Of the one or two questions in life that I prefer to duck, perhaps the most frequent comes from that daunting and amiable creature, the Bloomsbury enthusiast. “What was she like?” they ask.

In an essay on Dr. Johnson's friend, Mrs Hester Thrale—one of the last things she wrote—Virginia says, “The more we know of people the less we can sum them up. Just as we think we hold the bird in our hand, the bird fl utters off.” You won't be surprised when I tell you that it never crossed my mind, all those years ago, that one day I should have to stand up in front of an illustrious audience, many of them “Woolf specialists,” and speak to them about those pivotal members of Bloomsbury, Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Leonard was my uncle, one of my father, Philip's, elder brothers.

I wonder if by a concerted effort of imagination, we can go back mentally over seventy years to the late 1930s, the eve of the Second World War, when I was a schoolboy of about twelve or thirteen. Let us visit the small Sussex village of Rodmell, where Leonard and Virginia had their country house. They had bought it in 1919 and until the war came, used it as a weekend and holiday home. Most of the village consists of The Street, as it's called, which runs off the main Lewes–Newhaven road. On either side The Street is lined with chalkbound fl int garden walls, behind which are cottages, most of them inhabited by farm workers. This is a time before Rodmell, like so many villages, became gentrified dormitories where residents commute daily to London. Then it had a Post Office, a general store, a blacksmiths and a pub. Only the pub has survived.

After a few minutes’ walk we reach a long, two–storey wooden clapboard house on the right, which lies a few yards back from the road. Pushing open the garden gate of Monks House is the signal for what seems like a pack of furiously barking dogs to descend upon us.