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
