Evelyn himself was capable of bullying tendencies. He picked on a small and beautiful boy called Cecil Beaton: ‘the tears on his long eyelashes used to provoke the sadism of youth’.
Even at a tender age, Evelyn was attracted to seemingly glamorous and sophisticated friends. ‘I was early drawn to panache,’ he declared, recalling the sangfroid and the louche lifestyle of a little rich boy whose nanny would stand in attendance at football games in order to refresh him with lemon squash from a flask. At the cinema (which Evelyn adored), the rich boy regaled his lowly friend with filthy schoolboy jokes and lurid tales of the private lives of actresses. In return, Evelyn, who was going through a pious phase, tried to interest his friend in Anglo-Catholicism. High Church rituals had captivated him at the age of eleven. His friend, however, had more worldly things on his mind.
Waugh edited a school magazine called The Cynic. He collected war relics from the Western Front: bits of shrapnel, shell cases and a German helmet. Academic work was less of a concern. As a day school, Heath Mount did not set its sights at all high. It was not like the boarding schools that existed to feed the great public schools. Heath Mount accordingly provided insufficient preparation ‘for the endurances of adolescence’. Waugh later claimed that if he had been sent to a better prep school, he would have been clever enough to win a scholarship to Eton or Winchester. The assumption was that he would go to Sherborne: his father’s school and his brother’s, a very respectable destination, if not in the top rank beside Eton, Harrow and the rest.
In 1912, nine-year-old Lord Elmley was sent to prep school. His younger brother Hugh followed him there two years later, just after the war began. The school was a new establishment called West Downs, just outside Winchester. Owned and run by a Wykehamist called Lionel Helbert, who had previously been a House of Commons clerk, it was a small, friendly place in which the boys were treated with great care and affection. Beatings were frowned upon. The boys wore knickerbocker suits on weekdays in winter and grey flannels in summer. Sunday best was Eton suits and top hats. L. H., as Helbert was known, always took a walk after morning chapel, wearing a morning coat, and linking arms with the boys. On Sunday afternoons in summer he read stories of derring-do to the pupils out of doors, while they ate bananas and ginger biscuits.
As an Oxford undergraduate, Helbert had been very keen on drama and music. The hall in the new building at West Downs was called ‘Shakespeare’ and putting on plays was always a major part of school life – boys would be cross-dressed for The Taming of the Shrew and one appeared with a sheet over his head as the ghost in Hamlet. Madame Calviou, the French mistress, took charge of plays in French. Here Hugh’s acting talents had their first opportunity to shine.
As at all English prep schools, sport was equally important, especially cricket. Sports Day, attended by parents who had to be addressed as ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, was a highlight of the year, as was ‘Founder’s Day’, L. H.’s birthday, when he gave the whole school a break in the countryside. They would load up carts with picnics, and go up onto the downs or further afield.
The war was the constant shadow over Hugh’s prep school days. Many West Downs old boys were serving in the Army or Navy and the news of each death was felt by Helbert as a personal blow. The masters, too, were going off to the Western Front, leaving L. H. to shoulder the whole burden of the school himself. He felt that he must prepare the younger generation to go out and serve as soon as they were old enough. He therefore took up Scouting with great enthusiasm. The school was divided into five patrols and the West Downs boys could be seen in pairs going into the town on Scout duties, once even to London with a message for the War Office. Among Hugh’s contemporaries were the sons of a general, who wrote vivid letters from the front. These were read aloud to the entire school at Scouting pow-wows. Outside the school chapel, where prayers were said every morning and evening, Helbert put up a notice in large letters under the heading ‘Keep on Hopin’’:
Keep on lookin’ for the bright, bright skies,
Keep on hopin’ that the sun will rise,
Keep on singin’ when the whole world sighs,
And you’ll get there in the mornin’ …
The boys would sing this at the Wednesday singing class and at their autumn concert.
During the bad weather of late 1915, Hugh’s second year at West Downs, troops and horses were flooded out of the local military camp, with the result that the school was requisitioned by the Army in Helbert’s absence during the Christmas holidays. He returned to find the Welch Fusiliers sleeping in every room and even in the corridors and kit and equipment piled up on the expensive parquet floor of the new Shakespeare room. L. H. took it all in good humour.
Among Hugh’s contemporaries at West Downs was his cousin, a very tall boy called David Plunket Greene. They would go on to Oxford together and meet Evelyn Waugh there.
Evelyn’s enormous success as a writer and his assured place as one of the greatest English novelists of the twentieth century has obscured the fact that towards the end of the First World War his older brother became the most notorious young novelist in England. In 1917, Alec Waugh, still in his teens and awaiting active service, published a sensational semi-autobiographical account of school life called The Loom of Youth. He wrote it in just seven and a half weeks and it became a bestseller.
The book alluded to the forbidden subject of homosexual love in a boys’ boarding school. A storm of fury was unleashed and the novel was condemned by schoolmasters across the nation. Outraged letters were published in the newspapers. Bans were proclaimed in school libraries. Boys found with copies of it were threatened with caning. Anxious parents wrote to headmasters to ask whether such practices really did take place. The ban of course merely whetted the appetite of countless curious schoolboys who devoured the book looking for the offending material. As with D. H. Lawrence’s scandalous portrayal of anal sex in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, equally pored over by schoolchildren, you only had to blink and you missed it. Alec remembered a friend reading the book many years later and asking him ‘When do I reach ‘‘the scene’’?’ Alec looked over his friend’s shoulder and replied ‘You’ve passed it, ten pages past.’ The account seems innocent enough by today’s standards:
Thus did begin a friendship entirely different from any Gordon had ever known before. He did not know what his real sentiments were; he did not even attempt to analyse them. He only knew that when he was with Morecambe he was indescribably happy … Morecambe came up to Gordon’s study nearly every evening, and usually Foster left them alone together … During the long morning hours, when Gordon was supposed to be reading history, more than once there came over him a wish to plunge himself into the feverish waters of pleasure, and forget for a while the doubts and disappointments that overhung his life … he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin – to be found out.
Nothing more than that.
Alec’s book was in part revenge for his expulsion from Sherborne. He had been a model student: prefect, house captain, editor of the school magazine, winner of the English Verse Prize and member of the first XV and first XI. But then he was discovered in a homosexual relationship with a fellow pupil and ‘asked to leave’. As The Loom of Youth made clear, the ‘unforgivable sin’ in such all-male establishments was not the act itself, but ‘to be found out’.
The trials of Oscar Wilde still lingered in public memory. Alec had been made a victim of what he and others saw as absurd public hypersensitivity and overreaction towards homosexuality. He was not ‘the immaculate exception’ and he was incensed by the ‘conspiracy of silence’ and the hypocrisy of those who refused to see such
