Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. Paula Byrne

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       CHAPTER 2 Lancing versus Eton

      There was a scent of dust in the air; a thin vestige surviving in the twilight from the golden clouds with which before chapel the House Room fags had filled the evening sunshine. Light was failing. Beyond the trefoils and branched mullions of the windows the towering autumnal leaf was now flat and colourless … the first day of term was slowly dying.

      So begins Evelyn Waugh’s unfinished story, Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, which was closely based on his experiences at Lancing College in Sussex. A scrim of nostalgia hazes his memory. It was not like this when he left for Lancing on a damp and overcast day in May 1917. Arriving in the summer term meant that it was very difficult for him to make friends. Furthermore, whereas most of the boys had been hardened to absence from home by prep school, for Evelyn it was his first experience of boarding. ‘I had lived too softly for my first thirteen years,’ he ruefully remarked.

      The school itself was built high on the hills of the Sussex Downs, dominating the horizon with its huge chapel. ‘Lancing was monastic, indeed, and mediaeval in the full sense of the English Gothic revival; solitary, all of a piece, spread over a series of terraces sliced out of a spur of the downs.’ That is how Evelyn described it in his autobiography. Its solitariness was of a piece with his own.

      Ascension Day fell four days after he arrived. Having no idea that it was a school holiday, Evelyn had made no arrangements for family visits. No meals were served and it rained all day. The House Room was locked. It was the worst day of his life and he never forgot how wretchedly lonely he felt. He would bring up his own children to ‘make a special intention at the Ascension Mass for all desolate little boys’.

      Waugh kept a diary during his first two unhappy years at Lancing. He later destroyed it. In part, his unhappiness was a direct result of war deprivations: ‘the food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house and it grew steadily worse until the end of the war’. Milkless cocoa, small portions of tasteless margarine, bread and foul stew constituted the very best of the fare. School textbooks were war issue, printed on thin greyish paper and bound in greasy, limp oilcloth, something that offended his taste for fine binding and hand-printed paper.

      Many of the best young masters were fighting in the war, and the boys were made conscious of the sacrifices made daily by old boys and schoolmasters: ‘On Sunday evenings the names were read of old boys killed in action during the week. There was seldom, if ever, a Sunday without its necrology. The chapel was approached by a passage in which their photographs were hung in ever-extending lines. I had not known them, but we were all conscious of these presences.’

      Evelyn’s natural fastidiousness and his love of panache also contributed to his unhappiness. He recoiled against the poor table manners of his schoolmates, as they dirtied their napkins and flicked pats of margarine to the high oak rafters. Afternoon bathing was another source of agony, as the boys were forced to share tepid muddy bath water. The latrines were ‘disgusting’ and lacking in privacy – they had no doors. Rather than waiting his turn, which involved shouting out ‘After you’ to boys from other Houses, Evelyn preferred to make himself excused during lesson time, for which he paid the punishment of writing twenty-five lines.

      He was placed in Head’s House, the most prestigious in the school, with the headmaster H. T. Bowlby serving as housemaster, a privilege that cost an extra £10 per year. Evelyn found the school rules bewildering and absurd. For the first two years, boys were dressed in subfusc (black), then they wore coloured socks, then in the sixth form coloured ties. All first years were prohibited from walking with hands in pockets. For the second year they could be inserted, but with the jacket raised, not drawn back. Older boys in year two were permitted to link arms with a ‘one-year man’, but not the other way round. Only school prefects could walk in the Lower Quad. Treading on grass was generally forbidden. Many vivid details of this sort were captured in Charles Ryder’s Schooldays, together with schoolboy slang, such as ‘dibs’ for prayers and ‘pitts’ for bedrooms. Evelyn was distressed by the dearth of female company.

      When the war came to an end, school life changed for the better. Evelyn felt more settled. Food, always of vital importance in the life of a schoolboy, improved greatly. The Grub Shop now offered whipped-cream walnuts, cream slices, ices, chocolate and buns of every kind. One of the privileges for older boys was the ‘settle-tea’ that each senior member of House Room gave in turn. Hot, buttered crumpets were served in abundance, followed by cake, pastries and, in season, strawberries and cream. Senior boys had their own private studies and tea ceremonies: ‘we were as nice in the brewing of tea as a circle of maiden aunts’. They ordered their teas from London and ‘tasted them with reverence, discoursing on their qualities as later we were to talk of wine’. They also ordered little pots of caviar and foie gras: ‘Fullness was all.’

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