Jenkins's descriptions of Widmerpool's appearance are unflattering; at school he is painted as "heavily built, [with] 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 ..."[12] A few years later, he is wearing more fashionable spectacles but Jenkins notes that he still has a curiously fishlike ("piscine") countenance.[13] He has a propensity to put on weight; although barely 30, Widmerpool appears to Jenkins as portly and middle-aged.[14] 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".[15] After the war as an MP, his demeanour and shape are "demanding of treatment by political cartoonists".[16] In 1958, meeting Widmerpool (then in his mid-fifties) after some years, Jenkins is shocked by his elderly appearance.