Evelyn Waugh

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the company two months.

The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his work and would sometimes ‘address them individually as ‘George’ at stand-easies, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.

at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry — that stoic, redskin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting ‘Hooper’ and seeing if they still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes pondered: ‘Hooper Rallies’, ‘Hooper Hostels’, ‘International Hooper Cooperation’, and ‘the Religion of Hooper’. He was the acid test of all these alloys.

After dark we all slept.

At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for disorder and breakages in the darkness.

By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into shape on the road. Soon Hooper’s platoon had marched off into the darkness; I found the lorries organized lines of men to ass the stores from hand to hand down the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores with them for the first half hour; then broke off to meet the company second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.

It’s not a bad camp,’ he reported; ‘big private house with two or three lakes. Looks as if we might get some duck if we’re lucky. Village with one pub and a post office. No town within miles

‘What’s this place called?’

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

Outside the hut I stood bemused. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It was a still morning and the smoke from the cookhouse rose straight to the leaden sky.

Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a final effort to excite my interest he said: ‘There’s a frightful great fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals. You never saw such a thing.’

‘Yes, Hooper, I did. I’ve been here before.’

The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my dungeon.

‘Oh well, you know all about it. I’ll go and get cleaned up.’

‘I had been there before; I knew all about it.