It was through such amateur endeavours as these, and the occasional trip to see a Shakespeare play performed by the boys at Downside School (where the Brute was school doctor) that Arthur first came to love the written word. His teenage enthusiasm for literature was given no encouragement from his father, but it ripened under the tutelage of inspired teachers at his boarding school in Sherborne. Although the Brute quoted often from Shakespeare and the best-known poets of his day, Wordsworth and Tennyson in particular, he was not a literary man. As far as he was concerned, literature afforded no career for his son, and was not a serious topic for conversation. For the Brute, literature offered little more than a convenient vehicle for his showing off. When his son first mooted the possibility of a literary career it was in the face of his father's violent antipathy. At first the Brute refused to allow it, but in time realised that Arthur's heart, for once, was dogged and set. ‘Why can't you write slashing political pamphlets or bullish leaders for The Times?’ he roared. That was the only form of ‘literary’ career that made sense to him and the only one that would have made him a proud father.
For twenty years the Brute cherished a dream that one of his sons might study medicine and, in time, take over the practice at Midsomer Norton, but it was not to be. Alick, the rebel, quick to tears and sick to death of his father's domineering presence, had resolved to leave home at the earliest opportunity and, in 1883, aged only twelve, he enrolled as a naval cadet aboard HMS Britannia. Arthur saw him off, with an admonition to control his blubbing:
If thou would sail o'er seas in future years
Take my advice – abstain from tears.
Most unseasonable is the grief
In which your wounded feelings find relief.
For two years Alick scrubbed the decks until he was made a midshipman aboard the Iron Duke. He was in the Channel Squadron and later sailed the Pacific with the Surveying Service, painting exquisite watercolours of all that he saw. For years at a stretch he stayed away from home. On a rare and flying visit to Midsomer Norton in 1893 Alick found his father in a rage because he had not received the usual invitation from Sir John Horner to shoot at nearby Mells Park. Eventually it arrived and the Brute calmed down, but Alick recorded the affair in ‘The Legend of Mells Park Shoot’. It is a terrible piece of writing – unworthy of the name of Waugh – but it was not for this reason that Arthur disclaimed it. He was terrified that if the Brute saw it he might get the blame. On the back of the manuscript is written in Arthur's hand: ‘I certify that I have this evening read this poem for the first time and that I have not assisted in thought or act in its composition. Signed Arthur Waugh.’ It should not be difficult to understand why Arthur was worried:
What makes the Doctor look so mad?
What makes him look so worn?
Why do you see his pallid cheek
On such a nice fine morn?
With all his bedside invalids
He may be very cute
But Mr Horner of Mells Park
Won't invite him to shoot.
He watches every post come in
And messengers ride by.
He thinks of the old shooting times
And prays that he may die.
Never has such a season
Been so very slow
He used to shoot four days a week
About two years ago.
The evenings go by very slow
With no shoot for the morrow
And Adam Thatcher says he can't let him Scotch Whisky borrow
He cries – ‘This room is very dire –
The hall of wash-boy smells.’
But all of this he'd soon forget
If he got asked to Mells.
One morning not so long ago When his poor wife came down She saw her precious husband A-grovelling on the ground. He cried out, ‘Please forgive me all, I know I've been a brute, For Mr Horner of Mells Park Has invited me to shoot.’
His children on their knees then go
And say a silent prayer.
Their father is convulsed in tears
It's more than they can bear.
Then Budge comes in and prays there too,
And Jolly tries to bark,
They're all so pleased that Father has
Been asked to shoot Mells Park.
The poem goes on for many verses. The Brute gets to Mells and shoots well, has a big lunch and boasts to his friends of his sons’ fine achievements.
He tells them of his sailor son
Only just nineteen
Who from the navy was picked out
To converse with his Queen.
Of his son Arthur too they hear,
Mr Poet of this land,
Who last week walked with Tennyson
And held him by the hand.
But even after the Brute's successful day at Mells he remained unpleasant to his younger son. Alick left and did not return for six years. In 1899, he met Florence Webster, a Tasmanian eccentric from Hobart, married her and brought her back to Midsomer Norton, where she was treated as a simpleton by the whole Waugh family (including Arthur) and where, in the early months of 1900, she gave birth to a son called Eric.
At sea Alick had put on an enormous amount of weight and was hardly recognisable when he returned. Like all the men of his family he was unable to resist stuffing his face with bread:
The boy stood on the burnished deck,
His waistcoat buttons far undone,
He stuffed himself with bread.
‘This is my 50th crust!’ he cried
In accents clear and wild.
‘Just one more crust before I bust!’
– He was a vulgar child!
Many nights the Brute was out on call. He owned a small cottage in the town where, I suspect, he lodged a mistress – I am informed that several of his descendants in bastardy live, to this day, at Oxford. In an untypical flash of generosity, spurred perhaps by guilt, he vacated the cottage for Alick and Florence so that she could look after her baby there while her husband was at sea. Within three months of their arrival Alick, who had been bitten by an Anopheles mosquito in the Solomon Islands, was struck down with a malarial ague. Throughout the summer of 1900 he was bedridden; by late August, he was a pathetic wreck, jactating in a lake of his own sweat. After that he was comatose. His kidneys and spleen swelled each to the size of a party balloon and his blood turned to a sticky jelly – too glutinous to pass through the vessels intended for it. A few weeks after his twenty-ninth birthday, the fever overcame him and on 2 September he died. Alick was the first of his family to go and one of the first of the town's inhabitants to be buried in the new cemetery, four hundred yards over the road from the church.
Arthur was overcome with grief at the loss of his younger brother and poured out his heart in touching funereal verse. Thirty years later he was still mourning: ‘The first loss that a family has to face,’ he wrote, ‘the first vacant chair at the Christmas gathering – these are among the ineradicable testimonies to the passage of time. They leave those upon whom they fall older in heart and more uncertain of their bearings. Other losses that follow may bring greater changes, but it is the first loss that makes the deepest scar. Death has come up into our own stronghold, and the childish sense of security is gone.’
Immediately after the funeral, the Brute evicted Florence and her baby from the cottage and sent them back to Tasmania. But before she could leave he ordered her to pay the undertakers’ expenses and to settle Alick's tailor's bill for suits and cravats that he had acquired long before she had met him.
Arthur, ashamed of his father's behaviour, kept in touch with Florence and Eric through the years, looking on them with a mixture of warmth and genial derision. In 1921 they came to visit their English relations. The Brute was, by then, long gone. Evelyn, aged seventeen, noted in his diary: ‘I do not dislike my Aunt but Eric is terrible. How Uncle Alick, who appears to have been one of the stoutest Waughs for some time, could have produced him defi
es eugenics. I am quite miserable in his company. He is fat, uncouth, self-complacent, good-hearted and vulgar.’ Evelyn's mother clearly felt the same. Just after the Tasmanians had moved on to Midsomer Norton, she wrote to her elder son: ‘It was somewhat of a relief to see the last of our relatives. (Our house is still full of their luggage)… Eric's appearance was against him – big clumsy and uncouth with an impediment in his speech … he has no judgement or criticism. I wonder what the Aunts make of him. I expect they'll soon love him.’
At Sherborne, Arthur maintained his determination to pursue a literary career against all paternal counsel. He won the Senior Poetry Prize, edited the Shirbirnian, the school magazine, founded another called the Fifth Form Magazine, wrote plays that were performed and others – including a daring skit entitled The Headmaster – that were not. But it was only when he had left school in 1885 that the Brute finally reconciled himself to the fact that neither of his sons would inherit the practice and that he needed to find himself a partner from outside the family.
Arthur was nineteen when he went up to New College, Oxford, in January 1886 – not an especially handsome man, but better-looking, I suppose, than either of his sons at a similar age. He had large grey eyes that might be described as ‘owl-like’, but the rest of his face, his weak chin and flat pale cheeks, betrayed a timidity more typical of sheep than of owls. His nose had something of the puffin's bill about it. Timidity, the bane of his schooldays, proved the bane of his university years too: ‘My own Oxford days,’ he wrote, ‘resulted in discouraging inaction. Partly from shyness and partly from sheer inability, I joined the vast army of those who look on at what others are doing, instead of doing anything themselves.’ He regretted not having joined the OUDS, Oxford's dramatic society, or involving himself in the editorship of student magazines as he had at Sherborne. In attempting to get a few of his poems and plays published, he was politely rejected.
Despite these minor setbacks Arthur's Oxford years were not without success. He wrote the libretto to a burlesque tragedy, which he directed, produced and acted in at the Holywell Music Room. It was a fringe effort that mocked the OUDS and gained him notoriety. Shortly after that, and much to his surprise, he won the coveted Newdigate Prize for poetry with a long, flowery epic about General Gordon, the empire hero decapitated at Khartoum three years earlier. Winning this prize was no small feat. The roster of previous winners included John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde and Lawrence Binyon. The publication of Arthur's winning poem, ‘Gordon in Africa’, by Thomas Shrimpton & Son of Oxford in May 1888 was not, it has to be admitted, a major literary happening. Shrimpton's paid the author ten pounds for the rights and probably made a loss on the deal, but looking back on that event, more than a hundred and fifteen years later, we can see that the publication of ‘Gordon in Africa’ marked the birth of a remarkable literary dynasty. Works by Waughs have been in continuous print ever since: nine of Arthur's descendants have produced 180 books between them. Novels, plays, poems, essays, histories, travelogues, philosophies and biographies have gushed from our pens in cataracts ever since. In 1888 Arthur had no idea of the torrent he was unleashing but he was, at least, sure of one thing: the Newdigate Prize had vindicated his decision to go to Oxford, and his father would have to look again at the feasibility of a literary career for his son.
In a mood of overweening pride Arthur telegraphed details of his victory to Midsomer Norton. The Brute was away fishing all that week but his ecstatic reaction to the news when it caught up with him at the Bear Hotel in Hungerford, survives:
My Darling Boy,
I cannot describe to you my feelings when I read mothers telegram. Yesterday I nearly cried with joy. You have made us very very happy and it is such a good thing for you in connection with any literary career you may take up & I am so glad also because you have had disappointments and have borne them so nobly and now you have gained this great distinction – & one I know you will prize.
You will want some sherry and fine men to drink your health so I will direct Mansford to send you a little case from Frome.
I will write again when I get home. I leave this place tonight. God bless you my own darling son & make your career worthy of your best endeavours & then I know it will be a glorious one.
Ever your loving hopeful father, Al. Waugh.
True to his word, he wrote again, two days later, standing on his feet:
My Darling Boy,
I have read, reread, your poem over and over & the more I read it the more I like it not only for its beauty but for the high tone throughout. I am very proud & thankful my dear dear son. Everyone fixes on those lines of the Voyage out, the final scene is so excellent and the imagery so strong there & the lines on page 7 & the description of the hero on the watch tower impress me most. I shall try all I know to run up for the Commemoration. I MUST manage it – Mother is in Bristol which is very sad but she wants to be all right before going to Oxford.
We have had some tennis. Connie is playing up very well, Hooper is a very nice man & plays a good game as does Tisdale.
Now I must stop. I have not sat down all day.
With fondest love
Your loving hopeful father
Alexander Waugh
But the Brute's excitement was short-lived. When next they met he was irritated by the ‘self-satisfied atmosphere of puffed success’ that Arthur was generating. He had always found it easier to be kinder to his son under the shadow of failure than in the gloat and glare of triumph. Later, when Arthur told him of the poor third-class degree he had been awarded, the Brute was memorably forgiving. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘do you imagine that I look upon my sons as machines for the gratification of my self-esteem? You did your best and that is more than enough.’
Arthur's timidity was either inherited or copied from his mother, for she, like him, was terrified of everything. As an example of Annie Waugh's paranoia, I can offer a letter she wrote to Arthur in 1907 about his nine-year-old son who had made himself sick eating blackberries on a train: ‘I have a theory (I know you will laugh at an old mother's fads) that Alec's spine is not over strong and that kicking a football is felt by the weak part and goes to his brain – for his sickness never seems so much like stomach sickness as brain sickness because he does not feel it coming on long before. Well I am likely wrong, but a rest will show if it is football.’
When Arthur was about to be born in August 1866, she was petrified lest her labour should interrupt the Brute's first day of partridge-shooting. Later she would cower in anxiety if Arthur went for a swim, or walked under a tree in the rain. She was not dissimilar to the nanny who looked after me in the late 1960s: when I asked her for a pair of scissors to cut a cardboard lavatory roll into the shape of a steamship funnel, she screamed in the shrill ululations of a Halifax lunatic: ‘If yer ask for scissors, yer'll be asking for pins, an’ if yer ask for pins they'll spill ont’ floor, an’ TRAVEL OOP YER BODAY!
And so it took a great deal of alien courage for Arthur's petrified mother to write to her second cousin on his behalf. The cousin in question was Sir Edmund Gosse – not, perhaps, so famous now but, in his day, one of England's foremost men of letters. At the time he received Annie Waugh's letter he was a well-known poet, translator of Ibsen, biographer and editor of Thomas Gray's works, a regular contributor to the Spectator and other periodicals, as well as a personal friend to many of the most illustrious writers of his day. Annie remembered him as a small, pasty-faced lad whose mother had died when he was eight. After that he came frequently to stay with her and her sisters, treating their home as a sanctuary from the puritanical froideurs of his loathsome father. Gosse Père, Philip Henry Gosse, was a religious maniac, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, once famed for his zoological insights but now best remembered as the inventor of the creationist counter-argument to Darwin. ‘God deliberately planted fossils into our soil to make it look as though the earth is much older than it really is – a divine ploy, deliberately done to test our fai
th.’ The story of Edmund Gosse's childhood, his stays with Arthur's mother's family and his eventual escape from the paternal yoke to the brighter, happier world of English letters, is recorded in his little masterpiece, Father and Son, first published under a nom de plume in 1907. It is the only book by Sir Edmund Gosse that is still in print.
For all Gosse's faults – and they were legion – he received Annie's letter warmly and invited Arthur to tea. Henry James was in the house at the time and young Arthur had never felt so nervous. After an edgy, testing consultation, Sir Edmund agreed that he would write to the Brute on Arthur's behalf suggesting either that he give his son an annuity of a hundred pounds a year while he found his feet in literary circles, or set him up as a wine merchant in the West Country. Looking at the costs of each, the Brute reluctantly agreed to the cheapest, which was the former. His payments to Arthur lasted three years and, for the rest of his life, he never allowed Arthur to forget the extent of his generosity.
With his father's annuity Arthur rented himself a small flat in London's Gray's Inn Road. He had enough money left over for food, clothes and occasional cheap seats at the theatre. Within a year he had met, mainly at Sir Edmund's literary soirées, not only Henry James but W S. Gilbert, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Henrik Ibsen, Aubrey Beardsley, and a host of lesser lions. Arthur, a quaking West Country bumpkin, sat at the far end of Sir Edmund's polished table, drooling on these idols with his eyes popping and his weak chin wavering in excitement. Gosse noticed Arthur's bedazzlement and was quick to exploit it. For nearly thirty years he used his wide-eyed young cousin as a punching bag, a useful target for his obloquy, someone who would serve to keep his own wit flowing when conversation with those he sought to impress was in danger of drying up. Arthur accepted his pilloried position and maintained it with a quiet, humorous dignity until Gosse's death in 1928.
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