Portrait of a Childhood

We Americans are obsessed with how the British aristocracy live. We imagine the ideal upper-crust British childhood as a world populated solely by children, with a nanny in a black-and-white starched uniform in the background, rocking horses and teddy bears, happy nursery teas with scones, strawberries and cream--and not a scolding mother or father in sight. This comes, no doubt, from absorbing years of British literature, film and television; and why should they be any truer to life than our own?

British biographer Nigel Nicolson, 75, had a similar sort of upbringing. When he and his brother Ben were very small, they had the nursery teas, played in great country manors and were cared for by a succession of nannies. Then it was off to Eton and Oxford.

The trouble was, it was all a little too parent-free, as the writer will attest. Nicolson flew into Los Angeles recently to address the Jane Austen Society and to speak at the Long Beach Public Library on “Being Vita’s Son”--Vita Sackville-West, that is, award-winning poet, novelist, master gardener, but not exactly Mother-of-the-Year.

Nicolson, well over six feet tall, broad-chested and possessing the self-assured deportment of a scholarly gentleman, is also the son of diplomat-turned-writer Harold Nicolson, he likes to remind you. He laments that people don’t seem to be as interested in that fact: “It’s always Vita, Vita, Vita.”

He has been a publisher (one of the founders of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd.) and Member of Parliament; he edited the letters of Virginia Woolf and has written several biographies. But he has probably attracted the most attention for his “Portrait of a Marriage” (1973), a revealing and ultimately loving examination of his parents’ unusual marriage, interspersed with excerpts from the journal kept by Vita about her passionate affair with a woman named Violet Trefusis.

His most recent book is “Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.” The correspondence is housed, improbably, in the Lilly Library of the University of Indiana in Bloomington, where Nicolson spent “a happy month reading through all ten-and-a-half-thousand letters, and selecting about 500 for the purposes of the book.”

Vita and Harold remained emotionally close in a 50-year-long marriage despite the fact that they both were homosexual. “They were unfaithful to each other by mutual consent,” Nicolson says. “Infidelity, they would say, is normally regarded as the greatest danger to a marriage. They protested that the real danger was over-familiarity.”

Parenting, however, was not as easily worked out as infidelity.

As a child, Nicolson could accept the fact that his father’s diplomatic work kept him out of the country for months at a time. Vita’s coolness as a mother was duly registered by both sons, but, Nigel insists, not with malice or with thoughts of rejection. “We didn’t resent Vita’s remoteness in any way, and if she was away for months on end we didn’t really notice: Mummy’s on holiday, you know, she will be back. Life revolved around the nursery.”

When Vita was at home, the children would--as upper-class custom dictated--be washed and scrubbed by the nanny and taken into their mother’s sitting room to visit for an hour. “Our interventions at 6 o’clock had been agreed, but were not always very welcome. And she would patiently lay down her pen, take off her spectacles, look up and say hello. Because she was so devoted to her writing and her gardening, children really were an interruption. (Vita) was never unkind, but there was a lack of warmth toward us . . . since children to her were rather boring objects. They were obtrusive and didn’t know very much.”

Both Nigel and his brother Ben were sent to the proper public schools, where boys were visited traditionally by their mothers once or twice a term. “This was something Vita really hated doing. It wasn’t just the interruption. She had to dress up smart, you know. And she had to associate with much smarter mothers. There was never much to do on those occasions, and she would arrive and take us out to lunch somewhere.”

Both Nicolson boys felt closer to their father, who only came to the schools once or twice in 10 years. Harold was the overtly affectionate parent; he would tell the boys stories, draw pictures for them, take them on walks, read and discuss the books they might be reading at school. It was Harold who did the serious parenting and worked to instill in his sons his own principles and conduct.

Harold divided misdemeanors into “sins” and “naughtiness.” For naughtiness, punishment might mean being sent off to bed early. “Sins were so awful you were never punished for them. The very exposure of the sins was sufficient punishment. So we were delighted by this information and eagerly asked him what were the sins for which we don’t get punished. They were cruelty, untruthfulness and sloth. . . . He conducted his own life on those principles and of course it made a great effect upon us.” It was Harold, of course, who had the most profound effect on the direction that Nigel’s life would take in politics, publishing and writing.

“Anyhow, Harold was fun and Vita was mysterious. This was the division of our affections. And you see we knew nothing about her writing. And we knew nothing whatsoever about her love affairs.”

Vita’s brief love affair with Virginia Woolf, which evolved into lasting friendship, led to the Nicolsons’ coming into contact with some of the most provocative personalities of the ‘20s and ‘30s in England. Nicolson recalls that “every single member of the Bloomsbury group came down to Long Barn at least once in summer”: Clive and Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, Carrington and Roger Fry, among others, “just drifted in and out like anybody’s neighbors.”

Virginia Woolf, childless herself, became a sort of surrogate auntie to Ben and Nigel. “I got to know and love Virginia Woolf in a different way, I think more than any woman I have ever loved outside my own family. She was adorable. . . . She would tell my own mother to go away, ‘because, you see, I am talking to Ben and Nigel.’

“Her conversation was captivating and flattering because she treated little boys as if they were perfect adults. She would say, ‘What have you done today?’ We might say we got up as usual, and here we are. ‘What woke you up?’ And then we might say that it was sun coming through the bedroom window. ‘What sort of a sun? Angry sun? Or nice, friendly sun?’ ‘Which sock did you put on first--left or right?’ Breakfast. Everything. Every detail of our activity that day until the moment when you came into the room and found her there. Of course it was a game, but it was also a lesson. It was Virginia gathering copy. She was writing ‘To the Lighthouse,’ in which there is a little boy I always liked to believe was me, who figures quite prominently.”

While most people become more outgoing and bold with age, “the opposite was true of Vita, who grew shyer as she grew older.” Once the Nicolsons moved to the family’s home at Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, they pretty much stopped socializing at home. Shortly after World War II ended, Nigel and Ben wanted to throw a cocktail party to celebrate victory and a family reunion.

“Vita was horrified by the suggestion: ‘But we don’t know how to make cocktails!’ So we protested that people had written entire books on the subject and we could find out. Then she said that ‘We don’t know anybody to ask!’ We knew three people in the locality and had friends in London. We asked those three and asked them to bring their friends. . . . The party was a disaster. None of us could introduce anybody to anybody else; we didn’t know who they were. A lady came up to my mother and asked her who that lady in blue over there was. Vita was delighted that she recognized (somebody). ‘That’s Mrs. Hamilton-Price.’ ‘No, I’m Mrs. Hamilton-Price.’ The party never recovered from that.”

Nigel Nicolson doesn’t share his mother’s passion for privacy or gardening. He resides at Sissinghurst, the site of the gardens that are now a part of the British National Trust. He is not involved in the upkeep of the grounds and says that he is not a gardener at heart. And for six months of the year, the world intrudes: Thousands of tourists stroll outside his cottage to admire the gardens Vita and Harold created, buy books and mementos at the gift shop, stop for tea at the restaurant or use the public WC. (One is reminded that, late in life, even the reclusive Vita opened the gardens to the public and often chatted with visitors. But in her day there were no public facilities and certainly no tour buses bumping up the lane.) What is it like trying to work as a writer and live in what amounts to a public park?

Nicolson doesn’t think living at his castle is much different from having a flat in town and hearing passersby, cars and trucks outside your window. “I feel no invasion of privacy, if that’s what you mean. I like the people. They’re appreciative. If the garden club of Cincinnati comes over in a group I would almost certainly meet them and give them a 10-minute talk. If you create a garden of that complexity and only show it to family and friends, it’s like writing a book and never publishing it, or painting a picture and never putting it in a show.”