A House Full of Daughters

by Juliet Nicolson

  She walks among the loveliness she made,

  Between the apple-blossom and the water –

  She walks among the patterned pied brocade,

  Each flower her son, and every tree her daughter.

  But we defied one sentence in The Instructions. His bedside list turned out to be widely off the mark when three months later every seat in a magisterial chapel in London was filled by people who had admired and loved him, and who came to listen to the band of the Grenadier Guards play ‘Lily Marlene’ and pay tribute to a man who had led a rich and varied life. There were seven short reflections on his life as writer, politician, soldier, publisher, countryman, son and father. There was much left unspoken. We did not speak of his impatience, of his failure to understand women, of his obsession with his parents. There was much talk of what a good innings he had managed. The cliché did not work for me. I preferred another that told me grief is the price you pay for love. A friend wrote to say how she envied me. Her relationship with her father had been devoid of affection, and I carried her generosity of sentiment throughout that day. The evening after the service I started a new page in my diary headed ‘I am feeling very sad’. The relentlessly creeping awareness that my father was still not here and was now definitely not coming back, a truth that I had been turning away from for the past few months, ignoring the impending landslide, suddenly gained pace and clobbered me. It had taken the power of a large gathering of others united in an act of remembrance, expressing their delight in his friendship and tears at his absence, to make me accept the up-till-now unbelievable.

  As the weeks put an increasing wedge between the present and the day my father had died, I thought of the things I would not be able to tell him. His presence seemed to be rushing away from me in reverse; there was a diminishing of awareness, like an inverted telescope becoming more powerful by the moment, shrinking the past into an ever-receding point. How he would have been horrified by the Boxing Day tsunami, how proud he would have been of my brother’s new book, how pleased he would have been by the birth of my sister’s second child, and how taken aback and perhaps secretly delighted by the beauty of the memorial service held in his honour. The opportunity to talk about all these things had gone forever. I wondered if I would soon forget the sound of his voice. For a long time I avoided a favourite photograph in which he looked me in the eye as if to say don’t be so sad. Religion did not do it for me, although I occasionally lit candles in a church I love, and I knew the concept of the philosopher A. C. Grayling’s ‘lingering splinter in the mind’, the yearning for spiritual reassurance that hope will be resurrected from despair. And I understood what Stevie Smith meant by Tennyson’s feeling of ‘sea-sad, loamishly-sad’, being a hollowness too empty to articulate. But soon I retreated to words to try to understand what had happened, returning to those poets who had always made sense to me, to their eloquence on love, ageing, longing and loss, to Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Keats, Hardy, Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, words alive with healing power.

  * * *

  Not long ago, a decade after my father’s death, Carol Ann Duffy, the poet laureate, stood in a tent in a Sussex meadow in front of a crowd of people and read ‘Premonitions’, her transformative poem about her mother. Imagining time reversed, she describes a metaphysical world where ‘a bee swooned backwards out of a rose’ drunk with fertility, the life-power it has ingested, and where the warmth of love returns the dead to those who are still living. She spoke without faltering of the essence of what it is to be ‘daughterly’, with all the love and affection that state can engender, and despite the private intensity of her words, every person gathered there who had lived through the death of a much-loved parent felt she was addressing them directly, linking our hands with those we had loved and in so doing reuniting us.

  During the late days of September, the month in which my father died, the unexpectedly strong heat of an autumn sun sometimes feels like the guiding palm of a hand on my back and an illusion lingers that summer has decided just for once to ignore the urgency to leave. The protracted warmth confuses swallows that still swoop in pairs overhead, having delayed their departure longer than is wise, nature’s merging of one season with another mirrored by the human cycle of life, death and rebirth. On days like this, I sometimes imagine Dadda coming through the door, whistling silently, clearing his throat, self-conscious, apologetic for having been gone so long. And we would sit at the kitchen table together and catch up. ‘How’s John Major getting on?’ he would begin and we would embark on a consoling, exclaiming marathon, walking round the garden, puzzled that the struggling yew hedge had still not reached its full height, picking a favourite rose to tuck in his buttonhole while I tried not to sadden but to surprise and gladden him about all that had happened.

  * * *

  But I was lucky. Throughout the long, sad year of my father’s dying and death, I had been sustained by my friends, my family and Charlie. And throughout that year my daughters, grieving themselves for the loss of a beloved grandfather, did not falter once in their demonstrative love. A short while before my father died, I had visited Rome for the first time. The dawn queue to get into the Vatican was so long that as soon as the doors opened, I ran through the long corridors and the show rooms, stopping at nothing until I reached the Sistine Chapel. For five minutes I was quite alone. Above me on Michelangelo’s ceiling two hands stretched towards each other, almost touching, but holding back at the last moment. The knowledge that a hand is there to guide or to support or to communicate tenderness has been important to me since childhood. During treasured moments in my life, hands have touched across a table at a time of quiet pride, hands were enfolded at the moment of death, hands were held during the blessing of a marriage, and once, on the quay of a London dockyard, a mother had reached down towards her two small children, indicating her love for them as they placed their hands in hers. I know now that the hands of a mother can continue to enclose those of her grown children, offer reassurance without restraint, give them confidence to strive for their dreams, demonstrate her pride in them, their inestimable preciousness to her, her unconditional love for them. And I have learned what it feels like when, with an answering squeeze, a child confirms not only that she loves her parents back but forgives them.

  12

  Imogen

  Love

  We are having a picnic on a beach in the south of Harris in the Hebrides. Imogen is sitting on my knee. She is almost a year old and the fine almost Caribbean-white sand that I am trickling through my fingers absorbs her attention. She has never seen sand before and, for a moment, neither have I.

  The day my granddaughter was born felt like the last day of my youth, my own childbearing years still a vivid memory, the early years of motherhood illusorily just a small backward-reaching gesture away. I knew it was a day of transition as I hovered on the brink that Sunday afternoon at home in Sussex when Bean, my son-in-law, rang me, suggesting that it might be a good idea to take the next train to London. Not long afterwards, when I walked into the maternity ward of a twenty-first-century hospital, with all its machines and sophistication, I thought I knew what to expect.

  Several months earlier I had been leaning against the thick oak beam that supports our house when Clemmie told me that the baby she and her husband were expecting was a girl. At the hospital Bean greeted me, their first visitor, his face alight, euphoric. And then, there was Clemmie, her five-minute-old baby lying in her arms. She was gazing at her daughter with the same astonishment that I had first looked at Clemmie. As she looked up at me, I returned her gaze, humbled, rejuvenated, astonished, too, by the intensity of my love for her.

  When I left the three of them early the following morning and walked out into the cool London air, dawn was still a lifetime away. Shafts of moonlight were filtering through the clouds and bringing a shimmer to the high overhanging darkness. I went back alone to Clemmie and Bean’s house. A half-drunk cup of tea was still on my daughter’s bedside table next to a vas
e of white freesias that they had bought in the Columbia Road Market the afternoon before, an entire existence before. I curled up in bed and slept.

  During that first year of my granddaughter’s life, I discovered the flexibility of what I had assumed were long-established boundaries of unconditional love. Together Imogen and I have begun to accumulate a layering of memories, none of them yet articulated between us, but all, at least for me, stored forever. Imogen’s first summer was backlit by the warmth of the sun and the smell and the sound of the sea, the glitter on a wave, phosphorescent insects dancing in the moonlight above the near stillness of the Mediterranean at night, the shiny wetness of a pebble. French sand is darker and less fine than sand in the north of Scotland, but if you are a one year old the tactile pleasure in digging naked toes into its softness, burrowing for the cold dampness beneath the surface warmth, is just as thrilling now as it was a century and a half ago.

  I have watched Imo on her mother’s lap spinning round in front of me on an Edwardian merry-go-round, the painted wooden horse scratched by the scuff marks of generations of children. I have seen her riding high on her father’s shoulders while they both sing loud enough to wake sleeping squirrels in the trees around them. I have seen her reach out to be whirled up in the air by Flora. I have watched her discover the pleasure of biting into an apple. I have walked through London parks with her, finding ourselves equally mesmerised by the swans gliding on a pond. I have watched her being bathed in a plastic bucket on a pebbly Scottish beach where seals with long whiskers bobbed in the bay and where I last was with my father so many decades before, the black and white of my distant childhood suddenly suffused with colour.

  I have sat with Imo on a bench in the beauty of the Green Court at Knole, beside the doorway against which Virginia Woolf once leaned, S-curved, with my ten-year-old father. I have seen her take nascent steps along the path towards the Stone Court down which Vita once wobbled under the watchful eye of a grandparent. I have seen her recognise me and hold her arms out to me. I have marvelled that her first word, and for a while her only word, reflected so accurately her excitement about life. ‘Wow,’ she exclaimed unvaryingly at the sight of a banana, a bird in the sky, her parents. I have crept into her room in the middle of the night and seen her sleeping, still, silent, peaceful. At the end of a weekend I avoid the sight of an empty wheelbarrow which just hours earlier has contained a small laughing body. I have seen her mother and her father and her aunt Flora absorb Imo into their own lives as if there had never been a time when she did not exist. And as for me, I have fallen in love with her. Just as I did with my daughters a generation ago. And yet, rather than accentuating my own mortality, as I had expected, grandparenthood has deepened the experience of living.

  I remember being quite alone with her at Sissinghurst, sitting on a bench in the garden holding her on my knee, engulfed by tenderness, absorbing her stillness, feeling her quiet breaths beneath my hands, as we faced the moat, the covering of duckweed lifted into gentle ridges by the ghost of a wind, noticing her noticing the particles of dust trapped in the sunlight. A moorhen made a dash for the opposite bank, its body cutting a pathway through the green algae; the brilliant May leaves on 500-year-old oaks swayed in the breeze, their branches heavy with the weight of summer growth, dipping down and skimming the surface of the water. Imogen’s eyes shone and danced, the reactions on her face changing in quick succession from surprise to comprehension then delight like a speeded-up film sequence of a cloud-filled sky. The only other time I have seen such swift transference of emotion was on my father’s face in the days before he died, as if he was trying to fit every feeling in before time ran out.

  Last summer I went to Arcachon with my daughters and my granddaughter. We wanted to see where the beginnings of this story had ended. And we wanted to watch Imo feel the warm French sand on her toes just as Pepita’s children had done long ago. To our surprise we found a small hotel that had been welcoming guests since Pepita’s day. Even better, the hotel was in the same street as Villa Pepa! Walking a little apprehensively in the direction of the casino, Imo in Clemmie’s arms and Flora’s hand in mine, we were uncertain what we would find. But there, towards the end of Boulevard de la Plage, we suddenly spotted the coronet and the combined initials S&W sitting securely on top of the large metal gates through which Pepita and her tiny kindergarten had swept on their way to the beach some 150 years earlier.

  We stared in silence though the gates looking for the house. But the building that Pepita had embellished and made into a lovely place for her young family was no longer there. We gazed instead at the modern white three-storey building that dominated the jungly palm-tree-filled garden, a central archway cut through the white brick to reveal the dancing sea beyond, the only redeeming feature of the soulless design.

  Just then an elderly couple appeared and put their key into the lock, one of twenty-five couples for whom the apartments at 167 Boulevard de la Plage is now home. Explaining our presence outside the gates, I told them that my great-great-grandmother had once lived at that address. The elegant French woman looked at me closely. ‘La grande-fille de Pepita?’ she said. ‘Oh non! quel dommage!’ The house had been pulled down only seventeen years earlier she said, although nowadays new planning laws would not have allowed any such travesty. What a magnificent house it had been! And the pity of us coming all this way and being denied the sight of it! She went into the white building, shaking her head. We watched her until she disappeared, before we turned to each other, smiling through our tears.

  * * *

  I have thought of the great good fortune my granddaughter has in being born into a life where loyalty, respect and equality are all held in the highest regard, where guilt is not a feeling to be encouraged and where the benefits of the imagination are ever-present. If she had been born a boy, she would not have been treated any differently. Although the best of childhood experiences and traditions will endure – favourite books, Father Christmas, singing, dancing – Imogen is the beneficiary of a technological age whose advances will remain unknown to all of us born half a century before her. She is also part of a more honest generation, a more communicative generation, hopefully an increasingly tolerant and accepting generation, one that is not afraid to learn from the mistakes of the past and is determined not to repeat them, something I realise that is possibly the entire point of this book.

  Hands will be there to steady and guide this precious child, and to loosen their hold when she is ready to make her own way unaided. She will understand that it is laudable to be ambitious. She will be proud and uninhibited to be a woman.

  Imogen Flora is the only person in our immediate family to have a middle name, the choice a measure of the love Clemmie and her younger sister, Imogen’s aunt, bear for each other. Imogen’s first name has its origins in the old Irish dialect, the country where her parents were at university together and where they fell in love. The old Irish meaning of Imogen is beloved daughter.

  Note

  5. Vita: Ambivalence

  1. poor friend, you suffer in her absence because you have made her and shaped her to your own liking, but it is inevitable that she must go because she loves her husband

  Bibliography

  Several publications found in the bowels of the London Library have proved to be essential archive sources, including The Times, The Illustrated London News and that old stalwart of social documentation, The Lady magazine.

  In addition to several published histories, biographies and memoirs, I have drawn on many unpublished letters and documents that belong to the Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Nigel Nicolson estates, all of them administered by my brother, Adam, and me. In addition I have consulted several of the many books that have been published by and about the Sackville and Nicolson families.

  Lady Sackville by Susan Mary Alsop (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1978)

  The Penguin History of the USA by Hugh Brogan (Revised edition 1998)

  A Short History of the
British Embassy at Washington, D.C., USA by C.F.M. Browne (Gibson Brothers 1930)

  The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt (Phaidon 1951)

  Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (Fourth Estate 2009)

  A Hand-book for Travellers in Spain by Richard Ford (1845)

  Romantic in Spain by Theophile Gautier (Alfred A Knopf 1926)

  Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983)

  Wanderings in Spain in 1843 by Martin Haverty (T. C. Newby 1944)

  Spain in 1830 by Henry D Inglis (Whittaker Treacher & Co 1831)

  The Vanished Landscape: A 1930s Childhood in the Potteries by Paul Johnson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2004)

  Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee (Chatto & Windus 1996)

  Ammonites and Leaping Fish by Penelope Lively (Penguin 2013)

  Harold Nicolson: A Biography, Volumes 1 (1980) and 2 (1981), by James Lees Milne (Chatto & Windus)

  Spain (Murray’s Handbooks. Part 1 John Murray 1855)

  Sissinghurst by Adam Nicolson (Harper Press 2008)