Heard from Brownish Bros. They are willing to give £1. 5s in cash for Gissing or £1. 15s in books. Have decided to accept the latter alternative, so wrote immediately for the The Works of Samuel Johnson, 12 vols., calf, 1801, 15s; Sir Dudley Digges’s State Letters, folio, old calf, 1665, 6s; Paul and Virginia, 12 mo., calf, 1779, 2s.; Potter’s Euripides, 2 vols., calf, 1814, 5s. 6d.; and the Life of Queen Elizabeth, 4to., panelled calf, 1738, 3s 6d. This leaves 3s. to my account.
These were the first of the thousands of volumes Sassoon collected during his lifetime and which he neatly arranged to show their bindings to best effect. Neatness and order were, he declared, ‘a craving’. In his memoirs Sassoon creates the impression that he was, like his father, a browser. ‘Most of my serious reading was undoubtedly done with my watch on the table, and my thoughts may have wandered away to the golf links over at Sevenoaks.’ That is the confession of his youthful years; the mature Sassoon ‘knew his books so well that he could spring up and pull one down and open it at the very page to make his point’.
Taking possession of the Studio in that September of 1907 had emotional resonances:
If only the Studio could write reminiscences of its grown-up childhood how interesting they would be! My mother seldom spoke of those times, but the Studio had seen the happiness that came before those sad events which had so impressed themselves on my mind; and I would have liked to hear more about my father as he was at his best. The Studio must often have heard him playing his Stradivarius with that gipsy wildness which was the special quality of his fiddling. It had heard the light-hearted voices talking of the future without foreboding. The past had filled the Studio with vibrations that were one with my own history. For a moment I felt as if my father were in the room. So real had my meditations made him that I could almost smell his cigar smoke. But it was only the imagination of a moment.
For the next six years Weirleigh was the centre of Sassoon’s life, from whence he ventured into the surrounding countryside of Kent and Sussex. There were trips to London, sometimes with Theresa to concerts or exhibitions and on to the old family home at Melbury Road. There were also visits to stock up with hunting gear. The six years have a dual theme: emerging poet and enthusiastic sportsman. His days were lived on two levels – the public life, as in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and the internal, tranquil self of his second volume of autobiography, The Weald of Youth. These were also the years in which he formed a new friendship and strengthened an existing one. Both arose from Sassoon’s love of hunting and point-to-pointing.
Stephen Gordon Harbord (known as Gordon) was born in 1890, the son of the Revd Harry Harbord, rector of East Hoathly, near Lewes in Sussex. Sassoon introduces him in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In April 1911, Sherston goes as a spectator to a point-to-point meeting at Dumborough in Sussex. The racing card informs him that one of the riders is a Mr S. Colwood: ‘It can’t be Stephen Colwood, can it? I thought, visualising a quiet, slender boy with very large hands and feet, who had come to my House at Ballboro’ about two years after I went there. Now I came to think of it, his father had been a parson somewhere in Sussex, but this did not seem to make it any likelier that he should be riding in a race.’ In fact S. Colwood is G. Harbord, and the passage is a good example of how Sassoon mingles circumstances, changes names and dates. Dumborough is the alias for Eridge; Colwood was the name of the Harbords’ family home and it was Gordon’s brother Kenneth Blair Harbord who was Sassoon’s contemporary at Marlborough, but the experiences shared and the people portrayed are authentic, if at times heightened for effect.
The Harbords were a large family. In all there were nine offspring, of whom Gordon was the sixth and the third son. The father was regarded as a conscientious priest with a lively social ministry. He and his five boys were sometimes referred to as ‘the Vicar and his sporting sons’. They were keen cricketers and accomplished riders. A family photograph taken about 1903 catches them in pensive rather than sporting mood, and Mrs Harbord looks careworn. In fact, the family was a happy and jovial one, with the boys exhibiting all the rumbustiousness of youth. Sassoon first met Gordon in 1908, after which Colwood Park became a second home for him and Gordon, whom Theresa liked, was a regular visitor to Weirleigh. Gordon was not academically inclined any more than Sassoon but he was conscientious and obtained a degree at London University. Also, and unlike Sassoon, he was practically gifted, with a bent for engineering, like Michael and Hamo. The common factor which drew Gordon and Sassoon together was sport, particularly horses and cricket. They also shared a quirky sense of humour, which colours their letters to each other but makes them unintelligible to the outsider.
Humour was not the outstanding characteristic of the person who exercised the greatest influence on Sassoon, the horseman and golfer, in the pre-war years. Although they had been together at Henley House and afterwards at Cambridge, Norman Loder was somewhat in the background up to 1907 but then he persuaded Sassoon to make a more serious commitment to riding and to golf. ‘He knew that in most ways we were totally unlike, and was only dimly aware of my literary ambitions. If I had not been keen on golf and hunting our friendship could never have existed. On that basis he accepted me for what I was, just as I accepted him.’
He and Sassoon were virtually inseparable during the hunting and steeplechase season and, more often than not, Gordon Harbord made it a trio of enthusiasts. Weirleigh was a little too far from the meets frequented by Loder to make it a day’s journey, so Sassoon would stay with the Harbords or with Loder. The friendship with the latter, whose prowess at hunting and matters equestrian was acknowledged and admired, brought out the adventurous, derring-do in Sassoon’s character. His love of heightened excitement is obvious in the memoirs, as is the delight he took in the characters and the conventions of riding to hounds and point-to-pointing. Loder had no interests outside these things, not much humour and a plodding intellect. Sassoon, however, relied on him for companionship as well as instruction. He also admired his qualities. ‘He was one of those people whose strength is in their consistent simplicity and directness, and who send out natural wisdom through their mental limitations and avoidance of nimble ideas. He was kind, decent, and thorough, never aiming at anything beyond plain commonsense and practical ability.’
With his other friend Henry ‘Tommy’ Thompson, the summers were filled with visits to golf courses, but not even golf was allowed to impinge upon Sassoon’s commitment to cricket. He was proud of being a member of the Blue Mantles, who played their home matches on the county ground at Tunbridge Wells. It was a well-respected cricket club and Sassoon’s inclusion on an almost regular basis is a pointer to his talent at club level. He fancied himself as a club player, both as batsman and as bowler, and the local teams of Matfield and Brenchley were glad to take advantage of his ability. Sassoon was very much an outdoor person, and having returned to Weirleigh he was keen to be out and about on a horse, on the golf course or enjoying the activity of a fine day’s cricket. Walking and bicycling were activities he enjoyed for their own sake and could pursue alone. He exulted in the freedom of the open road and the natural world, which marks him out as a disciple of the author and poet George Meredith, whose books lined the shelves of his library and whose praises were extolled by Wirgie and Theresa. Since childhood Sassoon had been able to identify birds and plants, nursing a special enthusiasm for butterflies, Shelley’s ‘winged flowers’. The lanes and fields of Kent, the oasthouses, the orchards, the hedgerows and the gardens, were inspirational to him and his descriptions of his peregrinations bring colour and atmosphere to every facet of his work. It was a world which appealed to his aesthetic delight, his curiosity as well as his spirit of adventure. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, The Old Century and The Weald of Youth catch the essence of Sassoon’s musings in 1909:
The setting sun was behind me. To the left of the high ground along which I was driving, the Weald lay in all its green contentedness. I was feeling fine, and had played quite a decent little innings