IN THE WINTER AFTER my father’s death I started to feel my way towards a new, or at least a new-old, understanding of how Sissinghurst might be. I wrote to Fiona Reynolds, the director-general of the National Trust, who I knew slightly, to thank her for coming down to his funeral and to float past her a rather public version of the ideas that were on my mind.
There is only one thing at Sissinghurst I would love to see different – which is the farm not producing commodity cereals in a contractorised and heartless way, as it does now, but becoming a model of polycultural richness as it was 40 years ago: hops, fruit and dairy, to all of which it is well suited, and all of which could become the basis of a rampantly successful Sissinghurst brand of jams and beers and cheeses and all the rest of it. You would have to go a long way to find as good a ready-made brand as Sissinghurst waiting on the shelf. And it would employ people on the place! I am sure I have heard you talk often about a people-rich countryside, labour-intensive and high value-added agriculture and so on. The country needs it and this could be such a good and profitable working model for that idea. That is a long term dream of mine, but it is one I feel in my gut you might share.
She replied nicely but uncommittedly. Long-term was probably the phrase. Anyway, the idea of the ‘Sissinghurst brand’ is something that would come to seem too thin and wrong. The whole notion of a brand, even if the brand was meant to embody authenticity and richness, contradicted the very qualities it was meant to convey. The idea I had of Sissinghurst was something that was too much to be encapsulated in anything resembling a brand. I wanted to rekindle the sense of this place as a fully working and integrated whole. To do that, we had to sell something from it. We even had to sell the idea of ‘wholeness’. But that didn’t mean the brand was the destination. The brand was an instrument not the goal. I wanted a sense here of overwhelming well-being, which could be interpreted I suppose as a kind of brand but could scarcely be achieved if thought of as one. That was the paradox: a brand whose brand identity was its brandlessness.
Perhaps Sissinghurst could be considered a product, and like all products needed to renew itself, to sew together its old self, its particular qualities, with a new kind of response to an evolving world. And perhaps, now I look back on it, that is what I was engaged in: a rebranding exercise. What, in the most brutal terms, was the business here? Heritage horticulture with a lesbian-aristocratic gloss, allied to a tranquillity destination with café and gift shop attached. That was the old proposition. My ideas, equally brutally seen, were to bump that into another market niche by laying over it a holistic real-food agenda which would appeal to the urban ABC1s, precisely the kind of moneyed market the National Trust needed to court. I can write that now, three years later; it was certainly not how I was thinking of it at the time.
Meanwhile Sarah and I tried to settle into Sissinghurst. It was a slightly strange experience. The house was overwhelmingly parental: my father’s furniture, his books, his files, his pictures, his whole habit of being. I used to catch myself tidying up, not because I minded the mess our family was making but because he would have. Boots in the hall, old cups of coffee, dog beds, last night’s washing-up: all of this would have summoned from him that particular, half-audible, rather sibilant under-the-breath whistling, usually a tune from My Fair Lady, which was the signal of contained impatience and anxiety. A shift into ‘Lili Marlene’ was not good: major dissatisfaction. So I tidied up to avoid the whistling. And then, terrifyingly, I found myself whistling too. ‘Why are you whistling under your breath?’ my daughter Rosie asked. ‘Because I like the tune,’ I said, exactly what my father would have said, and just as untrue.
On top of that, we had to deal with the National Trust, which at times was like having a third, even more supervisory parent. We were undoubtedly a difficult new presence for them. Instead of a single, self-contained, beneficent and peace-loving octogenarian, they now had on their doorstep a family consisting of two busy, untidy grown-ups, a Land Rover that leaked oil all over the National Trust cream- and caramel-coloured tarmac, two daughters with bikes that were leant against yew hedges, three dogs that needed to do what dogs need to do, two adult rabbits (brother and sister) and their six babies, which were currently smaller than the mesh of the wire we had put up to enclose them. None of this was within the National Trust guidelines. The rabbit run we created looked like something on the back edge of a run-down housing estate outside Swindon. But what can you do if that is the sort of family you are?
And then in January 2005 the Trust sent me a ‘Draft Occupancy Agreement’, which seemed to confirm the worst. Sarah and the children were to have no rights to live here if I died. We needed permission to go into any part of the building except the part we actually ate and slept in. We were to ‘notify Trust staff if guests of the family will be entering the garden’. Our children were not to go anywhere near the greenhouses or nursery. We could have people to lunch only on closed days and only then ‘with the prior agreement of the Trust’. Any photographs we took inside or outside the house were to be Trust copyright. The Trust was to be informed if we were away for more than two days or if anyone came to stay. We were to park our car with the exhaust pointing to the west. The occupation of the house was ‘at the discretion of the National Trust’ – in other words we could be thrown out at any time it liked.
I reeled from this document, sunk in gloom. I have talked about it more recently to Sally Bushell the Trust’s property manager and she has explained it from her point of view. They didn’t know us at the time. For them, we were new arrivals. They needed to be careful about security and safety. The yew hedges had to be preserved from exhaust fumes. And it wouldn’t have been nice for our friends to have been challenged in the garden. At the time, though, I was in no mood for understanding. I wrote an angry letter to the Trust’s area manager, who had signed the document. ‘There is no sense that any of my family belongs to Sissinghurst,’ I told him,
nor that we grew up here, that we think of it as home, that we know it and have known it more intimately and for longer than anyone else, that it is a place to which we are deeply attached. This draft agreement might well have been proposed to someone who had just strolled in from Arizona or Mars. Many of its clauses treat me and my family as though we were simply unwelcome here, to be contained and enclosed, and not to be trusted.
I would like you to imagine addressing the kind of proposals you have made to my father. Would you have dared do that? I don’t think so. I can see my father now, if I showed him what you sent me, holding his head in his hands and saying it was unbelievable. It is an almost complete betrayal of any spirit of cooperation or trust we might have had. And if not to him, why to us?
This was bleak; it felt like the moment of dispossession. ‘How lovely to be at Sissinghurst,’ people would say, but it wasn’t lovely. Doubly or even triply, it felt like borrowed clothes: first because it was my father’s house, then because it was his parents’ and thirdly because it was the National Trust’s. A three-layered baffle lay between us and any sense that this was home. It made all too obvious the acknowledged fact that the status of ‘resident donor’ is difficult. Even the phrase reveals the difficulty, as if one were living in a body whose heart had been given away. It’s your home but someone else’s business, a place that is yours emotionally but very far from being yours in terms of who owns it, runs it, pays for it, works at it and conceives of its future.
I could see the position clearly enough to know that if I had been a National Trust employee, working hard all year to keep the place in prime condition, I might not have liked us either. There is something structurally unlikeable about a ‘donor family’. They swan about as if they own the place, but they don’t own it. They think they know how things should be but they don’t do much to keep them that way. For all the heart-drenching beauty of Sissinghurst, it felt a little cold. At times it felt like living in a theatre. One tends, at those times, to see the mechanisms rather than the show.
The Trust reeled in turn from my letter. I saw Sue Saville, the regional director, who did her best to mend the damage that had been done, smiling at me and rather sweetly touching my arm in reassurance. She said that visitors to NT properties liked the idea of a donor family living there. That the NT liked donor families because they often provided an instinctive feeling for a place which an administrator would have to guess at and feel for. That this occupancy agreement had been a mistake, a failure on the Trust’s part to imagine themselves into our shoes. Finally, one day that summer, Sir William Proby, the chairman of the Trust, came with Merry, his wife, to talk to me and to apologise. We sat in the garden together, looking at the azaleas, their honey-scent blowing over us. The Trust had got it wrong and Sir William was sorry. I know, poor man, that part of Sir William’s job is going around the country soothing donor families in these situations, but he did it well. There was no more talk of occupancy agreements.
Nevertheless, it hardly changed the atmosphere on the ground. Sarah and I decided one dank evening that we had to leave. What was the point in pouring our energies into this place when clearly it neither wanted nor needed us? Sissinghurst could roll along on its current path and nobody would ever know what hadn’t happened. There was another life to be had but I knew I didn’t want it. To leave would be a defeat and a retreat. I would be giving up. Surely there was another way, another form of relationship with everything that Sissinghurst meant? Maybe. Sarah was sceptical. What could it be? What way out of the straitjacket was there?
Through the course of 2005, I gradually worked my way to understanding what needed to happen here. That summer, going for a walk with the dogs, on the path just between the Priest’s House and the barn, apropos of nothing, I had an idea. The restaurant at Sissinghurst serves tens of thousands of people a year. Why not grow on the farm the food that the restaurant cooks and sells to the visitors? What does a good lunch need? Some lamb, beef, chicken, eggs, pork, sausages, vegetables, bread, butter, cream, fruit, pastry. If the farm here could supply these things again, as it once had, the place would, almost inadvertently, reacquire the vitality and multiplicity it had lost, not as a smeared-on look, but from its bones. Above all, there would be people working the land here again, people for whom the soil of Sissinghurst was of vital importance, who would get to know it and look after it as carefully as their own children. That stupendous list of tasks performed on the Captain Beale farm would again become at least half necessary. A good lunch would make a good landscape. Grow lunch. That was all it needed.
In the wake of the idea came its drawbacks. This was not a lovely blank canvas. Over two hundred people – employees, residents, volunteers – were directly involved in the working and management of Sissinghurst as it stood. That big and complex business, with its own multiple tensions and high profitability, had to be kept going while this new cluster of ideas – a market garden, an organic farm, a restaurant dependent on very local produce, a labour-intensive use of the land – was pushed into the middle of it, with the same management team having to make the changes. It would not be easy. The new Sissinghurst enterprise would have a ready-made market on its doorstep – the stream of visitors to the garden – but that benefit came at a huge price: the need to convert everyone from the old system to the new. What was good about the idea was also bad.
In October that year, one of the National Trust’s committees of the great and good – this was the Gardens Panel, chaired by Anna Pavord, the writer and plant historian – was coming to Sissinghurst anyway, to see how things were going. It was a routine visit, something that happens every two or three years. I decided I should talk to them about my idea. Here was a chance to get change into the bloodstream of the Trust. I rang Anna, slightly with my heart in my mouth, feeling that it was scarcely the role of a member of a donor family to suggest to the Trust how they should go about managing things, and asked whether I could address her committee. Of course, of course, she said. They would be there on Thursday. I could have ten minutes.
I have never written anything more carefully in my life. I knew I had to say it to them with some conviction, but I printed it out as well, so that the committee would have something to take away with them, a physical object which could make the idea stick. The meeting was to be held upstairs in the old granary, whose windows I had shot out with my air rifle one bored ten-year-old morning. It was now part of the varnished pine world of the National Trust restaurant. There were about twenty-five people there, arranged around a giant table, tweed jackets, ties, professional, slightly curious. I distributed my sheets of paper, stapled together, along with copies of the poem called ‘Sissinghurst’ which Vita wrote soon after arriving here. I then stood to address them. This is what I said:
Sissinghurst is more than a garden. It is a garden in the remains of a ruined house and that house is at the heart of its own piece of Wealden landscape. It is a deeply rooted place and its meaning and beauty depend on its working not only as a garden but as a place that is fed by those wider and deeper connections.
That was code for a major transformation of the place. If connections were what mattered here, then the whole way it worked had to change. Vita’s vision of the place had spread far beyond the horticultural. Garden, buildings, farm, woods, history, Kentishness, the land: these were the necessary ingredients. ‘This husbandry, this castle and this I’, she called it in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’. It was a place, she wrote, where she found ‘in chain/The castle, and the pasture, and the rose’. That chain, that sense of connectedness, was what Sissinghurst needed to embody. It was a garden in a farm and it should seem like that.
I told them about the four different tenants, the lack of anyone working on the farm full time. No animals attached to Sissinghurst, no farm buildings used as farm buildings, no one farmer who thought of Sissinghurst Castle Farm as his.
The result is a certain, efficient heartlessness, decisions made about this land not for the place but in the context of the four farm businesses of which it forms a part.
The garden at Sissinghurst is the crowning element of a landscape which needs to be polycultural. It once had both soft fruit and top fruit, hops, a herd of Guernsey cattle and another of Dairy Shorthorns, farmers who were attached to it as a place, as well as orchards, cereals, sheep, pigs, chickens and ducks. That is the landscape described in VSW’s poem, and that is the landscape to which we should aspire. I am sure the pursuit of such a rich and various landscape would bring the aesthetic changes to the landscape which the garden needs. Sissinghurst the place would become the poem which Vita envisaged.
How could we do that? By growing the food for the 115,000 people who sat down to eat something in the restaurant and café here each year. Lunch would make its own landscape. And for that we needed a business plan.
The farm would need to employ people. It would strengthen this community and would restore some vital connections to it. I think we have an opportunity here to make something of great rarity and beauty, a poem of connectedness, something of which we would all, in five or ten years’ time, be exceptionally proud.
There had been some nodding of heads as I spoke and people clapped when I sat down, but I had to leave the room for the discussion that followed. I wasn’t quite sure where the question had ended up. Afterwards, I spoke to Jonathan Light, the Trust’s area manager. ‘The one thing I am absolutely determined I am not going to do is string an albatross around Sissinghurst’s neck for the next twenty years,’ he said. ‘And there’s another point. The landscape looks like it does for a reason and that is because economics and the market has driven it to look like that over the last fifty years. If we try to do something different, we will be swimming against the tide.’ Negative then? I asked. No, not at all. ‘If we can demonstrate you can have a beautiful landscape, a mixed farm, and make money, then that really will be something we can show to others.’
The next day I had to go to Cheltenham to give a talk. On the way there, in the car, my phone rang. ‘I have Fiona Reynolds for you,’ her secretary said. I had met the new director-general of the Trust before but being called on the mobile in the car was a first. ‘I hear you’ve set the cat among the pigeons,’ she said. Friendly, warm, busy, amused. ‘I’ve had some excited phone calls. Do you think you could send me a copy of what you said? I am not saying anything but it sounds interesting.’ It was the best of signs. People on the committee wouldn’t have rung her if my words hadn’t gone in somewhere. As I drove back home, I couldn’t stop smiling. Just think: this thing I had been half-remembering and half-imagining was still alive.
I walked out across the farm that evening, taking the dogs through the autumn woods, kicking up the leaves in the trenches which the old roads had left in the wood floor. A rising moon hung at the end of the long rides and autumn filled the air like a soup. It seemed possible, then, that there might be no disconnection between the future and the past here, that the passing of time wasn’t mere diminution. In the car I’d heard a woman on the radio say that we met the world only once, in childhood, and that everything afterwards was only memory. I knew well enough the attractions of that idea, the Wordsworthian regret, the sense of significance being invested only in the past. But here now, maybe, there was something else: the ability to fold the past over into the future, like turning the blankets and sheets over at the top of a bed, or digging over a piece of ground, turning the sods, grass down, and breaking the exposed soil to make a new tilth. Walking through the wood that evening, with the dogs prodding for rabbits among the chestnut stools, and that moon climbing through the branches, I knew I had never felt such buoyancy, such deep and rooted buoyancy, and I wished my father had been there to tell him.