by Philip Eade
† William Wookey Northam Davies, known at Sherborne as Davies mi because he had an elder brother at the school.
4
A Lesser Place than Eton
Arthur had started at Sherborne in the summer term so knew perfectly well how difficult it was to go to a new school in the middle of the academic year. Yet his customary impatience to get the job done meant that he set his younger son on precisely the same path – one that Evelyn later reflected resulted in the ‘bitter, avoidable loneliness of my first terms at Lancing’.1 Evelyn was taken there for the first time on a dull and damp morning in May, travelling by train from London to Shoreham on the south coast and then by taxi the last mile up to a cluster of austere flint buildings set on a bleak spur of the South Downs, looking out over the grey English Channel. He later claimed to have parted from his father ‘without a pang’, excited to be embarking on a new phase of his life;2 an alternative indication of how he saw his plight at the time was the black border of chains he drew around the relevant page of his pocket calendar.
Founded in 1848, Lancing was the first of the schools built by the Tractarian clergyman Nathaniel Woodard, who had set himself the task of establishing a group of public schools to provide a sound Church of England education for what he saw as the country’s neglected middle classes. Each school was rather crudely graded to reflect the peculiarities of the British class system, with the idea that the richer schools would help to subsidise the poorer ones.
Woodard conceived Lancing as the richest and most socially elevated of them all, intended in his mind to cater for the sons of impoverished noblemen as well as those of clergy and other gentry of limited means. Hurstpierpoint, another of Woodard’s earlier foundations, was aimed more at the sons of tradesmen, farmers and clerks, while Ardingly was supposedly for smaller farmers, mechanics and shopkeepers.
Lancing was certainly impressive to look at. Though still unfinished, its magnificent chapel was already the fourth tallest ecclesiastical structure in England and to Evelyn’s mind the most spectacular post-Reformation church in the country – it was known locally as the Cathedral of the Downs. Furthermore, the school’s fixture list boasted matches against Eton, Winchester and Westminster, and its old boys were eligible for the newly founded Public School’s Club, evidence that the older schools were beginning to regard it as one of their own.3
However, it was still far from comfortable, one of Evelyn’s contemporaries recalling that the boys ‘slept in stone dormitories with the windows open, a minimum of bed-clothes, and then a cold-bath when we got up at 6.30’.4 And it had never achieved the social cachet that its founder envisaged. The school roll hardly abounded with sons of the nobility and Evelyn clearly felt that Lancing did not measure up to Sherborne, either socially or academically. His sense of its inferiority was reinforced not only by the endless talk at home about Sherborne but also, rather unhelpfully, by the Lancing headmaster, the Rev. Henry Bowlby, who, as Evelyn recalled, ‘never dissembled the opinion, to which we all assented, that Lancing was a less important place than Eton’.5
A former contemporary of Arthur’s at Oxford, Bowlby had been a scholar at Charterhouse and worked as a housemaster at Eton before arriving at Lancing in 1909. Evelyn’s friend Roger Fulford rated Bowlby ‘a great Headmaster’,6 and it is true that before the war he had carried out an impressive series of changes, additions and improvements, completing the building of the college, doubling the number of boys and firmly establishing Lancing in the second rank of English public schools. Moreover, his reputation as a successful housemaster at Eton meant that quite a lot of second sons who might otherwise have gone to Eton came to his house at Lancing instead.
By the time Evelyn arrived at Lancing, however, Bowlby had become a rather remote figure. According to the school historian he was by then ‘a tired and sick man’, worn down by the anxieties of running the school during a war in which his own sons were fighting as well as so many of his old pupils.7 His wife, meanwhile, was a ‘kind, silly woman’, Evelyn recalled, ‘with a peculiar proclivity for gaffes’.8 Once, when passing the photographs hung in the chapel of old boys who had been killed in action, she remarked: ‘Oh, isn’t it nice to see a second row go up!’9
Evelyn’s descriptions of the headmaster in his autobiography are not especially generous, recording for example that he had got his hurdling Blue at Oxford ‘in a bad year’ – whereas in fact he had hurdled for Oxford four years in succession and was president of the Oxford Union Athletic Club.10 Though Bowlby now walked with a limp, he was still tall, lean and ‘distinctly handsome,’ Evelyn conceded, ‘except when the keen winds of the place caught and encrimsoned his narrow nose’. According to Evelyn, his headmaster had more interest in becoming a bishop, like his father, than in schoolmastering, but his ambitions had been thwarted due to his having ‘made himself rather ridiculous [at Eton] by his courtship of the more illustrious fathers and by flirtations with the prettier mothers and sisters’.11
A possibly greater obstacle was Bowlby’s widely-reported acquittal years later, in 1929, while Canon of Chichester, on a charge of molesting four small girls on a train, after, by his own account, feeling their bare legs and ‘asking them if they were cold’.12 While the trial was being reported in the newspapers, one of Evelyn’s old school friends came to lunch at Underhill and was in the middle of denouncing their former headmaster when Arthur suddenly interjected: ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Arthur Waugh!’13 This puzzling – and to Evelyn possibly rather embarrassing – remark was presumably Arthur’s way of candidly acknowledging that he too felt vulnerable to temptation at times. Two years previously he had confessed to a clergyman friend that a ‘dark-eyed, curly-headed, dainty, smiling little fairy of about 23 fair springs’ had been massaging his ‘hinder parts’ to treat his rheumatism. After asking him to remove his trousers, the girl ‘waved her delicate fingers mystically & began taking the most reprehensible liberties with my body … It was the deepest enchantment I have ever undergone, but my conscience has tortured me ever since.’14*
At Lancing, meanwhile, Evelyn had been placed in Bowlby’s house, Head’s, which was considered the most prestigious in the school. Occasionally the headmaster hobbled round the dormitories addressing dutiful small talk to his charges.† The day-to-day running of the house was left to the house tutor, Dick Harris, a warm-hearted young man who was especially kind to new boys and, as Evelyn remembered, ‘entirely’ responsible for ‘such vestiges of happiness’ that he experienced during his first term.15 Otherwise it was a painfully lonely time during which the only boy in Head’s with whom he was permitted to associate was the other ‘new man’, Roger Fulford, with whom he was obliged to sit at the ‘new man’s table’, pointedly ignored by the rest of the boys in the House Room.
For their first three weeks, another junior boy was assigned to instruct them in Lancing’s strange rules and rituals: who was permitted to walk on which plot of grass; who could link arms with whom; when boys could put their hands in their trouser pockets (in their second year – though with the jacket raised, not drawn back); and so on.
On the third Sunday of term, new boys were required to stand on a table and sing a song. Arthur had suggested ‘My wife’s gone to the country, hurrah! hurrah!’, which Evelyn performed well enough to spare him the usual pelting with books and money boxes.16 However, in general he was not well liked, and in his first two terms he tended to be written off as an ‘awful little tick’.17 His first experience of the Ascension Day holiday was particularly miserable, when the whole school dispersed but Evelyn found that he had no friends to go with and so spent the day wandering about the empty school grounds alone. ‘Evelyn is a misfit, I’m afraid,’ Alec wrote to a friend at the time. ‘[He] hates Lancing. He shouldn’t. A boy ought to like his school.’18
Evelyn’s friend Fulford later recalled that he was ‘too independent, too prone to notice oddities and comment on them’19 – none of which qualities was welcomed in a new boy. Evelyn felt
the hostility towards him all the more acutely because, as he recalled, previously he had met ‘only people who seemed disposed to like me’. ‘Experience has taught me that not everyone takes to me at first sight (or on closer acquaintance),’ he wrote, ‘but I am still mildly surprised by rebuffs, such is the confidence which a happy childhood founds.’20
His isolation at Lancing was exacerbated by his fastidiousness. He was especially revolted by Lancing’s doorless, open-drained latrines, ‘the Groves’, where most boys went in pairs after breakfast but which Evelyn elected to visit alone during school hours at the cost of writing twenty-five lines. He was similarly repelled by the shared tepid, muddy baths after games (‘Clubs’) and the abysmal wartime food, as a result of which he experienced real hunger for the first time in his life.
His refusal to help less clever boys with their prep on the grounds that it was dishonest won him no friends, nor did his general abrasiveness: ‘Poor Evelyn has been getting into trouble at school again and all through that unwise tongue of his,’ Kate told Alec. ‘Perhaps some day he will learn.’21 His letters from Arthur were flung towards him by the head of the House Room with a contemptuous sigh – ‘Another one for Waugh!’ – eventually prompting Evelyn to ask Arthur to write less often, even though the letters were a great solace to him.22 Lancing’s respect for religion meant that he was rarely ridiculed for kneeling, in defiance of convention, at the incarnatus in the Creed at Holy Communion, however his habit of remaining ‘plunged in prayer’ by his bedside long after everyone else had finished was considered strange.
His conspicuous eccentricities suggest a desire to set himself apart from the other boys. Yet he later maintained that this was not always the case. ‘I did not admire the other boys,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I did not want to be like them. But in contradiction, I wanted to be one of them. I had no aspirations to excel, still less to lead; I simply longed to remain myself and yet be accepted as one of this distasteful mob.’23
Sunday afternoons were especially desolate, with the House Room out of bounds for two hours and the boys despatched to the Downs in their straw hats and black coats. ‘I often found myself walking alone or obliged to make a rendezvous with some equally unpopular boy in another House.’24 He sought refuge from his loneliness in the classroom, the school library, where he could only go on Sunday evenings until he was awarded his ‘library privileges’, and in chapel. Services were held every morning and evening and three times on Sunday, when the names of old boys killed in action that week were read out, a sombre ritual that became especially affecting for Evelyn after Alec was posted to the Western Front that summer.
The first summer holidays could not come soon enough as far as Evelyn was concerned and as they approached he eagerly marked off the days in the calendar he kept in his pocket. But just as the boys’ trunks appeared in the dormitories and he was on the point of going home, he caught mumps and was told that he had to spend the first two weeks of the holidays in the school sanatorium – an injunction that came as ‘an insupportable blow’, he recalled.25
More homesick now than ever, he spent his quarantine reading a copy of The Loom of Youth, which he refused to let his fellow invalids see.26 By the time he was eventually allowed back to Underhill, his parents were far more preoccupied with the welfare of Alec, who was on the point of being sent to France (in late July) – and then straight into the Battle of Passchendaele, where three out of seven of the line officers in his company would be killed.
While that battle was still raging, glowing reviews of The Loom of Youth appeared in the press and it quickly became a bestseller, as talked about as Tom Brown’s School Days had been sixty years previously. Arthur was delighted by its success yet dismayed that the book was seen as an attack on his old school. Alec wrote from the trenches denying this but the school magazine declined to print his letter. When Alec in turn refused to resign from the Old Boys’ Society, his name was summarily removed from the school roll, whereupon Arthur felt he had no choice but to ‘stand by my son, and follow him into exile’.27 Evelyn, meanwhile, was sent to Midsomer Norton to stay with his aunts, who found him ‘greatly improved’ after his first term at public school. ‘He couldn’t be nicer,’ wrote Aunt Connie, ‘so pleasant and ready to do anything we want him to do and pleased with any little joy we try to arrange. I don’t think he is nearly so satirical as he used to be. We are all very happy together.’
After a miserably cold and wet autumn term back at Lancing, during which Evelyn begged Arthur to remove him, the next holidays he arrived home to find a new member of the household, Barbara Jacobs, to whom Alec had become engaged after an intermittent two-year courtship. She was the daughter of Arthur’s friend W. W. Jacobs, the famously grumpy humorist and author of The Monkey’s Paw, who was said to have earned more than any other English writer of the time except Rudyard Kipling. Barbara was staying with the Waughs while attending a course of lectures at Bedford College in Regent’s Park, and although she was nearly three years older than Evelyn they took to each other immediately. Over the next two years she and her family would replace the Flemings as Evelyn’s favourite holiday companions, and he went often to their home at Berkhamsted, where Barbara’s brother attended the school of which Graham Greene’s father was headmaster.
Evelyn’s most vivid memories of Berkhamsted were of the games the children used to play in the Jacobses’ galleried music room, during which he and Barbara’s younger sister Luned would seek each other out ‘grapple, and, while the younger players squealed in the excitement of arrest and escape, would silently cling and roll together. We maintained a pretence of conflict. There was no kissing, merely rapturous minutes of close embrace. No mention of our intimacy was ever made between us. But after the game, when the lights came on, we would exchange glances of complicity and it was always either she or I who proposed “the dark game”.’28 Their attachment did not go unnoticed by Alec, who in January 1919 told his friend Hugh Mackintosh that ‘Evelyn has become quite amorous, I regret to say. [He] loves Barbara’s sister, a comely wench, and at odd periods of the day they are observed holding hands.’29
The attraction to Barbara meanwhile was purely platonic – or so Evelyn maintained. He was intrigued by her upbringing and rebellious and agnostic beliefs which were so different to his. ‘Until I met her, maiden-aunts and Anglican clergy had been in the ascendant; in Barbara I met the new age. I did not surrender to it without reserve, but I was stimulated by the encounter.’30
She was equally entranced by her new young friend and years later remembered him as ‘a perfectly darling boy, the nicest youngster you can imagine’.31 They spent entire days exploring London together randomly by bus, or, to Arthur’s dismay, daubing the walls of the old nursery – which Evelyn had redesignated ‘the studio’ – with their experiments in Cubism. Her enthusiasms rubbed off to the extent that Evelyn pretended to be a socialist at various times over the next few years32 and his form master cautioned him against approving ‘merely those things that are ultra-modern’.33 However Arthur discerned that his son was ‘not yet so wedded to what is new that you seem likely to despise what is old. You may copy the Cubist in your living room, but an Old Master hangs above your bed.’34
Evelyn’s next school holidays were once again overshadowed by the family’s fears for Alec, who was reported missing after straying behind enemy lines during the 1918 German spring offensive. Arthur’s anxiety this time was mixed with irritation at Evelyn and Barbara’s apparent indifference. ‘Their loud laughter rings through the house,’ he wrote to Jean Fleming. ‘I sit alone and think of the other boy, lonely, cold, hungry, even if he is alive; and I wonder what their hearts are made of.’35 Arthur spent ten fretful days replying to letters of sympathy before he eventually received a telegram from the Red Cross at Geneva to say that Alec was being held as a prisoner of war.
* * *
Evelyn had been miserable at Lancing during wartime, however life there perked up considerably after the Armist
ice of 11 November 1918. Alec was home by Christmas and Evelyn recalled that holiday as ‘the most joyous of my life’.36 Back at school, food was at last plentiful and the tuck shop, which in wartime had stocked only occasional oatcakes and tired bits of fruit, now brimmed with such long-forgotten delicacies as buns and chocolates and walnut whips.37
The House Room’s eight most senior boys, ‘the Settle’,* vied with one another to throw the finest tea party, with piles of crumpets, cakes, pastries and in summer strawberries and cream. Those with private studies (‘pits’) procured the odd pot of caviar and foie gras from London, and various varieties of China tea from a shop in Piccadilly, brewing them ‘as nicely as a circle of maiden ladies,’ Evelyn recalled, and ‘discoursing on their qualities as later we were to talk of wine’.38
Socially, Evelyn had also begun to feel more assured. Within Head’s House he had grown steadily more respected and even feared for his strong will and determined independence. By the age of fifteen, he and Roger Fulford and Rupert Fremlin† fancied themselves leaders of the self-styled ‘Bolshies’, a group of boys Evelyn later maintained were benevolent towards their juniors but hunted ‘as a small pack to bring down our equals and immediate superiors’.39 He and his friends ‘practically controlled the founts of popularity,’ Evelyn recalled, ‘and capriciously stopped or let them flow’.
Victims of their persecution included one Desmond O’Connor, nicknamed ‘Dungy’, who had unwisely antagonised Evelyn when Alec went missing by suggesting that he had deserted or was a traitor. When O’Connor was promoted above Evelyn and his cronies onto the house ‘Settle’ and as head of the dormitory, they ‘exercised every ingenuity’ to humiliate him. As an adult the wretched Dungy apparently shot himself while in India – as Evelyn recorded with neither relish nor remorse.40
Another casualty was Emlyn Bevan, later a prosperous City man and fellow of Evelyn’s at White’s but known at Lancing for obvious reasons as ‘Buttocks’. Evelyn recalled how he and Fulford composed a song which ‘celebrated his large posterior, his gluttony, his affectation for shaving before he need’.41 Cruel as the jibes often were, Evelyn did at least admit that ‘in all these nasty manoeuvres there lay the hidden fear that I myself might at any moment fall from favour and become, as I had been in my first year, the object of contempt’.42