Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  To cure his lameness Kate took him off to stay on the Thames estuary near Southend, where they paddled on the mudflats and a nurse came regularly with an electric battery to massage Evelyn’s feet and ankles. After three weeks of this regime they returned home but Evelyn’s feet had still not recovered, so in late August back they went.50

  This time Kate left Evelyn there on his own and for the next month he was billeted in a girls’ boarding school which had long since been deserted for the summer holidays. His only companion was a little girl named Daffodil whose father was away serving in India and who was punished for wetting her bed by having her hands bandaged for a day. Never having been separated from his family before, Evelyn felt utterly abandoned. The only bright spot was the appearance three times a week of the cheerful masseuse, Nurse Talbot, who after several weeks of seeing how miserable Evelyn was suggested to Kate and Arthur that he lodge with her family instead, which he did for the next five weeks. Her husband was an old soldier who became merry with drink most evenings, singing songs and showering Evelyn with praise. Their daughter Muriel was slightly older than Evelyn and, as he recalled from time to time, she obligingly ‘exposed her private parts to me, and I mine to her’.51 So content was he in this Dickensian household that he forgot to write home, prompting a pious letter from Arthur deploring his ingratitude – which Evelyn later recalled moved him ‘not to penitence, but intense resentment’.52 When he did eventually return home, Kate decided that he should do lessons with the Fleming children under a governess rather than go back to school for the autumn term. Mrs Fleming was for some time under the impression that he was an only child. ‘Oh but he isn’t,’ one of her children corrected her. ‘He has a brother at school whom he hates.’53

  An agreeable consequence of this extended convalescence was extra time spent with the Pistol Troop, which that year began producing a magazine that was typed by Arthur’s secretary and bound in full morocco, the first issue beginning with Evelyn’s short story ‘Multa Pecunia’. Arthur later conceded that while Evelyn had been inclined to take the routine of school ‘in a sort of negligent stride’ – in stark contrast to Alec – away from school he ‘displayed at the earliest age a precocious capacity for organising’.54 Besides the Pistol Troop and its magazine, he arranged shadow plays and theatricals in the nursery, writing the plays, making the costumes and scenery and directing the Fleming children who were themselves promising actors.55 More unusually, around this time Evelyn also proved himself ‘an irrepressible advocate of female suffrage’ according to Arthur. While visiting Boscastle he placarded the harbour with signs he had made demanding the vote for women, and during a garden party at Underhill, when half the guests disappeared from the lawn, they were found crowded into the boys’ playroom upstairs listening to an impassioned address by Evelyn on the ‘imperative necessity’ of the franchise being extended before the next general election.56

  As a boy Evelyn was rarely lost for something to do. His father remembered him as ‘bubbling with ideas’.57 He spent much of his time either rearranging the nursery furniture and pictures or drawing and painting, committing vivid images to his diary – including a gory picture of his appendix operation in which he is held down by his mother as the surgeon gleefully waves scissors and a knife in the air while a man (possibly Arthur) hammers a chisel into his groin. Battle scenes were another favourite subject, in styles derived from various magazines and comic books, as were inscriptions copied at the British Museum.

  He produced illustrated stories, also modelled on comics such as Chums and The Boy’s Friend rather than the classics that Arthur was constantly trying to press on him. He was an intermittent diarist, often in verse, and an eclectic collector – ‘coins, stamps, fossils, butterflies, beetles, seaweed, wild flowers, “curiosities” generally’.58 He possessed a microscope and an air gun, and aged twelve went through a chemistry phase ‘when with a spirit lamp and test tubes and assorted bottles, I conducted entirely unregulated and rather dangerous “experiments” in a garden shed’.59 An obsession with conjuring meanwhile took him often to a shop near Leicester Square, where the staff of expert conjurors soon tired of performing illusions at his request. ‘I must have proved [equally] tedious to the audiences I was constantly attempting to mystify,’ he later wrote, ‘particularly as I composed a facetious patter in imitation of the professionals I sometimes saw at children’s parties.’60

  His imagination and enthusiasm were quickly and broadly aroused, and so when his mother read him an article called ‘How to Join the Navy’, he promptly resolved to become a ‘Merry Jack tar’. ‘If I should be a sailor bold / I’d stand up on the deck / I’d lock my prisoners in the hold / And make their ship a wreck’.61

  Such imaginings were common enough among boys of his age – although his seem to have been more inventive than most. More striking was the interest he began to take in Anglo-Catholicism when he was eleven.62 At first religion was ‘a hobby like the birds’ eggs and model trains of my schoolfellows,’ he recalled, the appeal ‘part hereditary and part aesthetic’.63 When he went to stay with his aunts at Midsomer Norton he relished the frequent churchgoing and especially Sunday evensong.64 The High Church curate there taught him to serve at the altar and Evelyn recalled revelling ‘in my nearness to the sacred symbols and in the bright early-morning stillness and in the sense of intimacy with what was being enacted’.65 Back at Underhill, Evelyn began to worry his mother by drawing angels rather than soldiers, and at the age of twelve he made a shrine by his bed with candlesticks and incense and white plaster statues of saints bought from a religious emporium in Golders Green.66

  As a small boy he had gone with Lucy to the Low Church matins in the village and he later accompanied his parents and Alec to the newly consecrated St Jude’s in Hampstead Garden Suburb. One of Lutyens’s finest churches, the building was designed to dominate surrounding houses with its tall, pointed spire and sweeping, barn-like roofs;67 however a far bigger draw for Arthur was the hammy vicar Basil Bourchier, a cousin of the actor-manager Arthur Bourchier and himself an incorrigible performer in the pulpit. Evelyn would later portray him without embellishment in Charles Ryder’s Schooldays as ‘the very remarkable freak named Father Wimperis’ who drew great congregations to his church in a northern suburb and ‘alternately fluted and boomed from the pulpit, wrestled with the reading-stand and summoned the country to industrial peace. At the end he performed a little ceremony of his own invention, advancing to the church steps in cope and biretta with what proved to be a huge salt cellar in his hands. “My people,” he said simply, scattering salt before him, “you are the salt of the earth.”‘68

  Bourchier’s own sung Eucharist was full of incense and the same improvised ritual with the salt. During the actual Communion a large electric red cross was switched on over the altar.69 His vestments were more than conventionally ornate and his sermons, according to Evelyn, ‘dramatic, topical, irrational and quite without theological content’. Arthur maintained they would have served perfectly well as leading articles in the Daily Mail and thanks to his friendship with its proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, Bourchier’s pronouncements often did appear in that paper, variously demanding the lash for men who attacked women and fines for people who coughed in church, inveighing against vivisection and any clothes that entailed suffering to animals. People flocked from all over London to attend his services.

  In his autobiography Evelyn deemed Bourchier ‘a totally preposterous parson’,70 however according to his teacher at Heath Mount, Aubrey Ensor, this was a case of him ‘taking an after look’, whereas as a boy he ‘took St Jude’s and the Rev. Basil very seriously’. Ensor recalled going to see the medieval morality play Everyman, with Bourchier playing the Voice of God (and forgetting some of the Almighty’s lines) and Evelyn walking in front of him carrying a large open prayer book.71 Perhaps because of Evelyn’s subsequent loss of faith, the role of St Jude’s and Bourchier in his early religious formation has often been understated, not least by Evel
yn himself; yet even he conceded that, in spite of the vicar’s histrionics, he gained ‘some glimpse of higher mysteries’ during his services.72 In any event, Evelyn was confirmed at St Jude’s by the Bishop of Willesden on 29 June 1916 and the next week received instruction from Bourchier before his first Communion.73

  Evelyn’s precocious holiness put him at variance with the rest of the family, especially Alec, who ‘accepted religion without belief’ and saw his confirmation as ‘something to be taken in my stride … the next thing on the list’.74 Arthur, meanwhile, had undergone a spell of Darwinian doubts in the 1890s but was passing through an Anglo-Catholic phase by the time of Evelyn’s birth. After they moved to Underhill, at Evelyn’s request Arthur led the family and servants in prayers before breakfast but stopped in 1914, saying it was ‘no longer any good’.75 He served as a sidesman for many years at St Jude’s and apparently adhered to the Christian moral code, yet Evelyn doubted whether he had ‘a genuine intellectual conviction about any element of his creed’. Arthur seems to have been far more interested in the theatricality of Bourchier’s services than in any of the doctrines the vicar purported to teach there, and he was equally entertained by the various goings-on among members of the congregation – at another church he attended previously he particularly enjoyed the story of a solicitor of his acquaintance who had allowed himself to be caned by the curate as a means of showing penitence.

  Even if the adult Evelyn later came to question the depth of Arthur’s theological thinking, as a boy his interest in religion almost certainly helped him to feel closer to his father. For Arthur’s fiftieth birthday in 1916 he wrote him a poem, ‘The World to Come’, describing a soul’s journey to heaven, in the metre of Hiawatha. Evelyn later dismissed it as a ‘deplorable’ and ‘shameful’ effort, although at the time he was proud enough to have it bound in leather. Arthur was proud of it too, describing it to his friend Kenneth McMaster his ‘most wonderful’ present. ‘Not bad for a twelve-year-old,’ he crowed.76

  Evelyn’s religion brought him into occasional conflict with his otherwise doting mother. One Lent, Kate told him that he should be on his guard against his ‘besetting sin’, his ‘quick and unkind tongue’. He seemed at first to accept this but then rejoined: ‘You know, Mother, what is your besetting sin?’ ‘No, Evelyn,’ she replied, ‘what is it?’ ‘A lack of faith in Catholic doctrine.’ Recounting the incident afterwards to Alec, Kate admitted: ‘And of course, he was completely right. I do lack faith.’77

  She was thus all the more alarmed when, around the age of twelve, Evelyn announced that he wanted to become a clergyman and ‘began to recite long devotions from a pious book’. As a young girl she had grown distinctly disenchanted with her stepfather’s clerical life and the last thing she wanted was for her son to follow the same path. From then on, she decided it might be best if she declined to hear Evelyn’s evening prayers.78

  * Arthur Waugh was also curiously brave. He insisted on having all his teeth drawn without gas, refused to take cover from air raids and when warned one night – falsely as it transpired – that there was an intruder in the garden, he strode about it alone with a walking stick calling: ‘Come out you ruffian, I can see you.’ (A Little Learning, p. 67.)

  * According to Alec, she also thought that at that age at least Evelyn had ‘too gentle a nature’ for the Spartan discipline of Fernden (Alec Waugh, My Brother Evelyn, p. 168).

  * Leaving aside his gallantry and splendidly mustachioed appearance, Wood was perhaps not the ultimate embodiment of manliness. He was also known for his hypochondria, his vanity – it was said that he had his medal ribbons edged with a black border to accentuate their effect – and for being comically accident-prone, once managing to get his nose smashed by a giraffe that he tried to ride at a private zoo in India. See the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  * This was Evelyn’s second operation, the first having been when he was circumcised as a baby.

  3

  Serving Lord Kitchener

  Although he was happy enough at Heath Mount, Evelyn was still due to go and board at Fernden in 1914 in order to prepare him for public school two years later. However the outbreak of the First World War that July caused The Daily Telegraph to dispense with all its freelance book reviewers and Arthur promptly lost half his income. Besides ‘saving every penny against the winter & giving up at once our nice parlourmaid’,1 as he wrote to a friend, Arthur decided that it would now be quite out of the question to pay for boarding school for Evelyn and he wrote to Grenfell to warn him that even Heath Mount’s fees might prove beyond him. According to Evelyn the headmaster replied that if necessary he would keep the boy on for free; another master* recalled that Grenfell discreetly sent a bill without a total – allowing Arthur to fill in whatever sum he saw fit before signing his cheque.2 Afterwards Arthur solemnly told Evelyn that he was now ‘honour bound to be an exemplary pupil’ – an exhortation that Evelyn did not remember having yielded to.3 In any event, Arthur’s fears of financial disaster proved exaggerated and he never had to take advantage of Grenfell’s generosity.

  Evelyn was excited by the outbreak of war and when the family took the train down to Midsomer Norton that August he eagerly counted the signal boxes and sentries guarding the mainline bridges. ‘I followed the retreat from Mons to the Marne,’ he later recalled, ‘and drew countless pictures of German cavalry plunging among English infantry with much blood and gunpowder about.’4 The Pistol Troop had disbanded before seeing any of their longed-for action, but he and the Fleming children did their bit by selling empty jam jars for the Red Cross and cut up linoleum to sole slippers for wounded soldiers. Their Christmas show, a series of topical sketches performed before a crowded house in the Underhill nursery, raised 3/6 for the Belgian Relief Fund.5 The next summer, 1915, Mr Fleming arranged for Mac and Evelyn to work as messengers at the War Office, sitting ‘in a smoky den inhabited by an old soldier’ while waiting to take files from one room to another. Evelyn, then eleven, was determined to ‘serve Lord Kitchener’, as he recalled, but though he often passed his door he was ‘never summoned to his presence’. He was nonetheless thrilled by the whole experience.6 At Underhill nights were occasionally enlivened for Evelyn by the Zeppelin alarm going off, whereupon he would be ‘brought down from bed and regaled with an uncovenanted picnic’. Evelyn felt no sense of danger, which was in any case fairly remote in that part of London – no bombs fell within a mile of them. On summer nights, however, they would sometimes see ‘the thin silver rod of the enemy caught in the converging search-lights’ and ‘on one splendid occasion’ he saw a German plane brought down, ‘sinking very slowly in brilliant flame’, and hurried out to join those who were cheering by the roadside.7

  At school Evelyn raised more war funds by ‘making boats, Zeppelins, etc’ and ‘selling ‘em to other chaps’, as he recorded in his diary.8 He joined the Boy Scouts and raised a Heath Mount patrol in one of the local troops, parading on Saturday afternoons in the basement of a shop and marching to the Heath to play various war games. However their activities seemed distinctly dull compared with those of the Pistol Troop. More invigorating were the many fights he continued to pick at school and describe in his diary. When a boy called Fletcher accused Evelyn of being a ‘silly old thing’ and, behind his back, of being small and a fool, Evelyn declared his intention to ‘slay him’. Spotting him outside the school changing room, he ‘called him and jumped at him and knocked him down and immediately he said he had never called me a fool’.9

  Another outlet for his pugnaciousness was afforded by the wave of anti-German feeling then sweeping the country, as a result of which anyone or anything vaguely Teutonic – dachshunds included – was liable to come under attack. Quickly infected by this hysteria, Evelyn described a game of footer in the autumn term of 1914 as ‘grand’ apart from the poor positional play of a boy called Pappenheimer – ‘I suppose it comes from being a subject of that miserable German nation,’ he wrote in his diary.10 Long before the
royal family changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, several boys turned up at Heath Mount with names suddenly anglicised – one called ‘Kaiser’ reappeared less conspicuously as ‘Kingsley’. Evelyn’s claim that ‘we did nothing to persecute them’ is as hard to believe as it is to verify,11 but in any event the next year he recorded that he and Pappenheimer had decided to settle their quarrels ‘with the gloves’.12

  The enlistment of several masters prompted tearful send-offs at morning prayers during which Evelyn noted that ‘there were many chaps who hid behind each other so as not to be caught blubbing’.13 Among their replacements, the handsome and theatrically inclined Aubrey Ensor made the most favourable impression on him. Alec later maintained that Ensor saw his time at Heath Mount merely as ‘a prelude to a substantial career as a dramatist’14 – an ambition he scarcely realised although he did write and direct a handful of plays and revues on the London stage from the 1920s through the 1940s, occasionally impressing critics with his ear for dialogue and ‘neat pen for character sketch’.15 ‘Man’ (as Evelyn called him) Ensor’s greatest talents lay in the classroom, however, where he was an animated and inspiring teacher, apt to dance around the room while crooning the popular songs of the day.16 By contrast, Ensor complained that all the headmaster really cared about was the Common Entrance exams, and thus he was forever being told to ‘stick to facts’ rather than do anything so exotic as to ‘try to interest the boys in their work’.17

  A distant cousin by marriage through the Cockburns, Ensor soon made friends with the whole Waugh family and was often at Underhill. He particularly liked Kate – who was by then nursing hospitalised soldiers in Highgate – ‘a lovely person with a quick glint of humour in her eyes’. Evelyn may have inherited the glint, yet Ensor noticed that ‘neither of the boys seemed to have reproduced the warmth that lay behind her slight Scots reserve’.18 He clearly detected something worth nurturing, however, and although Evelyn did not mention him by name in his autobiography, Alec later identified Ensor as a key formative influence in his brother’s artistic development, responsible for broadening his horizons and ‘opening windows on new landscapes’, and in particular for introducing Evelyn to Saki Munro, whose short stories he would always admire. Ensor was a little taken aback when the eleven-year-old boy remarked, ‘Terrible man, my father. He likes Kipling.’19