by Philip Eade
As their rapport grew, Evelyn confided to Ensor how whenever he wanted the day off school he would wiggle the end of the thermometer with his tongue to obtain a temperature. And he shocked him by his persecution of a wretched master known to the boys as Uncle Water Rat, and his defiance of the headmaster’s request for clemency whenever a master ‘more than normally unsuitable was engaged’.20 Evelyn and Ensor’s friendship survived long after both had left the school, and years later, when Ensor was working as stage manager at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, he would contrive to get Evelyn tickets for matinees as close to the stage as possible. However he was po-faced when Evelyn sent him scurrilous postcards about the other Heath Mount masters,* and when he received a bundle of caricatures he admitted that he ‘felt it better to get rid of them’.21 Ensor was further reminded of Evelyn’s belligerence at the final matinee of an Old Vic season. The only available seats were in a box and Evelyn seemed so to resent the other people in it that he kept referring to Ensor’s recent chickenpox. He only stopped when Lilian Baylis entered the box in mortar and gown, which rendered Evelyn speechless.22
Despite their ups and downs, they were still sufficiently in touch by the time Evelyn wrote A Little Learning for him to send Ensor an uncorrected proof copy, which Ensor annotated, even though he was very friendly with Evelyn’s arch enemy Cecil Beaton, to whom Ensor sent samples from his vast collection of theatrical postcards to help Beaton with his work as a costume designer in Hollywood in the 1960s. Evelyn and Beaton had several other friends in common at Heath Mount, including their fellow theatre fan Dudley Brown, Evelyn’s regular accomplice in persecuting vulnerable masters and ‘business manager’ of his private detective agency, Messrs Wuffles† and Co.23 The son of a prosperous surgeon who lived at one of Hampstead’s smarter addresses, the Mount, Brown was a good deal richer and more sophisticated than Evelyn and gave him an early taste for the high life. Evelyn was particularly impressed by the fact that while playing football Brown was attended by a nanny ‘to refresh him at half time with lemon squash from a thermos flask’. He later greatly disappointed Evelyn, however, by asking him to lunch followed by a matinee and then casually announcing when Evelyn eagerly arrived at his house that there was really nothing good on that he had not already seen.24 Besides keeping an album of theatre programmes, Brown seemed to know an awful lot about the private lives of actresses and was revered by the other boys for his extensive knowledge of sex. Beaton remembered Brown whispering that children were produced by the man ‘mixing his “stuff” with the woman’s’,25 and Evelyn, though prudishly shocked when Brown taught him a scatological limerick, recalled being equally fascinated by his theories of reproduction – albeit not the sexual act itself, which he seems to have remained determinedly ignorant of despite the stripping sessions with Muriel Talbot. Whether or not Evelyn succeeded in his reciprocal attempts to interest his friend in Anglo-Catholicism is not clear. In any event, the adult Brown was ultimately drawn to the low life, which he took to ‘like a duck to a pond’ according to Beaton, and at the age of twenty-two he committed suicide by throwing himself from a window in the rue Jacob in Paris.26 According to Evelyn the property belonged to ‘a notorious pederast and drug dealer’.27
Another close friend of Evelyn’s at Heath Mount was Ernest Hooper, with whom Evelyn edited (and illustrated) an alternative to the official school magazine. ‘By George when the term begins things will hum,’ Evelyn told his diary just after New Year 1916. ‘I think it’s my last so I’m going to raise hell. Our first shell to smash the ramparts of convention is The Cynic, the most gorgeous paper out.’28 Subtitled ‘Cynical without being cheaply so. Piquant in moderation. Racy in Excess’, the paper was typed and duplicated by Arthur’s secretary and in its editorial volunteered ‘helpful’ observations about the masters’ efforts in the rival publication, predicting loftily that ‘when they have had a little more experience [they] will be able to produce quite a presentable little paper’. One of these masters, Mr Hynchcliffe, forbade them from selling The Cynic, but as Evelyn gleefully recorded they nevertheless sold out of the first issue, covering their printing costs and leaving half a crown over for their war fund.29 Four more issues followed over the next few months, providing further evidence of the impulses propelling Evelyn towards an eventual literary career – which at that stage largely involved poking fun at masters and fellow pupils, chief among them the unfortunate Cecil Beaton. (The adult Evelyn dismissed it as ‘flippant rather than cynical’ and conceded that ‘the few jokes that are intelligible seem very feeble’.30)
Despite these various endeavours, it was clear to Evelyn that his father was never going to be as interested in them as he was in the activities of his elder brother Alec, whose exploits at Sherborne (since 1911) Arthur had followed with an eagerness bordering on obsession, awaiting his letters, as Alexander Waugh puts it, ‘in the palpitating manner of a teenage paramour’.31 To his friend Kenneth McMaster Arthur admitted that he had ‘built my earthly hopes on him, and one must have something to keep one’s ambition young and fresh’. ‘Alec’s career has, no doubt, in consequence grown too large in my imagination. But I do want to see him doing some of the things that I have had to give up hope of doing.’32
Arthur was thrilled when Alec won the school’s senior poetry prize, just as he had done, but he derived far greater satisfaction from his sporting successes, Arthur’s own shameful inadequacies as a games player having been compounded by a weak chest and poor eyesight. Seizing the opportunity now to relive his inglorious Sherborne career through that of his more athletic and gregarious son, Arthur took about with him a copy of the school roll, annotated with Alec’s latest achievements, and with the names of those masters and boys that Alec liked underlined.
These characters and their various peculiarities soon became as familiar to Evelyn as the boys at Heath Mount,33 and the conspicuous celebration at Underhill of everyone and everything to do with Alec only intensified his feeling of being left out. Indeed at the time he claimed to have felt more than merely excluded; he also felt despised, or so he told Mrs Fleming when in 1914, aged eleven, he went round to her house wearing a bowler hat. ‘It belonged to my father first,’ he explained. ‘Then it descended to Alec: now to me. In fact it has come down to me from generation to generation of them that hate me.’ When he was told this, Arthur deemed it yet another demonstration of Evelyn’s ‘sharp tongue’, and his irritation was magnified by Mrs Fleming ‘cordially’ adding that he had never been a good father to Evelyn, who she said was afraid of him and at his worst in his presence. ‘Cheery news!!’ wrote Arthur when he reported all this to Alec.
The extraordinary bond between Arthur and Alec was demonstrated the same year when Alec’s housemaster told Arthur that his son was worried about masturbating too much – his passions inflamed, so Alec later recorded, by a novel containing nothing racier than ‘two luscious descriptions of embraces upon a sofa’.* ‘My Own Dear Boy,’ wrote Arthur. ‘I know from experience that there is nothing that eats into and corrodes the soul more than a secret. Now that you know that I know, you can feel there are two of us to fight this trouble – two of us absolutely as one.’ Continuing in similar vein for several pages, he warned Alec that persistent ‘self-abuse’ would lead to ‘weakness both of body and mind … paralysis and softening of the brain’ and the risk of his fathering ‘feeble and rickety children’ – if indeed he was capable of having any at all. ‘Say it is Saturday night and the idea attacks you,’ Arthur suggested. ‘Put it from you at once. Think of cricket or the day’s game, of the probable team next week.’ As to his reading, Alec should avoid Swinburne, ‘who was a victim of self-abuse (as I once told you)’ and therefore ‘not a very wholesome companion’. ‘Nothing inflames the mind like a lascivious picture or a suggestive line of poetry. Try to concentrate on more manly poets and give as much of your mind as you like to games, out of school. You won’t get your firsts [colours] unless your body is in subjection. Train the body, by this perpetual ef
fort of putting off temptation, to be the handmaid of the soul, and not its cruel mistress.’ He reassured him that ‘in all your efforts, your struggles, your failures, your beginnings again, in all that makes life one perpetual battlefield, you have at any rate one fellow soldier by your side; one who has fought all your battles before you and knows every inch of the way’.34
Arthur’s infatuation with his elder son did not go unnoticed by Alec’s headmaster, who accused him of spoiling the boy and making him self-centred. At Chapman & Hall the staff would enquire, slightly tongue-in-cheek, ‘And how is Master Alec this morning, sir?’
Arthur’s paternal devotion was accompanied by a newfound love for Sherborne, far exceeding any feelings he had had for the place as an unhappy schoolboy. ‘More [often] than was wise,’ Arthur later admitted, he would catch the train down to Sherborne on Friday evenings after work and install himself for the weekend at the Digby Hotel (later converted into a schoolhouse), entertaining Alec and his friends, watching the school matches on Saturday afternoon and attending chapel on Sunday morning.35 Kate often went with him and her surviving letters suggest that she became almost as obsessed as Arthur was with the school career of their eldest son.36 When Alec won his cricket colours in 1915, Kate wrote to him: ‘A thousand congratulations! It is almost too good to be true. How we longed to see you wearing that blue and gold ribbon, and now you will do so … I am so happy.’37
Having listened to the rest of his family going on about what a wonderful time Alec was having at Sherborne, Evelyn was naturally keen to go there too, and one evening in October 1916 he said to his father: ‘Oh, look here, Hooper is going to Sherborne in the summer term. Can’t you buck up & do some articles in the Fortnightly so as to be able to afford to send me also?’ As Arthur told Alec: ‘Seeing that I had had an assessment that morning for £142 income-tax to be paid in January, with more to follow in July: & had worked just on 8 hours at my desk – reviewing a book on Germany & the East & making notes for my next Book of the Week – The Soul of Russia & reading Mais* as well, & was dead tired, I felt this insult was about the last straw!’38
However, it was not Arthur’s annoyance or money worries that stood in the way of Evelyn following his brother to Sherborne but rather a scandal (about which Evelyn claimed to know nothing until he read Alec’s account years later)39 concerning Alec’s romantic entanglements with several younger boys at the school – and the novel he subsequently wrote about his experiences, The Loom of Youth.
In the throes of one of these affairs, in early 1915, Alec had written to a friend: ‘I shall never get tired of kissing Davies† – he is a darling. As he now works in his study in hall, I see an awful lot of him. But he is leaving this term, O lacrymarum fons, it will be very lonely without him.’40 Sometime later he reflected: ‘These loves are great passions while they last. They are mad and short and burn themselves with their own fire. I doubt that I shall ever feel again the same ecstasy that I knew three years ago when I discovered I was in love with Simonds … The love of boy for boy is in my mind one of the most beautiful things in life.’41 The affair with Davies continued well into the summer of 1915 and although Alec claimed to have been devoted exclusively to him, a few weeks before the end of term he was caught in some unspecified but evidently compromising situation with another boy, Mervyn Renton. The headmaster wrote to Arthur, sparing him the ‘exact particulars’ of what they had been doing but telling him that Alec could not now come back to Sherborne for his final year. Shattered by this letter, Arthur urged Alec to keep the circumstances of his disgrace ‘sacredly to yourself. It is the first time to my knowledge that such a thing has happened to a Waugh. I want no one to know of it, except the Chief [the Sherborne headmaster], Mother, you and I. It is enough that we should have to bear it.’42
Needless to say, Arthur glossed over all this in his autobiography, yet at the time, far from straining their relations, Alec’s humiliation seemed to bring father and son even closer than they had been before. ‘Dear Boy,’ wrote Arthur, ‘I am sure there is some spiritual relation between you and me which transcends the merely material world.’ In a subsequent letter, after it emerged that Alec had been shunned by many of the masters and boys, Arthur wrote to him: ‘The nails that pierce the hands of the Son are still driven through the hands of the Father also.’
Kate, too, now seemed to worship Alec even more than before. When he ended his Sherborne career in triumph by playing a match-winning innings in the final of the house cricket cup, she could barely contain herself. ‘Happy, Happy, Happy! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! It was some beating that! & your 77, some score that! I am so awfully pleased at your winning that Cup. I nearly went mad with joy … My joy is unspeakable. I did want you to finish up like that and you’ve been and done it!! Thank you ever so much Ally boy for the pride and pleasure you have given me. May you always play the game where ever you are and always come out strong in an emergency.’43
When Alec left Sherborne, he was destined for officers’ training and ultimately the trenches – whose obvious dangers were soon brought cruelly home to the Waughs by the death of Kate’s younger brother, Basset Raban, who was killed when a shell burst in the mouth of the dugout where he had been conferring with his staff. Conscious that his life too might soon be cut short, Alec somehow found time that winter to write a novel, The Loom of Youth. Beginning it just after Christmas 1915, he completed it in a remarkable seven and a half weeks, getting up at 4.30 each morning and returning to his manuscript at night after the day’s parades, and then posting each finished section to Arthur.
Halfway through, Arthur pronounced himself ‘astonished at the skill which your narrative shows’ yet he doubted the wisdom of its publication, given that it was so obviously autobiographical and contained candid descriptions of Alec’s contemporaries and masters at Sherborne and references to schoolboy homosexuality which were then considered shocking. Arthur feared that the book would ‘make enemies everywhere’ and ‘neither you or I could ever go to Sherborne again, and all idea of sending Evelyn would be at an end’.44
When Alec nevertheless secured a publisher, in January 1917, Arthur applauded his son’s ‘great achievement’ of having a novel accepted at eighteen but admitted he was ‘filled with conflicting emotions’. ‘Of course this means the end of Evelyn as a Shirburnian,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t know what to do next, but after you have actually got an agreement I shall write to Chief, & perhaps he will advise me. I feel rather lost for the moment: but I must remind myself that I have always been very uncertain about the advisability of Evelyn going to Sherborne, and I shall hope and trust that we may come to a wise decision which will make for the good of us all.’45
As publication of The Loom loomed that spring, Arthur arranged to have lunch with the Chief at which, according to his autobiography, they agreed that he would have to find an alternative school for Evelyn. Overriding Kate’s preference for sending him to a London school such as Westminster or St Paul’s, Arthur chose Lancing in Sussex, ‘a small public school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs’ as Evelyn later rendered it in Decline and Fall.
As so often with Arthur, the decision was reached with ‘a minimum of deliberation’, so Evelyn recalled, his tone betraying resentment at his father’s snap choice. Arthur could claim no family connections with the school and had never even visited it. However he thought Lancing’s High Church tradition would be ideally suited to his self-proclaimed ‘church-loving’ boy’ who, by his own account, aspired to become a parson.46 Arthur reckoned that the organised liturgical duties entailed by Lancing’s twice-daily compulsory chapel services would afford the ‘best test’ of his religious conviction.47
* Aubrey Ensor; see pp. 28, 32.
* Ensor recalled: ‘In the holidays the following conversation took place:
Me: “Evelyn if you send me another postcard like that I will send a copy to your Head Master and one to your father.”
Evelyn: “Man, you wouldn’t do that.”
Me: “Send me another p.c. and see.”
I did not get another.’
† One of Evelyn’s nicknames, although he did not permit its universal use, recording in his diary one day: ‘Rostail entered [the boot room] and squatting temptingly on the edge of a basin proceeded to call me “Wuffles”. I informed him that unless he refrain from using my names in a corrupted form I would have to chastise him. He, knowing he was larger than me, continued with the name whereupon I fulfilled my promise one hundredfold.’ (Easter Term, 1916; EWD, pp. 8–9.)
* The novel was Joseph in Jeopardy by Frank Danby (Methuen, 1912).
* S. P. B. Mais (1885–1975) was Alec Waugh’s inspirational English teacher at Sherborne and featured as ‘Ferrers’ in The Loom of Youth, whose writing and publication he did much to assist. Mais was a prolific author himself, eventually notching up 200 books, and a well-known early broadcaster, his astonishing work rate fuelled by bipolar disorder that went undiagnosed until he was almost eighty. Late in life he was reduced to asking Alex to help him out with bills, pointedly reminding him that he was ‘NOT the author of The Loom of Youth’.