Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  Sissinghurst then, in the 1960s, as well as a house, a family home and a garden open to the public, was a fully working farm. James Stearns, the farmer, a big, tall, young man, with enormous hands and a way of looking down at you from a vast height, lived with his wife Pat in the Victorian farmhouse. Seven or eight men worked under him, milking a Guernsey herd, keeping chickens and sheep, growing hops, wheat, barley and oats, with orchards, one of Worcesters, one of Bramleys. They made hay, still cut faggots from the wood and carted enormous quantities of farmyard manure out on to the fields at the end of every winter. Year after year, ploughing, rolling, harrowing, pruning, hedging, woodcutting, sowing, hop-stringing, sheep-dipping and shearing, mowing, haymaking, baling, clearing the streams, harvesting the cereals, picking the apples and then the hops, year after year, the farm was an intensely worked and busy place.

  As a boy, I felt this was only how things should be. The cattle pushing into the yard to be milked, their dung flopping out on the concrete, their sweet, milky breath, the massive stodge of mud and straw they made in their winter housing down by the big Elizabethan barn, the sound in the summer fields of their teeth tearing at the grass, the rough sandpaper lick of their tongues through the bars of a gate, the feeling that they might eat you if they could; the pigs and their own version of stodged-up chaos in the shed where the National Trust shop now is, and Copper, the chauffeur-handyman, telling me that they were the cleanest and neatest of animals; the chickens pecking their way around the pats in the cow field; the flock of Jacob sheep which lived in the field by the lake and were always, its seems, afflicted with foot rot; the harvest moment in the summer when the tall laden carts came back up to the barns from Frogmead and Lodge Field, piled high with straw bales, the men who had been stacking them riding on top, ducking under the branches of the oaks where they came past the moat; the hay harvest in the park, where the lines of cut hay swerved to avoid the ancient trees, leaving eye-shaped lozenges of uncut grass around each trunk, as though the trunks were the pupils of those eyes; the white clouds of blossom in the pear and apple orchards and then the autumn smell of the apples coming wafting to the house on the wind: these were the ingredients of the world as it was meant to be.

  Down in the southern end of Frogmead, there was a hop garden. It was only ten acres but seemed huge then, the hops growing in towering alleys stretching miles away into the dark, as if they were the creepers of some Amazonian forest. I scarcely dared go in. But in September, when the hops were ready, they were harvested, the bines cut from the network of wires and string, loaded into trailers, which were then hauled up the track to the oast houses for drying. I used to bike up behind them, pulled along by a smell that once smelt could never be forgotten: sweet, acrid, vegetable, mineral, woody, flowery, odd, heavy, heady, druggy, earthy and sharp, a taste more than a smell, its acidy resins catching at the back of the throat. I can taste these hops as I remember them now. As the trailers bumped along the track, bruised bodies of individual hops were left lying behind them like little green birds. As I rode over them the air turned green. There is something alien to the smell, not what you might expect from a plant that is native to England. It is more outlandish than that. It is a relative of cannabis, one of the Cannabaceae, and the air that hangs about it is smokily dopy in the same way, a subtle and combined smell, a blended soporific that would be more at home away on the other side of the Mediterranean, hidden in the souks of Aleppo or Isfahan.

  The tractors came up to the oast house, where gangs of men and women dragged the bines off the back and pushed them into the stripping machines on the ground floor, jiggering and sifting the cones from the leaves and string and stalks, and then feeding them through to the gantry, where they were taken to the kilns.

  From below, for eight hours or so, giant diesel boilers dried the hops, which were stacked a yard deep above the slatted floor in the big round oasts. When dry, they were shovelled out on to the upper storey, the hop loft, which was sheeny with a century of resin gelled into place, burnished and sticky with it. Hop lofts are always dark, with small windows, because light degrades a hop, and the only illumination comes sharply in at one side, from the open doorway, as if from the wings. It was a beautiful scene: the walls and beams whitewashed, the fresh hops going into the kilns lime green, the dried hops transformed, their colour, as my grandmother once described them in this same loft, ‘a cross between ash and gold, the colour of dust motes, of corn in moonlight’. In the worn and darkened wood of the room, the men brushed the dried hops into piles with birch brooms before pushing them with canvas shovels called scuppers towards a hole in the floor. A giant press stood over the hole, and underneath it, on the floor below, a giant sack, called a pocket, was hung from the beams. Into it the hops were first deftly shovelled and then, as a man turned the giant iron wheel on the press, a weight dropped into the pocket and pressed the hops into their bag. So tight were they in a full pocket that the two top corners of the sack, where it was tied, stuck out like bullocks’ ears. Each pocket had stencilled on it the horse of Kent, the Invicta county motto, the name of the farm and of the farmer, still here called A. O. R. Beale, James Stearns’s grandfather. At the end of the season, the number of pockets achieved that year was painted on the whitewashed beams above our heads.

  I loved the farm as it was then. I loved its detail and business, the sheer fullness of what happened there, the way the young men in the summer with their shirts off would chuck the tractors down the lanes between the buildings, throttle open, work to be done; or the shoving and jostling of the cattle, the business in the hop gardens, the orchards and the arable fields, the way that the men with their Jack Russells would stand around at the door of the barn, sticks in hand, smoking and laughing, waiting for the rats to run, the quivering dogs on the edge of the group, suddenly jumping for the rat in the dust and the loose corn, gripping it by the neck and shaking the body to death, while the men joked and rolled another.

  I loved the roughness of that world, the thorns and elders pushed up against the side of the buildings, the way that tractors would be left parked at loose and unconsidered angles by the garages, the nettles behind the pig shed, the stacks of logs in from the wood, waiting to be sawn in the saw shed next to the piggery, the sense of unregulated space and the freedom that came with that. This was not somewhere that was made for show, but had evolved this way because of what it did. All parts of the wider Weald that I was coming to know on my bicycle; the streams and the wood, the huge beech trees whose outer tips would come down so near to the wood floor that you could climb on to them and walk all the way up to the main trunk; the variety, multifariousness and vitality of this world on my doorstep – all of that was at the root of what seemed good here.

  In the middle of it all was the house and garden, where we lived. Sissinghurst had reached its apogee in the sixteenth century when an ambitious young man had built a giant, multi-courtyarded palace in which he could entertain Queen Elizabeth. That great building had fallen apart over the following centuries so that by 1930, when my grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, bought it, only fragments remained. The broken romanticism of its condition was one of the things that drew her here. She and her husband Harold Nicolson had slept in the only remaining part of the main courtyard, a fragment called the South Cottage. She had worked in the great Elizabethan Tower, their dining room and kitchen was in a small Elizabethan banqueting house on the northern edge of the garden, known as the Priest’s House, while their (largely unused) library-cum-sitting room, called the Big Room, was made in the old stables, part of a long front range. Their sons’ rooms were on the floor above it. The southern end of that range was divided into two dwellings, one for Mrs Staples, the cook, the other for the chauffeur-handyman, Jack Copper.

  In the early 1960s, after Vita had died and my father moved us back here from London, my parents converted those two dwellings into a single family house and that was where we now lived. Jack Copper and Mrs Staples had moved to new flats in the other h
alf of that range above the Big Room. In our part, my mother had installed a new, clean pine kitchen, with dark blue Formica surfaces, and a big six-burner gas stove in the centre of it. Mousse-moulds in the shape of curved fish hung from the wooden ends of the shelves, and there she cooked warm and delicious food, enormous cartwheels of mushroom quiche, sole in creamy sauces, giant pieces of roast beef, and roast potatoes which she fried to make crisp. One summer, when some people we hardly knew came to lunch, they said to her how delicious peas were when they came straight out of the garden. She and I knew they were frozen, Bird’s Eye, from the village shop. I had opened the bag earlier for her and poured them rattling into the pan. She thanked our stranger guests, agreed with them and then looked at me and smiled. I see the smile now, her crinkled laughing eyes, our precious secrecy.

  That dining room was lit with silver sconces that Vita had brought from Knole, the great Sackville house in which she had grown up, twenty-five miles from Sissinghurst but still in the Weald. The sconces were fixed to the umber hessian of the walls, and between them hung a large portrait of a Sackville ancestor, the puritan first earl of Dorset, who had been chosen by Queen Elizabeth to give Mary Queen of Scots the news of her impending execution. His rheumy, pink-edged eyes followed me around the room. Beside him were two pictures by John Piper of Knole in a rainstorm, and a snake strangling a horse, somehow made out of sand. There was a large carved chest, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which I think may have been Spanish, to hold the glasses, and one or two odd framed things: a drawing on a menu from a London restaurant in 1919, which was Edwin Lutyens’s first sketch of the Cenotaph, made for Vita over lunch; a poem of Verlaine’s written in high calligraphy on vellum, Je suis venu, calme orphelin, an offering to Vita from one of her lovers; and a battered medieval wooden Spanish saint called Barbara, Harold’s first present to her when first in love. The place was full of memorabilia, fragments salvaged from earlier lives.

  For all that, there was no heaviness about it, nor any atmosphere of gloom or ancestor worship. The very opposite: noisy, talky, warm, engaged, alive, nothing formal. I remember as a boy sitting at the long oak table, my back to the frightening earl, on the tall 1890s faux-Jacobean chairs, with flat wine-red velvet cushions on the cane seats, my father at one end, my mother at the other, my two sisters, our nanny Shirley Punnett and I along the sides, feeling in one of those rare moments when, however fleetingly, you imagine you see your life as it is, in its present form, exactly how it is, with all its parts combining and colluding, that here, at this table, with these people, in this house, with the farm beyond it and beyond that the woods and lanes of Kent – the onion skins of my world – I was happy and even blessed, that no one could properly ask for anything that I had not been given.

  Across the other side of the garden, in the South Cottage, my grandfather lived alone, or with the series of young male nurses who looked after him. He had lived there ever since he and Vita had come to live at Sissinghurst in 1932. By the mid-1960s, when he was almost eighty, he was in a sad and pitiable state, broken by a series of strokes and by his grief after Vita’s death in 1962. I remember nothing of her. Or what I do remember has been overlaid by books, films and photographs, so that I can no longer distinguish what I remember from what I know. Of him, I knew only his fragility, his sticks, his slow, shuffling progress down the garden paths, his weeping silently as he sat at the end of the lunch table, his gobbling of his food so that he had finished before my mother sat down, his strange clothes, left over from an earlier age – huge white or cream summer trousers with turn-ups, the broad-brimmed hats he always wore, plimsolls looking too small below those trousers, always a tie, however ragged. When he looked at us, it was with an unbridgeable distance in his eyes, as if we were scarcely there. In private and occasionally, he had moments of lucidity, particularly with my mother, in which he told her how much he hated the humiliations of his condition, how much he wanted to die, how much he missed Vita. With us, though, he seemed to be looking through a screen.

  Although the garden had been open to the public since 1938, it wasn’t treated with the sense of exquisite preciousness it is today. My friends and I used to bike around it and invent racetracks through it. The start was at the front of the house, between the nineteenth-century bronze urns and the floppy arms of the old rosemary bushes: down through the medieval gateway into the upper courtyard, sharp right in front of the pink brick Elizabethan tower swathed in clematis, across the lawn and through the narrow gateway into the rose garden – a terrifyingly spiny acanthus bush on the corner there – a zigzag through the alliums and the mounds of old roses before hitting the fastest of all straights through the Lime Walk and under the branching hazels of the Nuttery, where I would finally skid to a halt outside the Herb Garden. The whole thing, which is slightly downhill, could be done in just under a minute. If you had left the gate open there, you could cut through it, along the far side of the moat, up the tail end of the Bettenham track and back to the front of the house to complete the lap: three minutes if you were on form.

  There were no exclusions. Our dog, Rip, a terrier, chased cats down the yew walk and through the Rose Garden. In the evenings my father used to stand on the lawns with a tennis racket and hit a ball as high as he could, sixty, eighty, one hundred feet in the air, and ask one or other of us to catch it as it came down, stinging our fingers or smacking our palms, all for increasing double-or-quits money, starting with sixpence, going up sometimes to the heights of thirty-two shillings, sixty-four shillings, before crashing to zero when you dropped one. We did three-legged races from one end of the courtyards to another. And it wasn’t only us: children from the village used to come and play hide-and-seek in the garden. All the gates were always open. There was scarcely a lock on the place. I had a friend, Simon Medhurst, the son of a skilled mechanic and blacksmith who lived in a cottage on the farm, and together we used to make bases for ourselves in the attics of the long range and in the ratty barns. One day we found a pink cardboard box, filled with lead knights and their horses, both men and horses armoured, and plumes on their heads. They had been Vita’s toys from the 1890s. Simon, his sister Alison, Juliet and I played in the hay barns, making terrifying tunnels through the bales, filled with the threat of collapse and suffocation. There was a frighteningly dark air-raid shelter in the orchard where we all played naughty games of show and tell. More politely and more publicly we had a gypsy caravan where Juliet played at tea parties for our parents and their friends. Or we used to stand all morning in the fruit cage, eating the red and green gooseberries from the bushes and pulling the raspberries from the canes. Above the piggery, Simon and I made a den which no one guessed was there. We dragged chairs up the ladder and made a table from boxes. From there, through the warped gaps in the weatherboarding, we could spy on the world outside.

  All of this looks in retrospect as if it might have been a dream of happiness and integration. It wasn’t entirely. Inside this beautiful outer shell was a pool of unhappiness. Harold’s grief was explicit, but at least that was a symptom of his love for Vita. Between my own parents there was no longer any love. My father no longer slept in the same room as my mother. Very occasionally, their mutual frustrations burst out into the open. I remember one evening at the table in the kitchen, with all of us, as well as my nanny Shirley Punnett, who had been born in the village, sitting around the scrubbed deal, when the two of them began to shout at each other, from one end of the room to the other, a terrifying, exchanging, shouting barrage in the air above us, as if shells were exploding inside the room, and we ran away upstairs to our own rooms in tears. At another time my mother threw precious plates the length of that table, beautiful nineteenth-century plates on which early balloons were painted – they had belonged to Vita – while my father stood there fielding them as if at cricket.

  She couldn’t bear to be alone with him and, inevitably, another man fell in love with her. She was sad, beautiful, in her late thirties, and looking for someone who would g
ive her a warmer and more comfortable life than the distant, unsexual and reproachful supervision that was all my father could offer. She left in April 1969, when I was twelve, and went to live in a flat in London while my father continued to live alone at Sissinghurst.