by Paula Byrne
* Waugh’s letters to the Lygon sisters are often lacking in punctuation and sometimes idiosyncratic in spelling (all the more so when he was writing while drunk). I have not corrected them in quotations.
CHAPTER 12
Christmas at Mad
Maimie picked Evelyn up from Worcester station and drove him to Madresfield. Balls of mistletoe were secured high in the oak and lime trees. In the hall a huge tree was lit up for an hour after tea, with footmen standing on either side with sponges in case any of the candles set it alight. Open fires crackled in the grates of the various rooms, brought to life for the festive season. The young people loved to congregate in the comfortable smoking room, just off the library.
Despite the absence of their parents, the Lygons were determined to put on a good show. Maimie took the place of her mother and distributed Christmas presents to the staff, who lined up according to rank. Guests were also given presents. Christmas dinner was traditional, with paper hats and crackers. Guests were served burning brandy in silver ladles. There were indoor fireworks and games of charades. In the evening, the local choir sang Christmas carols in the minstrels’ gallery above the Dining Room. After singing they were given hot punch and biscuits. All of these details were lovingly recreated in Waugh’s description of Christmas at Hetton Hall in A Handful of Dust.
The girls invited a range of house guests that year. As well as Frisky and Bo, there was Patrick Balfour (Mr Gossip, who did not gossip about Boom), a young aristocrat called Edward Jessel and ‘an elegant and amiable young social butterfly’ (Harold Acton’s description) – Hamish St Clair Erskine. More guests arrived after Christmas – Baby Jungman, Diana Coventry, Lord Berners, Phyllis de Janzé. One of the guests was an acquaintance of Evelyn’s from his Oxford days, Hubert Duggan.
Hubert – witty, handsome and wild, described by Evelyn as a rakish dandy – was having an affair with Maimie. He was a stylish rider, a lapsed Catholic and an ardent womaniser. He had left Oxford prematurely because of the lack of female company. He seems to have been one of the few in Evelyn’s set who did not have a ‘homosexual phase’ at Oxford. Hubert was a close friend of Hugh’s and had been captain of Goodhart’s, his house at Eton.
Evelyn and Hubert became close friends. Some years later, Evelyn, having witnessed Hugh Lygon’s desperate slide into alcoholism, tried to save Hubert’s brother, Alfred, from a similar fate. But it was Hubert Duggan who was responsible for the most spiritually compelling moment of Evelyn’s life, a momentous event which would kickstart the writing of Brideshead.
For now, the young people were only concerned with having a good time. The company was incomparable, champagne flowed in abundance (decanted into jugs in accordance with Boom’s custom) and jokes were as plentiful. The family felt liberated from their mother’s presence and found amusement in everything. Edward Jessel bore a present of foie gras and then amused the others by tucking into it himself. Even the foie gras makes a guest appearance among the private jokes in A Handful of Dust.
After lunch, they took a walk to the ‘noble line’ of the Malvern Hills and when they reached the top one of the party pushed Hubert Duggan, who could not stop running until he finally ended in an exhausted heap at the gates of the girls’ school at the foot of the hills. Charity visits were also undertaken. Evelyn and Hamish Erskine went with Coote to Lord Beauchamp’s Home for Impoverished Clergymen.
Trips were taken to the local pubs. That year of 1931, Robert Bartleet, the son of the vicar, designed a Christmas card for the Hornyold Arms. Inside was a verse:
There are sometimes famous writers, for instance Evelyn Waugh,
And Lady Sibell Lygon, though seldom Bernard Shaugh.
For its rest and recreation after writing books and plays
To meet Remoter People during these Hectic Days.
In just the few months since his first arrival at Captain Hance’s Riding Academy, Evelyn had turned himself into a local celebrity.
Maimie later recalled that, ‘Our great thing was to be with people who made you laugh … Bores, whoever they were, simply never set foot anywhere.’ Lady Dorothy remembered the time as positively Arcadian: ‘we were young and foolish, and just enjoyed ourselves very much. Hubert Duggan used to come and stay at the time. He was very attractive … very amusing and great company. He and Evelyn got on very well. They were great friends.’ Coote was more than a little in love with Hubert despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he was having an affair with her older sister.
Hubert and Evelyn shared the painful bond of divorce, in strikingly parallel circumstances. Each of them had married in 1928 and divorced not much more than a year later; each union was brought to an end by the wife’s adultery while the husband was working away from home – Evelyn writing in Bognor, Hubert serving in Parliament. (In each case, the lover went on to marry the wife, then eventually committed suicide.)
The Lygon girls were of course aware of both divorces, but did not talk about them. ‘Nor did we feel,’ said Coote, ‘that Evelyn ever wanted to, his spirits were resilient and he seemed to live entirely in the present.’ This wasn’t entirely true: Evelyn was still hurt by the failure of his marriage, but he was forever grateful to the Lygons for the ‘decencies of hospitality’ at a time when he needed to feel loved and cared for. He would always look back on this Christmas at Madresfield as a golden time. In 1944, enduring a rotten, solitary Christmas as an intelligence officer in Yugoslavia, he told Coote that ‘Christmas makes me think a lot about Malvern.’ His letter to her listed all that he had held in his memory for so long: the staff standing in line to be given their handsome presents, the walk to the hills, Jessel’s foie gras. ‘Well well never again,’ he wrote sadly. The war had split them all apart.
Later still, in 1957, when Maimie had fallen on hard times and was desperately poor, Evelyn sent her a cheque, as he often did: ‘Darling Blondy, I want to send you a Christmas present and I don’t know what you would like. Will you get yourself something comforting? Do you remember how all the five-to-twos [Jews] went to Holy Communion at Madresfield on Christmas day? And how Jessell’s boy tucked into the pate he brought? And what a lot of fine gifts we showered on Capt H GBH.’
The Lygons put on a good show that first year without their father and mother. Two days after Christmas, Lady Beauchamp sent a letter to Coote, with a heartfelt postscript (her and little Dickie’s Christmas-cum-birthdays had been distinctly subdued): ‘I can say, what once you said to me – ‘‘only God knows how much I love you’’.’
Evelyn left Mad on 28 December to spend New Year with ‘the bright young Henry Yorkes’. He called them this because they were so serious and the antithesis of the Bright Young Things. Whilst at Forthampton Court, the country home of Henry’s family, Evelyn was sent a message from his agent telling him that Basil Dean was prepared to commission a film scenario. Dean was the founder and chairman of the Ealing Studios. Evelyn readily agreed to write the treatment, as he needed the money. The salary was good: £50 per week. He then returned to Mad to celebrate with the girls for a couple of days. He spent hours drinking with Frisky Baldwin and talking of Baby Jungman, who was still keeping him at arm’s length but not wishing to lose his friendship.
Evelyn returned to his parents’ home after the festive season was over. His father’s diary recalls that he came to Underhill carrying beautiful white lilacs to celebrate the news that Basil Dean had engaged him. Evelyn may well have been feeling guilty that he had been away from his family at Christmas.
On 14 January, he wrote to Frisky to boast that he was living in paid lodgings in the Albany near the Ritz. This was one of his favourite haunts: ‘Well. I am living like a swell, in Albany, as it might be Lord Byron, Lord Macaulay, Lord Lytton, or any real slap up writer!’ He also recalled the ‘deep man-to-man intimacies which we reserve for the Madresfield Crème de Menthe’, adding: ‘Jolly sporting of you not to put Boaz in the moat, old boy.’ He was missing Mad: ‘I have been trying to recreate Worcestershire in London.’
He had been drinking and socialising with the Lygon set in London, going to see Noël Coward’s new play Cavalcade with Lady Sibell (it reduced her to tears) and indulging in a staring match with Maimie’s one-eyed Pekingese – ‘the malignant Cyclopean-eye of Grainger winking across the Ritz lounge’. But it wasn’t the same ‘away from the Captain, (God bless him!)’.
Evelyn’s brief tenure as a screenwriter provided him with a life of ease that he revelled in. He was looked after by a studio representative called Paddy Carstairs, who ‘found him delightful, urbane and of course with that dry, witty sense of humour which abounded in his novels of that time … I found him warm and approachable. It was the time when he was much in the news and he was clear[ly] enjoying his success.’ Paddy paints a picture of Evelyn’s working day: arise mid-morning, cocktails at the Ritz, then a leisured lunch and a long chat that would be about anything other than the script. The moment Paddy tactfully guided the conversation towards the writing assignment, Evelyn would jump up exclaiming: ‘Good heavens, is it nearly six? I must go to a cocktail party, so shall we start tomorrow?’ And so it would be the next day and the next. Paddy was charmed: ‘I remember when he was off to the Ritz he was sartorially elegant and he would inevitably say: ‘‘See you about three, then, Paddy?’’ and as he moved off he always winked at me as if to say ‘‘It’s great to be lionised, but don’t for a moment think that I am taking it seriously’’.’
Paddy was intrigued by his schoolboy humour and his love of fantasy. There was a fire in the hotel and Evelyn re-enacted a preposterous scene of a character groping for his false teeth in panic: ‘It was odd to find, despite his very sophisticated comic books, he seemed to adore slapstick, the cornier the better. I found this very bizarre. Our completed treatment was never filmed and I don’t think either of us was very surprised.’
He frequently took Maimie to lunch at the Ritz. Their friendship was going from strength to strength. Often when she was in London, Maimie would meet Evelyn for cocktails à deux before supper with a larger party. They discussed their love lives. He dwelt incessantly on Baby Jungman, always making a joke of his haplessly unrequited passion. Far from being ashamed of his parents, as is sometimes suggested, Evelyn invited the girls to meet them. Coote remembered visiting Mrs Waugh in Highgate. She was given a warm welcome and a glass of sherry.
When he was out of town writing in Chagford, or they were down at Mad, they exchanged letters. These are as filled with private jokes as their conversation was. Evelyn reported that his friend, Eleanor Watts, was in love with a one-eyed actor, ‘as it might be Grainger’. The one-eyed Pekingese was a constant point of reference. Evelyn sent him invitations to cocktail parties, addressing the envelope to Mr Grainger. Many of his letters were written when he was drunk. In that condition, he could be lewd, but the girls never regarded this as an insult or a breach of decorum: ‘I hope you have fun with SOCIETY this week. Look after that dear dutch girl [Baby] and don’t let her roger anyone with clap … I hope your clitoris is very well. Good idea for Hughie to marry Sykes, then he will be catholic like me.’ He would chide Maimie for not writing to him as often as he did to her: ‘sad that all your letters to me have been stolen in the post’. But she offered him the use of the Belgravia home, ‘Halkers’, and of Mad, whenever he wanted to write in peace. Some of his letters are written from Belgrave Square, with thanks for letting him sponge.
In April 1932 the Vaudeville Theatre staged a dramatisation of Vile Bodies. It was not a roaring success. Arthur Waugh noted in his diary, ‘a good show but an indifferent audience’. There would have been even more empty seats had it not been for the presence of a large body of Waugh friends and relations. Evelyn was determined to make the most of his venture into theatreland, and planned a lavish party to celebrate the opening. He wrote to the Lygons, boasting that it was the hottest ticket in town: Lady Cunard (‘the old trout’) had just phoned to complain that she had been given seats in the eighteenth row – how could she take her guest Prince George and sit him in the eighteenth row? Lady Castlerosse, meanwhile, refused to pay for her tickets: ‘oh dear these great ladies … still it makes me feel like a social figure which is good for my low spirits because no one knows how despised I am in the theatre’. Evelyn had given his parents front row seats. He took his mother dressed in her best to dine at the Ritz. The Lygons, whom he now considered to be part of his family, were at the top of his guest list.
Sadly, there was a poor showing from them. They all had ailments of one sort or another. Little Poll, as he called Coote, had broken her collarbone in a riding accident, Sibell was in a nursing home ‘having her wisdom teeth removed’ (which seems to be a euphemism for a more embarrassing operation), and Maimie had hurt her ‘arse’. Baby Jungman was in Ireland: ‘Did little Miss Jungman send me a line of good wishes from Ireland? Not on your life,’ he complained to Frisky. He also wrote to Coote to commiserate on her injuries, joking that he had put up a monument to her bravery and popularity: ‘nothing like suffering to sweeten the soul’. Then to Frisky: ‘The slow extermination of our Lygon chums saddens me. First little Blondy’s arse. Now Pollen’s breastbone. Blondy came to see my play but went away in great pain before supper.’
Still, at least Blondy had made it to the show. His party also included Hubert Duggan and an assortment of minor aristocrats. Among them was Hazel Lavery, wife of the famous painter Sir John Lavery. An Anglo-Irish beauty, now in her early fifties, and an artist herself, she sat for her husband over four hundred times (his image of her as the personification of Ireland appeared on the banknotes of the Irish Free State). She was intimate with figures as various as George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and the Irish Republican, Michael Collins. She was having a casual, on-off affair with Evelyn. He joked to Frisky about his social success, though drawing attention to the renowned hostess Lady Cunard rather than his part-time lover Lady Lavery: ‘So Boaz is momentarily a social lion and Lady Cunard … calls him Evelyn and makes him sit on her right hand at luncheon and dinner … but is his head turned by these favours? NO: he remains the same simple lad who bounced around Malvern Academy on the broad back of Mater.’
He was deep into Black Mischief, known to the Lygons as ‘his feelthy novel’. He wrote to Coote from the Savile Club:
Darling Pollen,
God how sad about tiny breastbone. What an unfortunate family you are to be sure. There was little Blondy with her arse too and Hugh with his baldness. Well I am ill too and despondent and I have no money and I get so despised at the theatre where they are acting my play that it has given me that distressing and well nigh universal complaint the inferiority complex.
I have had a lot of SOCIETY of a pretty high and dashing kind so on Sat I am going to a monastery for three weeks to write my feelthy book. How I long to see you all again and will too when I have written the smut.
My word I am miserable about everything
xxxxxx
Evelyn needed to write in peace. He spent time at the Catholic School, Stonyhurst, where his Oxford friend Christopher Hollis was a teacher. And he also went back to Chagford. Coote wrote to him there with the latest family update. As always with the Lygons, it was black news borne with grim good humour and delivered with a light touch. But Evelyn was able to find just the right tone for his response: ‘Sweet Poll, Golly what a family. Hugh in a mad house and now Sibell at my ex-aunt Almina’s abortionist parlour. How my heart bleeds for you all.’ The nursing home where Sibell was ‘having her wisdom teeth removed’ was run by a relation of She-Evelyn’s. Hugh was in even more serious trouble, despite the jokes about his premature baldness and being in a madhouse.
His drinking had worsened. His good looks were being ravaged by hard living and his reluctance to write to his father meant that there was no one left to bail him out financially. On 18 March 1932, shortly before Evelyn’s play opened, a notice appeared in the London Gazette to the effect that the Honourable Hugh Lygon of ‘The Elms’, Tilshead, Wiltshire, had petitioned for bankruptcy in the
court at Bath. This disaster seems to have precipitated some sort of mental collapse.
Evelyn had seen Hugh and Sibell at Halkers. He had taken brandy with them and had long talks with Hugh saying, as he put it in his letter to Poll, ‘a great many things that I can’t say now’. Lady Beauchamp was informed of the disaster. She wrote to Coote: ‘I am so grieved for all you are suffering … let us be united in facing the sadness of this tragedy which has befallen us.’ On the same day that she wrote from Saighton Grange, Lord Beauchamp sent a letter to his daughter from Australia, telling her that he had received a cable telling him the shocking news of Hugh’s bankruptcy: ‘Never would it have happened if I had known.’
In later years, Coote blamed Lady Sibell and her brother Elmley for refusing to save Hugh from bankruptcy. For Coote, this was the beginning of the end for her beloved brother. She (like Cordelia Flyte with Sebastian) had always been the sister who had loved him best. Following this disaster his drinking increased. Over the years he would have abortive attempts to go on the wagon, but all were unsuccessful.
Hugh made plans to go to Italy with Evelyn in the summer, where they would meet Lord Beauchamp. Meanwhile, Maimie and Coote begged Evelyn to come to Madresfield to write his novel. He tried to put them off, knowing that he needed isolation and no distractions from his work. A lovely letter thanks them and explains his dilemma:
Now I am going to write the important part of my letter. Oh how I should love to live in your Liberty Hall but the trouble about poor Bo is that he’s a lazy bugger and if he was in a house with you lovely girls he would just sit about and chatter and get d. d. [disgustingly drunk] and ride a horse and have a heavenly time but would he write his book? No, and must he? By God he must. So you see, but listen.
