by Philip Eade
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After Henry Raban’s death, Lily had married a Raban cousin of his, an army chaplain in India with whom she had two more children. At an early age Kate and her sister were sent to England to be looked after by two maiden great-aunts and a bachelor great-uncle just outside Bristol. According to Evelyn, Kate was ‘entirely happy’ at their house, ‘the Priory’ in the village of Shirehampton, and ‘all her life she looked back on that elderly ménage as the ideal of home’44 – an unconscious echo of his own feelings towards his aunts’ house at Midsomer Norton. The chaotic houses Kate’s family lived in during her adolescence fell far short of this paragon, her stepfather having retired his Indian army chaplaincy to fill short-term vacancies at various West Country churches without a regular vicar.
By the time the Rabans came to live near Midsomer Norton Kate was fifteen, Arthur eighteen and about to start his last term at Sherborne. Smitten at first sight, he began asking her to tennis, picnics and dancing, and as he coyly recorded they soon became ‘something more than friends’.45 The Rabans were far from bookish – when Kate’s half-brother Basset first saw Arthur’s library, he cried: ‘All these books! And not one a feller could read!’46 – but Kate read everything that Arthur lent her and in later life read a book a fortnight, ‘always a good one’, according to Evelyn.47 She did not much like writing letters and, in the estimation of her great-grandson Alexander, though ‘shrewd and prudent’ she was ‘not particularly bright’.48 However her calm and reticent nature proved an excellent foil for Arthur’s nervous insecurity and impulsive, garrulous theatricality. Their courtship progressed over the next eight years, after which their parents raised no objections to their getting married.49
In a typically intimate letter to his elder son Alec, Arthur later confided that ‘when I became engaged to your mother, I was able to tell her that I had never had anything to do with any woman in the world. And the chief reason why I had that inestimable gift to give her (for man’s innocence is the finest of all marriage gifts) was largely that as a boy I broke myself early of the habit which is worrying you.’50 The habit he referred to was masturbation, or ‘self-abuse’ as he called it.
Yet Arthur evidently found it a struggle to rein himself in. In July 1893 he wrote to Kate: ‘I long for you so much, but after being away from you for so long, I can’t promise I should be good. So for the sake of your peace of mind, Old Chum, it’s just as well we can’t meet … don’t long for me to come to you for you know I am a brute and it’s better for you that I stay away.’51 Their great-grandson Alexander deduces from their long engagement that Kate was reluctant to commit, perhaps disconcerted by Arthur’s ‘immodest and demonstrative gropings’.52 However they were eventually married by her stepfather in October 1893, by which time Arthur had gone some way towards repairing his battered income with freelance literary journalism. After honeymooning at the spa town of Malvern in Worcestershire they began married life in West Hampstead, in a small flat above a dairy off the tree-lined Finchley Road. This was then much closer to the open fields than it soon became and was chosen partly because Kate would have far preferred to live in the country. They also hoped that, being higher than smoky central London, the fresh air would be good for Arthur’s asthma.
In the five years before their first son was born, Kate relished her role as homemaker. Having been surrounded by servants in India, her mother was a lousy housekeeper and to Kate’s mind lived in a state of continual, avoidable discomfort. Kate decided that her best strategy in any given domestic situation was to think what her mother would do – and then do the opposite.53 Evelyn later remembered his mother as ‘always busy with her hands, sewing, making jam, bathing and clipping her poodle … and with hammer and screwdriver hanging shelves and building rabbit hutches from packing cases’.54
Arthur, meanwhile, concentrated on his career, attending Gosse’s Sunday literary gatherings, reviewing books and writing for newspapers and journals. His essays included an appeal for ‘Reticence in Literature’, published in the first issue of The Yellow Book, an avant-garde magazine in which Arthur’s piece was hailed by the stuffier Academy as ‘sane and manly’ unlike the rest of the ‘worthless, silly’ articles. According to Arthur, the essay had an ‘immediate, recuperative and permanent influence on my chances of getting literary work’, and by the time he came to write his memoirs almost forty years later he had reviewed some 6,000 books.55 His anxious temperament did not suit the fluctuating fortunes of a freelance, however, and in 1896 he took a job as literary adviser to the board of Kegan Paul, Tennyson’s former publishers, in Charing Cross Road, with a salary of £600 a year,56 while writing reviews when he returned home each evening.
By this time, intending to start a family, he and Kate had moved to 11 Hillfield Road, a Victorian terraced house not far west of their old flat, backing onto a narrow back garden with a lawn, borders, an apple tree and a willow, and a patch where Kate could grow vegetables. The sound of owls at night added to the rural illusion. They had no telephone or electric light but lived comfortably enough, waited on at table by their maid Agnes in a cap and apron,57 with a man coming two days a week to do the heavier work in the garden. When they returned from holidays, a bare-footed porter would follow their horse-drawn cab all the way from Paddington in order to earn a shilling by carrying down their luggage.58
Their street was a cul-de-sac, which made it ideal for learning to ride the bicycles they had bought as part of the cycling craze sparked by the recent development of the ‘safety’ bicycle, whose inflatable rubber tyres made it far more comfortable than the previous boneshakers and pennyfarthings. Arthur could draw additional reassurance from George Bernard Shaw’s pronouncement that bicycling was ‘a capital thing for a literary man!’59 and he and Kate were soon going off on long bike rides to explore the lanes of Buckinghamshire, pursued by their poodle Marquis,* Arthur in tweed jacket and plus-fours, Kate in long skirt and balloon sleeves.
These expeditions continued for several years until Kate fell pregnant with their first child. He was born on 8 July 1898 and christened Alexander, though this was later shortened to Alec, in memory of Arthur’s brother Alick, who died in 1900.60 An indulged child from the start, Alec was given the sunniest room in the house for his nursery, with a south-facing bow window from which the Surrey hills could be glimpsed on a clear day. Almost all his earliest memories revolved around his father, his mother and nurse barely featuring.61 At five o’clock each day, when Arthur arrived home from work, Alec awaited him with his sketchbook and demanded he draw elaborate gory scenes from history or literature or spectacular disasters that might befall the Waugh household.
After Arthur became managing director of the publishers Chapman & Hall in 1902, he would get home slightly later but still found time to read poetry to his son, who loved the sound of it even if he rarely understood what it meant: ‘Noble words,’ young Alec would murmur when Arthur had finished. ‘Noble words.’62 Arthur also taught Alec to love cricket, and when he was five he gave him a cricket bat and they began playing single-wicket matches on the lawn. When Arthur announced Evelyn’s birth that autumn, Alec’s immediate reaction was, ‘Oh good, now we’ll have a wicket keeper.’ It proved to be a vain hope, cricket being one of the chief annoyances of Evelyn’s early life, the netting over his cot constantly pounded during his elder brother’s endless indoor Test matches.63 Alec admitted that any attempts on his part to teach his little brother its joys only served to reinforce his ‘permanent repugnance for the game’.64
Evelyn was born at 10.30 on the evening of 28 October 1903, quite suddenly, so Kate recorded in her diary, before the doctor could get there. Despite the speed of the birth, she had lost a lot of blood and needed extensive stitching. For the next few weeks she remained frail, suffering painful headaches and post-natal depression – possibly deepened by the fact that she and Arthur had both been hoping for a girl. She stayed in bed until at least the middle of December, when a wheelchair was brought to the house so that a
maid could push her up and down the road outside,65 and she was only just beginning to regain her strength by the time of Evelyn’s christening early in the new year.
On 7 January 1904, at St Augustine’s Church in Kilburn, he was christened Arthur Evelyn St John. In later years he grew to dislike both Evelyn, by which he was always known, largely because of the confusion it gave rise as to his sex,* and St John, which he thought gave him an air of absurd affectation.66
Unlike Alec, Evelyn remembered very little about his father from his infancy beyond the sound of his coughing and the smell of his pipe tobacco mingled with the menthol preparation he burned for his asthma. Although Arthur continued coming to the nursery each evening after work, Evelyn saw his appearance as an unwanted interruption in the day’s fun. Of far more interest to him were his mother and his young nurse, Lucy Hodges, the daughter of a Somerset smallholder who had come to look after Alec but formed a far stronger bond with his younger brother. Evelyn remembered Lucy with great affection and her influence could be detected in his early interest in religion – she read the Bible all the way through every six months – in his scrupulous truthfulness (when he wasn’t indulging in fantasy) as an adult and in the fact that the nurses in his fiction seemed to be the only characters to escape parody.
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In the autumn of 1906, when Evelyn turned three, his only surviving grandfather, the bad-tempered Alexander Waugh, died from pneumonia after falling ill while out shooting. Evelyn’s grandmother did not long survive him, dying fifteen months later. Between them they left enough money – the remnants of John Neill’s Peninsular War corn-trading fortune plus income from a coal mine on one of the Morgans’ Welsh properties – to enable Evelyn’s aunts to remain living quite comfortably at Midsomer Norton, while Arthur decided to use his legacy to build a new house.
The family had long since outgrown their home on Hillfield Road, where Alec’s non-stop cricket was getting on everyone’s nerves, and one day early in 1907 Arthur set off with Kate to explore the area being developed two miles away, just beyond Hampstead Heath, on what was then the north-western edge of London. From the top of the Heath they came down the steep wooded cutting to the village of North End, passing the bow-fronted Old Bull & Bush pub – soon to feature in Florrie Forde’s popular music-hall song – and the carriage entrance of North End Manor, one of the principal houses in what was then still a relatively rural community. Next to this was a small paddock where a character called Gypsy Joe kept his pony and trap and where, with characteristic impulsiveness, Arthur decided he would build his house.
* Alick left home as soon as he could, enrolling as a naval cadet at the age of twelve in 1883. Six years later he married a Tasmanian girl, Florence Webster, and brought her back to Midsomer Norton, where their son Eric was born in 1900. Later that year Alick died from malaria, whereupon the Brute promptly evicted his widow and child from the house he had lent them, ordered them to pay Alick’s funeral expenses and other outstanding bills and packed them back off to Hobart.
* In A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh writes that one of his great-great-grandfathers was Thomas Gosse, an itinerant portrait painter. In fact he descends from Thomas’s youngest brother John (Jacky) Gosse, who prospered as a merchant in Newfoundland before returning to Poole around 1820. Jacky Gosse’s daughter Anne (Evelyn’s great-grandmother) was thus first cousin of the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse (Thomas Gosse’s son), chief protagonist of his son Edmund’s memoir Father and Son. And Edmund Gosse was second cousin of Evelyn’s grandmother Annie Waugh (née Morgan). See Ann Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse (Faber & Faber, 2002).
* Balestier was followed by his sister Carrie, who came to keep house for him in Kensington but shortly became the ‘hated’ wife of Rudyard Kipling, the most famous of her brother’s new recruits.
* Henry Charles Biddulph Cotton Raban, born 1837, son of Henry Tilman Raban (born 1799) and Theodosia Mahon (born 1821).
† A friend of Walter Scott and other Edinburgh luminaries at a time when the city was ‘the Athens of the North’, Henry Cockburn was an engaging figure whose ‘rather melancholy eyes, when roused by energy or wit, sparked like a hawk’s’. A dash of eccentricity manifested itself in his attire that ‘set the graces of fashionable dress at defiance. His hat was always the worst and his shoes, constructed after a cherished pattern of his own, the clumsiest in Edinburgh.’ (See Edinburgh Review, January 1857.)
* Marquis was the first of a succession of spirited poodles owned by the Waughs. Terence Greenidge recalled one of his successors in the 1920s, Beau, having ‘an extraordinary habit of eating papers’ which he thought appropriate to a publisher’s dog.
* Chosen ‘on a whim’ by his mother, so he recorded, perhaps as consolation for not having had a daughter, the name was usefully distinctive for his future career as a writer, however his arrival in Abyssinia in 1935 was awaited by an Italian press officer ‘in a high state of amorous excitement’ holding a bouquet of red roses. ‘The trousered and unshaven figure which finally greeted him must have been a hideous blow, but with true Roman courtesy he betrayed nothing … and it was only some days later, when we had become more intimate, that he admitted his broken hopes.’ Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) p. 164.
2
The Sadism of Youth
The chosen plot for their new home was on the North End Road, then still a quiet, dusty lane with low white rails bordering its grassy footpaths, bypassed to the east and west by trunk routes for carters and coachmen. Within a year it would get a lot busier with the opening of the Tube line from Charing Cross to Golders Green, which set in motion a frenetic burst of housebuilding that quickly engulfed the dairy farms and market gardens to the north.
The terminus of the new line was at the junction of Golders Green Road and Finchley Road, a quarter of a mile downhill from where the Waughs built their house. A postcard of this crossroads from 1904 shows a lonely farmstead surrounded by open fields with a wooden signpost pointing to London, Finchley and Hendon1 – ‘such a place,’ wrote Evelyn, ‘as where “The Woman in White” was encountered’.2 By the middle of 1907, though, estate agents’ pavilions had begun to appear in the fields and by 1914 the entire area had been built over. Evelyn later pronounced his father ‘the first of its spoliators’3 and he spent much of his childhood living beside a vast, sprawling building site.
Nowadays a publisher of Arthur’s standing would have to spend well over ten times his salary for an equivalent London house, however in 1907 it cost Arthur barely what he earned in a year to build his new home – ‘little more than £1,000’ by Evelyn’s reckoning.4 By the standards of those days it was a very ordinary suburban villa, a typical middle-class professional’s home, although for a time it had the distinction of being the only new house in the village and its relative isolation made it look far more desirable than it now appears, next to a drive-in car wash.
Arthur involved himself in every aspect of the plans, stepping out all the rooms and stipulating sufficient windows to make it light and airy, although the effect was offset by his penchant for gloomy interior oak panelling, wainscoting and floorboards. The finished house – which Arthur named Underhill after the leafy lane where he and Kate had trysted at Midsomer Norton – was no architectural gem and Evelyn later deemed his father’s sentimental attachment to its actual structure ‘slightly absurd’. The only two times he could remember being beaten by him was when he had done ‘wilful injuries to its fabric; once by paring the corners of a chimney-piece with a new knife, once by excavating a tunnel through a boot-cupboard into the foundations where, until detected, I was able to crawl about under the floor joists’.5
Arthur’s devotion to his new home was intense, however, particularly since his asthma and slight deafness made him increasingly reluctant to go out in the evening. He was almost certainly the only person in North End at that time who went to work in London, but when he got back home each evening he retreated to his ‘book-room’ to das
h off book reviews for The Daily Telegraph (his reviews were written, so Evelyn recorded, ‘as he did everything, at deleterious speed’),6 poems and other writings.
Several evenings a week in the same room after dinner he would read aloud from his literary favourites. Sometimes he also read the popular plays of his youth, ‘stepping about the room,’ as Evelyn recalled in A Little Learning, ‘and portraying the characters as he had seen them on the stage’. Evelyn described how Arthur held his family rapt ‘with precision of tone, authority and variety that I have heard excelled only by Sir John Gielgud’.7 ‘In these recitations of English prose and verse,’ Evelyn wrote, ‘the incomparable variety of English vocabulary, the cadences and rhythms of the language, saturated my young mind, so that I never thought of English Literature as a school subject, as matter for analysis and historical arrangement, but as a source of natural joy.’8 However, as an adolescent Evelyn was frequently embarrassed by these readings and was scathing of them in his diary, describing one of Arthur’s typical performances as ‘a good lecture but incorrigibly theatrical as usual’. The diary was later bound and left on the shelves at Underhill and after Arthur nosily read what Evelyn had written, he never read aloud again. Alec later begged Michael Davie to omit these references from Evelyn’s published diaries, arguing that it was not what he would have wanted.9
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