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Sissinghurst Castle - Part Eighteen - Page 2

© Kirk Johnson

I smile when I read about the way that Vita gardened before and after the war; she would do her gardening in the afternoon, after the head gardeners and the more lowly gardeners were finished for the day, but during the war Vita was a real gardener. All of the young males, including her two sons, Ben and Nigel, entered the military and Harold was to spend much of the war in London as a member of Parliament. When her head gardener, Jack Vass, left for military service, he begged her to maintain the clipped hedges, even if she had to neglect everything else. Vita kept all of Sissinghurst's hedges clipped by hand. This was a tremendous amount of work, but those well tended hedges made it relatively easy to restore the gardens once the war was over.

During the war, Sissinghurst Castle served as a base for the local Home Guard. Every night a member of the Home Guard would stand watch at the top of the tower, looking for enemy aircraft. While the tower had always been Vita's private domain, she didn't resent that watchman; she wrote that "In a steel helmet and rifle he looks most picturesque in the moonlight over the parapet. Her response to the army maneuvers that took place in the forest and meadow next to Sissinghurst's lake wasn't so understanding. During the 1930's, the lake had been one of Vita's favorite parts of the property - at least as important as her new gardens. Her boys swam there when they were home from school and she often took evening strolls next to the lake or drifted on it in a small boat under the moonlight. As war approached, Vita spent many hours in pensive thought next to her lake - it became a sanctuary. Vita's sanctuary was violated when the soldiers drove their tanks over the wildflowers in the wood and turned the banks of the lake into mud. In 1945, Vita expressed her feelings in a letter to Harold: "I have lost all pleasure in the lake, and indeed in the woods, since soldiers invaded them and robbed them of the privacy that I so loved.....I feel that I, and the lake, and the wood, are all damaged and spoilt for ever." Vita never really cared for the lake after the war; she focused her affections on the garden.

In March of 1945 Ben was hit by a truck in Italy and was sent home with a slight head wound. Ben and his father were sitting in the garden while listening to the radio on the May 12, 1945, when they heard the news that Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Harold wrote to Nigel about how he and Ben rose from their seats with great dignity and walked across the garden to find Vita. Then the three of them went to the tower. "Solemnly we climbed the tower steps and out onto the worn parapet. We tied the flag to its ropes. We hoisted it. And there after five sad years it fluttered in the breeze". Nigel returned home a month later - Sissinghurst was at peace.

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