by Philip Eade
French windows led out from the book-room to the garden and to the north Arthur could gaze out across bucolic meadows until they too were sold to developers and houses sprouted up beside them. Kate had a small sitting room directly above on the first floor where Evelyn sometimes sat with her and the boys had a day nursery alongside, to which Arthur eventually added a balcony overlooking the garden. Their night nursery was on the floor above facing the road and the large Victorian villa opposite where the thirty-one-year-old ballerina Anna Pavlova came to live in 1912 in wooded seclusion until her once extensive grounds were built over too. There was one spare bedroom, which was often occupied by some guest or relation from the country,10 and a solitary bathroom, although the resulting inconvenience, compounded by the fact that it doubled as Arthur’s dressing room, was not unusual for a house of its kind at the time.
For Evelyn and his mother, neither of whom were especially enthusiastic city dwellers, the chief attraction of Underhill was the garden where Kate happily spent hours potting, planting, weeding and dead-heading while Evelyn drew countless complaints by climbing over the wall into the neighbouring North End Manor’s kitchen garden in search of lost balls. In his autobiography he portrayed the complainant, a maiden lady, as ‘an aged misanthrope’,11 however he scarcely went out of his way to endear himself to her. On one occasion he led his friend Mac Fleming into her garden and began lopping cabbages off their stalks, shouting, ‘Here we come, the Cabbage Chopping Clan!’12
When the manor house eventually came to be sold, Arthur took the precaution of buying this bit of ground, after which it became for Evelyn ‘the only part of my home to fascinate me’ on account of its tall jungle of weeds and the dark steps leading down to a derelict furnace-house. ‘This cellar and this wilderness I took as my special province, thus early falling victim to the common English confusion of the antiquated with the sublime, which has remained with me; all my life I have sought dark and musty seclusions, like an animal preparing to whelp.’13
On his frequent childhood visits to his aunts’ house at Midsomer Norton, Evelyn thus relished ‘the still airs of gas and oil and mould and fruit’, the fact that some rooms smelled ‘like a neglected church, others like a populous bazaar’. He would always remember their fierce cockatoo with its peculiarly pungent tray and the smell of leather and horses in the stables, even though the coachman had long since decommissioned the old brougham and kept only a solitary pony and trap, making up his hours by cleaning boots and pottering about the garden. To Evelyn’s young eyes, the Midsomer Norton household ‘belonged to another age which I instinctively, even then, recognized as superior to my own’.14
* * *
Almost as soon as they had moved into Underhill, Alec was sent away to board at Fernden, a prep school in Surrey, creating yet more distance between the brothers: the few postcards that he sent to Evelyn from there tended to begin ‘Dear It’. Meanwhile Kate began to give four-year-old Evelyn his first lessons at home, shared with a local girl called Stella, the red-headed daughter of their friend Ernest Rhys, the Welsh poet and founder of the Everyman’s Library. Stella found Kate Waugh ‘a dear – everybody was very fond of her’ and Evelyn ‘so self-reliant, cocky, outgoing and enthusiastic’. He was also ‘stronger and more clever than I was, but he did not rub this in’.15
But Evelyn’s most constant companion at this time was his nurse Lucy, with whom he regularly went shopping in Hampstead, where he was excited less by the merchandise than by ‘the dexterity of the shop-keepers … with butter-hands weights and scales, shovels and canisters, paper and string … I delighted in watching things being well done’.16 Three times a year they would also go to Hampstead Fair, where Evelyn exulted in the jostling crowds with their ‘pentecostal exuberance which communicated nothing but goodwill’, the monkeys capering on hand organs and, once again, the smells – ‘orange peel, sweat, beer, coconut, trampled grass, horses’.17 According to Evelyn’s autobiography, written some sixty years later, Lucy entirely reciprocated his love for her and was ‘never cross or neglectful’,18 however Stella Rhys recalled Lucy once telling them both off and Evelyn countering that she had ‘no business to speak to us like that’ because ‘we’re of a much better class she is!’.19
It was on one of his regular outings with Lucy that Evelyn came across three children playing on a mound of clay and was invited to join them. They were Jean, Philippa and Maxwell (‘Mac’) Fleming, who lived on the former farm that was now the estate office of the new Hampstead Garden Suburb. Their father (Edward Vandermere Fleming) worked at the War Office and to Evelyn’s fascination kept a revolver for his family’s protection and an Airedale watch-dog called Warder. The Flemings soon became Evelyn’s regular holiday playmates and the first of the surrogate families that he adopted during his early life, compensating for what he saw as the shortcomings of his own family and his rather isolated place within it.
Infected by Mr Fleming’s defence measures as well as the prevailing unease in the years shortly before the First World War, the children convinced themselves that a German invasion was imminent and set about fortifying the clay heap, storing provisions in anticipation of a siege and preparing poison soup for the enemy. Quickly having established himself as leader of their little band, Evelyn dubbed them ‘The Pistol Troop’ and rallied them each morning from the field by their house with the cry of ‘Hoik! Oy-oik!’, his right arm bent across his chest in salute.20 They agreed a strict code of laws and various initiation tests, such as walking bare-legged through stinging nettles, climbing tall trees and signing their names in blood. Never having been mollycoddled or discouraged by warnings of physical danger,21 Evelyn was a fearless participant in all these rituals, displaying the same bravery that he would later show when swimming in the sea, which he preferred ‘toppingly rough’, and as a commando during the Second World War.*
His physical courage and combative nature meant that he liked nothing better than a good fight and relished the regular skirmishes with other ‘roaming bands who attempted to enter our fort, whom we repelled with fists, clay-balls and sticks,’ he recalled. One regular adversary called Felix aroused particular indignation among the Pistol Troopers by enlisting the support of a far larger band of ‘gutter children’, as Evelyn contemptuously recorded in his diary at the time. At the height of hostilities, Felix ‘came again at a fierce charge but a voley of clay pelits combined with a stick charge drove him back again’. Felix charged once more, repelled this time by a ‘smashing blow in the face’ from Philippa, ‘our best fighter’ (she was awarded a medal for bravery that night); and again, now beaten back by ‘such a blow in the ribs’, delivered by Evelyn to one of Felix’s recruits, ‘that he fell flat on his face’.22 Despite his evident satisfaction at this, Evelyn maintained that the conflicts were rarely started by the Pistol Troopers, who as Evelyn later admitted were a self-righteous lot, forever going on about honour, and in any case they needed to save their strength for the Prussian Guard.23
* * *
In September 1910, just short of his seventh birthday, Evelyn donned green tweed knickerbockers for his first day at Heath Mount School, twenty minutes’ walk away up in Hampstead. The idea had been for him to spend two terms there before following his brother to Fernden, an alarming prospect given Alec’s reports about his despotic headmaster, who bade Alec ‘finish up!’ after he had disgorged his revolting sago pudding, dipped his fingers in ‘brown bitter liquid’ when he bit his nails and appeared in his bad dreams long after he had left the school.24 In the event, Kate’s wish to keep her younger son at home* combined with Evelyn’s evident happiness at Heath Mount meant that he stayed there for six years.
A month after Evelyn’s arrival, the headmaster, J. S. Granville Grenfell, told Kate he was ‘very pleased indeed with your young man. He is a smart boy, decidedly so, and promises extremely well. I do not know who has been teaching him, but he is better prepared than any boy of his age I have had for a long time. You will I am sure get an excellent report o
f his work and conduct generally at the end of term.’25
‘Granny’ Grenfell had been a few years senior to Arthur at Sherborne and was by then a forty-six-year-old widower. An admiral’s son, he had a naval air with his tall, slim figure, neat, pointy beard and tight-buttoned serge suit, his demeanour alternating ‘wrath [with] explosions of bluff geniality, in a way which might be supposed to derive from the quarter deck’, as Evelyn recalled.26 Already strongly attracted to fantasy, Evelyn was particularly intrigued by furtive talk among the boys of his wife’s ‘death-chamber’ somewhere in his lodgings, which he was rumoured to have locked and never re-entered and which Evelyn liked to imagine as ‘Miss Havisham’s bridal room, heavy with dust, festooned in cobwebs and rotting picturesquely’.27
Each morning began with roll-call and prayers in the gym, a sentry boy yelling ‘Cave!’ at the approach of the headmaster and the room falling silent as he leaped up the steps and entered with a lusty ‘Good morning, gentlemen!’ Like Dr Fagan’s charges in Decline and Fall, the boys chorused ‘Good morning, sir!’ in reply.
Saturdays were more nerve-wracking, when the headmaster drew everyone’s attention to the boys who had done well that week and then publicly denounced those who had not: ‘What is this I find? Fletcher. Fletcher has been idle. Stand out, Fletcher … We had better understand each other, young man … Any idling, Fletcher, and’ – banging his fist hard on the table – ‘I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks!’ Only later did Evelyn realise that Grenfell’s fury was mostly feigned and in any case he never suffered it in its fiercest form as he did well in his lessons and was one of the headmaster’s favourites.
Evelyn usually walked to school with Arthur on his way to Chapman & Hall. He remembered these morning walks as the first time he really got to know his father and enjoy his company.28 Still, Evelyn considered his office ‘a offely dull plase’,29 as he recorded in his earliest surviving diary entry shortly before his eighth birthday, and was ashamed of Arthur’s ‘sedentary and cerebral occupations’. He would have ‘better respected a soldier or a sailor like my uncles, or a man with some constructive hobby such as carpentry, a handyman; a man, even, who shaved with a cutthroat razor’. He always saw his father as rather ‘old, indeed as decrepit’, although he had been only thirty-seven when he was born.30
In his first year at school, Evelyn had lessons with a governess until 12.30, when the youngest boys were collected by their nannies. From his second year he stayed until ‘middle-day dinner’ and was taught by masters whom he recalled stoically as ‘mild enough’. None of them were married and they included one who chalked his ruler to ensure consistency of aim when carrying out a multiple beating31 and another who slobbered over his favourites32 and bade troublemakers bend over a footstool while he kicked their backsides – he was eventually dismissed for pinching boys’ bottoms.33 ‘Some liked little boys too little and some too much,’ reflected the adult Evelyn. ‘According to their tastes they mildly mauled us in the English scholastic way, fondling us in a manner just short of indecency, smacking us and pulling our hair in a manner well short of cruelty.’34
Cruelty was more likely to come from other boys – not least Evelyn. In 1912, the pretty and transparently timid eight-year-old Cecil Beaton arrived at Heath Mount. Beaton later recalled elevenses in the asphalt playground on his first day when ‘suddenly, out of nowhere, the bullies arrived’. Their leader was ‘half the size of the others’ and ran at full tilt towards Beaton before abruptly stopping just in front of him with a ‘wild, diabolical stare’. Standing on his toes, the boy deliberately moved his face closer to Beaton’s, ‘ever closer until the eyes converged into one enormous Cyclops nightmare’.35 Several times, according to Beaton, the boy withdrew and thrust himself forward, and then ‘stood baring his teeth at me’. In an earlier version of the same story they were black pitted teeth. ‘By the time the physical onslaught began, fright had mercifully made me only half conscious.’
Beaton’s vivid account of his terrifying introduction to Evelyn Waugh was written almost fifty years after the event. The next year he told the interviewer John Freeman on the television programme Face to Face: ‘Evelyn Waugh is my enemy. We dislike each other intensely. He thinks I’m a nasty piece of goods, and, oh brother! do I feel the same way about him.’36 Given their long-standing mutual loathing, it is conceivable that Beaton exaggerated his playground reminiscences. However Evelyn refuted none of them when he reviewed Beaton’s book in The Spectator in 1961, confessing ‘with shame’ that ‘the spectacle of his [Beaton’s] long eyelashes wet with tears was one to provoke the sadism of youth’, and that far from it having been an isolated incident, as the photographer suggested, ‘the bullying of little Beaton’ had been repeated many times. The flimsy excuse for all this, Evelyn recalled, was that ‘he was reputed to enjoy his music lessons and hold in sentimental regard the lady who taught him. I am sure he was innocent of these charges.’37
The persecution also included greeting Beaton with a loud ‘Hullo Cecil!’. The boys generally called each other by their surnames and Evelyn explained to his friend Stella Rhys that it was an ‘awful score to a chap to find out his Christian name!’.38 He and his accomplices also bent Beaton’s arms back and stuck pins into him. Evelyn recalled that the harassment stopped only when ‘my companion in this abomination and I were caught out and soundly beaten for it by a master’.39
Evelyn’s cruel streak remained evident throughout his life. Clues to it might lie in the more diabolical characteristics of his paternal grandfather, however if a tendency towards sadism was passed down from grandfather to grandson, it happened without them ever meeting each other. More likely Evelyn’s propensity was prompted by the circumstances of his upbringing.
There appears little doubt that at this age he felt entirely loved by his mother, who oversaw his homework each evening and listened to his prayers at bedtime. Their closeness was evidenced by the secret code in which he finished his notes to her: ‘Evoggles Goggles Moggles’ for ‘Evelyn Loves Mother’. If threatened with discipline by his father or Alec – who was given limited powers in this regard when he was eight – Evelyn would throw himself into the back of his mother’s high-backed chair in the dining room and shout ‘Sanctuary, sanctuary!’ Everyone understood that he could not be touched there.40
His sense of love and security underpinned the self-confidence and sunny nature for which he was known as a boy – albeit with the occasional fits of ‘life weariness and despair’ that his friend Stella Rhys noticed. However at the same time he had inherited Arthur’s emotionalism, which probably explains why he was later so scathing of this trait in his father, and Alec recalled that as a small boy he was apt to dissolve into tears at the slightest provocation.
Meanwhile, there was plenty of reason for Evelyn to feel left out by his father’s blatant favouritism towards his elder brother.41 In spite of their morning walks to school, Arthur was never entirely at ease with his younger son, and Evelyn could hardly fail to notice that he preferred Alec: in the school holidays they would disappear for long walks arm in arm over the Heath, or to cricket matches or the cinema. Years later, in 1933, Arthur wrote to Alec’s elder son on his christening: ‘The three great things in my life have been my Mother, my Wife, & my son – your father. Nothing else has mattered much to me but their love.’42 It was as if Evelyn had never existed.
Alec subsequently admitted that he had ‘remained an only child to all practical purposes right through my childhood, my brother Evelyn being in those early days no more than an encumbrance in a corner’.43 From an early age Evelyn would have been conscious that his elder brother saw him as such. The few surviving postcards that Alec sent to Evelyn from Fernden were occasionally affectionate, asking ‘How is your thumb?’ or ‘Has your cold quite gone? I hope it has.’44 However Alec later conceded that he had possibly been ‘not very kind’ to Evelyn when they were young and that he could ‘still visualize the occasion when my mother lectured me on this point’. He confes
sed that as an indulged child he had grown up with a superiority complex, confident that he was ‘going to make a considerable mark in the world’, while ‘Evelyn may well have felt himself relegated to a second place’.
In all the circumstances Alec ventured that Evelyn might have felt ‘challenged to assert himself’45 – which is presumably what he was attempting with the unfortunate Cecil Beaton in the playground, free at last from the yoke of his father and elder brother. Alec went on to observe that in spite of his later fearsome reputation, Evelyn had ‘a very tender heart’ as a young boy. ‘The toughness was superimposed, in self-defence. Beneath it he was highly vulnerable.’46
Evelyn’s short stature was possibly a contributory factor in this regard, rendering him more anxious to make his presence felt and thus more aggressive and domineering. He also had to contend with his effeminate name, although he later claimed to have successfully countered derision at school by reference to Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, who had won a VC during the Indian Mutiny and later commanded the army which defeated the Zulus.*
* * *
Looking back half a century later, Evelyn recalled that he had been ‘happy enough’ at Heath Mount but that the school was ‘merely an interruption of the hobbies and affections of home’.47 His school career was itself interrupted in the summer of 1912 when he fell ill with acute appendicitis and required an operation at home on the kitchen table. An appendectomy was then far riskier than it is today and not long previously the King’s surgeon had watched his own daughter die during the same procedure. Eight-year-old Evelyn was thus not told the diagnosis and later recalled a strange man appearing at his bedside inviting him to ‘smell this delicious scent’, before being put to sleep with chloroform. When he came round after the operation* he felt sick and found his legs strapped to the bed to protect his stitches. His next three nights were successively ‘bad’, ‘good’ and ‘splendid’, so Kate recorded in her diary,48 but it wasn’t until three weeks later that he was able to get out of bed, by which time the strapping had left him so weak that he could barely walk.49