by Philip Eade
With nothing yet fixed for him to do, Evelyn returned for a week to Chagford, where he ‘painfully picked up the threads of a very difficult chapter of love-making on a liner’.20 He managed to despatch the first chapter of Book Three (12,000 words) a week later yet was unsure as to the success of this section. ‘I feel very much the futility of describing sexual emotions without describing the sexual act,’ he recorded in his diary; ‘I should like to give as much detail as I have of the meals, to the two coitions – with his [Charles’s] wife and Julia. It would be no more or less obscene than to leave them to the reader’s imagination, which in this case cannot be as acute as mine. There is a gap in which the reader will insert his own sexual habits instead of those of my characters.’21
Back in London he again enlisted the help of Bob Laycock to rescue him from the spectacularly unsuitable jobs that the War Office kept proposing (the current choice was between adjutant to a transit camp in India and assistant registrar in a hospital) and to persuade Bill Stirling to take him back at 2 SAS with as much leave as he needed to finish his book. Deeply appreciative of Stirling’s help, Evelyn promptly asked him to be one of Harriet’s godparents, along with Basil Bennett, owner of the Hyde Park Hotel where he now tended to stay when in London; Mary Herbert’s secretary Miss Haig, ‘an inexplicable whim of Laura’s’ as Evelyn put it; and Laura’s other choice, Gretel Coudenhove-Kalergi, an elderly Austrian countess who had been staying with her maid at Pixton when war broke out and decided to remain there for the duration, and then for a few more years after it had finished, all the time ‘occupying two of the best bedrooms on the first floor’, so Evelyn’s son Bron later recorded with a degree of retrospective bewilderment, and ‘joining a large population of retired nannies, housekeepers and maids who occupied different parts of the house, living their own lives and jealously protecting their own territory’.22
Harriet’s fifth godparent was Nancy Mitford, to whom Evelyn looked ‘not so much for spiritual instruction,’ he assured her, ‘as for knowledge of the world, savoir faire, joie de vivre and things of that kind’.23 Evelyn had known Nancy since his marriage to Evelyn Gardner and later throughout his brief but deep friendship with Nancy’s sister Diana Guinness, during which time Evelyn mentored Nancy in her early endeavours as a novelist. In the early 1930s they often saw each other with literary friends such as the Sitwells, Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron and John Betjeman and at house parties with the Weymouths, Pakenhams and Churchills. After Nancy married Peter Rodd, whom Evelyn disliked for his curious combination of pedantry and fecklessness, there was a distinct lull in their friendship, however by 1939 that marriage was all but over and Evelyn soon became a regular patron of Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Mayfair where Nancy worked for much of the war and which he regarded as ‘the one centre of old world gossip left’.24 From then on theirs developed into one of the most famous literary friendships.
By the middle of May Evelyn was back into his stride and well on his way to finishing Brideshead, which he eventually brought to its climax on D-Day, 6 June: ‘This morning at breakfast the waiter told me the Second Front had opened. I sat down early to work and wrote a fine passage of Lord Marchmain’s death agonies … I sent for the priest to give Lord Marchmain the last sacraments. I worked through till 4 o’clock and finished the last chapter – the last dialogue poor – took it to the post, walked home by the upper road. There only remains now the epilogue which is easy meat. My only fear is lest the invasion upsets my typist at St. Leonard’s, or the posts to him with my manuscript.’25 Laura came to stay with him for a week while he corrected the typescript, and on 20 June he reported to Peters: ‘I have delivered complete ms. “Brideshead Revisited” to Chapman & Hall. Duplicate for yanks is coming to you as soon as a friend in Oxford [Martin D’Arcy] has vetted it for theological howlers.’26
With his book finished, Evelyn was now obliged to join up with 2 SAS for training at one of Bill Stirling’s shooting lodges in Perthshire, but before leaving he spent a few nights in London where he found himself strangely (for him at least) rattled by the V-1 flying bomb raids prompted by the recent Allied landings in Normandy. ‘I heard one flying near and low and for the first and I hope the last time in my life was frightened,’ he recorded. ‘Thinking this disagreeable experience over I think it was due to weakening my nerves with drink (I was drinking heavily all those days in London) and have therefore resolved today never to be drunk again.’27 From Scotland he wrote to Laura: ‘I have given up drunkenness for life. Are you pleased or sad? It is a cutting of one of the few remaining strands that held me to human society.’28
The new commanding officer of 2 SAS, Brian Franks, evidently had qualms about having Evelyn under his command, however by a stroke of luck news promptly arrived that Randolph Churchill wanted Evelyn to join him in Yugoslavia as part of Fitzroy Maclean’s military mission to Tito’s Partisans. Maclean had no hesitation in endorsing Randolph’s idea, having heard reports of Evelyn’s bravery in Crete and believing that his early travels further testified to his enterprise and resilience. Besides, he later admitted, ‘here, at last, was someone well qualified to contain Randolph, someone whom, with minor adjustments, he might even regard as his social and intellectual equal’.29 Maclean was keen to send a new mission to Croatia where Tito’s guerrillas were especially hard pressed in their resistance against the occupying Germans, and duly gave instructions for Churchill and Waugh to be infiltrated ‘soonest’. Randolph told Evelyn that as his second-in-command he was counting on him ‘to heal the Great Schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches’, which was proving a hindrance to his war policy.30 Evelyn ‘accepted eagerly’, and after saying goodbye to his family at Pixton and his mother in London, on 4 July he set off on a roundabout journey via Gibraltar and Algiers, where he joined a house party at the British Embassy with the ‘wonderfully unambassadorial’ Coopers. The other guests included Evelyn’s old friend Bloggs Baldwin, Victor Rothschild, Virginia Cowles and the journalist Martha Gellhorn, a great friend of Diana Cooper’s who was by then estranged from her husband Ernest Hemingway and according to Evelyn went about ‘stark naked most of the day & very repulsive’.31
Evelyn read Gellhorn’s novel Liana on a chaise-longue but pointedly said nothing about it when he had finished; she later called him ‘a small and very ugly turd’.32 His hostess also commented on how glum he was being. It is possible that he had got wind of the fact that Diana and Bloggs had recently begun a ‘lighthearted’ affair – a rare occurrence in Diana’s life – and was slightly jealous. In any event he responded that he had never been happier, having just written a novel he considered to be a masterpiece, in addition to having a wife he adored, four fine children, splendid health and ‘an active life calling him to Yugoslavia with his beloved Randolph … I said I wished he could reflect his happiness a little more, Diana recalled. ‘He said that other people had said the same.’33
From Algiers it was on via Catania, Naples and Bari to the island of Vis off Croatia’s coast where Evelyn soon had his first and only encounter with Marshal Tito, whom he instinctively disapproved of for his Communism and anti-Catholic stance. Evelyn had also already decided that the marshal was a woman, his favourite of several rumours that had circulated before the mysterious resistance leader’s identity became more widely known. Maclean later recalled introducing the two of them a few days later as Tito emerged from the sea in some very brief swimming trunks. ‘Will you please ask Captain Waugh why he thinks I am a woman,’ said the marshal. Evelyn did not record this slightly awkward encounter in his diary – which he continued to keep in serene disregard of standing instructions – however he later maintained that Tito’s ‘bathing dress’ left him in no doubt about ‘her’ sex.
Their next destination was the Partisans’ Croat headquarters in the rundown little spa of Topusko, amid a patch of liberated hills and woodland on the mainland, to which they flew under cover of night. But as their Dakota transport came in to land Evelyn was conscious in the darknes
s of it first descending and then shooting upwards, ‘and the next thing I knew was that I was walking in a cornfield by the light of the burning aeroplane talking to a strange British officer about the progress of the war in a detached fashion and that he was saying “You’d better sit down for a bit skipper”. I had no recollection of the crash nor, at the time, any knowledge of where I was or why, but a confused idea that we had made a forced landing during some retreat.’34
Soon after Evelyn came round he saw Randolph in tears as his servant had been among ten of those on board who had been killed instantly. As Randolph later wrote to Laura, it was ‘really providential’35 that he and Evelyn had survived, given that the plane’s engines had stalled at about 400 feet and it burst into flames immediately upon hitting the ground. Both of them had been badly burnt, Evelyn on his head and both hands and legs.
Bandaged like mummies, they were eventually transferred to hospital in Bari and soon visited by Hermione Ranfurly, who was amused by their periodic shouting matches and ‘arguments about nothing in particular’.36 Coote Lygon also came from her nearby WAAF base and recalled Randolph ‘creating a fine fuss’ about his knee and Evelyn telling her about his recently completed novel, Brideshead Revisited, the proofs of which he was eagerly awaiting from his publishers: ‘It’s all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom [Coote’s father Lord Beauchamp] – but it’s not Boom – and a younger son: people will say he’s like Hughie, but you’ll see he’s not really Hughie – and there’s a house as it might be Mad, but it isn’t really Mad.’37
During Evelyn’s subsequent convalescence in Rome he was operated on for a painful abscess on the back of his neck and suffered also from homesickness: ‘I feel I have been away many months,’ he wrote to Laura, ‘tho it is less than two, and long to be with you again.’38 He saw Diana Cooper and Bloggs Baldwin again and otherwise spent his time visiting churches and art galleries and reading. By mid-September he and Randolph had sufficiently recovered to return to Topusko, where they established their mission in a small farm on the edge of the town, looked after by a hard-worked cook-cum-housekeeper called Zora and a bibulous handyman known as Stari, who had lived for some years in America and replied to their every request with a cheery and unreliable ‘Sure, Boss, I’ll fix it!’39 The work of the farm, meanwhile, appeared to Evelyn to be ‘mainly in the hands of a little girl of five or so’.40
Evelyn made sure to get a bedroom to himself, ‘away from Randolph,’ he told Laura, ‘whose rhetoric in his cups I find a little wearisome’. The spa town’s medical baths had lost their windows to the war but were otherwise undamaged, and as Evelyn reported, ‘we go there daily & sit in radio-active hot water which I find very enervating. The town has been laid out entirely for leisure, with neglected gardens and woodland promenades reminiscent of Matlock. It suits our leisured life well. We do very little & see little company except a partisan liaison officer, the secretary general of the communist party, the leader of the Peasant party & such people. We also arrange for the evacuation of distressed Jews.’41
Evelyn was in ‘admirable’ health, he reported in a subsequent letter home, and ‘my nut very clear – so clear that I hunger to rewrite Mag. Op’. The only available alcohol was a local spirit called rakia which to Evelyn stank of somewhere between sewage and glue, so he had little difficulty in sticking to the non-drinking pledge he had made in London. He was thus sleeping unusually well by his standards – 10.30 until 6.30 – however at other times the uninterrupted boisterousness of Randolph was proving a considerable strain. ‘The good time of day for me,’ he told Laura, ‘is the first two hours of daylight before Randolph is awake.’
In mid-October they were joined by Freddy Birkenhead, F. E. Smith’s son and Winston Churchill’s godson, whom Randolph had fagged for at Eton. Evelyn, too, knew him fairly well and described him to his mother as ‘an old friend who is always amusing in a surly & sour way’. But ‘more than the pleasure of his company I value him as taking Randolph off my hands a bit’.42
Birkenhead was accompanied by Major Stephen Clissold, a ‘gentle schoolmaster’, as Evelyn described him, besides being a fluent Serbo-Croat speaker and expert on the Partisans. Clissold later remembered the sensation on arrival of finding himself ‘in the midst of an old boys’ reunion, an unexpected house-party in which I felt something of an intruder’, however Evelyn proved an unexpectedly ‘affable companion, who did what he could to put me at my ease’.43
The tension between Evelyn and Randolph was immediately apparent, though. ‘There he is!’ roared Randolph as Evelyn returned from meeting the newcomers at the airfield. ‘There’s the little fellow in his camel-hair dressing-gown!’ Evelyn gave Randolph a stare ‘cold and hostile as the Arctic Ocean’, recalled Birkenhead, ‘and remarked with poisonous restraint: “You’ve got drunk very quickly tonight. Don’t send any more signals.” ’44
A week or so later they were all awoken early one morning by cries of ‘Avion! Avion!’ and the menacing drone of German planes overhead. Though generally as insanely fearless as Evelyn, Randolph on this occasion became hysterical, convinced that they were being deliberately targeted because of his father. As the others all scrambled for cover in a ditch, Evelyn calmly strolled from the farmhouse wearing a white duffel coat that seemed designed to attract fire. ‘You bloody little swine, take off that coat!’ yelled Randolph. ‘TAKE OFF THAT FUCKING COAT! It’s an order! It’s a military order!’
Evelyn made a point of keeping the coat on and deliberately took his time lowering himself into the trench, pausing as he did so to remark to Randolph: ‘I’ll tell you what I think of your repulsive manners when the bombardment is over.’ Birkenhead later recalled that Evelyn’s behaviour ‘endangered all of us’45 as the mission was sprayed with machine-gun fire and bombs dropped near enough to blow its windows out. However Clissold remembered the raid more nonchalantly as a ‘rather ineffectual enemy visitation’ during which ‘no bomb fell near us’.46
In any event Randolph soon became anxious to clear the air and apologised to Evelyn for his sharpness. In an echo of his scorn for the wretched Colonel Colvin on Crete, Evelyn replied: ‘My dear Randolph, it wasn’t your manners I was complaining of: it was your cowardice.’47 When Randolph pleaded for kinder treatment Evelyn remained unmoved, explaining to his diary that
in these matters he is simply a flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong. In words he can understand, he can dish it out, but he can’t take it … The facts are that he is a bore – with no intellectual invention or agility. He has a childlike retentive memory and repetition takes the place of thought. He has set himself very low aims and has not the self-control to pursue them steadfastly. He has no independence of character and his engaging affection comes from this. He is not a good companion for a long period, but the conclusion is always the same – that no one else would have chosen me, nor would anyone else have accepted him. We are both at the end of our tether as far as war work is concerned and must make what we can of it.48
In a bid to stem the flow of Randolph’s incessant chatter, Evelyn and Freddy bet him £20 that he could not read the Bible in a fortnight, however Randolph proceeded to spend the next two weeks noisily reading quotations aloud or, as Evelyn told Nancy Mitford, ‘slapping his side & chortling “God, isn’t God a shit!” ‘49 In the long run, Evelyn and Randolph’s friendship would prove remarkably resilient, however at its lowest point at Topusko Evelyn wrote to Laura: ‘I have got to stage of disliking Randolph which is really more convenient than thinking I liked him & constantly trying to reconcile myself to his enormities. Now I can regard him as one of the evils of war like Col. Cutler or Tom Churchill or Roger Wakefield and so live with him more harmoniously.’50
Evelyn’s relations with Birkenhead were ostensibly more harmonious, Birkenhead later recalling Evelyn as ‘friendly and charming’ towards him and pathetically grateful for the 100 cig
ars he had brought with him, along with various replacements for items he had lost in the air crash – two pairs of shoes, a pot of shaving cream, a pair of hairbrushes, razor blades, plus a letter from Laura. However Birkenhead shared Randolph’s weakness for the bottle and in the uneasy aftermath of the raid he too began to get on the temporarily abstinent Evelyn’s nerves.
‘At luncheon Randolph and Freddy became jocular,’ Evelyn recorded a couple of days afterwards.
They do not make new jests or even repeat their own. Of conversation as I love it – a fantasy growing in the telling, apt repartee, argument based on accepted postulates, spontaneous reminiscence and quotation – they know nothing. All their noise and laughter is in the retelling of memorable sayings of their respective fathers or other public figures; even with this vast repertoire they repeat themselves every day or two – sometimes within an hour. They also recite with great zest the more hackneyed passages of Macaulay, the poems of John Betjeman, Belloc, and other classics. I remarked how boring it was to be obliged to tell Randolph everything twice – once when he was drunk, once when he was sober.