Fathers and Sons

by Alexander Waugh

  Perhaps it is the same for all sons: a childhood of trust (sometimes hero worship) leads to an adolescence of disillusionment and rage. In the busy years that follow we try to ignore our fathers and concentrate on feathering our nests without them; and when, at last, in fair round belly and seasoned middle age, we think ourselves emotionally ready to review the relationship with equanimity, we usually discover, to our dismay, that we have arrived on the scene too late. By then our father's star is fading, obscured in mists of eccentricity and semi-senile detachment. Sooner or later it will fizzle out altogether, but a father's death resolves nothing. While the son remains conscious the relationship never ends. Neither does it flourish. Instead it trundles round and round on an axis of the mind, suspended, unclosed, incomplete. Most unsatisfactory.

  I adored my father, more, I suppose, than he adored me, or at least I thought about him much more than he thought of me – but I do not repine, as the Wavian1 saying goes, for that is the nature of any father–son relationship. A father may have many children to add to his many concerns but a son has only one father, the ‘august creator of his being’, who chooses where he lives, where he goes to school, what he might find funny and, to a certain extent, what he thinks. Fathers are more important than sons, and therein lies the problem.

  My own father was not a conventional parent in the Hollywood or BBC sense. He never kicked a football around the garden, never played frisbee, never took me camping or white-water rafting. He did not construct models of Lego or castles of sand; he took no interest in my homework or my school marks or whether I made it into the school cricket team. He was, above all, a literary man, but he did nothing to inspire in me a love of books. He never read aloud, never suggested titles I might enjoy. He recommended nothing and never discussed literature or writers. He once offered me a pound to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies, not because he thought I would benefit by it but because he discovered the book had been plagiarised from W. L. George's Children of the Morning and needed someone to remind him of the plot so that he could make a case of it in the Spectator.

  His article appeared in December 1983 when Golding was in Sweden picking up the Nobel Prize for Literature. It ended:

  My researches suggest that W. L George had two sons by his second marriage to Helen Agnes Madden, who died in Houston, Texas, in 1920, so it seems by no means impossible that he has descendants. I am not, of course, suggesting for a moment that Mr Golding might like to share his prize money with them, but it would be a kind thought to send them a tin of pickled herrings or something of the sort on his return from Sweden.

  Papa was what would nowadays be termed a workaholic. He was the most prolific journalist in England. At home he slogged at his desk from the crack of dawn until lunchtime, was back in the library after lunch until supper, and often retired there after supper as well. He never took a holiday and wouldn't stop even on Christmas Day. In France, at a farmhouse in the Aude to which we repaired every summer, he wrote his articles in an open barn, occasionally shaking a fist when his children crunched the gravel too noisily in front of him. He could not live without his work and, on the rare occasions that he rested, would feel distinctly queer. ‘For a week I have done no work at all,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and marvel at the stamina of the English, who somehow manage to do none all their lives. After a few days, I found myself in a state of nervous exhaustion and moral collapse.’

  Most of my memories derive from mealtimes where he sat, at the head of the table, polite, quiet, never holding forth, usually attentive and always extremely funny. My mother led the conversations. He loved wine and managed to fill nine cellars at Combe Florey with top-class ports, burgundies and Rhônes, which he poured generously down the gullets of his family and guests. I was treated to the best vintages of France at every meal from the age of twelve. He insisted that it be uncorked at the proper time and in order to get it right for the evening would ask as he sat down to lunch, ‘Pray, what are we having for supper?’ which always made my mother very cross. Like his uncle Alec, he treated the drinking of wine as a ritual but, unlike his uncle Alec, always spilt large amounts of it on the table.

  The best wine only begins to develop – open out, show a leg or whatever – once it is in the glass. Within the space of two hours a wine which has lain undisturbed for twenty or thirty years will run the gamut through tight, suspicious puberty, vivacious adolescence, joyful awakening, sensuous maturity, fat and crumbling middle age to sour, crabbed senility.

  I learned from him everything I needed to know about wine and in my period of refusing to be a writer he tried to encourage me to become a wine merchant instead. Until the last two years of his life when his appetite failed him his greatest pleasure was food. He would eat almost anything except cabbage, which reminded him of Downside, and turnips, which reminded him of the barracks at Caterham. He was breathtakingly generous at expensive restaurants. Secure in the knowledge that he had never vomited since childhood, he went out of his way to experiment with exotic and, to many, unpalatable dishes. He tasted crocodile meat in Cuba, dog in the Philippines, raw horse in Japan, toad in Egypt and snake in northern Thailand. For a while he encouraged us to eat the squirrels at Combe Florey until we cooked one in red wine sauce that looked and tasted as we all imagined rat to look and taste. He never forgave the socialist governor of Szechuan, China, for preventing him eating a giant panda. My brother Nat has inherited Papa's enthusiasm for rare and exotic delicacies and cannot be trusted to sit by a swimming-pool without shoving every passing insect into his mouth. Ants, he says, are nice and lemony; fried wasps, no good.

  Outside his annual trips to a health farm Papa never dieted (distrusting those who did) and blocked his ears to faddish advice concerning starch and protein, salt and blood pressure and the dangers of cholesterol:

  Dieting has emerged as public health enemy number one; worse than eggs, milk, cheese, saturated fats, tobacco, alcohol, sex, meat, vegetables, potatoes, unsaturated fats, soft drinks, fast food, botulinus toxin and any known form of nerve gas yet developed. It destroys the brain cells and permanently impairs mental performance, distorts moral perceptions and tends toward unsafe driving, removing all libido while making the dieter more prone to HIV and its concomitant scourge, Aids. It adversely affects foetuses and is linked with an increase in cot deaths. It makes those who fall victim stupid, mad, ugly and boring.

  Over the years he put on a lot of weight. In his prime, he was ‘a fine figure of a man’ – at least, that was how he would have described himself. This, by extrapolation, meant narrow shoulders, thin, elegant limbs, a fattish neck and, for most of his adult life, a firm, round, Buddha-like belly that was a delight to admirers of both sexes and of all persuasions. Most sons are wrong about the handsomeness of their fathers. My own little boy rates me above James Bond – deluded fool. English fathers are not particularly handsome (they look horrid in supermarkets) – yet I believe my own to have been an exception. True, his looks were unconventional by the James Bond standard: he was bald on top with thick curls of golden ginger hair at back and sides, which he tried to flatten in the mornings with a powerful-smelling unguent. One of his eyes failed to align when he looked sharply to the right. He wore round, wire-framed spectacles – and, for a while, a Beatles pair set with tinted yellow glass. But for all this he was, as I say, a good-looking man. He had light blue humorous eyes, a fine masculine nose, a pleasantly cleft chin, and a noble, wise, philosophic shape to his head. He was not particularly tall (let us say five foot eleven), but when the subject arose, he would produce a measuring tape from the library, run it under his shoe, round his Buddha-like protrusions, up his forehead and along his crown, stopping only when he was sure that at least six foot two of it had been unravelled. He insisted that he was taller than both of his sons, which he wasn't.

  He was not a vain man but, like his own father, there was something of the dandy about him. He loved fine clothes – silk ties, handmade shirts and expensive leather shoes. His cup
boards, both in London and at Combe Florey, groaned with suits and jackets, tailor-made, of every cut, colour and cloth. At weddings he wore his father's sealskin top hat with a frock coat, which would have looked out of date on Arthur Waugh, that he had had especially made. Except in the most severe heat, he always wore a tie. One summer he grew a handlebar moustache, which made him look like a motor-bike queen on the Earl's Court Road circa 1968: ‘Every man must grow a moustache or a beard at least once in his life,’ he said – one piece of his advice I have never taken. His family thought he looked loathsome with that on his face.

  We seldom talked about his father as the subject invariably bored him. I remember one brief effort because it went something like this.

  ‘Papa, was Grandpapa clever?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I mean, was he good at chess?’

  ‘A grand master.’

  ‘What about maths? Was he any good at maths?’

  ‘Stupendously so.’

  ‘Advanced maths?’

  ‘Timmy, you're boring me.’

  He never called me by my real name. For the first eight or ten years of my life I was addressed simply as ‘Fat Fool’. Not that I minded. There was affection in his tone so I wore the ‘insult’ as a badge of honour. One day someone earnest must have told him to desist and ‘Fat Fool’ disappeared to be replaced with a string of names that weren't mine: Timmy, Roge, Nige, Jockey, Wilf – anything would do so long as it did not involve him in too much thought. I don't think he ever called me Alexander. Perhaps the closest he came to it was ‘Arlex’ in a satirical Scottish accent. When my father-in-law (also Alexander) came to stay, Papa threw up his hands in dismay. ‘This is all too confusing,’ he said. ‘I shall have to call you Billy One and Billy Two.’

  I must now interrupt this swinging portrait of my father to give a brief account of my own circumstances and the role I think I have played in this unfolding drama.

  I was born in December 1963, conceived (according to some calculations but not others) near Treviso in Italy at the house of a one-eared Arabist called Dame Freya Stark. I have been told that the nearest village was called Arsehole, though this strikes me as unlikely.2 I was my parents’ second child and their first son, the first male Waugh of the fourth generation from Arthur. Perhaps it was this that stirred feelings of patrilineal pride in the hearts of my grandfather and great-uncle Alec. ‘Grandfathers prefer grandsons,’ Evelyn said, when I was born. Papa told me that he was ‘pathetically pleased and proud to have a grandson’. Alec wrote offering his detached congratulation: ‘It is fine that the name of “Waugh” has been maintained.’ Grandpapa funnelled his pleasure into the embellishment of a silver plate and tankard – family heirlooms that had been given him by Arthur on his twenty-first birthday. By looking into my mother's pedigree he had established that a shield could be drawn in my name and filled with sixteen patterns (or quarterings), each pertaining to one of the sixteen families of my great-great-grandparents. The resulting peacock-tail display (which I think is called an ‘armorial achievement’) was engraved all over the tankard and the plate in such a way that it ruined the look of both. Grandpapa gave them to me as christening presents and I treasured them until the day they were snatched by burglars during a raid on our house in London in 1992. I expect they have since been melted down for their silver content.

  Evelyn's exuberance at the birth of his first grandson was tempered by anxieties about Bron's career. Papa was just twenty-four when I was born and without gainful employment, as they say. What was left of his last book advance was running out and he had been sacked by the Catholic Herald, yet continued to employ a daily help, a French maid and a maternity nurse. Evelyn sent some money to his daughter-in-law and wrote to a friend in the BBC begging him to find a job for his son: ‘I ask a boon. Please find remunerative employment for my son Auberon Alexander in your broadcasting service … I think the boy could be useful in the BBC. He has two children to support.’

  The money was well received, but it did not solve the long-term problem. Bron sent part of it to some bribable nuns in Cornwall asking them to pray for his success at a third interview with the intelligence services. Their prayers fell on deaf ears and MI6 once again turned him down. His hopes now rested on a possible job with the Daily Sketch and an interview with the BBC:

  Dear Papa,

  Thank you for your extremely generous present to Teresa. It may yet make the difference between honourable penury and public disgrace. I now feed six mouths completely, as well as clothing and keeping them warm. Lolita eats three loaves of bread a day and even our daily woman has fallen to eating my food, which makes a seventh mouth. I shall see that the servants starve first.

  Evelyn wrote back: ‘I hope you insinuate yourself into the BBC – a safe and reasonably honourable concern. The Sketch would be shameful. Provincial papers have a way of suddenly ceasing publication. Make Lolita keep to a diet of bread – much cheaper than the fresh meat demanded by English servants.’

  Crisis was averted when Bron found himself a job on the Daily Mirror. It was not especially well paid but he wrote little for the paper, spending most of his time in the office working on his third novel. His career as a journalist only came to life after his father's death. The spark that ignited it took the form of a review of his father's obituaries for the Spectator in May 1966. Papa was embarrassed by it later but at the time it was seen as a tour de force of vituperative journalism, which led directly to his appointment, aged only twenty-seven, as the Spectator's political correspondent.

  Despite Evelyn Waugh's enormous and beneficial contribution to English letters many of his obituaries were cavilling, sour and inaccurate. Time reported:

  In the last ten years of his life Evelyn Waugh was a flabby old Blimp with brandy jowls and a menacing pewter complexion … he lived in an eighteenth-century country house 140 miles from London where he played the country squire with a conservatism that soon became simply amniotic [?] … And then last week on Easter Sunday, home from a Mass sung (to his crusty satisfaction) in Latin, he climbed the stairs to his study and died of a heart attack.

  Urged on by his mother, who was ‘baying for blood’, Papa's counterattack was swift as well as sympathetic:

  If the purpose of this advanced style is to inform the public, they have been cheated. My father did not die of a heart attack, nor did he die in his study which is on the ground floor. The Mass he attended was not sung. He never at any stage played the country squire, having no interest in local affairs or rustic pastimes, and probably never spoke to more than half a dozen people in the neighbourhood. It is true that he lived in the country, as do many writers, and in a large house because he had a wife and six children to accommodate. Those who saw him in his last years will know that they were probably the most mellow and tranquil of his life – certainly much more so than the preceding ten. In the final years he worried about some work he had undertaken and was distressed by the extraordinary simple-mindedness of Catholic bishops, but to me he was never so benign or so gentle.

  The kernel of Bron's defence against Evelyn's critics is best illustrated by a single paragraph that sums up the stolid attitude to his father that lasted him throughout his life and formed the basis of almost every conversation I ever had with him about Grandpapa:

  The main point about my father, which might be of interest to people who never knew him, is not that he was interested in pedigree – it was the tiniest part of his interests. It is not that he was a conservative – politics bored him. His interest was confined to resentment at seeing his earnings redistributed among people who were judged more worthy to spend them than he. It is not that he was tortured by class aspirations – he was not. It is not that he had a warm and compassionate heart – warm and compassionate hearts are two a penny. It is not even that he was a Catholic – there are 550 million of them and a fair number must be Catholics by conviction. It is simply that he was the funniest man of his generation. He

  scarcely opene
d his mouth but to say something extremely funny. His house and life revolved around jokes. It was his wit – coupled, of course, with supreme accuracy of expression, kindness, loyalty, bravery and intelligence – which endeared him to everybody who knew him or read his books.

  Papa's review went on to attack several other obituaries, including one in the Observer by the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge. ‘I am twenty-six,’ Papa wrote, ‘and have a reasonable chance of surviving him [Muggeridge]… my pencil will be out, my throbbing compassionate heart in my hand, when the unhappy event occurs.’ This was followed by a merciless mock-obituary of Muggeridge in pastiche Muggeridge style. The unhappy event actually occurred twenty-four years later, when Muggeridge was eighty-seven, and my father wrote in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Like many wise old birds he attracted the attention of ornithologists from all over the world. Now he has finally dropped from his perch, they will have to go away. There is nothing to be said about him which he has not said himself many times over.’

  Soon after I was born my parents moved from London to an attractive rectory house in the village of Chilton Foliat, near Hungerford in Berkshire. I think Grandpapa came to visit us there only once though I do not remember the occasion. Five years after his death we moved into Combe Florey and Granny took all her things across the Crystal Palace into the North Wing. Ten years earlier she had been forced to sell her cows when the taxman forbade Evelyn to offset her farm losses against his literary income. Their departure was greatly mourned but she let the fields to the village butcher and watched his heifers grazing there instead.