Mad World Read Online Free PDF

by the publication of Alec Waugh’s novel. The passage in The Loom of Youth that really cut to the quick was not the brief flight of homosexual allusion but a sequence when a young soldier returns to his public school and smashes the ideals of the war: ‘All our generation has been sacrificed … At the beginning we were deceived by the tinsel of war. Romance dies hard. But we know now. We’ve done with fairy tales. There is nothing glorious in war; no good can come of it. It’s bloody, utterly bloody.’
    Days after the novel’s publication the soldier novelist, still in his teens, was posted to France. All of this only increased interest in Alec Waugh and his novel. There were already many soldier-poets but he was the first soldier-novelist. He had achieved literary celebrity and sales that ought to have made his publisher father proud. But Arthur was devastated: illusions were shattered and friendships were broken. The son of his soul had betrayed the school that had nurtured them both.
    For Evelyn, just thirteen, the immediate effect of his older brother’s disgrace was that Sherborne was barred to him just as he was about to go there. Instead he was sent to Lancing, a ‘small public school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs’. His father had never even seen the place and had no associations with it. Evelyn had an ecclesiastical temper of his own and had expressed hopes of becoming a parson. Perhaps he could do something to absolve the sins of his brother.

CHAPTER 2

Lancing versus Eton
There was a scent of dust in the air; a thin vestige surviving in the twilight from the golden clouds with which before chapel the House Room fags had filled the evening sunshine. Light was failing. Beyond the trefoils and branched mullions of the windows the towering autumnal leaf was now flat and colourless … the first day of term was slowly dying.
    So begins Evelyn Waugh’s unfinished story, Charles Ryder’s Schooldays , which was closely based on his experiences at Lancing College in Sussex. A scrim of nostalgia hazes his memory. It was not like this when he left for Lancing on a damp and overcast day in May 1917. Arriving in the summer term meant that it was very difficult for him to make friends. Furthermore, whereas most of the boys had been hardened to absence from home by prep school, for Evelyn it was his first experience of boarding. ‘I had lived too softly for my first thirteen years,’ he ruefully remarked.
    The school itself was built high on the hills of the Sussex Downs, dominating the horizon with its huge chapel. ‘Lancing was monastic, indeed, and mediaeval in the full sense of the English Gothic revival; solitary, all of a piece, spread over a series of terraces sliced out of a spurof the downs.’ That is how Evelyn described it in his autobiography. Its solitariness was of a piece with his own.
    Ascension Day fell four days after he arrived. Having no idea that it was a school holiday, Evelyn had made no arrangements for family visits. No meals were served and it rained all day. The House Room was locked. It was the worst day of his life and he never forgot how wretchedly lonely he felt. He would bring up his own children to ‘make a special intention at the Ascension Mass for all desolate little boys’.
    Waugh kept a diary during his first two unhappy years at Lancing. He later destroyed it. In part, his unhappiness was a direct result of war deprivations: ‘the food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house and it grew steadily worse until the end of the war’. Milkless cocoa, small portions of tasteless margarine, bread and foul stew constituted the very best of the fare. School textbooks were war issue, printed on thin greyish paper and bound in greasy, limp oilcloth, something that offended his taste for fine binding and hand-printed paper.
    Many of the best young masters were fighting in the war, and the boys were made conscious of the sacrifices made daily by