COMBE FLOREY REVISITED
This is the third time I've visited the graveside of Evelyn Waugh. One never knows, but I expect it will be the last.
The first time (see above pic and next two) was in March of 2006, forty years after his death. I'd flown from Edinburgh to Bristol with Kate, my partner. We rolled up at Combe Florey village in a hire car on Tuesday evening and went to the pub for a pint. To my astonishment, Evelyn's grandson, Alexander Waugh - dressed in white shirt, shorts and shoes - breezily walked in. Kate persuaded me that this was too good a chance to miss, and so she made an approach to his table on my behalf. Thanks to her, we talked to Alexander and his tennis coach all evening. Later that night, I was too excited to sleep. How strange.
The next day we returned to Combe Florey from our nearby lodgings (actually, I've no idea where we stayed the night), and visited Alexander's chum in the gate house to Combe Florey. I think it was after this that Kate and I visited Evelyn's graveside, but I'm not sure. Anyway, there were three pictures taken to mark the occasion. In the pic below, the horizontal grave slabs are for Evelyn Waugh and Laura Waugh, and the vertical gravestone is for Margaret Waugh, their daughter. 
And then I posed on Evelyn's grave. I apologise to all concerned for what might be interpreted as a show of disrespect. But, dear reader, can a kid of a mere 48 years of age not be cut some slack?
Note how you can see all the way from Waugh's grave to Combe Florey, his house for the last nine years of his life. Note also that Evelyn Waugh's grave is on a slope. The concern is that one day the graves would slip from the boundary of Combe Florey into the immediately adjacent church graveyard. This church, not being a Catholic Church, would not have been deemed a suitable resting place by Evelyn Waugh. Or Laura Herbert. Or their daughter, Meg.
The second visit was in August, 2011, just a month or so before my book Evelyn! was supposed to be published by Beautiful Books with a quote by Alexander Waugh on the back cover. There was an Evelyn Waugh symposium organised at Downside School, and on one of its days, Alexander hired a coach so that we could all (about thirty of us) travel to Combe Florey to see the house and the grave.
Here I am walking between the church and the raised grave.
And here I am (below) supposedly listening to Evelyn's complaints from beyond the grave. Mostly moans and groans about Cyril Connolly and Harold Acton. Nothing much changed in Evelyn Waugh's life after the age of fifty. Actually, that's not true as I trust the Combe Florey essays that I wrote in summer of 2025 demonstrate.
Another disrespectful pose, you might think. Again it was Kate who was taking the pictures, though it would be one of the last times she would accompany me on an Evelyn Waugh field trip. She had had enough of my obsessions (Enid Blyton and Evelyn Waugh) and was embarking on art projects of her own by this time.
And now it's 2026 and I am here for a third, and, as I say, presumably last time. On this occasion I intend to come away with a decent set of photos.
We approach the grave, not from the house as on previous occasions, but via the church. 
There are people talking inside, so we'll look in before we go.
I notice that work has been done on the wall that keeps the Waugh graves out of the churchyard. The stonework has been cleaned up and repointed, and a steel railing has been erected from what I take to be a new layer of coping stone.
Please note, dear reader, that there is no longer a view from the graves to Evelyn's old house. Combe Florey has long had occupants who have no connection with the Waugh family. Evelyn died in 1966 which is sixty years ago. And although his son, Auberon, raised his family at Combe Florey (including Alexander), once Auberon died the house didn't stay in the family for much longer. I think Teresa, Auberon's wife, stayed there on her own for a while. She wrote a book of fiction about it called The House. Meanwhile, Alexander had married and set up home somewhere not too far away from here, in rural Somerset.
I try and strike a more respectful pose this time. After all, here lies a writer who has always meant a great deal to me, ever since I read his books in the form of Penguin paperbacks while lying on a beanbag in my parents' home in Hemel Hempstead. I would have been seventeen when I read Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and several more. He used humour as a defence against the world and that worked for me too.
I was still reading Evelyn's comic novels when I went up to Cambridge to read Geography in 1976. It was at Downing College that I first met John Wilson, who is my essential helper for today. John has been with me twice to Piers Court, but this is his first visit to Combe Florey.
"Better not lean too much on that railing, John."
"Don't worry, Dunc. It;s a fine bit of workmanship. I expect it'll see us both out."
"Steady, lad. No talk of death. We've only just got here!"
Actually, it's a beautiful late summer day. I know it's September, but September is very much a summer month in these days of global warming. I will have to take my jacket off soon. 
But having at last got to this precise spot sporting a decent jacket, I want it to feature in a few shots.
Down to work. I've brought with me a set of photos on foam boards. The fact that I went to the trouble of having them printed at size A3, and mounting them on boards, shows I felt they had value.
This next shot shows three photographs that Alexander Waugh sent me, unpublished photos until they appeared in my book once it finally came out in 2015, courtesy of Harbour. 
The photographer was Alastair Graham, Evelyn's first lover, and the subjects are the Evelyns. That's Hevelyn and Shevelyn. Shevelyn does not look happy in these photos, in fact neither of them do. Which either says something about their relationship (which ended disastrously two years later) or about Alastair's intrusive presence in the days of their fresh love. The photos were taken in summer of 1927 (if I remember rightly) and Decline and Fall was published in September of 1928 (nearly a hundred years ago). The lightness and originality of that novel attests to how happy Evelyn Waugh must have been in that year.
The two photos on the right of the next pic show Kate in front of pubs that Evelyn Waugh frequented. The top one is the Barley Mow in Sussex, where Waugh wrote most of Decline and Fall. And the bottom one is The Abingdon Arms, Beckley, near Oxford, where Waugh began Vile Bodies. 
Amazing that these places have existed as pubs for 100 years. Or at least they were still open for business in that glory period of 2006/2007 when I was following in Evelyn's footsteps, from house to house and pub to pub. Oh, I'm feeling nostalgic for Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love. In the pages of that book, I go into the doomed relationship of the Evelyns in sumptuous detail.
This next picture was taken in another pub, the Easton Court Hotel, at Chagford in Devon, where A Handful of Dust was partly written. Kate was with me then. She is just about visible in the picture (she is taking a photo of me, and her white hair in particular is visible as a reflection), and we had a good time together. 
Evelyn didn't have a good time in the Amazon jungle (where much of Handfulers takes place), where he went to escape his disappointment that Baby Jungman wouldn't sleep with him in 1933. Or marry him. And if a girl rejects you, then you've no choice but to go to the ends of the earth just to get her off your mind.
If you're lucky, you survive. And if you survive then you have to return home. And so we return to Barford. I think that place is the focal point of Evelyn's happiness. John and I have been there at least three times (Barford is not that far from his home in Kenilworth) to keep an eye on the folly or temple that's at the bottom of the garden.
The above photo (on white-edged foam board) was taken in 2007. We were also there in 2019 and 2023.
But the main visit, I've just remembered was in May, 2013. That's when John and I took a set of photos at the temple, further dilapidated than in 2007, at the bottom of the garden, with me arsing about at the edge of the ruin. That's when I worked out a way of telling Evelyn's story via photos of the crumbling temple and a Lewis Carroll poem. The one about hunting for butterflies that sleep among the wheat. But it's this Lewis Carroll poem that I can recite by heart:
Long has paled that sunny sky
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Autumn frosts? What was Carroll on about? We barely get frost in winter these days.
Oh, but I know what the poet meant:
Interesting, surely, that Evelyn Waugh ended up here, in this secluded corner of Somerset, buried alongside Laura Herbert (a cousin of Evelyn Gardner) by whom he had seven children. In some ways it would have been appropriate if he'd been buried under the temple at Barford, in Warwickshire, alongside Alastair Graham and Evelyn Gardner.
But Evelyn would have belittled that idea. In your twenties you spend time with people you find attractive, if you're lucky. But you make a life with people that you find you can live with from day to day. Laura was able to put up with Evelyn's eccentricities in a way that Evelyn Gardner simply wouldn't have.
I ask John what he sees in the next photo.
He tells me he sees, in the background, two or three people sitting under a tree. Perhaps having a picnic. I tell him that it's a close-up of a tiny part of the background of the previous picture. For me, it is Sebastian and Charles smoking Turkish cigarettes on a knoll in the countryside not a million miles from Brideshead. The time when Sebastian said he'd like to bury something in the ground at every place he'd been happy. Then when he was old and ugly he would revisit the places and dig up those bits of his happy past.
It's significant, I think, that it was the relationship with Alastair at Barford and Oxford that Evelyn looked back on with such longing in 1944 when writing Brideshead Revisited. 
John reminds me that it was in the summer of our last trip to Barford that we also went to nearby Stratford, to see Shakespeare's grave and the statue that was erected for him in the church there. He reminds me that I had pointed out that the original memorial stated that William Shakespeare was a wool merchant, and it was only a hundred years later, around 1800, that the status of poet and playwright was given to him. Alexander Waugh had discovered this and a lot more, information he was sharing on his Youtube channel.
Oh, that's right. Alexander had studied various books published in Shakespeare's time and had come to the conclusion that the works of Shakespeare weren't written by a grammar school boy from Stratford, but by a man of the nobility, specifically, the Earl of Oxford who needed to keep his writing a secret. To my surprise I had begun to believe this theory (it made so much sense biographically; there is nothing of the wool merchant from Stratford in the plays) and always intended to have a discussion with Alexander about it. Then I was told by someone in the Waugh community that Alexander had died in the summer of 2024 at the distressingly early age of 60. That was so sad. I would never get a chance to talk about the authorship of A Midsummer Night's Dream with him.
I tell John that Alexander Waugh is buried elsewhere in the village of Combe Florey, beside his father, Auberon Waugh, Evelyn's second oldest child.
"Why was Auberon not buried here?"
"Good question. Maybe because this tiny bit of land was about to slip into the churchyard, and that was deemed less than ideal."
But the mention of Shakespeare has triggered something. Earlier this year I became fixated on Shakespeare's Sonnets, and in particular the sonnet numbered 18. Can I remember it? Does it work in an Evelyn Waugh context? Say Evelyn in the time of hanging about the temple at Barford and writing Decline and Fall in the Barley Mow. Let's find out.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date."
Brilliant. Keep going…
"Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd."
I am now on a roll. Just as Evelyn was while writing Decline and Fall with his Paul Pennyfeather and his Captain Grimes and his Margot Beste Chetwynde (pronounced, 'Beast Cheating')…
"But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st."
Great. Which just leaves the last two lines.
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
John is not that impressed. Basically because he remembers that I quoted the same sonnet in an On Kawara context just last month.
I argue that both tributes can be fair. My respect for Evelyn's creativity knew no bounds. And now my respect for On Kawara's creativity knows no bounds.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date."
"Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd."
"But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st."
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."
That's been quite an intense session. John has wandered off to take a break.
We actually lost touch for a while after college. John had been 'reading for the Church' but was sent down for indecent behaviour. Basically, he was debagged by the Bollinger set in the middle of Downing quad, and the college authorities refused to believe his protestations of innocence. ("He ran the whole length of the quadrangle, you say, without his trousers.") My how we laughed.
I stayed on at Downing for another ten years or so. Not in any official capacity. But I set myself up in a corner of the Master's Lodge and began writing. Every few years a new Master would come along and there would be that awkward first meeting in his dressing room. He would ask what I was doing there and I would say I was reading for the Church. Somehow that single line disarms dons. Anyway, it's a line that's never failed me. I put down my survival at Downing to what Captain Grimes said about the public school system: "Once you've been through it, it never lets you down." Though the funny thing, in my case, is that I've never been within a country mile of a public school.
So there you have it. John Wilson aka Paul Pennyfeather; Duncan McLaren aka Paul Pennyfeather.
What a couple of lightweights, some of you will be thinking. Fair enough, I say. What a couple of wool merchants, others of you will be thinking. "Don't push it!" I say.
A couple of lightweights, separated for ten years, but brought together again by, amongst other things, a mutual interest in, first, Enid Blyton, then Evelyn Waugh and, now, On Kawara.
"Shall we go into the church then? For old times sake?" asks John-Paul.
"Sure," I reply.
Inside the church we find two adults, one male and one female, talking together in what strikes me as an open-plan room at the bottom of the tower. They greet us in a friendly way and soon we are telling them what we've come to their village to do. I show them the Date Painting and get blank looks in response. However, both know all about the graves we've been looking at, and something about the history of the Waugh family in Combe Florey.
Teresa Waugh's name crops up. For some reason it takes me a moment to realise that this is Auberon Waugh's wife rather than the eldest daughter of Evelyn and Laura, also called Teresa. But soon I'm up to speed. Evelyn's daughter-in-law, Teresa, took it upon herself to ensure that something was done about the security of the graves, though neither the local council nor church authorities would appear to have made this business as easy as it might have been
I am on firmer ground when the name of Septimus Waugh, Evelyn and Laura's seventh child, is mentioned. When Septimus was a little boy, and lost, he had to be escorted back to Piers Court (the house in Gloucestershire where the Waughs then lived) by a local farmer. The letter of thanks that Evelyn sent the farmer is now in my ownership. I explain that I suppose I wanted it for the Evelyn Waugh signature rather than the Septimus content. But there it is. We are told by both church officials that as a stonemason, the adult Septimus was involved in making safe his parents' graves, by strengthening the supporting wall. Septimus has since died, Cindy Bottard tells me. She being the churchwarden (if I have remembered her ecclesiastical status correctly) that we're speaking with.
Cindy's male colleague (apologies: I didn't catch his name) tells me something very interesting about Septimus. According to Septimus, the reason that Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic was to please Laura - his second wife and Septimus's mother. This is what Septimus actually said to this church official, so it needs to be taken seriously. But the fact is that Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic in 1930, following the failure of his first marriage to She-Evelyn. He didn't meet Laura until about 1934 and they got married in 1937. However, the biographies written by various writers from Christopher Sykes to Selina Hastings wouldn't have been available for Septimus to read when he was growing up, and perhaps it seemed easier to tell the boy a simpler story back then. It makes me realise that a family's privately held story need not be the same as the publicly accepted one. Especially where an infamous person is involved.
Cindy Bottard obviously knows a fair bit about Evelyn Waugh the writer, so the names of books pass back and forth between us. She gives me pause for thought when she says that her own copy of Brideshead Revisited suggests that the book was written in 1959. I hate to correct someone in public, as it were, but I can't stop myself from stating that the book was written at the end of the Second World War, that is in 1944. Cindy is puzzled. She tells me that the printed foreword in her copy was definitely signed by Evelyn at Combe Florey in 1959. Which gives me a chance to explain that Evelyn took advantage of his quiet country retreat in Somerset to read over many of his novels, make a few corrections, and provide a context to the original conception of the work.
With my credentials as the world's greatest living authority on Evelyn Waugh firmly established (with the sad death of Alexander Waugh and the retirement of Martin Stannard this may even be true) we can all relax a bit. The delights of country life in Warwickshire and Gloucestershire are compared with those of Somerset… The delicate question of whether or not Combe Florey's highly rated pub is open for a liquid lunch on a mid-week afternoon is discussed… And the even more delicate question of why I am going around with a one day out-of-date Date Painting clutched in my hand is ventured.
Soon the church is alive with the tinkle of gentle laughter. It's as if a choir has assembled and is enjoying a moment of relaxation before getting down to the serious work of singing the praises of God.
The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Combe Florey. All welcome.
