The Disinherited

by Robert Sackville-West

  Virginia Woolf was more straightforward in her description of Vita’s feelings, writing in her diary a fortnight after Lionel’s death: ‘Lord Sackville is dead & lies at Withyham, & I passed Knole with Vita yesterday & had to look away from the vast masterless house, without a flag. This is what she minds most.’

  In a letter to Harold in July 1929, Vita compared her ‘voluntary exile from Knole’ to the end of

  a liaison with a beautiful woman, who never, from force of circumstances, belonged to me wholly; but who had for me a sort of half-maternal tenderness and understanding, in which I could be entirely happy. Now I feel as though we had been parted because (again through force of circumstances and owing to no choice of her own) she had been compelled to marry someone else and had momentarily fallen completely beneath his jurisdiction, not happy in it, but acquiescent. I look at her from far off; and if I were wilder and more ruthless towards myself, I should burst in one evening and surprise her in the midst of her new domesticity. But life has taught me not to do these things.

  Harold understood his wife’s feelings and her resentment of the new regime at Knole. The changes there, he wrote, ‘are superimposed upon Lionel’s memory. They are the little dead leaves which, falling, falling, will gradually efface the imprint of his footsteps. They are the dust of change settling on your childhood . . . Knole knows that it belongs to you more than to Charlie.’

  One of the first people on whom Victoria turned in her fury after Lionel’s death was her daughter. Vita and Harold discouraged Victoria from attending his funeral in the local parish church of St Nicholas, and were very relieved when Victoria resigned from the executorship of her estranged husband’s will. Lady Sackville found their attitude unsympathetic, and claimed in her diary that Vita had treated her ‘abominably’ for the last few years: ‘I had loved her so. I have finished with that monster of ingratitude.’ The break between mother and daughter – during which Victoria often refers to ‘the Vita’ as ‘the Vipa’ – lasted nearly two years. There was one particularly dreadful scene in the offices of the family solicitors, Pemberton’s, when Victoria accused Vita of stealing the pearls she had in fact given her daughter on her marriage fifteen years before, and forced her to hand them over. ‘She was like a mad woman,’ wrote Vita, ‘screaming Thief and Liar, and shaking her fist at me till I thought she was going to hit me.’

  It was only after Vita had spent ‘a bloody afternoon’ at Knole in December 1929, at the wedding of her cousin Diana, Eddy’s sister, to Lord Romilly that relations improved. Victoria sympathised with how Vita must have felt returning, out of duty rather than pleasure, to Knole and the chapel in which she herself had been married. Vita wrote sweetly and sadly to her mother, describing her emotions and the comfort she had taken from the older Knole servants who had understood, too, how she had been feeling. Early the following year, what Victoria called ‘the Awful Nightmare’ of her estrangement from Vita was over, and she returned the pearls.

  ‘Such vicissitudes fell to the lot of all those who came into any intimate contact with her,’ Vita wrote of her mother. ‘Her friends bore it with patience and pain; but other people, such as servants, secretaries, tradesmen, and professional men with their reputation to safeguard, did not at all relish the wild allegations she broadcast about them.’ At any one time, there were so many lawsuits pending – for slander, summary dismissal, or unpaid bills – that Lady Sackville jokingly rechristened her house the ‘Writs [Ritz] Hotel’. There are echoes in these Sussex County Court cases of Pepita’s regular trips to the magistrates’ court in La Teste in the 1860s, to settle her differences with the servants and tradespeople of Arcachon, another provincial seaside town. Vita often drew attention to her mother’s ‘rapscallion Spanish background’, to Catalina’s money-making schemes, and to Pepita’s volatility – ‘the vindictive grievances, the storms’, all of which were ‘far better suited to Albolote than to Knole’ or Brighton.

  After her departure from Knole in 1919, Victoria’s health deteriorated steadily. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 1925, and in 1926 suffered another nervous breakdown. Her diary became more and more self-pitying, and was often written in French – always a sign with Victoria that she was under severe emotional strain.

  What had originally been mere eccentricities became mad obsessions. Her passion for fresh air had first manifested itself at Knole, where she bought a door-stopper for almost every door (many of them still there) to keep a constant cold draught whistling through the house. When she moved, her clifftop house on the south coast, White Lodge, ‘caught the full force of the Brighton gales’, Vita recorded, which suited her mother ‘perfectly as the mania for fresh air had never deserted her and every door was still propped open and every window tied back with string’. She took to taking her meals outdoors, even in winter when it was snowing, well wrapped in furs and girdled with hot-water bottles.

  Her parsimony became more pronounced, like her grandmother, Catalina’s. Vita chronicled her mother’s later years with a mixture of adoration and exasperation, ridiculing Victoria’s money-making schemes. In order to repair the roof of White Lodge, she sent a circular letter to all her friends and acquaintances asking them to contribute enough cash to buy a tile for her Roof of Friendship Fund; she was extremely irritated when the painter William Nicholson took her at her word, and sent a tile wrapped up in a paper parcel. The chaotic ambition of Victoria’s building projects, and the scale of her acts of personal generosity, were increasingly matched by great meanness. Her letters were scrawled all over the backs of old circulars and stationery – in themselves, a record of her enthusiasms, obsessions and favourite haunts: Lady Sackville’s Fund for Kent Prisoners of War, notepaper snaffled from hotels or from Fortnum and Mason, catalogues for her defunct interior decorating store Speall’s, with its advertisements for candles and lampshades, silk cushions and screens. She once wrote to Vita on lavatory paper filched from the ladies’ room at Harrods, ‘Regarde, comme ce papier prend beaucoup mieux l’encre que Bromo’. ‘A stranger recommendation for a toilet-roll was surely never devised,’ commented Vita. Postage stamps she found ‘ruinously expensive’, and was for ever getting people to go out of their way to drop letters or notes off for her.

  As she grew older, her sense of time – which had always been sketchy – became more erratic. Meals were served at odd hours of the day, and Victoria would stay up half the night talking to whoever would listen, and rising late the following day. ‘The incredible disorder of her bedroom balanced the general disorder of her life,’ wrote Vita. ‘No picture of her would be complete without a picture of the untidiness and indeed squalor in which she elected to live.’ Vita ascribed this to her mother’s suspicious mind – inherited, she suggested, from ‘her riff-raff Spanish ancestry’. She now suspected everybody, to an extent that was neither ‘normal nor hygienic’.

  It meant, in effect, that she would never have her bedroom touched or dusted . . . that she kept odds and ends of food standing on tables because she declared that if it were taken away it would be stolen. The most expensive bottles of pickled peaches from Fortnum and Mason stood there, half empty, for weeks. Tins of truffles from Strasbourg, jars of French mustard, pots of jam from Tiptree, samples of bath-salts, scent from Coty and Molyneux, boxes stacked with old 1/2d. envelopes intended for re-use, a stray bottle of Kümmel or cherry brandy; and then, on her bed, letters, stationery, diaries, note-books, handbags, fly-whisks, eye-shades, unopened parcels, so that the general accumulation left her only about a quarter of the bed to lie in. Yet she never seemed to notice the discomfort. She was far more concerned with the idea that the servants would read her letters and diaries, or would move her possessions out of her reach.

  Victoria’s final years were a descent into darkness. As her sight failed, the letters that she scribbled late into the night, the litany of resentments, the collection of ‘Thoughts’, became increasingly illegible. Her world closed in. There were no references to the siblings who had once dominated
her diaries and her correspondence, but which now consisted simply of updates on her health, gossip about her few remaining friends, and accounts of the squabbles with her servants. It was a terrible irony how the sibling who so cynically secured the inheritance through a judicious marriage half a century before had become, in the end, as disinherited as the others: bitter, bedridden, and almost blind as she dreamed of her lost domain and unlikely schemes of reclaiming it.

  Although mother and daughter had been reconciled in 1930, after their two-year rift, their relationship had the occasional flare-up, Victoria’s letters to Vita veering wildly from affection to vituperation. During one of these, Victoria told her eighteen-year-old grandson, Ben, all about his mother’s affairs with women, including Violet and Virginia, and his father’s affairs with men. Many years later, Ben tried to explain to himself Victoria’s gratuitous mischief-making: ‘She may just have wished to give vent to her misery and loneliness – this blind old woman with a gardener on a cliff, with nothing to keep her alive but dreams of Washington, Knole and her lost beauty – by poisoning an innocent grandson’s mind.’ Virginia Woolf’s reaction was blunter: ‘The old woman ought to be shot.’

  In January 1936, Vita heard that her mother was critically ill, and rushed to her bedside at White Lodge. Lady Sackville died soon afterwards, on the thirtieth, leaving, according to Harold, who arrived a few minutes after her death, ‘a pathetic typewritten note’ saying that she was to be cremated and her ashes flung into the sea. ‘Vita is much harassed and shattered, but inwardly, I think, relieved,’ he wrote. A sense of perspective, if not relief, is evident in a letter Vita wrote to her son, Nigel: ‘I do feel that Grannyma’s life was a fitful fever but that now she sleeps well. I feel also that all her faults are forgiven her, and only her virtues are remembered. That is what I prayed for, whenever I knelt at her bedside. You were both so good to her and understanding . . . and my only regret is that you didn’t know her in the days when she was really gay and charming. You would have really loved her then, as I did.’

  The day on which Victoria’s ashes were due to be scattered at sea, 8 February, was bitterly cold, with a strong east wind. Harold lunched at the Metropole with Victoria’s secretary, Cecil Rhind, before picking up the urn containing the ashes from Mr English’s oyster shop in Brighton. They had been kept there overnight for fear that the press, who had got hold of the story, might picket the undertakers and take snapshots of Harold and Mr Rhind as they carried out the urn. But it was felt that Lady Sackville would have approved of her penultimate resting place, as Mr English was a particular favourite of hers, and she had often taken guests to eat oysters at his shop. The urn was then transported by car to a large open fishing boat waiting on the shingle, with two sailors. Clutching the little container in its brown-paper parcel, they clambered into the boat and, heads bent against the spray, they chugged along the coast until they were opposite White Lodge, some two miles out. At that point, as Harold described in his diary, ‘The two men stand up and take off their hats. So does Cecil. I kneel by the gunwale and spill the ashes over into the sea, saying, “B.M. [short for Bonne Maman], all who love you are happy that you should now be at peace. We shall remember always your beauty, your courage and your charm.” It is merely a handful of dust which slides out of the container into the waves.’

  There is also a stone in her memory, as the ‘beloved daughter’ of the 2nd Lord Sackville and the wife of the 3rd Lord Sackville of Knole, in the churchyard of St Nicholas’s in Sevenoaks. It bears an inscription in the sort of doggerel Victoria always appreciated: ‘A kindly thought is all I ask, But if remembrance be a task, Forget me.’ Victoria’s stone stands just a few feet from the grave of her father, which she used to visit regularly in the years before she left Knole. She would have been surprised to find that another name had joined her father’s, long after his death, on one side of the base of the Celtic-cross memorial: that of Charlie’s unpopular second wife Anne, who died in 1961. Charlie himself, who died the following year, chose to be buried in the family vault at Withyham, leaving his wife to share a grave with his uncle.

  Days after the death of her mother, Vita received a strange letter from her aunt. Amalia was writing to ‘rectify’ a notice she had seen in The Times, which stated that the late Lady Sackville had been the eldest daughter of Lord Sackville: she enclosed a copy of her letter to the editor, ‘which may reveal to you (if you do not already know it) that your Mother by birth had no right to the name of Sackville West’. Her letter to the editor claimed that Victoria ‘was not his daughter, but the child of “father unknown”,’ and in it she reserved the right to reopen the case ‘at any time . . . if I deem it necessary so in the interest of the family’, particularly if the paper continued to publish ‘misleading statements’. Vita wrote to Mr Pemberton, whose firm had represented the Sackvilles during the succession case and who still represented her uncle Charlie. She was worried that Charlie’s dignity and rights as Lord Sackville might in some way be affected by the publication of Amalia’s letter either in The Times or in some more scurrilous newspaper, and took it upon herself to act on his behalf as he was, at the time, on a boat to Havana. Pemberton duly wrote to Amalia, warning her that Uncle Charlie would ‘take a serious view of the publication of any matter which makes any suggestion of this sort’. On other occasions, Amalia – for whom fact and fiction were always curiously intermingled – claimed that Victoria’s father was a Jew who had been murdered in Spain, and a Basque goatherd. Vita’s lawyer simply dismissed Amalia’s rants as ‘the vapourings of an ill-balanced mind’.

  The older brother, Max, died aged seventy-eight in Pietermaritzburg, just a few months after Victoria, perhaps the only one of the protagonists in this story not to have been completely destroyed by the past, as the romantic tale of the ‘English milord and the Spanish dancer’ had turned to tragedy. Henry had been driven to suicide by his failed succession case; Victoria had ended her days feeling cheated and dispossessed, after all she had gone through to secure her legitimacy and inheritance; Flora had gone to the bad; and Amalia, hoping via marriage to achieve some of the diplomatic and social cachet to which she believed her ancestry entitled her, had continued to denounce Victoria after her death.

  So it was Amalia, the sibling with whom Victoria had had perhaps the most explosive relationship, who was now the lone survivor. Amalia had lived in East Kent since the 1920s, and her final home was a cottage in Hythe, its paintwork blistered by the wind and spray, and its peace disturbed by the cries of the seagulls. (Hythe, incidentally, is twinned with Berck-sur-Mer, the seaside resort in northern France where Victoria had spent her summer holidays with the nuns in the 1870s.) No. 4 Hillside Street, like White Lodge, had views over the Channel towards the country of the sisters’ birth. And there is a sense that Amalia (with her French husband) was always, like Victoria whose ashes swirled in the sea, caught between the two countries, switching between the two languages, and never quite at home in either.

  Amalia died in September 1945, in a nursing home in Folkestone, about as close to France as you can get. The notice of her death, which appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 17 September, observed all the niceties of title that were so important to ‘Amalia Marguerite Albertine, beloved wife of Richard William Martin, G.C.V.O., G.B.E., C.M.G. [Willie, or his widow, had evidently awarded him some bogus British honours] and younger daughter of the late Lionel, 2nd Baron Sackville’. An identical notice appeared in the Folkestone, Hythe and District Gazette the following week, buried among the marriages of homecoming servicemen, the tables of tide times, and a report that ‘sixty members and friends of the Folkestone branch of the Newsagents’ Federation held their first outing for six years on Wednesday’. As Folkestone resumed its peaceable activities, the last of those warring Sackville siblings was laid to rest, within sight of the country where their story had begun and where so much of it had taken place.

  * Archbishop Bourchier’s Chamber, now the Pheasant Court Room.

  *
My grandmother, the wife of Lionel’s youngest brother, Bertie.

  See Notes on Chapter 13

  Notes

  In most cases the sources of quotations are made clear in the text. With the help of the Select Bibliography, interested readers will be able to trace them without undue trouble. The following notes are intended, where sources are not self-evident, to help indicate where I have found additional information, and to provide ideas for further reading.

  Introduction

  The starting point for this book is Pepita by Vita Sackville-West, although detailed quotes are taken from the witness statements to be found in the National Archives (TS18/247). For the writing and publication of Pepita, see Glendinning. For the background to Knole and the Sackville family, see Robert Sackville-West (Inheritance). For mid-nineteenth-century Spain, see Ford; and for ‘Spanish’ dancers, in particular, see Seymour. For a playful essay on Pepita, see Girouard (Enthusiasms).

  Chapter 1: The Villa Pepa

  Again, one of the principal sources for this, and subsequent chapters, are the statements taken in 1897 ‘for the perpetuation of testimony’, in the National Archives (TS18/247). For Arcachon during the Second Empire, see Daney, Dejean, Fauduilhe, Garner, Hameau, Lalesque, Lee, Massicault and Roth; and for its villas, in particular, see Cottin (whose family owned the Villa Pepa from the 1870s to the 1970s). If you are ever in Arcachon, I highly recommend a guided walk of the Ville d’Hiver and its villas. For the reactions of the Sackville family to Lionel’s secret family, see Sackville Mss U269, in the Kent History and Library Centre, and the diaries of the Earl of Derby.

  Chapter 2: Lost in Translation