Book review: Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History

Review by LESLEY McDOWELL

ADAM NICHOLSON, AS MANY are aware, is the grandson of poet and lover of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson. In the 1930s, Vita bought Sissinghurst Castle with a legacy from her mother, a kind of replacement for her beloved home, Knole, which as a female she couldn't inherit. But it was Adam's father who handed the estate over to the National Trust when it became impossible for him to run it himself. On his death four years ago, Adam decided to move in and make some changes.

This isn't just the story of a stately home or a much-loved tourist attraction. Nicolson's book is one of those rare things: a story that seems small, irrelevant to most of us (how many can sympathise with the costs of running a castle?), rarefied in its history, full of detail about land rights and Trust guidelines, and yet which blooms in front of our eyes into a much larger, more important, more universal one. It's a story about families and, most crucially, about our relationship with the landscape around us, how we interact with it and with each other. As he repeats throughout, his pitch for Sissinghurst is "the need for connectedness". It might have been a pitch for us all.

Nicolson is clearly a romantic, however practical his negotiations with the National Trust and its officers are: only a romantic would take on such a huge project in the first place. His romanticism means that he likes to play with nostalgia, but he's always aware of what it is. There are two wonderful photographs (a note to Harper Press – photo captions would have been not just useful but revealing too, and it's shame they didn't include any) early on. One is of Adam as a boy with his father and grandfather. The other is of his father, Adam as a grown-up, and Adam's son. They mirror each other exactly: three generations are contained in each, but are more precise than that. Adam has a cigarette in his hand just like his father in the first photo; and the eldest men in both shots strike exactly the same pose.

They're important images because they speak to the project at Adam's heart: how to preserve the past so that we recognise it for what it is and respect it, but also how to move forward, and leave enough of it behind. He grapples with the technical jargon his new project has just embraced, this "rebranding exercise", that appears to relegate history to the sidelines, and yet he knows it's the kind of modernity he needs, in order to make it work.

Adam's project is to turn Sissinghurst back into a working farm. Partly, he admits, from a sense of nostalgia: boyish years spent running about the estate, getting to know the natural world; and partly from a love for his father, who spent his last years alone there after Adam's mother had left him. The National Trust has preserved Sissinghurst as a heritage site but the regulations that Adam comes up against, when he moves his young family into the house on his father's death and first proposes his plan, are hilariously restrictive ("we were to park our car with the exhaust pointing to the west" – although it's later pointed out this was to save the yew hedges). He wants to provide the estate restaurant with food grown on site – a simple idea that plunges him into an endless series of meetings, discussions, conferences and upsets with folk who don't want anything to change, clashes with others who want it to change more.

But, as he points out, Sissinghurst is no stranger to controversy. The history of the house is as fascinating as any ancient dwelling: a series of kings and queens lodged there periodically (Edward I; Elizabeth I); there's an evil lord "Bloody Baker" from the 16th century who had a hand in torturing the close friend of Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII; it became a sordid hell-hole for French prisoners of war in the 18th century, who would be shot for the slightest reason, and who did much to destroy the original interiors. Glorious stately home, dilapidated prison, farm – it has been them all in its varied history: but it's the farm and the "cyclical" nature of its work that Adam wants to see return.

As he acknowledges, Sissinghurst is what it is largely thanks to his famous grandparents. But it can be better, and the sense of what he owes both the legacy of his grandparents and the estate itself is a refreshing one. Family histories have been dominated by the misery memoir of late, highlighting the kind of emotional legacy nobody in their right mind wants to inherit. Adam Nicolson's account of his struggle to improve his boyhood home is also an account of his love for his unusual, conflicted, difficult, yet sympathetic father, who was the first to show him how to enjoy the land around him. It's a beautiful, fascinating, touching account.