* Perhaps it should be explained—there were at this time three sorts of formal invitation card; there was the nice sensible copy-book hand sort with a name and At Home and a date and time and address; then there was the sort that came from Chelsea, Noel and Audrey are having a little whoopee on Saturday evening : do please come and bring a bottle too, if you can; and finally there was the sort that Johnnie Hoop used to adapt from Blast and Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. These had two columns of close print; in one was a list of all the things Johnnie hated, and in the other all the things he thought he liked. Most of the parties which Miss Mouse financed had invitations written by Johnnie Hoop.
* See Decline and Fall.
* This story, slightly expanded, found its way later into a volume of Highland Legends called Tales from the Mist, which has been approved to be read in elementary schools. This shows the difference between what is called a “living” as opposed to a “dead” folk tradition.
1 Yorke’s nom de plume was Henry Green. He was author of the novels Living, Loving and Party Going. He and Waugh were contemporaries at Oxford, friends, and literary rivals.
2 Bryan Guinness and Diana Mitford, married 1929–1934.
3 Writer and editor, mutual friend from Oxford.
4 Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, writer and art critic.
5 Maud Burke, married to Sir Bache Cunard. Nicknamed herself Emerald in 1926.
6 Acton’s book The Last of the Medici was published in 1932.
7 John Heygate, writer. Became a baronet in 1940.
8 On July 9, Evelyn had sent Waugh a letter declaring that she was in love with, and the lover of, Heygate. There had been a reconciliation. Waugh had left London on July 26 and returned on August 1 to find the house deserted. The next day he received a letter explaining that she had left him. She went to Venice to stay with an aunt.
9 Two of Evelyn Gardner’s sisters had been divorced.
10 Acton had written on August 5 : “Are you so very male in your sense of possession? I am somewhat astounded by all the philandering I see around me. Or is it the fact of its being Heygate? Or is it due to quarrels and boredom?”
11 Yorke’s wife, Adelaide.
12 Bryan was heir to the Guinness Brewery fortune.
13 Heygate.
14 Lord Redesdale, father of Nancy and Diana Mitford, had a real though unremunerative gold mine in Canada.
15 Sir Alexander Spearman. When interviewed, he said he had no recollection of whales.
16 Hamish St. Clair Erskine, a mutual friend.
17 Maurice Bowra, another mutual friend.
18 Acton.