Evacuee Story Lines #3 Evelyn Waugh

I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp.

Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most disagreeable.  Reading Waugh – and about Waugh –  it is easy to conjure up a portrait of a dyspeptic, cantankerous, sour grump, and bad-tempered, obstreperous Tory. This is the Waugh Cyril Connolly once described as having a: “bloated, puffed-up face . . .the beady eyes red with wine and anger, his cigar jabbing as he went into the attack. . .”

Here’s another example of Waugh as disagreeable and vindictive old man:

About his friend and sparring partner Randolph Churchill,  Waugh commented:” “Randolph Churchill went into hospital. . . to have a lung removed. It was announced that the trouble was not ‘malignant’. . . . I remarked that it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.” – Waugh’s diary, March 1964.

So – Waugh was not the kindest and genial of people and he took particular pleasure in the grotesque. Not surprising then that he took a jaundiced view of the government-imposed uninvited guests of wartime aka evacuees. 

In Put Out More Flags, Waugh finds plenty of targets on whom to vent his spleen.  He ridicules the army, its regulations, leadership, and its upper-class cronyism. The foolish bright young things of his earlier novels are still foolish even as they gear up to do their bit. He has a go at bureaucracy, especially the Ministry of Information and the wartime counter-espionage measures. He takes jabs at the artistic and cultural elite and has a running joke at the expense of  W.H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood whom he nicknames Parsnip and Pimpernel.  And among those targets was Operation Pied Piper – the mass evacuation of children, mothers and babies, and the vulnerable from the big cities.

His diaries for the early months of the war show Waugh fretting about his failed efforts to enlist and dealing with the sudden arrival of evacuees. He removed valuable items from the rooms and made caustic observations about the general confusion and behavior of the evacuees who were lingering around, having nothing to do .and looking awfully bored while they “spent their leisure time scattering waste paper round my gates”. When evacuees begin to drift back to the cities, Waugh is delighted to see them gone.

The novel takes place in the lull that followed the declaration in September 1939

I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

And then: “The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over London.”

A false alarm sent people scurrying for the shelters. But the emergency – the aerial bombardment of British cities did not happen. And indeed was not to happen for almost a year. Churchill later called this lull “the twilight war’. Jokers in the British press called it the Sitzkrieg and the Bore War and the Americans dubbed it the Phoney War.

Operation Pied Piper had kicked into gear as tension rose in the days before the declaration. This pause between the rush of the evacuation and the Blitz provided the space for everyone to re-think that operation. And start complaining.  Poor suffering Evelyn Waugh gave satirical voice to those complaints in Put Out More Flags.

Many things had inevitably gone wrong with a plan so complicated and vast. The actual evacuation – the removal of thousands of children and their teachers, mothers and babies, and the vulnerable had happened with remarkable efficiency given the complexity. But then – in the absence of an immediate threat  – the complaints began to pour in. Complaints from all sides about the chaos in the reception areas, about the hygiene and behavior of many of the children, and the inadequacy of some of the billets.

Bewildered and frightened children were uprooted from their families to be relocated often with reluctance on the part of the reception areas. The culture shocks reverberated as bewildered slum children with nits arrived in the shires and wet the bed, and as middle-class children landed in rural poverty and faced the outdoor toilet and lack of running water. It was as if Disrael’s Two Nations had been cannonaded into each other overnight. 

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” – Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), Benjamin Disraeli

“The poor may have seen the countryside for the first time, but the countryside also saw the poor of the cities. It was a shock for both.” (Ben Wicks, 1988.) 

Child psychologists might be concerned with the emotional trauma inflicted on millions of children. Not so Evelyn Waugh, or his anti-hero – the amoral ne’er do well Basil Seal.

Barbara is Basil Seal’s sister and she is the confidant, well-meaning lady-of-the-manor, billeting officer for the village of Malfrey. She meets her match with the problem of the Connolly siblings. And then brother Basil hits upon the perfect money-making scheme. (Given his rivalry with Cyril Connelly you do have to wonder about his choice of name for this misbegotten. hideous trio.)

Meet the Connollies

Evacuation to Malfrey had followed much the same course as it had in other parts of the country and had not only kept Barbara, as billeting officer, constantly busy, but had transformed her, in four months, from one of the most popular women in the countryside into a figure of terror. When her car was seen approaching people fled through covered lines of retreat, through side doors and stable yards, into the snow, anywhere to avoid her persuasive, ‘But surely you could manage one more. He’s a boy this time and a very well-behaved little fellow,’ …”

Waugh provides the counterpoint to any sympathetic portrayal of traumatized children. The Connollies are a conniving, filthy trio who have been foisted on the good folks of Malfrey like a visitation of the plague.

These had appeared as an act of God apparently without human agency; their names did not appear on any list; they carried no credentials; no one was responsible for them. They were found lurking under the seats of a carriage when the train was emptied on the evening of the first influx. They had been dragged out and stood on the platform where everyone denied knowledge of them, and since they could not be left there, they were included in the party that was being sent by bus to Malfrey village. From that moment they were on a list; they had been given official existence and their destiny was inextricably involved with that of Malfrey.

Nothing was ever discovered about the Connollies’ parentage. When they could be threatened or cajoled into speaking of their antecedents they spoke, with distaste, of an “Auntie”. To this woman, it seemed, the war had come as a Godsent release. She had taken her dependents to the railway station, propelled them into the crowd of milling adolescence, and hastily covered her tracks by decamping from home.

There was Doris, ripely pubescent, aged by her own varied accounts anything from ten years to eighteen. An early and ingenious attempt to have her certified as an adult was frustrated by an inspecting doctor who put her at about fifteen… Her figure was stocky, her bust prodigious, and her gait, derived from the cinematograph, was designed to be alluring.

Micky, her junior by the length of a rather stiff sentence for house-breaking, was of lighter build; a scrawny, scowling little boy; a child of few words and those, for the most part, foul.

Marlene was presumed to be a year younger. But for Micky’s violent denials she might have been taken for his twin…. Marlene was simple. An appeal to have her certified imbecile was disallowed by the same inspecting doctor, who expressed an opinion that country life might work wonders with the child.

There the three had stood, on the eve of the war, in Malfrey Parish Hall, one leering, one lowering, and one drooling, as unprepossessing a family as could be found in the kingdom.

Barbara as the billeting officer she assigns the Connollies to the Mudges – “a tough farming family on a remote homestead.” Within a week they are back.

‘It’s not for myself, Mrs Sothill; I’m out and about all day and in the evenings I’m sleepy, and being with animals so much I don’t take on so. But it’s my old woman. She do take on and she won’t stand for it. She’ve locked herself in upstairs and she won’t come down till they’ve gone, and when she do say that she means of it, Mrs Sothill. We’re willing to do anything in reason to help the war, but these brats aren’t to be borne and that’s flat.’

‘Oh dear, Mr Mudge, which of them is giving trouble?’

‘Why it’s all of ’em, m’am. There’s the boy was the best of ’em at first though you can’t understand what he do say, speaking as they do where he come from. Nasty, unfriendly ways he had but he didn’t do much that you could call harm not till he’d seen me kill the goose. I took him out to watch to cheer him up like, and uncommon interested he was, and I thought I’ll make a country lad of you yet. I gave him the head to play with and he seemed quite pleased. Then no sooner was I off down to the root field, than blessed if he didn’t get hold of a knife and when I came back supper time there was six of my ducks dead and the old cat. Yes, mum, blessed if he hadn’t had the head off of our old yellow cat. Then the little un, she’s a dirty girl, begging your pardon, mum. It’s not only her wetting the bed; she’ve wetted everywhere, chairs, floor and not only wetting, mum. Never seem to have been taught to be in a house where she comes from.’

‘But doesn’t the elder girl do anything to help?’

‘If you ask me, mum, she’s the worst of the lot. My old woman would stick it but for her, but it’s that Doris makes her take on like she do. Soft about the men, she is, mum. Why she even comes making up to me and I’m getting on to be her grandfer. She won’t leave our Willie alone not for a minute, and he’s a bashful boy our Willie and he can’t get on with the work, her always coming after him. So there it is, mum. I’m sorry not to oblige but I’ve promised my old woman I won’t come back with ’em and I dusn’t go back on what I’ve said.’

The Mudges are the first of a succession of failed billets until finally, the children are placed in an institution. But then the institution itself is evacuated and back they are in Malfrey again. 

Basil takes over his sister’s role as billeting officer. What to her and the neighborhood is a nightmare becomes his business opportunity. Basil turns the problem of the Connellies into a commodity. He wins over the partnership of Marlene who is able to control the worst impulses of her siblings. Basil is now able to extract considerable sums of money from the good people of Malfrey, extorting them into payments for withdrawing the children.  

An all-round happy solution to an otherwise intractable problem.