A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  My father considered Orlando ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’. The romance of the novel was bound up in his own idolisation of Virginia, a sort of maiden aunt to him and his brother during their childhood, and a hero for the rest of his life. In 2002 Jeanette Winterson made a film about the writing of Orlando, in which Saffron Burrows, who played Vita, and Joely Richardson, who took the part of Virginia, brought their characters into disbelief-suspending reality. I spent some days at Knole with my father watching the filming, the mist rising above the silhouetted deer as dawn eventually broke on a sequence of magical November mornings. Nigel sat opposite Jeanette in the Great Hall, where Victoria had once thrown a sumptuous dinner for the future Edward VII. I was allowed to crouch in a corner as my father spoke with his usual eloquence about the past life of that room, and of the Christmas parties he had attended there as a boy when all the estate staff came for a slap-up tea. The sense of time past and time present collided as I watched my father speaking at the age of eighty-five, the sparkle and amusement still dancing in his voice, as he remembered his childhood, over which Vita and her mother had presided.

  * * *

  In the same year that The Edwardians was published, Vita, for whom place had always formed her fundamental sense of self, found somewhere that might compensate for the loss of, if not become a replacement for, Knole. Sissinghurst, a once grand Elizabethan manor house in the Weald of Kent, was a ruin for sale, a place crying out for rescue. When Vita first saw the crumbling walls and the graceful Elizabethan tower at its heart one rainy day in March 1930, her response to this broken place was visceral. She fell, in my father’s words, ‘flat in love with it’. A muddle of separate buildings remained standing after the house had spent seven years as a prison camp when England was at war with the French in the eighteenth century, and more recently had become the local poorhouse. The ruins of the once great house suited Vita and Harold well. After many months of clearing away centuries of rubble they made a home there. The arrangement was almost collegiate. Crossing outside courtyards from one part of the house to another, they slept in separate bedrooms in the South Cottage, above Harold’s workroom; Vita had the exclusive use of the tower for her own writing; the dining room and kitchen were on the other side of the garden in the Priest’s House; and the boys had bedrooms in the long, low building that had once stabled Elizabethan horses. There were no spare bedrooms, although occasionally a very favourite friend or lover was given a room when Ben and Nigel were away. There were generous spaces in their marital togetherness, and for my grandparents that was the secret to contentment.

  Sissinghurst became Vita’s refuge. It mattered to her more than anyone or anything except Harold and Knole. It became hers. Neither law nor man could take it from her. Harold did not own so much as a blade of the Sissinghurst grass. And it was at Sissinghurst that Vita could write and at Sissinghurst, in the earth on which it sits, where her creativity found its enduring memorial. Her distinguished reputation as a horticulturalist grew quickly, partly through her newspaper articles but especially through her garden. Its originality, intimacy and romance has made it one of the most famous, most visited, most copied and most loved gardens in the world. The particular poignancy of the place lies, for me, in its fragility, the permanence of her creation all the more precious for its inherent transitoriness. Sissinghurst felt to Vita like Knole’s younger sibling, and any suggestion that it might also one day be owned and managed by the National Trust prompted a rage of defence. In 1954, when Nigel floated the idea, Vita’s response in her diary was unequivocal. ‘Au grand jamais, jamais. Never, Never, Never. Not that hard little plate at my door. Nigel can do what he likes when I am dead, but as long as I live no Nat. Trust or any other foreign body shall have my darling. Over my corpse or my ashes; not otherwise. It is bad enough to have lost my Knole but they shan’t take s/hurst from me. That at least is my own.’

  Isolation became essential to Vita’s creativity. However, there was a time when too much of it tipped into loneliness. The more I read about how much time she spent alone, worrying about her creativity, uncertain whether she would ever write anything lasting or worthwhile, allowing herself to doubt herself, the more I understood her feelings. For different reasons, I had felt like that too. Both Harold and Vita were enthusiastic, lifelong sherry drinkers. But during the war, when Harold was away in London for long periods at a time and Sissinghurst lay beneath the flight path that German bombers took to make their raids on London, Vita found that alcohol helped her to pass the dark and frightening nights as well as to alleviate the pain of creeping arthritis. On returning to find her ‘muzzy’, Harold would revert to his habit of avoiding discussion of uncomfortable personal truths face-to-face and resort to letters. In March 1941 when Virginia Woolf went missing, her suicide still only suspected, he came down by train at once from London to be with Vita as soon as he heard the news about her dearest friend. But during that whole evening neither of them mentioned Virginia’s name once or the reason for Harold’s sudden arrival. The following day he wrote Vita a loving letter about Virginia. Later he wrote again: ‘I get anxious when I see you with a bad colour and not listening to anybody and speaking slowly and with difficulty. I always know that those moments mean staggers and it frightens me.’ But then his courage to continue with what he knew to be the truth failed him. ‘I think it is something to do with glands or the gland which makes one balance properly … I want to persuade you to see a doctor and know you will not agree.’ His fear of confrontation enabled her to continue drinking. An alcoholic’s greatest fear is being caught out. Lies are easily told if the recipient is willing to believe them. On a few occasions the gardeners found Vita passed out in the flower beds and returned her to the cottage by wheelbarrow. Their loyalty and discretion about these shameful incidents was admirable, the truth emerging only after her death.

  While Knole had been Vita’s source of strength for the first thirty-six years of her life, Sissinghurst and Harold were the props of her later years. Harold’s early career as a diplomat was succeeded by a less successful period as a politician before he became a biographer, a broadcaster and a celebrated diarist. His intelligence, charm and vivacity ensured that he was present at some of the most socially and politically significant moments of the mid-twentieth century. He died in 1968 but his distinguished professional and literary reputation has endured. Only one of his achievements has been overlooked: Harold was never credited fully for his creative partnership with Vita in the making of the garden at Sissinghurst.

  The early crisis in their marriage was never repeated. Harold’s patience with and love for Vita during the most testing moments of her relationship with Violet Trefusis had tempered Vita’s need for escape. While Harold had frequent, if short-lived, flings with beautiful young men, Vita indulged in passionate, sexually charged affairs with, at some estimates, a total of more than fifty women. She was predatory, her compulsive habit necessarily fed by constant change, her behaviour that of the addict for whom instant gratification is by nature transitory. Her sexual voracity included poets, journalists, butch women, feminine women, neighbours and even her own sister-in-law. She was ruthless about the feelings of those who risked other relationships for her, cavalier about those who fell deeply in love with her. Some of her lovers had been heterosexually content until being trapped in Vita’s lustful headlights, most famously Virginia Woolf, whose affair with Vita was the only time in her marriage that she was unfaithful to Leonard. Although some of the women, Virginia in particular, became and remained her greatest friends, as lovers they, and even Virginia, were exchangeable and disposable when Vita had tired of them in bed. In a letter written to Harold in November 1960 Vita blames him for not ‘warning’ her about homosexuality because ‘it would have saved us a lot of trouble and misunderstanding’. She claims somewhat disingenuously, considering her premarital affair with Rosamund, that she knew nothing about homosexuality, male or female, before she became engulfed in the sexua
l typhoon, namely Violet, that nearly swept her out of her marriage forever. In the same letter she admitted that she loved him ‘much more than I loved you on October 1st 1913’, acknowledging with bemusement and pride the unlikely but enduring nature of their forty-year marriage. Almost twenty years earlier, during the war, she had written Harold a poem, a confirmation of her love. I cannot read it aloud without my voice cracking.

  I must not tell how dear you are to me.

  It is unknown, a secret from myself

  Who should know best. I would not if I could

  Expose the meaning of such mystery.

  I loved you then, when love was Spring and May.

  Eternity is here and now, I thought;

  The pure and perfect moment briefly caught

  As in your arms, but still a child, I lay.

  Loved you when summer deepened into June

  And those fair, wild, ideal dreams of youth

  Were true yet dangerous and half unreal

  As when Endymion kissed the mateless moon.

  But now when autumn yellows all the leaves

  And thirty seasons mellow our long love,

  How rooted, how secure, how strong, how rich,

  How full the barn that holds our garnered sheaves!

  Harold was the hero of the pair. He was a snob, an anti-Semite, a racist and a hedonist, but despite that he was also a force for good. His greatest personal challenge was to stand up to the selfishness of his wife because he loved her, and they remained emotionally if not physically committed to each other. The maverick nature of their marriage was accepted by their closest friends and even became a source of gentle amusement between husband and wife. During their joint lecture tour in America in 1933 a journalist asked Harold if he and Vita had ever collaborated on anything. ‘Yes, we have two children’ was Harold’s honest reply. Marriage to Harold was probably the most significant act of Vita’s life. He had offered her escape and reassurance during the often difficult path that single daughterhood imposed on her, while accepting and never being threatened by the power that Knole held over her.

  Harold would have been a wonderful father of daughters. He filled the sensitive maternal role for his two sons, writing to eleven-year-old Nigel a marvellous letter about the trials of puberty. ‘Spots come from picking – not just picking blackberries or strawberries but from picking spots. Also from not taking Eno’s fruit salts when one is bunged up. I used to have spots something dreadful at your age – and now I have got a complexion of which any school girl would be proud.’

  Motherhood baffled Vita. Perhaps she could not really understand the male sex, although I think it unlikely that daughters would have found her an easy mother either. She had little understanding of or interest in children. My father and his brother grew up admiring but fearing her. They sensed that she felt obligation rather than love towards them. They considered themselves an interruption within the privacy of her day. They were never invited to visit her in her writing room and were wary of upsetting her. One Christmas my father unpeeled a banana in front of her, with the ringing of the church bells at Bethlehem on the wireless in the background. As he began slowly and noisily to eat the banana, she lost her temper and shouted at him for his insensitivity, sending him from the room. Half a century later his retelling of the story to me could still evoke the ferocity of her reaction and the depth of my father’s regret at angering her. In his autobiographical attempt to make sense of his experience as a son he admits that Vita had ‘posthumously become more central to my life than when she was alive because of the books that I and others have written about her’. Vita’s sons chose to confess the anxieties of spotty adolescence not to Vita but to Harold. Neither of them had any experience of what it was like to be nurtured by or indeed to nurture a woman. For all Vita’s creativity, and her own need for intense relationships, she had been unable to make her boys understand her own sex. They would have to look outside their own family boundaries to try to discover what womanhood, or at least femininity, meant.

  6

  Philippa

  Loneliness

  During the lifetime of my mother, Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, I knew little and cared little about her past. While my father’s family had long been concerned, well, to be more accurate, obsessed, with the business of recording and recounting everything that happened to them, no one wrote anything much down about the elaborately named Tennyson d’Eyncourts. There were no diaries and curiously few photographs of Philippa’s family, and with an attitude that now seems unforgivably arrogant, we almost entirely overlooked her side of things. When her stories of wartime deprivation made their way to the surface, we did not listen. Instead we yawned. We were intolerantly and demonstratively bored. I knew almost nothing about where she had lived as a child or gone to school. When I was much older, I used to wonder a lot about her childhood. My ignorance saddened me. I found myself longing to discover that there had been some gaiety and real happiness in those early years before her marriage. All those years later I wanted that so much for her. But I was fearful of finding out the truth.

  I regretted not having paid attention to Philippa’s stories of her schooldays and to the moments when she tried to balance things among the mass of achievements notched up by Nigel’s overdocumented antecedents. She would claim connections with famous people she had met only once, stressing how her ancestry was littered with distinguished politicians and writers. It is only recently that I have looked into her assertions and found that her claims had much truth in them. Her mother, Pamela, was a cousin a few times removed of William Gladstone, the prime minister, and her father Gervaise’s family was only a cousinly generation or two away from Alfred, Lord Tennyson. An old copy of Country Life featuring the Tennyson ancestral home, Bayons Manor, in Lincolnshire, sat on my mother’s glass-topped coffee table next to a valuable leather-bound first edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King with Gustave Doré illustrations, bought by her at auction. Philippa’s paternal grandfather was a naval architect who received a baronetcy in 1930 for his outstanding contribution to the wartime shipbuilding programme and for his work on the design of the military tank that rumbled onto the shattered battlefields in 1917 and was instrumental in defeating the enemy. There was even an Archbishop of Canterbury, a remote (extremely remote) cousin on her father’s side, who had preached the sermon at Nell Gwynne’s funeral.

  The wedding photograph of my maternal grandparents shows a couple well at ease in each other’s company as they leave the precincts of the elegant St Margaret’s, Westminster, after walking down an aisle chosen for the same purpose by Samuel Pepys and Winston Churchill. They are on their way to the reception at the Hyde Park Hotel. The wedding was grand enough to be featured in The Times, The Morning Post, The Lady, The Queen and The Illustrated London News. Pam is pictured gap-toothed and beaming, carrying an armful of long-stemmed lily of the valley, her cream-coloured ankle-length satin gown clinging to her tiny frame while a long Honiton lace veil lined in shell-pink chiffon has been fastened to her hair in a 1920s flapper-style coronal. Gervaise, who escorts her, is slim, proud, tall, his shoes so shiny Pam could have eaten her wedding breakfast off them. Gervaise, who eventually succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1951, was a financially cushioned man with a substantial country house in Hampshire, a rented shooting lodge in Perthshire, a ten-bedroom villa in the South of France and a suite at London’s Dorchester Hotel. He conducted his professional life as a successful stockbroker with vigour, buying and selling securities with impressive acumen, and studying and maximising his own investments. He also found time to attend to the demands of his role as prime warden of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers and president of the Shellfish Association of Great Britain. He was a flamboyant figure in the City, his devotion as a husband tending to outweigh his paternal responsibilities. The object of his devotion was an unlikely one. Disapproval and contempt were Pamela’s default settings. Elegantly belted tweed suits were worn over cream and lemon silk p
ussy-bow-tied blouses. Her holiday-blue eyes fogged over with affected incomprehension when someone said something she did not approve of. She had become jagged and medicinal-scented after a severe attack of tuberculosis when she was in her forties, which had resulted in the removal of her entire left lung and also part of the right one by Sir Clement Price-Thomas, the King’s own doctor, no less. In order to reach the lung, a rib was lifted out; the pioneering operation left patients with a weakness from which they were unlikely to recover, and made my grandmother’s already slender frame lopsided, with a void at the heart of her. She was wholly unhuggable, and in her own way just as unmaternal as Vita.

  My mother, Philippa, was unlucky. She arrived in the world at a bad time to be a daughter. She was brought up after the carnage that destroyed such a high percentage of male youths during the First World War and which had made boys matter so much more than girls. As a child she was shunted away from home to avoid the bombs of the Second World War, and later her presence was obscured by the post-war gloom that preoccupied adults in the late 1940s. As a young woman she had the desire to escape from the dullness of home life, making her ready to compromise in the 1950s. A decade on she had become tethered by marriage and motherhood and was too late to take advantage of the youthful emancipation of the 1960s.

  She was born in London in December 1928, just as the generation that preceded her was abandoning their Edwardian sensibility. The Great War was a spectral presence, a shadowy part of the landscape of children’s existence, haunting them with reminders of their good fortune at having dodged the tragedy of the century. An awareness of the vast deficit of young men prevailed. They had become the country’s precious commodity. Boys played revenge-inspired team games called Us versus Jerry. Military-minded London park attendants retained their soldier moustaches that seemed to Paul Johnson, the writer and critic who was born a month before my mother, to have been ‘hammered into their faces from inside’. Bowler-hatted men suffering from what was not yet recognised as post-traumatic stress, sold matches on street corners. Philippa’s brother Giles watched Mr Butler, the keeper of the playing fields at Eton, tuck his empty left coat sleeve into his jacket pocket while keeping his spare arm on a shelf above the boys’ washbasins in the cricket pavilion. His false limb terminated in a hand smartly clad in a brown leather glove. It was worn during matches and other formal occasions, the holding pin screwed into a metal plate in the stump as tightly as a hot-water bottle stopper so the arm didn’t fall off during the match.