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 friends of Theresa, nor as prominent as the many neighbours who called to see her. In Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 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