Paula Byrne writes that Evelyn Waugh’s last Ascension Day at school
was spent with Preters, who had borrowed a motor car. The boys drove the Chichester, got very drunk at luncheon and drove round and round the Market Cross shouting out to passers-by that they were looking for the nearest pub. He also enjoyed pleasent late afternoon sessions behind the chapel, smoking ‘sweet-smelling gold and silk-tipped Levantine cigarettes’.
This would remind us of at least three Sebastian related things:
- Hardcastle’s car;
- “And drink — no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you’re constantly seen drunk in the middle of the afternoon.”
He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the examination school were beginning to re-assert themselves in his mind.
“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I said. “I know it must be embarrassing for you, but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon…” - …and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Sebastian’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.