Pepita Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Vita Sackville-West

  List of Illustrations

  List of Principal Characters

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One Pepita, 1830–1872

  1 Cosa De España

  2 Gypsies in Spain

  3 The Star of Andalusia

  4 The House of the Royal Peacocks

  5 El Lord y la Bailarina

  6 End of the Dancer

  Part Two Pepita’s Daughter, 1862–1936

  1 Pepita’s Daughter

  2 Knole

  3 Seery

  4 Trouble

  5 More Trouble

  6 The Last Years

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Vita Sackville-West was an extraordinary woman from a long line of extraordinary women – this book tells their stories. Her grandmother Pepita, daughter of an old-clothes pedlar, made her fortune as a dancer and had a scandalous affair with an English diplomat. Their illegitimate daughter Victoria, Vita's mother, spent her childhood hidden in a convent but went on to be the glamorous mistress of Knole, one of the grandest old houses in England. Vita brings her legendary wit, passion and eccentricity to this colourful family portrait.

  About the Author

  Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Kent’s Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926) which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. She died in 1962 at her Sissinghurst home.

  ALSO BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

  Novels

  Heritage

  The Dragon in Shallow Waters

  The Heir

  Challenge

  Seducers in Ecuador

  The Edwardians

  All Passion Spent

  Family History

  Grand Canyon

  Non-Fiction

  Passenger to Teheran

  Saint Joan of Arc

  English Country Houses

  The Eagle and The Dove

  Sissinghurst: The Creation of a Garden

  PEPITA

  List of Illustrations

  Pepita

  Catalina Ortega

  Juan Antonio de la Oliva in 1875

  Some of Pepita’s ‘treasures’

  The sole of Pepita’s shoe (actual size)

  Another of Pepita’s ‘treasures’—the tablecloth

  Lola

  Pepita and her daughter in 1870

  My Mother and her sisters on their way to Washington

  My Mother when in Washington

  Knole

  My Mother and I

  Sir John Murray Scott, with a Polish dwarf

  My Mother in 1910

  My Mother in 1917 (sitting out in the snow)

  My Mother at Brighton, about 1920

  List of Principal Characters

  Spanish

  CATALINA ORTEGA, widow of Pedro Duran, a barber of Malaga, by whom she has two children:

  JOSEFA, known as PEPITA; and

  DIEGO, a soldier and adventurer.

  MANUEL LOPEZ, a shoemaker of Malaga, living ‘apparently matrimonially’ with Catalina.

  LOLA, his daughter, who subsequently marries Diego.

  JUAN ANTONIO GABRIEL DE LA OLIVA, a dancer of Madrid, who marries Pepita.

  English

  LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, subsequently second Lord Sackville, a secretary in the British diplomatic service; Pepita’s lover. Referred to as ‘my grandfather’.

  VICTORIA JOSEFA, eldest daughter of Pepita and Lionel Sackville-West. Referred to as ‘my mother’. She marries her first cousin (i.e. the son of my grandfather’s younger brother), another

  LIONEL SACKVILLE-WEST, subsequently third Lord Sackville. Referred to as ‘my father’.

  Introduction

  Pepita was my grandmother’s grandmother, a figure once as enigmatic and romantic to me as she had been to my grandmother Vita Sackville-West. A framed portrait of Pepita, with her lilting name, a distant relation, dressed in her flamboyant theatrical clothes and staring provocatively down from our dining-room wall, formed a constant if mysterious backdrop to my own early years. Only when, decades later, I read Vita’s biography of this curious figure did I discover the full truth of her implausible, convention-defying story.

  Pepita was a Spanish gyspy child born in 1830 on Calle Puente, one of the poorest streets in the poorest districts of Malaga in Southern Spain. Vita writes that Calle Puente was so narrow that neighbours on opposite sides could stretch their hands across the alley and shake hands with one another. Pepita’s mother Catalina Duran was a washerwoman and a pedlar of old clothes, the sole provider for her daughter and her son Diego. Pepita’s father Pedro, who had been a local barber, was killed in a street brawl when Pepita was about six years old. The transformation of a child who Catalina’s friends observed moving ‘like a bird in the air’ down the cramped streets of her natal city, to the beautiful twenty-year-old flamenco dancer who captivated the crowds in Europe’s most famous theatres and fell in love with a British aristocrat, is as unlikely a tale as it is irresistible. Although the detail of Pepita’s life was always somewhat hazy to the young Vita – she died twenty years before Vita was born, in 1872 – the structure of Vita’s own upbringing, and therefore her life-long sense of identity, was shaped by her grandmother. Of course, it was also shaped by her mother, Victoria Sackville, who died not long before Vita began writing this book.

  In the summer of 1936, six months after her mother’s death, Vita was sorting through papers at Victoria’s house near Brighton when she found a squat black metal trunk packed to the rim with what Vita called ‘The Spanish documents’. She brought the trunk home to Sissinghurst on 15th June and spent the whole of the next day alone, examining its contents without moving from her desk. ‘They are enthralling’ she wrote that night in her diary, beginning at once to mark certain passages on the thick cream paper of the archived documents with a scarlet crayon and to make careful notes in her distinctive brown ink in the margins. The idea of this biography was apparently forming in her mind even as she read the pages for the first time. The documents had been carefully saved by Victoria following their use as evidence in the notorious inheritance trial in 1910 which hinged on the legitimacy of Pepita’s five living children. If the eldest, Max, were able to prove that his mother had been secretly married to Lionel Sackville-West, her lover and Max’s father, then Max would supplant his cousin to become the heir to one of the greatest houses in England. The unfortunate hitch in Max’s case was the documented proof that a youthful Pepita, as a struggling impecunious dancer anxious to perfect her technique, had married Juan De La Oliva, her dancing teacher. There had been little romance involved in the contract but divorce in the rule-bound Catholic church of mid-nineteenth-century Spain was out of the question. The documents contained interviews with some of Pepita’s contemporaries, many of whom were by then a great age but all still living in Spain. The interviews provided a series of first-hand insights from close relations and intimate friends into the characters of Pep
ita and her mother Catalina, for whom few photographs, no film footage and no private diaries existed. Here at last was Pepita’s story told in revealing detail by some of those who had grown up with her and some who had known her best. It was as if Vita, as literary archaeologist had stumbled into a perfectly preserved paper tomb.

  Apart from Portrait of a Marriage, a book based on a private memoir and only published after Vita’s death, Pepita was the most overtly personal thing Vita wrote, and for me, together with some of her poetry and her novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, among her most engaging. More than fifty years after her death Vita Sackville-West is most famous, not for her writing, but for the magical garden she made with her husband Harold at Sissinghurst and for her love affairs with women. Her most famous lover was Virginia Woolf but her most notorious was Violet Trefusis with whom she eloped, threatening never to return to her husband and two small sons. For Vita the romanticist, story-teller, biographer, dreamer, rule-breaker, a woman who, like Pepita, had pushed society’s tolerance to the point of snapping, Pepita’s untold tale fell like unpredicted sunshine onto her desk. Through the telling of the life stories of her grandmother and then her mother, who occupies the second half of this joint biography, Vita began working out where she herself belonged. Her investigation into her matriarchal line was an excursion into how her heritage had shaped her and made her who she was.

  As well as the invaluable contents of the tin trunk, Vita’s research for the book was multi-layered. Some of her most precious resources lay in Lady Sackville’s memories of Pepita which had remained vivid throughout her life. Victoria had cherished and burnished the nine years that she knew her mother, their mutual devotion unfaltering. At times this was the only thing mother and daughter could cling to in the face of the prejudice emanating from the local Catholic community at home in Arcachon in France, towards a Roman Catholic woman living in sin and her illegitimate children. On just one occasion Vita witnessed for herself the intensity of her grandparents’ love for one another. Years after Pepita’s death, Lionel saw Vita hanging onto the long plaits that trailed down her mother’s back and cried out in anger, the Proustian trigger of pain prompted by the reminder of how the child Victoria had once clung to Pepita’s luxuriant hair.

  Vita had travelled to Spain herself more than once in search of her gypsy heritage. During her first visit in 1913 she was in the middle of an intensely physical love affair with a childhood friend, Rosamond Grosvenor, while simultaneously engaged to marry Harold Nicolson, a young diplomat. Her own memories of watching the Andalusian gypsies dance, their sensuality still potent to Vita years later, almost overwhelm her near the beginning of this book, inducing her to address Pepita directly, glad that her ‘strange career’ after ‘many vicissitudes should have made you the mother of my mother’. In a séance-like, strangely seductive plea she implores Pepita to ‘Come to me. Make yourself alive again. Vitality such as yours cannot perish.’ It is later in the same passage that she turns to her mother and gives the first indication that this is not only to be Pepita’s story: ‘Why should I be afraid of invoking you or my own mother?’ she asks Pepita’s spirit. Close your eyes after reading her descriptions of the velvet dusk of a Sevillian evening ‘as it deepened into an actual caress of the senses,’ and you too become suffused with the heat, the sexiness and the vitality of southern Spain.

  In contrast to the Pepita half of the book, much of the second half is written from the direct experience of a daughter who both adored and was exasperated by her enigmatic and progressively difficult mother. Victoria’s life story is every bit as dramatic as Pepita’s. Semi-abandoned at the age of nine after her mother’s death, she was brought up in a convent in Paris until suddenly rescued by the intervention of her paternal aunt, the Countess of Derby, and by her namesake, the Queen herself. Victoria Sackville-West evolved into the enchanting and socially sought-after chatelaine of the Legation in Washington. And it was here than the men who began to fall for her contributed to an extraordinary inventory of suitors, beginning with Chester A. Arthur the fifty-three-year-old President of the United States and continuing with the artist Auguste Rodin, the architect Edwin Lutyens, the financier William Astor, Sir John Murray Scott, the heir to the Wallace Collection and the shopkeeper Gordon Selfridge. Even the Prince of Wales, the future Edward Vll, fell for her charm and beauty.

  Victoria died on 30 January 1936, ten days after George V and twelve days after Rudyard Kipling. ‘Stunned’ Vita wrote in her diary that night and the following day that she felt as if she had ‘been hit over the head with a mallet’. ‘Although she went wrong’ Vita wrote ‘and got every possible value wrong,’ soon after Victoria’s death Vita almost forgave her everything. The passage of time allowed Vita to write, so she says, with ‘all the silly little irritations fading and the real quality emerging’. But in Victoria’s short Book of Reminiscences she had described the nature of Vita’s discretion with her customary double-edged flattery. ‘She is a very difficult person to know’ Victoria admitted of her daughter, ‘she is a beautiful mask. She has put on a thicker mask since the distressing V affair’. Certainly discretion was part of Vita’s etiquette in writing Pepita, as she stopped short of describing the full extent of Victoria’s sudden and dreadful decline. In the spring of 1919, Victoria had caught her husband kissing his long-time lover, Olive Rubens, among the tulip beds at Knole and suffered a nervous collapse from which she never recovered. Her volatility became terrifying, a sunshine mood replaced with hurricane ferocity, her emotional barometer flipping without warning. But if at times Vita downplayed the ‘bad-fairy’ side of her mother, the full horror of some of Victoria’s meddling and vanity was understandably softened by Vita’s still recent sense of loss. Towards the end of Victoria’s life her eccentricities are a source of some of the funniest, if saddest parts of this book. This book is in part an exercise of hope that Vita would gain a new perspective on her mother, but at the same time a celebration of the woman Victoria had once been. If at times Vita presented her mother as ‘adorable’, in contrast to Virginia Woolf’s view that there was ‘little more to Lady S. than an insipid, selfish, rather stupid housemaid of amorous propensities jumped up into the Peerage’, then that was a daughter’s prerogative. Frankness is forgivably tempered by filial loyalty and, indeed, love.

  At the age of six Vita had dressed in khaki and played soldiers with the boys from the village, her rebellious, alternative nature evident from her earliest days. Vita had made wonderful fictional use of her sumptuously privileged upbringing in her novel The Edwardians, published nine years earlier. Knole, the great calendula house near Sevenoaks in Kent with its 365 rooms that had belonged to the Sackville family since the time of Elizabeth I, formed the central character in Vita’s perceptive, ironic story that is half condemnatory and half integral to her aristocratic sense of herself, packed with all the gossip and scandal that occupied bored aristocrats before the First World War. If the first half of Pepita identifies Vita with the wild impulsive gypsy culture of which she was so proud, the second reveals the world of the British aristocrat in which her mother shone and into which Vita was born. It becomes clear that Pepita is not only about two but three generations of daughters – Vita’s presence is ubiquitous. She is there watching the next generation of gyspy dancers in Spain and later as her mother dresses for an Edwardian banquet, intoxicated by the ‘vivacity which flashed and sparkled as the rings upon her lovely hands.’ Vita is there to marvel with the knowing eye of a bright child at Sir John Murray Scott’s fin-de-siècle apartment in Paris. And, on the cusp of the Second War, Vita is there to mourn her parents, as the old world fades into the new.

  Patterns of behaviour emerge, common to the three women. All three loved to perform, whether dancing to the ecstatic crowds in the theatres of nineteenth-century Europe, acting the part of a bogus Countess under the disapproving eye of Catholic France, excelling at playing the hostess to Henry James in the British Legation in Washington D. C., and, although no
t part of this book, dressing as a wounded French soldier in the streets of Piccadilly – Vita’s audacious disguise as she escorted a girlfriend through the London streets after the First World War. None of these powerful women were easy to be married to, to be in love with or to have as mothers. Vita viewed almost all relationships as expendable. Both Vita and Victoria fought against maternal dominance, swinging between idolatry and rejection while reserving the steadier emotions of respect and affection for their fathers.

  By objectifying and analysing her long fascination for her gypsy heritage, the writing of this book and the unravelling of the emotional confusion of her early life seemed to tame Vita and calm her lust for adventure. She had bought Sissinghurst in 1930 and much of her passion and creative energy became increasingly focused on making a garden from the rubble of a crumbling Elizabethan mansion. Unable as a woman to inherit her beloved Knole due to the archaic rules of primogeniture, Vita found the great house returned to her, at least on paper, in Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando. Similarly, in Pepita, Vita secures and confirms for herself the strength of her affiliation and debt to the first two women she loved.

  On receiving the manuscript at The Hogarth Press, Virginia reported to the author that she read Pepita ‘like a shark swallowing mackerel’. The book was published on 30 October 1937, almost a year after the abdication of Edward Vlll and two years before the outbreak of a war during which Britain would shift still further from the old Edwardian sensibilities of class, privilege and restrictive opportunities for women. The book was praised in particular for the honesty of Vita’s portrait of Victoria, Edwin Lutyens writing to Vita that his old lover was revealed to him as ‘porcelain, the glaze of which is crazed’. The enthusiastic reviews were matched by sales of 10,000 copies in Britain in two months, four reprints in six months and a selection in America for the prestigious Book of the Month Club.