Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  With no takers yet for his patriotic services or his house, life at Piers Court continued much as usual for the time being, with Evelyn devoting his time to planting box hedges, building a wall and erecting a Gothic balustrade with the help of the gardener Prewitt. But at the end of September some Dominican nuns took the house for £600 a year for use as a girls’ school and Evelyn and Laura decamped to Pixton, where they found a household of fifty-four, including twenty-six evacuated children. ‘We ate in the hall,’ Evelyn recorded that evening, ‘making a fine target for the children’s spittle from the top landing.’3

  ‘I can’t think of a worse torture,’ Henry Yorke wrote to commiserate, ‘than being stuck with your in-laws & the frightful children.’4 Evelyn grabbed every opportunity to escape to London and in late October he had an interview there with Ian Fleming – then only a slight acquaintance – for a job in naval intelligence. The next day he was delighted to be accepted by the Welsh Guards, only to be told a few days later that they were full up after all. By now beginning to despair, Evelyn suspected ‘there must be someone at the War Office occupied in blocking my chances’,5 which was conceivable given his words of admiration for Mussolini in Waugh in Abyssinia and for Franco in Robbery Under Law, although subsequent whispers that his interviewers had thought his suede shoes ‘unsuitable’6 suggests it was more likely pure snobbery on their part.

  On his return to Pixton he recorded that ‘a fresh wave of lice has effected an entry’.7 And the next day: ‘Work out of the question as the evacuated children are now admitted to the garden at the back of the house under my windows. Impetigo, thrush, and various ailments are rampant.’ The only thing for it was to take himself off to his writing refuge at Chagford. ‘It was sweet of you to let me go without protest,’ he wrote to Laura from the Easton Court Hotel. ‘It was the only sensible course. I shall be able to work here. I hope to get the novel really under way before the birth.’8 A couple of days later he reported: ‘I work all morning. Then walk. Then a little work. Then a bath, a cocktail, dinner, and the crossword and early bed & long sleep. Except for one thing [Laura not being there too] an idyllic existence – but that one thing makes the crucial difference.’9

  Within four days he had added 4,000 words to the 15,000 he had completed before war broke out. Laura came to meet him in Exeter on his birthday and again the following weekend, but otherwise he toiled on alone with the novel, by now sufficiently absorbed to have temporarily ceased worrying about not being on active service.10 On 16 November he moved to a boarding house near Pixton to await the birth of their baby and the next day drove over after Laura went into labour. Afterwards he told Maimie Lygon: ‘Laura has had a son. Will you be its god-mother? It is to be called Auberon Alexander. It is quite big and handsome & Laura is very pleased with it.’11 Maimie had herself recently married the Russian émigré wine merchant Prince Vsevolod Ivanovich Romanov, nephew of the last Tsar, and was thus now Princess Romanovsky Pavlovski, which Evelyn promised her Auberon would be made to say as soon as he learned to speak. Laura seems to have minded far more than Evelyn about having a boy. ‘I am fretting about your anti-daughter feeling,’ Evelyn had written to her beforehand. ‘Daughters are a great comfort to their parents compared that is with sons.’12

  Four days after Auberon’s birth, Evelyn went up to London to see the Royal Marines, his application having been ‘strongly supported’13 by Winston Churchill at the instigation of Brendan Bracken, whom Evelyn had known vaguely since the early 1930s.* Staying at Highgate, Evelyn found his parents ‘markedly unsympathetic to my project of joining the war’.14 His interview the next day was preceded by a medical examination in a flat in St James’s: ‘I went first to have my eyes tested and did deplorably,’ he recorded. ‘When asked to read at a distance with one eye I could not distinguish lines, let alone letters. I managed to cheat a little by peering over the top. Then I went into the next room where the doctor said, “Let’s see your birthday suit. Ah, middle-aged spread. Do you wear dentures?” He tapped me with a hammer in various organs. Then I was free to dress.’ At the interview itself at the Admiralty, a friendly colonel told him: ‘The doctors do not think much of your eyesight’, but after asking him to read a large advertisement across the street he accepted him nonetheless, adding breezily: ‘Anyway most of your work will be in the dark.’15

  Evelyn’s day got even better that afternoon when the editor of the American Life magazine commissioned two articles ‘at the startling price of a thousand dollars’, which went a long way towards settling his immediate debts. Cue champagne at his club, a magnum at dinner with Patrick Balfour, then three more bottles and one of rum with Kathleen Meyrick at a nightclub. ‘I was sick at about five.’16

  Required to report for duty with the Marines on 7 December, he spent the intervening week recovering from this bender at Pixton with Laura, who was now suffering from pleurisy. Travelling down to Chatham, his fellow officers struck him as ‘the kind of nondescript body one might have conscripted out of the first omnibus one saw in the Strand’. But he perked up on arrival, when they were greeted with pink gins and he was given a large bedroom to himself with a fire continually blazing in it. ‘The food is absolutely excellent,’ he told Laura. ‘On the first evening there was a cold supper on account of a play which was being given us in our own theatre. I was led to the supper table with profuse apologies and found lobster, fresh salmon, cold birds, hams, brawn exactly like the cold table at the St. James’s. Afterwards several rounds of excellent vintage port.’17

  The next week they began a six-week intensive infantry course consisting of map-making, sanitation, small-arms, military law, endless arms drill and the dreaded PT.18 Evelyn was the first to admit that even with his newly grown moustache, ‘as smart a little moustache as Errol Flynn,’ as Diana Cooper described it,19 he did not look very impressive in his uniform: Mary Pakenham said he was the only person she knew who was made less distinguished-looking by wearing it. But he nonetheless thought himself quite good at ordinary military drill, an assessment with which his colour sergeant did not always agree: ‘Lieutenant Wuff, press on that rifle butt and keep your precious eyes to the front. To the front I said! You’re not ‘ere to collect daisies!’20

  On the whole, though, the life suited him very well. ‘Marine barracks are like a senior common room without the bore of dons talk,’ he told Helen Asquith, ‘– good Georgian architecture, old silver & mahogany, vintage port – all the concomitants of university murder stories with enough physical exercise to give one an appetite; no responsibilities, no intellectual exercise except in attempting to convince the Protestant chaplain of the authenticity of Our Lord’s miracles.’21

  After all this, Christmas at Pixton with its notoriously bad cooking came as a rude shock, especially since the house was now full of ‘slum children’ and ‘silent professional spinsters, ironically called “helpers”‘. With Laura still convalescing in bed, he chose to eat most of his meals on a tray in her room. Returning to Chatham just after New Year, he spent the next weekend with Tom Burns in London and was touched to be reconciled with Baby Jungman over cocktails. ‘The Dutch Girl has got a new youth out of the war,’ he told Laura, ‘(and the death of her King Charles spaniel). She dances with Canadian soldiers at night clubs three nights a week and sits up in an A.R.P. post the other four.’22 That summer she would be swept off her feet by one of her dance partners, a walrus-mustachioed Scot called Graham Cuthbertson who was serving in a Canadian regiment. Frank Pakenham later recalled: ‘He obviously had plenty of sexuality. Perhaps it needed someone like that to overcome Baby’s chasteness, which possibly he did not even notice.’23 Most of Baby’s former suitors seemed to think he was a bounder, however Evelyn chivalrously told her that her marriage was ‘the first good news since the Graf Spee’ and that her husband ‘must be a prodigy to have triumphed where so many have fallen’. ‘Do let us all four meet. Laura joins with me in sending her true love. I pray you may be as happy in marriage as I have been these last thr
ee years.’24 The marriage soon produced two children, yet despite Evelyn’s prayers it was not long before the couple drifted apart.

  * * *

  In mid-January the Marines moved to a grim disused holiday camp at Kingsdown near Deal, which was so cold and uncomfortable that Evelyn sought refuge whenever he could at ‘a club for old buffers’ – the Deal & Walmer Union. Their affable new colonel, Godfrey Wildman-Lushington, expected them to be under canvas by April, which Evelyn did not much like the sound of. The colonel also spoke of ‘extreme athletic fitness as essential for active service,’ Evelyn told Laura, ‘so I think you can rest easy in your mind that I shall be left behind with the luggage when the more sensational adventures are attempted’.25 Yet despite being a conspicuous bon viveur who evidently hated PT and was growing stouter by the day due to overindulgence in the officers’ mess, Evelyn managed the gruelling thirty-mile marches with all his kit remarkably well; one regular officer later noted that he had ‘a very good pair of lungs on him’ and was ‘surprisingly fit’.26

  The brigade commander, Albert St Clair-Morford, was a striking character and the obvious prototype for the lovably bloodthirsty Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in Sword of Honour: ‘[He] looks like something escaped from Sing-Sing,’ Evelyn recorded after the brigadier’s first lecture, ‘and talks like a boy in the Fourth Form at school – teeth like a stoat, ears like a faun, eyes alight like a child playing pirates, “We then have to biff them, gentlemen.” He scares half and fascinates half.’27

  The next month, Evelyn visited St Clair-Morford at his home, ‘a depraved villa of stockbroker’s Tudor,’ as Evelyn perceived it. ‘I said in a jaggering way, “Did you build this house, sir?” and he said “Build it! It’s 400 years old!” The Brigadier’s madam is kept very much in her place and ordered about with great shouts. “Woman, go up to my cabin and get my boots.” More peculiar, she is subject to booby-traps. He told us with great relish how the night before she had had to get up several times in the night to look after a daughter who was ill and how, each time she returned, he had fixed up some new horror to injure her – a string across the door, a jug of water on top of it etc. However she seemed to thrive on this treatment & was very healthy & bright with countless children.’28

  Evelyn was as infected by the brigadier’s bellicosity as he was entertained by his eccentricity and told John Betjeman, who had been turned down by the RAF on medical grounds:29 ‘Don’t on your life get into a pansy mobile base defense unit. Infantry brigade is the thing … The only way to bring this business to a happy conclusion is to kill great numbers of Germans. If we go on thinking only of defence there will be nothing worth defending. Why do you prefer defence? I can’t understand it.’30

  Evelyn had seen a lot more of Laura since Christmas, lodging with her for a time away from barracks in a local hotel and spending weekends together in London. In April, just as she had begun to feel well again for the first time since the birth of Auberon, she was somewhat less than elated to find she was pregnant yet again. ‘It is sad news for you that you are having another baby and I am sad at your sorrow,’ Evelyn wrote to her. ‘For myself, surrounded with the spectacle of a world organized to kill, I cannot help feeling some consolation in the knowledge that new life is being given. Your suffering will be to give life, ours, if we have to suffer, to take it. A child that is a danger & distress now may be your greatest happiness in the future. If I do not live through this war, you will have your children’s love & their need of you.’31

  The consensus among the vast majority of chroniclers of Evelyn’s military career is that he was ‘not good with men’ and was disliked by his troops because of his sarcasm and impatience and tendency to talk over their heads – he was once memorably overheard gently advising a group of nineteen-year-olds that ‘Whistling and catcalls is a form of courtship that rarely leads to union.’32 There was almost certainly some truth in reports of his unpopularity, however the evidence for it seems to consist almost entirely of the testimony of his fellow officers rather than the recollections of the troops themselves, several of whom gave evidence to the contrary. There are also several other indications that for much of the time Evelyn got along perfectly well with his men, who enjoyed his boldly nonconformist approach to soldiering even if his irritability sometimes got the better of him. He defended his men in several courts-martial and in defiance of the colonel’s orders gave one young marine a night’s leave so that he and his ‘young lady’ could compete in a dancing competition. As Evelyn told Laura, the man returned ‘with a silver cup as high as himself, champion of the South of England’.33 At the beginning of April he told Laura that he was the only temporary officer in his battalion to have been given command of a fighting company. ‘But I am sad to leave my platoon whom I was greatly attached to.’34

  The next month brought promotion to captain and a predominantly favourable report from Colonel Wildman-Lushington and Brigadier St Clair-Morford: ‘A natural commander and experienced man. He works hard and gets good work out of his subordinates but must curb a tendency to lean on his 2nd in Command. Possesses any amount of moral courage and has self-confidence when on subjects he knows. A little impatient. I believe that with more military experience he will make a first class Company Commander.’35

  In August, however, Evelyn was abruptly relieved of his command after he was overheard loudly berating his quartermaster sergeant in front of the men for the lack of drinking water on their train to Birkenhead, en route for Scapa Flow and then – after a two-week voyage – West Africa. Shortly prior to this he had gone to see Brendan Bracken about transferring to the commandos being formed by Sir Roger Keyes as director of Combined Operations, however he now worried that it would look like he was leaving under a cloud, and just as his battalion was about to see action for the first time. Rather than take up the offer of immediate transfer, he therefore accepted an appointment as battalion intelligence officer, an information-gathering role that was perhaps better suited to his particular talents than that of company commander. The action that he had been hankering for, however, proved elusive. Their part in an attempt to install General de Gaulle and the Free French in Dakar was eventually aborted due to a combination of what nowadays might be termed adverse weather conditions and the general not receiving as cordial a welcome as hoped. Afterwards Evelyn wrote to Laura that in the hours leading up to what had promised be a very hazardous operation, ‘my thoughts were with you, & with you only, all the time’ but that ultimately ‘bloodshed has been avoided at the cost of honour’.36

  A few days later he wrote to her: ‘I realised [then] how much you have changed me, because I could no longer look at death with indifference. I wanted to live & I was pleased when we ran away.’ But whenever he did see action in future Evelyn showed himself to be almost entirely impervious to danger and his subsequent enforced retreats, far from bringing any sense of relief, seemed to cause only profound feelings of shame and disillusionment.

  * * *

  It was on his way back in Gibraltar that Evelyn received a letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Laycock to say he had a post for him in his commando, which Evelyn rather tactlessly described to his worried parents as ‘a more melodramatic force than the Marines’.37 A vague acquaintance since the early 1930s through the Lygons, Bob Laycock was the officer Evelyn would come to admire above all others he served with. Then aged thirty-three, four years younger than Evelyn, brave, charming and supremely well connected, he was the son of the raffish Nottinghamshire landowner Brigadier-General Sir Joseph ‘Joe’ Laycock, KCMG, DSO, who was said to have fathered two children with Edward VII’s mistress Daisy Warwick before luring Bob’s famously beautiful mother away from her previous husband, the Marquess of Downshire.38 Bob Laycock was himself married to a daughter of Freda Dudley Ward, chief mistress to the Prince of Wales before Wallis Simpson. After Eton and Sandhurst he had joined the elite Royal Horse Guards in 1927 and combined a glittering cavalry career with such adventures as sailing halfway round the world be
fore the mast in a Finnish windjammer.39 On the outbreak of war his scientific expertise had taken him to Cairo as an anti-gas staff officer, a dull and dead-end job from which he managed to escape with the help of David Niven, the film star.

  Niven was soon to marry Laycock’s niece and had no hesitation in recommending his future uncle to his boss at the War Office, Dudley Clarke, who was founding the commandos to carry out offensive raiding operations behind enemy lines in occupied France, inspired by the Boer horsemen who had harried the British in his native South Africa. Laycock’s sailing background meant he was ideally suited to seaborne raids and landing operations and by Niven’s account, Clarke ‘immediately decided that this was just the man he wanted’.40 Laycock thus set about raising 8 Commando. An officer of great initiative, imagination and daring, within three years he would be the youngest major-general in the army.

  ‘The business of forming a unit of volunteers, officered by my own friends, seemed, and still does seem to me, the pleasantest way of going to war,’ Laycock recalled.41 Many of his officers were recruited at the bar of his club, White’s, of which Evelyn was not yet a member but soon would be. Although Laycock’s officers were chosen from those who, like Evelyn, had volunteered for hazardous service, he was looking for those whom he felt he could trust. A great fan of Evelyn’s novels, Laycock later remembered agreeing to Bracken’s suggestion that he take Evelyn on the grounds that he was ‘often even funnier in fact than in fiction’ and ‘could not fail to be an asset in the dreary business of war’.42