161. An England Travelogue

KIM: Hi everyone. Welcome to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes, and we're squeezing today's episode in during our lunch hour. But I'm actually really excited for this one because Amy is going to tell us all about her recent trip to England. 

AMY: Um, I think maybe listeners might start to groan a little bit because personally, that's the last thing that I enjoy doing is listening to people talk about their vacations. I promise, well, actually, I cannot promise 100%, but I hope that this episode will not be as tedious as all that. I've already been to England a couple times, so I didn't do any of the standard landmarks, you know, well known that everybody kind of has to hit up. I had an opportunity to really explore some lesser known sites. And yes, I may have even encountered a few lost ladies!

KIM: Oh, I can't wait to hear more about that. I'm so excited.

AMY: Okay. So highlights: day one, Hampstead Heath. You've been there, right? 

KIM: Yeah. I used to live near Hampstead Heath, so I went there all the time. 

AMY: It's so pretty. We went to this really cool modern home that's in Hampstead: Number 2 Willow Road. It was the home of an architect named Erno Goldfinger. It's in this modern style that sets it apart from all the other architecture in Hampstead, right? And remember our friend Ian Fleming, who likes to throw squid at his girlfriends? 

KIM: Yes. 

AMY: Well he, when this home was being built, did not like the look of it. (I guess a lot of neighbors protested and took it up with the neighborhood council or whatever.) And Ian Fleming was so annoyed about the whole thing that he wound up naming his one villain in the James Bond “Goldfinger.” 

KIM: I was gonna make a joke about that! About Goldfinger and James Bond. Oh, wow. And there is a connection. That's so funny. Okay.

AMY: Anyway, we're on a group tour there. We were told explicitly when we walked in, “Do not touch anything.” This one guy could not stop touching everything. He kept getting yelled at.

KIM: Citizens arrest time!

AMY: It was shocking. I am such a rule follower. 

KIM: Oh, totally. Me, too. I was with my old college roommate, Meg, I should say. So she and I were silently horrified. The guide kept telling him, “Sir, please stop.” Anyway, this house, 2 Willow Road, is my first connection to a Lost Lady of Lit because prior to leaving on the trip, I was reading an article. There's a new biography out on Leona Carrington, who wrote, um, The Hearing Trumpet, was a kind of surrealist writer. Anyway, I was reading the review for this book and it mentioned that she met her husband, the painter Max Ernst, at the home of her friends, Erno and Ursula Goldfinger. And I was like, “That's where I'm going! That's 2 Willow Road!” So Leonora Carrington met her husband at a party at this house. 

KIM: Mm-hmm. .Yeah, the Lost Lady serendipity continues. 

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. after that we walked into Hampstead Heath, we looked at Kenwood House. I did not go in Kenwood House because there's only so many houses that my travel companion Meg can do, and we had already done one that day, so I was like, alright. But I would've loved to go in. Keats' home is in Hampstead Heath also. 

KIM: Oh, yes, yes. 

AMY: I didn't have time for it. And also I was spending way too much time, keeping my eyes peeled for Harry Styles, because apparently it's his neck of the woods. Did not see him. Alright, moving on to Day Two. The John Soane’s Museum. He was one of England's greatest Neoclassical architects. This was his house. It's beautiful. It's got all these cool skylights, but what's really interesting about it is he was a collector of all these classical antiquities, from coins to full-size sculptures. 

KIM: The kind of hoarder we like.

AMY: Yes, but I wouldn't even say hoarder because he has it all meticulously placed. I am just marveling at everything I'm seeing. Also he's got this art gallery in the house. It's like all these hidden panels, so a wall that you can actually open up then there's another layer of paintings inside. So this guy owned William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress. 

KIM: Oh my God! 

AMY: Hidden in one of these hidden compartments. So I think they could tell that I was super geeking out about everything in this house, so they opened the cabinets and they took you through each painting and explained the whole story. 

KIM: I have to go there.

AMY: I know. I can't stop raving about it. It's so beautiful. Alright, after the John Soane’s Museum, I got to meet up with one of our guests for lunch: Lucy Scholes. 

KIM: I am so jealous about this. We love her. 

AMY: She did our episodes on Rosamond Lehmann and Kay Dick, and how great is this? So she picked a restaurant called Toklas, as in Alice Toklas. And I was like, oh, what a great coincidence. And she's like, “Of course I picked that for Lost Ladies of Lit!” So anyway, great seeing her. She says, hi, Kim. Then I went to this really cool place. It's like a tiny storefront, but it's called Novelty Automation, and I saw it on Instagram… 

KIM: Oh my God. That is so you.

AMY: What? 

KIM: I just already… Novelty Automation.

AMY: I know totally. You go in and you buy tokens, and then there's a bunch of, like, arcade games, I would call them, but they're mechanical, and then, um, you just play all the games and they're like… I'll give you an example of one. It's this cage and it has a ferocious dog's head that's probably made out of paper mache or something. And you have to stick your hand in the cage, and then a meter comes on that shows how courageous you are and you start hearing the dog panting and growling and stuff. And you're seeing how long you can keep your hand held in this cage. Then at the last second, the dog snaps and then of course you pull your

KIM: Or do you?

Right. Exactly. Maybe a better person than I could have lasted. 

AMY: But yeah, like it's all super creative. I was obsessed with this. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: I would've gone back if I had had more time. 

KIM: Have you been, there's one in San Francisco and it's definitely got a creepy side to it, but it's basically old carnival-type games like that. 

AMY: Okay. 

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: It's kind of like that, like the Zoltar machine kind of thing. They all have that kind of vibe. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And I don't even wanna talk about any of the other ones 'cause so much of it is about the surprise.

KIM: Yeah. Yeah. 

AMY: So then that night, we went to this place called the Viktor Wynd Museum. It's in an absent bar, and it's this very tiny museum that's packed, I mean, thousands.

That sounds crazy, but it's really a lot of weird curiosities. it's like

real weird 

stuff.

And I'm talking, 

it's not for children 

and it is not for the faint of heart. Like some of 

it is hard to look at. Taxidermied animals out the 

wazoo. There's like a whole, remember how we talked in the, um, Jurassic Technology episode about the, um, 

house flies that were dressed up like ballerinas. So there's a housefly picnic at the Viktor Wynd Museum.

It's a bunch of flies that are having a picnic have little 

wine glasses 

KIM: Oh my God. You found all the perfect places. 

AMY: I found 

the perfect places for me. 

Amy: if you're into all those curiosities and stuff. Sometimes my tastes run

a little to the strange

for sure.

KIM:: yeah, hidden because it's like meeting you at first you would not realize that, but you have depth. That's 

AMY: Viktor Wynd is a real guy who just has collected all this stuff for a long time and has it all set up here. Um, he has a whole section on Stephen Tennant, the famous English

dandy, I guess what, however you wanna describe him. He would, 

So while I was looking at the Stephen Tennant displays, . Another little framed photograph caught my eye and lo and behold, who do we find again? But 

Leonora 

Carrington. 

KIM: wow. 

AMY: Apparently she was friends with Viktor Wynd. I was like, what are the odds? Like two days in a row, Leonora Carrington is popping up. It just made me think we're supposed to do an episode on her clearly. cause it's like she was shouting to me. Yes. Okay, so I went to this immersive theater experience by a theater company called Punchdrunk. The name of the performance was The Burnt City, which is basically ancient Greece, like like Troy, Agammemnon, like a combination of two ancient tragedies that they take and my friend, Meg, has already been to one of these in New York City. She's like, “it's really cool. Just trust me.” She started being kind of hesitant to tell me, and I was like, “is this gonna be something super weird?” And so you get in, it's this dark warehouse. They give you a mask because the mask is the only way to differentiate the audience from the performers, because the are like walking around 

you. There's all these rooms. 

It's like a haunted house, like you walk in, you're not even supposed to stay with your friends or anything. You're supposed to go totally on your own. You can open any door, you can open the books on the shelves. You can open the drawers on the nightstand. 

KIM: That’s amazing. It is like our kind of Disneyland. 

AMY: It was a little bit unnerving. And then there's lots of like, performative dance done by very sinewy, half naked people. Sometimes fully naked people. 

KIM: Okay. 

AMY: Um, I was kind of done by the end of the two hours. 

KIM: Oh, I'm intrigued. 

AMY: But I'm glad I did it. Um, Uh, I will jump ahead to day four. We did some other fun stuff on day three, but I'm just gonna jump ahead to Blenheim Palace 'cause this takes me back to our episode Number 24 on The Gilded Age and Consuelo Vanderbilt. That's where she lived. So there were tons of pictures of Consuelo everywhere, like beautiful giant paintings of her. I think we talked about the fact that she didn't really love living at Blenheim Palace. And I kind of get why, because she was an American coming to marry the Duke of Marlborough. This house, I mean, it's a palace. It's bigger than Buckingham Palace. It dwarfs her giant mansion from Newport, Rhode Island, right? Like, it makes her Newport home look like a tiny house. Um, so it was interesting to see, but I got why she found it very kind of cold and oppressive to live there. It's also the home where Winston Churchill was born. So if you remember Jenny Churchill, Winston's mother. She was staying there for a while, like before their house in London was ready, and Winston was born “prematurely,” I say in quotation marks, um, 

KIM: Mm-hmm. One of those.

AMY: Yeah. One of those, probably. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: So, yeah, after Blenheim Palace, I had cream tea with another of our former guests Simon Thomas of the Tea or Books? podcast.

KIM: We love him. 

AMY: Yeah. He was on to discuss O the Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith 

KIM: Yeah. I hope we'll have him on again. 

AMY: Yeah, I think he's gonna come back on, you know why? Because while I was visiting him, he gave me a new book from the British Library Series that he consults on, and this one is by Angela Milne called One Year's Time. 

KIM: Mm. 

AMY: It's really good. She is actually the niece of A.A. Milne of Winnie the Pooh fame. 

KIM: Okay, 

AMY: I think it would be cool to have him back on and discuss that. And he's, uh, just as charming in person as he was on our podcast recording.

KIM: Aww.

AMY: We almost got attacked by bees while we were eating, but we were fine. We had to retreat indoors. but yeah, fun visiting with him. And that launched the start of my visit to The Cotswolds, 'cause he's kind of on the edge of that area. The Cotswolds are called An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty 

KIM: Hmm. 

AMY: It's not a misnomer it's like the, like the quintessential idea of an English village. So like the stone houses, the thatched roof cottages, the little rolling streams, the um, kissing gates. All that kind of stuff that you think of in England, or like a Thomas Hardy novel or something like that. Unrelenting beauty. At one point we were, um, parking to go to our next place that I'm gonna talk about. But there was a field of sheep and we got out of the car and we were totally in the way of everyone pulling into the parking lot. And so the person like waving people into the lot was like, “ladies, you have to get outta the way.” My friend was like, “Sorry, we just, we don't have sheep in Brooklyn!” Like, we were just like, everything was stopping us dead in our tracks. We were so excited. So in the Cotswolds, we went to this place called Snowshill Manor. Another architect. His name was Charles Wade, and he was also an artist, very eccentric. I would kind of describe him as like an architect version of Willy Wonka. I mean, he even kind of looks like that in some of pictures… he likes to dress up and wear weird hats and things like that. So he had this, um, manor house that he. I think he redesigned it. I'm not sure that he built it from scratch, but he used it to house 22,000 items that he collected in his lifetime, which I use the term “hoarder” with one of the docents, and they got a little bit outraged with me, so we're not supposed to call him a hoarder. He collected things and he had 'em all curated, sort of like John Soane, again, like curated very nicely. But you would just walk into a room and it would be filled with spinning wheels. You’d walk into another room and it was all baby prams or Regency costumes or suits of armor. Everywhere your eye rested, it was on something fabulous that you were just like, “Oh my God, what?” His motto was “Let nothing perish.” So he just didn't like throwing anything out. He actually didn't even live in the house. The house was for the objects and he lived in a little cottage in the backyard, like a shed that didn't have any electricity or anything. And apparently, Queen Mary visited Snowshill Manor in 1937, and she said that of all the collection, Mr. Wade was the most remarkable piece in the collection. So he was quite a character. Virginia Woolf visited too at one point, and she got annoyed because she didn't know when to leave to catch her train because he would not tell her the time. And there was like more than a hundred clocks in the house, but they were all set to different times. So that's where the Willy Wonka thing is coming in and she was getting really frustrated. So yeah, very much a character. I love him. But while I was visiting this museum, there was yet another instance of a guy touching stuff. There was a weird children's toy, and he didn't understand quite how it worked, and he just reached out and grabbed it and started spinning it, despite the sign. It had a sign that said, “Extremely fragile. Do not touch.” There's no way you should have been touching any of this. But once again, I was appalled. Okay. That night, we wound our way to Stratford on Avon and we caught a production of Macbeth

KIM: Oh my God. 

AMY: At the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

KIM: One of our favorite plays. 

AMY: I'm making you sick with envy.

KIM: Oh, this is, yeah, this is, I'm, I'm like, happy for you, but also like, oh, when am I gonna get to do this?

AMY: Okay, next day, I decided we had to take a pilgrimage to go see the grave of Nancy Mitford. If you guys remember we did an early episode on her with her biographer, Laura Thompson. It wasn't too hard to find. She's buried in a church yard. It's Nancy, then next to her are her sisters, Unity and Diana. So all three of their headstones in a row. I was hoping I was gonna have this quiet moment of reflection.

KIM: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

AMY: There was a gardener mowing the grass like five feet from us. And so I was super annoyed, but then I thought about it after the fact and I was like, “No, Nancy does not want a quiet contemplative moment at her grave. Like, that's the last thing she would want.” She would, like, play some sort of joke or whatever. So like the lawnmower actually wound up being perfect.

KIM: Right.

AMY: Um, went and drove by the two Mitford homes. Um, the one we kind of saw driving up on like kind of a, a higher road and we just looked down and there was all these rolling hills, and then you could see Asthall, the whole big sprawling mansion in the distance. And that was amazing. And then I wanted to also see Swinbrook, which was another house that they lived in, so the GPS took me right to it. Take a right here. So I take a right and all of a sudden I realize I drove up their driveway! 

KIM: Oh, they're probably used to it. 

AMY: A cooler person would've totally gotten out and knocked on the door and became best friends with whoever lives there now, but I was like, “Throw it in reverse! We're trespassing!”

KIM: Rule follower. Yep. 

AMY: But that, basically, those were the highlights of my trip, I guess I would say. 

KIM: Wow. 

Amy: So thanks for coming along on my journey. I’ve already shared a few. photos from the trip on our Lost Ladies of Lit Facebook forum page. But I'll add a few more and we'll include a link for all the sites that I mentioned. And, we'll be back next week with another full-length episode. Our lunch break has ended.

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone. Our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and KIM: Askew.