by Alec Waugh
Squire paid all the expenses of his team. When he was in funds he was most generous. Too many people today remember him as he was in the late 30s and the 40s, improvident and ill-kempt, always anxious to raise a small loan. He was in low waters in 1931, but he went on living as though he were still affluent. I believe I am correct in saying that in the early 20s he paid the university fees of two men who became highly prominent later on. John Gross in his The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters gives a sad picture of his declining years: ‘after giving up the editorship of the London Mercury in 1934 he drifted further and further into a semi-vagrant existence; he was saved from the worst by his work as a reader for Macmillan’s and a reviewer for the Illustrated London News, and by the kindness of various women friends, but for the most part his life was a chaos of unpaid bills and unfulfilled commitments. He was once reduced to telling an editor that his manuscript had been blown out of the window of a taxi while he was on his way to deliver it.’
During the later 1920s, a number of his friends made strenuous efforts to organise his finances. He was making a reasonable amount of money; a bank would have been prepared to settle his debts in return for a monthly liquidation of his indebtedness. An organised budget was all that was needed. Surely a very simple thing. But no one could control his improvidence, his enthusiasm for new projects, his addiction to the bottle. Only once did he make a serious attempt to pull himself together, in the late summer of 1928. It was an attempt worthy of his eccentricity, of his refusal to admit that anything was impossible. As August was working to a close, and soccer was making its inroads into the last days of the cricket season, he murmured, ‘What I wouldn’t give to play one more game of Rugger.’ H. S. Mackintosh overheard him. Mackintosh had been a contemporary of mine at Sherborne. He was a successful business man, who made quite a name for himself, as a writer of light verse, ballades in particular. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t’ he said. ‘It’s only a question of getting into training.’
‘I’m forty-four.’
‘But your heart’s all right. Let’s see what my father says.’
Mackintosh’s father was a doctor. He entered into the conspiracy. There was no reason why Squire should not return to the football field, if he went into solid training, if he gave up alcohol and smoking and took regular exercise, in gradually increased doses. Mackintosh proposed Squire as a member of the Rosslyn Park R.F.C.; this entitled him to wear a red and white striped jersey. Clad in this, he would three times a week in the early evening run up and down the lawn of Mackintosh’s Hampstead garden, passing a Rugby football back and forth. ‘The first week we’ll have a thirty minutes practice; the second week forty minutes, the third week fifty. After a month we’ll see how you are making out. In the meantime no smoking, and no alcohol.’ The claims of a family, the sacred trust of poetry, his obligations to the London Mercury, these he could resist, but the hope of playing Rugby football forced him into temperance. It was all of it very typical of Squire. Mackintosh treated him as Laban had treated Jacob. He continually postponed the fulfilment of Squire’s hopes. ‘Another week, Jack, I think. We should make it in another week.’ Then when the week was past, once again he would shake his head. ‘You don’t want to spoil it all by playing before you’re ready.’ From mid-August to mid-October the evening practices continued. By then it became too dark for practices after a day’s work. ‘Never mind,’ said Mackintosh, ‘There are the week-ends, a double dose on Saturday and Sunday.’ But on Saturday Jack had to finish the article for the Observer that he always left to the last moment. ‘It’ll have to be Saturday afternoon.’
For ten weeks the treatment continued. Then the weather broke. The Saturday run up and down the lawn had to be postponed. It was still raining on the Sunday, then Mackintosh’s firm sent him overseas for three weeks. Squire could scarcely have been expected to stay in training without the goad of that football being passed from hand to hand.
On his first day back in London, Mackintosh found Squire in the Savile in a state of post-prandial stupor. ‘No good, Hugh old boy,’ he muttered, ‘too old for football. Have to stick to cricket.’ As far as I know he never again abandoned the habits of a lifetime.
He was at his best on his cricket tours. He was boyish and light hearted. He never gave himself any airs. Even the rain did not damp his spirits during those ten days. I remember that I had a thoroughly good time on that cricket tour, because I was with friends, but the gricket was ruined by the rain; it was an appalling summer. I cannot recall the details of a single game. My father came down to watch the game at Fernden. His joining us is the only thing about the game that I remember. His diary records, ‘Alec made a duck.’
That night we dined in Farnborough, at the old coaching inn. The evening broke up, as every Invalids’ dinner did with the singing of that old song from ‘The Arcadians’:
It’ll be all the same, all the same
a hundred years from now.
No use a worrying, no use a hurrying
no use a kicking up a row.
It’ll be all the same, all the same
when a hundred years have gone,
Somebody else will be well in the cart
and the world will still roll on.
During the tour I shared a room in the local pub with Eric Gillett. I had brought with me the manuscript of So Lovers Dream and he asked if he could read it. Eric Gillett was and still is one of my closest friends. He is three years older than I, but we were raised in the same stable. He was at Radley, which is one of Sherborne’s rivals and had been in the XI in 1913, the year before I was in the Sherborne side. He had planned to go to Oxford, to Lincoln College, but the war stopped that and in October 1916 he was very badly wounded on the Somme in the hip and leg. Today those wounds cause him a great deal of pain and inconvenience. But they did not prevent him in the 20s from being an agile cricketer. At Hockey he kept goal. On Clifford Bax’s cricket tours he was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ - because he recounted an incident of two venerable military figures opening an innings in the last hour of the first day in a two-day match, ‘Well Jumbo, old boy,’ said one of them, ‘shall we go in and play for keeps.’ I do not know why it should have seemed funny but it did. And the nickname was appropriate. He had an elephantine quality which has increased with the years as he has put on weight and the limp from his wound has grown more pronounced. I met him first in August 1921, when he came on Clifford Bax’s Newbury cricket tour. He had met Arnold Bax in Switzerland, and Bax enrolled him in the side. It was surprising how many members of the side had, after the war, been enrolled by Arnold Bax who never seemed to go anywhere and, as far as I know, hardly ever entertained, whereas Clifford was a social person.
When Gillett joined Clifford’s side, he was still at Oxford. He took a little while to find himself in the post-war world. For a time he was warden of a college in Birmingham. Then he married and accepted a post as a lecturer in Singapore University. We all thought that he had gone for good. Clifford used to publish every Christmas a small volume containing the scores of the previous summer. The accounts of the matches were written by different members of the sides, some of them were really rather good and A. D. Peters’ account of a match in the manner of Damon Runyan was printed in a cricket anthology edited by Denzil Batchelor. In the account of a match in July 1926, Clifford Bax wrote of Gillett playing a sterling innings of over fifty ‘in probably his last match for us on the eve of his departure for Singapore’. But he was back within three years, as exuberant as ever, resolved to make his mark in the world of publishing. He has not been by any means unsuccessful. He has written reviews, he has talked on the B.B.C., he has worked for two publishing houses. He has done a fair amount of editorial work. He is someone of whom most people in the literary world have heard. He is well liked and he is respected. He is a familiar figure both at Lord’s and at the Sussex Cricket Ground at Hove.
He gave me very valuable advice about my novel. When he was half way through, he said, ‘This
is really two books you know. It’s a love story that explains the problems of a contemporary writer when he falls in love, but it also presents a picture of America today which is independent of that story.’
‘I must reread it with that in view.’
When I did, I recognised that he was absolutely right. As I wrote in an earlier chapter, I had had two things on my mind when I set down to write the book; I wanted to write about Ruth, and I wanted to describe what I felt about America. In its own way America’s impact on me was as much a coup de foudre as my romance with Ruth. As I had first seen America and Ruth simultaneously, I had felt that the two emotions ran side by side. The one enhanced, explained and intensified the other; and if I had recounted my romance as it had actually happened, and the heroine of the novel had actually been Ruth, I might have run the two issues into one, but because I had altered both Ruth’s character and the setting of the plot, I had written two separate books, a story and a treatise. On revision I removed about twelve thousand words that had no bearing on the central story, in the hope of using them in the future.
The novel was immensely improved by Eric Gillett’s criticism. I have often read in dedications, a novelist’s tribute to the help that he has received from editors. The case of Maxwell Perkins and Thomas Wolfe is quoted by practically every professor of creative writing. But personally I have only three times been helped by criticism. On this occasion by Eric Gillett, in 1929 by A. D. Peters, who suggested a different ending for a light modern-girl novel called Sir, She Said, and a few years ago my New York agent Carol Brandt saved my erotic comedy A Spy in the Family. As one or two readers of these pages may remember, a young married woman on a holiday in Malta is seduced by a German lesbian. On her return to England she finds that the German was an agent in a drug traffic concern. The heroine’s encounter with her had been taped, and the heroine was forced by the threat of blackmail to smuggle heroin into England. This opening section occupied 100 pages. It was my original plan to show the London branch of this blackmail group operating on several other victims, so that I should have had three distinct stories interwoven. I intended a novel of some hundred thousand words. I showed the first 100 pages to Carol Brandt with a synopsis of the remainder. She shook her head. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Stick to your one heroine. You are very unlikely to find another character as interesting as she is.’ I did not see her point at first. In my previous novels I had exploited the technique of interwoven plots. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘was why your last one (The Mule on the Minaret) didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The reader was puzzled at being switched from one set of characters to another. Stick to your one character this time. She’s vivid and interesting.’
‘That means a very short novel doesn’t it.’
I had formed the idea that I was not good enough to write a short novel, that I had to impress by bulk.
She shook her head. Sixty thousand words that grip the reader are better than a quarter of a million that confuse him.’
I had the good sense to follow her advice. My erotic comedy is a mini-book. It is not for all palates, and it shocked, surprisingly enough, the fiction editor of Playboy, but it has had on the whole a very satisfactory reception, particularly as a paperback. I think it is my best-told story.
On my return from Bowler’s Green I found Evelyn in the Savile. He was preparing to leave for France the following day. He had finished Remote Peoples in his monastery and was in funds again. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘could you lend me thirty pounds?’ Once again I had reached the limits of my overdraft. I should get an advance from Cassell’s on the delivery of So Lovers Dream but that was two weeks away and I did not want to borrow from Peters before I had to. ‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘I’ll make you a cheque out right away.’ But at that moment the porter called him to the telephone. He was away five minutes. He returned, smiling. ‘I’m afraid that I shan’t be able to lend you that thirty pounds after all. A young female has decided to accompany me to the South of France.’
I never learnt her name, but the sequel to the incident I heard later from Patrick Balfour. She was an ex-debutante of twenty-three, and she enjoyed what she called ‘brinking’, going as near as possible to the line without crossing it. Evelyn had a look of innocence, and she expected to be able to keep him dangling, but she very soon found that without a bestowal of ultimate favours she would have to find her way home alone. She shrugged. If that was what he wanted, well he must have it, but he should have so much of it that he would wish he had not brought the matter up. She insisted on prolonged siestas. For propriety’s sake, though that is not necessary in France, they had different rooms; at night she would not let him go back to his room till two or three and in the early mornings, at first light, she would bound into his room, eager and voracious. To her surprise and later to her considerable pleasure, she was accorded an appreciatively appropriate welcome. On the second morning, she was thinking, ‘This is too good to miss a minute of.’
‘Don’t you think, Evelyn, that it would be easier if we shared a room?’ she said.
My return to Villefranche was delayed by a Royal Command to attend a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace. I was as surprised as I was delighted to receive the impressively embossed card of invitation. I could not think why I had been thus honoured. I had never been to a lev^e and during the last five years I had spent so much time abroad that I had lost any claim that I might have possessed in 1925 to being a ‘figure about town’. But there it was; the embossed card was proudly erected on the mantelpiece and the night before I supped at the Savoy so that I could get my silk hat ironed in the cloak room. Very few men, if any, wore grey hats in those days, but I wore a silk hat for lunch on Sundays and two or three times a week in the evening. Every month or so, I would get it ironed at the Savoy, giving the attendant a shilling instead of the customary sixpence.
Thursday July 23 was one of the few completely fine days that summer. Cricket was played everywhere. As I sauntered from the Park Lane tube station I noticed how the traffic was being redirected. This was on my account, I smugly told myself. I thought of all the people who were being inconvenienced because certain selected subjects of the Crown had been bidden to saunter under the Palace trees. It made me feel very important.
That was my chief sensation throughout the afternoon – a sense of self-importance. But it was in itself a highly enjoyable occasion. I had not been to very many garden parties. Weddings in the country and fêtes on rectory lawns were the extent of my experience. I read next morning in The Times that several thousand guests had been entertained. But there was no sense of being crowded. I did not have to queue up for my iced coffee, my strawberries and ice cream. In the distance I saw Their Majesties moving among the guests. I did not know a great many people there. I recognised more people than I knew. I was amused to see a start of surprise on the face of a fashionable lady whom I had met once or twice at the Hansards in Cadogan Gardens and who clearly had not expected to see me there. I encountered the St John Ervines. That pleased me. They were two of the first friends I made in London after the war. I liked them very much. They were important figures in the literary scene. I was always flattered when I received an invitation from them. Their presence at the party increased my self-esteem. I could see now what had happened. Royalty had felt that it should honour literature so it had selected a special group of youngish writers of distinction – people like the Ervines and myself. Then I detected a rather ostentatious poetaster who edited a very little magazine which did not pay its contributors. A very second-rate figure on the fringe. Why on earth had he received an invitation? I did not feel quite so well about my own. He greeted me with what I thought excessive cordiality. I barely knew him. I could imagine him in the future coming up to me at some publisher’s gathering and remarking over loudly, ‘I haven’t seen you since last year’s Royal Garden Party.’
My spirits were cheered, however, by the eagerness with which a couple of very young and attractive girls hurried over
to me, Betty Askwith and Theodora Benson. I had met Theodora two years before when I was lecturing in the midlands. Her parents had a house in the neighbourhood, and my hostess had asked her to lunch to meet me. I can still see her walking across the lawn to join us. She was very slim, very tall; because of her height she walked with a slight stoop. She was wearing a well-cut tailored coat and skirt. She was then at the start of her career. I do not remember anything she said. Later I was to find her one of the funniest women I have ever known. But she was shy and silent on this occasion. I did not know much about her work. All I did know was that she wrote books in collaboration with Betty Askwith. A little later she wrote to tell me that she and Betty had been reading with interest my novel about young girls, Sir, She Said. They would like to discuss it with me. Would I come to tea with them?
Theodora was quite different when she was with Betty. I have never known a couple who were so much a team. They talked together as though there were one person; then they became separate and were two. It was fascinating. They had great youthfulness, and a deep, deep innocence. I asked them if they found it difficult to write in collaboration. Did each have her special set of characters? They shook their heads; no, they talked out the dramatic scenes together. ‘We take it in turns as to who describes the kisses.’ I thought that very touching. That autumn they published Lobster Quadrille, with Grant Richards. They had a celebration party, at, I think, Theodora’s house. There were about eight of us. We went after a light meal to a musical. I do not remember its name, but I remember two of the songs, ‘The Party’s Getting Wild’ and ‘I Won’t Leave My Bachelor Days Till My Bachelor Days Leave Me’. After the show we went back to Theodora’s home for a drink and a sandwich. Grant Richards, who must by then have been nearly sixty, looked as spruce and immaculate at the end of the evening as he had at the beginning. He was a great charmer.
