Room with a troubling view

Susan Hill calls for a campaign to save a literary family seat

Edith. Osbert. Sacheverell. A sister and two brothers, surname Sitwell. They are not quite forgotten but nor are they well known to anyone younger than 50 and by many they are now regarded as a joke. Wasn't Edith the one who wore fancy dress and huge rings and pretended to be Queen Elizabeth I? Osbert? Sometimes confused with Osbert Lancaster. Sachie? . . .

In fact, the Sitwells played a minor but significant role in the history of the arts, especially literature, in the 20th century. Edith was a good poet. "Still Falls the Rain" is a great poem. Appearance-wise she was the Vivienne Westwood or Isabella Blow of her day, her features mesmerising, and she knew that if you looked like that you either put your head in a paper bag or showed off. She turned showing-off into an art form. Most famously she wrote Façade, which William Walton set to music, and which still features in the orchestral repertoire.

Osbert's finest achievements were a good novel, Before The Bombardment, and one of the best autobiographies ever written, six volumes with the overall title of Left Hand, Right Hand. It sold in huge quantities after being taken up by the Reprint Society and found a place in almost every middle-class home in the kingdom.

The youngest Sitwell, Sacheverell - Sachie - was an intrepid traveller to obscure and exotic places and wrote some good books about them in a flowery style ; but he had an unrivalled eye for the bizarre and the oddly beautiful. He also wrote vast quantities of bad poetry and was a man of enormous charm, with the aquiline Sitwell features, tall, thin frame and pale blue eyes.

The Sitwells were fashionable icons of their day - an era dominated by Diaghilev and Stravinsky - but they came from solid upper-class English stock. The family home was (and still is) the imposing Renishaw in Derbyshire but much of their childhood was spent in Scarborough, in a fine Georgian villa, called Wood End, part of a handsome crescent in like style.

Thirty years or so ago, I came to know Sachie Sitwell after I went to interview him and he discovered that I, too, was Scarborough born and bred. There was nothing else he wanted to talk about. We sat for hour after hour in the drawing room of his Northamptonshire manor house talking about Scarborough, of which, separated by 40 years, we had the same memories: the cliff-path walks, the great curve of the bay at low tide, the entertainers on the foreshore, the fishing boats, the lobster pots, the woods full of bluebells and primroses in spring, the buildings. And above all, the house, Wood End.

Our memories of that were, of course, rather different. To Sachie, it had been home, with the night nursery at the top of the house, facing down the steep valley, through which the winter gales roared and howled and the sea could be heard crashing and booming on the rocks and against the cliffs.

To me it was a haunted house. By the late 1940s it had been turned into a Natural History museum, but the conservatory, which old Sir George Sitwell had erected, was still there, heated to sustain immense tropical plants and even trees, through which flew exotically coloured parrots and canaries. There was a pond in the centre with goldfish as thick as your arm gliding about in a sinister way just below the surface of the dark green water and the air was moist and vegetal-smelling. It was a compelling place and it burrowed deep into my imagination. Years later I wrote a short story about it called "In the Conservatory". The rest of the house was full of stuffed animals and birds and all the usual old-fashioned museum specimens of flora and fauna found in the area.

And then there was the Sitwell room to which I was drawn over and over again, more so as I got older and became interested in the extraordinary family whose magnificent portrait by Sargent hung on the fireplace wall. The room had a comprehensive collection of Sitwell books and manuscripts, and the original John Pipers of Renishaw, through which I first came to admire and love his work and eventually, to know the man. I used to walk round via Wood End on my way home from school and call in, first to the conservatory, before climbing upstairs to the cool, dark, quiet Sitwell room which smelled of old books and furniture polish. Its atmosphere somehow burrowed into my soul in a way that I knew even then would help to form me as a writer.

Our literary and artistic heritage matters. We all know that. Why do so many people visit Haworth parsonage and Shakespeare's tomb and Hardy's Dorset? We used to knock things down and destroy both houses and burial sites and memories but we know better now. Oh really?

Is that why Scarborough Town Council, having neglected Wood End and its surrounding Georgian houses for so many years, is about to deal the final death blow to it and the Sitwell Room? Of course the Sitwells are not the Brontës but they are important in the literary, artistic and social history of the 20th century and the house is listed. But any minute now, Wood End will be turned into 30 or so "business units" and the Sitwell Room will be closed for good. What will happen to its contents no one seems to know.

There is no call whatsoever for such units. The conversion will be an act of vandalism that will cost money and make none.

Local protesters are doing their best but their arguments have so far fallen on the deaf ears of a philistine council. Time is running out. Come on somebody. Do something!