Although the infant Walter listened with interest to the talk about Wagner and the ‘mad king’, and enjoyed the constant flow of music and song that ran through 4 Kleestrasse, there remained a certain distance to his appreciation. Unlike his younger siblings – particularly Bernhard – he had ‘no musical gift at all’ and was not able even to ‘sing true’.111 He showed a more ready aptitude for the household’s other main preoccupation: art. The evidences of Oswald Sickert’s profession were all around the flat. And although his studio room may have been sacrosanct, his paintings were on view, as were works by his father and by his friends. His artist confrères were constant visitors. Füssli, besides painting the 3-year-old Walter, executed a ‘charming’ Ingres-like portrait of Mrs Sickert in her black moiré-antique dress with white lace collar, her hair framing her face in ‘smooth shining rolls’.112 Surrounded by such examples it was not surprising that the ‘chief pleasure’ of Walter – and of his brothers – was ‘painting, drawing and modelling in wax’.113 More time was spent in artistic endeavour than in anything else. Almost none of Walter’s puerile production has survived. There is, however, nothing to suggest he was a prodigy. Nevertheless, even at five it seems that, unlike the vast majority of children, he was more concerned to record what he saw, rather than to escape into the realms of the imagination. Mrs Sickert sent one friend a ‘rather crude drawing’ by the 5-year-old Walter of Helena as a babe in arms.114
Mrs Sickert was ‘at home’ at Kleestrasse on Thursday afternoons, and often received visitors.115 The growth of the family enhanced rather than diminished the Sickerts’ thriving social life. There were several other families with young children who gravitated towards them. Eleanor was befriended by the Edward Wilberforces, a young couple who had one son the same age as Robert and another christened only three weeks after Helena. Edward Wilberforce had left the Navy after getting married (to an American with the arresting name of Fannie Flash) and was preparing for a career at the Bar. He had devoted his time in Munich to writing an entertaining and opinionated book on the life of the town.116 Although there was no ‘English Doctor’ in Munich, Dr Heinrich von Ranke (grand-nephew of the great historian), who had a practice in Carlstrasse, was a keen Anglophile who spoke excellent English.117 A specialist in treating children, he became the Sickerts’ family doctor and a good friend. Dr Ranke was mildly eccentric, full of ‘German fun’ and fond of practical jokes; his tiny wife was – like Oswald Sickert – a ‘Schleswig-Dane’ and – like Eleanor – the daughter of an English astronomer.118 They too had a bevy of young children, playmates for the infant Sickerts.119
Shortly after the Sickerts’ move to Kleestrasse, Johann Jürgen Sickert came down from Altona to visit the family in their new home and to see his grandchildren. He was only sixty-one and it was a surprise when, not long after his return home, he died. He was found early one morning at his studio, dead in his chair, in front of his easel.120 Oswald Sickert had to go and sort out his affairs. He discovered his native town in a curious and unhappy condition. In the summer of 1864 the Prussians, together with the Austrians, had engineered another quarrel with Denmark. It had led to a very brief military confrontation in which the Prusso-Austrian alliance had comprehensively defeated the Danes. The spoils of their victory were the longdisputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. Altona and its citizens had ceased to be subject to the Danish crown. Oswald Sickert – like his father (and his son) – was neither political nor nationalist. Art and music were his concerns. During his long residence in Munich he had come to regard himself as a Bavarian-German of liberal tendencies.121 But the unrest of war and the clear signs of Prussia’s military ambitions in Europe were unsettling. Back in Munich, Eleanor announced that she was ‘growing fidgety’.122
It was also an unsettling time for the young Walter. Eleanor was becoming increasingly alarmed at his health: ‘Wat looks very pale and thin,’ she reported, ‘but he eats and drinks and sleeps & walks any distance.’ He could still manage a trip to the Botanical Gardens to feed the ducks, but found it hard to concentrate for long. Even the prospect of earning a coin for learning to spell some new words was not enough to sustain his interest. He soon grew tired.123 Munich was known to have a less than healthy climate. Infant deaths were common. (Eleanor was later told by Dr Ranke that she was the only mother on his books to have ‘borne four children and brought them alive out of infancy in the city’.) The ‘high bitter air’ was liable to cause bronchial problems, and indeed all the Sickert children suffered regularly from croup. Walter’s complaint, however, was of a different order. The reason for his pallor and lassitude was discovered to be some sort of intestinal blockage or abscess. This seems to have developed into an anal fistula as the body, seeking a new outlet, opened up a narrow channel between the lower part of the rectum and the skin around the anus. An operation became necessary to close up the wound, and restore the natural channel. It was a problematic business. The fistula was kept from healing by the constant entrance into it of material from the bowel. The first attempt by the Munich doctors was unsuccessful. And so was the second. By the middle of 1865, Walter was still suffering.124
That summer, Eleanor took the family to Dieppe. It was a punishing journey to make with four small children, in a train without lavatory compartments or buffet car.125 But the town held such a special place in her affections that she wanted to introduce her offspring to its charms – to the old streets, the castle on its cliff, the Gothic churches of St Jacques and St Remy, to the quaint onion-domed Casino, the long pebbly beach, the bracing northern sea, to the school house on the slopes of Neuville that had been her youthful home; and – of course – to Mrs Slee and her daughters. It was Walter’s first experience to a town that would become at different times his home, his refuge, and his inspiration.
It was also his first introduction to his godmother. Anne Sheepshanks came over from England, full of kind thoughts and offers of practical help. Her first scheme of assistance was to increase and formalize the allowance that she made to Eleanor and establish it under a trust.* Her second concern was Walter’s health. After the failure of the two Munich operations, she believed that nothing short of a London specialist would suffice. The acknowledged centre for rectal surgery was St Mark’s Hospital, in London’s City Road, and it was arranged that Oswald Sickert would bring Walter over to London in October. As Miss Sheepshanks no longer had a house in town, she rented one – at Duncan Terrace, Islington – close to the hospital.126
The expedition, following directly upon the holiday at Dieppe, gave Walter a foretaste of another of his future motifs. It was, however, the drama of the operation, and his central part in that drama, rather than Islington’s well-proportioned Georgian terraces, that seems to have impressed him most. It became another of the key points in his personal mythology. ‘Islington,’ he liked to claim in later years, ‘has always been kind to me. My life was