SISSINGHURST BELONGS TO the National Trust. In a cabinet on the first-floor landing, my father had left a file for me. All the relevant papers, carefully arranged in chronological order, some of them marked with Post-its, told the story of how and why he had given Sissinghurst to the Trust in the 1960s. Soon after he died, and after I had replied to the five hundred condolence letters we had received, I sat at his desk and read through the file. I knew that if I was going to do anything for Sissinghurst I had to understand the relationship with the Trust in detail. Nothing would happen here unless the Trust came to share the ideal.
By June 1962, when Vita died, the Trust had already become a complex organism, well into its middle age. It is a profoundly English institution, in love with the past and with the natural world, polite in its ideals and civilising in its aims. As David Cannadine has written, it had its beginnings in a period at the end of the nineteenth century when along with ‘royal ceremonial, the old school tie, Sherlock Holmes, Gilbert and Sullivan, test match cricket and bacon and eggs’ a whole clutch of institutions was established which have survived and have come to define a certain kind of Englishness. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), the Dictionary of National Biography (1885), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (1889) and Country Life (1897) are all the National Trust’s contemporaries. It had begun in 1895 with a high-minded, liberal, philanthropic desire to bring the solace of the untouched natural landscapes of England and Wales to the multitudes of Britain’s industrial cities. The properties it owned – largely pieces of beautiful landscape – were to be ‘open air sitting rooms for the poor’. After 1918, that liberalism morphed into its conservative cousin, a Stanley Baldwinesque longing for the perfections of a forgotten age. In the late thirties and even more after 1945, that reactionary glow to the Trust deepened once again into the phase that still marks it in the minds of many. With a helping hand from the Old Etonian Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton, the Trust was able to acquire a string of country houses and their estates, not through buying them, but through the Treasury transferring these precious places to the Trust in lieu of death duties and as a memorial to the dead of the Second World War. As a central part of this Country House Scheme, the donor families, as they were called, were allowed and encouraged to remain in the houses which they no longer owned.
Presided over by the spirit of the charming, arch-conservative, gentry-loving Jim Lees-Milne – one of my grandfather’s most devoted lovers – the Trust became an elite oasis in which a version of old England was able to survive. It was, until the mid-1960s, a club for aesthetically inclined grandees. Its all-important Historic Buildings Committee was made up almost entirely of peers. When a man called John Smith (who later founded the Landmark Trust) was proposed as a member, the chairman, Viscount Esher, said, ‘I suppose it is a good thing to have a proletarian name on the Committee – anybody know him?’ ‘Yes,’ said the earl of Euston, ‘he is my brother-in-law.’
The curators and designers who formed a (largely gay) coterie at the centre referred to the muddy-booted agents and land managers in the regions as the ‘mangel-wurzels’. There was little concern for the realities and subtleties of landscape ecology. What mattered was the elegant view and the general sense that here at least the inroads of the vulgarising masses had been resisted. Enormous liberties were taken not only with historic interiors (where the favoured decorator, John Fowler, devised a kind of all-purpose National Trusty loveliness) but with historic gardens (Hidcote had its authentically vulgar cherry trees removed) and important landscapes (the great if battered avenue at Wimpole in Cambridgeshire was needlessly cut down and many of the Trust’s ancient woods were planted with conifers). Angry reports by the conservationists springing up in the 1960s regularly condemned the organisation for an indifference to the things that really mattered.
The 1960s saw the beginning of a fourth phase: more efficient, less introspective, more commercial, pushing for large-scale membership and large-scale visiting, publishing more, opening up the previously hidden parts of their properties, getting serious about nature conservation. This was just the moment Sissinghurst engaged with the Trust. It had become a classic English organisation, riddled with tensions: moneymaking against high-level aesthetic appreciation; wide-scale access against conserving the fragile and the delicate; purity against populism; a grandee vision against popular need.
Both Vita and Harold had a long relationship with the Trust, serving on its committees and writing its guidebooks, even in Vita’s case the guidebook to her beloved Knole after the Trust had taken it over in 1948. Harold had eventually become vice-chairman of the governing council. Sissinghurst and the Trust were always in each other’s orbit, even if, for Vita in particular, its value was ambivalent. It represented for her both the preservation of what was precious and the very forces of bureaucratisation and mediocrity against which the precious needed to be preserved. When in 1954 my father, rather bravely, first mentioned to her that he thought the Trust might be the ideal owners and managers of Sissinghurst, it did not go well. ‘Never, never, never,’ she wrote in her diary that evening.
Au grand jamais, jamais. Never, never, never. Not that hard little plate at my door. Nigel can do what he likes when I am dead, but as long as I live no Nat. Trust or any other foreign body shall have my darling. Over my corpse or my ashes; not otherwise. It is bad enough to have lost my Knole, but they shan’t take S/hurst from me. That, at least, is my own. Il ya des choses qu’on ne peut pas supporter. They shan’t; they shan’t; I won’t; they can’t make me; I won’t; they can’t make me. I never would.
About ten days after Vita died in June 1962 my father met the Trust’s secretary, Jack Rathbone, ‘all casual like’, for a drink in the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall. Would they be interested in taking Sissinghurst on? Vita’s estate was worth about £100,000, on which there was £38,000 of inheritance tax to pay and hardly any cash to pay it with. Harold was chronically in debt and Vita had spent almost everything she had on the garden and buildings. My father’s only options were to sell the whole thing, sell everything else he had or give Sissinghurst to the Trust. Only by giving it to them could he guarantee that his parents’ life-work, far more lasting than anything either of them had written, would have a chance of surviving. Rathbone agreed to a visit.
He and Sir George Taylor, the head of Kew, came down by train on 5 July 1962. My father was with them, at his most Tory MP charming. He gave them copies of the Sissinghurst accounts. It all looked neat, the books balancing satisfactorily year on year. Money from the garden visitors, farm rents, timber sales and the sale of plants just about covered the costs of the six gardeners, the secretary, the chauffeur-handyman, the cook and Mrs Honeysett, the daily. Rathbone and Sir George – described by my father in his diary as ‘a big bluff man, rather like an Australian who has discovered an unknown gentian in the Andes’ – arrived at Staplehurst station in a good mood. There they were met by Jack Copper, the chauffeur-handyman, famous at Sissinghurst for two things: the home-made hand grenades he had prepared during the war in case the Germans arrived; and the cider press he kept at the back of the garage for a swift one whenever any of the gardeners or farmhands felt a thirst coming on, as they did most afternoons. A famous incident involved Vita walking out of the garden and down to the garage, to find George Taylor, one of the gardeners, coming towards her.
‘Drunk again, George,’ Vita said.
‘Are you, madam?’ George said. ‘That’s funny, so am I.’
A companion story, which has lurked for years in the Sissinghurst undergrowth, never mentioned by my father, tells of Vita, after a glass or two of sherry in the Tower, being taken by the gardeners in a wheelbarrow to her bed in the South Cottage.
Here, immediately, was a signal of that other Sissinghurst world: rough around the edges, idiosyncratic, authentically itself, not smoothed or sheened, not tightly controlled but a little improper, alcoholic, not quite respectable. That morning, the grandees from the Trust wanted to see something of the estate, and so my father told Copper to drive round by Bettenham. Leafy lanes, lovely views, everything going very well until Copper pulled over. He had got himself lost in the four miles between Staplehurst and Sissinghurst. I can imagine my father’s clearing of the throat. ‘We’ll have to go round by Horse Race.’ Eventually they arrived, having lost the way again, coming in over the ‘smooth shorn grass between the orchards’ to find the secretary, Ursula Codrington, who had some thwarted dramatic ambitions, coming out of the entrance arch ‘looking like an Andalusian peasant with a striped apron’. She was followed by the two head gardeners, Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger – both impeccably and utterly English despite their names – who were desperately anxious at the threat of a dead managerial hand being applied to the place they loved. They had been getting ready for a fortnight, sweeping and preening the place so that it looked as perfect as they could make it. Nervous introductions, then the slow walk round: Upper Courtyard grass and the purple border, the Tower lawn with pink and lemon-yellow roses trained against the walls, the Rose Garden, in which the ancient damasks and gallicas were erupting in slow vegetable fountains, the Lime Walk and the Moat Walk, the Herb Garden with its view out to the wood, the orchard, the White Garden, the stony half-Mediterranean Delos, the greenhouses, the vegetable garden, while the two great men tested the competence of the gardeners at every turn.
Then a pause, and the secretary of the National Trust turned to Nigel and said, ‘Do you know the thing I like most at Sissinghurst?’
‘No,’ said Nigel, looking anxiously at Pam and Sibylle.
‘I just love the fact that it is quite so untidy.’
‘Untidy?’
‘Well, you know, that relaxed look, as if no one has bothered to tidy up.’ Nigel rushed them all up the Tower. ‘The whole Weald was bathed in sunshine,’ he wrote to my mother in London that evening. ‘I have never seen it so clear. I pointed out the boundaries of the estate. The clock struck one. It was at that moment I think that the fate of Sissinghurst was decided. It will pass into the hands of the National Trust.’
Or so he hoped. Rathbone and Taylor recommended acceptance of Sissinghurst but only ‘subject to finance’. Their previous acceptance of houses and gardens without thinking hard enough about the money had landed them in trouble. Nigel’s first breezy suggestion was to give the house and garden to the Trust, sell most of the farmland to raise an endowment and keep the nearest fields and woods for himself. To this Rathbone replied that Sissinghurst represented ‘a very difficult financial problem’. In October 1962, he warned Nigel that ‘this is likely to be a long business’. My father wouldn’t have that. In December 1962 he was tugging at Rathbone like a terrier. ‘Don’t you think we should take this a stage further. It would be nice if we could have the thing agreed before the opening of the garden in April [1963].’ Rathbone: ‘It may take a little longer than that.’
By January 1963, my father had refined his proposal: house and garden to the NT, plus some surrounding farmland, most of the rest sold off to raise cash with which to endow the property with £15,000 and a couple of fields kept for himself. He and ‘any descendants of mine’ would have the right to live there for free. He would act as the Trust’s unpaid manager and have the right to be consulted over any decision affecting Sissinghurst. Any income at Sissinghurst would remain at Sissinghurst. Its coffers would never be drained for general National Trust purposes – this profoundly valuable clause made at the suggestion of the National Trust itself.
The proposals were to come up before the NT finance committee that July. They looked at Nigel’s figures for income and expenses and reached a set of gloomy verdicts. After Vita’s death, they were sure that visitors would fall away. They had no inkling of what would actually happen: that Vita’s Sissinghurst, which seemed a little out of date in the early sixties, would come to represent for hundreds of thousands of people a lost world of romance and beauty. It is as if the Trust in the early sixties were not quite aware of the hunger for the past which would build so powerfully over the next thirty years. Kipling’s house at Bateman’s in Sussex, which the Trust had owned since the 1930s, had never been popular with visitors. Why should anyone be interested in the garden of a minor poet, long since unfashionable and ‘back-number’ as Harold had called it? The Trust also thought that the beauty of the garden itself would slowly and inevitably diminish as Vita’s inspiration sank into the past. It was, anyway, going to be increasingly expensive to keep the buildings going. The Trust had standards of maintenance which were higher than a private individual’s. Besides, Vita had been underpaying her garden staff and wages would now have to rise. There had to be allowances made for disasters and contingencies. There were management costs. The Trust had accepted responsibility for Knole without an adequate endowment and now they were suffering an intolerable financial burden there. Their ‘realistic forecast for the future’ at Sissinghurst saw a heavy ongoing annual deficit of £3625. If the Trust were to take Sissinghurst, Nigel would have to provide an endowment big enough to make up that annual shortfall. On top of that, he would have to pay a market rent if he was not to fall foul of the Inland Revenue. As it stood, there was no way the Trust could accept my father’s offer.
Nigel wrote to Ivan Hills, the Trust’s area agent:
Your draft budget is appalling. If the logical consequence is that the Trust could not take Sissinghurst without an endowment of something like £90,000 [the amount required to generate £3,625 a year; about £1.5 million in 2008 terms] then very regretfully we would have to abandon the idea, for I haven’t anything like that amount of money in the world. I haven’t any idea where this amount of money is to come from. Annual repairs, contingencies, £800 a year for a management fee, a gardens advisor … And now you tell me that, in addition to that, I shall be expected to pay a rent. Really I can’t do this.
Three-way negotiations between my father, the Trust and the Treasury dragged on through 1963 and 1964. Nigel remained convinced that the Trust had overestimated costs and underestimated income. He wrote to my mother: ‘It is difficult to see why they need £3000 more than we have ever spent on it ourselves. “Oh,” says Jack Rathbone, “the Tower might fall down.” “Well,” I say, “it won’t fall down every year.”’ Negotiations were opened with other government departments and by January 1965 the Trust had managed to extract from the Ministry of Works the promise of an annual grant to cover the expected shortfall. With that in their pocket, the Trust decided to accept Sissinghurst if Nigel could provide a £15,000 endowment. He was earning £3000 a year at the time but the sale of Bettenham and Brissenden farms could raise the cash.
Rather gallantly, at the same time he had embarked on a new conversion project for turning the southern end of the front range into a single family house. Neither he nor my mother wanted to spend their lives, as his parents had done, traipsing between bedrooms in the South Cottage, sitting room in the old stables, dining room in the Priest’s House, workroom in the Tower, children’s rooms in the brewhouse. It was to be one warm, centrally heated, hot-watered house for a single happy family. By 1965, he had spent £17,000 on that, inserting a beautiful new oak staircase, my mother’s modern kitchen, a big sitting room and eight bedrooms into what had been the two cottages occupied by Mrs Staples and the Coppers. I remember moving in that summer, the physical pleasure of the big new oak doors, my bedroom up in the attic, one dormer window looking out to the poplars at the front, the other to the Tower and the wood, my mother at home in the kitchen, and the dreadful leaving of it that September as I went away for the first time to boarding school in Oxford.
He loved Sissinghurst more than anything in the world. He adored his father and in a more distant way admired his mother. The remaking of Sissinghurst was the best thing they had done, they had done it together and its preservation was, for my father, an act of intense filial duty and care. Sissinghurst was them. He could never have let it go or cashed it in and still looked at himself in the mirror in the morning. He needed to preserve Sissinghurst, he wanted for me not to have to sell it, and by the autumn he had become desperate. He offered the Trust everything he owned: all books, pictures, silver, the small islands he owned in Scotland, if only they would take Sissinghurst off his hands.
Sissinghurst is somehow kept going while my resources are running out. Everyone here is gradually losing faith in the deal coming off at all. Meanwhile our finances are very delicately balanced and there are almost no reserves. The weekly wage bill is large for a private house. There is no income from the garden throughout the winter months. I am taxed on the income I get and the rents. I pay interest to the Treasury. All this is draining what little I have left. I shall simply not know what to do if the negotiations are not completed soon.
Faintly, in my memory, looking now at these blurred carbon copies of his letters, I see myself then, aged eight, that Christmas, putting my head around the corner of the door into his workroom, his anglepoise light down low over the surface of the table, smoke from his cigarette curling up into its beam, a yellow biro in one hand, and the fingers of the other pushing back over his scalp through his hair. Briefly he looks up at me and smiles.
The uncertainty dragged on for the best part of another year. Treasury officials did not respond to letters for months. Civil servants moved jobs and the details of the case were forgotten or pushed to the back. My father’s attempts at a viable budget became ever more agonised until, at last, in August 1966, a breakthrough, a very English solution. He realised there were strings to be pulled: he had been at Balliol with Niall Macdermot, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Nigel wrote to him: ‘My dear Niall’. Surely he could get something moving on this? Within a month the juices started to flow and the Treasury accepted the offer of house, garden and farm. The sale of Bettenham and Brissenden raised quite enough money for an endowment. There was no talk of a rent. Nigel would not have to give the Trust everything he owned. The Ministry of Works would give an annual grant for five years to cover the expected deficit. By Christmas 1966, it was settled. A solution that had seemed inadequate for years now for some reason seemed to be perfectly fine.
On 6 April 1967, the metal plate saying ‘National Trust Sissinghurst Castle’ arrived from the Royal Label Factory. On 12 April, my father wrote to the new secretary of the Trust, Jack Boles:
My dear Jack,
This is just a note of thanks from your newly adopted child. I heard today that everything was completed according to plan and the announcement will be made this afternoon.
So ends happily negotiations which have lasted almost five years. I have a real affection for the Trust, deepened by this experience, and to me it will cause no pang when I raise your metal plate this evening at our gate. I feel only gratitude and thankfulness that Sissinghurst will thus be preserved for ever.
Juliet and I went up with him to the top of the lane that evening to see the new plate on its new oak post, which Jack Copper had set up that afternoon. It meant nothing to me then, but everything to him. He felt, I think, that he had done his duty to this place, that he hadn’t wrecked it, or simply disposed of it, or betrayed his inheritance. The National Trust was a resting place, a cradle from which threat could be warded off and change kept at bay. It had come at some emotional cost. That April, my mother wrote to him:
It’s time you left this place for a while. It’s wrong for you to stay here all the time. You become confused and muddled as to how you and I should regard Sissinghurst. Finally, now you’ve achieved the assurance of its protection, you may have to worry a bit how you care for and protect your family. But away from us all you may be able to consider this rationally.
A few days later he set off for a four-month tour of Europe, writing a book about great houses of the Western world.
My father had saved Sissinghurst. He had bound together house, garden and most of the farm in a single quasi-public ownership. By doing that he had made it inviolable and established our own family’s presence here for ever, at least in theory. And the process of how he did it was at least in part a model for me, forty years and a generation on: engage with the world as it is; keep pushing; don’t be put off by the sluggards; keep your sense of humour; don’t be afraid to show your teeth now and then; but don’t hold grudges; be generous and grateful; always have the goal in mind; but remember too that Sissinghurst isn’t everything. He had done it well, with all the qualities required: doggedness in a corner, love of Sissinghurst, acumen, persistence. The National Trust had shown itself too: as a rational operator, prepared to be patient, in for the long term – it was to own Sissinghurst ‘in perpetuity’ – financially cautious, dedicated to an ideal of beauty, not afraid to say no and not be swayed by emotion or romance.
I had never before embarked on any enterprise that involved steering a large corporate body in a new direction. I had worked for newspapers, broadcasters and publishers, I had founded and run with my cousin Robert Sackville West a small publishing company. But each of those involved making something new and self-contained. This would be different: a change in ideals and practices for something which already felt it was doing fine. The systems at Sissinghurst were heavily dug in and highly evolved. They would have bucketfuls of answers to any proposal I might make. It would be a case of uncorporate man meeting corporate life and both, inevitably, being changed in the process.
I realised if I was going to propose something to the Trust I had to know in some detail what had happened on the farm here in the past. In 2005, there was no farmer at Sissinghurst. The land was let out to four separate farmers who had the bulk of their businesses elsewhere: a pair of brothers, the Pipers, who were expert arable men from Hawkhurst; two different graziers, June Munday and Ian Strang, who kept sheep and cattle here; and a man and his son, the Farrises, who owned a wood on the northern edge of the farm and rented a couple of Sissinghurst fields next to it, on which they grew game crops for their pheasants. It was a place that had been cut in four. It was the landscape equivalent of low-maintenance gardening.
From the 1920s until 1999, the very opposite had been true. A dynasty of outstanding men, their wives, sons and daughters, had been the farmers both on Sissinghurst Castle Farm and at Bettenham, its neighbour. Captain A. O. R. Beale, known as Ossie, a decorated hero in the First World War, had been the tenant here in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1945 he had gone into partnership with his son-in-law, a Canadian pilot from Coastal Command, Stanley Stearns. After Stanley’s death in 1967, a partnership between Stanley’s son James Stearns and his uncle John Beale had taken on the farm and continued with it until James’s retirement in 1999, when the present four-part system was set up. James and his wife Pat still lived in the big Victorian farmhouse, which they ran as a bed-and-breakfast. James’s mother, Mary Stearns, Stanley’s widow and his sister Linda, with her husband, Brian Clifford, still lived side by side in the two halves of Mount Cottage on the north-west corner of the farm. His uncle, John Beale, and cousin Nick lived in the Priest’s House.
The Beales-Stearnses were long-standing Sissinghurst families quite as much as the Nicolsons-Sackville-Wests. It was clear that in them there was a deep reservoir of understanding about how this place might work as a single, integrated farm again. So I talked to them all. One morning early in 2005, James walked me round the fields. All the generalised nonsense that people talk about landscape fell away with the farmer’s eye, with James’s big bass voice and his gentle, half-hesitant, half-adamant air. The engine room of the farm, as he called it, was in the northern half, the big arable fields called Lodge, Large, Frogmead and Eight Acres. ‘You could get four and a half tons an acre of wheat off all of them in a good year,’ he told me, looking at me with his huge bloodhound eyes. Some of Frogmead lay a little frosty and so ‘you would need to be careful if you were thinking of putting fruit in there’. In other words: don’t. The hops did well in Frogmead but only a madman would consider setting up a hop garden nowadays. The economics of hops were in tatters, destroyed by a combination of lager (which needs no hops) and chemical substitutes, which were said to flavour the beer just as well.
The whole of the rest of the farm was, in James’s view, rather subsidiary to that northern arable block. He had never been a great man for animals, and all the photographs his mother showed me of him when he was young had him sitting on a tractor, ploughing or bringing in the harvest. The belt of grazing around the Castle and garden, the four wet fields, known as the Well Fields, in the far south-western corner of the farm, and the very rabbity Horse Race and Nine Acres, all varied in his mind from ‘too small’ to ‘clogged’ and merely ‘rubbish’. Only the Park and the Cow Field next to the old dairy survived James’s general verdict that the arable engine room was what counted. What was so good about the Park? It made ‘beautiful blue soft hay’, especially at the far end. And the Cow Field? ‘It’s the best bit of dirt on the farm. The cows were always turned out on to it and it would grow anything now. It’s wet along the southern edge and up in the northern corner. I think there might be a broken drain there. But the rest of it: you couldn’t look for anything better.’
I had never heard anyone talk about Sissinghurst like this before. No one here had ever talked to me about dirt as a lovely thing. It was as if James was a voice from the past, from a time that understood the reality of something I only half remembered, a reality beyond the reduced condition of the modern world. I loved talking to him, and I could see he loved talking to me. I don’t think anybody had talked to him like this for years.
Even so, I knew this emphasis on heavy arable cropping was not quite the whole picture, or at least it was a picture that had already come down from the high point it had achieved a little earlier under his grandfather. I went to the National Archives in Kew. During the war, confidential reports were made to the government about the state of every farm in the country. I looked up the Farm Survey Record made at Sissinghurst and Bettenham on 4 June 1941. The two farms were being run in tandem and the farmer was listed as Captain A. O. Beale. Here at last, in all the sterility of a ministry form, was the picture I had been looking for, the concentrated meaning of a place complete in itself, quite straightforwardly listed in the printed boxes and dotted lines of an airmail-thin, sky-blue government form.
The mixed and variegated fields were laid out in front of me: 93 acres of wheat, 7 of barley, 11 of oats, 1 of rye, 5 of mixed corn and 23 acres of beans, into which the animals could be turned at the end of the year. There were 3 acres of first early potatoes and 5 of maincrop. (These the Beales used to sell to local schools and individuals, bag by bag.) There was kale, a little rapeseed, an acre of turnips and 21/2 of mangolds. There were 101/2 acres of hops in Frogmead and 46 acres of orchard with grazing below the trees. The 15 acres of peas were to go for canning. Fifty acres of meadow were to be made into hay and 144 acres of grass to be grazed by 45 head of cattle and 600-odd sheep, ewes and lambs. There were 12 pigs and 27 piglets, 110 chickens, 4 horses and 21 people, men and women, boys and girls, working here.
It was no fantasy, then: here at one level farther down than James’s memories was his grandfather’s farm at full stretch at the height of the war. All of it, according to the report, was in a near-perfect condition: rich, busy and complex, with piped water to the farmhouse, fields and buildings, all fences, ditches, drains, eight farm cottages and the farmhouse itself in good repair, with no infestation of rabbits or moles, rats or mice, rooks or wood pigeons and with no derelict fields. Two 22-horsepower Fordson tractors as well as five fixed engines powered the work on the 450 acres Captain Beale rented from Vita. Messrs S. J. Day and L. Holland, who compiled the report, wrote that ‘This farm is being farmed to full capacity in a most excellent manner. The present arable crops being especially good.’
I looked through the neighbouring farms. There was no scrimping of criticism there. Captain Beale’s neighbours would have been crushed to read the verdicts written on them and their farms: lack of energy, insufficient attention, no good with hedging and ditching, illness, ignorance, lack of experience and ambition, lack of modern knowledge, ‘not enough pains being taken with the arable’, ‘I do not think the occupier has much idea of how to manage land’, poor ploughing techniques, their farms infested with magpies, anthills, docks and charlock, thistles, their ditches clogged, their fields too small, their drainage hopeless, their houses reliant on wells and without electricity. Almost alone in the entire parish, Bettenham and Sissinghurst Castle Farm stood out as a joint model of completeness.
‘The Hon Mrs VM Nicolson’ filled in her own form, listing her half-acre of maincrop potatoes, 6 acres of orchard and grass, I acre of vegetables for humans, her 3 cows, 18 ewes, 42 chickens, ‘I motor mower for lawns (not used yet this year)’ and ‘I engine to drive circular saw for wood’. I knew that engine, still there when I was a boy, connected with a long wobbling belt to the naked saw-wheel which would spin to a blur when Copper started it up with the crank and make its own repeated animal whine as he pushed one log after another past its revolving teeth. Vita could not ‘give the best estimate you can of the annual rental value’ because ‘much of it is a pleasure garden’.
There are moments when you realise that what you had only been sleepwalking towards has suddenly acquired a substance and a materiality. That is what it felt like at the varnished beech desk in the National Archives, looking at these forms, which I am sure no one had looked at since the 1940s. I do not need to have the fields at Sissinghurst in front of my eyes to see them in every detail, but that morning I saw them as I knew I wanted them to be.
Linda Clifford, James Stearns’s sister, gave me something even better: her grandfather’s farm diary for 1954. Here, fourteen years later, in the peak of the 1950s boom, were the same pair of farms still pursuing the same wonderful, variegated, polycultural ends. Captain Beale, now in partnership with Stanley Stearns, still had seven men working for him, not to speak of the thirty or forty hop-pickers who came down from London in the autumn and stayed in the sheds beside the Hammer Brook, where their foundations and bits of corrugated-iron roof are still to be found in among the brambles. There was a herd of dairy shorthorns at the Castle, and another of Guernseys at Bettenham. There were pigs and sheep, all the same cereals, as well as plums, pears and two sorts of apples. The breathtaking part of it was the work programme for the year. I made an abstract of the year’s tasks:
Ploughing (Jan 20; July 23 Tassells; Oct 4)
Defrosting pipes (Feb 1)
Litter yards (Feb 1, 2, 11)
Snow clearing with dung lifts (Feb 2)
Sawing (Feb 5)
Shooting foxes (Feb 8)
Hedging (Feb 9)
Pruning (Feb 9, Nov 5)
Woodcutting (Feb 9)
Sowing (Peas 12 March; Barley 13 March; Wheat 15 March; Clover
under barley April 13; Kale July 30 (Bettenham); Oats Oct 6;
Wheat in Banky Nov 3)
Hop dressing (15 March)
Moving poles in hop garden (28 March)
Rolling (April 9, 13)
Harrowing (April 13)
Hop stringing (April 14, May 17, 29, June 1)
Sheep dipping (April 14)
Faggot carting (30 April, May 17)
Weeding (30 April)
Turning our heifers (30 April)
Gang mowing in orchards (May 15, 18, 29, June 1, 5, 22, 24)
Hop earthing up (June 1, 24)
Mowing (Park June 8)
Hoeing (Kale June 22)
Haymaking and baling (June 23, 24, July 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 29,
August 3, last bale made August 4)
Silage making (Hoppers Hut July 2, Aug 11, Horse Race
Aug 13, 14, 17)
Cut clover (Aug 11)
Combining barley (Aug 11, 13–14)
Apple picking (Aug 12, September 2, Oct 4, 27, 28)
Combining oats in Birches (Aug 14, 15, 16)
Baling straw (Aug 16, 17, 19, 21)
Cutting peas (in Banky Aug 16, 17, 18, 21; in Frogmead,
Hop Garden Aug 28)
Combining wheat in Large (Aug 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26)
Combining clover in Lodge (Aug 23)
Hop picking (Sept 6–30)
Combining Barley in 8 acres (13–17 Sept)
Combining peas (in Hop Garden Sept 19, 20, 21; Banky
Sept 23, 29, Oct 4–8)
On top of all this was the pharmacopoeia of treatments to which the crops and fields were subject. Although monumental quantities of farmyard manure were being carted out on to the fields from the cattle’s winter housing, any thought that fifty years ago this was an organic farm, as I had fondly imagined, soon disappeared under Captain Beale’s busy, often slightly scrawled diary jottings. Chemical imbalances, fertility deficiencies, fungal and pest attack: the tractors were out almost daily applying one potion or stimulus after another. Nitrate chalk, potash and superpotash, Epsom salts and ‘Copper colloidal’ for the peas, Melaldehyde on the wheat, slag on the orchards, Arcolin on the kale, the kale sprayed for flea-beetle, and the full battery of sulphate of ammonia, Pestox, Blitox, sulphur, copper sulphate and Boclear all applied to the labour- and capital-intensive hop gardens.
All this was clear enough. There had not been a moment when the guillotine had come down. Here was the farm in transition from its old to its modern state. The large workforce, the integration of the dairy herds with the pastures and arable fields, providing their dung and requiring their fodder, was still the old world going at full tilt. Alongside it were all these ‘artificials’, these answers in a bag. By the end of the decade, Stanley Stearns had bought a hop-processing machine which made the forty hop-pickers unnecessary. By 1968, the hops, which had caught ‘wilt’, a fungal disease, were no longer worth going in for. The cattle finally went in 1980. Any idea of rotation went with them. There was no longer any need to interrupt the growing of arable crops with a fertility-building clover and grass ley if you could simply apply fertility brought in by a lorry. Artificial fertilisers made mixed farms inefficient. If you could grow 41/2 tons an acre of wheat on a field year in, year out, then that was the way to go. Sissinghurst became a mainly arable farm, with some field-scale lettuces and Brussels sprouts grown on the side. It made some money – just – but its 259 acres were too small to compete with the East Anglian cereal barons, let alone America or the Ukraine. The industrial processes that made chemical farming possible had not only removed from this landscape almost everything that I loved about it, by the 1990s they had also made Sissinghurst unviable as a farm.
Given these economic and technological conditions, was there any way of recovering the enriched landscape? Was Sissinghurst caught in a kind of historical bind? Or was there a route out of this, based not on competing in world markets but by satisfying the modern appetite for ‘real food’? Could Sissinghurst become, in effect, a retail farm? Could a new version of the high, expert agriculture that Captain Beale, in his tweed jacket and tie, his pipe in one hand, the other in a jacket pocket, had performed so expertly, could that be practised here again?