9780141182483

Evelyn BridesheadWaugh Revisited

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall , which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Paula Byrne is the author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead . She has also published two novels and a series of best-selling biographies of, among others, Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.

The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

With an Introduction by Paula Byrne

PENGUIN CLASSICS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Classics is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published in Great Britain by Chapman & Hall 1945

Published in Penguin Books 1951

Revised edition first published by Chapman & Hall 1960

Published in Penguin Books 1962

Published in Penguin Classics 2000

Published in Penguin Classics 2022

This edition published 2024 001

Copyright 1945 by Evelyn Waugh

Introduction copyright © Paula Byrne, 2022

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I am not I: thou art not he or she they are not they E. W.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin d 02 yh 68

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

isbn: 978–0–141–18248–3

www.greenpenguin.co.uk

Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. is book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper

1

2

revealed – I take leave of Brideshead – Rex

3 Mulcaster and I in defence of our country – Sebastian abroad – I take leave

Book Three: A Twitch upon the Thread

1

2

3

4

5

Introduction

In March 1944, Evelyn Waugh, invalided from the war with a broken leg, wrote a letter to his close friend Dorothy Lygon: ‘I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and those are mainly the demons sex and drink.’ A few months earlier, Waugh had attended a parachuting course at Tatton Park near Manchester. He loved the experience, describing his first jump as ‘the keenest pleasure I remember’. But on his second jump he cracked his fibula, putting himself out of action. With no o cial duties, he formally requested leave to write a new novel. He began writing in January, and worked with intense concentration. He told Dorothy Lygon that he had been drinking heavily and was ‘beginning to lose my memory which for a man who lives entirely in the past, is to lose life itself’.

He wrote quickly, telling his agent: ‘My Magnum Opus is turning into a jeroboam. I have written 62,000 words.’ By June, he had finished: ‘I think perhaps it is the first of my novels rather than my last.’ That Christmas he sat for a bust in support of a local artist – ‘it will be the next best thing to having myself

stu ed’ – and sent out 50 privately printed copies of his new novel, which was to be called Brideshead Revisited. Waugh, who liked to surround himself with a close circle of female friends, begged fellow author Nancy Mitford to turn literary sleuth: ‘keep an ear to the ground . . . Please tell me what everyone says behind my back.’ Nancy duly reported back, telling him that his friends found it ‘subtle clever Catholic propaganda’ and that the general view was ‘it is the Lygon Family. Too much Catholic stu .’

The Lygons of Madresfield Court were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and fascinating as their fictional counterparts. At Oxford, Waugh fell in love with the beautiful but troubled Hugh Lygon, and took a dislike to his stu y older brother, Lord Elmley, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Bridey. Later, Waugh befriended Hugh’s sisters, Mary and Dorothy, partial models for Julia and Cordelia Flyte, when he met them at their ancestral home in Great Malvern. In 1931, their father, Lord Beauchamp, was hounded out of England because of his homosexual liaisons. Like Lord Marchmain, he became an exile in Venice. Though not a Catholic, his wife was as pious as Lady Marchmain. Madresfield became a second home to Waugh. Though his friendship with Mary and Dorothy would last a lifetime, Hugh, an alcoholic, died young. ‘Sebastian gives me many pangs,’ wrote Dorothy on reading Brideshead, recognizing a fictional version of her brother in the character of Sebastian Flyte.

Waugh was delighted with Mitford’s two ‘splendid letters’ about his ‘Magnum Opus’. ‘What a bob’s worth’, he wrote in

response. His emotional distance from his father, his sentimental education at Oxford, his early love a airs, his initiation into the aristocratic world of the Lygons, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his abortive love a air with the army: all the things that mattered most to him up until the end of the Second World War went into the novel, even though many years later (now bitter and disillusioned) he grew ashamed of its excesses, its sentimentalism and richly ornate language. The revised edition of 1960, reprinted here, made some substantial cuts and modified some of the ‘grosser passages’. In a new preface for the second edition, Waugh wrote that the original was ‘infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past . . . which now with a full stomach I find distasteful’. Nevertheless, in 1944, he believed that it was his great work and that it would go on being read for many years to come. Much to his horror in later years, he was right.

He prefixed the first edition with an author’s note: ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Despite this disclaimer, removed for the second edition, Brideshead Revisited is, along with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, the most autobiographical of Waugh’s novels. It was, after all, his first completed novel using first-person as opposed to third-person narrative. Charles Ryder, like his creator, was born in 1904, attended a minor public school, and went up to the University of Oxford in the early 1920s. The plot manifestly mirrors Waugh’s undergraduate experience. A lonely young man attends one of the smaller

Oxford colleges, and languishes in the company of dull but clever middle-class boys until he is befriended by a group of sophisticated, flamboyant Etonians. They introduce him to an enchanting world of cosmopolitan culture, heavy drinking, beautiful clothes, friendship, stimulating conversation and a privileged childhood that he has missed out on. In terms of his sentimental education, it is not examinations and prizes that Charles takes with him or academic learning that Oxford bequeaths, but rather ‘the other, more ancient lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour’.

The Oxford part is especially haunting and beautifully written to such an extent that Waugh fretted to Nancy Mitford that he had kept lapsing into verse. As befits the title of ‘Book One: Et in Arcadia Ego’, these chapters are su used with a glow of sunlight on grey-golden stone, flowering chestnuts, handsome young men on bicycles, light falling over the spires, grassy meadows, dappled streams, men in cricket whites, dazzling green lawns, punting and strawberries. The leader of the aesthetes is Sebastian Flyte, an aristocrat of Roman Catholic persuasion. At Oxford he is ‘the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty’ – though his fellow Etonian Anthony Blanche spitefully calls him ‘Narcissus with one pustule.’ Nanny notices that his face always looks washed even when it isn’t. For Charles, Sebastian has a face ‘alive and alight with gaiety’. With his outward beauty goes an inner purity. Among Waugh’s revisions of the text from first to second edition is a

description of Sebastian’s e eminate and fragile good looks; he changes ‘he was magically beautiful with that epicene quality’ to ‘he was entrancing with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first wind’.

Sebastian’s charm and eccentricities of manners endear him to all social classes. The grumpy barber used to undergraduate pranks and Charles’ scout (college manservant) Lunt are captivated by him. It is Sebastian who leads Charles into Arcadia. He is a symbol not only of Oxford and undergraduate love, but also of childhood, as seen in his teddy bear, his red pyjamas and his love for his Nanny. He vomits uncontrollably through Charles’ window like a small child and writes his apology in crayon on Charles’ best drawing paper. But Sebastian’s reluctance to grow up is his downfall. Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, warns Charles that, unlike his father, who hates ‘all the illusions of boyhood’, Sebastian ‘is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy’.

The naming of characters, so important to Waugh, here assumes a deeper resonance. Sebastian names his teddy bear Aloysius after St Aloysius de Gonzaga, the patron saint of young students. (The Oratory Church of St Aloysius is the Catholic parish church in the heart of Oxford.) Sebastian himself is named after Saint Sebastian, the beautiful youth depicted in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance with a flight of arrows assailing his body. He became the patron saint of homosexuality: in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the ‘Sebastian-figure’ is

hailed as the supreme emblem of Apollonian beauty; Tennessee Williams wrote a poem called ‘Sebastian de Sodoma’; Oscar Wilde’s alias was Sebastian. Anthony Blanche’s parting shot to Sebastian at the end of the first luncheon makes clear the connection: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin cushion.’

That there is something holy about Sebastian Flyte is suggested by his youngest sister, Cordelia. Towards the end of the novel, she tells Charles that Sebastian’s ‘Holiness’ is recognized by the Tunisian monks and that her brother is ‘very near and dear to God.’ She also tells Charles that ‘no one is ever holy without su ering’. Like the saint for which he is named, Sebastian wishes to work with lepers. The historic Saint Sebastian was known as the ‘protector of the plague’: Waugh’s Sebastian nurses his German lover, Kurt, who is riddled with syphilis. Kurt eventually leaves Sebastian, who travels the world to find him. Sebastian eventually locates Kurt, discovering him, having been forcibly conscripted by the Nazis, serving as a stormtrooper. Sebastian’s love turns Kurt away from the Nazis – ‘six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a year of Hitler’ – with the tragic result that he is sent to a concentration camp. Charles and Sebastian’s ‘romantic a ection’ at Oxford is partly sexual, their ‘naughtiness’ is ‘high in the catalogue of grave sins’. Charles has no regrets, and grows out of his ‘Romanticism’ but Sebastian is as reluctant to renounce his homosexuality as he is his teddy bear and his nanny, despite the self-hatred and guilt

it makes him feel: ‘I wouldn’t love anyone with a character like mine . . . I’m ashamed of myself . . . I absolutely detest myself.’

By his second year at Oxford, Sebastian’s ‘days in Arcadia’ are ‘numbered.’ Anthony Blanche has gone down, leaving England to live with a policeman in Munich. Blanche’s absence is felt keenly. Without him, Charles and Sebastian draw closer together and exclude all their other friends; Blanche has ‘locked a door and hung the key on a chain’. His role as stage director of the friends’ world has played out: ‘Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines, they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the lime-lights.’ Time has passed and things have moved on. Now there are ‘new figures in new gowns’ under the arches. ‘The Languor of Youth – how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably, lost.’ In his undergraduate room, Charles has the phrase Et in Arcadia ego inscribed on a skull, an allusion to an eighteenth-century painting in which shepherds in Arcadia encounter a skull on a plinth bearing these words, as if spoken by Death. As Shakespeare wrote, ‘Youth’s a stu will not endure.’

Now Aloysius sits forgotten on a chest of drawers, as Sebastian’s dependence on alcohol increases. Waugh wrote that he wanted the novel to convey the ‘gradual stages of di erentiation between the habits of a group of highly-spirited youngsters, all of whom on occasions get drunk in a light-hearted way, and the morbid, despairing, solitary drinking which eventually makes

Sebastian an incurable alcoholic.’ His portrayal of an emaciated drunkard is masterly. Sebastian’s addiction causes him to steal and lie, skilfully escaping his minders. His trembling hands light his cigarettes, he has a ‘drunken thickening in the voice’ and a ‘pallor fresh and sullen as a disappointed child.’ Lady Marchmain, powerless to help her son, remarks: ‘One of the most terrible things about them [drunkards] is their love of deceit. Love of truth is the first thing that goes.’ But Waugh himself always remained sympathetic to his creation. In 1955, he responded to a fan letter from a Mr Gad: ‘I am glad that you find “Sebastian’’ an interesting character. I don’t think he had any egotism. He was a contemplative without the necessary grace of fortitude.’

Many of Waugh’s close friends thought the Oxford part of the novel ‘perfect’ but that there was a falling o once Sebastian left the main story. Harold Acton, who, along with fellow-Etonian Brian Howard, was the model for aesthete par excellence Anthony Blanche, described the Oxford scenes as the ‘most successful evocation of the period I know.’ Acton reported back to Waugh: ‘I slid my paper knife through the still virginal pages like an itching bridegroom and was panting, trembling and exhausted by the time I had finished cutting them . . . swept alternately by pleasure and pain: pleasure at your ever-increasing virtuosity and mastery of our fast-evaporating language . . . pain, at the acrid memories of so many friends you have conjured.’ Anthony Blanche himself could not have put it better.

INTRODUCTION

Despite its autobiographical elements, the Oxford section of Brideshead Revisited owes a debt to Compton Mackenzie’s (1913−14) novel Sinister Street, one of the books that Charles Ryder has in his undergraduate room. The hero, Michael Fane, is a lonely middle-class boy who loves art and is taken up by a set of glamorous Etonians. Fane believes that Oxford should be approached with a stainless curiosity: ‘Already he felt that she would only yield her secret in return for absolute surrender. This the grave city demanded.’ Similarly, Charles, before meeting Sebastian, feels that he has not yet unlocked Oxford’s secrets. ‘But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find the low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on to an enclosed and enchanted garden which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.’ These parallels point towards one aspect of the peculiar power of Brideshead Revisited: that it is at once autobiographical and archetypal, both the portrait of an age and a novel that speaks to the aspirations of youth in other ages.

‘Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a place. I’ve just had a snoop around. Very ornate, I’d call it. And a queer thing, there’s a sort of R.C. Church attached. I looked in and there was a kind of service going on – just a padre, and one old man. I felt very awkward. More in your line than mine.’

More in your line than mine. The careful reader will be alerted to the double meaning. Hooper is referring to Charles Ryder’s occupation as a painter of English country houses and lover of baroque architecture, an echo of his creator’s role as the literary chronicler of the decline and fall of the stately home. But there is also another spiritual meaning at play.

Though the revised edition printed here is split into three parts, the novel originally had just two. This made clear the symmetry between Charles’s love of the brother in part one and of the sister in part two. Charles himself acknowledges the foreshadowing: ‘I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was the Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.’ In the revised version, book two is transitional and then book three, ‘A twitch upon the thread’, focuses Charles’s spiritual journey on his relationship with Julia.

In 1947, Waugh was approached by MGM in Hollywood regarding a proposed film adaptation of the novel. Though the film was never made, Waugh’s Hollywood memo to the ‘Californian savages’, as he called the studio executives, provides an invaluable insight into his novel. He was emphatic about the main subject: ‘the theme is theological [. . .] the novel deals with what is theologically termed ‘‘the operation of grace” that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself’. One wonders what the Hollywood execs made of this appeal to the divine.

The novel, he explains, is about Charles Ryder’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and the ‘twitch upon the thread’ that reels in Sebastian and Julia, lapsed Catholics who have rebelled against their mother and their religion, but who are in the end powerless to resist God’s grace. As the Hollywood memo made clear: ‘The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control on human souls which have once been part of her.’

Many readers miss or ignore the theological and spiritual element, so caught up they are by the glamour of the Flytes and the glorious locations – Oxford, Venice, Paris, Morocco, Mayfair and the stately home of Brideshead Castle – just as Charles is entranced by all the splendour that Brideshead and the Flyte Family represent. This distraction of surface is deliberate. But the clues are planted in the narrative all the way from Hooper’s words in the prologue to the all-important scene at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed when atheist Charles prays for a miracle and witnesses ‘God’s grace’. The novel urges you to read it backwards.

Waugh’s Hollywood memo also explains the two important architectural features of Brideshead Castle: the chapel and the fountain. When Charles first comes to stay at Brideshead, he sketches the Italian baroque fountain, with its carved tropical animals ‘vomiting water.’ The fountain renews his vitality: ‘I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.’ Waugh based his fountain, not on Castle

Howard’s Atlas Fountain, as is often supposed, but on three famous Bernini fountains in Rome. The Brideshead chapel was based precisely on the Madresfield chapel, with its arts and craft decoration and huge life-size frescoes of the earl and his wife and their children frolicking as angels – though in order to avoid the embarrassment of too close a public identification with the Lygons, in an e ort to disguise the building, Waugh added the dome of Castle Howard to his imagined great house. When Charles returns during the War, the fountain has been turned o and is covered in barbed wire. The soldiers who now occupy Brideshead throw their cigarette ends and the remains of their sandwiches into it, as if it were a waste bin.

Earlier in the novel, Julia’s outburst about sin takes place at the fountain. Waugh’s Hollywood memo explained that the principal theme of the second half of the book is her redemption. The Anglican Nancy Mitford was confused about the theology and Julia’s renunciation of Charles, telling Evelyn: ‘Now I believe in God and I talk to him a very great deal and often tell him jokes . . . he also likes people to be happy and people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody’s else’s life is upset (and then he’s not so sure).’ Waugh patiently explained: ‘It must be nonsense to say people never give up sleeping together for “abstract principles” . . . of course with Julia Flyte the fact that the war was coming and she saw her life coming to an end anyhow made a di erence.’ In the memo to MGM, he goes further: ‘I regard it as essential that

after having led a life of sin Julia should not be immediately rewarded with conventional happiness. She has a great debt to pay and we are left with her paying it.’ There will be no Hollywood ending for Charles and Julia.

The important point, Waugh stressed, was that Charles is reconciled to Julia’s renunciation of him. If the fountain represents the worldly magnificence and grace of the family which captivates the impressionable undergraduate, the chapel symbolises his redemption. Though Charles and Julia must renounce one another, each is the catalyst for the other’s spiritual rebirth:

‘The physical dissolution of the house of Brideshead has in fact been a spiritual regeneration.’ Charles comes full circle when his company is stationed at Brideshead, his memories return, he sees Nanny, and then visits the chapel and kneels to pray. The operation of divine grace upon him comes at Lord Marchmain’s death, when he prays for a sign and the dying man makes the sign of the cross. Charles is praying for Julia, but when the miracle occurs, it is his own soul that is saved. The epilogue sees him kneeling at the altar of Brideshead chapel, praying ‘an ancient, newly-learned form of words.’ The surfaces of life that once dazzled Charles are, by now, tarnished. But faith persists: whilst the fountain is covered in debris, the chapel is unchanged and the light of the tabernacle is burning.

Preface

This novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers. Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. I am less happy about its form, whose more glaring defects may be blamed on the circumstances in which it was written.

In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to incur a minor injury which a orded me a rest from military service. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding ocer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find

distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.

I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julia’s outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmain’s dying soliloquy. These passages were never, of course, intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a di erent way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude. But I have retained them here in something near their original form because, like the Burgundy (misprinted in many editions) and the moonlight they were essentially of the mood of writing; also because many readers liked them, though that is not a consideration of first importance.

It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity. Brideshead today would be open to trippers, its treasures rearranged by expert hands and the fabric better maintained than it was by Lord Marchmain. And the English aristocracy has maintained its identity to a degree that then seemed impossible. The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points. Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty co n. But it would be impossible to bring it up to date without totally destroying it. It is o ered to

a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.

Combe Florey 1959

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED

Prologue

Brideshead Revisited

When I reached ‘C’ Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the Army.

Here the tram lines ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow could doze in their seats until roused by their journey’s end. There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten their caps before passing the guardroom, quarter of a mile in which concrete gave place to grass at the road’s edge. This was the extreme limit of the city. Here the close, homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the hinterland began.

The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and ploughland; the farmhouse still stood in a fold of the hill and had served us for battalion o ces; ivy still supported part of what had once been the walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the wash-houses survived of an orchard. The place had been marked for destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already half a mile of concrete road lay between bare clay banks, and on either side a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the place part of the neighbouring suburb. Now the huts where we had wintered waited their turn for destruction.

Over the way, the subject of much ironical comment, half hidden even in winter by its embosoming trees, lay the municipal lunatic asylum, whose cast-iron railings and noble gates put our rough wire to shame. We could watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease. As we marched past, the men used to shout greetings to them through the railings – ‘Keep a bed warm for me, chum. I shan’t be long’ – but Hooper, my newest-joined platoon-commander, grudged them their life of

privilege; ‘Hitler would put them in a gas chamber,’ he said; ‘I reckon we can learn a thing or two from him.’

Here, when we marched in at mid-winter, I brought a company of strong and hopeful men; word had gone round among them, as we moved from the moors to this dockland area, that we were at last in transit for the Middle East. As the days passed and we began clearing the snow and levelling a parade ground, I saw their disappointment change to resignation. They snu ed the smell of the fried-fish shops and cocked their ears to familiar, peace-time sounds of the works’ siren and the dance-hall band. On o -days they slouched now at street corners and sidled away at the approach of an o cer for fear that, by saluting, they would lose face with their new mistresses. In the company o ce there was a crop of minor charges and requests for compassionate leave; while it was still half-light, day began with the whine of the malingerer and the glum face and fixed eye of the man with a grievance.

And I, who by every precept should have put heart into them – how could I help them, who could so little help myself? Here the colonel under whom we had formed, was promoted out of our sight and succeeded by a younger and less lovable man, cross-posted from another regiment. There were few left in the mess now of the batch of volunteers who trained together at the outbreak of war; one way and another they were nearly all gone – some had been invalided out, some promoted to other battalions, some posted to sta jobs, some had volunteered

for special service, one had got himself killed on the field firing range, one had been court-martialled – and their places were taken by conscripts; the wireless played incessantly in the anteroom nowadays, and much beer was drunk before dinner; it was not as it had been.

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt sti and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day – had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? – as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about

anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found the early ti s become more frequent, the tears less a ecting, the reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and selfseeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

So, on this morning of our move, I was entirely indi erent as to our destination. I would go on with my job, but I could bring to it nothing more than acquiescence. Our orders were to entrain at 0915 hours at a nearby siding, taking in the haversack the unexpired portion of the day’s ration; that was all I

needed to know. The company second-in-command had gone on with a small advance party. Company stores had been packed the day before. Hooper had been detailed to inspect the lines. The company was parading at 0730 hours with their kit-bags piled before the huts. There had been many such moves since the wildly exhilarating morning in 1940 when we had erroneously believed ourselves destined for the defence of Calais. Three or four times a year since then we had changed our location; this time our new commanding o cer was making an unusual display of ‘security’ and had even put us to the trouble of removing all distinguishing badges from our uniforms and transport. It was ‘valuable training in active service conditions’, he said. ‘If I find any of these female camp followers waiting for us the other end, I’ll know there’s been a leakage.’

The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a party of archaeologists.

‘The Pollock diggings provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy which succeeded them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate draining system and the construction of permanent highways, over-run by a race of the lowest type.’

Thus, I thought, the pundits of the future might write; and, turning away, I greeted the company sergeant-major: ‘Has Mr Hooper been round?’

‘Haven’t seen him at all this morning, sir.’

We went to the dismantled company o ce, where I found a window newly broken since the barrack-damages book was completed. ‘Wind-in-the-night, sir,’ said the sergeant-major.

(All breakages were thus attributable or to ‘Sappers’demonstration, sir.’)

Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the company two months.

The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his work and would sometimes address them individually as ‘George’ at stand-easies, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to a ection for him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.

The new colonel had been with us less than a week at the time and we had not yet taken his measure. He had been standing rounds of gin in the ante-room and was slightly boisterous when he first took notice of Hooper.

‘That young o cer is one of yours, isn’t he, Ryder?’ he said to me. ‘His hair wants cutting.’

‘It does, sir,’ I said. It did. ‘I’ll see that it’s done.’

The colonel drank more gin and began to stare at Hooper, saying audibly, ‘My God, the o cers they send us now!’

Hooper seemed to obsess the colonel that evening. After dinner he suddenly said very loudly: ‘In my late regiment if a young o cer turned up like that, the other subalterns would bloody well have cut his hair for him.’

No one showed any enthusiasm for this sport, and our lack of response seemed to inflame the colonel. ‘You,’ he said, turning to a decent boy in ‘A’ Company, ‘go and get a pair of scissors and cut that young o cer’s hair for him.’

‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘It’s your commanding o cer’s wish and that’s the best kind of order I know.’

‘Very good, sir.’

And so, in an atmosphere of chilly embarrassment, Hooper sat in a chair while a few snips were made at the back of his head. At the beginning of the operation I left the ante-room, and later apologized to Hooper for his reception. ‘It’s not the sort of thing that usually happens in this regiment,’ I said.

‘Oh, no hard feelings,’ said Hooper. ‘I can take a bit of sport.’

Hooper had no illusions about the Army – or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made every feeble e ort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he said, ‘like the measles’. Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry – that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man – Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The

history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon – these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpetnotes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

He seldom complained. Though himself a man to whom one could not confidently entrust the simplest duty, he had an overmastering regard for e ciency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would sometimes say of the ways of the Army in pay and supply and the use of ‘man-hours’: ‘They couldn’t get away with that in business.’

He slept sound while I lay awake fretting.

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting ‘Hooper’ and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: ‘Hooper Rallies’, ‘Hooper Hostels’, ‘International Hooper Cooperation’, and ‘the Religion of Hooper’. He was the acid test of all these alloys.

So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now than when he arrived from his OCTU . This morning, laden with full

equipment, he looked scarcely human. He came to attention with a kind of shu ing dance-step and spread a wool-gloved palm across his forehead.

‘I want to speak to Mr Hooper, sergeant-major . . . well, where the devil have you been? I told you to inspect the lines.’

‘’M I late? Sorry. Had a rush getting my gear together.’

‘That’s what you have a servant for.’

‘Well, I suppose it is, strictly speaking. But you know how it is. He had his own stu to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they take it out of you other ways.’

‘Well, go and inspect the lines now.’

‘Rightyoh.’

‘And for Christ’s sake don’t say “rightyoh”.’

‘Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out.’

When Hooper left the sergeant-major returned.

‘C.O. just coming up the path, sir,’ he said.

I went out to meet him.

There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little red moustache.

‘Well, everything squared up here?’

‘Yes, I think so, sir.’

‘Think so? You ought to know.’

His eyes fell on the broken window. ‘Has that been entered in the barrack damages?’

‘Not yet, sir.’

‘Not yet? I wonder when it would have been, if I hadn’t seen it.’

He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity, but I thought none the better of it for that.

He led me behind the huts to a wire fence which divided my area from the carrier-platoon’s, skipped briskly over, and made for an overgrown ditch and bank which had once been a field boundary on the farm. Here he began grubbing with his walkingstick like a tru ing pig and presently gave a cry of triumph. He had disclosed one of those deposits of rubbish, which are dear to the private soldier’s sense of order: the head of a broom, the lid of a stove, a bucket rusted through, a sock, a loaf of bread, lay under the dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.

‘Look at that,’ said the commanding o cer. ‘Fine impression that gives to the regiment taking over from us.’

‘That’s bad,’ I said.

‘It’s a disgrace. See everything there is burned before you leave camp.’

‘Very good, sir. Sergeant-major, send over to the carrierplatoon and tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up.’

I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebu ; so did he. He stood a moment irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned on his heel and strode away.

‘You shouldn’t do it, sir,’ said the sergeant-major, who had been my guide and prop since I joined the company. ‘You shouldn’t really.’

‘That wasn’t our rubbish.’

‘Maybe not, sir, but you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side of senior o cers they take it out of you other ways.’

As we marched past the madhouse, two or three elderly inmates gibbered and mouthed politely behind the railings.

‘Cheeroh, chum, we’ll be seeing you’; ‘We shan’t be long now’; ‘Keep smiling till we meet again’, the men called to them.

I was marching with Hooper at the head of the leading platoon.

‘I say, any idea where we’re o to?’

‘None.’

‘D’you think it’s the real thing?’

‘No.’

‘Just a flap?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everyone’s been saying we’re for it. I don’t know what to think really. Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go into action.’

‘I shouldn’t worry. There’ll be plenty for everyone in time.’

‘Oh, I don’t want much you know. Just enough to say I’ve been in it.’

A train of antiquated coaches was waiting for us at the siding; an R.T.O. was in charge; a fatigue party was loading the last of the kit-bags from the trucks to the luggage vans. In half an hour we were ready to start and in an hour we started.

My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to

ourselves. They ate sandwiches and chocolate, smoked and slept. None of them had a book. For the first three or four hours they noted the names of the towns and leaned out of the windows when, as often happened, we stopped between stations. Later they lost interest. At midday and again at dark some tepid cocoa was ladled from a container into our mugs. The train moved slowly south through flat, drab main-line scenery.

The chief incident in the day was the C.O.’s ‘order group’. We assembled in his carriage, at the summons of an orderly, and found him and the adjutant wearing their steel helmets and equipment. The first thing he said was: ‘This is an Order Group. I expect you to attend properly dressed. The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial.’ I thought he was going to send us back but, after glaring at us, he said, ‘Sit down.’

‘The camp was left in a disgraceful condition. Wherever I went I found evidence that o cers are not doing their duty. The state in which a camp is left is the best possible test of the e ciency of regimental o cers. It is on such matters that the reputation of a battalion and its commander rests. And’ – did he in fact say this or am I finding words for the resentment in his voice and eye? I think he left it unsaid – ‘I do not intend to have my professional reputation compromised by the slackness of a few temporary o cers.’

We sat with our note-books and pencils waiting to take down the details of our next jobs. A more sensitive man would have seen that he had failed to be impressive; perhaps he saw, for he

added in a petulant schoolmasterish way: ‘All I ask is loyal cooperation.’

Then he referred to his notes and read:

‘Orders.

‘Information. The battalion is now in transit between location A and location B. This is a major L of C and is liable to bombing and gas attack from the enemy.

‘Intention. I intend to arrive at location B.

‘Method. Train will arrive at destination at approximately 2315 hours . . .’ and so on.

The sting came at the end under the heading, ‘Administration’. ‘C’ Company, less one platoon, was to unload the train on arrival at the siding where three three-tonners would be available for moving all stores to a battalion dump in the new camp; work to continue until completed; the remaining platoon was to find a guard on the dump and perimeter sentries for the camp area.

‘Any questions?’

‘Can we have an issue of cocoa for the working party?’

‘No. Any more questions?’

When I told the sergeant-major of these orders he said: ‘Poor old “C” Company struck unlucky again’; and I knew this to be a reproach for my having antagonized the commanding o cer.

I told the platoon commanders.

‘I say,’ said Hooper, ‘it makes it awfully awkward with the chaps. They’ll be fairly browned o . He always seems to pick on us for the dirty work.’

‘You’ll do guard.’

‘Okeydoke. But I say, how am I to find the perimeter in the dark?’

Shortly after blackout we were disturbed by an orderly making his way lugubriously down the length of the train with a rattle. One of the more sophisticated sergeants called out ‘Deuxième service.’

‘We are being sprayed with liquid mustard-gas,’ I said. ‘See that the windows are shut.’ I then wrote a neat little situationreport to say that there were no casualties and nothing had been contaminated; that men had been detailed to decontaminate the outside of the coach before detraining. This seemed to satisfy the commanding o cer, for we heard no more from him. After dark we all slept.

At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for disorder and breakages in the darkness.

‘Fall in on the road below the embankment. “C” Company seem to be taking their time as usual, Captain Ryder.’

‘Yes, sir. We’re having a little di culty with the bleach.’

‘Bleach?’

‘For decontaminating the outside of the coaches, sir.’

‘Oh, very conscientious, I’m sure. Skip it and get a move on.’

By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into

shape on the road. Soon Hooper’s platoon had marched o into the darkness; I found the lorries, organized lines of men to pass the stores from hand to hand down the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores with them for the first half hour; then broke o to meet the company second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.

‘It’s not a bad camp,’ he reported; ‘big private house with two or three lakes. Looks as if we might get some duck if we’re lucky. Village with one pub and a post o ce. No town within miles. I’ve managed to get a hut between the two of us.’

By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry, through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the windscreen; somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of rain beginning now to fall.

I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the second-in-command, ‘What’s this place called?’

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched o the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in

my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Outside the hut I stood bemused. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It was a still morning and the smoke from the cook-house rose straight to the leaden sky. A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and churned to mud, followed the contour of the hillside and dipped out of sight below a knoll, and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and catcalls, all the zoo-noises of the battalion beginning a new day. Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite manmade landscape. It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley. Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream – it was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon – which had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the

clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces – Did the fallow deer graze here still? – and, lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.

Hooper came sidling up and greeted me with his much imitated but inimitable salute. His face was grey from his night’s vigil and he had not yet shaved.

‘

“B” Company relieved us. I’ve sent the chaps o to get cleaned up.’

‘Good.’

‘The house is up there, round the corner.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a place. I’ve just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I’d call it. And a queer thing, there’s a sort of R.C. Church attached. I looked in and there was a kind of service going on – just a padre and one old man. I felt very awkward. More in your line than mine.’ Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a final e ort to

excite my interest he said: ‘There’s a frightful great fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals. You never saw such a thing.’

‘Yes, Hooper, I did. I’ve been here before.’

The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my dungeon.

‘Oh well, you know all about it. I’ll go and get cleaned up.’

I had been there before; I knew all about it.