Ditchingham Hall, to which this garden belongs, is in Norfolk: an early Georgian house of red brick, which was bought by my great-grandfather and enlarged by my grandfather, who reactivated the old kiln where the bricks for the house had been made. Georgian bricks were smaller than modern ones. Gramps had the bricks for the extension of the house made the same size as the old ones, as well as of the same clay, so the join between old and new, still perceptible if you knew where to look when I was a child, has now become invisible. The house looks exactly as though it was originally built the size it now is.
When I was a child, in the 1920s and 1930s, the garden was looked after by scrawny, bearded Mr Wiseman – so like Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor that they might have been brothers – with two men under him. It was large, much of it sloping slightly down from the house (more steeply so towards the lake), and it didn’t exist only for ornamental purposes, but also to support the house. As well as lawns, shrubberies and a rose-garden there were stables, barns, pigsties, potting sheds and glasshouses. Because it was a pre-Jekyll garden, the rose beds were the only flower beds except for those for picking, tucked away in the kitchen garden. The glasshouses were the vinery, the nectarine house, the melon and cucumber house, and the big one full of colour, which was called Gran’s greenhouse and was for the flowers in pots which came into the drawing room. And there may have been another small one behind Gran’s, presumably for propagation.
The parts of the garden were distinct. There was the terrace with its view over the front park and lake, onto which the library opened from a door which used to be the house’s front door before my grandfather changed things round. The terrace felt more like house than garden because one stepped out onto it so easily, and after breakfast Gran used to sit on its stone steps while she brushed Lola, her poodle. It was a place for civilized behaviour, where we interacted with our grown-ups more than in most places. The urns that stood at intervals on its wall had been brought back from Italy by Gramps, and small pink roses, with a lot of heavily scented honeysuckle, clambered over the walls – on summer evenings, through the bedroom windows over looking the terrace there used to come delicious waves of honeysuckle. At one corner of the terrace a path led off along the side of the house to the big shrubbery that sloped down to the stackyard, where the outdoor privy intended for the men servants was concealed. After breakfast Gramps would tuck The Times under his arm and proceed in a stately way to that privy, which he happened to prefer at that time of day, and if you noticed him going past a window you must pretend you hadn’t. (I’m not sure if that is a memory of my own or one handed down by a cousin six years older than I am who knew things from before I was born.) At the terrace’s other end, round the corner on the gravel sweep leading to the front door, was the cedar tree. There were other cedars, but this was the cedar tree, magnificent and surely everlasting, which gave the house’s front view its beauty. (Of course nothing is ‘everlasting’. Eventually the cedar’s roots began to threaten the house’s stability, so it had to go.)
Beyond the gravel stretched the lawns, the area for hospitality, which included the Mound, an oddly unnecessary little Edwardian feature which small children liked to roll down, but which had no other conceivable purpose, and, opposite the front door, the tennis courts, with two handsome cedars beyond and the Spreading Tree on the far right. The Spreading Tree must have been a very early Victorian, or perhaps even Georgian, folly – it was a larch, with a trunk stout enough to indicate considerable age. At the height of a tall man it had been fiercely trained to grow sideways in all directions (how this was done, God knows), supported where necessary by posts, so that it had ended up looking like a large, feathery green table, perfect for climbing into because its flattened and intertwined branches provided several comfortable hammocky places where you could lie reading, unseen by anything but a passing bird.
The lawn tapered off to the right, separated from the park by inconspicuous iron railings. Nowadays there is a beautiful herbaceous border between the lawn and the shrubbery, but in my childhood there was a gravel path, with a summer house tucked into the shrubbery and Gran’s rose garden on the lawn side. The rose garden consisted of six, or perhaps eight, long narrow beds, each containing a different kind of tea rose, with between them pillars swathed in climbing roses. The rose garden was the place where Gran, who knew a great deal about gardening, actually got her hands on it. Near a back door of the house was a small room called the Flower Room because vases were kept and flowers were arranged there (and wet dogs were dried off). In it Gran kept her leather gauntlets, secateurs, trowel and a big watering can with a long brass syringe. At the first sight of a greenfly that can was filled with a mixture of water and soft soap, and out she went to give the roses a good drench. No chemical ever touched them, and they were always radiantly healthy. I think Gran pruned them, too – all her daughters grew up to be skilled pruners.
The part of the shrubbery next to the Mound was shaded by a tree as splendid in its way as the cedar: a glorious great beech. Beeches, alas, are comparatively short-lived trees. Many of them were planted in the park and garden, all at the same time during the eighteenth century when the grounds were first laid out, and they really were the glory of the park (though no individual tree was more splendid than this one, so near the house) . . . and now: all gone, not because of anyone’s decision, just because of their age. We used to have tea under that tree, and once we acted a play there, the first play I ever was in. I think I was a mushroom – not a speaking part, so I can’t have forgotten my lines, but I do have a dim sad little memory of having to be forgiven for getting something wrong – perhaps the mushroom had hopped about. Which didn’t prevent me from loving that tree so much that a few years later I stood underneath it trying passionately to will my ghost to haunt that place after I was dead.
My grandfather’s extension of the house had made its ground-plan U-shaped instead of square. Every spring six big pots of fuchsias were set out in the space between the wings. The back door of the original house was never used. ‘Our’ back door was in the wing on the left (as you looked back at the house). Beside it were hung mackintoshes and several hooded loden cloaks, which could be used by anyone, as could the several pairs of ‘jemimas’ standing in a row beneath them. Jemimas, which I’ve never seen or heard of elsewhere, were clumsy overshoes made of waterproofed felt, fastening over the instep with a latchet. Galoshes were considered sissy, whereas jemimas, although they looked much more old-womanish, were perfectly acceptable on manly feet. The last door into the house in the other wing led into the laundry, which once a week became a quite alarming steamy hell when an old woman called Mrs Rayner came to do the house’s washing in an enormous copper. Some of it was hung to dry on racks on the floor above the copper, but most of it dried on the bleach, which was a feature of most large houses.
The bleach was a grassy space slightly larger than a tennis court where linen was hung or spread to be whitened by sunlight. Ours was sheltered from the wide gravel way down to the stables by a tall and solid yew hedge. At the bleach’s end were the kennels, so-called in spite of the fact that no dog was ever kept in them. When my cousin Pen and I were respectively about twelve and ten, we kept our goats in the kennels, or rather we milked them and put them to bed there. All day they were tethered out of doors in places carefully chosen by us for their lushness. We had goats because I was supposed for a time to be consumptive, or nearly so (a false alarm), and cow’s milk was thought to be the cause of it, which it well might have been in those days. The scare was one for which I was grateful: because of it I spent a whole year living with Gran rather than just visiting her frequently as the rest of the family did. Living there, and not having to do lessons: my idea of pure heaven, and at that age a year seems like for ever. Apart from a few setbacks, I have been lucky all my life, and that unforgettable year was the start of it.
The stables came next – or rather the top stables, built of the same brick as the house, and sedately overlooking a small lawn round which the back drive swirled. The first door into the stables led to the room where the house’s electricity was made, too mystifying to be familiar. Next came the harness room, Seeley’s stronghold. He had been my great-grandfather’s coachman, so he went on being called coachman rather than groom all his life. When my great-grandparents came to Norfolk from Yorkshire, Seeley rode the two grey carriage horses all the way down, so I suppose my great-grandmother’s brougham must have been purchased after the move. There were two stalls and one big loose box in the stable, the big box being Susan’s. She was the smart little black hackney mare who pulled Gramps’s dog cart and covered the twelve miles to Norwich within an hour. When they reached Norwich Gramps would stop at a respectable pub on its outskirts, where Susan was well looked after while he walked about his business in the city. The two stalls were usually inhabited by hunters belonging to my uncle who came and went complete with their own groom. The last part of the stables was the coach house, which quite soon became the garage, where the chauffeur, Mr Youngman, cherished my grandparents’ boringly sober car. (Youngman, with his wife and daughters, lived in a cottage which had a plaster cherub above its front door, which for some time my brother and I thought was Mr Youngman as a baby.)
Our ponies, when not out to grass as they mostly were, lived in the lower stables. Since both Pen and I, and later my sister Patience, were horse-mad, these were important. There was a steep drop at that point, so we reached the lower stables either by a flight of steps at the corner of the bleach, or by the back drive which circled down to it round a grassy hillock on which there grew a handsome walnut tree. Backing onto the top stables there was a row of smaller loose boxes, each with a halfdoor, looking out onto a rough square. On the left there was a large coach house where the dog carts were kept (later assorted cars). Opposite there was a big black barn where for a long time Great-granny’s brougham and the wagonette slowly mouldered away under ever-thickening layers of dust, and the governess cart, still often used by us, stood by Uncle Bill’s goat cart. I was familiar with a photograph of Bill as a little boy proudly driving his goat, but never saw the cart in use. The fourth side of the square was occupied by a row of low buildings for keeping things in, only one of which was special: the one in which every year Seeley cured the ham – the pigsty, by the way, was attached to the end of the barn, and if you were me you were careful to avoid the lower yard on the dreadful day when the annual pig was killed. Seeley, a good Yorkshireman, knew the secrets of curing a ham in the proper Yorkshire way, and after the pigkilling there would be several days when he abandoned the stables, retreated to one of these little houses, and became almost priestly in devotion to his grave task. You must not disturb him, though you could peep. Usually he was very ready to talk, full of fascinating horse information. (One white foot, buy a horse / Two white feet, try a horse / Three white feet, look well about him / Four white feet, do without him.) Seeley’s hams were wonderful. There was always one on the sideboard at breakfast time, and if anyone was foolish enough when carving it to ‘scoop’ it in a misguided attempt to avoid fat, Gramps became very cross indeed. (Those breakfasts! As well as the ham there was always a boiled egg each for every person there, as well as the main dish – perhaps sausages and bacon, or grilled kidneys. And quite often no one ate a boiled egg. What on earth happened to them? A present-day kind of solution such as eggs mayonnaise for supper would certainly have had no place in Mrs Wiseman’s kitchen. Mrs Wiseman, by the way, was Wiseman’s daughter, not his wife. The ‘Mrs’ was an honorary title always given to cooks. In spite of all that food no one was fat, I suppose because we walked and rode so much.)
Alongside the drive leading down to the lower stable yard there was a tall beech hedge, looking at first sight like the garden’s end. It was in fact the beginning of the most important part of it: the kitchen garden. Just through the gate in the hedge there was on the left an apple orchard and on the right a rather disorderly space containing the aviary in which Gran’s ringdoves lived, the big frame in which her parma violets were grown, the melon and cucumber house, and in the background (I think) various kinds of manure and compost heaps. The parma violet frame was impressive. I suppose they are not easy to cultivate (one never sees them nowadays), but Mr Wiseman was clearly an expert: the intensely fragrant flowers were large and grew profusely for what seemed like the whole year. They were Gran’s favourites. Beside her chair in the drawing room there was always a silver bowl full of them. It can’t really have been there all through the year, but it is impossible to picture her sitting there without it . . . and any violet I have sniffed at since then has been a sad disappointment.
Once you were past the melon house you came to the walled garden proper, with the other greenhouses and the long, low potting shed on your right, which was always in perfect order and, unlike most modern potting sheds, contained no chemicals except for a small sack of Epsom salts. Muck, leaf mould and the hoe: those were Mr Wiseman’s weapons (with, of course, other hands to wield the hoe; its chip-chip-chip was almost always to be heard). In the eighteenth century William Cobbett wrote a didactic book about gardening which included a plan of the ideal kitchen garden. Many years after I had grown up and was living in London, I came across it, and to my delight recognized the Ditchingham kitchen garden in every detail; except that where we had the melon house, he had a most elaborately composed ‘hot bed’ on which to grow melons. The Ditchingham garden had quite obviously been laid out according to the instructions in his book, with that one improvement added.
It was walled on three sides, the fourth being sheltered by the apple orchard and the large cage for soft fruit, where the raspberries, strawberries and currants could flourish, protected from birds. A stream bisected the garden. Before the stream came through the left-hand wall, and after it went out through the right-hand wall, it was just a large ditch with water at its bottom between rough grassy banks. For the width of the garden it was a smooth little canal, full to the brim between brick banks. This was achieved by a weir at the point where it left the garden, which controlled the water’s flow to the exact extent that produced a full canal and a gentle outflow over the weir. The canal was crossed at three places by little iron bridges – the bridge nearest the weir had a plank bridge beside it, the purpose of which I don’t know, although it was certainly more comfortable than its iron neighbour to sit on, with feet dangling in the water, during our many tadpole and newt fishing sessions. On one side of the canal was a wide herbaceous border, handsome although it was there only for picking, as were the sweet peas. The rest of the walled garden was devoted to exquisitely grown vegetables, and the walls to espaliered fruit.
A well-cultivated walled kitchen garden is beautiful. It has a peculiar serenity derived from its purpose, not unlike that of a church, which you feel as soon as you enter it . . . or rather, that was how it used to be, when its purpose, the sustaining of a household, was real. For a good many years now, that purpose has ceased to exist, wiped out by the patterns of modern living, so it is pointless to regret the fact that Ditchingham’s kitchen garden has been replaced by a very lovely pleasure-garden; but I feel it a privilege to have known it while it was still fulfilling its original purpose, because it was – it really was – a wonderfully thought-out and maintained fabrication of great beauty. There was not a single part of it that did not function exactly as it was meant to.
That was no thanks to us, the children, though we did play our parts properly up to a point. There were certain things which we were supposed to do, and we did them. During summer, for instance, it was the custom that the women and children of the house picked the strawberries and raspberries that were to be eaten that day, collecting them into big, cool cabbage leaves, and they also picked the sweet peas, which had to be done regularly if they were to be kept flowering as long as possible. No hardship there – indeed, a good deal of pleasure, particularly among the raspberries, because there was no rule against nibbling as you went along. Strawberries were slightly less enjoyable because of the necessary stooping or squatting. Towards the end of the season it did become a bit of a chore, particularly with the sweet peas because their stalks became shorter and shorter, which made big fat bunches less rewarding, but I don’t remember ever thinking of going on strike. However, although we didn’t leave undone that which we ought to do, we did do a good many things we ought not to do, particularly Pen and me, who prided ourselves on being connoisseurs of peaches.
The peaches grew against the far wall (against which the vinery was built: it faced south so got the full benefit of the sun). Next to the peaches were the huge yellow pears greatly valued by Gramps, each of which would be wrapped in white muslin by Mr Wiseman to protect it from wasps. Pen and I never stole a pear because, I suppose, that muslin bestowed on them some kind of semi-magical untouchability, but we kept a sharp eye on the peaches, and struck as soon as they were ripe. There was a convenient little door in the wall near where they grew, leading into the Cedar Walk, the strip of ornamental woodland that girdled the kitchen garden and was the end of the garden as a whole, and having grabbed our chosen peaches we would dart out of the door into the Cedar Walk, where we could guzzle them in safety. ‘I’ll tell your granny on you!’ Mr Wiseman would roar if he saw us, but it wasn’t that threat which alarmed us because we knew how mild Gran’s scolding would be; it was the force of Mr Wiseman’s anger. To him we were pestilential little nuisances who deserved a good smacking, and we felt it.
Stealing the grapes was much harder. The vinery door was often left open to give them air, and there was a stepladder handy, but manoeuvring the ladder into place, climbing it, choosing the place in a bunch where the nipping-out of a grape would be least noticeable (taking a whole bunch was unthinkable) – all that made darting impossible, so we did it very rarely. And as far as I was concerned there was a slight impulse to be protective of the grapes, because Gran had taught me how to thin them. They, like the roses, gave her the chance to get her hands on her garden. If the bunches were to reach perfection, halfway through their ripening a good half of the grapes had to be cut out, so that none of those left touched a neighbour. The result looked terrible, poor skinny little bunches which must surely perish; but, ‘No, no, don’t stop,’ Gran would urge, and of course she was right. The bunches when fully ripe were marvellously shapely groupings of big plump grapes, each one perfect within a perfect whole. It was hard to decide which was more delicious, the green or the purple. I think it was really the green, because they were true muscats, but the purple were so beautiful that one seemed to be tasting their appearance.
The other things we stole were not the figs, but gooseberries. The fig tree grew next to our escape door and bore a lot of fruit because, according to Gramps, it had been planted properly with a dead donkey under its roots; and it may have been the thought of that poor donkey that prevented me from liking figs very much until I was older. The gooseberries were in a second fruit cage at the edge of the lower orchard (cooking apples and quinces), which was outside the walls of the kitchen garden – a sort of overspill. There were little hard green gooseberries, good for cooking but very sharp uncooked, small round red ones which were pleasant enough, and very large golden ones which were sweet and succulent. Stealing those was boring because no one minded – they were not considered precious – but we did it quite often when the Golden Balls were at their best. Apart from them, the lower orchard offered no temptations, but one tree became, to me, special. When I reached my teens we lived for some years in the Hall Farm, just across the park from Gran’s house, and walked back and forth between the two houses every day, often more than once, passing through that orchard every time. Close to the path, just before one crossed the stream to cut through a corner of the Cedar Walk into the back park, there was a very old apple tree which leaned over the path and bore huge emerald-green cooking apples. One day, as I stooped to go under its branches, I came face to face with a group of these apples, and for some reason was suddenly acutely aware of how amazing they were. I stood quite still, gazing at them – gazing and gazing. It was as though I could hear them Being, as though something must be about to happen because of them . . . I think it was the nearest I ever came to a mystical experience. It didn’t happen again, but left me with a secret respect and affection for that tree – and may have been the beginning of a feeling that trees are as much living things as animals are, which I have to this day.
In the Cedar Walk, of course, the trees ruled. You entered it from that lower orchard, or from the kitchen garden, or from the back drive. At that end it was a dense, almost impenetrable mass of yew, laurel and box, but it allowed itself certain frivolities: beside the gate into it, for example, there were two sources of exceptionally sweet scent, a sweet briar and a syringa (nowadays we would call it a philadelphus), and you soon came to a neat little island of lawn at the centre of which there stood a tall and shapely red may tree, an elegant surprise. Opposite there was a sprawl of honey-scented yellow azaleas, and then a group of bamboos on the edge of the stream, where it was just about to slip under the wall and become the kitchen garden canal. Across the stream the Cedar Walk proper began, announced by two handsome beeches, one on either side of the broad, mossy path, and then came the cedars, spaced out beside the path – I can no longer remember how many of them, but think it was six or seven. Between them and the kitchen garden was a small forest of tall yew trees, not densely crowded together, but enough of them to produce a darkness, and on the other side of the path a narrow strip of shrubs and smaller trees separated the Walk from the park. Where it came to its orchard end there was a group of rhododendrons, a big holly tree, and a row of smaller beeches beside the stream, on one of which we had all carved our initials.
The Cedar Walk had been planned and planted by someone who was never going to see it – not him, nor his children, nor even his children’s children, though they would have had a clearer view of what it was going to be. What amazingly generous confidence in the future those eighteenth-century landscape designers had! By the time my great-grandfather bought the house their dream had become reality: there was this serene, sheltered, splendid walk where the ladies of the house could take healthy exercise without dirtying their shoes, and the gentlemen could retire to think their thoughts inspired by woodland privacy. (When during the Second World War the house was taken over by the Army, one of the officers who was there for a while told me that he imagined himself pacing that walk with a copy of Horace’s Odes in his hands. Need I say that I fell in love with him.) We children, when we stalked each other, birds’-nested, climbed trees, dammed the stream or just idled in the Cedar Walk, were inhabiting a two-hundred-year-old dream: a place planned to support not only its inhabitants’ bodies, but also their minds – perhaps even their souls. And we were too young to perceive how near that dream was to reaching its end. How profoundly lucky we were! And how lucky Ditchingham Hall has been to pass into hands that can steer it out of that disappearing dream into a life that belongs to the present.
There was a time, after my uncle’s death, when it looked as though this was not going to happen. I remember walking in the park, looking at the empty house – it’s extraordinary how heavily the emptiness of a house declares itself – and finding it painful beyond words. Not for anything would I have gone into the abandoned garden, and my mother and my uncle’s other surviving sister could hardly bring themselves to think about what might be going to happen. The feeling was a strange one: not just regret that a lovely house might vanish, but a sense that all of our past lives that it had contained would vanish with it. Not a rational feeling on my part, given how far the realities of my life now were from anything to do with that place, but I was surprised at how powerful it was. It was a great relief when we learnt that my uncle’s daughter and her husband had decided to move into the Hall: a far from light decision, given its size, and how much it needed modernizing. It was as though something in ourselves, not just the house, had come alive again.
All this reminds me of an absurdity. I think I was thirteen. For some unremembered reason I was alone in the back park on a lovely spring day, sprawling on the grass among daisies, wallowing in the feeling of how much I loved this place. If only it could one day be mine! And I began to wonder if that could ever happen. Disregarding tiresome matters such as income, and supposing inheritance within our family would follow the same pattern as inheritance in the royal family, who – I asked myself – would have to die before it came to me? My mother being my grandparents’ youngest daughter, it soon became evident that it would be everyone, even my brother, because would he be likely to accept that I being older than him prevailed over his being male? Not a hope! He was as devoted to the place as I was, and even more ruthless. The whole lot of them would have to go except for my younger sister . . . and would it be acceptable for me to pray for such a holocaust? No, of course it would not. So: it would never, never, never be mine, and that was that.
One of our unfortunate governesses used sometimes to exclaim in despair, ‘Why, oh why, can’t you behave like Rational Beings?’ I think it was at that moment in the back park that rationality set in and began to replace daydreams with an appreciation of what I really owed, and still owe, to having spent so much of my youth in that dear place.