Darling Mummy and Papa,
The most wonderful thing has happened – I have sold that pathetic short story of mine for a perfectly monstrous sum, with which I hope to do great things. It is true that the magazine which bought it is not the most cultured or edifying in circulation, but Papa has written for it, and it pays 10 guineas for the wettest story imaginable – every time I read it it seems worse. The money has not arrived yet, but the offer has, which I promptly accepted. It's really too good to be true and after the exams I intend to turn out enough short stories to swamp the offices of every magazine in the country. They asked for a photograph of myself and I sent them a wonderful one in Victorian costume. I don't know if they will put it in but if they do it will be too gorgeous.
No news – it has been a very quiet term so far and will probably continue so, as I have to see the Headmaster every week so that he can get to know me. I have the horrible feeling always that I am being psychoanalysed by him, which is all too depressing.
I do wish I had written the story under a pseudonym – it is so futile.
All my love Bron
P.S. I have joined the League of Empire Loyalists which is wonderful fun. I have to circulate pamphlets throughout the school and other schools. I have sent them to 30 people at Ampleforth, 3 at Eton, 1 at Stowe and hundreds of others. It is an Imperialist movement which is always marching around London with banners and loud-speakers in vans. I received 3 letters today from fellow Imperialists, which always give me a thrill.
AW
Observant readers will have noticed that the ten guineas mentioned to his father was less than half the sum that Lilliput had actually agreed. On the manuscript letter Bron has violently scrubbed out ‘25’ and replaced it with ‘10’. I imagine he did this for fear that his father would consider him rich enough to survive without paternal tips and allowances. Apart from this small lie, Bron's letter seems to have hit the spot. Nothing could please Evelyn more than the idea of his eldest son joining the ‘family business’:
My dear Bron,
I congratulate you with all my heart on your success with your story. You have not named the discerning magazine – Everybody's perhaps? Anyway it is an agreeable thing to see one's work recognised. I look forward greatly to seeing the issue. They wont pay you until the end of the month in which it appears. That is the usual practice.
Your hairless uncle Alec has also had a success at last. His latest book has been taken by the American ‘Book of the Month’, serialised, filmed – in fact the jack-pot. It is very nice for him after so many years of disappointment and obscurity. He has not drawn a sober breath since he heard the news.
Your uncle Auberons hopes are less rosy,3 but your mother, grandmother, aunts and pig-walloper4 have had and are still having a highly enjoyable time in Sunderland. Your mother still believes she has been in Sutherland.
I am glad the headmaster is paying attention to you. His aim I think is to find whether it is better to continue your education or to send you with a changed name and £5 to Australia.
I trust your Empire League is not under the auspices of Sir Oswald Mosley? If it is you will end up in prison like my old friend Diana Mitford.
Think of all lonely schoolboys on Ascension Day in memory of your father in 1916.
Your afifec. papa
The League of Empire Loyalists was a mildly ridiculous, pseudo-sinister right-wing organisation that stood for ‘the resurgence at home and abroad of the British spirit and the conscientious development of the British Colonial Empire under British direction and local British leadership’. Bron joined, not because he felt strongly about colonialism, but because it excited his passions for secrecy to be attached to an organisation outside the school funded by a shadowy figure known to members only as ‘RKJ’. Evelyn regarded Bron's involvement as harmless folly and in July 1955 acceded to his son's request to travel to London to take the secretary of the League to the annual Downside Ball where they hoped to recruit new members to the cause. Bron left home on 25 July with a bottle of his father's gin and caught a bus to Gloucester. At Gloucester station he grandly offered the gin to railway staff on the platform, then boarded the train for London. He didn't make it to the dance. Evelyn's diary records a partial version of events:
Bron left early by bus for London to stay with a school friend and go to the Downside dance. At 2 o'clock Laura and I took the children to the cinema in Dursley. We were greeted by the manager saying that the Stroud police wished to speak to us. They said that a youth had been arrested incapably drunk carrying Bron's suitcase. From their description it was plain that the prisoner was Bron. We drove to Stroud and found him white and dirty eating a bun. He had a third of a bottle of gin, of the brand I drink, in his possession. We took him home and sent him to his room. Later he said that he missed his bus to Gloucester, spent all his money in the White Hart buying a bottle of gin, drank most of it at Gloucester Station, conceived the idea of travelling to London without a ticket and with 2d in his pocket. When arrested he gave a false name and address and was identified by correspondence in the suitcase. Inquiries at the White Hart in Gloucester elicited the reply that no bottle of gin had been sold that day. We told Teresa and Margaret, leaving the rest of the household, I hope, in ignorance. An evening of ineffable gloom.
In Bron's first novel, The Foxglove Saga, written five years later, a boy called Kenneth is discovered by his father drunk on his stolen whisky and, as in the Gloucester incident on which it was based, is sent to bed to await his father's wrath on the morrow.
Kenneth thought how pathetically unsure of himself his father looked standing alone in the drawing-room trying to appear Victorian and strict. It was not as if his father had any sanction he could apply. It was not like school where they could beat you into a jelly, and Kenneth reckoned he was slightly stronger than his father…
As he lay in bed he prepared speeches to make to his father in the morning; jewels of sarcasm and wit came into his mind, and every possible point his father could make was anticipated, and a devastating reply contrived. Eventually a witticism so bold and yet so exactly on target came into his head that he switched on his bedside light and wrote it down in
Biro on the back of his hand. Then he switched off the light and composed himself to sleep… When he woke up he had a nasty taste in his mouth and his stomach felt slightly queasy. As he washed he found that he had written indelibly on the back of his hand the words Buggers don't bite. He couldn't think what it meant although he remembered that it had seemed frightfully important at the time.
Evelyn turned up at the juvenile court in Stroud wearing an ostentatious checked cap. Bron pleaded guilty and was fined ten shillings. When Evelyn was invited to take the stand he doffed his cap to the magistrate and said simply, ‘I beg you to regard the incident as a disastrous experiment rather than as a mark of vicious-ness and depravity.’
For the rest of that long summer holiday as Bron awaited his return to the unknown and unwanted world of Fr Aelred's Caverel House, he was in disgrace with his father. Before long Evelyn became so depressed and irritated by his presence that he packed him off to stay on his aunt's farm at Nutcombe, in Somerset. Evelyn's exasperation may be traced through his diary:
10/8/55: Back from London. To my annoyance Bron is still here. I was promised his absence. The children greeted my return with illuminated addresses and Septimus in fancy dress presenting the key of the front door.
15/8/55: Early Mass. Bron left for Nutcombe. In spite of my earnest prayers I was delighted to see him go. The household became happy once more and we began to plan an outing to Birmingham Art Gallery and Stratford Theatre. Displeasure takes the form of boredom with me nowadays.
21/8/55: Communion, praying again for charity towards Bron. By telephone the glad news that he is prolonging his stay at Nutcombe.
14/9/55: Bron was returned to Downside. We dropped
him there after a visit to my Raban uncles and aunts. Clusters of unprepossessing boys were lu
rking round the drive and gates. Laura gave him £4, his allowance for a quarter in advance, most imprudently. He immediately joined the corner boys, perhaps to drink and smoke. A cheerful dinner in his absence.
Evelyn's prayers for charity towards Bron were more readily answered when his son was out of the house and he could channel such charity as he possessed in the direction to which it was best suited: letter-writing. His letters to Bron, of which some eighty survive, cumulatively testify to the warmth, kindness, solicitude and urbane, gossipy good humour that characterised his paternity at its best. Any son would have been proud to be the recipient of such a correspondence. In his first letter to Bron in the new term, he described Alec's daughter's wedding and his plans to sell Piers Court, which, now threatened by road-widening schemes and spreading conurbation, was no longer desirable.
Dear Bron,
I hope you are comfortably established under Father Aelred and are making some desirable new friends. Please inform me what studies the headmaster has prescribed for you.
You did not miss any great pleasure or amusement at your cousins wedding. It was highly respectable and dull. She looked very personable.5 I knew no one of the hundreds of guests. Nor did your uncle Alec. A Protestant Bishop performed the ceremony, the Hyde Park Hotel provided their regular wedding fare. It was all very middle class.
Septimus, as you would expect, was widely admired. I must admit the little darling looked well and conducted himself without reproach. Even your half-great-uncle George was inconspicuous. A thoroughly tedious afternoon in fact.
Next day your mother and I went to Brighton returning in time to show an insane baronet over the house, but he was not quite insane enough to purchase it. Portlip has been bought so it seems probable that we shall all be here at Christmas.
Ever your affec. papa
E. Waugh
All references to Septimus are glowing and it might be tempting to deduce from them that he was Evelyn's favourite son, but I do not think it true. Of his three sons Evelyn was predominantly interested in Bron who craved his father's attention and made sure he got plenty of it. He was more ambitious for Bron than for any of his other children. Septimus, as the youngest in the family (ten years younger than Bron and only sixteen when his father died), was treated with the extravagant indulgence usually shown by rich old American women for their Chihuahuas. Evelyn never showed the slightest interest in James, his second son. The two youngest children were grouped together in Evelyn's mind as ‘the boys’, but with Septimus always preferred. ‘Your brother James is home dull as ditchwater; your brother Septimus bright as a button.’
James was intelligent in mind and able with his hands but, like his mother, he was fundamentally lazy, unambitious, unrealistic and undemonstrative. Evelyn bullied him. ‘And now,’ he would say to assembled guests after dinner, ‘and now my son James will tell us an amusing story.’ Poor James would leave the table in tears. At best Evelyn found James ‘quaint’ and expected him, without conviction or interest, to follow the traditional path of an English gentleman's younger son by entering the army or the Church. He had no expectation for him as a writer, believing him devoid of literary taste. ‘James is reading P. G. Wodehouse with great seriousness. “Don't you find it funny, James?” “I think this book is meant to be serious, Papa.” The book was Carry on Jeeves.’ Later, in despair at James's lack of literary curiosity, he bribed him to read one of his own books. James chose The Loved One, Evelyn's shortest novel, and sat for a while sighing over the first page in the drawing room. When Laura announced she needed help topping and tailing beans in the kitchen James, not usually keen on that sort of thing, leaped to his feet and forgot all about the book.
On Evelyn's fifty-second birthday, 28 October 1955, James presented him with a metal crucifix; Meg gave him a rosary she had made at school. Bron, who had telephoned Meg to ask the date of their father's birthday, forgot to write or send a present. Perhaps he had meant to offer birthday salutations in a letter of the twenty-second but, with all the excitement of being given the part of John Worthing in his house production of The Importance of Being Earnest, he must have forgotten. Throughout his life Evelyn took birthdays seriously. He enjoyed giving and receiving presents and regarded his eldest son's forgetfulness as a slight.
Dear Bron,
Thank you for your letter.
I am glad to hear you have so good a part in so good a play. Are strangers admitted to the performance? I should like to see it.
The chief event here has been my 52nd birthday which was celebrated with all suitable pomp. Rich gifts were brought by the representatives of all civilised nations and many barbarous tribes. The silver band played continuously from dawn to dusk. Pontifical high mass was celebrated in Dursley church. In the evening an ox was roasted in Miss Hoopers hut and eaten by Lady Tubbs.6
Your mother's cowman, whose name escapes me – Christopher? – broke his legs with a motor bicycle and your mother has to milk twice a day for the next three months. It is a grievous imposition which makes it impossible for her to leave home. She found a substitute for one week-end. We visited your sisters at Ascot who ate more than was decent.
Your brother Septimus continues to give unusual pleasure.
I am appalled to hear of the Abbots sacrilege in allowing televisions into the Abbey. I hope the place is struck by lightning.
Ever your affec. papa E. Waugh
On Bron's birthday, a month after Evelyn's, he received a tie (which he did not like) and a letter from his mother. He replied to Evelyn:
Please excuse the extreme squalor of this letter – it is being written in a prep and must somehow look like an history essay. Thank you very much for the magnificent birthday present – I have not had the opportunity to wear it yet, and have contented myself with peering in the mirror; after my vile act in forgetting your birthday you could have been quite justified in ignoring mine entirely.
Bron had been present at Piers Court a year earlier when men from the BBC had come to interview his father. They had tried to humiliate Evelyn with impertinent questions about his moral values: ‘In what respect do you as a human being believe that you have primarily failed?’; ‘Have you ever wanted to kill somebody?’; ‘You are a fairly facile writer?’ When asked, ‘Do you find it easy to get on with the man in the street?’ Evelyn replied, ‘I've never met such a person.’ And when pressed as to whether he would be prepared to execute a man, he answered: ‘Do you mean actually do the hanging?’
‘Yes.’
‘I should think it very odd for them to choose a novelist for such a task.’
After the interview Bron noticed the malign effect of the interview upon his father, and commented, ‘They did not like you much, did they, Papa?’ In his autobiographical ‘conversation piece’, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn turned the remark round: ‘When they were out of sight down the turn of the drive, one of the children who had been listening to the conversation in the van said: “You didn't like those people much, did you, Papa?”’
At this time Evelyn was ill, suffering from a surfeit of chloral bromide mixed with too much alcohol, fibrositis in his legs, a filthy cold, persecution mania and depression. To improve his health he decided to take a cruise to Ceylon but once on board ship suffered a breakdown with hallucinations and debilitating barminess. Laura wrote to Bron at Downside:
Darling Bron,
Papa told me to tell you he had not written because he was not well. I hope he will come back soon. Otherwise I think I will fly out to him on Sunday week as it is beastly being ill the other side of the world. In the meantime please pray that he may swiftly recover and return home. I do not mean that he is dangerously ill but just very unwell.
My cow called Margaret has had a heifer calf but it is not nice and I shall not keep it…
All my love to you, Mother
Evelyn's hatred of the BBC predated the Piers Court interview but was especially virulent in the year that followed. He had detected an underlying malic
e in the interviewers’ questioning and in Pinfold had criticised the menacing, ‘insidiously plebeian voice’ and the ‘hint of the underdog's snarl’ in the leader. The thought of these terrible ‘electricians’, as he called them, trampling with their cameras and microphones upon the sacred apse of Gilbert Scott's spectacular abbey at Downside horrified him. Bron wrote to reassure his father:
The televised High Mass was not quite as awful as it might have been. There was a host of ugly little men chewing gum that crawled up and down the aisle with lots of rope
etc. Two cameras flash red and green lights on you as they swing enormous 3 foot noses in every direction.
The Abbey is now swamped with letters from ‘Mother of six, Birmingham’ who are, apparently, flocking to the church as a result of the performance.
But two days later something much more interesting happened at Downside than the televised mass. I do not think that Bron deliberately burned a large part of the school to the ground, though he might have done it accidentally while playing around with matches and cigarettes. The blaze was reported in the national press, which was where Evelyn first heard of it. In a letter to his daughter Meg at Ascot he hinted that there had been something fishy about it: ‘Have you read about the Downside fire? By curious good fortune all the buildings which were scheduled for demolition have been consumed. They were well insured. No other buildings were affected. If the property belonged to anyone other than monks one might suspect arson.’
In his autobiography my father claimed that Evelyn always suspected him of having caused it. When Evelyn asked him outright Bron brazenly refused to enlighten him either way; he used this inflammatory technique often in his life. I remember the press once got hold of some cock-and-bull idea that Papa was the ‘fifth man’ in the Burgess-Maclean-Philby-Blunt spy ring. The telephone rang all day and to each journalist Papa politely replied, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny that I am the fifth man.’ Curiously his name appears on a list of British spies on the Internet even though in his several attempts to secure full-time employment in the Secret Service he was unsuccessful. Whether or not he struck the match that caused it, the fire at Downside filled him with exquisite sensations of anarchic happiness that remained with him for the rest of his life. His letter to his father reflects this joy:
Fathers and Sons Page 35