This can only be a suggestion – it is neither provable nor disprovable – but it seems to me that these routes into the Weald are the oldest things here. And it is perfectly likely that they are not a human construct. They may be older than the presence of people here, the fossilisation and defining of routes into the great half-open, half-grassland forest, used by the early herds. This making of paths by the great herds into the wilderness is a universal fact. When men came to lay the first railways through the Appalachians in the mid-nineteenth century, the routes they chose were the tracks that had been made and kept open through the Virginian forests by the trampling and grazing of the bison. Our Kentish lanes may have the same beginnings.
Sissinghurst in antiquity was not part of the solid, impenetrable and frighteningly dense forest, but threaded with these through-paths making their ways between the clearings and thickets, finding themselves sometimes in savannah-like parkland where the deer grazed and game was to be had, sometimes passing through patches where young oaks were sprouting up between the thorns and the hollies.
The deep past, then, was not, as we are so often encouraged to imagine it, some desperate and dreadful experience coloured only by threat and unkindness, but full of possibility, excitement and beauty in the empty half-open woodlands which were here then. Half-close your eyes one evening in Blackberry Lane and those four images from the Cranbrook bosses will come back to you: a relaxed beneficence among the fresh green hawthorns; some anxiety in the shadows; the bird half seen in the obscuring trees; and the big-mouthed grin of the goggle-eyed wood god. It is all here now and it was all here then.
There was one last object which if it had survived might have been the emblem of Sissinghurst two thousand years ago. It represents a little window on the distant past which opened in a Victorian summer and has since closed. George Neve, the distinguished tenant farmer here, a man of parts, contributor to the letter columns of national newspapers, was settled into the large and comfortable brick farmhouse at Sissinghurst which he had built almost twenty years before. The young cedars of Lebanon he had planted on his south lawn were eight years old and doing well. The laurels and rhododendrons in the dell next to his house were beginning to gloom over satisfactorily. It was time to show the county what sort of man he was.
George Neve invited the general meeting of the Kent Archaeological Society to spend part of its day at Sissinghurst. They came on 24 July 1873. Earl Amherst would be attending, as would Viscount Holmesdale, his son. There were about 140 people in all, including a general, an archdeacon and twenty-five vicars, many with their wives. After a preliminary meeting in the South Eastern Hotel in Staplehurst, they visited Staplehurst and Frittenden churches, and then came on to Sissinghurst in their carriages, where ‘Mr George Neve, of Sissinghurst Castle, most hospitably invited the whole company to partake of luncheon in a shaded nook upon his lawn, where tables were laid with abundant refreshments’.
After lunch, the company re-entered their carriages and went on to Cranbrook Church. Before they left, Neve would undoubtedly have shown them his treasure. It had been ploughed up five years before, at a depth of about eight inches, from a field near Bettenham, no more specific than that. A few years earlier, in another neighbouring field, the men on the farm had ploughed up an urn containing some bones. That, unfortunately, had been destroyed, but the treasure found in 1868 Neve had kept, and had even had photographed. An image of it would be reproduced in the volume of Archaeologia Cantiana that reported his lunch party. It was a gold ring, made of two gold wires, twisted together. One of the wires was thin and of the same diameter throughout; the other was three times as thick but tapered along its length to a point.
It was a piece of Celtic jewellery, belonging to someone about two thousand years ago who spoke a version of Welsh or Breton, the kind of ring that is found all over Europe, from Bohemia to the Hebrides. Its twistedness is the mark of a culture that liked complexity and the way in which things could turn inward and mix with their opposite. It was a beautiful thing: private not public, suggestive not assertive, symbolic not utilitarian. Perhaps it was a wedding ring, a binding of two lives, in gold because gold is everlasting. At some time in the last 130 years, this precious object has disappeared, but at least we have the image of it and the knowledge of its existence. I see in the Bettenham ring the culmination of this first phase of Sissinghurst’s existence. It – and the fact of a burial being made here – confirms a certain view of the ancient Wealden past. This was not, at least by the time of Christ, some godforsaken, Tolkienian forest in which trees loomed and rivers dripped, where people trod rarely and fearfully. Far from it: people knew Bettenham and Sissinghurst as theirs. Stream, meadow, wood and track, long summer grasses, spring flowers, the spread of archangel, stitchwort, campion and bluebells on the edge of the wood, the flickering of light down on to the water, the flash of the kingfisher, the pike in the dark pools, the songs of the nightingales and the woodpeckers, the swallows and house martins dipping on to the ponds, the fluster of pigeons, the flicker of kestrel and sparrowhawk: they would have known it all – and more, not in some marginalised way, scraping a desperate, squatter existence from the woods, but with comfort, gold, elegance and the symbolising of love and mutuality in a ring. They would have farmed here. Even two thousand years ago, Sissinghurst was home.
FIVE
Testing
From October 2005 onwards, I slowly tried out the ideas I had for Sissinghurst. Following my nose, asking my friends for hints and tips, I began to engage with the realities. I have nearly always worked alone and have loved that, the silence and privacy of it, the space which solitary work allows for ideas to accumulate and thicken like crystals dangling in a solution. On your own, understanding comes not by argument but accretion. It’s quick.
I always knew this was going to be different: the meetings, the hierarchies, feeling my way past embedded difficulties, seeing my own ideas from other people’s point of view. All of that was the price of getting something to happen for real, of pushing it beyond the limits of longing or regret, beyond the written.
I knew from the start that any scheme here had to be commercially viable. This couldn’t be a fantasy park. Any exercise in vanity farming, in aesthetics or window-dressing, would mean nothing and anyway would smell wrong. In modern terms, it had to survive in the market, providing something that people were actually prepared to buy. I felt sure they would. But we needed, first, a feasibility study. It would cost, I discovered, between £15,000 and £20,000.
Jonathan Light, area manager for the National Trust, Sally Bushell, the property manager at Sissinghurst, Sarah and I had a meeting in our kitchen, the first of hundreds: Sally gentle, warm, organisational, consensus-conscious, increasingly investing in a hope and belief that this idea might work, always friendly to us; Jonathan a precisionist with a razored haircut and the straightest of backs, who in an earlier life was a chartered engineer with ICI, now married to a barrister, always working out his requirements beforehand, distinguishing between desires and needs, a careful, note-taking, systematic man, economical in what he said but with a sharp line in the sardonic remark, the embodiment of consistency and courtesy, precisely the calming and sustaining presence Sissinghurst needed; and Sarah and I both slightly anxious in meetings, not quite having the meeting language and so tending to look amateur and impetuous, the ‘flaky creatives’, as Sarah called us one day.
That wasn’t entirely fair. I had run a small farm in Sussex for ten years and a small publishing company before that. Sarah had started and built up her own mail-order business, selling seeds and everything needed in a garden, combined with a gardening and cookery school. She had made a name for herself as a gardening and cookery writer, promoting a direct and bold style of gardening and cooking which had caught people’s imaginations. Before that she had been a medical doctor, a junior renal specialist. We weren’t exactly innocents but this particular set of circumstances at Sissinghurst was different. With the label of ‘don
or family’ hanging over us, it wasn’t entirely easy to be our usual businesslike selves.
Nevertheless, we four were calmly getting to know each other, daring a joke now and then, gathering a trust in each other’s capabilities and good intentions. At the beginning, Jonathan asked whether I could get together an Outline Proposal for a Draft Project Brief for an Investigation of the Business Case to go out to Tender for a Consultative Exercise on the Ideas I had? Those were not quite his words but I said I could and it took a morning.
The ideal was of a kind of mixed farming that was traditional in the Weald until the 1960s, when the combination of an increasingly globalised market and the arrival of artificial fertilisers made it unviable. That kind of mixed farm was the frame in which the garden at Sissinghurst was originally set. The study needed to examine how far it was possible to reinvigorate the farming methods at Sissinghurst, with a view not to distant markets but to the value that its own restaurant and farm shop could create. The massive retail potential at Sissinghurst made the old landscape possible. The full polycultural variety should be the goal: raspberries and strawberries, blackcurrants, apples and pears, hops, dairy cattle, as well as cereals, beef cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, pigeons and ducks.
There were a thousand questions. How would Sissinghurst sell the products of its landscape to its visitors? Could the farm really provide the restaurant with everything it offered its customers? What would the economics be of a farm shop at Sissinghurst? Could the restaurant and shop, at the beginning of the year, ‘order’ their requirements from the farm? Could Sissinghurst make its own ice cream, bread, cakes, scones and jams from the dairy cows, fruit fields, wheats and ryes grown in the fields? Could the woods produce pea sticks, hurdles, chestnut fencing and furniture to be bought by customers? Could people take hop bines away with them in their cars? Was pick-your-own a possibility, perhaps of flowers as well as fruit? Could a chicken-run provide the eggs for the omelettes the restaurant would make? Was there a place for a bakery with a takeaway counter? Bringing animals back to the farm, the repatriation of farm management to Sissinghurst, the growing of vegetables and the setting up of a farm shop would all need buildings and equipment. Where should they go? And how would they fit with the tourist business?
Alongside that was the question of a business structure. Were the profit margins to be set in advance? Or could the Trust tolerate a lower level of profit here in return for the landscape benefits? Was it necessary to stick with the idea of farmer as producer and restaurant as client? Or should a single enterprise become the tenant of the farm, the restaurant and the farm shop? How integrated, in other words, could the retail and production arms at Sissinghurst be? Could a loss on one be set against the profits on the other?
Driving blind – and not knowing the true situation – I guessed that the Trust would have little money to bring all this about. But I also knew that it had raised £360,000 in two years at Sheffield Park in Sussex from visitor contributions – with the same number of visitors per year as Sissinghurst. That money was for repairing some collapsing lakes rather than this more nebulous and commercial scheme, but still it was no more than one pound a visitor. Would the Sissinghurst visitors want to pay for the set-up costs of this?
There was also a question of land. The farmed area at Sissinghurst looked as if it might be too small at 259 acres. More land was probably needed, either rented or acquired. I knew, of course, of the neighbouring Bettenham and Brissenden farms, which once belonged to my grandmother and which now belonged to a ninety-two-year-old law professor, Professor James, who lived at Benenden. I rang him one evening. ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘Nigel’s son? You know he sold me those farms?’ I did. ‘A terrible price, terrible, really terrible.’ For you? I asked. ‘No, no,’ he laughed. ‘For him.’ My poor father had sold those farms, now worth £3.5 million, for £15,000 in 1964. ‘To do up his house, wasn’t it?’ Professor James asked. I didn’t go into the details but instead risked my question. ‘Do you think there is any chance, Professor, that when you die you might consider leaving those farms, or some of them anyway, to the National Trust, to reunite the estate as it was before the 1960s? We have great plans for the farm here.’ A pause on the other end of the phone. ‘If there is one organisation in England to which I would not leave my property, it is the National Trust.’ He had been appalled, a few years earlier, when the Trust, which had accepted land on Exmoor on the condition, among others, that stag hunting would continue across it, had agreed under pressure from its own largely urban and anti-hunting membership to ban the hunt from its land. This was a question of honour, Professor James said, allied to one of uncertainty. How could he be sure that any agreement he made about these farms would be observed after he was dead? I said we would all do our best to see that agreements were honoured and how we had nothing but the best interests of the land in mind. ‘No, no, no,’ he said, swatting away a puppy. ‘Anyway, Robert Lewis, who has farmed it for many years for us, he’s the man for that land.’ So Bettenham and Brissenden were severed from Sissinghurst, perhaps for ever. We would have to live within our limits.
Sally, Jonathan, Sarah and I worked our way through the suggestions. I added a need for aesthetics. ‘Whatever is done must both look and feel right for Sissinghurst, and enhance rather than detract from what is already here. Aesthetics cannot be a last-priority bolt-on.’ Jonathan added the need for ‘reversibility’. If it went wrong, nothing we had done should be undoable. The scheme ‘must not land a white elephant on either the NT’s or Sissinghurst’s back’. And any scheme must be ‘revenue-neutral’. Sissinghurst as a whole must earn as much after any changes we made as before.
Having looked at the leases of the four farming tenants, Jonathan also found some good news. There was a break clause in all of them which meant that if we had a coherent plan together by September 2006, the Trust could give them a year’s notice to quit, which meant that by 26 September 2007, the land at Sissinghurst could be back in hand and the project could begin to work. The Trust had recently had some disastrous publicity when they had amalgamated two farm tenancies in the Lake District, and so they would have to tread with immense care around this issue. But this gave us a deadline and a timetable.
Fiona Reynolds had asked me to talk to the National Trust AGM that November in Brighton. ‘Don’t frighten the horses,’ Jonathan said, and so I spoke to them after dinner in big generalities. What was the National Trust for? It came down, I told them, to a new understanding of what was meant by the word ‘place’. That word is enshrined in the name of the Trust; it is a National Trust for Places. And what is a place? Not just a location.
The Trust does not own ‘sites’ in the way Asda or BP does. It doesn’t plonk down its identity on a neutral spot. Nor is a place an idea or an image. It is intensely concrete, the opposite of anything virtual, something that is thick with its own reality. And, more than that, a place is somewhere with a quality you might call ‘inner connectedness’. That is a subtle but powerful thing, which is related to a kind of self-sufficiency, a feeling in a place that its life is not borrowed or imposed from elsewhere, but is coming up out of its own soil.
The old debate, I told them, had always set commercialism and enterprise against poetry and conservation. But that was missing the point. People had a growing hunger for authenticity and the enriched place. The enormous proliferation in the modern world of slickly and thinly communicated meanings had generated a demand for the opposite, for the sense when you arrived somewhere that not only did this look wonderful but was wonderful, that it wasn’t just a skin. Gertrude Stein had famously said of Oakland, California, that ‘There is no there there’. For the Trust, and for all of us, thereness and turnover could be the same thing. All the NT had to do was make sure it was constantly cultivating and rejuvenating the thereness of the places it owned and its customers would flock in.
I did not feel in private quite as sanguine. I had underestimated the way in which these ideas would ruffle feathers at Siss
inghurst. Anxiety was already raising its head. What people loved here was its ‘tranquillity’, and people were worried that my ideas would disturb it. Trucks, intensification, multiple demands: none of those felt very Sissinghursty. Nobody much liked the idea of chickens or pigs because of the smell. Already, just creaking open like a board splitting in the sunlight, the cracks were appearing between those who had the easy ideas and those who were expected to make them work.
In December, one freezing foggy Sunday, Sarah and I went to see Jacob Rothschild. The Rothschild house at Waddesdon belongs to the National Trust but the Rothschilds, because they are able to subsidise it to the tune of £1 million a year from a family trust, are able to decide pretty well everything that happens there. The garden writer and designer Mary Keen, who is a friend of the Rothschilds, had asked him to ask us to lunch. I wore a suit, which was a mistake as everyone else was in shirts and jerseys. A butler told us to park our dirty Land Rover next to a Swiss-number-plated Range Rover. Lady Rothschild gave us champagne. ‘Or would you prefer something else?’ A classical pavilion of a house. Guardis on the wall. Lunch in a French rococo room. I felt like a suited prune amid such riches, but Lady Rothschild was warmth itself. ‘Barbara Amiel said that Jacob marrying me was about as likely as the Emperor of Japan marrying a Hottentot,’ she whispered at lunch.
Rothschild was regal, huge in his red jersey, loping, looking at the world from a great height but full of grace. Just audible beneath the surface a great deal of idling, ticking-over horsepower in reserve, but generous in his eyes, exuding interest. Sarah grows a bulb called Gloriosa superba Rothschildiana. I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head. After lunch we talked about the Sissinghurst scheme. He thought the Sissinghurst Trust idea bad because it set up two power bases and an inbuilt tension. ‘Why not take the whole thing over, including the garden?’
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 10
