The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
SISSINGHURST, MY FIRST LOVE
From her grandmother Vita Sackville-West’s ‘ruined Elizabethan mansion’ to the Chelsea street where she and her daughters recovered from a family break-up, place is deeply emotive for
From the home of her grandmother, novelist Vita Sackville-West, ot the street where she arised her daughters, author Juliet Nicolson on why place matters
When my daughters and I moved into our new house we painted the front door a deep cornflower blue. A few years later on the much-dreaded day of moving out, I pulled that door sharply closed behind me for the last time, walking down the familiar London street arm in arm with my two daughters. The noise of the slam echoed in my mind long after we had turned the corner. As the girls disappeared down the steps into the darkness of the underground, I got into my car and drove away much too fast to a place far away where I would be able to howl alone, undisturbed in the silence. How I was not stopped for breaking the speed limit I will never know. Behind the wheel I realised I was half mad, racing through almost-red lights, flying over speed bumps, trying hard not to think about what I had left behind.
In that house full of daughters we three had slowly adjusted to life after my first marriage had ended. Between us, we passed exams, failed exams, ate much macaroni cheese, began to write poems, to change plugs, to dance, laugh, mourn, love and triumph. It had been a place of learning and of healing. And then that time was over. Even now, a decade later, if I ever find myself near that small Chelsea street, I still avoid passing the blue front door. Moving house can be right up there on the emotional Richter scale, associated variously with divorce, death, money or simply the growing up of children, who no longer need a room of their own at home. Maybe they have moved on to university, to share a flat with friends, to work abroad, to be married, to live in a different place in which to establish their own rootedness. But houses hold power over the reluctant mover, prompting a feeling that an important chapter has closed and life may never be the same again.
Memories of the place where we were brought up – whether it be the coffee farm on the plains below Mount Kenya that is embedded in my husband’s heart, or my birthplace in a village on the edge of the New Forest – return us to the childhood innocence that we miss when the rigours of adulthood become challenging. If I close my eyes I am running through a meadow filled with daisies as tall as me. Bees move in slow motion, pollen-drunk above me. Sometimes I can even hear the rustle of a field mouse. I am four years old. Place reminds us not only of feeling carefree but of discovery, loss, momentous decisions and reassuring continuity. Somewhere there is a wooden bench high on the Sussex Downs where a proposal of marriage was made; somewhere the burned-out embers of a campfire lie on a remote pebbled beach where everything fearful is a Hebridean sea away.
For me, place matters not only at times of great joy but also when I feel unable to cope with life, when the solidness of bricks and mortar, against which I can physically lean, props me up in a way that human beings cannot. Place has always mattered to the women in my family, especially to my grandmother, Vita Sackville-West, who grew up as an only daughter at Knole, a vast house in Kent. The rules of primogeniture dictated that inheritance must run through the male line so when Vita’s father died in 1928, Knole went to a male cousin and my heartbroken grandmother grieved as if a deeply loved person had died.
In 1930 she moved to Sissinghurst Castle, an Elizabethan mansion in ruins, where she made her famous garden. I was seven years old when Vita died, having left Sissinghurst to my father. We moved in within a week of her death. At Sissinghurst we biked, climbed haystacks, made camps in the crocus-strewn orchard and in an abandoned air-raid shelter built beneath the roots of ancient apple trees. Down in the woods we watched our stick-boats race down the stream, and it was to the woods that I escaped from the adults with my first boyfriend. Sissinghurst was the place where I was first married. But it was also the place where I came when less celebratory things happened. I came home to Sissinghurst when my mother was dying, when my marriage was ending, when I wanted a refuge for my children.
Sissinghurst now belongs to the National Trust, but it still retains its power over me. The ghosts of the French soldiers, imprisoned almost three centuries earlier in the long-gone grand house, still haunt the bank on the other side of the silent, silky moat. The tangy smell of the low box hedges, once the height of a child, returns me to my seven-year-old self, as does the cobweb-strewn, slope-roofed shed containing Vita’s collection of chunky garden rakes and stout spades that rust on their ancient hooks. I have not lived there for some years, but when I cannot sleep Sissinghurst is the place to which I return in my mind, wandering through the rooms, clattering down the stairs, rolling down the small incline towards the statue on the other side of the water.
It is difficult to know why one particular place triggers that feeling of belonging. After we left London I searched for a house, someone else’s house that might feel like it could become our own; a place where the man I had fallen in love with would become my husband, where my grown-up children could bring their friends and maybe one day where grandchildren might play. My elder daughter was with me when we turned into the driveway of yet another possibility. We had agreed that if she felt it to be The One she would squeeze my hand. If I returned the gesture our search was over. The owners were showing us round. They loved the place but were moving north. Children’s heights had been recorded in
Moving prompts a feeling that an important chapter has closed and life may never be the same again
pencil markers on the precarious stairwell that led down to a musty cellar. I could see tears hovering in the mother’s eyes. We walked out into the garden. The tiled roof of an old dovecote was glowing in the setting sun. I felt the squeeze of a hand in mine. Without hesitating, I returned the pressure.
Holidays often provide the place where we feel most liberated; towns, cities, open spaces, coastlines with which we associate happiness. I was eight years old when I went abroad for the first time. My mother had announced we were to stay with a new ‘family friend’. Many years later I discovered that she had been in love out there – but not with our father. From the friend’s villa in Saint-Tropez my five-year-old brother and I watched Brigitte Bardot through binoculars, puzzled that she had forgotten to put on the top of her gingham bikini. But now in the bling-laden port, I cannot quite recapture that sense of infinite possibility, of the abundance of ice creams, of the mystery of grown-ups whispering and plotting their illicit summer romances, of the feeling of being warm all the time, even when I woke up.
Disastrous holidays can put the never-again marker even on lovely places. Long ago as a teenager in Venice, a city packed with seductive expectation, I struggled through a dreadful few days on the brink of dumping the person I should have been swooning at on the misty bridges. A joyful remembrance of things past can be deleted by present reality, the full whack of nostalgia painful when it backfires. Even when – or perhaps especially when – a holiday has delivered the whole deal, I am wary of returning. I once camped on a hill outside Assisi waking with the dawn, sitting on a carpet of buttercups and cowslips and gazing across at the glorious Basilica of St Francis, above which a single halo-shaped cloud floated. I had never felt such perfect happiness. Many years later I went back to that enchanted place, but I could not find it. Maybe it had never existed. How disorientating and agonising it must have been for Londoners in the Second World War to find whole parts of their city had vanished in the time between sleeping and waking. Perhaps all that really matters, when even bricks and mortar and butterflies are not there, is the power of imagination and memory.
Houses and cities are not alone as mood-alterers. Buildings, passageways, even trees, can touch all of us: the sanctity, solemnity and enclosing, soaring beauty of a church and the deep peace of a graveyard bring comfort in distress. Rooms with historical associations, such as the one in Rome near the Spanish Steps where Keats died aged just 25 or the house in Chawton where Jane Austen sat at her modest desk to write, make the impulse to time-travel possible. Sometimes neither beauty nor size are relevant. The arrivals hall at Heathrow is a friend’s favourite place on the planet, along with her larder at Christmas and her vegetable garden in May. The enormous shady oak that bore the weight of our solid wooden-seated swing for decades still feels magical to me. Fictional places such as the mysterious forest in Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes or Mistress Quickly’s Shakespearean pub or even the places invented in dreams can mean more than anywhere else.
And yet too much reminiscence can be dangerous. Wishing away the present in the determination to recapture the innocent, untroubled past can be an emotionally corrosive habit.
Early one spring morning, not long ago, when no one had yet woken to the urgency of the day, I went for a walk high on the Downs above our home. In the barn the cows buried their faces deep in the hay while far below me the sea shone like a strip of silky ribbon. Above the water the geese flew, silhouetted in perfect formation as if auditioning for a wall frieze. I slipped sideways through the little swing gate, velvety moss masking the wood. I climbed up on to the open hillside where mad hares chase one another in March. The air was still, the skies as deceptively transparent as the screen that divides the priest from the penitent. A black-gloved fox gripped by romance failed to notice any human presence as he soft-barked through the fence to his ladylove. He was high-tea close to the chickens but he only had eyes for the owner of the titian coat that shimmered through the wooden slats. Not a car, a plane or a person was in sound or sight. Here was the timeless countryside that my grandmother would still recognise. I have never regretted that squeezing of hands.
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson is published by Vintage, price £9.99. To order a copy for £7.49 (a 25 per cent discount) until 26 March, visit you-bookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640*
When I feel unable to cope, the solidness of bricks and mortar props me up in a way that people cannot