From the 1920s until 1999, the very opposite had been true. A dynasty of outstanding men, their wives, sons and daughters, had been the farmers both on Sissinghurst Castle Farm and at Bettenham, its neighbour. Their latest representative, James Stearns, who had the farm until his retirement in 1999, still lived in the big Victorian farmhouse, which he and his wife Pat ran as a bed & breakfast.
I knew that in them there was a deep reservoir of understanding about how this place might work as a single, integrated farm again. So one morning early in 2005, James walked me round the fields. All the generalised nonsense that people talk about landscape fell away with the farmer’s eye, with James’s big bass voice and his gentle, half-hesitant, half-adamant air. The engine room of the farm, as he called it, was in the northern half, the big arable fields called Lodge, Large, Frogmead and Eight Acres. ‘You could get four and a half tons an acre of wheat off all of them in a good year,’ he told me, looking at me with his huge bloodhound eyes. Some of Frogmead lay a little frosty and so ‘you would need to be careful if you were thinking of putting fruit in there’. In other words: don’t. The hops did well in Frogmead but only a madman would consider setting up a hop garden nowadays. The economics of hops were in tatters, destroyed by a combination of lager (which needs no hops) and chemical substitutes, which were said to flavour the beer just as well.
The whole of the rest of the farm was, in James’s view, rather subsidiary to that northern arable block. He had never been a great man for animals, and all the photographs his mother showed me of him when he was young had him sitting on a tractor, ploughing or bringing in the harvest. The belt of grazing around the Castle and garden, the four wet fields, known as the Well Fields, in the far south-western corner of the farm, and the very rabbity Horse Race and Nine Acres, all varied in his mind from ‘too small’ to ‘clogged’ and merely ‘rubbish’. Only the Park and the Cow Field next to the old dairy survived James’s general verdict that the arable engine room was what counted. What was so good about the Park? It made ‘beautiful blue soft hay’, especially at the far end. And the Cow Field? ‘It’s the best bit of dirt on the farm. The cows were always turned out on to it and it would grow anything now. It’s wet along the southern edge and up in the northern corner. I think there might be a broken drain there. But the rest of it: you couldn’t look for anything better.’
I had never heard anyone talk about Sissinghurst like this before. No one here had ever talked to me about dirt as a lovely thing. It was as if James was a voice from the past, from a time that understood the reality of something I only half remembered, a reality beyond the reduced condition of the modern world. I loved talking to him, and I could see he loved talking to me. I don’t think anybody had talked to him like this for years.
1940s: the Stearns family at Bettenham
Even so, I knew this emphasis on heavy arable cropping was not quite the whole picture, or at least it was a picture that had already come down from the high point it had achieved a little earlier under his grandfather. I went to the National Archives in Kew in south-west London. During the war, confidential reports were made to the government about the state of every farm in the country. I looked up the Farm Survey Record made at Sissinghurst and Bettenham on 4 June 1941. The two farms were being run in tandem and the farmer was listed as Captain A. O. Beale, James Stearns’s grandfather. Here at last, in all the sterility of a ministry form, was the picture I had been looking for, the concentrated meaning of a place complete in itself, quite straightforwardly listed in the printed boxes and dotted lines of an airmail-thin, sky-blue government form.
The mixed and variegated fields were laid out in front of me: 93 acres of wheat, 7 of barley, 11 of oats, 1 of rye, 5 of mixed corn and 23 acres of beans, into which the animals could be turned at the end of the year. There were 3 acres of first early potatoes and 5 of maincrop. (These the Beales used to sell to local schools and individuals, bag by bag.) There was kale, a little rapeseed, an acre of turnips and 2¼ of mangolds. There were 10½ acres of hops in Frogmead and 46 acres of orchard with grazing below the trees. The 15 acres of peas were to go for canning. Fifty acres of meadow were to be made into hay and 144 acres of grass to be grazed by 45 head of cattle and 600-odd sheep, ewes and lambs. There were 12 pigs and 27 piglets, 110 chickens, 4 horses and 21 people, men and women, boys and girls, working here.
It was no fantasy, then: here at one level farther down than James’s memories was his grandfather’s farm at full stretch at the height of the war. All of it, according to the report, was in a near-perfect condition: rich, busy and complex, with piped water to the farmhouse, fields and buildings, all fences, ditches, drains, eight farm cottages and the farmhouse itself in good repair, with no infestation of rabbits or moles, rats or mice, rooks or wood pigeons and with no derelict fields. Two 22-horsepower Fordson tractors as well as five fixed engines powered the work on the 450 acres Captain Beale rented from Vita. Messrs S. J. Day and L. Holland, who compiled the report, wrote that ‘This farm is being farmed to full capacity in a most excellent manner. The present arable crops being especially good.’
I looked through the neighbouring farms. There was no scrimping of criticism there. Captain Beale’s neighbours would have been crushed to read the verdicts written on them and their farms: lack of energy, insufficient attention, no good with hedging and ditching, illness, ignorance, lack of experience and ambition, lack of modern knowledge, ‘not enough pains being taken with the arable’, ‘I do not think the occupier has much idea of how to manage land’, poor ploughing techniques, their farms infested with magpies, anthills, docks and charlock, thistles, their ditches clogged, their fields too small, their drainage hopeless, their houses reliant on wells and without electricity. Almost alone in the entire parish, Bettenham and Sissinghurst Castle Farm stood out as a joint model of completeness.
‘The Hon Mrs VM Nicolson’ filled in her own form, listing her half-acre of maincrop potatoes, 6 acres of orchard and grass, 1 acre of vegetables for humans, her 3 cows, 18 ewes, 42 chickens, ‘1 motor mower for lawns (not used yet this year)’ and ‘1 engine to drive circular saw for wood’. I knew that engine, still there when I was a boy, connected with a long wobbling belt to the naked saw-wheel which would spin to a blur when Copper started it up with the crank and make its own repeated animal whine as he pushed one log after another past its revolving teeth. Vita could not ‘give the best estimate you can of the annual rental value’ because ‘much of it is a pleasure garden’.
There are moments when you realise that what you had only been sleepwalking towards has suddenly acquired a substance and a materiality. That is what it felt like at the varnished beech desk in the National Archives, looking at these forms, which I am sure no one had looked at since the 1940s. I do not need to have the fields at Sissinghurst in front of my eyes to see them in every detail, but that morning I saw them as I knew I wanted them to be.
Linda Clifford, James Stearns’s sister, gave me something even better: her grandfather’s farm diary for 1954. Here, fourteen years later, in the peak of the 1950s boom, were the same pair of farms still pursuing the same wonderful, variegated, polycultural ends. Captain Beale, now in partnership with Stanley Stearns, still had seven men working for him, not to speak of the thirty or forty hop-pickers who came down from London in the autumn and stayed in the sheds beside the Hammer Brook, where their foundations and bits of corrugated-iron roof are still to be found in among the brambles. There was a herd of dairy shorthorns at the Castle, and another of Guernseys at Bettenham. There were pigs and sheep, all the same cereals, as well as plums, pears and two sorts of apples. The breathtaking part of it was the work programme for the year. I made an abstract of the year’s tasks:
Ploughing (20 Jan; 23 July (Tassells); 4 Oct)
Defrosting pipes (1 Feb)
Litter yards (1, 2, 11 Feb)
Snow clearing with dung lifts (2 Feb)
Sawing (5 Feb)
Shooting foxes (8 Feb)
Hedging (9
Feb)
Pruning (9 Feb, 5 Nov)
Woodcutting (9 Feb)
Sowing (Peas 12 March; Barley 13 March; Wheat 15 March;
Clover under barley 13 April; Kale 30 July (Bettenham);
Oats 6 Oct; Wheat in Banky 3 Nov)
Hop dressing (15 March)
Moving poles in hop garden (28 March)
Rolling (9, 13 April)
Harrowing (13 April)
Hop stringing (14 April; 17, 29 May; 1 June)
Sheep dipping (14 April)
Faggot carting (30 April, 17 May)
Weeding (30 April)
Turning our heifers (30 April)
Gang mowing in orchards (15, 18, 29 May; 1, 5, 22, 24 June)
Hop earthing up (1, 24 June)
Mowing (Park 8 June)
Hoeing (Kale 22 June)
Haymaking and baling (23, 24 June; 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 20, 21, 29 July; 3 Aug, last bale made 4 Aug)
Silage making (Hoppers Hut 2 July, 11 Aug; Horse Race 13, 14, 17 Aug)
Cut clover (11 Aug)
Combining barley (11, 13–14 Aug)
Apple picking (12 Aug, 2 Sept, 4, 27, 28 Oct)
Combining oats in Birches (14, 15, 16 Aug)
Baling straw (16, 17, 19, 21 Aug)
Cutting peas (in Banky 16, 17, 18, 21 Aug; in Frogmead, Hop
Garden 28 Aug)
Combining wheat in Large (20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26 Aug)
Combining clover in Lodge (23 Aug)
Hop picking (6–30 Sept)
Combining Barley in 8 acres (13–17 Sept)
Combining peas (in Hop Garden 19, 20, 21 Sept; Banky 23, 29
September, 4–8 Oct)
On top of all this was the pharmacopoeia of treatments to which the crops and fields were subject. Although monumental quantities of farmyard manure were being carted out on to the fields from the cattle’s winter housing, any thought that fifty years ago this was an organic farm, as I had fondly imagined, soon disappeared under Captain Beale’s busy, often slightly scrawled diary jottings. Chemical imbalances, fertility deficiencies, fungal and pest attack: the tractors were out almost daily applying one potion or stimulus after another. Nitrate chalk, potash and superpotash, Epsom salts and ‘Copper colloidal’ for the peas, Melaldehyde on the wheat, slag on the orchards, Arcolin on the kale, the kale sprayed for flea-beetle, and the full battery of sulphate of ammonia, Pestox, Blitox, sulphur, copper sulphate and Boclear all applied to the labour- and capital-intensive hop gardens.
All this was clear enough. There had not been a moment when the guillotine had come down. Here was the farm in transition from its old to its modern state. The large workforce, the integration of the dairy herds with the pastures and arable fields, providing their dung and requiring their fodder, was still the old world going at full tilt. Alongside it were all these ‘artificials’, these answers in a bag. By the end of the decade, Stanley Stearns had bought a hop-processing machine which made the forty hop-pickers unnecessary. By 1968, the hops, which had caught ‘wilt’, a fungal disease, were no longer worth going in for. The cattle finally went in 1980. Any idea of rotation went with them. There was no longer any need to interrupt the growing of arable crops with a fertility-building clover and grass ley if you could simply apply fertility brought in by a lorry. Artificial fertilisers made mixed farms inefficient. If you could grow 4½ tons an acre of wheat on a field year in, year out, then that was the way to go. Sissinghurst became a mainly arable farm, with some field-scale lettuces and Brussels sprouts grown on the side. It made some money – just – but its 259 acres were too small to compete with the East Anglian cereal barons, let alone America or the Ukraine. The industrial processes that made chemical farming possible had not only removed from this landscape almost everything that I loved about it, by the 1990s they had also made Sissinghurst unviable as a farm.
Given these economic and technological conditions, was there any way of recovering the enriched landscape? Was Sissinghurst caught in a kind of historical bind? Or was there a route out of this, based not on competing in world markets but by satisfying the modern appetite for ‘real food’? Could Sissinghurst become, in effect, a retail farm? Could a new version of the high, expert agriculture that Captain Beale, in his tweed jacket and tie, his pipe in one hand, the other in a jacket pocket, had performed so expertly, could that be practised here again?
THREE
The Idea
In the winter after my father’s death I started to feel my way towards a new, or at least a new-old, understanding of how Sissinghurst might be. I wrote to Fiona Reynolds, the director-general of the National Trust, who I knew slightly, to thank her for coming down to his funeral and to float past her a rather public version of the ideas that were on my mind.
There is only one thing at Sissinghurst I would love to see different – which is the farm not producing commodity cereals in a contractorised and heartless way, as it does now, but becoming a model of polycultural richness as it was 40 years ago: hops, fruit and dairy, to all of which it is well suited, and all of which could become the basis of a rampantly successful Sissinghurst brand of jams and beers and cheeses and all the rest of it. You would have to go a long way to find as good a ready-made brand as Sissinghurst waiting on the shelf. And it would employ people on the place! I am sure I have heard you talk often about a people-rich countryside, labour-intensive and high value-added agriculture and so on. The country needs it and this could be such a good and profitable working model for that idea. That is a long-term dream of mine, but it is one I feel in my gut you might share.
She replied nicely but uncommittedly. Long-term was probably the phrase. Anyway, the idea of the ‘Sissinghurst brand’ is something that would come to seem too thin and wrong. The whole notion of a brand, even if the brand was meant to embody authenticity and richness, contradicted the very qualities it was meant to convey. The idea I had of Sissinghurst was something that was too much to be encapsulated in anything resembling a brand. I wanted to rekindle the sense of this place as a fully working and integrated whole. To do that, we had to sell something from it. We even had to sell the idea of ‘wholeness’. But that didn’t mean the brand was the destination. The brand was an instrument not the goal. I wanted a sense here of overwhelming well-being, which could be interpreted I suppose as a kind of brand but could scarcely be achieved if thought of as one. That was the paradox: a brand whose brand identity was its brandlessness.
Perhaps Sissinghurst could be considered a product, and like all products needed to renew itself, to sew together its old self, its particular qualities, with a new kind of response to an evolving world. And perhaps, now I look back on it, that is what I was engaged in: a rebranding exercise. What, in the most brutal, modern commercial language, was the business here? Heritage horticulture with a lesbian-aristocratic gloss, allied to a tranquillity destination with café and gift shop attached. That was the old proposition. My ideas, equally brutally seen, were to bump that into another market niche by laying over it a holistic real-food agenda which would appeal to the urban middle classes, precisely the kind of moneyed market the National Trust needed to court. I can write that now, three years later; it was certainly not how I was thinking of at the time.
Meanwhile Sarah and I tried to settle into Sissinghurst with our two daughters and my three sons, who were mostly away at school and university. It was a slightly strange experience. The house was overwhelmingly parental: my father’s furniture, his books, his files, his pictures, his whole habit of being. I used to catch myself tidying up, not because I minded the mess our family was making but because he would have. Boots in the hall, old cups of coffee, dog beds, last night’s washing-up: all of this would have summoned from him that particular, half-audible, rather sibilant under-the-breath whistling, usually a tune from My Fair Lady, which was the signal of contained impatience and anxiety. A shift into ‘Lili Marlene’ was not good: major dissatisfaction. So I tidied up to avoid the whistling. And then, terrifyingly, I found myself w
histling too. Why are you whistling under your breath?’ my daughter Rosie asked. ‘Because I like the tune,’ I said, exactly what my father would have said, and just as untrue.
On top of that, we had to deal with the National Trust, which at times was like having a third, even more supervisory parent. We were undoubtedly a difficult new presence for them. Instead of a single, self-contained, beneficent and peace-loving octogenarian, they now had on their doorstep a family consisting of two busy, untidy grown-ups, a Land Rover that leaked oil all over the National Trust cream- and caramelcoloured tarmac, two daughters with bikes that were leant against yew hedges, three dogs that needed to do what dogs need to do, two adult rabbits (brother and sister) and their six babies, which were currently smaller than the mesh of the wire we had put up to enclose them. None of this was within the National Trust guidelines. The rabbit run we created looked like something on the back edge of a run-down housing estate outside Swindon. But what can you do if that is the sort of family you are?
And then in January 2005 the Trust sent me a ‘Draft Occupancy Agreement’, which seemed to confirm the worst. Sarah was to have no rights to live here if I died. All of us needed permission to go into any part of the building except the part we actually ate and slept in. We were to ‘notify Trust staff if guests of the family will be entering the garden’. Our children were not to go anywhere near the greenhouses or nursery. We could have people to lunch only on closed days and only then ‘with the prior agreement of the Trust’. Any photographs we took inside or outside the house were to be Trust copyright. The Trust was to be informed if we were away for more than two days or if anyone came to stay. We were to park our car with the exhaust pointing to the west. The occupation of the house was ‘at the discretion of the National Trust’ – in other words we could be thrown out at any time it liked. The agreement my father had made with them in 1967 was no more than a list of his wishes. It had no force in law.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 6
