Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a writer and publisher. He's the child of one of 20th century England's most unconventional

marriages. His parents loved each other deeply, but they enjoyed homosexual affairs.

Their son brought up in beautiful isolation at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent

when Eton and Oxford co-founded a famous publishing house, became a Tory MP and then settled back to writing his books, the most famous of which portrait

of a marriage is all about his extraordinary parents.

He is Nigel Nicholson.

Those parents were, of of course Harold Nicholson and

Vita Sackville West who would probably today be mainly remembered for creating the

gardens of Sissinghurst if you hadn't written that book about them, Portrait of a Marriage,

instead of which perhaps we think first of their homosexual affairs.

Do you therefore regret doing that, regret writing that book?

No, it was a great problem of whether to publish my mother's autobiography or not, which she wrote

when she was only late 20s, about this dramatic affair when she eloped with another woman called Vallet to Fuchsis.

And I shared her manuscript, which I found after her death, to one or two of her friends and my brother.

And the general opinion was not unanimous

that this was something which was so excellent as a bit of an autobiography, so interesting, so vivid, that it should be published.

Nevertheless, it took you what? We waited ten years before you published it. published yes I had to wait to obviously

until after my father had died and Violet and Trefusius had died and it was

during their time there was ten, that I could ponder the rightness or the wrongness of

exposing my mother to what some people call matricide.

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