VE Day at Heytesbury

On 8th May 1945, as the rest of the nation celebrated victory in Europe with noisy parties and military parades, Siegfried Sassoon wrote that he felt a sense of "mental flatness". He had done his best to avoid anything to do with the Second World War. (As usual with Sassoon, his actions were contradictory; he had written for the papers to back up the war effort, though it can be safely assumed that his heart was not in it.) He must have felt that he and his generation had failed. After the Great War, they had initially believed that there would never be another one like it. Sassoon, with his Jewish blood, must quickly have come to realise that it was inevitable, despite the pacifism he had embraced in the 1930s. Even his own published work had been banned in Germany.
When the time came and the Observer, a paper that had once been owned by his own family, asked him for a celebratory poem, he produced something much less congratulatory in tone. His peace at Heytesbury House had been seriously disturbed by the war, with evacuees needing to be accommodated, and he had retreated to his study to work on his memoirs, leaving the additional work to his young wife Hester, who already had her hands full with their son George, still a toddler in 1939.

Many of Sassoon's friends enlisted, but he was not tempted to apply to join the Home Guard. He told one of his friends that he felt like "a semi-submerged barge on a derelict canal". He started to despise Hester for taking an interest in the progress of the war. Nevertheless, he conceived a great dislike for Hitler and began to see this conflict as the final struggle between good and evil. This was in contrast with the feelings of some of his friends, such as Edmund Blunden and J C Dunn, who were both unhappy with Britain's conduct.

By the end of the war, the first two volumes of memoirs had sold well and received praise from reviewers, one notable exception being Malcolm Muggeridge, who had referred to The Old Century as "an anaemic fairy story". However, even combined with the successes of D-Day and the prospect of an end to the war at last, it was not enough to make 1945 a happy year for Sassoon. During the war, his former lover, Stephen Tennant, had crawled out of the woodwork, making unexpected visits to Heytesbury. He was the last person Siegfried wanted to see. Someone he cared about far more, Glen Byam Shaw, had been badly wounded while serving in the far east. Another friend, Rex Whistler, was killed in 1944. In the meantime, Siegfried's relationship with Hester had gradually deteriorated and was at breaking point.

His friend Blunden had already divorced two wives, and Sassoon began to think that this was the only way out of his problems with Hester. He had sent her to stay with her mother, but she refused to stay away, continuing to phone and visit frequently. Rather than celebrate VE Day together, he insisted that Hester return to her mother's, and himself ignored what was going on outside the haven of Heytesbury. His poem had appeared in the Observer two days earlier.

"To Some Who Say Production Won The War" was a sad and bitter poem. It began with a dig at the profiteers, who had come through the war at the expense of others who had given their lives: "Defenders of the soul of man assailed/By foul aggression and its creed of crime."

By the time the Japanese had been defeated in August 1945, Sassoon declared he was past caring. "I have no literary ambition at all now," he wrote, adding that his life from now on would be centred on his son George. He had failed to recognise the inevitability of losing his son to adulthood. For the moment, he tried to settle back into the comfortable rural existence he had previously enjoyed.