Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  I reeled from this document, sunk in gloom. I have talked about it more recently to Sally Bushell the Trust’s property manager and she has explained it from her point of view. They didn’t know us at the time. For them, we were new arrivals. They needed to be careful about security and safety. The yew hedges had to preserved from exhaust fumes. And it wouldn’t have been nice for our friends to have been challenged in the garden. At the time, though, I was in no mood for understanding. I wrote an angry letter to the Trust’s area manager, who had signed the document. ‘There is no sense that any of my family belongs to Sissinghurst,’ I told him,

  nor that we grew up here, that we think of it as home, that we know it and have known it more intimately and for longer than anyone else, that it is a place to which we are deeply attached. This draft agreement might well have been proposed to someone who had just strolled in from Arizona or Mars. Many of its clauses treat me and my family as though we were simply unwelcome here, to be contained and enclosed, and not to be trusted.

  I would like you to imagine addressing the kind of proposals you have made to my father. Would you have dared do that? I don’t think so. I can see my father now, if I showed him what you sent me, holding his head in his hands and saying it was unbelievable. It is an almost complete betrayal of any spirit of cooperation or trust we might have had. And if not to him, why to us?

  This was bleak; it felt like the moment of dispossession. ‘How lovely to be at Sissinghurst,’ people would say, but it wasn’t lovely. Doubly or even triply, it felt like borrowed clothes: first because it was my father’s house, then because it was his parents’ and thirdly because it was the National Trust’s. A three-layered baffle lay between us and any sense that this was home. It made all too obvious the acknowledged fact that the status of ‘resident donor’ is difficult. Even the phrase reveals the difficulty, as if one were living in a body whose heart had been given away. It’s your home but someone else’s business, a place that is yours emotionally but very far from being yours in terms of who owns it, runs it, pays for it, works at it and conceives of its future. For my father, who was responsible for the act of giving Sissinghurst to the Trust, this did not arise. He had saved Sissinghurst by giving it away.

  If I had been a National Trust employee, working hard all year to keep the place in prime condition, I might not have liked us either. There is something structurally unlikeable about a ‘donor family’. They swan about as if they own the place, but they don’t own it. They contribute nothing financially. They think they know how things should be but they don’t do much to keep them that way. For all the heart-drenching beauty of Sissinghurst, it felt a little cold. At times it felt like living in a theatre. One tends, at those times, to see the mechanisms rather than the show.

  The Trust reeled in turn from my letter. I saw Sue Saville, the regional director, who did her best to mend the damage that had been done, smiling at me and rather sweetly touching my arm in reassurance. She said that visitors to NT properties liked the idea of a donor family living there. That the NT liked donor families because they often provided an instinctive feeling for a place which an administrator would have to guess at and feel for. That this occupancy agreement had been a mistake, a failure on the Trust’s part to imagine themselves into our shoes. Finally, one day that summer, Sir William Proby, the chairman of the Trust, came with Merry, his wife, to talk to me and to apologise. We sat in the garden together, looking at the azaleas, their honey-scent blowing over us. The Trust had got it wrong and Sir William was sorry. I know, poor man, that part of Sir William’s job is going around the country soothing donor families in these situations, but he did it well. There was no more talk of occupancy agreements.

  Nevertheless, it hardly changed the atmosphere on the ground.

  Through the course of 2005, I gradually worked my way to understanding what needed to happen here. That summer, going for a walk with the dogs, on the path just between the Priest’s House and the barn, apropos of nothing, I had an idea. The restaurant at Sissinghurst serves tens of thousands of people a year. Why not grow on the farm the food that the restaurant cooks and sells to the visitors? What does a good lunch need? Some lamb, beef, chicken, eggs, pork, sausages, vegetables, bread, butter, cream, fruit, pastry. If the farm here could supply these things again, as it once had, the place would, almost inadvertently, reacquire the vitality and multiplicity it had lost, not as a smeared-on look, but from its bones. Above all, there would be people working the land here again, people for whom the soil of Sissinghurst was of vital importance, who would get to know it and look after it as carefully as their own children. That stupendous list of tasks performed on the Captain Beale farm would again become at least half necessary. A good lunch would make a good landscape. Grow lunch. That was all it needed.

  In the wake of the idea came its drawbacks. This was not a lovely blank canvas. Over two hundred people – employees, residents, volunteers – were directly involved in the working and management of Sissinghurst as it stood. That big and complex business, with its own multiple tensions and high profitability, had to be kept going while this new cluster of ideas – a market garden, an organic farm, a restaurant dependent on very local produce, a labour-intensive use of the land – was pushed into the middle of it, with the same management team having to make the changes. It would not be easy. The new Sissinghurst enterprise would have a ready-made market on its doorstep – the stream of visitors to the garden – but that benefit came at a huge price: the need to convert everyone from the old system to the new. What was good about the idea was also bad.

  In October that year, one of the National Trust’s committees of the great and good – this was the Gardens Panel, chaired by Anna Pavord, the writer and plant historian – was coming to Sissinghurst anyway, to see how things were going. It was a routine visit, something that happens every two or three years. I decided I should talk to them about my idea. Here was a chance to get change into the bloodstream of the Trust. I rang Anna. She said I could have ten minutes.

  I have never written anything more carefully in my life. I knew I had to say it to them with some conviction, but I printed it out as well, so that the committee would have something to take away with them, a physical object which could make the idea stick. The meeting was to be held upstairs in the old granary, whose windows I had shot out with my air rifle one bored ten-year-old morning. It was now part of the varnished pine world of the National Trust restaurant. There were about twenty-five people there, arranged around a giant table, tweed jackets, ties, professional, slightly curious. I distributed my sheets of paper, stapled together, along with copies of the poem called ‘Sissinghurst’ which Vita wrote soon after arriving here. I then stood to address them. This is what I said:

  Sissinghurst is more than a garden. It is a garden in the remains of a ruined house and that house is at the heart of its own piece of Wealden landscape. It is a deeply rooted place and its meaning and beauty depend on its working not only as a garden but as a place that is fed by those wider and deeper connections.

  That was code for a major transformation of the place. If connections were what mattered here, then the whole way it worked had to change. Vita’s vision of the place had spread far beyond the horticultural. Garden, buildings, farm, woods, history, Kentishness, the land: these were the necessary ingredients. ‘This husbandry, this castle and this I’, she called it in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’. It was a place, she wrote, where she found ‘in chain/The castle, and the pasture, and the rose’. That chain, that sense of connectedness, was what Sissinghurst needed to embody. It was a garden in a farm and it should seem like that.

  I told them about the four different tenants, the lack of anyone working on the farm full time. No animals attached to Sissinghurst, no farm buildings used as farm buildings, no one farmer who thought of Sissinghurst Castle Farm as his.

  The result is a certain, efficient heartlessness, decisions made about this land not for the place but in the context of the four f
arm businesses of which it forms a part.

  The garden at Sissinghurst is the crowning element of a landscape which needs to be polycultural. It once had both soft fruit and top fruit, hops, a herd of Guernsey cattle and another of dairy shorthorns, farmers who were attached to it as a place, as well as orchards, cereals, sheep, pigs, chickens and ducks. That is the landscape described in VSWs poem, and that is the landscape to which we should aspire. I am sure the pursuit of such a rich and various landscape would bring the aesthetic changes to the landscape which the garden needs. Sissinghurst the place would become the poem which Vita envisaged.

  How could we do that? By growing the food for the 115,000 people who sat down to eat something in the restaurant and cafe here each year. Lunch would make its own landscape. And for that we needed a business plan.

  The farm would need to employ people. It would strengthen this community and would restore some vital connections to it. I think we have an opportunity here to make something of great rarity and beauty, a poem of connectedness, something of which we would all, in five or ten years’ time, be exceptionally proud.

  There had been some nodding of heads as I spoke and people clapped when I sat down, but I had to leave the room for the discussion that followed. I wasn’t quite sure where the question had ended up. Afterwards, I spoke to Jonathan Light, the Trust’s area manager. ‘The one thing I am absolutely determined I am not going to do is string an albatross around Sissinghurst’s neck for the next twenty years,’ he said. ‘And there’s another point. The landscape looks like it does for a reason and that is because economics and the market has driven it to look like that over the last fifty years. If we try to do something different, we will be swimming against the tide.’ Negative then? I asked. No, not at all. ‘If we can demonstrate you can have a beautiful landscape, a mixed farm, and make money, then that really will be something we can show to others.’

  The next day I had to go to Cheltenham to give a talk. On the way there, in the car, my phone rang. ‘I have Fiona Reynolds for you,’ her secretary said. I had met the new director-general of the Trust before but being called on the mobile in the car was a first. ‘I hear you’ve set the cat among the pigeons,’ she said. Friendly, warm, busy, amused. ‘I’ve had some excited phone calls. Do you think you could send me a copy of what you said? I am not saying anything but it sounds interesting.’ It was the best of signs. As I drove back home, I couldn’t stop smiling. Just think: this thing I had been half-remembering and half-imagining was still alive.

  I walked out across the farm that evening, taking the dogs through the autumn woods, kicking up the leaves in the trenches which the old roads had left in the wood floor. A rising moon hung at the end of the long rides and autumn filled the air like a soup. It seemed possible, then, that there might be no disconnection between the future and the past here, that the passing of time wasn’t mere diminution. In the car I’d heard a woman on the radio say that we met the world only once, in childhood, and that everything afterwards was only memory. I knew well enough the attractions of that idea, the Wordsworthian regret, the sense of significance being invested only in the past. But here now, maybe, there was something else: the ability to fold the past over into the future, like turning the blankets and sheets over at the top of a bed, or digging over a piece of ground, turning the sods, grass down, and breaking the exposed soil to make a new tilth. Walking through the wood that evening, with the dogs prodding for rabbits among the chestnut stools, and that moon climbing through the branches, I knew I had never felt such buoyancy, such deep and rooted buoyancy, and I wished my father had been there to tell him.

  FOUR

  Origins

  It is an article of faith with me that a place consists of everything that has happened there; it is a reservoir of memories; and understanding those memories is not a trap but a liberation, a menu of possibilities. The richer the knowledge, the wider the options. Multiplicity is all. The only enemy is narrow, singular definition. And Sissinghurst, perhaps like any place that people have loved, is layered with these multiplicities. Even now, anyone who lives or works here soon develops an intense relationship to it, none of them quite the same, none quite distinct, none of them quite secure. Our different histories are buried and half-known but we all think we own the real thing, or at least want to. It is a place drenched both in belonging and in the longing to belong.

  I always knew that its foundations were in clay, silt and sand – clay at the bottom end of the farm, through which the Hammer Brook runs, sand on the higher ridges above it and silt scattered through all of it. The clay is late land, always lying cold and reluctant, heavy and wet. It is where the fertility lies and where cereals do have some kind of a chance, at least with modern equipment. Hops, which are hungry plants, were always grown down on the heavy land by the Hammer Brook. In summer the clay is capable of turning to concrete – and then dust – as soon as the sun starts to shine. In winter, it makes for thick and cloggy ground. If you walk across one of the clay fields when it has been ploughed, it gathers in lobed elephantiasis clumps around your boots. Teams of six or eight oxen were always needed to pull a plough through these fields, and when Queen Elizabeth and her court came here in August 1573, Lord Burghley, who was with her, said it was worse than travelling in the wilds of the Peak District. Even in midsummer the roads were ‘right deep and noyous’. If heavy goods had to be brought in – in particular the bells for the churches – or timber taken out, the oxen laboured for days. I asked a farmer who had worked all his life on the clay lands to the north of here what his farm was like. ‘Not boy’s land,’ he said.

  Clay, born in the wet, remains a friend to it. Surface water turns into streams. The streams cut away at the clay country, leaving the better-drained sand and silt standing proud as ridges. It is that physical difference which has cut the physiognomy of Sissinghurst. High is open and relatively dry; low is wet, secret and thick with clay. A hole dug in the clay ground here becomes a pond. No lining is needed. Clay smeared with a digger-bucket seals itself. In the 40,000 acres of pure clay lands to the north and east of Sissinghurst, I have counted on the map very nearly four thousand ponds. They are usually no more than the holes where farmers have dug, more often than not for the slightly limy clay called marl, which was used from the Middle Ages onwards to sweeten these generally acid soils. The holes have simply filled with water, but each has its character: overhung with ancient oaks, the outer fingers of their lower branches dipping into the dark surface; smartened in the garden of a newly gentrified farm; or eutrophic, clogged in the middle of an arable field with all the green slime that comes from too much fertiliser draining into it.

  The sand is the clay’s opposite: thirsty, capable of drying out in anything resembling a summer, without the nutrients on which good crops rely but making for easier and lighter country. Clay and sand are the polarities of the place, although in reality the situation is not so clear cut. The two principles mix and muddle across the whole of Sissinghurst. The soils roam from silty sands and sandy silty clays to silty clay loams and on to solid clay itself, perfect for the bricks that were made at least since the eighteenth century in the Frittenden brickworks just to the north of Sissinghurst. Patches of lightness appear here and there in the middle of heavy fields, and sudden wet clay sinks can be found in the middle of soils that are otherwise good and workable.

  Only here and there do the two extremes appear as themselves. On the hill above Bettenham, there is an old sandpit, perhaps where the sand for the mortar used in building Sissinghurst was dug, and where now you can find little flakes and pebbles of the sandstone pulled out by the rabbits. It also appears in another small pit in the Park, just next to the old road going south, a friable, yellowish stone which crumbles between your thumb and finger. Here and there are thin iron bands within it. But play with a pebble for a moment and all you are left with is smooth, talcum-like dust on your skin. There are small pieces of this stone, included as yellow anomalies, among the bricks next
to the entrance arch at Sissinghurst. On the high dry ridge at the western edge of the farm, there is a field still called Horse Race because that is sandy, well drained and had the best going for the gentry in the seventeenth century and the officers of the eighteenth-century militia who used to race their horses here up until the 1760s. But it is not as building stone that this sand is significant. It is for the lightness it has given some of the soils here, far lighter than many places in the Weald.

  At the top of the big wood there is a light, almost purely sandy patch, where a big group of sand-loving beeches grows. They are the most climbable trees at Sissinghurst, and not one of them appears down in the damp clay land. A third of a mile away, at the other end of the ridge, a cluster of sand-loving Scots pines was planted here in the 1850s by George Neve, the improving Victorian tenant. It was here that my father, as an anxious young man in the 1940s, proposed to the beautiful and entirely alluring Shirley Morgan, the only girl he ever loved and who would never accept him, despite a campaign lasting years. It was a well-chosen spot: if he had decided to lay her down on the damp sticky clay soils at the bottom of the farm, he wouldn’t have had a chance. At least he got the geology right; but geology wasn’t enough. How much easier it must be for men who live on perfectly drained, downland turf, with endless vistas across their spreading acres, to convince the girls they love. My poor father could only point to distant views scarcely visible between the trunks of the surrounding trees. Over there, on a good day, he would have said, you can almost see the tower of Canterbury Cathedral. It wasn’t enough; Shirley married a brilliant and handsome marquess whose beautiful house in North Wales has a view across its lawns of mountains and the glittering sea. My father never ceased to love her.