My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (20 page)

The Invalids were very different.
England, Their England
is dedicated to Squire. He figures in its pages as Mr Hodge. The book is comic and the comedian's licence to exaggerate is freely used. Into the famous cricket match are crowded the high spots of a dozen matches, and no real game could have ended in that kind of a tie with half the fielders colliding in mid-wicket. It is full, rich caricature. But in the presentation of Mr Hodge's captaincy and management there was no caricature at all. It really was like that.

I first met the Invalids as an opponent in the summer of 1921. I was living in Ditchling and captained the village side. Squire had wanted to make it a whole-day match. But it was harvest time, the villagers could not get away, so we agreed on a one-thirty start with a buffet lunch first for the visitors in my bungalow. I expected my guests around midday, but the first opponent appeared at half past nine, in the belief that it was a whole-day match. I have forgotten his name. I have never seen him since, he was a very silent man. I soon began to hope that other members of the side would be under a similar misapprehension, but the slow passing hours of the morning were only broken by a couple of telegrams for Squire from players who had been delayed. Noon came, half past twelve, one o'clock; then the solitary arrival and myself ate a portion of the lunch, covered over the remains in the hope that they would be reasonably fresh at supper-time, and made our way to the ground where the villagers were patiently waiting for the ‘toffs from London'. Eventually the game began at five to four, with the last two places filled by an eleven-year-old schoolboy and the taxi driver who had driven half the side from the remote station to which they had been misdirected.

I will not call that a typical experience—but it was an effective introduction to the Invalids. Squire was at that time the busiest man of letters in the country: more often than not he was forced to leave the writing of his Sunday article for the
Observer
till the Saturday morning, and most regular members of his side can recall fidgeting in his study, beside the messenger who was waiting to take down his manuscript to the printer, while the Invalids, one by one, were assembling forty miles away in a Sussex pub. Every regular Invalid has his own pet story of a side six short without its captain being put in to bat and desperately trying to hold out till lunch when a further instalment of players might be expected.

No side can have been managed more capriciously off the field and its management in the field was unexpected. Squire, unlike Bax, had not had, well, how shall I put it—the conventional grooming of a cricketer, and he captained his sides, as Hitler led his armies, not from a study of the textbooks but by the light of poetic intuition.

In a half-day game once against a good side on a good wicket, he opened his attack with his second and third change bowlers. At tea, with the score at 165 for two, he explained his plan. ‘I thought I would get two or three quick wickets, then loose my good bowlers, when they were fresh, against the tail.'

He enjoyed bowling, and some maintained that his tactics in the field were dictated by the subconscious need to create a situation when he would be justified in putting himself on to bowl. He had, as a bowler, some curious idiosyncrasies. The average captain, when deciding from which end he will prefer to bowl, studies the slope of the ground and gauges the direction of the wind with a wetted finger. Squire looked at the sun. ‘I'll go on this end,' he would say. ‘At the other end the glint of the sun upon the stumps would put me off.' ‘Mr Hodge,' A. G.
MacDonell wrote, ‘was a poet, and therefore a theorist and an idealist. Every ball that he bowled had brain behind it, if not exactness of pitch.' He took a four-step trot, and tossed high into the air a ball guileless of spin and swerve. It was astonishing how often he broke a partnership.

But the most remarkable feature of a remarkable eleven was Squire's capacity to get the best play out of his side. Was it an innate gift of leadership or did the memory of an earlier Sir John who would not ‘march through Coventry with that', inspire or rather goad a reasonable club cricketer, who recognized how hopelessly the odds were laid against him, into a desperate resolve to put a face on things? Something of both most likely. Certainly most regular Invalids will admit that they played ten per cent above their normal form for Squire and two high victories stand upon his records—against a strong R.A.O.C. side at Aldershot, when that fine musician Walton O'Donnell took seven wickets and made over 80, and at the Oval against the Lords and Commons largely owing to a three-figure partnership between Clifford Bax and that sound writer of detective stories, Milward Kennedy, who appeared on the score card disguised by his baptismal name, M. R. K. Burge.

It is one of the anomalies of leadership that Squire, untrained as a cricketer, with no skill at the game and little knowledge of it, should have been able to get the best out of his team, while as editor of the
London Mercury
, with his great knowledge of literature and feeling for the humanities of literature, he should not have been able to get the best work out of his friends. The rates of pay on the Mercury were low but most writers would sooner have £10 from a paper they respect and an encouraging editor who takes pleasure in their work than £30 from
an impersonal, commercially-minded magazine. Over the years a number of excellent poems, essays and stories appeared within the yellow covers of the
Mercury
, but few of Squire's juniors felt when they had reached a final sentence, ‘This really is rather good. I'll let Jack have first look at it.'

I wrote in my
Early Years
in explanation of the fact that it contained so little about my brother, ‘I lack the key to Evelyn. I cannot enter imaginatively into the mind of a person for whom religion is the dominant force in his life, for whom religion is a crusade.… You cannot appraise a stained-glass window if you look at it from the outside and, not possessing that key to Evelyn's nature, I might give in a full-length essay… a misleading picture of him.' I was afraid ‘that I might get the picture out of focus. I might lay the wrong emphasis on certain episodes, and mislead rather than guide his readers.'

But when I wrote that, I could not have foreseen that Evelyn would never finish his own autobiography; and though for those same reasons I do not feel myself competent to draw a full-length portrait of him, I do feel that I owe it to his memory to sketch for the benefit of his readers a picture of his early days, up till his conversion.

During the last fifteen years of his life, I saw him so seldom that I can remember each separate occasion on which we met—there were fewer than a dozen—weddings and funerals, his libel action against Nancy Spain; once we lunched in London; once a trip of his to Monte Carlo coincided with one of mine to Villefranche. I twice visited him in his house in Somerset. But though we met so little, we were in constant touch. We frequently corresponded; I have a large folder of his letters which I shall one day annotate and edit for presentation to a university library. I was very conscious of him down there in Combe Florey, at work among his books or pottering round his garden. I was questioned about him constantly. Mutual friends would recount this or the other
piece of gossip. When something happened I would think, ‘That will make Evelyn chuckle. I must write to him.' I still involuntarily go on thinking that. I cannot believe he is no longer here.

The only period when we were really close was the decade between his going up to Oxford and my second marriage—January 1922 to October 1932. I saw little of him during his childhood. He was by five and a quarter years my junior. Two-thirds of the year I was away at a boarding school. He took no interest in athletics. When my father announced his birth, I said, ‘Good, now we'll have a wicket keeper.' But my attempts to teach him cricket inculcated in him a permanent repugnance for the game.

He was, inevitably, something of a nuisance to me. Presumably I was to him. In our first home, in West Hampstead, my nursery cricket—a game I played by myself—was restricted by the danger of hitting a ball into his cot. When we moved to Underhill, a larger house, I at first left the nursery to him, and spent the winter daytime reading in my father's book-room. But after a while I became interested in billiards, and a small table was installed in the nursery. Evelyn must have regarded this as an invasion of his territorial rights.

It is probable that he realized that I considered him a nuisance and that he resented it. He made friends, soon after we moved to Underhill, with a family that lived a quarter of a mile away in a house called Wyldesmead. He has described how he and this family organized ‘the Pistol troop', to resist the German invasion which at that early day was to them obviously imminent. A clay heap in a builder's plot was fortified, and provisions for a siege were buried. The parents of the family, who had not yet met my parents, were for a time under the impression
that Evelyn was an only child. ‘Oh no,' said one of them, ‘he has a brother whom he hates.'

It is possible that I was not very kind to Evelyn. I can still visualize the occasion when my mother lectured me on this point. We were spending an August with my father's family, where I had to see rather more than usual of my brother. My mother said, ‘I don't like hearing your aunts complain that you aren't kind to Evelyn.'

I fancy that I, an indulged child, very much my father's favourite, grew up with a superiority complex. I was confident that I was going to make a considerable mark in the world. Evelyn may well have felt himself relegated to a second place. He once said to his mother, ‘Daddy loves Alec more than me. But you love me more than you love Alec' This was indeed true, but my mother felt that she should not show favouritism. ‘No,' she said, ‘I love you both the same.' ‘Then I am lacking in love,' he said.

When I returned for the school holidays, my father used to paste over the face of the grandfather clock in the hall, ‘Welcome home to the heir of Underhill'. Evelyn's comment on this was—he was then only six—'When Alec has Underhill, and all that's in it, what will be left for me?' My father never put the notice up again. The incident had an amusing sequel; forty years later my mother, who had inherited my father's estate, apart from his library which had been left to Evelyn and myself, consulted me about her will. She had not a great deal to leave, apart from the furniture, most of her capital having been invested in an annuity. I was by then a resident alien of the United States. I had no need for furniture. Evelyn had six children; reasonable provision had been made by my father-in-law for my three children; Evelyn had contributed generously to his mother's support during her last years, so that it seemed to me both equitable
and trouble-saving for me to disinherit myself. With some reluctance she agreed and made Evelyn her sole heir, so that in the end it was Evelyn who got ‘Underhill and all that's in it.'

Cyril Connolly reviewing a life of Ian Fleming wrote in connection with the rivalry, fostered by their mother, between Ian and his elder brother, Peter, ‘One can detect a similarity of predicament as between Alec and Evelyn Waugh and Peter and Ian Fleming, but one can strain Adlerian principles too far. Without Peter (or Alec) the second brothers might have done just as well.' But it is indeed possible that Evelyn as a second son was challenged to assert himself. He seemed to detect a conspiracy against him between his father and his brother, though he treated it jokingly; when he was sixteen or so he appeared in a tail-coat at an evening party. The neighbours to whom I have referred, commented on his smartness. ‘It was my father's coat,' he said, ‘then it was Alec's; now it is mine. In fact it has come down from generation to generation of them that hate me.'

Evelyn has described his childhood as being blissfully happy. He adored his mother and his nurse. He resented his father's intrusion on their life together. His day ended with the click of his father's latch-key in the lock, and the shout from the hall, ‘Where is K, where is my wife.' My life, on the other hand, started with my father's return from work. I do not really know how I spent my Christmas and Easter holidays. I did not have a single friend in the neighbourhood, until during my second year at Sherborne, another boy from Hampstead came to the School House, H. S. Mackintosh, to whom I have already made reference in these pages. I was never lonely, but I certainly led a solitary life.

Evelyn had a sunny nature; he was emotional and apt to dissolve in tears. Our mother had in the dining-room
a large high-backed chair which my father had given her, on condition that she did the carving. If my father or myself threatened him with discipline, he would throw himself into the back of this chair, shouting ‘Sanctuary, sanctuary.' He could not be touched when he was there. He invented his own language of love between his mother and himself. The word ‘goggles' stood for love. He would finish his letters, ‘Evoggles goggles moggies'. His love was so special that it needed a special vocabulary, like Swann's Cattleyas.

In later life Evelyn may have given the impression of being heartless; he was often snubbing, he could be cruel. But basically he was gentle, warm and tender. He was very like his father, and his father's own emotionalism put him on his guard. He must have often thought, ‘I could become like this. I mustn't let myself become like this.'
Brideshead Revisited
is the only one of his novels in which his poetic side was given a loose rein. He wrote it between February and June 1944. His father had died in the preceding summer. Is it too fanciful to suggest that that death gave him a feeling of release? The warning example was now removed.

In many of Evelyn's novels there is the portrait of the gentle loving man being exploited by self-seeking worldlings—Paul in
Decline and Fall
, Adam in
Vile Bodies
, Tony in
A Handful of Dust
. That was one side of Evelyn, the larger side, but he was also Basil Seal. Some people only saw that side of him. When he first read
The Diary of a Nobody
, he exclaimed delightedly, ‘But Lupin's me.'