How to Disappear (21 page)

In 1977 the
New Statesman
published a letter in which an American, Telford Gosling Spratt, announced that he was researching a book to be called
Evelyn Waugh: The Gay Years
and appealing for reminiscences. Nothing came of it and the title was hilarious, reminiscent of a Fred Astaire film. But it's definitely a topic. John Betjeman once exclaimed on the radio ‘Oh, we were all queer then!' Waugh could never have been that carefree. The later rejection of so much of himself- of that generosity of spirit and enlarged capacity for life represented by his bisexuality – and his recourse to caricatured forms of religion and of social image, were disastrous. Existence became for him ever more loathsome, his days ever more alcoholic and miserable. Which would not be so objectionable had this state of affairs been of benefit to his art. But alas it was disastrous for that too. The books go terribly down hill. Whole tracts of them become nothing more than posey propaganda. The lightness went out of his work because it went out of his life.

The syndrome is not unique. The arc of the playwright John Osborne's life presents an unlikely parallel. An important attachment to another male early on, followed by professional success turning into drunken dandification, and to belligerent homophobic squirehood in the fourth phase. Both Osborne and Waugh presented a ludicrous spectacle in their last years, as if the ‘camp' had to find an outlet somewhere and did so in theatrical plumage. Since both were astute observers of the human scene they must have recognised their absurdity and in part relished it. Which makes it ‘ambivalence' or ‘love-hate' by another route. To parody with such gross indecorum the squire role they had adopted was a form of offence against it, and what began as an awareness of the comedy of life became with the passing years a Dionysiac orgy of enraged mockery and despair. Both Osborne and Waugh had gay chums to the very end. Osborne incidentally was another one I missed; out of the blue he proposed a rendezvous with me at the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Street, where Oscar Wilde was arrested, but I was in the South of France and couldn't make it. And Alastair Graham? From the range of photographs to hand one can see that he was never sartorially excessive in this way. Though usually smart, to the point of dapper, he was also – socially – the real thing: a reserved upper-class man.

What you are reading is a story of shame and hiding. If most of the hiding was Graham's, most of the shame was Waugh's. Waugh of course became an international celebrity, whereas Graham's life, subsequent to their relationship, entered a fog of obscurity and strangeness.

The years from 1934 to 1937 are particularly crucial to Graham. Up to that time he had travelled extensively in the Mediterranean. After it, he is a recluse. Why?

Giving up work, the loss of his gorgon-protectress mother, the desire to evade the ghosts of the past, these factors no doubt played their part. But could there have been a more urgent trigger? In 1936 (as I am to learn) he was staying with Clough Williams-Ellis at Portmeirion and heard that the Wern was for sale much further down the coast. That same year he bought it from a Major Evans and moved there in 1937. Living in the lodge were a gardener and his thirteen-year-old daughter Lottie and they stayed on. I decided to revisit New Quay.

I saw Lottie Evans, Graham's housekeeper, again in March 1990, this time in her council house on the edge of New Quay. She had retired.

‘Can you remember Mr Graham's arrival at the Wern?'

‘Oh yes. He came with Mrs Cooke the housekeeper and George Wood the butler who'd both been with his mother at Barford. Mrs Cooke had been in his family's service since Mr Graham was three years old and she trained me as a maid. Mr Graham did up the Wern beautifully. It's full of knick-knacks now, but when he had it, it was full of big oil paintings.'

Other local people were also more willing to fill in the gaps. The outbreak of the Second World War forced Graham to participate far more in local life and he developed several robust tastes: beer, sailing, fishing at sea. He went on a boat for the relief of Dunkirk, he joined the Royal Observer Corps, was for a time liaison officer with the US Navy, and also acquired a yacht, the Osprey.

Dylan Thomas was living in New Quay during the war and Graham didn't have a very high opinion of him and told a local reporter, Lyn Ebenezer, in 1978 (uncharitably given that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thomas's death) that Dylan ‘was quite boring in company, at least that's how I always found him, and he was forever begging for money.'

In 1945, as local press cuttings reveal, Graham had been involved in a shooting incident at Majoda, the bungalow occupied by Thomas and his wife Caitlin. They'd all been drinking at the Black Lion pub with a Captain Richard Killick who'd served in Greece. The man was married to a childhood friend of Dylan's called Vera and he became convinced that the poet had seduced his wife and had a threesome with Caitlin (which would have been in keeping). The party returned to Majoda and some time later the Captain followed, arrived outside and started firing at them through the keyhole. Then he burst in with a Sten gun and strafed the ceiling with bullets, shouting ‘You're nothing but a bunch of egotists!'.

Graham told Richard Jones, whom he met in the early 1950 s at an annual dinner of the New Quay Yacht Club, that Killick had thrown a hand grenade into Thomas's bungalow and that, fearful for the Thomas children asleep in the next room, Graham covered it with a cushion and gallantly sat upon it. But Killick wasn't that mad – later it was discovered he'd defused the grenade before tossing it in. Graham reportedly said that ‘By speaking to the Captain and discussing the current situation in Greece, I managed either to make him interested or bored him sufficiently for him to calm down. He agreed to accompany me to his house, Ffynnon Feddyg, which was next door.'

When the case came up at Lampeter in midsummer, the Captain faced four charges, including one of attempting to murder Dylan Thomas. Graham, who was a witness for the prosecution, received a phonecall from his friend David Talbot Rice who by coincidence was the Captain's commanding officer and appearing for the defence.

Graham concluded ‘We were all, including Dylan, very glad when the Captain was cleared by the jury. He was a gentleman, and I'm certain that it was the drink, and the fact that his war experiences had affected his nerves that made him act as he did.'

When Lyn Ebenezer asked Graham how he'd got to know the Dylan Thomases, he replied ‘Through Augustus John who at the time was painting the portrait of a woman in Aberaeron. He called one night with Caitlin. They had one of the Thomas children with them who was placed in my bed while the rest of us had a few drinks. Suddenly Caitlin, who was an acknowledged dancer, stripped off and danced naked on the table. And when I fetched her child, the child had wet my bed.'

After the war, Graham's secretiveness and distaste for life beyond New Quay grew stronger. Dylan Thomas called him ‘the thin-vowelled laird' in a letter to Margaret Taylor and used him as the model for Lord Cut-Glass in
Under Milk Wood
of 1954. ‘Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping'.

In 1958 Graham decided to sell Wern Newydd. Money was getting tight. Mrs Cooke had died and so had the butler George Wood. Servants of their calibre would never exist again. He had tried to find some, advertising for live-in help, recalled Lottie Evans. A couple arrived from Swansea, stayed two nights and left, vexed by Graham's exacting standards – and the fact that the Wern still had no electricity or mains water. Inside it the atmosphere must have been pure Regency.

‘Except,' said Lottie, ‘an enormous paraffin burner in the kitchen! I told him I couldn't carry on working up there and doing it all. He had a big sale with a marquee on the lawn. But even though he sold so much, Rock Street was
full
of papers and books and furniture.'

‘But why did he hide away here?'

Always the same question.

‘Oh…I don't want to go into all that. Ask them up at the Wern. Have you been up to the Wern yet?'

No. And it was time that I did.

The Thomas family, no relations of the poet, purchased Wern Newydd from Alastair Graham and they kindly invited me over for a drink. In the nine years since I'd driven past it and been so taken by its lovely location, the surroundings had altered completely. A garish petrol station had been installed opposite, a holiday camp put up next door, and the Wern itself developed as a commercial riding stable. But I'd never been inside, and when I did it silenced me. It's a wonderful, romantic old place.

The present structure is mostly seventeenth century with parts dating back to the thirteenth. There is much panelling and a wide wooden staircase with shallow tread and barley sugar banisters. Henry Tudor, subsequently Henry VII, stayed here for a night in 1485 on his way to the Battle of Bosworth.

Mrs Thomas said ‘When we took over, the grounds were in a terrible state. Alastair Graham couldn't have had anything done for years. So overgrown was it, that we didn't realise there was a stream running through the garden. But the house was beautiful inside. We found a number of his old books thrown out in the rain with the rubbish. What was so odd was that they were very personal books, the sort you'd think he'd want to hold on to.'

The Thomases retrieved them and put them back in the library where they currently reside, and they include Graham's mother's Prayer Book (Alistair has viciously scraped her bookplate out of it); a Book of Ballads inscribed to Alastair's father by his tutor at Eton; and two further Prayer Books both inscribed ‘Alastair Graham from Mother, First Communion May 13th 1918'. Since Alastair's father did not die until 1921 it is curious that the inscriptions are only from the mother – and so very cold. Forty years later the son threw them into the bin. They meant nothing. Or too much, and he wanted to leave all that behind. Either way, he'd obviously ditched the roaring Catholicism mentioned by Claud Cockburn.

‘We also found a bill,' said Dr Thomas (who is a ship's surgeon). ‘When Graham first came to the Wern he devoted most of his energy to doing it up. The bill says he spent £5,000 on renovations which was an enormous sum before the Second World War – and it can't have been the only bill. He was famous for his parties, in the earlier period anyway. Caitlin Thomas danced naked on the dining-table [again!]. Viscount Tredegar was a good friend. Tom Herbert, the local vet, was a close friend of Alastair's, and he told us that Edward VIII visited Graham at the Wern incognito.'

Tom Herbert had been one of my original sources. I was told he knew a lot. But he'd said virtually nothing while Graham was alive. And now it was too late. Herbert died several weeks before my current visit to New Quay.

‘When we arrived,' said Mrs Thomas, ‘the pine panelling in the dining-room was painted pink. He'd also converted the musicians' hall into a chapel and painted it green and had Mass said in the house.'

There had been a vogue between the wars for painting wood panelling in unnatural colours. Ottoline Morrell had started it at Garsington when she did it up in 1915, breaking with tradition and painting the rooms of Elizabethan oak in grey, green, scarlet and canary-yellow.

Graham had become a Roman Catholic as early as September 13th 1924 but Lottie Evans recalls no religious goings-on at the Wern. ‘Very lapsed, I'd say,' was her remark when I put it to her. Jan Orpen however, a local drinking pal of Graham's, remembers that ‘A Father Bathbrick used to call at the Wern from time to time to keep him in touch. Bathbrick was a famous drinker but Graham, at least when I knew him, was quite moderate. He could have an evil temper and was very self-centred, but he could mix with anyone and never talked down. After he moved to Rock Street he never saw anyone of his own level. He was a very good cook by the way. I've got a little pamphlet he prepared,
20 Different Ways of Cooking New Quay Mackerel.'

I asked Dr Thomas why he thought Graham had escaped to this place in the 1930 s.

‘I don't think he had any choice. He was told by the police – go to ground or go to prison. You know he was part of a homosexual ring in London which was very illegal in those days. There must have been some sort of crackdown in the offing. Rosa Lewis too advised him to get the hell out of town. I gather he was briefly recalled to London during the Suez Crisis because of his knowledge of Egypt.'

So here at last was something more specific about Graham's disappearing act. Tom Herbert told me that Graham had said to him ‘Rosa Lewis was very unkind to me.' Could this have been what he meant? I'd heard that Graham was quite close to Rosa Lewis, the ‘Duchess of Duke Street', friend of Edward VII and patronne of the Cavendish Hotel. This was – somehow – through his mother's only brother, the deceased William Low, who came to England at the end of the nineteenth century with £750,000 and proceeded to spend it. Willie Low died in 1905 but Rosa never forgot a spender. In the company of Graham, Waugh had visited the Cavendish Hotel. Rosa Lewis becomes ‘Lottie Crump' in one of the most brilliant scenes in
Vile Bodies.
She was outraged and never forgave Waugh, and Graham must have taken the flak.

At Rock Street, Graham went out less and less often, apart from his regular drink at the Dolau Inn. Lottie Evans said ‘When he moved into the town he told me he would be spending his winters abroad from now on but he only spent about three nights away from the house the whole time he was there.'

‘We tried to invite him to dinner once,' said Mrs Thomas, ‘but his reply was “I can't, I'm not fit to be seen”.'

That terrible expression again.

Though Graham became president of the New Quay branch of the local Lifeboat Association and was accepted by many of the townsfolk, something sinister and unexplained always clung to him. When I first met him in that pub in 1979 my overriding impression was of pathos, notwithstanding his little joke about Waugh's endowment. Much of Graham's delicate camouflage was blown away at the end of his life when
Brideshead Revisited
was broadcast on television. Graham didn't have a television set himself and a local doctor, Dr Vasey, collected him in the car to watch it at the Vasey household. He loved the show initially, until it became more widely known that he was the original of its pivotal character and the press descended – but they had no more luck than I did. Life in New Quay had been possible because his homosexuality was an unspoken thing. Now here it was on national television, not in your face exactly – Sturridge didn't force the sex angle – but beyond inuendo.