LONG LIVE GREAT BARDFIELD: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF TIRZAH GARWOOD

When Tirzah Garwood was 18 she went to Eastbourne School of Art and here she was taught by the artist Eric Ravilious. Over the next four years she did many wood engravings and these were widely praised and several were displayed by the Society of Wood Engravers. Alas, after she and Eric were married in 1930 a large part of her time was spent on domestic chores. In 1935 she had the first of her three children. In 1942 – the year she was operated on for breast cancer – she wrote her autobiography (in the evening, after the children were in bed);  this has now been published with the title Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood.

When she began her autobiography Tirzah wrote: ‘I hope, dear reader, that you may be one of my descendants, but as I write a German aeroplane has circled round above my head taking photographs of the damage that yesterday’s raiders have done, reminding me that there is no certainty of our survival. If you are not one of my descendants then all I ask of you is that you love the country as I do, and when you come into a room, discreetly observe its pictures and its furnishings, and sympathise with painters and craftsmen.’

Tirzah quickly found her own inimitable tone in Long Live Great Bardfield: unshowy, understated, uninhibited, matter of fact, human (so human) and funny. ‘I had bought the tortoises from Woolworth’s to save them from death in the same spirit that we [later] offered our home to German refugees.’ Her story is important not just as the portrait of a group of artists in the interwar years (why this particular outbreak of talent hasn’t been made into a film one can’t imagine) but because it expresses her individuality and brilliance and humanity as she chronicles the life of a woman struggling to lead an artistic life amidst the constraints of childcare and housework. In the words of  Virginia Woolf, ‘How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom.  Always the bell rings and the baker calls’.