The Loom of Youth was published in 1917. Few novels have been the centre of more controversy. This will surprise a modern reader; the book is tame enough today; but it must be remembered that for half a century the English Public School system had been revered as one of the ‘two main pillars vaulted high’ that supported the British Empire. My novel was one of the first to criticize its cult of athleticism and the very first to accept as a matter of course the existence of homosexuality in the average school. The Spectator for ten weeks and the Nation for six devoted two or three pages of each issue to a correspondence debating its veracity.
Ten days after its appearance I joined the B.E.F. in France as a second-lieutenant in a machine-gun company. Reading the reviews of my novel in the trenches, realizing that I had ‘set the Thames on fire’, I thought ruefully of the exciting time I should be having if I were in London. A success like this could come only once in life and I was missing all the fun of it. I felt sorry for myself. But actually I was lucky. As a junior officer responsible for men’s lives in action, I could not give myself any airs. At Passchendaele and Cambrai I was a very unimportant person. Had I been in London as the lion of the season, I do not see how I could have helped having my head turned.
I was, moreover, in no position to follow up my success. Eight years went by before another book of mine sold more than twenty-five hundred copies. An abrupt and complete eclipse would have been hard to take. Those few garish weeks might have spoilt my enjoyment of the next ten years.
I was taken prisoner in the big retreat of March 1918, and spent the remainder of the war in captivity in Mainz. My fellow prisoners included Gerard Hopkins, Hugh Kingsmill and Milton Hayes. It was the first time that I had met on equal terms men of intelligence and education several years older than myself. Mainz was for me the equivalent of a university. I read voraciously, argued and exchanged ideas.
In the spring of 1919 I left the Army with a posting to the R.A.R.O. (Regular Army Reserve of Officers) and in the autumn joined the staff of Chapman & Hall, the venerable publishing house of which my father, Arthur Waugh, was the Managing Director.
It was a half-time employment. I spent Mondays and Fridays in the firm’s offices, in Henrietta Street; the rest of the week I could devote to my own writing. I had a flat in London, but I have never been able to write in a big city. Too much is happening. I need a day-to-day eventlessness before I can concentrate upon a novel. During the winter I used to go out of London every Monday evening to a small country inn in Hertfordshire, returning on the Friday morning.
I was a keen athlete. I played Rugby football every Saturday during the winter, and cricket three or four days a week during the summer. I did my serious writing during the winter. In April, between the football and the cricket seasons, I took a holiday abroad.
Cricket and football determined the pattern of my life. They kept me not only in sound condition physically, but in touch with what are called ‘ordinary people’. I was fortunate in that. It is very easy for a young writer to drift into a Bohemian set where he meets only painters, musicians, actors and other writers. Bohemians can be and usually are delightful as companions; but for the novelist they are less ‘good copy’ than the doctors, lawyers, accountants, businessmen whom I was meeting on the playing fields.
The ’twenties are today qualified with the adjective ‘roaring’; they are presented as a period of hectic, extravagant self-indulgence. They may have been for some people; they were not for me. I was working hard. I kept early hours so as to be fit for football. I had very little money. The early ’twenties were a happy time for me, but not a wild one.