to his home, Piers Court at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire, Waugh was inactive; when he resumed work his first task was to complete his Sword of Honour novel, Officers and Gentlemen, which occupied him for most of the rest of 1954. In late December or early January 1955 he left for Jamaica for his usual winter in the sunshine, and began work on his new novel there. He chose the name "Pinfold" for his protagonist, after a recusant family that had once owned Piers Court. Waugh worked on the Pinfold novel intermittently during the next two years. After his return from Jamaica he set the book aside, confining his writing to journalism and occasional prefaces—"neat little literary jobs". There is no mention of Pinfold in his diary or in letters. Waugh's biographer Martin Stannard describes Waugh at this time as physically lazy, unable to harness his still considerable mental energies—the diary entry for 12 July 1955 notes the pattern of his days: "the morning post, the newspaper, the crossword, gin". Waugh's longstanding feud with the Beaverbrook press preoccupied him, particularly after an uninvited visit to Piers Court by the Daily Express journalist Nancy Spain in June, that left Waugh "tremulous with rage". In March 1956 Spain attacked Waugh in an Express article, after which he began a libel action against her and her paper. Meanwhile, preparations for his daughter Teresa's coming-out ball provided a further hindrance to progress on the novel. It is not until 11 September 1956 that his diary records: "I have resumed work on Pinfold". Soon after, he was writing 1,000 words a day—on 26 September he told his friend Ann Fleming that "the mad book is going to be very funny I believe". A week later he asked his friend Daphne Fielding for permission to dedicate the book to her. Waugh had decided in the summer of 1955 that he would sell Piers Court. By October 1956 the sale had been completed and he had acquired a new home in the Somerset village of Combe Florey. While the chaos of the move went on around him, Waugh worked on the novel; in November he moved to his pre-war bolthole, the Easton Court Hotel at Chagford, where he hoped to finish the book. As the date for the libel case against Nancy Spain and the Express approached, Waugh was involved in a second libel action, against the author