and assailed Marsh with views on poetry and poems. His host was an indulgent listener. Marsh liked people, especially young men and particularly artistic young men. His closest friendship was with Rupert Brooke, towards whom he acted almost as a father, certainly as an indulgent uncle. Possibly homosexual but more than likely asexual, Marsh was the centre of an extensive social and literary network in London and a frequent guest at the most exclusive country-house parties. He was entirely the right person to guide Sassoon out of the provincialism that was hindering his progress as a poet.
Throughout the spring and summer Sassoon worked diligently at his poetry. He went up to London in June to a dinner-party given by Edmund Gosse at which one of the guests was Robert Ross. Like his host and Eddie Marsh, Ross was a patron of emerging actors, writers, painters and poets, but his notoriety sprang from his friendship with Oscar Wilde, his loyalty to his memory and the jealousy this engendered in Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s nemesis. No one sitting around Gosse’s table that evening would have been unaware of Ross’s battles through the courts against Douglas’s venom, to which was added the poisonous activities of Sassoon’s erstwhile publisher T. W. H. Crosland. Sassoon liked Ross and, since his own declaration to Carpenter, felt solidarity with him. Ross’s biographer writes, ‘Robbie was instinctively drawn to the idealistic poet, who so obviously fulfilled all the spiritual and cultural elements he desired in a friend.’ Despite this reciprocity of feeling, Ross made no effort to advance the aquaintance that evening.
Following his return to Weirleigh, Sassoon applied himself to his poetry, keeping Marsh informed of his progress or, more accurately, the lack of it. Theresa thought he should get more fresh air and he was inclined to agree with her. In September he forsook poetry and Kent for hunting and Warwickshire. Norman Loder had recently moved there to be Master of the Atherstone Hunt and Sassoon decided to scale the heights of his sporting ambition during the next six months. No one was happier with this move than Tom Richardson, who travelled north a month later in charge of Sassoon’s four hunters, the purchase of which had warmed the groom’s heart, thoroughly depressed Mr Lousada the trustee and placed a considerable strain on the combined resources of Theresa and her son. But Sassoon thought it all worthwhile as he breathed the morning air and in the evening played the pianola while Loder snoozed in a fireside chair. It was like the days they had spent together when Loder was Master of the Southdown Hunt in his native Sussex. ‘There was something almost idyllic about those first weeks.’
Almost idyllic – Sassoon felt pangs of hopelessness about his poetry. Writing on 9 October he told Marsh: ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever publish any poems, the stuff I wrote last summer was utterly hopeless. Perhaps I will begin fresh in the spring.’ But should that new start be in Kent? Marsh had already suggested not: ‘But why don’t you come and live in London? You can’t expect all the interesting things to come down and stay with you in Kent.’ Marsh was pushing on a half-open door.
Norman Loder had more than one reason for leaving Sussex for Warwickshire, as Sassoon discovered on his arrival. One of the prominent hunting families in the Midlands was the Fisher family of Amington Hall, Market Bosworth. One of the daughters, Phyllis, a keen and able horse-woman, had taken Loder’s fancy. Their engagement was imminent. Sassoon could be diffident and awkward when meeting new people, but he liked Phyllis from the moment they met. She and Norman were among the central figures in Sassoon’s life over the next decade, especially after the war when ‘good old Sig’ would move into their house for the hunting season.
It was during that 1913 season, the last before the war, that Sassoon formed another friendship which, on his part, awakened deep sexual passions. Robert Hugh Hanmer was born in 1895 and, like Gordon Harbord, was the son of a clergyman, the Revd Hugh Hanmer, sometime Rector of Market Bosworth and environs. The Hanmer family were landed gentry, whose estates were situated on the border between Flintshire and Cheshire. They, like the Harbords, were born into the world of the horse and the hound. Mrs Hanmer was a member of the Ethalston family in Sussex, who were prominent in the hunting fraternity there. She would certainly have been familiar with the Loders of Handcross and likely as not to have known the Harbords at Colwood Park. Through this network Robert and his sister Dorothy found themselves part of the Atherstone Hunt ‘which prided itself on being quite like a family party’. Sassoon was well aware of the nature of his feelings for Robert. Their repression was essential if the friendship was to develop, which it did over the next year, mainly through Dorothy keeping up a correspondence from the Hanmer side: Bobby was not the letter-writing kind.
The hunting season was drawing to its close and Sassoon was getting restless for London and the company of Eddie Marsh. He had also resolved the matter of leaving home. Early in February 1914 he wrote to Marsh: ‘I have quite made up my mind to live in London a good deal in the future. I shall never do any decent work buried alive among fox-hunters. So I want you to help me find somewhere to live and I don’t want to say anything about it to my people, (at present), as I know they would kick up a fuss and spoil the whole venture!’ In fact Sassoon had done some house-hunting during his occasional visits to the capital and, attracted to the idea of being near Marsh, had more or less decided on Number 1, Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Marsh lived in Number 5. He moved to his new rooms in May, having secured a housekeeper, Mrs Fretter, whom, he told Marsh in a letter from Weirleigh, ‘I engaged in spite of our first tremulous electric interview, [and who] appears to be economic’. Considering his sheltered upbringing, which hardly if ever called on him to engage with domestic concerns, Sassoon did well in organising the rooms, although he did run into difficulties with the upholsterers and also with the carpets: ‘too big or too small I forget which’. It had not been easy persuading Theresa that this was the right decision. She was still upset over the sudden death of Miriam, her maid. It was not the best time to forsake Weirleigh, always at its most attractive in spring, Sassoon’s favourite season: ‘April in Kent has been quite lovely, orchards in blossom and sunlight.’ But even these attractions failed to diminish the staleness he felt, or the aimlessness of his rural existence and, as he admits:
I felt that I ought to set to work on a tremendous poem full of prophetic sublimity, spiritual aspiration, and human tragedy and that I needed to start my life all over again and give up everything except being noble and uplifting. I felt that my recent existence had been philistine and one-sided.
The move to London, he hoped, would provide the antidote. If his poetry was to achieve anything, then contact with the world beyond the ‘sentinel pines’ on the Weald’s horizon was crucial. As an earnest of this fresh start he left all his books behind, taking only his Oxford Dictionary. On arriving in London he bought a folio of Gray’s poems. The rooms, modest in size, were situated at the noisy end of Gray’s Inn. This intrusive rumbling of traffic along Theobald’s Road did not deter Sassoon, as he had made clear to Marsh: ‘I shall certainly take the rooms, noise and all, I hope there will be noise of poetry in my head which will drown all other sounds.’
Sincere, as he undoubtedly was, about making a fresh start, he failed to keep to a routine in his new surroundings which would facilitate the writing of vibrant verse. But it was a liberation. Theresa, though doubting the wisdom or necessity of the move, came to inspect the place. Her approval, if guarded, was another worry out of the way. Conscious of the need to be a man about town, Sassoon acquired the necessary symbols of rolled umbrella, a bowler and a top hat, together with full evening suit. The outward appearance, however, did little to rekindle the muse and, instead of being the poet, Sassoon became a tourist.
Riding on the top of a London bus or walking nonchalantly through the streets, he filled his days with diversions. He was lonely. Marsh, busy with his political duties during the day and his social round in the evening, was rarely available. The Gosses were abroad and the expected social connections were non-existent. Wandering around London Zoo, Sassoon came unexpectedly on Helen Wirgman, herself as lonely as he felt. Their mutual situation, though unexpressed, provided the opportunity to renew their friendship with occasional concert and theatre visits, as well as Wirgie coming to tea in Raymond Buildings. Such visits could be a strain, as Wirgie was easily upset by an incautious remark or even an innocent one, but he always felt indebted
