Virginia Woolf,To Be Twenty (Avere vent’anni) on Pancakes and Porridge

“When in a good and merry mood Trisy would seize a dozen eggs, and a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, and then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, and catch them as they fell in dozens and dozens and dozens of pancakes. But her porridge was a very different affair … It dolloped out of a black pan in lumps of mortar. It stank: it stuck.”

—From a series of sketches Woolf wrote for her nephews in their paper, The Charleston Bulletin. Illustration by Quentin Bell.