Both Vita and Harold had a long relationship with the Trust, serving on its committees and writing its guidebooks, even in Vita’s case the guidebook to her beloved Knole after the Trust had taken it over in 1948. Harold had eventually become vice-chairman of the governing council. Sissinghurst and the Trust were always in each other’s orbit, even if, for Vita in particular, its value was ambivalent. It represented for her both the preservation of what was precious and the very forces of bureaucratisation and mediocrity against which the precious needed to be preserved. When in 1954 my father, rather bravely, first mentioned to her that he thought the Trust might be the ideal owners and managers of Sissinghurst, it did not go well. ‘Never, never, never’, she wrote in her diary that evening.
Au grand jamais, jamais. Never, never, never. Not that hard little plate at my door. Nigel can do what he likes when I am dead, but as long as I live no Nat. Trust or any other foreign body shall have my darling. Over my corpse or my ashes; not otherwise. It is bad enough to have lost my Knole, but they shan’t take S/hurst from me. That, at least, is my own. Il ya des choses qu’on ne peut pas supporter. They shan’t; they shan’t; I won’t; they can’t make me; I won’t; they can’t make me. I never would.
About ten days after Vita died in June 1962 my father met the Trust’s secretary, Jack Rathbone, ‘all casual like,’ for a drink in the Travellers’ Club in Pall Mall. Would they be interested in taking Sissinghurst on? Vita’s estate was worth about £100,000, on which there was £38,000 of inheritance tax to pay and hardly any cash to pay it with. Harold was chronically in debt and Vita had spent almost everything she had on the garden and buildings. My father’s only options were to sell the whole thing, sell everything else he had or give Sissinghurst to the Trust. Only by giving it to them could he guarantee that his parents’ life-work, far more lasting than anything either of them had written, would have a chance of surviving. Rathbone agreed to a visit.
He and Sir George Taylor, the head of Kew, came down by train on 5 July 1962. My father was with them, at his most Tory MP charming. He gave them copies of the Sissinghurst accounts. It all looked neat, the books balancing satisfactorily year on year. Money from the garden visitors, farm rents, timber sales and the sale of plants just about covered the costs of the six gardeners, the secretary, the chauffeur-handyman, the cook and Mrs Honeysett, the daily. Rathbone and Sir George – described by my father in his diary as ‘a big bluff man, rather like an Australian who has discovered an unknown gentian in the Andes’ – arrived at Staplehurst station in a good mood. There they were met by Jack Copper, the chauffeur-handyman, famous at Sissinghurst for two things: the homemade hand grenades he had prepared during the war in case the Germans arrived; and the cider press he kept at the back of the garage for a swift one whenever any of the gardeners or farmhands felt a thirst coming on, as they did most afternoons. A famous incident involved Vita walking out of the garden and down to the garage, to find George Taylor, one of the gardeners, coming towards her.
‘Drunk again, George,’ Vita said.
‘Are you, madam?’ George said. ‘That’s funny, so am I.’
A companion story, which has lurked for years in the Sissinghurst undergrowth, never mentioned by my father, tells of Vita, after a glass or two of sherry in the Tower, being taken by the gardeners in a wheelbarrow to her bed in the South Cottage.
Here, immediately, was a signal of that other Sissinghurst world: rough around the edges, idiosyncratic, authentically itself, not smoothed or sheened, not tightly controlled but a little improper, alcoholic, not quite respectable. That morning, the grandees from the Trust wanted to see something of the estate, and so my father told Copper to drive round by Bettenham. Leafy lanes, lovely views, everything going very well until Copper pulled over. He had got himself lost in the four miles between Staplehurst and Sissinghurst. I can imagine my father’s clearing of the throat. ‘We’ll have to go round by Horse Race.’ Eventually they arrived, having lost the way again, coming in over the ‘smooth shorn grass between the orchards’ to find the secretary, Ursula Codrington, who had some thwarted dramatic ambitions, coming out of the entrance arch ‘looking like an Andalusian peasant with a striped apron’. She was followed by the two head gardeners, Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger – both impeccably and utterly English despite their names – who were desperately anxious at the threat of a dead managerial hand being applied to the place they loved. They had been getting ready for a fortnight, sweeping and preening the place so that it looked as perfect as they could make it. Nervous introductions, then the slow walk round: Upper Courtyard grass and the purple border, the Tower lawn with pink and lemon-yellow roses trained against the walls, the Rose Garden, in which the ancient damasks and gallicas were erupting in slow vegetable fountains, the Lime Walk and the Moat Walk, the Herb Garden with its view out to the wood, the Orchard, the White Garden, the stony half-Mediterranean Delos, the greenhouses, the vegetable garden, while the two great men tested the competence of the gardeners at every turn.
Then a pause, and the secretary of the National Trust turned to Nigel and said, ‘Do you know the thing I like most at Sissinghurst?’
‘No,’ said Nigel, looking anxiously at Pam and Sibylle.
‘I just love the fact that it is quite so untidy.’
‘Untidy?’
‘Well, you know, that relaxed look, as if no one has bothered to tidy up.’
Nigel rushed them all up the Tower. ‘The whole Weald was bathed in sunshine,’ he wrote to my mother in London that evening. ‘I have never seen it so clear. I pointed out the boundaries of the estate. The clock struck one. It was at that moment I think that the fate of Sissinghurst was decided. It will pass into the hands of the National Trust.’
Or so he hoped. Rathbone and Taylor recommended acceptance of Sissinghurst but only ‘subject to finance’. Their previous acceptance of houses and gardens without thinking hard enough about the money had landed them in trouble. Nigel’s first breezy suggestion was to give the house and garden to the Trust, sell most of the farmland to raise an endowment and keep the nearest fields and woods for himself. To this Rathbone replied that Sissinghurst represented ‘a very difficult financial problem’. In October 1962, he warned Nigel that ‘this is likely to be a long business’. My father wouldn’t have that. In December 1962 he was tugging at Rathbone like a terrier. ‘Don’t you think we should take this a stage further. It would be nice if we could have the thing agreed before the opening of the garden in April [1963].’ Rathbone: ‘It may take a little longer than that.’
By January 1963, my father had refined his proposal: house and garden to the NT, plus some surrounding farmland, most of the rest sold off to raise cash with which to endow the property with £15,000 and a couple of fields kept for himself. He and ‘any descendants of mine’ would have the right to live there for free. He would act as the Trust’s unpaid manager and have the right to be consulted over any decision affecting Sissinghurst. Any income at Sissinghurst would remain at Sissinghurst. Its coffers would never be drained for general National Trust purposes – this profoundly valuable clause made at the suggestion of the National Trust itself.
The proposals were to come up before the NT finance committee that July. They looked at Nigel’s figures for income and expenses and reached a set of gloomy verdicts. After Vita’s death, they were sure that visitors would fall away. They had no inkling of what would actually happen: that Vita’s Sissinghurst, which seemed a little out of date in the early sixties, would come to represent for hundreds of thousands of people a lost world of romance and beauty. It is as if the Trust in the early sixties was not quite aware of the hunger for the past which would build so powerfully over the next thirty years. Kipling’s house at Bateman’s in Sussex, which the Trust had owned since the 1930s, had never been popular with visitors. Why should anyone be interested in the garden of a minor poet, long since unfashionable and ‘back-number’ as Harold had called it? The Trust also thought that the beauty of the garden
itself would slowly and inevitably diminish as Vita’s inspiration sank into the past. It was, anyway, going to be increasingly expensive to keep the buildings going.
The arrangement with the donor family was that the Trust would pay for virtually everything – building- and garden-maintenance, wages, farm and estate costs – and would receive all income from visitors and farm rents. The family itself would pay for the decoration and furnishing of the parts of the house it lived in, and for its own domestic costs. But there were problems. The Trust, as a public body charged with looking after its properties ‘in perpetuity’, had standards of maintenance which were higher than a private individual’s. Besides, Vita had been underpaying her garden staff and wages would now have to rise. There had to be allowances made for disasters and contingencies. There were management costs. The Trust had accepted responsibility for Knole without an adequate endowment and now they were suffering an intolerable financial burden there. Their ‘realistic forecast for the future’ at Sissinghurst saw a heavy ongoing annual deficit of £3,625. If the Trust were to take Sissinghurst, Nigel would have to provide an endowment big enough to make up that annual shortfall. On top of that, he would have to pay a market rent for his part of the house if he was not to fall foul of the Inland Revenue. As it stood, there was no way the Trust could accept my father’s offer.
Nigel wrote to Ivan Hills, the Trust’s area agent:
Your draft budget is appalling. If the logical consequence is that the Trust could not take Sissinghurst without an endowment of something like £90,000 [the amount required to generate £3,625 a year; about £1.5 million in 2008 terms] then very regretfully we would have to abandon the idea, for I haven’t anything like that amount of money in the world. I haven’t any idea where this amount of money is to come from. Annual repairs, contingencies, £800 a year for a management fee, a gardens advisor … And now you tell me that, in addition to that, I shall be expected to pay a rent. Really I can’t do this.
Three-way negotiations between my father, the Trust and the Treasury dragged on through 1963 and 1964. Nigel remained convinced that the Trust had overestimated costs and underestimated income. He wrote to my mother: ‘It is difficult to see why they need £3,000 more than we have ever spent on it ourselves. “Oh,” says Jack Rathbone, “the Tower might fall down.” “Well,” I say, “it won’t fall down every year.”’ Negotiations were opened with other government departments and by January 1965 the Trust had managed to extract from the Ministry of Works the promise of an annual grant to cover the expected shortfall. With that in their pocket, the Trust decided to accept Sissinghurst if Nigel could provide a £15,000 endowment. He was earning £3,000 a year at the time but the sale of Bettenham and Brissenden farms could raise the cash.
Rather gallantly, at the same time he had embarked on a new conversion project for turning the southern end of the front range into a single family house. Neither he nor my mother wanted to spend their lives, as his parents had done, traipsing between bedrooms in the South Cottage, sitting room in the old stables, dining room in the Priest’s House, work room in the Tower, children’s rooms in the brewhouse. It was to be one warm, centrally heated, hot-watered house for a single happy family. By 1965, he had spent £17,000 on that, inserting a beautiful new oak staircase, my mother’s modern kitchen, a big sitting room and eight bedrooms into what had been the two cottages occupied by Mrs Staples and the Coppers. I remember moving in that summer, the physical pleasure of the big new oak doors, my bedroom up in the attic, one dormer window looking out to the poplars at the front, the other to the Tower and the wood, my mother at home in the kitchen, and the dreadful leaving of it that September as I went away for the first time to boarding school in Oxford.
He loved Sissinghurst more than anything in the world. He adored his father and in a more distant way admired his mother. The remaking of Sissinghurst was the best thing they had done, they had done it together and its preservation was, for my father, an act of intense filial duty and care. Sissinghurst was them. He could never have let it go or cashed it in and still looked at himself in the mirror in the morning. He needed to preserve Sissinghurst, he wanted for me not to have to sell it, and by the autumn he had become desperate. He offered the Trust everything he owned: all books, pictures, silver, the small islands he owned in Scotland, if only they would take Sissinghurst off his hands.
Sissinghurst is somehow kept going while my resources are running out. Everyone here is gradually losing faith in the deal coming off at all. Meanwhile our finances are very delicately balanced and there are almost no reserves. The weekly wage bill is large for a private house. There is no income from the garden throughout the winter months. I am taxed on the income I get and the rents. I pay interest to the Treasury. All this is draining what little I have left. I shall simply not know what to do if the negotiations are not completed soon.
Faintly, in my memory, looking now at these blurred carbon copies of his letters, I see myself then, aged eight, that Christmas, putting my head around the corner of the door into his workroom, his anglepoise light down low over the surface of the table, smoke from his cigarette curling up into its beam, a yellow biro in one hand, and the fingers of the other pushing back over his scalp through his hair. Briefly he looks up at me and smiles.
The uncertainty dragged on for the best part of another year. Treasury officials did not respond to letters for months. Civil servants moved jobs and the details of the case were forgotten or pushed to the back. My father’s attempts at a viable budget became ever more agonised until, at last, in August 1966, a breakthrough, a very English solution. He realised there were strings to be pulled: he had been at Balliol with Niall Macdermot, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Nigel wrote to him: ‘My dear Niall’. Surely he could get something moving on this? Within a month the juices started to flow and the Treasury accepted the offer of house, garden and farm. The sale of Bettenham and Brissenden raised quite enough money for an endowment. There was no talk of a rent. Nigel would not have to give the Trust everything he owned. The Ministry of Works would give an annual grant for five years to cover the expected deficit. By Christmas 1966, it was settled. A solution that had seemed inadequate for years now for some reason seemed to be perfectly fine.
On 6 April 1967, the metal plate saying ‘National Trust Sissinghurst Castle’ arrived from the Royal Label Factory. On 12 April, my father wrote to the new secretary of the Trust, Jack Boles:
My dear Jack,
This is just a note of thanks from your newly adopted child. I heard today that everything was completed according to plan and the announcement will be made this afternoon.
So ends happily negotiations which have lasted almost five years. I have a real affection for the Trust, deepened by this experience, and to me it will cause no pang when I raise your metal plate this evening at our gate. I feel only gratitude and thankfulness that Sissinghurst will thus be preserved for ever.
Juliet and I went up with him to the top of the lane that evening to see the new plate on its new oak post, which Jack Copper had set up that afternoon. It meant nothing to me then, but everything to him. He felt, I think, that he had done his duty to this place, that he hadn’t wrecked it, or simply disposed of it, or betrayed his inheritance. The National Trust was a resting place, a cradle from which threat could be warded off and change kept at bay. It had come at some emotional cost. That April, my mother wrote to him:
It’s time you left this place for a while. It’s wrong for you to stay here all the time. You become confused and muddled as to how you and I should regard Sissinghurst. Finally, now you’ve achieved the assurance of its protection, you may have to worry a bit how you care for and protect your family. But away from us all you may be able to consider this rationally.
A few days later he set off for a four-month tour of Europe, writing a book about great houses of the Western world.
My father had saved Sissinghurst. He had bound together house, garden and most of the farm in a single qu
asi-public ownership. By doing that he had made it inviolable and established our own family’s presence here for ever, at least in theory. And the process of how he did it was at least in part a model for me, forty years and a generation on: engage with the world as it is; keep pushing; don’t be put off by the sluggards; keep your sense of humour; don’t be afraid to show your teeth now and then; but don’t hold grudges; be generous and grateful; always have the goal in mind; but remember too that Sissinghurst isn’t everything. He had done it well, with all the qualities required: doggedness in a corner, love of Sissinghurst, acumen, persistence. The National Trust had shown itself too: as a rational operator, prepared to be patient, in for the long term – it was to own Sissinghurst ‘in perpetuity’ – financially cautious, dedicated to an ideal of beauty, not afraid to say no and not be swayed by emotion or romance.
I had never before embarked on any enterprise that involved steering a large corporate body in a new direction. I had worked for newspapers, broadcasters and publishers, I had founded and run with my cousin Robert Sackville-West a small publishing company. But each of those involved making something new and self-contained. This would be different: a change in ideals and practices for something which already felt it was doing fine. The systems at Sissinghurst were heavily dug in and highly evolved. They would have bucketfuls of answers to any proposal I might make. It would be a case of uncorporate man meeting corporate life and both, inevitably, being changed in the process.
I realised if I was going to propose something to the Trust I had to know in some detail what had happened on the farm here in the past. In 2005, there was no farmer at Sissinghurst. The land was let out to four separate farmers who had the bulk of their businesses elsewhere. It was a place that had been cut in four, the landscape-equivalent of low-maintenance gardening.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 5