Levin said my father should have burned the manuscript. Rebecca West said the same. Cyril Connolly had been friendly about the book in private but in his Observer review was cold. After reading them all, my father went upstairs without a word. My sisters and I read with some delight the copy of Private Eye that ran a spoof introduction to the book. Under a large picture of an Edwardian country-house party, ‘Nigel Sackville-Nicolson’ wrote that he had published this account of his mother’s homosexuality only ‘after long and careful consultation with my family, my dearest friends and my bank manager …’ It left his reputation enlarged but, in some quarters, damaged, and it made him £80,000.
Violet, Vita had written, very rarely came to stay with her at Long Barn, their house near Sevenoaks. Whenever she did,
the antagonism between her and the house was ludicrous and painful. The country would seem deliberately to drape itself in tenderness and content, and she, feeling the place to be an enemy, would turn yet more fierce, yet more restless, while I stood bewildered and uncertain between the personification of my two lives.
My house, my garden, my fields, and Harold, those were the silent ones, that pleaded only by their own merits of purity, simplicity, and faith; and on the other hand stood Violet, fighting wildly for me, seeming sometimes harsh and scornful, and riding roughshod over those gentle defenceless things.
Engagement with the draped tenderness of the Weald, the mud-pie life, competed in Vita with something larger, unsweet and more domineering. The traumatic affair, ‘a vortex of unhappiness’, had revealed to her in the starkest possible form the contesting elements of her own personality. That polarised view of herself, both domineering and tender, both private and theatrical, both rotted and filled with a love of the exotic, would in time come to shape Sissinghurst.
The second transforming event of their lives was the death of Vita’s father in January 1928. It was the moment when Knole passed into the hands of her Uncle Charlie, when the fact of dispossession was finally confirmed. The house and its lands had in the nineteenth century belonged to two of her great-aunts. There had never been a question of women not being able to inherit Knole. But Vita, who possessed it in a way more deeply than anyone ever had, was now finally denied it.
On 16 May that year, as she wrote to Harold, now in Berlin,
I allowed myself a torture-treat tonight. I went up to Knole after dark and wandered about the garden. It was a very queer and poignant experience, so queer and so poignant I should almost have fainted had I met anybody … I had the sensation of having the place so completely to myself that I might have been the only person alive in the world, and the not the world of today, mark you, but the world of at least 300 years ago … Darling Hadji, I may be looney but there is some kind of umbilical cord that ties me to Knole
At the end of May 1928 she heard that Charlie, the new Lord Sackville, and his American wife were moving into Knole and were thinking of selling some of the great paintings and furniture she most treasured, a dismantling of her store of memories. She went there, had lunch with them and came home in tears, unable to drive for them, with the rain streaming down the windscreen outside.
It was in the light of this dispossession that the cottage at Long Barn no longer seemed enough. In November 1929, in a flush of excitement, they heard that the moated stone keep of Bodiam Castle was on the market. They thought for a moment that they might buy it, that each of the four of them – Vita, Harold, Ben and Nigel – could occupy one of the corner towers, meeting occasionally for a ham sandwich in the central hall, a model of Nicolson family life to which they all apparently quite happily subscribed, but at £30,000 it was out of their range.
The search for a substitute Knole was already under way when in March the next year they heard that the fields next to Long Barn were to be turned into a battery chicken farm. In April 1930, with the poet Dottie Wellesley, Vita came to Sissinghurst for the first time. They found the ruin, dripping with wet. It bore every mark of its long history, a place of broken grandeur, looking, in a curious way, like a ruined Knole, with a tower and a succession of courts, filled with the ghosts of Sackville ancestors and rubbish where life might have been. It was crying out for redemption, an opportunity to make a garden that drew on the sense of its own abandoned past. Perhaps its fragmentary and broken state made it more satisfying than Knole. A ruin, in these circumstances, was better than anything gilded and complete. The disintegrated Sissinghurst could stand in for a ruined inheritance.
The sales particulars described the splendid Victorian farmhouse – the ‘excellent family residence and grounds’, ‘well clothed with choice creepers, approached by a Carriage Drive and Sweep’, ten bedrooms, ‘well matured grounds with lawns and rhododendrons’ – the five hundred acres of wood and land and, almost as an afterthought, ‘the Towers of Sissinghurst Castle in the background’. It was, of course, that background to which Vita and Harold were drawn: gaunt, partly unroofed, damp and bleak. They wavered. Harold, on 13 April, after a second look, considered it ‘big broken down, and sodden’, but Vita had the money, and it was her choice. They bought it for £12,375. There was no electricity, no running water, no drains, no heating and scarcely a fireplace that worked. One or two of the windows had glass in. But this was the invitation: to pour their energies into redemption of the past.
It was here in 1931, in her room on the first floor, that Vita wrote the poem that she called simply ‘Sissinghurst’. It was the best thing, Harold thought, she ever wrote, and she dedicated it to Virginia Woolf. Far more than Vita’s garden-writing ever could, the poem addresses the core of Sissinghurst. It is a place apart:
Buried in time and sleep,
So drowsy, overgrown,
That here the moss is green upon the stone,
And lichen stains the keep.
Time has almost stopped. A kind of enriched stagnancy colours the place and her vision of it. Sissinghurst, like the depths of its darkened moat, becomes a pool in which Vita can feel both ecstatically alive and at the same time suspended from the real world:
For here, where days and years have lost their number,
I let a plummet down in lieu of date,
And lose myself within a slumber,
Submerged, elate.
1932: Harold, Nigel, Vita and Ben Nicolson in front of the Tower, the lawn just sown, the rosemaries planted
Those last two words are the essence of Vita’s Sissinghurst, a freedom found in a deep absorption with place, land and the sense of a treasured past, a past that was better than the present, drenched into these bricks and this soil.
There was a chance here to revitalise a once-great but deeply neglected place, to take a ruin and make it flower. Again and again, whenever Vita wrote about Sissinghurst, the atmosphere she summoned was of that embedded history, a certain rich slowness, even a druggedness, as if evening, when colours are soft and thickened, were its natural and fullest condition:
The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun. Everything was hushed and drowsy and silent, but for the coo of the white pigeons sitting alone together on the roof … They climbed the seventy-six steps of her tower and stood on the leaden flat, leaning their elbows on the parapet, and looking out in silence over the fields, the woods, the hop gardens, and the lake down in the hollow from which a faint mist was rising.
The garden became, inevitably, a reflection of its makers. The received idea is that it was a marriage of sensibilities: a certain classical elegance and even austerity in the planning by Harold; a rich and romantic profusion in the planting, mostly by Vita, what she called the ‘cram, cram, cram, every chink and cranny’ method, the verve of ‘exaggeration, big groups, big masses’. All that is true, even if not in quite so schematic a way. Often it was Vita who advocated a simplicity and straightforwardness in design; often it was Harold who wanted a more baroque and theatr
ical effect. Letters from many of Harold’s passing lovers, now preserved along with the rest of his papers at Balliol but never published by my father, describe him as masculine and assertive, a manly man, with his yacht, his pipe and his familiarity with the powerful and the great. His reputation among those who lived and worked at Sissinghurst was for brusque coldness and indifference. It was Vita who used to come and sit on the kitchen table in the farmhouse and talk to the children, who was always amused by the jokes and joshing of the men who worked on the farm or in the garden. She always used to come to the birthday parties of the young Stearnses in Bettenham. Harold was away in London much of the time, only to be spotted leaving for or arriving from the station in his dark blue pinstripes. The distant and reserved Vita in the Tower, always calling herself Vita Sackville-West and never Mrs Nicolson, seems largely to be a product of my father’s emphasis on it. In fact she was known at Sissinghurst only as Mrs Nicolson or, after Harold was knighted for his biography of George V, as Lady Nicolson. Most of her books in the Tower are initialled ‘VN’. ‘V. M. Nicolson’ was how she described herself to the War Agriculture Committee. And although Nigel rarely went to her room in the Tower, many others did, spent long hours there with her, talking deep into the night. Jim Lees-Milne, Harold’s friend, lover and biographer, remembered a bewitching, dusky evening talking up there:
There were no reservations of any kind. No topics were barred. Her curiosity about and understanding of human nature in all its aspects were limitless. Her sympathy with every human frailty and predicament was all embracing. This was the Vita I knew and most dearly loved. As dusk faded into night I watched the outline of her noble head against the chequered Tudor casements of the tower, would watch the tip of her cigarette from a long holder glow fiery red as she drew upon it, with constant but imperceptible inhalations so that her profile – always her profile of drooping eyelid, straight nose and soft rounded chin – would emerge from the darkness as in a momentary vision. I would smell, when I could no longer see, the cloud of Cypriot tobacco peculiarly her own; and listen to that deep slightly quavering, gently swelling voice, broken by eddies of short sharp laughter. ‘Oh do tell me what happened next.’ Then I understood what this unique woman’s love meant to Harold.
Even in the way the garden developed, the received picture is not quite true. Many of Harold’s plans for Sissinghurst, including a wall of busts of himself and his friends, loggias and ‘caves’, are far from the picture of the cool, Mozartian rationalist struggling to impose order on Vita’s bubbling chaos. In the early days he suggested vast flower beds to fill the upper courtyard – not the cool green pools of lawn that are there today – and a Versailles-style fountain occupying the Rondel in the Rose Garden. It was often Vita who had to slim down his grandiose fantasies. The story and its interactions are subtler than the myth often allows.
The relationship of exact form to luxuriant planting is now almost a cliché of twentieth-century garden design. Sissinghurst’s planterliness, its love affair with the Mediterranean, with spring bulbs and roses, with yew, brick, stone and grass – all of this is simply the lingua franca of twentieth-century gardening. Much of it was there in Vita and Harold’s first garden at Long Barn. And it has mistakes. The colour of the new brick walls, despite an enormous amount of care taken over them, is not good, too brown and too dead, never glowing. Even the curved wall at the west end of the Rose Garden is a little pretentious. The small north-facing Delos they never got right. Harold’s additions to the Priest’s House and the South Cottage are a little lumpen. This is not an exercise in perfection. The yew walk is too near the Tower and the two rows of yews are too near each other. Nor is the walk aligned properly with the paths in the Rose Garden, even though my father always claimed that was his fault. Hadji had asked him to place a marker in the Rose Garden which would exactly extend the line of the yews. The poor boy placed it about a yard and a half wrong, the new Rose Garden path was laid and the kink in the alignment remains there to this day.
Does any of this matter? Of course not. The genius of Sissinghurst’s design – Harold disciplined by Vita – is in its self-deprecation, its lack of egoism, its courtesy in playing second fiddle to the plants, the place, the surrounding country and its deeper meanings.
The garden at Sissinghurst was known and loved by a small band of enthusiasts from the 1930s onwards. Country Life had run a long illustrated article about it over three consecutive issues in September 1942. In 1946, Vita herself had appeared on the cover ‘in the garden of her home, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent’, wording which implies that the Vita–Sissinghurst connection still needed explaining, even to a Country Life audience. It was only in the 1970s, with the coming of the heritage boom, the Bloomsbury boom and the Portrait of a Marriage boom, that Sissinghurst became the English garden par excellence.
Not that it doesn’t deserve its fame. I am sure the reason that Sissinghurst continues to stand apart from its many near-contemporaries is the way it is slipped so discreetly into the ruins of its site, its interfolding of building and garden, garden and farm, farm and country. The garden, as a design, merely fills the frame that the place provided for it. It is subsidiary and subtle, no more than the dancing partner for an existing ancientness. It has sometimes seemed to me as if the fullness of the planting in the garden is merely drawing up the stories that are soaked into Sissinghurst’s bones. Harold’s design does not compete with that. As Jane Brown pointed out, there are no elegant drooping curves at wall-ends, no rich Italian stone frames to openings, no niches of plum-coloured brickwork to enliven the Elizabethan pink. A garden was not imposed on Sissinghurst; it seems as if Sissinghurst was allowed to have its garden.
The bones of what they did were outlined extraordinarily quickly: by 1932 what is now the White Garden, the Tower Lawn, the Spring Garden, the Cottage Garden, the yew walk and the Nuttery had all been laid out. The hedges and trees that would in time give the garden its form were already largely planted. By the end of that decade, the new walls closing off the Rose Garden and the north side of the Upper Courtyard had been built and the orchard designed.
Innocence had no place here; there was to be sophistication in the ruin. Rareties and subtleties came from the very beginning. Harold collected foxgloves from the wood in an old pram and by accident brought up bluebell bulbs with them. They would have preferred to make the paths of York stone as they now are, but there wasn’t enough money, so paving-stone-sized slabs of rough concrete were cast on-site. What statues they bought were cheap. Some have already disintegrated and been replaced with copies. Only what they inherited from Vita’s mother after her death in 1936 – the bronze and lead urns, the statue of the Bacchante now in the Spring Garden, the bench at the head of the moat walk designed by Lutyens – was of undeniable quality. The beautiful stoneware pot in the centre of the White Garden, a seventeenth-century Chinese oil or ginger jar, had been bought by Harold in Cairo for ten pounds.
Sissinghurst was not, it was always said, a winter resort. The cold and the discomfort were intense. The hessian on the dining-room walls in the Priest’s House would billow in a wind. Lunches usually ended with inedible roly-poly pudding. There was no spare room, although visitors often slept in Nigel’s and Ben’s rooms when they were away and even occasionally in Harold’s bed. (I remember my father telling me that and shuddering: ‘How he must have hated it!’) The electric heating system in the library had unaccountably been installed in the ceiling, creating the conditions for a deliciously warm attic, but a persistently frozen and scarcely used room beneath.
Even so, Harold and Vita did not live in poverty. They had two gardeners, a chauffeur, a cook, a lady’s maid, two secretaries and other servants. Grapes, peaches, apples, pears, raspberries, gooseberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, mangetouts, cabbage, aubergines, squashes, pumpkins and quinces were all grown for their table. Scenes are fondly remembered of the butler and his wife, the kitchen maid, walking gingerly across the winter garden, trays in front of them, from the
kitchen in the Priest’s House through the snow-encrusted White Garden, leaving their tracks across the Lower Courtyard, through the yew walk and to the South Cottage, the only surviving part of the great Elizabethan courtyard, where Vita was lying ill in bed, waiting for her lunch or supper. In wartime it was worse. Vita wrote to Leonard Woolf in January 1940:
Dear Leonard,
I ought to have answered your letter long ago, but both the boys came home for 24 hours leave and immediately took to their beds with ’flu. You may imagine that Sissinghurst is at no time an ideal place for invalids, but when it means carrying trays, hot water bottles and other requirements through snow-drifts some sixteen times a day it is really hell. Then George got it; then I got it; then Mac [her secretary] got it. Nigel lost his voice. I lost my voice. Pipes froze; lavatories ceased to function; snow came through the roof and dripped on to my bed. So perhaps you will forgive the delay.
Something of the atmosphere in the early Sissinghurst emerges in a letter from Vita to Harold describing a day in April 1936:
How people can say life is dull in the country beats me. Take the last 24 hours here. An extremely drunken man had left his pony to be tried in the mowing machine. So it was put in the mowing machine; I watched; all seemed satisfactory; I went away. So did the mowing machine. Kennelly [the gardener] sent it away without saying a word to me or to Copper [the chauffeur/handyman] who is responsible for it. Copper arrived in my room and abused Kennelly. I went and cursed Kennelly, who indeed was in the wrong. In the evening at about 9, I was told that Punnett [the builder] wanted to see me. I went out. He was in tears, having just found his old father drowned in the engine tank, and a note written to himself saying it was suicide.
Next morning, ie today, George [the manservant] came to fetch me: Copper would like to speak to me. I found Copper in the garden room covered in blood with a great gash in his head. Kennelly had come into the garage and knocked him down without any warning. He had fallen unconscious, and had come round to find Kennelly throwing buckets of water over him. He had then tried to strangle Kennelly, and they had only been separated by the arrival of Mrs Copper. So I sent Copper to the doctor in George’s car, and meanwhile sent for the police. Accompanied by the policeman I went out in search of Kennelly, whom we found very frightened and white. He was ordered to go and pack his things and leave at once. So that was that and we are now without a gardener.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 25