There was nothing now to be done about that. Nevertheless, I knew in my heart that to look across this landscape now was to see something that was not as it should be. The house and garden were no longer connected to a working landscape. There were no animals here, no farmer who considered this farm his own, no farm building used for farm purposes, no sense that this place was generating its own meaning or its own energies. The fields were inert, with no movement or life in them.
And so, on these morning walks, while my father lay in bed, asking about the garden, the flowers, I could see only a kind of voltage gap: between everything I had, emotionally, invested in this place, inadvertently or not, and the lifeless collection of fields and buildings on which my eyes fell. It looked like façadism to me, an eviscerated pretence, not really a farm any more, scarcely even a place any more: just a beautifully maintained garden dropped between a café and a shop, with some fields somewhere in the background. Is there any atmosphere sadder than an empty, dead barn? Or a field that used to glow with health now simply the sterile medium in which highly chemicalised and industrialised crops could be produced? Christopher Lloyd used to say that there was nothing sadder than a garden path that was not used. But here I saw something sadder still: something which for perhaps forty or fifty generations had been fully alive, now maintained in a condition of stilled perfection. There was no longer any relation of life to place.
The afternoon of the day my father died, late in September 2004, I went up to a hill on the edge of the land that surrounds and belongs to Sissinghurst and for the first time in ten years, and for the only time since, smoked some cigarettes. They were delicious. The burnt matches smelled sweet and woody in the sunshine and the smoke filled my throat and lungs like a drug. It was settling, being there and doing that. I smoked and looked, picking the tobacco from my lips, as nothing much happened in the five hundred acres of wood and farm in front of me, the trees dark blue, the stubble pale with age, a kestrel hanging and then falling into a long curving cruise above the grasses on the edge of the fields.
The top of that hill, only half a mile away from the house and garden which five million people have visited in the last thirty or forty years, is almost private. From there a track drops down the field to the Hammer Brook and then across the cornfields before making its way through a pair of hedges, one old, one new, to the moat, buildings and lawns of Sissinghurst itself. From time to time a man and his dog came past. There was a woman on a grey horse. And a polite couple in green anoraks. A wind from the north-west was blowing across us all, as it would for the next few days, and the flag on the Tower, at half-mast, stood out like a noticeboard of my father’s death. The kestrel, now over the alders by the stream, hung and flickered, that steady eye, slid away ten or twenty yards and hung again. Pigeons flustered out of the big wood to the south and flogged their way across the open ground.
Death itself is more than welcome after the strain of dying, and the air that afternoon felt light and heady, as if a clamp had been released. I looked across the fields and felt I could breathe at last, not because my father had died – not at all: I had come to love him – but because the many months of his lying in bed, gradually thinning under his bedclothes, the sheets becoming tents across his bones, as he made inordinate efforts to be polite for his visitors, even for us his children, leaving him slumped and exhausted afterwards, alone with the humiliations of age, the shame you could see every day in his eyes – at last all of that was over.
For all the sense of relief, even if you are in your forties, the death of a father leaves a feeling of orphanage in its wake. A fixed point in the landscape had been removed and the flag flying from the Tower, extraordinarily bright in the sunshine, was all that remained. I was suddenly responsible for my life in a way I had never been before. I was dislocated, both free and loose, as if a limb, the limb of my own life, had come out of its socket.
When he died, early that morning, very calmly, his nurse, my two sisters, Sarah and I were all with him and it was, in the end, the steadiest and gentlest of moments. It felt simply, in the quietness of his breathing having stopped, as if the race was over. Only the week before, typically of him, he had given me the Oxford Book of Death to read. He had reviewed it when it came out in the 1980s – slightly offended that the literary editor of the Spectator had considered him a suitably aged candidate to be its reviewer – and had quoted in the review Henry James’s words as he felt death approaching: ‘Ah,’ the novelist had murmured, ‘the distinguished thing.’ That is what it felt like the morning of my father’s death.
My elder sister Juliet said we should pick some flowers for him: three of the late Iceberg roses from the White Garden, their second flush of the year. We cut them with scissors and put them on his chest near where he lay in his narrow, single bed, with the nineteenth-century drawings of Athens given him by his mother when he was a boy on the wall beside him, a photograph of his brother Ben on the bookshelf, next to a jacket of a new edition of his father’s diaries, the window open and the cold September sun coming past the magnolia outside. The doctor arrived and then the undertakers. They carried his body downstairs on a stretcher from which a set of wheels could come down, turning it into a trolley. They wheeled him along the stone path in the upper courtyard and out through the entrance arch. They had brought a blanket and put it over his body and face, but you could see the outline of a person beneath it. The hearse – not a hearse but a white Volvo – was parked by the entrance. It was a Thursday and the garden was closed, as it usually is in the middle of the week, with little chains strung between posts. As I was unhooking them to allow the undertakers to put him in the car, an Italian came up to me, tall, a little agitated. ‘Is the garden closed?’ Yes, I am afraid it is today. ‘But we have come from Italy.’ Yes, I’m sorry, it is always closed on a Wednesday and Thursday. ‘Why is it closed today?’ Because it needs a rest every now and then.
The undertakers had opened the boot of the car and were manoeuvring my father into it. ‘But we have come from Milan. Could we not just for a few minutes …?’ His body was in and the boot down. The Italian seemed not to have noticed what was happening. I am so sorry, I said, there are one or two things going on here today. ‘Just ten minutes?’ No, I’m sorry, no. The undertakers got into their car, saying they would be in touch later, and drove quite slowly away. ‘Five minutes?’ asked the Italian, now with his wife smiling kindly beside him.
No, I said, not today.
I thought about my father as I looked at Sissinghurst. All I could feel then was gratitude for his love and affection, for the way, out of his own fragility, he had loved us. Fathers inevitably forget the most important moments in their relationships with their children. There were many, but I remembered one in particular. I talked to him about it one day when he was ill in bed, and of course he had forgotten. I was small. I must have been about seven. We were at home, looking out at the grass on one of the lawns at Sissinghurst where a mulberry tree used to grow. Gordon Farris, the gardener, was hoeing the beds under the lime trees, and my father described to me the difference between Gordon’s work and the work of what he then used to call ‘a city slicker’; and the contrary difference in what they earned, and their status in the world because of it. In that tiny parable was bundled up an entire universe of liberal political and social ideas, a kind of moral baseline, a yardstick against which the acreages of life could be measured. There were many other things – more than he knew: the importance of love and work, of treating people properly, of not giving up, not cheating, of friendship, efficiency and honesty; of the love of nature and the landscape; of buildings, history and archaeology; and above all, as the defining frame for all these things, a love of and attachment to Sissinghurst.
I was thinking of this, this gift of a place, with all that word means, as I sat and smoked that long afternoon, looking across a piece of England, of Kent, the Kentish Weald, which I knew better than anywhere on earth. I listened to the traffic booming on the r
oad to the south and looked at the bobbled roof of the woods, on which the sun was just laying its coat of afternoon light, the scoop of hedged fields between them, the shadows of the trees drawn out across the stubble, almost from one hedge to another, the dust lying in pools on the track at my feet. Was Sissinghurst, this picture of rooted and inherited stability, to be the frame for the remaining half of my life? That afternoon I thought so, and felt its arms closing around me.
I went down to the Hammer Brook. It was a quiet and windless afternoon. The stream, at the end of summer, was low and the feet of the alders exposed, but here and there along its length, over some of its darkest pools, so deep that there is no telling where the bottom lies, the big, old oaks were standing on the banks and stretching their arms out across the river to the other side. One by one, quite regularly, every now and then, the acorns fell from the trees into the river, a slow, intermittent dropping, occasionally hitting a branch on the way down and ricocheting through the tree, but more often a steady, damp, percussive music: a plum-like plop, a silence, and then another, glop. The acorns didn’t float, but sank into the depths of the pool to join the piky darkness of the river bed.
When there was a gust of wind, some of the leaves came floating and zigzagging down to the water, where they landed on the surface as curled boats, to be carried away downstream, or more often caught in the banks, or on the logs and branches that stuck out from them, where in the damp they started to rot, already becoming humus, returning nutrients to the soil from which they had sprung. Meanwhile the soft, slow oak-rain continued, a glugging, swallowing cluck or two each minute, the dropping sound of history and time, mesmeric as I listened to it, the twin and opposite of fish rising, the gulp of a river swallowing seed.
‘The past is never behind,’ John Berger wrote in Pig Earth, his great collection of tales and meditations on life in a small village in the French Alps. ‘It is always to the side. You come down from the forest at dusk and a dog is barking in a hamlet. A century ago in the same spot at the same time of day, a dog, when it heard a man coming down through the forest, was barking, and the interval between the two occasions is no more than a pause in the barking.’ That is what I have come to understand about the acorns dropping into the Hammer Brook. Nothing is intelligible without the past, not because it is the past but because it is the missing body of the present. The bed of the Hammer Brook has always seemed to me like an ancient place, where without effort one can see and feel what it was like here in the distant past, but Berger’s point is more than that. In places like this, at this level, time has not passed at all. The dropping of the acorns is how things are.
I came to realise what I was hungry for, not that afternoon, but in the weeks and months that followed. It was to revive a landscape that had been allowed to forget its past. That desire, my attempt to make it a reality and a belief that it was something that had significance beyond Sissinghurst, is what this book is about. I knew that to understand it I first had to go back to some roots and sources, to the beginnings of this place, to establish some of the foundations, to understand what the historical beginnings of Sissinghurst had been, to discover its hidden meanings. But even as I began to think about them, I understood that the place I remembered, with all its multifarious life, was the last of the great continuities that stretched back from here deep into the past. By chance, just at the moment it was coming under the knife, I had been allowed to see it, before the locust years ate away at its body. In the light of that, those years, the years of ‘modernity’, seemed now to have been an aberration. The lasting fact was the system as it had been. The new sanitised monoculture was a short wrong turning. All I wanted was to rejoin the main path.
How to make these landscapes live again? How to sew back together the very things that modern life seemed to have severed: people and place, good food and good environments, what was done now and what had been done here before? How to reconnect? That was the all-important question: how to reconnect the deeper meaning of the place with the way it existed today. That need for connectedness became the driving motive for me. If I could help steer Sissinghurst towards a richer condition, that would be a form of reclaiming it, of moving it on to another stage in its existence. Sissinghurst had to be restored to a fullness of life, but how to do it? That was the task and the question.
TWO
Inheritance
Sissinghurst belongs to the National Trust. In a cabinet on the first-floor landing, my father had left a file for me. All the relevant papers, carefully arranged in chronological order, some of them marked with Post-its, told the story of how and why he had given Sissinghurst to the Trust in the 1960s. Soon after he died, and after I had replied to the five hundred condolence letters we had received, I sat at his desk and read through the file. I knew that if I was going to do anything for Sissinghurst I had to understand the relationship with the Trust in detail. Nothing would happen here unless the Trust came to share the ideal.
By June 1962, when Vita died, the Trust had already become a complex organism, well into its middle age. It is a profoundly English institution, in love with the past and with the natural world, polite in its ideals and civilising in its aims. As David Cannadine has written, it had its beginnings in a period at the end of the nineteenth century when along with ‘royal ceremonial, the old school tie, Sherlock Holmes, Gilbert and Sullivan, test match cricket and bacon and eggs’ a whole clutch of institutions was established which have survived and have come to define a certain kind of Englishness. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), the Dictionary of National Biography (1885), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (1889) and Country Life (1897) are all the National Trust’s contemporaries. It had begun in 1895 as an entirely private charitable project. The motive behind it was a high-minded, liberal, philanthropic desire to bring the solace of the untouched natural landscapes of England and Wales to the multitudes of Britain’s industrial cities. The properties it owned – largely pieces of beautiful landscape – were to be ‘open-air sitting rooms for the poor’. After 1918, that liberalism morphed into its conservative cousin, a Stanley Baldwinesque longing for the perfections of a forgotten age. In the late thirties and even more after 1945, that reactionary glow to the Trust deepened once again into the phase that still marks it in the minds of many. With a helping hand from the Old Etonian Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton, the Trust was able to acquire a string of country houses and their estates. Dalton’s scheme was to encourage large landed families, many of them faced with enormous death duties, to transfer the ownership of their properties to the government, which would then hand them on to the Trust. The value of the properties would be set against the amount of tax that was owed. Many great country houses were in this way saved for the nation. Dalton thought of them, collectively, as a magnificent memorial to the dead of the Second World War. In return for giving their inheritance to the nation, the donor families, as they were called, were allowed and encouraged to remain in the houses which they no longer owned.
Some families, like the Sackvilles at Knole which was transferred in 1948, were given a two-hundred-year lease. Others were granted the right to stay there for ever. It may seem in retrospect like a slightly strange deal to have been struck by the government. Why, if it was accepting these properties instead of tax, should the ex-owners have any rights there at all? The answer lay in the nature and beliefs of the National Trust at the time.
Presided over by the spirit of the charming, arch-conservative, gentry-loving Jim Lees-Milne – one of my grandfather’s most devoted lovers – the Trust was an elite oasis in which a version of old England was able to survive. It was, until the mid-1960s, a club for aesthetically inclined grandees. Its all-important Historic Buildings Committee was made up almost entirely of peers. When a man called John Smith was proposed as a member, the chairman, Viscount Esher, said, ‘I suppose it is a good thing to have a proletarian name on the Committee – anybody know him?’ ‘Yes,’ said the earl of Euston, �
�he is my brother-in-law.’ This was the organisation which persuaded the government that donor families should be allowed to stay put, some for ever.
The curators and designers who formed a (largely gay) coterie at the centre referred to the muddy-booted agents and land managers in the regions as the ‘mangel-wurzels’. There was little concern for the realities and subtleties of landscape ecology. What mattered was the elegant view and the general sense that here at least the inroads of the vulgarising masses had been resisted. Enormous liberties were taken not only with historic interiors (where the favoured decorator, John Fowler, devised a kind of all-purpose National Trusty loveliness) but with historic gardens (Hidcote had its authentically vulgar cherry trees removed) and important landscapes (the great if battered avenue at Wimpole in Cambridgeshire was needlessly cut down and many of the Trust’s ancient woods were planted with conifers). Angry reports by the conservationists springing up in the 1960s regularly condemned the organisation for an indifference to the things that really mattered.
The 1960s saw the beginning of a fourth phase: more efficient, less introspective, more commercial, pushing for large-scale membership and large-scale visiting, publishing more, opening up the previously hidden parts of their properties, getting serious about nature conservation. This was just the moment Sissinghurst engaged with the Trust. It had become a classic English organisation, riddled with tensions: moneymaking against high-level aesthetic appreciation; wide-scale access against conserving the fragile and the delicate; purity against populism; a grandee vision against popular need.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 4
