‘So what are your plans?’ said our gentle, civilised Airbnb host over a tray of tea and cake to welcome us into their perfect home. I outlined the highlights of our prospective three-day literary tour. ‘The Augustus John exhibition at the Salisbury museum; the Henry Lamb at Poole; Hardy’s cottage. And if we have time the Barley Mow on the Wimborne Road where Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall.’ ‘My word, you are a cultured couple,’ he said, half-humorously. ‘Oh, we’re so cultured it’s ridiculous,’ I said.
The Augustus John exhibition was wonderful. (So was Salisbury’s museum.) Michael Holroyd’s biography of John, then his pictures, were the spark which inspired Catriona to pick up a paintbrush and me to start looking at paintings. Every picture at Salisbury museum was familiar to us via art book reproductions. I was shocked, however, to see that the works that I had imagined to be small were huge and vice versa. Same with the Lambs. Of the 40 paintings on two floors I knew all but a few, but again was shocked by their size. His portrait of Waugh was three times larger than I thought it was. His Stanley Spenser and friends 20 times bigger.
Waugh sat for Lamb at Lamb’s Poole studio in 1928. At the time Waugh had taken a room at the Barley Mow pub on the Wimborne Road to finish his comic novel Untoward Incidents, named after the Duke of Wellington’s terse assessment of the annihilation of the Turkish fleet at Navarino. Chapman and Hall needed Waugh to pad out his virtuoso beginning to bring up the word count before publishing the funniest book in the world as Decline and Fall. Lamb spent boozy evenings with Waugh and their respective fiancées at the Barley Mow.
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