WHEN Adam Nicolson first took over the tenancy of Sissinghurst Castle from his father in 2004, he was inspired to convert the land back to farmland, using the organic produce to supply the castle's visitor restaurant and shop. But he reckoned withou
t the mass of red tape to be dealt with.
This book tells the story of a modern-day battle at a castle where French prisoners once fought battles of a different kind. He chronicles his long, fraught journey towards the goal of organic farming with energy and good-naturedness. It is this sense of determination, vision and optimism that dominates his wide-ranging biography of a beloved home.
To set the Sissinghurst of today in context, he charts the rise, fall and resurrection of the castle, from Anglo-Saxon times when it was no more than a series of ridges, via its heyday as an Elizabethan mansion and then to the grim French 18th-century prison which resulted in a castle left destroyed and decaying before his famous grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, rescued the four surviving buildings.
In his honest recollection of life with his own author father, Nicolson reflects: "Was this world of written intimacy and posted emotion, of long-distance paternal and filial love, in fact a simulacrum of the real thing? A substitute for it? Nicolson closeness had been a written performance for a hundred years. And that unbroken fluency in the written word made me think that it concealed some lack."
There is no unbroken fluency in Nicolson's compelling story. The vivid quality to his writing ensures that the reader feels included on a tour around Sissinghurst.
Nicolson also has a prosaic ability for original similes and metaphors; viewing a kingfisher, "a magnesium strip in the light and dark of the river" we can envisage the child "standing in the river, the water running up against my boots, and dragging at them, so that the rubber was wobbling with the pull of the current and the tops of the boots were opening and closing like a pair of lips". It's this ability to remember, combined with a pen that floats with consummate ease between the past, present and future, that makes Sissinghurst an exemplary biography of place.
The full article contains 400 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
