AT THE END OF THE SEASON at Sissinghurst, the gardeners always find spots on the lawns where visitors have stood and gazed at a particularly seductive rose or luscious wisteria, and under their feet the grass has withered and the lawn gone slightly bald. They call these ‘Admiration Patches’, and they need to be aerated and revived each autumn. There is no doubt that in the history of Sissinghurst the period from my grandparents’ arrival in 1930 until Vita’s death in 1962 is one of those exaggeratedly looked-at and slightly worn patches, the most famous moment in ten thousand years of Sissinghurst’s existence.
The story of their arrival and life at Sissinghurst has been told over and over again, in private and public. This fame was nearly all due to my father’s persistence in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. An element of it was commerce. He knew in his parents’ story there were valuable publishing properties. He knew, too, that the National Trust was anxious that when Vita and Harold died, the interest in Sissinghurst would wane and its financial basis would collapse. He became, in the last forty years of his life, Sissinghurst’s custodian, librarian, archivist, publicist and entrepreneur. All through the peak of the Bloomsbury boom, he carried on an enormous and global correspondence with scholars and fans. One could tell, each year, where the latest foreign editions had appeared, as first American and French, then German, Dutch and Danish, Latvian and Russian, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish and, finally, Japanese and Korean enthusiasts for Sissinghurst and its literary-lesbian-hortico-aristocratic amalgam arrived at the gate to drink at the shrine. My sisters and I used to stand there trying to spot the territories my father’s publishing campaign had recently conquered.
But if this was canny, it was not cynical. It was also a form of honouring his parents’ memory. Nothing in his life mattered more to him than them, and Sissinghurst became in effect a portrait of their marriage. They framed his life and he remained their perpetual son, bound to them both, but in polar-opposite ways. His relationship with his father was one of overwhelming love and admiration. Harold played with him, told him stories, drew him pictures, empathised with him as he made his way into the world, understood his nascent homosexuality, urging him to keep it in perspective, and always pressing on him the central virtues of a civilised life: tolerance, kindness, energy, civility, integrity. They discussed everything all the time. ‘He always claimed’, my father wrote of him, ‘that it was impossible for a father to transmit experience, but in fact he did so, for his advice was always practical, and by understanding the exact nuances of our dilemmas, he dissipated them.’ My father felt he lived not in his father’s shadow but in his light.
Towards the end of his life, my father sold nearly all of his parents’ letters to American universities, but before he died, he told me that if I were to sell anything, as he imagined I might, the one thing he would like to remain at Sissinghurst for ever was the file of letters that his father had written to him and his brother Ben during the war. It is a thick typewritten folder which contains what is, in effect, a manual of fatherhood: of love, anxiety for his children, a flattering ease in the telling of news and the testing of opinions, a fascination for the world, a brilliant play across anything that amused, stirred or worried him, in his life or theirs, written from the House of Commons where he was an MP or from the Ministry of Information, where for a time he was a junior minister in Churchill’s government, to the battlefields of North Africa and Italy, page after page drenched in a form of love that was so strong it could be easy, funny, courteous, dignified, articulate and challenging without ever losing its undernote of deep and passionate affection. My father kept this file in his bedroom until he died.
With his mother, it was different. She had neglected him and his brother when they were children, leaving them for months on end when away with lovers or friends; and when, in the second half of her life, she returned from her adventuring, to embed herself at Sissinghurst, she was absent there too, in the Tower, and when in the Tower in the world of poetry, from which her children felt – and were – entirely excluded. Whenever my father wrote about her, that sense of exclusion, almost of expulsion, was the dominant note. She ‘withdrew into preferred solitude’. Poetry was ‘her secret life, the life of the tower, into which we never attempted to penetrate’. He was constantly anxious that he might wound her. There was a ‘gap between her and us. It had been there since we were babies.’ If she talked to them or wrote to them, her tone was ‘constrained’. She ‘thought herself a failure as a mother, but it was as much our fault as hers. We never made the necessary effort to know her well.’
This double emotional inheritance, of warmth and cold, transmitted through my father, has soaked into Sissinghurst. Its image has become fixed in a binary vision of the twentieth century here. Harold was classical, Vita romantic. Harold was kind and engaged, Vita distant and unintelligible. Harold was clever, Vita passionate. Harold was civility, Vita poetry. Harold my father knew; Vita he didn’t. Harold he loved, Vita he didn’t. These polarities became our governing myth.
I knew the story of my grandparents’ lives from the moment I was conscious. My father used to stand on the dais at one end of the Big Room and tell it to visitors while I stood at his side. The climax would always be that, after his death, ‘Adam, and Adam’s Adam, and Adam’s Adam’s Adam’ would live here, far on into the unforeseeable future, words that would make me glow with significance and squirm with embarrassment while the people stared from three steps below us on the polished oak floor.
The family mythology swirled around us, planets orbiting above our heads in ever wider and more distant circles. There was a Nicolson element, to do with generation after generation of public servants and military men, backed by layer on layer of Edinburgh lawyers, and going on beyond them, mistily, to chieftains of the clan in Skye and Assynt in the far north-west of Scotland. But the Nicolson story was not at the heart of Sissinghurst. It was never important enough. Two coats of arms stood on either side of the entrance arch: three Baker swans on the right and the chequers and bars of the Sackville Wests on the left. It was Vita who had the money, who bought and owned Sissinghurst, who conducted negotiations with Captain Beale, the farm tenant, whose flag flew over the Tower, whose room in the Tower silently oversaw Sissinghurst and whose spirit infused the place. Under the Tower a memorial stone put up after she died remembers her as the person ‘who made this garden’. Harold is not mentioned.
She dominated the present and behind her stretched an inheritance of pure glamour. Her mother had persuaded Sir John Murray Scott, the vast, five-foot-waisted, lonely owner of the Wallace Collection, to leave her half of it in his will. The legacy was contested by his relations (‘dumpy, dull and middle class’, according to my father), but as soon as Victoria Sackville established her claim, in a spectacular court case, she sold the collection en bloc to a Paris dealer, adding £270,000 to the £150,000 in cash Scott had left her too. These figures can be multiplied by at least fifty for their modern equivalents. Vita would inherit most of it; it became the fund on which Sissinghurst floated for Vita’s life. Her mother’s mother, Pepita, had been a Spanish gypsy dancer, whose hair was so long that it dragged on the floor behind her, with whom her grandfather, Lord Sackville, had fallen in love after seeing her dance onstage. Behind them lay receding avenues of Sackvilles going back towards Restoration, Cavalier and Elizabethan heroes, all set in the huge grey Kentish palace of Knole, the house in which Vita had been brought up and which, if she had been a boy, she would have inherited. Against this bouillabaisse of a story, the Nicolson aspect, the element of middle-class normality and sanity, was thin fare.
Vita had been lonely as a child. She had looked with a sceptical eye at the Edwardian indulgences of her mother’s friends, fell in love with poetry as a girl, and more than that with Knole and with the romance of its stories. She was wooed by the great heirs of Edwardian England, could have had dukedoms and county-covering estates for the asking, but never stooped to that. She refused the giant houses offered her by Lord Lascelles (Harewood) and Lord Granby (Haddon Hall and Belvoir), largely perhaps because Knole was greater than either, not in the gilded richness of its rooms, but in something less articulate: the pale grey simplicity of its ragstone walls; its succession of courtyards and the buried secrets they promised; the way you could push into Knole, uncovering layer after layer, one court folding out from another, linked by intricate route-ways, through flagged back halls and into other high, narrow spaces, where the windows of the surrounding galleries looked down blankly from above, suddenly coming by chance at the foot of a stair on a cupboard full of gilded porcelain or the delicious eighteenth-century statue of a duke’s mistress, nude and prone on her velvet blanket, her body resting on cushions as luscious as herself.
Knole is more maze than house, a private coral reef of accumulated riches, where under its four acres of roof, and within layers of encrustation, its long galleries are filled with the pictures still hanging in the order in which they were inventoried in the seventeenth century, furnished by successive Sackville Lords Chamberlain, who brought down to Knole everything rejected by each change of fashion at court. It is the most beautiful beach in England, thick with the successive tidelines of English taste. It would be difficult to imagine a more powerful stimulus to the imagination than this: Knole, loneliness, the flamenco brilliance of the Spanish-gypsy-dancing gene, dusty brocades, the looming portraits, the charm and volatility of her seductive, plutophile, intemperate mother, the mulch of Englishness, the badge of illegitimacy only a generation back, a sense of herself as the heir to this slow, deep river of fading beauty, something which poured over and through her as if she were more weir than heir.
As a young woman, Vita added to all this a love of Italy and the jewelled life of the Renaissance, the scents and tastes of the Mediterranean world. Benozzo Gozzoli, Venetian colours, cistus and rosemary, almond and apricot blossom all combined to intoxicate her as a teenage girl. She began to feel in herself what she thought of as the fire of her own Spanish blood, mixed with Kentish earth, and began to sense even in her earliest poems her own self to be strung between these poles. Nothing in her was ever parochial or limited, but that exoticism, and a wilful streak of selfishness and dominance, played over a deep and almost stagnant bed of Kentish rootedness. Richness and melancholy joined hands across her own inner divide.
Instead of one of the grandees of aristocratic England, she married a young Third Secretary in the Foreign Office, who came, in his own description, from a family of ‘impecunious high civil servants’. He was a matching combination of contradictory talents: high minded, with a belief in the central role public service should play in a man’s life; homosexual, with an almost unassuageable appetite for clever and beautiful young men; a brilliantly witty and delighted describer of the world around him; multilingual, passionately internationalist, in love with the civilisations of Greece and France; and above all filled with curiosity for anything that life might bring. Only one man in a thousand is a bore, he told my father, and my father quoted repeatedly to me, and he is interesting because he is one man in a thousand.
Again and again my father would tell me when I was young about his father’s comparison of his life and career to an alpine meadow, spotted and lit with flowers, and how preferable that was to a single crop of maize or lucerne. But this multiplicity, and the love of the shimmering surface, was always to be allied to work, love and loyalty. Harold longed for rootedness himself. ‘I wanted to feel autochthonous, the son of some hereditary soil,’ he wrote. These desires and interests, and this appetite for a life that combined wide horizons with a sense of enriched belonging, were what made their marriage. They felt, immediately, mutual. When he and Vita were married, at Knole in 1913, and lived first in Constantinople, where Harold was attached to the embassy, and then at Long Barn, a cottage outside Sevenoaks, which they called their ‘little mud pie’ and could have fitted inside one of Knole’s courtyards, they thought of each other as playmates, self-consciously innocent, young and happy.
All of these threads would, in time, find their way into Sissinghurst, but after the end of the Great War, two devastating events changed this happy, pretty picture of their early lives. The effects of both could have been foreseen; neither was; both left them changed; and both became, in opposite ways, shaping influences at Sissinghurst.
The first was Vita’s long love affair and elopement in 1918/19 with Violet Trefusis, the daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. It began in ‘a mad and irresponsible summer’, as Vita described its early phases, ‘of moonlit nights, and infinite escapades, and passionate letters, and music, and poetry. Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn’t care deeply.’ Violet, according to Victoria Glendinning, was ‘a damaged and damaging young woman’; to Harold ‘some fierce orchid – glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life, throwing cadaverous sweetness on the morning’s breeze’. She undoubtedly wanted to destroy Vita’s marriage. Vita was more equivocal and, in letter after grief-stricken letter, wrote piteously of the love she had for a husband she claimed to be deserting.
In 1920, as the affair’s fire was dimming, Vita wrote a long manuscript account of it, which she kept in a Gladstone bag, stamped with the gold letters V.N. It remained hidden first in her sitting room at Long Barn and then in her turret room in the Tower at Sissinghurst for the rest of her life. It was never shown to anyone before her death and was only finally published by my father in 1973, after Vita, Violet and Harold had all died, as the central element of a book he called Portrait of a Marriage, a title in which he packed the pain and grief of this affair in the cushioning tissue paper of his parents’ lifelong, often declared love for each other.
I remember with great clarity the moment the book came out. He had written to me at school to warn me of the coming scandal. I now know, from his own papers, how anxious he was. The prospect of its publication left him ‘terrified by the reproach I might draw on myself’. He felt guilty,
knowing that even if it was true that Vita wanted it published, Hadji would have deplored it. He was the figure that haunted me throughout. I argued that it was a confession which only a son could handle with delicacy and love, but this was an excuse. I wasn’t doing it out of love, but to set a new style in biography, of total honesty, to make a stir, earn me money, show that I was capable of taking a risk,—not only with my reputation but with Vita’s.
He had justified it, he wrote in his own self-reproaching memoir, written twenty years later, as ‘a eulogy of marriage, [which] had lessons for other people who found themselves lesbians and homosexuals, but could still have a very happy marriage. It might “help” people, I wrote, but this was special pleading. I was finding excuses for my guilt. That guilt has still not dissolved.’
Violet Trefusis’s sister, to whom Nigel sent the typescript, called it a ‘distasteful book’. ‘It seems incredible to me’, she wrote to him, ‘that while professing to revere your mother’s memory, you are prepared to publicise for profit details of her infatuations of over half a century ago.’ Lord Sackville, who ‘had affection and great admiration for your mother’, told Nigel that ‘these feelings have been tarnished by your book’. Admiration poured in from much of the world but none of it ever quite washed away his own sense of betrayal. When the serialisation of the book started to run in the Sunday Times, he could not bring himself to look at it. ‘Ben knew’, Nigel wrote in his memoir, ‘that my love for Vita was very shallow, his shallower.’
I was back at Sissinghurst the day the papers came with the reviews in them. He had been told that Bernard Levin had reviewed the book in the Sunday Times. The paper lay on the kitchen table unopened between us. My father finally steeled himself to look at it and turned to the review section. He leant over the pages with both elbows on the table and his head in his hands, reading between the protective grid of his fingers. Levin had fixed on what he saw as the narcissism and self-indulgence behind this story of late, luscious, moneyed romanticism, the urge of the wild ‘gypsy’ spirit to break free of the tedium of a civil servant husband, of children and normality. The skewering sentences, on which Levin fixed, were these:
I saw Violet twice more. Once in my own house in London; she looked ill and changed; and once in the early morning at her mother’s house, where I went to say goodbye on my way to the station. There was a dreary slut scrubbing the doorstep, for it was very early, and I stepped in over the soapy pail, and saw Violet in the morning room. Then I went to Paris alone.
Levin said my father should have burned the manuscript. Rebecca West said the same. Cyril Connolly had been friendly about the book in private but in his Observer review was cold. After reading them all, my father went upstairs without a word. My sisters and I read with some delight the copy of Private Eye that ran a spoof introduction to the book. Under a large picture of an Edwardian country-house party, ‘Nigel Sackville-Nicolson’ wrote that he had published this account of his mother’s homosexuality only ‘after long and careful consultation with my family, my dearest friends and my bank manager … ’ It left his reputation enlarged but, in some quarters, damaged, and it made him £80,000.
Violet, Vita had written, very rarely came to stay with her at Long Barn, their house near Sevenoaks. Whenever she did,
the antagonism between her and the house was ludicrous and painful. The country would seem deliberately to drape itself in tenderness and content, and she, feeling the place to be an enemy, would turn yet more fierce, yet more restless, while I stood bewildered and uncertain between the personification of my two lives.
My house, my garden, my fields, and Harold, those were the silent ones, that pleaded only by their own merits of purity, simplicity, and faith; and on the other hand stood Violet, fighting wildly for me, seeming sometimes harsh and scornful, and riding roughshod over those gentle defenceless things.
Engagement with the draped tenderness of the Weald, the mud-pie life, competed in Vita with something larger, unsweet and more domineering. The traumatic affair, ‘a vortex of unhappiness’, had revealed to her in the starkest possible form the contesting elements of her own personality. That polarised view of herself, both domineering and tender, both private and theatrical, both rotted and filled with a love of the exotic, would in time come to shape Sissinghurst.
The second transforming event of their lives was the death of Vita’s father in January 1928. It was the moment when Knole passed into the hands of her Uncle Charlie, when the fact of dispossession was finally confirmed. The house and its lands had in the nineteenth century belonged to two of her great-aunts. There had never been a question of women not being able to inherit Knole. But Vita, who possessed it in a way more deeply than anyone ever had, was now finally denied it.
On 16 May that year, as she wrote to Harold, now in Berlin,
I allowed myself a torture-treat tonight. I went up to Knole after dark and wandered about the garden. It was a very queer and poignant experience, so queer and so poignant I should almost have fainted had I met anybody … I had the sensation of having the place so completely to myself that I might have been the only person alive in the world, and the not the world of today, mark you, but the world of at least 300 years ago … Darling Hadji, I may be looney but there is some kind of umbilical cord that ties me to Knole
At the end of May 1928 she heard that Charlie, the new Lord Sackville, and his American wife were moving into Knole and were thinking of selling some of the great paintings and furniture she most treasured, a dismantling of her store of memories. She went there, had lunch with them and came home in tears, unable to drive for them, with the rain streaming down the windscreen outside.
It was in the light of this dispossession that the cottage at Long Barn no longer seemed enough. My father always maintained (perhaps relishing something of a myth) that a few years before they had flirted with the idea of buying the moated stone keep of Bodiam Castle in Sussex. Each of the four of them – Vita, Harold, Ben and Nigel – would occupy one of the corner towers, meeting occasionally for a ham sandwich in the central hall, a model of Nicolson family life to which they all apparently subscribed. But Bodiam had been too expensive.
The search for a substitute Knole was already under way when in March the next year they heard that the fields next to Long Barn were to be turned into a battery chicken farm. In April 1930, with the poet Dottie Wellesley, Vita came to Sissinghurst for the first time. They found the ruin, dripping with wet. It bore every mark of its long history, a place of broken grandeur, looking, in a curious way, like a ruined Knole, with a tower and a succession of courts, filled with the ghosts of Sackville ancestors and rubbish where life might have been. It was crying out for redemption, an opportunity to make a garden that drew on the sense of its own abandoned past. Perhaps its fragmentary and broken state made it more satisfying than Knole. A ruin, in these circumstances, was better than anything gilded and complete. The disintegrated Sissinghurst could stand in for a ruined inheritance.
The sales particulars described the splendid Victorian farmhouse – the ‘excellent family residence and grounds’, ‘well clothed with choice creepers, approached by a Carriage Drive and Sweep’, ten bedrooms, ‘well matured grounds with lawns and rhododendrons’ – the five hundred acres of wood and land and, almost as an afterthought, ‘the Towers of Sissinghurst Castle in the background’. It was, of course, that background to which Vita and Harold were drawn: gaunt, partly unroofed, damp and bleak. They wavered. Harold, on 13 April, after a second look, considered it ‘big broken down, and sodden’, but Vita had the money, and it was her choice. They bought it for £12,375. There was no electricity, no running water, no drains, no heating and scarcely a fireplace that worked. One or two of the windows had glass in. But this was the invitation: to pour their energies into redemption of the past.
It was here in 1931, in her room on the first floor, that Vita wrote the poem that she called simply ‘Sissinghurst’. It was the best thing, Harold thought, she ever wrote, and she dedicated it to Virginia Woolf. Far more than Vita’s garden-writing ever could, the poem addresses the core of Sissinghurst. It is a place apart:
Buried in time and sleep,
So drowsy, overgrown,
That here the moss is green upon the stone,
And lichen stains the keep.
Time has almost stopped. A kind of enriched stagnancy colours the place and her vision of it. Sissinghurst, like the depths of its darkened moat, becomes a pool in which Vita can feel both ecstatically alive and at the same time suspended from the real world:
For here, where days and years have lost their number,
I let a plummet down in lieu of date,
And lose myself within a slumber,
Submerged, elate.
Those last two words are the essence of Vita’s Sissinghurst, a freedom found in a deep absorption with place, land and the sense of a treasured past, a past that was better than the present, drenched into these bricks and this soil.
There was a chance here to revitalise a once-great but deeply neglected place, to take a ruin and make it flower. Again and again, whenever Vita wrote about Sissinghurst, the atmosphere she summoned was of that embedded history, a certain rich slowness, even a druggedness, as if evening, when colours are soft and thickened, were its natural and fullest condition:
The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun. Everything was hushed and drowsy and silent, but for the coo of the white pigeons sitting alone together on the roof … They climbed the seventy-six steps of her tower and stood on the leaden flat, leaning their elbows on the parapet, and looking out in silence over the fields, the woods, the hop gardens, and the lake down in the hollow from which a faint mist was rising.
The garden became, inevitably, a reflection of its makers. The received idea is that it was a marriage of sensibilities: a certain classical elegance and even austerity in the planning by Harold; a rich and romantic profusion in the planting, mostly by Vita, what she called the ‘cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny’ method, the verve of ‘exaggeration, big groups, big masses’. All that is true, even if not in quite so schematic a way. Often it was Vita who advocated a simplicity and straightforwardness in design; often it was Harold who wanted a more baroque and theatrical effect. Letters from many of Harold’s passing lovers, now preserved along with the rest of his papers at Balliol but never published by my father, describe him as masculine and assertive, a manly man, with his yacht, his pipe and his familiarity with the powerful and the great. His reputation among those who lived and worked at Sissinghurst was for brusque coldness and indifference. It was Vita who used to come and sit on the kitchen table in the farmhouse and talk to the children, who was always amused by the jokes and joshing of the men who worked on the farm or in the garden. She always used to come to the birthday parties of the young Stearnses in Bettenham. Harold was away in London much of the time, only to be spotted leaving for or arriving from the station in his dark blue pinstripes. The distant and reserved Vita in the Tower, always calling herself Vita Sackville-West and never Mrs Nicolson, seems largely to be a product of my father’s emphasis on it. In fact she was known at Sissinghurst only as Mrs Nicolson or, after Harold was knighted for his biography of George V, as Lady Nicolson. Most of her books in the Tower are initialled ‘VN’. ‘V. M. Nicolson’ was how she described herself to the War Agriculture Committee. And although Nigel rarely went to her room in the Tower, many others did, spent long hours there with her, talking deep into the night. Jim Lees-Milne, Harold’s friend, lover and biographer, remembered a bewitching, dusky evening talking up there:
There were no reservations of any kind. No topics were barred. Her curiosity about and understanding of human nature in all its aspects were limitless. Her sympathy with every human frailty and predicament was all embracing. This was the Vita I knew and most dearly loved. As dusk faded into night I watched the outline of her noble head against the chequered Tudor casements of the tower, would watch the tip of her cigarette from a long holder glow fiery red as she drew upon it, with constant but imperceptible inhalations so that her profile – always her profile of drooping eyelid, straight nose and soft rounded chin – would emerge from the darkness as in a momentary vision. I would smell, when I could no longer see, the cloud of Cypriot tobacco peculiarly her own; and listen to that deep slightly quavering, gently swelling voice, broken by eddies of short sharp laughter. ‘Oh do tell me what happened next.’ Then I understood what this unique woman’s love meant to Harold.
Even in the way the garden developed, the received picture is not quite true. Many of Harold’s plans for Sissinghurst, including a wall of busts of himself and his friends, loggias and ‘caves’, are far from the picture of the cool, Mozartian rationalist struggling to impose order on Vita’s bubbling chaos. In the early days he suggested vast flower beds to fill the upper courtyard – not the cool green pools of lawn that are there today – and a Versailles-style fountain occupying the Rondel in the Rose Garden. It was often Vita who had to slim down his grandiose fantasies. The story and its interactions are subtler than the received idea often allows.
The relationship of exact form to luxuriant planting is almost a cliché of twentieth-century garden design. Sissinghurst’s planterliness, its love affair with the Mediterranean, with spring bulbs and roses, with yew, brick, stone and grass – all of this is simply the lingua franca of twentieth-century gardening. Much of it was there in Vita and Harold’s first garden at Long Barn. And it has mistakes. The colour of the new brick walls, despite an enormous amount of care taken over them, is not good, too brown and too dead, never glowing. Even the curved wall at the west end of the Rose Garden is a little pretentious. The Yew Walk is too near the Tower, the two rows of yews are too near each other, its entrance to the orchard is poorly designed and it isn’t aligned properly with the paths in the Rose Garden. The small north-facing Delos they never got right. Harold’s additions to the Priest’s House and the South Cottage are a little lumpen. This is not an exercise in perfection. The genius of Sissinghurst’s design – Harold disciplined by Vita – is in its self-deprecation, its lack of egoism, its courtesy in playing second fiddle to the plants, the place, the surrounding country and its deeper meanings.
I am sure the reason that Sissinghurst continues to stand apart from its many near-contemporaries is the way it is slipped so discreetly into the ruins of its site, its interfolding of building and garden, garden and farm, farm and country. The garden, as a design, merely fills the frame that the place provided for it. It is subsidiary and subtle, no more than the dancing partner for an existing ancientness. It has sometimes seemed to me as if the fullness of the planting in the garden is merely drawing up the stories that are soaked into Sissinghurst’s bones. Harold’s design does not compete with that. As Jane Brown pointed out, there are no elegant drooping curves at wall-ends, no rich Italian stone frames to openings, no niches of plum-coloured brickwork to enliven the Elizabethan pink. A garden was not imposed on Sissinghurst; it seems as if Sissinghurst was allowed to have its garden.
The bones of what they did were outlined extraordinarily quickly: by 1932 what is now the White Garden, the Tower Lawn, the Spring Garden, the Cottage Garden, the Yew Walk and the Nuttery had all been laid out. The hedges and trees that would in time give the garden its form were already largely planted. By the end of that decade, the new walls closing off the Rose Garden and the north side of the Upper Courtyard had been built and the orchard designed.
Innocence had no place here; there was to be sophistication in the ruin. Rareties and subtleties came from the very beginning. Colour schemes were devised before the plants that were to fulfil them. Harold collected foxgloves from the wood in an old pram and by accident brought up bluebell bulbs with them. They would have preferred to make the paths of York stone as they now are, but there wasn’t enough money, so paving-stone-sized slabs of rough concrete were cast on-site. What statues they bought were cheap. Some have aready disintegrated and been replaced with copies. Only what they inherited from Vita’s mother after her death in 1936 – the bronze and lead urns, the statue of the Bacchante now in the Spring Garden, the bench at the head of the Moat Walk designed by Lutyens – was of undeniable quality. The beautiful stoneware pot in the centre of the White Garden, a seventeenth-century Chinese oil or ginger jar, had been bought by Harold in Cairo for ten pounds.
Sissinghurst was not, it was always said, a winter resort. The cold and the discomfort were intense. The hessian on the dining-room walls in the Priest’s House would billow in a wind. Lunches usually ended with inedible roly-poly pudding. There was no spare room, although visitors often slept in Nigel’s and Ben’s rooms when they were away and even occasionally in Harold’s bed. (I remember my father telling me that and shuddering: ‘How he must have hated it!’) The electric heating system in the library had unaccountably been installed in the ceiling, creating the conditions for a deliciously warm attic, but a persistently frozen and scarcely used room beneath. Even so, Harold and Vita did not live in poverty. They had two gardeners, a chauffeur, a cook, a lady’s maid, two secretaries and other servants. Grapes, peaches, apples, pears, raspberries, gooseberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangetouts, cabbage, aubergines, squashes, pumpkins and quinces were all grown for their table. Scenes are fondly remembered of the butler and his wife, the kitchen maid, walking gingerly across the winter garden, trays in front of them, from the kitchen in the Priest’s House through the snow-encrusted White Garden, leaving their tracks across the Lower Courtyard, through the Yew Walk and to the South Cottage, where Vita was lying ill in bed, waiting for her lunch or supper. In wartime it was worse. Vita wrote to Leonard Woolf in January 1940:
Dear Leonard,
I ought to have answered your letter long ago, but both the boys came home for 24 hours leave and immediately took to their beds with ’flu. You may imagine that Sissinghurst is at no time an ideal place for invalids, but when it means carrying trays, hot water bottles and other requirements through snow-drifts some sixteen times a day it is really hell. Then George got it; then I got it; then Mac [her secretary] got it. Nigel lost his voice. I lost my voice. Pipes froze; lavatories ceased to function; snow came through the roof and dripped on to my bed. So perhaps you will forgive the delay.
Something of the atmosphere in the early Sissinghurst emerges in a letter from Vita to Harold describing a day in April 1936:
How people can say life is dull in the country beats me. Take the last 24 hours here. An extremely drunken man had left his pony to be tried in the mowing machine. So it was put in the mowing machine; I watched; all seemed satisfactory; I went away. So did the mowing machine. Kennelly [the gardener] sent it away without saying a word to me or to Copper [the chauffeur/handyman] who is responsible for it. Copper arrived in my room and abused Kennelly. I went and cursed Kennelly, who indeed was in the wrong. In the evening at about 9, I was told that Punnett [the builder] wanted to see me. I went out. He was in tears, having just found his old father drowned in the engine tank, and a note written to himself saying it was suicide.
Next morning, ie today, George [the manservant] came to fetch me: Copper would like to speak to me. I found Copper in the garden room covered in blood with a great gash in his head. Kennelly had come into the garage and knocked him down without any warning. He had fallen unconscious, and had come round to find Kennelly throwing buckets of water over him. He had then tried to strangle Kennelly, and they had only been separated by the arrival of Mrs Copper. So I sent Copper to the doctor in George’s car, and meanwhile sent for the police. Accompanied by the policeman I went out in search of Kennelly, whom we found very frightened and white. He was ordered to go and pack his things and leave at once. So that was that and we are now without a gardener.
They first opened the garden to the public for two days in 1938, the entrance fee sixpence in an old tobacco tin, if you noticed it, on an old card table in the entrance arch. There must have been some pent-up demand: eight hundred people came that day. Vita would happily meet and chat to the visitors who accosted her. Harold could be ruder: ‘A dreadful woman bursts in upon us,’ he wrote in his diary of an unexpected photographer from Picture Post. ‘I am very firm. But Viti with her warm-heartedness is weak. She calls it “being polite.” Anyhow I refuse to be photographed, and go off and weed. I am weeding away, grunting under a forsythia, when I realise she is behind me with her camera. All she can have photographed was a large grey-flannel bottom.’
The family had little to do with the farm. Captain Beale was the farmer, and Vita would negotiate rents with him, or object to his planting ugly crops (which meant everything except corn), and there was an orchard in the present car park. East Enders came down in scores for the hop harvest, and Vita, who, according to my father, ‘thought their squalor romantic’, would go down in the evenings to join their campfires. My father ‘went with her once and they gave us evil-smelling and tasting mugs of tea. Dutifully I drank her mug as well as mine, for she hated any tea, and seeing her mug empty she said “Oh I must have spilled my tea” and they gave her another which surreptitiously I drank too.’
This was never really a landed family. ‘Granpapa Sackville left us his Purdy guns,’ my father wrote, ‘which Vita encouraged Ben to use, but we did only once, when Hadji took one of them, saw a rabbit sitting still on the wood-path, aimed, fired, missed, rabbit didn’t move, missed again, then it loped off, and we laughed with a delight that is still remembered. After that the guns were given to Copper, and he sold them after Vita’s death.’
The war interrupted progress, and for six years Sissinghurst roughened and thickened. Hay crops were taken off the lawns. Weeds invaded the beds and haystacks were made in the orchard. Vita extended her ownership of the surrounding land, buying Bettenham and Brissenden, trying to buy Hammer Mill, but at £12,000 it was too expensive. Captain Beale organised the Home Guard and a watch was kept on the Tower for German parachutists. But the cycle of the year continued; the lumbering wagons brought up the cordwood for her fires; the ‘classic monotony’ of the rural life persisted, heightened and even made perfect by the threat hanging over it. In the autumn of 1940, they watched the fighters in the Battle of Britain, cutting white patterns against the blue of the summer sky, tumbling silently overhead like butterflies. One night, unable to sleep, Vita
went down to the lake where the black water gave me a sense of deepest peace … the moon gave no reflection into the darkened waters. The only things which gleamed and glowed were the water lilies, whitely resting on the black pool. Taking the boat out, I cut the milky stalks of the lilies in the moonlight and as I did so drifting aeroplanes appeared over the lake, chased by the angular beams of searchlights, now lost, now found again; now roaring out now silent, traceable only by their green and red lights sliding between the stars. A fox barked at them, like something in a fable. I tried to compose the fable for myself, something which would combine the fox, the lilies, and the white bodies of the young men up there aloft, but nothing neat would come to me …
Jack Vass, the head gardener and mainstay of Sissinghurst from 1939 onwards, volunteered for the RAF in 1941, saying to Vita as he left: ‘Look after the hedges. We can get the rest back later.’ Dutifully, if a little amateurishly, Harold and Vita clipped the yews and pleached the limes until he returned. Vita knew she couldn’t make Sissinghurst without him. One year he planted 12,000 Dutch bulbs, and in 1946 she prayed to her diary:
Oh dear kind God, please let Vass live strong and healthy until he is eighty at least, and never let him be tempted away to anyone else’s garden. His keenness is so endless, and nothing is too much trouble. Besides he’s so good looking, so decorative.
Vita’s long series of articles in the Observer from 1947 until 1961 subtly and even surreptitiously, without actually naming Sissinghurst, advertised the garden to the wider world. It was something she longed to put on show. Vita was enthusiastic when the BBC wanted to make a Sissinghurst documentary in the mid-fifties. Harold was not keen on ‘exposing my intimate affections to the public gaze’. But when both of them were first conceiving of the White Garden – and it is scarcely ever remembered that the planting was as much Harold’s as Vita’s idea – it was with a view to what it would look like to the public. ‘I believe that when we scrap the delphiniums,’ he wrote to her on 5 July 1949, ‘we shall find the grey and white garden very beautiful … I want the garden as a whole to be superb in 1951 for the British Fair or Festival, with heaps of overseas visitors, and many will come down by car.’
Vass finally left in 1957, after he and Vita had argued over something to do with the Sissinghurst Flower Show. He was succeeded by other stopgap gardeners, but Sissinghurst entered a new phase with the arrival in October 1959 of Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger. They remained joint head gardeners until 1990.
The Sissinghurst they found on their arrival was rough and untended. When Vita interviewed them for the job, she had a hole in her breeches which she held together with her thumb and finger. Vita was in the habit of digging up the odd plant while a visitor was with her and offering it to them, leaving a hole in the flower beds. The glasshouses were full of scraggy and rather shameful plants. In the White Garden, the bricks on the wet ground squelched when you walked on them and water squirted up your trouser leg. The fig trees in the Rose Garden were occupying three-quarters of the flower beds, with no room for flowers. Sibylle Kreutzberger remembers Vita and Harold setting off for a winter cruise in late 1959 and leaving the two new gardeners to tackle the pruning:
We hacked away for weeks while she was away. There used to be a winter secretary who came in and sent Vita’s post off to wherever they’d gone to. One day this secretary came round the corner and the whole Rose Garden was strewn with branches the thickness of your thigh. ‘I do hope Lady Nicolson hasn’t got second sight,’ she said.
As Harold had predicted, Vita’s entire inherited fortune poured into the creation and maintenance of Sissinghurst. Even when ill, she continued until 1961 writing her articles for the Observer because she needed the income. Only in her last years did she have to start selling her possessions at auction, some silver and a pair of the bronze Bagatelle urns, of which six now remain in the garden.
When Vita died in June 1962, she knew that she had created something of lasting value. ‘We have done our best,’ she wrote to Harold in November 1961, ‘and made a garden where none was.’ He survived her by six years, sad and lonely. Visitors would see him sitting on the Tower lawn with the tears running down his cheeks. My father was ‘awed by his desolation’, but when Harold died in 1968, my father also collapsed in tears of a depth he had never known.
For a week or two after Vita died in the summer of 1962, my father tried to use her room on the first floor of the Tower as his own. But he was haunted. ‘I could not endure it. I ceased to be myself: I became a ghost of her.’ Ever since, it has remained as she left it, carefully curated by the National Trust, packed away in a thousand leaves of tissue paper every winter, carefully revealed every spring, so that visitors can peer in through the metal grille that now fills the doorway, allowing one to look but not to touch.
My father had been in there only half a dozen times in thirty years, and it is now a shrine, a preserved ensemble, drenched in a peculiar faded, organic, tobacco brown, ‘the verdure brown’, as Vita called it, of a tapestry or an autumn wood. One morning the other day I sat and worked for a few hours at her desk when the garden was closed. Vita’s Sissinghurst remains more present in that room than anywhere outside it. A French blue-brown tapestry, of a pool in a garden, where a pair of swans drifts in the water and oranges hang from the trees in pots, lines the wall in front of me. Looking at it, I write down the words: ‘a curved arcade of shadowed trees’ and feel the Vita-ism creeping up on me, the ghost, another generation on. On the rough oak desk itself there are ink rings where a bottle tipped or was spilt. There is a photograph of Virginia Woolf, her lover, that long saluki face from which the person, it seems, has withdrawn half an inch below the surface, and is apparent only in the heavy, tented eyes. ‘The human contact others can achieve is not for such as her,’ as Ethel Smyth described Virginia to Vita. Opposite her, there is a photograph of Harold by Karsh, with a cigarette in one hand, a pencil in the other, his curly hair oiled back and on his face half a smile, more in the eyes than the mouth, as if about to speak, the person not sunk into the face, but barely contained within it.
This room is an assembled world. In the drawer of the desk there are amber beads, a screwdriver, a Moroccan dagger in its sheath, a book of matches and some envelopes, a label saying ‘Potentilla Nitida’ and a dried seed pod like a small artichoke. There is nothing thin or refined. Everything is richly itself: the eighteenth-century leather-bound memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier stand beside a selection from Landor. Sticks of sealing wax lie with some pens in a Mexican earthenware tray. There is a small alabaster pot and some tarnished gilt scales on which letters can be weighed. Everything is rich and faded, a fraying of stuff that was once valuable and is now merely treasured. Nothing here was ever renewed. It arrived and, as soon as it arrived, like a picked flower laid on a desk, it began to fade. Vita allowed her possessions to age, silks to wear, wood to darken, terracotta to chip and fail. ‘Her possessions must grow old with her,’ my father wrote. ‘She must be surrounded by evidence of time.’ It was a vision and an aesthetic of gradual withdrawal, the bass line of music in which the high notes were the growing and flowering of the garden around her. In here was the lower register, a kind of melancholy, a saddened music. Sissinghurst as a whole, as Jane Brown wrote, also became one of the ‘crumbling shrines of the ancient garden gods of Florence and Rome’.
It is a more reflective, slower and deeper place than much of modern Sissinghurst can really allow. On the morning I worked there, trying to understand this place by absorption, osmotically, one of the gardeners, Peter Fifield, was mowing the lawn, and the burr of the mower’s engine and the smell of the grass came up the spiral Tower stairs. I realised, as I never had before, that nowhere has quite the relationship to Sissinghurst that this room does: central and presiding, the onion rings of it spreading out from here, across the garden and the other buildings, the farmyard and the farmhouse, the closer fields, to the woods and the shadowed trenches of the streams. This Tower room is the gravitational middle of all of that but it is also hidden and enfolded, buried in the layers of the place like its heart, a presiding secrecy.
Inventories have been taken here, and the Trust has carefully numbered every object, book and paper. But you can read this room as more than a catalogue of objects. It is a form of self-portrait. There is a layer of imperial richness here: a chipped lapis tile on which a vase can sit. And another, on the other table, a brown and amber medieval floor tile, made of English clay. On the bookshelf next to her desk, there is The Rhymers Lexicon, in which in pencil on the title page she has written ‘a rhymer, that’s what I am’, and in which many words are ticked as used and not to be used again. Some are added: peristyle between puerile and reconcile; coracle between cruelle and demoiselle.
In a Venetian notebook there is a letter from Freya Stark, describing the olives and lemon orchards of the Mediterranean scene then spread before her eyes, and a long list, stretching over thirty years, of the books she lent to her children, to her cousin Eddy and Uncle Charlie, to Dottie Wellesley and other lovers, even to her mother. There is a letter written by a woman who loved her, from 17 Montpelier St, SW7, undated:
Thank you for a very lovely day. I shall long remember the rain sliding on the panes, the chanting fire and your voice coming from a long distance as if suddenly you were speaking to me across the years. An echo – or a warning – I shall probably never know – but thank you for everything
Madeleine
There are duplicate order books from the great nurseries for hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, jonquils and narcissi, for tulips, and crocuses, for Iris reticulata and a hundred dark fritillaries. In a secret drawer in one of the wooden cabinets, there is an ivory paper knife in the shape of a tiny shoe. Vita’s grandfather had it made when Pepita, his mistress, died, having the ivory cut to the shape and size of the sole of one of her dancing shoes. Beside it, a small coral brooch is pinned to a photograph of Pepita surrounded by her children. There are photographs here of Victoria’s brother’s children and grandchildren, Vita’s lost Spanish cousins.
All the English poets are in her writing room, but in the small turret room off it are her gardening books, books of literary criticism and biographies of the poets, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Bergson’s Le Rire, and a shelf of Elizabethan history. Above them is a complete run of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, initialled ‘VN Long Barn’ and with an inscription on the flyleaf from Verlaine in the hand of Violet Trefusis:
On est fier quelquefois
Quand on se compare.
Beside it, in Sex and Character by Otto Weininger (‘VN Polperro July 1918’), Vita underlined: ‘Men who are merely intellectual are insincere. All that they care about is that their work should glitter and sparkle like a well cut stone.’
Tucked high in one of the rather damp shelves in the turret I found the proofs of her poem ‘The Garden’, which she composed here, at this desk, through the war years, and which was the last poem she wrote. It was her final claim on poetry, in which she had once felt secure, but even then sensed slipping from her. I read it, with the April cold in my fingers and the mower outside, as the thudding ringing of the bell came down from above on the hour. I wanted to redeem what she had written, to find the Sissinghurst music here, but, strangely, and for no want of trying, I could not make her poetry take hold. It lacks the final, unanswerable authority of real poetry. There is an emptiness to the rhetoric and it does not get you by the heart, or the throat. Its lines seem always to be more interested in their form, their appearance, than in what they might mean. Vita’s misfortune was that she was so much greater as a gardener than as a poet. In the end, everything she wrote was nothing compared to what she did in this place. ‘Gardener,’ she calls out at one point in ‘The Garden’, ‘poet unaware/Use your seeds like words.’ Perhaps in those few words there was a moment of knowledge and recognition.
A life and its griefs are soaked into the fabric of this room. At the foot of one of the bookcases, I found a calfskin attaché case. In it was a note in pencil from my father: ‘These objects and papers were found on VSW’s desk when she died.’ They were mostly the stuff of everyday life, interrupted by illness – she had cancer – and death. Some little notebooks, with lists of what to pack, sachets of photographs of the donkey Abdul, Harold and various women I could not identify. An engagement diary, with dates stretching on into the summer of 1962 beyond her death. A seed packet of Sutton’s wallflowers, ‘Persian Carpet’, 5s. A small note saying ‘Foie de veau veneziana’ and ‘Sultanas in apple pie’. A quote from Xenophon: ‘There is nothing that does not gain in beauty when set out in order’, and a poem by Thom Gunn cut out of the New Statesman. But alongside those daily, transitory things, two others remained from her long distant past, kept here, not in some hidden uninspected repository of a filing cabinet or a drawer but on her present desk, as much to hand as the photographs of Virginia or Harold. First, a letter from my father to his, written in December 1925 when my father was eight and his father had gone to the embassy in Tehran for two years.
Last night I felt so sad about you being so long and far away and I cryed a bit. Oh Daddy I do miss you, it is horrid to think of you all those thousands of miles away, and two years is a long time to wait for a person whome one loves very much which I do you. I love you more than very.
Gogy [his French governess] has litten the fire in your little sitting room, and I am writing on your desk.
I hope I will no longer be sad about you,
Your loving,
Niggs
That letter is the only sign of her children in this room. Alongside it, still on her desk nearly forty years after it was written, was its opposite, something a few years older, evidence of another kind of love. Nigel’s little letter is in pencil, carefully corrected by Goggy, neatly tucked into a small, neatly addressed envelope. This other thing is rapidly and even wildly written in heavy black ink in short hurried lines on the back of the telegram forms of the Hotel Windsor in Monte Carlo. It is a poem in French, written by Violet Trefusis at the end of those ‘four wild and radiant months’ between December 1918 and March 1919 when Vita, dressed as Julian, the wounded soldier hero, had lived her life of ecstatic freedom away from the bonds of bourgeois normality, from Harold and the children. But this poem, the passion of its writing still apparent, comes at the end of all that, the moment, or at least one of them, when Vita rejected her most dangerous lover. It is Violet’s admission of defeat, when Vita made her choice for Harold and her family. It marks the moment, one could say, when Sissinghurst became possible. ‘Adieu Mon Ange,’ Violet had written,
Si triste échange
Tant pis pour moi.
Sissinghurst itself is the monument to the choice Vita made.