A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  When we moved to Sissinghurst, her writing room on the first floor of the Elizabethan tower remained undisturbed, just as she had left it. There is something thrillingly daring for a child about looking through a grown-up’s possessions, knowing their owner will no longer walk in and challenge you. After Vita died, Adam and I climbed the tower steps up there for the first time. We would sit at her desk and rifle through the drawers, marvelling at a passport that would never be used again, at the engagement book with forever blank pages for the second half of the year of her death, coveting a pair of scissors with handles wound round with red raffia and a pen made of bamboo. The words on a page of blue writing paper, hidden at the back of the desk drawer, puzzled me, so I kept the page. ‘Darling, I left a pearl earring on your side of the bed yesterday. Keep it safely for me? your Mary.’ Sheets of brand-new stamps were tucked within the folds of the leather blotting pad. A corner cupboard, painted green by Vita in 1930, the year she bought Sissinghurst, hung on the wall to the right of the desk. Inside was a bottle of emerald nail polish that seemed exotic, even indecent, for a grandmother, and a pot of Gloy, a liquid glue with a red rubber slitted top, that was slipped with speed into an acquisitive child’s pocket. On the top shelf of the cupboard lay a small box containing the sole of a delicate dancing slipper that had been fashioned into a shape so flat and slim that it looked like a cooking spatula, but one too fragile ever to be used to stir a stew. Childlike writing covered the underside. This represents the sole of the shoes worn by my mother. My father told me he had this paper-knife done from one of her shoes in 1871. (Left to me by Papa) Victoria Sackville 1908. Vita’s mother had identified Pepita’s shoe a few days after the death of her own father.

  As well as the idiosyncratic seductiveness of her exuberant garden, where the roses sometimes trailed so low over the paths one had to duck to avoid becoming ensnared, the interior of the house was redolent of Vita, crammed with her treasures and her clutter. The Sackville coat of arms was stamped on the silver sconces in the dining room, Georgian silver wig stands for overheated judges were displayed on the big desk, tapestries that had once hung on Knole walls now hung in Sissinghurst bedrooms, a much-loved pottery jug shaped as a chicken clucked water into glasses on the dining-room table. Many years after Vita’s death and heavily influenced by my father, I began to pay attention to her writing, her trailblazing, her unconventionality, her conventionality, and I grew proud of my association with the alarming old woman with a chewed tortoiseshell cigarette holder in her mouth. She had been an intimidating grandmother who had demonstrated little empathy towards children but also an exotic grandmother whose stories of Old Lionel’s coach journeys to London accompanied by outriders armed with silver pistols passed their way from Nigel to me. As I grew older, my impression of her changed. I was eighteen and in my first term at university when Portrait of a Marriage, the book that made her posthumously famous as a ruthless rule-breaker, was published, and I applauded my father for his long-deliberated decision to make public her shocking story of same-sex infidelity. The timing suited my own bid for emancipation.

  Some of her old treasures are now mine. A green leather case with the word ‘Vita’ scrawled at a diagonal in gold script across one corner lives beneath my bed. The case is lined in cream satin, and a series of indentations create little silky beds in which jade-handled instruments nestle neatly. There is a small pair of scissors, a hairbrush, a nail file, a nail buff, a comb and two glass pots with smooth green lids. Inside one pot is some sinister-looking cream, yellowish and crusted. The other jar is empty but the contents, brackish powdered rouge that accentuated cheekbones a hundred years ago, have spilled all over the case, damp staining the satin inlay pink. The expense of the case is obvious, this talisman of affluence belonging to an earlier age, but although Vita kept it safely among her precious things, or at least never threw it away, she had obviously never cared for it in the way a more fastidiously girly woman might. The purpose of the case seems to have sat at an uncomfortable angle to its owner, while the owner, at her own estimation, proceeded at an odd angle to life. After Vita died, Harold gave me the three-foot-high wooden angel, painted in dull gold, that had been in her bedroom ever since they had rescued it from a deconsecrated church in Venice half a century earlier. Nigel put it on a plinth in the eaves above my bed, from where, he said, it would always bless me.

  After she died, Harold continued to live in the cottage he had once shared with Vita. Without her he was almost inconsolable, incapable of shaking off his grief. His existence without her became what his biographer James Lees-Milne called ‘a slow and steady diminuendo’. When I was alone with him, he would chant a little rhyme to me: ‘He for a little tried to live without her, liked it not and died.’ One day when we came across the garden to see him, he was up his red wooden collapsible ladder in his writing room in the cottage. He was searching for a book on the top shelf. Realising Adam and I were looking up at him, he momentarily lost his balance. ‘No one will ever call me Hadji again,’ he said very slowly as he came down the ladder, holding open a book with an inscription that Vita had written on the flyleaf. ‘Hajji’ was originally a respectful term used to mean a Muslim who had completed the pilgrimage to Mecca. Throughout their marriage, in private and in Vita’s letters to Harold, she had called him Hadji (her spelling), what she understood to be the diminutive Arab word for old man, and the sight of the word in her handwriting and the great absence of her had suddenly overwhelmed him. ‘We will,’ I said. And we always did.

  In old age Hadji suffered from the combined effects of several small strokes, the most recent of which reduced his mental agility. Most days Adam and I would collect him from the cottage and bring him across the lawn to lunch in our part of the house. He would sit at the head of the table. As my father attempted cheerful conversation, my grandfather and my mother would barely respond, lost in their own sad isolation. Occasionally Hadji would cry out, ‘Oh, Viti, Viti, Viti,’ while my mother remained silent, never touching the delicious lunches she had cooked for us. Instead, a plastic tub of cottage cheese mixed with tinned pineapple and a carton of yogurt sat on her own plate, the control she imposed on her figure apparently giving her some sense of influence over an existence in which she otherwise felt powerless.

  However, away from the tension of the dining room, Harold still felt to me like a marvellous grandfather, a blueprint for grandfatherhood. Before Vita’s death, when I was six years old and Adam just three, he had helped us plant a sapling oak on the bank of the moat opposite the huge trees that had been there for hundreds of years. The planting was a marker of our belonging there. The sapling took root and thrived, and now the tree is enormous, a source both of pride and of slight shock that we have both lived for so long. Harold loved us children from the beginning and was made demonstrably happy by us coming to live permanently at Sissinghurst.

  ‘Can I join you in the paddling pool?’ he would ask as he stepped, without waiting for an answer, straight into the water, wearing his shoes and socks. ‘May I offer you a light?’ he would suggest, footman-solicitous, as we placed a sugar cigarette on our lips while he flicked a match to the red-painted end.

  There were dares known as courage tests. ‘I dare you to jump off the top of the tower steps with your eyes shut.’ Or, ‘I dare you to climb to the top of the wall on the lower courtyard.’ The long drop from the top of the tower steps to the lawn below required our small legs to be courageous, but the Bagatelle urns that Victoria had given Vita from her Wallace Collection legacy, and now planted with sweet-smelling viburnum, acted as hand steadiers. The wall was a greater challenge. A fragile, crumbly Elizabethan affair, it was sturdy enough to support a fully bloomed Madame Alfred Carrière rose but hardly robust enough for the combined weight of two boisterous grandchildren. My mother would appear and shout, ‘Oh, Harold, I have asked you not to endanger the lives of my children.’ ‘What about my wall?’ he would reply as he gestured for us to climb higher, his moustache rising up his face
and expanding with his smile. He invited physical affection. I would run the length of the long yew walk at top speed as he waited for me at the other end, a white figure in his cream linen trousers and bashed-up panama, holding out his arms wide as I hurled myself into his embrace. When it was time for him to get on with his writing or when he simply needed to be on his own, he guaranteed sixpence to whoever could hide in a cupboard for longest.

  We spent a lot of time with Hadji in his cottage. He kept a bisected mug on his desk, a present from his secretary, that said, ‘I only asked for half a cup of tea’ in gold letters, which we thought very funny. And he kept his paper clips and rubber bands in two little blue-lidded pots marked ‘Odds’ and ‘Ends’. We used to watch him shave in the mornings, using dark orangey-transparent Pears soap to work up the lather, joining in with his loud shouts of pain when he pretended to cut himself. As he became increasingly frail, he was looked after by a sequence of single male companions, all of them known as ‘My Man’, who cooked and cleaned for him and took care of his well-being. Michael Kirk was in his early twenties with twinkly blue eyes and curly dark hair and he was our favourite Man, a sort of dashing elder brother and nanny rolled into one. Michael adopted a newborn lamb called Jacob, which had been abandoned by its mother, and brought him into Hadji’s cottage. Sucking a real-life baby’s bottle with a power and urgency far beyond the capability of an infant, Jacob’s hooves made a little sliding tap dance, cha-cha-ing on the slippery brick floor of Vita’s flower room. We loved Jacob the lamb until he grew into Jacob the sheep, when he became smelly and annoying with his headbutts and we left him in Michael’s far more patient care.

  * * *

  The garden was our playground. The miniature maze formed of box hedge outside the Priest’s House was the exact height for a child’s hand to brush along the feathery surface as we ran through the narrow paths of the White Garden. Most of the time we bicycled everywhere, along the grass paths, sometimes past Vita’s brightly coloured caged budgerigars, although their frantic flapping and cries for freedom meant that was a route I avoided. Occasionally Michael took us swimming in the sea at Camber Sands at nearby Rye, but most afternoons we escaped across the stile by the thyme lawn, leaving the garden and its showy publicness behind us, running down the poplar avenue that crossed the open field, past our oak-seated swing, through the clattery, collapsing bottom gate and taking the path into the wood. We would climb into the small wooden boat and row out onto the lake – almost unpassable in some places for the thickness of the duckweed – disturbing the paddling moorhen that vanished in a spray of water among the reeds. Trailing our fingers over the side in the green slime, we would watch tadpoles slither from our grasp, the sun catching the momentary translucent shimmer of the dragonflies as they tipped their wings on the water’s surface and made iridescent circles around us. Vita described that radiant place as one of the few that could ‘repair the cracked heart, the jangled temper or the uneasy soul’. Years earlier she had pushed her own boat down the slope onto the lake, a skiff ordered on a whim from the Army & Navy soon after she came to live at Sissinghurst, as she too watched the dragonflies ‘darting off on their blue and brown nuptial flight, so lean and so oddly joined and jointed’.

  On summer weekends we went ‘boat racing’ with our father, dropping our own carefully selected stick into the stream and watching as it was carried along with the current before urging it in increasingly noisy and desperate terms to out-float the competition. Only when our wooden boat encountered a stone or the waterlogged root of a tree were we allowed to give it a helping prod along past the obstruction with a ‘hoiker’ cut by our father from the bendy hazelwood that grew there in profusion. There was inherent cheating, and our father, the chief cheater, invariably won the race. The boat-race route took us past the small fenced cemetery devoted to the graves of Vita’s dogs, with Byron’s lines to his own Newfoundland terrier Boatswain quoted on their tombstones: ‘Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth’ – an epitaph which we found incomprehensible but nonetheless desperately sad.

  In winter, we would put one foot on the ice at the edge of the lake to test the strength before inching as near to the centre as we dared. One year my father lost his balance and fell backwards on top of me, crushing my head onto the ice beneath him. As I returned to consciousness, still lying on the frozen surface, the worry on his face was replaced first by an expression of relief at my survival followed quickly by another of even worse anxiety. ‘Never, never tell your mother what I have just done, promise me?’ I promised. Years later he would describe the moment as one of the most frightening of his life, my near icy death made worse by the prospect of admitting responsibility for it. He hated my reminding him of it. Even as a tease.

  Towards the fields on the other side of the house, the Victorian red-brick farm buildings huddled together, the sweet, sickly ammonia smell clinging to the cowsheds and mixing with the earthiness of the surrounding fields. Behind the sheds was a huge tap that ejected dead frogs, drowned in the rusty discharge. At teatime, milking time, Daisy and Marigold and all their florally named companions swayed back down the lane, returning from a day’s munching in a hip-butting mass. Following the familiar twice-daily procedure, we watched the Wellington-booted farmer martial his herd into the milking shed, the pink fleshiness of the cows’ udders swinging above the grey clanking milk pails.

  In late summer the hop pickers arrived for their holidays from London’s East End, sleeping in the huts and tents around the hop fields above the cowsheds. The men would pick from the vines while the paisley-scarved women sat on long trestle benches in the oasthouse, exchanging gossip while sorting good hops from bad with darting fingers, the palms of their hands smoothing the hard green buds that jostled and jumped past them on the conveyor belt. Farther down the hill were the chicken sheds, and off to the side the low building that housed the pigs, where a dozen newborn piglets lay under a warming light in a neat row along the underside of their deep-breathing, wiry-haired mother: pigs under a maternal blanket. Once we left the always-closed door open on purpose and the old sow lumbered into the yard, her tired eyes opening and closing, confused by her liberation, her piglets vociferously frantic, running circles around her. We were in disgrace for days.

  In the orchard we had a den in the clammy, fetid air-raid shelter. Adam and his friend Simon dug for potatoes abandoned there during the Second World War, and I commandeered the only shelf, on which I stored a comb and a banana and basked in the sense of keeping house. I like to think we rarely conformed to gender stereotype, but for some reason the dugout inspired those roles. On rainy days we hung about in the old brewhouse, lurking at the bottom of the haunted staircase, swinging off the carved post on which a sixteenth-century Sissinghurst laird was said to have chopped off the hand of a pretty young servant reluctant to follow her master upstairs to the bedroom. Sometimes I took my book and went alone to the attic floor, where no one ever came and from where I could eavesdrop on the voices below me or could listen out for the weekly travelling baker who kept a basket of sweets and chocolate for sale in the back of his bread van. Vita’s chauffeur, Jack Copper, stayed on with us for a few years after her death to do all sorts of odd jobs, as well as making home-made cider in the garage. After a hefty tasting session, he would weave up the lane at the wheel of the old black Zephyr as we bounced in the back seat on our way to buy starfish-pink fruit chews, four for a penny in the village sweetshop. Shirley had moved with us to Sissinghurst from London, remaining our invaluable nanny. Sometimes she took us to see her mother, Aunt Pun, who lived in the village. Aunt Pun, who wore her long grey plait coiled and pinned round the back of her head, like my mother’s old headmistress had done, and a periwinkle-patterned overdress with polished stout-brown lace-up shoes, made the best teas I have ever eaten. A bowl of just-picked tomatoes, still warm from her sunny garden, and another containing lettuce, pulled from the earth moments before, would sit next to a plate of ham, thickly sliced, a newly baked loaf and
a pat of creamy butter. A jug of marigolds would sit at the centre of the white cloth, and after we had dipped the tomatoes in salt to illogically enhance their sweetness, a tray of floury currant scones would appear with a dish of home-made raspberry jam. The feast always ended with a generous slice of Victoria sponge that barely made contact with the tongue before melting away. Occasionally I was invited to make up Aunt Pun’s bingo foursome in the village hall, where she was inevitably in charge of the tea and scones. I sat with her friends, inhaling the sweet scent of violet cologne, while young and old marked their cards. Eighty-eight, two fat ladies, always got a chortle, and a couple of accomplished wolf whistles invariably accompanied Legs Eleven. Aunt Pun, authoritative, no-nonsense, all-providing, consistent, smiley, was my idea of a mother.

  * * *

  My own mother was becoming more and more unhappy, her moods switching between semi-hysterial laughter on the telephone with her friends, when she would snort through her nose, to anger and to silence. Her existence at Sissinghurst had been made more uncomfortable by her reluctant agreement to condense four of Vita’s gardening books for publication into one volume. She had always shown a real interest in the garden, which Nigel appreciated and valued, and he thought this suggestion would give her ‘an occupation’ and therefore make her happier. But by imposing on Philippa the old family pattern of writing about the life and work of an earlier generation, he only emphasised her lack of self-confidence. Fourteen years after the pledge to his parents that he would make Philippa ‘a Sissinghurst person’, rather than allowing her to establish her own identity, he was still trying. He was a man for whom presentation and show, rather than emotional honesty, often held priority. And when those required standards fell below his expectations, he judged harshly.