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

by Paula Byrne

  His tsarist origin and her popularity in society were enough to get them some good wedding presents: a silver cigarette case with lighter from the Queen (in the photographic portrait taken for the wedding Vsev has a matching cigarette holder), a stack of jewellery from the groom’s mother, Hepplewhite dining-room furniture from the Lygon siblings, a television radiogram set from some of Maimie’s girlfriends, and a silver casserole dish from her former lover, Prince George (and Princess Marina). Maimie gave Vsev a set of solid silver dinner plates inscribed with his crown and initial – the only crown left to him. He gave her an ostrich-skin dressing-case and a couple of antique cigarette cases. They married on 31 May in the Chelsea Register Office, with a religious ceremony the following day in the Russian Orthodox Church on Buckingham Palace Road. Maimie, perhaps casting a wistful eye towards the Palace up the road, thus became the Princess Romanovsky-Pavlovsky.

  Young Dickie gave her away because Elmley was ‘ill’. Her dress was in oyster satin with flounces of old family Brussels lace. There was a good turnout of exiled Romanovs and society figures, along with some of the old set – Henry Yorke, Christopher Sykes and of course Evelyn and Laura. A Tatler photographer caught the moment during the Orthodox service when crowns were placed over the heads of bride and groom.

  Evelyn disliked Maimie’s husband, calling him the ‘intolerable Russian’. He met him properly for the first time in July, when he drove to Malvern to meet Coote, Maimie and her new husband at the Hornyold Arms. He also lunched with Coote at her new house in Upton upon Severn: ‘commodious, nondescript, very cheap house’, he noted in his diary. It was very strange to be with the girls in Worcestershire, but excluded from Mad itself.

  There was little sign of heavily built and thickly spectacled Coote getting married. Evelyn still joked with Maimie about possible suitors for her sister, but Coote herself was happy to remain single. The prospect of war overshadowed everything. Everyone’s lives were about to change.

  CHAPTER 20

  Waugh’s War

  What really hung over us then, like a great storm cloud, was the idea of Hitler.

  But like all parties, it had to come to an end.

  (Maimie Lygon)

  In July 1939, Evelyn was busy at Piers Court. His journals are full of industry: he is hanging portraits, planting bulbs, digging paths and restoring panelling. He also began work on a new novel, whose heroine owed not a little to Diana Mitford. It is not a novel in any direct sense about the Lygon family – though in the manuscript there is an interesting excised episode in which a gentleman is blackmailed by his servants, a fate that had befallen Lord Beauchamp when he was blackmailed by the Madresfield cook, Mrs Harper, who threatened to expose his homosexuality. Evelyn had heard about this incident from Maimie. The novel also details a quasi-autobiographical father/son relationship that is distant and formal.

  Both father and son despise the modern age and view life as a ‘huge, grim and solitary jest’. A major theme is the erection of blocks of jerry-built flats adjacent to the family home, Hill Crest Court. The destruction of ancient houses was always a deep concern of Evelyn’s. Barbarians were taking over the modern world. The arrival of Mona at Madresfield was perhaps a symptom of the changing times. This novel also introduced a new character type, Atwater, who would assume a prominent place in Evelyn’s post-war novels. Vulgar and touchy but also a clown, he is the symbol of the new age of the common man – half-educated, blasé, an insensitive bore, he will be reincarnated as Hooper, Apthorpe and Trimmer. The type is everything that was diametrically opposed to Lord Beauchamp.

  The book was unfinished, but eventually published as a fragment, called Work Suspended, in 1942. An exceptionally incisive account of it in the Partisan Review highlighted the key theme: ‘For fifteen years, Waugh has sung the house, and with it the precious furnishings he finds suited to it … And in this love of house, of continuous domicile and individual roof, Waugh appears for the defence in one of the most important struggles in English poetry and letters of the past twenty years.’ For this critic, Nigel Dennis, Waugh’s preoccupation with country houses was bound up with his hostility to the poets and intellectuals of the New Left:

  These young mainly upper-class men, he argues, tried to purge themselves of their upper-class preferences, their acceptance of the old, rural order … The intellectual pledged his new fidelity to the city, to the waste land that must be recreated … Like these intellectuals, Waugh saw the ghosts in the old houses, the flies lovely in amber; unlike them, he totally rejected the plea to ‘advance to rebuild’. The ghosts must be materialised; or, if that were impossible, they must be preserved as the best available wraiths.

  But as Evelyn worked on the novel through the long hot summer of 1939, it was becoming increasingly clear that the threat to England and its old ways was not the New Left at home, but the far right in Germany.

  As soon as war was declared, Evelyn abandoned the novel in order to sign up for soldiering. But his age (thirty-six) put him at a disadvantage. He felt bitter that he appeared to be of the generation who were too young to fight in the first war and too old for the second. A desk job on government business was a possibility, but that would kill him as a writer. His inclination was to join the Army as a private – the ‘complete change of habit’ would be the best possible stimulus to his imagination.

  Just over two weeks after the declaration of war, Sibell unexpectedly arrived for lunch, in company with her new husband in his shiny RAF uniform. She was ‘in a great state of nerves, full of laments about blackout and rationing’. Evelyn took her rather too literally and it was left to Laura to point out ‘that she was apprehensive for Michael’s safety’. Waugh, by contrast, had no immediate prospect of war action. After various knockbacks he came to the conclusion that someone at the War Office was blocking his chances. Worse, all of his friends seemed to have positions (apart from Harold Acton, who was turned down by everyone and, in a development that would have appalled the fictional Anthony Blanche, was reduced to teaching English to Polish airmen in Blackpool).

  Stinchcombe was preparing itself for evacuees from the East End of London. The local schoolmistress told Evelyn that Piers Court was designated as a billet. During the war many country homes were requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence and used for army quarters, training camps, schools or hospitals. Waugh eventually let out Piers Court to a Dominican order of teaching nuns.

  In Brideshead the Castle is requisitioned as army billets. The troops do their best to destroy the house’s architectural features, though not the chapel with its enduring flame. In reality, many great stately homes suffered immense damage because of wartime requisitioning. Madresfield Court, unusually, remained intact. There was good reason for this. The eighth countess, Elmley’s wife, was often asked why Madresfield had not been requisitioned. She would reply that this was because ‘treasures from the tower’ were coming. The treasures were the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. Madresfield was the place designated for safety if the princesses were required to leave London, and thus the house was perfectly conserved during the war years. In preparation for the possible day of arrival, Elmley and Mona would place a book on the bedside table for the princesses, appropriate to their ages. As the war went on, they changed the book annually.

  The requisitioning of large houses during the war was exploited to hilarious effect in Evelyn’s next novel, Put Out More Flags. The incorrigible scam-master Basil Seal, acting as billeting officer for evacuated children, extorts money from the gentry for not sending the awful Connolly children to their stately homes. Waugh had no time for those members of the upper classes for whom the war effort did not extend to willingness to having their homes invaded by working-class children.

  While the country mobilised, Evelyn pulled every string he could in order to join up. But there seemed to be no demand for middle-aged ‘cannon fodder’ – until his friend Brendan Bracken (Rex Mottram in Brideshead) exerted influence on Winston Churchill to support his appli
cation to join the Royal Marines.

  Meanwhile, Maimie wrote to Evelyn from her home in Lennox Gardens: ‘We are here indefinitely and later running a Russian unit of the Red Cross though from what I know of A. Russians and B. Red Cross even a 100 years war will have been long over by the time we are ready.’ They had one ambulance and the outfit was known as ‘Princess Pavlovsky’s Unit’. Grainger, her beloved Pekingese, was at last dead. She joked that they hoped to form another ambulance unit as a memorial to him and take it to Peking via the Trans-Siberian Railway, ‘but of course we’ve got to win Russia first’. She also gossiped that Captain Hance had a ‘very special secret job and is to be sent overseas’, but ‘I can find nothing to be said in favour of this war … I am leading a life of doing nothing but knit operation stockings.’

  Other friends were less involved in the war effort. The Coopers, to Evelyn’s disgust, had decamped abroad. John Julius had been evacuated to Canada and Diana joined her husband on a lecture tour of America: ‘My heart bleeds for you and Duff,’ wrote Evelyn with heavy irony; ‘I can think of no more painful time to be among Americans and to be obliged by your duties to pay attention to their ghastly opinions.’

  The Waughs’ first son, Auberon, was born on 17 November 1939. Six days later, Evelyn went to London for his interview for the Royal Marines. He returned for the boy’s christening. ‘Laura has had a son,’ he wrote to Maimie; ‘Will you be its Godmother? I know you won’t be able to come for [the] christening on account there’s a war, but I could have a proxy for you. It is to be called Auberon Alexander. It is quite big and handsome and Laura is very pleased with it. We should so love it if you would accept. Please do.’ He was tremendously proud and excited. In the event, three of the godparents, Chris Hollis, Frank Pakenham and Maimie, were cut off by weather and failed to show for the christening. Only Katharine Asquith got through. Maimie was the only one of the four godparents who was not a Catholic. Evelyn wrote to her afterwards: ‘It is very nice indeed to have you as Godmother of my son. He was christened this morning under the names Auberon Alexander. As soon as he can speak he shall have to say Romanovsky-Pavlovsky.’

  He also told her his big news: ‘I have been given belligerent rights by Mr Churchill in a private army he is starting for purposes of his own and go into training on Jan 1st. I shall be in London to buy uniform before then and will call and see you with great love.’ He knew that he would get good copy out of the war and he duly did: the 1942 novel Put Out More Flags and the autobiographical trilogy Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender (republished collectively as Sword of Honour) are arguably the finest Second World War novels to have come out of England.

  As Christmas approached, he thanked Maimie for sending a beautiful christening cup. He hadn’t yet seen it, but Laura had drawn a picture. He wrote that he was sorry she had influenza and told her how much he was enjoying the barracks at Chatham in Kent where he was in preliminary training for the Royal Marines, joking that compared to Captain Hance’s riding academy it was not ‘very frightening’. Despite his talk of joining up as a private, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and immediately took to the gentlemanly camaraderie of the officers’ mess – not to mention the port. At first he loved everything about the Army, with the exception of the physical training. His love of the good life became a company joke: ‘Mr Wuff, that’s a rifle in your hand, not a cigar!’ He liked the Royal Marine jargon, too: the men saying ‘going ashore to see the madam’ when they meant going home to see their wives.

  The men were affectionate enough in calling him Uncle Wuff. They liked his subversive streak, especially when it was directed against his fellow officers. Once he enquired of a pompous visiting officer if it were true that in the Romanian army no one beneath the rank of major was permitted to wear lipstick. On another occasion he argued in favour of sending in sheep to set off enemy mines. His men were less enamoured of his being a stickler for etiquette and proper procedures and of his love for the past, as when he tried to convince the young men how much better the world was before the invention of electricity. He had cases of claret and burgundy sent up from home. These were known as ‘Waugh’s stores’. He wrote to Laura with news of his little triumphs and disasters: ‘Did I tell you that I have won a complete victory over the Stilton cheese question and it is now properly served?’

  A fellow officer, John St John, later said that Put Out More Flags and the three autobiographical novels gathered as Sword of Honour provided ‘the truest as well as the funniest guide to what the war was really like’. As Peter Pastmaster says in Put Out More Flags: ‘Most of war seems to consist of hanging about. Let’s at least hang about with our own friends.’

  When his unit was transferred to less elegant barracks at a disused holiday camp at Kingsdown in Kent. Evelyn moved out of the main, cold house into one of the huts and installed an oil stove and fur rug sent down from Pixton. It was like boarding school all over again. At Kingsdown he met the brigade commander, St Clair Morford, describing him in his diary as looking ‘like something escaped from Sing-Sing and talks like a boy in the Fourth Form at school – teeth like a stoat, ears like a faun, eyes alight like a child playing pirates. ‘‘We then have to biff them, gentlemen.’’ He scares half and fascinates half.’ Evelyn immortalised him in the figure of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in Men at Arms.

  At the end of January, officers were given leave to live out with their wives. Evelyn sent for Laura and took rooms at the Swan Hotel in Deal. He used this interlude in Put Out more Flags:

  Alastair had a bath and changed into tweeds … Then he took a whisky and soda and watched Sonia cooking … after luncheon he lit a large cigar; it was snowing again, piling up around the steel-framed windows, shutting out the view of the golf course; there was a huge fire and at tea-time they toasted crumpets.

  ‘There’s all this evening, and all tomorrow,’ said Sonia, ‘Isn’t it lovely?’

  During one of those week-ends Sonia conceived a child.

  After further training at Bisley near Aldershot and an aborted plan for his company to go and defend the coast of the Republic of Ireland from a German invasion, he was sent to Cornwall, having achieved the rank of captain. ‘Our task is the defence of Liskeard,’ he informed Laura; ‘None of us can quite make out why anyone should want to attack it.’ After various other postings around Britain, in early September 1940 he found himself serving as battalion intelligence officer on an expedition, undertaken in conjunction with General de Gaulle’s Free French, to capture the port of Dakar in French West Africa.

  This was the first of a number of major military fiascos in which Captain Waugh participated. All of them were described with alarmingly little exaggeration in Sword of Honour. The assault on Dakar was a balls-up from start to finish, ending in an ignominious retreat. In spite of a message from Churchill urging the expedition to complete its mission, the decision was made to turn around. Two other ships in the expeditionary force were badly damaged. Evelyn wrote to Laura: ‘Bloodshed has been avoided at the cost of honour.’ He was so disgusted by the conduct of the Royal Marines that two days later he wrote to the War Office requesting a transfer. With his customary honesty, he told his wife that ‘during the time when we expected to be sent into an operation which could only be disastrous, I realised how much you had changed me, because I could no longer look at death with indifference. I wanted to live and was pleased when we ran away.’

  In Gibraltar, on the way back to England, he received the excellent news that Colonel Robert ‘Bob’ Laycock had got him into the independent company of Army commandos that he had been commissioned to raise. Back in London, he tried to find Laycock in order to confirm the transfer. This took some time (Bob was in fact in Scotland), so there was an opportunity to see old friends – though he was disgusted to find some of them, such as the Coopers, huddling in the Dorchester, sharing rooms and anxiously whispering that the hotel was not steel-framed. He had marched through an air raid in search of Laycock: this co
wardice was not what he was expecting.

  The next day he saw Maimie, and her new husband, and here found the sangfroid absent from the Coopers. Vsev was working as a wine merchant by day and an air-raid warden by night. As usual, Evelyn was irritated by him, though he liked the access to fine wines from Saccone & Speed. The Romanovsky-Pavlovskys had moved from their big house to a cottage behind the Brompton Oratory. ‘She is living a life of serene detachment among acres of ruin,’ Evelyn reported to his wife:

  Her minute house full of opulent furniture, a disorder of luxury – lapdogs, orchids, dishes of grapes, boxes of chocolates, about 50 mechanical toys with which she and Vsevolode play in the evenings. She, very stout, and oddly dressed, exactly like eccentric royalty. She was giving a cocktail party at 12 in the morning ‘because people are so dutch about jaggering me at night’, full of cosmopolitans who kissed her hand. Pam Chichester was staying there with a broken rib having been blown out of two houses. When the party left we had a great luncheon of oysters and gruyere cheese, with two bottles of very old champagne. Then Vsevolode and I smoking cigars a yard long and Maimie smoking one of a good six inches, we went to a matinée. It is not at all London life as Hitler imagines it.