Although the close-knit world of the Sackville West children had begun to pull apart after the death of Pepita, the charming, childish letters they wrote to each other during the 1870s suggest a great affection between the siblings – in marked contrast to their later correspondence. In a letter crammed with spelling mistakes, Henry tells how he cried when Victoria left for the convent, begs her to write him a longer letter than her last one and, on no account, to forget to enclose a picture of herself. In August 1878, he describes, in a letter from the lycée at Vanves (now the Lycée Michelet), on the south-western outskirts of Paris, a visit to Buttes Chaumont, the park established ten years before in the north of Paris. He had just seen the lions, tigers, jaguars, hippopotamuses and an elephant in the zoo when, after lunch and a boat ride, he and his friends encountered a party of ‘deaf-and-dumb children’ who he feared were going to attack them. The same month, Amalia writes to Victoria, hoping for good weather in Berck-sur-Mer, a resort on the northern coast where Victoria was on holiday with the nuns. There is a letter from Flora too, in which she imagines all the things her sister must have been doing at Berck – travelling there in the wagon lit with her chums, fishing for shrimps, riding donkeys on the vast white sands, swimming in the sea – and she asks Victoria to bring back some shells for her little sisters, as she had done the year before. Scrawled at the end of the letter is a hasty note from Béon: ‘deux mots seulement ma chère Pepita, pour te dire tout le plaisir que m’a fait ta charmante petite lettre’.
In the ten years following Pepita’s death, the children saw their father, on leave from Buenos Aires, for one brief period in 1876 and once again in 1880. While he was in Europe on the first of these visits, Lionel stayed for a few days with the Béons in Paris, visited Victoria in Berck and Boulogne in August, and took Max out of school in Bordeaux. In September, he saw Max off by steamer from Southampton to South Africa, where it was hoped he would make a life for himself. He lodged at first on a series of farms as he learned about agriculture. It must have been hard for an eighteen-year-old Catholic boy speaking very little English to be transported from south-west France to these hard-scrabble, pioneer farms on the other side of the world. Lionel was at first unimpressed by accounts of Max: ‘It seems that he has a very difficult disposition and he is very obstinate but I hope to succeed with him.’ Gradually, however, as the truth surrounding Max’s circumstances emerged, he became more sympathetic.
In March 1878, Max wrote to Lionel in French from a farm belonging to the Norton family at Greenwich, Umvoti. As he recovered from an acute inflammation of the bowels, which had kept him up for six nights on end vomiting blood, Max described how he had been treated on the various farms where he had been sent to work. A Mr Shepstone had put him out to a Mr Woodroffe, whom he believed at first to be ‘a perfect gentleman’ but who soon revealed himself to be ‘so harsh to me, making me work like a Kaffir’. He was made to wait at table and generally treated as a servant. When Max fell ill, Mr Woodroffe simply laughed at his condition, and sent him out to work, precipitating the violent inflammation that had ‘nearly carried [him] off’. What particularly distressed him was the lack of respect with which he had been treated, and he was pleased when his father eventually wrote to these farmers to let them know who he was. ‘I have some pride Father,’ Max wrote, ‘and I do not like to be taken for a vagabond as they previously believed me to be.’
Max did not feel, however, that his time had been wasted: he now spoke good English, could tell a good animal from a bad one, and had learned to ride. ‘I wish to be useful to you and to show you that you have in me a sensible and grateful son,’ he wrote to his father, but could not see how he could help him so long as he remained in Natal. Ideally, he would like to leave Natal but, at the very least, he hoped that his father would procure some more suitable career for him.
Through the good offices of Lady Derby, Max was taken on to the staff of Sir Bartle Frere, who had been appointed two years earlier as High Commissioner (the equivalent of Governor-General) for Southern Africa. ‘If he does not make his way now it will be his fault,’ wrote Lionel.
From September 1878 to March 1879, Frere was in Pietermaritzburg, where he had been directed by the Colonial Office to deal with the escalating unrest. He was living in the English-style villa residence of the Governor of Natal Sir Henry Bulwer, and it is likely that this is where Max lived and worked too. That summer in the dusty capital of Natal was a time of increased tension. Frere’s attempts to create a confederation in the region were being resisted by the states of Southern Africa, including the Afrikaners of the recently annexed Transvaal and the various Black African states. In Natal, where the British were outnumbered twenty to one, there were frequent cases of cattle-rustling and attacks by King Cetewayo’s Zulu warriors on Christian missionaries and their converts. As he tried to convince his political bosses in London of the seriousness of the threat posed by ‘the demon king’, Frere complained of leading ‘a very dreary life . . . grumbling at deficiencies I cannot supply & delays I am powerless to shorten’. He had little support, no civil service, and communications across the vast expanses of mostly virgin land – Pietermaritzburg was 1,000 miles from Cape Town – were very slow.
‘The continued preservation of peace depends,’ he continued, ‘on the caprice of an ignorant and blood-thirsty despot, with a most overweening idea of his own importance and prowess, and an organised force of at least 40,000 armed men at his absolute command, ready and eager at any moment to execute, in their ancient fashion of extermination, whatever the caprice or anger of the despot may dictate.’ When Cetewayo ignored an ultimatum by Frere, British troops were ordered into Zululand. In January 1879, one of the columns was massacred at Isandlwana – with more than 800 British troops killed (the equivalent of an entire regiment). Many of the families in Pietermaritzburg lost a member. The Anglo-Zulu War had begun, and Pietermaritzburg itself was only seventy miles from the front.
Max’s time on Frere’s staff, therefore, came at a crucial moment in South Africa’s history. The dispatches he was clerking dealt with the consequences of Isandlwana, which included the censure and eventual recall of his boss. Yet he never took to the task. The news his father received about Max had started to put him out ‘greatly’. ‘He tells me that he does not find himself at ease with the Governor. He does not like to copy despatches, that the work was bad for his health [one of the first of many references in the correspondence to Max’s health]. He has changed his ideas and believes that farming will suit him better, and has returned to his old friend Mr Norton . . . It is impossible to do more than I have done for him and he was in a position to make a fortune. Now it is necessary to begin again.’ In short, Lionel was ‘very discontented with his conduct’. He had himself been ‘writing out despatches for 20 years’, he complained to Béon, ‘but young men nowadays have other ideas’, and, by the way, could Béon ‘get [him] more of this Champagne?’
Life for the children changed on Mme de Béon’s death in November 1879. ‘I feel very much for all you have gone through,’ Lionel wrote in commiseration to Béon on the nineteenth, ‘I also do not wish to speak of arrangements that have to be made for my children before knowing what you would think of doing yourself. In all cases your interests are mine and you can rely on my devotedness.’ In the event, Flora and Amalia went to join Victoria in the convent and, according to what Victoria told her father, were pleased with the arrangement.
Despite Lionel’s promise to Victoria not to leave the girls in the convent for long, a year passed before he arranged for them to be removed. He engaged the help of Mrs Mulhall, since she was ‘the only Catholic lady of [his] acquaintance’, and he needed advice about educating them as Roman Catholics. Lionel had got to know the author of Between the Amazon and the Andes in Buenos Aires, where she and her husband ‘moved in the best Spanish and English Society’. Indeed, Lionel himself featured in the book, as a member of a shooting party she had encountered in Paraguay consisting of British and
French diplomats. ‘It was curious to hear the different opinions on the expedition,’ she wrote. ‘The Frenchmen complained bitterly about the mosquitoes and the rough life, which the Englishmen, on the contrary, enjoyed, as they had capital sport, having killed three tigers, a quantity of patos reales, and other birds, besides capturing a live alligator . . . I am indebted to the Hon. Lionel Sackville-West for the following notes on sport, which I give with his permission.’ There followed some detailed recommendations from Lionel about the different guns required: a breech-loading and a muzzle-loading gun, as well as a short Snider rifle for shooting deer, and an ‘Express’ rifle for shooting jaguars on the rivershore from a boat.
Mrs Mulhall was ‘only too happy to do anything for them when she went over to England’, and in the summer of 1880 she and her husband accompanied Lionel on a visit to his daughters in Berck-sur-Mer. Soon after that, the intrepid Mrs Mulhall, whom the preface to her book described as ‘the first Englishwoman to penetrate the heart of South America, travelling for thousands of miles through untrodden forests’, escorted them to England. On the Channel crossing, Mrs Mulhall told Victoria that her parents had never been married (a delicate task which Lionel later claimed he had never specifically commissioned her to carry out). ‘This was a great shock and surprise to me, but I naturally did not at first realise the consequences,’ Victoria later recalled.
On arrival in England, Mrs Mulhall took the children to Grasslands, her house in Balcombe, Sussex, for a few months. From here, Victoria wrote an affectionate letter to Béon in November, acknowledging the kindness and care they had received from his late mother, and asking him to send her a photo of himself, and if he had one of her own mother, too (even if she had to return it, having gazed at it). She asked after Henry, or ‘Bébé’ as he was known in the family, who had stayed behind in France at school and had developed a ‘quinsy’ (abscess) on his eye. ‘Goodbye dear Béon,’ she ended her letter, ‘I kiss you from all my heart, Your little friend Pepita.’ It was as if the Béons were as much a part of the family as her father and his distant relations. But all this was to change. Towards the end of the year, Mrs Mulhall took them to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Highgate Road in London, where they stayed until July 1881.
In March 1881, Victoria confided to Béon that she had been informed by Mrs Mulhall ‘as delicately as possible’ of ‘certain little family matters that you know about papa and mama’. It had been Aunt Mary, Lady Derby, who had thought it time for Victoria to learn the truth, so that she would not be ‘vexed’ at the ‘differences that are made for us’. Aunt Mary, ‘who seems the best disposed towards us of the world’, had also thought it a good idea if they were to be known from now on as West rather than Sackville West, a name ‘which is so well known here’. Victoria was already so well schooled in the dark arts of secrecy and discretion that she asked Béon not to write to her on this subject at the convent, ‘where they do not know anything’, and where the nuns were inclined to open and read her mail. He was to send all letters via her father, whose correspondence she always received under seal.
The new nomenclature extended to their first names, too. As a young girl, Victoria, whose full name was Victoria Josephine Dolores Catherine, had sometimes been known as ‘Lolo’ (short for Dolores) and sometimes, like her mother, by the pet name of Pepita (a diminutive of Josefa or Josephine). Indeed, her father and sisters called her Pepita throughout the 1870s, and it was as Pepita Sackville West that she had been enrolled in the convent school run by the Sisters of St Joseph. Her aunt Mary now insisted she be called Victoria; and that ‘Fleur de Marie’, as she was originally named, should be called Flora.
Why, at just the moment when Lionel’s children were moving to England and meeting for the first time some of their wealthy and aristocratic relations, were they being asked to change their names? Was it simply for form’s sake that they were being asked to call themselves plain West rather than Sackville West? Or was there a more strategic reason? In September 1881, Lionel was encouraged by his sister Mary, Lady Derby, to sign a memorandum declaring that ‘my adopted children, Max, Henry, Josephine, Flora and Amalia, are not legitimate, nor in succession to family property’. The memorandum was sent to William Edward, my great-grandfather, who acted as his older brother’s agent, paying for the maintenance of the children out of money set aside for this purpose by Lionel.
William Edward and his sister Mary had discussed the problem of Pepita in the 1860s, and ‘the awkwardness of [Lionel’s] position in the diplomatic service arising from his connection with her as his mistress’. Then, in the 1870s, after the death of Pepita, their discussions had focused more on the financial mess that Lionel had created for himself, and the obligation to maintain the daughters. Now more than a career or money was at stake. There was the succession to Knole itself.
It would be hard to imagine something more settled than Knole. In Knole and the Sackvilles, Vita Sackville-West’s love letter to the house in which she had been born and grown up, and which was to exercise a hold on her greater than any human being, she captured the spirit of the place:
It has all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition . . . It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of the roofs of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields.
In parallel with this settled, rooted place was the shiftless existence of Victoria and her siblings. During the years since they had left the provincial backwaters of Arcachon, they had effectively been orphans, leading hand-to-mouth lives in the charge of a series of guardians. As they moved from the houses of friends to rented seaside villas, from Catholic boarding schools to London lodgings, their names changed too – in contrast to their legitimate uncles, aunt and cousins, for whom the principle of preserving an association between the family name, Sackville, and the family place, Knole, remained paramount.
As a fifth son, Lionel had had, at birth, very little prospect of succeeding. But, due to a combination of unlikely family circumstances and legal complications, he was by the late 1870s heir to the title and to Knole. The oldest son, George, had died in his thirties in 1850. The second son, Charles, a soldier, had always hated the idea of being ‘thrust forward to fill the gap’ created by the death of his adored elder brother, and, in 1873, he eventually committed suicide by drowning (the last time that he was seen alive was crossing the road to the towpath along the River Cam). The third son, Reginald, a clergyman, had then succeeded to the senior of the two family inheritances – as Earl De La Warr and owner of Buckhurst in Sussex. There was a provision, however, in the family settlements, known as the ‘shifting clause’, which precluded him, as Earl De La Warr, from inheriting Knole as well; and so, after a bitter court battle, it was the fourth son, Mortimer, a courtier, who assumed ownership of Knole in 1873. In 1881, Mortimer, who had by now been created Baron Sackville of Knole in his own right, was in his sixties, married and childless. Lionel was next in line, and Lionel’s younger brother, William Edward, the only brother with legitimate children after that. The question of the legitimacy, or otherwise, of Lionel’s children was becoming ever more pressing.
Lady Derby was the family member most insistent on establishing some clarity. She was probably the most powerful and meddlesome of that generation of siblings, and brought to family politics the same energy and control (not to mention capacity for intrigue) that she had brought to her proxy political career. In the 1860s she had attempted to establish her first hus
band, the Marquess of Salisbury’s, country seat Hatfield as a powerhouse for aspiring Tory politicians, and in the 1870s, she had promoted, behind the scenes, the interests of her second husband, the Earl of Derby.
Aunt Mary visited the girls at the convent, as did their grandmother, the Dowager Lady De La Warr. Whenever they went to Derby House, however, they would be turned out of the drawing room – ‘banished’, as Victoria later described it – to prevent them meeting any visitors. Those visitors included another of their aunts, the Duchess of Bedford, who used to visit her sister at six o’clock every evening, but steadfastly refused to see her nieces and actively disapproved of the help Lady Derby gave them. ‘To this day,’ Victoria claimed in 1897 (the year of the Duchess’s death), ‘I have never seen her.’ This may not have been a great loss since, according to Georgiana Blakiston, the author of a book on Woburn and the Russells and a great-niece of Elizabeth’s husband, ‘the unimaginative and ponderous temperament of the Duchess of Bedford was not capable of raising the cloud of gloom that encompassed their family life [her husband eventually shot himself]’. Their uncle Mortimer, Lord Sackville, refused to see any of his nephews and nieces, too.
Another of their rare visitors at the convent in Highgate that summer was Eugénie Louet. Bonny, as she was known in the family, was then governess to Lady De La Warr’s family, and she brought with her the two De La Warr girls, first cousins of the young Sackville Wests. It was the first time that Victoria, Amalia and Flora had met Bonny (she was later to become Victoria’s lady-companion and trusted confidante), and they plied her with questions about their history. Later that year, Bonny accompanied the girls to Buckhurst for the day.
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