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30 years have passed since my parents, Leonard and Rosalind Ingrams, bought Garsington Manor in 1982, and their life there has added another chapter to its history. But though it seems difficult now to imagine they could have lived anywhere else, the story my mother tells of how she chanced upon the house would make you think the house may have instead found her. On another baking hot day in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where we were living at the time for my father's work, my mother was wrapping a china plate in the back pages of a newspaper when she noticed the words 'Garsington Manor' among the small-print adverts she was busily scrunching up. Her attention was caught as she had read of the house in books about its previous owner, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and the writers, artists and intellectuals who had visited the house during the wartime years. The advert stated that the house was up for sale, and though she had no intention of buying it, her curiousitywas piqued enough to chance a visit the next time she was back in England. She had no picture of what the house looked like, and she didn't know the part of Oxfordshire it was in. But
moments after she rang the doorbell she realised that she wanted to get to know it all much better. My father flew to join her on her hasty second visit. As they walked through the garden by themselves, seeing what beauty lay in Lady Ottoline's design, which had since fallen into some neglect, my mother attempted to keep hold of reality and asked my father how they could justify taking on such a huge responsibility. He replied by lifting her onto a yew hedge and saying: 'Because it will be fun.' That three-letter word is too simple to sum up the past 30 years in the house, but it can't be denied that a lot of fun has been had there by many people, thanks to my parents and their wish to share it. Between my father's passion for music and my mother's love of poetry and art, they created a place which has delighted many and which might have earned the approval of Lady Ottoline herself. My mother's eye decorated the house, and replanted the garden, bringing light and colour to both. She chose furniture slowly, over the years, and each piece would find its place under her hand,joining the mix of our family's furniture and the few pieces left behind by the previous
Top: attached to the east side of the house, the stone loggia, designed by Philip Tilden in the 19208, became part of the stage for summer operas. Above: Lady Ottoline had had this hallway painted a' dark peacock-blue-green'. Opposite: this side door brought performers from the house straight to the stage. 'In the early days we used to watch the operas from the attic window without being seen by the audience: Catherine says
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owner, Lady Wheeler-Bennett. Behind this eye of hers was a knowledge ofItaly and a sensitivity to Lady Ottoline's original vision for Garsington Manor, which had been influenced by visits to Florentine gardens and the Villa San Michele on Capri. My mother understood that Garsington's special quality stemmed not only from its visual beauty but also from its unconstrained atmosphere that risked being fettered by any smart chic that might suit a grander house. She chose wallpaper for many of the rooms, intuitively knowing what colours would suit which, and on the walls she hung pictures of places or people she knew, some painted by friends. For us (her children), this made the house feel like our home, instead of a famous house which we were respectfully preserving. This was important because it would have been easy to bow beneath the weight of the house's past. Originally a J acobean manor built in the 1620s for William Wickham on land once owned by Geoffrey Chaucer's son, Thomas, it remained the property of the Wickham family until the late 18th century. Its next owners never lived there, and it was rented to tenant farmers, remaining largely unaltered until it was sold in 1913to Lady
Ottoline and her husband, Philip, who came to live there with their daughter, [ulian, soon afterwards. They made few changes to the house, instead devoting themselves to the garden, making the existing fish pond into a formal Italianate lake, and commissioning the architect Philip Tilden to design the stone loggia on the east side of the house. Between 1914 and 1928 Lady Ottoline made Garsington Manor home to one of the best-known cultural coteries of the 20th century, the Bloomsbury group. The list of those who visited - and in some cases, wrote about - the house is extraordinary: Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, EM Forster, DH Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Lytton Strachey, LP Hartley, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Andre Gide, Wyndham Lewis and all the Sitwells. In addition to these writers, artists and intellectuals such as Clive Bell,Mark Gertler, Dorothy Brett, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell, JM Keynes, Henry Lamb, Herbert Asquith and Bertrand Russell were all frequent guests. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920) and Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), both contain vivid portraits of Garsington and its goings-on,
Top: this half of the kitchen was originally the servants' dining room, part of the extension made to the house in the 19305. The french windows, put in by Catherine's parents, lead out to the main lawn. Above: the larder is also 19305.Opposite: on the landing is an inlaid chest of drawers that Rosalind bought in Syria. Further up the Jacobean staircase is a doll's house made for her out of fruit crates in Rome, where she grew up
and further references to it appear in many poems and short stories. Luckily, as a child growing up there, neither I nor my friends understood the importance of any of the house's previous inhabitants, and I did not feel self-conscious until adolescence hit and my reading widened a little. My experience ofliving in Garsington as a child was of going to school and making friends locally. Rather than being tucked away in its own grounds, the house lies along a main road, and my parents always understood that it was as important to the village as it was to us. To the tradition of the annual fete and the summer play in the gardens, they added barn dances, village weddings, local history meetings and 'Gardens Open' days. The next addition was perhaps the most ambitous of all. Garsington Opera was also started almost by chance - when in the summer of 1989 my father invited an amateur orchestra to which he belonged to perform in front of the loggia. Their families sat on the grass below on a fine June evening, and by the end of the concert it was clear that this had to happen again. The next year, when fundraising for the Oxford Playhouse was an important local
concern, it seemed natural to my parents that they should invite a touring opera company to perform Mozart' sMarriage ofFigaro on the same terrace in aid of the charity. It turned out that there was a huge appetite for outdoor singing among summer flowers, and my father quickly set about establishing his own company, Garsington Opera, which continued at the house until 2010. While the audience enjoyed the gardens, the opera singers and production crew took over the house, and for three months each summer nearly every room became either a dressing room or a production room. Privacy was non-existent and my mother would try to set down boundaries between opera and family life: as a teenager I was often sent off to friends' houses to revise for exams. Five years after my father's sudden death in 2005, my mother took the difficult decision to ask the opera company to move to a new home as its success meant that it could only grow bigger. She was clear that Garsington should remain a house, rather than a permanent opera house. Her decision has allowed for a new chapter in the house's history to begin a To contact Garsington Opera, ring 01865 368201, or visit garsingtonopera.org
Top: Rosalind painted the Blue Room's Queen Anne panelling. The Victorian bed came from Catherine's great-grandmother. Above: the small cupola roof, bunt in the 16205, is visible behind the front of the house, with its towering yew hedges. Opposite: the downstairs loo is covered in Pugin wallpaper, while the chair and curtains are William Morris. On the walls are costume designs for some of the early operas staged here
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