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 soon’. Until that point the boys’ education had been haphazard, with friends being dragooned 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