Impossible, I said.
‘Why?’
For a million and one reasons. The great difference was that the Rothschilds had their huge fund hosing money into Waddesdon and the National Trust was happy to accept anything they were prepared to pour down its throat. We were not in that position. But he was also discouraging about the prospect of raising any money. ‘It is much, much more difficult than you imagine.’ There was a kind of shy directness to him, and he was funny. ‘I couldn’t sack a day-lily,’ he said.
At home at Sissinghurst a couple of days later we gave a drinks party for everyone living and working there. Sofas pushed back, hot mulled wine, a big fire. Some time into the party, a woman, flushed with the warmth, came up to me. ‘You really think you’re the lord of the manor now, don’t you? Well, Adam, I can tell you something: you are not.’ So here it was: the sunny visions of perfection exposed to a cold and withering wind. There were people at Sissinghurst who considered it theirs, who had devoted their lives to it, who loved it quite as much as I did, and who felt that Sarah and I were more interested in our own welfare than in Sissinghurst’s. ‘Are we helping you do what you want,’ someone asked me, ‘or are you helping us do what we want?’ I thought even then that perhaps we should simply leave them to it and that they could make it in their own image.
We had a final meeting just before Christmas with Sue Saville and Jonathan Light. Sue said the Trust was happy to put some money into a feasibility study. A feasibility study! Have three words ever sounded quite so sweet? And how will it be paid for? I asked. ‘Sissinghurst will pay for it,’ Jonathan said. How, though? ‘The clause your father inserted in the 1967 agreement has meant that Sissinghurst is what we call a Special Trust in Credit. It has a large reserve accumulated against a rainy day.’ The disciplines exercised over the last fifteen years or so have meant that the size of the Sissinghurst financial cushion is astonishing. While the world has been borrowing, Sissinghurst has been saving, and the accumulated reserve now allows substantial annual expenditure with no diminution of the invested capital. People rarely applaud the National Trust for its financial management but this policy has been exemplary. Not a single aspect of the scheme this book describes would have been possible without it. As Jonathan said that afternoon, the farm project could not be allowed to lose money on its current account in the long term, but, within reason, it was not going to be constrained by shortage of capital.
Together, Jonathan, Sally, Sarah and I worked our way through the early part of the year. I made a list of target qualities for any scheme:
Authenticity
Richness
Rootedness
Connectedness
Vitality
Delight
Jonathan and Sally drew up a huge and careful tender document. Consultants came and made their bids for the work. We walked them around the place in the late winter, some in the rain, some on wonderful mornings when there was a frost on the moat, just a skin, not enough for a moorhen to walk on. The first spikes of the narcissus were up in the orchard and the aconites were out under the hedge between Delos and the White Garden, casually there like beautiful weeds. Against the light blue of the March mornings the consultants had ideas and questions. The old dairy and the barn next to it might be the farm shop and café. The Horse Race hedges would have to grow up if the fruit trees were to go back. Could the farm be enlarged? Could the restaurant expand into the barn? Did it have to be organic? There was a sense above all of potential in the air. Some of them were a bit highfalutin. ‘I don’t see why, when we know we’ve got our feet in the treacle,’ Jonathan said after reading one report, ‘we need to have our heads in it too.’ Helen Browning from the Soil Association took a bit of the soil away in a napkin I gave her. It felt like a kind of spring, tentative, only half there but, still, half there.
I went for walks in the early woods. The colours were changing, the purple of the alder catkins now mixed with the hazel and then the goat willows coming on like lights, the ‘palm trees’, as my nanny Shirley Punnett always used to call them. The geese were clanging away across the farm, their voices a long, deep echoing you could hear a mile downwind. Sissinghurst was full of one of the miracles of spring: the light suddenly penetrating to the floor of the wood, for the first time since the previous year, reaching into its depths as if into an aquarium or an unfinished house.
It was a heady time for me. I felt excited at the prospect of my idea becoming a reality. This was different from how it had been for a long time. I had become used to the idea that changes would happen at Sissinghurst without my knowing about them in advance. My father as he got older had increasingly accepted the decisions being made around him. I remember finding him once almost in tears, sitting at the kitchen table, having come back from a walk down by the lake. He had found that the wood he had loved all his life, fringing the lake and the stream that runs beside it, had been cut down. No one had told him. He did not like an argument and had said nothing. That silent acceptance of unannounced change had seemed like the prevailing reality. Now I felt the National Trust responding to my ideas. Under Jonathan’s hands they were taking on substance and the experience was vertigo-inducing. I realised I had never wielded influence here before.
To my relief, the Soil Association, the champion of the organic idea, was awarded the contract, and their glamorous team turned up: Helen Browning, powerful, strong minded, clear voiced, a big farmer in Wiltshire, chair of a government committee on animal welfare, a partner in her own organic food business; alongside her, Katrin Hochberg, a cool, taut, courteous German in her twenties, with high cheekbones and eyes the colour of the North Sea in February. Both of them glowed with the kind of health that was a billboard for the organic idea. And Phil Stocker, a Bristol man, once a big-time chemical farmer who went to work for the RSPB, saw the organic light and now devotes every hour of his life to persuading the farmers of England to go the way he has gone. Every sentence he speaks delivers straight, persuasive idealism. When these three arrived, I felt as if I had bought a new car. With them we could go anywhere. No weariness and no viscosity, nor any sense that they were in service to some antiquated or inherited idea. They looked like ushers to the future.
We walked around the farm on a sunny day in April. Spring was coming on and the blackthorn was out in the hedges. An occasional wild cherry was a white flash in the wood. The higher trees had not yet leafed up but in the garden the magnolia petals were lying browned and scattered among the lungwort at their feet like the scales of a fish. There was colour in the world. The pigeons were sitting in the trees like fattened Christmas decorations. From out in the arable fields, where the soil was still as bare and brown as it had been at the end of August, the daffodils, the forsythia and the cherry blossom in the orchard blazed away. You could smell the soil drying in the sun as if it were some kind of vegetable mass.
With Helen and then again with Phil I walked across the empty arable fields. Nothing was growing in them. Nothing had been planted and the weeds had been sprayed off. Everywhere around us, the celandines were emerging in the hedge banks and the garlic along the stream, the anemones and the first of the bluebells were out in the wood. The cuckoo was cuckooing, there were yellowhammers and blackcaps, and some larks were singing high above us, embroidering their song on the glowing air, but the earth beneath our feet was lifeless, a dusty and degraded place. Phil had a spade with him, and in one arable field after another he dug into the surface. Everywhere, in Frogmead and in Lodge and Large, even in Banky on the far side of the Hammer Brook, the spade went in an inch or two and stopped. That top couple of inches was loose and friable but below it the earth had compacted into solid and impenetrable clay. There were some wormcasts here and there on the surface, but when Phil dug deeper and revealed a section in the side of small square hole, he showed me how nothing living was penetrating deeper than the surface inches. Here were the results of decade after decade of extractive agriculture. Some farmyard manure was still sprea
d on these fields, and they were occasionally broken up with a subsoiling plough, but in essence they had been squeezed and compacted to within an inch or two of their lives. The Soil Association is called that for a reason: the basis of organic farming is attending to the well-being of the soil. It is the matrix in which life – bacterial, vegetable and animal – has its beginnings. Here the matrix was little better than a polystyrene block, the sterilised background into which artificial fertilisers could be injected and high-intensity grains grown. That pale, lifeless soil was a picture of everything that had gone wrong. You only had to look at it to see that an organic system here, one that rested the land from time to time in fertility-building leys, which restored organic matter to these lifeless soils, was the only way this scheme could go. Organic was the obvious and default option.
Only in one place did Phil’s face light up. Just outside the restaurant, in the Cow Field, where the dairy herd had always been turned out after milking, I dug Phil’s spade in. If you had been watching it in slow motion, you would have seen, with my first plunge, its worn and shiny leading edge slicing down into the green of the spring grass, slowly burying the full body of the blade in the earth and travelling on beyond it so that the spade came to rest with the ground level an inch up the shaft. Nothing wrong with that. I sliced out a square of turf and lifted it over. A delicious tweedy-brown crumbling soil appeared, a Bolognese sauce of a soil, rich and deep, smelling of life. Inside the small square trench, juicy beefsteak worms writhed in the sunlight. Here was James Stearns’s ‘best bit of dirt on the farm’, the stuff in which he had said we could grow anything we liked. ‘It’s got to be the veg patch, hasn’t it?’ Phil said. Smiles all over his face. Peter Dear, the NT warden, came with his dog, and the three of us lay down on the grass there, looking across the Low Weald to the north-east, chatting about the birds, and how they loved the game crop in Lower Tassells. There were two larks making and remaking their song high over Large Field below us. How could we ensure the new farm was as friendly to birds as that? It was a moment when I felt I could see something of the future, that slow, exploratory, otter-like feeling, which you recognise only as it rises to the surface inside you, that an idea might be one worth having.
It was clear from the beginning that the consultants’ task was more than to provide a set of plans and figures. Anything new had to fit with the old. Helen said to me almost as soon as she arrived that none of it would work unless both Sissinghurst and the Trust subscribed to it. So we were to have meetings, partly to hear what Sissinghurst thought of the ideas and partly to tell Sissinghurst what the ideas were.
Late in April 2006, we all gathered in the lower part of the restaurant, the whole Sissinghurst community, which almost never gathered in one place. The anxiety was palpable in the room. I was nervous and I knew both Jonathan Light and Helen Browning were too. Helen had brought with her some facilitators, two glowingly beautiful, clear-eyed young women in plum and lime-green cardigans from the Soil Association. I told Helen afterwards how marvellous they were. ‘I’ve got shedloads of those,’ she said.
We split into groups and discussed what meant most to us about Sissinghurst. Jo Jones, one of the gardeners, summed up the best of Sissinghurst as ‘established slowly over time; vulnerability; fragility; tenderness’. Claire Abery, another gardener, liked the feeling of a whole estate but she said she would be glad if the visitors never turned up. People loved the sense that the place was full of its stories, that Sissinghurst somehow had an emotional existence beyond its bricks and lawns.
Then we came up with some ideas for the future. Several people said ‘Do nothing’ and ‘Make no Change’. The anxiety had its origins, I think, in a fear that any changes could only be for the bad. For many years the gardeners had defended Sissinghurst against what they had seen as excessive commercialisation from NT Enterprises, the Trust’s business arm, and thought of themselves as the guardians of Sissinghurst’s soul. On top of that, the years of reduced spending had meant that the gardeners’ eating and washing facilities had not been updated since the 1960s and were frankly disgraceful. The restaurant building had not been improved since the early 1990s. The offices and workshops were far below the standards expected in everyday commercial life. Many people working at Sissinghurst had been clamouring for these improvements for years and nothing had been done. Now here, apparently, as soon as Adam turns up, there was money à gogo for consultants, plans, changes. Why was that? And was it fair?
Many months later, the head gardener, Alexis Datta, apologised to me for the ‘negativity’ she had shown to these ideas over the months. The roots of the hostility between us were in some ways very simple. We both thought we knew what the essential Sissinghurst was, and both felt proprietorial about it but the two visions didn’t match up. What I was suggesting had its roots deep in the historical soil of Sissinghurst, but no one here had ever seen any of it. They did not know what was missing. What I thought of as old and better they saw as new and suspect. Nor did they see any lack in the farm. ‘What could be better than that?’ Alexis asked me one day when pointing across the grass of the Cow Field and the big arable fields beyond it. ‘I want it to be kept like that,’ she said. Her friend, the gardener Jacqui Ruthven, told Alexis that Sarah and I coming to live at Sissinghurst was ‘like having white trash move in’. It is not particularly easy to be told that, but I recognised well enough that we represented disruption, unneatness, a departure from the way it had been for the last ten or fifteen years.
I had not understood one crucial point. Everything I was suggesting drew its inspiration from what I had known and seen forty or forty-five years ago. My plans seemed to me like a regrounding of Sissinghurst, a return to the condition – or a version of it – in which it had existed for centuries. To almost everyone else, though – if not my sisters and not the Beales, Stearnses or Cliffords – it felt like a major disruption of something that, in their experience, up to seventeen years in one case, had ‘always’ been as it now was. My return to source was for them a destruction of perfection.
There was some recent history to this. Under my father’s stimulus, and an unrelenting publicity campaign, publishing volume after volume about his parents’ intriguing lives, visitor numbers had peaked at 197,000 in 1991. The whole place and everyone working in it were stretched beyond any sense of ease or comfort. It was felt that the ‘spirit of the place’ was being damaged by its tourist business and a new strategy was set up: stop all publicity, reduce visitor numbers, introduce timed tickets to the garden and cut expenditure so that Sissinghurst could begin to accumulate a financial reserve. The income from that reserve would mean in future that Sissinghurst no longer needed to rely on a huge visitor flow. By 1992 visitor numbers had dropped to 151,000, and went down to 135,000 in 2001. Meanwhile, the strategic reserve was steadily growing. The threat of crass commercialisation had been averted and the ideal of stillness and quiet, a steady state, had come to replace it.
What I was saying seemed to be overturning that, and it would continue to be difficult for months. At times it became personal. When I sat down opposite one of the gardeners at one meeting, she said, ‘Oh God, do we really have to have you here?’ In May we had two gardeners come for the day to do the flower beds in our part of the garden, which we had left untidy. ‘Thank God someone is doing something about this garden at last,’ Alexis said to them. ‘But don’t do it too nicely, will you? Why don’t you go to the farm they used to live on and make that garden a little bit nicer and with any luck they’ll leave us and go back and live there.’
My head told me that it was a question of washing away the fears. And that there was also a perfectly hard set of constraints: Sissinghurst did not need any more visitors; nor too much of a drain on its running costs. Any plans had to be careful about not damaging what was already here. But in the face of all this it was difficult to maintain buoyancy and conviction. People higher up the Trust were prepared to countenance our plans; at Sissinghurst I felt increasingly
besieged. I cherished tiny breakthroughs. Early one morning, Claire Abery told me that she had been given Sarah’s book about growing vegetables, she was loving it and was planting up raised beds in her garden. ‘Most of the time people don’t join up the aesthetics with growing the veg but Sarah has done it,’ she said. I said Sarah was keen to help in growing the vegetables here. ‘Do you think I could do it with her?’ Claire said. I could have kissed her.
At the end of April 2006, I asked Simon Fraser, a good and wise friend of mine, what we should do. He was sanity itself. I should put my ideas and energy into setting things up now in the way I thought they ought to be. Be patient. It takes time for ideas to become clear. Make sure the farm was combined with the farm shop and restaurant so that they were mutually supportive, not in some kind of market competition with each other. Don’t get financially, managerially or practically involved, as that would end in grief and upset. Sarah and I should remain as members of the Sissinghurst Farm Board, to trim the direction it would take in the future. Eliminate risk, have no areas of conflict, give Sissinghurst what you can and then leave the National Trust to it. That was all we could do. It belonged to them and they would have to manage it. We shouldn’t ever put ourselves in a position where we were claiming more than they could possibly give. Gauge that gap. Go where there is a door to be opened. Don’t think of demolishing walls.
I realised, as Simon spoke, that this was an exercise in adulthood, in understanding the nature of organisations, and perhaps of places. It was unlike writing, where all you had to do was get the sentences and paragraphs in a clarifying and pleasing order. This was about having an idea, getting it in order, and only then creating a culture – in the sense of a laboratory culture, a growing environment – in which the ideas could take root and flourish. It was going to be slow and would never follow a straight line. And it needed the other side to speak. Nothing would happen unless everyone involved in the life of Sissinghurst made their claims on these ideas. It wasn’t a question of recovering Sissinghurst but the opposite: allowing it a life, giving it what we could, gradually easing the concerns of people who worked here, understanding that we had to adapt our ideas to the sense of tranquillity that they cherished. The coexistence of vitality and tranquillity: that was the ideal, a kind of balanced health. And then confessing to ourselves that Sissinghurst had a life that stretched far beyond us.
Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History Page 11
