At Underhill Arthur was starting to feel extremely anxious. A few days had passed and not a line from Alec. He couldn't sit down. K too was shaking. She had lost a great deal of weight during the war and her ribs were starting to protrude. Whenever she heard the guns over London she shook or burst into tears. A few days became a week – and still no news. Arthur was pacing up and down, quoting poems, praying, sighing, pressing Jean Fleming's father at the War Office for regular bulletins.
Evelyn, who was fourteen, and Barbara, who was seventeen, were unperturbed by all the commotion in the house – or, at least, chose to counter it with a lighter mood of their own. Barbara's art lessons were ‘great fun’ and she had made a close friend of Evelyn whose humour and intelligence she greatly admired, introducing him to the delights of Cubism, which he found a refreshing antithesis to the fey Victorian tastes that had been foisted upon him by his father. While Arthur was pacing anxiously for news from the Front, Evelyn and Barbara occupied themselves upstairs with painting the walls of the ‘day nursery’ (renamed ‘the studio’) with a large ‘Cubist’ fresco of their own design. The tension was more than Arthur could bear, as he explained in a letter to his ‘if-only’ daughter Jean:
Barbara and Evelyn have been busy for two days defiling the studio with the most awful paint. They have painted the fireplace and walls all over cubes of colour, yellow, red, blue, in irregular splotches. You never saw anything so awful. And as they do it, their loud laughter rings through the house. I sit alone and think of the other boy – lonely, cold, hungry, even if he is alive; and I wonder what their hearts are made of. Truly it is a strange world; and love is chiefly made up of suffering. But those who have really loved, would rather suffer than not have known.
Ever, dear, your loving friend, Arthur
As far as Arthur was concerned, the painting, splotching, giggling and flirting had to stop. He sent Barbara back to Beechcroft and despatched Evelyn to his maiden aunts at Midsomer Norton.
At the same time as all this was going on at Underhill, Captain Jack De Vieux, of the British Expeditionary Force, encamped somewhere in a muddy corpse-strewn field to the east of Arras, was sitting down to type a letter. It was addressed to Mr Arthur Waugh:
Dear Sir,
It is with the deepest regret that I inform you that your son, 2. Lt. Alec Waugh, is missing.
On the 28 March he was with his section together with Lt. Sime when the enemy attacked. Nothing more was seen or heard of them after they had dispatched their first report, so I can give you no idea of what might have happened to him.
As his Company Commander for 8 months I knew him both as a soldier on parade and off. I could never wish for a better officer and he is a great loss to the Coy, and to all officers as a true friend. He was exceedingly popular with all ranks, especially with his section. He would always
join his men in any sport that they were having when out of the line and was always thinking of what he could do to amuse them. When in the line he was always to be found working hard and doing his duty in a manner that was a credit to the Coy.
Please accept from all officers, N.C.O.s and men of the 233rd M.G.C. our deepest sympathy in your great loss,
Yours sincerely, Capt. J. H. De Vieux
28Frank Sherwood Taylor went on to become a popular science writer and was a director of the Science Museum at the time of his death in 1956.
VI
Spirit of Change
Arthur and K learned that Alec was missing in action before Captain De Vieux's letter had arrived at Underhill. Jean Fleming's father, who worked at the War Office and was in charge of casualty reports, had been scanning despatches on Arthur's behalf. When he saw Alec's name he sent his daughter round with the grim news. She arrived with a pale face and whispered into Arthur's ear ‘the worst news that had ever tried my strength to the uttermost’.
English newspapers soon got hold of the story: ‘Author of The Loom of Youth is Missing’. Arthur was inundated with correspondence. Ten days later he had replied to over two hundred letters of sympathy, but there was still no news of his son. On the eleventh day he spotted a telegram buried among his letters and tore it open in haste. It was from the Red Cross in Geneva, announcing that Lieut. A. R. Waugh was among those officers being held prisoner who had arrived safe and well at Karlsruhe. Arthur had a card printed with the good news on it, which he sent to all his friends.
Shortly afterwards he received a line from Alec: ‘It must have been miserable, the waiting after you got the “missing” message from the War Office. But it's all right now – fini la guerre’ He explained that his capture had been ‘a foolish affair – No order came through and we found ourselves mysteriously surrounded. Our ammunition ran out, our guns got hit – voilà.’ One senses the lie in that final verbal flourish, or at least a certain economy of truth. In his book Prisoners of Mainz published just after the end of the war he was even more elusive about what had happened: ‘At seven o'clock the Germans came over, and by twelve we were being escorted to Berlin. Our actual engagement resembles so closely that of every other unfortunate during those sorry days that it deserves no detailed description.’
Rumours soon spread that he was a coward, a deserter, a traitor, even. At Lancing Evelyn gave a black eye to a boy called Dungy for impugning his brother's honour. It was not until the publication of his autobiography some twenty years after Arthur's death that Alec was willing to give a slightly fuller account:
The incoming tide was stealing closer. We were cut off and we were defenceless. My section commander and I looked at each other. ‘I don't see that there's anything we can do,’ he said.
I nodded.
‘We'd best destroy the guns,’ he said.
By noon it was all over and we were the wrong side of the line.
In different circumstances, home life without Alec might have strengthened the relationship between Arthur and his younger son, but Evelyn found his school holidays joyless, especially during the war. His mother, whose companionship he craved, was employed in the Voluntary Aid Detachment with the Ambulance Corps and was mostly out of the house. When Arthur returned from work his principal conversation was of Alec. Even after the news had reached him that he was safe in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany he continued to worry, terrified that the Germans would execute all their prisoners rather than send them home once hostilities had ceased. Armistice Day on 11 November 1918 was thus a nervous day for Arthur. He was not happy again until six thirty p.m. on 5 December when Alec arrived at Underhill ‘shining eyed and looking splendid’. During Alec's incarceration at Mainz, Evelyn's presence at home had become an irritant to his father, who was vexed by his younger son's seeming indifference to Alec's fate. Both he and K detested Evelyn's ‘sharp tongue’, and K told him that this was his besetting sin. ‘And do you know what is your besetting sin?’ Evelyn asked her – of course she did not.
To keep Evelyn out of his way Arthur sent him again to Midsomer Norton, where the ‘virgin’ aunts were supposed to check his ‘sharp tongue’ and send weekly reports. ‘We are all struck by the great improvement in Evelyn,’ Aunt Connie wrote to Arthur in August 1918. ‘He couldn't be nicer – so pleasant and ready to do anything we want him to do and pleased with any little joy we try to arrange. I don't think he is nearly so satirical as he used to be. We are all very happy together.’
While Alec was languishing at the Kaiser's pleasure, Arthur sent Jean Fleming a present of Compton Mackenzie's sad, semi-autobiographical novel Sinister Street with a letter outlining his state of mind:
I hope I do right in sending you Sinister Street and that I did not dull the edge of your zest for life. After all, not all young men go through such tragic and distracting experiences, I did not for one. But it is well to know what life can be like. To know all is to forgive all. And one cannot really sympathise with one's fellow creatures until one knows how terribly the human heart can suffer… One by one all Alec's friends are taken from me, and their going is a great wrench. A p
art of him seems to vanish into the valley of the shadow, as each new one goes over into the fight. I wander what has happened to his company and to Capt De Vieux who wrote to me so kindly. There has been heavy fighting where they are. I am afraid some of them will have fallen. The war seems very near us again just now and I feel very lonely.
Evelyn has been invited to paint some of the carved angels in Clandown Church about two miles from Midsomer Norton. He wrote today for endless paints and brushes. He has also been serving at the altar and going to picnics – a weird mixture of faith and frivolity…
It is bitterly cold today and I rather hope you are not bathing. I think it is too cold for you. Take care of yourself. You are of great value to many people – not least you may be sure, to your loving friend, Arthur
Briefly, in the summer holidays of 1915, Evelyn had worked as a despatch boy, running files up and down corridors for Jean Fleming's father at the War Office. In August 1918 he spent several days as an errand boy at Chapman and Hall. In the holidays he went often to the cinema, to museums or out for walks with K, but for all these distractions the hours at Underhill dragged slowly by. On Saturday mornings Arthur required the house to be silent while he wrote his weekly book review for the Daily Telegraph. At luncheon he held forth. His subjects were Alec, youth, age, and the younger generation. In the afternoon he went for a walk. Everyone changed for dinner. On Sunday mornings the family went to church and after lunch Arthur had a rest and the house had to be quiet again. In the evenings he attempted to lure everyone into the book-room so that he could read to them.
Holidays were made more bearable for Evelyn by Barbara's presence. In his autobiography he claimed that he was never physically drawn to his brother's fiancée: ‘She had many admirers but I never thought her particularly beautiful or attractive,’ he wrote. ‘With Barbara there was never a hint of physical contact.’ Perhaps this was true. Perhaps also they were a little in love. Certainly Barbara enjoyed a closer friendship with Evelyn than with Alec before his return from Germany and even for a while after it. Evelyn called her Bobbie. She remembered him years later as ‘a darling, a perfectly darling boy. He was the nicest boy you could possibly imagine.’ She was two and a half years older but treated him as an equal, laughing at all his jokes, repeating his wise words and encouraging him to look at the world outside the narrow confines of Underhill. Together they explored London on foot, or on the tops of double-decker buses. They visited galleries, cinemas and theatres; they rowed on the lake in Regent's Park. She accompanied him to the station on his return to school. Evelyn and Barbara found in each other a little streak of anarchy that bonded their friendship, at times to the exclusion of all else.
After dinner Barbara and Evelyn – if they could not get away in time – would be trapped into listening to Arthur's stagy readings in the book-room. He recited them large chunks of Dickens, poems by Symonds, plays by W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Pinero, in which he took all the roles, revelling in exaggerated changes of accent to indicate which character was speaking. When he acted or read aloud he pinned his gaze on one member of his audience. It was excruciatingly embarrassing. Although Evelyn sometimes enjoyed listening to him reading poetry when they were alone or with Alec, he felt ashamed when people from outside the family were present. One of his diary entries reads: ‘This afternoon I went with father to hear him lecture on Dickens’ women to the St Augustine's Guild. A good lecture but incorrigibly theatrical as usual.’
We would have known a great deal more about Evelyn's home life during these years if he had not been afraid that someone might snoop in his diaries. Only hints remain:
Friday 10 October 1919
This morning I tore out and destroyed all the first part of this diary about the holidays. There was little worth preserving and a very great deal that could not possibly be read and was really too dangerous without being funny … I shall have to be wiser next holidays in what I record.
A year later he touched again on the same problem:
What a futile thing this diary really is. I hardly record anything worth the trouble. Everything important I think had better be stored in my memory as it consists chiefly of ‘shops in morning; cinema in afternoon’. I ought to try and make it more profound but it becomes so dangerous.
If home life fatigued Evelyn, school was even more depressing. Lancing was painful and he was bitterly unhappy there. He started a society of disaffected depressives called the Corpse Club. Not unnaturally, it failed to cheer him. Tossed between Scylla and Charybdis – home and school – he wrote, ‘I think a lot about suicide. I really think that if I were without parents I should kill myself; as it is I owe them a certain obligation.’ In his first published piece of fiction, a short story called The Balance, written five years later, the young Adam Doure imagines his own suicide and looks on in disgust as his parents discover his body: ‘A scene of unspeakable vulgarity involving tears, hysteria, the telephone, the police.’
At school and at home, Evelyn believed that his best policy was to maintain Alec's ethos of ‘watertight compartments’. Arthur did not often visit Evelyn at Lancing; nor was he encouraged to do so. On one of the rare occasions when he came down to take Evelyn out to lunch, his son remarked sullenly in his diary: ‘I did not enjoy it much.’ Later he wrote to Arthur requesting him to stop writing so often as he was embarrassed at receiving more letters than any of the other boys. Schoolfriends were not invited home for the holidays. It was a self-imposed rule to which Evelyn adhered rigidly until his last year at Lancing when he broke it for his most unusual friend, Francis Crease.
At the height of this friendship Evelyn wrote: ‘I am feeling very depressed and unhappy. Crease will be away a month and he is the only real friend I have here.’ Evelyn was then sixteen and a half. Whether or not he was handsome seems to have been a matter for dispute. He was small for his age with thick ginger hair, big ears and bright, staring eyes. His most remarkable feature was his razor sharp wit: he could be painfully and absurdly funny. Whether people were prepared to describe him as ‘handsome’ or ‘ugly’ seemed to depend on their reaction to this wit. Evelyn thought of himself as ‘quite pretty in a cherubic way’; Barbara's sister, Luned, thought he was ‘very funny’ and consequently ‘very handsome’ – they frolicked with each other at parties. Harold Acton, who thought Evelyn one of the wittiest men alive, remembered him with aesthetic lust at Oxford: ‘I still see Evelyn as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows, the curved sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair I had seen in marble and bronze at Naples…’ And then there were those who did not find his jokes funny at all, those who were too stupid to understand them, or who felt inadequate or diminished by his ready repartee. Harold Nicolson described Evelyn in 1930 as ‘a bright eyed, pink faced, reddish haired, stocky jawed, coarse lipped youth’; and Alec's friend Marjorie Watts, who was terrified of Evelyn and remembered him as a schoolboy, wrote, ‘He was hideous. He had two pink eyes, he was most unattractive. Just the kind I detest. Pale face and pink-rimmed eyes because he was fair.’
Evelyn's close buddy Francis Crease was one of those who happened to enjoy his wit and who found him attractive. But Crease was no ordinary friend. He was middle-aged. A plump and effeminate dandy, with a pink and white face, prone to hysteria over small things – someone who might have been described in the mid-1970s as ‘a mincing fairy’ or, in the more cautious terminology of our times, as ‘a mannered homosexualist’. Evelyn believed that Crease was entirely without sexual interests. Their relationship was never physical, though in temperament – on Crease's side at least – it seems to have blown hot and cold in the petulant manner of adolescent love. Crease was both a shady and a secretive figure. Nothing was known about his past; nor would he ever speak of it. He lived by private means in rented rooms at a farm called Lychpole, a long walk across the fields from Lancing. He was an amateur scribe. All his interests were artistic. The friendship
between these two began in January 1920 when Evelyn arranged to take weekly lessons in calligraphy from him. After the first on 29 January, Evelyn wrote:
Dear Father,
The lettering lesson was great fun. Crease is the truest dilettante I have ever seen. He lives the life of a recluse in a suite of rooms he has taken and furnished beautifully in old oak and old china in a farm miles from anywhere. He is very comfortably off, rather effeminate, rather affected, very refined and artistic, well bred and charming. Apparently his career has been spoiled by ill-health. He had some rather distinguished job at Corpus, Oxford. He is a great admirer of Alec, particularly of his poem, ‘Sherborne
Abbey’, which he gave me to letter out as being the ‘most worthy of beautiful treatment of any modern poem’. I don't admire his lettering awfully – it is rather affected but he says that I have the makings of a really fine scribe. I think he is going to be a really good friend.
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