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.’
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
