale chalk track, half a mile long. It has a faintly Sleeping Beauty air, softened at the edges by feathery elms and weeping willows, half buried beneath a tangle of pink roses climbing up its ochre facade, topped by a steeply pitched red-tiled roof. Cows chew the cud in a large flint barn to one side, filling the air with the fermented, sharp tang of fresh manure. Behind is a cornfield, then the gently rising heft of the South Downs. In front are a pond prone to duckweed, a lichened apple orchard where children love to hide and a tousled, north-facing walled garden perfumed in summer with syringa, sweet peas, tobacco flowers and stocks.
Visitors come to Charleston today primarily for the farmhouse interior: all those walls, tables and chairs covered in exuberantly painted nudes, vases and swirling patterns in blues and yellows, midnight greys and earthy reds: the fruit of Vanessa and Duncan’s excessive creative energy. But Grace would have seen none of this as she entered the side door into the servants’ quarters. A dark little hall, more of a vestibule really, opened to the right on to the dining room and to the left on to the kitchen. Here was the heart of operations, the only place in the house one could ever get properly warm. The kitchen at Charleston stood in stark contrast to the rest of the house. It was grubbily whitewashed, low-ceilinged and small-windowed, with a temperamental coke-fuelled stove and a gritty, sloping concrete floor. Lead pipes snaked along the wall over a small sink. A large scrubbed table, a place of work, stood in the middle, around which people would congregate.
Grace was shown up a steep and creaking double flight of stairs to the attic bedrooms, where camp beds were lined up in a makeshift dormitory under the dusty rafters. They had one day to get the house right before Mrs Bell arrived with the children: one day to air the many mattresses by heaving them out of the windows, to dust away the cobwebs of the past few months, to sweep up the mouse droppings and scrub the brick passageways down on their knees. In Angelica’s imagination it was a swift and cheerful process:
At the beginning of the holidays it took the house one short night to wake from its torpor: by morning, the servants, whose names–Grace, Louie, Lottie, Nelly–were so typical of their generation, had it singing like the kettle on the hob; without them, Vanessa’s creation would have been impossible.
But hours before one could even make a pot of tea, the stove had to be cleaned out and stoked with coal from the cellar, which might–or might not–have been ordered by Mrs Bell in time for their arrival.
What did Grace think, on entering the family’s exuberantly decorated rooms for the first time? She doesn’t say. After one month at Gordon Square strange things had, no doubt, quickly become ordinary. But really, it was as if a child had been let loose with several fat brushes and half a dozen cans of paint. The furniture was covered in experimental swirls, dots, chequered squares and overlapping hoops. The walls were similarly painted, roughly so, with damp spots now breaking through from beneath, crumbling the plasterwork to dust. Portly women splayed their legs on door panels; acrobats tumbled brightly down cupboards. A slightly shocking sense of fearlessness danced across the surface of every room. The effect on all entering, it is said, was one of intense liberation.
This was the reputation of Charleston. It was a ‘paradise on earth’ of sensual pleasures and freewheeling conversation into the small hours, of music on the wind-up gramophone and a relaxed attitude in the bedrooms. The 1920s are remembered by those who were there as the heyday of Charleston, with its ‘holiday camp’ house parties. But was it really like that? By the 1920s Vanessa Bell led a celibate life while Duncan pursued his adventures elsewhere, ever nervous of censure. Angelica, a child at the time, distinctly remembered an atmosphere of constraint, even gloom in the house. She wrote of the adults’ ‘lack of physical warmth and animal spirits’, recalling her mother in particular as unable to show ‘human warmth’. This was compared to the ‘warm, earthy humour’ of the ‘harum-scarum’ girls in the kitchen. Grace’s summer diary for 1924 similarly suggests a more inhibited atmosphere. ‘Rained like the devil, & I laid on the bed, & read Hajji Baba. Mrs Virginia Woolf arrived after tea to the great joy of the household, as she is very amusing, & helps to cheer them up.’ (Her abiding memory of Mrs Woolf was of a ‘very frivolous’ lady–not the melancholy neurotic of popular imagination.)
By contrast, Grace’s diary conjures servants’ quarters echoing with shrieks of laughter, practical jokes and flirtatious, physical horseplay. The kitchen was where the real sexual anarchy dwelt at Charleston, among what Vanessa called the ‘crop-haired generation’ of maids. ‘Arthur West, Will White, E. Kemp, Spenser Wooller called in & started chasing me, they were a terrible nuisance’, Grace writes in September 1924. ‘Tom West told Mrs Upp he was my young man & tried to kiss me, thereupon I called upon God to let me die, & he could not kiss me & gave it up as a bad hope. Arthur West did, the rotter. Mrs Upp so amused she made water, & had to go upstairs. Alice very mad.’ Teenagers Julian and Quentin lurked in the kitchen, watching the goings-on between the ‘kitcheners’ and local lads, waiting for a chance to insert themselves.
At the end of that long, playful summer, the boys persuaded the 21-year-old Grace to come on a slightly risqué adventure. ‘Julian & Quentin very set on my climbing the beacon to see the sunrise tomorrow’, she wrote on 5 September 1924. Charleston stands isolated at the foot of Firle Beacon, the highest point in the range of Downs that extends, ‘like a row of half-submerged ancient elephants’, as Angelica put it, from the River Cuck in the east to the Ouse in the west. Julian and Quentin–heavy-breathing, fantasising adolescents of 16 and 14–hatched a plan to scale its summit.
And so it happened: Grace and a blushing Louie Dunnett, Angelica’s nursemaid, met the two boys in the still small hours outside the back door and set off together through the dewy cornfield. One hour later and warm with the effort, the four sat close together on top of the Beacon and watched the clouds turn ‘a gorgeous Salmon Pink’, wrote Grace. ‘We came back by the Winding Path, and arrived back at Charleston, after Julian, Quentin & I had paid each other extravagant compliments, about 7.30. Alice looked mad.’ The expedition was recorded in their home-made newspaper, the Charleston Bulletin, but as the boys told it just the two ‘intrepid explorers’ went up to the top. That two young maids came with them was too complicated, too unsettling to laugh off to the adults. Friendship with the servants was encouraged by Vanessa, but not intimacy.