Trouble down there

Ferdinand Mount

• Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet 1886-1918 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
  Duckworth, 600 pp, £9.99, September 2002, ISBN 0 7156 2894 1
• Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches 1918-67 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
  Duckworth, 526 pp, £30.00, April 2003, ISBN 0 7156 2971 9
• Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil by Peter Stansky
  Yale, 295 pp, £25.00, April 2003, ISBN 0 300 09547 3

My father had no gun, or any land to shoot over. So when he decided that it was time for me, then aged 15 or 16, to learn how to shoot, he had to cadge. We borrowed an old 12-bore from a local farmer, a rickety weapon the lock, stock and barrel of which were barely connected, and my father then asked his neighbour, Siegfried Sassoon, who lived in the next village, whether we could loose off a few cartridges in his woods. They had become friends through a shared interest in steeplechasing, cricket and poetry and also perhaps through a shared experience of war, though my father’s had been briefer and much less horrific.