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
