had fallen on the crowd.)
O is it a half-volley or long hop,
A seventh bounce long hop,
A fast and fierce long hop,
That the bowler letteth fly?
The ball was straight and bowled him neck and crop.
He knew not how nor why.
Full sad and slow pavilionwards he walked.
The careless critics talked;
Some said that he was yorked;
A half-volley at a pinch.
The batsman murmured as he inward stalked,
‘It was the extra inch.’
This was Siegfried’s first published poem. Mr Bettesworth took a shine to his poetry and published four more in the following 18 months. However, sustaining a belief in his vocation as a poet proved a difficult task. His success in Cricket, pleasing though it was, seemed more of an end than a beginning. But once again, in an unexpected moment, the hope was fed. He describes how in 1904, while in Cotton House library:
Idly I pulled out a book which happened to be Volume IV of Ward’s English Poets. By chance I opened it at Hood’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’, which was new to me. I had always preferred poems which went straight to the point and stayed there, and here was a direct utterance which gave me goose flesh and brought tears to my eyes. It wasn’t so much the subject of the poem which thrilled me as the sense of powerful expression and memorable word music. For the first time since I had been at school I felt separated from my surroundings and liberated from the condition of being only a boy. As a child I had believed in my poetic vocation and had somehow felt myself to be a prophetic spirit in the making. Now my belief was renewed and strengthened.
Sassoon, Old Marlburian, in the summer of 1904, was ‘bicycling’ his way through his nineteenth year. He had decided to go up to Cambridge, but the University had yet to decide whether to accept him. Bridging the gap between desire and its fulfilment required the passing of an examination. In the village of Frant, near Tunbridge Wells and within easy cycling distance of Weirleigh, lay Henley House, a crammer establishment of some repute. The young adult on his bicycle was a ‘happy-go-lucky sort of person, head in air and pleasantly occupied with loosely connected ruminations’, who had thrown off much of the anxiety and nervousness of the schoolboy. He had crossed a boundary, much as he crossed the boundary between Kent and Sussex on the bridge by Dundale Farm, on his way to board at Henley House. His was a charmed existence. Under his father’s will he was financially secure, the trust fund being administered mainly by the family solicitor, Mr Lousada. He was not wealthy and neither was Theresa; comfortable would be the best summary of his financial position. This meant, among other things, that there was no pressure to be successful; there was no family firm to enter and no call to find a profession. Mr Lousada and his alter ego Mr Pennett in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man were more than willing to assist him into the Law. But what need of this to a bicycling youth, who was a poet? Inspiration lay all around him in the beauty of the Weald. The social order from the Squire down to the housemaids and stable-lads exuded permanence and its meridian prosperity seemed immutable. Sassoon was enjoying, like Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead, ‘the languor of youth – a mind sequestered and self-regarding’. E. M. Forster, a contemporary and later a friend, in describing his own youth might well be describing Sassoon’s: ‘I belong to the fag end of Victorian liberalism, and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.’ Sassoon confesses of that time through his alter ego George Sherston: ‘How little I knew of the enormous world beyond the valley and those low green hills.’ Enlightenment would come in its own savage way; meanwhile it was still ‘God in his Heaven and sausages for breakfast’. To which he might have added, ‘horses in the stables, golf-clubs in the bag, and bat and pads by the door’.
Henley House had four teachers and 20 students: Sassoon thought it a vast improvement on Marlborough, where he had felt moody and unappreciated. Now he was considered lively and amusing, and was consistently cheerful. In The Old Century, Sassoon exudes a sense of relief as academic pressure is lifted off his shoulders and he settles into a routine, which, while unhurried, fulfilled what was required to pass into Oxford or Cambridge. Much of this was due to the ‘quiet methods’ and laconic style of the headmaster and proprietor Mr Malden – known as ‘The Boss’ – and his staff, all of whom are remembered and portrayed with affection by Sassoon. There would be little to say of Henley House and the year he spent there were it 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