A House Full Of Daughters.

Juliet Nicolson, on ancestry.
Sissinghurst Castle: Vita Sackville-West’s granddaughter, Juliet Nicolson, on ancestry | Daily Mail Online
'WHAT HE WANTS IS AN ADORING SLAVE'
An exclusive extract from Juliet’s book A House Full Of Daughters.
During my mother’s lifetime I knew and cared little about her past. While my father’s family had long been concerned – well, to be more accurate, obsessed – with the business of recording and recounting everything that happened to them, no one wrote anything much down about the Tennyson d’Eyncourts. There were no diaries and curiously few photographs of Philippa’s family and, with an attitude that now seems unforgivably arrogant, we almost entirely overlooked her side of things. When her stories of wartime deprivation made their way to the surface, we did not listen. Instead, we yawned. I knew almost nothing about where she had lived as a child or gone to school. When I was much older, I used to wonder a lot about her childhood. My ignorance saddened me. I found myself longing to discover that there had been some real happiness in those early years before her marriage.
She arrived in the world in 1928 – a bad time to be a daughter. She was brought up after the carnage of the First World War, which destroyed such a high percentage of male youth and made boys matter so much more than girls. As a child, my mother was shunted away from home to avoid the bombs of the Second World War and later her presence was obscured by the postwar gloom that preoccupied adults in the late 1940s. As a young woman, the desire to escape from the dullness of home life made her ready to compromise. Later, she was tethered by marriage and motherhood and was too late to take advantage of the youthful emancipation of the 1960s.
On 8 April 1953 Nigel wrote to his mother. He had been engaged to Philippa for a month. ‘I can see her shaking off the dull conventions of her family and becoming a Sissinghurst person. She is an unopened flower. A strong bud. It will be fascinating to see her develop.’ At the age of 36, Nigel was still looking for his parents’ approval. And they gave it, but with reservations, joining in the family conspiracy that she would have to be taught how to be a satisfactory Nicolson wife. ‘Can she open a bazaar well?’ Harold had asked Nigel. ‘She’ll have to learn,’ Nigel replied. And in a shocking letter to Vita shortly before the wedding, Harold wrote: ‘I do not think she is an interesting or intellectual girl, but Nigel would not want that – what he wants is an adoring slave.

A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson.
Snobbery, scandal and sex in the shrubbery: seven generations of the Sackville-Wests.

- Juliet Nicolson: reflects on the ghosts of family weddings past | Daily Mail Online