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, precluding any possibility of slinking into a room or walking unobserved in a crowd.
There was also the challenge of keeping pace with the other boys in the classroom. He had no appetite and possibly no aptitude for the sciences. His gift lay in the arts, particularly poetry – a passion he hid from his fellow pupils lest he became the butt of ribaldry. He knew himself to be a citizen of a world where the imagination reigned supreme. Public schools, he believed, had little time for such temperaments. It was an incorrect assessment but a very convincing excuse. ‘Abstract ideas were,’ he has admitted, ‘uncongenial to my mind.’ In other words it was not so much a matter of ability but of aversion. Once Siegfried decided he did not want to do something he would not do it. Won’t do and can’t do were interchangeable terms for Siegfried and it required teachers of rare quality and imagination to evoke a response in him.
In the autumn of 1900 Michael went to Malvern School. In the tradition of the system his second brother became Sassoon major, with Hamo inheriting the minor title. This emancipation did little to help Siegfried academically but it did increase his self-confidence. He also adapted. ‘I became a more or less ordinary boy, impulsive, irresponsible, easily influenced, and desirous of doing well at work and games.’ An essential element required for a positive view of himself was to secure the good opinion of the masters and be regarded by them as mature and adult. Mr Norman, the headmaster, was kind, responsive and lacked stuffiness, but it was another master, Mr Jackson, who evoked Sassoon’s greatest admiration, not only for helping him academically but for encouraging him to play golf. The game was not new to him. He had wandered over from Weirleigh to Lamberhurst and watched the players on Squire Morland’s nine-hole course. Few, including the Squire, ever completed a round in under 50. As courses go, it had its own charm and challenges. In The Weald of Youth he recalled ‘that it provided very poor practice for playing anywhere else. In fact, one could say it was a game of its own.’ Mr Jackson, like Tom Richardson, was never content with the second rate. Only the best courses around Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells would suffice to meet his standard. Thus the third element was added to Siegfried’s trinity of sports.
Mr Jackson was also a first-rate teacher and Sassoon major made significant progress in the classics and English, too, in which he reached the top of the list. It was not a brilliant academic performance but it was sufficient to secure a place at one of England’s top public schools, Marlborough College.
Before going west to Wiltshire and the new school, it was home to Weirleigh for Christmas and the New Year. Nineteen hundred and two began with a heavy snowfall and the chance for Theresa and the boys to go tobogganing, all the more enjoyable now that they were all together again. There was, despite her conservative and fixed views, a certain physical recklessness