EASTER SUNDAY, 1966
ONE
On March 6, 1966, Diana Mosley wrote from her home near Paris to Evelyn Waugh. She had been born Diana Mitford, sister of Nancy who Evelyn regularly corresponded with, but she had been Diana Guinness in 1930 when she and Evelyn and Bryan Guinness had been the closest of friends, spending all their time together. Diana - whether Mitford, Guinness or Mosley - a brilliant and formidable woman.
Diana told Evelyn that she had now read A Little Learning twice, greatly enjoying and admiring it. She was in the process of writing her own memoirs, covering the first twenty years of her life, and wondered why their relationship had suddenly cooled. Evelyn's book had ended with Waugh teaching at a school in Wales in 1925, still five years short of the idyllic time shared with Diana and Bryan, so there was no answer to her question there. Her letter to Evelyn ended by stating: 'When I cast my mind back I see us as we were then…' At this point in the sentence she mentions specific places and people and incidents. '…hundreds of memories and most of them linked with you and your jokes and your point of view and your cleverness.'
After absorbing her warmth, Evelyn must have written back straight away. He admitted that the friendship came to an abrupt end because he had become jealous. 'You (and Bryan) were immensely kind to me at a time when I greatly needed kindness, after my desertion by my first wife. I was infatuated with you. Not of course that I aspired to your love but I wanted you to myself as especial confidant and comrade. After Jonathan's birth you began to enlarge your circle. I felt lower in your affections than Harold Acton and Robert Byron and I couldn't compete or take a humbler place. That is the sad and sordid truth.'
Waugh ended his letter in the following way: 'I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican council has knocked the stuffing out of me.'
I wonder how this honest and self-deprecating reply made Diana feel. What I do know is that on March 25, she managed to write that she felt Evelyn had got bored with her and moved on to other people and places. She assured him that it hadn't been that she had preferred the company of Harold Acton or Robert Byron to his own. After giving birth to her son she had simply felt like going to lots of parties and enjoying herself in a most superficial way. She then refers to what she thought of as the cruel portrait of her as the pregnant Lucy in Work Suspended.
Again Evelyn must have replied to this letter more or less straight away. He assured Diana that Lucy was not a cruel portrait of herself. Diana's had been the only pregnancy that he had observed at close quarters by the time he had been writing that novel, and to some extent it was a portrait of Evelyn being in love with Diana. One can only agree with Evelyn that Work Suspended is suffused with tenderness, as the first-person protagonist accompanies the pregnant Lucy everywhere in her husband's absence.
Evelyn seemed to known that Diana had admired his war novels (perhaps Nancy had told him) and he asked in his letter if she would appreciate the single-volume edition of the work as an Easter present. He went on: 'Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his council they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy. Church going is pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored.'
And so to Diana's last letter to Evelyn, dated April 9. She wonders if it was too late to say 'YES' to the Easter present he spoke of. Evelyn's books were constantly borrowed from her bookcases and the middle volume had not been returned. She didn't mind when this happened to other writers' books in her library. But she resented the loss of any of his own titles.
I don't think Evelyn would have had a chance to post Sword of Honour to Diana, because he collapsed and died the next day. It's that sad episode this essay is primarily about. But I wanted to use the Diana correspondence as a prequel as she had been so important to him once, when his world had been altogether different. It's good that they were reconciled, and were able to share a few memories and kind words, before he died.
I have no doubt that Sword of Honour would have found its way to Diana's library, either sent by the Waugh household after the funeral or ordered from a bookshop by herself. I see her leaning over the book, her brow rapt with concentration, then looking up from page 262 and from the line 'All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nuts'.
I imagine her saying to herself, 'Now why did Evelyn write 'nuts' rather than 'nut'?' She tries the sentence both ways and then, calling upon her vast reservoir of common sense, serenely carries on with the story.
TWO
Evelyn was doing very little in those first three months of 1966. Last letters were written to Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper. But it was in a letter to his eldest child, Teresa, that he said something significant. On March 9, the same day that he wrote his first reply to Diana Mosley, he repeated what he said to Diana about his health and the importance of the church. 'I have been unwell all the last 18 months - not diseased but depressed - no one I want to see, nothing I want to do, nowhere I want to go. The Vatican Council has been a black shadow. I try not to see us as living in the dereliction of Saint Mary Magdalen when she said "they have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have put him." And that, of course, was a matter of minutes before the joyful revelation of Easter.'
Evelyn had high hopes of Easter. He tried to persuade Dom Hubert van Zeller, a priest from Downside, to come to Combe Florey and say an Easter Mass in Latin. But the priest was told by a higher authority in the Roman Church that his duty was to the whole Catholic community and that he should remain at Downside for Easter.
Waugh then realised that Father Caraman, who employed his daughter Meg in London, was staying locally for Easter. As a Jesuit, Father Caraman did not have to answer to any higher authority, short of God, and so it was arranged that he would deliver a traditional (Latin) Mass at the catholic chapel of Wivelscombe, just five miles away from Combe Florey.
Meg, together with her husband and child, was staying with the Waughs for the weekend. Laura's relations, Auberon and Mary Herbert, came to the special Mass from Pixton. And so did Bridget Grant, another relation on Laura's side. Apparently, Evelyn was in high spirits at the chapel, before and after the 10am mass.
Back at the house, Waugh had his heart attack shortly before lunch. But the details of what happened have only emerged very slowly over the decades. I will now go through the sequence of events as reported by each biographer in chronological turn.
First, Christopher Sykes writing in 1976. That was already ten years after Waugh's death. Sykes wrote that Laura was in the kitchen, Father Caraman and Harriet were playing piquet while sitting in the bow window of the drawing room. That's the front room to the right of the front door, with the library being on the left.
'It seems that some time in the morning Evelyn went to the back parts of the house. While there he had occasion to raise his arms and this gesture brought on an instant and instantly fatal heart attack. Laura found him dead.'
What a hotchpotch of censorship and guesswork that is!
Auberon Waugh was next to cover the incident, in his autobiography Will This Do, published in 1991. That's twenty-five years after his father's death.
He had been told over the phone during the day that his father had died. He arrived at Combe Florey at midnight, by which time the body of his father had been removed from the house. Only Meg's husband, Giles FitzHerbert was still up. The house smelled strongly of paraldehyde, the foul substance Evelyn had been in the habit of using to induce sleep. 'In the heightened awareness of the moment, the revolting smell seemed to have an odour of sanctity.'
This remark oddly echoes the last sentence in Auberon's first novel, The Foxglove Saga, relating to the death of Lady Foxglove (the protagonist's mother). 'She died soon after Christmas, as she had lived, in the odour of sanctity, and everybody agreed that it would be difficult to imagine a more perfectly Christian death.'
On arrival, Auberon had noticed a small pile of excrement on the carpet outside the downstairs lavatory. Other members of the family must have noticed it too, but nothing was done about it until the daily help arrived the next day. We will get back to this observation shortly.
The second and final volume of Martin Stannard's biography came out in 1992, just a year after Auberon's book. This adds detail to the death scene. 'During that morning, 10 April, Waugh pottered off somewhere, probably to the library. He was not seen alive again. When he proved difficult to trace, a search was instigated culminating at the downstairs lavatory. Inside, Laura found her husband sprawled face down. There was a gash on his forehead. It seems that he had suffered a coronary thrombosis, tried to rise and staggered forward, dashing his head against the door handle. Meg's nanny attempted the kiss of life. Caraman gave conditional absolution.'
I suspect Stannard had not been able to talk to the members of the Waugh family who had been present. After all, death can be understood to be a private not a public matter. He ends his book by reporting the ridiculous theory that Waugh had killed himself by sticking his head into the toilet bowl, thereby drowning. Apparently this was what Father Caraman had told Graham Greene. Caraman denied the story but Greene stuck to it. Greene does not mention this in Ways of Escape, published in 1980, which deals with Waugh's death. But then 1980 was before a letter from Christopher Sykes to Martin Stannard of 1983, mentioning the Father Caraman story, a story which Sykes had tried not to listen to but which Greene had taken on board.
Clearly Stannard put in a lot of effort trying to follow up this wild fiction. He may have thought he had a scoop on his hands. Indeed, it dominates the very last page of his biography, which ends with the line: 'All we can say with certainty is that he died, as he had lived, alone.' I don't think this is fair, given that Evelyn's beloved daughter Meg was of the household that Easter. Not to mention Laura, his wife, and Harriet, James and Septimus, three more of his children. Alone? Hardly. Not in any conventional sense.
Next up, Selina Hastings in 1994. She had been writing up a life of Evelyn Waugh in parallel with Stannard and hadn't necessarily read his account before publishing her own. This is how she puts the death scenario: 'Shortly before lunch Evelyn left the room. When after an interval he had not returned, James knocked on the door of the downstairs lavatory, which was locked. Climbing on Septimus's shoulders, James looked in through an outside window and saw his father collapsed on the floor.'
The introduction of Septimus and James is new. But the 19-year-old climbing on the shoulders of his 16-year-old brother sounds a strange note. Now Hastings is a scrupulous biographer. I suspect she was briefed by a member of the Waugh family who did not have all his or her facts straight. Why not fetch a ladder?
Waugh readers, those of them who had survived the intervening 39 years since Evelyn's death, had to wait until 2004, when Alexander Waugh wrote about his grandfather's death in Fathers and Sons. Clearly he had been able to ask direct questions of his uncles. He tells us: 'Evelyn (who had been jovial all morning) had left the drawing room looking pale but amiable…' (No wonder Evelyn had been jovial all morning, he was looking pale, not florid!) 'Half an hour later he failed to appear for lunch. After an episode of gonging in the hall, Septimus (sixteen) tried the door of the downstairs lavatory. It was locked from the inside. He took a ladder out of the place we call the Crystal Palace and erected it where he could climb up and look in through the high lavatory window.'
At this point I'm going to include a photo of the Piers Court (not Combe Florey) lavatory. It also had high windows as you can see. 
Though as the rest of Alexander's account makes clear, the internal arrangement of the room was not the same. The reason for including this image will become apparent later in this essay.
Back to Septimus Waugh on Easter Sunday, 1966, per Alexander Waugh in 2004: 'From the top of the ladder he saw his father slumped, motionless - dead, in fact - on the lavatory floor. He called in panic to his brother James, who clambered in through the window, stepped nimbly on the cistern and over his father's body to unlock the door from the inside. Once it was opened, Evelyn was dragged out into the passageway. He had a severe cut on his forehead where he had presumably knocked himself falling against the door handle.'
Now we have almost the whole story. Evelyn was sitting on the toilet, straining to achieve a bowel movement. He has a heart attack. On realising that this is happening he gets up off the toilet, staggers forward with his trousers impeding free movement, stumbles, falls forward and bashes his head on the door handle. He dies while lying face down on the lavatory floor. Once found, his body is dragged out of the confined space of the lavatory. He is turned over so that Meg's nanny can try to revive him. This fails and Waugh is given conditional absolution by Father Caraman. Of course, Meg and Harriet, as well as Laura, will have been present - and highly distressed - since soon after James had unlocked the lavatory door. An utterly traumatic experience for all concerned. Someone will have stayed with Meg's child in another room, no doubt, perhaps her father. Death for one not particularly old man; devastation for everyone else in the household.
Alexander's account doesn't cover what I've said in that last paragraph. Instead, it concentrates on the line in his father's account that reads: 'I noticed a small pile of excrement on the carpet outside the downstairs lavatory.' Apparently this observation, when it was published in Will This Do? caused dismay to many of Evelyn's friends. And Alexander spends the best part of two pages trying to explain why his father wrote what he did. He comes up with four reasons for Auberon saying what he did. But surely the truth is that Evelyn was famous for saying the unsayable in his novels. Auberon had made a reputation for himself at Private Eye and in his Telegraph column for saying the unsayable. And now Alexander was following the family line into the third generation of male Waugh writer saying the unsayable. I've no problem with any of that.
Alexander also picks out a quote from Meg, when writing to console Diana Cooper, which is a perfect summing up. 'Don't be too upset about Papa. You know how he longed to die and dying as he did on Easter Sunday, when all the liturgy is about death and resurrection, after a Latin Mass and holy communion, would be exactly what he wanted. I am sure he had prayed for death at Mass. I am very, very happy for him.'
In Philip Eade's biography of 2016, he briefly but correctly summarises the sequence of events at Combe Florey on Easter Sunday, 1966, and includes the lovely quote from Meg's letter to Diana Cooper. It only took fifty-two years to get Evelyn's demise sorted out, but they got there in the end.
Or is there more to say?
THREE
Let's begin with this image of the downstairs lavatory at Piers Court. It's a room, like the library, that the rest of the Waugh family were asked to steer clear of. Evelyn didn't want his concentration disturbed as he wandered from desk to toilet and back to his desk again to resume some piece of writing from where he'd left off.
As you can see, the walls are covered with art works. These were paintings brought back to England from his trip to Abyssinia, principally to see the coronation of Haile Selassie, in 1930. The toilet itself is set in a solid, ornate wooden chair that has armrests covered in a leopard skin print. The image to the left of the mirror is this one:
Waugh used it as the frontispiece to his travel book, Remote People, published in 1931. Note that the text says 'From the painting by a native artist'.
One can see that Waugh has made use of the above image in coming up with the frontispiece for his novel, Black Mischief, which was published in 1933. I'm going to reproduce that flipped on its vertical axis, to make the parallels more obvious. Though that makes it more difficult to read the sentence ''From the painting by a native artist'.
The horse-tail fan has been replaced by a firing rifle. The vase of flowers has been replaced by Christian symbols, while the BA (AB in this reversal) is no doubt from Oxford University, as that is a prominent motif in the novel.
When Evelyn Waugh moved from Piers Court to Combe Florey, the distinctive furnishings of his library went to. As did the collection of unfashionable Victorian paintings that adorned the walls of both homes. I have little doubt that the valuable African art was also transferred from lavatory to lavatory. But even if that was not the case (Teresa, Evelyn's oldest child is still around to be asked) they might easily have come into Evelyn's mind in his final moments of life.
I like to think that Evelyn, lying face down on the tiled lavatory floor, would have brought to mind the tin church that he'd seen in Rhodesia on his trip there in 1960. It was called the Serima Mission and was designed by Father Groeber of the Swiss Bethlehem Fathers and fabricated with the help of native builders and artists. I recall that Evelyn mentioned that it was constructed of corrugated iron. I can see it now. Just as Evelyn may have seen it on Easter Sunday, 1966.
Shall we go in? Yes, let's follow faltering Evelyn inside. He described the church as one of the most beautiful and original churches in the modern world. Paul Pennyfeather would have loved it. Yes, but that's just the start…
It's the perfect size for a private chapel. Evelyn had tried to get one consecrated in the grounds of Piers Court but hadn't been given the required permission from the Vatican. He'd met the Pope once. There is joke that ends with the Pope saying, "But you've got to understand, Evelyn, I'm a Roman Catholic too."
The four pews could sit up to two people each, meaning his whole family could be sat there while Father Groeber, or Father Caraman, or whoever, read the Latin service. Each pew had a massive book on the seat. This would be the Knox Bible. In other words, the bible that Evelyn's good friend and Oxford chum Ronald Knox had spent ten years of his life translating from the Latin, both Old and New Testaments. What a feat of endurance. What a tale of enduring faith.
But as Evelyn goes from book to book, he realises that each book is different. Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit and Martin Chuzzlewit. Which means the tin chapel must be in the middle of the Amazon rainforest! What was the name of the Jesuit priest he had met there, back in 1933? It doesn't matter. Father Mather perhaps? Or am I making that up?
Evelyn realises that he has prayed to God in at least three continents. As a young explorer, he'd prayed to God in Brazil in 1934. As an old tourist, he'd prayed to God in Rhodesia in 1960. And he was still praying to God in Combe Florey in 1966.
Hang on, the books aren't by Dickens at all. These four big, bulging beauties are copies of his own Sword of Honour. Evelyn turned to page 262 and saw that the sentence he was looking for read sweetly: 'All round the bum-boats floated selling fruit and nut.' Yes, these white-jacketed books were the real deal. Made perfect by the author in his penultimate year.
Let's join Evelyn in the middle of the chapel. 
Shall we take into our hands the wooden block? Could it be that the single sentence that has been written there has been written on a bit of the True Cross? Evelyn wrote Helena in 1951 and had always said that it was his best book, though I doubt if anyone with a highly cultivated sense of humour, like Evelyn's, would put it on top of Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies or Scoop. Anyway, it is about the ancient Briton's life's journey from Norfolk to Jerusalem in search of the actual wooden beams on which Jesus had been crucified.
There is something about the piece of wood that feels good to hold. A single, solid sentence: 'I WILL GO ON TRYING TO FIND YOU'. How could a book with a 1000 tissue-thin pages holding a million words ever hope to compete with the directness of that?
Maybe if each of the tissue-thin pages was part of a roll, a toilet roll, that would also give consolation through its spongey softness. Each sheet pre-printed with 'I WILL GO ON TRYING TO FIND YOU'. No, no, no, that wasn't what Evelyn wanted to say. Ditch that thought.
True cross. True belief. That's where we're at.
No need to say any more. All is said.
All is said and done.
Amen.
Oh, perhaps one last thing.
June 9, 2025
