Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

March faded into April and ‘underfoot the blossom was/ Like scattered snow upon the grass’;

in the Wilderness, close to Knole’s garden front, daffodils and bluebells carpeted the artful expanse of oak, beech and rhododendron. Sometimes, indoors, Vita was placed on her mother’s bed, with its hangings embroidered with improbably flowering trees, ‘and I watched her for hours, lying or sitting on my lap. Her little sneezes or yawning were so comic. I hugged her till she screamed.’ At other times, husband and wife lay next to one another with their baby between them. When Vita cried, Lionel walked up and down Victoria’s bedroom, cradling her in his arms. In time, when Vita had learnt to talk, ‘she used to look at each of us in turn and nod her head, saying “Dada – Mama –”. This went on for hours and used to delight us.’

These are common enough pictures, albeit the surroundings were uncommonly sumptuous. The air was densely perfumed with a mix of Victoria’s scent (white heliotrope, from a shop off the rue St Honoré in Paris), potted jasmine and gardenias that stood about on every surface, apple logs in the grate and, on window ledges and tables, ‘bowls of lavender and dried rose leaves, … a sort of dusty fragrance sweeter in the under layers’: the famous Knole potpourri, made since the reign of George I to a recipe devised by Lady Betty Germain, a Sackville cousin and former lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne.

Such conventional domesticity – husband, wife and baby happy together – is unusual in this chronicle of fragmented emotions. ‘She loved me when I was a baby,’ Vita wrote of her mother in the private autobiography that was published posthumously as Portrait of a Marriage.

In her diary, which she kept in French, Victoria described her baby daughter as ‘charmant’, ‘adorable’, ‘si drôle’: ‘toujours de si bonne humour’ (always so good humoured). On 17 June, she and Vita were photographed together by Mr Essenhigh Corke of Sevenoaks. But it was Lionel’s name, ‘Dada’, that Vita uttered first. It was 4 September. She was six months old.

Victoria’s diary charts Vita’s growth and progress. Some of it is standard stuff. There are tantalising glimpses of the future too. On 19 April 1892, Victoria opened a post office savings account for her daughter. Her first deposit of £12 was partly made up of gifts to Vita from Lionel and Lord Sackville. The sum represented the equivalent of nearly a year’s wages for one of Knole’s junior servants, a scullery maid or stable boy. Until her death in 1936, Victoria would continuously play a decisive role in Vita’s finances: her contributions enabled Vita to perpetuate a lifestyle of Edwardian comfort. Later the same year, Victoria introduced her baby daughter to a group of women at Knole. Vita’s reaction surprised her mother. Confronted by new faces, she behaved ‘wildly’ and struggled to get away. It is tempting to witness in her response first flickers of what the adult Vita labelled ‘the family failing of unsociability’.

In Vita’s case, that Sackville ‘unsociability’ would amount to virtual reclusiveness.

The faces little Vita loved unhesitatingly belonged to her dolls. Shortly after her first birthday, Victoria made an inventory of her daughter’s dolls. It included those which she herself had bought at bazaars, a French soldier and ‘a Negress’ given to Vita by Victoria’s unmarried sister Amalia, as well as Scottish and Welsh dolls. ‘Vita adores dolls,’ Victoria wrote. In the ‘Given Away’ column of her list of expenses at the end of her diary for 1896, she included ‘Doll for Vita’, for which she paid five shillings. It is the only present Victoria mentions for her four-year-old daughter and contrasts with the many gifts she bestowed on her friends, her expenditure on clothing and the sums she set aside for tipping servants. Happily Vita could not have known of this imbalance. The following year she was photographed on a sturdy wooden seat with three of her dolls, Boysy, Dorothy and ‘Mary of New York’. Wide-eyed, Vita gazes uncertainly at the viewer. She is wearing a froufrou bonnet reminiscent of illustrations in novels by E. Nesbit; her ankles are neatly crossed in black stockings and buttoned pumps. She was two months short of her fifth birthday then and had ceased to ask her mother when she would bring her a little brother;

she was still too young to be told of Victoria’s fixed resolve that she would rather drown herself than endure childbirth for a second time. Vita’s dolls had become her playmates and surrogate siblings. She had quickly grown accustomed to being alone: eventually solitude would be her besetting vice. For the moment her favourite doll was tiny and made of wool: Vita called him Clown Archie. He was as unlike ‘Mary of New York’, with her flaxen curls and rosebud mouth, as Vita herself, though there was nothing clown-like about the serious, dark-haired child. There never would be.

By the age of two, Vita was a confident walker. Earlier her grandfather had described to Victoria watching her faltering progress across one of Knole’s courtyards. On that occasion a footman attended the staggering toddler. In the beginning, Vita’s world embraced privilege and pomp. ‘My childhood [was] very much like that of other children,’ she afterwards asserted, itemising memories of children’s games, dressing up and pets.

She was mistaken. Granted, there were universal aspects to Vita’s formative years: her love for her dogs and her rabbits; her fear of falling off her pony; her disappointment at the age of five, on witnessing Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession from the windows of a grand house in Piccadilly, that the Queen was not wearing her crown; her frustration at her parents’ strictures; even the ugly, homemade Christmas presents she embroidered for Victoria in pink and mauve. Too often her childhood lacked a run-of-the-mill quality. Hers was a distinctive upbringing, even among her peers. Its atypical aspects shaped her as a person and a writer; shaped too her feelings about herself, her family and her sex; shaped her outlook and her sympathies, her moral compass, her emotional requirements.

The trouble lay mostly with her mother. At thirty, recovering at her leisure from her confinement, Victoria Sackville-West remained beguilingly contrary; she had not yet been wholly spoiled. On the one hand she was capricious and snobbish (she described Queen Victoria as looking ‘very common and red-faced’

); on the other she was passionate and romantic, still the same eager, loving young woman who had confided to her diary with cosy delight, ‘Every day the same thing, walking … reading, playing the piano, making love’; still capable of enchantment.

With her hooded dark eyes and hair that tumbled almost to her knees, she was lovely to look at. In the right mood, she was exhilarating company. Like Juliet Quarles in Vita’s novel The Easter Party, ‘she was irresponsible, unstable, intemperate, and a silly chatterer – but … under all these things she possessed a warm heart’.

In time the combination of beauty, wealth and position encouraged less attractive facets to her character, but this illegitimate daughter of a poor Spanish dancer had yet to forget her good fortune in marrying her cousin. Hers was the zeal of a convert, leavened at this stage with apparently boundless joie de vivre: she embraced with gusto the life of an aristocratic chatelaine that had come to her like the happy ending to a fairy tale. As she herself repeated with justification, ‘Quel roman est ma vie!’ (My life is just like a novel). No one ever persuaded her to relinquish the heroine’s role.

Victoria’s year consisted of entertaining at Knole, country house visits and extended Continental holidays; her favourite days were those she spent alone with Lionel. These were leisurely days of flirtation and passionate lovemaking, of arranging and rearranging the many rooms she thrilled to call her own. She papered one room entirely with used postage stamps and made a screen to match. She installed bathrooms, the first for Lord Sackville, one for herself and another for Vita, close to the nursery. Along the garden front of the house, she rearranged furniture in the Colonnade Room to complete its transformation into an elegant if draughty sitting room. Its walls were painted in grisaille with grand architectural trompe l’oeil; seventeenth-century looking glasses and silver sconces threw light on to deep sofas. There Vita’s fifth birthday was celebrated with a Punch and Judy show; Vita dressed on that occasion with appropriate smartness in ‘an embroidered dress with Valenciennes insertion over [a] blue silk slip’, the sort of dress Victoria herself might have worn.

As would her daughter, Victoria Sackville-West exulted in her splendid home. ‘Everybody says that I made Knole the most comfortable large house in England, uniting the beauties of Windsor Castle with the comforts of The Ritz, and I never spoilt the real character of Knole,’ she claimed for herself.

Knole became her passion and filled her with a pride that was essentially vanity; she delighted in her ‘improvements’ to its vast canvas. ‘No one knew how, when the day was over and the workmen had gone home, she would lay her cheek against the panelling, marked like watered silk, and softer to her than any lips,’ imagined one of her observers.

She had no intention of allowing motherhood to unsettle a routine that suited her so admirably. Inevitably, her manner of life affected her daughter.

Vita’s first Christmas was spent in Genoa. It was a family party of Victoria, Lionel, Lord Sackville, Vita, and Vita’s nurse, Mrs Brown. After Christmas, Mrs Brown took Vita to the South of France to stay with Victoria’s former chaperone, Mademoiselle Louet, known as Bonny; Lionel and Victoria continued on to Rome. Vita’s parents did not cut short their travels in order to celebrate her first birthday in March 1893: they were more than 1,600 miles from their baby daughter, in Cairo. In subsequent years they exchanged Cairo for Monte Carlo, their destination for Vita’s third, fourth and sixth birthdays. On those occasions Vita remained at Knole. On 9 March 1896, Victoria enumerated in her diary her losses and winnings, and those of Lionel, at the Casino: only as a parting shot did she note ‘Vita is four today.’ She did not suggest that she missed her daughter or regretted their separation; on the same day two years later, she admitted: ‘I think so much of my Vita today.’

Every year there were visits to nearby London and a trip to Paris in the spring, ‘with the chestnut trees coming out and the spring sunshine sparkling on the river’.

Accommodated within this routine, Vita’s childhood was by turns permissive and repressive. From infancy she was frequently left alone at Knole with her shy and silent grandfather. Lord Sackville believed in fairies. Morose and uncommunicative in adult company, he enjoyed the companionship of a tame French partridge and a pair of ornamental cranes called Romeo and Juliet, who accompanied him on his walks outdoors. His presence in Vita’s early years was benign if detached. Together they played draughts in the hour after nursery tea: as time passed, a shared antipathy to parties and smart society types sharpened their bond. Vita endeavoured to please her grandfather: ‘She is very busy gardening and cultivates mostly salad and vegetables for her Grand Papa,’ noted Victoria when Vita was eleven.

Nurses and governesses oversaw Vita’s days; they were overseen in turn by Victoria, whose volatility ensured that none remained long at their post and that each dismissal could be traumatic and painful for Vita. When Vita was five, ‘Nannie’ was dismissed for theft. The truth was somewhat different. After the unexplained disappearance of three dozen quail, ordered for a dinner party, Victoria decided that Nannie had secretly consumed the entire order and acted accordingly.

With her parents abroad, as soon as she could walk Vita was free to lose herself in the self-contained fastness of Knole. She remembered ‘[splashing] my way in laughter/ Through drifts of leaves, where underfoot the beech-nuts/ Split with crisp crackle to my great rejoicing’.

She climbed trees and stole birds’ eggs. She ran wild in ‘wooded gardens with mysterious glooms’ and on one occasion she fell into a wishing well. Indoors, even the frayed and faded curtains of Knole’s state rooms possessed a peculiar power of enchantment over her. After nightfall, beginning as a small child, she wandered through the rooms with only a single candle to hold fear at bay. Hers was a playground like few others.

The company of her mother, ‘maddening and irresistible by turns’,

was predictably more stringent. Victoria’s sharp tongue was quick to wound, particularly on the subject of Vita’s looks, which proved an ongoing source of disappointment. ‘Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly’:

it was Vita’s hair, with its stubborn resistance to curling, that exercised Victoria above all. She may have spoken more from pique than conviction – on 20 February 1903 she recorded in her diary, ‘The drawing of Vita by Mr Stock is finished and is quite pretty, but the child is much prettier and has far more depth and animation in her face;’

it was all the same to Vita. Vita subsequently categorised her mother ‘more as a restraint than anything else in my existence’,

but as a small child she delighted her with her quick affection and her loving nature. ‘She is always putting her little arm round my neck and saying I am the best Mama in the world,’ Victoria wrote on 1 August 1897.

Vita grew up to regard her mother as compelling but incomprehensible: she dreaded her unpredictability and her ability to humiliate with a look or word. ‘She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns.’

Mutual misunderstanding coloured their relationship almost from the first: Vita was probably thinking of her mother when, in an essay about art composed in her late teens, she wrote, ‘It is possible, and indeed common, to possess personality allied to a mediocre soul.’

In one letter, written in a round, childish hand, Vita implored Victoria to ‘forgive me. Punish me, I deserve it, but forgive me if you can and please don’t say you are sorry to have me and go on loving me.’

Vita learned from Victoria that so-called loving relationships could embrace indifference, pain and even hatred, and that equality was not assured between partners in love. As she wrote in 1934 of one particularly mismatched couple in her novel The Dark Island, ‘She liked him, yet she hated him. She was surprised to find how instantly she could like and yet hate a person, at first sight.’

For Vita that model of loving and hating existed in the first instance not in stories but her family life. It was a dangerous lesson.

It was Victoria, not Lionel, who administered punishments, and Victoria who ordered Vita’s life. When Vita was five, Victoria forced her to eat dinner upstairs: ‘she is always eating raw chestnuts and they are so bad for her’.

Instead she insisted on simple food typical of nursery regimes of the period; Vita’s particular hatred was for rice pudding. The following year, Vita was again punished by dining upstairs: the six-year-old tomboy with the post office savings account had escaped her nursemaid in Sevenoaks in order to buy herself a ball and a balloon. Accustomed to extravagant flattery and naturally autocratic in all her relationships, Victoria inclined to high-handedness: where Vita was concerned she expected obedience. As it happened, her treatment of her daughter hardly differed from her behaviour towards her husband or her father. In each case she preferred to jeopardise affection rather than yield control.

Until Vita was four, Knole was home not only to her parents and her grandfather, but also her Aunt Amalia, ‘very Spanish and very charming’ in one estimate,

remembered by Vita only as ‘a vinegary spinster … [who] annoyed Mother by giving me preserved cherries when Mother asked her not to’.

(She annoyed Victoria more with her constant requests for money. The women were temperamentally incompatible and ‘endless rows and quarrels’ made both miserable.

) Also in the great house, hugger-mugger within its far-flung walls and ‘rich confusion of staircases and rooms’,

lived Vita’s other families: four centuries of Sackville forebears, ‘heavy-lidded, splenetic’,

preserved in heraldic flourishes and the rows of portraits in which Vita would glimpse ‘our faces cut/ All in the same sad feature’;

and Knole’s servants and retainers. All influenced the small girl in their midst.

From the outset of her marriage, Victoria Sackville-West had set about rationalising Knole’s running costs. By 1907, she would successfully reduce the annual household expenditure by a third to £2,000.

She did so while retaining a staff of sixty, including twenty gardeners; their combined wage bill cost her father and afterwards her husband a further £3,500.

Few of these servants were known personally to Victoria, Lionel or Lord Sackville, or even recognised by them by sight. To Vita, free to explore regions of the house her parents seldom visited, they formed an extended kinship.

‘As a mere child, I was privileged. I could patter about, between the housekeeper’s room and the servants’ hall,’ Vita recalled in an article written for Vogue in 1931. ‘The Edwardians Below Stairs’ examines the elaborate staff hierarchies of her childhood. It also demonstrates how much of Vita’s time was spent among Knole’s servants, whom she knew by name, who shared her games and who omitted to lower their voices or silence their gossip in front of the dark-haired little girl who moved among them so easily. ‘I could help to stir the jam in the still-room or to turn the mangle in the laundry; I could beg a cake in the kitchen or a bottle of cider in the pantry; I could watch the gamekeeper skinning a deer or the painter mixing a pot of paint; my comings and goings remained unnoticed; conversation and comment were allowed to fall uncensored on my childish ears.’

As Vita wrote of Sebastian and Viola in The Edwardians, ‘As children in the house, they had of course been on terms of familiarity with the servants, particularly when their mother was away.’

So it was in her own case.