Written by Jane Read; first published in St. George’s Parish Magazine (Warminster), November 1998:
When, almost nine years ago I first found St. George’s Church I heard of the people who had preceded me, amongst whom the war poet Siegfried Sassoon whose work long ago had made a lasting impression.
I was told that he came to worship at St. George’s and always sat in the second row, below the lectern in the Rosary corner. When it was time to process forward for Communion he always vaulted over the front pew, his tall angular frame still athletic. Thus giving an impression of his religious spontaneity and eagerness to share in the feast that is the Eucharist.
It was only later that I heard yet more about him. It was when the late Muriel Galsworthy asked me to tea. She had heard that I had a profound admiration for the work of the dramatist John Galsworthy in whose plays I had been privileged to act professionally. “Oh,” she said, “Uncle Jack” as she used to call him. We spoke of his compassion and balance of social judgment much in evidence in the Forsyte Saga.
Our conversations in her lovely Georgian house would flow. Out of that sensibility came further reminiscences. She described to me her first meeting at St. George’s with Siegfried Sassoon. “I hear you’re a Galsworthy,” he said, “Come to tea, tete a tete, tomorrow at four.”
Their friendship thus begun lasted until his death. Both were deeply Catholic and linked by bonds of literature and family associations. He was also devoted to her “Uncle Jack”.
She came to know of his journey to discover his faith in which a special providence had taken a hand. Someone whom he had never met had made a study of his poems and other writings. This was a nun of the Convent of the Assumption, Mother Margaret Mary, evidently a person of deep discernment. She wrote that she found in his work not only the undeniable and deep compassion for his men (1914 to 1918 was climactic agony), but underlying that, an undeniable search for God. She found him responsive and a meeting at her Kensington Convent took place. She encouraged him to draw deeply upon his mystical gifts and through faith to find the path of transcendence of suffering both his own and that of his men. He made the journey and was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Downside.
It was a great comfort to know that he had had the strength and support of two memorable women whose unconscious mercy helped a most necessary process of transformation in the last years of his life.
I had one further privilege yet to come. When it became the time of Muriel Galsworthy’s Requiem, she had asked that I would read out of the collected poems that Sassoon had given her: “Falling Asleep” in which he saw the faces of his men, so many faces.