'I did not know how lucky I was'

Appended to Sassoon's The Old Century is a further memoir, Seven More Years, which carries young Siegfried's story forward into the new century. Towards the end of it comes his memorable encounter with a Camberwell Beauty, which some readers might remember from my book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment. While in the large room at the top of his family home, Sassoon becomes aware of a butterfly trapped between the skylight and the gauze tacked over it...

'By standing on a chair – which I placed on a table – I could just get my hand between the gauze and the glass. The butterfly was ungratefully elusive, and more than once the chair almost toppled over. Successful at last, I climbed down, and was about to put the butterfly out of the window when I observed between my fingers that it wasn't the Small Tortoiseshell or Cabbage White that I had assumed it to be. Its dark wings had yellowish borders with blue spots on them. It was more than seven years since I had entomologically squeezed the thorax of a "specimen". Doing so now, I discovered that one of the loftiest ambitions of my childhood had been belatedly realised. I had caught a Camberwell Beauty.'

I had forgotten what it was the young Siegfried was doing when the fluttering Beauty caught his attention. He was, or intended to be, reading among the impressive books he had recently been collecting to form his own library...

'I decided that I really must read some Ruskin, in whom I had heavy arrears to make up, for during my final term at Cambridge I had  somewhat fortuitously subscribed for that Library Edition of his works which was being gradually issued in thirty-nine volumes. Thirty of them had already arrived, and they were uniformly corpulent ... Attracted by its name, I made a start with The Crown of Wild Olive, but after a few pages I lost the thread and lapsed into leaf-cutting – an occupation which was more compatible with my wandering thoughts. I might have continued cutting the leaves of Ruskin's work for the rest of the morning, but I began to be bothered by the flutterings of a butterfly....'

And there it was... I remember that 39-volume set of Ruskin from my early years, when it sat unsold and unwanted on the shelves of many a provincial second-hand bookshop, its author's reputation having sunk below the horizon. Nowadays, with Ruskin back in favour (up to  a point), you would have to pay a considerable sum to get your hands on a complete set. 
  Seven More Years is every bit as engagingly readable as The Old Century, and, having finished it, I think I'm going to have to read more of Sassoon's memoirs. Here is the closing scene of the book, in which young Siegfried is in the garden of the family home, on the edge of the Kentish weald...

'Meanwhile this September morning looked as if nothing could change its meridian prosperity. As I turned to go up to the house, I couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be more than twenty-one. Lucky to be in love with life, I did not know how lucky I was.'