by Philip Eade
Shortly afterwards, Evelyn wrote a piece for The Spectator in which he ruminated on the dotty peer’s ‘moving and rather mysterious words’: ‘In Lord Noel-Buxton we see the lord predatory. He seems to think that his barony gives him the right to a seat at the dinner-table in any private house in the kingdom.’5
Privately, Evelyn had been ‘tremulous with rage’ all evening after the intrusion, as he recorded in his diary. ‘And all next day.’6 Within two weeks he had put the ‘polluted’ Piers Court on the market, although not before opening his doors to an American television crew under the misapprehension that they would pay him $100 for his trouble. As Evelyn recalled, it was an ‘excruciating’ day: ‘The impresario kept producing notes from his pocket: “Mr Waugh it says here that you are irascible and reactionary. Will you please say something offensive?”‘7
On 4 July Evelyn wrote to the estate agents Knight Frank & Rutley: ‘You may remember that you came here about nine years ago when I had the idea of moving to Ireland. Now I have the idea of moving anywhere. I am sick of the district … I don’t want the house advertised. But if you happen to meet a lunatic who wants to live in this ghastly area, please tell him.’8 Another year passed before they found what they were looking for, a ‘cosy, sequestered’ house in ‘very pretty truly rural surroundings’ at Combe Florey, seven miles north-west of Taunton, with, as Evelyn told Nancy Mitford ‘possibilities of beautification’. ‘If only I were a pansy without family cares I could make it a jewel.’9
He regarded Combe Florey as ‘a suitable place to end my days’. Among its attractions, he told Ann Fleming, was ‘a lunatic asylum bang next door which is valuable (a) for me if I get another go of barminess (b) in providing indefatigable gardeners at slave wages (c) husband for Harriet [Waugh]’.10 He sold Piers Court for £9,500 in June and three months later paid £7,500 for Combe Florey.
The much-needed surplus which he had earmarked for all the planned improvements was doubled in February 1957, four months after their move, by a tax-free award of £2,000 libel damages. Soon after her visit, Nancy Spain had conveniently published an article suggesting Evelyn was an embittered and unsuccessful writer whose total first edition sales were ‘dwarfed’ by those of his brother’s recent novel Island in the Sun, which had sold 60,000 copies ‘as a direct result of my Daily Express notice’, maintained Miss Spain – ‘rather overstating the case,’ as the judge later remarked. But, as the judge also said in his summing-up, some of her other assertions were ‘hopelessly inaccurate’,11 Evelyn’s books having sold well over four million copies in Britain and America and his total first edition sales amounting to 180,000. Evelyn nevertheless neurotically convinced himself that he would lose the case and his fears were intensified while the jury was out when his counsel, his old Oxford friend Gerald Gardiner, apologised for ‘letting him into a mess’ and disconcertingly hinted that he might have to pay costs of £5,000.
‘At the end of the first day I would have settled for a fiver,’ Evelyn later told Nancy Mitford. ‘But I had taken the precaution of telling the Dursley parish priest that he should have 10% of the damages. His prayers were answered in dramatic, Old Testament style. A series of Egyptian plagues fell on Sir Hartley Shawcross from the moment he took up the case, culminating in a well-nigh fatal motor accident to his mother-in-law at the very moment when he had me under cross-examination & was making me feel rather an ass. He had to chuck the case and leave it to an understrapper … I had a fine solid jury who were out to fine the Express for their impertinence to the Royal Family, quite irrespective of any rights or wrongs.’12 The defendant, he told Diana Cooper, had ‘perjured herself frequently but behaved in a gentlemanly way afterwards, gripping my hand and saying “better man won”‘.13
Alec had flown over from Tangier, where he now lived for much of the year, to bolster his brother’s case: ‘You flitted out of court like a rare tropical butterfly,’ Evelyn wrote to him afterwards, ‘& I assumed you were off to your exotic pleasures. Else I should have sought you out to thank you for your startling loyalty in coming to my chilly island to give evidence on my behalf.’14
Evelyn’s Combe Florey beautification budget received another valuable boost in April with a further £3,000 damages from the Beaverbrook press, this time over its review of a new edition of The Meaning of Treason by Beaverbrook’s old flame and Evelyn’s old friend Rebecca West, in which she had accused him and Graham Greene of having ‘created a climate of cackbrained confusion between virtues and vices … a climate in which the traitor flourishes’ – a view endorsed by the Daily Express’s literary editor in his review. Evelyn’s earlier suit against Rebecca West’s publishers had resulted in the withdrawal of her book, an outcome for which she never forgave him even though he had mercifully not pressed for damages, and besides which she was scarcely in a position to complain, having herself recently suppressed the autobiographical novel by her illegitimate son with H. G. Wells because of its unflattering portrayal of his parents.*
The libel victories were immensely gratifying for Evelyn, not least since the Beaverbrook press appeared to have been waging a vendetta against him for many years, culminating in various recent sneering profiles and some particularly hostile reviews of Love Among the Ruins in 1953. Evelyn’s association with Lord Beaverbrook stretched back to his inglorious stint as a cub reporter on the Daily Express in 1927 and he first portrayed the power-crazed press baron as Lord Monomark in Vile Bodies (his original name, Ottercreek, in the manuscript gave a fairly strong hint as to whom Evelyn had in mind) and more memorably as Lord Copper in Scoop, at which point Beaverbrook took Evelyn’s publishers to court over the original cover claiming (with good reason) that the lettering the Daily Beast’s masthead immediately brought to mind the Daily Express. The cover was changed to omit the offending masthead but thereafter Evelyn could not help thinking that his treatment by the Beaverbrook papers was somewhat less than friendly.
The tax-free £5,000 damages were very welcome too, counterbalancing Evelyn’s customary extravagance in decorating his new house. ‘I have been buying objects like a drunken sailor – candelabra, carpets, fireplaces,’ he told Ann Fleming shortly before the first libel award. ‘The prodigious sideboard which I bought at Ston Easton has been erected with an infinity of skilled labour.’15 He had also set aside some of winnings for a luxurious holiday in Monte Carlo with Laura, but his old friend Monsignor Ronald Knox was dying of liver cancer and instead Evelyn agreed that they would accompany him on a depressing trip to the south Devon seaside. Evelyn had known Ronnie Knox as an illustrious and inspirational fellow Catholic convert (and fellow castle creeper, their detractors might add) since the early 1920s and a decade later Knox had been instrumental in persuading Mary Herbert of Evelyn’s merits as a potential son-in-law. Their friendship had deepened after the war, when Knox moved from being private chaplain to the Actons at Aldenham Park in Shropshire, where he did the first of his famous Bible translations, to the Asquiths at Mells and became a regular visitor to Piers Court. In 1950 Knox had asked Evelyn to be his literary executor. Evelyn tried to persuade him to come to Monte Carlo, and failing that Brighton, but Knox was too unwell to travel far so Torquay it had to be. ‘Torquay is absolute hell,’16 Evelyn wrote to Jack Donaldson soon after arriving. ‘Poor Ronnie is very infirm & fretful,’ he told Ann Fleming, ‘can’t eat, drink or read. All that gives him any relief is laborious crossword puzzles … [he] talks as though he will be on my hands for a month. I love and revere him, but oh dear –.’17 After a week Laura excused herself in order to greet some new cows while they moved on to Sidmouth. But Evelyn soon found that ‘ghastly’ too, so he took Knox back for a fortnight to Combe Florey, where his stricken friend wrote most of the Romanes Lecture he was due to give that summer at Oxford, ‘On English Translation’. ‘It was an extraordinary feat,’ Evelyn recorded. ‘He was oppressed with lassitude and nausea. He had only his host’s modest library to draw on. But the paper is as sharp and sparkling as any written in his youth.’18
Evelyn had been quick to knuckle down to his biography. ‘Ronnie’s death has transformed my life,’ he told Diana Cooper that November. ‘Instead of sitting about bored and idle I am busy all day long.’20 It helped that he was already well acquainted with two of the people who knew most about Knox’s life, Katharine Asquith and Daphne Acton, and he lost no time in tracking down Knox’s surviving sister, Lady Peck, in Edinburgh, his old friend and disciple Laurence Eyres at Ampleforth and his confidant and confessor Dom Hubert van Zeller at Downside. Evelyn admitted that he felt out of his depth when it came to tackling Knox’s spirituality, however Dom Hubert was reassuring. ‘I am sure you are right about keeping off Ronald’s religious life,’ a relieved Evelyn wrote to him in January 1958, after their talk. ‘He knew I knew nothing about it, but he wrote to Daphne that he could think of no one more suitable than me to write his biography. So he plainly wanted to be treated as a man of letters rather than of prayer. But of course a lot of people will say that I miss his essential point and of course they will be right.’21
In February 1958 Evelyn went out to stay with the Actons in Rhodesia, where they had emigrated after the war to farm at M’Bebi. There Lady Acton freely told him all about her intense platonic love affair with Knox while he had been preparing her for her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1937, six years after her marriage to the 3rd Lord Acton, whose family had been Catholics for centuries. She sent Evelyn several bundles of their correspondence and urged him to write the biography ‘as if I were dead’,22 despite admitting that while Knox had behaved ‘with effortless chastity’ throughout their relationship she had ‘found it more of a strain’.23 Evelyn greatly admired Daphne’s beauty, intelligence and above all perhaps her candour. Her chaotic household (containing ten children) was ‘everything that normally makes Hell,’ he told Ann Fleming, except for ‘Daphne’s serene sanctity radiating supernatural peace’. She was, he added, ‘the most remarkable woman I know’.24
Arriving back in England after his three-week trip, Evelyn got straight down to work and by June he had completed more than half of his manuscript, doing more research as he went along. ‘It is a work of pietas,’ he told Harold Acton, ‘and I enjoy doing it.’25 But then came the shocking news that Bron was fighting for his life in Cyprus after inadvertently letting off a machine-gun into his own chest while examining it in the turret of his armoured car. Laura flew out the next day, 11 June, and wrote to Evelyn:
Bron has lost one lung and his spleen. He has a shot through the shoulder and his left hand was badly wounded. The Blues doctor who is very nice and who met me when I arrived said his courage was really wonderful. He is an old Downside boy and he said that Bron’s resignation and the way he quietly prayed on the way into the hospital had been an inspiring thing to witness and his bravery through it all. They say the next 48 hours are still very critical but he won’t be off the danger list for at least another 10 days as there remains the danger of infection. Originally they thought he had no chance at all of surviving. I went and saw him for about 10 minutes tonight and he was clearly in a good deal of pain, particularly breathing – completely uncomplaining but finding hard to speak owing to lack of breath.26
Bron had joined the Royal Horse Guards the previous year, aged only seventeen, after choosing to do his National Service before going up to Oxford, a decision he had come to rue well before his horrific accident. When his parents sent him cakes and books to Caterham, Bron replied: ‘I cannot tell you how comforting it is to think that there are benevolent agencies working somewhere outside this wilderness of malice and violence and stupidity.’27
But soldiering had seemed a good deal more agreeable since arriving on Cyprus: ‘So much happens here that I cannot think where to begin,’ he wrote to his parents. ‘Life is immensely exciting and unbelievably comfortable.’28 More ominously, he added: ‘I cannot hit a human sized target at 10 yards with 20 shots once with my assured pistol, which I am constantly in fear of losing.’29 On the day of Bron’s accident, Evelyn wrote proudly to Diana Cooper: ‘My boy is a cornet of the horse. I hope he has some fighting.’30 A few days later he replied to her letter of sympathy: ‘Details are wanting, but it sounds to me as though he will never completely recover. I shall go out to travel home with Laura if he dies.’31
Laura sent regular bulletins home and nine days after the accident Evelyn wrote to Ann Fleming: ‘It has been an anxious week, but today the news from Cyprus makes it seem probable that Bron will survive. He stopped six bullets and has had a lung, his spleen, two ribs and part of a hand removed. Few people can have lived after such a fusillade. All done by the unaided and independent action of a new-fangled machine gun. I have known many good soldiers hit by their own side (including a posthumous VC)* and several rather moderate soldiers who shot themselves. This is the first time I have known the weapon take control.’32
Evelyn’s reaction to Bron’s plight was in some ways reminiscent of the striking detachment he had displayed all those years ago when his baby daughter Mary died the day after she had been born. His decision not to accompany Laura to Cyprus to see Bron struck some people as odd, however he seems to have decided that his going would make no difference to his son’s recovery. ‘Prayer is the only thing,’ he told Diana. ‘The one good result of newspaper reports is that monks and nuns and priests all over the country are praying for him.’33
Besides, by staying behind and holding the fort he was able pass on all Laura’s farming instructions: ‘Will you tell Giovanni* to give one spoonful of cake daily to Magdalen and Desdemona this week and two spoonfuls daily to them from next Monday. Also if Lucy is still giving 40lbs a day of milk she had better be artificially inseminated the next time she comes bulling with the Aberdeen Angus bull. If she is not giving as much as 40lbs I do not want her served at all.’34
The same letter carried news that Bron would shortly be coming off the danger list. But Evelyn rightly suspected that his son’s recovery would still be long and complicated. Hence he wrote to Bron’s old housemaster at Downside, Father Aelred: ‘Please continue to pray for him. I am sure it is prayer which has saved him so far.’35 Similarly to Father Caraman: ‘Please don’t let any of the kind people who have been praying for him turn to other topics.’36 Whenever Bron suffered a setback, Evelyn suspected all the nuns and monks and clergy and laity who had been ‘praying like mad’ of suddenly slackening off. When he made progress, the reverse was assumed to be the case. ‘The Novena has worked,’ Evelyn wrote to Daphne Acton in August. ‘My son has taken a turn for the better. Thanks awfully. It was most obliging of you.’37
Bron was eventually flown back to the Queen Alexandra Military Hospital at Millbank in early July. ‘Welcome home,’ wrote Evelyn. ‘I am delighted that you have escaped from the torrid and treacherous island of Cyprus. I wish I could come and greet you but I have a long-standing and very tedious engagement in Germany. It started as a treat for your mother, who now can’t come with me. I am being paid to stand up in a theatre in Munich and read aloud for an hour to an audience of Huns who think that such a performance will somehow help celebrate the 800th anniversary of the foundation of their city. I am sure neither the Huns nor I will enjoy it.’38
Evelyn finally saw Bron a week later and promptly resolved to have him transferred to the more comfortable King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers (Sister Agnes) in Marylebone. But
an abscess on Bron’s back promptly developed into a chronic infection of his chest cavity, and he was instead moved to the Westminster Hospital to be cared for by Sir Clement Price Thomas, ‘a noted chest surgeon,’ as Bron later recorded, ‘who had chiefly distinguished himself by his unsuccessful operation on the late King George VI for lung cancer’.39
Desperately ill and afraid once again that he might die, Bron scribbled a letter to his father: ‘Dear Papa, Just a line to tell you what for some reason I was never able to show you in my lifetime, that I admire, revere and love you more than any other man in the world. My possessions belong to you in any case, and will obviously be retained, divided or jumble-sold at your discretion, but I should very much like my collection of gramophone records to be given to the Grothiers (that is Vera [the Waughs’ nanny] and her husband). Love Bron.’40 He sent this to his bank in a sealed envelope with instructions that it was to go to his father in the event of his predeceasing him.
By early August, Bron was still too weak for the major operation that Sir Clement had planned and so the surgeon suggested that he go to King Edward VII’s Hospital after all. ‘He is now fattening up in Sister Agnes’s home for butchery and is greatly enjoying himself being much pampered by all,’ Evelyn told Daphne Acton. ‘This is primarily to say stop praying for Bron. I am sure there are more urgent cases waiting for your attention.’41 As a serving officer Bron was admitted free and Evelyn now informed his son that he was stopping the £25 a month allowance he had been paying him as he was short of money and Bron would not need it in hospital, a decision that caused Bron to weep ‘bitter tears of rage’ by his own account, although naturally he did not say so in his next letter to his father: ‘Far from being upset by your action,’ Bron replied, ‘I am enormously grateful that you should have been so generous as to continue my allowance up to this moment. I hope that you soon overcome your financial difficulties. Mushroom growing is said to be remunerative or you could open a lodging house.’42