Sassoon was eager to do some preliminary work on his memoirs – at least that was his intention. Starting in earnest, however, was delayed in part by the atmosphere in Tufton Street. He did produce some poems, including ‘Evensong in Westminster Abbey’. He wanted to prolong into autumn the wandering, social mood that had typified his summer and this he did, his diary recording a mounting mileage, including a visit to Brighton. In London he frequented the theatre and enjoyed lunching and dining. It was a time too for bumping into old friends. On 28 September, at a flat in Maida Vale, Sassoon spent an evening in the company of Gabriel. They rarely saw one another now, although Gabriel was still on Sassoon’s list of those to whom he gave money and remained so for a few more years. It was charity rather than affection – not cold charity, though; the passion had gone but Sassoon remained concerned at Gabriel’s increasing degeneracy.

On 1 October, his luncheon guest was Osbert Sitwell. Their estrangement had ended in the summer. Sassoon had always regretted the feud which, on reflection, he acknowledged as ill-judged on his part but excusable because of Osbert’s cattiness. On 17 June, Sassoon had spotted Osbert leaving Hatchards bookshop, followed him along Piccadilly and on reaching the Circus drew alongside him, feeling ‘an impulse to speak’. They shook hands. Sassoon said, ‘I saw you and couldn’t help feeling amiable.’ Osbert replied with typical insouciance, ‘I am always amiable.’ They walked together down Waterloo Place and their three-year battle was over.

Reconciliation was the order of the day. Sassoon’s lunch the following day, 2 October, was at the Savoy with Ivor Novello. Three days earlier he had been at the Prince of Wales Theatre for a performance of Novello’s detective drama, The Rat. After the show he went backstage to meet its star, Isabel Jeans. Evidently Sassoon no longer ‘despised everything’ Novello stood for. This drama of apparent harmony between the two is not available for others to read. Sassoon destroyed the diary record for the last three months of 1924. Speculation and inference are the only guides, plus some later diary entries in 1925–26. It is likely that Sassoon was establishing a relationship, or had even started an affair with Novello, having been given every encouragement by ‘dear Ivor’, as his friends liked to speak of him. He was a consummate flirt, who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs. In contrast to his lyrics he was devoid of sentiment when bored with a friendship or a romance. Sassoon would not have lasted long.

If he was hurt by Novello’s rejection, a substitute soon appeared who would soften the blow. One of Novello’s friends was Constance Collier, actress, producer (of The Rat, among other plays) and patron of young talent. She was also a friend of Frankie Schuster and a regular visitor to the Hut at Bray. It was there in the summer of 1924 that she and Sassoon began their friendship after which they met in London, sometimes in her home. No doubt Sassoon and Miss Collier discussed Novello and she introduced Sassoon to her other friends and protégés. One young actor, Glen Byam Shaw, was especially regarded by her. She smoothed his way into productions and brought him to the notice of producers by whom he was taken up, including Ivor Novello. Inevitably his youthful looks, gentleness of voice and manner were attractive to Sassoon. Between October and the year’s ending, he sent Glen two postcards; a third followed in January. Byam Shaw did not respond to the postcards, though he was amused by them.

Sassoon was not attending to the other writing he had promised himself – his ‘prose masterpiece’. He was still excited by the possibility of using his own past as the subject. Such an approach had also been suggested to him by Edmund Gosse. His recommended form was a long autobiographical poem after the style of the Victorian Romantics. A more contemporary approach came from Sam Behrman, his New York friend, who suggested a novel culled from Sassoon’s experience of the post-war world, especially the industrial unrest and the challenges to outdated social structures. By 1921 Sassoon had been full of ambition to write a major tome about homosexuality which might prove to be ‘one of the stepping stones across the raging (or lethargic) river of intolerance which divides creatures of my temperament from a free and unsecretive existence among their fellow-men’. Even when declaring the idea to himself he knew it was a pipe dream and that such a book on such a theme would not be written for many years to come, perhaps not even in his lifetime. The law of the land precluded any idea of such a publication and the times were not ready for ‘another Madame Bovary dealing with sexual inversion’. When he did write his prose ‘masterpiece’ homosexuality was completely excluded, as were his love affairs. It was E. M. Forster who made the vital connection between a prose work and Sassoon’s diaries. The theme of ‘then and now’ and Forster’s suggestion coalesced as Sassoon journeyed across England; but two years would separate the idea and a serious attempt at the task. That attempt would not be made while in Tufton Street.

Meanwhile Sassoon’s relationship with Turner was in decline. The friendship and regard he felt for Delphine Turner remained unimpaired. Sassoon knew that she was a victim of her husband’s infidelity. Then there were Turner’s wild and verbose pronouncements, which over the months rose to excruciating levels of self-importance and fatuity. It was Sassoon’s defence of Turner that had ruptured his friendship with Osbert Sitwell three years earlier. Doubts about the wisdom of that loyalty had disturbed Sassoon and already given rise to a desire for reconciliation with the Sitwells. Rarely now did Turner, on returning to Tufton Street of an evening, enter the ground-floor rooms but went straight upstairs, where he spoke a few words to Delphine before going to his own quarters on the top floor. Sassoon did not have to speak to him which was a relief, although when they did come face to face there was never any sign of antagonism. Even so, it was impossible to continue an arrangement where sympathetic contact had ended.

The last day of March brought cause for cheerfulness in the shape of a large wooden box containing 99 copies of his latest privately printed collection of poems, Lingual Exercises. The opening poem reflects Sassoon’s mood:

Forty years after its composition, Sassoon wrote: ‘“Alone” has been one of my most successful poems. I value it because it was the first of my post-war poems in which I discovered my mature mode of utterance (what I call my cello voice).’

His living conditions continued to frustrate him and a final break was inevitable. In July the stage was set for the denouement, in which the main part was played by Lady Ottoline Morrell. His diary entries have the hallmarks of a short story.

On July 4 I wrote ‘I saw Turner yesterday at Tufton Street and we talked for half-an-hour, so pleasantly that my secret antagonism seemed rather grotesque.’ On July 5 ‘Last night I read Turner’s platonic dialogue on Art, in typescript. It contains an odious travesty of Ottoline, who is described as a sort of Jezebel, whereas I see her as an essentially simple soul under her superficial decoration of aesthetic and intellectual interests.’

On Monday I returned the dialogue with a note urging him to cut out a phrase about ‘Lady Caraway’s eagerly offered embraces’ before he shows it to Ottoline. I added that I wouldn’t advise him, as I’d ‘no hope that he would avail himself of my advice’.

This evening he replies. ‘I expect Ottoline to be intelligent enough to know that one cannot write fiction without embellishments, extensions, and ornamentations of one’s original models. I did not attempt to make a portrait of her. She is merely the starting-point of a speculation.’

I have now written, telling him that he is deceiving himself; that he has used the material nearest to his hand; that the ‘portrait’ is offensively recognisable and that the Morrells will be hurt, and O.M.’s enemies delighted, if he prints it. I felt inclined to add that it will be ‘the starting point’ – not of a ‘speculation’ – but of his being permanently cut by the Morrells, whose hospitality has been such a help and enjoyment to him for nearly five years. I am only making this effort to save the feelings of Ottoline (and Delphine). I have lost all faith in Turner, as a writer. He seems to have become an imitator of Aldous Huxley’s sophisticated aridities, without any of Huxley’s educated clarity. Turner is a poet, imaginative and rather incoherent. This dialogue is neatly written but worthless. If he prints it he will accentuate my hostility to him.

Ottoline, who was unaware of Turner’s treachery and full of concern for him and Delphine, sought to save their marriage. Unorthodox as ever, she brought together not the husband and wife but the wife and the mistress. Nothing came of these eccentric efforts. Undeterred, Ottoline gleaned from her talks with Turner, and later with Delphine, that the marriage could be rescued if the Turners had a car. How this conclusion was reached or how it would be efficacious is a mystery. She wrote to Sassoon, who put a cheque for £75 in an envelope, presented it to Delphine with a note promising another £50 later on, and made it clear that he was doing this for her alone. The Turners duly bought a small car. Sassoon was very critical of Turner as a driver for his lacking road sense! As for Turner, he was in a state of bliss: a new car, his marriage saved and his extra-marital activities totally unimpaired.

Sassoon was now desperate to escape from Tufton Street and he knew that if anyone could help it would be Ottoline. He told her his problem and stressed the need for urgency. It was clear to him that spending the months from November through to the following spring working on his poetry and taking initial steps towards a prose work would become impossible if he was forced to stay in Tufton Street. His hopes were raised at the end of August. Ottoline, it seemed, had solved the problem, securing rooms in Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury. Sassoon inspected them and was well pleased. Then he asked about the rent and quickly changed his mind.

‘With the intensest relief,’ he wrote, ‘I escaped from that poisoned house this morning.’ His destination was first Highcliffe near Bournemouth, where Ruth and Henry Head gave him their usual warm welcome. So did the Hardys a few days later. Hardy seemed indestructible. He was 85, still writing poetry, and when Sassoon called was correcting the proofs of his latest collection. This visit was the shortest Sassoon ever paid to Max Gate – lunch, tea and then, with Thomas and Florence ‘waving cheerily outside the gate, with Wessie in close and tonsiled attendance’, Sassoon went to join Frankie Schuster and Adrian Boult for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester.

Among the many thoughts which occupied him on the eve of his birthday was the absence of any word from Glen Byam Shaw, the young actor he had met through Constance Collier almost a year ago. Sassoon and Constance were often together, Sassoon calling at her flat and she relying on him as an available and ready escort. News of Glen’s acting endeavours formed a natural ingredient of their conversation. From his hotel in the West Country, he decided to send another postcard to Glen. It was a month later that Sassoon received an apologetic reply in which Glen suggested they meet. He also wrote: ‘When are you going to give me some of your poems to read? I should love to do so and will promise not to leave them about.’ Sassoon was quick to respond and arranged the meeting for the evening of 20 October at the Reform Club. Later at Tufton Street they browsed through Sassoon’s collection of books and manuscripts and spoke fondly together of Constance and mutual acquaintances. ‘A very successful evening,’ Sassoon wrote. ‘He seems nice and straight forward, full of charm and good sense.’ When Glen left him Sassoon says that he was filled with a sense of peace. He had unburdened himself and wanted Glen to know how much he appreciated such sympathetic understanding.

Glen too wrote a letter expressing his delight and enjoyment of an evening which he ‘would never forget’. It was all music to Sassoon, who dashed off another letter full of affection and promise: ‘You have no idea how it makes me want to do things for you, and share with you all my solitary thoughts.’ Immediately Sassoon took it upon himself to share some of his experiences of life from which, he hoped, Glen would benefit: ‘And now I will tell you one of the “things” I have learnt; it is this; never to make excessive demands of people one is fond of; never to encroach on their freedom; to give all one can and to hope in return for their trust.’

These letters from the opening days of their friendship throw a light upon Sassoon’s deep paternal impulses through which he sought to raise a relationship ‘above mere sensualism’. It is impossible when reading his letters to Glen not to hear the accents of concern for the other person, a protective voice speaking out from its own experience of confusing choices, personal disillusion and vulnerability. It is clear that like Sassoon, Glen had been emotionally bruised by Ivor Novello. This shared experience drew them closer to each other. ‘You must try not to feel bitter about “him”. I don’t, though he outraged and betrayed my decent feelings to an incredible degree.’ And in the third letter of that first week of friendship, Sassoon referred again to the torturous experience Glen had suffered at the hands of Novello: ‘You must let me try to restore your faith in the niceness of life. Life isn’t like that really; you only struck a nightmare patch of it, where standards of decency don’t exist and everything is a sham and an evasion of sincerity. Life is damned difficult when you face its fundamental facts. I never began to face them till 1914.’

Glen’s reaction to such honest concern was reserved but genuinely thankful that this friendship now begun brought with it the possibility of healing. He also solved Sassoon’s immediate problem by finding a flat for him at 23 Campden Hill Square. The flat, upon being inspected, was declared perfect. Its owner, a portrait painter called Harold Speed, appeared a bit of a bore but there was no call for Sassoon to spend time with him. At £150 a year it was everything he needed. There was room for a piano, a good kitchen and if Speed would agree to knocking down a partition wall, two modest rooms could be made into a commodious sitting room and study. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the flat was only a three-minute walk from where Glen lived.

Leaving Tufton Street, when the moment came, was not without regret. It had been Sassoon’s centre for five years, during which he had written the privately printed volumes of poetry. Sassoon caught the moment on the eve of departure in his poem ‘Farewell to a Room’:

Travelling from Westminster to Kensington, Sassoon committed himself to new ‘confederate silences’, a new friendship and a new and healthier lifestyle. He was out of bed by ten o’clock and ate a combined breakfast/lunch at eleven o’clock. Next came a session at the piano, followed by writing letters before taking a daily constitutional between two and five. The evenings remained much the same as at Tufton Street, being focused mainly on the Reform. His writing, however, remained nocturnal. ‘The Power and the Glory’, his first poem at Campden Hill Square, was written on 13 December, a week after he moved in. Not that the routine was inviolable. Glen would call of a morning and Theresa, of course, arrived to assure herself that ‘dear Siggy’ was well, safe and comfortable. Seeing him contented, so she was too, but preoccupied. Her brother, Sassoon’s beloved Uncle Hamo, was dying slowly and painfully. The sadness of the moment was relieved by thoughts of Glen: ‘The happiness he has brought me is more soothing than anything I’ve ever known. I am surprised by my own emotional tranquillity. Also I have felt lately a new sense of proportion as regards the trivial details of life. My life seems simpler in construction, and I realise how few are the details which are worth bothering about. This is an internal harmony which I have been striving for since 1918. Or is it the complacency of middle age?’

Despite the cold winter days prior to Christmas, Sassoon and Glen set out for Weymouth and Dorchester. This new companion must be introduced to Hardy. On the evening of their arrival at Weymouth Sassoon read in the paper that Hamo had died. The many visits to Max Gate were always ‘sunshine days’; now that circle of happiness was broken. Hardy’s friendship with Uncle Hamo and Edmund Gosse stretched back over the decades and the three of them had been solicitous for Sassoon. With a black suit borrowed from Philip Morrell, Sassoon went to Christ Church, Oxford. He placed Hardy’s wreath against the trestles beneath the coffin, then sat at the back of the cathedral and thought of that gentle uncle and guardian whose patience he had so sorely tried.

Uncle Hamo had counselled his nephew some years before: ‘Do a good day’s work; don’t be reclusive; go to bed in good time and get up early.’ Sassoon could not claim to have followed this rule of life. The opening line of his 1926 diary carries a faint echo of a call to seriousness. He pledged himself to proper application and less gadding about. ‘Travel broadens the mind but solitude purifies it,’ he wrote, as he refused an invitation from Gerald Berners to spend the spring at his apartment in the Via Varese in Rome. Friends must not distract him from his work and he must learn not to be upset by their attitudes and behaviour. Osbert Sitwell was a case in point. Sassoon regretted the rift and determined to be more friendly and accommodating. He was not going to be unsettled by Turner any more. He missed Blunden, who had another year left in Japan. As for Robert Graves, he was about to sail to Cairo to teach English in the university. It was only a short-term contract but it would help the finances and Nancy would regain her strength and vitality in the hot climate. Graves was still a dilemma to Sassoon and their relationship, which oscillated between friendly and fractious, was an irritation he could well do without. Nancy, he acknowledged, had been much more welcoming during the last year, without any of her feminism having abated. She particularly condemned Turner, citing him as a prime example of male cruelty and selfishness in his treatment of Delphine. Sassoon had to agree. However, he objected to Nancy and Graves sniggering at Ottoline. Their sojourn in Egypt, during which they would have the company of Graves’s new friend from America, Laura Riding, meant that the danger of them intruding on Sassoon’s solitude was removed.

Sassoon loathed domestic disturbance. It seemed to pervade everywhere – the Blundens, the Turners, the Graveses, it was even poisoning Weirleigh. Michael’s family were living off, as well as living with his mother. Sassoon resented this and blamed his brother’s indulgence towards his wife, Violet, and her petty-spirited attitude towards Theresa and Mrs Fenner the housekeeper. Sassoon could not visit while that situation existed. He ventured there only when he knew Michael and his family were away or, if unobserved, he could slip into the studio, where Theresa spent most of the day. Each visit she seemed to age; she was suffering bouts of eczema, attributable, Sassoon believed, to the pressures at Weirleigh. The death of Uncle Hamo raised the spectre of his mother’s demise: ‘I realised what her death would mean to me and how much she has suffered and endured.’

The situation resolved itself when Michael and Violet moved to a new house not a great distance from Weirleigh, but enough to allow Siegfried a greater freedom of access and relieve some of the causes of Theresa’s discomfort. But Sassoon needed Weirleigh for reasons other than those of a solicitous son – he needed the Weald and his home so he could tap the vein of remembrance. For memories to be transposed Sassoon needed the physical sensation of the house and countryside where he had walked, bicycled, played cricket, ridden to hounds and watched the Weald change its colour but not its contours. There was no value in grasping at intermittent moments, he needed to return to embrace and possess it. After each visit Sassoon carried manuscripts, music and items of juvenilia back to London.

Sassoon had only one serious doubt during this time: ‘Glen is a charming relaxation, but I dread expecting too much of him, knowing too well how soon he might drift away from me and take me for granted.’ But Glen was of a different calibre from his other young men. The comparison Sassoon had in mind was probably Gabriel Atkin. He noted in his diary upon moving into Campden Hill Square: ‘My bosom’s best friend is only a hundred yards away.’ Gabriel, his ex-bosom friend, was also very close, living in Peel Street, but unaware of Sassoon’s proximity. They had last seen each other in October 1924, in Maida Vale, in the flat of a mutual friend. At the time Sassoon was becoming embroiled with Ivor Novello and made no effort to contact him but through an intermediary he sent sums of money which he knew Gabriel would dissipate at the Café Royal, getting drunk, creating an affray and being evicted by the house detectives. He was relying more and more on drugs, a habit he had started as a student in Newcastle. Sassoon had heard a rumour that Gabriel was about to move to France, but he cared little. The sporadic financial assistance continued for a time but Sassoon was reconciled to the fact that Gabriel was ‘a hopeless case’.

The quietness of Campden Hill Square during the spring of 1926 gave Sassoon the opportunity to bring together a selection from his two privately printed volumes: Recreations and Lingual Exercises. The recipients of the private and limited edition had shown them to friends and acquaintances and Heinemann, his publisher, heard very positive reactions, including glowing remarks from the critic Desmond MacCarthy. Sassoon was persuaded to publish this collection of 32 poems under the title Satirical Verses. On 28 April The Times carried an advertisement and the volume went on sale the following day. It was Sassoon’s first publication available to the public in six years. There was little enough in it to remind people of the fierce and protesting war poet. There were poems, however, of sardonic social observation and political arrows aimed at the snobbish, offensive attitude adopted by the upper class towards the working class. The book reached the shops on 29 April. On 3 May the General Strike began.

Heinemann had organised what Sassoon described to Glen as a ‘deluge of publicity’. It was all in vain with everybody’s mind on the strike. Glen was appearing in a play in Leeds, a city where there was serious rioting. Sassoon worried about that and the horror of violence pouring out on to the street. ‘As you know,’ he told the stranded Glen, ‘I have the strongest objection to people settling disputes by violent methods.’ He also told him that the strike had ‘killed the book stone-dead’. Sassoon could see no justification for this crisis and regarded it as more of a general muddle than a general strike. ‘My sympathies are all with the workers,’ he declared, but he did not believe much would change. The upper classes had it coming to them, of that he had no doubt, and he took a momentary delight in the thought of Sir Philip Sassoon, his cousin, watching his house in Park Lane engulfed in flames. The delight petered out when the possibility suggested itself that the revolutionaries might march from there to Pall Mall and set fire to the Reform.

He was shocked when on 8 May Osbert told him that he had just seen ‘12 tanks parading down King’s Road’. Osbert also told Sassoon that he intended to try to influence Downing Street into settling this unnecessary civil disruption. He intended using his kinship with Lord and Lady Wimborne to bring the factions together for discreet talks. Lord Reading was to be the intermediary between the Wimbornes and the government and Osbert would persuade the railwaymen’s leader and Labour MP, J. H. Thomas, to broker the discussions with the TUC. Sassoon, who was present at some of the subsequent meetings arranged by Osbert, became both depressed and outraged at the thought of the miners being beaten by the owners. Sometimes that outrage spilt over and Osbert would have to admonish him for being unhelpful. In an echo of Dr Rivers, Osbert told Sassoon: ‘You must try not to think in terms of your emotions but in terms of your intellect.’ Sassoon regarded this as ‘a wise and helpful saying. I must not make an exhibition of myself’ – all of this underlined in his diary.

Osbert’s advice may well have been prompted by Sassoon’s histrionics when in the house of the Editor of the Daily Express, Beverley Baxter. In his memoir, Strange Street, Baxter recalls arriving home in the small hours of the morning:

Sassoon’s record of the encounter does not include the declaiming prophet element and is very uncomplimentary about Baxter. He recognised this bald, heavy-cheeked young man in a golfing suit as someone who wanted to smash the unions. There seemed no hope of harmony and ‘In a few days both sides will be beyond the zone of conciliatory meetings.’ Within three days of striking that pessimistic note the strike was settled. Sassoon was walking in Kensington Gardens on the afternoon of 12 May when he heard the bells begin to ring a joyous peal, which he recognised as the signal marking the end of the strike. It was like that morning eight years before when he walked in the Oxfordshire countryside and heard the bells ring out the end of the war. As he walked towards the Albert Memorial he decided that it would not be inappropriate to quote ‘Everyone suddenly burst out singing’. But, unlike in 1918, not everyone in 1926 was singing the same song.

Glen returned to London from Leeds. Sassoon had not seen him since March. It had been even longer since he had seen Robert Graves, who in the middle of June returned from his time in Cairo with Nancy, their children and his American friend, Laura Riding. Graves had found the members of the English faculty difficult (a feeling reciprocated!). It had been well worth enduring. Nancy had been relieved of the daily care of the children; a first-rate doctor had changed her treatment and Graves had earned a good salary. He was in high spirits when he wrote to Sassoon in August, not from his house in Islip, Oxfordshire, but from rented accommodation in Ladbroke Grove, a stone’s throw from Sassoon’s flat. He and Laura Riding were living at this address, while Nancy and the children were at the house outside Oxford. Graves said in his letter that it was Nancy who had ‘asked Laura and me to leave her the job of running the house all by herself: and come up to Town to write seriously’. It all seemed somewhat of a jumble to Sassoon, who read this letter together with a second letter dated 18 September (Sassoon had spent July to 11 September in Italy and France with the Morrells, hence the delay in receiving the correspondence). The second letter said that Robert and Laura were ‘going off together to Austria for a bit: unconventional but necessary and Nancy’s idea’. Sassoon was totally confused and confided to his diary, ‘From this I can only assume that R and L are living together, and that Nancy wants a quiet life at all costs. Probably they are behaving quite sensibly, but I can’t help wondering how it will all end.’

Before Sassoon could reply another letter arrived, this time from Vienna, reaffirming how marvellous everything was. Responding with the minimum of enthusiasm, Sassoon told Graves that if those involved with the arrangements were happy then nothing else mattered. The desultory tone of the letter reflected Sassoon’s flagging interest in Graves. How he missed dear little Blunden, whom he now regarded as his only hope among his old friends. ‘When will he be back from Japan – next year sometime, I think?’ In the meantime there was Glen, and his friendship with the Sitwells was restored. Weirleigh was also accessible now that Michael had moved out. Indeed the relationship between the brothers improved somewhat, but not between Sassoon and his sister-in-law.

On 20 September, a fine and warm Saturday with the temperature reaching 80 degrees, Sassoon set off for Weirleigh. Theresa’s recovery of vitality continued, much to the satisfaction of her son. Joining them for tea were two ladies from Sassoon’s childhood, May Marchant and her sister Bessie Wormald, whom he describes as ‘two people from my remote past – nice simple jolly ladies of the old-fashioned country gentlefolk type’. Like Weirleigh, these two old friends of Theresa were rich in association for him. It and they belonged to his parochial pre-war self. There was a dangerous and subtle appeal which, were he to respond too readily and fully, would overwhelm him and stifle his creative instincts. These journeys to Weirleigh underlined for him the distance between ‘then and now’. Travelling to Matfield he expected that the scenes of childhood would have been transformed into something nearer his present experience but on arrival he found that nothing had changed and that he was coming back as a stranger; what he describes as his Enoch Arden complex. The village, the garden, the house, mother, May and Bessie Marchant, New Beacon School, the country around, all evoked memories, each with deep-rooted associations but all frozen in time: ‘I go down to Weirleigh and unlock certain dusty cupboards in my mind, and take out the faded manuscripts which belong to mental states which I have outlived and outgrown.’ And again, ‘I am a visitor from abroad, looking in at windows, and musing on myself as I was in bygone years. I go there alone, and I come away alone. I go into mother’s studio and look at the pictures she painted 30 years ago. But there are no new pictures, and never will be.’

Sassoon began writing Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man in September 1926. He was clear as to its theme and style; the story of a boy growing up, pre-1914, in an upper-class home in Kent. Orphaned, he would be indulged by his Aunt Evelyn, who had a penchant for the eccentric as well as the conventional. Peopled by servants, as Sassoon’s circle was in those days, and placed in an idyllic rural setting, the tale would be a chronicle of England at that time, as observed by a young boy crossing the boundary from childhood into youth and adulthood, and how that world impinged upon him. It would be a personal view and by intention a local and limited one, what Sassoon describes as ‘keeping within the frame’. There would be no regard paid to the social, political and industrial upheavals of the 1890s or those of the opening decade of the new century. There would be a passing nod to the Boer War and hints that Britain had an Empire, but this would be less important than England having a cricket team. It was about ‘remembering and being glad’.

Plainly and anecdotally told, the narration would be in the first person singular and spoken by a young man named, symbolically, George Sherston – George being the archetypal first name for an Englishman, Sherston from a small village on the southern boundaries of the Cotswolds, which would link the character to fox-hunting and point-to-pointing. This was the territory over which Sassoon had often ridden with Norman Loder. But now there was a more recent connection which prompted Sassoon’s choice of surname for his alter ego. Sherston Magna was, and remains a rural idyll on the north Wiltshire plain. It was also the land of the Byams, whose name remains on Byam Farm and Byam Cottage: on a white marble memorial in the parish church and on the family tomb alongside the exterior south wall. Their descendant Glen Byam Shaw was the author’s muse.

To enable him to use characters from real life without embarrassing either them or himself, Sassoon, as already shown, adopted the device of the alias; Mr Moon became Mr Star, while the solicitor Mr Lousada became Mr Pennett and Tom Richardson became Tom Dixon. Sassoon raided his journals and letters for the main narrative, sometimes altering dates and other small details. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man would be a thinly disguised autobiography and would end with the outbreak of the war to which George Sherston would go to face ‘the ugly facts of night’ in a foreign land, leaving for ever his idyllic life.

Glen Byam Shaw listened to the planned narrative and early extracts. His reaction was enthusiastic. ‘G. is going to be an indispensable aid to me in the matter,’ recorded Sassoon, who then went on to offer this rather backhanded compliment: ‘It is the sort of stuff which he can criticise. If he finds it interesting and amusing I shall know it is all right.’ Certainly his sails caught the wind and within a week he had written over 6,000 words. His diary records the number of words written as increasing by a thousand a day. Given that Sassoon wrote in a slow and deliberate way, editing as he went along, the output not only was fast but speaks of a writer completely engaged with his subject. Between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. he composed, condensed and eliminated. Since 1906 he had kept a diary; by 1926 this had honed his ability to write in that subjective voice essential to convey emotional retrospection. ‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man will always be your book,’ he told Glen. Even with the words and ideas running freely, Sassoon was assailed by doubts about ‘building a viable edifice out of these little memories of my early days of sport and simplicity’. Slaying such fears was the singular contribution of Glen who, listening to each new addition, whether visiting the flat or in his dressing-room in the theatre, told Sassoon that the book was going to be an enormous success.

The series of reports to Glen read somewhat like a serialisation: ‘You will be glad to hear that Aunt Evelyn and I have got to the Flower Show. I am now 17 and playing in the cricket match: the clock has just struck 12 – but the match has not begun yet. Aunt E has been judging the vegetables in a large hot tent. The total now is 17,000.’ By November Sassoon was down in Weirleigh, recovering more diaries and using the ‘luxury of loneliness’ to mine each one for narrative material. By mid-November it became obvious that there was sufficient material for a sequel. He thought the title of the first volume would perhaps restrict, if not preclude, such a venture. True, the greater part of the book would be about fox-hunting, with supporting themes such as cricket and country pursuits, but the latter part would be about the war. He decided to drop the original title and replace it with the more prosaic A Tale That Is Told. Then, and inexplicably, Sassoon suddenly developed writer’s block. The ever-faithful Edmund Gosse, reading the incomplete manuscript in the New Year, thought it would become a prose work of significance. In previous years this level of commendation coming from a writer whose own memoir of childhood, Father and Son, had been accorded classic status would have sent Sassoon back to his work with a new sense of purpose. Blocked and cast down, Sassoon was convinced that his masterpiece would never be completed, though.

His efforts to produce prose had stifled his output of new verse. Nothing had been composed since April, nine months previously. That he survived this wilderness was due to an oasis of friendship. Blunden’s letters from Japan were, he wrote, ‘exquisitely penned intimacies – comprehensible to nobody except him and me’. The support of Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith moved Sassoon to declare Edith ‘a magnificent woman’ and afford Osbert the ultimate accolade in placing his photograph alongside that of Blunden on his mantelpiece. He owned himself ‘fortunate to have such wonderful friends’. As for Glen, Sassoon took comfort in this moment of seeming failure to reflect on his success in encouraging his friend into a serious commitment to the stage. Visiting Weirleigh and the Weald he was further depressed by the thought of them as ‘the haunts of an empty-minded young man, ignorant of the world, and himself, as emotionally retarded by sexual inexperience and futile athleticism – a discontented young man’.

Into this tortuous syndrome came unheralded a poem:

Nativity

‘I was a poet when I wrote it – such poems are not written, they write themselves. The process is emotional – intellect isn’t used at all.’ Such a moment did not raise the gloom under which Sassoon laboured but it did affirm that his vocation had not died. It was a consoling visitation.

Circumstances mundane as well as mystical also made their impact on Sassoon’s life, the first of these coming in the form of an obituary notice:

Aunt Rachel, who had held in thrall the young Siegfried as she glided through her magnificent house in Mayfair, who had so stoutly aided the cause of Dreyfus and defied the religious intolerance of her mother, had spent a quarter of a century mentally deranged. She had loved her brother Alfred and been supportive of Theresa and the boys. The estate she left was considerable, being in excess of £315,000, of which her nephew Siegfried, and one suspects her favourite, inherited £50,000. Rather piously he wrote that ‘Auntie Rachel’s Bradburys’ would not induce him to change his way of life: ‘I distrust this money. I shall give a lot of the income from it to my mother.’ Others would also benefit. The Sitwells were invited to a Continental holiday paid for by Sassoon in September, after he and Glen had spent time on their own in Bayreuth.

‘I am 40 years old – remarkably young looking – devoid of literary ambitions, serenely fond of Glen in a way which makes me feel no need for anyone else.’ Sassoon was putting on a brave face, knowing that in October Glen would leave for America on a tour that would last a year. He had every intention, therefore, of enjoying warm summer days with him. It was a shock of seismic dimensions when on 25 May Glen wrote to warn him that his contract at the Oxford Playhouse might mean his having to cry off from the holiday, confirming this on 3 June. ‘The day disintegrated. Our relationship will be in jeopardy if he fails,’ wrote Sassoon. Immediately he wrote to Glen, refusing an invitation to Oxford: ‘I would rather not see you, as I should at once begin to make a fuss, which I don’t want to do, considering how nicely we have always got on.’ Caught in a series of mishaps – he had dislocated his shoulder a few weeks previously, been involved in a nasty car accident and now this Glen upset – his mood was prickly.

Dinner-parties were the last thing on his mind when Osbert invited him to dine at 2 Carlyle Square, Chelsea, to meet four Americans, together with Francis Birrell, Steven Runciman and Mrs Belloc Lowndes. As the table talk grew more and more raucous, Sassoon regretted having said yes, but Osbert was so insistent. The evening marginally improved when the after-dinner guests arrived, including Sacheverell Sitwell, his wife Georgiana, William Walton, Constant Lambert and the Hon. Stephen Tennant, whom Sassoon had not met before and to whom he was not introduced. The whole evening had been a sheer waste of time.

If only he could recover the flow of writing, but the distractions were too many. Then there was his continuing irritation with Glen, who was either impervious to or unaware of the disappointment he had caused:

Sassoon was working himself up into a frenzy over the matter, which began to affect his sleep; he regretted not having had a set-to with Glen and cleared the air. The Sitwells were very attentive to Sassoon. Sacheverell and Georgiana invited him to the christening of their son Reresby at Lambeth Palace and also to dinner at their home in Tite Street, Chelsea. Sacheverell told him that Stephen Tennant would be there and was, Sassoon records, ‘very anxious to make my acquaintance’. At the dinner Sassoon began to play up a bit in excitable talk, mainly he admits, ‘for the benefit of S. Tennant, who was obviously a very good audience.’ When they all moved on to a party in Berkeley Square, Sassoon watched this epicene creature, consumptively frail with ‘affected manners and an ultra-refined voice. But he has a very beautiful face, and is witty and intelligent and well-bred. Of his attractive charm there is no doubt at all.’ During the following week, Osbert mentioned Stephen Tennant several times and a dinner planned at Carlyle Square – ‘Would you like to come too, Siegfried?’

On the evening of the dinner, as Sassoon arrived at the front door, Stephen Tennant was leaving. He was, he told his host, feeling unwell.