Wheatley was sent to hospital in Marylebone at the Great Central Hotel, before he obtained permission to be transferred home and was taken to his parents’ house in an ambulance. He stayed there through January, under the care of the family doctor, until he was ordered to report to the 6th Reserve Brigade at Biscot Camp, near Luton.
Most of its members had been invalided out of France and were recuperating before being sent back. There was nobody there that Wheatley knew, but he was soon to make a new friend. A scrap of paper survives from the Twenties in which an unknown hand notes:
Made friends in War with curious type of man seven or eight years older than himself whose views and conduct entirely obsessed him – His parents strongly disapproved of this friendship and influence and tried many times to break it up without success. (Eric and women!)
Wheatley’s first sight of his friend was not very promising. Reaching his two-man room, he found another officer lying on his bed and reading; he was tall, thin, and well dressed. He continued with his book, until the soldier carrying Wheatley’s luggage had gone, then gave Wheatley a rather cold look, and said “My name is Gordon-Tombe. Tell me about yourself.”
Tombe perked up a little when Wheatley mentioned that his father was a wine-merchant, and when Wheatley told him he hated sport, Tombe laughed and quoted Kipling’s line about “muddied oafs and flanneled fools.” Hating sport was a good sign to Tombe, and he said “I think we shall get on together.”
Wheatley was never good at judging ages and just a few years later, setting a private detective to search for Tombe, he described him as a man of about forty. This would have made the man on the bed about thirty five, but he was twenty four. Born in Nottinghamshire, then raised and educated in Ireland, Tombe had joined the Public School Corps as a private when war broke out, and later become a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery. He had been invalided out of France after being blown up and buried by a shell, which left him with a limp and, in the words of a journalist, “impaired in health and possibly in moral character”.
Tombe had no intention of going back. People were sick of the war, especially after the Somme and the long stalemate. Voluntary recruitment had fallen – it would be interesting to know if any of the women and children who handed out white feathers ever had regrets – and at the Front the joking phrase “a separate (or “private”) peace” had come into widespread use, as in “I think I’ll make a separate peace.” Tombe had already made his.
Wheatley remembered Tombe as Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, but his name was George Eric Gordon Tombe (not double-barrelled), and he was known as Eric. Tombe told Wheatley that he was estranged from his parents after running away with the family silver, and Wheatley believed it, but it was not true. Tombe was not as distant from his parents as he pretended, but he ran his life by dividing it into strict compartments, which he described as his “system of cul-de-sacs”.
Witnesses would later describe him as “a very genial young man, clean-shaven … walked with a limp”; “a gentlemanly young fellow, well-dressed, and well spoken.” Wheatley describes him as having intelligent eyes, strong eyebrows, and laughter lines making deep curves at the sides of his mouth. Above all, Tombe’s charm seems to have been verbal; he spoke a language all his own, and he drew Wheatley into it.
Wheatley’s father, in Tombe-speak, was “the Old Hatcher”, and he lived in “The Hatching House,” his office. Money was “boodle”, as in P.G.Wodehouse, and women were “ ’oggins” (a word better known, if at all, as naval slang for the sea). Tombe was wont to refer to himself as ‘Father’, as in “You can’t do that on Father” and “No place for Father, me old cock sparrow.”
He also seems to have made an impression on Wheatley with “Well, of course”, and “Well, I don’t know”, and he would say that such-and-such a thing “gets me stone cold”, or “stone cold I was – all of a doo da!” Another favourite expression was “… disappear in a cloud of blue smoke”.
Wheatley’s vocabulary was not very wide, but Tombe was at home with words such as apotheosis, which was one of his favourites. He was also something of a philosopher, and would emphasise “life is a succession of phases”. “The development of one’s individuality,” a development with a somewhat decadent tinge to it, was of cardinal importance and much recommended to Wheatley. Tombe was also an exponent of what he called the “Masterly Policy of Inactivity” (which comes from Taoism and the wu wei, or principle of masterly inaction; it is quoted in the Theosophical writing of Madame Blavatsky). Wheatley later gives it to the Duc de Richleau in The Devil Rides Out.
Tombe’s father was the Reverend George Gordon Tombe, and much of Tombe’s character can be seen as a rebellion against his background. He would refer to God as “the old gentleman with a long grey beard who invariably speaks English” (another of his odd sayings was “I am so happy dear boy – that I wouldn’t call God me uncle”).
Looking back in old age, Wheatley felt that “In mental development I owe more to him than to any other person who has entered my life,” and he dedicates his autobiography to “My father, my grandfathers and to my great friend in the First World War, Gordon Eric Gordon-Tombe, who, between them, made me what I am.”
Wheatley had always been something of a bon viveur, but in a very small way. He would boast to Hilda that he had managed to sleep late, or breakfasted “sumptuously” on scrambled eggs and sausages. But when Tombe entered his life, he brought with him a more sophisticated idea of being what he called a “conscious hedonist”. Tombe incarnated the late Victorian and Edwardian reaction against Christianity and morality, along with a strong current of Edwardian paganism (as in The Wind in the Willows, with its manifestation of the God Pan in an almost incongruous chapter, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’). Tombe was interested in religion, and he persuaded Wheatley to the idea – part of the wider influence of Theosophy – that Christ, Buddha, Lao-Tzu and other sages were all equally “masters.”
In short, Tombe introduced Wheatley, in a slightly belated fashion, to the whole alternative syllabus of the 1890s, the decade of aestheticism, decadence, and esoterica. Tombe was especially keen on Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, the philosopher of nihilistic aestheticism who argued that it was not the fruits of experience, but experience itself, that was the important thing. It was a radical distinction, doing away with Victorian ideas of purpose and progress, and replacing them with a refined version of living only for the minute.
Wheatley had long been an avid reader, but mainly of historical romances and spy fiction. His spare moments in the War, of which there had been many, were not spent studying Field Artillery Training or Stable Management, but reading the likes of Baroness Orczy. It was Tombe (“the most widely read man I have ever met”) who introduced him not just to to Wilde and Pater but the Russians (Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy) and the French (Flaubert, Zola, Gautier, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Balzac, Proust).
The Tombe syllabus had a particular bias towards books that were then considered racy, such as Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Casanova, and shaded into sexology – Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, as well as Freud, shifting further into the likes of the Marquis de Sade, The Perfumed Garden, the Burton edition of the Thousand and One Nights, and the works of “Dr Jacobus X”, the latter indecent by any standards but dressed up as anthropology.
Tombe also encouraged Wheatley to read about ancient civilisations and world religions. He read Plato, Ovid, Aristophanes; Lucius Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Gibbon on ancient Rome, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie on ancient Egypt. He read about China, Persia, Chaldea and India. And he read the sacred books: the Koran, the Vedas, the Mayan Popol Vuh, the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta, the sayings of Buddha, and the Tao Te Ching.
Tombe’s own creed was remembered by Wheatley as the “cynical but happy” carpe diem nihilism of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was immensely popular at the time and went through endless luxury editions; Wheatley later owned four or five.
*
One of the most damning insults in the Tombe lexicon was “imitation of gentleman.” This has its ironic aspect, because it could apply to both Tombe and Wheatley. Tombe was less of a gentleman than he seemed. The hyphen was assumed (his surname was Tombe), and he was a motor mechanic. Before the war he had been living in Stoke Newington, and in 1913 he had married a local girl called Ruby Burbidge, a theatre actress. He was then calling himself George Gordon-Tombe, and he put four years on his age; at twenty, he was not old enough to marry without his parent’s permission.
Some words in the Tombe lexicon are puzzling, one of them being “bimana.” This seems to refer to people en masse, or ordinary people, and it seems to be derogatory. The most likely meaning is ‘two-handed animals’ (as in ‘bi-manual’), from the eighteenth-century French naturalist Cuvier. Cuvier suggested that the human species deserved this nomenclature because it was the only manually adept animal. In Tombe-speak it seems to mean manual in a more scathing sense, almost the sense of Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals.”
It is ironic that Tombe himself was a motor mechanic – or as he more genteelly put it on his marriage certificate, a motor expert. Being a mechanic was not only a little declassé, but it didn’t pay very well, and before long Tombe found that crime was much more the ticket. Fraud and fornication were the two main activities of his short life as a gentleman criminal, in which Wheatley would find himself playing Bunny to Tombe’s Raffles.
Wheatley was still trying to court Barbara Symonds, but it was hopeless. As ever, his nervous letters to Barbara have none of the charm of his letters to Hilda. Convalescing after Salisbury Plain, he tells Barbara that after her last reply he had decided never to write again, but now he has changed his mind:
The reason is that I am so absolutely bored that I should just like to smash everything in the house, but still as one doesn’t I thought I would just let off steam by writing to you instead because I simply hate doing it and I am quite certain that you will hate to read it.
He continues
I am absolutely fed up I got a very bad attack of flu and pneumonia in November … and so I have been on leave ever since, and I am afraid London is getting very dull or I am probably the latter …
Would she meet him for lunch up West, followed by a show? “I don’t suppose you will for a single minute,”
I know you think I am just the biggest thing in outsiders that ever happened why goodness knows I don’t except for the fact of the call I paid that Sunday afternoon and I only did that out of sheer devilry because you practically refused to speak to me when I saw you come out of church that morning …
He adds a resume of their near-affair, and the Incident:
… I suppose I behaved in rather a outsiderish fashion many years ago on that Sunday when it poured in torrents and we took a cab home, do you remember my passionate avowals of love and kissing you by main force much against your will, there you see out comes prehistoric man in all his glory seizing the thing he wants in spite of protests …
Wheatley then treats Barbara to a picture of his likely bourgeois future, balanced against the roguish possibility of Wheatley the caveman cowboy:
… even if I was a very terrible person then I am not so very frightful now in fact it rather terrifies me to think what a highly respectable person I am becoming twenty years hence I can see myself as a highly respectable merchant paying my weekly bills going to church on Sundays to the family pew, taking up gardening as a hobby travelling up and down in a first class smoker to Victoria inordinately fond of my roses and altogether a highly useful member of society. That is of course if the prehistoric bit in me doesn’t come out in that case I shall probably turn into a cattle thief or card sharper or any of those other charming people you can see any afternoon of any day at any picture palace …
“I see that I have talked an awful lot of drivel,” Wheatley adds, and this may have been what Barbara thought. But if she felt like taking on “the philanthropic work of cheering up a very very bored little officer,” then she was invited to drop him a line mentioning a restaurant and show.
She replied as kindly as possible, saying it was really very nice of Wheatley to want take her out, and that she was sorry to have to refuse. She signed it “Yours sincerely, Barbara Symonds”, an improvement on her previous “B.A.Symonds”.
But Wheatley wouldn’t give up, and a year or two later, with Barbara now dating a Major, he was writing
… my pals all wonder what has happened to the cheerful lad I used to be – if they could only know all the desperate longing that I have for you… the pent up maddening passion which makes me want to seize you whether you will or no – drag you even, and rush you in a car up to some tiny village in the Highlands where the peasants cannot speak English – and defy all the Majors that ever walked to take you away from me – perhaps they would understand, yet many of them are Bimina [sic], and to them understanding is not given.
That is the great mistake with me – were I only Bimina too, I would adhere to my original plan and wait confidently for the future, but I’m not, the agonies I go through are too much for me and unless I cut adrift I shall get on the rocks and do something foolish.
What Barbara thought of this business about “Bimina” is anyone’s guess.
*
“Gordon Eric seemed to desire no other friends than myself,” Wheatley remembered, “so apart from meals he spent very little time in the Mess.” Wheatley’s old hatred of Church Parade became more pointed through knowing Tombe, and Tombe gave him an erudite piece of advice. If he wanted to get out of Church Parade, Tombe suggested, he should say that instead of being C of E he was a Neo-Nestorian (a follower of the fourth-century heretic Nestorius, who insisted that the divine and human aspects of Christ were separate). Wheatley went along with this eagerly – probably because he wanted to belong as a friend of Tombe – but it may have been a joke on Tombe’s part. If it was such a good idea, one wonders why he didn’t do it himself.
It is just the sort of ploy that the army is good at batting back, and Wheatley found himself ordered to lead the Church Parade for the men from various dissenting and non-conformist sects. His new job was to march them to and from a distant Methodist chapel, so now instead of an hour within the Luton camp he had an eight mile march every Sunday morning.
Wheatley sometimes went up to London (although he could no longer manage it on Sundays, thanks to Tombe’s clever advice) with various cronies from the Mess. If they split up in town their practice was to rendezvous at midnight in the Turkish Baths on Russell Square. This was cheaper than a hotel and a good place to sober up, so they would ask for an early call and stay until it was time to go back to camp in the dawn. Tombe would also go to London, on his own, and Wheatley noticed that Tombe never invited him along. He evidently hadn’t yet found a proper place for Wheatley in his system of cul-de-sacs.
When Tombe was away, Wheatley would go to the Mess and play cards in endless games of vingt-et-un (or “pontoon”). These would go on interminably, breaking for meals, and in one session Wheatley grew so bored with his cards that he called aloud to the Devil to give him luck, no doubt feeling this was a very rakish and Regency-Hellfire-ish thing to do.
Immediately he drew two aces and ‘split,’ drew again, and ended up with three ‘Naturals’ and a ‘five-and-under’1. He cleaned up with sixteen times their stake from each of the other players (he wrote in the Fifties, growing to twenty-two times in his autobiography). “It scared me stiff,” says Wheatley.
If, that is, it ever happened. By the time Wheatley wrote the story up he was Britain’s occult uncle, and he had needed to find occult anecdotes. Nevertheless, it is possible it did happen, particularly under Tombe’s influence, and it would have been subjectively very striking, like asking the Devil to make a bus come and seeing one immediately appear.
*
Wheatley was still being sent on courses: he went to courses in Buckinghamshire, Woolwich (where he noticed that the social standard of the Officer’s Mess had declined badly in the course of the War) and Northampton, where he had to spend time in a gas-filled shed wearing a primitive gas mask. No one liked this, but they had to do it so they could assure the men it was safe.
It became increasingly clear that at last Wheatley was going to get to France, but it was an incomparably less exciting prospect than it had seemed four years earlier. Wheatley’s mother bought him a bespoke armoured tunic from Wilkinson’s, an early form of flak jacket, with rectangular steel plates linked together in the lining to cover most of the torso. Fearing a wound to the genitals as much as anything else, Wheatley insisted on having the lower front flaps armoured as well.
Wheatley’s orders came through in July, and he took his ‘embarkation leave’, a period allowed before going to the front. His father made him waste a day of this going to Westgate to say goodbye to his Wheatley grandparents. He was a man of twenty going to France, perhaps to die, and Grandmother Wheatley gave him a parting gift of two shillings (about three pounds today).
Eric had meanwhile found a job with the Air Ministry in Kingsway. On Wheatley’s last day in London he asked Eric to lunch at the Carlton Hotel, which stood on the corner of Pall Mall and Haymarket, and they ordered melon, Lobster Cardinal, roast duck and a rum omelette, only be told they were not allowed to have it.
A new regulation had come in forbidding uniformed officers to spend more than five shillings on a meal (about eight pounds). Wheatley sent for the head waiter, and explained it was his last day in London before going to the Front. He then sent for the manager, who was French. Still no good.
What should they do? They could have meat with baked beans, and an ice cream to follow, or one of them could go up to Piccadilly Circus and bring back a prostitute to hand over their money, if they were prepared “to suffer our Lucullan feast to be spoiled by the woman’s presence.” While they were deciding, the manager came rushing back after a change of heart, because Wheatley was going to fight for France: “Have what you like! Have what you like!” he said, “But remember, your mother stays in the hotel. It is she who pays the bill.”
Next morning, Wheatley took the train from Victoria to Southampton. And the day after that, August 8th 1917, he finally left for France.
1 ‘Split’, choosing to play them as separate hands: ‘Naturals’, aces and tens; ‘five-and-under’, five cards near 21 but not ‘bust’ i.e. not over 21.