William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Valediction forbidding mourning. Can there be a stranger borough in London? Can there be images of the city more dramatically bleak and excitingly futuristic? The wind seems keener and fiercer in Newham than elsewhere in London, tugging at you as it rushes from across the North Sea and the Thames estuary, hurrying on its giant flotilla of dark rain clouds, spinnakering westwards. Stand on the dockside at the city airport and watch the planes lift off for Frankfurt and Bruges, your eye momentarily held by the flashing light at the tip of Canary Wharf, your ear catching the rumble of a train on the elevated trackways of the DLR — as you turn you note the precisely angled slope of the dry-ski run and the bright stacked apartments of a new village-cluster and, behind you, the fuming steel ziggurat that is the Tate and Lyle sugar factory. Some sort of weird rejuvenation is happening here out in the east of London, however surreal. The mineral rain spits on your face, abrading your cheeks gently, as with a fine steel wool.

Woolwich, or to be more precise, North Woolwich, forms the southernmost portion of the borough, and, because the rest of Woolwich was south of the river — in Kent — it was known, until it was amalgamated into Newham, as “Kent in Essex.”

Xeroxing a map of Newham and noticing how it is composed of so many real places with real histories made me realize how artificial a construct it is. So I suggest we should abandon its current pronunciation, the apologetic, half-swallowed mumble of “newum,” and boldly rechristen it New Ham, which, along with the ancient low-lying meadows of East and West Ham, might give the place a sense of continuity and a kind of validity — make it seem less young.

Young boroughs lack traditions, lack a sense of community. Newham has existed for only thirty-five years. West Ham, by contrast, is an ancient parish and was even a parliamentary borough in 1855 and, moreover, one that played a significant role in the history of socialism. Keir Hardie was elected Labour MP for West Ham South in 1892. Neville Chamberlain suspended its Board of Guardians in 1926 for what the government regarded as over-generous poor relief. What can youthful Newham offer in terms of history and tradition that won’t seem wholly ersatz?

Zoroastrianism may seem an unlikely notion, even a facetious one, but Newham and its agglomeration of parishes and county boroughs have always been a home to nonconformity and pluralism. There were over a hundred nonconformist chapels of all denominations at the turn of the century; there were Quaker meeting houses in Plaistow in the seventeenth century and the borough still boasts two convents and two friaries. I’m sure that today any passing Zoroastrian would receive a warm welcome in the Amazing Grace’s International Worship Centre on the Barking Road. You look around at all the contrasts and contradictions of the place and have to conclude that, whatever its difficulties, its transformations and its deprivations, the real and enduring spice in Newham’s life has always been its ineffable, unrivalled and bewildering variety.

2000

Evelyn Waugh died on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966, at the age of sixty-three. I was at boarding school and had just turned fourteen but I remember the occasion of his death. One of the more rebellious intellectuals in the sixth form had pinned a notice to the main notice board deploring the fact that the philistine school authorities had made not a single announcement, had urged not a solitary act of remembrance, about the passing away of one of the greatest English novelists. This ardent Waugh fan urged that individual boys make donations so that flowers could be sent to the family. A small list of names, with modest sums of money beside them, was scrawled below. I don’t know whether some bouquet or other eventually made its way from the school to Waugh’s home in Somerset — but I do remember pointedly logging away the unfamiliar name of this author. Evelyn Waugh? … Wonder if he’s any good?

Thirty-five years later I now know the answer to that question but I could never have foreseen just how intense my relationship with the works and the man would become. Its latest manifestation is the four-hour adaptation of Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and for which I wrote the script. This is the second time I have adapted Waugh’s work for the screen. The first was Scoop , a two-hour film for LWT, made in 1987. In 1982 I was TV critic for the New Statesman and wrote at length about John Mortimer’s epic adaptation of Brideshead Revisited . But by then the embroilment was well underway: I had read all the novels, of course, and had even taught them to undergraduates at Oxford. I had started searching second-hand bookshops for first editions. My Waugh obsession was fully developed.

Waugh, more than any of his peers, provokes this level of interest. The obvious reason for this is that the works endure so well and provide such great rewards. But the other explanation must be that we know so much about the man himself. I own four biographies, not to mention several other memoirs by family, friends and acquaintances. The juvenilia have been published and so have the travel books and the complete journalism; then there are the notorious journals and the collected letters and other additional volumes of correspondence between Waugh and Nancy Mitford, Waugh and Diana Cooper. Almost every public and private word the man wrote has been published and he’s not been dead forty years — we have all the information on Evelyn Waugh we could possibly want.

And this is what informs and charges our reading. Waugh is the most autobiographical of writers — even the grotesque and outlandish comedies— Vile Bodies, Black Mischief —are solidly rooted in the details of his life. This tendency to recycle his own experience is nowhere more evident than the trilogy of novels Waugh wrote about the Second World War— Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) — which he collected together, somewhat revised, under the general title of Sword of Honour , first published in a single volume in 1965.

The central figure of the trilogy is Guy Crouchback who, at the outbreak of war in 1939, is thirty-five years old, almost the same age as Waugh at the time. There all similarity breaks down: Guy is, in effect, an almost fantasy alter ego for the author — a cradle Catholic from an ancient aristocratic family, an independently wealthy single man living in Italy. Everything, so the uncharitable view would go, that Waugh himself aspired to and yearned for in his life.

But the course that Guy Crouchback’s war follows is, in almost every degree, that of Waugh’s. Waugh eventually managed to secure a commission in the Marines and was later transferred to the Commandos. The glamorous resonance of these names belies the mundanity and relentless frustration of Waugh’s military experience. Like Guy, Waugh’s first brush with action was a mission to Dakar in West Africa. Then in 1941 he was sent to Crete with the Commandos to try and repel the German invasion, just managing to escape before the British forces surrendered. Then, after a period of inactivity (during which he wrote Brideshead Revisited) , Waugh was dispatched to Yugoslavia in 1944 to be part of a military mission liaising with Tito’s partisans.

Waugh was hugely discontented as a soldier. He was a brave man (quite fearless under fire during the Crete debacle) but he was difficult and unpopular. No commanding officer wanted Waugh in his force and he was routinely shunted from command to command as patience ran out and tempers erupted. He was rude and truculent: a wealthy and famous novelist, he was a malign and prickly presence in the officers’ mess. I remember once meeting Fitzroy Maclean — with whom Waugh served in Yugoslavia — and I asked him what he thought of Waugh. Maclean said he had never known an officer more loathed and detested by the men who served under him. Maclean and Waugh cordially disliked each other so the opinion has to be treated with some caution. But, after Crete, Waugh’s disillusion with the army and its values was profound.