Mad World (25 page)

On this first visit to Malvern he booked himself rooms at the County Hotel, a vast building adjoining the spa. It was a stone’s throw from the Riding Academy in Church Street and close to the cinema – filmgoing was still a favourite pastime for Evelyn.

Baby Jungman’s friendship with the Lygons helped to ease Evelyn’s passage into this new environment. Maimie and her younger sister Coote introduced him to the ferocious Captain Hance. Evelyn wrote to Baby to tell her how grateful he was that the girls had helped to break the ice with Hance, who was devoted to the Lygon family. Evelyn and Captain John Hance got along well, despite Hance’s formidable reputation. Hance had spent eleven years as an army riding-instructor. He swore profusely and could reduce hardened cavalrymen to jelly with his barbs. Famously he had shouted at one unfortunate horseman: ‘You’re not a cadet. You’re an old Piccadilly prostitute on a night commode!’

Hance had set up the very first residential riding school in Malvern.
He ran it with his wife ‘Mims’, his son Reggie and his daughter Jackie, teaching men and women from all over the country, steeplechasers and competition showjumpers, as well as those who wanted to improve their hunting skills. Several of their pupils went on to win at Aintree, the toughest jumping racecourse in the land.

At the time Evelyn attended the school, Hance was at work on a book called
School for Horse and Rider
, in which he argued that the problem with the British civilian attitude to riding was that after a course of ten or a dozen lessons people would be left simply ‘
to pick up
the rest by haphazard experimentation upon a horse’. His book is a passionate manifesto for a newly rigorous and systematic equestrian education. He explained that the minimum period of enrolment in his school was a week, with lessons from 9.30 to 11.30 and 2.30 to 4 in the afternoon, followed by a lecture at 5.30. Every aspect of horsemanship was covered, with particular emphasis on correct posture and good jumping technique. The book is full of illustrations with such captions as ‘A good jump over a blind and hairy place’, ‘A very common sight – the rider’s leg drawn too far back’, and ‘A correct half-passage side-saddle without the help of the leg on the off-side. Note delicate handling of the reins.’ Though he did not say so in the book, he was a hard taskmaster who would throw horse manure at people who could not get their technique correct.

Evelyn joked to his friends that he had taken up riding as a means of social advancement, but this was not strictly true – he had begun to take riding lessons when he was in North Wales, far from high society. Of course it was the case that invitations to big houses in the country carried the expectation, even the obligation, of a ride to hounds, but the real reason for his enrolment at Captain Hance’s was that it was Baby Jungman’s suggestion. Improving his riding was a way to be close to her.

Despite his determination, he never became proficient. His passion only lasted a couple of years, though he later hunted with the Lygons, despite frequent falls. Coote – like all her siblings, a superb rider – laughingly described Evelyn as one of the worst riders she had ever seen, but she said that he and Captain Hance developed mutual admiration for each other’s very different capacities.

The Lygon girls took immediately to Baby’s writer friend. They insisted on his coming to dine at Madresfield. Maimie picked him up after Captain
Hance’s lecture and he found himself being driven up to the great house.

Evelyn had by this time been a house guest in several stately homes. English country houses were becoming a passion, their demise a theme of his novels. Like many, he saw them as a symbol of England. At the same time, his affection for the stability of the country house was connected to his own rootlessness.

Madresfield was special because it had been home to the same family for eight centuries. Like the mythical Brideshead, the real Madresfield had been remodelled several times. Parts were Jacobean, but there had been a major renovation in the style of Victorian Gothic.

Madresfield is a red-brick, moated manor house with yellow stone facings around the doors and windows. On sunny days one could see the golden carp and the blue flash of a kingfisher in the moat, which is twenty feet wide. (Charles Ryder compares Julia Flyte to a kingfisher.) On autumn days such as those when Evelyn first saw the place, a mist would rise out of the moat. The surrounding parkland was once royal hunting country. The house is set in 4,000 acres and has 136 rooms, many of them immense, some tiny.

Four separate avenues of oaks, cedars, poplars and cypresses lead up to the house. There is an enclosed lawn with a succession of statues of Roman emperors. The grounds boast a rock garden, a yew maze said to be better than that at Hampton Court, a wonderful variety of trees and flowering shrubs. In the topiary garden there is a bronze sundial which has carved on it: ‘That day is wasted on which we have not laughed.’ Evelyn and the girls made that motto their own.

This was the house that was the nearest place to home for Evelyn during these nomadic years. Despite its vast size, it feels homely and inviting, but it is nevertheless a million miles away from Underhill. For Evelyn, it was like entering an enchanted world. A door leading from the hall opened into the library, one from the library led up to the chapel, another to the long gallery and a side door to the minstrels’ gallery above the old Tudor dining room. Room upon room was filled with treasures, old masters, fine porcelain, antiques, objets d’art. In
Brideshead
, with all the careless ease of the aristocrat, Sebastian says to Charles, who is fascinated by the house and its treasures, that there are a ‘few pretty things I’d like to show you one day’.

The hybrid of Tudor and Victorian features appealed to Evelyn, who
was a great apologist for the Gothic Revival. The house had its major reconstruction in the 1860s, but Evelyn would have been told by the girls that the most remarkable renovations and improvements were entirely new, undertaken by their father. A leading patron of the Arts and Crafts movement, he had imprinted his taste on every detail from the decoration of the chapel and the library to the many artefacts, lamps, tiles, wall-hangings, window panes, William Morris fabrics, doorplates and carvings that had been introduced. His hand and eye were everywhere in the house that he loved and from which he had just been exiled.

When one sees Madresfield today, the Arts and Crafts style merges seamlessly into the hybridity of the house, yet at the time when Evelyn Waugh saw it, it was contemporary, fresh and cutting edge. It shows Lord Beauchamp as a pioneer.

He and his wife had commissioned C. R. Ashbee to decorate the library. Ashbee’s decorations were original and unique: among his materials were silver-wire, hammered metal, coloured stones and enamel from his guild workshop. His designs ranged from architecture to furniture to jewellery. In 1902, he moved his workshops to Chipping Campden, hoping to create an Arts and Crafts paradise for skilled labourers in the beautiful Cotswold town. This placed him in close proximity to Worcestershire, the county dominated by the Beauchamps.

Between 1902 and 1905 Ashbee designed carvings for the four doors of the library and two large bookcase ends. The latter show the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, forming the centre of a series of images depicting the many paths to learning and wisdom – the scholar, the doctor, the musician, the reaping farmer. At the very bottom of one of the stack ends is a little boy filching a volume, a jokey allusion to the proverb carved above, ‘Thou shalt not steal’. The design, finished by means of intricate pewter doorplates, played simultaneously to Beauchamp’s aestheticism and his wife’s piety.

Above the flight of stone stairs to the chapel is a slightly later addition, a stained-glass window executed by the artist Henry Payne to a design by Beauchamp. It is an illustration of the story in St Matthew’s Gospel of the Roman centurion who begged Christ to heal his servant. The centurion is kneeling at the feet of Christ, in his hand a huge sword. In the left-hand corner of the window is a woman lying on her deathbed whilst a young boy, in tears, is being comforted by his elder sister. The face of the kneeling
centurion is Beauchamp’s own, the sword an allusion to the Sword of State which he bore at the coronation of George V in 1911 (it was shortly after this that the window was designed). The scene behind him replays the death of his mother, his own grief at her death and his sister’s support. At the top of the window there is a grass enclosure with five lambs, representing his children. The face of the Christ resembles that of the earl’s late father.

The figure with the face of the earl himself is sometimes described as that of a sinner seeking forgiveness, but this is to miss the point. In the Gospel story the centurion is not a sinner, he is a master asking for his beloved servant to be healed – the earl always cared for his servants, one way or another. Matthew’s purpose is to illustrate that the high-ranking Roman centurion has extraordinary faith despite being a pagan. He says to Jesus: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word, and my servant will be healed.’ Jesus’s reply is ‘in no one in Israel have I found such faith’; he heals the servant. There is an underground theological tradition of reading this story as Jesus’s endorsement of a homosexual relationship. Historically, it was certainly the case that many Roman masters had sexual relations with their male servants. Whether or not this thought occurred to Lord Beauchamp, there was clearly a complex set of emotions at work in his design of the window – guilt, sorrow, love and faith, but perhaps also desires recognisable to only a few.

Close to the stained-glass window is a little door that opens into the chapel. It was originally two bedrooms known as the King’s Rooms, where Charles II was supposed to have stayed during the Battle of Worcester. The chapel was built as part of the 1865 redesign in the days when there was a resident chaplain taking services for the household every morning and evening. But the extraordinary feature is the Edwardian Arts and Crafts decoration. It was commissioned in 1902 as a wedding present from Lady Beauchamp to her husband. Beauchamp took a deep interest in every aspect of the design. The paintwork, stained glass and metalwork were designed and made by the Birmingham Group, the altar cross an elaborate creation of Arts and Crafts metalwork, decorated with
champlevé
enamel. Everything is of a piece, from candlesticks to sanctuary lamps to gold-embroidered altar frontal.

Most startling of all are the wall frescoes, which feature the Lygon
children amongst a profusion of delicate flowers, all of which could be found in the gardens of Madresfield. There are also lifesize portraits of the earl and countess, fully robed and kneeling in prayer on either side of the altar, below angels and the figure of Christ. The countess is in her bridal gown and veil, the earl in his Garter robes. The frescoes took so long to complete that by the time the chapel was finished all seven of Beauchamp’s children were included. They are represented as beautiful blond cherubic children picking flowers at the feet of an angel. The angels wear printed cotton smocks – the quintessential Arts and Crafts fabric. The whole effect is of a kaleidoscope of colour.

In
Brideshead
Sebastian insists on showing his family chapel to Charles, mockingly describing it as a ‘monument of
art nouveau
’. Waugh’s prose takes flight:

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the Arts-and-Crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

‘Golly,’ I said.

‘It was Papa’s wedding present to Mamma. Now, if you’ve seen enough, we’ll go.’

Evelyn changes the gold triptych to pale oak and the sanctuary lamp and metal furniture to bronze, but otherwise there is no mistaking the Madresfield chapel.

‘Golly’ is an appropriately ambiguous reaction. Charles is distinctly underwhelmed by the art nouveau chapel: ‘I think it’s a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired … I don’t happen to like it much.’ Evelyn’s first impression of the real thing was also far from the usual one of unqualified admiration. He wrote to Baby Jungman: ‘I thought the Boom chapel at Madresfield the saddest
thing I ever saw.’ This may be partly because he sensed that its style did not suit Baby’s Catholic sensibility, but the reaction was also shaped by the knowledge that the family represented as the picture of perfection had been fractured beyond repair.

The third room that Beauchamp dramatically remodelled was the Staircase Hall: a vast room that had been created out of three smaller rooms and made in part to house the enormous Italian pink marble fireplace that was an ostentatious wedding present from the Duke of Westminster to his sister. On either side stand tall freestanding Venetian lanterns collected by the earl and countess on one of their many trips to Venice, their favourite Italian city. When Evelyn saw the room, it had two enormous art nouveau hanging lamps. Carved into the cornice circling the room is a quotation from Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats,
Adonais,
‘Shadows fly: Life like a dome of many coloured glass stains the white radiance of eternity until death tramples it to fragments. The one remains, the many change and pass: Heaven’s light for ever shines.’ This was a text that could be read differently according to disposition: the pious countess took comfort in the eternal light of Heaven, while the earl could contemplate the beauty and transience of the youthful male form embodied by the fragile figures of Keats and Shelley.