by Alec Waugh
Many years later she was to say to me, ‘If you want to get to know a man, you’ve got to go to bed with him.’ I do not think she bothered to get to know a man, until she had been to bed with him.
Maugham makes a courtesan say in The Razor’s Edge, ‘It’s the second night that counts,’ and I have usually found that when the first night goes very well, it is never so good again, whereas the start of a serious affair is usually unsatisfactory. This was not so with Mary. I shall always remember tenderly that first night with her; but I shall always remember, with equal tenderness, the other nights we spent together. We never lost touch with one another; we became very good friends and whenever it seemed a good idea we made love together. The last time was in New York in the early 50s. She had a house in the country and had come in for a party. She was staying at the Algonquin. I was dining out. ‘If you get back before half after eleven call me up,’ she said. I took very good care to be back by quarter past.
The next evening we went into Nice. We had mint-juleeps in one of those quiet bars in which Nice abounds. Whereas before she had sat silent and secretive, now she chattered freely. I found that she was widely read, that she had an acute critical sense. She knew a great many painters. ‘Binks (that was her nickname for her husband) has taught me what painting is. You teach me what writing is.’ I was never to learn quite what she meant by that, but her criticisms of writers were always sound – even when they were destructive, which they often were. Twenty-four hours before I had had to ‘make’ conversation with her, now I was the listener. Twenty-four hours before, though I had admired her beauty as she had leant back against the wall of the Garden Bar, I had felt no impulse to put my arms round her; now I felt that I could not face two hours of sitting opposite her across a dinner table. ‘Let’s get the barman to make us a sandwich,’ I suggested. ‘Let’s picnic in the hotel’. I thought it would be romantic to drive back in an open fiacre. The twenty minutes beside her seemed unending.
Waiting for her in her letter box at the hotel was a green cable form. She pounced on it, she tore it open. ‘Wonderful, wonderful,’ she cried. ‘Binks will be here tomorrow.’ My heart sank. What cruel luck. When I was on the very brink of one of the best nights of my life. I need not have worried. It made no difference; but right through a long, long night she kept the cable form clenched in her left hand.
It was on the next morning that I took my parents to lunch in St Paul at the Colombe d’Or. We had meant to take Mary with us, but she preferred to spend the morning at the hairdressers in Nice, so that she should look radiant for her husband. My parents and I got back soon after six. As we walked down from the Octroi, the occupants of a taxi waved at us. Mary and her husband. He was, I recognised, a young painter who had been staying at the Welcome, the year before, and with whom I had become quite friendly.
There was another sartorial saga in addition to that of Keith Winter’s shirts: Evelyn needed a pair of grey flannel trousers. It would have been simple for him to have got a pair at the Galeries Lafayette. But that, he said, he could not afford. He must get them on credit; so before leaving London he ordered a pair from his second grade tailors. It was his theory that a man should have two tailors, one for his urban clothes and country tweeds. The other for sports jackets, trousers and the like. He got his smart clothes from Anderson and Sheppard, but he had minor articles run up by a small Jewish tailor in the Charing Cross Road, from whom before coming out to France, he ordered a pair of grey flannel trousers with instructions that they were to be sent out to him. In those days a suit could be made within a week. It was an expensive and roundabout way of acquiring a simple object, but it was not unlike him to decline to pay cash and to refuse to wear a French garment. Seldom if ever can a project have been subjected to more delay. The trousers were in the first place sent to Paris instead of Villefranche. Customs duties had to be paid on them; the porter in his Paris hotel refused to pay them so the trousers were sent back to London. Evelyn telegraphed that the trousers were to be sent out by air. When eventually the trousers arrived, it was found that they did not fit. The entry for June 24 in my mother’s diary reads, ‘Left Villefranche 10.30 for Marseilles. Took Evelyn’s trousers with us.’ The extent of Evelyn’s concern over the incident may be gauged by my mother’s having bothered to mention it in a record that rarely contained as much as four lines a day.
The incident immersed Evelyn in gloom. He felt that there was a conspiracy against him. He had brought with him the manuscript of the travel book that was eventually published under the title Remote Peoples. He was not happy about it. He was rarely very happy about his travel books. He regarded them as hackwork. He made a book out of every long trip he took. I think this was a mistake. A single trip did not always provide him with as much material as he needed. After the war he condensed his three travel books into one When the Going was Good. It is infinitely better in my opinion than any one of the three separately. He was so dissatisfied with his last travel book, A Tourist in Africa, that he only sent copies to those who had helped him on his trip. My elder son Andrew who was A.D.C. to the Governor of Southern Rhodesia got a copy while I did not.
He had now come to feel he could not make the progress he needed with an uncongenial piece of work in The Welcome Hotel, with the various distractions provided by his parents, myself, Keith Winter, Patrick Balfour and the painter. He had heard of a monastery in Cabris where he could live for twenty-four francs a day, but he was short of money and could not afford to pay his hotel bill at the Welcome. He had asked his London agent to relieve the siege, but no funds had yet arrived. Another spearhead in the conspiracy. His gloom deepened. One morning I went into his room to find him stretched out on the bed, a leg hanging loose over the side: his hands under his head. He did not acknowledge my entrance, I went away. I returned an hour later to find that he had not moved. He was still staring at the ceiling. A family conference was held. It was clear that he must be got away from Villefranche. Unfortunately, I, too, was short of money. I had just enough to last me during the five days before I accompanied my parents back to England. In the end my father advanced him 1,500 francs.
My parents, though their resources were slender, were never without money. In the following April Vile Bodies was produced as a play in London. Evelyn had arranged a small supper party at the Savoy afterwards. At the last moment he found that he had reached the limits of his overdraft. He asked me for help. Two days before I had received a request from my bank not to issue any more cheques till my account had been placed in credit. In the end our mother came to our assistance. Our table at the Savoy was placed in the centre of the main room, away from the dancing floor. Ours was a gay party. I saw a good many heads turned in our direction. Evelyn and I must have seemed two fate-favoured mortals and so we were, yet we could not raise ten pounds between us.
On the afternoon of the day on which I finished So Lovers Dream my parents and I drove up to Chabris and left Evelyn in charge of the priests. It was very like seeing a small boy off to school. The monastery looked very dreary. That evening Binks caught the night train for Paris, leaving Mary behind. Neither of them seemed particularly depressed. I gathered that their marriage was nearing its close. ‘He doesn’t want the responsibilities that go with a home,’ she said. ‘He preferred the way it was in Russia, no servants, a studio in which to paint. I thought he would like a home.’ I was very tempted to stay on in Villefranche. But I had a number of things to do in England. My novel had to be typed and corrected. I wanted to play some cricket. I also wanted to sit in the pavilion for the test match. ‘But I’ll come back the very first moment that I can,’ I promised Mary.
X
On July 24th I started back for Villefranche. Quite a lot happened in those four intervening weeks. I soon became aware that England was not quite as safe and cosy as she had seemed when I read the Gossip columns in the Continental Daily Mail on the terrace of The Welcome.
Chapman and Hall was clearly in a financial plight, with the new m
anaging director on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was glad to think that I was no longer on the Board. I was also glad that I was no longer a Chapman and Hall author. As my own interests were not involved, I could be a very much better friend to my father. I could give him my full sympathy. I did not have to worry about how I should be affected personally.
My parents on their return decided to sell Underhill. It was too big for them, and a ‘To Be Sold’ notice-board went up by the front gate. It was a shock to see it there. Underhill had been my home since 1907. When I came back for the holidays, my father would put a placard in the grandfather clock ‘Welcome Home to the heir of Underhill’. It had been my base since nursery days. Every return from school, from the Army, from my trips abroad had been made to Underhill. My parents would no doubt get themselves a flat where I could keep my clothes, where a spare room would be ready for me, but it would be different. Change was in the air.
I am surprised now that I did not realise how serious and widespread was this sense of change. The English tend to take things for granted; they concentrate on their personal and private problems and leave the conduct of public affairs to the professional politicians whom they have elected and the bureaucrats whose salaries they pay. But rereading Harold Nicolson’s diaries for the years 1930–2,1 am astonished how little I was aware of what was going on behind the scenes, and of how situations were being created by which in a year or two I was to be affected personally.
The menace of British fascism was one of the most disturbing features of the years 1933–9, and the preparations for that disturbance were being made during 1931. It cannot be denied that the failure of Sir Oswald Mosley’s public life was one of the tragedies of the pre-war decade. Nigel Nicolson wrote among his prefaces to his father’s diaries, ‘1931 was the year of the New party experiment. It is difficult for those who now associate Sir Oswald Mosley’s name only with his headlong descent into fascism, with slogans chalked on a wall, to visualise the brilliant flowering of his youth. In 1931 he was thirty-five years old. Born the heir of a baronetcy, married to Lord Curzon’s daughter – his marriage was attended by both the King of England and the King of the Belgians – handsome, rich, eloquent, determined, he frequently changed his party allegiance, but it did not hamper the growth of his reputation.’ He was elected to Parliament in 1918 as a Conservative. He moved towards the left and sat as an Independent. Two years later he joined the Labour Party, and in June 1929 when Labour was again in power, Ramsay Macdonald appointed him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster – with special responsibility for unemployment.
He appeared then the young man of destiny, but he was soon to find himself at ‘outs with the party bosses’. He suggested in the Mosley manifesto a series of measures to relieve unemployment, including public utility schemes such as slum clearance and agricultural reconstruction, the stabilisation of prices through bulk purchase, the ‘scientific’ regulation of tariffs, the public control of banking and the expansion of home purchasing power. The remedies he suggested may well have been practicable. But he could not convince his immediate superior, J. H. Thomas, so he resigned from the Government and his place was taken by Clement Attlee. His speech of resignation made a great impression on the House. In October at the Party Conference he put his ideas forward in opposition to Ramsay Macdonald. He was only narrowly defeated. In January 1931 he returned to the attack at a special meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In his Life of George V Harold Nicolson wrote, ‘his speech was a success, but he insisted on a vote, and Arthur Henderson by deft compliments and appeals to solidarity and commonsense outwitted him’. His error robbed the country of a great parliamentarian: Mosely was now on his own. He was in Nigel Nicolson’s phrase ‘a formidable threat to all three major parties from whom he hoped to attract many recruits’: all the leaders wanted to have him on their side – Lloyd George, Churchill, the Conservatives, the Liberals, all courted him. Beaverbrook and Rothermere both considered giving him their support. The trouble was that he was not prepared to serve under any one. He insisted on running his own show.
I never met Mosley. I only once saw him at a meeting that he addressed in Basingstoke. In was in 1937 or 1938. By then he was in the wilderness, and in what his father-in-law had warned him against, ‘ineffective isolation’. He had a strong platform personality and was an effective speaker. But to me he seemed unlikeable; I suppose that was his tragedy. No first class man was ready to work with him for long. John Strachey left him in mid-1931. Harold Nicolson left him early in the following year.
On July 1st, I played my first match as a member for MCC. It was against Felstead School. I read in my father’s diary that I took seven wickets for thirty-eight. I have no recollection of the game itself, but I do remember that S. H. Saville was on the side. He had been as a Middlesex cricketer one of the heroes of my youth. In August 1910 at Lords when Middlesex, set 242 to win by Essex, had lost eight wickets for 140, he and P. F. Warner had hit off the remaining hundred in an hour. As I had watched him from the mound with the sun slanting from behind the professionals’ pavilion and a match card stuck under my straw hat to protect my eyes, I had little guessed that twenty-one years later, I should be going out to field beside him.
The test match for whose sake I had returned was against India, and proved disappointing: India was very weak. But I spent two enjoyable days watching the Oxford and Cambridge match. It was a surprising game. For Cambridge, A. T. Ratcliffe by scoring 201 broke J. F. Marsh’s record of 171 that had stood for fifty years; the very next afternoon the Nawab of Pataudi scored 238 and on the following day Oxford won by eight wickets, their first win since 1923.
On the Sunday before the match began I went down to Oxford to lunch with the Willerts. It was an occasion that was to have consequences for me. I met there Inez, the younger daughter of Walters of The Times. She was sixteen years old. She was dark, highly attractive, with an Oriental air. It was one of the few sunny afternoons that summer, and we sat on the lawn discussing modern poetry. I made, she was to tell me later, a considerable impression on her because I was the first adult who had treated her on equal terms. We were to meet often over the years. She was in Cairo during the war; her husband – she is now Lady Burroughs – was a diplomat. I remember a small cocktail party of hers that was attended by King Farouk. Later in Washington she was to extend much hospitality to me. My meeting with her was one of the many incidents in 1931 that was to make me look back on that year gratefully.
There was a second corollary to my meeting with Inez Walters – one that had a big effect on my parents’ lives and consequently on mine. Inez Walters had a married sister, Mrs O’Neil. I cannot remember whether she was there that day or whether I learnt from Inez that she had a one-year-old poodle for which she was trying to find a home. My parents had had a poodle all their married life. They were now looking for another. I put my parents in touch with Mrs. O’Neil. On the 21st of July she came, bringing ‘Tuppence’. My parents were delighted with him and retained him. His arrival altered my parents’ life in this, that they became so devoted to him that they felt they could not leave him with a vet when they went on their annual holiday. They decided that in future they must go somewhere that they could take him with them. So they picked on a hotel boarding house in Worthing. This meant that they never went to France again. It was the break of a routine for us. My father missed France. When the train pulled out of Calais or Boulogne, a broad grin would cross his face. ‘France all round me, happy, happy, happy’, he would say. He had become so conditioned to going to France every June or July that when the summer began, he would often start breaking into French – a language he scarcely spoke.
Tuppence was one of the three best of the poodles that we had – we had six in all – and when he had to be put down in November 1941, my mother felt that she was too old to start the training of another. She was afraid that after a few years she would not be strong enough to take him on the long walks over the heath that his health required.
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He was a loving and much loved dog. Mrs O’Neil used to visit him once a year. She had taught him when he was a puppy to jump on her knees and place his paws upon her shoulders. When she came to see us he would always, the moment she had sat down, jump on her knees and perform his trick. He never did this with anybody else. My mother was rather jealous.
In mid-July I went to Surrey for J. C. Squire’s annual cricket tour. It was to last ten days. It was the fourth such tour I went on. Usually it was one of the best weeks in the year. Squire had a house at Bowler’s Green. He used to put up two or three players in his own house. The others he put up in a local pub, or housed with local friends. Sir Edward Marshall Hall’s widow had a large house nearby. She was a German woman, I fancy Jewish, of considerable wealth. Squire always arranged that Ralph Straus should be her guest. It seemed to him that an appropriate marriage could be arranged, but Straus preferred his independence.
We had a mixed fixture list. We played against one or two very rural villages, but there was one match against the R.A.O.C., at Aldershot. Here we were playing out of our class, but once we managed to beat them. We played once at Tichborne Park, a village side but a beautiful ground with a good pitch, and at Fernden against a side got up by my old preparatory school headmaster N. G. Brownrigg, on the school ground.
I have written elsewhere about Squire’s captaincy. He is the Mr Hodge of A. G. Macdonnell’s England, Their England. The description of the village match in it has become a classic. It depicts a very typical invalids match.
