by Philip Eade
But his new responsibility made him feel miserably lonely and disloyal to those who had looked to him for leadership in their troublemaking. He dreaded being thought of as self-important, officious or patronising, and his gloom was compounded by his loss of religious faith. He took to going for long walks after lights-out with with another senior boy called James Hill, during which they consoled each other about the ‘loneliness of leadership’ and talked about suicide, Evelyn going so far as to compose ‘last letters’ in which he admitted his deep fear of failure: ‘I know I have something in me,’ he wrote to his friend Dudley Carew, ‘but I am desperately afraid it may never come to anything.’20
Just as he was about to embark on one such excursion a frantic letter arrived from Arthur, who had somehow heard about his nocturnal visits to the seashore. ‘It is years since we have heard anything that has so distressed us,’ wrote Arthur. ‘That you, a House Captain, in the confidence of your leaders, should play such a rotten & contemptible game. It is unworthy of the name of Waugh, and doubly unworthy of yourself, of whom I have always been so proud … When Alec told me this sort of thing was going on at Sherborne, I asked him for his word of honour that he would never do it … I appeal to you to send me by the first post your honourable assurance that never again will you break bounds, never go out at night, never do anything so fatuously foolish to endanger your whole future.’21 Still ignorant of the circumstances surrounding Alec’s earlier expulsion from Sherborne, Evelyn thought the letter ‘unconvincingly rhetorical’, a product of his father’s habitual theatricality which made him wince. But he wrote in his diary: ‘I am at least glad he has taken a strong line about something at last.’22
Arthur admired even if he did not much like the play that Evelyn had written that term called Conversion, a satire of public-school life in three burlesques: ‘As maiden aunts think it is’; ‘As modern authors say it is’, a skit on The Loom of Youth; and ‘As we all know it is’. In the final act Evelyn’s hero is blackmailed out of his troublemaking in chapel just as Evelyn had recently been persuaded out of ragging the Corps. ‘Now look here,’ says the prefect, ‘we shall be needing another House Captain next term and I shall recommend you … Now, will you be sensible?’23 ‘Congratulations on your wit and cynicism,’ Arthur wrote after he had read it. ‘With such promise I feel you are bound to come off at Oxford. You have at 17 what we laboured to get, and couldn’t, at 23. Go on and prosper and my heart goes with you.’24 After it had been performed to great applause before the whole school, Roxburgh told Evelyn the epilogue showed ‘a touch of genius’.25
* * *
Among Evelyn’s contemporaries, his friend Roger Fulford later recalled his ‘immense, uncanny power over his schoolfellows’.26 Another boy, Christopher Chamberlin, thought him ‘the first subversive person I’ve met who was obviously thinking for himself’.27 However, Max Mallowan, the future archaeologist husband of Agatha Christie and one of Evelyn’s main intellectual rivals while at Lancing (after beating Evelyn in his Roman history essay, Mallowan crowed to his parents, ‘That is a triumph!’),28 recalled that he was ‘popular among the boys for he was amusing and always ready to lead us into mischief, but he had a way of getting others into trouble and himself invariably escaping. He was courageous and witty and clever but was also an exhibitionist with a cruel nature that cared nothing about humiliating his companions as long as he could expose them to ridicule.’29 But just as Evelyn admitted to hiding the fear that he might at any moment suddenly fall from favour, his truculent and domineering demeanour did not preclude the occasional influence of other boys. One who made a significant impact on him was the future politician Hugh Molson, who later recalled that he and Evelyn had been ‘close friends without really liking each other’,30 while Evelyn ultimately deemed Molson ‘a pompous ass’.31 However, when Molson had first arrived at Lancing in October 1919, sixteen-year-old Evelyn thought him ‘amazing’ and ‘undoubtedly clever’, with ‘the true aristocrat’s capacity for being perfectly at home in anyone’s company’.32
If not quite aristocratic, the amazing Molson was the scion of a prosperous Canadian brewing family who now lived near Lancing at Goring Hall, which Hugh’s father, a Unionist MP, rented from the Bowes-Lyons. Though born in Montreal, Major Molson had been educated at public school in England and was scarcely distinguishable from the local gentry, listing his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘shooting, motoring, golf’. Evelyn paid several visits to the Molsons at Goring, designed by Charles Barry and frequented for a time by the young Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future Queen and later Queen Mother. It seems likely that this was his first experience of staying in a large English country house and he noted approvingly how comfortably the Molsons lived and that dinner was ‘excellent and beautifully served’.33
Molson went equally often to the more modest Underhill, where Arthur Waugh struck him as ‘a caricature of a Victorian’ with a rhetorical, sentimental, canting way of speaking. The adolescent Evelyn, meanwhile, ‘couldn’t bear it, or him,’ noted Molson, ‘and made no bones about expressing it at table or in the presence of his parent’. This was all rather embarrassing for Molson, especially given Arthur’s tendency to appeal to him for sympathy and wonder aloud what he had done to deserve this treatment from his son.34
Evidence of what Evelyn later saw as Molson’s self-importance came soon after his arrival at Lancing, when he edged Evelyn into one of the bays in the school library and confided that he had written a book on education which he meant to publish.35 The same term, when asked whether he was interested in politics, Molson replied ‘preternaturally so’ – thus acquiring the nickname ‘Preters’, which stuck for the rest of his Lancing career.
Destined to follow his father into politics and at one time touted as a future leader of the Conservative Party, at school Molson espoused a curious combination of socialism, atheism, pacifism and hedonism.36 Among his other precocious endeavours was a series of essays, some of which he pressed on Arthur Waugh for criticism, others he persuaded periodicals to publish. Evelyn deplored his friend’s long-winded prose,37 yet the mere fact of publication served as an important spur. After Molson boasted to him that he had had an article accepted, Evelyn told his diary: ‘I must try and write one next holidays.’38
Another activity in which Molson led the way was drinking. Before he had taken to alcohol in earnest himself, Evelyn marvelled at his friend’s consumption during a drive out from school on Ascension Day, 1921. Molson had borrowed a car and at lunch in Chichester managed to get through: ‘a neat whisky, a whisky and water, a gin and bitters, two whisky sodas, two liqueurs, a double whisky almost neat, two bottles of cider, two glasses of port, one neat whisky’. On the drive back he was ‘a trifle risky’ and ‘drove round and round the market cross shouting to passers-by that we were looking for the alms houses’.39
Evelyn did not approve of all of Molson’s excesses. In February 1921 he recorded after a morning’s walk together: ‘He is very much all over himself as he has just stolen more cocaine from the doctor. I see myself having a fairly hectic time with him …’40 And after they spent a reading fortnight together in preparation for their Oxford scholarship exams, he primly dissuaded his friend from letting off steam with a night of ‘whoring’ – not that Evelyn would prove completely averse to such recreations in his later bachelor life.
Back in 1919, it was also Molson who had come up with the idea of a cultural society for the Upper Fifths, frustrated with not being allowed to air his important views at the school debating society. He recruited Evelyn and Fulford and together they founded the Dilettanti Society (the name suggested by Evelyn) for poetry readings, art lectures and political debate. Applicants poured in, among them Tom Driberg, the future journalist and Labour MP who recalled an unsettling interview in which Evelyn strode up to him one day in Great School and barked: ‘Who’s your favourite artist?’ According to Driberg’s biographer, he was so ‘flustered by the unblinking stare of Waugh’s eyes’ that he ‘sudden
ly forgot every artist who ever lived. Eventually, in a panic, he managed to pluck a random name from some distant recess of his brain – “Sir John Lavery”. It was a ridiculous reply. But, to his surprise, he was elected forthwith.’41 Another boy who said that his favourite painter was Landseer was promptly rejected.42
A bespectacled scholar eighteen months Evelyn’s junior, Driberg would become a lifelong friend and credited Evelyn with providing much of the literary and artistic stimulus during his time at Lancing. Like Evelyn, he was very unpopular at the school to begin with, alienating other boys with his showy intelligence and unashamed aestheticism, his extravagant High Church religiosity and his camp renditions of Roxburgh’s fruity diction. Despite his hatred of Driberg’s politics, which by the age of fifteen veered towards Communism, Evelyn soon warmed to him, particularly after both became sacristans in the school chapel, serving at the Eucharist and changing the altar frontal.
It was to Driberg that Evelyn eventually confided that he had lost his faith, a bombshell delivered in the summer of 1921 in the midst of arranging the altar for the Sunday service. According to Evelyn, Driberg said that if he no longer believed in God, he had no business handling the altar cloth.43 Driberg’s slightly different memory of the incident was that he had rebuked Evelyn for not hanging the altar cloth straight, to which Evelyn retorted: ‘Nonsense! If it’s good enough for me it’s good enough for God!’ – a remark that Driberg later deemed ‘mildly blasphemous [but] not a proclamation of atheism’.44
In his diary, Evelyn recorded that he had been an atheist for the past two terms without the courage to admit it to himself. He felt sure it was only a phase, however, and the only thing that really worried him was the possibility that it might cut him off from a devout boy named John Longe, whom he liked better than any other Lancing contemporary at the time. ‘If I thought it would I would believe anything,’ he wrote. ‘He has been one of the few things that make school worthwhile.’45
In later life Driberg was a famously reckless homosexual* and while at Lancing he wore make-up during the holidays and in term-time harboured several unrequited crushes. He more or less controlled himself until his last year, however, when as deputy head of school he made unwelcome advances to a boy in his dormitory.46 Perhaps keen to welcome his friend to the fold, Driberg maintained that the schoolboy Evelyn, too, had had similar inclinations but that he repressed them. ‘I certainly never heard of him as a practising homosexual until later, at Oxford,’ Driberg wrote. He saw Evelyn’s subsequent marriages and outspoken intolerance of homosexuality as a ‘suppression of his true nature’ and ventured that the pressure of denying his bisexuality may even have helped precipitate the eventual mental breakdown related in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.47 Despite subjecting some of the characters in his fiction to archly homophobic contempt, Evelyn admitted in his autobiography to having been ‘susceptible to the prettiness of some fifteen-year-olds’ (in 1920 he gave ‘library privileges’ to a boy called Lowther ‘just because he is pretty’)48 yet maintained that he ‘never fell victim to the grand passions which inflamed and tortured most of my friends’.49 In his last year at Lancing he wrote disapprovingly in his diary of ‘keennesses’ and congratulated himself for suppressing such emotions, preferring to act as censorious confidant to his more besotted friends.
Evelyn’s reserve may have partly reflected his immaturity and prudishness – references to sex in his diaries tended to be couched in terms such as ‘filth’, ‘lust’ and ‘depravity’. But in any case he was less restrained with girls and at the age of fifteen he appeared to be keen on several. Besides the ‘comely wench’ Luned Jacobs, who admitted to having adored Evelyn,50 Alec discerned him to be ‘somewhat enamoured’ of Hugh’s sister Moira and ‘a little affected’ towards Philla Fleming – he wrote home before the holidays urging his parents to arrange some theatricals and ‘choose a play in which I kiss her passionately’.51
Philla, though, was a waning flame, as in due course would be poor Luned. In the autumn of 1919 Evelyn wrote brutally in his diary: ‘I trust she [Luned] realizes the ridiculous affair is at an end’ and ‘if she does open the subject again I think I shall have to snub her. She is really not worth it.’52 Evidently he had second thoughts and the next Christmas holidays they again held hands and frolicked by the fire. Evelyn hazarded at the time that she ‘would have let me kiss her had I wanted to’, and later that year it did develop into a fully fledged kissing romance. However, in January 1921 he wrote to her telling her that it was finally over.53 Luned responded with a pathetic letter: ‘What a fool is a fond wench,’ wrote Evelyn in his diary – a line from The Beggar’s Opera which he saw six times that year. Nevertheless, she later recalled his letter ending their affair as ‘the kindest’ and acknowledged that in any case she was ‘too young [and] a boy of Evelyn’s age was not going to be tied down to a little schoolgirl’. Besides ‘he was streets ahead of me intellectually’.54
Evelyn’s attraction to Luned had dwindled that summer (‘She has coarsened out a lot’)55 and he had found himself drawn to others, among them the ‘divine’ Betty Bulleid, whom he met with his aunts at Midsomer Norton, ‘sweetly pretty,’ he recorded, ‘much better than Luned’.56 More recently he had fallen for the ‘remarkably pretty’57 Ursula Kendall, daughter of an Old Etonian headmaster friend of Arthur’s in Hampstead, ‘beautiful and gracious and womanly,’ seventeen-year-old Evelyn wrote wistfully in his diary, ‘but I am afraid that others, better than I, have seen this too’.58 A flirtation followed – at any rate a friend later described Ursula as an ‘old love of Evelyn’s’59 – however after accompanying her to one or two dances that spring he discovered that Ursula was madly in love with a slightly older boy, a likeable but as Evelyn saw it ‘quite brainless and slow’ Old Wykehamist called Bobby Shaw. Around the same time, he also took a shine to the more boyish-looking Joan Laking, sister of the rakish Sir Francis Laking, Bt, but she turned out to be a lesbian.
Joan Laking was a first cousin of Dudley Carew, Evelyn’s slavish disciple at Lancing, a fellow habitué of the school library and co-founder of the Dilettanti, of which Evelyn was the elected chairman, Carew the secretary. Their friendship had developed along similarly unequal lines, with Evelyn the condescending master, Carew the doting pupil: ‘If only I can hold his affection I shall be alright,’ Carew anxiously told his diary.60
Like Evelyn, Carew was an aspiring writer and he later published a couple of novels – ‘justly forgotten’ as one Waugh scholar brutally puts it – before joining The Times. Virtually everything he wrote at Lancing he passed to Evelyn for criticism. When in June 1920 Carew sent a poem that began: ‘You have broken all my idols / Given me fresh creeds to keep’, Evelyn reflected that it was ‘rather embarrassing to have so large an influence which works out in such a bad poem’.61
Carew later accepted Evelyn’s description of him as a ‘natural hero-worshipper’, yet he saw himself as Evelyn’s Boswell and hung on his every word. He is often seen as a risible figure, and certainly his conversations with Michael Davie while he was editing Evelyn’s diaries suggest a rather pathetic character: ‘Oh Evelyn, dear, Oh … He was so wonderful, and he makes himself out so dreadful … He was perfection as a boy.’ But to give Carew his due, he was among the first to recognise Evelyn’s extraordinary talent. ‘Oh but he’s great,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘I have got unwavering faith in his genius.’ Accordingly he kept every scrap that Evelyn wrote to him, all of which he ultimately sold to the University of Texas in a rage after reading Evelyn’s unkind portrayal of their friendship in A Little Learning. Carew contended that what had latterly damned him in Evelyn’s eyes was not so much his obsequiousness – he claimed unconvincingly that he ‘always stood up to him’62 – as the fact that he had introduced Evelyn to his disastrous first wife, having earlier become too close for comfort to Evelyn’s parents.
Carew was a frequent visitor to Underhill and his diary affords revealing glimpses of the Waugh household just as Evelyn was about to become
an adult. In August 1921, he recorded that the normally jovial Alec was ‘an extraordinary chilling and repressing influence. Directly he comes in Arthur stops making jokes. Evelyn stops being clever, I stop talking and only Mrs W is left undisturbed. He has gimlet eyes, a baleful glare …’63 unbeknown to Carew, Alec was wretchedly unhappy at the time, hating his job reading ‘tenth-rate’ manuscripts at Chapman & Hall64 and even more miserable in his marriage with Barbara, whom he had wed under pressure from her parents in July 1919.
At first the couple had lived at Underhill, before eventually building a wooden bungalow on a small plot at Ditchling bought with Alec’s earnings from The Loom of Youth.65 Throughout this time the marriage remained unconsummated, however, a situation for which Alec gallantly claimed full responsibility, attributing their difficulties to his ignorance of ‘the physiology of sex’ and of ‘the amount of tact and skilful patience that is required to initiate an inexperienced girl’.66 Alec and Barbara eventually separated in January 1922 and a year later divorced. Alec’s humiliation was completed by the judge who, struggling to grasp his explanation as to what had gone wrong, peered over his spectacles and said: ‘I think I understand, young man, you couldn’t get it in.’67 The non-consummation became the subject of endless ribald speculation in the Waugh family, Evelyn’s son Auberon suggesting ‘a malfunction of erectile tissue due to invisible emanations from a silver cup inscribed from W. W. Jacobs, which was kept, for some unclear reason, next to the newly-weds’ bed’.68 There also lurked a suspicion that Alec, despite his subsequent reputation as a compulsive womaniser, remained essentially homosexual. One of his sons recalled him in old age sitting outside a café in Tangier, watching some handsome young Arab go by and sighing: ‘Just think of the firm dusky limbs quivering beneath that fella’s djellaba.’69 Privately, meanwhile, Alec indelicately let slip that the real obstacle was Barbara’s hymen, which he claimed was ‘built like a concrete portcullis’.70