in the Frankly Speaking series. The second of these was broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 16 November 1953. Most of Waugh's friends thought that he had acquitted himself well, and he was mildly pleased with the result, writing to Nancy Mitford that "they tried to make a fool of me and I don't think they entirely succeeded". Nevertheless, the broadcasts preyed on Waugh's mind; he saw hostility in the attitudes of his interlocutors, a point noted by his 13-year-old son Auberon Waugh, who later wrote that the interviews "drove my father mad". His friend, the poet John Betjeman, gave him William Burges's Narcissus washstand but Waugh became convinced that an ornamental tap was missing from the washstand, and was shaken when Betjeman denied the tap had ever existed. In January 1954 Waugh sailed on the SS Staffordshire, bound for Ceylon. He hoped on the voyage to find the peace that would enable him to finish his stalled book. On board, his strange behaviour became an increasing concern to his fellow-passengers, and the letters which he wrote to his wife Laura from the ship alarmed her—Waugh appeared to be in the grip of a persecution mania in which he was beset by threatening, malevolent voices. He left the ship at Alexandria and flew on to Ceylon, but the voices continued to harass him. He wrote to Laura: "Everything I say or think or read is read aloud by the group of psychologists whom I met in the ship ... the artful creatures can communicate from many hundreds of miles away". Laura arranged for her friend Jack Donaldson to fly out with her to Colombo to bring Waugh home, but before they could do so Waugh returned to London of his own volition. There he was persuaded by his friend, the Jesuit priest Philip Caraman, to accept treatment from Eric Strauss, the head of psychiatry at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Strauss quickly diagnosed that Waugh's delusions arose from poisoning by his sleeping drugs, and substituted paraldehyde for chloral. The hallucinations disappeared immediately, and Waugh recovered his senses. Writing history Christopher Sykes, Waugh's friend and first biographer, believes that during his sessions with Strauss, Waugh may have discussed the idea of writing a fictional account of his hallucinatory experiences. He may have prepared a brief draft, but if so this has not come to light. In the three months following his return