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The relief flight to Castle Howard

LETTERS to The Times on the alleged errata in the TV Brideshead surely deserve to be collected up and published in pamphlet form.

Pedants, in their anxiety to trip each other up, have, in some cases, been falling on their own faces.

Such obvious solecisms as the lordly smoking of a cigar without removing its band have remained, moreover, unremarked. (Now someone can write in and say that the band was once meant to prevent the staining of gentlemen’s white gloves.)

An interesting point came up about jurisdiction over private Catholic chapels allegedly ascribed, in the TV script, to the Bishop of London.

But did the writer of that particular letter hear wrongly? Waugh himself spoke of the Bishop in London, though even that was probably incorrect as such jurisdiction normally rested with the diocesan bishop.

Had Waugh been more explicit about dioceses, however, he would have given away the open secret as to the site in his imagination of the fictional Brideshead — certainly not in North Yorkshire.

On the other hand Waugh did once tell friends of his penchant for Castle Howard as a possible backdrop should the book ever be filmed, and this is said to have influenced the producers in their choice of location.

What is not so generally known is the somewhat bizarre occasion for Waugh’s visit to Castle Howard as a result of which he supposedly formed this preference.

He was a guest at Ampleforth at the time and had expressed a desire, from which the worried guestmaster had failed to dissuade him, to stay not in the relative comfort of one of the normal guest rooms, but in the monastery itself. He wanted, he said, to get away from everything and have a very quiet time.

Conditions in the monastery, however, were unexpectedly austere and poor Evelyn got very restless. Things came to a head when he had to get up in the middle of the night but could not find a loo.

Finally, in desperation, he groped his way through a likely looking door when a very old monk suddenly woke up with a start and sat up in bed.

The terrified but urgently indigent Waugh stuttered his apologies and asked anxiously “where is the loo?” But all the old Bede listening would say was “Not in here!”

Next morning, visibly shaken, Waugh made his excuses and decided to escape. Despite the post-war austerity of the period he secured the services of an obliging nearby taxi-owner and was soon bowling contentedly through surrounding countryside.

As much by chance as anything he found himself hard by Castle Howard at which, alighting from the ancient taxi, he stared from a distance, in lengthy rapture. Was it at that moment that he decided that this magnificent stately home would be an ideal setting for a Brideshead film?

Some people think so and, if they are right, it may be that we owe a lot to the old monk who was woken up so suddenly in the night thirty five years ago.

Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

-Catholic Herald, 30th October 1981.

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