Siegfried Sassoon’s notebooks
16th February 2013 | 0 Comment(s) | Cambridge University Library
Outside the Cambridge University Library, icicles are hanging off the trees and the snow has thrown a thin blanket of silence over the streets. Inside, though, the quality of silence is different, it has weight. This silence is warm and velvety, luxurious. Walking past secluded alcoves lined with great tomes, all I can hear is pages turning and the rhythm of my own footsteps following me along the corridors like the start of a poem.
Passing the backs in the reading room, curved like question marks, I remember Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, and the great scene of the angels in black overcoats passing through the library. Suddenly, like them, I am listening to something that is not silence at all, but the murmur of questions, the thoughts and stories of the people working here, as well as the voices coming out of the books.
In an upper room, Emma Saunders is cataloguing the papers of the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. On a small cushion that cradles the notebooks, she carefully opens his childhood poems for Mamsy, and there is Sassoon speaking to me in his clear ten-year-old voice.
He has tried to create a whole book of poems as a birthday gift for his mother, complete with illustrations, a frontispiece and instructions like ‘turn over’ just in case she doesn’t think of it herself. There are all the places where he changes his mind about a word, crosses it out, makes a spelling mistake. At ten he has read enough older poets to copy their poetic melancholy and sometimes just take a few lines he likes.
He goes on to fill notebook after notebook, even in the war when he is hospitalised, first with ‘trench fever’ (actually picked up in the barracks rather than the trenches) then shot through the shoulder, and later wounded in the head. In the archive, among all the poems, is a hospital tag, a seemingly prosaic thing that tells a story of its own.
Image caption:
‘Siegfried Sassoon’s hospital ship identification tag, used when he was evacuated home during the Battle of the Somme, August 1916. From CUL MS Add. 9852/1/7.
See Emma’s blog at:
https://specialcollections.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=3039
Imtiaz Dharker, poet in residence at the University Library.
