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CHAPTER 1
A Tale of Two Childhoods
âMy name is Evelyn Waugh I go to Heath Mount school I am in the Vth Form, Our Form Master is Mr Stebbing.â
So begins his first extant literary composition, a brief self-portrait called âMy Historyâ, written in September 1911, at the age of seven. It is the work of a boy of strong opinions and sharp wit:
We all hate Mr Cooper, our arith master. It is the 7th day of the Winter Term which is my 4th. Today is Sunday so I am not at school. We allways have sausages for breakfast on Sundays I have been watching Lucy fry them they do look funny befor their kooked. Daddy is a Publisher he goes to Chapman and Hall office it looks a offely dull plase. I am just going to Church. Alec, my big brother has just gorn to Sherborne. The wind is blowing dreadfuly I am afraid that when I go up to Church I shall be blown away. I was not blown away after all.
The child, William Wordsworth once said, is father to the man. Here is Evelyn Waugh the writer in embryo: a good hater of bad masters, a spectator of the world who can make ordinary things (like sausages) look funny. He is just going to church: eventually he will be blown in the direction of Rome. His household is comfortably middle class: prep school, domestic servants (Lucy in the kitchen with sausages), the home dominated by Daddy, with his important-sounding job (Publisher) in his dull London office. And a big brother who has just gone to a big, renowned public school: Sherborne. Some years later, an ill wind will blow dreadfully from there, redirecting Evelyn to another school.
Mother is not mentioned in this first little sketch. But Evelyn was closer to her than he was to his father, chiefly because Arthur Waugh, managing director of the publisher Chapman and Hall, idolised his first-born son Alec to an absurd degree. Albeit with good intentions: Arthur was determined not to be like his own father, a sadistic bully who rejoiced in the nickname âThe Bruteâ. Arthur, educated at Sherborne School and then New College, Oxford, had married Catherine Raban, a gentle girl from an English colonial family originally hailing from Staffordshire, in 1893. Their first child, Alexander (âAlecâ) was born in 1898. Arthur called him âthe son of my soulâ and, as the boy grew, developed a relationship with him that was intense, exclusive and all consuming.
Evelyn was born on 28 October 1903 at the family home in Hampstead. When Evelyn was four and the family moved to a larger house, closer to Golders Green, Alec left for boarding school. This might have been the moment when the younger son could have come out from under the wing of Mother and Nurse. But he didnât. Evelynâs relationship with his father always remained difficult. There is already a hint of irreverence in that early sketch, with its dismissal of Chapman and Hallâs offices as âa offely dull plaseâ. Evelyn would grow into a rebellious teenager who carefully cultivated a satirical, worldly, disengaged persona, not least in order to set himself against what he perceived to be his fatherâs nauseating sentimentality and histrionic tendencies.
Arthur Waugh, who was very well respected and connected in the London literary world, had the tastes of his age and class: Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Dickens and cricket (this was the era of the legendary Dr W. G. Grace). The Dickens copyright was the jewel in Chapman and Hallâs crown. Arthur Waugh was rotund, diminutive, with twinkling eyes and candyfloss white hair. Ellen Terry, the greatest actress of the age, had the perfect name for him: âthat dear little Mr Pickwickâ.
In such a literary household, it was probably inevitable that Evelyn should grow up literary â or at the very least that he should view his own family through the filter of books and plays. Arthur Waugh seemed to spend all his time acting out roles. When he greeted visitors, he was the over-hearty Mr Hardcastle of Oliver Goldsmithâs She Stoops to Conquer. In deploring the ingratitude of his sons, he was Shakespeareâs King Lear. Above all, he was Mr Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmithâs Diary of a Nobody. âWhy, I am Lupin!â Evelyn cried out delightedly when he first read the book, identifying instantly with Pooterâs rebellious, loutish and troublesome son. It remained a favourite book, which he regarded as the funniest in the English language. The hilarious clashes in values and attitude between the respectable lower-middle-class civil servant Pooter and his reckless, extravagant son mirrored to a tee Evelynâs sense of his own disjointedness from his father. It is no coincidence that in Brideshead Revisited Lady Marchmain reads Diary of a Nobody aloud to lighten the tension generated by her son Sebastianâs drunken behaviour at dinner.
Evelyn later displayed his fatherâs gift for adopting theatrical roles, particularly in his middle age when the part that he cast for himself was, as he put it in his autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, âthat of the eccentric don and testy colonelâ: âhe acted it strenuously, before his children ⌠and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personalityâ.
Arthur Waugh would have been delighted by Ellen Terryâs Pickwick comparison. He often read Dickens aloud in his marvellously theatrical voice. Though Evelyn, ever the Lupin, affected to despise his fatherâs theatricality (âhis sighs would have carried to the back of the gallery at Drury Laneâ), he also later acknowledged Arthurâs verbal gifts: âhe read aloud with a precision of tone, authority and variety that I have heard excelled only by John Gielgudâ. Had Evelyn lived to witness the celebrated 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead, he would have found it fitting that Gielgud stole the show with his performance in the role of Charles Ryderâs father. Arthur kept Evelyn and his friends enthralled with his readings of Dickens and Shakespeare and his favourite poets. In the autobiography A Little Learning Evelyn wrote of how his fatherâs love of English prose and verse âsaturated my young mind, so that I never thought of English Literature as a school subject ⌠but as a source of natural joyâ.
The account of Waughâs happy childhood in A Little Learning belies the common view that he was deeply ashamed of his middle-class, suburban upbringing. He paints a delightful picture of the pleasures of life at Underhill, the family home on the edge of Hampstead Heath. He felt lucky to be at a day school and not to be sent away to board: âit was a world of privacy and love very unlike the bleak dormitories to which most boys of my age and kind were condemnedâ.
He viewed Hampstead as something like an eighteenth-century pleasure garden. He loved the thrice-yearly fair, with its aromas of âorange-peel, sweat, beer, coconut, trampled grass, horsesâ and the rowdy crowd of âcostersâ from the East End of London, kitted out in pearl-buttoned caps and suits. Feared by some, they were creatures of fascination to the young boy who saw in them a âkind of Pentecostal exuberance which communicated nothing but goodwillâ. It did not seem to matter that father was forever preoccupied with Alecâs triumphant exploits down in Dorset on the playing fields of Sherborne.
At the centre of this small boyâs âparadisalâ world were âtwo adored deitiesâ: his mother and his nurse, Lucy. Mother was associated with âearthy wash-leather gloves and baskets of globe artichokes and black and red currantsâ. Lucy was a devout Christian, âstrictly chapelâ, who loved him unconditionally and was ânever cross or neglectfulâ.
Equally adored was a trio of maiden aunts who lived at Midsomer Norton in Somerset. When visiting in the summer holidays, Evelyn nosed around their house. It was stuffed with Victoriana: cabinets of curiosities, fans, snuff boxes, nuts, old coins and medals. The smell of gas, fruit, oil and leather. The auntsâ life was like something out of the previous century, locked in aspic. A whirl of church bazaars, private theatricals, picnics and games, âthe place captivated my imagination as my true home never didâ.
âSave for a few pale shadowsâ â as, for example, when he almost choked to death on the yolk of a hard-boiled egg â Evelynâs childhood was bathed, he claimed, in âan even glow of pure happinessâ. Like nearly all literary recollections of times past, A Little Learning offers up the image of childhood as a paradise lost, an Eden from which the author has been expelled, a secret garden glimpsed through a door in the wall, an alternative world like the one into which the child tumbles in one of Evelynâs favourite books, Alice in Wonderland. This theme of exile and exclusion from Arcadia would preoccupy him throughout his life and his work. He always felt as if he did not quite belong. That was what fired his imagination and his comic vision. Whether writing about a deranged provincial boarding school, or the exploits of Londonâs Bright Young Things, or the old Anglo-Catholic aristocracy, he was always the outsider looking in.
His sense of displacement from his own family was there from the start, despite all the genuine memories of a happy and stable early childhood. In later years he was never close to his parents and his brother. With Alec away at boarding school, he was drawn to other families. When Evelyn was six he watched three children, two girls and a boy his own age, playing in a nearby street. He befriended the family. In his autobiography he calls them the Rolands. They were actually called Fleming and they became the first of his substitute families, and remained so for more than a decade.
The children built themselves a fort and formed a gang called The Pistol Troop. They endured tests of courage, walking barefoot through stinging nettles, climbing dangerously high trees and signing their names in blood. Evelyn threw himself into these boisterous games. He was as physically brave as a young boy as he would be when a traveller and a soldier in later years.
The children also devised their own magazine and put on amateur dramatics, writing and acting in their own short plays. The magazine, containing one of Evelynâs first stories, was typed and handsomely bound. So began his lifelong obsession with fine bindings. Whenever he finished writing a novel, he had the manuscript expensively bound, and most of his works were produced in not only a mass-market printing but also a beautiful hand-bound limited edition for presentation to friends.
Mrs Fleming thought that Evelyn was an only child, until she was put right by one of her own children: âOh, but he isnât, he has a brother at school whom he hates.â He did not hate Alec. Rather, he accepted with seeming equanimity that the five years that separated him from his brother made âin childhood, a complete barrierâ. Having no sister, he was drawn to female friends and held girls in high regard.
After an appendix operation at the age of nine, he spent time convalescing with a family called Talbot who lived near the Thames Estuary. He was drawn to their stuff â a banjo, old photograph albums, a phonograph, china vases and great coats â but it was the family that really captured his affections: âthe household was extraordinarily Dickensian, an old new world to me. I was very happy there, so happy that I neglected to write home and received a letter of rebuke from my father ⌠I returned home and this glimpse of another world was occluded.â
From this time on, he would always be drawn to glimpsed other worlds and large, seemingly happy families. The Talbots were not rich or grand. Far from it: the money they received for Evelynâs board and lodging was used to release furniture from the local pawnshop. The father, an unemployed old sailor, was mildly drunk every night, but he was a jolly drunk. He built the children a makeshift tree house. It was there that Evelyn and the eldest Talbot girl, Muriel, exposed their private parts to each other.
Despite the idealisation of other families, the impression persists of Evelyn as a happy boy in the âlustrum between pram and prep schoolâ, collecting microscopes and air-guns, squirrelling away âcoins, stamps, fossils, butterflies, beetles, seaweed, wild flowersâ. Like most boys he went through obsessive phases, one year with his chemistry set, another with magic tricks. He was drawn to dexterity, observing the local chemist melting wax to seal paper packages and the Hampstead shopkeepers working deftly with weights and scales, shovels and canisters, paper and string: âAlways from my earliest memories I delighted in watching things well done.â
Years later, when his Oxford friend Henry Yorke took him to his familyâs factory in Birmingham, he was able to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the industrial plant, recording in his diary how impressed he was by the âmanual dexterity of the workers ⌠The brass casting peculiarly beautiful: green molten metal from a red cauldron.â This is not to say that he was drawn to the white heat of a technological future. The manual dexterity of those workers was, he said, ânothing in the least like mass labour or mechanisationâ. Rather, it was âpure arts and craftsâ. His delight in watching things well done was bound up with a sense of custom and tradition. As he admits in A Little Learning, he was in love with the past. He longed for the loan of a Time Machine. Not to take him to the future (âdreariest of prospectsâ), in the manner of H. G. Wells, whose The Time Machine was published just a few years before he was born, but rather âto hover gently back through the centuriesâ. To go back into the past âwould be the most exquisite pleasure of which I can conceiveâ.
If the adult Evelyn had travelled on his Time Machine back to the childhood of one of the aristocrats who would become his Oxford contemporaries, he would have found â and been pleased to find â that little had altered over the years. Hugh Lygon and his siblings were typical products of a system that had endured for generations. For the boys, prep school, Eton and Oxford; for the girls, very little in the way of formal education â a governess who taught in the schoolroom at home and the use of a well-stocked library were deemed to suffice.
Hugh was the second son of William Lygon, the seventh Earl Beauchamp. His early childhood was as far removed from Evelynâs middle-class background as could be imagined: a heady cocktail of aristocracy, eccentricity and piety. Evelyn was effectively an only child once Alec went away to school; Hugh was one of seven. The Lygon family consisted of William, known from his birth in 1903 as Lord Elmley, Hugh (born 1904), Lettice (1906), Sibell (1907), Mary (1910), Dorothy (1912) and Richard (1916). They divided their time between Madresfield Court, their ancestral home nestling beneath the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, Halkyn House, their town residence in Belgrave Square (Londonâs smartest address), and Walmer Castle â which genuinely was an enormous castle in Kent, the earlâs official residence in his capacity as holder of the ancient office of Warden of the Cinque Ports. The family and their immediate entourage moved between houses in their own private train.
At the time of the 1911 census, shortly before Elmley and Hugh went off to board at prep school, the household at Madresfield included a butler, a valet, three footmen, two hallboys, a housekeeper, five housemaids, a nurse, three nursery maids, a cook and four kitchen maids. A coachman and two grooms lived in the stables, while a skeleton staff of four was retained at Halkyn House.
The family were very devout and when at Madresfield they all attended Anglo-Catholic services twice a day in the chapel. All the staff had to attend too, men on the right and maids on the left, with the family in front. High Church rituals were strictly observed: the candle on the right of the altar would always be lit before the one on the left. Each child had a leather-bound prayer book with their name on it, a flower emblem engraved in gold and a loving inscription from their father.
When they were at their London home, the Lygons would cross the city every Sunday to their favourite church in Primrose Hill. Rather surprisingly, they travelled by bus and the newly opened underground railway; Lord Beauchamp in top hat and morning coat, Lady Beauchamp in satin and fur bedecked with jewels. The earl considered taxies an extravagance and thought that Sundays should be a day of rest for cars as well as horses.
The Lygon children disliked their overbearing, pious mother. Lady Beauchamp always insisted on hiring a nanny who had a neat parting precisely in the...
