LITMIR.BIZ

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lowering my voice to a confidential whisper in case I am overheard and exposed to the world at large, ‘but I went to a place called Malvern.’

      ‘Marlborough?’ my questioner booms. ‘But that’s a splendid school. What house were you in? Did you happen to know …?’

      ‘No, Malvern,’ I say, making my voice as quiet but as clear as possible; at which a half-pitying, half-baffled look flits across his kindly features, and the conversation is swiftly hurried in a more wholesome direction.

      Part of the problem with being an Old Malvernian is that one’s fellows are a fairly undistinguished crew. Like Malvern, Marlborough in the old days seems to have been a fairly brutal, philistine school, but at least its more literary pupils had the consolation of knowing that John Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon and Louis MacNeice had also suffered and survived. Malvern, by comparison, offered cold comfort. During my time at the school, the Old Malvernian most admired by the Governors, and held up as a model for us all, was an angry-looking cove called Sir Godfrey Huggins, who boasted bulging blue eyes, scarlet cheeks and a bristling grey moustache. (I have taken some liberties with the colour scheme, since the photograph of Huggins which hung in the place of honour in one of the school corridors was, of course, in black and white.) Huggins had risen to become the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, and when in due course he was made a peer, he assumed the title of Lord Malvern, in gratitude to his alma mater. One of the trains that ran between Paddington and Malvern, and points beyond, was named after him, and bore on either side of its boiler a curved metal plaque to that effect. A photograph of the train’s engine, some five feet wide, had been presented to the school in a handsome wooden frame and nailed up alongside that of the former Prime Minister, rubbing shoulders with former headmasters in gowns and mortar boards, and cricketing elevens dating back to the 1860s.

      Altogether more interesting, but less widely advertised within the grounds of the school, were James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s paranoid master-spy, and Aleister Crowley, the bald, pop-eyed black magician who liked to be acclaimed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or ‘the Great Beast’, and spent much of his time frolicking with naked handmaidens and sacrificing goats in a deserted monastery in Sicily. C.S. Lewis was a balding sage of a more reputable variety, but although he was an old Oxford friend of Mr Sayer, the Senior English Master, he had blotted his copybook by ridiculing Malvern (referred to as ‘Wyvern’) in his autobiography, Summoned by Joy.

      Curiously, for such a philistine and sports-mad school, minor literary men loom larger than games players among the old boys of interest. Raymond Mortimer, a most unlikely Malvernian, hated the place and moved on as quickly as possible to Balliol, Bloomsbury and the Sunday Times; John Moore, an affable old countryman who looked as though he should have worn a tweed fisherman’s hat, smoked a pipe and spoke with an Archers accent, was much admired in my childhood for his novels set in a country town based on nearby Tewkesbury, and was involved in setting up the Cheltenham Literary Festival; Sir John Wheeler Bennett was well known in his day as an urbane and well-connected historian, diplomat and, no doubt, secret service agent; Humphry Berkeley, a former Tory MP, wrote The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, which must be one the funniest books ever published, with the bonus of drawings by Nicolas Bentley. Younger Old Malvernians, or so I’m told, include Jeremy Paxman, James Delingpole, Giles Foden and the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

      But the one who intrigued me most was a shady-sounding Irishman called Derek Verschoyle, who like me was not only a Malvernian but had then gone on to Trinity College, Dublin: he had also had dealings with André Deutsch, and had been a friend of Alan Ross. I first heard of Verschoyle nearly thirty years after I had left school, when I began to contribute to the London Magazine, and what Alan Ross told me about him tickled my interest in long-forgotten publishers and minor literary men. Like all the best anecdotalists, Alan liked to tell the same stories, suitably embellished, over and over again; and Verschoyle was one of the figures who regularly resurfaced. I don’t think Alan knew much about his background, but I later learned that the Verschoyles were of Dutch origin, and had settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. Hamilton Verschoyle had given up the Bar for the Church, eventually becoming the Bishop of Kilmore, and had been admired by Queen Victoria who, spotting him riding in Rotten Row, declared him to be the best-looking man she had ever seen; his son, Frederick, spent most of his life in the west of Ireland, dreaming of his undergraduate years at Cambridge and recalling how he had once played cricket for the Gentlemen of Kent.

      One of three children, Derek Verschoyle was born in 1911. His father, an engineer, wrote scientific books and was the inventor of a hand-operated lathe known as the Verschoyle Patent Mandrel, and the family divided its time between London and Tanrago House in Co. Sligo. Derek Verschoyle’s fifth and final wife, Moira, remembered meeting him on a family holiday in Kilkee, on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I had noticed him before,’ she wrote in a memoir, So Long to Wait, ‘because I always noticed colours that were pretty and that looked satisfying when put together, and he was always dressed in lovely mixtures – pale green shirts and dark green trousers, or two shades of blue, and I had seen him once in a primrose shirt that looked simply beautiful with his red curly hair.’ She noticed too that he was ‘very, very neat and tidy and wore a tie, and his shirt had a proper collar like a man’s with a pin in it. He had a nice square face with freckles and he smiled at me, but I didn’t think he could be much fun to play with if he was always going to be so tidy.’ Years later she would have ample opportunities to discover whether or not he was fun to play with, but in the meantime his mother told her that ‘He has been delicate, and he needs a little rough treatment.’

      No doubt rough treatment was in plentiful supply when he was sent to Arnold House prep school in north Wales, where he ended his days as head boy. Evelyn Waugh was then briefly employed at the school, and outraged the more conventional masters by turning up for work in baggy plus-fours, an ancient tweed jacket and a rollneck sweater. Verschoyle later claimed that Waugh taught him to play the organ, despite having no knowledge of the instrument himself, and some say that the head boy provided a model for the precocious and worldly Peter Best-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall: in later years he employed Waugh as a reviewer for the Spectator, and lent him his flat in St James’s Place in the summer of 1943. After leaving the model for Llanabba Castle, Verschoyle went on to Malvern: he reached the Classical VI, became a house prefect and a lance-corporal in the Corps and, according to the Old Boys’ Register, was ‘prox. acc. of the English Essay Prize’ before leaving for Trinity College, Dublin in 1929.

      Not long after leaving Trinity he resurfaced as the theatre critic of the Spectator. A year later, in 1933, he was made the magazine’s literary editor. According to Diana Athill, who had it from her father, he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take potshots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues. He became particularly friendly with Peter Fleming, who was also on the staff, and beginning to make his name as a glamorous and fashionable travel writer, and with Graham Greene. With Fleming he co-edited Spectator’s Gallery, an anthology of essays, stories and poems from the magazine, published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, and through him he got to know the publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When, some years ago, I wrote to Hart-Davis to ask what he remembered of Verschoyle, he replied that he could recall absolutely nothing about him even though he had been the best man at Verschoyle’s second wedding; he told his son Duff that Verschoyle had been ‘an absolute shit’, but Duff’s biography of Peter Fleming includes a pre-war photograph of a white-clad bounder waiting his turn to bat for a team that included Fleming, Edmund Blunden and Rupert Hart-Davis, then an energetic editor at Cape.

      Like Fleming before him, Verschoyle employed Graham Greene as a fiction reviewer, and then as a film critic. Greene, who eventually succeeded Verschoyle as the Spectator’s literary editor, commissioned him to write the essay on Malvern in The Old School, a collection of essays he edited for Cape in 1934 in which Auden, Greene, Stephen Spender, Harold Nicolson, Antonia White, L.P. Hartley, William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen and others looked back on their schooldays with varying degrees of affection, ridicule, amusement and disdain; maddeningly, Verschoyle’s

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