Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  Sissinghurst, in its roots, is a little second rate. This part of Kent has never been smart England, and its deepest of origins, the sources of its own soil, are decidedly murky. I love it for that. This is ordinariness itself: no volcanoes and no cataclysms, just a slow, deep gathering of what it was. The first moment when Sissinghurst came into being, when the stuff you can now hold there in your hands was there to be held, was about 120 million years ago. Britain was at the latitude of Lagos. Dinosaurs walked its river valleys, and a range of old and stony hills lay across the whole of England to the north. Forests of horsetails and giant ferns shrouded the valley slopes. Two steaming rivers flowed south out of those hills, their tributaries grinding away at the old rocks of which the hills were made. The rivers ran fast and carried with them a load of coarse-grained sand. As they emerged from the hills, just south of London, they flowed into a huge and swampy delta, covering perhaps 30,000 square miles, stretching from here far to the south of Paris, a dank, tropical place with many soft islands within it. Here the current slowed and dropped the sand in wide banks across the estuary. These, in their origins, were the sands on which Shirley Morgan lay immaculate and the officers of the Hampshire Militia, the young Edward Gibbon among them, raced their sweating horses.

  As the rivers coming south from the uplands in Hertfordshire and Essex wore away at their hills, they slowed and became sluggish, carrying now only the finest of grains. What had been delta sands turned to thick grey mineral mud. The grains settled closely together in a gluey morass, a brackish and hostile place. It was a fossilised quagmire, impenetrable, a trap for anything that wandered into it, burying entire trees and whole animals, a graveyard of gummy secrets. This was the origin of the Wealden clay. Of course, my father didn’t try to kiss Shirley Morgan there. They would have sunk into it, slowly disappearing, as if into the jaws of an insect-eating fungus.

  When I was a boy, I used to play with the clay in the summer. You could dig it out of the side of the lake banks, wet and slithery in your hands, your fingers pushing into the antique ooze. If you held a small ball of it in your fist and wetted it and squeezed it, two slimy snakes of clay, like a patissier’s piping, would emerge top and bottom, curling, ribbed, while their miniature cousins came out between the joints of your fingers. It felt like ur-stuff, stuff at its most basic, as good as dough or pastry, squeezable, makable, lovable. Occasionally, we moulded it into pots, one of which I still have sitting on my desk, unglazed and unbaked, a rough lump from the basement of existence. Your shorts and shirt after one of these mornings would be unwearably filthy, your hands and legs washable only under a hose.

  This was the clay which in the sixteenth century gave modern Sissinghurst one of its essential substances and colours: brick. No record survives of the great brick building programmes here, either from the 1530s or the 1560s, but there can be no doubt that the clay for the pink Tudor and Elizabethan palaces at Sissinghurst came from the stream valley just to the south. When Vita and Harold wanted to put up new garden walls in the 1930s, they commissioned bricks from the Frittenden brickworks only a mile away on the other side. But the bricks of those walls never looked right: too brown, without the variable, pink, iron-rich, rosy flush the sixteenth-century builders had found. Even from a mile away, the brick Vita and Harold used was obviously not from here. It was one of their mistakes.

  If the Sissinghurst process followed the pattern elsewhere in the Weald in the sixteenth century, the clay itself would have been tested and selected by an expert, a travelling brickmaker. In the autumn or early winter, gangs of labourers would then have dug the raw clay out of the valley and spread it out over what are now the Lake field and Long Orchard, so that autumn rains could get into the lumps and the frost split them. All winter the clay lay there on the fields, a dirty orange scar, like the embankment for a railway or bypass under construction. In the spring, the clay was rewetted and then, with more gangs of day labourers, trampled underfoot. Raw clay is full of little stony nodules. If they are left in the clay when it is fired, they overheat and split the bricks. For weeks, probably in large wooden troughs, the clay was kneaded and the little stones removed so that the brickmakers were left with a smooth and seamless paste which could be pushed into wooden brick-sized moulds, usually here nine inches long, four wide and two deep, the long, thin, smoked-salmon sliver-shaped bricks of sixteenth-century Sissinghurst. I remember seeing moulds of exactly that form in the Frittenden brickworks when I was a boy, but they have disappeared now. The clammy raw clay bricks were then turned out of the moulds and left to dry in stacks for a month. In Frittenden there were long, open-sided wooden sheds for this, with oak frames and tiled roofs, but the scene in the fields of Elizabethan Sissinghurst would have been more ad hoc than that: bricks drying in what sun there was on offer. The whole process would have relied on a good fine summer.

  Only at the end of the drying, when the bricks would already have developed some of the cracks and wrinkles you can still see in Sissinghurst’s walls, would they be fired. Specialist brickmakers would arrive again, hired for the purpose, and build temporary ‘clamps’, clay-sealed kilns in which the bricks were baked in a wood fire. It was a local and not entirely consistent process. Those bricks that were at the windward end of the clamp were more thoroughly fired than those downwind. The clay itself had wide variations in iron content. Different clamps, some with drier timber than others, some even using brushwood, burned at different temperatures. And so the flickering pinkness of Sissinghurst’s walls emerged from the ground, everything from red to black, the near-white pink of flesh to the pink of camellias, wine red, apricot, even where it is rubbed a kind of orange, but in sum, across a whole wall, always with a rosy freshness, a lightness to the colour which denies its origins in damp and fire, and scarcely reflects the whole process, the transmutation of an ancient eroded swamp. Not that the Elizabethans would have liked the variability. They would have admired and required precision and exactness. It was only because there was no stone here with which to build that they turned to the clay. The idea of bringing any quantity of stone from the quarries in the greensand ridge eight miles to the north was unthinkable, in time and expense, on the wet clay roads. Clay ground, thank God, meant a brick house, a subliminal joining of a high-prospect tower to the ground it surveys.

  Even since human beings first arrived here, 750,000 years ago, seven ice ages have come and gone, driving the people, the animals and the plants far to the south, to their refuges in the warmth of southern Europe, and leaving this place, if not ice-bound, at least a frozen tundra, bleak and treeless. If I shut my eyes, I like to see it then, just at its moment of emergence, at the end of the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago. It is a rolling windswept plain, continuous into Europe. Nothing coats the horizon but the grasses and the moss. There is cold to the north. Storms cross it in winter. In summer, as it does the steppe, the sun dries and burnishes it, a Ukrainian pelt concealing the earth. Ten thousand years ago, the average July temperature in Kent was already in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. With that warmth, into this huge savannah, more developed forms of life come rippling up in the wake of the retreating cold. First, the great herds of grazing animals, what may appear now like a North American scene but was indeed the case in northern Europe as the ice withdrew. Roe deer, red deer, no bison but the huge wild cows called aurochsen (of which the last, a Polish cow, died in 1627, and one of whose horns is still used as a communal drinking cup in a Cambridge college), elk or moose and herds of wild boar: all of these in their hundreds of thousands thrived on the great grassy treeless plains, where the wolves and lynxes pursued them. Bears would have fished for salmon and trout in the Medway and the Beult, the Hammer Brook and its glittering, unshaded tributaries. Foxes, cats, martens, otters and beavers would all have been making their way up from the south, a spreading tide of appetite and complexity.

  A sense of openness and fullness would have been there at the very beginning of Sissinghurst. Even now, wild animals in thes
e situations are not afraid. The first European visitors to the great American plains found the herds wandering up to them with fearlessness and curiosity, a look in the eye from a stag, a straight sniff from a moose. Charles Darwin killed a fox on the South American island of Chiloe in 1834 by walking up to it and hitting it on the head with his geological hammer. Those paintings of Douanier Rousseau’s in which wild animals put their noses into the faces of men asleep on the ground are not romantic fantasies but descriptions of how the world once was. Eden was a reality here. And the first domesticated animals accompanied the men. As Sir Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin, described in 1865, the children of the native Americans kept bear cubs as their pets. All those paintings on cave walls clearly bear witness to animals seen close up and in numbers. A drawing on ivory from the Pyrenees of about ten thousand years ago shows a horse’s head in a harness. People and their animals walked up into the oceanic widths of the grassy savannah. This moment is the oldest of the Wealden folk memories. I have my grandmother’s copy of the first great book written about Kent, William Lambarde’s Perambulation, published in 1570. She must have had it in the 1920s when writing The Land, her long Virgilian epic on the Weald, sidelining in it the passages she liked. The Weald, Lambarde had written, and she marked, ‘was nothing else but a Desart, and waste Wildernesse, not planted with Towns or peopled with men, as the outsides of the Shire were, but stored and stuffed with heards of Deer and droves of Hogs only’.

  The birds came with them and with the birds the trees. In the pollen record, those trees whose seeds are dispersed by birds are the first to appear in the wake of the shrinking ice. Snow buntings, the Lapland bunting and the shore lark all now spend the summer in the tundra on the edge of the Arctic and the winter farther south. They would have carried the first tree seeds up to sub-arctic Sissinghurst, perhaps the blackthorn and hawthorn, whose berries they would have eaten in the Dordogne or the Lot and would have dispersed here to make the first shrubby patches in the grasslands. The nutcracker has been found carrying hazelnuts ten or twelve miles from the trees where they picked them up, and perhaps, ahead of the wind, the nutcrackers were responsible for the big hazel woods which were the first to grow on the grasslands here. A thousand miles at ten miles a year takes only a century.

  Quite slowly, with the help of the warm south wind, the wood thickened. First, the willows, the pioneers, set up in the damp patches, the fluff of their seeds drifting up in the summers. By 8000 BC the birch had arrived. Five hundred years later, the oaks came, their acorns almost certainly carried north by jays. The elm had also come, growing only on the dry land, not down in the damp of the clay. (‘The oak unattended by the elm,’ J. M. Furley, the great nineteenth-century historian of the Weald, wrote, ‘betrays a soil not prized by the agriculturalist.’) By about 6000 BC alders had colonised the stream margins, where they are still to be found, reliant on the water flowing steadily past their roots. The ash came at the same time. Not until about 5000 BC were there any beeches here, and then only, as now, on the drier hills. The hornbeam came even later and the chestnut not until the Romans brought it.

  All of them had come north from their ice age refuges in France, wandering up on the wind into the increasingly friendly environments of Kent. It is like the cast of a play coming on to the stage and finding a seat there. As you walk through the woods and stream margins of Sissinghurst today, it is of course possible to listen to the ensemble, just to drink in the flecking green light of the wood in summer, but you can pick out individual lines of the instruments too and find here now, perfectly articulate if you listen for it, the story of their arrival.

  The thorns were the early pioneers. In a rough and neglected sliver of Sissinghurst Park Wood, where some giant alder stools have overgrown themselves and crashed down on to the wood floor, leaving a hole in the canopy behind them, blackthorn has invaded to make a thick and bitter, self-protective patch. The long sharp thorns are poisonous. If one of them pricks you and breaks off in your flesh, the red-flushed wound festers for days. The blackthorn patch is everything the word ‘thicket’ might imply, tangled into a hedgehog of denial and involution, clawing at itself, a crown of thorns thirty feet across. A big hawthorn standing coated in mayflower in a hedgerow is one thing – and well-grown thorns certainly make outstanding firewood – but the essence of a thorn is this thickety resistance to all outsiders, a miniature act of self-containment which the medieval English called a spinney, a spiny place, designed to exclude.

  As children, we were always taught that you must try to sympathise with the spiky and the spiny, to understand what it was that did not allow them the open, displaying elegance of the beech or the confidence of the oak. Why are thorns so bitter? What can be the point, in such a calm English wood, of such unfriendliness? You feel like asking them to relax, even if relaxation is not in their nature. But everywhere in the woods at Sissinghurst there is one repeated clue to this foundation-level exercise in tree psychology: at the foot of almost every oak there is at least one holly nestling in the shade. Why? Why is the spiky holly drawn to the roots of the oak? What sort of symbiosis is this? But the question, it turns out, may be the wrong way round.

  Why does the oak live with the holly? Because the holly, when they were both young, looked after the oak. Its spiky evergreen leaves protected the young acorn seedling from the browsing lips of the ever-hungry deer. The oak had a holly nurse, and only after a while did the young tree outstrip the protector that now shelters in its shade.

  That too was the role played by the early spinney thickets. In an England filled with roaming herds, new trees needed to adopt one of three or four strategies to outstrip the nibbling lips. Either a spiny blanket which would mean they weren’t eaten themselves. Or sheltering within someone else’s spiny blanket, so that by the time they emerged from it they were big enough not to be eaten. Or, like those other pioneers, the willows, growing so fast that at least one or two of you could outstrip the ubiquitous mouths. Or finally, like the birch, just as much of a pioneer of new ground as the willow or the thorns, colonising new areas in such numbers that at least one or two would escape the enemy. The browsing beasts were at war with the trees and the tree strategies were clear enough: hunker down (the thorns); borrow a friend (oaks, elms, beeches and ashes); keep running (the willows); or blast them with numbers (the birch).

  Every one of these post-ice age theories of defence – spike, cower, rush or proliferate – is there to be seen in the Sissinghurst woods today. A few years ago, one of the great beeches on the high ridge of the big wood collapsed in a gale. Nothing was more shocking to me than to find it one autumn self-felled and horizontal, its stump a jagged spike ten or twelve feet high, looking more ripped than broken, as if someone had taken a pound of cheese and torn it in half. My father always used to bring us here in springtime when we were small and lie us down on the dry bronze leaves and mast below the tree. The new leaves sprinkled light on our faces. Each leaf was like a spot of greenness, floating, scarcely connected to the huge grey body of the tree. My father always said the same thing: how wonderful it was that this duchess, each year, dressed herself like a debutante for the ball. I cannot now look at a beech tree in spring without that phrase entering my mind.

  Later, I climbed it often enough, chimneying up between its forking branches, avoiding the horrible squirrel’s dray in one of its crooks, finding as you got higher that limbs that had seemed as solid as buildings farther down started to sway and shift under your weight and pressure. Then coming up into the realm of the leaves, as tender as lettuce early in the summer, acquiring a sheen and a brittleness as the months went on, until at last, in the top, like a crow’s nest in a square-rigger, where the branches were no thicker than my forearm, I could look out over the roof of the wood, across the small valley, to the Tower, whose parapet half a mile away was level with my eye and where the pink- and blue-shirted visitors to the garden could be seen by me, while I knew that to them I was quite
invisible.

  Now the whole tree was down. Its splaying limbs had been smashed in the fall and lay along with the trunk like a doll someone had squashed into a box. I could walk, teeteringly, the length of the tree, as if I were a nuthatch whose world had been turned through ninety degrees. Even then, the beech started to rot where it lay. As it did so, something miraculous happened: in the wide circle around the beech’s trunk, to which its multilayered coverage of leaves had denied light, nothing in the past had grown. Now, though, the light poured in, and in that circle hundreds and hundreds of birch trees sprang up, a dense little wood of rigid spaghetti trees, a noodle wood, without any great dignity or individual presence but extraordinary for its surge and hunger, opportunists, like pioneers pouring off their ship into a new and hope-filled land. Within their new wood, the body of the beech lay as a mausoleum of itself, vast and inert, an unburied colossus, yesterday’s story, no more than a reservoir of nutrients for the life that was so patently already coming after. The birch surge was, in its way, just as much as the thorn thicket, or the oaks sheltering in the embrace of the holly, or the romping willows on the banks of the lake, a vision of what happened here after the ice age was over, when the cold withdrew, and trees reclaimed the country.

  As much as the clay, the trees are at the heart of Sissinghurst. To the south and west of here, the woods of the High Weald make up a broken, parcelled, varied country, thick with tiny settlements and ancient names, all of them in their own nests of privacy, tucked in among the folds of the wood on the hills. It is still possible, even today, to walk for eighty miles in a line going west from Sissinghurst – if you are careful and pick your path – without leaving woodland for more than a quarter of a mile at a time. Not until you reach the Hampshire chalk at Selborne does open country defeat you. Weald means Wald, the great wood of England, and although it has been eaten into and nibbled at for at least fifteen centuries, and perhaps for more like fifty, it persists. It is the frame of Sissinghurst, the woods, in Kipling’s words, ‘that know everything and tell nothing’.