The great fire was immense fun; the circular you got from the headmaster keeps just within the bounds of truth, although it does not give a glimmering of what actually happened. Besides the gym, which, as he says, is completely destroyed,
three dormitories (not two) are left without a stone upon a stone, and one is badly damaged. The linen room, containing the whole schools sheets etc has been completely destroyed. One class room has been pulled down because it was unsafe. ‘The boys behaviour was, in all cases, exemplary.’
The school divided, more or less, into three distinct sections: those who were confined into their dormitories, not being able to escape at an early stage, then those who gallantly tried to put the fire out, and then the reactionary group who tried to let it burn. More hoses were squirted at the boys than at the fire. The headmaster was equally delighted with both groups – he was torn between the conflicting emotion of the thought of the insurance (a claim for £40,000), the love of a bonfire, and his duty to the insurers. The other monks did not attempt to conceal their delight. Father Hubert van Zeller danced in front of the fire singing the Te Deum off key. Another monk rushed into Father Wulston Phillipsons room (some thirty yards from the fire) and started throwing the wireless out of the window, breaking pictures, jumping on gramophone records etc.
I managed to get out of the dormitory while a riot was taking place at the other end, down in the hall. I joined a group of other boys who had escaped and were busy throwing their corps uniforms into the blaze. I managed to grab a hose from a semi-stupefied fireman and was the first (of many) to squirt the headmaster. The Tusk was wildly excited, squirting himself with synthetic foam, until he looked like a Christmas cake Santa Claus. The flames were now raging some thirty feet above the top of the gym. Among the junior boys there was a general tendency to be heroic, but since there was no one to be rescued and they had no one to practise their Boy Scout training on, they had to content themselves with running everywhere very usefully, and running the gauntlet of our hoses, which knocked them down like nine-pins.
I joined the Headmaster who was standing with the Abbot instructing the firemen as to which parts of the building they should let burn, and which parts they should
squirt so long as they stopped if the fire showed any signs of abating. At 3.00 a.m. the fire reached its climax. While it roared and hissed some fifty feet above the roof while iron girders became white-hot and crashed in twisted shapes on to the floor, while over 2000 gallons of water were being pumped every minute at enormous pressure from some forty hoses, while all this was happening, boys were still running up and down to the Barlow top dormitory with tooth-mugs full of water.
With that horrible bureaucratic outlook which always prevails in schools, work has been resumed as usual. Boys are sleeping on mattresses in the class-rooms, Old House, even Old Chapel, but still things go on. Gym is being held out of doors.
The whole of the prefabricated area of school – about 2 acres – is now a pile of rubble with twisted bed frames here and there. The fire was definitely a good thing.
All stories in the papers about 40 boys being rescued by monks are quite untrue – they were made up by myself and Mark Sykes for the reporters’ benefit. I was televised by the BBC and ITA hunting, distraught, for lost belongings. Actually we were looting the remains of the signals room. I found one charred toothbrush.
Must end up. Hope but not expect to hear from you about possible plans for next Sunday.
All my love Bron
If Bron had been responsible for the Downside conflagration – and on reflection I think that he probably was – he executed the task imperfectly. As his letter to Evelyn grudgingly admits, lessons were immediately reallocated to places that were undamaged and the desperate boredom and routine of learning and discipline continued. Within a month Evelyn had caught Bron lying again. On his return for the Christmas holidays, Evelyn gave him a lecture and five pounds; Bron explained to him that he was unhappy at school and wished to leave. Evelyn refused to allow it, telling him that he must work for a scholarship in English or history to Oxford or, failing that, must join the army. No sooner was Bron back at school than Evelyn sent him the forms:
I met the present adjutant of the Blues the other evening and he said you should join the regiment. You can decide when the time comes (if your school record renders you acceptable to either) between Blues and Coldstream. Nothing is lost by applying now. Will you therefore sign and post.
But Bron was having none of it.
Just as Evelyn had appealed to Arthur to remove him from Lancing in 1920 and been refused, so history repeated itself with Bron. Back at Piers Court Evelyn was feeling the pinch: most of the servants had been dismissed and he wanted to sell up. The following correspondence of four consecutive letters tells its own story.
10 February, 1956
Dear Papa,
The term has run about three weeks now, and it has become increasingly apparent to me, at any rate, that I am unlikely to coin an award in either English or History. This letter is not written in a fit of depression or fury, but is the result of several months’ consideration. My stay at Downside is costing you a great deal of money, and, should I go to university, I will cost you a great deal more. I am doing very little good at Downside for the school or for myself, and I really think it is a mistake to go on paying for an education which is neither a pleasure nor a profit. Not long ago you mentioned you had some influence in the hotel-trade. If I entered this there would be no need for a University education. I already possess two advance level passes, and, if I stay on, the most I can hope to gain
this year is another two; if I stay on another year it is possible that I may coin an award that would be either worthless or nearly worthless to you financially, and would have cost you well over £500.
It would be convenient if I could get my two years basic-training in the hotel trade before National Service. In this way I would not completely waste the next two years, which seems to be inevitable otherwise.
If you write to Father Passmore I think he will raise no objection to my removal at the end of the term: our increasingly bad relationship renders this by no means improbable in any case.
Please believe me when I say that this letter is not the result of a fit of depression.
Love Bron
Dear Bron,
I have written to enquire at what age apprentices are taken into the hotel trade. I think you are still too young but I don't know. Meanwhile think and pray about your future. This is an occasion that will affect your entire life.
I have much sympathy with your restlessness with school life. I felt as you do at your age, asked my father to remove me, was resentful at the time when he refused. Now I am grateful to him.
If there was anything you ardently wished to do – go to sea, learn a skilled trade etc – because you felt a real vocation for it, I would not stand in your way. I believe you think hotel-keeping simply a means of leaving school. That is a very poor motive for taking a job and hotel-keeping is not a craft which fits you for anything else. If you fail in that you will be further from starting anything else. ‘Previous experience: two years as kitchen boy, waiter, lift-man, book keeper’ is not a high recommendation for any other appointment. If you leave school now you will
not get a commission in a good regiment. Perhaps you will not get a commission at all.
Most of the interest and amusement in life come from ones friends. All my friends are those I made at Oxford and in the army. You are condemning yourself either to a lonely manhood or one among second-rate associates. All because you lack the will power and self-control to make a success of the next eighteen months by co-operating with those who have only your own best interests at heart, throwing yourself into the life of the school and doing your work and obeying the rules. At your age, wherever you go, you will find yourself under discipline much less humane and benevolent than that of the monks.
You have a sense of humour and a good gift of self-ex
pression. On the other hand you are singularly imprudent and you have a defective sense of honour. These bad qualities can lead to disaster.
My financial interests have no bearing on my wish for your welfare. I am sorry you should suggest that they might.
Your affectionate papa E. Waugh
19 February, 1956
Dear Papa,
After the Headmaster s letter I find I am in the novel position of trying to persuade someone how badly I am doing in work. I am not going to quote marks at you, but it is a fact that in a class of singularly backward boys I am not among the first three. I am fortunate enough to get along well with my tutors, which accounts largely, but not entirely, for the good half-term reports the Headmaster received.
However, be that as it may, everything you said in your letter was absolutely true. It would be useless to pretend
I had a vocation for the hotel-trade, or any other at the moment. I regarded it simply as a way to get out of school. If leaving school at 16 does entail all the disadvantages you mention – a friendless life, and an army career in the ranks – it would be silly to leave now. On the other hand I can see no way in which the next two years will not be wasted here.
You mention throwing myself into school life. I have tried all the methods – I speak at debating societies, found others, and attend all the high-brow philosophical discussions, and even attempt to edit papers. What more could be desired? Games are quite out of the question, and anything else is hardly respectable.
You mention obeying school rules. I am convinced that school life would be insupportable without breaking them. The only alternative to a life of pleasure is games, which I am unable to enjoy in the smallest way.
However hard I work it is almost impossible to excel at an entirely new subject among people who have been studying it for three years.
My relationship with the Headmaster makes any advancement in the school extremely unlikely, and even Father Aelred, with whom I am consistently on the best of terms, can not help me in this.
Love Bron
Dear Bron,
I am delighted to hear that, unaccustomed as you are to public speaking, you have won the debating prize and are going to Sherborne with the team. You will not, I think, hear your cousin Peter speak there.
The only honest answer to your letter is this: growing up is a disagreeable process for most men. You have to grow up somewhere. Downside seems to me the best place, but I am always open to other suggestions. If you leave
prematurely everyone will always think you were sacked. To be sacked from school is not absolutely fatal but it is a grave disadvantage for the early years of whatever career you decide on. I am pretty sure it will prevent you getting a commission in any Household regiment and would make entry into Oxford more difficult.
I could probably get you into Stonyhurst, but as it is school itself rather than Downside, that you dislike, I don't see the advantages unless it enabled you to shake off undesirable friends. But one can make undesirable friends anywhere if one has the taste for them.
I don't suppose you want to go to Dartmouth?
I see no reason why, once you have passed into Oxford, you shall not spend the last two terms before going up at a foreign school learning a language.
In the hope of understanding you better I have been reading the diaries I kept at your age. I am appalled at what an odious prig I was. Debating, boxing, ragging the OTC, intriguing for advancement, atheism and over-eating seem to have been my consolations at Lancing. One great advantage you have on me is the contact with a place of prayer. Don't neglect that advantage. Your spiritual and moral welfare is the main thing of absolute importance.
Your affec. papa EW
Bron stayed at Downside for one further term, at the end of which, shortly before Christmas 1956, he was awarded an open exhibition in English at Christ Church College, Oxford. There seemed no point in his staying on. Evelyn and Passmore both agreed that his continued presence at the school would be painful and counterproductive to all concerned. Father Aelred wrote to congratulate him: ‘You may not believe me, but I'm sorry you are going and I shall really miss you… although you have burned your fingers one way and another, you have learned much and God has taught you much.’
Two years of military service was, at that time, a compulsory duty for all fit, young men of Britain. All they had to do was cough with their testicles in the cupped, enquiring hands of a medical orderly, and they were in. The test was hard to fail, but at least the choice of whether to attend university before or after the army lay open and Bron decided that his interests would be best served by getting his National Service over and done with, and the university agreed to hold his place until October 1959. For some reason that I have not been able to divine, he did not inform his father of his decision until April the following year. In the meantime, it was agreed that Bron should travel abroad and con a foreign tongue until September. Had he chosen to go up to Oxford before the army he would have found compulsory National Service abolished by the time he left; but he could not have predicted this in 1956. When Evelyn heard of his son's decision not to delay military service he wrote, ‘I am very glad you have decided to try for the army in September. I am sure you won't regret it in later life.’ As things turned out, his decision to put the army first proved a grave mistake that, I believe, contributed to my father's untimely death.
51There were, in fact, two dogs at Edrington, both loved by Joan.
52In the guests’ bedroom at Piers Court, Fr Aelred would loudly chastise himself for things he had said at dinner. His howls were heard right through the night. At breakfast he was always tired and bruised.
53Bron's uncle, Auberon had hoped to be elected as the National Liberal MP for Sunderland but failed.
54Alick Dru, married to Bron's aunt Gabriel, used to beat his pigs savagely in order to tenderise the meat.
55The wedding of Alec Waugh's daughter, Veronica, to Christopher Keeling.
56Lady Tubbs: a figure of fun in the neighbourhood. Married to Colonel Alan Durand in 1944, but styled herself according to her first marriage to Sir William Tubbs, first and last baronet, who died in 1941.
XII
Under Fire
Evelyn and Laura moved from Piers Court to Combe Florey at the end of 1956. For six months, while the house was being renovated, Septimus (who was six) stayed with Vera Grother at her cottage near Piers Court. Neither of his parents visited him during this time. Evelyn had grown bored with ‘Stinkers’. He enjoyed making, decorating and improving houses, but once these things were done he lost interest. He remembered with pride his brief apprenticeship in carpentry at Southampton Row when he had made an attractive mirror with the Waugh family crest fixed to the top, which hangs at Combe Florey, and a table that seems to have been lost. At Combe Florey he followed the carpenters and skilled artisans from room to room, discussing dovetails and tools, arranging for a panel to be inserted here, a boxed bath there. His mother wished he had never become a writer, and blamed his tortured personality on his literary career: ‘If it hadn't been for She-Evelyn, he might have designed lovely furniture,’ she once remarked plaintively to Alec.
‘But, Mother dear, think of the books he has written.’ ‘I know, Alec dear, I know, but furniture is so useful. Besides, he would have been happier designing furniture.’
Combe Florey House was much larger than Piers Court. It came with a resplendent archway gatehouse dating from the twelfth century (refitted at the end of the sixteenth), two cottages in the village and just about enough land for Laura to continue in her loss-making dairy ventures. Evelyn paid £7500 for it – three-quarters of his annual income at that time. The manor house, formidable and square with an enclosed courtyard in the middle, is perched on a hill overlooking the medieval church on one side, with sweeping views of the Quantock Hills on the other. It was built in the reign of Charles II and constructed of an extraordinary reddish-pink sandstone common to only a small number of villages in the area. In the
eighteenth century the front door and windows were aggrandised with magnificent Gibbsian surrounds and Evelyn rebuilt the stone perron to put it in symmetry with the front elevation. All the rooms are large, high-ceilinged and rectangular. The house's finest internal feature, a spectacular pine and softwood staircase with three twisted balusters to the tread, was fitted at the time of a grand remodelling in the 1730s. Bron and his siblings adored Combe Florey, but Evelyn, who at first saw in it ‘possibilities of beautifaction’, was never happy there.
‘If only I were a pansy without family cares I would make it a jewel,’ he said. Was it pansyish to have all the doors and skirting-boards painted in black gloss and the hall decorated in red flock, or brocade, wallpaper once popular among Indian restaurateurs but now out of fashion everywhere? At first Evelyn had grand plans to redesign the gardens and change the windows, but within a few years he had run out of money and lost interest in the world around him. The bookshelves, beautifully designed to fit the library at Piers Court, looked small and out of place at Combe Florey, but his expanding collection of Victorian paintings and furniture suited the house. The atmosphere was eccentric and lugubrious. A couple of mad Italians cooked, chauffeured and served at table, loudly accusing each other of adultery as they did so. Two ladies from the village helped to clean, but otherwise there was no one in the house. In the garden Coggins ruled, quickly securing himself a foothold in Laura's heart with recondite judgements on the state of her cows and the needs of her plants. When the Italians left he spread himself out for most of the day on a grubby chaise-longue in the kitchen to discuss udders while Laura podded the peas and stirred the stew. After Evelyn's death she gave him a large chunk of woodland within spitting distance of the house. He, or his descendants – I forget which – built a large, flat, plain bungalow upon it, surrounded by a six-foot-high orange security fence. Evelyn referred to him always as ‘my rival Coggins’, and shortly before his death conceded wearily to my father that ‘Coggins has taken complete command of all your mother's affairs.’
Fathers and Sons Page 36