by Arunabha Sengupta
Lonely, friendless for almost all his life, scarred by the same war that made his reputation as a poet—that had him decorated for bravery and thrown into the military psychiatric asylum for anti-war protest. Siegfried Sassoon lived a rather long, rather troubled, rather reclusive life.
Yet, he was perhaps at his happiest on the cricket field.
Not that he had any skill. His batting, according to most affectionate of recollections, was most ordinary. Dennis Silk, warden at Radley College and a former Somerset cricketer knew him well, estimated an average of 17 in a good season. But, as David Foot wrote, ‘one suspects that friendship lent generosity to the calculation.’
When his team fielded he sauntered to mid-on, where he liked to position his gaunt, statuesque, saturnine self, and often drifted off even while being part of the game. The balls would travel towards him and crack him painfully on the shin. He would bend down slowly, as chunks of eternity were counted off by his playmates, and lob the ball gently, underarm, to the bowler.
His cricket was described as ‘one of those old gramophones with horns, a little cracked … you felt there had been something there at one time.’
But then, as proprietor of the Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, Sassoon could afford to take the field enthusiastically, with ‘Çatch it, Captain Sassoon’ frequently ringing through the country side, with the muffled ‘Oh bloody hell’ following immediately thereafter in a less audible volume from the bowler. Sometimes he would desert the outfield altogether, to sit on the iron fence or lean against the gate.
While batting he would generally go in low in the order, for his brief forays, and unskilled slow bowlers would sometimes be put on to haul his score towards the elusive double figures.
Not that he had been any better as a cricketer in his youth.
Growing up in Victorian England as a scion of the landed gentry, he did watch country house cricket and the game on village greens. His private tutor, Mr Moon, would send down a few overs at him, the stable groom would bowl over-arm— becoming the lob-bowling Mr Star and fast-bowling Dixon in his Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man.
In his thinly disguised garb of George Sherston, Sassoon painted an evocative picture of his father-less childhood days of willow and leather, horses and hounds. The Canterbury Cricket Week features in the book prominently, “I went there by train with Dixon and spent a long hot day watching Prince Ranjitsinhji make about 1 75 not out. My aunt's black Persian cat was called Ranji, which made the celebrated Indian cricketer quite a comfortable idea for me to digest.” There is also a detailed description of the Flower Show cricket match, of notching up the winning single to ensure victory by one wicket.
He was in the house team for two years at Marlborough, but after that cricket was more of a tale of passion than merit. Even his first poem was accepted when he was at school — by WA Bettersworth, editor of Cricket.
During a reluctant year at Cambridge he discovered Law and History were too arid, and he wrote: “The Blue Mantles averages in my scrapbook show that in the years 1910 and 1911 I had 51 innings with 10 not outs and an average of 19. This I consider quite a creditable record for a poet.”
Cricket ran like a much necessary thread connecting the various disconnected, often tumultuous, bits and pieces of Sassoon’s life. He loved sauntering on the field, loved the company of cricketers, loved picking his Heytesbury House team, and loved driving in his two seater Humber in his eccentric manner to away matches of his side. Cricket gave him space and time.
Sassoon often found solace when he entertained cricketers, and delighted them with a discourse on a cricketing topic, such as curiosities of the initials of old Kent cricketers.
Foot says, “Mid-on was as good as cavern away from introspection: offering as much solitude as he found on his daily stroll. Through the woodland of his estate.”
An anachronism in both directions of time, a country gentleman to his bones, the echo of a bygone age, and a homosexual who declared his orientation way before it became fashionable,
Siegfried Sassoon kept playing cricket till his late 70s. He was born on 8 Sep 1886.
Illustration: Maha