by Paula Byrne
As at all English prep schools, sport was equally important, especially cricket. Sports Day, attended by parents who had to be addressed as ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, was a highlight of the year, as was ‘Founder’s Day’, L. H.’s birthday, when he gave the whole school a break in the countryside. They would load up carts with picnics, and go up onto the downs or further afield.
The war was the constant shadow over Hugh’s prep school days. Many West Downs old boys were serving in the Army or Navy and the news of each death was felt by Helbert as a personal blow. The masters, too, were going off to the Western Front, leaving L. H. to shoulder the whole burden of the school himself. He felt that he must prepare the younger generation to go out and serve as soon as they were old enough. He therefore took up Scouting with great enthusiasm. The school was divided into five patrols and the West Downs boys could be seen in pairs going into the town on Scout duties, once even to London with a message for the War Office. Among Hugh’s contemporaries were the sons of a general, who wrote vivid letters from the front. These were read aloud to the entire school at Scouting pow-wows. Outside the school chapel, where prayers were said every morning and evening, Helbert put up a notice in large letters under the heading ‘Keep on Hopin’’:
Keep on lookin’ for the bright, bright skies,
Keep on hopin’ that the sun will rise,
Keep on singin’ when the whole world sighs,
And you’ll get there in the mornin’ …
The boys would sing this at the Wednesday singing class and at their autumn concert.
During the bad weather of late 1915, Hugh’s second year at West Downs, troops and horses were flooded out of the local military camp, with the result that the school was requisitioned by the Army in Helbert’s absence during the Christmas holidays. He returned to find the Welch Fusiliers sleeping in every room and even in the corridors and kit and equipment piled up on the expensive parquet floor of the new Shakespeare room. L. H. took it all in good humour.
Among Hugh’s contemporaries at West Downs was his cousin, a very tall boy called David Plunket Greene. They would go on to Oxford together and meet Evelyn Waugh there.
Evelyn’s enormous success as a writer and his assured place as one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century has obscured the fact that towards the end of the First World War his older brother became the most notorious young novelist in England. In 1917, Alec Waugh, still in his teens and awaiting active service, published a sensational semi-autobiographical account of school life called The Loom of Youth. He wrote it in just seven and a half weeks and it became a bestseller.
The book alluded to the forbidden subject of homosexual love in a boys’ boarding school. A storm of fury was unleashed and the novel was condemned by schoolmasters across the nation. Outraged letters were published in the newspapers. Bans were proclaimed in school libraries. Boys found with copies of it were threatened with caning. Anxious parents wrote to headmasters to ask whether such practices really did take place. The ban of course merely whetted the appetite of countless curious schoolboys who devoured the book looking for the offending material. As with D. H. Lawrence’s scandalous portrayal of anal sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, equally pored over by schoolchildren, you only had to blink and you missed it. Alec remembered a friend reading the book many years later and asking him ‘When do I reach ‘‘the scene’’?’ Alec looked over his friend’s shoulder and replied ‘You’ve passed it, ten pages past.’ The account seems innocent enough by today’s standards:
Thus did begin a friendship entirely different from any Gordon had ever known before. He did not know what his real sentiments were; he did not even attempt to analyse them. He only knew that when he was with Morecambe he was indescribably happy … Morecambe came up to Gordon’s study nearly every evening, and usually Foster left them alone together … During the long morning hours, when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure, and forget for a while the doubts and disappointments that overhung his life … he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin – to be found out.
Nothing more than that.
Alec’s book was in part revenge for his expulsion from Sherborne. He had been a model student: prefect, house captain, editor of the school magazine, winner of the English Verse Prize and member of the first XV and first XI. But then he was discovered in a homosexual relationship with a fellow pupil and ‘asked to leave’. As The Loom of Youth made clear, the ‘unforgivable sin’ in such all-male establishments was not the act itself, but ‘to be found out’.
The trials of Oscar Wilde still lingered in public memory. Alec had been made a victim of what he and others saw as absurd public hypersensitivity and overreaction towards homosexuality. He was not ‘the immaculate exception’ and he was incensed by the ‘conspiracy of silence’ and the hypocrisy of those who refused to see such sexual experimentation as entirely common: ‘I wonder how many ex-public school boys would deny that at some point in their schooldays they indulged in homosexual practices; practices that had no lasting effect, that they instantly abandoned on finding themselves in an adult, heterosexual world,’ he later wrote.
The homosexual controversy, however, was only part of the scandal. An equally serious accusation was that Alec’s novel had dared to criticise the public school ethos, the very spirit of which was combating the Hun on the battlefields of France and Belgium. Alec later confessed that his intention had indeed been to expose the myth of the ideal public schoolboy venerated as a pillar of the British Empire. For many, this was his truly unforgivable sin.
English public schools had been undergoing significant transformation since the second half of the nineteenth century. Reforms by Thomas Arnold at Rugby and the bestselling novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays had popularised a new image of the great boarding schools as nurseries of gentlemanly behaviour and patriotic service. The public school ethos of self-sacrifice on behalf of King and Country, school and friend, reached its apogee in the Great War. On battlefields such as the Somme, the losses were disproportionately high among the public-school-educated officer class. To take Eton as an example. The school had an average of about 1,100 pupils. Imagine the serried ranks of boys in an annual school photograph; 1,157 Old Etonians were wiped out in the war: the equivalent of every child in that photograph. This is what people meant when they talked about the death of a generation.
The much-lauded image of the courageous public schoolboy, educated in a gentlemanly tradition of chivalry, honour, loyalty, sportsmanship and leadership, sacrificing his life for his country, was dealt a body blow by the publication of Alec Waugh’s novel. The passage in The Loom of Youth that really cut to the quick was not the brief flight of homosexual allusion but a sequence when a young soldier returns to his public school and smashes the ideals of the war: ‘All our generation has been sacrificed … At the beginning we were deceived by the tinsel of war. Romance dies hard. But we know now. We’ve done with fairy tales. There is nothing glorious in war; no good can come of it. It’s bloody, utterly bloody.’
Days after the novel’s publication the soldier novelist, still in his teens, was posted to France. All of this only increased interest in Alec Waugh and his novel. There were already many soldier-poets but he was the first soldier-novelist. He had achieved literary celebrity and sales that ought to have made his publisher father proud. But Arthur was devastated: illusions were shattered and friendships were broken. The son of his soul had betrayed the school that had nurtured them both.
For Evelyn, just thirteen, the immediate effect of his older brother’s disgrace was that Sherborne was barred to him just as he was about to go there. Instead he was sent to Lancing, a ‘small public school of ecclesiastical
temper on the South Downs’. His father had never even seen the place and had no associations with it. Evelyn had an ecclesiastical temper of his own and had expressed hopes of becoming a parson. Perhaps he could do something to absolve the sins of his brother.
CHAPTER 2
Lancing versus Eton
There was a scent of dust in the air; a thin vestige surviving in the twilight from the golden clouds with which before chapel the House Room fags had filled the evening sunshine. Light was failing. Beyond the trefoils and branched mullions of the windows the towering autumnal leaf was now flat and colourless … the first day of term was slowly dying.
So begins Evelyn Waugh’s unfinished story, Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, which was closely based on his experiences at Lancing College in Sussex. A scrim of nostalgia hazes his memory. It was not like this when he left for Lancing on a damp and overcast day in May 1917. Arriving in the summer term meant that it was very difficult for him to make friends. Furthermore, whereas most of the boys had been hardened to absence from home by prep school, for Evelyn it was his first experience of boarding. ‘I had lived too softly for my first thirteen years,’ he ruefully remarked.
The school itself was built high on the hills of the Sussex Downs, dominating the horizon with its huge chapel. ‘Lancing was monastic, indeed, and mediaeval in the full sense of the English Gothic revival; solitary, all of a piece, spread over a series of terraces sliced out of a spur of the downs.’ That is how Evelyn described it in his autobiography. Its solitariness was of a piece with his own.
Ascension Day fell four days after he arrived. Having no idea that it was a school holiday, Evelyn had made no arrangements for family visits. No meals were served and it rained all day. The House Room was locked. It was the worst day of his life and he never forgot how wretchedly lonely he felt. He would bring up his own children to ‘make a special intention at the Ascension Mass for all desolate little boys’.
Waugh kept a diary during his first two unhappy years at Lancing. He later destroyed it. In part, his unhappiness was a direct result of war deprivations: ‘the food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house and it grew steadily worse until the end of the war’. Milkless cocoa, small portions of tasteless margarine, bread and foul stew constituted the very best of the fare. School textbooks were war issue, printed on thin greyish paper and bound in greasy, limp oilcloth, something that offended his taste for fine binding and hand-printed paper.
Many of the best young masters were fighting in the war, and the boys were made conscious of the sacrifices made daily by old boys and schoolmasters: ‘On Sunday evenings the names were read of old boys killed in action during the week. There was seldom, if ever, a Sunday without its necrology. The chapel was approached by a passage in which their photographs were hung in ever-extending lines. I had not known them, but we were all conscious of these presences.’
Evelyn’s natural fastidiousness and his love of panache also contributed to his unhappiness. He recoiled against the poor table manners of his schoolmates, as they dirtied their napkins and flicked pats of margarine to the high oak rafters. Afternoon bathing was another source of agony, as the boys were forced to share tepid muddy bath water. The latrines were ‘disgusting’ and lacking in privacy – they had no doors. Rather than waiting his turn, which involved shouting out ‘After you’ to boys from other Houses, Evelyn preferred to make himself excused during lesson time, for which he paid the punishment of writing twenty-five lines.
He was placed in Head’s House, the most prestigious in the school, with the headmaster H. T. Bowlby serving as housemaster, a privilege that cost an extra £10 per year. Evelyn found the school rules bewildering and absurd. For the first two years, boys were dressed in subfusc (black), then they wore coloured socks, then in the sixth form coloured ties. All first years were prohibited from walking with hands in pockets. For the second year they could be inserted, but with the jacket raised, not drawn back. Older boys in year two were permitted to link arms with a ‘one-year man’, but not the other way round. Only school prefects could walk in the Lower Quad. Treading on grass was generally forbidden. Many vivid details of this sort were captured in Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, together with schoolboy slang, such as ‘dibs’ for prayers and ‘pitts’ for bedrooms. Evelyn was distressed by the dearth of female company.
When the war came to an end, school life changed for the better. Evelyn felt more settled. Food, always of vital importance in the life of a schoolboy, improved greatly. The Grub Shop now offered whipped-cream walnuts, cream slices, ices, chocolate and buns of every kind. One of the privileges for older boys was the ‘settle-tea’ that each senior member of House Room gave in turn. Hot, buttered crumpets were served in abundance, followed by cake, pastries and, in season, strawberries and cream. Senior boys had their own private studies and tea ceremonies: ‘we were as nice in the brewing of tea as a circle of maiden aunts’. They ordered their teas from London and ‘tasted them with reverence, discoursing on their qualities as later we were to talk of wine’. They also ordered little pots of caviar and foie gras: ‘Fullness was all.’
Respected masters returned from the war. Among them was the legendary figure of J. F. Roxburgh, one of two greatly contrasting figures who dominated Evelyn’s adolescence. In his autobiography, he devoted a chapter to his ‘Two Mentors’. The other mentor was Francis Crease. Roxburgh and Crease represented the worldly versus the aesthetic life.
Evelyn’s interest in graphics – illuminated manuscripts, the design of borders and initials, calligraphy, elaborate scripts – led one of his tutors to approach local scribe, Francis Crease. Evelyn had already noticed Crease at chapel on Sundays. He was not a prepossessing figure. His high nose and pink and white skin made him seem mildly absurd. He was middle aged, effeminate and always dressed in soft tweeds. He had a delicate, mincing gait and spoke in a shrill voice. ‘Today,’ Waugh wrote in the more open era of the 1960s, ‘he would be identified as an obvious homosexual.’
Evelyn went to Crease’s home at Lychpole Farm for private lessons. He loved the visits, not only because they offered an escape from school, but also because he was drawn to Crease’s aesthetic creed. In the first lesson Crease threw up his hands and exclaimed: ‘You come to me wearing socks of the most vulgar colour and you have just written the most beautiful E since the book of Kells.’ This he clearly regarded as an inexplicable paradox. Thursdays became a high point of the week, not only for the lessons, but also for their aftermath: ‘the best part is when work is put away and we have tea in his beautiful blue and white china. It is such a relief to get into refined surroundings.’ Young Evelyn was especially impressed by this sensitive and highly cultured man’s devotion to his craft and his belief that ‘if one is ever going to do good work one has to give one’s life to it’.
Crease was invited to Underhill, the Waugh family home. A defining moment in Evelyn’s life came when he asked for Crease’s opinion of his father, Arthur Waugh. Crease replied: ‘Charming, entirely charming, and acting all the time.’ Evelyn asked his mother for her opinion and she ‘confirmed the judgement. My eyes were opened and I saw him, whom I had grown up to accept in complete simplicity, as he must have appeared to others.’
The relationship between mentor and pupil was terminated by what seemed to Evelyn a rather trivial incident. In Crease’s absence, he had used a quill knife and broken it. Crease had written a furious letter saying that he would never see him again and that Evelyn had broken not just his knife but, more importantly, his trust. A second letter came in the post, apologising for the first. But it was too late for Evelyn: ‘the wound did not heal … after the incident of the broken blade the old glad, confident morning light never shone on our friendship’.
But the person who really broke Crease’s spell was J. F. Roxburgh, upon whom Evelyn looked with unalloyed schoolboy hero-worship. He was as different a man from Crease as it was possible to imagine.
J. F. was a god to nearly all the Lancing b
oys. At the age of thirty-one he had returned from the war a hero, having been Mentioned in Dispatches and recommended for the Military Cross. He later became the first headmaster of Stowe. It was not difficult to see the attraction. He was handsome, willowy and elegant, and physically strong. Evelyn would always be drawn to this type of physique, so unlike his own. J. F. cut an immensely dashing figure with his colourful hand-woven ties and stylish suits. He liked to make a studied late entrance to chapel dressed in his Sorbonne robes. He was a man of great charisma: witty, charming and learned.
He had a beautiful, sonorous voice and it was a joy, said Evelyn, to hear him declaiming Latin ‘like a great Negro stamping out a tribal rhythm’. Over forty years later, in A Little Learning, Waugh remembered it as a voice that set up ‘reverberations in the adolescent head which a lifetime does not suffice to silence’. J. F. didn’t just walk into a room: his entry was always a moment of exhilaration. Evelyn, conversely, had a curiously ungainly walk, a kind of trudge that caused his friends to make jibes about trench foot.
Even whilst invigilating exams, J. F. was unlike the other teachers who sleepily turned over their textbooks. He, by contrast, appeared ‘always jaunty and fresh as a leading actor on the boards, in the limelight, commanding complete attention’. Evelyn was also drawn to J. F.’s love of language, his dislike of cliché and slang, his attention to precision in grammar. In the boys’ essays ‘oo’ in the margin stood for ‘orribel oxymoron’ and ‘ccc’ for ‘cliché, cant or commonplace’. Other comments would include a devastating ‘Excellent journalism, my dear fellow.’ J. F. used unusual words and phrases, to amuse as well as to educate the boys. Poor reading was a ‘concatenation of discordant vocables’. His examination papers were elegantly printed and instead of the perfunctory termly report, he wrote long letters home to parents on hand-woven paper embossed with his name. Evelyn’s lifelong disdain for printed as opposed to engraved postcards perhaps came from here.
