LAYCOCK AND IVOR CLAIRE

The potential association of Bob Laycock with the fictional Ivor Claire is complicated. It illustrates the dangers inherent in all simplistic one-to-one identifications, even in cases as luminous as Lovat's links with Trimmer/McTavish. It is further complicated by Waugh's understandable changes of mind in the twenty years embracing his wartime experiences, and their gradual recreation in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Waugh's feelings about Laycock seem to have changed more than once; his presentation of Claire also undergoes readjustments in the course of the three novels and their final single-volume recension.

In Men at Arms Waugh clearly sets up a long plot-trail by establishing Guy's schoolboy sense of honour through his memories of the Truslove story, and its antithesis in Truslove's fellow-soldier, Congreve, whose shameful cowardice casts a permanent shadow over his company. In Men at Arms the obvious parallel to Congreve appears to be Leonard, the trainee Halberdier whose wife persuades him to avoid combat abroad and take a cushy home posting in canteen work. Retribution follows swiftly via an authorial thunderbolt killing him in the London Blitz.

However, in Officers and Gentlemen, the showy polo-playing Congreve's true function emerges as the predictive parallel to Ivor Claire, hero of the Corso Hippico in Rome. Claire's desertion from Crete, the night before the Allied surrender, casts its shadow of proxy shame over Guy, just as Congreve's fellow-soldiers felt tainted. To the non-specialist reader it appears to have nothing to do with Bob Laycock, who is amply and clearly fictionalized in Guy's commanding officer, Tommy Blackhouse. And Blackhouse – to his irritation – is kept out of the entire Cretan dèbâcle by falling on the eve of their disembarkation and being shipped back to Egypt with a broken leg.

Consequently, to most readers it must come as a complete surprise to hear that, shortly after the publication of Officers and Gentlemen in July 1955, Ann Fleming sent a telegram to Waugh ending ‘Presume Ivor Claire based Laycock dedication ironical Ann’. In his diary for 6 July Waugh records ‘horror’ at her message, quoted verbatim. He concludes, ‘I replied to say that if she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact it will be the end of our friendship’.