When writer arrived in Georgetown, British Guyana, he was probably in need of a break. The journey overland had been exhausting, and the recently divorced writer was probably still languishing in the throes of unrequited love for socialite Teresa Jungman. This 700-mile psychomachia in the Amazonian rainforest would go on to inspire , one of Waugh’s most sinister novels.
Clearly, though, between scorpion-ridden mattress, soporific rum swizzles and vampire bats, Waugh found himself in suitable comfort to employ one of his most exclusive of adjectives. ‘Darling Blondy and Poll,’ he in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, the niece of on whom Waugh would base Julia Flyte in , ‘I am back in Georgetown and all the world is Highclere.’ So enamoured by Highclere Castle was this most caustic of cartographers that Waugh would employ the name of the seat of the Earls of Carnarvon to describe any country or weekend of partying that he deemed to be sufficiently luxurious.
Almost a century later, its Jacobean towers and Capability Brown gardens attract thousands of visitors, who make the pilgrimage from climes as far flung as Tennessee to spend a day at the ‘ Downton Abbey’. Lady Fiona Carnarvon has just spent the afternoon with some of them, pulling weeds in the sun on Highclere’s 5,000-acre estate. ‘It’s a cor blimey massive task,’ she jokes, Highclere Castle cap on her head.
‘I thought we had enough people – we had 60 or 70 but I’ve realised we needed 200.’ Over a .