A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  At the age of twenty-seven Victoria had probably never been lovelier but she did not encourage the attentions of the young man who had tried to remove her yellow dress with his eyes at the Hampshire dinner table. Nor did she respond to Lionel’s deluge of increasingly intoxicated letters. He was five years younger than Victoria, a Protestant and a first cousin. As a husband he was out of the question. Putting him from her mind she chose instead to concentrate on her filial duty, reminding herself that her father was her priority, especially now that he carried the responsibility of a title and its attendant demands. Conveniently, she was able to explain to Cousin Lionel, thereafter known as Young Lionel in order to differentiate him from his uncle, Old Lionel, that she was already committed elsewhere, but the truth was that the prospect of going to bed with a man scared her frigid. With the hip-length hair, cheek-stroking eyelashes and remarkable beauty of her mother, and a maturity and capability that outdid most other young women of her age, Victoria had neither the time nor the inclination for an intimate relationship with any man except her father, who gave her everything she needed. An alliance that had begun between two virtual strangers, a young woman with no adult experience of life and a solitary unmarried man, still mourning the only woman he had ever loved, had grown into a partnership and a mutual dependence that Victoria and Old Lionel had no wish to alter. If Washington had been an extended trial run for living together, then the move to England provided them with the nearest thing a father and daughter can achieve to a marriage, with the obvious exception.

  The next suitor to claim Victoria was not a person but a place. Knole has been the Sackville family home for centuries. The calendar house is famous for its show-off statistics, incorporating 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, seven courtyards and thousands of windows, and is reached by a long drive leading directly off Sevenoaks High Street. The early part of the house was built in the middle of the fifteenth century by Thomas Bourchier, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was then given ‘voluntarily’ by another archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, to Henry VIII in 1538 before Thomas Sackville, Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer (the position equivalent to today’s chancellor), became the owner. The house was completed during a hundred years of almost continuous construction from the end of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth. The eventual agglomeration of buildings was huge. Even Vita, who knew Knole better than anyone, never stopped having to work out the quickest way from one part of the house to another. An Edwardian scullery maid admitted on her retirement that she had seen the dining room only twice in four years, while a hall boy did not realise that the bearded man in shirtsleeves who chopped down bushes in the undergrowth was not the under gardener at all, having never in several months of service been introduced to his employer.

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  When the Sackville-West family first arrived from Washington, exhausted by the parties and balls of the South of France, the horse-drawn carriage containing Lionel and his daughters Victoria and Amalia made its way through the thousand-acre park, up Knole’s long and sinuous drive. More than a century later the experience of arriving at Knole at dusk, just as the winter sun is setting, remains identical as you pass the rounded backs of grazing deer, tame enough to lift their heads only briefly at the sound of the car before lowering them once again to the grass. I have always loved that feeling of anticipation before the house appears; it’s like waiting for the first glimpse of the sea over the brow of a hill. The house remains hidden until the last moment, when suddenly a mass of asymmetrical courtyards rises up from the low dip ahead, looming like a small village against the sky.

  Victoria’s first and muted impression was not of the house itself but of the housekeeper Mrs Knox, who was ‘very nice and obliging’. But soon a sense of awe and privilege that seduces anyone who has been lucky enough to spend even one night at Knole merged with Victoria’s realisation that she was not any old visitor: she belonged to the place and the place to her. The advantages for a young chatelaine at Knole were undeniable. As well as the fun of having the Sackville jewels to dress up in for dinner in the grandeur of a bedroom which had once belonged to Archbishop Cranmer, finding an unknown Gainsborough in the attic, opening cupboards that were jammed with ancient treasures as well as years of junk, befriending two cranes christened Romeo and Juliet who stalked the garden and, snob that she was, enjoying the ‘bowing and scraping’ of the servants, Victoria set about the practical task of making a previously dust-sheeted and cobwebbed Knole comfortable.

  ‘Ai kip ha-oose,’ she would say, boasting in her distinctive French-accented English that ‘keeping house’ continued to be her chief role, as she applied to Knole those skills that she had learned in Washington. She found herself in charge of a place where the rooms were named after archbishops, a Venetian ambassador, a king and other eminent residents and visitors from preceding centuries. The walls were hung with paintings by Van Dyck, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Hoppner; the wooden floors covered in precious carpets; the furnishings faded velvet chairs and sofas including the famous drop-sided ‘Knole settee’. The peculiar ‘old house’ scent of centuries impregnated the rooms. Vita described it in her history of Knole as ‘a mixture of woodwork, pot-pourri, tapestry, and the little camphor bags that keep away the moth’. That potpourri recipe had been handed down the years from ‘a prim looking’ Lady Betty Germaine, a Sackville family friend during the reigns of George I and II, much as a family portrait or the story of a dancer might make its way through successive generations.

  Victoria began to electrify Knole, not only with her presence but also by installing light at the flick of a gold embossed switch. Old Lionel, no longer employed by the government and dependent on the limited family funds, could scarcely afford the enormous bills Victoria incurred as Knole gradually became equipped with all the modern tricks and conveniences. Central heating was fitted as well as plentiful plumbed-in bathrooms, making obsolete the procession of maids who until then had carried heavy jugs of hot water the long distance from kitchen to bedroom. Victoria oversaw every detail of the renovations of the bedrooms and bathrooms, even joining in on the redecoration. Stamps had long held a particular fascination for her, perhaps since the eagerly awaited letters she would receive at the convent in Paris from her father in exotic countries. Extravagant but also budget-conscious, and evidently ingenious with scissors, she papered an entire bedroom herself in used stamps. And although it was unforgivably painted over in the 1960s, two of her framed collages survive, the bowls of flowers of all colours made entirely out of stamps eased off their envelopes and cut into shapes forming the most delicate of leaves and foliage. Each one must have taken her weeks. Some of Knole’s most treasured paintings, among them portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough, were sold to pay for the upkeep of a house that had acquired a reputation for being one of the most comfortable in England. The Prince of Wales came to stay, as did his close friend Mrs Keppel. The Astors came. John Singer Sargent came. Corridor creepers were no longer anxious about repeating a famously unfortunate incident when a man, mistaking the Bishop of Chester’s room for that of his mistress, shouted, ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ as he leapt on top of the distinguished cleric. Little face-saving panels with changing slips of paper had since been built into the doors to identify the occupant. Victoria was not only the most generous but also the most tactful of hosts.

  When the gleaming Maudslay, with doors at the back and passenger seats facing each another as in a bus, drew up at the front of the house, Victoria boasted that Knole was the second private residence, after the royal palaces, to have its own car. In April 1891 Victoria recorded in her diary that a telephone handset had been installed in Lionel’s bedroom to ‘our great amusement’. The connection was thrilling but unpredictable, the Knole line finding itself at times accidentally linked up to a number where Lord Salisbury, the prime minister, could be heard testing the clarity of the connection by reciting ‘Hey Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle’.

  Both Lionel and Victoria contin
ued to miss Pepita. Both were capable of bursting into tears at the mention of her name decades after her death, and both were anxious not to allow that name to fade. Not long ago I opened a drawer in a chest at Knole to find a collection of her painted fans, their delicate ivory spindles packed away in tissue paper, unused but, at least at the time of storing, not forgotten. And there were times of family despondency, when even Victoria’s exuberant personality could not raise her own or her father’s spirits, the added shame at his disgraced exit from Washington still hanging over him. Eddy Sackville-West, a young cousin, remembered many uncomfortable, wintry dinners in the family dining room with his uncle Lionel. In the oak-lined Poets’ Parlour, named after the portraits of Dryden, Pope and other late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers bankrolled by the 6th Earl of Dorset that stared down from the walls, the diners ate in a silence alleviated only by Victoria’s faltering attempts at chatter, the hush articulating her father’s melancholy better than any words could do. Victoria’s efforts at small talk competed only with the ticking of clocks as the ferocious winds blew down the large chimney and Eddy felt the whole room contracting and expanding irregularly ‘like the heart of a dying man’. But if mealtimes remained challenging, Victoria could at least remember how as a small child in Arcachon her father’s gloom had lifted at the sound of her mother’s singing, and she made sure the long corridors at Knole were filled with the unaccustomed sound of music as she sang her mother’s favourite song, ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, and ‘Anges purs, anges radieux’ from Gounod’s Faust at the top of her clear voice. There was nothing she would not do to make her lugubrious father happy. In order to ease his lumbago she insisted on mixing the water for his daily bath herself to make sure the temperature was right. She had supper with him every night and afterwards they played Halma, a new form of draughts that had been all the rage in America.

  As well as concentrating on the welfare of her father and their guests, Victoria oversaw the twenty-five indoor servants. Presided over by the housekeeper Mrs Knox and the butler Hicks, the staff included footmen, housemaids and laundry maids who collectively ensured that spending a Saturday to Monday at Knole was a covetable invitation. Meals prepared by the irascible, saucepan-flinging French chef were delicious, if elaborate, his speciality an ortolan within a quail, a truffle within the ortolan and pâté de fois gras within the truffle. The wood for the numerous fireplaces throughout the house was cut in the estate woodshop and planed smooth so that guests putting a log on the fire would not get splinters. Looking down from an upper window in the staterooms, one can still see, grouped around the Queen’s Court, the now abandoned and nettle-throttled buildings that were occupied by the services required for the smooth running of the Big House. There is the carpenter’s shop, the brick builder’s shop, the forge that employed four full-time resident blacksmiths, the laundry and, a little distance away, the icehouse. When the brewhouse ceased production in the 1920s, a compensatory beer ration was allocated to all the resident staff both within and without the house. All these staff looked after three full-time residents. Flora West had married a Frenchman and lived in Paris, and Victoria’s brothers, Max and Henri, were both farming in South Africa, while Amalia remained at Knole with her father and sister, accepting for the moment, if a little sulkily, Victoria’s dominant role.

  There were two other competitors for Victoria’s attention. She had indicated that she would consider the suit of the Marquis de Loys Chandieu, a temptingly rich Frenchman whom she had met the preceding winter in Cannes. ‘Abroad’, as Chandieu was known because he lived there and because stating the obvious was a sort of in-joke in the family, was frequently invited to stay at Knole, and despite his Protestant family’s unease at Victoria’s Roman Catholicism, he was determined to overcome her entrenched resistance to romance. Meanwhile, Young Lionel had fallen heart, soul, mind and, above all, body for his yellow-outfitted cousin. He bombarded her with letters and indulged in explicit, tortuous conjecture that Abroad would eventually claim her hand. While Victoria may have been falling romantically in love with the marquis, she was not impervious to her smooth-talking cousin. Sensing both vulnerability and hesitation beneath Victoria’s confident exterior, Lionel seized his advantage.

  ‘I am raving MAD for love of you,’ he wrote in his careful script, while Victoria replied in slapdash, smudged, black-ink sentences that follow the edges of the page in so tight a circle I have found it necessary to turn the sheet round and upside down in order to establish the sense of it all. But the recklessness of her handwriting was in contrast to the reservations she expressed. While Lionel was away, working for his Foreign Office exams in Germany, he stayed in touch by writing to Victoria every day. ‘I was nearly asleep in church today when I was woken up by hearing the fellow praying lustily for our lady Queen Victoria. That dear name makes me start whenever I hear it. I am sure, darling, if the prayers of a fellow like me are any good, you ought to be happy as you are MY lady queen.’

  An elaborate double bluff formed part of his extensive seduction repertoire: he lavished flattery on Abroad. ‘He can give you everything to make you happy and comfortable and you would be able to do so much for your sisters and brothers and I can give you nothing,’ he wrote disingenuously, well aware of Victoria’s love for Knole and therefore that as next in line to inherit the house, he would eventually have a huge advantage over the inconvenient Abroad. Three months following their first meeting, Young Lionel returned from Germany. After dinner he walked with Victoria through the staterooms, heady with the ever-present scent of her white heliotrope perfume with its enticing combination of marzipan, vanilla and cherry pie that lingered in a room long after she had left. Putting aside his customary ploy of self-deprecation, Young Lionel led Victoria along the beautiful Cartoon Gallery to the King’s Bedroom, where, finding the light of a full moon emblazoning the magnificent silver furniture, he was unable to contain his emotion any longer. ‘God help me, V. I love you so,’ he blurted out. His boldness remained undaunted three months later when, just before Christmas, with the moonlight glinting cooperatively once again on the silver mirrors, silver chairs, silver snuffboxes and silver sconces, Lionel asked Victoria to marry him.

  Ever conscious of her obligations towards her father, Victoria remained unsure of the advantages and drawbacks offered by each of her suitors. ‘Je serais ou marquise ou pairesse,’ she wrote, acknowledging that the second title was marginally more attractive, at least to Victoria, a peeress in England having more cachet than a French marchioness, though in truth she wasn’t really eager to make a commitment to either man. However, although persistence is flattering, even to the most committed spinster, what Victoria liked best was a hidden bargain, whether it was a reusable stamp or a cousin who offered something no money could buy. Young Lionel’s conclusive advantage lay not in the eloquence of his love letters, nor in his caressing, undressing eyes, but in the three-for-one benefit that a marriage to him would bring: a respectable legal contract with an English aristocrat; the legitimate right to stay in the house she now adored; and guaranteed cohabitation with her father, the man to whom she had always felt most loyalty and with whom her sense of identity was bound up.

  She confided her decision to accept Young Lionel’s proposal first to her aunt Mary, who supported her niece wholeheartedly, giving ‘a hundred thousand advantages to set against objections that might be raised’. Next Victoria wrote to her brother Max, giving him the news of her engagement. Anxious to dispel any accusations that she might be abandoning their only parent, she insisted for the umpteenth time how ‘formerly I could not make up my mind ever to marry, as I felt it my duty to stay with dear Papa and take care of him in his old age’. Marriage to Young Lionel ensured that she would remain a devoted daughter because it meant she would never leave him behind at Knole.

  * * *

  On 26 January 1890 Young Lionel and Victoria announced their engagement. And at the age of twenty-seven, although she had not quite fallen in love with Lionel,
she began to discover that making love was rather wonderful. Shortly after her arrival at Knole the local Sevenoaks photographer had recorded the presence of the new mistress of the house. Some of the relentlessly stiff portraits show her posed rather incongruously at a spinning wheel in the staterooms, while in others she is clearly not lost in the pages of the book she holds on her knee. In an official photograph taken a few months later to celebrate the engagement, Lionel is standing looking one way while Victoria is seated looking the other, a good yard of air between them. They appear never to have met before, as they deploy all the reticence, even indifference, that Edwardians considered appropriate between members of the opposite sex when posing for the camera in public.