Mad World (36 page)

During a June heatwave in London, he went down to Madresfield. Back in London, on 5 July, after a tea party given by Lord Berners, Evelyn
wandered over to Halkyn House to see if any of the Lygon girls were home. Instead he found Hugh, alone in the library, drinking gin. Hugh told him that he was leaving for Spitsbergen in two days’ time with Alexander Glen.

Glen was a Balliol undergraduate. In 1932 his life had changed as the result of a misapprehension. He thought that a friend had invited him to a debutante’s party, only to be told that they were shortly to sail from King’s Lynn. On remarking that the Norfolk coast was an odd place from which to set out for an evening’s drinking and dancing, he was told that the
party
in question was actually a group going to explore the Arctic. But he went along anyway and fell in love with the Far North. He went back the next year, leading a sixteen-man Oxford University summer expedition, which carried out valuable topographical and geological surveys of West Spitsbergen. In the winter he spent some months with the Lapps of northern Sweden.

Now he proposed another trip, on a much smaller scale, which would be an exploratory mission for a full-scale Oxford University Arctic survey that he duly led in 1935–36.

Glen met Hugh at Madresfield, where he was staying after Sibell’s Chepstow Races party. The young explorer asked him if he would like a jaunt and, he recalled, ‘Hughie said he’d love a jaunt.’ Many years later, Glen vividly recollected Hugh’s sweetness and gentleness. Not only was he very quiet and altogether a ‘lovely companion’, he was also intelligent and bookish – not at all the image of him as remembered by others.

Late in life, Glen remembered that the third member of the party, before Evelyn got involved, was to be a man called Anthony Holland whose father had been one of the great West African explorers in the 1880s. He recalled taking Anthony up to Madresfield to meet Hugh. He said that they got on very well before dinner. Hugh’s boxing trainer was there. The trouble began when Anthony got very drunk over dinner. There was a row that culminated in a fight between him and Hugh. Glen recalled that Holland knocked Hughie out when they were taking port and that there was a tremendous scene. He said that the girls, Maimie and Coote, were there. Holland was ‘very stiff upper lip’ and said that he’d better withdraw from the expedition.

According to Glen’s recollection, Evelyn was staying at Mad at the time, and upon Holland’s withdrawal Evelyn asked, ‘Can I come along?’ and
he said: ‘Of course you can come along, and this made it very jolly.’ Evelyn’s diary does not survive for June, when this would have been, so there is no confirmation that he was there at the time – Glen’s recollection came from late in his life and it seems that he was conflating the evening at Mad with a meeting in London. The impression given by Evelyn’s journal, which resumes after a long silence with the Berners tea party, was that his decision to join the party was made on a whim so as to escape the hot and tedious London summer: ‘I said I would go to Spitzbergen too. Then I went back to dress. While I was in my bath Sandy Glen rang me up and came to see me. We had champagne while I dressed. He said it was all right my going to Spitzbergen with him. I gave him £25 for fares and he gave me a list of things I should need.’

This accords with the much less dramatic account of the origin of the trip that Glen recorded in his 1935 book
Young Men in the Arctic
: ‘We were due to leave Newcastle on 7th July, and on the evening of the 5th I received a message from Lygon to say that Evelyn Waugh was very keen on joining us. Supplies had been ordered for two, but I had left a small safety margin which was nearly sufficient for a third person.’

The next day Evelyn met up with Hugh at Halkers where they drank gin. Then they went to Lillywhite’s to buy equipment for the trip – skis and ice axes and balaclava helmets. Evelyn tried on windproof clothes and bought a sleeping bag and cover. Sandy was very pleased that Evelyn thought to lay in a crate of chocolate and a supply of morphine. Later on Evelyn rang ‘The 43’, an infamous club in Gerrard Street, Soho – ‘half a speakeasy and half a brothel’, according to Alec Waugh – and requested his favourite girl, Winnie (the name he gave to the daughter of the woman hired for the divorce assignation in
A Handful of Dust
). When they said that she had not arrived, he went to her flat. He noted drily in his diary that ‘she put up a good show of being sorry for my departure’. In fact, when he departed Winnie was the only person who sent him a good-wishes farewell telegram. ‘Nothing from Madresfield,’ he told his diary.

The next morning he went to Mass ‘to confess Winnie’. Then back to Halkers to drink gin. They drank Black Velvets in the heat of the afternoon on the train from King’s Cross to Newcastle. Sandy struggled to keep up with the two seasoned drinkers. He had never drunk Black Velvet before and was soon feeling the effects.

On board the passenger ferry to the Far North they had more drink
and met a Norwegian alcoholic who smashed light bulbs with his head. To kill time on the slow passage up the Norwegian coast, Hugh and Evelyn played piquet and had a beard-growing competition: ‘Hughie’s is golden and even. Mine appears to be black and patchy.’ Evelyn cut his head and looked ‘disreputable’ in his bloodied bandage. Their appearance and their propensity to drink large quantities of alcohol meant that the English passengers ‘ceased making friendly advances’.

Evelyn grew irritated by Glen, calling him ‘the leader’ in his diaries and telling jokes and stories that only Hugh would have known about, but Glen insisted on laughing and joining in. Glen was the experienced one and they had to follow his lead. Hugh and Glen were much fitter, physically, than Evelyn, who had allowed himself to get out of shape with his partying during the previous months.

On 14 July they set sail on the last leg of the journey, from Tromsø to Spitsbergen. Conditions were not good; there was a heavy swell and Hugh and Glen were sick. It was difficult to sleep with ‘golden sunlight streaming into the cabin all night’: Evelyn took a treble dose of sleeping draught and crashed out for thirteen hours. At about seven in the evening they came into sight of Spitsbergen, ‘Black mountains with glaciers flowing down to the sea between them – occasionally a narrow silver strip between iron grey sky and iron grey sea, the glaciers brilliantly white.’ At Advent Bay the view was desolate, cloudy and dark: ‘the higher slopes below the clouds were marked like zebra with white streaks of snow’. Small copper-green icebergs floated near the banks. They rowed in a small whaling boat to get to their camp. Glen remembered that the rowing was fairly rough and that Evelyn struggled, but was terribly brave: ‘He was frightfully out of condition but he’d never give up.’

Their base was called Bruce City. It consisted of four huts and a glacier. There were supplies there from Glen’s earlier expedition. Evelyn and Hugh were annoyed when Glen gave a bottle of rum to the whaling crew. Terns swooped at their heads in a hostile manner, though Evelyn was fascinated to find that the supplies left from the previous year were in first-rate condition.

After a night’s rest they rowed across a fjord to another, smaller bay. Evelyn described the scene in his essay ‘The first time I went to the north’:

Seals bobbed up in the water all round us; there were innumerable small icebergs, some white and fluffy, others deep green and blue like
weathered copper, some opaque, some clear as glass, in preposterous shapes, with fragile, haphazard wings and feathers of ice, pierced by holes. The whole bay was filled with their music, sometimes a shrill cricket-cry, sometimes a sharp, almost regular metallic ticking, sometimes the low hum of a hive of bees, sometimes a sharp splintering, sometimes a resonant boom, coming from the shore where another crag of ice broke away from the underhung glaciers. The fog cleared about midnight, the sun lay on the horizon and in the superb Arctic light, that is both dawn and sunset, the ice face shone clear and blue to the white snow above it and the water was dense indigo.

The trigger-happy Glen was startled by Evelyn’s objection to his killing a seal on the grounds that all life was sacred. Glen was struck by this ‘tenderness’ in Evelyn and said that it made a great impression on him: ‘he was very powerful’ as a personality, he recalled. Glen’s published account of the expedition contains a close-up photograph of a seal but not, alas, one of Evelyn and Hugh.

The first task was to move the stores. They planned to climb a glacier three miles away, across a mosquito-infested valley of mud and sharp stone. They had to carry everything on their backs: ‘we made two journeys a day, taking between thirty and forty pounds in a load. It was beastly work.’ Once they were on the snow they felt that the worst of their labours were over. They were wrong. On the second day there was heavy rain and the great thaw made trudging across the wet snow even harder, especially as they had now loaded the sledge and were without dogs. Hugh and Evelyn went in front, harnessed with the ropes to pull, while Sandy Glen, exercising the prerogative of the expedition leader, stood behind to steer and push. After two exhausting hours they had barely gone a hundred yards. Glen later remarked, ‘Lygon and Waugh had never seen a glacier before, let alone taken part in a sledge journey, and they had pictured our travelling twenty miles or so a day over a crisp, smooth surface.’ Far from the snow being crisp and smooth, it was wet and soft.

Hugh had a particular aversion to getting wet, but it was his fate to be constantly soaked through. Again, Evelyn struggled as he was not as physically fit as the others, but he never complained. They had to move the stores in two loads, and it took a week of ten-hour shifts carrying
half the provisions on their backs and then returning for the sledge. In the exceptional thaw due to the warm temperatures their clothes and bedding became soaked, and it was impossible to dry them out. Their small primus stoves were used to boil oatmeal and pemmican (dried meat mixed with melted fat), which Evelyn found disgusting. He also found the skis very hard going in the soggy snow. Glen drew his attention to an excellent ski instruction manual in their supplies. It emphasised the necessity of not regarding skis as two boards glued to one’s feet. ‘Above all,’ it said, ‘be happy, whistle.’ Evelyn had the utmost contempt for this, Glen reported: ‘his skis were a painful necessity fixed rather inevitably to his feet, and he would not look upon them as anything but despicable athletic implements’. Hugh, by contrast, was ‘amazingly good’ on his skis. Evelyn had a similarly disdainful attitude to the porridge that was the basis of their diet, with the result that he lost even more weight than the others in the course of the expedition – Glen was amazed at how much work he got through, considering how little he ate.

There was fog all around and tempers frayed as Glen changed his mind about climbing the glacier. He decided to turn west in the hope of finding a trapper’s hut and a boat used on his last expedition. Evelyn was extremely pessimistic about the prospect. They came to the mouth of the Mittag-Leffler glacier, from the base of which a small number of streams trickled into the sea. Dense fog surrounded them, so they set up camp and slept. When they awoke the fog had lifted and the landscape was beautiful, laced with Arctic flowers such as saxifrage and wild poppies. They breathed in ‘the unique Arctic night, not a breath of wind, immaculate’. The next day was as blissful, as they moved among a mass of bird life: terns, duck and geese laying on nests so close together and in such a great mass that it was almost impossible not to stand on them.

They reached the trapper’s hut and Evelyn was left to clean it while Hugh and Glen returned to the old camp for the stores and tent. Evelyn cleaned the hut, chopped wood, tended the stove and then fell asleep, but not for long. Soon after, Glen burst in ‘in a state of some agitation’. The small streams had burst and turned into torrents in the few hours since they had crossed the river. Hugh had managed to wade across to their former camp, but Glen had not. Hugh, drenched to the skin, had stripped off his clothes, presenting Glen with the sight ‘of an entirely naked man running along the side of a glacier six hundred miles from the North
Pole’. The problem now was that Hugh could not cross back again without the help of the other two.

Half an hour before they even reached the glacier, Evelyn could hear the roar of the water: ‘the flow was terrific … running at a dizzy speed, full of boulders and blocks of ice whirling down in it’. The ice threatened to knock them off their feet. The danger of being swept away was extreme, so the two men tied themselves together with tarred twine and were able to pull each other through the freezing water.

When they saw Hugh, he was laden with supplies. They threw him the twine on a ski stick and managed to drag him across, but at the last minute, with Glen safely back on the glacier, Evelyn was knocked over by an ice boulder, pulling Hugh down with him. The powerful current swept them away together. ‘I had time to form the clear impression,’ Waugh remembered, ‘that we were both done for.’ But then the twine snapped, and ‘I found myself rolling in shallow water and was able to crawl ashore.’

Hugh was stuck on a small iceberg upstream and there seemed to be no way of rescuing him. Evelyn and Glen shouted at him to throw away his backpack, but he wouldn’t. Hugh finally got to his feet and waded across, still fully loaded. Evelyn had ‘uncertain memories of how we got back to the hut’. He was badly shaken and it took Hugh a long time to thaw out: ‘We seem to have rubbed one another with sand to get back our circulation. Our jaws were out of control, set tight with cold or chattering so that we could not speak.’ Glen remembers making a massive fire with the large quantities of driftwood that lay about. They dried their clothes and themselves. They slept and then awoke to find themselves covered in cuts and bruises.

Evelyn was very angry about the incident. They only had flour and some sugar to eat and a decision had to be reached as to what to do next. They could attempt the river, they could wait for the trapper to return to the cabin, or they could climb up into the mountains, a longer route that would take them above the river and back to their original base, where there were supplies and their boat. Evelyn recalls that Glen wanted to wait for the flood to abate. Although Hugh’s knee was badly injured, Evelyn suggested setting off across the mountains: ‘I did not think it would be successful, but it seemed preferable to waiting.’ Glen recalls that he favoured staying, thinking that the river would block itself again. Hugh, as always, was very detached and totally unconcerned in the nicest
possible way. He did not complain about his knee, but they had to wait until he felt well enough to walk. Glen remembers Evelyn shrieking at him that the whole business was ‘typical of your folly’. Glen was unperturbed and agreed to try the mountain route, a trek of seventy miles without proper supplies and only half a bowl of pemmican a day.