But Sissinghurst seems inseparable from anxiety. We had first the worries over the seating plan at dinner. The scheme was to surround each of the people who work here with the people who had come from outside, hopefully with inspiring ideas. Katrin Hochberg from the Soil Association was convinced that this was going to backfire. The people who work at Sissinghurst, she told me over the phone, were going to think, What the hell is going on? Who are these people swinging in here telling us what to do?’ There was the danger that after so much careful build-up and so much consultation the thing would explode in acrimony and resentment.
There were drinks under and on top of the Tower. Kent was looking as beautiful as the day my father had showed it all to the secretary of the National Trust forty years before. The Italian chef Antonio Carluccio and his wife Priscilla Conran were warmth and encouragement. Jo Fairley, who invented Green & Black chocolate, said I should have courage. I said I was overbrimming with it. Guy Watson, who grows organic vegetables on a large scale at Riverford in Dorset, and Will Kendall, who made a national success of the Covent Garden Soup Company, both said, ‘It’s just so obvious. None of us can work out why we are even here. Why don’t they just do it?’ I told my old university friend, the writer and gardener Montagu Don, what they had said. He said everybody thought the same. Here was one of the central aspects of this story. An individual entrepreneur would feel in his bones that he should just do it. But somehow institutions can’t behave like that. They have to commission studies, articulate the opportunities and risks, weigh the strengths of an idea against its weaknesses and bring every aspect of a scheme into fully examined light. That, to me and these friends of mine looked very like sclerosis, a furred and clogged decision-making system, when what was needed was simple, quick decisiveness. But I couldn’t avoid a disturbing thought: institutions may be unable just to do it, but institutions, mysteriously, are what do it more than anything else in the end. None of these famous media and business entrepreneurs had 3.5 million members behind them, but the National Trust did. What was the relationship between these things? Was the Trust slow to decide because it was big and old? Or was it big because it was slow? Had it lasted because it was slow and careful? Was there a relationship between the viscosity of institutions and the power they wield? And was this lack of spontaneity the reason they survived? Or was it just big-organisation small-c conservatism: we’ve always done it like this, so there is no reason to change?
I sat next to Fiona Reynolds and for the first time had a talk with her about the deeper motivation for these ideas. She told me how when she was at Cambridge she had been entranced by The Making of the English Landscape, the book by W. G. Hoskins that had invented the idea of landscape history. It was a book I had fallen in love with at exactly the same time. And then I talked to her about Sissinghurst, what we were trying to do. It was a chance to encourage people into a new way of seeing things, I said. She undoubtedly saw the Trust as an organisation for leading people a bit farther, for providing the enrichment that comes from beautiful places. She had spent four years sorting out the Trust’s finances and governance. Now, maybe, I said, was the point when something else could come to the front, when the Trust could be renewed as something that reconnected itself to other, newer, older, more inspiring ideas, where it wasn’t just a middle-class comfort zone. Meaning? she asked. Would she consider, for example, experimenting with Sissinghurst as a place in which financial targets set from elsewhere in the Trust might be suspended? Where we could look to set up a garden-farm-shop-restaurant system that focused more on the place’s own well-being than on the straightforward bottom line? Where a glowing ideal of a landscape and a life wasn’t hung up on gross profit margins? Her reaction to that was an ‘Mmm’, but with a rising inflection …
We had our long, enjoyable and sometimes slightly angry meetings in the sunshine the next day. Everyone agreed that there should be no hint of the farm being a demonstration farm, with signboards or the rest of it. It should simply function and be, remaining subsidiary to the garden. Its new fields and buildings should have understood the historic form here but not be a slavish copy of them. It needed to work. Tom Oliver of the Campaign to Protect Rural England argued for the landscape as a place of life and mobility, nothing should be tarted up, and the landscape designer Kim Wilkie said that ‘The aesthetic framework should be poetry not painting – not just a seen picture but a whole-body, all-senses experience.’ Decisions about Sissinghurst should be made at Sissinghurst; the landscape identity would then emerge from the place itself. The farm should be brought in ‘peninsulas’ – Kim’s word – close up to the garden boundaries. The connection should be visceral and felt. The garden should never be brought into the farm. The farm should always be its own self-motivated place.
That was the easiest of the groups. Others, talking about the restaurant, found it more difficult to reach common ground. The real-food champion Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall made an impassioned speech on behalf of authenticity and freshness. How do you really bring the landscape into the restaurant? How can you make it feel as if the food comes from here? But the task was to accommodate 115,000 visitors a year inside that real-food ideal. It could never be a River Café-style experience. You couldn’t have waitress service with such numbers. Food had to be collected from a counter and food sitting on a counter had to be different from food served on a plate. But lots could be done about the ambience. Herbs could be grown in pots outside the door. The veg garden should be beautiful and visitable. There could be outside seating in the summer. In winter there could be special game evenings. The chefs could be trained up to relish this river of produce streaming in from outside. Ginny Coombes said the excitement in the team outweighed the anxiety. ‘But please let’s have some support.’ Stuart Richards, the big wheel in National Trust Enterprises, confirmed that Sissinghurst no longer needed to turn in a 40 per cent net margin as profit. Fiona Reynolds had told him that. In other words, the Trust had decided that the landscape benefits of the idea were worth buying.
The Soil Association now had to pull together a model for the farm/restaurant/shop. They were working to some exceptionally tough NT ceilings. No increase in revenue was to be allowed from an increase in the number of people who might want to visit this new farm. And because of the demands imposed by a National Trust environment – beautiful materials, elaborate approvals, sensitive surroundings – a cow shed that might have cost £100,000 on an ordinary farm would cost £200,000 here. As a result, the numbers just weren’t adding up. Overall, the total investment, if you included the use of working capital, came to £1.2 million. I couldn’t quite tell if we were in cloud cuckoo land.
I went for magical walks that summer with the National Trust warden Peter Dear, a man still in his thirties, with whom I felt the closest possible identity of purpose and mind, and who knew more about the wildlife of Sissinghurst than anyone else alive. He had made new ponds in which beetles and bugs proliferated. We scooped them out with nets. He guided me to a knowledge of the damselflies and dragonflies on a level I had never guessed at before: the Cinnabar moths and the four-spotted chaser, the black-tailed skimmer and the Beautiful Demoiselle, whose dazzling body Peter called ‘emerald blue’. He found a White Admiral on the marsh thistles, whose underwing was a rare and delicious creamy orange. He knew there were Purple Emperors in the wood, but they lived in the upper canopy of the oaks and so we never saw one. But he showed me where the trout were still hanging in sunlit pools in the Hammer Brook. He planned out, and would later plant, stake and fence with my whole family, a ring of twelve oaks in the field across the moat, as a memorial to my father. He wrangled with me as we walked through the shadowy thickness of the summer wood over the benefits and drawbacks of organic farming. He rigged up for me one evening a net of ropes – he climbs rocks in his spare time – in the oldest tree at Sissinghurst, a four-hundred-year-old oak pollard buried in the chestnut coppice, and I spent a day in that tree from dawn onwards, clipped to Peter’s webbing
slings, enveloped first in the barrage of summer song, then drifting in the midge- and spider-thick world of a great silent tree, its skin of leaves a globe above me, while the pigeons walked about like beadles on the wood floor and treecreepers ran up the trunks, corkscrewing their way along one beetle-rich line after another. Black-and-white woodpeckers hammered crazily into the dry dead branches, unable to settle or decide. Squirrels skittered past without the first idea I was there, but still taut, quivering, looking over their shoulder. Rabbits played anxiously in the grassy open rides below: a second or two in one spot, a skip to the next. There was no ease in the wood. All life here flickered and jumped. I lay stretched out on the sloping branches of the oak in a world that knew nothing but tension. The great patience of the tree stood there in silence, an ideal nothing else could seem to manage.
I thought about what we had done in all our year of meetings and I knew that our solutions and suggestions only restated the problem: the beautiful idea looked as if it was too expensive. The application of real costings meant the world of Sissinghurst would remain diminished. The circle wasn’t square, and my instinct that we could do something new and good here was looking like an empty hope.
I was in Scotland when the answer came. It was towards the end of July. My mobile rang. Jonathan Light: ‘I just wanted to tell you the outcome of the Regional Planning Group’s meeting,’ he said.
Yes, I said.
‘The top and the bottom of it is that the Group are not going to recommend either of the schemes to the Regional Committee on the third of August.’ Sinking. ‘Yes,’ I said to him. ‘I thought that might be the direction you’d take. When I saw the £1.2 million low point.’ ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we might be able to salvage something – an orchard, some sheep and some new hedges, maybe some veg and chickens, and that would push Sissinghurst in the right direction, wouldn’t it?’
I put the phone down, devastated by the point we had reached.
Intuitively, viscerally, my idea felt right. It attended to the appetite for local food and real food, for a sense of authenticity in the landscape and the feeling that the best places are deeply fuelled by their own agendas, that they are richly themselves. The idea in its development had generated a great deal of tension but also some excitement and enthusiasm at Sissinghurst. It had become, to an extent, a shared view of how the future there might look. There was a lustre to it.
Now, at the end of all this, we had arrived at a rejection. Risk was the problem. The questions asked had defined the answers. It was as if the pilot of a plane, anxious about arriving at his destination, had loaded up with so much spare fuel that the plane had become too heavy to take off.
What it meant, though, was that the heart of the idea had been stripped out. Maybe there still would be some apple trees grown and chickens raised at Sissinghurst. But it felt as if a mediocrity filter had been applied. That it would be safer to supply food in vans from elsewhere. That the visitors could continue to be patronised, and that other unvisited farms could continue to provide the revenue on which the place relied. It was a victory of safety over imagination. That is why it was disappointing, because it set a frame of ordinariness for Sissinghurst. It didn’t feel like a missed opportunity; more like an opportunity carefully presented and wilfully denied.
In August 2006 the whole project looked like it was lying dead on the floor.
EIGHT
Glory
I plunged back into Sissinghurst’s past, to look for the aspects of Sissinghurst that stretched beyond modern tensions and difficulties. I hoped to find Sissinghurst in its glory, in the sixteenth century, when it leaped up out of its rooted and Kentish condition and became for a moment a place of power and glamour. Intriguingly it turned out that Sissinghurst was never a more troubled place than then.
In the decades before 1500, the Wealden villages around Sissinghurst boomed. Money surged into them. The Weald was not part of the strictly regulated, seigneurial world of the good lands in the north of the county, and so the people here had long nurtured their liberties. The ability to rent and buy land; small dues owed to distant overlords; a habit of dividing property between all children; a poverty in the soils which created the need for a mixed system of farming: all of this made for a radical independence of spirit and a competitive, entrepreneurial world. There was a long history here of rebellion and resistance to authority, stretching back to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. Nowhere else in England did the new Protestant ideas take such quick and vivid root. William Tyndale, the great early translator of the Bible, in exile in the Low Countries, had contacts in Cranbrook, had his works smuggled into England by Cranbrook clothiers and for a while was living in the Antwerp house of Richard Harman, a Cranbrook man, dissenter and merchant. When Thomas Wyatt led a rebellion against Bloody Mary in 1554, no parish contributed more men than Cranbrook to his fiercely Protestant following. And this was one of the parishes in the next century from which a steady stream of Puritans would leave for the freedoms of Massachusetts.
A modern land market was fully operating by the fifteenth century. Estate agents, auctions, gazumping, short-term rentals, buying to let, speculation and mortgages were all at work in the Kent Weald, embedded in a rapidly modernising and commercialising world. Business and farming were deeply intertwined here. Cranbrook was the largest town in Kent (with over two thousand inhabitants) and the parishes around it were one of the busiest parts of England. Most of it was occupied by a free peasantry, who farmed holdings made up of small fields or closes, almost never in single blocks but scattered across parishes and between them. It was cattle country, with few sheep and only a little arable. Wheat and oats were grown but no barley and no hops. Beef cattle were the source of cash. A trade was maintained with north Kent, along the old droveways, by which beef walked north and barley came south.
No records survive for the farm at sixteenth-century Sissinghurst, but they do for another gentry estate belonging to the Culpepers at Bedgbury in the neighbouring parish of Goudhurst. There in 1542 they planted 14 acres of wheat and 34 acres of oats, about 20 acres lay fallow and there were about 160 acres of grassland – some pasture for grazing, some meadow from which hay was taken – on which about thirty breeding cows and their followers and forty ewes and their lambs were raised. Gradually I came to realise that if we were ever to introduce a system to Sissinghurst which would work, it would be not unlike this. The land itself would dictate our use of it.
In the early sixteenth century, the parishes around Sissinghurst were doing exceptionally well, the population rising decade after decade. By the 1550s, this was the most densely occupied part of Kent, with the families and immigrants afloat on an extraordinary industry: the manufacture of about twelve thousand luxury woollen broadcloths each year. The wool did not come from here and the cloths were not sold here. A group of large, proto-capitalist clothiers bought the wool (usually in London markets), had it shipped down the Thames and then up the Medway to Maidstone and from there carted it south on the old Roman road. Unlikely as it might sound, this amphibious route remained the recommended way to come to Sissinghurst from London, particularly for goods, at least until the end of the seventeenth century. Shiploads of wool, 30,000 pounds at a time, 450 tons of wool a year, were brought down to these parishes and converted into cloth, which was shipped back out to London, Antwerp and the markets in France, Spain and the Mediterranean. Dyes came from Brazil and Africa, indigo and cochineal, woad from France, Seville oil from Spain, much of it shipped in via Rye.
A fuzzy boundary existed between smallholder, labourer and artisan. There were dozens of holdings no bigger than seven acres. Little orchards were planted next to modest one-up, one-down houses. Chickens and pigs were everywhere. There were yeoman farms of some thirty acres – not many and rarely in a single block – and only one or two per parish that were bigger than that. Almost everyone who worked on the land also had a trade. This landscape was almost suburban in character, the cloth business sewn into every corne
r of the country. Nor was it a place of great rootedness. Although most people living here came from Kent, most of them, according to their wills, did not die in the village where they had been born. It was, in other words, a surprisingly modern world. Elizabethan Cranbrook had shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, glovers, masons, butchers, truggers, eight shopkeepers, a copper and smith, three barber-surgeons, a haberdasher and a milliner.
The town and the surrounding villages were animated with the trades associated with cloth-making. At least thirty or forty people were involved in the making of each cloth: carding, dyeing and spinning the wool, weaving the cloths, fulling them, raising the nap, shearing them. A finished cloth, twenty-eight yards long, weighing ninety pounds, was worth as much as fifteen deer. ‘Clothing in the Wylde of Kent’, according to one petition from the clothiers to the queen, ‘is the nurse of the people.’
A tenth of all English cloth manufacture came from six parishes around Sissinghurst. These Wealden cloths were famous for their colours: scarlet, russet, damson, ginger, blue medley, grey, orange tawney and ‘rattescolour’, pheasant, pepper and mallard. The boys at Eton were dressed in ‘sad Kent’ from Cranbrook, and there were undoubtedly quantities of money around. No one should imagine it as a world of delight. It was rough, raw and exploitative. The large clothiers’ houses had apprentices sleeping in the attics at night, working by day in the filthy, hot, wet dye houses at the back. In outhouses and those attics, vast piles of wool, wood and finished cloth were stored. One person in five was a spinner, at the poverty pay of twopence or threepence a day, often paid many months late. Whenever clothiers died, they owed money to the spinsters, the poorest of the poor who had nowhere else to turn for work or sustenance in an overpopulated country. The soils were not good enough and most of the people were dependent on the clothiers, who acted as bankers, entrepreneurs, employers, controllers, landlords and magistrates. Life expectancy was still low; most deaths still occurred in the ‘hungry gap’ of March and April. Across the sixteenth century as a whole in the parish of Cranbrook, for every 80 people that died in August, 130 died in April, twice the modern seasonal difference. People in the sixteenth century were still as vulnerable to the turning of the year as a population of weasels or rabbits.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 16