The usual route was to sign up with the scholastic agency Gabbitas and Thring (W. H. Auden nicknamed them ‘Rabbitarse and String’). Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, Graham Greene and the fictional Paul Penny-feather of Decline and Fall all passed through its door. Greene said that to do so was to ‘pawn yourself instead of your watch’.
In early January 1925, Evelyn was interviewed by the headmaster of the prep school Arnold House. The name may have been evocative of the great Thomas Arnold of Rugby, but the location was less promising: it was in Denbighshire in North Wales, which could hardly have been further from Oxford.
Mr Banks, the head, ‘a tall old man with stupid eyes’, offered the post forthwith. He was desperate and, if Evelyn is to be believed (he is probably not to be), only one question was asked: ‘Did he possess a dinner jacket?’ This was necessary to entertain the wealthier parents. With only a couple of weeks to go before the start of term, Evelyn threw himself into a farewell whirl of socialising with the Plunket Greenes.
There was a disastrous evening at the Café Royal, where champagne cocktails were drunk, followed by oysters and chablis. Olivia disgraced herself. A few days later Evelyn noted in his diary that he had attended a dinner party of his brother Alec’s that was ‘almost wholly spoiled by the abominable manners of the Greene family, who arrived fifty minutes late’. After dinner they went to the theatre and then on to a nightclub where, drunk again, Olivia began kissing a handsome fellow called Tony Bushell. Evelyn tried unsuccessfully to get equally drunk himself. He was very rude to Olivia, but she was in no condition to take offence. The next day, ‘with a glowing resentment against the Greene family’, he sent word that he was leaving ‘for the country’. But that evening he spoiled his gesture by getting drunk and calling at the Plunket Greenes’ in the early hours of the morning, accompanied by two friends. He said that he would not leave until Olivia knelt down and apologised to him. She declined and he broke a gramophone record. A version of the episode was later incorporated into his novel A Handful of Dust.
Amends were made before he went north. Olivia came to see him at Underhill where she told him that he was a great artist and should not become a schoolmaster. He was upset at the thought that she was finally beginning to show interest just at the moment when he was leaving for North Wales: ‘I went to bed feeling more desolate than I had felt since the embarkation of Alastair.’ Whilst he knew that marriage was out of the question, he felt that he was getting close to a romantic and sexual relationship. Women, he was beginning to discover, were far more complex and tricky than men.
He left for Arnold House on 23 January 1925. When he arrived there he found a telegram awaiting him from Hugh Lygon and John Sutro. It read ‘On, Evelyn, On’.
Despite his misgivings, Evelyn enjoyed his brief experience as a schoolmaster. When John Betjeman was forced to turn to teaching, Evelyn assured him that ‘You will remember these schooldays as the happiest time of your life … not entirely facetiously.’ More importantly, the time at Arnold House, in all its glorious awfulness, gave Waugh the inspiration for his first novel.
A letter to his mother on his arrival described the haphazard management of the establishment: ‘it is the most curiously run school that ever I heard of. No timetables nor syllabuses nor nothing. Banks [headmaster] just wanders into the common room and says ‘‘There are some boys in that classroom. I think they are the first or perhaps the fourth. Will someone go and teach them Maths or Latin or something’’ and someone goes and I go on making a wood engraving.’ The wood engraving was for Olivia, whose hold still consumed him. He felt cut off. The school was in Llanddulas, a tiny town sandwiched between Rhyl and Colwyn Bay.
His wit made him popular with the boys and he in turn found them amusing, usually unintentionally so. ‘Yesterday in a history paper,’ reads a diary entry written on a cold February night, ‘the boy Howarth wrote: ‘‘In this year James II gave birth to a son but many people refused to believe it and said it had been brought to him in a hot water bottle’’.’
One of the new masters was itching to start a mutiny against the amiable and ineffectual headmaster. ‘I hope there will be trouble,’ responded Evelyn. He found some of the boys ghastly, but warmed to others among them. He let the clever ones read racy French novels whilst he did his own work. When they asked what he was writing, he would reply: ‘A history of the Eskimos.’ He continued to dress somewhat in the manner of Mr Toad – in plus fours, a tweed jacket and a roll-neck sweater with a check collar peeping out. He took to wearing spectacles and smoking a pipe. He also grew a moustache. Like his fictional alter ego Paul Pennyfeather, Evelyn gave organ lessons despite being not in the least musical.
Though he made the best of the place, he was low in spirits, missing the Plunket Greenes and thinking of his past life. He was desperate for news from the city of his dreams, writing to Harold Acton and pleading for updates on the Hypocrites.
When he returned to London in the holidays he saw a lot of Olivia. As usual, her company was synonymous with heavy drinking and committed party-going. One party in particular ended up with Evelyn under arrest (an incident that turns up in Brideshead). Evelyn and Olivia gave a party, to which her cousin Matthew Ponsonby was invited. He came in his car and was sent out to buy more drink with Evelyn, who was, by this time, already drunk. The men stopped off for drinks along the way and were arrested for driving the wrong way around a traffic island. Matthew and Evelyn, ‘Drunk and Incapable’, were put into police cells. The next day, Evelyn was bound over at the cost of £2. It was far more serious for Matthew, who was the driver of the car. Though his father (the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) bailed him out, Matthew came extremely close to a prison sentence. In the end he was banned from driving for a year and given a large fine, half of which Evelyn offered to pay: ‘After all I was rather more than half to blame and I got off so lightly myself.’
The Ponsonbys blamed Evelyn for the whole business. They described him as a ‘disreputable friend of the Greenes’. Their son had been led astray out of his ‘good nature’. Evelyn, they contended, was an irresponsible drunk who had appeared at Mrs Plunket Greene’s house already inebriated. He had proceeded to decant a bottle of champagne into Gwen’s white china ducks, persuading his friends to drink from them. But Ponsonby was far from blameless; he was an incorrigible drink-driver. Before long, there was another, much worse incident, also hushed up, in which he knocked over and ‘killed or at least seriously injured’ a young boy.
Though he felt guilty about his responsibility for the Plunket Greenes being dragged into the ‘Drunk and Incapable’ affair, he still spent Easter with them at the disused lighthouse they were renting on Lundy Island. Lady Plunket, as Evelyn called Gwen, met him and Olivia off the boat. In the evening she read aloud to them, while David drew caricatures. Richard and his fiancée Elizabeth were also there, as was Terence Greenidge (revisiting one of his filming locations from the previous year). Evelyn was still unable to cure himself of his love for Olivia: ‘While I was in Denbighshire I had hoped that I only loved her as a personification of all the jolly things I had left behind, but here I am with Terence mouthing Kant into a pint glass and David making endless jokes about Lesbos and lavatories, and Richard rowing unseaworthy boats in fearnought trousers, and Lady Plunket serene over it all, but I am still sad and uneasy and awkward whenever I am with Olivia.’
He felt inhibited, not to say mildly disgusted, by the sexual freedoms of the party. One night, after some earnest conversation with Richard’s fiancée, he joined the others only to find a girl called Anne, almost naked, ‘being slapped on the buttocks and enjoying herself ecstatically’. Another house guest, Julia Strachey (niece of the biographer Lytton Strachey), was looking on. Julia, rather like Evelyn, was a misfit and a writer who drifted through life attempting, as she put it in an unfinished memoir, to ‘find some family love after