Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (TEXT ONLY)

by Paula Byrne

  Arthur Baldwin, a second son like Hugh, was also in love with Baby Jungman, though with his round face and ginger whiskers she did not find him very attractive. Coote Lygon remembered that a great friendship arose out of the hopeless rivalry between Arthur and Evelyn. Being in the company of Baldwin and the Lygons allowed Evelyn to indulge his feelings for Baby and to discuss her endlessly.

  If Evelyn’s friendly rivalry with Arthur Baldwin was one source of constant amusement, another was the banter that centred upon the riding academy. According to Coote, Evelyn transposed Captain Hance and his family to an ‘Olympian level’: ‘he invented lives for them which, like the gods in ancient Greece, were still linked with the mortals below; their least pronouncement was debated and scrutinised for omens and auguries. The Captain’s name was always succeeded by the initials GBH – which stood for God Bless Him, and his health was frequently drunk.’ When Maimie and Coote left Mad to go to Norfolk to campaign on behalf of their brother in the October 1931 general election campaign, Evelyn wrote to say that Malvern was not the same without them. ‘I miss you both very much at school and in play time.’

  The Madresfield set invented nicknames for one another. Maimie was ‘Blondy’, Coote was ‘Poll’ or ‘Pollen’, Baldwin was ‘Frisky’, Evelyn was ‘Boaz’ or ‘Bo’ – a Masonic soubriquet* purportedly intended to annoy Elmley who had joined the Freemasons, something of which Evelyn, as a Catholic, disapproved. Baby Jungman was ‘The Dutch girl’, on account of her family origins.

  Because Baby was so impossible to woo, the word ‘dutch’ was used to indicate something awkward or difficult. Thus in the manner of a secret society, they invented their own language. A ‘jagger’ meant someone or something kindly and helpful, in honour of spinsterly Miss Jagger. An Anglican priest was a ‘lascivious beast’. To ‘laycock’ was to chuck at the last minute (this was in honour of Robert Laycock, a family friend who had been best man at Lettice’s wedding). To bagpipe someone was to have sex with them, and so on. In his biography of Ronald Knox, Evelyn suggested that ‘the accumulation of common experiences, private jokes and private language … lies at the foundation of English friendship’. Such things were certainly the foundation of his world at Mad.

  My brother drank, you know.

  (Lady Sibell Lygon)

  Evelyn was being drawn into the life and world of the glamorous Lygon sisters. But what about his old Oxford love? What had happened to the ‘lascivious Mr Lygon’, the beautiful young man with whom he had been besotted, imploring Tom Driberg ‘if you come across Hugh … or anyone else I love give them a kiss from me’?

  Hugh had become an assistant trainer in the stable of Edgar Wallace on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. For a time, he had a little house in the local village of Tilshead, a pretty hamlet of flint houses. He seemed happy and settled. He had his first success when a horse called Evaporate that he had trained became a winner in 1931. But all Hugh’s brief successes had a way of evaporating. That was the summer when the family tragedy erupted, and it was sensitive Hugh who took it worst. He was the one who talked his father out of suicide and accompanied him to Germany.

  If habitual lateness was one of Hugh’s faults (he was even late for his own funeral), another was his reluctance to put pen to paper. The lack of letters makes it very hard to recover his voice, in contrast to those of his sisters, which come across so vividly in their correspondence with Evelyn Waugh.

  Letters were to take on increasing significance following Lord Beauchamp’s expulsion; they were his lifeline, and he rarely lost the opportunity to impress upon his children their importance. He was forced to write to the others to ask for specific news of Hugh, who did not remain in Germany for long. Shortly after Hugh returned to England in June 1931 Boom wrote to Coote from Berlin desperate for news of him: ‘How is Hugh? He will be the centre of fashion again when the manoeuvres begin. I want to see a photo of the new bowler hats.’ Poignantly, Boom also refers in this letter to his youngest son, who was only fourteen and away at boarding school: ‘Do you think there would be an awful row if I sent Dickie a snapshot of me? I don’t suppose he has a photo. Does he ever write to you? Poor darling! How he would love to come to the Show!’ He was referring to the Madresfield Agricultural Show that always took place in August and that was one of the high points of the Lygon year. It is recreated in a charming scene in Brideshead when Cordelia first meets Charles Ryder.

  He later wrote from Berlin that he was enjoying the museums, especially the Botticellis and the Greek sculpture. Ever the cultivated tourist, he wrote ruefully that he was lost without a Baedeker (there wasn’t one for Berlin). And still the concerned politician, he also noticed the poverty and how ‘the lower classes’ had to put up with a very poor standard of living.

  By the end of August, Beauchamp was in Paris, having set himself up in an apartment near the Place de l’Étoile: ‘after an agitated time with much voluble conversation, here I am settled in to the flat – with a very nice spare room’. He was thinking about the children and the possibility of their visiting him. He described smoking his first cigar and taking dancing lessons. ‘Altogether, you won’t know me!’ The strikes in England depressed him: ‘On the whole Japan and Java may be better places to live than in England during the next few months.’ Coote made plans to visit him in Paris, but by October he had set sail for the Far East and Australia. She always remained a superb correspondent. Her father relied on her to pass on messages to Hugh, always imploring him to write, which he never did.

  Hugh’s poor letter-writing habits were to have disastrous consequences, especially when he failed to keep his father informed about his pressing financial difficulties. Towards the end of October 1931, Hugh was at Madresfield. He too planned to leave for Paris. Lady Sibell was with him, but the younger sisters had left Malvern to canvass for Elmley in Norfolk. The general election would see a huge victory for the ‘National Government’, with the result that Stanley Baldwin would once again become the most powerful man in the land.

  Evelyn and Frisky Baldwin promised to write to the sisters and keep them informed about all the Malvern news. Frisky dutifully wrote to Coote, gossiping about staff squabbles. The governess Peglar, who had taken over from the hapless Miss Bryan, had been causing trouble and ‘stirred up a false mutiny among Bradford the Butler and his peers’. ‘I find myself saturated with a nauseating pity for the lonely old bleeder,’ he wrote, ‘sitting in her little cold old room, and feeling that she’s gone too far and she can’t turn back and that they’re all against her.’ Speaking of governesses, Frisky joked, if Coote failed to go carefully with money, she might be reduced to earning her own living: ‘she didn’t want to end up as a governess, peglaring for a living’. It must have seemed unthinkable that one of the daughters of Lord Beauchamp would end up as a governess.

  Other bits of gossip from Mad were not so amusing. Frisky reported that there had been trouble between other family members. The night before Hugh was due to leave for Paris had been full of tension and unease. Frisky had argued with headstrong Sibell, who had been repeating confidences, then Hugh had been drowning his sorrows in the time-honoured fashion: ‘Hugh was tipsy and drank more and more and more, God it was sad.’

  Evelyn had been spending time on his own at the Malvern hotel since Maimie and Coote had departed. He was busy correcting the proofs of Remote People, his non-fiction book about his months in Africa. Sometimes, though, Frisky was ordered by Lady Sibell to swing by the County Hotel and pick up Mr Waugh to bring him to Mad for dinner. Sibell later took against Evelyn, but in those early days she was very fond of him and craved his company as much as her other sisters did.

  Evelyn’s letters to the sisters, sent from the County Hotel that late autumn of 1931, were the beginning of a correspondence that was to last over thirty years until his death. Captain Hance was finishing his book and his daughter Jackie was modelling on horseback for the photographs. Evelyn found the whole business very funny and reported with glee of how a pupil had asked
to be photographed being whipped by Captain Hance: ‘it is called Masochism and if you ask Elmley and he thinks you are old enough he will explain what that means’.

  He joked about his success with Hance, who is ‘dead nuts on me’. They would smoke cigars together and talk about politics and art. ‘I am well in with that family,’ he wrote, adding: ‘Give Elmley a rousing cheer from his old Varsity chum.’ Elmley would duly be re-elected with a greatly increased majority.

  The family he really wanted to be in with was the Lygons. He didn’t have to try very hard. He won them over by a combination of self-deprecation and mock insults. They loved a man who was willing to say the unsayable. His jokes often alluded to his inferiority: he had been promised straps to wear on his riding clothes – ‘so I am very classy now’ – and had been promoted to a better horse. He was also aware that people mocked his decision to learn to ride. He responded by saying that he was doing it for medicinal reasons. As a cure for what? ‘Drink.’

  In his next letter he joked that his stock had fallen because his horse Tom Tit threw him off and the captain had wrongly assumed that he was an Eton man, and when he found out he wasn’t Hance had walked out of the bar where they had been having a drink. His jokes about his social inferiority were just that – jokes, but they were also a way to let the Lygons know that he wouldn’t presume too much. In Black Mischief there is a character called Viscount Boaz. This is a self-mocking joke, though it may also have been a dig at Elmley and his disapproval of the nickname.

  Evelyn continued to write funny letters, joking about back injuries and how Jackie Hance had false teeth because her real ones had been ‘rolled out’ by a horse when she was fourteen. But, as with Frisky’s letters, there was a serious undertone concerning Hugh’s increasing dependence on alcohol. Hugh had telephoned Evelyn at the County Hotel and invited him to Madresfield for the evening. Evelyn continued the tale: ‘Well I hate to say it but the truth is that Hugh had been at the bottle and he was walking about the house with a red candle saying he thought the lights might go out.’ This was alarming behaviour. Evelyn told them that he had stayed to have some brandy with him, but that Hugh became more and more despondent. He was worried about money and had bought many racehorses that he couldn’t afford. Eventually they went upstairs and found Sibell, ill and also despondent because she couldn’t think of what to say in her gossip column. He ended the letter lightly: ‘I think Jackie is in love with me only I often think this about girls and it is hardly ever true so I daresay she isn’t.’*

  One of the most dispiriting aspects of alcoholism is the way in which it reduces adults to irresponsible children who need to be guarded and protected from themselves. The fact that both Frisky and Evelyn reported on Hugh’s drunken behaviour to his sisters suggests a degree of complicity. At some level they were in the unenviable position of spying on Hugh. Evelyn would later depict with compelling truthfulness the fictional Lady Marchmain’s attempt to have Sebastian spied upon, whilst alcohol is hidden from him.

  Hugh’s financial worries were certainly contributing to his depression and heavy drinking. It must have been difficult for the sisters to see their sweet-natured brother on such a course of self-destruction, so soon after the collapse of their parents’ marriage and their father’s humiliation. In later years, they still found it painful to talk about Hugh’s alcoholism. The sisters put his troubles down to his being a second son, and the pressures of their father’s scandal. But they never uttered any blame, always showing great compassion and tolerance. Hugh’s homosexuality was not mentioned in their retrospective accounts, but it undoubtedly contributed to his despair, given what had happened to his father when he was outed.

  He did go to France that autumn and meet up with his father. But he did not tell of his own woes either then or later. There were other distractions in Paris, not least that Lady Beauchamp and her brother the Duke of Westminster were continuing to employ private detectives. Beauchamp still cherished hopes of returning to England, but the Grosvenors’ opposition was implacable, and it seemed that he would be forced to continue a wanderer for the foreseeable future. He wrote to Coote to tell her that he was also being spied upon: ‘The detectives in Paris annoyed me a great deal – when will she relax her hatred of us all? … There seems to be no use in coming back if your mother is still implacable.’ Lady Beauchamp was clearly angry that the children continued to take her husband’s side, even though she was the injured party.

  Evelyn went from Malvern to Mary Milnes-Gaskell for the weekend, where he reported that he met Nancy Mitford who ‘played cards all night in a dashing way’. This other Mary, Baby Jungman’s friend, lived with her brother at nearby Great Tewkesbury and had been in the Riding Academy with Evelyn. Their father had died in September that year, and the house was now owned by her younger brother Charles. It was another fatherless home where Evelyn could play the surrogate brother. By the time he returned to the academy after the weekend, the Lygons had left Madresfield. It was time for him to move on.

  In his next letter to the sisters he told them that he would be visiting the family of his Oxford friend Henry Yorke at Forthampton Court, near Tewkesbury. Still in love with Baby, he wrote to Frisky Baldwin: ‘I am sorry I made bad blood with Teresa [Baby] but you must know, old boy, that alls fair in love. Anyway I can tell you this that whenever I plot and make bad blood – as I do pretty often I may say – it is always I who lose in the end.’

  In early November, Remote People (‘Remoters’ in Lygon parlance) was published to mixed reviews. Evelyn returned to London to be best man at a wedding and then wrote to the Lygons to inform them where he was going next. He pleaded with them to write to him at the Easton Court Hotel, Chagford in Devonshire. The hotel was an extraordinary place discovered by ‘Mr Gossip’ of the Daily Sketch, Patrick Balfour. He had told Alec Waugh about its peculiar charms, and Alec in turn had passed the tip on to Evelyn. Chagford was a writer’s paradise, with comfortable rooms, delicious food, lovely gardens, and many miles distance from the temptations and distractions of London. One could even hunt if one wished. It would remain a haven for Evelyn in his wandering years.

  Easton Court was run by an American woman, Mrs Cobb, and her partner, Norman Webb (affectionately known as the Cobwebs). They adored Evelyn. This would be the place to which he would retreat during the war to write Brideshead Revisited. Evelyn begged the Lygons to write to him in his exile, as he intended to spend all day writing and needed to keep up his spirits. ‘At Chagford,’ he wrote, ‘I pretend to my London chums that I am going to hunt stags but to you who are my intimates and confidantes I don’t mind saying that I shall sit all day in my bedroom writing books, articles, short stories, reviews, plays, cinema scenarios etc etc until I have got a lot more money.’

  In the usual fantastic style of conversation that characterised his relationship with the Lygons, Evelyn described the Chagford hotel as a ‘distributing centre for white slaves or cocaine or something like that. They never give one bills.’ Mrs Cobb ‘mixes menthol with her cigarettes’ and ‘we drink rye whisky in her bedroom’. He wrote to the girls that he had been riding and would be out with the hounds in the morning. He was becoming one of them.

  But he was worried about Christmas. He had little desire to be at Underhill with his parents, and another festival season with the Guinnesses was out of the question after his estrangement from Diana. So he was delighted when Coote wrote to him at Chagford to invite him to Mad for the festivities.

  The Lygon girls were turning their minds to the winter holiday season. Christmas Day had always been a huge event at Madresfield, not least because it was both Lady Beauchamp’s birthday and that of her youngest son Dickie. She was very proud that they shared a birthday not only with each other, but also with their Lord in Heaven. For the servants it was a season of extra work, what with house parties and long hours of darkness necessitating the household’s huge consumption of candles (the wax that dropped from the chandeliers had to be scraped laboriously from the
polished floors). But for the girls, Christmas 1931 was going to be very difficult. With their mother in Cheshire and their father abroad, none of the old family traditions could be maintained. They decided to invite their new friend and confidant to join them. Evelyn was thrilled: ‘Dearest Lady Dorothy, It would be just too lovely for any words to join in your Christmas cheer. Deevy’ – this was Nancy Mitford’s word for ‘divine’ – ‘in fact hot stuff. Oh but you can’t mean really mean it. Oh you are an awful tease.’

  His first task, he said, would be to replenish his wardrobe for the occasion: ‘the prospect of coming to Madresfield relieves all my gloom and HOW!’ Over the coming weeks, his anticipation filled his delighted letters to ‘those sweet orphan girls’: ‘I Hope Lord E will dress up as Father Xmas and go round putting oranges in stockings. May I bring fireworks?’

  He was writing furiously and asked Lady Sibell to plug his new book in her Harper’s Bazaar column: ‘Tell Lady Sibell to say that all the smart set are reading Remote People the brilliant book by that well known hunting gent, E. W.’ The thought of Christmas kept him going through the November gloom (‘Very depressed. Rain all day. No money. Can’t write. Fire smokes … Looking forward to Yuletide’). The next day he wrote again to say that his bicycle was lame, so he didn’t make it to the meet, which was at a pub run by a ‘mad major with a falsetto voice who thinks he is descended from Thomas a Becket’: ‘it was all a trifle eccentric’. He ends by saying yet again that it will be heavenly to come to Madresfield for Christmas. He would indeed remember the experience for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  * Named after Mr Grainger, the Warden of Walmer Castle during Maimie’s childhood.

  * ‘Boaz’ was the name for the secret handshake of an Entered Apprentice in the Freemasons. By adopting it, Evelyn and the girls were implicitly forming their own secret bond of friendship. It is probably also relevant that the original biblical Boaz was a man who befriended the good-hearted women Naomi and Ruth at a time of family trouble (in the Old Testament Book of Ruth).