Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Of all his children, Evelyn was particularly hard on Bron. He recognised that the boy had spirit, but worried that he was doomed to waste from an early age. He expected too much of him too early, without having the patience or gentle nurture to help him along. ‘I find my children particularly charmless,’ he wrote in 1947. ‘I am attempting to give Bron some extra lessons. He is lazy but not very stupid.’

  Although Evelyn was a younger son, the ownership of Piers Court inspired him with an old-fashioned passion for primogeniture. There was a triangular pediment on the front elevation, which he had decorated with a plaster escutcheon of the Waugh coat of arms, and in 1941, when he was stationed in Cairo with the Royal Marines, he made a will leaving the house to Bron. Piers Court should have belonged to Laura since it was due to the £4000 wedding present from her grandmother that they were able to afford it, but Evelyn had paid for it in advance with his own money and was, therefore, able to dispose of it as he saw fit. His 1941 will stipulated: ‘I devise all my freehold estate unto my trustees upon trust for my son Auberon Alexander Waugh as and when he shall attain the age of twenty-one.’ Laura was unhappy with the will and wrote to tell him so. Evelyn replied: ‘The will you criticise was made under legal advice and is perfect. Piers Court is not entailed and on Bron's dying intestate after me goes to his next of kin, yourself. If Auberon dies before me and I do not make a new will, the bequest to him is void and Piers Court goes to you.’ But this did not answer Laura's gravest objection: that if Bron inherited Piers and died leaving it whimsically to a third party, she would be homeless. Eventually the will was superseded by a fairer division, but for the time being Bron was officially ‘son and heir’. It is odd that Evelyn, who had so strongly objected to his father's banner welcoming home ‘the heir to Underhill’ should have devised a will based on the inequalities of primogeniture. My father often used to call me ‘my son and heir’, though he impressed on me from the start that this was a term of endearment not a title conferring advantage over my siblings in the posthumous division of spoils or any sort of meal ticket.

  As ‘son and heir’, Bron was taken by his father on holiday to the South of France, for weekends with friends and on trips to London. His wine glass was filled higher than those of his siblings, and at Piers Court he was the only child to be allowed a room at the front of the house, next to his parents. The rest were billeted in the servants’ and nursery quarters at the back. But Bron's special status was not in all ways to his advantage. More was expected of him than of his brothers and sisters, and Evelyn was particularly unforgiving of his weaknesses. Vera tried her best to stand between the dragon and his wrath; so, too, did Laura, often pretending it was she who had broken a plate or lost a book to shield her children from their father's rages. If Bron entered the room with his hair improperly brushed, Evelyn shouted, ‘Out!’ He would ask him without warning impossible questions about Pythagoras, the history of the Romans, Catholic doctrine, or the works of Shakespeare, and when his boy failed to supply the correct answers dragged him into the library for summary instruction. Bron always left the room in tears. On the way to Sunday mass Evelyn would ask him:

  ‘Pray, what do you propose to celebrate this Sunday, Bron?’

  ‘Today, Papa, is the third Sunday before Lent.’

  ‘Good boy, and what do you call the third Sunday before Lent?’

  ‘What do you call what?’

  ‘I am not asking what I call anything. I am asking you what you call the third Sunday before Lent.’

  ‘Septuagesima, Papa, I call it Septuagesima.’

  If he failed to answer correctly, a stark, sour coldness would descend from his father's body and seep like a nasty vapour towards him. To spare Bron these humiliations Vera instructed him before mass every Sunday: ‘When Mr Waugh asks you what Sunday it is you must tell him it is St Andrew's Day…’

  Bron held Vera in special affection, as she seemed to fill the gap between his father's hostility and his mother's detachment.2 After the war, when Evelyn's star had risen in the United States following the success of Brideshead Revisited, both he and Laura were often away from home. Vera took on the role of replacement mother.

  She wrote with news of the children to Laura, who responded with stories of her travels, and asked after her cows rather than her children. Bron's close bond with Vera continued even after he went away to school. A letter he sent to her when he was thirteen in his first year at Downside survives. She was engaged to be married to Terry Grother:

  Darling Vera,

  Just a line to wish you a very happy birthday and to tell you how my heart and soul have been pining for your divine company…

  Papa wrote me a letter of 3 pages – 20 words of which I could read and that's all… Could you, for I'm sure Mummy forgot to tell you – send off the scout uniform of mine…

  PS: Don't show this letter to Terry or he will use it in the divorce proceedings after you are married, as a love letter.

  Alec's elder son Andrew had been taught no Latin in Australia so he couldn't pass his entrance examinations to Eton and Winchester. Instead he was sent to Alec and Joan's measly third choice school – Sherborne. Alec did not take anything like as keen an involvement in Andrew's Sherborne career as Arthur had taken in his. A few visits, a few letters, but he was not especially interested. Joan derided Sherborne to her sons as a dim, lower-class establishment. She had received a proposal of marriage from a viscount shortly after accepting Alec and tended, in consequence, to look down upon the Waughs. Alec, on the other hand, believed he had done Joan a favour in marrying her.

  He was disappointed also by the physical and mental shape of his children after their long sojourn in Australia. None of them knew any Latin. Peter, who was seven, could not even spell Waugh. At least Andrew should be good at cricket. In the summer holidays Alec enrolled his elder son for coaching at Lords, but was ‘shocked’ to discover that Australia had taught him nothing of the game. ‘He had no idea of the technique of the left shoulder; he swung across the ball.’

  Alec did not follow his sons’ school sports with any great interest, or read to his children as Arthur had, or attempt at any stage to inspire them with a love of literature and poetry. When he saw Andrew wearing the familiar school uniform for the first time he felt ‘a quirk of responsibility for him’. But the quirk did not amount to much and nor did it grow into anything more substantial. As a father, Alec was notable by his absence. When a concerned friend once asked him, ‘But how will your children ever get to know you if you are always away from home?’ he answered, ‘They can read my books.’ But he made no effort to ensure that they had copies of them. (Most, except The Loom of Youth, were out of print within fifteen months of publication.) The separate parts of his life were still contained, as they always had been, within ‘watertight compartments’. In his autobiography Alec was frank about his sloppy fathering:

  My conventional civic duty was clearly to devote my energies to my family, to reforging links with them, to planning for their future, to making amends for the six years’ separation. That was my civic duty. Yes, I know, I know. I had been six years away from my family, but I had also been six years away from my desk. I put the claims of my writing first. Time was running out. I had to make the most of the time still left.

  Sad. Most fathers do not see their paternal responsibility as a ‘civic duty’ but Alec was an unusual man. He insisted on a stark choice between work and family, but never suggested that the same choice might apply between work and his mistresses, work and cricket, work and golf, work and his various gentlemen's clubs. All other things could be fitted in; it was only his family who couldn't. Nor was he being truthful in asserting that he had deserted his desk for six years. In that time he had produced two novels, a military memoir and several short stories. Evelyn was highly critical of His Second War and accused Alec of writing with ‘an air of affectation’ – ‘All your slang is unfamiliar and uncongenial to me … If you must write in the first person give the chap a na
me. Sentences beginning “Himself” where “Alec” or “I” are needed, depressed me.’

  Alec wrote to his mother: ‘I have just received from Evelyn a typical letter about His Second War. He seemed to think the book quite good. His tone was of course very patronising. I think he thinks he is being funny.’ Alec was well aware, and had been for fifteen years, that while his brother's literary star twinkled high in the night sky his own flickered dimly low in the twilight haze but, to his eternal credit, he never expressed a squeak of jealousy.

  After Arthur's death Alec continued to search for his father and sensed that Arthur was trying to get through to him ‘from the other side’:

  My father used to burn a powder called Himrod's Asthma Cure. It had a very peculiar and pungent smell. One morning soon after my return from the Middle East, I walked into what had been his bedroom and my nostrils were assailed by the familiar smell. I mentioned it to my mother. ‘It is extraordinary,’ I said, ‘how the smell of Himrod lingers. It was very strong this morning.’ ‘But that's impossible,’ she said. ‘He never burnt Himrod after we moved into this flat. Besides I've had the room repainted.’

  My father's hatred of discipline in all its guises magnified itself at All Hallows prep school, a draughty converted Victorian mansion, not far from Midsomer Norton, in east Somerset. Evelyn had painted a rosy picture of the English boarding-school system, and the poor ginger-haired, freckle-faced fellow had swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Bron set off on his first day with the broad smile and swinging gait of someone expecting a treat. He arrived at the imposing gates of All Hallows ‘a midget in new school outfit’, holding his father's hand, on 28 January 1946. He was the smallest and the youngest boy in the school. In his diary Evelyn wrote of the headmaster and his wife: ‘Dix had little presence. Mrs Dix seemed trustworthy.’ As far as Bron was concerned Francis Dix – the white-haired, white-moustachioed, flagellant, voyeur, paedophile headmaster – had far too great a presence in his life over the next six years. For though Dix might have cowered and winced in the glaring presence of Evelyn Waugh he was a ferocious monster with his boys.

  Bron was proud that his father struck terror into the heart of Dix, even though later in life he recognised that his father's awesome personality was the cause of much of his apparent unhappiness:

  My father was a small man, scarcely five foot in his socks, and only a writer after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality. I do not see how he can have been pleased by the effect he produced on other people. In fact he spent his life seeking out men and women who were not frightened of him. Even then, he usually ended up getting drunk with them, as a way out of the abominable problem of human relations.

  During term-time Evelyn put in occasional appearances at All Hallows. He agreed one year to present the school prizes but embarrassed Bron by wearing a flashy bowler hat and following with exaggerated, theatrical attention Dix's every movement as he performed a set of conjuring tricks. Evelyn must have remembered how embarrassed he had been at Arthur's ‘incorrigibly theatrical’ Dickens readings in his childhood yet he, too, was an ‘incorrigibly theatrical’ father to his children. Curiously, as the years rolled by, he became more and more like his father. Bron, on the other hand, moved in the opposite direction, and became less and less like Evelyn as he grew older.

  In the 1930s Evelyn was a figurehead of the younger generation. He stood for all that was fast, brash, witty and loud, but after the war he transformed himself into an old-fashioned clown not unlike his father. He wore outmoded and outlandish suits and hats, insisted on changing for dinner, surrounded himself with Victorian furniture and bric-à-brac and, like his father, appeared to the world as an arcane eccentric from a Victorian novel. He affected to despise modern gadgetry, especially the telephone and wireless, yet he loved the sit-on lawn mower at Piers Court (until he crashed it into a thicket) and was overjoyed in 1961 with his purchase of a washing-up machine, expressing his great satisfaction with it in a letter to his daughter Teresa:

  Since you emigrated you have become part owner of two Holman Hunts but an acquisition which excites more pleasure and interest is an engine for washing plates. Since our last servants left, washing-up became a great bore so I invested in a white expensive object which instantly blew up filling the pantry with steam and shards. Yesterday a mechanic came out and restored it since when it has become an object of worship like a tractor in an early Bolshevist film.

  Evelyn wrote of Arthur, in A Little Learning, that ‘his melancholies were brief and quickly relieved’. In this respect he was unlike his father. He suffered from deep, intractable depressions all his life. Boredom was his greatest enemy and it haunted him throughout his days. Fear of it and cravings for shock or excitement are classic symptoms of a depressive disorder. Evelyn, as I say, was a brave man but the stark horrors of boredom terrified him.

  21 March 1943

  A night disturbed by a sort of nightmare that is becoming more frequent with me and I am inclined to believe is peculiar to myself. Dreams of unendurable boredom – of reading page after page of dullness, of being told endless, pointless jokes, of sitting through cinema films devoid of interest.

  Even his foreign travels failed to stimulate him. In Remote People, an African travel book written in 1931, he described himself as ‘desperately and degradingly bored’, as ‘a martyr to boredom’. During four days in Abyssinia he experienced boredom ‘as black and timeless as Damnation; a handful of ashes thrown into the eyes, a blanket over the face, a mass of soft clay, knee deep’:

  No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics. The boredom of civilized life is trivial and terminable, a puny thing to be strangled between finger and thumb. The blackest things in European social life – rich women talking about their poverty, poor women talking about their wealth, weekend parties of Cambridge aesthetes or lectures from the London School of Economics, rival Byzantinists at variance, actresses off the stage, psychologists explaining one's own books to one, Americans explaining how much they have drunk lately, house flies at early morning in the South of France, amateur novelists talking about royalties and reviews, amateur journalists, quarrelling lovers, mystical atheists, raconteurs, dogs, people who try to look inscrutable, the very terrors, indeed, which drive one to refuge in the still remote regions of the earth, are mere pansies and pimpernels to the rank flowers which flame grossly in those dark and steaming sanctuaries.

  Boredom and irritation characterised Evelyn's attitude to his children during the holidays at Piers Court. ‘My two eldest children are here and a great bore,’ he wrote, to his friend Nancy Mitford. ‘The boy lives for pleasure and is thought a great wit by his contemporaries. I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober…’ When he tried Teresa drunk she had a terrible hangover the next day and so did he, and her dry, grating voice annoyed him all the more. Evelyn encouraged his children to drink from an early age, insisting it was beneficial for them to do so: full glasses of wine for the eldest, half-glasses for the next and so on down to a liberal thimbleful mixed with water for little Septimus.

  ‘Children all home. Teresa's voice odious, Bron lazy, Margaret stupid but charming, Harriet mad.’ He did his best to entertain them but he was never strong enough to keep up the effort for long – he put too much in and felt he got too little out – so that by the end of each school holiday no one was happier than he to see them return to school. ‘At last the holidays have come to an end,’ he wrote in 1948. ‘In my most miserable school days I did not welcome the end of term more gladly.’ As the holidays dragged on, he found his disgust with his family grew past bearing and took refuge in the library, banning children from the front of the house, or sto
le away to London for refreshment. In his absences from Piers Court the children played happily, noisily and freely around the house; but even then no one dared enter the library. In 1954 Evelyn wrote to Nancy Mitford:

  My news are the great news that all my children have at last disappeared to their various places of education. My unhealthy affection for my second daughter has waned. I now dislike them all equally. Of children as of procreation – the pleasure is momentary, the posture ridiculous, the expense damnable.

  Evelyn's disillusionment with his second daughter, Meg, was shortlived. Like Arthur, his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him, Evelyn elected one of his children as the favourite. From the age of nine Meg was the chosen one, carried around, hither and thither, like a lucky mascot or sausage dog puppy. She accompanied him on trips to Italy, Greece and South America, and for weekends in the country, to London and out to the cinema. His relationship with her was exclusive and, as she grew older, bordered on the incestuous. It is a miracle that none of his other five surviving children seems to have minded a jot. When Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn, ‘I hear your daughter Teresa is beautiful and fascinating, how lucky for you’, he replied, ‘My daughter Teresa is squat, pasty-faced, slatternly with a most disagreeable voice – but it is true that she talks quite brightly. She has cost me the best part of £1500 in the last year and afforded no corresponding pleasure. Margaret remains the star of my existence.’