In Europe by Geert Mak Read Free Book Online

and now – attached great importance to their own domain. They were willing to conform to the rigours of a tightly run public life, but as compensation they demanded great freedom in their own, private realm. Within those private boundaries they could behave as eccentrically as they liked. ‘My home is my castle’: the government was expected to rein itself in, the planners could only go so far, chaos was simply the price one paid. According to the urban historian Michiel Wagenaar, it was in this way that there arose ‘the urban landscape of the free market’.
    And that was not all. Filthy nineteenth-century London virtually forced its own inhabitants to get out, and before long that exodus was actually made possible by the construction of a rail network. It was around London, therefore, before anywhere else in Europe, that there arose a new phenomenon: the rural estate, the anti-city of the stately suburb, home front for a new generation of comfortable merchants, a place in which they could foster their own norms and values, their own forms of leisure and, ultimately, their own ideas about nation, religion and politics.
    I have been invited to tea at the home of Nigel Nicolson, eighty-two years old, publisher, diarist and former Member of Parliament. He is the grandson of the third Lord Sackville, and the son of diplomat and MPHarold Nicolson and the writer Vita Sackville-West – also known as the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's
Orlando
. It is late afternoon, the sky is beginning to change colour, and among the rolling hills around Sissinghurst Castle one occasionally hears the report of the pheasant-shooters’ guns.
    We are sitting in the kitchen, where it is almost cold enough to see our own breath. Most of the castle has now been surrendered to the National Trust – money! – and the day trippers. Nicolson lives alone. He is wearing an unusual quilted robe.
    The afternoon is destined to be a memorable one. He tells me about the lives of his parents – one of the most oft-described of English marriages – but most of our time is spent trying out the brand new microwave oven he has recently received as a gift. ‘A miracle, a miracle,’ he keeps shouting. ‘But how on earth does one go about heating up a mince pie?’
    I teach him how to boil a cup of milk using the microwave, and he tells me about his years growing up at Knole – hundreds of rooms and chimneys – and at Sissinghurst. ‘We didn't have a normal mother-son relationship,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘My mother spent all day working in her room in the tower here. In the space of thirty years, I may have gone in there three times. The one who always busied herself with my younger brother and I was Virginia Woolf. Some funny woman once said to me: “You do know, I suppose, that Virginia loves your mother?” To which I replied: “Of course she does! Don't we all?”’
    Virginia was the ideal ‘auntie’. ‘She taught us to look at things through the eyes of a true writer. She always wanted to know more. ‘What colour coat was that teacher wearing?’ she would ask. ‘How did his voice sound? How did he smell? Details, details!’ One time, when we were catching butterflies, she asked us: ‘Tell me, what is it like to be a child?’ I still remember my reply: ‘You know very well what it's like, Virginia, because you were a child once yourself. But I have no idea what it's like to be you, because I've never been big.’
    I asked him whether having such celebrated parents was ever a burden to him. ‘A film was made about their lives, even a television series. But they weren't like that at all. Harold, my father, was portrayed as a wet, while in fact he was a very astute man. With such parents, a certain undeserved fame rubs off on one. But at the same time, it has also worked very much to my advantage. My inheritance was not extensivein the financial sense, but rich in contacts and influence. And it lent me a natural self-confidence, a