Читать книгу Siegfried Sassoon - The First Complete Biography of One of Our Greatest War Poets - John S Roberts - Страница 8

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 at Matfield in Kent. Although Sassoon was described in his lifetime as a ‘quintessential Englishman’, it is incongruous that not one of his names is of robust Anglo-Saxon origin. His mother was responsible for the choice of the forenames. She admired the operas of Wagner, hence Siegfried. The middle name was given to mark the esteem in which she held a certain Canon Loraine, who had prepared her for confirmation and thereafter gave her spiritual guidance. There is no evidence that Siegfried was unhappy with the choice. Of his surname he was less enamoured. ‘Sassoon is the name I go by, a mere susurration in eternity – to oblivion with it!’ For him, in his formative years especially, the name carried nuances far removed from the joy which it denotes in Hebrew. It was synonymous with broken relationships and ostracism. ‘Ever since I could remember, I had been remotely aware of a lot of rich Sassoon relations. I had great-uncles galore, whom I had never met, and they all knew the Prince of Wales, who sometimes stayed with them at Brighton. Never having received so much as a chuck under the chin from any of these great-uncles, I couldn’t exactly feel proud of them for being so affluent but I was, as a matter of course, impressed by the relationship, and often wondered what they looked like.’ He need not have wondered. His father’s face and a look in the mirror would have revealed the exotic physical characteristics he shared with his forebears.

In 1858 Sassoon David Sassoon, Siegfried’s paternal grandfather and known as S.D., became the first of the family to set foot in England. The Sassoons had set their feet in many other places. Sephardic Jews, they had wandered over the centuries from Palestine to Spain and Syria. The branch from which Siegfried descended flourished first in Baghdad then in the city of Bombay, from whence in pursuit of their commercial interests individual members travelled afield, in particular to Asia and China. S.D. was one of nine children from two marriages, he being the eldest of the second brood. The names of his brothers and sisters are a mixture of their Hebrew ancestry and the family’s deep respect for the British Empire – Albert, formally Abdullah, and Arthur balancing Reuben and Aaron, and the girls matching Kate with Rebecca. The children were well educated, confident, clannish and sagacious. Within the business, cultural and religious life of the Jewish community in India during the nineteenth century the Sassoons flourished under the founder of the modern dynasty, David Sassoon. Despite becoming immensely wealthy and influential he remained a modest man and possessed a generous spirit. Wealth was regarded as a means to an end. Hospitals, libraries and synagogues received substantial endowments. But however great their wealth or their commercial and social success, nothing was achieved at the expense of their loyalty to the Jewish faith.

Having developed the business eastwards, David Sassoon looked for new opportunities in England, where the cotton trade in the north was expanding. Of his sons he believed that S.D. was the best suited to further the family interests. S.D. travelled alone and established an office in Leadenhall Street in the City of London. Within a matter of months he was joined by his wife, Fahra, their three-year-old son Joseph and a three-month-old daughter Rachel. Fahra anglicised her name to Flora but, though an admirer of her adopted country, she arranged the household to reflect the customs and beliefs of Judaism. They bought a house called Ashley Park near Walton-on-Thames, which had once been the residence of that indefatigable builder of vast properties, Cardinal Wolsey. S.D. was as inveterate a bibliophile as Wolsey was a builder. He mined material from his extensive library for inclusion in his essays on aspects of culture and his study of languages. Preoccupied with business and immersed in learning, he was left little time to enjoy the fresh air of Ashley Park and its green slopes leading down to the Thames. Flora was not interested in commerce, nor the social scene. Small, outspoken and of a quixotic temperament, she found her main pleasure in her children and in music. In 1861 a third child and second son was born and given the names of Alfred Ezra. He would become Siegfried’s father.

S.D. did not enjoy robust health. He was tall and thin, giving the impression of frailty. His father did not expect the demands of the London office to be onerous and, given his son’s interest in Western culture, thought it an ideal location for his health and fulfilment. So it might have been, had not circumstances intervened. The Civil War in America and the blockade of the southern ports denied supplies of cotton to the factories in the north of England. All eyes turned to India and the East. Suddenly the Leadenhall Street office became pivotal and made demands on S.D. which he found difficult to meet. In the oppressively hot summer of 1867, as he waited to meet a business acquaintance in the foyer of the Old Langham Hotel, Sassoon David suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 35.

Reuben Sassoon was sent from Bombay to continue his late brother’s work. Over the next decade he was followed by his other brothers. Each would achieve commercial success, social notoriety and royal favour. The Prince of Wales was not prejudiced against Jews, nor against those who had amassed fortunes through trade. His attitude was not entirely altruistic; he needed the Sassoons and others to underwrite his ceaseless demands for social distraction. House parties, horse racing, gambling and gargantuan dinner-parties required a constant flow of money. The Sassoons were more than able to meet the demand. Each son inherited £500,000 on the death of David Sassoon, to which were added the profits of the trading company. They bought houses in London and on the south coast of England, which were put at the disposal of the Prince and his social circle. They were given royal honours, including knighthoods; they were admired, no doubt they were envied, certainly they scaled the social heights of Edwardian England, but to Siegfried they were the great-uncles who never so much as gave him a ‘chuck under the chin’.

Throughout his life Siegfried made few references to his Jewish ancestry and even fewer acknowledgements of his indebtedness to it. Indeed it was only in his last years and in response to a questioning friend that he recognised how his paternal side had given him religious, poetic and prophetic insights. ‘You are right about my inheritance. I sometimes surmise that my eastern ancestry is stronger in me than the Thornycrofts. The daemon in me is Jewish.’ The Thornycrofts knew the Sassoons of Ashley Park but neither family on first acquaintance could have guessed how their destinies would intertwine to produce a poet, a prose-writer and a quintessential Englishman.

Thomas and Mary Thornycroft were Siegfried’s maternal grandparents. Both were descendants of English yeomanry – Thomas’s roots lay deep in Cheshire and Mary’s in Norfolk. They were sculptors and met while studying and practising under the auspices of Mary’s father, John Francis, who had moved from East Anglia to London. Mary, born in 1809, was nearing her thirtieth year when Thomas arrived at the Francis home near Regent’s Park. He was seven years younger than Mary but this made no difference to the almost instant attraction they felt for each other. In 1840 they were married and ventured to Rome to pursue their studies before returning to England and establishing a home and studio first in Stanhope Street, then at Wilton Place in Knightsbridge. Sculpture was not an easy living but the Prince Consort was an enthusiastic patron, as was the Queen. Public commemoration and private decoration brought expanding opportunities from which Thomas and Mary benefited. The register of the Royal Collection contains an impressive list of the Thornycrofts’ contribution. Osborne House, the private retreat of the Queen and Prince Albert on the Isle of Wight, contained numerous examples of Mary’s work, many still there today. The greater part of Thomas’s work was commissioned by public corporations to fill city squares and town halls with illustrious city fathers in effigy.

Between 1841 and 1853 seven children were born: two sons and five daughters, of whom Georgiana Theresa, the future mother of Siegfried, was the youngest. Contemporary accounts describe her as petite, with red hair and a shy smile. Although the last of the brood, she was not over-shadowed by her siblings. From an early age she showed an independent spirit and a witty turn of phrase. She was particularly close to her brother Hamo and remained so. All the children inherited the creative genes of their parents as painters and sculptors. Reading the list of admissions to the life classes at the Royal Academy one sees the names of Mary Alice, student May 1863; Helen, student January 1868; William (Hamo), student June 1869; then Theresa, June 1870. Thomas and Mary were enlightened parents. Hamo’s daughter, Elfrida Manning, wrote that the ‘girls would never have thought of themselves as advanced, yet they did everything that their modern successors, liberated by the bicycle, did in the next generation. They rowed, swam and when invasion threatened in 1871, learned musketry drill from their brother.’ In writing of his mother, Siegfried expressed admiration for her as a daring diver into the swimming pool at the local baths, accompanied by her friend Nellie Epps, the future Mrs Edmund Gosse.

In a home where good conversation was encouraged, Theresa and her sisters developed strong opinions, which were expressed with crisp assurance and a hint of dogmatism. They were influenced by two movements – the Pre-Raphaelites and High Anglicanism. Theresa was never a radical in politics or in anything else and resisted her brother Hamo’s attempts to persuade her to embrace the Socialist ideas of William Morris. The precepts and observances of the Christian religion were central to her view of life and in that orbit everything else moved and was judged. Decorum was a favourite and often-used word, reflecting her belief in an ordered and structured society. A household of artists the Thornycrofts most certainly were, but there was nothing Bohemian about them. Siegfried described their social attitude as the ‘Thornycroft mentality’ and on more than one occasion declared it to be their greatest gift to him.

To accommodate the artistic needs of the family, Thomas decided to leave Wilton Place and build a larger house with studios in Melbury Road, Holland Park, an area running north from Kensington. It was still open country and the homes of two renowned artists, Frederic Leighton and G. F. Watts, were situated there. In honour of his Cheshire forebears he named the new residence Moreton House. Thomas was by this time more engaged in engineering than sculpture and his eldest son John showed a similar inclination. Together they established a marine engineering works at Chiswick, to which John Donaldson came as manager. He married Frances, the third Thornycroft daughter, who became the mother of 10 children known as the ‘little Dons’ – Siegfried’s happy cousins and over-active holiday companions. Mary Thornycroft, solid and matriarchal, was never happy unless she held a piece of clay in her hands. ‘Stick with the clay,’ she told her son Hamo. She never tired of encouraging her daughters to visit and to participate in exhibitions, especially at the Royal Academy. She was also in demand by rich patrons who desired sculpted representations of themselves and their loved ones. It was her reputation in this field which caused the initial acquaintance with the Sassoons, when in 1863 she was invited to Ashley Park to sculpt S.D. and Flora.

Following the death of her husband, Flora’s life revolved around the rearing of the children. Her brothers-in-law offered assistance; Reuben was particularly solicitous, but each knew that Flora would brook no interference. She believed herself to be, and indeed was, more than capable of meeting the demands of widowhood. Supported by family wealth, strength of character and her entrenched cultural and religious convictions, she determined that the future would be propitious for her children, especially her favourite son, Alfred Ezra. He was full of charm, showing an early liking for music, particularly the violin. Flora was more than pleased and believed him to be a future concert artist. Never one to doubt her own judgement, she bought her prodigy not one Stradivarius but two. He was also fond of books, though not of reading them to any purpose. Alfred was not a robust child but, like his sister Rachel, he was a determined one. Flora did not encourage her sons to enter commerce. As far as Alfred was concerned this was a wise decision since he lacked the application required for success. This lack was not confined to commerce. Flora worried when her son began to exhibit signs of the dilettante rather than the purposeful student. He had passions for horses and cricket; he loved dancing and party-going. With his good manners and Sassoon winning ways he was attractive to women and attracted by them. Life for Alfred was to be measured in miles rather than fathoms.

Exeter College, Oxford, was a diversion for a few terms but proved too restrictive. The Continent beckoned; indulged by his mother he responded but went no further than Paris, where he tasted the delights of café society, the theatre, the boudoir and, if her autobiography is to be believed, an expensive dalliance with the actress Sarah Bernhardt. No doubt the gilded name Sassoon and its connections provided the entrée. This frenetic and undirected style of life continued when he returned to London but Flora’s delight in her son was undiminished, as it was in her daughter. Rachel was of small build and a delicate complexion. In 1882 her mother commissioned Hamo Thornycroft to sculpt a figurine of Rachel. Hamo’s fiancée, Agatha Cox, noted that the sitter was ‘graceful, but not a pleasing face’. The remark has the undertone of fear that Hamo might be beguiled. At Melbury Road, Rachel met and liked Theresa: a friendship developed. It is possible that Alfred accompanied his sister to Hamo’s studio and first saw Theresa there, but they did meet in Ashley Park, where Theresa was invited on several occasions by Rachel and welcomed by Flora, who did not suspect that the gaiety and boisterous laughter, always a mark of her son’s presence in the house, was a prelude to bitterness.

Alfred became interested in modern art and sculpture in particular. The roll of entry for the life classes at the Royal Academy for the autumn of 1883 includes the following: ‘Alfred Sassoon. Age 22. Walton-on-Thames. Recommended by H. Thornycroft.’ Art and ardour were potent in the wooing of Theresa. She was eight years older than Alfred but this proved no impediment to the growth of their desire for each other. Impediments came, as might have been expected, from Flora. When Alfred’s intention to marry Theresa was made known to her, this redoubtable woman was aghast. Despite being warned that his relationship to the Sassoons would be endangered if he persisted, Alfred was unmoved. It was now time for threats of disinheritance and the cessation of his allowance under his father’s will. But Alfred was astute enough to check the terms at Somerset House. The money lay outside Flora’s jurisdiction. A secret engagement was entered into in November and with the help of Hamo and Canon Loraine, a special marriage licence was issued. Theresa and Alfred were married at the Church of St Mary Abbots in Kensington on 30 January 1884. Hamo and Edmund Gosse stood witness. No parents or family were present.

The Thornycrofts were overjoyed when the news was revealed to them. Hamo had feared that his parents would have tried to prevent the marriage if told beforehand. Moreton House was in festive mood – not so Ashley Park. Flora called down a curse on the marriage and upon any issue proceeding from it. She forbade her other children to communicate with their brother: he had chosen a gentile for a wife and must suffer for his treachery.

In The Times on 23 April 1884, an advertisement appeared for the sale of a residence known as Weirleigh, Brenchley, Kent. Theresa and Alfred had decided that they would live in the country but within convenient reach of London. Alfred boarded the train at Charing Cross for Paddock Wood, from where he made a short journey and gained his first view of the house above whose door was emblazoned in Latin: Vero nihil verius – Nothing is truer than truth. Built in the 1860s, Weirleigh stands at the point where the road from the village of Matfield takes a sharp incline to Paddock Wood and the railway station. This strange pile of Victorian architecture had previously been the home of the nature artist and cat lover Harrison Weir. He had an obsession for adding to the house, with the result that it lacks symmetry. Theresa was critical of Harrison Weir’s architectural ideas, which she constantly attacked as wasting so much space. Nonetheless the house enveloped her and for the next 60 years was the centre of her life. Of Weirleigh and its garden the adult Siegfried wrote, ‘it is the background to all my dreams both pleasant and unpleasant.’ Wandering through the rooms for the first time is like revisiting familiar surroundings, so accurate and vibrant are Siegfried’s descriptions of them. This is especially true of the square, light-oak staircase, which rises past the room where he and his brothers were born. As one stands at the top and looks down the well, the spirit of place which he evokes in The Old Century and in his poetry, is almost palpable:

Down the glimmering staircase, past the pensive clock,

Childhood creeps on tiptoe, fumbles at the lock.

Out of night escaping, toward the arch of dawn,

What can childhood look for, over the wet lawn?

The documentary quality of his prose and poetry captures the essence of Weirleigh – the house, the garden and the distant prospect of the countryside: ‘Looked at from our lawn, the Weald was, in my opinion, as good a view as anyone could wish to live with. You could run your eyes along more than twenty miles of low-hilled horizon never more than ten or twenty miles away. The farthest distance had the advantage of being near enough for its details to be, as it were, within recognisable reach. There was, for instance, a small party of pine trees on the skyline toward Maidstone which seemed to be keeping watch on the world beyond – a landmark on the limit of my experience they always seemed, those sentinel pines.’

At Weirleigh, Theresa created a typical upper-middle-class country home of the nineteenth century: Anglican, sociable, self-confident and organised. The staff, augmented by occasional help, comprised cook, scullery maid, parlour maid, nursery maid, gardener, groom and stable-lad. The grounds lay to one side and in front of the house. An upper, lower and bottom lawn were each separated by briar and clematis hedges; there was a peony walk, an herbaceous walk, a lawn tennis court, with an orchard to its right and, beyond, a kitchen garden fenced in by apple trees and gooseberry bushes. The perimeter of the garden was lined with rhododendrons, conifers and pine trees. Alfred and Theresa made few alterations. They did, however, extensively refurbish the stables and renovate Harrison Weir’s studio near the house, which afforded space on the top floor for Alfred to set out his library and gave him solitude to play his violin, attempt some sculpture and paint landscapes of the Weald visible from the window. Theresa worked on the ground floor, filling her canvases with angels and seraphim, religious symbols and epiphanies of the spiritual world.

The Sassoons quickly established contact with the local gentry. Squire Marchant and his children, in particular his daughters May and Bessie; Major Horrocks and his sister Clara; Captain Ruxton, a gentleman farmer who was always ready to ‘roll-up his sleeves at harvest time’. Theresa would order the trap and Richardson the groom would drive her hither and thither as she visited those who were within calling distance. Relatives and friends from further afield took the train and alighted at Paddock Wood to enjoy a day or even longer. The cavalcade of characters who worked at Weirleigh, or lived in the Weald, as well as those who came to visit, are immortalised in Sassoon’s memoir of childhood, The Old Century, and also in his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Theresa was an accomplished horse-woman and enjoyed a day’s hunting. She was a country person who relished the rural life, much as her forebears had done in Cheshire and Norfolk. Alfred was not by nature or breeding a countryman. At Matfield he helped the local cricket team and added substantially to its batting strength. He was also a fine host and a somewhat frustrated entertainer, particularly in music and song. Theresa and he enjoyed the house being full of guests; but the dilettante in him was restless and the train from Paddock Wood to London became an increasingly regular means of escape.

Their three sons arrived in quick succession. Michael was born within the first year of the marriage, Siegfried in 1886 and the youngest, Hamo, in 1888. A nursemaid was employed, after the fashion of the day, a Mrs Mitchell from nearby Tunbridge Wells. The arrival of a nursemaid in many households meant that parents spent little time with their children. Not so Theresa and Alfred. They were attentive, even doting. The outward bliss, however, belied a growing tension. They were no longer in love. Alfred’s excursions to London became more frequent. It gradually emerged that he was involved in an affair with the American authoress Julia Constance Fletcher. Writing under the name of George Fleming, she achieved her greatest success with Kismet, a Nile novel. In 1889, after five years of marriage, Alfred left Weirleigh to be with his lover in Kensington, in a house within a stone’s throw of the church in which he had married. Theresa and Alfred never spoke to each other again.

Theresa faced the separation in a manner entirely consistent with her straightforward and practical approach to life. Her family helped, of course, being solicitous in both their visits and letters. Hamo, the brother closest to her, rounded on the faithless Alfred with unsavoury racist observations. At this time he was busy building his reputation as a sculptor. Recognition came quickly and his work eventually occupied central sites in London; Cromwell outside the Houses of Parliament, General Gordon on the Embankment and Gladstone in the Strand. One of his works, ‘The Sower’, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1886, caught the eye of Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘I saw the Academy. There was one thing, not a picture, which I much preferred to everything else there – Hamo Thornycroft’s statue of the Sower. A truly noble work and to me a new light.’ John Thornycroft, the elder brother, was busy too, working with his brother-in-law, John Donaldson, in the marine engineering works at Chiswick, where according to Sassoon, ‘Uncle John designed the boats and Uncle Don did everything else.’ Hamo and his brother prospered and were knighted for their work. Their father, John Thornycroft, saw only the beginnings of their success. He died in the year of Siegfried’s birth and four years before the break-up of his youngest daughter’s marriage. His last sculpture, a vigorous representation of Boadicea and her daughters, was without a permanent situation in London at his death. In her last years Mary set herself the task of securing it a worthy and prominent position. Eventually it was erected at the Whitehall end of Westminster Bridge, directed threateningly towards the Houses of Parliament.

Theresa and the three boys were always of close concern to all the Thornycrofts and also to one other relative who, in the affections of Michael, Siegfried, Hamo and Theresa, stood almost supreme – Rachel Sassoon, Alfred’s only sister. She had defied her mother’s command to ostracise her brother. At first her defiance was furtive but then quite open. Flora, having registered her strong disapproval, did not proceed to make it a cause for estrangement. However, three years after her brother’s apostasy Rachel, too, married out. Frederick Beer was a person of consequence, immensely wealthy and the owner of the Observer newspaper. He married Rachel in 1887 and as a wedding gift bought the Sunday Times for her. Ostensibly she became Editor of both papers. It is to be doubted that her lifestyle would have made possible any intense involvement. She took a particular interest in new publications, as her nephew, the young Siegfried, deduced from all the review copies which lay in piles around the house. Her qualities were many, notably defiance in the face of bigotry which fuelled her revolt against her mother and support for Alfred. She also campaigned for another Alfred – Dreyfus, her voice and that of her papers being among the first to detect and expose the anti-Semitism that sought to destroy an innocent man and would have done so, but for the voices of conscience and justice.

The Beers lived in grandeur at Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair. Siegfried recalls visiting in the late nineties, having been met at Charing Cross Station by the brougham, complete with groom and coachman. Auntie Rachel showered the boys with gifts and treats. Frederick Beer is recalled by Siegfried as a shadowy figure meandering through the vast rooms, cigar in hand. On subsequent visits he vanished to an upstairs room and Siegfried never saw him again. Mr Beer was suffering from inherited syphilis about which his wife knew nothing. In fact she refused to believe he was ill in any way and went on arranging the house and domestic affairs as though her husband would at any moment walk down the marble stairs, cigar in hand, ready for whatever duty or pleasure life had in store for him. Auntie Rachel is portrayed in The Old Century as a wistful creature of contrasts and contradictions, symbolised by the beautiful diamond rings she wore on a grimy hand; a warm, affectionate aunt who yet offered her nephew a cold ivory cheek and smiled as though it were an afterthought. Through small explanations from Theresa and his innate ability to reach below the surface of things, Siegfried recognised the sadness in his aunt’s life: the loss of the object of her love. If only, he mused, it could all be put right again; if only Auntie Rachel and Mr Beer could wake up and find that the threatening forces, now so destructive of their happiness, were but a dream and everything was as it had been.

If only the past could be undone – how he wished that for Weirleigh, too. Auntie Rachel used to visit them there. She was a shrewd judge of character and recognised in Theresa an unerring integrity and wisdom. Above all, she admired Theresa’s discretion about the behaviour of Alfred. The anger, disappointment and sense of betrayal Theresa must have felt remained unspoken, especially at Weirleigh. Whether one can hide such feelings from every child is a matter of conjecture; what is beyond dispute is the heart-rending impact it had on Siegfried.

Alfred returned regularly to Weirleigh to see his sons. Before he arrived Theresa would lock herself away in her room. From the nursery window high up in the house the boys would watch for the village fly to arrive at the main gate and roll into the driveway. Laden, as Sassoon recalls, ‘with guava jelly, pomegranates and funny toys which didn’t need too much taking care of’, Alfred would hurry to the nursery and spread his gifts before the boisterous trio. He knew how to entertain them with games on the nursery floor and out on the spacious lawns. The bond, already strong, was strengthened by each succeeding visit and deepened the desire for permanency. The depth of longing for all to be well again was recounted by Sassoon 50 years later with such artless intensity it is as though he had newly experienced it: ‘One autumn afternoon we were out in the garden and he was giving us a ride in the gardener’s handcart. We were all shouting and thoroughly enjoying ourselves when we came round the corner of some rhododendrons and met my mother. There she stood and we all went past her in sudden silence. I have never forgotten the look on her face. It was the first time I had seen life being brutal to someone I loved. But I was helpless, for my father’s face had gone blank and obstinate, and the situation, like the handcart, was in his hands. All I could do was to feel miserable about it afterwards and wonder why they couldn’t make it up somehow. For I wanted to enjoy my parents simultaneously – not alternately.’ So much of the later Sassoon is revealed through that experience. The young, sensitive Siegfried adapted to circumstances but his ‘memoried mind’ retained the imprint.

Mrs Mitchell, the nursemaid, was an unsympathetic character, unable to enter into the world of the child. Discipline took precedence over affection and rules prevailed over imagination. Nonetheless she assumed an importance in Siegfried’s young world, being the link between him and his absent father. Mrs Mitchell’s allegiance was unreservedly given to Alfred. She was aware of a provision made for her in his will, but the legacy of £100 a year was dependent upon her remaining with the children until they attained an age when her services would no longer be required. Her relationship with Theresa was anything but cordial. However, the prospect of the annuity made her resolute.

What Siegfried did not know was the likelihood of Alfred dying a relatively young man. He had developed tuberculosis and was advised to leave London and move to Eastbourne. In 1893 he took rooms on the south coast in the hope of arresting any further physical decline. Keen as ever to see his children, he made arrangements for Mrs Mitchell to bring them there. The first visit was a happy one when the father and the three boys were photographed together. They are not stilted and formal as most Victorians look in photographs but portray a sense of closeness and affection. Obvious, too, is the shared Sassoon likeness, in particular the striking resemblance Siegfried bore to his father with his deep-set eyes and cleft chin.

Alfred’s decline into acute tuberculosis was inexorable and by the end of the year he was confined to his bed. It is not known who told the boys of their father’s condition and the reason for the terrible cough; probably it was Mrs Mitchell. How sensitively she did so can only be guessed at, but the picture Sassoon painted of her in his memoirs leaves room to doubt her capacity for gentle reassurance. Siegfried prayed for his father’s recovery as fervently as he had desired the reuniting of his parents. Mrs Mitchell took Michael, Siegfried and Hamo for another visit to Eastbourne. It was to be memorable for more than one reason. Entering the room they saw, standing at the window, pensive and silent, a man who was introduced as their Uncle Joseph – Alfred’s elder brother. Also in the room was the redoubtable and until that moment unseen Flora Sassoon, their grandmother. Although she greeted them with a smile, this small, brown-faced old lady created an atmosphere of menace for the seven-year-old Siegfried.

The portraits in The Old Century are kindly drawn; Grandmama Sassoon and Mrs Mitchell are among the exceptions. Both had caused unhappiness to Theresa. Siegfried was not only the most sensitive of the three sons but also the most fervently protective of his mother. It is unlikely that he understood the complexities of the situation but children are instinctive in their loyalties. In the garden at Weirleigh he saw for the first time life being brutal to someone he loved and would never forget it.

In his father’s sickroom, Grandmama Sassoon unrolled a chart upon which was described the Sassoon family tree. It was with an air of bemusement that Siegfried followed her finger down the succeeding generations to the place where his own name and those of his brothers were inscribed:

And it comes back to me, that sense of being among strangers, with Pappy being killed by that terrible cough, and the queer feeling that although this new grandmama was making such a fuss of us, it would make no difference if we never saw her again. I can see myself gazing at the Family Tree and wondering what all those other Sassoons were like, and how my great-grandfather had managed to produce so many of them. And I remember my miserable feeling that the only thing that mattered was that my mother ought to be there, and that these people were unfriendly to her who loved my father as they had never done and would have come to him with unquestioning forgiveness. Even Mrs Mitchell was against her; for I knew, with a child’s intuition, how she had helped to keep them apart.

Such experiences explain why Sassoon preferred to think of himself as a Thornycroft. It was the last time he met his Uncle Joseph, the last time he met his Grandmama Sassoon and the last time he saw his father.

The Thornycrofts were fun to be with and so too were the Donaldsons, the family of Theresa’s sister, Frances. The family bonds grew even stronger when Grandmama Thornycroft came to live at Weirleigh. Sassoon’s description of this elderly lady is tender and admiring. Her black dress with white edges, her soft voice, stately walk, her serenity as she sat by the french windows and watched the seasons change in that year of 1894 are reminiscent of the later portraits of Queen Victoria. Age, too, can bestow an ethereal quality that summons up the past. This was an aspect of his grandmother which attracted Siegfried. He writes of watching her and seeing her transformed in his imagination into a beautiful young woman. One afternoon he watched her as she promenaded in the drawing room arm-in-arm with her son John. How grown-up, how dignified, how different in his young mind to the rent relationship between Pappy and Grandmama Sassoon: ‘I bless the Thornycroft sanity which I inherited from my mother.’

And not only their sanity, but also their creative imagination: Sassoon liked to create worlds of his own to which he could slip away, unnoticed and undisturbed. These were not worlds he could share with his brothers. If, as he has said, ‘My artistic side is derived from the Thornycrofts’, then Michael and Hamo could claim that they had inherited the Thornycroft delight in making things, repairing things, designing things. Siegfried did wonder why he was so impractical. His brothers’ interest in things mechanical isolated him. ‘We were as different as chalk and cheese,’ was how Michael described their relationship. Siegfried was fanciful and introspective: ‘I was in an undisturbed world of my own, localised and satisfactory as such worlds always are.’

In the hard winter of 1895 Mary Thornycroft died. Siegfried went to see her in her coffin, surrounded by white lilies. His mother had told him that during her last weeks Grandmama had wandered into her past, where she had been happy with her husband and children in a kind of never-ending summer. Siegfried found this deeply consoling. The past should always be like that. The sad, the unattractive have no place in that kingdom. The past, however, cannot be so easily sanitised, as a much older Sassoon would realise – though even in 1938, writing The Old Century, he still clung to selectivity: ‘I prefer to remember my own gladness and good luck, and to forget, whenever I can, those moods and minor events which made me low-spirited and unresponsive. Be grateful, therefore, and share my gratitude that I lived in such a pleasant region. For in those days I found no fault with the world, and did not foresee that it would, in my lifetime, alter much.’

Deprivations are, however, recorded and Sassoon is prepared to share the pains of childhood. In April 1895 Alfred Sassoon died: ‘I thought I would never stop crying,’ wrote his son. Siegfried’s unrelieved grief may have been the reason why, unlike his brothers, he was not allowed to attend the funeral, or perhaps Theresa wanted him with her at Weirleigh. The wisdom of the decision is to be questioned on the grounds that it left Siegfried with a sense of incompleteness. His bewilderment was not helped by the reports of the funeral given by Michael and Hamo. Alfred was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in the East End of London. The whole affair had frightened the brothers by its strangeness, the Hebrew tongue and their lack of familiarity with Jewish ceremonies. They conveyed their fright to Siegfried with, no doubt, an inevitable measure of exaggeration. Siegfried felt his father had been spirited away by strangers; buried in an unknown tongue, in a remote graveyard. Something else fed his grief – he would now never enjoy his parents simultaneously.

Within weeks of the funeral Mrs Mitchell left Weirleigh with her annuity. There were mixed feelings about her departure, regret mingled with relief. Despite her unpleasantness she belonged to the familiar world of Siegfried’s first awakenings; the world of Weirleigh, when Pappy was still there and, afterwards, the link between him and his sons. As she went from Siegfried’s bedroom for the last time, descending the glimmering staircase and past the pensive clock, he was aware that his daybreak world was changing. There remained one constant – Mamsy. ‘Time teaches one to admire such people who refuse to pull a long face however deeply life may hurt them, and whose cheerfulness is born of courage as well as being the outcome of their abundant liveliness.’