"Waving at the Gardener," the 2009 Asham Award collection of short stories, will be published by Bloomsbury in September.
Another home once owned by Virginia Woolf is in the news. Earlier this month, the news was that the Round House is up for sale. Now the news is that the site of Asham House is full of trash.
Asham House, Woolf’s country home in Sussex from 1912 to 1919, was demolished in 1994 so that a landfill could expand. The Virginia Woolf Society opposed the demolition, but it took place anyway.
The amount paid in compensation to the East Sussex County Council was used in part to set up the Asham Literary Endowment Trust.
Now the 60-acre landfill — which has taken in around 250,000 tons of rubbish each year — is full. It will close today for what operators call a “substantial restoration programme.”
The program will restore the site to a “Sussex Downland standard, in keeping with the surrounding environment and landscape, providing a high quality habitat for plants and animals,” according to a story in the Mid Sussex Times.
When Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived in Asham House, the legend was that the house was haunted. This became the basis for Woolf’s two-page short story “A Haunted House,” which tells the tale of a ghostly couple who glide through the rooms of their well-loved home at night.
Ironically, the gentle ghostly couple were searching for “buried treasure.” But neither Woolf nor her fictional characters could have imagined the tons of trash that would be buried on the site over the course of 15 years.
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I stayed at Asham house three times when my uncle,Leslie Tilman was a chemist at the blue circle cement works .The Tilman,s three sons insisted on telling my two sisters and I that the house was haunted,DEFINATELY. I have never believed in ghosts and when offered the most haunted room in the house I reveled at having it to myself.My younger sister remembers thinking how very brave I was. We have a family photo of us all outside the fancy french windows and uncle Les behind ,face covered in shaving cream pretending to be a ghost. I remember an unusual,round or octagonal shaped lounge at the end of the house with furniture in the centre of the room as well as a deep cellar where we did look for treasure but only found drink! ,There were tall trees fairly close to the house with noisy rooks nesting and a bank down near the lane where we saw glow worms. We used to play a good game of cricket in an old chalk pit nearby although Aunty Phyllis was always worried that we might fall down various holes. Aunty Phyllis was used to living near cement works because of her husbands job and she spent ten minutes every morning dusting the chalk dust . As I remember She did’nt have many ornaments.
As I child I was not particularly literary so the connections with Virginia Woolfe passed me by so it is interesting for me to now know where the ghost stories probably came from, Virginia Woolfe’s fertile imagination.