‘Where did I go wrong?’ he asked Edith Olivier. Like Cecil Beaton and Rex Whistler, he knew that he had fundamentally misunderstood Stephen. He had treated him as a child and expected him to behave like an adult. Too late in the day he realised this and wrote to Glen Byam Shaw: ‘Stephen wants what is withheld. He is always a victim of his own selfishness and like all people of that type he is always under the impression that he is above criticism.’ What Stephen demanded was an audience, to be fêted, applauded, admired, adored, his whims indulged and his beauty constantly affirmed by his worshippers. He was a butterfly who could not be caught, who would not be possessed or dominated. Sassoon was so infatuated that he could not deal with Stephen’s capricious nature – ‘However naughty he is, one always reverts to adoring him.’ But his fatal misjudgement was to believe himself indispensable to Stephen. The reverse was the case – Stephen had become indispensable to him. As a result he failed to see the signals that he was no longer wanted. His presence, once a comfort, had become a demand, that impossible demand on friendship that W.J. Turner had warned him against in Germany. How he might have benefited from the example of Cecil Beaton and Rex Whistler, who sidestepped that error and retained Stephen’s friendship. He might have saved himself a lot of agony if he had responded as his mother did. She had said: ‘I hear Stephen is in a lunatic asylum – the best place for him.’

Edith Olivier understood how deeply Sassoon was being crushed. She saw him the day the letter arrived from Dr Ross and wrote in her diary that he was ‘absolutely broken. It was torture to see Sig’s anguish and I could not help him.’ She was too wise to offer false comfort and pretend all would be well again; it was over. They drove to Wilsford and took a stroll in the gardens, as if for the last time. The Miss Hunters, Beryl and Eileen, thought they, too, were on the verge of departure, believing Stephen would not return. It was an era coming to an end. Four days later Edith wrote, ‘Haunted all night by thoughts of Sig who said he felt as people who kill themselves – people with no future, but he says he won’t.’

All in all, 1933 had been a rotten year. At its beginning he had broken his collar-bone when his horse stumbled, throwing Sassoon to the ground, then trampling all over him. Tossing what he thought was an extinguished match into a waste-paper basket he set it and the curtains on fire, and very nearly the house. There were two altercations in his Packard car, the first with the kerb-stones on a sharp corner and the second with a bus, its driver and the local police. The lanes of Wiltshire were not designed for fast cars to challenge buses in overtaking manoeuvres and mudguard-to-mudguard duels. In heated language Sassoon demanded an explanation from the bus driver (notorious for his bad manners, noted Sassoon) as to why he was racing him. Before receiving a reply he accused the man of being ‘a bloody fool’. Then he got into his car and drove off, believing the incident concluded. It was not long before the local policeman (a lazy and incompetent man, noted Sassoon) was investigating this further example of Captain Sassoon’s questionable ability as a driver. Collusion was in the air (the bus driver and the policeman were close friends, noted Sassoon). But he knew how to stem this corruption of authority. He enlisted the aid of Edith Olivier, whose cousin ‘is a great friend of the Chief Constable of Wilts and will get the C.C. to put a stop to all this nonsense. And I suppose the stupid Wilsford P.C. will get it in the neck.’ Sassoon was, however, found guilty, fined £6. 9s. 4d. and came within a whisker of losing his licence. Only Toad of Toad Hall excelled him in the combination of righteous indignation and incompetence at the wheel.

Sassoon had burdens enough and was in no mood for more: just the sort of time when Robert Graves tended to appear in one form or another. During the three years’ silence between them, he had settled in Mallorca with Laura Riding and, in the village of Deya, enlarged his house and built a road down to the sea. Then the tradesmen reverted to their inconvenient convention of asking for payment. Graves had not budgeted wisely, money was needed quickly but all sources had dried up – all that is except one:

The PS was vintage Graves: ‘I don’t say anything about repayment, but I expect that this is not impossible.’ It is also vintage Graves that the first of Sassoon’s replies is nowhere to be found but it is obvious from subsequent letters that Sassoon did not oblige. Enlightening rather than elevating, the correspondence created another rash of accusation and counter-accusation. Sassoon could not see the funny side of Graves’s dilemma, nor that the whole episode was the stuff by which friendships are cemented, not, as in this case, consigned to a silence of 20 years.

Edith, the support to whom Sassoon looked in these days of mixed fortune, ensured that he had little time to brood. When Stephen returned to Wilsford, news filtered down to Fitz House via the Hunter sisters but Edith persisted in turning Sassoon around to face new directions and meet new people. Among the most important were the Morrisons of Fonthill Abbey. They were political and artistic patrons and discerning collectors. Fonthill was full of rare and beautiful objets d’art, manuscripts and books harvested by Alfred and Mabel Morrison. Their son Hugh became MP for Salisbury in 1918. Edith was a staunch Conservative and worked for him in this and subsequent elections. Katharine, their daughter, married a barrister, Stephen Herbert Gatty, who progressed to a knighthood and to the position of Chief Justice of Gibraltar. Edith also introduced Sassoon to the Gatty offspring: Richard, Oliver and Hester. Yet despite her endeavours, Sassoon complained to Glen more than once of feeling isolated. Much of this was of his own choosing, increased by the demands of two collections of poems he was preparing. There was loneliness, also grief, mixed with anger. He took to riding across to Wilsford to exchange news with ‘Really and Truly’.

Glen came to stay at Fitz House; Edith and Rex dined there on champagne and caviar. Newcomers to the nearby village of Rockbourne were Lord David Cecil and his wife Rachel. Sassoon was acquainted with David and admired Rachel’s father, the writer and critic Desmond MacCarthy. Edith and the Daye House became the centre of a circle similar to Garsington, though less intense. Ottoline came down to spy out the land and see Sassoon. She liked Edith and the people she met at the Daye House but was suspicious of Violet Bonham Carter, who was greatly taken with Sassoon. Violet had been sharp with her cousin, Stephen, for his selfishness and beastliness. She was familiar with the Tennants’ mercurial behaviour; her stepmother Margot being one of them. Her letters to Sassoon from Swaylands and Wilsford had been a comfort, in that he liked to know even the bad news but they did nothing to help him break away from the obsession. Edith, on the other hand, was trying to release Sassoon in creating opportunities through which a sense of freedom and a new beginning might emerge.

The highlight of the summer was the Wilton pageant. Held during the first week of June in the grounds of Wilton House, it was a splendid but demanding event, which included full dress rehearsals. Sassoon was on Edith’s guest list, as were Glen and Angela Byam Shaw. So too were Richard and Hester Gatty. Edith noted in her diary that Hester looked ‘a dream in an oyster silk Caroline dress’, while her brother looked ‘rather dull as Charles I’. Sassoon appeared somewhat self-consciously as an Elizabethan bard. According to Edith, the weather was ‘blazing’ and took its toll on many of the participants. Hester Gatty, she noted, had ‘retired with a headache to the shade of the riverbank. Sig, however, was very happy. The whole thing has been real fun and has made a huge difference to him.’ It was Edith’s reward to see him inching his way out of Stephen’s shadow and she was determined not to let him slink back into solitariness, which only made him brood and become self-pitying. The Thursday after the pageant she went with him to dinner at Rockbourne. David and Rachel Cecil, newly married, appealed to Edith’s romantic instincts. ‘A delicious evening of talk – such fun, and all amazing,’ she wrote.

Sassoon’s spirits were raised when Blunden married Sylva Norman in July. Blunden was settled at Merton College, Oxford, and working on more projects than he had fingers on which to count them. Solace as well as income was the spur. His divorce from Mary had left its mark. Like Sassoon, he needed constant emotional support as much as creative stimulus. Their friendship was part of the emotional reserves upon which each drew. Blunden’s busyness robbed them both of much of that support.

Throughout August Edith was constant in her attention. Sassoon spoke openly to her, as he rarely did with women. She had an advantage in that she made no demands on him, sought nothing from him and offered herself as a listener. Above all, she understood the depth of his feelings for Stephen. One evening in August, strolling through the gardens at Wilton, he told her how his feelings for Stephen ‘can only end with his life, and he divides people he knows between those who understand this and those who don’t.’ Edith did not ask him about the implications of such a commitment, or how it might colour, even determine, future relationships but she understood from an earlier conversation that he no longer fretted himself about his ex-lover. He was capable of ‘criticising him from the outside’. Stephen had became an ‘element in his past life which had made him what he is’.

As one reads extracts from Edith’s diary and Sassoon’s of this time at the Daye House in the summer of 1933, there is the clear impression of him having caught a glimpse of possible happiness. Again it was to Edith that he confessed how he had enjoyed the summer, the pageant, Ottoline’s visit, then Glen and Angela, dinner with David and Rachel and the laughter as Rex propelled Edith recklessly around the garden in a wheelbarrow, nearly colliding with Sassoon’s car. But he also knew, as he drove back to Teffont, he was going home to an empty house: ‘I need love to light up my existence. Mental friendships are not enough. Emotional companionship is what I need.’

On 5 September, as he drove home he saw a young lady in a pink dress. She was sketching, as indeed she had been two days previously when he had noticed her for the first time. He thought he knew her but could not remember from where. Later they met on the road that leads to the village. After they had exchanged afternoon greetings she introduced herself as Hester Gatty. Then he remembered her from the Wilton pageant. With her brother Richard, she had been a houseguest of Edith. She was now staying at the Black Horse, the inn a few hundred yards from Fitz House. With that minimum of acquaintance he invited her to dinner that evening. ‘H.G. has rather a sad face, but is attractive,’ he wrote, adding immodestly, ‘she is not likely to forget her evening with me – as I was at my best all the time and we got on easily.’ In fact so easily that Hester explained she had recently recovered from a nervous breakdown, the result of a failed love affair. Such a display of confidence greatly moved Sassoon and he wrote: ‘I felt grateful for her companionship.’ They spent the next days together, Sassoon driving her around the countryside during the day and entertaining her at dinner in the evening. On parting he confessed in his diary, ‘I felt a strong affection for her,’ after which he wrote (one is tempted to say, inevitably) that she needed protecting. The danger signals were appearing.

As the niece of Hugh Morrison of Fonthill Abbey, Hester would not be absent for long from Sassoon’s social circle. Edith Olivier had known her since she was a child and, as was Edith’s way, had helped her through her earlier romantic trauma. On Saturday, 1 October, at Hester’s request, Sassoon drove her home to Ossemsley Manor, arriving there in time for luncheon. He enjoyed the company of Hester’s brother Richard and strolled the grounds of what he thought was an ornate, but cluttered Edwardian home. Lady Gatty was very deaf, but ‘with a charming, kind face’. The house and its grounds, the family, the ambience nothing like what he had imagined. Hester seemed out of place there. He could not explain why he felt this, but it was one of the questions which preoccupied him as he drove back to the Daye House and to Edith for the weekend. Hester, he recognised, was offering him an escape from his solitary existence but even allowing for her ease of manner and the evident affinity they felt for each other, was it possible that she could be happy with him, a man 20 years her senior? Then there was the question of his homosexuality. He had told her about Stephen – that is about their friendship: discretion and delicacy imposed the boundaries. ‘What can I do? I can’t say to her, “Look here, I am 47, and I have never had a love affair with a woman. The best thing you can do is never see me again.”’ Questions and doubts assailed him but more prominent was the feeling that life was ‘gently leading’ him away from Stephen.

Sassoon was perplexed and continued to be so as he travelled the following week to London to meet Hester. Staying at the Reform, he slept badly, his mind occupied by uncertainties. He determined it was best to tell Hester clearly about his feelings for her, in particular how he saw her as his supreme chance for happiness and that he was convinced that he could make her happy. Then he states in his diary, ‘My belief that I am in love with her, physically as well as mentally, has strengthened since Sunday.’ They met in the afternoon and talked – at least Sassoon did – about the past six years. Next day, Saturday, they travelled back to Salisbury. Sassoon, now positively garrulous through excitement, told her over and over of his serious intentions. Hester was reluctant to accept his over-complimentary view of her. On reaching Salisbury, they parted but only for a while. That evening at 8.10, as Sassoon precisely records, he arrived at the Daye House to be reunited with Hester. When he saw her any last doubts were vanquished. He knew she was happy and he whispered to himself, ‘O, Hester, you must redeem my life for me.’

Edith was in no doubt that ‘Sig and Hester would marry’. It was right and appropriate that her home should have played so central a role in it all. She also thought of how that dinner at the Cecils’ – David and Rachel being so in love with each other – must have inspired Sig towards marriage. Edith deserved her moment of romantic illusion as much as she deserved the seat reserved for her in the parish church of Christchurch on 18 December. Hester and Siegfried were married in the Lady Chapel. Among the small number invited were Rex Whistler and T. E. Lawrence (at that moment assuming the identity of Aircraftsman Shaw), and Glen was best man. Theresa was not well enough to attend. Sassoon had taken Hester to Weirleigh in October and all was pleasant. Edith, in Theresa’s absence, sat in the place reserved for the mother of the groom, admiring the couple she had brought together. She was especially happy for dear Sig. He was quite right in saying it had been a wonderful summer. They had shared so many thoughts and become good friends. She also remembered Stephen.

Ten years previously, on 27 March 1923, Sassoon wrote a prophecy in his diary:

He was in fact 47 when he heard that Heytesbury House, in the village of that name, near Warminster, was up for sale for £20,000. Standing in the Wylye valley on the edge of Salisbury Plain, it had caught Sassoon’s eye as he visited the Nicholsons at nearby Sutton Veny. Built in 1700, with a façade and portico added 80 years later, this two-and-a-half-storey gentleman’s residence stood sequestered among trees. It had eight principal bedrooms, nine secondary bedrooms, five bathrooms and six main reception rooms. Light falling through the tall windows enhanced the spacious and elegant proportions of the rooms. One, just off the main hall, bore the name of Queen Matilda. It was claimed that the house occupied the site which once was her residence. Sassoon and Hester took possession on 18 May 1934. It was quite a change from the basic accommodation Sassoon had lived in since 1919. For the first time in his life he was a man of property which included extensive parkland, woods and fields. He loved Heytesbury, a home made possible mainly through Aunt Rachel’s legacy. As a gesture of gratitude and affection her portrait occupied a place of honour in the library. That room was soon full with Sassoon’s collection. Standing there he may have recalled a stanza from his hero Shelley’s poem, Epipsychidion:

Taking possession of the house was a great challenge to the managerial skills of Hester. Not overly endowed with such gifts, she lacked the sense of order and arrangement which Sassoon possessed. If anything, he tended to be too neat and tidy. ‘Hester is doing her best,’ he would say, defensively. Great excitement and much activity filled the place as they, to quote Sassoon, ‘built a little private Utopia’.

One of the first visitors to the new house was T. E. Lawrence. Writing to Geoffrey Keynes, he said he had made ‘a raid on Heytesbury. All visitors there intrude, as yet, I think. He and she are like children alone in the world. S.S is abnormally happy. He looks so well, too. Whether it will last I cannot say. The barometer cannot always stand so high.’ On her first visit Edith described the place ‘as a dream’. Max Beerbohm tussled with nouns and adjectives to express delight: ‘This morning I said to Florence, “they are both of them lovely spirits, in a lovely” – and here I paused for the right word and could only think of “bottle”, and said “bottle”’ and then righted myself and spoke the word I had wanted, “setting” which Florence thought a great improvement. Heytesbury is worthy of you.’

Not least among the joys of Heytesbury was its cricket pitch. Standing at the village end of the park, it became the centre of many a summer. A cricket match was the only occasion when Blunden and Sassoon were in contention for supremacy as their opposing teams squared up to each other. In the summer of 1934 Sassoon played his first game in 14 years. His diary for 30 June records that his team played against Warminster. He got a duck – given out by what he regarded as a travesty of a decision – his only consolation being a victory for Heytesbury by nine runs. Thirty years later, he told Dom Martin Salmon of Downside in detail of this cricketing injustice as he saw it. Salmon maintained it had been for Siegfried’s good because he became ‘a very difficult batsman to dislodge’.

Sassoon’s marriage and the move to Heytesbury marked another boundary. As the years progressed he became less enamoured of town life. Each year since the war he had enjoyed a season on the Continent – Germany, Italy and the south of France. During the 1930s he made only three trips abroad: in the spring of 1934, 1937 and 1938. But nothing pleased him more than to welcome his friends to Heytesbury as his desire to leave his new home fell away to the point where, he boasted to Max, ‘I now get my hair cut in Salisbury.’ A poem of this period, ‘Elected Silence’, reveals his mood:

If this was, as some suggested, a retreat, it was not from the world and its claims but from the world and its clamour. ‘Despite his solitariness he watched the world astutely,’ wrote Blunden. Edith Olivier recalled Sassoon speaking of the prophetic role of the poet. It was a role which Sassoon was about to assume.

‘The poet can only warn,’ said Wilfred Owen. In the decade after the Armistice it was not only poets who recognised the signs of Europe moving towards another war. Prominent among the seers was Winston Churchill, whom Sassoon met at a house party just before moving to Heytesbury. Churchill’s attitude towards President Wilson’s vision for a new world order and later his opposition to the Labour movement, in particular his actions during the 1926 General Strike, soured Sassoon’s opinion of him and, in consequence, the friendship with Eddie Marsh. But he agreed with the warnings Churchill was uttering about the ambitions of the European dictators. It was a sickening blow when in their conversation Churchill confirmed what Sassoon dreaded, that war was inevitable. To allow such a calamity would be to renege on every promise made at every cenotaph and war grave. Yet he had always feared that war would come when he heard the calls for vengeance and reparations drown out the calls for reconciliation and forgiveness. His poem ‘Reconciliation’, published in Picture Show in 1919, is indicative of his response. During his travels in Germany and Italy, he saw and heard more than music and opera. Hyper-inflation created bankruptcy and cast down friends like Onkle Walther and Tante Johanna at Haus Hirth. In Philipp of Hesse he had noticed and recorded the simmering anger of hurt pride that would seek its revenge.

During the decade that ended in a second world war, Sassoon published three volumes of poetry: The Road to Ruin (1933), Vigils (1934) and Rhymed Ruminations (1939). Such is the chronology of publication, but not of composition. Some of the poems in the third volume were written before the first or second volumes were published. Far from being three separate entities, these volumes are a continuum of thought and theme. Sassoon was never arbitrary in his selection of poems for a volume. This is not to deny the integrity of the individual poem, but when Sassoon wrote ‘my real biography is my poetry. All the sequence of my development is there,’ he is confirming that each poem shares something with the others, in addition to having a life of its own. The poetry is drenched with the thoughts of Frazer’s Golden Bough and the ethnological and anthropological ideas of Dr Rivers. His influence on Sassoon spills over into the poetry; in Vigils the poem ‘Revisitation’ carries the initials ‘W.H.R.R.’ in brackets under the title. In using the word ‘Vigils’, Sassoon conjured up the image of the silent, careful watcher of unfolding events. It is one of his better titles.

A synoptic approach to the three volumes reveals Sassoon’s train of thought on man and his destiny faced with what he feared was a war which threatened the continuance of the human race. He did not believe, indeed had ceased to believe before the war, in the Judeo-Christian revelation but retained a belief in the cosmic battle between good and evil fought on man’s behalf by angels (Sassoon was a great believer in angels. They fly in and out of his poetry like his favourite Camberwell Beauty). Neither did he lose his sensitivity to the mystical, what he called his ‘religious sense’, especially in response to nature. The poet Ralph Hodgson, who had been a frequent caller at Tufton Street, was as influential in this facet of Sassoon’s experience as Dr Rivers had been in other aspects – ‘R.H. has the most religious mind I know. By that I mean he is passionately concerned with goodness. Poetry is the central point of his religion.’ Hodgson also possessed an abounding optimism about man’s progress which appealed to Sassoon. When in 1924 Hodgson left for an academic post in Japan, Sassoon felt a deprivation equal to the previous loss of Blunden and of Rivers, two years earlier.

In his poetry Sassoon portrays man climbing out of some primordial swamp and through a process of advances and regressions pressing towards some destination of bliss. Edging his way upward, he developed a sense of himself and his destiny. Each generation climbs on the shoulders of its predecessor, reaching a little higher up the face of the rock. Immortality is not individual but rests in the continuance of the species. Generations live on in their offspring, who carry with them the hope and cultural memory of their forebears. Indeed, hope and memories are the rod and staff that comfort them. The climber on the rock is an amalgam of past, present and future, a thread in the kinship of humankind, whose role it is to follow and to fulfil. He learns from the past, navigates the present and ensures the future. War is inimical to hope and an offence against harmonic progress. War is evidence that man has moved in the wrong direction across the face of the rock and entered a gully from which he must retreat. War delays progress. War is ‘The Ultimate Atrocity’, the title of the fourth poem in The Road to Ruin:

With apocalyptic urgency Sassoon’s poetry is now directed to this danger. Unlike any other war the next one will be the War of the Great Bacillus, poisonous gases and hideous devastation. The eponymous poem which opens The Road to Ruin sounds the alarm:

Among the friends who received copies of The Road to Ruin and Vigils was T. E. Lawrence. Writing to acknowledge the second volume, he told Sassoon that the poems should be read ‘slowly and in sequence. These poems are like wood-violets and could be passed over by men in a hurry.’ But in the 1930s men were in a hurry. With the world going headlong into another war and ideologies in conflict, the cauldron of politics was boiling over. This was a time for taking sides and raising banners. The Road to Ruin – prophetic, sharp and sardonic – had its admirers but Vigils seemed anaemic. Sassoon’s style, language and content were inappropriate to a generation of poets who were politicised, committed to an ideology – W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and, to an extent, Louis MacNeice.

What Sassoon achieved in the First World War through a conjunction of poetry and a cataclysmic event was repeated by the Auden generation focusing on the evils of capitalism and the threat of Fascism. Ironically, Sassoon had entered that battle in the previous decade with his prose and poetry expounding and espousing the cause of the Labour movement and the miners in particular. The overture to the Second World War was the Spanish Civil War, which galvanised artists of the Left around the Republican cause. There is no echo of this in Sassoon’s work. That his poetry pointed to consequences beyond the moment, seeing as far as the war after next when an aeroplane – a recurring image in the trilogy – would deliver the ultimate atrocity in wiping out the species, brought no honour from the poets and writers of the thirties. Why should it have done? Sassoon was not bringing a unique insight to the times; there were others in literature, politics and science earlier and louder in the field. He was not a solo performer but part of a chorus, though nonetheless valuable for that. The Road to Ruin contained only seven poems including the title poem and there is great disparity of accomplishment and effectiveness between them. The weaknesses become more pronounced when these poems are placed alongside the work of the younger poets, and when reading the trilogy as an entity, especially the puerile contents of the oddly entitled Rhymed Ruminations.

Sharing the theme of war with The Road to Ruin and Vigils, it spoke of the poet’s bemusement at finding the world again on the verge of destruction and possessed by fear born of an ‘air-raid-worried mind’:

Sassoon no longer believed that man, despite his technological sophistication, was progressing. Far from advancing he was going round in circles, repeating his follies. This is the thrust of his poem ‘878–1935’. It had all happened before, on his own doorstep:

Rhymed Ruminations is also an exploration of the individual desire for inward harmony and meaning; a continuation of the themes begun in The Heart’s Journey and Vigils. It expressed Sassoon’s gradual disenchantment with his own century and his yearning for a world in which the alliance between man and nature is restored; the world of Blake, Wordsworth and George Meredith. The answer to his quest lay not in the future but in the past; something lost on the way which must be found. His poem ‘A View of Old Exeter’ was inspired by a painting of the same name by the artist J. B. Pyne. Sassoon closes the poem with the desire to stare and

With thoughts like this it is no wonder Sassoon was still perceived as playing in the Georgian band conducted by Eddie Marsh, to whose music nobody was dancing any more, although some might listen in the warm glow of a nostalgic evening. Running almost parallel with the trilogy of poems was Sherston’s Progress (1936), the final volume of the Sherston Trilogy. He had started writing it the previous October. It had been difficult, dealing as it did with his time in Craiglockhart and the last year of the war, that ‘dirty trick which was played on my generation and me’. With the clouds of another war gathering, he completed the book on 9 January 1936. He was not joyous – where had all the sacrifice led? There is an unintended irony in the title Sherston’s Progress. In retrospect it all appeared regression. He told Eddie Marsh: ‘It has been a laborious task but it seems to have plenty of vitality – and I feel confident that it will be read with enjoyment.’ Rather dejectedly, two days later he wrote again to Marsh, not about prose but about poetry. Heinemann published a regular edition of Vigils. It was dedicated to Hester – ‘The reviews of Vigils have been most peculiar. A new generation of critics has sprung up and they seem to regard me as a dreary back number.’ This was followed by the first of another, more directly autobiographical trilogy, the deeply nostalgic Old Century (1938). It was all about yesterday: it was escape literature, anecdotes for the end of the day; a sentimental obituary of a defunct era. He resembled one of those characters in Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’:

The rural is the past, it’s where the old, the conservatives are. Meanwhile, ‘the rebels and the young/Have taken the train to town,’ says MacNeice. Sassoon had missed that train and was standing on the platform waving his handkerchief, a man so like his epithet of Lord Grey, ‘designed for countrified contentments’. This perception of him was a travesty but it says a great deal about Sassoon that he did nothing to correct the image. Perhaps he was comforted by Hardy’s word about ‘those intellectuals up there in London’. Rejection is not so easily dismissed. Being known only as a ‘war poet’ and fox-hunting man irritated him but he could not escape the label.

His poetry did, however, find a resonance in the 1930s, becoming an essential and public part of the pacifist organisation, the Peace Pledge Union: the PPU, as it became known, was founded by a gifted former Rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London and Dean of Canterbury. The Revd H. R. L. Sheppard was committed to what was called the Social Gospel. Its emphasis was the realisation of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The Labour leader Clement Attlee described it as ‘Christianity without the mumbo-jumbo’. It succeeded in forming an easy coalition with non-adherents to the faith, particularly with Socialists. In the middle of the 1930s the pursuit of peace and the avoidance of war became the centre of Sheppard’s ministry. Dick Sheppard created an alliance among all those who renounced war as a means of settling international disputes. He had a gift for publicity and prodigious energy. Celebrities were invited to become sponsors and to promote the aims of the movement. Mass meetings were organised and the leading lights, usually three per meeting under the chairmanship of the founder, would tell their audiences that war must be banned from international affairs. Sassoon became one of the first sponsors in 1935. His willingness to assist was helped by the high esteem in which Sheppard was held by Max Beerbohm, who had met him in Rapallo. Max was taken by his gaiety and easy manner. He was, said Max, ‘a welcome intrusion’ and quite unlike any clergyman he had ever known.

Sassoon was not willing to deliver a speech, believing that his most effective contribution to the cause would be to read some of his poetry. On 14 July 1935 he was among those on the platform at the inaugural night in the Royal Albert Hall. Among the PPU’s most prominent members and speakers at its rallies were Bertrand Russell and Vera Brittain. She wrote of how she and others were moved to tears, listening to Sassoon reading of war and its waste, of bravery, suffering and desolation. Extant recordings of Sassoon reading his poems endorse her account of him as an impressive and effective presence on the public platform.

Hester was also having her own moment of glory – that same year her picture appeared in the February edition of Vogue. ‘I love her deeply and gratefully,’ her husband wrote. Revealingly he continued, ‘but it is a love that has learned, by previous experience, to safeguard itself – or try to.’ On the eve of his marriage he told Eddie Marsh: ‘Hester’s advent has been such a miraculous happening. She is a perfect angel.’ A year later his diary records: ‘Protective and possessive love can never realise that it can be a bit boring at times – lovely sweet Hester, why can’t you realise this?’ He could have been talking about himself. From then on the criticism escalated from the niggardly to the unbearable. By May, following the death of T. E. Lawrence, Sassoon craved privacy: ‘Let me have my feelings to myself,’ he pleaded in the pages of his diary. In August after Theresa and Michael had paid a visit to Heytesbury – in itself enough of a trial – he found Hester’s persistent attention suffocating. It was a never-ending regime of ‘captivity and supervision’.

Hester’s intrusive manner was part of the nervousness that had impaired her health some years before. Sassoon was not an unsympathetic person nor undemonstrative but he needed freedom from distraction to ‘shape his secrecies alone’. There had been excitement when in September Hester became pregnant. She was unwell and spent 10 days in bed. Sassoon was concerned for her but also grateful for solitude. He wrote off to his mother and friends announcing that ‘a little Sass is expected next year – and is thought to be five weeks on the way’. Hester had a miscarriage.

His sadness was short-lived. The following March he wrote to Glen with the news that Hester was pregnant again. The letter also mentions that two ‘plaintive letters’ had arrived from Stephen, who was in America: ‘He is trying to get back in his usual style, but I simply can’t believe that he deserves any sympathy after the way he treated me. He would do exactly the same again if he had me in his power.’ Stephen had written the previous summer but Sassoon had rebuffed the approach. Edith Olivier commended him: ‘I know Stephen has a prankish wickedness in him, and would rather like to try his power and see if he could break their happiness.’

On 31 October a telegram arrived at Rapallo announcing: HESTER HAS A SON. BOTH WELL. SIEGFRIED. Having jumped up and down, Max responded with questions: ‘What will he be christened? Sherston? Or Hesterus? or What?’ Sassoon and Hester had come to London for the confinement, renting 18 Hanover Terrace, next door to the former home of Edmund and Nellie Gosse. On 28 November the baby was baptised George Thornycroft Sassoon in St-Martin-in-the Fields by Dick Sheppard. Edith Olivier, Max and Blunden were his godparents. Rex was there too, as were Osbert Sitwell and an ailing Ottoline. Sassoon was a proud and happy man but, like others, preoccupied about the future.

The previous evening he had made another appearance at the Albert Hall with Dick Sheppard on behalf of the PPU. Before an audience of 8,500 people he asked, in stentorian tones, ‘Have you forgotten yet?’ The question was originally posed to ex-servicemen reprieved from death; now he posed it to those threatened by devastation. As with so many new movements and causes, the meetings of the PPU were thronged with the converted but the general public preferred to follow their leaders, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain.

Returning to Heytesbury, Sassoon turned to his next book, the estate and George – ‘My self reborn’, as he wrote in the poem ‘Meeting and Parting’. Christmas 1936 was, he said, ‘the happiest Xmas ever’. Again, writing to Glen in the late spring of 1937, Sassoon told him that George was ‘lovelier than ever, and as contented and good humoured as any baby could be’. For the first, but not the last time, Sassoon wrote of his son: ‘I feel that my whole future depends on him.’ On the eve of their engagement he had said the same thing about Hester.