Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  The warmth left Sissinghurst that day. The warmth left with her. The kitchen there never smelled good or right again. It became cold and inert. My father replaced the old double gas stove with a cheap upright electric thing and had the gap filled in with the wrong-coloured Formica. The house was never warm again. My father shrank into a feeling of hopelessness and despair. He heated the room he worked in with an electric blower, and the room with a television in at the far end of the house with another. The rest of the house remained fridge cold. The cold clung in the walls. Cold seemed to hang behind the curtains and seep up from the floor. If the heating was ever turned on, it would take days for the warmth to penetrate the depths of the house. Getting into bed was like getting into a sea.

  My mother had removed some furniture and my father rearranged what was left to fill in the gaps. He made himself instant meals and boil-in-the-bag kippers. Entire weeks went by in which he ate nothing but bananas and cream, occasionally relieved with a Findus fish pie. If anyone came to lunch, he would get the caterers in. One Christmas, when I was there with him alone, as I had asked to be, we exchanged our presents at breakfast and he went up to his room to work. I spent the morning picking books from the shelves and reading a page or two before returning them to their place. At lunch we had half a pound of sausages each and half each of a side of smoked salmon someone had given him for Christmas. Then we watched television and scarcely spoke. A few years later, when my sisters all came to warm up another Christmas, he went to bed on Christmas Eve and stayed there until we left a week later, his meals being brought to him on trays and a few muffled remarks passed through the door. He could not live with the reality of human engagement. It was as if his need for love, real enough, had never been quite unlocked. I did not know it at the time, but he felt he had failed. Any confidence he had once enjoyed now drained out of him.

  He worked in the meanest and pokiest room in the house, with no view from the windows, using a varnished modern table from a shop in Tunbridge Wells, sitting on an old and dirty chair. He rarely turned the hot water on. Was it somehow gratifying to combine this private despair with his charming life outside? I doubt it. His repeated nightmare was standing on the stage in his prep school, while the audience and the rest of the cast waited for him to speak his lines, but no words came and he was left standing there, his mouth silently opening and closing as if he were a fish.

  Just at this moment, in June 1976, Jim Lees-Milne wrote about him in his diary, and in what Jim wrote I suddenly see my father not in the clawing, anxious way that children attempt to understand their parents, but from the outside, and through the eyes of an acute and informed observer. ‘What an odd man Nigel is,’ Lees-Milne wrote.

  Affectionate, fair, honourable, just, dutiful, hardworking, a first-class writer, an exemplary parent, an aesthete, exceedingly clever yet modest. At the same time, is he quite human? He speaks didactically, in a precise, academic manner. He is a cold man who wants to be warm, and cannot be. He has humour and understanding, being totally without prejudices. Discusses his parents’ love lives as though they were strangers. Asked me whether Harold picked up young men of the working classes. No, I was able to tell him. Asked me if I had an affair with Harold. Yes, I replied, but he did not fall in love with me for longer than three months. Nigel told me he was in love with James [Pope-Hennessy] at the same time as his father was and had an affair with him. I know more about this incident than he thinks. For Jamesey told me he was in love with Nigel and used to lie with him without touching. That has always been Nigel’s failing, the inability to make close contact. I expect he regrets it in middle age.

  That is not the sort of thing anyone tells their teenage children, and so my sisters and I orbited around the sad and central absence of our father, his regret-filled cold, without ever quite seeing it for what it was, and all of us saddened and angered by it in our turn.

  More than anyone I have ever known, he came to polarise the good and the bad in his life: social, warm, delighted, graceful, generous, successful and hospitable summer openness; solitary, unseen, parsimonious, gloom-ridden, cold, unwelcoming winter despair. If we came to stay, he would long for us to leave. I said to him once that he treated his books and everything he wrote in the way that most people treated their children, with endless, careful nurture; and his children in the way most people would treat a book – look into it, see what it has to say and put it back on the shelf. Sometimes, he seemed like the enemy. In his files, he kept the letter from the headmaster of my boarding school, saying that I was the most neglected boy the school had ever had. Did he not realise that boys needed visiting from time to time?

  He certainly wrote, wonderful letters, which made me cry with longing for home. Only many years later would I come to distrust them, and through them everything about our family’s word obsession. Sissinghurst floats on a sea of words. Shelf after shelf in our house was filled with the millions of words a family of writers has produced over three or four generations. Filing cabinets stood around in our corridors and our landings of my grandfather’s letters to my father and to his brother Ben, my father’s and Ben’s letters to their father, my father’s letters to me and to my sisters, and all of ours to him. There are hundreds of my father’s letters to my mother, if few from her to him, not to speak of the thousands of letters from Harold to Vita and her to him. Harold’s diaries and my father’s diaries occupied complete cabinets of their own. Yards of shelf were filled with the books they had all written. Tin boxes stood stacked in the corner full of Vita’s letters to her mother and her mother’s in return. And so there was another landscape here, written and rewritten, sheet after sheet, a whispering gallery of family meanings, lasting more than a century, from my great-grandparents to us, a layered tissue of communication. You could make a mattress of those papers, lie back on it and feel the past seeping up into your flesh like a kind of damp.

  But for all the volume, all the drawers and files, there seemed to be something lacking. So much was written but so little seemed to have been said. If I think of those filing cabinets standing there in the corridors, what I see is a world that is said to be private and intimate but is in fact coloured with performance and display, a show of bravado and communication laid over the anxiety and apprehension underneath. How much of it was real? Was this world of written intimacy and posted emotion, of long-distance paternal and filial love, in fact a simulacrum of the real thing? A substitute for it? Nicolson closeness had been a written performance for a hundred years. And that unbroken fluency in the written word made me think that it concealed some lack. If closeness were the reality, would it need to be so often declared?

  My father’s social life consisted not of a steady stream of friends and visitors but bursts of smart sociability in the summer, what he called The Season. I remember one lunch party he held in which everyone had a title. I looked at it all in the unworldly, unforgiving way of adolescence and as I remember it now I can feel the chill of my own regard. Without pause, for what seemed like weeks at a time, they would discuss the Bloomsbury Group. I deliberately learned nothing about it. There were waitresses and cooks, bottles of Riesling, conversational sallies. In each of the guests’ bedrooms my father would provide short, semi-complimentary CVs of the other guests. Only once, thankfully, did he put the wrong list in the wrong room so that one man found himself described as ‘past his best’; another as ‘patronising’. I looked at my father and thought he was living each day for the account he could write of it the following morning in his diary. After that summer show, he retreated to boil-in-the-bag TV dinners, a sense of diminution and failure. This polarised spectacle, the deep disconnection in him, troubled me then as it does now. I remember accusing him once of ‘dishonesty’ – the only word I could bring to address this troubled core of unhappiness – and he of course asked me, cold, angry and forensic, for examples, of which, in fear, I could provide none.

  As a teenager, I remained both devoted to him and angry for what I thought of
as his selfishness, his hiding of the truth, his weakness, his lack of practical love, the theatricality of his life, the way in which he would do little or nothing for us and demonstrate so much vivacity, charm and engagement to those people who hardly knew him and who can have meant little to him. His love of America was the encapsulation of all that: visit after visit, in which he would act ‘Nigel Nicolson’ in front of adoring audiences to whom the edited version could be presented, before returning to the cold of Sissinghurst, to be that other, self-despising person, living, as he put in his private memoir written in 1985, in ‘the morass of self-reproach I feel’.

  In that memoir, written when he was sixty-eight, he summed himself up:

  The two great deficiencies in my make-up are lack of judgement, and an incapacity to feel deeply, in anger or in love. A mushiness of temperament, a short-cut mind, indolence, no power to execute, a copy-cat mind, poverty of intellect and spirit, constantly wishing myself more rich in scope, self indulgent, and selfish were it not that I take pains not to appear so, my generosity fake, my gentleness an excuse for lack of vigour. It’s not a pretty self-portrait.

  He was so lonely that he could feel comfortable only with people who scarcely knew him. Anyone who came at all close was, to use the word he used in his own memoir, ‘menacing’. Intimacy itself was menacing.

  He and I were always different. I liked roughness and incompleteness, the wrinkled suggestion of things, Romanticism, the seventeenth century and authenticity. He liked Palladianism and neatness, the Augustan vision, Chippendale not oak, Jane Austen not Shakespeare, tidiness and the effective display. He couldn’t contemplate the idea of religion or psychology; he developed an overt distaste for sex or even any talk of it. I played Bob Dylan loud on the record player but he was unable to listen to music, thinking instead that he should read a book about the workings of the orchestra. He once said to me that if anyone was ever moved by music, it was a symptom of sentimentality.

  All he wanted was clarification and tidiness. He was in many ways disgusted by mess and increasingly fearful of the anarchic or the spontaneous. But it is one of the consolations of age that the anger and incomprehension of the adolescent can turn to sympathy and love. I feel towards him now as a father might feel towards a son who seems curiously stuck in his relation to the world, who has not let himself emerge, who has not in some ways let himself be, to be the immediate creation of flesh and appetite he, at least in part, might have discovered. It is as if my father spent his life not existing but making himself up, endlessly fashioning a papiermâché skin to cover the hollow he both knew and dreaded beneath it.

  In his later years he cleared, ordered and sorted Sissinghurst. Everything found its place. No letter was written without a copy being kept, none received without being filed. He burned a great deal of the lumber in the attics. All our childhood toys were thrown away. I didn’t see any of this for what it was at the time. I was away at school, university and work. I didn’t realise that this process of clearing up, of cleaning, sorting and clarifying, not only represented my father’s attempt in the outer world to cure the sense of worthlessness and dirtiness within him, it also coincided with some kind of ending of the world I had known as a boy.

  Of course, other factors were in play. The landscape historian Oliver Rackham has called the central decades of the twentieth century ‘the locust years’. It was the period when a hungry and powerful simplicity, a rationalist clearing away of the mess, was imposed on the world, when logos was substituted for mythos, the rational fact for the imaginative idea, something rather blank and reasonable for the complex and wavering story. In the outer world, the demands of modern agricultural systems meant that the same simplifying, tidying up and ‘making efficient’ was occurring across the entire farmed landscape of England. Mixed farms were giving way to more profitable monocultural systems.

  Sissinghurst had been open to the public since the late 1930s, and for us the visitors had always been as much part of the place as customers in a shop. A Sissinghurst without visitors would have felt odd and incomplete, as if a play were being performed to an empty house. But in the 1960s and ’70s, as Sissinghurst became more famous, the ever-growing numbers of visitors had to be accommodated in new ways. So the hops went, as their market collapsed, and the hop gardens were taken out. The oast houses went silent, to become first a tea room and then an exhibition space. The black tin hoppickers’ sheds, whose pale, light blue interiors were like the miniature parlours of London houses, were demolished. The orchards were grubbed up and grants were given to bring that about. I still remember the lopped branches of the trees lying on the autumn grass and the stubs of the trunks standing there in their orderly rows like an abandoned cemetery. The cattle went and then the farmhands. The tractors went: there was no more of that familiar open-throttle chucking of the tractor through the gap between the pig shed and the garden fence. Then the pigs went and their place became a series of carports of which my father was particularly proud. The Jacob sheep’s foot rot became worse than ever and they went. The chickens went. The hay was no longer stored in the brick barn and the old Dutch barn outside it was demolished. The woodshed and the pig shed became a shop. The old granary, where the wood of the partitions was worn by the heavy usage of filled sacks, men and labour over three hundred years, so that the wood inside looked as if it had come from the groynes on a beach: all that was taken out and converted into part of ‘The Granary Restaurant’.

  July 1986: Tom, Adam and Nigel Nicohon in the same place

  Jack Copper died, his garage was taken down and a smooth mown piece of grass with elegant parkland trees replaced it as though a slice of an American campus had taken up residence in the farmyard. My father had the rough, shed-like buildings removed from around the perfect arch of the sixteenth-century barn. The thorn trees and most of the elders that grew next to the oasts were removed, so that their uninterrupted forms could be seen clearly, out and in the open. The cart shed became a ticket office, the dairy and bullpen a coffee shop and plant shop. The stony track was tarred and smoothed. Neatness, efficiency, modern systems and a certain absence and emptiness replaced what had been the lifeblood of a lived place.

  No longer was any dung carried out to any field. Dung in fact entirely disappeared from Sissinghurst. No produce from the fields returned to any of the buildings. No animals lived here. No one worked on the farm full time. ‘I look at this farm now,’ Mary Stearns, James’s mother, said to me one day, ‘think what it once was and almost weep.’ The old veins and arteries of the place, the routes going out into the land from the cluster of buildings at its heart, were not used any more except for ladies taking their dogs for a walk. Only the widened busy arterial lane which is Sissinghurst’s umbilicus to the outside world remained an active, living route. Along it came the hundreds of thousands of visitors, all supplies, all the food for the restaurant and all the oil for the central heating. Back along it, all the visitors left and all the rubbish with them.

  I scarcely saw this change for what it was, but that is how the real losses occur: invisibly, cumulatively, in a way one cannot grasp or measure. Only afterwards you see that the snow has melted, that autumn has somehow become winter, that the evening or the past is over.

  When my father was ill in 2004, we came back to live at Sissinghurst. When I was a teenager, I had left for university and then lived in London and other places. Since 1994 my wife Sarah and I had been living, with our two daughters, in a small farm about twenty-five minutes away, just over the county border in Sussex. Now my father, who was eighty-seven, was fading but outside Sissinghurst was throbbing with its new life. It had become one of the most successful ‘visitor attractions’ in the south-east of England (180,000 visitors a year, turning over £2 million), and in doing that had slowly and invisibly lost its soul. Remembering what had been here, I came to realise what had gone: the sense that the landscape around the house and garden was itself a rich and living organism. By 2004, all that had been rubbed awa
y. An efficiently driven tourist business, with an exquisite garden at its centre, was now set in the frame of a rather toughened and empty landscape. It sometimes seemed as if Sissinghurst had become something like a Titian in a car park.

  I walked a lot around Sissinghurst, its woods and fields. Sometimes it filled me with despair. It seemed as if the country was over. It had become a bogus version of itself: thin city, tied together by cars. Get up in the morning at Sissinghurst and you heard the pulse of rural England: not wonderful, variegated birdsong; but traffic – the seamless, unitonal, flat and flattening noise of tyres on tarmac. This ubiquitous presence of traffic in the morning was for me a sudden and terrible measure of what had happened in the twenty-five years I had been away. The traffic laid a lid of sound on everything else. Sissinghurst on those exquisite mornings would be beautiful only if you were deaf.

  As I took the dogs for a walk in the wood, the mist lay along the stream in the valley, threading itself in and out between the alders that grow there in a woody marsh. The early sun was pouring honey on the trees and over the fields of the Weald beyond them. Between them, just appearing over the wooded shaws, the tile-hung farmhouses and the white cowls of the oast houses looked, as my father always used to say, as if nothing had happened here since the first maps were made at the end of the eighteenth century. The dogs sniffed for nothing in the grasses. But behind and over it all, the traffic roared, and the traffic was the new reality.

  The sound of traffic is the great eroder, the dominant signal that although, in some aesthetic way, little may have changed, in reality everything has. The planning system might have guaranteed that farmers have not sold off garden-sized plots for bungalows. No motorway has been cut through here. But that noise means the old meanings have gone. Was I sentimentalising this? Was it ever different? I feel sure it was. I can remember hearing, as a specific instance, the sound of motorcycles burning up on the road that runs along the ridge above the wood, like a slice cut through the air. That can only mean that the air itself was silent, or near silent. Now it was filled with this aural otherness, a thick substance of the nothere laid all over the here, like woodchip wallpaper slapped all over the walls of a room you used to love.