into helping. Now a more purposeful routine was needed. Tutors were employed, an arrangement which the three boys approved. They were content in their sequestered world, to which other children were rarely if ever allowed; its demands were far from onerous. Siegfried summed it up with typical conciseness: ‘God in his Heaven and sausages for breakfast!’
The first tutor was a retired teacher who had settled in the village. Mr Moon took what might kindly be described as a wide-ranging approach – a bit of this and a bit of that, with some general background. Lessons were confined to the morning, the afternoon being for carpentry and cricket. Undemanding it certainly was, except for Latin. Siegfried could make no headway in the subject and never did. But he enjoyed English literature and listening to ‘Moonie’ reading extracts. Theresa kept an eye on their progress – or perhaps an ear would be more accurate. She was concerned that the boys were not advancing in languages and feared that Mr Moon lacked depth of knowledge. Thus Fräulein Stoy arrived at Weirleigh and Siegfried struggled with French and German. She also gave him piano lessons but, despite his love of the instrument, he failed to make it sound ‘eloquent and eventful’. He liked the Fräulein, as he liked dear old stooping Moonie, but neither of them came near to Ellen Batty’s imaginative and engaging approach. Arriving at Weirleigh with high ideals and intentions, Fräulein Stoy soon found herself succumbing to the overall atmosphere of informality and unhurriedness. With the arrival of a third teacher she was eclipsed and, according to Siegfried, became ‘only a harmless appurtenance of the household’. It would be wrong to accept at face value Siegfried’s account of his progress under Mr Moon and Fräulein Stoy. He had in full measure the tendency to self-deprecation and understatement. That acknowledged, he was aware of the basic problem: ‘My brain absorbs facts singly, and the process of relating them to one another has always been difficult. From my earliest years I was interested in words, but their effect on my mind was mainly visual. My spontaneous assumption was that a mouse was called a mouse because it was mouse-like.’
The next tutor quickly understood Siegfried’s tendency to disengage from subjects which were presented in too abstract a way. Mr Hamilton introduced a routine which Siegfried described as refreshing, particularly in English literature. He also widened the horizons and for the first time the possibility presented itself of a world of exploration beyond the garden, Gedges Wood and the sentinel pines on the horizon of the Weald. The Beet, so nicknamed for his ripe reddish complexion, was ‘in every way an entirely suitable person to liberate us from the localisms of our over-prolonged and somewhat segregated childhood’. Clarence Hamilton had much more to commend him than his learning and piety (he was destined for the Church) – he was a cricketer of some merit. Being a student of the game, something he remained throughout his life, Siegfried knew details of the tutor’s batting prowess, at his public school and then during the captaincy of his college team at Cambridge. Much was expected of him by his young admirer. Unfortunately, the Beet’s cricket was to fall below the hopes of both Siegfried and the Matfield cricket team: on his first appearance for the home side he was dismissed after three deliveries. The putative hero and saviour had fallen victim not to the opponent’s prowess but to the topography of the wicket and its vagaries, which confirmed the local wiseacres’ opinion, ‘them toffs never do no good on the Green’.
Someone who did know how to bat on the Green was Tom Richardson, the groom at Weirleigh. He loved cricket as much as Siegfried did and carried his bat for Matfield with all the ardour and pride of any England opener. His first loves, however, were horses and hunting. The Eridge Hunt under Lord Henry Nevill over the border in Sussex held a special appeal for him, being in his opinion the best. Tom was idealised by Siegfried in The Old Century and especially in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, where he is given the name Tom Dixon. It is clear in both how influential he was in Siegfried’s early years. In all things he was conscientious, possibly a little dry and serious, but he took charge of Siegfried and taught him the art of riding and how to be a good judge of a horse. The appeal of the saddle was common to the three brothers, but Michael and Hamo preferred theirs on bicycles. By 1898 Siegfried had outgrown his pony. Theresa, on Tom’s recommendation, bought a hunter for Siegfried called Sportsman. It was a memorable partnership from the moment he mounted and felt a shudder when seeing how far from the ground he now was. Tom took Siegfried in hand and taught him that slackness in the saddle was as reprehensible as slackness in appearance. ‘He would have considered it a disgrace to have worn his stable clothes when taking me out, and I never saw him drive even a ponycart without looking as though it was a carriage and pair.’ This was Siegfried’s first real introduction to discipline, to which he responded. Tom was keen to involve Siegfried in hunting, especially to ride to hounds with the Eridge Hunt. The somewhat reserved, poetically inclined boy proved a fearless rider when stimulated by a high fence. Hunting also forced him into new company – not the most welcoming and sometimes rather stiff. Siegfried was not always at ease but he was always conspicuous, Tom having made sure that his pupil was immaculately turned out, especially with his clean bright yellow gloves. Riding out on Sportsman, high enough to see over the village hedgerows, Siegfried was elated but self-conscious. Tom observed him with a critical eye and pondered future successes and perhaps another hunter in the stables.
Buying and keeping horses placed a strain on Theresa’s limited funds and Weirleigh was a costly house to maintain. Alfred had not been generous in his provision for her – she received £200, a life interest in Weirleigh and various possessions he had left in the house and the Studio. The bulk of the estate, which amounted to a little over £5,000, was for the benefit of the boys. Alfred had incurred a heavy penalty for marrying outside the faith. In 1899, Theresa and the trustees were preparing to meet the cost of the boys’ education: Michael had already entered a nearby preparatory school and Theresa knew that come the new year, her two other sons must follow him. For them, the new century would be about the world beyond Weirleigh.
New Beacon School was new in the sense of having been moved to a fresh site on a hill overlooking the Kentish town of Sevenoaks. Siegfried and Hamo joined Michael there in the spring of 1900. The school specialised in preparing boys for entry into the major public schools of England. Michael and Hamo embraced their freedom from Weirleigh but their middle brother, who was now known as Sassoon minor, was nervous and tentative. It was his first experience of living in a community where privacy was at a premium and his first experience of being in an all-male environment which fostered the ideal of platonic companionship and commitment. Falling below such an ideal was a betrayal, but to exceed it was to be bestial. Homosexuality was an aberration, a deviancy which brought its practitioners everlasting condemnation – but only if they were discovered – sometimes through betrayal. Siegfried did not involve himself in its practices but ‘the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts’.
His uppermost thought was to be acceptable to the other boys and well thought of by the masters. The most important thing, he determined, was to avoid being gauche and not to fail in the subtle art of the done thing. The mores, customs and rules of the prep school, like those of public schools, were a maze, even for the most confident of boys. For the self-conscious, nervous and incautious, a careless moment could open up a pit of self-destruction. The forced gregariousness and the lack of privacy did nothing to boost the confidence of those whose inclination was to secret worlds of their own.
Then there was the difficulty of being a latecomer. He was approaching his fourteenth birthday. Boys would have spent at least five, if not seven, years in the system by the time they were his age. Theresa’s eccentric attitude towards public schools obviously put her second son at a disadvantage. To have enjoyed so many years of informal and eclectic education at home made the transition to formality and regimentation difficult. Observing his brothers taking to their new environment with gusto created in Sassoon a sense of inadequacy: ‘I stood alone on the edge of the playground, feeling newer than I’d ever done in my life.’ To reach the age of 14 without having made a circle of friends must have blunted his capacity to mix freely with others. Sassoon would always be a nervous companion and a reluctant member of any group. At New Beacon School he laid the foundations of a life-long strategy to play the observer rather than the participant. The wisest course was to keep a low profile. This, physically at any rate, was difficult as he was tall for his age,
