the brothers disappear and Siegfried dwells alone in a world dominated by older people. ‘My childhood was not altogether a happy one. This must have been caused by the absence of companions of my own age.’ Although he writes this as a complaint, as a deprivation, the fact is that by inclination Siegfried did not need companions of his own age because they did not belong to the secret world he relished as a child. It was the adult world that he desired, whose inhabitants fed and satisfied his deep desire for mystery, as personified by Wirgie. They possessed the ability to cast a spell – something which was always broken when his brothers ‘came clattering down the corridor’. Neither were the brothers sympathetic to Siegfried’s cherished belief in himself as a poet. They showed little appreciation of his juvenile attempts at poetic expression.
Siegfried was attracted to music from a very early age. Throughout his life he enjoyed playing the piano, going to concerts and listening to broadcast performances. Music affected him at several levels. Listening to Wirgie playing the Beethoven Sonatas, he sensed that she was not only interpreting Beethoven but imbuing them with autobiography, giving expression to her deep and complex personality. Seeking as he was an effective means to articulate his own complexities, the attraction of music was obvious. Its sounds allowed the imagination to roam freely; it created pictures in the mind. Music was a portent of the numinous; it summoned and fed the ‘mystery’ leading on to harmonies not caught by the natural ear. The middle-aged Sassoon could well have been describing the 10-year-old boy when he wrote:
I think I’m fond of being alone
With music and my past.
By the summer of 1896 Siegfried nursed the idea that he was born to be a poet. There had been some preconditioning of his mind by Ellen Batty, who had read in his palm undeniable signs of a poet in embryo. Theresa, too, was influential. In June 1925, Sassoon wrote, ‘I have a copy of Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare inscribed by her to me on my third birthday. Very odd, as she was such a practical person, not the least high falutin. Whatever made her do it?’ In posing the question Sassoon is being disingenuous. In The Old Century he supplies the reason: ‘My mother had a strong maternal feeling that I was destined to be a great poet.’ The late Victorian age was full of such tender, affectionate, sometimes destructive mother-son relationships. In the case of Siegfried there can be little doubt that it was Theresa’s perspicacity that recognised early her son’s talent for verse, often saying to him: ‘Sig, go and write your poetry.’ Theresa’s influence was all-pervasive in these years. She encouraged him to read poetry, as well as compose it. His favourite poems were those of Shelley and Tennyson. The former offered memorable lines; the latter, particularly in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, a complete and entrancing narrative. Above all, both provided atmosphere and mystery in abundance. The meaning of a poem was always subservient to its capacity to enthral, all the better if the enthraldom was heavy with melancholy. He wrote in The Old Century, ‘I have a tendency to expect all great poetry to be gloomy, at any rate serious.’
If there was a painter born to feed this passion for the darker side of life it was an old family friend, a neighbour at Melbury Road and godfather to young Hamo, G. F. Watts, or ‘dear old Watts’ as he was known to Theresa. Weirleigh housed copies of his paintings and a self-portrait hung on the stairs. Siegfried was thus familiar with his work when Theresa took him to view an exhibition of Watts’ work in London. He stood, a dreamy and impressionable boy, ‘gazing ecstatically at “The Court of Death” and “Time, Death and Judgement”’. He gazed at them, considered them and then went home to ‘try and write poems about them’. The poems he wrote were collected into two small books and presented to Theresa as a gift of love, the first on her birthday in March 1897 and the second at Christmas the same year. The thought must have cheered her; whether the content did is questionable. ‘Eternity and the Tomb were among my favourite themes and from the accessories of death, I drew my liveliest inspirations.’
There lay the lake of sleep: eternal sleep
That looked so still.
And far beyond, the palace of King Death
Who hidden lay:
And he spake thus: ‘I hold the lives of men
From the beginning to the end.’
And, yea, behind him, angels stood
Guarding the things unknown, beyond the Tomb.
Edmund Blunden described such attempts as ‘little sanctified verses’ suffused as they all were by religious allusion and imagery. Theresa’s commitment to the Anglican tradition – the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the Psalms – gave Siegfried a rich vocabulary rooted in religion and a mind preoccupied by death and judgement. The deaths two years earlier of his Thornycroft grandmother and his father also contributed to the preoccupation. Not all the contents of those 1897 volumes lacked humour, though. There is a short narrative piece entitled ‘Something About Myself’, in which, posing as a kitten, he tells a short family history. But even in this prose effort the Beatrix Potter element is mixed with helpings from the Brothers Grimm: his brothers get carried off in wicker baskets and his mother wiped out by invading cats! The story was illustrated by him as well. The whole production is remarkable for a 10-year-old.
Theresa found all this literary effort, even the lugubrious bits, greatly encouraging. Siegfried was very neat in his copying of each verse and totally concentrated on the poem in hand. His brothers found it all a reason for jest. On one occasion when Michael kicked the leg of the table on which Siegfried was writing, causing his brother’s book to be smudged, he received a punch on the nose. He and Hamo had intruded on Siegfried’s secret and tidy world.
It was an exuberant household. Theresa readily admitted that her three boys gave her ‘a high old time’, but she was resolute in her opposition to sending them away to public school at too early an age. ‘She had a deep distrust of the feeding arrangements at schools and maintained that as we were all of us delicate, it would be a mistake for our brains to be overtaxed by conventional education.’ Keeping the boys at home went against the norm, but Theresa was not intimidated by convention. Having the riotous trio at home, however, did mean a severe curtailment of time available to pursue her own painting. Uncompleted canvases lay around the Studio like unfulfilled promises. A decade earlier she had caused a sensation at the Royal Academy Exhibition with her painting, The Hours, in which some 24 figures floated across the sky, passing from darkness into light. Her work was full of religious symbols and motifs showing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. Consistent application, however, was impossible with the demands of running the house, raising the boys and the need ‘to redeem the district from dullness’. Not all her efforts to do so were successful. The Poetry Society soon languished, but not before the boys disturbed proceedings. People liked to drive over to the house to visit Theresa and see ‘the dear boys’ and, having done so, would depart thinking how much easier it would be if Theresa were to send her sons away to boarding school.
These visits ended with a tour of the Studio. One picture in particular was always the subject of admiration. Painted in 1891, it depicted Christ and three boys: ‘It was a picture which showed us in our angelic childhood and fully deserved their admiration for it was most touching and beautiful.’ John Richardson, whose father was Tom the groom, saw the painting when he was a boy at Weirleigh: ‘I remember standing beneath that elegant roof, gazing in awe-struck wonder at a huge canvas on which Theresa Sassoon had depicted a life-size figure of Christ; the kindly compassionate face looking down at three boys lying on the grass at his feet. The three boys were clearly her own three sons. At that time, I had never seen anything more beautiful and can recall that I tip-toed away, feeling as if I had intruded on something very private and intimate.’ The painting conveyed the piety which underpinned Theresa’s view of life and also her deep need of her sons and this perhaps, as much as her doubts about boarding schools, influenced her decision not to send them away ‘too
