Mad World (32 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
On arrival down under, Boom was in good spirits despite a leg injury. He was delighted to have his favourite son with him for company. They settled in Darling Point, ‘with a small but efficient staff’ and magnificent views.
Darling Point was a prestigious suburb of Sydney with supposedly the best outlook on the harbour. Boom and Hugh lived in Carthona, a magnificent harbourside sandstone mansion located at the end of Carthona Avenue. Built in 1841 for the Surveyor-General Sir Thomas Mitchell, it was one of Sydney’s finest properties. Designed in Gothic style with arched and leaded windows, Carthona resembled a miniature Madresfield on the other side of the world. Boom wrote to Coote with a vivid description of his new home, describing furniture that was comfortable but horribly stained, a big room with gold walls and green furniture, the dining room in black and deep blue and ‘my little room with blue gold chairs and nondescript paper’. A fastidious man of great taste, he noticed every little detail. Though the interior was gloomy, the view more than compensated: ‘I write looking over towards one of the bays with a promontory beyond covered with house half-buried in trees of which many are in purple flowers just now’. He had a daily massage, which took up ‘a heap of time’. He also told Coote that Hugh was hoping to see the Test Match.
There was much talk of cricket in his letters: this was the season of the infamous ‘Bodyline’ series, when the controversial tactics of England captain Douglas Jardine and his fast bowlers led not only to the regaining of the Ashes but also to a major diplomatic incident when the Australian government protested that it was unsportsmanlike to aim at the batsman’s body rather than the stumps. If Hugh did manage to get a ticket for the packed Sydney Test Match in the first week of September, he would have seen the fast bowlers Larwood and Voce decimating the Australians (who were for once without the mighty Don Bradman), while the English batsmen Herbert Sutcliffe, Wally Hammond and the Nawab of Pataudi all scored centuries. It was a famous victory.
Raymond de Trafford came to stay. Boom reported that he had taken a tiny flat and is ‘launched upon a sea of gaiety’. They had taken him to a play and a wrestling match. Boom recovered some of his dignity by becoming President of the Australian Sporting Club. He became involved in the boxing scene, especially enjoying the heavyweight bouts. The
physiques of the lifeguards on Bondi Beach remained a source of much admiration. All in all, Boom wrote to his youngest daughter, ‘Sydney is as delightful as ever and I see just those I like.’
Evelyn returned to England confirmed in his faith and exhilarated by his Italian trip. Meeting Lord Beauchamp had had a profound effect upon him. The theme of the aristocrat in exile, far from his beloved ancestral home was to haunt him. Like Lord Beauchamp, he too was a wanderer, and he now went to Pakenham Hall in County Meath (home of his Catholic friend Frank Pakenham, who later became Lord Longford).
Still he was in love with Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman. Her letters dating from this time give a good indication of the state of affairs. Baby keeping Evelyn at arm’s distance, Evelyn wanting more and becoming increasingly frustrated: ‘Darling Evelyn, Don’t be cross with me and keep ringing off all the time … what do you expect me to do when you say that you might fall in love with me and that your intentions are evil … I mean to try as hard as I possibly can not to behave badly.’
It has been suggested that their relationship was at stalemate because Baby simply did not find Evelyn physically attractive. But it was more complicated than this. Baby, despite her flapper reputation, was very serious about her religion. That is part of the reason Evelyn so loved her, as he did Olivia and as he would later love the woman who became his second wife. Evelyn wanted to have a sexual relationship, but for Baby this was not possible, especially since in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church he was still married. Yet she was also being frustratingly ambivalent: ‘If you weren’t married you see it would be different because I might or I might not want to marry you but I wouldn’t be sure.’
Maimie and Coote, who had witnessed Evelyn’s despair, were furious with her. Sibell recalled that Maimie had a ‘frightful row’ with Baby on Evelyn’s behalf and said: ‘If you’re going on like this with Evelyn, why don’t you go and sleep with him?’ Baby replied: ‘Because I’m saving him from committing a mortal sin.’
In October
Black Mischief
was published. With this book, Evelyn began the practice of lavishly binding a first-edition copy for each of his closest friends. The dedicatees, Maimie and Coote Lygon, would have been top of the list to receive theirs. Evelyn told Diana Cooper that he thought that the book was good ‘in just the same sense that Capt Hance’s
horsemanship is good’. By which he meant professionally most accomplished. But also, ‘I don’t credit it with any real value.’
The reviews of ‘Blackers’ were mixed. Some saw it as a transitional work of increasing seriousness, others as a humorous
jeu d’esprit
in the manner of Ronald Firbank. The novel, drawing on Evelyn’s 1930 visit to Abyssinia for the coronation of Haile Selassie, tells the story of the efforts of the English-educated ‘Emperor Seth’, assisted by a fellow Oxford graduate Basil Seal, to modernise his Empire, the fictional African state of Azania. As Evelyn himself explained, the real ‘savages’ in the novel are the Bright Young Things and European middle-class emigrants. In its juxtaposition of sophisticated and ‘primitive’ cultures, it was an experimental dry run for
A Handful of Dust
, the great novel that grew from his love of Madresfield and his sensitivity to the effect of Lord Beauchamp’s exile on his children.
*
Few people know about this important event in his life. The trip to Rome has escaped his biographers partly because the published edition of his letters only partially prints his ‘Open Letter to the Archbishop of Westminster’ (written in May 1933), omitting the key sentence: ‘I was confirmed privately in Rome last summer by Cardinal Lépicier.’
Evelyn spent time with his parents that autumn, ‘pretty gloomy on account of being v. old and poor’. He often escaped to the Ritz for lunches and dinners. On one occasion he saw Sibell sitting at the next table. Evelyn was cross with her for a bitchy reference to Diana Cooper’s ‘raucous laugh’ in one of her articles. He invited her for cocktails only to tear a strip off her for her betrayal. He only forgave her when she cried and then admitted that her lover Lord Beaverbrook had written the article.
In order to escape from home, he now planned a trip to British Guiana and Brazil, wanting to go ‘among the wildest possible forest people’. South America had caught his fancy in part because of an article that he read in
The Times
on 29 October. Peter Fleming, brother of future Bond-creator, Ian, had written about an expedition in search of an explorer called Colonel Fawcett, who had ventured into the Brazilian jungle in 1925 in search of the fabled lost city of El Dorado. Fawcett was never seen again, but there were rumours of his being held captive by natives, or being worshipped as a god. Fleming’s completed account was published the following year under the title
Brazilian Adventure
. Evelyn met Fleming in London and got his advice about an adventure of his own.
The trip would also be an escape from matters of the heart, the dispiriting relationship with Baby and his casual affair with Lady Lavery.
But the main thing was to get new material. With the publication of
Remote People
and
Black Mischief
, he had exhausted the stock of his African trip. South America would provide him with plenty of fresh copy. He booked a passage to Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana. His plan was to travel on horseback through the jungle to Boa Vista, making full use of the riding skills learned from Captain Hance. Then Manaos, and back to Europe.
Before departing for South America he made a valedictory visit to Madresfield, first to the Lygons and then to Captain Hance. His ‘Collins’ to Maimie (dated November 1932) shows him in good spirits:
Darling Blondy,
Well goodbye-ee don’t cryee wipe the tear baby dear from your eye-ee tho it’s hard to part I know I’ll be tickled to death to go na pooh tootle oo good bye eee.
So it was lovely at Mad and I cant thank you enough for all the innocent pleasure I had there.
Best wishes to you all for the New Year. I hope that before I return you will all be married to royal dukes, mothers of many children and the idols of the populace.
All love and xxxxxxx
A diary entry for 4 December 1932 describes his visit to Mad in the week before his departure. ‘Arrived at Madresfield to find everyone still in bed. Three girls and Hubert in the house. Bloggs and Thom Lea to luncheon, later Lord Dudley, very jaunty. Saw Mr Harrison and Captain Hance and left early next morning with Hubert in his car.’ A letter to Maimie written from the Savile Club, when he was more than a little drunk, suggests how deeply he had fallen in love with Mad:
Well you will say how Bo must have hated staying with me this week-end. However, no, not at all, quite the reverse. I love it and will look back on the noble lines of the Malvern hills that I love so dearly … I was going on to enumerate all the glories of Malvern then I would say how wistfully and with heartache I would look back on them from the jungle.
Already the seed of his next novel was germinating: a man deep in the jungle looking back with wistful heartache on an English country house created in the exact mould of Madresfield.
He met Hazel Lavery in the vestibule of the Savile, and she drove him to North End Road to pick up clean clothes and then took him to have his passport photograph taken for his Venezuelan visa. He tried to see as much of Baby as he could. There were many church visits together, and he was delighted when she presented him with a gold St Christopher to wear around his neck. He later attributed the saving of his life to this medallion. Baby saw him off as he embarked for Georgetown: ‘Deadly lonely, cold, and slightly sick at parting … Down the river in heavy rain and twilight. Heart of lead.’
Christmas was especially difficult. In
Ninety-Two Days
, the travel book he wrote about this trip, he commented that: ‘Everyone has something to be melancholy about at Christmas, not on account of there being anything intrinsically depressing about the feast but because it is an anniversary too easily memorable; one can cast back one’s mind and remember where one was and in what company, every year from the present to one’s childhood.’ Inevitably, spending Christmas of 1932 so far from England, he cast his mind back to Madresfield and the Christmas of 1931. He was invited to Government House in Georgetown for Christmas dinner, and his thoughts returned to the Malverns. He wrote to Maimie: ‘So yesterday it was Christmas and we had very far flung stuff – turkey and mince pies and paper hats … and we drank to ‘‘Absent Friends’’ and everyone cried like Mr Hanson and I thought of you and little Poll and Lady Sibell and Hughie and Lord Elmley … and the Capt. G.B.H. and Min and Jackie and Reggie and Bartleet … God how S[ad].’
He was writing regularly to Maimie and, as usual, kept up an amusing account of his travels and the eccentrics he had met along the way, including an elderly man who talked in his sleep (‘Buy something, fuck you! Why don’t you buy something’). He would soon meet a more sinister eccentric, who would provide him with the starting-point – which became the end-point – for his next novel.
Christmas was also a low-key event for Hugh and his father in Australia, a world away from the lavish traditional celebrations at Mad. Beauchamp
took pleasure in small things such as a gift of a beautiful orange and white dressing gown from his son. He and Hugh were planning a trip to the Blue Mountains, the spectacular range famous for its wildlife and flora and the blue mist in the air, an effect of the oil of the Eucalyptus trees.
Hugh was making the most of the opportunities afforded by Australia in the summer season. He went sailing and speed-boating. Boom wrote to Coote to tell her that he had finally convinced his son of the value of letters, especially to those in exile. ‘Hugh appreciates the fact now! A sinner converted indeed!’
Beauchamp went on to give a poignant depiction of his life. While Hugh was out in the harbour on a speed boat, he sketched his own routine: reading a book in Hugh’s room, a daily morning massage, cocktails at the club, home for luncheon, surfing at Bondi, lawn tennis at home, dinner at 6.45, sleep by ten, embroidery every day. He was still feeling the lack of yellow silk, about which he had complained in an earlier letter. A skilled embroiderer, he sent home as a Christmas gift for Mad the seat covers that he made for the dining chairs. Embroidered in bargello (Florentine flame stitch), they remain there today.
The children would not go to see their mother and Lady Beauchamp wrote that she was missing out on great happiness. There was an element of revenge in their refusal to visit her: they were ensuring that she felt as much of a pariah in Cheshire as their dear father did in Australia. He may have been missing Dickie, but at least he had Hugh. Boom wrote constantly, with Madresfield always on his mind. He had always loved his home, but now that he was in enforced exile his longing for it increased achingly.
Evelyn too, in his shack in the jungle, was thinking of Madresfield, as he was often to do. He wrote to Coote on the first day of the new year of 1933:
Dear Poll,
It is only five weeks since I left Madresfield. Now I am four thousand miles away and oh what a changed world. Instead of the smiling meadows of Worcestershire and the noble lines of the Malvern hills that I love so dearly, I look out upon a limitless
swamp broken only by primaeval forest, desert and mountain. This club, if club it can be called so different is it from the gracious calm of Bucks and Punches, is a low shack on the edge of the jungle. A single oil lamp sways from the rotting beam and so thick are the mosquitoes round it that it sheds only a pale glow. The table has long ago been devoured by ants and I write on my knees crouching on an empty cask … Outside in the night air I can hear the tom-toms of hostile Indians encamped around us and the rhythmic rise and fall of the lash with which a drink crazed planter is flogging his half caste mistress.