Knole and the Sackvilles

by V. Sackville-West

§ iii

After Lord Whitworth’s term of office had come to an end he and the duchess returned to live at Knole, and to make such improvements there as were agreeable to the taste of the early nineteenth century. Such were the Gothic windows of the Orangery, which replaced the Tudor ones and were inscribed with the date 1823, and further changes were projected, such as a design which was to sweep away the symmetry of the lawns on the garden front and bring a curving path up to the house. This scheme, however, was never carried out. The bowling-green still rises, square and formal, backed by the two great tulip trees and the more distant woods of the park. The long perspective of the herbaceous borders was left undisturbed. The apple-trees in the little square orchards, that bear their blossom and their fruit from year to year with such countrified simplicity in the heart of all that magnificence, were not uprooted. Consequently the garden, save for one small section where the paths curve in meaningless scollops among the rhododendrons, remains to-day very much as Anne Clifford knew it. It has, of course, matured. The white rose which was planted under James I’s room has climbed until it now reaches beyond his windows on the first floor; the great lime has drooped its branches until they have layered themselves in the ground of their own accord and grown up again with fresh roots into three complete circles all sprung from the parent tree, a cloister of limes, which in summer murmurs like one enormous bee-hive; the magnolia outside the Poets’ Parlour has grown nearly to the roof, and bears its mass of flame-shaped blossoms like a giant candelabrum; the beech hedge is twenty feet high; four centuries have winnowed the faultless turf. In spring the wisteria drips its fountains over the top of the wall into the park. The soil is rich and deep and old. The garden has been a garden for four hundred years.

And here, save for a few very brief notes to bring the history of the house down to the present day, these sketches must cease. The duchess Arabella Diana dying in 1825, her estate devolved upon her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, my great-grandmother, who married John West, Lord de la Warr, and who died in 1870, left Buckhurst to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was my grandfather. He was, as I remember him, a queer and silent old man. He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave demoiselle cranes; he turned his back on all visitors, but sized them up after they had gone in one shrewd and sarcastic phrase; he bore a really remarkable resemblance to the portraits of the old Lord Treasurer, and he seemed to me, with his taciturnity and the never-mentioned background of his own not unromantic past, to stand conformably at the end of the long line of his ancestors. He and I, who so often shared the house alone between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand a child. He told me that there were underground caves in the Wilderness, and I believed him to the extent of digging pits among the laurels in the hope of chancing upon the entrance; he made over a tall tree to me for my own, and I mounted a wooden cannon among its branches to keep away intruders. When I was away, which was seldom, he would write me harlequin letters in different coloured chalks. When I was at home he would put after dinner a plate of fruit for my breakfast into a drawer of his writing-table labelled with my name, and this he never once failed to do, even though there might have been thirty people to dinner in the Great Hall, who watched, no doubt with great surprise, the old man who had been so rude to his neighbours at dinner going unconcernedly round with a plate, picking out the reddest cherries, the bluest grapes, and the ripest peach.

When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him—and never knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me—and sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy, and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London; of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but “my Lord” and “my Lady.” I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to bed. But although our understanding of one another was, I am sure, so excellent, our rare conversations remained always on similar fantastic subjects, nor ever approached the intimate or the personal.

Then he fell ill and died when he was over eighty, and became a name like the others, and his portrait took its place among the rest, with a label recording the dates of his birth and death.

APPENDIX
A Note on Thieves’ Cant

The vocabulary given on page [135] contributes no word which may not be found in any cant dictionary, and therefore may appear undeserving of inclusion. But I put it in because I think few people, apart from students of philology, realize the existence of that large section of our language in use among the vagabond classes. Cant and slang, to most people’s minds, are synonymous, but this is an error of belief: slang creeps from many sources into the river of language, and so mingles with it that in course of time many use it without knowing that they do so; cant, on the other hand, remains definite and obscure of origin. Slang is loose, expressive, and metaphorical; cant is tight and correct: it has even a literature of its own, broad and racy, incomprehensible to the ordinary reader without the help of a glossary. Its words, for the most part, bear no resemblance to English words; unlike slang, they are not words adapted, for the sake of vividness, to a use for which they were not originally intended, but are applied strictly to their peculiar meaning.

Although the origin of cant as a separate jargon or language is obscure—it does not appear in England till the second half of the sixteenth century—the origin of certain of its words may be traced. Of those included in the vocabulary on page [135], for example, ken, for house, comes from khan (gipsy and Oriental); fogus, for tobacco, comes from fogo, an old word for stench; maund, or maunder, to beg, does not derive, as might be thought, from maung, to beg, a gipsy word taken from the Hindu, but from the Anglo-Saxon mand, a basket; bouse, to drink (which, of course, has given us booze, with the same meaning, and which in the fourteenth century was perfectly good English), comes from the Dutch buyzen, to tipple. Abram, naked, is found as abrannoi, with the same meaning, in Hungarian gipsy; cassan, cheese, is cas in English gipsy; dimber survives for “pretty” in Worcestershire. Cheat appears frequently in cant as a common affix.

As for autem mort, I find it in an early authority thus defined: “These autem morts be married women, as there be but a few. For autem in their language is a church, so she is a wife married at the church, and they be as chaste as a cow I have, that goeth to bull every moon, with what bull she careth not.”