The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War by David Lebedoff (Random House 2008)

On that same balmy night in June of 1930, while Waugh was amusing the duchess, a young man of the same age but very different appearance, Eric Blair, was working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds, a manufacturing city in the north. He was the unwelcome guest of his brother-in-law, who regarded this lodger as a penniless failure with no job and no future.

This opinion was shared by almost everyone acquainted with Blair. It was a relatively small group but one that included several experts on failure; they had learned about it firsthand. Blair looked, and often smelled, like a tramp, because he was one. He, however, made the distinction that he wasn’t really a tramp, but only chose to be among tramps to free himself from class prejudices about poverty and dirt. He put it this way: “When you have shared a bed with a tramp and drunk tea out of the same snuff-tin, you feel that you have seen the worst and the worst has no terrors for you.

Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin Modern Classics 1942)

They went out, later, when the packing was done, into the blackout to a bar. Other friends came to join them.

"No one seems interested in my scheme to annex Liberia."

"No imagination. They won't take suggestions from outsiders. You know, Sonia, this war is developing into a kind of club enclosure on a race-course. If you aren't wearing the right badge they won't let you in."

"I think that's rather what Alastair felt."

"It's going to be a long war. There's plenty of time. I shall wait until there's something amusing to do."

"I don't believe it's going to be that kind of war."

This is all that anyone talks about, thought Ambrose; jobs and the kind of war it is going to be. War in the air, war of attrition, tank war, war of nerves, war of propaganda, war of defence in depth, war of movement, peoples' war, total war, indivisible war, war infinite, war incomprehensible, war of essence without accidents or attributes, metaphysical war, war in time-space, war eternal...all war is nonsense, thought Ambrose. I don't care about their war. It's got nothing to do with me. But if, thought Ambrose, I were one of these people, if I were not a cosmopolitan, Jewish pansy, if I were not all that the Nazis mean when they talk about "degenerates," if I were not a single, sane individual, if I were part of a herd, one of these people, normal and responsible for the welfare of my herd, Gawd strike me pink, thought Ambrose, I wouldn't sit around discussing what kind of war it was going to be. I'd make it my kind of war. I'd set about killing and stampeding the other herd as fast and as hard as I could. Lord love a duck, thought Ambrose, there wouldn't be any animals nosing about for suitable jobs in my herd.

"Bertie's hoping to help control petrol in the Shetland Isles."

"Algernon's off to Syria on the most secret kind of mission."

"Poor John hasn't got anything yet."

Cor chase my Aunt Fanny round a mulberry bush, thought Ambrose; what a herd.

So the leaves fell and the blackout grew earlier and earlier, and autumn became winter.