Pepita

by Vita Sackville-West

  Since there were never any half-measures for my mother, the modest pied-à-terre she had taken at the seaside for her little grandsons was rapidly transformed into ‘my palace at Brighton’. To hear her talk about it, you would really have thought she had acquired the Pavilion. She was always like that. Never did anybody’s geese develop into such sumptuous, snowy swans. She almost convinced one, because she was so completely convinced herself. Thus she was persuaded that you could see the sea from her house, and indeed it was true that if you went to the top floor you could just catch a glimpse of it round the corner of another building, but the only view which the windows really commanded was a magnificent one over Brighton’s gasometers.

  She now flung all her energy into transforming her three houses into one habitable dwelling, a miracle no one could possibly hope to accomplish. By her own admission she spent over £50,000 in the attempt, and one thought sadly of the gems of architecture she could have acquired for that expenditure. Amongst other things she constructed a sort of underground vault, saying that it would be nice for the little grandsons to play in on a wet day; it was a windowless cavern, and so far as I know nobody was ever known to go into it. Then she put in a passenger-lift, and a central-heating system which could never be used as its furnace was found to consume a ton of coal a day. By demolishing walls she created a dining-room in which you could comfortably have seated a hundred guests, but as she never had more than one or possibly two people at a time to stay with her, and had all meals out in the loggia anyhow, this was not of much practical use either.

  In all these activities she had the co-operation of an architect who seemed to have been specially created to suit her. She and Sir Edwin Lutyens together were the richest comedy. That most delightful, good-natured, irresponsible, imaginative jester of genius could keep her amused by the hour, as, with his pencil flickering over the paper and the jokes pouring endlessly from his lips, he flung domes and towers into the air, decorated them with her monogram, raised fountains and pavilions, paved garden walks with quartz and marble, and exercised all the ingenuity which she so well understood. Of course they squabbled. There were times when he tried loyally to restrain her extravagant schemes. There were times when she worried him nearly into his grave. There were times when he irritated her, for underneath all his flippancy he held certain standards from which, as an artist, he would never depart.

  ‘You understand nothing of the grammar of building,’ he would say in despair; ‘now look, I’ll show you …’ but she would never look and would never even attempt to understand.

  III

  Thanks to gold-mines and extravagances of every kind, she occasionally found herself short of money, and the means to which she resorted in order to raise cash were various and successful. There was, of course, the obvious method of selling jewels or works of art, and I know that during one year alone she obtained £20,000 in this way, and during another year a further £25,000, all of which disappeared, I don’t know how, where, or to whom. These sales were sometimes attended by incidents which somehow I do not feel would have befallen anybody else. There was, for instance, the occasion when she left £1000 in Bank of England notes in a taxi, never to be recovered. There was the other occasion when she wished to sell a diamond necklace which had once been the property of Queen Katherine Parr and sent it to a London jeweller for this purpose. In broad daylight, and in a shop full of people, it was stolen out of the window from the inside and has never been since seen; she did, however, profit by the insurance money. It fortunately never occurred to her to organise a flag-day for her own benefit, but she did conceive and put into execution the idea of raising funds among her friends for any scheme she particularly wanted to carry out. Thus in order to help towards the cost of doing up one of her many houses, she invented the fund for the Roof of Friendship and wrote to everybody she knew asking them to give her enough to buy one tile, or more than one tile if they were feeling generous. She was furious with the painter William Nicholson, when he sent her a real tile done up in a brown paper parcel.

  MY MOTHER AT BRIGHTON, ABOUT 1920

  I remember one day I was staying with her at Brighton, and a telegram was brought for her while she was in her bath. I was directed to read it to her through the door. ‘Handed in at Bangkok’, I read. ‘I am commanded by His Majesty to inform you that the elephant was despatched yesterday to your address.’ Peals of laughter came through the door at my astonishment. ‘I quite forgot to tell you, darling, I have had such a good idea: a white elephant stall. You know people have them at bazaars? but I shall have this one for myself. And then I thought as elephants came from Siam I would write to the King and ask him for a white one.’

  It duly arrived about a month later, a chubby little elephant of solid silver, which I have no doubt she sold for a most repaying sum.

  It was at about this time too that she developed a taste for gardening, but here again her methods were of the most unorthodox kind. Her knowledge of horticulture was nil, and she had no wish to increase it. All she wanted was a gay display. As I have already said, she had never cared for flowers for their own sake, though she liked the colour and sometimes the scent, but on the whole greatly preferred them made of any material other than the one which Nature had provided. Thus if she saw a gap in her border she would cheerfully stick in a group of delphiniums made of painted tin, on nice tall metal stalks, and, when I remonstrated in my dull English fashion, would quite logically point out the advantages: they flowered whenever one wanted them; they remained in flower so long as one wanted, for years if need be; they required no staking; and one didn’t have to bother about ‘ces détestables slugs’. There was no convincing answer to offer to these arguments.

  Tin delphiniums, however, by no means exhausted her resourcefulness as a gardener. It was not long before she discovered that hawkers came round the streets with pony-carts, selling plants in pots. Plants in pots were just the thing to please her, and any flower-merchant with a barrow was sure of a lavish customer. In fact, I think the hawkers of the neighbourhood must have passed the word round to one another, for, whether in London or in Brighton, these floral barrows seemed to stroll within range of her windows with far greater frequency than anywhere else. She would tap on the windowpane, making wild signals to the flower-merchant to stop, which he was only too willing to do; and then would go down to the front door to meet him in any attire. Sometimes, if she happened to intercept him during the afternoon, she would be fully dressed; but if during the morning, she would go down in her dressing-gown and night-gown, to stand on the doorstep buying the whole barrow-load off him, and finding out the whole of his family life at the same time. Then, still in the dressing-gown and night-gown, she would get him to carry his plants into her garden at the back, and would stand there talking while every plant was set in its place. I wonder whether any of these itinerant sellers ever looked at her with any sense of surprise? She surely must have seemed an odd customer? The night-gown she wore was of the very thickest and cheapest flannel, yet it was fastened at the neck by an emerald and diamond brooch of historic value; and from those gleaming gems, employed as an ordinary safety-pin, hung a police-whistle, a threepenny affair bought at Woolworth’s. On the top of the flannel night-gown came a cloak of Venetian velvet,—flannel and velvet, tin-whistle and emeralds, mixed in real unselfconsciousness. And over the lovely head something was always instinctively thrown,—it might be a shabby Shetland shawl, it might be a piece of black lace like a mantilla, but there was always something, as a woman of Latin race always covers her head instinctively on going into the street or into church.

  In this guise she would stand, supervising her street-vendors and her own gardener, as under her instructions they planted plants as never plants were intended to grow. She outraged all their feelings; she had no regard at all for what plants were or what they wanted. Annual, biennial, perennial, meant nothing to her: it merely irritated her that plants shouldn’t flower the whole time, and in exactly the rig
ht colours. Plants in pots, however, solved the difficulty. One could sink them into the ground and pretend that they had grown there.

  ‘Look, Harold, you always told me no one could grow lilies in a town garden. Look at those!’

  She and Harold then go for a stroll up and down the garden-path; and on their way back find that all the lilies have disappeared.

  My mother knows quite well that the servants, according to her instructions, have taken up the lily-pots and carried them indoors for the night, but she feels she must explain this disappearance to Harold, and anyway is never at a loss.

  ‘If I have told them once’, she says, ‘not to cut the lilies, I have told them twenty times.’

  Perhaps of all the odd corners of her garden the one she liked best was a sort of rockery entirely planted with flowers made of china.

  IV

  It was not so very long before she tired of her palace at Brighton, sold it for £5000 (therefore at a loss of some £45,000), and bought a smaller and more manageable house on the cliff near Roedean School. Here, at any rate, she could see the sea. Rather unexpectedly,—for she was too un-English to care much for Nature,—she really loved the sea. Incidentally, she also caught the full force of the Brighton gales, which suited her 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. Nobody, seeing the appalling draught in which she permanently lived, could ever understand why she didn’t get pneumonia over and over again. Even in the depths of winter she would never have a fire in her room.

  There was a short but unfortunate period when she also owned a house at Streatham, a singularly hideous Victorian villa of yellow brick, which for some reason she said was like an Italian palazzo. Here she amused herself by making a staircase of imitation books with joke titles, also a large maze of wattle fencing. There were jokes in the maze too, such as an empty whisky-bottle suspended from a string, with the label ‘Departed spirits’; and she caused a most realistic half-crown to be painted on a stepping-stone. Her delight whenever anyone attempted to pick it up was great. And since a certain Sir Richard Sackville had once lived at Streatham in the reign of Mary Tudor she decided that the trees in her garden had been planted by his wife.

  ‘Is it not curious’, she would say to her guests, ‘that we should now be sitting under a tree planted by another Lady Sackville?’

  It was very curious indeed.

  I never went much to Streatham, for her time there coincided with the longest and unhappiest quarrel we ever had. It started on the day my father died, and as it seemed to be about nothing at all I can only imagine that the grief she then refused to admit drove her into this oblique method of relieving her feelings. She hurled the wildest accusations against me: I had stolen her jewels, I had refused to allow her wreath to be placed on his coffin…. It was useless for me to protest that I could disprove either of these things; useless to protest that a hundred witnesses could disprove them; there was nothing to do but to wait for the storm to subside. It had lasted nearly two years, when I was unaccountably taken back into favour.

  Such vicissitudes fell to the lot of all those who came into any intimate contact with her, for she had the unfortunate capacity for persuading herself that she had been outrageously and ungratefully treated. I should be sorry to have to give a list of those who, after sacrificing their time, their nerves, and sometimes their health, found themselves suddenly accused of some purely imaginary offence and flung into outermost darkness. 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. It was seldom, in fact, that some law-suit was not pending, either for libel or slander, for wages which she had refused to pay on summary dismissal, or for bills which she had refused to settle. I think nine suits all outstanding at the same moment was the record. She herself took it lightly, and rechristened her house the Writs Hotel.

  It made one a little uneasy.

  It was all so very difficult to cope with; there was really nothing to be done. No amount of experience would ever teach her prudence. Nor would the logical consequences of personal inconvenience ever persuade her to curb her tongue or her pen. It was no good warning her that her entire household would walk out in a body, as actually happened several times. At the back of her mind she knew well enough that somebody would always come to the rescue, for, after all, she couldn’t be left to starve, and she so managed that at least one devoted soul was always available in moments of necessity. It never surprised me in the least on arriving at the gale-swept house on the cliff, to find it completely denuded of servants, and her solicitor filling a hot-water bottle for her from a kettle.

  As a matter of fact, I believe she welcomed the excitement. Anxious to protect her from herself, we always made the mistake of assuming that she would prefer to avoid these troubles, whereas I think that in reality she provoked them in the subconscious desire to give herself something to do. If one must analyse further,—and really her conduct at times was so inexplicable that one turned right and left in search of some clue,—I think that all must be ascribed to some essentially tragic failure. The bad fairy who attended the christening of Sleeping Beauty must have attended my mother’s also. Gifts had been showered on her: beauty and charm and energy, abounding vitality, courage, determination; just the little more, and she would have been truly Napoleonic. But the bad fairy ordained that she should fritter everything away. He spoke wisely, who compared her to a powerful dynamo generating nothing. There was no driving-belt attached to her whirling wheels. The force was there, but no result from the force. In politics, social work, or philanthropy, she might have been a real figure, though indeed I cannot imagine her ever working in co-operation with others: she was a dictator, not a colleague. But such things held no interest for her.

  And so naturally as she came towards the end of her life there remained nothing but a sense of frustration and an immense boredom, combined with a frenzied desire to exercise authority and to fill the endless days. Because she was, as the judge had said, of high mettle, she would never accept but would always fight. She fought, lashing out even at those she loved best and striking at those who could not answer back; hurting herself, I think, as much as she hurt others, and certainly causing acute anxiety to those who felt themselves responsible for her safety and comfort. There were very black days during those years, and the cruellest blow of all came with the threat of eventual blindness.

  Here, again, she was so intractable that it was impossible to help her. She would have nothing to do with doctors, oculists, or treatments. Neither would she have any companion who might read to her or help with her voluminous correspondence. For although she had estranged herself from most of her old friends,—not through any fault or wish of theirs,—her inventiveness was such that she found means to occupy herself in other ways. The memory of the Roof of Friendship fund was still with her, and of the fun she had had every morning opening her letters to see that cheque or postal-order they would contain, so she now devised a scheme which from its patriotic nature would allow her to write to complete strangers, especially to those whose birthdays she had seen announced in the daily press. This scheme had the not unambitious object of reducing the National Debt by a contribution of one million pennies. She had a number of canvassing forms lithographed, and as she used them up later on to write her private letters on the back, I am able to reproduce the text here: