Jenkins's descriptions of Widmerpool's appearance are unflattering; at school he is painted as "heavily built, thick lips and metal-rimmed spectacles giving his face as usual an aggrieved expression ... [as if he suspected people of trying to worm out of him important information ..." A few years later, he is wearing more fashionable spectacles but Jenkins notes that he still has a curiously fishlike ("piscine") countenance. He has a propensity to put on weight; although barely 30, Widmerpool appears to Jenkins as portly and middle-aged. At the outbreak of war in 1939, in a badly cut army uniform, he resembles a music-hall burlesque of a military officer or else "a railway official of some obscure country". After the war as an MP, his demeanour and shape are "demanding of treatment by political cartoonists". In 1958, meeting Widmerpool (then in his mid-fifties) after some years, Jenkins is shocked by his elderly appearance. His clothes are ill-fitting through weight loss, giving him the look of a scarecrow; his grey hair is sparse and his facial flesh hangs in pouches. The final glimpse of Widmerpool, in his cult milieu, reveals him as a physical wreck, looking aged, desperate and worn out.