A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  ‘I thought the Germans had gone away now, Mrs Tremson.’

  ‘Well, that might be. And good riddance to them. But it’s those Russians that are coming now. Taking over from where the Germans left off. Coming over to finish the job.’ Whistling involuntarily as she sucked in her breath through a gap in her teeth, she fashioned another cigarette from her tobacco tin, the stub of the last one neatly stowed away in her flowery apron pocket, muttering about the new threat that would be the death of us all. Gesturing with the ragged end of her mop, she hinted that an explosive was probably hovering nearby, perhaps even hidden behind the Hoover in the broom cupboard. I dreaded the day when we would all have to shelter from destruction in the coal-hole under the street with nothing to eat except Mrs Tremson’s wine gums. She was big on wine gums and kept a stash of them in her pocket, from which they would emerge slightly grubby with flecks of Kleenex and ash. I would go to bed terrified about the advancing Russians. Like Mrs Tremson, I was convinced they were coming to get us just as the Germans had come to get our mother when she was a child.

  During the two decades that followed the end of the Second World War, the threat of a third remained disturbingly real. In the early 1960s, memories of the misplaced optimism that had grown up after the First World War had not been forgotten by those of Mrs Tremson’s age. Not long after our move to London I found several wads of food-ration book stubs, bound in elastic bands, shoved into the back of a chest outside my mother’s bedroom. In the new post-war generation of children, a rudimentary political awareness began at an early age, especially for those growing up in cities, and above all in London, where buildings and confidence had not long ago been violated. With a ubiquitous struggle to make ends meet and a class and gender divide still defiantly entrenched, one did not have to look very far for evidence of inequality and deprivation. Without the means to articulate my growing sense of the unfairness of my own good fortune, Mrs Tremson’s worries troubled me. It never occurred to me to ask why she worked so long into the evening, or whether she faced a long journey home ‘on that bleedin’ bus’. She protected her privacy with monosyllabic vehemence. All she would admit to in answer to my mother’s enquiries about her persistent yawning was ‘needs must’. Hard work and pride guided her through her life, and when daylight hours ran out, she responded by fitting in the last of her cleaning jobs well into the night. Anxious to help, I would steal a handful of threepences from my mother’s purse and balance them in a wobbly hexagonal tower on the Formica counter, but the pile would remain untouched. Although she was always known as Mrs T, no one knew if she had a husband or any children. If they did exist, there was little doubt who was the chief breadwinner in her household. But now I wonder if her mop-shaking anger had originated when those damned bombs had fallen in Bethnal Green twenty years earlier and deprived her of a family. Her commitment to us was unconditional. She never made any demands of me, never asked for homework to be finished, teeth to be cleaned or hair to be brushed, and she tolerated my presence in her shiny kitchen without comment. Her reliability and constancy provided reassurance in that emotionally broken house.

  * * *

  A sequence of deaths both public and private marked the first half of the 1960s and resulted in big changes in all our family’s lives.

  During Vita’s lifetime we had been frequent visitors to Sissinghurst. Vita wrote and has been written about as a novelist, a poet, a biographer, a feminist, a lover, a lesbian, a home-wrecker, a wife, a mother, a gardener, a friend. But she was also four times over a grandmother. The contrast between Vita and my mother was evident even to a small girl. On our weekend visits I would join Philippa, all femininity in her belted summer dresses, bouncing curls and sweet scent, as we followed Vita, striding ahead of us through the garden. Snapping her secateurs open and closed with one hand as if unlocking and cocking a gun, she held in the other an old tortoiseshell cigarette holder, her words drifting towards us through a spiral of smoke as she drew the cigarette to her lips. Long-limbed in breeches and knee-length lace-up boots, she wore a creamy pearl necklace in the indent of her neck above a silk shirt, her earrings dangling low, the jewellery her only concessions to the conventions of her sex. Sitting next to her at lunch, I was close enough to inhale the tobacco impregnation of her flattened hair. She was terrifying and thrilling, as tall as my father, her voice aristocratic, deep, silky, seductive, disturbing. She sounded like a male version of the lady on Listen with Mother, elongating the vowels as in ‘cleassic’ and adding an ‘h’ to endings as in ‘summah’.

  On paper she approved of the idea of me, her granddaughter, the feminine line restored. And yet she was uncertain how to show much warmth to a reserved child. We would sit at opposite ends of a garden bench warily examining each other, but twice we had an encounter that came closer to intimacy. During the hop-picking season she took me down the lane that runs behind the moat and out into the ancient Wealden fields. I had to trot beside her to keep up; no encouraging hand was lowered that day to meet mine. But as we left the lane and walked between the rows of bitter-smelling hops, plump in their muted green summeriness, stopping to examine their leaf-layered heads, which looked like miniature artichokes, there was a companionship in her authority that might have developed into something more if she had lived longer. I felt pleased to have conquered the fear of being alone with her. In the spring of 1962, she was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Nigel took Adam and me to Sissinghurst to say goodbye. We had learned to dance the twist and had been practising on the brick terrace in the garden in London. Vita sat in a deckchair on the lawn, her knees covered by a favourite rug made from cream and pale brown llama skin, the rumble of her deep tobaccoey laugh and the expression of delight softening a face exhausted by illness. She died a few weeks later on 2 June at Sissinghurst on a glorious early-summer’s day. That evening our father came as usual to read us a bedtime story but instead lay down briefly beside me and closed his eyes. When he drew the curtains and went downstairs, leaving me in darkness, I could feel the wetness of his tears on my pillow.

  Vita left Sissinghurst to my father in her will, and we moved in at once. Adam and I were given the old apple storerooms in the Priest’s House, across the stairwell from our mother. Nigel slept separately in the front wing of the house, just as he had done as a boy. But Vita’s legacy proved to be a financial headache for my father, especially with the punitive inheritance taxes of 1962. He had no capital of his own, and Vita had spent the bulk of hers on making the garden. Much of the money Nigel earned as a publisher and writer was absorbed by the huge fees of the private schools to which he sent his children. The only immediately obvious way to raise the money owed to the Inland Revenue was to sell Sissinghurst itself. But Nigel had another plan. Over the next few years he devoted himself to negotiations with the National Trust, which eventually accepted the house and garden for the nation in lieu of the tax. Despite his mother’s ‘jamais, jamais’ echoing in his mind, he signed the agreement. He had negotiated well. The family was to be allowed to live in the house and garden rent-free in perpetuity. He had saved Vita and Harold’s beautiful creation for posterity.

  That same sad summer that Vita died was made still sadder when Romeo, my mother’s Border terrier, who had accompanied her into her marriage, became ill. In the middle of our school holidays, when Philippa was yet again away at the French seaside, the dog died of old age. ‘There will be nobody to comfort Mumma in France,’ I said to Nigel, horrified to think of her being so unhappy and so far away. My father wrote to tell her of our distress but she did not come home. On 31 July he spent their ninth wedding anniversary alone with us. Still she did not come home. Then her grandmother died. Nigel went to the funeral on behalf of his absent wife. A week later a blue, flimsy airmail-paper letter arrived for my father. Phillippa wondered whether he would mind if she stayed on for yet another week. She was having such a lovely time. Nigel wrote back describing the reception her letter had received: ‘Juliet came and sat on my tummy on Thursday mornin
g and flung down your letter. I read it in bed. It caused universal upset that you were not coming home till the 16th.’ Maternal abandonment was chillingly familiar for Nigel. His mother had left her husband and temporarily eloped with Violet Trefusis when he and his brother were young children. Now Nigel’s own wife was behaving in exactly the same way.

  There were further upsets to stumble through before my parents could attempt to find stability in their new life away from London. Six months after Vita’s death, on 29 December 1962, Pamela, my remaining grandmother, also died. She was fifty-eight and had been unable to fight off a virulent attack of pneumonia with her remaining half lung. Years later my father suggested to me that her constitution had been further weakened by too many martinis. Unlike the shock I felt at my father’s tearful response to Vita’s death, I have little recollection of my mother’s reaction to the loss of her own mother. We were sent to stay with our cousins in Norfolk while Philippa went straight from the funeral to the Bahamas to find comfort in the warmth of the Caribbean sunshine, liberated from maternal disapproval at last. Gervaise was still alive but he soon found a new wife, Vinnie, a jolly, rich Texan widow with winged diamanté glasses, with whom he moved to happy tax exile in Bermuda. We rarely saw him again.

  In October 1962, during the two weeks after the Cuban Missile Crisis had erupted, a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had joined forces with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, had appeared inevitable. There was, however, a mitigating factor in this new international threat. Hope for a resolution lay in the charismatic new American president. Jack Kennedy was a man whose male potency and movie-star aura had travelled across the Atlantic, reaching out through television screens across the country. Youth, good looks and an even younger, equally glamorous wife made this president seem invincible to my idol-struck mother, who never tired of remarking how by the strangest of coincidences the president and his wife were the identical ages as herself and my father. Hers and many other people’s fears about the USSR’s growing territorial ambitions were dispelled when the joint diplomatic skills of Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev ensured the crisis was averted. A year later, late on the evening of Friday, 22 November 1963, we crept down the stairs in the Priest’s House at Sissinghurst in our pyjamas and slippers. A thick tapestry curtain lined with green hessian obscured the dining room’s view of the staircase and ensured that anyone sitting on the stairs could not be seen. Parting the curtain one inch, we watched pictures of chaos on the small black-and-white set below us, a scene of madness, cars travelling at speed and police sirens yelling. People with serious faces were holding one hand across their chests and a woman in a hat like an upturned milk pan was being helped into an aeroplane. But our attention was soon diverted from the frantic pictures on the screen onto Harold, Philippa and Nigel, who made no effort to restrain their grief, their adult watertight invincibility suddenly revealed as porous.

  And there was yet more disturbance to come. One January morning in 1965, just over two years after we had become grandmotherless, and a little more than a year after the assassination of Kennedy, we returned from our Saturday riding lesson to find our mother slumped in sorrow. For my mother, as for so many of her generation, Churchill’s death felt like the death of a parent.

  She took us to his lying-in-state at Westminster Hall, having arranged to jump the queue with a special pass provided by her soldier brother. We were smuggled in through a side door and made sure we put on dramatically sad faces when we were confronted by the coffin lying on top of the catafalque. But the emotion we felt was the thrill of being part of an important occasion rather than any sadness for a large old man forever smoking a cigar whom we had never actually met. Two days later we came back from our lesson and sat with our mother in our jodhpurs and riding boots watching Churchill’s funeral on the television. After the heavy coffin was carried slowly and precariously down the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral by eight young guardsmen, it was placed on a boat for its journey down the river, past the Houses of Parliament. As the huge cranes along the Thames dipped their heads in respect, my mother held our hands and wept. The Observer journalist who wrote afterwards that ‘this was an act of mourning for the imperial past. This marked the final act in Britain’s greatness’ spoke for my mother, my father, and all those hundreds of thousands of people for whom the olden days were now over forever. With first her mother’s and then Churchill’s death, the adult world that had formed such a large part of the structure of Philippa’s life was disintegrating.

  Not long afterwards, a photographer from the local county magazine came to the house to take pictures of the newly renovated part of Sissinghurst. He wanted some family shots. My mother had just heard that Rip, Romeo’s successor, had been run over by a car at the top of our lane. She had been told that although he had survived, he might be brain-damaged. I remember watching her as she sat for the photographs, looking beautiful, wrapped in a green woollen cloak edged in black, gazing into the far unfocused distance, her eyes washed with tears. That day I loved her very much.

  * * *

  Although Adam and I were still at school in London, where we continued to live during the week, the family began spending every weekend at Sissinghurst immediately after Vita died. Soon a new piece of luggage appeared in the boot of our mother’s car but we were forbidden to unload the squat black leather case, ‘Mumma’s face case’, with her initials in gold lettering stamped next to the brass lock. Officially it held her shampoo and pots of face cream but we sometimes got a glimpse of the unfamiliar medical jumble crammed inside before she hastily snapped the lid shut. Once or twice when she was out I would creep into her bathroom and examine the contents. There were large white tubs containing Rip’s new epilepsy pills and mysterious silver bookmarks indented with three neat rows of tiny white tablets, the individual days of the week printed above each row. I was a teenager before I recognised their purpose and an adult before I worked out why my mother needed contraceptives. Brown opaque bottles of varying sizes with screw-top lids had been tossed into the bottom of the case, leaning tipsily against one another. The bottles contained hundreds of small yellow capsules. That summer on the radio stations Mick Jagger was celebrating the wonders of Valium, mother’s little helper, singing of how it helped alleviate a sense of loneliness, lifted you out of being present in a dull and confined life, and dissipated the sense of what a drag it is getting old.

  After a while we left London altogether to live at Sissinghurst full-time, and my mother’s position as mistress of that lovely place seemed briefly to give her confidence – just as Victoria had found when entrusted with the running of Knole. The beauty of Sissinghurst provided an almost human ability to nurture. Philippa took a new interest in things. She began to take extra care with her clothes; using the small legacy from her mother, she bought five jaunty kilts of every colour, which she wore with matching cashmere polo necks. And she began to cook again, making us delicious lunches of roast chicken and crunchy new potatoes or joints of beef with creamy home-made horseradish sauce. But she was lonely, with even fewer friends in the country than she had in London.

  While the grown-ups were preoccupied with their adult anxieties, Sissinghurst was the best thing that had ever happened to me. The key to a small opening built within the huge swing doors that fill the central entrance arch and shield the garden from the world at night is not like any others on my chain. It is smooth and unmarked, giving away no clue as to what it opens, a secret garden key. Letting myself in feels not so much like an arrival as a completion, a slowing of the rhythm of my heartbeat as I lock the door behind me, a coming home. The absence of both my parents and my grandparents has made no difference to my feelings, except perhaps to strengthen my sense of incredible luck at being part of the place where I have always felt both a daughter and granddaughter, a cherisher and cherished, protector and protected. This is the place, in all its tumbling, flowery romance, that matters to me more than any other, is my certainty whenever I am uncerta
in. At times in my life, before motherhood, I have loved it more than anything or anyone else. I understand without any difficulty what it meant to Vita. They are my feelings too. When I was living abroad or whenever I was away from home and unhappy, I would walk the rooms of both house and garden in my mind. In my mind I would seek out the reassurance and peacefulness of the tower and the encircling garden. I would summon that image of great beauty, concentrating on the moment when, in Yeats’s words, ‘midnight’s all a glimmer’. At times of anxiety I would dream that the house had crumbled away, or caught on fire and burnt down, or that there had been an apocalyptic flood, the tower floating out to sea, balanced on its side like a slimmed-down Noah’s ark.

  The loveliest, luckiest time to be there is after the garden has closed to the public, when the chatter stops and the National Trust institutional hoo-ha that buzzes around the place ceases. When I am alone there, late on a summer evening, I can sense Vita’s presence in some places: in the shed where her gardening tools are kept, in the sunken garden on the lower courtyard, on the far side of the moat, in her own bedroom. Sometimes a little puff of dust escapes from a bowl of dried rose leaves and lavender grains, the relics of Lady Betty Germaine’s recipe, abandoned long ago on a windowsill and momentarily caught in a shaft of light filtered through the diamond-pane windows. Once when I was living in Vita and Harold’s South Cottage by myself, the switch fused on a new television set I had installed in Vita’s bedroom for company. The man who has been mending televisions at Sissinghurst for decades explained that ghosts do not like excessive electric currents in their bedrooms and tend to make their displeasure felt. The television worked perfectly from then onwards. Vita had made her point.