My mother, Philippa, died nearly 30 years ago, aged 58. She was several years younger than I am now and had been ill for a long time. At her funeral in London, the cold impersonality of the Golders Green crematorium was relieved by the heady scent that rose in front of me. A soft yellow eiderdown of mimosa, my mother’s favourite flower, was sumptuous enough to conceal her coffin. But I could not cry. Motherless friends reassured me. They said it would take a while. I waited.
There comes a time, perhaps with the death of someone close – an illness, a divorce, a second marriage, the birth of a grandchild – when there is an impulse to look at the context of one’s life. Only recently, shamefully recently, I began to realise that my failure to weep at my mother’s funeral was partly because I had never really understood her, never known what had shaped her. I began to wonder not only about her life before I was born, but also about other daughters in my family, and whether I could trace any common ground or patterns that might have travelled down our female line.
Daughterhood is the one state that every woman on the planet has in common. Whether we are married, single, orphaned, adopted, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, an aunt, nothing can alter a woman’s lifelong ownership of this specific relationship. There is no dodging it. In theory, a child of whatever sex is born dependent, grows into independence and remains there for ever. But daughterhood is more complex than that, altering in shade and degree throughout one’s life, involving whole acreages of guilt, loyalty, frustration and ambivalence in ways that sonhood doesn’t.
Assumptions about my long-dead maternal ancestors, the daughters who preceded me, had embedded themselves long ago, unchallenged, their familiarity obscuring the truth. Perhaps by looking at “the olden days” more closely, I could breathe colour into old black-and-white anecdotes and restore their tattered edges. The challenge I set myself was to become a family analyst, to wipe away the mist from the cliches of the past. As I started to uncover similarities in behaviour, I was unnerved by the recurring mistakes, the triumphs, the despair and occasionally, exhilaratingly, periods of exceptionally good days that my grandmother Vita knew as “the flaring days”. I was amazed at the regular emergence of addiction, abandonment, disloyalty, of emotional bargains made and lost. Could I, at this late stage, learn to reject the hereditary bad and, if there was any, embrace the genetic good?
My great-great-grandmother Pepita was born into poverty in southern Spain in 1880, the child of a washerwoman, Catalina Duran. As the sheets and clothes of the neighbourhood hung out to dry from the balcony of their tiny house, Catalina saved enough money to send her daughter to dancing school. By the time Pepita was 21, she had married her dancing teacher and with her audaciously sexy flamenco dances captivated not only sell-out audiences in Europe’s grandest theatres but also the heart of British attache Lionel Sackville-West. Their long affair produced seven children, the eldest of whom was my unpredictable, infuriating, utterly lovely-to-look-at great-grandmother Victoria. When Pepita died, Victoria became her widowed father’s chatelaine at the British embassy in Washington before marrying her cousin, young Lionel, who was heir to Knole, one of England’s largest and grandest houses.
Throughout the Edwardian years, Victoria Sackville was one of society’s most flamboyant hostesses, entertaining le tout monde from the king himself downwards. Her daughter Vita, an only child, grew up to be a famous writer, wife, lover and creator of Sissinghurst, one of the loveliest gardens in England. Vita had no daughters and there the matrilineal link skips across from Vita’s younger son, my father, to his wife, my mother.
Philippa had been brought up in the 1930s, shelved and neglected between two brothers and two world wars. She left school at 15 deprived of the chance to secure any qualifications beyond her school certificate, her education truncated by war, gender and family expectations. Marriage, motherhood and the keeping of a good home for her husband and children was all that was required of her by her parents, her husband and herself. As opportunities opened up for me, educationally and professionally, my mother found it difficult to be happy for me. When I was offered a place at university, she was offended when I rejected her suggestion that a couple of months being “finished” in Florence would be preferable. I knew that the chance to learn the rudiments of the language and the art of pasta preparation before settling down, preferably with a rich duke, would finish me off. My father was encouraging of all that she discouraged. Although at the time I thought he loved me more than she did, I now understand that her own sense of failure swamped her and she became unable to breathe in an atmosphere where everyone, even her own young daughter, seemed to be achieving more than she ever had.
All of these women occupied a central position within their immediate family. Pepita because her mother loved her, Victoria because her father needed her, Vita because she was an indulged only child. In my family, my mother’s increasingly frequent absences abroad became a growing source of puzzlement to us and sealed a collective determination to bring her home. There was a tendency towards selfishness. Once she became successful, Pepita deserted the devoted Catalina, too preoccupied with her own glamorous life. Vita eloped, abandoning her husband and tiny children because of her passion for another woman.
Several of the women were adept at subtle power play, making themselves indispensable to the men in their families. Secrets abounded, usually about sex. All but one of them drank addictively. And all were capable of electrifying, inspirational passion. While the father-daughter bond benefited from being less competitive, these mothers could be cruelly critical. The message was that one was not clever enough, pretty enough, not quite up to scratch, not quite anything enough.
The huge Sackville hereditary nose has been a source of anxiety to all the daughters who have owned one. Victoria ensured it was erased from Vita’s official wedding pictures, while, for my 21st birthday, my mother offered me the choice of a party or rhinoplasty. I chose the party. But there was also an inspirational thread of creativity running through these generations of women – of dance, music, literature, gardening. And we all kept diaries, wrote letters, recording our lives in minute detail.
The death of my father more than a decade ago was like a chunk of cliff coming loose and thundering to the ground. I was an orphan. No longer a daughter. The loss of both my parents has in some ways liberated me. Sometimes, I am aware of my good fortune as well as theirs: they were saved from extreme and possibly debilitating old age. With the dramatic increase in human longevity, several exhausted women friends of mine have parents living well into their 90s. There seems to be some truth in the old saying: “A daughter is a daughter for life, a son is a son until he takes a wife.” Just as these women start to fall in love with their children’s children, their aged mothers and fathers become a priority. These women must accept, albeit with a guilt-laced reluctance, the way the old order of things is flipped upside down as a daughter (usually a daughter) becomes a parent to a parent.
I am the mother of two grown-up daughters who matter to me now as profoundly as they did the day they were born. Even if they had huge noses, which they haven’t, I would love those noses unconditionally. During the progress of tracking the women who came before me, red alerts have regularly been flagged. As a result, I now try to listen, not just to hear, to make suggestions rather than hand out advice when a love affair goes wrong for example. I try not to compete, to blur the generational lines, while at the same time trying to keep up at least a bit. Onesies are inappropriate, but it’s good to know about Netflix and send WhatsApp messages, even to paint my nails green. Occasionally. On holiday. I think I am trying to be the sort of mother I would have invented for myself.
I wish and wish that my mother had not died so young, the rapacious illness of alcoholism claiming her at 58. When she was alive, I longed for her to find the courage to change, but I could not help her. Addiction was her more powerful ally. I understand that power too; for many years, I was subject to that same pull. With the help and love of family, friends, daughters, I came through, but I was lucky because in the end – well, not quite the end – I wanted to change and Philippa did not.
The saddest thing is that she did not live long enough to know her granddaughters. A grandchild is like sunlight dappling darkening corners. I could have told her that now. But last year, on holiday in France, something shifted yet again. A sudden whiff of mimosa caught at my throat and I realised that in understanding my mother at last, I had also learned to forgive her.
• A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson is published by Chatto & Windus, £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
