"It doesn't come alone."
As the years go by, I find myself saying this more and more. My contemporaries and I used to discuss the problems we were having with our children, and the various amusing things they had said and done. Now we discuss the problems we are having with our aging relatives, and the various amusing things they have said and done. I recall Margo Blunden telling me that her father, Edmund, used to talk about his friend, the aged Siegfried Sassoon, in much the same way during the 1960s. "Poor old Sig..."
It happens in life and is reflected in literary societies, and indeed in all kinds of voluntary organisations. You've probably heard someone, somewhere, in the past few months, complaining about being unable to get younger volunteers to keep services going, to participate in committees, and so on. Few and far between are the young singles who want to spend their spare time in the company of old fogeys like us, and equally hard to acquire is the help of those with young children, who have very little time to spare for anything other than the daily grind. Equally, those who work full-time don't often want to spend their evenings doing clerical work for those who can't pay them to do so (although they sometimes like to spend their leisure time attending events of the kind we continue to organise).
Just recently I've once again found myself discussing the question of subscription rates, a matter that comes up regularly in all the societies I'm involved with. Should we do away with the "seniors" rate, since most members are seniors? Should we change the age limit from 60 to 65 or even 70? In some cases I'm now paying the seniors rate myself, and I don't relish the idea of having to pay more when I'm living on a pension. In terms of the SSF, we've always striven hard to keep our membership rates affordable, preferring not to build up a massive bank balance we can't justify - but other societies sometimes feel it necessary to have that cushion there for security. For who knows what the economy is going to be doing this time next year, let alone in ten years' time?
To return to Sassoon, his latter years were a time of self-examination. In his twenties and thirties, he had achieved much, although he chose to belittle himself. In January 1918, with his best times still ahead, he wrote in his diary, "I am home again in the ranks of youth - the company of death". In middle age he revisited his early years, as well as his army career, eloquently describing, in The Weald of Youth, the mixed feelings that had caused him to join up in the first place. He came late to marriage and parenthood, something that often indirectly leads to failure on one or both fronts, and he was very aware of the impending danger of a loss of physical and/or mental faculty, hence the enjoyment he felt in the company of younger people, and his determination to play cricket into his seventies, even if it meant having a runner.
His letters to Dame Felicitas Corrigan were full of self-examination (as though he had not done enough of it when writing his memoirs), but we know from Dennis Silk's account that he had not lost his wry sense of humour. His friendship with Ronald Knox during the 1950s was a meeting of like minds; Sassoon commented that he enjoyed Ronald's more light-hearted works, such as Let Dons Delight, which he had already read five times by 1962. Knox, of course, was only 69 when he died; Siegfried was already 71 when he converted. But, unlike Lady Acton, one of Knox's younger and more serious-minded converts, who threw one of Knox's detective novels over the side of a cruise ship because she found it too frivolous, Sassoon appreciated both sides of a person's character, and perhaps even preferred the frivolous. Dom Sebastian Moore, the monk who actually gave him his instruction in the Catholic faith after Knox's death, suggested that he had little interest in topics such as transsubstantiation and the immaculate conception, preferring simply to accept these as an excuse to chat with Moore for hours on their bench in the rock garden at Downside.
The darker side of Sassoon's old age is revealed by Dennis Silk's recordings of the elderly poet reading his war poems. After meeting him for the first an only time, in 1964, the poet and artist David Jones said, "However much he tried he could never get that 1st War business out of his system, which is exactly the case with me". Felicitas Corrigan felt that the "egocentricity" of Sassoon's latter years, though undeniable, was not a problem, and his last published poem, "A Prayer for Pentecost", reveals that he had achieved at least a degree of inner peace. May we all be granted that.
