Si triste échange
Tant pis pour moi.
Sissinghurst itself is the monument to the choice Vita made.
TWELVE
Renewal
The decision to go ahead with the farm project had been made in December 2007. It seemed for a time as if all was set. Advertisements were put in relevant papers for a project manager; for a vegetable grower and a deputy; and for a farmer. Early in 2008 we had a string of open days on which candidates came to Sissinghurst for their interviews and to be walked round in the cold and the wind. It was exciting. Here at last, living in flesh and blood, were some of the people who were going to make the change.
The first to join was the new project manager. Tom Lupton is a tall, big-voiced man, Oxford-educated, with a long history of land-management in the tropics, a hunger for order and eyebrows that jump at each emphasis in a sentence. It was like having the engineer on the Aswan dam supervise the building of your pond. Why was he doing it? Certainly not for the National Trust salary. More because it was ‘an ideal thing to get involved with. It was an idea with a very holistic view, doing things I have spent all my life doing, using land to improve people’s lives at the same time as protecting the environment, and done by an organisation which takes a long-term view. It was a marriage of all those things.’
Next was the vegetable grower. The ad in Horticulture Week came out in February 2008. Amy Covey, a twenty-three-year-old, with a big-teeth smile and a blonde, tanned presence as buoyant and English as her name, was working in a private garden in the Midlands. She was young to take it on, but we all felt when she came for an interview and we showed her the bleak unploughed, wind-exposed stretch of ground that was going to be her vegetable garden that her sense of enthusiasm and capability, her wonderful undauntedness, was just what Sissinghurst needed.
Third in this flow of new blood was to be the new farmer. But here it went wrong. A farming couple was chosen but after months of negotiation with the Trust, no agreement on the details of the tenancy could be reached and they withdrew. It was the first sign that the sailing might not be all entirely plain.
There were some marvellous and optimistic developments. A three-and-a-half-acre vegetable plot was laid out in nine different segments, the crops to rotate through it year by year. Peter Dear, the National Trust warden, had it manured, drained, ploughed, fenced, gated and hedged. An extra segment was added for the children of Frittenden school to grow their own veg. The site for the polytunnels was set up behind a screening layer of oak trees. Irrigation was put in. Peter and a party of volunteers made windbreak panels from the wood, using chestnut poles and sliver-thick chestnut slices which he wove between the uprights. Birch tops and hazels were cut for the peas and beans to climb. Peter drew up a plan for the whole farm in which all the hedges, gates and stiles were carefully and exactly detailed.
I loved it all. Suddenly, new life was springing up out of the inert Sissinghurst ground. It was slightly rough at the edges. Despite some ferreting earlier in the year, the rabbits wrought mayhem with the early plantings and the beds had to be surrounded by low green electric fencing. Black plastic mulch marked out each strip of veg. The soil was not as good as we all had hoped and the vegetable gardeners had pushed grapefruit-sized lumps of clay to one side so that they could get each bed half-level. The sown lines were a little wobbly and there was an ad hoc feeling to the garden, but it was this hand-made quality of the vegetable garden which touched me. Not for decades had someone attended to this ground in this way. The paths worn between the rows by the boots of the gardeners and their volunteers; the picnic tables for the Frittenden children; and the Handbook of Organic Gardening left on the tea-shed table: all were marks of a new relationship to this place. They were the signs of Sissinghurst joining the modern world, the same movement which had re-invigorated allotments across the country, which understood the deep pleasures and rewards of growing your own, which loved the local in the most real way it could. This new presence of people out on the ground – bodies in the fields – was exactly what I had dreamed of four years before: land not as background, as wallpaper or flattened ‘tranquillity zone’ to walk your dogs, but the thing itself, engaged with by real people, the plants sown in it bursting into a third dimension, the soil the living source of everything that mattered.
Sarah drew up a planting list of what the veg garden could and should grow, a cornucopia menu that stretched across the months and years. Intensely productive but not labour-intensive salads, herbs, leafy greens, chard, spinach, courgettes and beans. Alongside them all the veg which taste much more delicious if they have just been picked: tomatoes, carrots and sugar snaps (peas themselves were thought to be too labour-intensive for the kitchen – too much shelling for not enough product). Third were ‘the unbuyables’ – unusual herbs such as lovage, the edible flowers, red Brussels sprouts, stripy pink-and-white beetroot, as well as yellow and purple French beans. All of them, as Sarah said, ‘for flavour, style and panache’. Kales, leeks and purple sprouting broccoli, ‘the hungry gap crops’, would grow through the winter and be harvested in March and April when the restaurant opened for the season. Raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries and red and black currants were planted in long lines between the nine sections of the garden, both to provide windbreaks and to give the plot a visual structure. Forty new volunteers were recruited to help work there and in the polytunnels.
Tom, Peter and Amy drew up plans for the new orchard. A third of it was to be filled with 90 big old-fashioned apple trees (mainly juicing varieties so that the apples could be collected from the ground and no one would have to climb high in the trees to pick them). Most of the rest, just over three acres, was to be smaller modern trees, 1,500 of them, no more than eight feet tall, for easy picking and tons of fruit. Plums, apples, pears and a few cherries: a vision of blossom and fruiting heaven. I had the idea of putting thirty acres of hay meadow back into Frogmead along the banks of the Hammer Brook and meadow experts came to advise. Peter was designing wet patches for birds and dragonflies along the streams and a new rough wood to extend the habitat for nightingales and warblers. We bought some new disease-resistant elms to place around the landscape as the great towering tree-presences of the future. Architects redesigned the farmhouse as a modern B&B.
Everywhere you looked, all through the spring and summer of 2008, change was underway. More people, new people, new structures, new land uses, new relationships. All these changes were exciting but it also felt like a long, slow earthquake heaving up under a stable and intricately defined place. Inevitably, the stress and grief began to tell. Difficulties, tensions and rows started to break out. There were tears and snubbings, huffs and confrontations. No one had quite understood how deeply these ideas for the place, and all its emphasis on reinvigoration and the re-animation of the landscape, would disturb the people who lived and worked here.
People were getting angry, offended, offensive and dismissive. I talked to Tom Lupton about what was going wrong. He is the definition of a wise dog and one of the problems, he said, was that I had not properly understood how deeply attached other people were to Sissinghurst. I had assumed I was the only person to whom it meant a great deal.
There is a lot of emotion tied up in this project. From you, of course. You have obviously staked a lot in it. But that’s true of a lot of people who live and work here. Sissinghurst is not like going into the supermarket. People come here and very quickly form emotional bonds. They love it. It feeds many individual needs, which are very difficult to get fed in many places these days. Sissinghurst spoon-feeds it to people. As you walk from the car park, you are given these wonderful, sensuous experiences. In through the gateway, the tower, you wander into the garden. It’s beautiful but it’s obviously been beautiful for a long time. That is very reassuring and very comforting. It’s a refuge but it does a bit more than that. I can’t believe that many people don’t leave here feeling better. It’s a recharging point and for people who work here it has a
n increasing value to them the more they are steeped in it. You, Adam, need to be aware how many other people have loved being here.
It was well said and I heard it clearly. I asked Sam Butler, the National Trust Visitor Services Manager, about this too. Why were people so attached to Sissinghurst? Was it just a tranquillity balm? I had always thought of it as a place that should have life and vitality, which should feel enriched by the things going on here, by a sense of a living landscape not an embalmed one. Sam gave me a sceptical look.
I know you would like to bring the farm up close around the garden so that there was more of a contrast. I can see that, but I quite like the feminine, soft, National Trust sanitisation. I quite like that because that is where I am comfortable but what you are proposing is much more masculine and that’s unknown territory. I am not sure how I am going to respond to that.
Really? Was a sanitised, blanded-out soft zone really what was needed?
I like it and most of our visitors like it. It makes it accessible and for those who don’t know the countryside, they need their hands holding, giving them a comfort zone so that they can access it without it being too threatening.
How was she feeling about the whole transformation? A week or two before, at a meeting, she had suddenly coloured up at something I said.
It was like a slap in the face. I had been listening to you and Tom and I suddenly realised that this place was going to change for ever in the way I felt about it. It didn’t matter whether it was good or bad. I knew it was different and that for me was a loss, because I have been tied to this place for such a long time.
We have visitors who come here every Saturday morning to read their papers in the orchard, who used to come here maybe with a partner or a husband or a wife or a child they have lost and they now come here to reflect as well as to enjoy the flowers and the views and the vistas. And you know we must look after those people too.
All this was an education for me, almost the first time I had ever listened to the stories other people at Sissinghurst were telling me.
The real pinchpoint, though, was the restaurant. It was vital that the restaurant changed to reflect what was happening in the wider landscape. It would make little sense to set up all these connections between land, place and people if the restaurant continued to produce food much as before. Sarah, who was the author of prize-winning gardening and cookery books and had a decade’s experience of growing and cooking vegetables for her gardening school in Sussex, if no knowledge of running a large-scale catering operation, took on the task of introducing the restaurant to these new hyper-local sources of produce. She tried to persuade the managers and chefs to adopt a new responsiveness to the food coming in off the field. For months, over these questions, there was an agonised non-meeting of minds.
Both sides felt deeply unappreciated by the other. Ginny Coombes, the restaurant manager, who has been generating quantities of cash for Sissinghurst year after year, felt bruised by the whole process.
There is no appreciation of how far we have come, or of what we have taken on. A lot of ideas have been thrown at us and it isn’t easy. We are moving in the right direction and we are doing a lot already with local and seasonal. That’s my mantra! It is something the Trust has been working towards for years. And we are improving year on year. Someone needs to say, ‘Listen to the staff, they run it, they know what they are doing. We want to help you improve what you have got already.’ But we don’t feel that anyone is saying that.
It was never going to be easy. For chefs and restaurant managers used to high-pressure, high-volume production of meals for hundreds of visitors, often in less than perfect circumstances, all our talk of ‘the dignity of vegetables’ was not even funny. Mutual frustrations erupted. Sarah pursued her gospel: vegetables are cheaper to grow than meat, better for the environment, better for you, utterly delicious when they are so fresh, and make you feel good when you know exactly where they have come from. And Ginny said ‘Look, do you know what it is like in here on a busy day?’
When you came to me three years ago and said ‘What about growing our own veg here?’, I thought that would be a wonderful thing. But it has all got so over-complicated. I love what Sarah does at Perch Hill and I listened. That is all fine when you have fifty people to feed. When you have got a thousand people a day, they want choice.
Early in June 2008, to get some understanding of what Ginny and her staff were having to deal with, Sarah and I worked in the restaurant for two days, her in the kitchen, me on the tables, behind the counter and doing the washing up.
Seeing it all from the other side was pure reality-check. The customer demand was relentless and the need to shave costs unbending. The building – a restaurant inserted into an old granary-cum-cow-shed – is badly laid out. For the staff it is often unbearably hot as wafts of hot air come from the industrial dishwasher, the heated counters or the ovens. The clearing away system does not help the waiters and there is a lot of double handling. The queue for a pot of coffee gets muddled with the queue for the hot dishes. Space behind the counter is cramped and, where different routes cross, inconvenient. Everybody works unrelentingly hard and remains cheerfully nice to each other through the heat and harassing customers. And everybody ends the day exhausted. I felt I had been in a trawler for eight hours. Only when one of the visitors said ‘This must be such a nice place to work,’ did I very nearly ask him if he had just landed from Mars.
Of course this restaurant finds it difficult to embrace any change. An irregular supply of vegetables from the plot, in variable volumes, is going to need an elastic frame of mind. Working in this tight and difficult environment allows no room for elasticity. I asked Ginny about this. ‘People here don’t see our side of it, our passion for it, the work and energy we put in here,’ she said.
I know you saw it the other day, how drained people are at the end of a working day. But nobody gives us credit for it. And nobody knows exactly what is needed. It is all big ideas, everybody thinks they know better than us. We are taking on board the advice that everyone seems to be giving us, but give us time.
It was in truth a culture clash between Sarah and the NT restaurant staff. There was an assumption on their side that Sarah was promoting her own private agenda, when she felt she was ushering in part of the food culture which had been the lingua franca of food writing, restaurants and shops on both sides of the Atlantic for the last twenty years. An emotional and resolute refusal to entertain most of her ideas made her feel as if she was banging her head against a wall. Parts of the National Trust wanted her to contribute, others didn’t. ‘All I am trying to do is modernise the restaurant in its attitude to fresh produce, to simplicity as the modern way. They think I am trying to extend my empire. And the organisation can’t back me up because they have to support their staff. But you don’t have to wave goodbye to flowers and texture and freshness and goodness just because you are providing two hundred meals a day.’
Late that summer, Sarah and I went to a meeting in London with Sue Wilkinson, the NT’s director of marketing. She told us, in effect, that the place Sarah was trying to take the restaurant was not the place the NT wanted to go. The local food managers had said that ‘the expectation of the general public was the “hot two-course meal”’ and the chef at Sissinghurst had reiterated that: ‘This is a standard fish and meat and three vegetables place. It always has been and always will be.’ Sarah had arranged for Peter Weeden, head chef at the Paternoster Chophouse, a London restaurant which specialises in modern, fresh, seasonal food, to be brought in as a consultant but his contributions were rejected. ‘Maybe Sissinghurst is not ready for that much change,’ he said when he left. When Sissinghurst volunteers were asked about suggested changes to the restaurant menus, one said, ‘Just because Vita went to Persia and ate some curry or whatever they eat there, I don’t think people would really want that experience here.’ And another: ‘I don’t think you come to Sissinghurst wanting Chinese meals. I’m sure that’s not peo
ple’s expectations.’ A man I had never met said to me at the garden gate, ‘It all depends on whether people prefer olive oil and vinaigrette to bangers and mash. And if it’s bangers and mash, you’re going to have egg all over your face, aren’t you, Mr Nicolson?’ I said I didn’t think he had quite understood the whole picture.
Much of what Sarah was suggesting – a freer, looser, richer, more internationalist line – was not only part of the modern mainstream but came from the roots of modern Sissinghurst. That cut no ice. An almost purely conservative sense of ‘we know best’ carried the day. In the autumn of 2008, Sarah took a step back. The Food Group at which she had tried to persuade and show the National Trust catering staff what she had in mind was disbanded. It was agreed that she should provide the restaurant with the recipe for a single dish a month, which they would trial. Her relations with the restaurant manager and chef should from now on be exclusively through the National Trust hierarchy.
At the same time, I was also suffering my defeats. I had been asked by the property manager to devise a new, historically based approach for the area immediately outside the garden, between the car park, the ticket office and the front gate. Over the previous thirty years, it had been managed in a bland, corporate, golf-course style of large swathes of mown grass with ornamental trees. This was the first part of Sissinghurst to be seen by visitors and to my mind it gave all the wrong signals. I wanted it to be more rural, to give a sense that this was a garden in a farm, that Kent itself not suburbia lapped at the garden walls. But the head gardener did not see the point, or at least did not agree with it, and told me that she and the property manager alone should decide how it was managed. The grass would be allowed to grow a little longer around the edges but essentially the area should remain unchanged. The Trust hierarchy supported her and the ideas I had been asked to provide were dropped.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 27