Читать книгу Siegfried Sassoon - The First Complete Biography of One of Our Greatest War Poets - John S Roberts - Страница 10

On the evening of Mrs Mitchell’s departure, Siegfried developed pneumonia. Whether external events and inner tensions combined to bring on what, in those days, was often a fatal condition can only be surmised. He became delirious and his temperature reached 105º. The illness, and his long period of convalescence and of solitude marked a profound deepening of his awareness of aspects within and around him. Felicitas Corrigan writes of Sassoon that he ‘belonged to that band of men and women to be found in every race, country and religion, who may be characterized as homines religiosi. They seem to be gifted by nature with a sense of the numinous, as lesser folk are with an ear for music or an eye for form.’

During the months of April to July 1895 he experienced a secret world carried to him by the familiar sounds of Weirleigh and the distant Weald of Kent. He had already discovered the solitary pleasure of fishing in the orchard pond and the enchantments of nearby Gedges Wood. Now intimations of his future vocation as a poet also came to him and the endless possibilities inherent in the word ‘mystery’.

Throughout his illness he was nursed by Ellen Batty, a friend of Theresa. She had come to Weirleigh some time before the departure of Mrs Mitchell to help with the boys’ education. Ellen represented a world full of hope and kindness in contrast to the harsh and suspicious world of Mrs Mitchell. Being the servant of hope and of endless possibilities, she opened up options rather than closed them down. She was also a born teacher, perhaps laying greater stress on exuberance than accuracy, but she knew how to enthuse, how to make knowledge accessible, how to bring alive the past in a way that was congenial to Siegfried. He confessed that he did not much like abstract thought, preferring to receive facts one by one, and each fact had to ignite his visual imagination.

He was also enjoying his life as an invalid and being the centre of attention. Fussed over by the family and the entire household, sleeping in the best bedroom, Siegfried was content. With the arrival of warmer weather he was carried downstairs to the garden, where Theresa had a tent erected. ‘To be out of doors again at that time of year was indeed like coming back to life.’ Alone all day he strained his ear to catch the gruff voices of the gardeners, the rumble of the wheelbarrow, the scythe being sharpened and the horses snorting at the front gate. Jays were squawking and pigeons cooing, and down in the valley the sound of the train on its way from Kent to unfamiliar worlds.

There was another sound which more than any other touched the depths of his being: ‘In a crab-apple tree close to my tent there hung a small Aeolian harp that lent to the light summer breezes a local euphony which swelled and faded to a melodious murmur. The sound was like poetry; for even then poetry could just stir my mind – as though some living and yet mysterious spirit – touching me to a blurred and uncontrolled chord of ecstasy.’ The experience of independence and security which the tent gave him was something he would seek throughout his life. A place apart, where he endorsed the belief of William Hazlitt, ‘Never less alone than when alone.’

Prominent also was a preoccupation with time and the spectre of death. He was puzzled by them rather than frightened, a puzzle which grew out of the need to know who he was. What was his relationship to the world which existed before he was born and those events he was too young to remember? Here is the seed-corn from which grew the major themes of his poetry and prose: ‘Can it be so far away – Yesterday, Yesterday?’ In the early years of his marriage, Alfred Sassoon had given Theresa a bottle of perfume. Siegfried borrowed the now-empty bottle from his mother and sniffed the residual fragrance: ‘I unconsciously made it a symbol of the time when they had been happy together.’ The phial offered more: ‘I supposed it to have come from Persia, where my ancestors had lived, so it seemed a sort of essence of my father’s oriental extraction.’ Was this a sign of deep bereavement, an attempt to reclaim a lost loved one and to erase the sadness of a broken relationship? The depth of his anxiety and grief over the death of his father and of the estrangement between his parents cannot be overestimated but it is equally valid to recognise here that Siegfried desired to ‘remember and be glad’.

From the material of the past, Siegfried began creating his own version of Once-upon-a-time. In the best bedroom, where he had lain throughout his illness, there was an oblong photo frame which contained 10 photographs of relations and friends. These were visual records of times before Siegfried was born. The group projected, he said, ‘a sort of happy past feeling’. They were all friends of Theresa and she had recounted to him days spent with them before her marriage. One of them was Helen Wirgman, known affectionately as Wirgie, who still came to Weirleigh for visits. Siegfried was fascinated by her, mainly because she belonged to the happy past but also because she shared the world of the young without making that world seem in any way trivial. An accomplished linguist, musician and traveller, she used anecdote, metaphor and the natural world around Weirleigh to open Siegfried’s mind. ‘I can see her sitting there in the schoolroom, telling me about Europe and making me imagine some of it quite clearly against the background of its mysterious immensity.’ For Siegfried, Helen Wirgman and the mysterious were synonymous. He was, and always would be, attracted to such people, of whom Grandmama Thornycroft and Auntie Rachel were earlier examples.

For the first 11 years of his life, Siegfried lived in an environment that was predominantly adult and female. Although his relationship with his brothers was close, they remained divided by temperament. Michael and Hamo were extroverts, Siegfried an introvert. In The Old Century, the brothers are not as central as the many friends of Theresa, nor as prominent as the many neighbours who called to see her. In Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the brothers disappear and Siegfried dwells alone in a world dominated by older people. ‘My childhood was not altogether a happy one. This must have been caused by the absence of companions of my own age.’ Although he writes this as a complaint, as a deprivation, the fact is that by inclination Siegfried did not need companions of his own age because they did not belong to the secret world he relished as a child. It was the adult world that he desired, whose inhabitants fed and satisfied his deep desire for mystery, as personified by Wirgie. They possessed the ability to cast a spell – something which was always broken when his brothers ‘came clattering down the corridor’. Neither were the brothers sympathetic to Siegfried’s cherished belief in himself as a poet. They showed little appreciation of his juvenile attempts at poetic expression.

Siegfried was attracted to music from a very early age. Throughout his life he enjoyed playing the piano, going to concerts and listening to broadcast performances. Music affected him at several levels. Listening to Wirgie playing the Beethoven Sonatas, he sensed that she was not only interpreting Beethoven but imbuing them with autobiography, giving expression to her deep and complex personality. Seeking as he was an effective means to articulate his own complexities, the attraction of music was obvious. Its sounds allowed the imagination to roam freely; it created pictures in the mind. Music was a portent of the numinous; it summoned and fed the ‘mystery’ leading on to harmonies not caught by the natural ear. The middle-aged Sassoon could well have been describing the 10-year-old boy when he wrote:

I think I’m fond of being alone

With music and my past.

By the summer of 1896 Siegfried nursed the idea that he was born to be a poet. There had been some preconditioning of his mind by Ellen Batty, who had read in his palm undeniable signs of a poet in embryo. Theresa, too, was influential. In June 1925, Sassoon wrote, ‘I have a copy of Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare inscribed by her to me on my third birthday. Very odd, as she was such a practical person, not the least high falutin. Whatever made her do it?’ In posing the question Sassoon is being disingenuous. In The Old Century he supplies the reason: ‘My mother had a strong maternal feeling that I was destined to be a great poet.’ The late Victorian age was full of such tender, affectionate, sometimes destructive mother-son relationships. In the case of Siegfried there can be little doubt that it was Theresa’s perspicacity that recognised early her son’s talent for verse, often saying to him: ‘Sig, go and write your poetry.’ Theresa’s influence was all-pervasive in these years. She encouraged him to read poetry, as well as compose it. His favourite poems were those of Shelley and Tennyson. The former offered memorable lines; the latter, particularly in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, a complete and entrancing narrative. Above all, both provided atmosphere and mystery in abundance. The meaning of a poem was always subservient to its capacity to enthral, all the better if the enthraldom was heavy with melancholy. He wrote in The Old Century, ‘I have a tendency to expect all great poetry to be gloomy, at any rate serious.’

If there was a painter born to feed this passion for the darker side of life it was an old family friend, a neighbour at Melbury Road and godfather to young Hamo, G. F. Watts, or ‘dear old Watts’ as he was known to Theresa. Weirleigh housed copies of his paintings and a self-portrait hung on the stairs. Siegfried was thus familiar with his work when Theresa took him to view an exhibition of Watts’ work in London. He stood, a dreamy and impressionable boy, ‘gazing ecstatically at “The Court of Death” and “Time, Death and Judgement”’. He gazed at them, considered them and then went home to ‘try and write poems about them’. The poems he wrote were collected into two small books and presented to Theresa as a gift of love, the first on her birthday in March 1897 and the second at Christmas the same year. The thought must have cheered her; whether the content did is questionable. ‘Eternity and the Tomb were among my favourite themes and from the accessories of death, I drew my liveliest inspirations.’

There lay the lake of sleep: eternal sleep

That looked so still.

And far beyond, the palace of King Death

Who hidden lay:

And he spake thus: ‘I hold the lives of men

From the beginning to the end.’

And, yea, behind him, angels stood

Guarding the things unknown, beyond the Tomb.

Edmund Blunden described such attempts as ‘little sanctified verses’ suffused as they all were by religious allusion and imagery. Theresa’s commitment to the Anglican tradition – the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalms – gave Siegfried a rich vocabulary rooted in religion and a mind preoccupied by death and judgement. The deaths two years earlier of his Thornycroft grandmother and his father also contributed to the preoccupation. Not all the contents of those 1897 volumes lacked humour, though. There is a short narrative piece entitled ‘Something About Myself’, in which, posing as a kitten, he tells a short family history. But even in this prose effort the Beatrix Potter element is mixed with helpings from the Brothers Grimm: his brothers get carried off in wicker baskets and his mother wiped out by invading cats! The story was illustrated by him as well. The whole production is remarkable for a 10-year-old.

Theresa found all this literary effort, even the lugubrious bits, greatly encouraging. Siegfried was very neat in his copying of each verse and totally concentrated on the poem in hand. His brothers found it all a reason for jest. On one occasion when Michael kicked the leg of the table on which Siegfried was writing, causing his brother’s book to be smudged, he received a punch on the nose. He and Hamo had intruded on Siegfried’s secret and tidy world.

It was an exuberant household. Theresa readily admitted that her three boys gave her ‘a high old time’, but she was resolute in her opposition to sending them away to public school at too early an age. ‘She had a deep distrust of the feeding arrangements at schools and maintained that as we were all of us delicate, it would be a mistake for our brains to be overtaxed by conventional education.’ Keeping the boys at home went against the norm, but Theresa was not intimidated by convention. Having the riotous trio at home, however, did mean a severe curtailment of time available to pursue her own painting. Uncompleted canvases lay around the Studio like unfulfilled promises. A decade earlier she had caused a sensation at the Royal Academy Exhibition with her painting, The Hours, in which some 24 figures floated across the sky, passing from darkness into light. Her work was full of religious symbols and motifs showing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Consistent application, however, was impossible with the demands of running the house, raising the boys and the need ‘to redeem the district from dullness’. Not all her efforts to do so were successful. The Poetry Society soon languished, but not before the boys disturbed proceedings. People liked to drive over to the house to visit Theresa and see ‘the dear boys’ and, having done so, would depart thinking how much easier it would be if Theresa were to send her sons away to boarding school.

These visits ended with a tour of the Studio. One picture in particular was always the subject of admiration. Painted in 1891, it depicted Christ and three boys: ‘It was a picture which showed us in our angelic childhood and fully deserved their admiration for it was most touching and beautiful.’ John Richardson, whose father was Tom the groom, saw the painting when he was a boy at Weirleigh: ‘I remember standing beneath that elegant roof, gazing in awe-struck wonder at a huge canvas on which Theresa Sassoon had depicted a life-size figure of Christ; the kindly compassionate face looking down at three boys lying on the grass at his feet. The three boys were clearly her own three sons. At that time, I had never seen anything more beautiful and can recall that I tip-toed away, feeling as if I had intruded on something very private and intimate.’ The painting conveyed the piety which underpinned Theresa’s view of life and also her deep need of her sons and this perhaps, as much as her doubts about boarding schools, influenced her decision not to send them away ‘too soon’. Until that point the boys’ education had been haphazard, with friends being dragooned into helping. Now a more purposeful routine was needed. Tutors were employed, an arrangement which the three boys approved. They were content in their sequestered world, to which other children were rarely if ever allowed; its demands were far from onerous. Siegfried summed it up with typical conciseness: ‘God in his Heaven and sausages for breakfast!’

The first tutor was a retired teacher who had settled in the village. Mr Moon took what might kindly be described as a wide-ranging approach – a bit of this and a bit of that, with some general background. Lessons were confined to the morning, the afternoon being for carpentry and cricket. Undemanding it certainly was, except for Latin. Siegfried could make no headway in the subject and never did. But he enjoyed English literature and listening to ‘Moonie’ reading extracts. Theresa kept an eye on their progress – or perhaps an ear would be more accurate. She was concerned that the boys were not advancing in languages and feared that Mr Moon lacked depth of knowledge. Thus Fräulein Stoy arrived at Weirleigh and Siegfried struggled with French and German. She also gave him piano lessons but, despite his love of the instrument, he failed to make it sound ‘eloquent and eventful’. He liked the Fräulein, as he liked dear old stooping Moonie, but neither of them came near to Ellen Batty’s imaginative and engaging approach. Arriving at Weirleigh with high ideals and intentions, Fräulein Stoy soon found herself succumbing to the overall atmosphere of informality and unhurriedness. With the arrival of a third teacher she was eclipsed and, according to Siegfried, became ‘only a harmless appurtenance of the household’. It would be wrong to accept at face value Siegfried’s account of his progress under Mr Moon and Fräulein Stoy. He had in full measure the tendency to self-deprecation and understatement. That acknowledged, he was aware of the basic problem: ‘My brain absorbs facts singly, and the process of relating them to one another has always been difficult. From my earliest years I was interested in words, but their effect on my mind was mainly visual. My spontaneous assumption was that a mouse was called a mouse because it was mouse-like.’

The next tutor quickly understood Siegfried’s tendency to disengage from subjects which were presented in too abstract a way. Mr Hamilton introduced a routine which Siegfried described as refreshing, particularly in English literature. He also widened the horizons and for the first time the possibility presented itself of a world of exploration beyond the garden, Gedges Wood and the sentinel pines on the horizon of the Weald. The Beet, so nicknamed for his ripe reddish complexion, was ‘in every way an entirely suitable person to liberate us from the localisms of our over-prolonged and somewhat segregated childhood’. Clarence Hamilton had much more to commend him than his learning and piety (he was destined for the Church) – he was a cricketer of some merit. Being a student of the game, something he remained throughout his life, Siegfried knew details of the tutor’s batting prowess, at his public school and then during the captaincy of his college team at Cambridge. Much was expected of him by his young admirer. Unfortunately, the Beet’s cricket was to fall below the hopes of both Siegfried and the Matfield cricket team: on his first appearance for the home side he was dismissed after three deliveries. The putative hero and saviour had fallen victim not to the opponent’s prowess but to the topography of the wicket and its vagaries, which confirmed the local wiseacres’ opinion, ‘them toffs never do no good on the Green’.

Someone who did know how to bat on the Green was Tom Richardson, the groom at Weirleigh. He loved cricket as much as Siegfried did and carried his bat for Matfield with all the ardour and pride of any England opener. His first loves, however, were horses and hunting. The Eridge Hunt under Lord Henry Nevill over the border in Sussex held a special appeal for him, being in his opinion the best. Tom was idealised by Siegfried in The Old Century and especially in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, where he is given the name Tom Dixon. It is clear in both how influential he was in Siegfried’s early years. In all things he was conscientious, possibly a little dry and serious, but he took charge of Siegfried and taught him the art of riding and how to be a good judge of a horse. The appeal of the saddle was common to the three brothers, but Michael and Hamo preferred theirs on bicycles. By 1898 Siegfried had outgrown his pony. Theresa, on Tom’s recommendation, bought a hunter for Siegfried called Sportsman. It was a memorable partnership from the moment he mounted and felt a shudder when seeing how far from the ground he now was. Tom took Siegfried in hand and taught him that slackness in the saddle was as reprehensible as slackness in appearance. ‘He would have considered it a disgrace to have worn his stable clothes when taking me out, and I never saw him drive even a ponycart without looking as though it was a carriage and pair.’ This was Siegfried’s first real introduction to discipline, to which he responded. Tom was keen to involve Siegfried in hunting, especially to ride to hounds with the Eridge Hunt. The somewhat reserved, poetically inclined boy proved a fearless rider when stimulated by a high fence. Hunting also forced him into new company – not the most welcoming and sometimes rather stiff. Siegfried was not always at ease but he was always conspicuous, Tom having made sure that his pupil was immaculately turned out, especially with his clean bright yellow gloves. Riding out on Sportsman, high enough to see over the village hedgerows, Siegfried was elated but self-conscious. Tom observed him with a critical eye and pondered future successes and perhaps another hunter in the stables.

Buying and keeping horses placed a strain on Theresa’s limited funds and Weirleigh was a costly house to maintain. Alfred had not been generous in his provision for her – she received £200, a life interest in Weirleigh and various possessions he had left in the house and the Studio. The bulk of the estate, which amounted to a little over £5,000, was for the benefit of the boys. Alfred had incurred a heavy penalty for marrying outside the faith. In 1899, Theresa and the trustees were preparing to meet the cost of the boys’ education: Michael had already entered a nearby preparatory school and Theresa knew that come the new year, her two other sons must follow him. For them, the new century would be about the world beyond Weirleigh.

New Beacon School was new in the sense of having been moved to a fresh site on a hill overlooking the Kentish town of Sevenoaks. Siegfried and Hamo joined Michael there in the spring of 1900. The school specialised in preparing boys for entry into the major public schools of England. Michael and Hamo embraced their freedom from Weirleigh but their middle brother, who was now known as Sassoon minor, was nervous and tentative. It was his first experience of living in a community where privacy was at a premium and his first experience of being in an all-male environment which fostered the ideal of platonic companionship and commitment. Falling below such an ideal was a betrayal, but to exceed it was to be bestial. Homosexuality was an aberration, a deviancy which brought its practitioners everlasting condemnation – but only if they were discovered – sometimes through betrayal. Siegfried did not involve himself in its practices but ‘the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’.

His uppermost thought was to be acceptable to the other boys and well thought of by the masters. The most important thing, he determined, was to avoid being gauche and not to fail in the subtle art of the done thing. The mores, customs and rules of the prep school, like those of public schools, were a maze, even for the most confident of boys. For the self-conscious, nervous and incautious, a careless moment could open up a pit of self-destruction. The forced gregariousness and the lack of privacy did nothing to boost the confidence of those whose inclination was to secret worlds of their own.

Then there was the difficulty of being a latecomer. He was approaching his fourteenth birthday. Boys would have spent at least five, if not seven, years in the system by the time they were his age. Theresa’s eccentric attitude towards public schools obviously put her second son at a disadvantage. To have enjoyed so many years of informal and eclectic education at home made the transition to formality and regimentation difficult. Observing his brothers taking to their new environment with gusto created in Sassoon a sense of inadequacy: ‘I stood alone on the edge of the playground, feeling newer than I’d ever done in my life.’ To reach the age of 14 without having made a circle of friends must have blunted his capacity to mix freely with others. Sassoon would always be a nervous companion and a reluctant member of any group. At New Beacon School he laid the foundations of a life-long strategy to play the observer rather than the participant. The wisest course was to keep a low profile. This, physically at any rate, was difficult as he was tall for his age, precluding any possibility of slinking into a room or walking unobserved in a crowd.

There was also the challenge of keeping pace with the other boys in the classroom. He had no appetite and possibly no aptitude for the sciences. His gift lay in the arts, particularly poetry – a passion he hid from his fellow pupils lest he became the butt of ribaldry. He knew himself to be a citizen of a world where the imagination reigned supreme. Public schools, he believed, had little time for such temperaments. It was an incorrect assessment but a very convincing excuse. ‘Abstract ideas were,’ he has admitted, ‘uncongenial to my mind.’ In other words it was not so much a matter of ability but of aversion. Once Siegfried decided he did not want to do something he would not do it. Won’t do and can’t do were interchangeable terms for Siegfried and it required teachers of rare quality and imagination to evoke a response in him.

In the autumn of 1900 Michael went to Malvern School. In the tradition of the system his second brother became Sassoon major, with Hamo inheriting the minor title. This emancipation did little to help Siegfried academically but it did increase his self-confidence. He also adapted. ‘I became a more or less ordinary boy, impulsive, irresponsible, easily influenced, and desirous of doing well at work and games.’ An essential element required for a positive view of himself was to secure the good opinion of the masters and be regarded by them as mature and adult. Mr Norman, the headmaster, was kind, responsive and lacked stuffiness, but it was another master, Mr Jackson, who evoked Sassoon’s greatest admiration, not only for helping him academically but for encouraging him to play golf. The game was not new to him. He had wandered over from Weirleigh to Lamberhurst and watched the players on Squire Morland’s nine-hole course. Few, including the Squire, ever completed a round in under 50. As courses go, it had its own charm and challenges. In The Weald of Youth he recalled ‘that it provided very poor practice for playing anywhere else. In fact, one could say it was a game of its own.’ Mr Jackson, like Tom Richardson, was never content with the second rate. Only the best courses around Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells would suffice to meet his standard. Thus the third element was added to Siegfried’s trinity of sports.

Mr Jackson was also a first-rate teacher and Sassoon major made significant progress in the classics and English, too, in which he reached the top of the list. It was not a brilliant academic performance but it was sufficient to secure a place at one of England’s top public schools, Marlborough College.

Before going west to Wiltshire and the new school, it was home to Weirleigh for Christmas and the New Year. Nineteen hundred and two began with a heavy snowfall and the chance for Theresa and the boys to go tobogganing, all the more enjoyable now that they were all together again. There was, despite her conservative and fixed views, a certain physical recklessness about Theresa, some element of the tomboy which her sons must have loved as they watched her careering down a snowy slope on a tea tray. Then the laughter stopped. There was a telegram from Auntie Rachel begging Theresa to come to London at once – dear old Mr Beer had died. Sassoon recorded in The Old Century what happened next. It is an example of his gift for evoking humour and pathos:

We had long known that Mr Beer’s death would be a happy release, but now, in that cheerful snowscape, we stood and wondered if we ought to go on with our tobogganing. The slide was in splendid condition, and it might thaw by tomorrow; and after all we hadn’t seen Mr Beer since about 1897. Hamo suggested tossing up, but none of us had got a coin, so we resumed operations, feeling sorry for Auntie Rachel and rather hoping we shouldn’t have to attend the funeral. We did; and the house in Chesterfield Gardens, never a festive one, seemed as though it had been waiting all its life for this mournful event. Auntie Rachel, when we got a glimpse of her, was murmurously distraught, and seemed to have ordered a vast quantity of white flowers which no one knew what to do with. Very few people were there, and most of them were strangers to us. There was a subdued grimness about the ceremony which made me unable to relax into feeling reverent. I knew that Auntie Rachel had been behaving very oddly. Since he died she had been continually telling my mother that Mr Beer wasn’t dead, and at intervals she had protested against his being buried at all. My mother had been through a very trying time since the telegram was handed to her over the hedge.

Auntie Rachel’s odd behaviour was due to her having been infected by the syphilis inherited by her husband. She would endure a long decline into dementia.

At the end of January, Theresa and her son took the train from Paddington to Marlborough. Sassoon felt ‘pleased and rather important’ at becoming a pupil of so illustrious a school, but at 15 he also felt quite capable of reaching any destination on his own. At the back of his mind, too, was the knowledge of Theresa’s tenacity and eccentricity. Her suspicions of educational establishments, particularly their domestic and catering arrangements, would lead, he feared, to the unrelenting interrogation of those in charge. His fears were more than justified. Arriving at the school ‘unpunctually early’, Theresa proceeded to do her motherly duty via the headmaster, the Revd George Bell; the housemaster of Cotton House, Mr George Gould; and the matron, Mrs Bolt, to whom she handed extra blankets for Siegfried. Her son felt ‘rather like a milksop’.

Whatever his feelings of exasperation, once they returned to the railway station Siegfried became conscious of impending separation. ‘I believe I was my mother’s favourite. She used to refer to me as her second self.’ No relationship went deeper than his relationship with Theresa: he adored her. The pain of separation from his mother was something for which he was quite unprepared. ‘My devotion to her was so comprehensive that I had never given any thought to it.’ Returning to the college, pausing at the gates, he reaffirmed his strategy for survival: ‘The safest thing to do, I thought, was to try and be as silent and inconspicuous as possible.’ It proved an effective plan, so much so that he records with no small pride: ‘By the time I was almost halfway through my first term I felt that I was getting on much better than I’d expected. No one seemed to have taken an active dislike to me and I was in Mr Gould’s good books.’

There is something revealing in the desire to avoid being disliked, as opposed to any mention of active friendship, and his continued need to be on good terms with the adult world in the person of his housemaster. He worked hard and showed great application in order to achieve good results. Theresa had arranged special tuition in music and he threw himself into sporting activities. Given time and a little good fortune he might be, if not a distinguished Marlburian, at least a creditable one. So it might have been had not circumstances intervened.

Six weeks after arriving at Marlborough, Sassoon went down with measles, which developed into double pneumonia. The contagion had affected Cotton House and the rest of the school. Without being asked, Theresa hurried to Marlborough to nurse her son. No doubt her prejudices against public schools were confirmed by this calamity. Sassoon was in a serious condition and, according to Mr Gould, would have died but for the intervening hand of Theresa and her special brew of beef tea. Sassoon recalled in a letter that his mother’s attendance at his bedside was ‘considered a bit infra dig by the authorities. Parents of apparently good social position didn’t do such things as a rule.’ It was another triumph for Theresa’s originality. Three weeks before the end of term he was well enough to go home to Weirleigh to convalesce. This was the first of many interruptions to his time at Marlborough. In the next autumn term he suffered heart strain and remained at Weirleigh until the following May. The following January of 1903 it was decided he should stay at home for the whole of the term lest another outbreak of measles at the school cause him to suffer a recurrence, perhaps a fatal one, of pneumonia. Out of a possible eight terms he should have completed between 1902 and the summer of 1904, he managed only four and a further six weeks of another two terms.

These absences inevitably impeded his chances of attaining academic credibility and the commendation of the masters. Marlborough was an uphill struggle, redeemed only by his talent as a cricketer. Mr Gould seemed suspicious of Sassoon’s seriousness and application, accusing him of being a bit of a dodger who took soft options such as organ lessons instead of hockey. Despite his vow to keep his head down and avoid pitfalls, Siegfried walked straight into a situation which further reduced his standing in the eyes of Mr Gould. The pupil who usually played the piano at evening prayers cried off with a cut finger and asked Siegfried to take his place. The boy chose an easy hymn for the desperately nervous substitute. Mr Gould announced the hymn number and, without a modicum of confidence, Siegfried struck the opening chord, followed by a few bars and then came a deluge of boys’ voices. It was unfortunate for Siegfried that he had not checked the words of the hymn. Its five verses lent themselves to ‘facetious interpretation’ and inferences about Mrs Bolt the Matron:

How blest the matron who endued

With holy zeal and fortitude,

Has won through grace a saintly frame,

And owns a dear and honoured name.

The remaining verses are a litany of anatomical allusions: ‘As I struck the first chord for verse 2 (which began “Such holy love inflamed her breast”), I could only confusedly suppose that I had somehow blundered when Mr Gould practically bellowed “Let the music cease!”’ Although later Mr Gould was heard to chuckle, it was from such incidents he divined Siegfried to be ‘irresponsible and deficient in solidity of character’. His final report contained the crushing remark: ‘lacks power of concentration; shows no particular intelligence or aptitude for any branch of his work; seems unlikely to adopt any special career’. It was a harsh judgement, made even worse when Mr Gould’s last goodbye was accompanied by the words, ‘Try and be more sensible.’ Siegfried, however, took a more philosophical view of his time at Marlborough: ‘moderately pleasant, but mentally unprofitable’.

Marlborough did one good thing for him, though: it nurtured the re-emergence of his poetic vocation. One of his masters, Mr O’Regan, encouraged the appreciation of poetry among his pupils and as a spur would occasionally offer a half-crown as prize for the best poem. The opposition was not fierce and Siegfried invariably won. Not that the editor of the school paper recognised any merit in his poetic endeavours – he rejected every poem submitted by Siegfried. Lying at home during his enforced absence from school in the spring of 1903, Siegfried composed what he called a parody, inspired by a debate current at the time about altering the height of the wicket, and sent it off to Cricket magazine. Entitled ‘The Extra Inch’, and having a Gilbert and Sullivan atmosphere and style, it appealed to the editor, Mr Bettesworth, who printed it.

O batsman, rise and go and stop the rot,

And go and stop the rot.

(It was indeed a rot,

Six down for twenty-three).

The batsman thought how wretched was his lot,

And all alone went he.

The bowler bared his mighty, cunning arm,

His vengeance-wreaking arm,

His large yet wily arm,

With fearful powers endowed.

The batsman took his guard. (A deadly calm

had fallen on the crowd.)

O is it a half-volley or long hop,

A seventh bounce long hop,

A fast and fierce long hop,

That the bowler letteth fly?

The ball was straight and bowled him neck and crop.

He knew not how nor why.

Full sad and slow pavilionwards he walked.

The careless critics talked;

Some said that he was yorked;

A half-volley at a pinch.

The batsman murmured as he inward stalked,

‘It was the extra inch.’

This was Siegfried’s first published poem. Mr Bettesworth took a shine to his poetry and published four more in the following 18 months. However, sustaining a belief in his vocation as a poet proved a difficult task. His success in Cricket, pleasing though it was, seemed more of an end than a beginning. But once again, in an unexpected moment, the hope was fed. He describes how in 1904, while in Cotton House library:

Idly I pulled out a book which happened to be Volume IV of Ward’s English Poets. By chance I opened it at Hood’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’, which was new to me. I had always preferred poems which went straight to the point and stayed there, and here was a direct utterance which gave me goose flesh and brought tears to my eyes. It wasn’t so much the subject of the poem which thrilled me as the sense of powerful expression and memorable word music. For the first time since I had been at school I felt separated from my surroundings and liberated from the condition of being only a boy. As a child I had believed in my poetic vocation and had somehow felt myself to be a prophetic spirit in the making. Now my belief was renewed and strengthened.

Sassoon, Old Marlburian, in the summer of 1904, was ‘bicycling’ his way through his nineteenth year. He had decided to go up to Cambridge, but the University had yet to decide whether to accept him. Bridging the gap between desire and its fulfilment required the passing of an examination. In the village of Frant, near Tunbridge Wells and within easy cycling distance of Weirleigh, lay Henley House, a crammer establishment of some repute. The young adult on his bicycle was a ‘happy-go-lucky sort of person, head in air and pleasantly occupied with loosely connected ruminations’, who had thrown off much of the anxiety and nervousness of the schoolboy. He had crossed a boundary, much as he crossed the boundary between Kent and Sussex on the bridge by Dundale Farm, on his way to board at Henley House. His was a charmed existence. Under his father’s will he was financially secure, the trust fund being administered mainly by the family solicitor, Mr Lousada. He was not wealthy and neither was Theresa; comfortable would be the best summary of his financial position. This meant, among other things, that there was no pressure to be successful; there was no family firm to enter and no call to find a profession. Mr Lousada and his alter ego Mr Pennett in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man were more than willing to assist him into the Law. But what need of this to a bicycling youth, who was a poet? Inspiration lay all around him in the beauty of the Weald. The social order from the Squire down to the housemaids and stable-lads exuded permanence and its meridian prosperity seemed immutable. Sassoon was enjoying, like Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead, ‘the languor of youth – a mind sequestered and self-regarding’. E. M. Forster, a contemporary and later a friend, in describing his own youth might well be describing Sassoon’s: ‘I belong to the fag end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.’ Sassoon confesses of that time through his alter ego George Sherston: ‘How little I knew of the enormous world beyond the valley and those low green hills.’ Enlightenment would come in its own savage way; meanwhile it was still ‘God in his Heaven and sausages for breakfast’. To which he might have added, ‘horses in the stables, golf-clubs in the bag, and bat and pads by the door’.

Henley House had four teachers and 20 students: Sassoon thought it a vast improvement on Marlborough, where he had felt moody and unappreciated. Now he was considered lively and amusing, and was consistently cheerful. In The Old Century, Sassoon exudes a sense of relief as academic pressure is lifted off his shoulders and he settles into a routine, which, while unhurried, fulfilled what was required to pass into Oxford or Cambridge. Much of this was due to the ‘quiet methods’ and laconic style of the headmaster and proprietor Mr Malden – known as ‘The Boss’ – and his staff, all of whom are remembered and portrayed with affection by Sassoon. There would be little to say of Henley House and the year he spent there were it not for the friendships he made and which continued for many years after. The first of these was with his Classics teacher: all-round athlete, footballer and golfer, George Wilson. Sassoon’s description of him is an illustration of his tendency to idealise older men, who acted as his mentors:

George was a man who was always glad to see someone else do better than himself, at golf or anything else. Even when I first knew him his selfless character was apparent in his fine resolute face. Eyes and voice had a shining quality of courage, humour and intelligence. He was, in fact, one of the paragons of my human experience – one of those men who go through life without being aware if it.

Only towards the end of The Old Century does Sassoon preface an introduction with a sentence about friendship: ‘Among my contemporaries at Henley House I had found a friend.’ The friend’s name was Henry Thompson and he was known by Sassoon as ‘Tommy’. There would be another Tommy in his life but Henry was the first. A native of Cumbria, he was cramming for a place at Oxford. As with Sassoon, his education had been interrupted by illness.

He was small, red-haired, and alert, with eyes which often had a look of being puckered up to encounter the wintry weather. He had very nice manners, which would take the form of behaving with sympathetic understanding of his elders. He had a delightful cronyish quality, and when I took him over to see my mother they became like one mind in their mutual interest in growing roses from the dissimilar soils of Cumberland and Kent. With me he shared an enthusiasm for golf.

His good manners apart, Tommy’s appeal for Sassoon lay in his north-country shrewdness, his golf and in being the kind of person with whom Sassoon could share thoughts about the future: he and Tommy would together ‘play every championship golf course in Great Britain, ending up at the Royal and Ancient’. Only with one other person did Sassoon plan a shared enterprise based on companionship and that was Robert Graves, more than a decade later.

Norman Loder was the third and the most important friend that Sassoon made at Henley House. He is not mentioned in The Old Century, as the other two are, but in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, with the pseudonym Denis Milden. Loder was a member of a well-connected county family, who lived at Handcross in Sussex. Theresa would almost certainly have been familiar with the name and it is probable that Sassoon had seen or met Loder before their encounter at Henley House. When he first appears in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man he is barely into his teens and already the epitome of all that a rider should be.

My memory fixes him in a characteristic attitude. Leaning slightly forward from the waist, he straightens his left leg and scrutinises it with an air of critical abstraction. All his movements were controlled and modest but there was a suggestion of arrogance in the steady, unrecognizing stare which he gave me when he became conscious that I was looking at him intently. Already I was weaving Master Milden into my day-dreams, and soon he had become my inseparable companion in all my imagined adventures, although I was hampered by the fact that I only knew him by his surname. It was the first time that I experienced a feeling of wistfulness for someone I wanted to be with.

Loder, alias Milden, is Sassoon’s first admitted crush.

In autumn 1905 Sassoon went up to Cambridge. Loder went up, too, but there is no evidence that they spent much or indeed any time together. Sassoon was not short of company, however. His brother Michael had completed his first year at Clare, the college to which not only Sassoon was admitted that October, but also his brother Hamo. It was something of a record for three brothers to be in the same college at the same time, but the trio was dissolved when Michael went down at Christmas without a degree. In addition there were and would be cousins, Donaldson and Thornycroft. There being no English Tripos at that time, Sassoon, or someone on his behalf, decided he should read Law. Considering he relied so heavily on the inspirational, the image and the evocative to scale the heights of learning, Sassoon’s choice was a strange one – if it was his. Mr Lousada, no doubt, hovered with intent, knowing that Sassoon had not the faintest idea what subject he should read. As one who had known Alfred Sassoon, he may well have feared the adage ‘like father like son’. The picture drawn of the solicitor in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is of someone for whom life meant commitment to seriousness and there was nothing more serious than the Law, certainly not poetry. When the moment came for a decision, all other options having failed, Lousada secured the verdict. If this is true, then Lousada did Sassoon a disservice, only partly redeemed by allowing him, as his Trustee, the sum of £80 a term.

Sassoon started well, but with his mind more on poetry than Jurisprudence, progress was slow and interest declined. What lay at the heart of the problem was, as he had already discovered at New Beacon School and Marlborough, his total inability to engage in what he counted as academic aridity. There was nothing dramatic or imaginative in the subject and he was, to say the least, disenchanted. The portrait he paints of himself at this time is of a young man determined to discover and enjoy his own world, the world of the imagination; he was a daydreamer, though fully aware that disaster in the Tripos would be the inevitable consequence of his mental meandering. Life lived on one’s own terms was the guiding principle. He wanted to be a poet, not a lawyer. At the suggestion of his senior tutor, W. L. Mollison, Sassoon switched to History: ‘I tackled the History Tripos with a spurt of unmethodical energy. I had found Law altogether too inhumane and arid, but History was bound to be much more lively and picturesque.’

Not so. The underlying discipline necessary for success in his latter subject was the same as that required for the former. Soon he was equally in trouble with his History and was duly warned by his tutor. ‘“You really must put in some solid work on the struggle between the Empire and the Papacy,” he remarked. To which I dutifully agreed and spent most of the next day reading The Earthly Paradise in a punt under a pollard willow with a light breeze ruffling the bend of the river and bringing the scent of bean-fields, while Cambridge, a mile or two away, dozed in its academic afternoon.’

William Morris, another Old Marlburian, was offering him an ‘imaginative experience which provided an ideal escape from commonplace actualities’ such as tutorials and essays. Mollison, his tutor, was long-suffering and sympathetic to the earnest young poet. Sassoon was writing an epic blank-verse poem on Joan of Arc, in what he described as a ‘state of rapt afflatus – a sort of first-love affair with blank verse. I really was bursting with poetic energy that year, though so immature.’ He had also been bursting with golf – on the Mildenhall and Royston courses, among other diversions. Would ‘Molly’ have been so tolerant had he known? Sassoon was also working on an anthology of his favourite poems: ‘Swinburne was the main influence at that time. I loved Tennyson but was incapable of imitating his distinctness. Dante Rossetti also, and I’d imbibed quite a lot of Browning, Saul being my prime favourite.’ As for his own poems, he was collating them for a slim volume which, after much thought, he decided to publish in a private edition.

Publishing small private volumes of his work became his chosen method, of which Sir Rupert Hart-Davis has written: ‘I think the explanation lay in a lifelong dichotomy in his nature. He longed for praise and recognition, but he was instinctively reclusive, so unsure of his gifts and afraid of making a fool of himself, that he preferred his poems to appear first in small and expensive editions, a sort of safeguard to prove their worth and test readers’ reactions.’ Sassoon admits to another reason, his total lack of experience with which to judge his work and awareness of its derivative quality, if not of content then certainly in style. His reticence did not prevent him sending occasional poems, which were accepted for publication in Granta, the university magazine. The poems selected for inclusion in the small volume were dense with metaphors, a good number of them of the mixed variety, and combinations of conflicting feelings expressing life’s ups and downs in florid style. Occasionally there is a promising opening line. One of which he was particularly proud, as he confessed a half century later, declares boldly, ‘Doubt not the light of Heaven upon the soul.’ ‘Not a bad start!’ was his comment. If there is an underlying component in the collection, it is of life as pilgrimage, of seeking after some providential purpose. Sassoon spent the summer putting finishing touches to the proposed volume and on 20 September sent it to the Athenaeum Press. Within two weeks the first proofs arrived, with a second set in early November.

Having returned to Cambridge he was more than ever out of sympathy with his studies and was minded to go down without completing his degree. Theresa, he was confident, would support this; he might even have suggested it to her during the summer. She saw no point in her son pursuing matters in which he was not interested. Uncle Hamo took the opposite view and wrote urging him to persist. As a possible diversionary tactic, he suggested that his nephew enter for the Chancellor’s Medal. The subject was Edward I and, although Sassoon thought it a strong theme for an epic poem, he became disillusioned with his efforts. Eventually he struck on a possible treatment and sent in the finished work. Convinced he would not win the prize, he went home to Weirleigh for Christmas. The 18th December was a red-letter day. Fifty copies of the presentation volume arrived. He noted in the proudest terms, ‘no one knew about it, not even my mother’. Theresa was splendidly surprised with her Christmas gift.

In the New Year Sassoon had a slight chill which, turning into a mild case of flu, delayed his return to university till March, another of those convenient illnesses which enabled him to postpone the evil day. Uncle Hamo may have suspected as much and, unlike his sister, felt regret that his nephew would not complete his degree. Writing to his friend Edmund Gosse, he said that Siegfried jibbed at the idea of work and was determined to follow a line of his own; that he had his mother’s support in this and must go his own way. He also appealed to Gosse to have a word with Theresa. Nothing came of his efforts. His idea of the Chancellor’s Medal, or the Chancellor’s Muddle as Theresa called it, also met with failure – his nephew did not win. Sassoon’s undergraduate days at Cambridge came to an end. Well aware that his uncle was disappointed, he wrote to him on 19 May 1907:

Dear Uncle Hamo,

Cheque received: I must screw myself up to inform you that I intend to give up Cambridge. I see no use in staying there three years and not getting a degree, and am sure I should never pass the exams. I expect you will be very sick with me about it, but I don’t think I should ever do anything there. I admit it appears rather idiotic, but I have quite made up my mind about it.

Your not at all truculent nephew

S.S.

Not truculent! And accompanied by a slice of imperiousness in the final sentence. Uncle Hamo accepted defeat, knowing that his nephew would be 21 that September and free to follow his own course. A few weeks before the birthday, Sassoon went in a semi-apologetic spirit to Uncle Hamo’s studio. The trepidation he felt as he approached was dissolved by the ever charitable and gentle uncle, who showed himself quite reconciled to the decision. He was working on a statue of Tennyson and he encouraged his nephew to try on the Laureate’s cloak and hat. It was something of a coronation, with Uncle Hamo’s commendation of his nephew’s work and faith in his future. ‘Let us hope that some day you will have no need to borrow the mantle of greatness, old man. Let your thoughts ring true; and always keep your eye on the object while you write.’ The advice was sound, though unfortunately Tennyson’s outsize hat had slipped down to cover Sassoon’s eyes.