As their father was dead it fell to Auberon to give his sister away at her wedding. He was only fourteen and in the car on the way to church hot salty tears splurted on to his morning suit as he pleaded with his sister to abandon her plans to marry Evelyn: ‘Oh, Laudie, Laudie,’ he begged, ‘you cannot marry that awful shit. It is still not too late to change your mind.’ When Evelyn heard of this he was unforgiving.
Auberon's dislike of Evelyn was the aristocrat's natural dislike of the arriviste or, as my father preferred, the ‘traditional jealousy between privilege and actual achievement’. Auberon was no fool. He spoke six languages fluently, had a natural and unusual wit and was adored by figures as random and far apart as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Karol, his Polish butler, but to Evelyn, who deplored his manner of speech, the habitual twisting of his wrists by his face as he spoke, and the suffocating odour of his scent that wafted oppressively around his person, Auberon was no more than a spoiled idler. It is true that he never achieved much in his life and frittered most of it in overeating, overspending, selling-off Herbert heirlooms and thus ensuring that no one could ever succeed him at Pixton.
Auberon was the third Auberon Herbert of a distinguished line. The name Auberon (properly pronounced Orbr'n) was invented, according to Evelyn, by Laura's great-grandfather, Henry, 3r Earl of Carnarvon. The earl's younger son, Laura's great-uncle, was Auberon Herbert, the famous anarchist philosopher, whose own son (and namesake) achieved a modicum of renown as a one-legged airman who disappeared over enemy lines in November 1916 calling himself Lord Lucas. The Oxford Dictionary of Names thinks Auberon means ‘noble bear’, adding to this implausible definition ‘as in Auberon Herbert and Auberon Waugh’. To the best of my knowledge there have only ever been eight Auberons and all descend from Henry Carnarvon. The name must never be confused with Oberon, a jealous fairy out of Shakespeare who pronounces it differently.
Arthur did not like the name; nor did he, or anyone else, make arrangements to see the baby until he was older. In August 1940 he had written to Kenneth McMaster complaining, ‘Evelyn's wife went to her mother at Pixton Park, Dulverton. She had a son on November 27th last [sic]. She is expecting another in December. The Roman Catholic priests insist upon it.’
For the first six years of his life Auberon, or Bron, as he soon became, lived at Pixton. The war was raging and Evelyn, who was fighting for King and country and, in any case, had an edgy relationship with his in-laws, was seldom there, disdaining the place even when on leave. But the house was far from empty: it was filled with servants, old retainers, close and distant cousins, aunts, great-aunts, one step-great-great-grandmother and, on the top floor, twenty or thirty evacuee children from bomb-target cities in the Midlands. My father carried few memories of Evelyn at this time, and only muddled, disjointed impressions of his mother. He could just distinguish her from her two sisters, who also lived in the house. Laura was a mother in name only. As he later wrote: ‘I was not aware that motherhood involved any particular emotional proximity.’
Neither Laura nor Evelyn was thrilled to have children. Laura had dreaded the prospect of girls. When her elder sister had a baby she wrote to congratulate her: ‘I am so glad that you have got the baby over – it must be a relief that it's over – I am sorry it's a girl.’ Perhaps Arthur was right that Catholicism drove them to have children. Evelyn, who eventually had seven children, once told my father that if he had not been a Catholic he would only have had three, but I wonder if even three would have been too many. He was lucky to have had a war to go to. When he returned to civilian life at Piers Court, his children immediately grated on his nerves; Bron was six years old. In 1946 he wrote to his friend Lady Diana Cooper:
I have my two eldest children here [Piers Court], a boy and girl, two girls languish at Pixton; a fifth leaps in the womb. I abhor their company because I can only regard children as defective adults. I hate their physical ineptitude, find their jokes flat and monotonous. Both are considered great wits by their contemporaries. The elder girl has a taste for theology which promises well for a career as Abbess; the boy is mindless and obsessed with social success. I will put him into the army later; meanwhile he goes to boarding school at the end of the month with the keenest expectation of delight.
Lady Diana wrote to Conrad Russell: ‘I think Evelyn's shrimp will be much happier at boarding school than under Laura's wing. She dislikes her children as much as their father does.’ I do not know how much of this is true or whether Evelyn and Laura's apparent dislike of their children at this time amounted to anything more than an assumed show of boredom, mock-humour and bravura. Evelyn told Diana Cooper that ‘for choice he would take his six children to church at Easter, see them shriven and annealed and, at the church door, slaughter the lot in their innocence and absolution’.
‘But what about you, Evelyn?’ Diana asked him.
‘O, I would repent at leisure and be forgiven.’
I think he was joking; if not he had a poor grasp of the rules and arrangements of the Catholic game.
While Evelyn was rushing around at his war work, he instructed Laura in her letters not to bore him with details of the children and, in 1941 when he was contemplating his Christmas leave, he wrote to her:
If I do get leave it will probably be suddenly and the first you will hear will be a telegram summoning you to Claridges
where we must spend a day or two before thinking about the country… I shall not visit my children during this leave. They should be able to retain the impression formed of me for a further three months. I cant afford to waste on them any time which could be spent on my own pleasures. I have sent them some kippers as compensation.
Christmas the following year was just the same: ‘I am very glad not to be with my children for Christmas. There is an hotel at Shaftesbury with a very splendid sideboard. I think we might take a weekend there soon when you are fuckable.’
Teresa, much loved by Arthur and K, was a sore irritation to both her parents in her early years. ‘My father writes to say he looks forward to Teresa coming. Poor sucker.’ But Arthur was delighted by his granddaughter and wrote a letter of fulsome praise that Evelyn, incredulous, forwarded to Laura: ‘Here is a report on Teresa from my father which will interest and surprise you.’ In 1942, when Laura was pregnant with a fourth child, he wrote to her suggesting names: ‘JAMES if it is a boy; if a girl it is kinder to drown her than to bring her up like her poor sister. I note that you have recalled that wretched child just in time to scar it with chicken pox.’ Laura wanted another son. Evelyn appeared not to mind: ‘I am fretting about your anti-daughter feeling. You must not mind when this new baby is a daughter. Daughters are a great comfort to their parents compared that is with sons.’
At Pixton, Bron, his sisters and all their cousins enjoyed the sort of freedom that children seldom experience under the watchful eyes of their parents. The house was large enough for them to escape the gaze of grown-ups for hours on end and the grounds, with mature trees, rolling parkland, dilapidated stables and welcoming tenants’ cottages, were as a paradise to a free spirit like Bron who, from the start, resented any intrusions on his liberty. The adults of the house rarely questioned what their children were up to. Discipline, such as there was, was usually delegated and usually physical. Mary Herbert, Pixton's matriarch, instructed her perfumed son Auberon to carry out the business of corporal punishment. As heir to the estate and Lord High Executioner of Pixton Park, this pear-shaped young man chose the grand hall as the setting for this important function. Small crowds of cousins assembled on the stairs, while evacuees were permitted to watch – and to gob, if they liked – from the second-floor gallery. At the bottom, beneath the portraits of his illustrious Herbert ancestors,1 Auberon ceremoniously flagellated Bron, his little nephew, with an old golfing shoe that had belonged to Hilaire Belloc.
Laura, a heavy smoker with a fondness for sherry, was too lazy to carry out corporal punishment but she did not object to it in principle. From Pixton she wrote frequently
to Evelyn to complain about Bron. Sometimes he replied with indulgence: ‘I am sorry my poor son is so morbid and sensitive. He has a bad heredity in that matter.’ At other times he advised physical retribution: ‘I am sorry my son is so vicious. Why do you think yourself unable to whip him? He is really quite small. If you hold him firmly in one hand and lash out often enough and hard enough some blows are bound to fall in the right place.’ Once, and only once, she chased Bron for a mile and quarter lashing his bare legs with stinging nettles whenever she caught up with him. But this was unusual behaviour: for the most part she kept herself at a distance from her children, neither hugging, chatting nor whipping. As my father later wrote, with a hint of bitterness, ‘My mother did not feature in any particular way throughout those six years of my life at Pixton. Much of her time was spent serving in an Air Force canteen and in other vital war work.’
Evelyn might have thought or hoped that his long absences from Pixton would engender in his children some fond images of heroism, bravery, dashing good looks and doughty deeds that would make him especially interesting to them on his infrequent returns. He sent Bron a postcard photograph of himself, with a gun in his holster, looking handsome in full military uniform in Yugoslavia.
This is your Papa. Pin it up. I do not know when I shall come home but hope it will be soon. I shall expect you to read, write, ride and paint perfectly before I next see you.
Your affectionate Papa EW.
But Pixton was no Underhill. The stream of anxiety and heady sentiment concerning Alec in the First World War found no parallel for Evelyn in the Second. Bron scarcely knew who his father was and did not much care one way or the other. His sister Teresa's first memory of Evelyn was of a red-faced, uniformed man appearing from a window at Pixton, shouting across the garden: ‘For God's sake, someone take those children to the other lawn.’ I think he wore the uniform on these off-duty occasions to excite his children, but it had little effect. Bron's first memories were no less depressing than Teresa's. He and all the other children were having tea in the dining room at Pixton when Evelyn, again in uniform, walked in. My father can take up the story from here:
I had a particular passion for yellow jam tarts, but tarts of any colour were a delicacy, making their appearance on the tea table perhaps once a fort-night. The distraction caused by my father's arrival was too good an opportunity to miss. Within seconds I had cleared all the plates of yellow jam tarts and was shifting about ten of them into the pockets of my corduroy shorts, when there was a bellow from the door. My father, who attached greater importance to his paternity than I did, wished to know why his only son had not gone to greet him. The tarts, in broken and squashed condition, were extricated from my pockets and I was sent to bed in disgrace.
Alec Waugh's children, far away in sunny Australia, were brought up by Joan in the belief that their father was a gallant, handsome hero, such as they had read about in children's books and comic strips. When Peter, aged five, was asked what his father did in the war he replied proudly: ‘He is admiral of the Jewish navy.’ It was considerate of Joan to boost Alec to her children in this way, especially since his latest book, His Second War (1944), an account of his army service dedicated to the other Joan – giant Joan Duff (‘O for the viols of her voice’), revealed no evident heroism on Alec's behalf. When the war was over and the little Waughs had returned from Australia, Joan assembled her children at Waterloo station to greet their father. They had not seen him for six years. Only the two eldest, Andrew and Veronica, had any but the dimmest memory of him. Peter, the youngest, had none at all. As the train emptied, with hundreds of soldiers pouring off it and diving into the arms of their loved ones, the three children trembled in anticipation.
‘There he is!’ cried Joan. Peter stepped forward immediately to shake the hand of the first lantern-jawed muscle-man to catch his eye and was pulled back sharply.
‘Not that one, Silly, this one,’ she said.
He looked in dismay at the small, bald, simian figure shuffling towards them along the platform with a heavy sack under his arm. It was not until Alec had tipped the taxi driver generously that Peter thought he understood the true nature of his father's heroism.
As soon as Alec was back, he was itching to be off again. After two days with his family at Edrington he took a train from Silchester to London. Evelyn met up with him briefly at one of his clubs and wrote to a friend:
Alec arrived recently with many distressing nervous habits. He made a century against a minor public school. I asked him why he did not make use of one of Joans cars. He said that if he were to do that he would not be able to commit adultery with a clear conscience. I asked him how often he had done so in the last five years. Five times. It hardly seems worth tramping the London streets for.
Within two months of his return to England, Alec was off again. ‘New York,’ he wrote, in the last of his memoirs, ‘was the axis round which my world revolved after the war.’ He arrived there in September 1945 and ‘the next four months were as good as any I had known’. On his return in January 1946, he spent no more than two days with his family before setting off for a hotel in Devon to write a book on his own.
During the war, Evelyn had made a few stabbing efforts to get to know his son. He invited Laura to bring Bron to see him at a training camp in Hawick: ‘Bring Bron and why not send Teresa to Highgate?’ In August 1945 he took him to stay with the Churchills where little Winston, the Prime Minister's grandson of the same age, was marched out to entertain him. For the whole of their stay Bron delighted his father with his good manners, enthusiasm and humour. He fell into a bonfire but showed fortitude in the face of pain and, as Evelyn wrote to Laura, ‘won golden opinions on all sides, even mine’. Indeed, he was so pleased with Bron that he decided to take him on to see K and a few of the sights of London. In three letters to Laura, Evelyn expressed how much he was looking forward to the trip and for two days went to considerable lengths to entertain Bron. From Evelyn's diary:
On Wednesday I took him to the zoo which was crowded with the lower classes and practically devoid of animals except rabbits and guinea-pigs. On Friday I devoted the day to him, hiring a car to fetch him from Highgate and to return him there. I wore myself out for his amusement taking him up the Dome of St Paul's, buying him three-cornered postage stamps and austerity toys, showing him London from the top of the hotel, taking him to tea with his god-mother who gave him a sovereign and a box of variegated matches. Finally I took him back to Highgate.
All seemed to have gone well, until K asked her grandson how his day had passed. Evelyn was deflated by Bron's response and, feeling absolved from paying him any further attention, packed him back to Pixton in the care of his sister-in-law. That evening he wrote to Laura:
I have regretfully come to the conclusion that the boy Auberon is not yet a suitable companion for me… I took him back to Highgate in a state of extreme exhaustion. My mother said ‘Have you had a lovely day?’ He replied ‘A bit dull.’ So that is the last time for some years I inconvenience myself for my children. You might rub that in to him.
Three months before his infelicitous London excursion with Bron, Evelyn had published the novel for which he would become most famous. Several of his admirers were disappointed. In place of the dry hilarities of his earlier books, there was a new, alien mood of moist sentiment. At the time Evelyn was in no doubt that Brideshead Revisited was his finest work, ‘my magnum opus’, as he called it, but after a decade of reading and rereading it his confidence in the novel's opulent tone had started to wane. In his preface to the 1960 revised edition he explained how it had been written in the six months between December 1944 and June 1945 while he was convalescing from a minor parachute accident: ‘It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is enthused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full
stomach, I find distasteful.’
Brideshead was begun only a few months after Arthur's death, but ideas for it had been brewing in Evelyn's mind for some time. The story is narrated as a flood of pre-war memories by an army captain whose battalion during the war is billeted to Brideshead Castle. Since his days at Oxford, the captain's life had been intimately connected with various members of the Flyte family, who had inhabited the castle until it was commandeered by the army. Many angles of influence came to bear on Evelyn during the conception of that scenario but I wonder if his billeting a year earlier at the Digby Hotel – amid the architectural splendours of Sherborne, its sandstone abbey, school, old associations of father and brother, now transformed to an army barrack – did not act as some sort of a spur to Brideshead. I wonder also if Evelyn's nostalgia for Oxford before the war and for the imaginary Brideshead in the days when it was a home were not influenced to some degree by his perusal of his father's nostalgic autobiography shortly after the old man's death. In One Man's Road, Arthur had written:
Oxford, who has welcomed so many armies home, now victorious, now again vanquished, but all alike her sons, Oxford seems to have suffered more than most from the brief but biting ordeal of war. I remember sitting in Tom Quad at Christ Church midway in the first year of hostilities, and wondering whether the place could ever be the same again as it was when we were young. Everything for which Oxford stood was at a standstill; the Colleges were barracks, the meadows drill yards; the long tradition of manners which ‘makyth man’ was broken.
Today in the Broad and the High you can hear very little except the horns of the charioteer. The motor car indeed might be taken for the symbol of our era of restlessness and change; and nowhere does it seem so incongruous as under the shadow of Magdalen Tower. For the motor-car has turned every man's road into a railway. Never again will the journey be made in the steady, jog-trot fashion of my youth.
Fathers and Sons Page 30