Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was older than his fellow poet Edmund Blunden. But they shared two things – one, the searing experience of being involved in combat in the First World War, and the impact that had on their lives and their work; the other was that they were born and brought up in an area of Kent very close to each other – Blunden in Yalding, and Sassoon a few miles away in the village of Matfield, close to Tunbridge Wells.
Despite these similarities, they did not know each other until later in their lives, and then not particularly well. Sassoon, whose father was Jewish and mother Anglo-Catholic, left two different sets of memoirs – one fictionalised (and published in 1936 as `The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston’), and the other written slightly later, including `The Old Century’ (1938) and `Weald of Youth’ (1942). This effort of trying, in different genres and formats, to make some kind of organised sense of his experiences before and during the war was one he put great effort into. It is these books, rather than his poetry, of which he wrote a huge amount throughout his life, which continues to hold interest today.
In `Weald of Youth’ Sassoon makes clear the importance of having a map of the places he was referring to, and some idea of their real relationship to each other, and their layout on the landscape. Writing of how he sometimes took down an Ordnance Survey map of the parts of Kent and Sussex that figured in his memory from when he was young, he praises the map he has, revised from 1866 to 1893, because it `enables me to lose sight of the arterial road makings and other tyrannies of mechanized trafficry which have altered the character of so much of the countryside.’ (`Weald of Kent’, 1942, 1986 reprint, Faber and Faber, London, 41). Describing being revisited by a spate of memories of almost Proustian levels of portentousness and meaning, Sassoon imagines himself, `a half ghost, soundless from the shades of the future’ wandering from a house, and then, focussing back on the map, and the world it describes, wondering why the `tiny river Bewlt’ (usually spelt Beult today) and the `tiny river Teise’ `are both awarded the rank of river.’ He continues:
`Though the youthful Bewlt in its five mile wanderings had never been more than a brook; while the stripling Teise, which had yet another ten miles to travel before merging itself in the Medway at Yalding was content to saunter past orchards, copses, pastures, and hop-gardens without achieving the dignity of working a watermill or even earning a rent for its fishing-rights. I have never seen much of the Bewlt; but the windings of the Teise were well known to me, with the added interest that, for some seven miles before it met its tiny trinbutary, this pleasant alder-shaded stream formed the boundary between Kent and Sussex.’ (Weald of Youth, 47)
Sassoon, whose friendship with the tragic Wilfrid Owens in the war has become so celebrated, actively took a position of opposition to the conflict, and spent the rest of his life a vocal and influential pacifist. He was to convert to Roman Catholicism later in his life. The division between his life before and after the War was evidently a psychologically huge one, just as it was for many of his generation. It created traumas and mental collapses which were ill understood at the time, but had a visible, often overwhelming impact on those who had taken part. Perhaps that explains why the pre-war world and the excavation of it in his memory was to important – it clearly contained a source of nostalgic reassurance, but also perhaps some clues to a stabilising unity and core character that had been upended by later experiences and needed to be reaffirmed.
This youthful world was one structured on two activities – one fox hunting, about which, through the fictional guise of George Sherston, Sassoon writes a great deal; the other is, like Blunden, an idealisation of cricket, and its links to rural life and society in the time he was young. Both were ways of also describing a social structure that was ebbing by the time he was a young man, and which most historians agree was blown away by the impact of the War, and the destruction of so many young lives. They were also, clearly for Sassoon, sources of satisfaction and achievement, and a tangible link to a world that had disintegrated, but which could still be recreated through remembering the importance of these activities, and the people he had known while engaged in them. In cricket, at least, he had aspired to play for Kent, but only managed to be in the Matfield village side.
Sassoon’s memoirs, fictional and real, shift via the events of 1914-1918 to his life in London soon after the War, and the ways in which he built up a literary reputation there. Schooled at the New Beacon School in Sevenoaks, he was to board later at Marlborough College and then at Clare College, Cambridge. His mother, Theresa Thorneycroft, a sculptor and painter, continued to live in Matfield till her death in 1947, in Weirleigh, a neo-gothic mansion which sits beside the winding road from Paddock Wood towards Matfield village green. Occasionally, Sassoon would come back to visit her, until her death, when the house was sold and his tangible link with the village ended.
The house however was a powerful enough presence in Sassoon’s life to figure in his subsequent poetry – particularly through mention of specific characteristics like the 92 steps of its main staircase. Later reports of its being haunted however were quashed by residents. Matfield itself has a popular gastropub called `The Poet’, recognising Sassoon’s link there. Despite these connections, he is buried in Somerset. He had lived in Wiltshire from 1945 after the breakdown of his marriage to Hester Gatty. \lsd