Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  On the last day of the holidays Evelyn allowed the children to choose a dinner menu – when Teresa asked for Brussels sprouts, he was furious. The table was laid with the finest silver and after dinner everyone was encouraged to make speeches. Evelyn rose to his feet, in white tie and tails, with long lines of shining medals pinned to his bosom, and expressed, in the simplest and most eloquent terms, his unbounded relief at the impending departure of his flock. But the children detested their boarding-schools and their father's speeches wounded them grievously. As Bron later wrote:

  The most terrifying aspect of Evelyn Waugh as a parent was that he reserved the right not just to deny affection to his children but to advertise an acute and unqualified dislike for them. This was always conditional on their own behaviour up to a point, and seldom entirely unjustified, but it was disconcerting, nonetheless, to be met by cool statements of total repudiation.

  The occasional flashes of warmth, humour, generosity and kindness for which Evelyn was beloved by a large circle of close friends were not then so obvious to Bron. He was terrified of his father and took pains to avoid his company, as Evelyn took similar pains to avoid Bron's. He told me he was grateful for Evelyn's obsessive devotion to Meg as it deflected his father's gaze from himself. Out of Evelyn's sight Bron was permitted to do almost anything he wanted. The grounds at Piers Court, though not on the scale of Pixton, were extensive. He had a room at the back of the house for chemical experiments, smoking, secret drinking, shooting out of the window and listening to loud music on his gramophone. Holidays at Piers Court, especially when his father was away, were invariably happy.

  49At the time of his birth rumours abounded that Auberon was the illegitimate son of his tutor and godfather, Hilaire Belloc, in which case he had no Herbert blood. A few surviving facts support the thesis. Belloc loved Mary Herbert and wrote poems to her. Auberon's physiognomy resembled Belloc's more than Aubrey Herbert's. Aubrey Herbert was not pleased by Auberon's birth. Unless baby Auberon was eleven months in utero he cannot have been conceived by Aubrey, who was in Albania. Belloc was a regular guest at Pixton in his absence.

  50Evelyn was also very fond of Vera. He took her to the cinema to see The Third Man with Graham Greene; took her father on a boat trip up the Severn River and gave her a signed photograph of the family inscribed: ‘For Vera with love from many old friends including Evelyn Waugh.’

  XI

  Fantasia

  Evelyn, thanks to his good, solid Protestant upbringing, detested Bron's inability to tell the truth. Most children lie to get themselves out of trouble or to secure themselves a third helping of pudding or some other juvenile advantage, and Bron did all these things, but also he lied for the fun of it, for no possible gain other than sheer joy of invention and the pleasance of deceit. I understand and admire this attitude in young children. When my wife was pregnant with our first child, my mother-in-law asked me what sex I hoped the baby would be. ‘I don't particularly mind,’ I replied, ‘so long as it's a liar.’ She was shocked, but a child is no good unless it is charged with fantasy and confident enough to foist it upon others.

  From his earliest days Bron's lies took fabulous form. He told his grandmother at Pixton that he had seen evacuee children eating rat-poison. He hadn't – but they had spat on him from the second-floor gallery during his Uncle Auberon's ritual floggings and he desired vengeance. In the identification parade that followed he picked out two or three of the meanest-looking, who were promptly whisked off to hospital in Exeter to have their stomachs pumped. The lie was never detected and he got away unpunished but many others were exposed. When he was three and a half his cousins inscribed a slate ‘Bronnie is a liar’ and appended it, out of reach, to the trunk of a tree. Try as he might, with sticks and with stones, he was unable to dislodge it. In January 1944 Evelyn wrote to Laura:

  Your son has had his hair cut in Highgate and looks very neat. My mother thinks him in indifferent health and more ignorant than on his former visit. He appears to be happy with her and expresses his preference for Highgate with greater strength than mere civility requires. His untruth-fulness is confirmed; he persists in asserting that he and my Aunt Constance climbed the high iron fence surrounding the cricket field.

  During his time at prep school Bron told his father a lie for which he was never fully forgiven. He claimed that a boy called Lavery had taken a ten-shilling note from him with the intention of throwing it away because it lacked a metallic line through the middle. According to Bron, Lavery did this to prove that ten-shilling notes without metallic strips were valueless. Evelyn asked Bron if he had actually seen Lavery throw the note away. No, he hadn't. At this Evelyn wrote a stern letter to Lavery's father accusing his boy of theft and instructing Bron to write a similar rebuke to Lavery, demanding his ten shillings back. Both Lavery and his father denied the charge, so Evelyn, determined to resolve the matter with a letter to the headmaster, asked Bron: ‘Are you absolutely sure, before I write this letter, that you are telling the truth?’ At which point Bron crumbled and told his father that it was all a pack of lies.

  In his book my father suggests that the whole story was a fantasy that ran out of control, that he had no intention of accusing Lavery of stealing the money, only of engaging his father in an interesting conversation about metallic strips and proving his point about their value. He was highly acquisitive at this time and obsessed by money. He might have accused Lavery of the crime in the hope of getting Evelyn to redeem the loss – if so, it was a cunning schoolboy ruse that backfired. I wonder, even, if it is true that Bron, as he claimed in Will This Do?, confessed the lie to his father, or whether Evelyn found out by other means. His diary entry is ambiguous: ‘I fasted and gave up wine during Holy Week and attended a number of religious services. I made the disconcerting discovery that Bron's tale of Lavery's theft was pure invention.’

  Whatever the truth, one thing is certain; that Evelyn trusted Bron little thereafter. He was no fool. He could see that his son was a crafty, devious and slightly delinquent boy of a type who would have fared well in Fagin's army of Victorian pickpockets. Bron made cunning swaps with his brothers and sisters for any of their possessions that he coveted. When a great-aunt died and her property was distributed equally among the children, he bartered with his siblings until he had collared the lot and they had nothing. Throughout his life he honed his skills as a master barterer and was brilliant at it. He could have cleaned out every stall in Marrakesh for a couple of dirhams, if he had put his mind to it. I remember a beaming smile as he left a shop with an ornament having paid thirty-five per cent of its asking price. ‘How did you get it so cheaply?’ I asked him.

  ‘I told the fellow I didn't need it, didn't like it and didn't want it,’ he replied.

  He took me once to the flat of a painter of pornographic capriccios in Florence. The artist – who was English – greeted us at the door. ‘I am in a great hurry,’ Papa said, ‘as I have left my family starving in a restaurant without any money.’ The artist, who was ingratiating, showed us round his studio with pride. Fourteen or fifteen diligently executed oils of people exciting one another in the nude were arranged along one wall. Papa looked pleased with them all and his enthusiasm was spotted at once by the artist.

  ‘So, how much are they?’

  ‘The small ones are a thousand pounds each and the large ones three thousand five hundred.’

  Without a flicker of hesitation Papa said, ‘I'll take that one, that one, the small one over there and… perhaps, yes, I shall have the one with the lady in the mask as well.’

  ‘All four?’ cried the artist, barely able to conceal his glee.

  ‘All four,’ said Papa. ‘For three hundred and fifty pounds.’

  The painter was visibly shocked. ‘All right,’ he demurred, in a whisper, between his teeth.

  Papa produced the cash from his wallet and we left, smirking, with the paintings under our arms.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1949 Alec decided to ap
ply for American citizenship; it meant that he would no longer be able to spend any more than ninety-two days a year in England. In reality he stayed at home for considerably less than this allowance permitted and the time spent with his children had long since been whittled down to only a few weeks at Edrington each year. When not in America he visited the Caribbean, the Seychelles, or spent his months writing novels at the Hôtel Escurial in Nice or the Hôtel Velasquez in Tangier. His children looked upon his visits to Edrington as they might the arrival of a favoured god-parent or a grandfather. He was friendly and polite with them, he did not argue with their mother and seldom disciplined them. Once he picked Peter up and hurled him out of a window, but that was an aberration and he felt guilty about it for the rest of his life. He was neither lavish with gifts nor prodigal with praise but he left them in no doubt that, had he bothered to spend more time at home, he would have been a fine father.

  In America Alec lived out of suitcases in hotels. He had no home of his own there, but the nomadic life suited him well. All that he needed to complete his bid for freedom was a divorce from Joan. The idea was first mooted on his return from Baghdad after the war. News of his intentions reached his ageing mother in the spring of 1946. She wrote to her son, begging him to reconsider:

  Darling Alec,

  Please don't think me interfering – and truly your well-being and happiness is [sic] all I care about – but is this disturbing step your only way of finding it? Up till yesterday I thought it was entirely Joans desire and that she wished to marry someone else, but yesterday she was in tears at breakfast time – I don't know what letter had disturbed her – and later she spoke of this divorce and said it was entirely your wish; that she wouldn't go through with it but for you; that she was used to living a lonely life and could make her own life. I know you cannot happily lead a domestic life with her all the time, your tastes are so dissimilar and she would not expect you to. Now have you

  considered this grave step from every point of view? Family life is a very precious and interesting thing. Have you considered what it means living outside the pale of all its goings on, its gatherings and celebrations, birthdays and Christmases? To be an outsider of all this? You have a very charming family and you cast away much. Each year as they grow up brings them into closer companionship with you: and are you doing them a wrong not sharing their homelife and bringing matrimony into contempt?

  Darling Alec, forgive me for writing to you like this; and I will stick to you and defend you whatever aunts and friends may say. And of course it will be a great blow for the Norton aunts, for I do not know what the feeling of the church is for the ‘guilty’ party. Then, in time of sickness I cannot bear to think you would have no home to go to. As long as you have me I love to think you would come to me – but sometimes I think I grow old.

  I know this is a rotten letter so tear it up and forget about it, but believe that I love you dearly and only wish for your happiness and that you should do what is right; and always I love you, and am always your loving

  Mother

  As soon as Alec's American citizenship had been granted, he arranged a secret divorce in Reno. Desperate that his mother should not discover his plan he employed the best undercover techniques he had learned during his time in Baghdad to ensure that the press would not get hold of the story. In his petition he claimed that Joan was guilty of ‘mental cruelty’ for refusing to allow him to keep a dog at Edrington.1 After two months’ residence in Carson City, pretending to friends and family that he was writing a book, Alec succeeded in procuring the necessary papers. Evelyn was not told and did not discover that his brother was die-vorced (as he pronounced it) until 1962.

  K never did discover the truth. Nor were Alec's children informed. Peter only found out when he was eighteen during an altercation with Joan: ‘You should know – you're married to him after all,’ he said.

  ‘Well, no, I'm not, actually. You see, your father and I were divorced many years ago.’

  K, who was not, as can be seen from her letters, an especially literary person, lived on at Highgate in her dotage superintended by her housekeeper, Mrs Yaxley. When Evelyn sent her copies of his books she was more interested in their covers than their contents but, with the friction between her husband and son now ended by Arthur's death, she began to enjoy her status as mother to such an important writer. In 1950 when Evelyn sent her a copy of his novel Helena, she wrote to him: ‘It is terribly sweet of you giving me one of your beautiful copies of Helena: I am most grateful and appreciative. It is a joy to handle such a perfect piece of book making: the luxurious paper – wide margins – clear type all delightful in which to read the work of my genius of a son.’

  In later years Evelyn found visits to her flat irksome. He was bored by her company, then filled with self-loathing at his inability to attend to her more charitably. ‘Damn, damn, damn! Why does everyone except me, find it so easy to be nice?’

  K wrote to him on his fiftieth birthday in October 1953:

  Many happy returns for your birthday. Fifty years, half a century, what a lot of years that seems! And what a lot you have accomplished in that time! I do thank you for all you have brought to my life – all the happy memories and all those sweet early years. I know I have failed you often, but I have loved you always, and my mind glows with thoughts of you, and pride in your distinguished achievements.

  Arthur had left her everything he had except his books, but it was not enough to live on. Evelyn set up a generous trust for her remaining years, to which Alec (much to his brother's irritation) was unable to contribute. Alec persuaded K to make Evelyn her sole heir, instructing her solicitors to draft a will that would leave him nothing. At first K was horrified at his suggestion: ‘Your father would turn in his grave at the “heir of Underhill” being disinherited,’ she said. But Alec was adamant. ‘I am abroad for nine months of the year,’ he told her, ‘and am not able to accept the responsibilities proper to the head of the family. Evelyn is in a position to accept and should be rewarded.’

  Bron and the other grandchildren visited K regularly in London and she came occasionally to see them at Piers Court, but in her last years she was too feeble to endure much movement. Evelyn invited her, reluctantly, to live with him at ‘Stinkers’ but she declined, struggling on for another year at Highgate until, in early December 1954, aged eighty-four, she died in her chair with a cup of cold tea in her hand. On 7 December Evelyn wrote to Bron at Downside:

  My dear Bron,

  Granny Waugh died yesterday, very peacefully. Mrs Yaxley came into the drawing room and found her dead in her chair after tea. It is how she hoped to die. For the last two years, as you know, she has been very weak. Please pray for her. I wish you had known her when she was young and active. That is how I like to remember her.

  The funeral is at Highgate on Thursday afternoon. I do not think it is feasible for you to go to it. Teresa will be coming from Ascot – not the other children. If however you very much wish to come, I shall not forbid it. We shall be at Hampstead Lane at 12.30. The service is at 2 and you would have to make your own way back immediately afterwards. You must decide for yourself if you wish to come and make your own arrangements.

  Ever your affectionate papa E. Waugh

  In his autobiography Papa announced that he had been forbidden to attend his grandmother's funeral as he was in disgrace. As the letter shows, this was not quite correct.

  ‘One's enthusiasms are a solitary affair,’ my father would say to me. ‘You cannot expect to share them with others.’ This particularly applied when I was playing the piano, listening to the gramophone or scraping on my viola in the bathroom. I wonder if it was something that Evelyn had said to him. Perhaps not: it never occurred to Evelyn that his enthusiasm for the Roman Catholic faith should not be shared or, rather, inculcated into his children. As the years went by Evelyn's Catholicism deepened. From Brideshead Revisited onwards all his novels contained a Catholic theme. He went regularly on retreat to monasteri
es to pray, hired only Catholic nannies for his children and reduced his non-catholic circle of friends to a handful. He might have expected his beliefs to prove as valuable to his children in later life as they were to himself, but history should have taught him that the zeal of the convert is seldom passed down on the hereditary principle.

  By 1950 he and Laura had six surviving children: Teresa, Bron, Meg (sometimes Pig or Hog to her father), Harriet (or Hatty), James and Septimus. They were all sent to Catholic schools, encouraged and tested by their father in their devotions and given (more than any other type of present) religious books and religious artifacts. When Meg wrote to Evelyn from her boarding-school at Easter to tell him that all the other girls’ parents had sent Easter eggs, could she have one too, he wrote back: ‘I won't send you an Easter egg. You must nibble bits of the other girls’. Perhaps as a reward for your great unselfishness I will send you a little book of devotion instead.’

  When Bron was fourteen he made a will. Evelyn was appointed executor, Vera Gilroy (Nanny) and Norman Attwood (Farm Hand) were witnesses to his signature. Listed among his possessions at that time were:

  A blue china statue of Jesus, a rosary from Jerusalem fash-

  ioned in dried olives, a jewelled cross from Portofino, a mother-of-pearl cross from Jerusalem, a Pope-blessed rosary from Rome, the Midsomer Norton family Bible, a Roman Missal and a Missale Romanum (separately itemised), a bronze medal of St Gudule Church, a bronze medal of St Peter's Basilica in Rome and a mother-of-pearl Jerusalem picture of the nativity.

  Having divided his belongings more or less equally among his siblings Bron left to his father: ‘As the executor of my will Mr Evelyn Waugh (novelist) should legally be granted nothing, but may take, a discreet time after my death having elapsed, £100, or whatever remains of it after my burial and any possession of mine unbequeathed to another.’