I am rereading Brideshead Revisited. It must be a dozen years since I last pulled this favourite Evelyn Waugh novel from our shelves, and I might not have done so again but for Dad.
To save our weekly phone catch-ups from the exchange of weather reports they can become, I have recently been enlivening things with stories about my more exciting adventures in parts foreign, and then emailing Dad half a dozen photos proving that at least some of what I had told him was true.
I have sent him images from the week I spent walking parts of the Larapinta Trail in Australia’s Outback, when the days were spent tramping through the heat of desert country and nights were spent curled up inside a swag, praying I wouldn’t become dingo tucker.
There were the sky-high thrills of a heli-hiking trip in the Purcell Mountains in Canada, with a hairy escape by chopper from a snowy saddle as storm clouds closed in, then glamping and dodging black bears at a wilderness resort on the shores of Clayoquot Sound on Vancouver Island.
Next, I told him about walking parts of the Ring of Kerry in western Ireland, getting pissed on Guinness in a pub called Murphy’s in Galway, and visiting the farmhouse in County Clare, best remembered as the parochial house in the greatest sitcom ever made, Father Ted. Dad now has a copy of a particularly daft picture of me, a smirking fool, wearing Bishop Brennan’s mitre.
Finally, I sent him photos from my somewhat self-conscious pilgrimage to the home, or rather homes, of Brideshead. As a family, we had watched the wonderful, early-1980s television adaption together in our cramped living room in Palmy. I can’t say that the Catholicism, adultery and guilt, which saturate Waugh’s story, made much of an impression on my adolescent mind, but we Dixons, a party of gawping tourists, marvelled at the lavish homes, tailored finery and pampered lives of the aristocratic Flytes, and imagined ourselves them.
Thirty years later, and long after finally reading the novel for the first time, I made myself a gawping tourist once more, visiting, at the expense of Britain’s tourism authority, Castle Howard, the Yorkshire estate which had been the Flytes’ stately home in the series, and Madresfield Court, the ancient Worcestershire pile owned by the family who had inspired the book.
I can’t remember what I was expecting to find when I asked to visit these grand monuments to another age. Certainly not Charles Ryder or Sebastian Flyte, nor rooms filled with red-faced fellows in dinner jackets puffing fat cigars over port.
What I did find were a lot of people like me. But there was also old art, outrageous furniture and some quite wonderful gardens.
At Castle Howard, the Atlas Fountain, so memorable in the series, had been emptied for repairs, but the miles of hedges and acres of lawns were finely clipped. Inside the “Walled Garden” were battalions of blooming delphiniums and roses, rows of giant hostas and a huge potager.
At Madresfield Court, which is surrounded by a moat, there were clipped yew hedges, a maze and pet cemetery, whole armies of roses, a lime arbour and a pond with white water lilies just coming into flower.
I couldn’t help it, I imagined myself a Flyte all over again.
There are passages in Brideshead Revisited I know by heart. Yet I’m still not sure, after however many re-readings it has been, that I entirely understand what Waugh, who in his late 20s converted to Catholicism, is trying to tell me.
There’s plenty in there about faith and God’s grace, about love and redemption, but what I am most alive to this time is Charles’ mourning for things lost, his heavy, melancholic nostalgia for better times.
I suppose in my telling Dad about my past travels, about the journeys and opportunities I had and will never experience again, I may be suffering a little of the same.
