Mad World (28 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
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).
*
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.
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’’.’