Authors: Paula Byrne
Mad World (37 page)
In the meantime, they had a further local difficulty. They had lost their hats in the disastrous river crossing. This not only exacerbated their coldness, but also created a problem with the terns. In
Young Men in the Arctic
, Glen explains their resourceful response:
Many of them were nesting near the hut and they resented our presence. If one as much as ventured outside, a crowd of angry shrieking terns would dive in turn at one’s head and only the thickest balaclava helmet gave adequate protection from their pecks. After much thought we hit upon our ration bowls as substitutes, but the loud ping, which announced that a tern had made a bull’s eye, seemed to encourage every other bird in the neighbourhood to join in the attack. A few days later we made the great discovery that if we held a long stick above our heads, it, instead of the head, became their target.
Once Hugh was able to walk, they set off. They did the journey in three days. They slept two nights in the open in damp and windy weather. Going over the top of a col, they took shelter from an incoming storm under an overhanging rock. Evelyn, huddled close to Glen, made ‘a splendid comment, saying ‘‘If I hadn’t joined the Church of Rome four years ago I could never have survived your appalling incompetence’’’ – he stood bolt upright in the midst of the storm to make this pronouncement. ‘Hughie, very typically, was making himself comfortable under the rock, taking no notice of this.’
They had been on their feet for over twenty-four hours when they at last saw their base camp, separated from them by a shallow stream. Hugh and Evelyn refused to take another step. Glen’s hunger drove him on and when he got to the hut he lit a huge fire and made a meal. ‘Then conscience struck’: he made some scones, filled them with redcurrant jam and chucked them over the river. Waugh and Lygon fielded them very well, so Glen’s conscience was salved. They finally came back to the hut and that was the end of the journey.
They slept for thirty-six hours, regained their strength and rowed back to the Norwegian coalmine from where they had begun.
For Evelyn, the experience was ‘hell – a fiasco very narrowly rescued from disaster’, as he put it in a letter to Tom Driberg. His essay on the adventure, published in a collection by various authors entitled
The First Time I
– , was duly subtitled ‘Fiasco in the Arctic’. He said that he could have called it: ‘The first time I ever despaired of my life’. Evelyn did, however, acknowledge that the Arctic had many advantages over the tropics. There was constant light in which to read, everything was clean, cuts healed quickly, food remained fresh for weeks at a time, there were no insects, no microbes and no poisons – none of that unending warfare against corruption, the sterilising and disinfecting, the iodine and the quinine, mosquito nets and snake boots that impeded one in the tropics.
The ever-sanguine Glen recalled the whole experience as a joyous one and had nothing but praise for Evelyn’s courage and tenacity: ‘Hughie was quite fit. Evelyn was very unfit, but enormously brave, you see, he just never gave up.’ He looked back with pleasure on the evenings when they drank whisky and smoked cigars. The conversation was ‘very far reaching and very good’. He was aware that, being a decade older than he was, Hugh and Evelyn knew more about life and art and people, though less about the Arctic, than he did. He found Evelyn an easy and pleasant companion: ‘I found him sweet, absolutely.’ He excused Evelyn’s bad temper as mere insecurity – a tendency to panic. He admired Evelyn’s response to the beauty of the landscape and the wildlife, though found it hard to understand a man who would exclaim ‘I hate dogs.’ Yes, Waugh had panicked over the torrent incident, but he had shown ‘enormous bravery overcoming his own panic’.
Glen’s account captures perfectly Hugh Lygon’s insouciance and phlegmatic disposition. He comes across as a remarkable character: a tall, handsome, muscular young man with his golden beard and athlete’s physique, but also calm (preternaturally so) and somehow finding his corner of the mountain to take shelter in. His gentleness was a foil to Evelyn’s vivacity, vigour and irritability. He shone in his ability to joke and to talk intimately with Evelyn.
Glen saw that Hugh and Evelyn were ‘very, very close’. There were non-stop jokes between them, which in time he began to share: ‘Jokes were far more dangerous than anything else, because your tummy was so
sore with laughter … it was hysterical.’ The two friends were perfectly balanced. Evelyn was a worker, who drove himself too hard, while everything ‘just bounced off’ Hugh. The third man saw that in some ways Evelyn wanted to be Hugh. He also felt that Waugh was ‘extremely kind’ in not making him feel gauche and immature. And that he didn’t leave him out, even though he and Hugh were such close friends.
Both Evelyn and Hugh had distant relationships with their own older brother, so they became brothers to each other. They talked a lot about Oxford and London life and mutual friends and of course Madresfield. And about politics and about Germany, but not, according to Glen, about religion. The intimacy created by their condition so far from home and in such a hostile environment led Evelyn to open up in a way that was rare for him. Glen listened in as Evelyn poured out his heart to Hugh: how he was conscious that Alec was always his father’s favourite son and how different he was from Alec, not sharing his obsession with cricket and his womanising ways; how he longed to escape from Highgate and his father not because he disliked his father, but because he disliked his ‘rather bourgeois dullness’; how he loved sophisticated frivolity, which he found cathartic; how he loved that Madresfield was run by the girls, and that Maimie and Coote were always so glad to see him.
Glen, who admired the Lygon girls himself, felt that Evelyn was especially close to Coote, though people always thought it was Maimie. He reckoned that Coote underestimated Evelyn’s ‘very great affection for her’. This was typical of her modesty. Glen recalled his own mental picture of Coote sitting in the window doing petit point – ‘one of these vivid little pictures of life’. He regarded her as one of those people who was really unaware of whether she was rich or poor, with something of the gypsy in her (later she would work in Turkey, then live on a river boat on the Thames).
Sandy Glen’s memories reveal Evelyn and Hugh at their best. They were not only brave and hard working, but also terrific company. He wrote in
Young Men in the Arctic
of how conversation ran often upon food, which was hardly surprising considering how hungry they always were. He remembered one particular conversational fantasia:
Dordogne was eventually chosen for a later holiday by Lygon and Waugh. As good food and good wine can best be appreciated after
exercise, they decided to take a valet-chauffeur. He would precede them and find the best villages to which they, in their turn, would walk from their previous evening’s abode. Baths run, clean clothes laid out, and finally the most carefully chosen dinner and wines would await their arrival. Books, people and travel were the main subjects when we tired of food itself. We cut out lunch and ate twice a day, so it was in the morning and evening that we did most of our talking. The greatest joy in sledging comes when supper is over and conversation exhausted: then there are no limits to the flights to which thoughts may take one. The while one’s pipe sends up its drowsy smoke, in intertwining streaks of blue and grey.
The Dordogne remained a fantasy. Evelyn and Hugh would never share such intimacy again.
They returned to Mad at the end of August, informing Coote and Maimie that they had had mountains in the Arctic named after them.
There is a remarkable passage in
Brideshead Revisited
after Cordelia’s long description of Sebastian and his doomed future as an alcoholic. Charles lies awake, tossing and turning, thinking about his friend:
And another image came to me, of an Arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide, and tumble, high above, gather way, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.
This extraordinary metaphor of destruction, building in a rolling sentence that is itself like an accumulating snowball, is a memory of the trip to the Arctic with Hugh. It is the literary legacy of the fiasco in the north.
While Hugh and Evelyn were narrowly escaping disaster in the Arctic, Lord Beauchamp was once more wandering the globe. He returned from Australia to Lord Berners’s flat in Rome. Maimie took her turn to go out and stay with him. Evelyn returned to Highgate again, using his parents’ home as a base while he saw his friends and regaled them with his Arctic adventures. His father’s diary grumbles that he came in late when everyone else had gone to bed, leaving lights on and doors open. Lupin had returned from yet another harebrained scheme to annoy and frustrate his parents. Arthur’s diary certainly has the aura of Mr Pooter: ‘Evelyn brought gin bitters, and I drank them for lunch … went up to K’s, did 1/3 of the crossword and had a nap … Had a good dinner of egg-salad, duck and green peas and pears. Went early to bed, leaving K and Evelyn to argue and play cards.’
Evelyn wrote to Maimie: ‘Well it must be decent at Rome but very full of traffic because all roads lead there. If you see the Pope please tell him to jolly well get a move on with my annulment.’ Then another letter: ‘Darling Blondy, So I too am staying with my Boom. At present it is all dignity and peace but I expect we shall soon have a quarrel and black each others eyes and tear our hair and flog each other with hunting crops like the lovely Lygon sisters.’
He told Maimie that he was going to spend a studious autumn writing the life of ‘a dead beast’ (i.e. Catholic priest) – the Jesuit martyr,
Edmund Campion. He also wrote that he had dined with the Yorkes and that ‘Henry loved your Boom’ – so Henry Yorke must have been another of the old Oxford set who went out to stay with the exiled earl. And, he continued, ‘I wish you had seen me at the N. Pole. I had great sex appeal – thin as Bartleet.’ He was very pleased with the reception of
A Handful of Dust
: ‘the good taste book I wrote about sponger is being a success and wherever I go the people shout Long Live Bo and throw garlands of flowers in my path and I have a brass band to play to me in my bath’.
‘Handfulers’, as they called it, was published in September. In the library at Madresfield there is a first edition inscribed ‘To Hughie, to whom it should have been dedicated’.
Diana Cooper told him that everyone was raving about the new book. She shared the general admiration, but she also chided him: ‘You were so very hostile when you left for the Pole that you froze the voicing of my praise.’ In his reply he tried to explain to her how he felt about friendship, but later he crossed out the paragraph:
The trouble is that I find the pleasures of friendship need more leisure than you can possibly give to it at the present. Also that I am jealous and resentful and impatient though you are none of those things. It is of no interest to me to see you in a crowd or for odd snatches of ten minutes at a time. Perhaps in thirty years time when some of your adherents have died or fallen away.
This self-censored comment provides a good insight into his exacting view of the requirements of friendship. There are shades of that other goddess Diana (Guinness) whose friendship had been so important to him but whom he had lost because he was jealous and couldn’t bear to be in second place. By contrast, his friendship with the Lygons endured, because they put him at number one or at the very least had the grace to give him the impression that they did. Later that month he took two of the sisters (Sibell and Coote) to a boxing match. And he wrote to Maimie to tell her that he had seen lots of mutual chums at Nancy Mitford’s wedding to Peter Rodd.
He was at home for most of September and then went off to Chagford, asking the sisters to write to him. He planned to make a start on the
Campion biography and also wanted to finish two short stories, ‘Mr Cruttwell’s Little Outing’ and ‘On Guard’.
He wrote to ‘Darling Poll’ from Chagford: ‘Did you know that in the glorious epoch 1900–1914 [does he mean 1914–18?] the word ‘‘poll’’ was used by our gallant boys … to mean a tart … so now I shall give up calling you Poll on account of its being disrespectful. Darling Dorothy.’ He once again joked that he had found a prospective husband for her: ‘I went to Longleat yesterday and thought it a bad taste house and there was a poor lonely old man called Lord Bath and he had his little dinner laid out on the table god it was sad why not marry him?’ The letter also includes a smutty joke of the kind that he liked to reserve for letters to her: he had been reading a ‘feelthy’ book which ‘says that in rogering the cock should never be withdrawn so much as a millimetre and this gives the maximum pleasure to the lady on account of pressing her bladder’. On a rather different note he told her that he had visited a chapel where there was a stained-glass window with a portrait of the local earl as a child and that this had reminded him of her family chapel – ‘as it might be Elmley etc at Mad’. He begged her to send him a birthday card because he got ‘none last year and it made me very sad’. He asked her to ‘tell Hughie to hurry up and have catholic lessons’ – despite Sandy Glen’s protestation to the contrary, the question of faith may have been something they discussed at Spitsbergen. The letter ended with the news: ‘I wrote a funny short story about a loony bin and a very dull one about a dog who bit a lady’s nose. That dog was rather like Grainger only not as intellectual perhaps more like Wincey but god it was a bad story. Please give my best love to your sweet sister and your disgusting friends, Bo.’
