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Sissinghurst

Ancient and modern unite

Adam Nicolson
HarperPress, 342pp, £20,

Mary Keen

Wednesday, 22nd October 2008

Sissinghurst, by Adam Nicolson

Once, when Adam Nicolson was asked the question ‘will you be writing a family memoir?’, he answered, ‘I think my family is the most memoired family in the history of the universe. It’s like a disease. “No” is definitely the answer to that.’ But Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History is at least a quarter family memoir. After ‘a whispering gallery of family meanings, lasting more than a century’, the son and grandson of those most written-about writers has spoken out loud, in a voice of truth and tenderness.

When he was 12, his mother left his father, and ‘the warmth left Sissinghurst that day’. Before the arrival of a family ice age, Nigel Nicolson used to encourage his son to explore the Kentish country around Sissinghurst, to look for places that he made precious and important to Adam. The boy would set off on his bike with a map, to find Roman roads and fords, on a quest for the places reverberating with the past that he now so lyrically and compellingly captures in every book he writes.

In a boyhood as idyllic as the one led by Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, the young Nicolson roamed the woods and farms about Sissinghurst, coming home to the fridge-cold father, who ate boil-in-the-bag TV dinners and thought that being moved by music was a sign of sentimentality. As the son grew up he realised how different he was from his father. ‘I liked roughness and incompleteness, Romanticism, the 17th century and authenticity. He liked Palladianism and neatness. Chippendale not oak, Jane Austen, not Shakespeare, tidiness and the effective display.’ But in the end, the son feels love and affection for the father he had struggled to understand. It is this exploration of ways to understand and accept how things are that makes the book much more than an objective history of a place and its people.