A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  But the shop did not put a stop to Victoria’s loneliness. Increasingly, she started to look for something or preferably someone who might distract her, protect her, love her. Sir John Murray Scott, the son of a Scottish doctor, known to the Sackville family as Seery, was the perfect individual to combine the two roles. A weighty six-foot-four figure with white whiskers, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, Seery first filled Victoria’s depleted emotional needs and then her financial requirements.

  Although Seery owned properties in London and Scotland, most of the Wallace Collection treasures left to him by the childless Sir Richard Wallace, for whom Seery had worked as secretary, were kept in Wallace’s enormous gold-fretted-balconied house, just down the road from L’Opéra in Paris. I recently stood outside the huge door, now an entrance to the head office of a French bank, and looked directly up to the icing-sugared pinnacles of Sacré-Coeur sitting on top of the hill of Montmartre. But the interior is no longer intact. During Seery’s day a sequence of lovely rooms housed the astonishing Wallace Collection. The modern world had not yet invaded this time capsule, with its numerous ticking clocks, chiming the quarter-hours in unison. No telephone bells rang here, no electric light competed with the candlelit sconces that illuminated the eighteenth-century treasure house, its ‘silent and sumptuous’ furniture displaying the decorative masterpieces of successive French reigns.

  Where Lionel was always leaving, bounding up from the breakfast table to go to a committee meeting, not even able to spare half an hour to have a row, Seery always had time for Victoria, even time to analyse their own disagreements. As Lionel became more and more inaccessible, Victoria relied more and more on Seery’s unconditional devotion. His sudden death in 1912 from a heart attack just as Victoria was waiting for him to arrive for lunch crushed her, although the shock was mitigated in part by the extreme generosity of his will. During his lifetime Seery had given Victoria £84,000 as well as a house in Mayfair, and left her a further £150,000 in his will plus the exquisite contents of his house in Paris, the bulk of the treasures of the Wallace Collection. His will was contested by Seery’s two brothers and two sisters, who accused Victoria of using undue influence on their brother. Although she won the case, by the end of it she was still broken-hearted but also practical, selling almost the entire Wallace Collection in order to help boost the Knole bank account. She kept back only a few things, among them a circular marble ormolu table with the letters of the alphabet engraved on each of its drawers and two grey urns decorated with sphinxes, scallop shells and lion masks that Victoria gave as a much treasured present to Vita. When I visited Seery’s country house outside Paris, the empty plinths in the garden confirmed that the urns were never replaced.

  With Seery’s death, Victoria’s sense of herself started to disappear; the props of her life were beginning to crumble and, like the urns, difficult to replace. She had always found her own existence unpredictable and thrilling, never failing to comment in her diary and in letters to Vita on the hardship, the adventure, the blessings, the unfairness, the drama of it all, exclaiming with non-ironic regularity ‘Quelle roman est ma vie!’ Throughout the drama of the court case with Seery’s siblings she had maintained an impressive dignity. But her temper in tandem with her self-pity meant her behaviour grew ever more erratic. For a while she struggled on. ‘I am very 1792,’ she would announce to puzzled friends, intending to clarify that she shared her resilient sensibility with all French aristocrats who had somehow survived the revolution.

  * * *

  Many years later my father would tell us stories about Victoria’s eccentricity in her old age. As children he and his brother would be driven to ‘Grannyma’s’ for lunch at her solitary windswept home, perched like an uncertain gull on the blustery cliff near Brighton, which the eminent architect Sir Edwin Lutyens had doubled in size and ‘improved’ for her. My father and uncle, Ben, would be made to sit for hours on the all-weather balcony ‘huddled in her fur coats and with hot water bottles on [their] knees, waiting for lunch at five p.m. when it would be served by the under gardener, the cook having given notice that morning’. Victoria was so frequently in debt to her servants that her house was known in the family as the Writs Hotel. Because there were often financial rewards attached, Ben and Nigel tolerated the visits, even their grandmother’s insistence that they stroke the underside of her forearm to feel its softness, of which she was most proud. Grannyma gained her grandsons’ reluctant loyalty through bribes of food packages sent to school and with cheques rewarding them for accepting her invitations to lunch. My father remembered how they would be ‘smothered with flattery or scorched by reproaches’. He always spoke of his grandmother with a mixture of reverence and horror. Throughout his life her powerful personality remained vivid to him. She was a woman of capricious eccentricity, of generosity, absurdity, capability, gullibility, manipulation, flirtatiousness, sexiness, charm and waywardness. In 1933 a letter to sixteen-year-old Nigel that begins ‘What a delightful surprise it was to hear from you. I thought I had become absolutely nothing to everybody’, is followed by an offer to send him a weekly supply of fresh salmon and pay for the installation of a private bathroom for his own use. A few months later another letter announces that a ‘hamperette’ from the Army & Navy containing ‘cold tongue in slices, biscuits, cakes’ is on its way to him at boarding school, and wonders if he ‘would like some Kia-ora the week after?’ while reminding him, ‘you are a very naughty boy, in neglecting your Grannyma in that unseemly fashion. I don’t want long letters but I like a little word of appreciation and remembrance once a fortnight.’ The letter is signed ‘Grannyma on the balcony’, as her passion for fresh air was still undimmed.

  But I now understand that the decline of Victoria’s mental stability was a tragedy not only for her but also for Vita. The self-pity of Victoria in old age is at heartbreaking odds with the verve of the youthful woman who managed two grand residences in two countries with celebrated style and capability and who seemed to have half the world’s men at her feet.

  After Seery there had been other admirers: the wealthy American financier and newspaper proprietor William Waldorf Astor, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin and her architect Edwin Lutyens among them. Just as Pepita chose each provider for what he could give her at the time, so Victoria had learned to chart her way from one financial and emotional prop to the next. Pepita’s mother, Catalina, had been the first to support her daughter, followed by Oliva, who was in turn replaced by Old Lionel. Victoria mirrored Pepita’s search for refuge, at first with her father, then with her cousin, and then with a sequence of useful and paternalistic men of whom Seery was the largest in every way. Only rarely has a woman in the past few generations of my family broken out of this particular pattern of bargain-making with men. Vita was one of them.

  5

  Vita

  Ambivalence

  When Vita was born, in 1892, the influence of the socially buttoned-up Victorian age was at last beginning to wane. Immersed within the late-flowering, self-conscious, hedonistic romanticism of her class, she grew up first as a child confined to an almost archaic household, and then as a young woman on the cusp of great social change. During the very early years of her childhood her mother was the dazzle at the centre of her life. ‘If ever the phrase “turn one’s heart to water” meant anything it meant when my mother looked at you and smiled,’ Vita would later write of her mother. Victoria and Vita were barely out of each other’s presence, as Vita’s unpleasing hair was ringletted to Victoria’s satisfaction and Vita became willingly enslaved to her memerising mother, in the same way that Catalina had once adored Pepita. ‘My love for her mounted higher and higher,’ Vita wrote, even when her mother generously forgave her for minor transgressions that she had not committed. There were times when Vita would ‘have died for her, would have murdered anyone that breathed a word against her.’

  In her novel The Edwardians, using fiction as a transparent disguise for autobiography, Vita describes watching Vic
toria dressing for dinner. As her mother was strapped into her corset, ‘the silk laces and their tags would fly out under the maid’s deft fingers with the flick of a skilled worker mending a net’ and Vita would help herself to the chocolates that Victoria kept in her dressing-table drawer and follow Victoria’s reflection in the looking glass as her mother placed the family diamonds around her neck. When Victoria had completed her toilette, and glittered her way downstairs to greet her dinner guests, Vita would return to the nursery with a nanny who was under maternal instruction to humour Vita’s aversion to rice pudding.

  But soon Victoria made life difficult for Vita. Or maybe it was the other way round. ‘She loved me as a baby,’ Vita remembered, ‘but I don’t think she cared for me much as a child. I don’t mean to imply that my mother neglected me but simply that she figured more as a restraint than anything else in my existence.’ And Vita was right. Gradually Vita’s independence began to irritate Victoria, and her own centre of interest moved from her child to herself. As Victoria’s pleasure in her growing daughter diminished, so her power over her slackened and paradoxically pushed Vita further from her. Vita did not conform in a satisfactory way to Victoria’s conventional expectations. A photograph of a furious four-year-old Vita indicates her mood when made to pose surrounded by dolls. At the age of five she was demonstrating an unusual taste for wearing khaki uniform. She appeared at lunch with, at her own admission, her ‘painfully frizzled’ hair inadequately combed. Her appetite for chocolate was excessive. She was growing fat. She was so ugly and unkempt it hurt Victoria to look at her. Other mothers voiced complaints about the way Vita teased their children on the rare occasion outsiders were invited for tea or during the dancing class introduced by Victoria as a weekly feature in Vita’s curriculum. Warnings were issued as the often unintentional but irreversibly damaging process of undermining the self-esteem of a child rolled on, the consequences of suffocating love alternating with disproportionate levels of control. The shift from Victoria’s long-held position of power, in which Old Lionel and Young Lionel had indulged her behaviour in any way she wished, was now challenged by her self-contained child. And Victoria did not like it. Her growing conventionality was threatened by Vita’s refusal to conform to her notion of an ideal daughter. The child was difficult.

  * * *

  As Vita took those first infant steps down the straight path that bisects the Green Court at Knole, followed by that anxious but obsequious footman and her doting, ageing and forlorn grandfather, an awareness of her own importance as the only child of the house was inevitable. ‘I am an incredible egoist,’ she wrote later, ‘that’s the long and short of it.’ The Sackville- Wests had always celebrated their relevance within the wider world. The walls of Knole were covered with portraits of Vita’s ancestors, most of them men, most of them proud, indulged, powerful individuals for whom the concept of self-promotion, if not always self-love, was integral to their lives. But surrounded by a group of self-absorbed individuals whose attention to her solitary progress along the paths and corridors of her upbringing was intermittent, Vita had to shout louder and work harder if she was to attract attention.

  Regulation, criticism and restraint inevitably prompted rebellion. The three-foot-high wooden doorstop in the form of Shakespeare that Victoria had given to Vita – ‘because I think you like poetry’ – propped open her bedroom door rather than closed her in. As soon as Vita was able to run through the Green Court and out of the small central door in the main gate, the Outer Wicket, she vanished into the park. And here her desire for a secret existence began to develop. ‘Secrecy was my passion,’ she acknowledged. ‘It’s a trait I inherit from my family so I won’t blame myself excessively for it.’ Here in the park she found freedom from her mother’s authority with the children of a local family with whom she made friends. Four of the five Battiscombe children were girls. Ralph, the only boy, was Vita’s ally and best friend. They dressed up as Boer generals in miniature army uniforms and together shoved putty up the Boers’ (played by Ralph’s sisters) noses, bound their mouths with handkerchiefs, tied them to trees and beat their captive legs with nettles. According to Vita the girls enjoyed it just as much as she and Ralph did, confident they would not sneak to their mother because sisters do not betray brothers.

  As Vita’s mother became ever odder, so a daughterly affection for her father grew. Together they maintained a teasing conspiracy that while Victoria’s increasingly dotty habits were infuriating, they were also idiosyncratically endearing. They tolerated the contrast between her wild extravagance and extreme parsimony. They were amused by the paper obsession that spilled over from the professional demands of Spealls into all other areas of her life. Husband and daughter indulged wife and mother with an abundance of patience that encouraged her worst excesses. As Lionel and Victoria’s involvement with Olive and Seery reduced the companionship of marriage to discussions of daily practicalities, Vita realised that her parents were ‘ludicrously ill matched’. The adolescent Vita rejected the wary and cynical grown-up environment and withdrew into her own private existence as often as she could. But she valued her father’s gentle ways, his shy attempts to advise her, and felt it her filial duty to protect him from his wife’s criticism.

  Their intimacy grew in part from Vita’s own guilt at not being a boy, depriving her father not only of an heir but also a son with whom he could do things that fathers liked to do with sons. ‘Dadda used to take me for terribly long walks,’ she wrote in her confessional memoir that formed part of Portrait of a Marriage, ‘and talk to me about science (principally Darwin) and I liked him a great deal better than mother of whose quick temper I was frightened. I don’t even remember thinking her pretty which she must have been.’ The contrasting manner of her father, with his dull personality, and his lack of originality, ‘at heart requiring nothing of life but that it should be peaceful at home’, was something of a relief to Vita.

  Two additional parental figures played an influential part in Vita’s upbringing, both old men who lived in the house and who, in their differing but consistent, uncritical ways, offered the child more stability than either of her parents. Her grandfather, Old Lionel, welcomed the companionship of his granddaughter, with her childlike acceptance of his ‘funny ways’, and redirected his dwindling resources of affection towards her. He would save the choicest hothouse peaches, cherries and plums from the silver bowls in the dining room, filling his pockets with delicate fruit, before concealing them in his desk in ‘Vita’s drawer’ and inviting his compliant granddaughter to play a well-rehearsed game of hunting for the hidden treasure. Vita applauded his enjoyment of whittling lids of cigar boxes into paper-knives, and admired his biannual habit of reading the whole of Edward Gibbon’s six-volume study of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Although Vita used to ‘scream in agonised protest’, she did not object to Old Lionel’s extraordinary habit of squirting orange juice directly into her eyes, as he explained that Spanish mothers swore it made their babies’ eyes more beautiful. His evident distress on the day she had swung on Victoria’s braided hair, just as Victoria had once done with Pepita, enhanced Vita’s understanding of her grandfather’s great romance, long buried but retrievable at the flick of a plait.

  Old Lionel died in September 1908, aged eighty-one. He had been suffering for several months from prostate cancer. Sixteen-year-old Vita had been sent away to stay at Seery’s house in Scotland to be protected from the trauma of death while Victoria sat with Old Lionel, his hand in hers, his mind veering along the uneven passage between consciousness and unconsciousness. Although Victoria had been at the Villa Pepa when her mother died, she had never seen anyone during the last moments of life. Afterwards she told Vita that as her father’s breathing finally stopped she had been thankful for the peacefulness that accompanied the ending and for the knowledge that she had forgiven him ‘for all the harshness and unfairness he had often shown me’. She knew that Old Lionel had given her much more than harshness. From the age of nin
eteen he had provided her with her major role in life and her sense of who she was.

  * * *

  For Vita, the twenty-five-stone Sir John Murray Scott, with his round pink face like a baby and ‘white mutton-chop hair’, was her mother’s most devoted protector and never-quite-lover. ‘His generosity and hospitality were unbounded, and proceeded from no love of ostentation for he was essentially simple – but from the inherent warmth and open handedness of his nature,’ she wrote.