Waugh's experiences in Brideshead Revisited and my own

Started reading Evelyn Waugh's most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1944?), which is a revisit for me because I read it maybe 20 years ago and remember little, though it's coming back to me as go through the first 60 pp or so (I never saw the movie or the TV series, either). The novel is a journey into the past as experienced by the narrator, Charles Ryder, who is an officer in 2nd World War stationed in England and at the outset of the novel moves his troop to a new location which re suddenly recognizes as a now-in-ruins Brideshead, an estate where he'd spent much time when in college ca. 1920? And we go back to his college experience: We learn that he is from a wealthy but, as we would say today, dysfunctional family - mother dies while working as a nurse in the first WW and father estranged and deranged. Ryder settles in at Oxford and is taken in by a group some upperclassmen, notably Sebastian (of Brideshead) who are wealthy profligates, heavy drinkers, would-be aesthetes, highly affected, and predatory. Ryder, on his first visit to Brideshead, meets Sebastian's sister, Juliet?, and she will obviously be a key plot element, though Waugh is slow to develop that story line. The whole crew of wealthy dilettantes may seem extreme and improbable to some readers, but I can vouch for the uncanny accuracy of the portrayal, having lived alongside a very similar group of undergrads in my youth; I witnessed and observed in an attenuated American version of this type of what we then called "preppy" life: Extreme privilege (for most, some lived precariously above their means), cultish behavior, flamboyant personalities, scorn for work and studies, essentially a-political and insular, lots of homoerotic overtones, and extremely funny, insightful, worldly, and alluring conversationalists. There's material for a novel in my experiences, though at such a remove in time I know it's beyond my grasp. Reading Waugh instead.