My Brideshead Revisited

It is fashionable nowadays to mock nostalgia as though it were a waste of time or an aberration of the self-indulgent mind, but I disagree. Melancholia, sentimentality and rose-tinted glasses are excellent in combination and if the advice of our ancient sages – ‘Know Thyself’ – is to be followed at all, what better way to begin on that journey than by a wistful revisitation of the memories and haunts of youth?

I left the Old Rectory, Chilton Foliat on 28 October 1971, squeezed into the back of a blue Volkswagen Beetle with a goldfish bowl on my lap and spaniel breath in my face. I was seven-years old and never thought I would see the place again. Before getting into the car, I was allowed one last leap from the stump of a prunus tree outside the drawing-room window. My sister and I were in tears as we drove out of the front gate.

The reason for my revisitation, some 50 years later, was a generous and wholly unexpected invitation from the present owners (children of the late Alan and Tara Elliot whom I had never met) to look over the old home on the eve of their grand selling-up. If they thought I was in the market for buying it they were wrong. The Church of England sold the rectory to my parents for £3,500 in 1964, putting the incumbent vicar, Percy Bird, into a new-build fortress just beyond the garden. Strutt & Parker are now asking almost £6m.

This gracious and wholly English Queen Anne house was bought from my parents by Alan Elliot, a entrepreneur, the chairman of Blick, who made his fortune out of time – not in the usual way as the bankers do, by applying interest to loans, but by concentrating his formidable mercantile mind on time management, clocking-in machines, alarms and parking meters. Coming from a literary family with no understanding of financial affairs, I was led to believe that all businessmen were extremely wealthy and that Mr Elliot was the wealthiest of them all. My father whispered to me in strange accents that the downstairs lavatory, which I had flooded one hot summer to create a swimming pool, now served as the entrance to a private race track stretching beneath the entire village; that a high laurel tree, from which I peed on my poor sister’s head, had been cut down to make way for a heliport and rocket launcher; that the children’s nursery was where Mr Elliot stashed his fortune in piles so high that no light could get through the window that looked out into the churchyard; that my old bedroom was the place where Mr Elliot’s servants polished, counted, cut and arranged all his diamonds.

I may not have believed in these fables at the time but the memory of them made me apprehensive as I approached the unfamiliar cast iron gates from where I saw the house, for the first time in more than 50 years, in the light of our new white sun, shining brighter, cleaner and more spectacular than anything I could recall.

My father was not rich. He had written a couple of novels and was working as a low-paid journalist when we moved in. In a back corridor next to the croquet set hung a framed poster showing him looking important by the garish legend: ‘SUNDAY MIRROR - A Brilliant Young Writer Reports - Our British Morals by Auberon Waugh’. Now, in its place, another reminder of another moral lecture – Sebastiano Ricci’s magnificent painting of Alexander the Great’s encounter with the Diogenes. The famous cynic philosopher was a notorious man with a lively mind who maintained the habit I had abandoned aged four (that of peeing on other people) well into his old age. Ricci portrays him wizened and naked, sitting by the clay tub, in which he lived, giving the humbled king a critique of wealth and worldly ambition. It is a profound work which has no doubt served as a bracing corrective to generations of its wealthy owners through the centuries and is indicative of the self-reflective nature of the late Alan Elliot’s collecting.

So I have little memory of that elegant room. I am sure it was not as smart and comfortable as the Elliots have made it. Two jaw-dropping English cabinets, one 17th century of olive and walnut wood, the other 18th century of japanned lacquer, were exactly the sort of furniture that I would have loved and busticated while searching furiously for hidden treasures among its secret compartments. A pair of importsnt Irish equestrian portraits by of Thomas and Sarah Conolly of Castletown by William Osborne made mockery of the vast and primitive 18th century painting of leopards that my father had bought in a rash moment of extravagance at Sotheby’s. None of us minded that one of the leopards had only two legs and resembled more a mutilated goat than a leopard or that most of our guests believed it to be a mutilated goat. Mr Elliot’s thoroughbred four-legged horses reminded me of the importance of actually looking at a painting before placing a bid on it. Alas beyond my means!

I was very little then, and everything seemed so big, or is it that now I am big everything seems so little? Did I really roll down that bank on the lawn? I cannot imagine how a mouse could pass more than one rotation on it now, yet I rolled and rolled, over and over ad nauseam until I reached the bottom. The garden has been expanded from about two acres to eleven since my day and the prunus tree from which I leapt has been removed. It is highly unlikely that I will ever see the place again. What should I do in my last minutes there, I wondered. I know, I shall go back in and take another another moral lecture from Ricci’s Diogenes. “Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse” – Got it! Then I left.

Alexander Waugh is General Editor of a 43-volume scholarly edition of the complete works of his grandfather, Evelyn Waugh, and author of several well acclaimed books including Fathers and Sons.