Evelyn Waugh

by Philip Eade

  Nichols’s portrayal was perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek, however one can well imagine it infuriating certain other commandos who regarded themselves as rather tougher than Captain Waugh. It also earned Evelyn a stern reprimand for not having sought the approval of the Marine Office after Brendan Bracken, as Evelyn saw it, ‘backed out of his responsibility’ – thereby sowing the seeds for his unflattering portrayal as Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited, ‘half a man posing as a whole one’.

  On his last day in London before resuming military life, Evelyn saw Baby Jungman, as he still referred to her despite her marriage, now ‘with a vast baby solely in her charge’, he told Laura. ‘She has changed a great deal with contact with rough Canadians and loss of virginity and is now frank in thought, coarse in speech & likes a stiff whisky. Very surprising.’5 He returned to duty at Hayling Island on the Hampshire coast ‘with the most profound misgiving’.6 Unable to recapture the adventurous enthusiasm with which he joined up at Chatham, he told Laura that life at his new base was ‘squalid, idle & lonely’, albeit philosophically adding that it was ‘suitable payment for fun with the commando & for my safe & happy return from Egypt’.7 In November they moved north to Hawick, ‘a grim, picturesque little town’, as Evelyn described it, made grimmer by the intense cold and wind and rain, and the dreaded wireless playing ceaselessly in the mess. ‘Weary, wet, lonely, bored,’ he concluded a letter to Peters. ‘There is no one here with any sense of humour,’ he complained to Laura, ‘but they never stop laughing.’8 His boredom was relieved only by the books that The Spectator and The Tablet sent him to review, and in early January 1942 by a company commander’s course which chanced to take place at Bonaly Tower, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Evelyn recognised the Cockburn coat of arms on the staircase and discovered that it had been built (by the architect William Henry Playfair in 1836) for his great-great-grandfather, Lord Cockburn.

  At his suggestion, Laura joined him for part of the time (‘it is absolutely glorious that you can come’, he told her)9 and they stayed at the Caledonian Hotel on Princes Street before transferring to humbler and more economic quarters, with Evelyn taking a taxi each day out to Bonaly. He thought the teaching staff ‘admirable’, apart from the intrusively perceptive psychoanalysts: ‘I was interviewed by a neurotic creature dressed as a major, who tried to impute unhappiness and frustration to me at all stages of adolescence.’10

  In February he returned to Hawick with his thoughts about the war growing gloomier by the day, the alliance with the Soviet Union having removed its ‘heroic and chivalrous disguise’, as he saw it, and rendered it instead ‘a sweaty tug-of-war between teams of indistinguishable louts’. ‘Do you understand now,’ he wrote to Diana Cooper, alluding to his brusqueness when she came to stay at Piers Court in 1939, ‘why I would have no wireless or talk of Central Europe at Stinchcombe? … Are there corners where old friends can still talk as though they were free? If there are, they must say in those corners that there is nothing left – not a bottle of wine nor a gallant death nor anything well made that is a pleasure to handle – and never will be again.’ It was in this foul mood that on 2 April he made his first appearance on a BBC radio discussion programme, The Brains Trust, during which he managed roundly to offend all the other panellists by refusing to have lunch with them beforehand, making fun of them during the broadcast and finally suggesting that they all give their fees to the War Fund.

  Desperate to get back to soldiering among friends, he wrote to Bob Laycock: ‘I wish I were back with you. I suppose that there is no opening?’ Laycock had recently returned from Egypt to command the Special Service Brigade, having earlier gone missing after the abortive raid on Rommel’s headquarters in Libya, when Geoffrey Keyes was killed and posthumously awarded the VC and Evelyn’s friend Robin Campbell severely wounded in his leg, which he eventually lost in a prisoner-of-war camp. ‘It looks unlikely that [Laycock] has survived,’ Evelyn noted at the time; ‘but in White’s everyone says he is too “fly” to be caught.’ Sure enough, Laycock had miraculously presented himself to some British troops on Christmas Day after six weeks living off berries behind enemy lines, attributing his survival to his knowledge of the habits of foxes, in gratitude for which he never went hunting again. Though he knew perfectly well how difficult Evelyn could be, Laycock remained fond of him and in addition had been much impressed by his courage and coolness under fire on Crete. He agreed to have him back as an intelligence officer. ‘“The Blues” [Royal Horse Guards] have accepted me,’ Evelyn wrote to Laura, ‘so I can now grow my hair long and wear a watch chain across my chest, and you can have a suit made of their check tweed.’11 After joining his new unit at Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast, Evelyn wrote to Coote Lygon from ‘a nice black market hotel where I have grape fruit and large dishes of eggs daily’. ‘Chucker Laycock has proved most unchucking,’ he purred, ‘and I am back with him & Philip Dunne and other old chums.’12

  Two weeks later, still feeling chipper, he wrote a much-quoted letter to Laura which showed how much he delighted in things going wrong, to say nothing of his flair for embellishment and preference for the most picturesque form of whatever story he happened to be telling:

  So No.3 Cmdo were very anxious to be chums with Lord Glasgow [whose Kelburn estate lay just north of the commandos’ base at Ardrossan] so they offered to blow up an old tree stump for him and he was very grateful and he said don’t spoil the plantation of young trees near it because that is the apple of my eye and they said no of course not we can blow a tree down so that it falls on a sixpence and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever and he asked them all to luncheon for the great explosion. So Col. Durnford-Slater D.S.O. said to his subaltern, have you put enough explosive in the tree. Yes, sir, 75 lbs. Is that enough? Yes sir I worked it out by mathematics it is exactly right. Well better put a bit more. Very good sir.

  And when Col. D. Slater D.S.O. had had his port he sent for the subaltern and said subaltern better put a bit more explosive in that tree. I don’t want to disappoint Lord Glasgow. Very good sir.

  Then they all went out to see the explosion and Col. D.S. D.S.O. said you will see that tree fall flat at just that angle where it will hurt no young trees and Lord Glasgow said goodness you are clever.

  So soon they lit the fuse and waited for the explosion and presently the tree, instead of falling quietly sideways, rose 50 feet into the air taking with it ½ acre of soil and the whole of the young plantation.

  And the subaltern said Sir I made a mistake, it should have been 7½ lbs not 75.

  Lord Glasgow was so upset he walked in dead silence back to his castle and when they came to the turn of the drive in sight of his castle what should they find but that every piece of glass in the building was broken.

  So Lord Glasgow gave a little cry & ran to hide his emotion in the lavatory and there when he pulled the plug the entire ceiling, loosed by the explosion, fell on his head.

  This is quite true.13

  Laura was at this time expecting another child and in advance of the birth Evelyn suggested: ‘James if a boy; if a girl it is kinder to drown her than to bring her up like her poor sister.’ If this was not meant to be taken too literally, Evelyn was genuinely concerned that Teresa had not been getting enough attention at Pixton. Staying there that Easter, he had found Bron ‘sanguine and self-confident’ and Teresa ‘contrary to accounts, a civil, intelligent and self-possessed little girl’, however also ‘inarticulate and pasty faced’. He thought a ‘long visit’ to his mother in Highgate might ‘undo some of the mischief of Pixton neglect’, so after Easter they went up to London, Laura taking the children to Highgate while Evelyn treated himself to a night on the tiles with Frank Pakenham and Maimie Lygon, eventually crawling into bed at the St James’s Club. Two weeks later, by which time he was back with his unit, he received a letter from his father: ‘I am enjoying Teresa’s visit very much. And find her a gentle affectionate & lovable little creature … Mother has given up her time to her entirely
– having ceased to play bridge or attend at the Red Cross depot.’14

  Laura’s baby girl was born on 11 June 1942 at Pixton and christened Margaret Evelyn two weeks later. Evelyn got there shortly after the birth but was recalled before the christening to a photographic interpretation course in Derbyshire, where he soon made a point of reciprocating Bob Laycock’s loyalty to him by reporting some ‘insolent’ remarks he had heard in a lecture about the Rommel raid, which Laycock admitted ‘made my blood boil’.15 ‘I think this wicked colonel [the lecturer] will be severely beaten,’ Evelyn smugly told Laura.

  However in August he undid his good work somewhat by arriving at dinner with the Laycocks considerably the worse for wear after ‘a hard day’s drinking’. ‘From that evening I began to trace a decline in my position in Bob’s esteem,’ he recorded. ‘The next ten days I wandered aimlessly in the triangle Ritz, St James’s, Claridge’s, spending most of the time with Randolph or Phil [Dunne].’ That autumn Evelyn’s diary chronicled regular binges culminating in assorted minor disasters. After a ‘beautiful day of overeating and overdrinking’ at the home of Harry Stavordale at Evershot, near to the Sherborne camp where they were stationed after Ardrossan, he recorded: ‘Called at 6.30 [a.m.]. Still very confused with drink and smelling of “orange gin”. Drove as far as Camberley in a stupor where we had a collision which destroyed the car.’16 ‘You see,’ he wrote to Laura, ‘I do get into mischief when I am Whiskerless do I not.’17 (Whiskers was Evelyn’s pet-name for Laura.)

  That Christmas he described a party of ‘great drunkenness’ at Longleat with another old friend, Daphne Weymouth, the morning after which he called on Olivia Plunket Greene, to whom he had remained characteristically steadfast as she had descended into alcoholism. She was by then living in a cottage on the Longleat estate and Evelyn ‘found her with no trousers on completely drunk and Gwen blacking the grate. Then I came back to Sherborne and off we went again, to a great dinner party given by Bill Stirling & Peter Milton. Last night I suffered from the delusion that black rooks were flying round and round my bed room.’18

  * * *

  On 28 October, his thirty-ninth birthday, Evelyn had recorded: ‘A good year. I have begotten a fine daughter, published a successful book, drunk 300 bottles of wine and smoked 300 or more Havana cigars. I have got back to soldiering among friends. This time last year I was on my way to Hawick to join 5 R.M. I got steadily worse as a soldier with the passage of time, but more patient and humble – as far as soldering is concerned. I have about £900 in hand and no grave debts except to the Government; health excellent except when impaired by wine; a wife I love, agreeable work in surroundings of great beauty. Well that is as much as one can hope for.’19

  However he still yearned for more military action, the dearth of which was highlighted by Laycock’s acceptance of ‘sporting invitations far ahead’, as Evelyn ruefully noted in his diary, not to mention the various successful raids recently carried out by other commandos, most notably by No. 4 Commando at Dieppe in August 1942, where Shimi Lovat’s capture of the Varengeville battery had earned him a DSO to add to the MC he had been awarded after an earlier raid at Boulogne. Lovat was one of the most dashing commandos of them all, a fearless Highland chieftain famously described by Winston Churchill as ‘the handsomest man to cut a throat’, however Evelyn thought him a show-off and privately pronounced him ‘a Palais de Danse hero’.20 Years later in the Sword of Honour trilogy he mercilessly caricatured him as the former hairdresser Trimmer/McTavish.

  Evelyn was at first impressed by Lovat’s qualities as a soldier. After watching the film of Dieppe at the Combined Operations Club and hearing a fairly full account of the operation, he could only conclude that ‘Shimi Lovat did brilliantly, the only wholly successful part of the raid’.21 But in due course his admiration for him was overtaken by feelings of irritation: ‘I have had a very great victory in a very minor battle [a dispute about maps] with Shimi,’ he told Laura in October, ‘and hate him instead of Wakefield.’22 Sometime later he reported: ‘Shimi has tried to make me lecture to his commando so I have countered by offering a series of lectures on imperial geography to be followed by a written examination for all ranks or, alternatively, a popular talk in praise of David Stirling. That will annoy.’23 And the next year: ‘Shimi’s conceit is boundless. I thought perhaps that now he had done something he might pipe down a bit. Instead he is planning to become the Voice of the Army in the House of Lords.’24 The dislike was evidently mutual, and years later Lovat devoted three pages of his autobiography to vilifying Evelyn as a slovenly soldier and brazen social climber, ‘a greedy little man – a eunuch in appearance – who seemed desperately anxious to “get in” with the right people’.25

  The simmering tension between the swaggering aristocrat and impertinent parvenu came to a head in the summer of 1943 after Bob Laycock departed for North Africa as part of Operation Husky – the Allied invasion of Sicily – leaving orders that Evelyn continue in his recent post as liaison officer at Combined Operations Headquarters in London before joining him when transport became available.

  Though annoyed not to be included in the initial party, Evelyn was distracted for the time being by the death of his father in the early morning of the same day that Bob Laycock left. Evelyn was with Laura in London at the time and spent the next few days staying at his parents’ Highgate flat going through his father’s papers – ‘he kept up a large correspondence with very dull people,’ Evelyn noted – and having bookplates engraved so that he and Alec could keep his books together in their respective libraries. He displayed little emotion either in his diary or in his replies to letters of condolence, his main concern being for his mother, whose nerves had already been shattered by the Blitz. ‘It is a disagreeable world for the old and I think he was glad to leave it,’ Evelyn wrote to Tom Driberg, who had recently been elected an independent MP. ‘His only regret would be leaving my mother. I am in a backwater of the war at the moment but hope for adventure soon.’26

  Evelyn wanted very much to go to North Africa in early August and wrote to Alec suggesting that if he could get home from Syria, ‘it would be a good thing as our mother is desoeuvree and lonely … the best thing would be for you to live with her … I hope you will be able to get back to see to things after I have left.’27 However Shimi Lovat suggested that a course at the fearsome commando training depot at Achnacarry in Scotland might not go amiss after so long at a desk job. This was a distinctly unattractive proposal for Evelyn as it threatened to delay his departure to the point at which he could no longer be of any use to Laycock in Sicily. It would also have entailed his coming under the jurisdiction of the training depot’s commandant Colonel Vaughan, an ex-drill-sergeant and renowned stickler with whom he had recently clashed, accusing him of making a homosexual pass after the colonel reprimanded him for acknowledging him disrespectfully with a casual wave of his riding crop.

  Evelyn responded that Laycock had explicitly stated that he should remain in his post until embarkation and that he had ‘good personal reasons [following his father’s death] for wishing to remain in London as long as possible’.28 Lovat wrote back that Laycock’s orders had been ‘automatically cancelled’ (by his superior, General Charles Haydon) and that Evelyn was to report to the depot on 1 August. ‘You will not proceed overseas unless passed fit by Achnacarry. I hope I have made myself clear.’29

  Interpreting this as a deliberate act of provocation on Lovat’s part motivated by personal malice – a fellow officer at Brigade HQ later described it as ‘a childish and obvious bit of intimidation’30 – Evelyn requested an interview with General Haydon to discover why an exception was being made in his case, pointing out that if doubt existed about the fitness of an officer for foreign service, the usual procedure was to refer him to the medical authorities; Evelyn had incidentally been pronounced fit by a Harley Street consultant after referring himself. But Haydon proved even less amenable and insisted that he not only do the depot course but also an intelli
gence course. He concluded their interview by saying that Evelyn had brought nothing but discredit to the Brigade since he joined and advised him that for the Brigade’s good he should leave as soon as possible. Calculating that by the time he had done the two courses it would be too late anyway for him to go to Sicily, Evelyn complied, explaining afterwards to Bob Laycock: ‘A cad [Lovat] and a lunatic [Haydon] make a formidable couple when they are hunting together.’

  For his part Haydon later wrote to Laycock to explain that ‘Evelyn Waugh has caused trouble and is going’, adding: ‘I know very well that this will disappoint and probably annoy you, because I am aware that you have a high opinion of Waugh’s personal courage in the field. This is not in question …’ Laycock certainly was annoyed and when he heard from another officer how Evelyn had been ‘bullied by Lovat and Haydon’, he remarked to his wife, ‘How feeble of them – I am angry’.31 His reaction appears to refute the suggestion made by both Christopher Sykes and Shimi Lovat that he had never intended for Evelyn to join him in Sicily.

  Evelyn’s tendency to rub certain people up the wrong way had clearly contributed to his own downfall – even Laycock had earlier warned him that he was ‘so unpopular as to be unemployable’. Given that Evelyn recorded Laycock’s comment without protest in his diary, he was evidently alive to his own shortcomings when it came to getting on with people whom he disliked. Less forgivable as far as some of his fellow officers were concerned was his occasional tendency to tease, or as some saw it ‘bully’,32 his own men, although on the other hand several he commanded later recalled how much they liked him. But while Laycock was well aware of Evelyn’s faults, the idea that he had somehow secretly connived in his sacking – even if Evelyn initially believed this to have been the case – is not only contradicted by the surviving correspondence but also seems unlikely given the past tensions between Bob Laycock and Shimi Lovat.