The de Berhams certainly contributed to the beautification of Cranbrook church. Their arms, along with those of the archbishop and the de Bettenhams, are on the west face of the church tower. What this means, intriguingly, is that the wonderful distilled lucidity and simplicity of Elisia Berham’s will, its delicacy and distance, are almost exactly contemporary with the wild-green-men bosses in that church, which the de Berhams almost certainly helped pay for. But does that grinning, snake-mouthed wood god, and the dense mystery of the half-hidden wood bird, connect with ‘the white bed complete’ and Elisia’s treasured Book of Hours? Is that the combination which reveals the nature of medieval Sissinghurst, a refined world richly and deeply connected to the earlier and earthier presence which surrounded and enveloped it? I like to think so.
Nothing much survived from that moment. The two friaries were dissolved, Mottenden in 1536 and Lossenham in 1538. Their vestments, a chalice or two, the bells, the kitchen equipment and some of the friars’ hay was sold off and the land leased out. At Sissinghurst itself, the de Berhams lasted probably until the 1530s, when they sold up, no one knows why. It has often been written that they sold Sissinghurst in the 1490s but I can find no evidence of that. Only in 1533 did a newly rich family, the Bakers of Cranbrook, buy from them the manor of Sissinghurst and its lands, and with the Bakers Sissinghurst entered a new and dramatically different phase of it existence.
Almost nothing remains from the de Saxingherst–de Berham years beyond their beautiful memory. The moat, which now defines two sides of the orchard, is likely to be medieval in origin, even if adapted later. On an autumn day, its ‘black mirror of quiet water’, as Vita described it, is another of the places into which the acorns steadily fall. There is nothing to be seen above ground of the medieval house. The stone lip of drain possibly connected to the well in the court of that house can still be found in the wall of the Moat Walk. That well, just outside the South Cottage, was excavated by George Neve, the farmer and amateur antiquarian, to a depth of thirty-five feet in the nineteenth century, when human remains were found in it. It has now disappeared, but instead Peter Rumley, a Kent archaeologist and building historian, has made a new suggestion: the timbered buildings visible in a drawing made by one of the officers guarding French prisoners here in the 1760s might in fact be the de Berhams’ medieval house, or at least an Elizabethan adaptation of it.
Big brick Elizabethan chimneys have been added to the timber frame, but the fretted bargeboards on the gables, the jettied-out upper storeys and the sense of accretion, of parts being added and adapted, as well as the close-studded oak timbers in the façades, all hint at this being a medieval building. In the washy pen and ink of a certain Captain Francis Grose, with the sentry boxes of the Hampshire militia in the foreground, this is probably as near as we can ever get to Sissinghurst before the Renaissance and its money changed it.
SEVEN
Rejection
Each spring, Sissinghurst clicks back into its public life. Before it opens to the public in March, there is a flurry of preparation. The garden beds are forked over, the lawns are given their first mow of the year. Paths are swept, the sign asking people not to tread on the flowers is wiped down and put out under the arch. The shop is re-stocked, the new restaurant staff are trained up in the arcane and complex systems of the kitchen and self-service counter, the warden has ensured that no tree is about to fall on any visitor, the stewards are asked to learn or re-learn about the contents of the rooms where they stand guard and the volunteers in the car park are trained in asking for the £2 parking fee. There is a sort of pre-party buzz, a place re-awakening from its winter ease and privacy. It is a highly evolved and interlocking system, with over two hundred people working here as permanent staff, seasonal staff or volunteers. You only have to walk around this preoccupied, busy place to see that changing it was never going to be a question of simply having an idea.
Throughout the spring of 2006, the meetings on the farm project rolled on as before. Meetings! I have never sat around so many tables in my life. Jonathan said he had never taken part in anything that had involved so much consultation since closing down a factory with a workforce of four hundred. From time to time, someone would voice the idealism of it all. Caroline Thackray, the Trust’s regional archaeologist, said that ‘The garden is there because the landscape is there. The setting is what lit up Vita’s mind.’ Sarah Roots, the Trust’s head of marketing in the south-east, told us all one day that ‘people should be walking through cowpats to get to the garden. They need to smell the farm as they go into the garden.’ Katrin Hochberg from the Soil Association said we should be ‘steered by a sense of community’, and Sally Bushell that we should try to feel we had ‘the freedom to experiment’.
The anxiety about change was never far away. I often felt I was trying to push a fat clay-mucky lump of otherness into the neat and productive workings of a clock. Ginny Coombes, the restaurant manager, was at full stretch, with 115,000 people coming through the restaurant over six months, a third of them in the six weeks between the Chelsea Flower Show and mid-July. The head gardener, Alexis Datta didn’t like the idea of vegetable-growing. ‘Horticulture is not as pretty as what we’ve got now,’ she said at one meeting. ‘I would prefer grass. Horticulture won’t enhance the farm. I don’t like the idea of polytunnels. But I don’t want it looking deliberately old fashioned either. I don’t want to attract more people.’ She had big worries over visitor numbers, housing the people who were coming to work here, buildings, where they were going to be built, water supply, car parking, the capacity of the lane, what it was all going to look like, the effect on the surroundings. ‘I feel we are rushing into it,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to sound negative. I don’t really mind veg but I do mind the view from the top of the tower.’ Later she told me she was worried that some of the smaller fields I was advocating were going to look like ‘one of those privately owned stately homes where the owner is trying to get the punters in by having a few rare breeds in a little paddock’.
Difficulties clustered around the business questions. Under the NT system, Sissinghurst retains all its own profits to invest in the future of the property. To maintain the flow of funds, the NT likes to see a 40 per cent return on its restaurant turnover. Anything like that was looking very difficult under the new scheme. Could Sissinghurst be allowed, within the National Trust system, a special derogation so that it did not, at least for a year or two, have to generate quite such a high percentage of profit? That might be difficult, it was said, because other properties would complain.
Phil Stocker of the Soil Association produced some figures which laid out precisely what sort of farm resource the restaurant would need. The surprising fact to emerge was just how productive the land, even when managed on a low-intensity, organic basis, could actually be. The restaurant, with 115,000 customers a year, could be supplied from:
86 chickens laying eggs
2 dairy cows in milk at any one time
25 beef cattle
3 sows
a tenth of an acre of lettuce
half an acre of potatoes
a fifth of an acre of carrots
3 acres of wheat
The problem was not that Sissinghurst was too small; it was too big. But the economies of scale meant that a farm working with the quantities needed by a single restaurant would never be viable. A single sausage would cost ten pounds. The farm had to sell more elsewhere in order to reduce the cost of the produce sold to the restaurant to a reasonable price. To make the farm viable, it would also need to sell 48,000 eggs, 3,400 kilograms of beef and 170 tons of grain. We all thought that much of this could go through a farm shop. But a farm shop with nothing but eggs, beef and flour would be a sorry thing. So most of the farm shop would have to be stocked from elsewhere, which would mean that the village shop in Sissinghurst would have a competitor on its doorstep, tails would be wagging dogs and a local crisis would erupt. I may have thought that what was needed at Sissinghurs
t was a little more connectedness. What each of these exercises revealed was the intricately knotted and knitted condition of life as it was.
We were confronting head on precisely the problems which had produced the sort of landscape from which small farms, and even mixed farms of any size, had largely disappeared. These intractable difficulties were what lay behind the erosion of the world I had known as a boy. On top of all this, there were deep suspicions from some parts of the Trust about the viability of an organic system. Some people thought organic farming was worse for the environment. The commercial arm said their customers were not interested in organic produce. In 2005 the Trust had sold a million pots of local jams and honey and it was clear from market research that most people thought the Trust was organic anyway. Wasn’t going organic in danger of putting the whole Sissinghurst scheme at risk?
Clearly my ideas would be no good if they did not fit real-world conditions. It was all very well recovering the atmosphere of medieval Sissinghurst, but what good was that if the modern world could not accommodate those ideals? These were real objections, not mere anxieties or neuroses. The Trust understood the virtues of what I was suggesting, but they didn’t want to end up looking stupid.
Early in June I went to a meeting held in London by the National Trust for all its donor families. It was a beautiful early summer morning when the sunlight stuck out from the side-streets in diagonal mote-filled slabs. We were to meet in Spencer House, the great eighteenth-century private palace in St James’s, restored by Jacob Rothschild. I walked there from the station through the richest streets in Europe. Swallows cruised the length of the tarmac and early white roses were in flower on the edge of the park.
Spencer House is in the part of London where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries every great family used to live, in a narrow street but with a façade looking over Green Park. It is like a palace in eighteenth-century Rome. A stone hallway. Upper-class men in soft, well-cut suits, their skin as pampered as the wool. Ties that start out at the horizontal buckle beyond the knot and dive for gold pins. Cufflinked cuffs, tugged and adjusted. Burnished, pointy, black lace-ups. The deepest level of the English establishment which, for all the changes of the last century, seems to be as established as it ever was. Some women also in wool, sub-Chanel. Giant diamonds. A gathering of the most ancient of England. I talked to an old friend of my father’s, the woman with the most wonderful name in England: Mrs Hornyold-Strickland. She had been having trouble with the Trust over the flag at Sizergh Castle in Cumbria. On a table were badges for everyone, a catalogue of the peerage and its wives, ranks of earls and viscounts, with their properties named beneath them, or to be exact their ex-properties, their ancestral places, which now belonged to the Trust. I had never seen so many titles gathered together. It looked like the Congress of Vienna or Agincourt. I pinned my badge on: ‘Adam Nicolson – Sissinghurst’.
The NT high-ups were there: Fiona Reynolds, the director-general; Sir William Proby, the chairman; Simon Murray, the director of operations; Sue Saville, our regional director. ‘I always introduce people at this thing,’ Sue said to me, ‘but they always know each other already. Freddy? He’s my mother’s second cousin. None of them have the faintest idea who we are.’ So, indeed, I met my first cousin once removed, John St Levan, who lives on St Michael’s Mount, a National Trust house in Cornwall. And my second cousin once removed, Robert Sackville-West, my oldest friend, who lives at Knole, Vita’s beloved childhood home. A colonel of the Grenadiers asked me, ‘How long have you put up with the Trust?’ A couple of years, I said. ‘You wait,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long before you’re not quite as cheery.’ Coffee came round. Jacob Rothschild saw me. ‘How’s the scheme?’ Fine, I said.
Paintings from the Italian Renaissance on the walls, a perfect private palace, like a hotel that wasn’t scuffed in the way of hotels. We sat on rows of little chairs in the great dining room. Robert and I were together in the front row, a wonderful team-feeling to have him there. Simon Murray said the Trust wanted to delegate, to push decision-making down to the regions. Then the grumbling began.
The only reason these people were there is that they had been taxed into these chairs. The NT mechanism had provided them, or their fathers, with a way of continuing to stay in their houses, to pretend that the world remained as it was before 1911, before modern tax laws began to redistribute the extraordinary wealth this room had once represented. Now these dinosaur donors had the illusion of significance but not the substance or the power. The low whine of impotence came from the ranks behind me. The NT staff were hopeless because they were poorly paid. The NT was taking a purely commercial attitude with its estates and should understand something about communal coexistence. One famously cantankerous lady could barely contain her rage, about what was not clear. Someone asked how the Trust could think of buying new properties such as Tyntesfield, the huge Victorian country house near Bristol, when they couldn’t pay their property managers enough. Murray explained the difference between grant-funded capital expenditure and daily running costs.
It was a pitiable scene. What was intended, I suppose, as an airing of views, even a gesture by the Trust to show that the dinosaurs mattered, felt in the event like a demonstration of their irrelevance. The very meeting in this glamorous London palace set up the Trust as a large, powerful, centralised body, and the lords and ladies assembled in the room as an old, nostalgic and emasculated audience, saturated in self-pity. I thought, first, as I sat there, how much I would prefer to be at the National Trust table looking at us than in one of our little chairs looking up at them. But then I remembered that every occupant of every chair in that room had their own Sissinghurst, their own book like this one bundled up inside them, written or unwritten, thought or unthought, and that these thin, wheedling complaints were only the voices of attachment and the love of place somehow translated into the wrong tone and the wrong language. I wondered then whether the Trust’s relationship to its donors was correctly framed. There was so much buried passion in this room, but apparently so little engagement. It was framed as an opposition, but could it not be framed as a partnership? Perhaps these crusty men and women could become in effect ‘inheritance consultants’, the experts in buried meaning, in the folding of the past into the management of the future? If the Trust didn’t do that, the result was this: complaint, a jangled joylessness, the old, long-repeated idea that things weren’t what they used to be.
At lunch, on one side, I was next to a well-primped lady with angry opinions and antediluvian views, loathing the Trust on class grounds, making no pretence that she didn’t, as she ate their lunch, and describing at length the ‘agonies’ of building an extension to her house. On the other side was Sarah Staniforth, the Trust’s historic properties director, wife of the leading environmentalist Jonathon Porritt. She talked about how houses had to be slept in if they were to be known. I talked to her about Gaston Bachelard and his idea that the purpose of a house was that it allowed one to dream in peace. If you got that right, everything else would be right. Maybe the tenancy of the Priest’s House at Sissinghurst, I said, might become the prize for an arts competition? A year’s tenancy with a poem or a painting as the rent? She wasn’t completely averse.
After lunch I talk to the Cornish colonel again. He and his brother had twinned estates. They were too rich to feel comfortable in the position they were in but not rich enough to do anything about it. It was clearly best either to be a Rothschild – with enough money to call the shots – or a Nicolson, with no money and happy in the end to receive whatever might be on offer.
Later that week, Sarah and I had what Claire Abery, the gardener, called our ‘famous day’. We invited a cluster of people to come to Sissinghurst to discuss the ideas we had been chewing over: garden designers, chefs, experts in retailing and restaurants, journalists interested in the new food culture, organic growers, people with a passion for the meaning of the landscape. It was in effect a company strategy day, an attempt to en
thuse Sissinghurst and the people who work there with the sort of thinking which all these outsiders were dedicated to, and who in their different ways represented new attitudes to land, food, people and the connections between them. Was it naïve to think that Sissinghurst might take to their suggestions with alacrity? In retrospect, I think it might have been. People really don’t want to be told to do things differently, whoever is doing the telling.
The outsiders all gathered at Sissinghurst on a beautiful evening early in June to spend the night here and talk the following day. It was a strange summer. The irises and the roses were out at the same time, which was rare, playing havoc with the colour system in the garden. But the southern end of the White Garden was in full fiesta, the lovely white Sibirica irises, the white poppies, the little white rose like something from a Persian miniature all covered in bees. The orchard was thick with sorrel and buttercup-sprinkled grass.
Sarah had filled the house with flowers from the garden at our farm twelve miles away in Sussex: sweet-smelling stocks, the firework alliums called Schubertii, creamy speckled foxgloves, some crinkled Iceland poppies and dark purple columbines. The doors of the house were all open and the light came flooding into spaces that all winter and spring had been dark. Just to look at it filled my balloon of optimism. Surely, here, from this, people could find their way to a better future.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 15